Cold East. Alex Shaw

      

       About the Author

      ALEX SHAW spent the second half of the 1990s in Kyiv, Ukraine, teaching Drama and running his own business consultancy before being headhunted for a division of Siemens. The next few years saw him doing business for the company across the former USSR, the Middle East, and Africa.

      Cold Blood, Cold Black and Cold East are commercially published by HarperCollins (HQ Digital) in English and Luzifer Verlag in German.

      Alex, his wife and their two sons divide their time between homes in Kyiv, Ukraine, Worthing, England and Doha, Qatar. Follow Alex on twitter: @alexshawhetman or find him on Facebook.

       Also by Alex Shaw

       Cold Blood

       Cold Black

      Cold East

      ALEX SHAW

      HQ

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

      First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

      Copyright © Alex Shaw 2018

      Alex Shaw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      E-book Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008306342

      Version: 2018-07-26

      Table of Contents

       Cover

       About the Author

       Also by Alex Shaw

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Prologue

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

      

       Chapter 4

      

       Chapter 5

      

       Chapter 6

      

       Chapter 7

      

       Chapter 8

      

       Chapter 9

      

       Chapter 10

      

       Chapter 11

      

       Chapter 12

      

       Chapter 13

      

       Chapter 14

      

       Chapter 15

      

       Epilogue

       Dear Reader

       Dear Reader

      

       Keep Reading …

      

       About the Publisher

       To my wife Galia, my sons Alexander and Jonathan,

       and our family in England and Ukraine

       Prologue

       Donetsk Region, Ukraine

      ‘I can’t see them yet.’

      ‘They’ll be here soon, he said so.’ Vitaly Blazhevich peered into the distance towards the besieged city of Donetsk. Smoke rose from tower blocks on the outskirts, the result of early-morning shelling by Russian-supplied Grad rockets. The ceasefire agreement between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-backed insurgent organisations of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR) had been in operation for several months, yet attacks continued.