Gennadiy was deep into organizing his regiment and planning their activities when he received the devastating news the next morning: an American bomber task force of modified B-1 and B-52 bombers had blasted their way past western Russia’s sophisticated air defense network and attacked Ryazan Alternate Military Command Center, 120 miles southeast of Moscow. The devastation was complete . . . and Gennadiy’s father, the center of his universe, the man he wanted nothing more than to emulate, had been blown into dust. He made immediate arrangements to head back to Moscow to be with his mother and family, but before he left Aginskoye he learned that his mother, upon hearing the news about her husband, had committed suicide by an overdose of sleeping pills . . .
. . . and, once again, he learned that the commander of the bomber task force that killed his father, and thereby also his mother, was General Patrick McLanahan. The rogue American aviator had been promoted to lieutenant general shortly after the attack and made a special adviser to the new/former president of the United States, Kevin Martindale, placed in charge of rebuilding the long-range strike force.
Gennadiy Gryzlov turned into a different man after that day. He resigned his commission and left the military. He’d always had a high level of energy, but now his personality became more akin to that of a whirling dervish. He took control of his family’s oil, gas, and petrochemical companies and had them positioned perfectly when oil prices began to skyrocket in the later part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and he became one of the wealthiest men in the western hemisphere. He remained a bachelor and became one of the most popular and recognizable playboys in the world, pursued by wealthy women and men everywhere. He translated his wealth, popularity, and good looks into political capital and was appointed minister of energy and industry and deputy premier of Russia in rapid succession, then elected prime minister by the Duma even though he had never served in the legislature, aligning himself for higher office. He ran for president thereafter and was elected to the office by more than 80 percent of the voters in the 2014 elections.
But now the face of the tall, handsome young man, easily the most photographed male face on planet Earth, was contorted in a mixture of disbelief, rage, and resolve. Sergei Tarzarov, the president’s chief of staff, trotted into Gryzlov’s office when he heard the president shouting. “Get Sokolov and Khristenko in here on the double,” Gryzlov shouted to his chief of staff, his longish dark hair whirling around his head as he stomped around his office. “I want some answers, and I want them now!”
“Yes, sir,” Tarzarov said, and he picked up a phone in the president’s office. Tarzarov was almost a generation older than Gryzlov, a thin and unimposing-looking man in a simple brown suit, but everyone in the Kremlin knew the former intelligence officer and minister of the interior was the power behind the presidency and had been so since Gennadiy’s father was in office. “They saw the broadcast and are already on the way, sir,” he reported a few moments later.
“Why, that smug, preening, clueless bastard—I will show him how to make a statement to the world,” Gryzlov snapped. “It was nothing but an election-year stunt. I hope it blows up in his face! I hope he dies in a fireball during reentry. Then the American government will be in a state of complete chaos!”
“Receiving data from the ministry of defense,” Tarzarov reported after checking his tablet computer. “Minister Sokolov ordered an update of our space offensive and defensive forces and ground, air, and naval forces that support space operations. He and General Khristenko will brief you as soon as they arrive.”
“Why the hell did we not know that Phoenix was going to fly to that space station?” Gryzlov shouted. “We know what that bastard does almost before he knows it, and we have plants, eavesdroppers, listening devices, cameras, and informants all over Washington. Get Kazyanov in here too. No, get the entire security council in here.” Tarzarov made another phone call and reported that Viktor Kazyanov, the minister of state security, Russia’s top espionage and counterintelligence service, was also already on the way to the president’s office.
“Mr. President, Phoenix has got to be totally crazy to pull off a stunt like that,” the minister of defense, Gregor Sokolov, said as he quickly strode into the president’s office a few minutes later. “If he was not damaged goods before he blasted off, the cosmic radiation and lack of oxygen will surely get to him—if he really did all the things he claimed to do, and all of this is not an elaborate election-year fake—and then the American space program will be deader than it was after the space shuttle Challenger blew up.”
“Shut up, Sokolov,” Gryzlov said. “The fact is, he did it, and I want to know how, I want to know why I didn’t know about it, and I want to know what we can do if he starts doing all the shit he says he is going to do—and I want to know it right now!”