EndWar

It was he and Izotov who’d come up with the brilliant plan to secretly fund the Green Brigade Transnational and train them to attack the Freedom IV lifter at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The plan was to prevent the Americans from completing the Freedom Star Space Station from which three companies of Marines could deploy anywhere on earth within ninety minutes. It was a simple matter of hiring terrorists to become your mercenaries. The difference was, the Green Brigade actually believed in what they were doing. Ideals were more important to them than money. As the Americans said, it was a win-win situation.

While the attack turned out to be a failure, it led to an unexpected and ultimately beneficial series of events. The JSF tracked Green Vox and his cronies to a training camp in the mountains of Bulgaria, but before they reached him, Izotov was able to plant information on the terrorists linking them to members of the European parliament.

The idea was to get the Americans to turn on the European Federation. Start a war between them. And then Izotov and Doletskaya would move in for the kill and seize all of Europe. Green Vox escaped that attack, but the JSF found the information planted by the GRU.

But then the situation turned once more. Green Vox holed himself up in the swamps of Belarus.

And that’s when Doletskaya made his first mistake.

The Enforcers Corps had, in fact, captured Green Vox, but Doletskaya ordered his platoon leader to demand the turnover of Green Vox so that the Russians could deliver him to the United States because the Euros could not be trusted to do that. The Euros refused and, remarkably, wiped out Doletskaya’s men.

And so Izotov and the president were forced to put another spin on the incident: European forces fired on Russian troops as they were attempting to capture Green Vox. As a consequence, Kapalkin stopped the flow of Russian oil and natural gas to Europe. Security forces at an Albanian refinery were overwhelmed by Russian forces, and some of the European shipments were restored.

Of course, blowback from the incident was severe. Russia was on the brink of war with the EF. And if the Euros managed to turn over Green Vox to the United States, he would crack under interrogation and reveal that he’d been funded by the GRU.

Both the EF and the United States would wage war against the Motherland.

That was hardly the plan.

Green Vox needed to die. And so Doletskaya had assembled one of his best teams, who infiltrated Fort Campbell and reprogrammed the base’s air defenses so that the plane carrying Green Vox was blown out of the sky before it could land.

Many bottles of vodka had been emptied in the hours following that crash.

Even better, the Americans were unable to identify Green Vox’s assassins. Of course, Kapalkin was sure to point the finger at the European Federation. And Nathalie Perreau, that infuriatingly brilliant French woman who’d become the first president of the EF in 2016, was quick to return the accusation.

It was in the Motherland’s best interests to drive a huge wedge between the United States and Europe, so Izotov and Doletskaya had come up with a final plan, which took them back to the beginning of it all:

Destroy the Freedom IV lifter, whose launch had been delayed because of the first Green Brigade attack.

Again, relying upon his cunning and two decades of tactical military experience, Doletskaya ordered a well-disguised team of Spetsnaz forces to seize control of a European air base in Finland. They killed everyone, erased all security data, and uploaded a virus into the European Federation’s missile shield.

Hours later, when the Freedom IV lifted off, the virus caused Europe’s laser satellites to misidentify the spacecraft as a missile. The ship was incinerated, killing dozens of Americans onboard. To create even more confusion, Doletskaya arranged for no less than ten terrorist groups to claim responsibility for the Finland base attack and destruction of the lifter.

More bottles of vodka were emptied.

And now there was great mistrust between the European Federation and the Americans.

No, it was not a total victory for the Motherland, but given how badly things could have gone, Doletskaya had been quite satisfied with the outcome.

Now another chapter in the war was about to be written, and it had begun with an elegant dinner and the company of a woman more beautiful and more intelligent than any Doletskaya had encountered.

“Hello, Colonel,” she said, wearing a dark red dress, pearls, and a smile that left Doletskaya breathless. He helped her into her chair, returned to his; and as he sat, she hoisted her perfectly tweezed brows and tossed her jet-black hair out of her eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Colonel. I’m fine. It’s just I’ve never seen you out of uniform.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “Likewise.”

He smiled. “You have a keen wit.”