Kuznetsov raised an eyebrow in surprise. When he spoke, his voice was like tempered steel. “Hmm, then we best hope your plan works. This year, this moment — we won’t have a better time to act than now. In eighteen weeks, the world as we know it will be gone. And a new world will be reborn in its place — one led not by the West but by the East.” Zhang set his cup down with deliberate precision. “The Americans will be overextended. They will scramble when it begins, but they will not know where to defend.”
Mirov poured himself another drink, his smirk barely concealed. “They still believe in their markets. By the time they understand, their economy will already be in flames.”
Lieutenant General Sergei Orlov sat back in his chair as he rolled an unlit cigarette between his fingers. “The simulations are complete,” he added. “NATO’s response time is predictable. They will hesitate.” His gaze flicked toward Zhang. “We will not.”
This was why Orlov was called The Chess Master. His mind worked several steps ahead of his opponents’. It was a skill Kuznetsov had put to good use when he’d appointed him Director of National Security Operations. The man worked in the shadows. Few knew of him; those who did feared him. He was the man who effectively ran the nation’s private military contractors.
Cuī Zemin smiled coldly as he stared at Orlov, then shifted his gaze to Kuznetsov. “When the time is right — they won’t know what hit them.”
Kuznetsov nodded to Cuī, the man known as The Ghost. Cuī was the director of the Ministry of State Security 6th Bureau — Special Affairs Division. It was Orlov and Cuī who were responsible for lighting the flames that would set the world on fire.
Raising his glass, Kuznetsov gave a final toast, the weight of history settling upon them. “Then, gentlemen… let the firestorm begin.”
The vodka burned as it went down, smooth and inevitable. The servers returned, sensing the moment was right to serve the plates of honey-drenched medovik, an indulgence before the storm was unleashed. They ate in silence, savoring the final moments before the world burned.
For Klara Hedevig, it was just a usual Tuesday. Christmas had come and gone and now it was time to get back to work. She was up before the sun, keeping the curtains drawn as she prepared a thermos of blackcurrant herbal tea and toasted rye crispbread with foraged jam — routine, austere, and very Swedish.
From her third-floor apartment in Innerstad, the old walled city portion of Visby, Klara tracked foot and vehicle traffic along a minor route that NATO contractors had been using to reach the Gotlands Regemente (P18) depot. Using a thermal monocular and spotting scope mounted behind a discreet wool curtain, she logged plate numbers, convoy time stamps, and fuel resupply intervals, then coded her notes into her Coastal Weather Drift database. All entries appeared as wind vectors and temperature records from a weather buoy, shared weekly to a cloud repository hosted in Tallinn.
Just before dawn, Klara donned snow boots and winter gear for a short “migratory overwintering survey” of marshland just south of Visby Harbor. She carried with her thermal binoculars with birding overlays, a standard Leica scope, and a backpack-mounted omni-antenna disguised as a folded bird blind frame — used to passively scan for encrypted VHF comms from new SHORAD nodes.
Along her way, Klara encountered local joggers, retired birders, and a curious border collie or two. She greeted everyone warmly. They were all used to her habits by now. In a waterproof Rite in the Rain notebook, she jotted “bird notes.”
Having completed her cold-weather recon of equipment staging, she headed back home, defrosted her boots, and walked the few blocks over to her day job at the Baltic Resilience & Renewables Initiative. She sat down on the yoga ball seat at her upcycled desk, stretched her back, and cracked her knuckles.
She knew she had two actual grant proposals to write that day, but before she did that, Klara followed her usual ritual. She opened her laptop, logged in to a VPN, used a TOR browser to further obscure her IP address, opened the DuckDuckGo search engine, and logged in to her usual birding messaging boards. She typed up some of her real observations from her morning walk. “I spotted a small group of Bohemian waxwings near the cemetery this morning. I estimate approximately thirty females and twenty males.” Her message also held code words for her handler to interpret. She clicked through some of the other posts until she discovered one that interested her.
I finally have another message from Viktor, she realized as she noticed the specific phrasing in a post about European robins along the shaded stone walls.
Klara logged into her Tuta email account, which was fully end-to-end encrypted, including subject lines and metadata. There, in the drafts folder, was a new email waiting for her to read.
Viktor Mikhailov, her GRU/SVR handler, also knew the password to her account and had typed up a note for her. Because the email was never sent to anyone, it was basically impossible for any intelligence agencies to intercept. This was one of the main ways they had communicated for the last ten years or so.
“It is time to move ahead with the advertising campaigns for the Baltic Wings Festival,” he wrote. “Anders Ulfsson, the director of Gotland’s Visit Gotland office, has made assurances that the Baltic Wings Festival will be listed on the high-traffic Nature Events calendar. Should he give you any trouble or insist on any unreasonable vetting procedures, remind him of how much he loves skiing and ask him how he enjoyed his all-expenses paid trip to Courchevel 1850 in France.
“Further, I have approved your request for funds to rent that cluster of cabins on Fårö Island,” Viktor continued. “Once that site is set up, we will begin to send some of our preliminary RVs with equipment your way. They will camp at Lauters Hamn and make individual drop runs to our cabins with supplies.”
It’s finally becoming real, Klara thought. She had already been planning the Baltic Wings Festival for a little over a year — getting participation from other legitimate NGOs who were interested in her vision of an event that combined bird-watching with environmental talks and activities. She had arranged various illustrious speakers from all over Europe, figured out catering, security, and volunteers to run the program, and reserved various campsites, cabins and Airbnbs all over Gotland in preparation for an influx of around a thousand visitors, which was unusual for early May.
Klara gleefully turned on the advertising blitz she had arranged for the festival and opened up the registration. Soon, the money would begin pouring in, and the groundwork would finally be laid for one hundred GRU/SVR agents to flood the island all at once, traveling with various legitimate NGOs under passports from Germany, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland.
Of course, there would be real attendees at her event. Klara had done a lot of groundwork, and her day job gave her the bona fides to run this event. Plus, her side project, as head of the Baltic Wings NGO, cemented her as a staunch environmentalist and a lover of birds, so she’d easily snagged Dr. Anu Ristmägi of the Estonian Ornithological Institute and Dr. Elias Thorne, professor of environmental systems at the University of Kiel, Germany, among others.
She went over the program for the Baltic Wings Festival once more, making sure she had all her t’s crossed. Not only did each site hold very real interest for bird and nature lovers, each had some proximity that would provide strategic tactical advantage. For example, the activities she had advertised for Fårö Island highlighted the migration routes of the ruff, which was known for its showy breeding plumage and lek behavior, flaunting extravagant head tufts and collar feathers in open marshes. At the same time, agents on the island would enjoy a strategic position where there were very few law enforcement personnel to make any sort of resistance.