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SYRIA
GENERALAleksandr Semenov exited his private elevator and left the modern wing of the building. The dilapidated lobby was a reminder of the complex’s past life as a hospital, but that area was no longer in use. Paint peeled from the concrete walls and a crumbling ceiling had deposited a layer of dust and debris on the tile floor. To his right, a set of cracked glass doors reinforced with duct tape looked onto an empty landscape.
He stopped to gaze through them, past the perimeter fence and guard towers, to the arid land rolling toward the horizon. In the distance, he could see bare stone mountains that seemed to have been melted by the relentless Syrian sun. Scattered clouds cast shadows across the baked earth before disappearing into a yellow haze.
Sun, dust, and exile. The three things that defined his time there.
Thoughexilewas perhaps too strong a word. There was no question that Russia’s president was envious of Semenov’s successes and feared his influence among Kremlin insiders. And with good reason. Despitebeing barely fifty years old, Boris Utkin was in questionable health and as backward-thinking as men decades his senior. It was only natural that Russia’s elite would be looking to what was next. Natural, but in Utkin’s eyes, also extremely dangerous.
Banishing his most gifted general to Syria had admittedly been a clever move on the chessboard. Semenov had become too powerful to imprison or remove, and he was too cautious to succumb to an assassination attempt. The president had portrayed this assignment as an honor—a mission so critical to Mother Russia that it could be entrusted to no one else. It was an excuse that rang hollow to all ears that mattered, but that hadn’t been enough to save Semenov from spending his last two years in this hellhole.
On its surface, Moscow’s involvement in propping up the Syrian government was a rare triumph. Russia’s military support had crushed the insurgency and had kept the rest of the world on the sidelines. Beneath that victory, though, was the same rot that had plagued his country for nearly half a century. The contracts to rebuild Syria had never materialized and plans to exploit its natural resources had never been pursued. Instead, the idiots in Moscow had turned their attention to a confrontation with the West. A confrontation that, inevitably, had evolved into one of the greatest disasters in Russian history.
The former president had been a prodigy at exploiting the memory of Soviet power. Working only with a third-rate military, silos full of nonoperational nuclear weapons, and an anemic economy, he’d managed to get Russia a seat at the table. To interact with Europe, America, and China as equals. When he slammed a fist on his desk, the world trembled the same as they had when the Soviet Union was at its peak.
Now that spell was broken. Russia had been revealed for what it was: a starving old woman lashed by the Siberian wind. The world had been given a glimpse behind the Potemkin village that his countrymen had been building since the time of Catherine the Great. And once revealed, there was no going back. NATO powers would neveragain fear his country’s conventional military capability. The Europeans would wean themselves completely from Russian energy, and sanctions would remain in place.
Of course, the men in power—those responsible—were unwilling to face the destruction they had wrought. But there were whispers. In dark corners of the Kremlin, the next generation of leaders yearned for a man capable of rebuilding Mother Russia for the modern era. Of making the world once again cower before it.
And he was that man.
He’d been only thirty years old when they’d given him command of Russia’s asymmetrical warfare unit in St. Petersburg. At the time, it had been a backwater project laughed at by ancient generals still enamored with technologies used in World War II. That laughter had gone silent when he’d transformed the division into an offensive weapon that no country in the world could match. A weapon that didn’t just sit in a silo or rust away on some military base. One that could beused.
Hacking, ransomware, election interference, social media disinformation, the support of fascist and terrorist groups, blackmail. It had all been his doing. Even the Syrian refugee crisis that had sparked nationalist movements throughout Europe had been his vision. Once seen as nothing more than a convenient by-product of Russia’s involvement in the country, it was now recognized as the only tangible benefit.
The era of conventional wars between great powers was over. The projection of power now had to be done using stealthier and, in many ways, more effective strategies.
His strategies.
The idea that the West could be defeated by conventional military means was nothing more than a bizarre fantasy. A dangerous delusion that had led to Russia’s current sorry state and blinded its leadership to the fact that victory was indeed achievable if they were willing to embrace the modern battlefield.
Not that this was a simple matter. The terrain constantly shifted,new technologies appeared and then faded into obsolescence almost overnight, and the West became more proficient at defending itself. Innovation had to be constant, creativity trumped discipline, and boldness was rewarded.
It was precisely his gift for bold innovation that had landed him in the Middle East. His latest strategy was seen as too dangerous to be carried out from within Russia’s borders. President Utkin had insisted that plausible deniability was critical and used that as cover to send his potential rival to Syria—a place where he would be cut off from his Kremlin allies.
When the heat of the sun penetrating the damaged glass became uncomfortable, Semenov began moving again. The steel door at the far end of the space had a keypad lock that lacked the sophistication he was accustomed to, but was sufficient for the task at hand. Few of his prisoners wanted to escape and, even if they did, there was nothing but dry, open terrain for seventy-five kilometers in every direction.
The corridor he entered was significantly cooler and Semenov picked up his pace. The wall on his left turned to glass, providing a view of an interior courtyard that was empty at this time of day. The room that was his destination was guarded by a single uniformed soldier. The young man stiffened when he noted his commander’s approach, firing off a crisp salute before opening the door and standing aside.
Semenov entered an expansive space that featured a floor-to-ceiling chain-link construction that acted as a funnel. It wasn’t unlike the system used by livestock operations, but in this case the livestock was human. Or at least a close approximation.
He scanned the eighteen dark, dirty faces behind the wire, but they were no different from the ones that had come before. Not surprising, since they’d been taken from the same places. The men were courtesy of a prison that housed captured ISIS fighters and other antigovernment insurgents. In contrast, the women had been plucked from a refugee camp northeast of Damascus. Most were the wives of foreign jihadists who had been either killed or captured.
Five Russian soldiers kept the group moving, dealing efficiently with the level of resistance they’d come to expect. Some of the men jostled and shouted meaningless demands in Arabic, while the women tried to make themselves as small as possible.
Semenov watched a girl pass through the narrow gate at the tip of the funnel. He focused on her youthful eyes and the vague outline of her body beneath her chador. She followed the orders of a translator and lowered herself onto a stool near the wall. There, a woman dressed as a nurse selected a syringe and indicated that the girl should expose her arm. After the injection was administered, a soldier grabbed her beneath the arm and led her through a door at the back.
The procedure had been refined over the years to minimize violent incidents, but no amount of tinkering could prevent them entirely. It seemed that there was always one and this time was no different. A young man feigning meekness as he passed through the gate suddenly attacked the nurse. In the early days of this project, troublemakers had been summarily executed, but later Semenov had thought better of it. The most interesting subjects were the strong ones.
He watched as the man was slammed to the concrete floor and held there by three soldiers. His sleeve was torn off and the rattled nurse inserted a needle without the benefit of sterilization. He looked a little unsteady when they got him to his feet, but the remaining prisoners would attribute that to the violence and not the injection.
Semenov committed the man’s bearded face to memory before he disappeared through the door. It would be a pleasure to watch him break. The initial defiance. The unanswered pleas for God’s salvation. And finally surrender. It was the path they all took eventually.
Boris Utkin would soon discover that banishing Russia’s most valuable asset to Syria was yet another in a long line of disastrous decisions. The work Semenov had accomplished during his exile would do nothing but add to his legend. The president wasn’t the only powerful man in Moscow. There were others and they would be taking notice.
Semenov stepped from the elevator into an opulent suite that included both his office and living quarters. It was part of the new wing of the complex, built by Syrian slave labor, but finished by Russian craftsmen. A reminder of where he came from. And to where he would one day return.
He’d barely settled in behind his desk before his assistant appeared in the doorway. Leonid had been with him for five years and had proved to be a capable lieutenant. Originally from the FSB, he was smart enough to understand that Semenov was the future—both his own and Russia’s.
