Red Hammer: Voodoo Plague Book 4 Read Online Free

his aide had properly synchronized
them to the second.
    Alexie had grown up in a peasant village on the slopes of
the Ural Mountains during the time of Soviet rule.  He may have been born a
peasant, but he had been blessed with a very high IQ and a canny mind.  At only
five years old he had watched as the KGB rolled into his tiny village to arrest
a man who had complained about the government seizure of the meager crops he
had produced on a small plot of land.  He had only been trying to feed his
family.  Rather than frightened, Alexie had been in awe of the men dressed all
in black, driving the shiny black Volga sedan.  He decided that day to become
one of them when he was old enough.
    Barinov joined the right youth groups, consistently
impressing the group leaders with his vocal and rabid support of the Kremlin
and all things Soviet.  By his early teens he had been noticed by the right
people and plucked out of abject poverty to attend the Stalin School for Boys
in Moscow.  He soon became the school master’s favorite, regularly informing on
his classmates that exhibited anything less than absolute zeal for the Soviet
way of life.  Upon graduation he received a glowing recommendation from the
school master, who happened to be the brother-in-law of a Colonel in the KGB. 
Young Alexie realized his dream at the tender age of 17, taking the oath of
loyalty to the most brutal intelligence agency the world had ever seen.
    His rise in the ranks of the KGB was meteoric, joining the
Communist Party and becoming a full Colonel by his 35 th birthday.  Alexie
was on the cusp of becoming a Major General when the Soviet Union fell. 
Suddenly, the power he had wielded was so diminished it was as if it had never
been.  Not one to despair, Alexie aligned himself with the criminals that
quickly took all but political control of Russia in the absence of the heavy
boots of the Soviet government.  He became enormously wealthy, cultivating
friends and assassinating enemies in the shadows.
    When Vladimir Putin came to power as Russia’s strongest
leader since Brezhnev, Barinov rode his coattails into the Kremlin.  The hammer
and the spear behind Putin, he was ruthless in silencing any dissent, and
quickly became the most feared man in Russia.  Two years earlier he had
approached his counterpart within the Chinese government with a plan to finally
destroy America.  Alexie blamed the Americans for ultimately causing the fall
of his beloved Soviet Union, and had been plotting his revenge for decades. 
Science had finally progressed to the point where he felt he could achieve his
goal without risking the destruction of Russia by American nuclear weapons.
    Diverting hundreds of millions of dollars, the Chinese
wouldn’t accept Rubles, Alexie seduced highly placed men within the Chinese
communist party to participate in his plot.  Not only to participate and
develop the nerve agent/virus combination, but to execute the actual operation. 
To take the blame and the brunt of the American response.  But for his plan to
work, Barinov needed to have control of the Russian military.  While even
Generals trembled at the mention of his name, he couldn’t order the armed forces
to do anything.  For that, he needed Presidential authority. 
    Almost a year before the Chinese launched the attacks,
Alexie had found an opportunity to have a private, late night meeting with
Putin.  A vodka drinker in public, Putin preferred single malt whiskey when in
private.  Barinov arrived for their meeting with a $100,000 bottle of
Glenfiddich single malt whiskey in hand.  The alcohol had already been laced
with a lethal dose of polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that was undetectable
by the Kremlin’s radiation detectors as it gives off no gamma rays, and the
alpha rays emitted are so weak they couldn’t pass through the heavy glass
bottle that held the whiskey.  Alexie abstained from drinking during his
meeting with Putin, and three weeks later