Dark Fate, Chpater 218

Chapter 218 – Failed Contingency

His name was Frantsev Vasil Vyacheslavovich. Of course, he hadn’t actually been called by that name in twenty years, not since his mother and sister died in the Vladikavkaz bombing. He had turned his focus to his work with the KGB turned FSB. He hadn’t been anyone important, then. A field agent primarily occupied with counterterror operations. But he had worked hard, and those above him had either retired, or ‘retired’. Now, he was the head of ‘Special Projects’ for the agency.

One might think that being assigned to the nondescript, unlabeled office building in Yakutsk, rather than FSB headquarters in Moscow, was something akin to exile, but Vasil saw it differently. Special Projects needed to operate in the shadows, and even in Russia there were too many people who liked to dig up secrets in Moscow. People who let their ideals get in the way of what needed to be done, for the good of the Motherland.

By coming out to Yakutsk, and personally selecting the one hundred and fifty-six men and women who worked in this building, he had eliminated the risk of people asking annoying questions, or attempting to inform the public of things they did not need to know. Of course, his department was not just those few people directly under him in this building. The Special Projects Department had hundreds more people on the payroll, stationed throughout Russia, and key cities around the world. None were in groups of more than five.

Those men and women were not direct action agents, but intelligence gatherers and resource managers. Anyone engaged in direct action was gathered in this building, and the local agents provided them with safehouses, resources, and ‘boots on the ground’ intelligence. That limited the risk of any information leaks, as the objectives were always tightly compartmentalized, and the only ones who knew the bigger picture were here, rather than anywhere that they could be easily caught.

He had actually been on a vacation when the Initialization happened, enjoying a stay in Kamchatka. Frost trolls had appeared outside the city, cutting off travel by land, and there was no regular air travel between where he was staying and Yakutsk. Because of that, he’d had to spend a month staying with his ‘cousin’, the local resource officer, before the roads were safe enough to risk driving.

Of course, he hadn’t been idle. Secured communications meant that he could still run his department, even away from the office. Thanks to that, he had been able to put a ruling in place, before any of his subordinates could act. No one from Special Projects would buy anything for the department from the System Shop in the city they worked in. They had no way of knowing what kind of tracking the System had, so, as a precaution, all purchases would be made by operatives and agents while they were traveling in other cities, to ensure that they couldn’t easily be tracked.

Ideally, he would have ignored the System Shop altogether, at least until they had a better idea of how it worked and what records it kept. But that was simply not realistic. They needed to know what resources the System Shop had available. Not just for their own projects, but to defend against whatever actions anti-government or foreign actors might take.

That was how he had discovered the [Mystic Monster Maker]. It was an interesting compound. Artificially enhancing a creature to the same level in the next Tier was an impressive ability. The fact that the creature was living on a timer before the compound burnt their body out was a bonus, not a problem, from his point of view. The constant problem with biological warfare over the years was that it became far too easy for a bioweapon to escape containment, or mutate so that the countermeasures you had in place were no longer effective.

In essence, it was the old trouble with nuclear weapons in the Cold War. Yes, the weapons were powerful. However, everyone knew that if one was used, it would cause a chain reaction of nations launching weapons at each other, as they tried to take everyone down with them. If you could not turn a weapon off or restrict its damage once it was unleashed, then it was a poor weapon, only to be used as a way to ensure that whoever killed you didn’t get to enjoy their victory.

Annoyingly, Ceres had both reinforced the terrifying power of such weapons, and shown themselves beyond any true retaliation. Oh, there were talks of sanctions, and economic pressures, but Ceres did not need the nations of Earth, and was easily able to get any resources they needed either from the rest of the solar system, or by trading with countries who didn’t put sanctions on them. It didn’t even matter if those countries were landlocked, since their transports could literally drop straight down out of the sky, without crossing other countries’ airspace. They were, in a word, a problem.

The planned annexation of Panama was an opening that they couldn’t pass up. Ceres needed to be hobbled, or at least humbled. The fact that a newly evolved Kraken had recently been found, with a nest of eggs, in the Sea of Okhotsk was so fortunate that, if he had been a religious man, he would have called it a clear case of divine intervention. It had not taken much to convince the President to authorize the mission.

Everything had been going perfectly. The eggs had been smuggled into the Canal, and the Kraken had been injected with the compound, turning it into a Giant Kraken. Once released, it immediately began tracking its eggs, likely through some sort of magic, or a skill it had through the System. Either way, the Tier 3 monster was on a direct course for Panama, and the Canal.

It should have been a desperate battle, preferably with Ceres being forced to use its weapons on the Canal itself. That would have allowed the Russian government and others to send ‘peacekeepers’ to the area, and work on disrupting the area before the Demon King could take full control. Perhaps even forcing the canal to be turned over to different management. The Americans wouldn’t allow Russia to control the canal, but there was a good chance that the UN could claim control, which would tie up any changes Ceres wanted to make in knots, while putting at least some kind of leash on King Greene.

Instead, the damn bastard went and ruined everything. Not only had the Giant Kraken been wiped out, without causing any damage to Panama or the Canal that could justify the peacekeepers, but Greene’s quick actions and decisive power had won him even more support in the region, and convinced two more countries to join the Ceresan Empire. Worse still, somehow the new Emperor had found out he was the one that purchased the [Mystic Monster Maker], and announced his real name to the world.

That was a problem, but not one he couldn’t adapt to. After all, not even the President knew his true name. Even on the paperwork, he was Bondarev Yakov Ivanov (a playful reference to the fictional spy, James Bond, naturally). No, it was the restriction on Russian ships passing through Ceresan territory was annoying on several levels, since not only did it hurt the normal economy, but the underworld economy was far from pleased at their shipping routes being tampered with. If that continued long enough, both the oligarchs and the syndicate leaders would become major problems.

The sound of a crash outside brought his line of thinking to a halt. Habit born of surviving more firefights than he cared to count had him on his feet and by the window, service pistol in hand before his mind fully registered the crash. It wasn’t paranoia when people really did want to kill you, after all.

A garbage truck had crashed through the gate to the secured parking lot below, and continued as it pushed several cars out of the way, including his own, specially modified, Lada Vesta. Ballistic glass in the windows and armor in the door panels had not exactly held up well against the sheer mass of the garbage truck, unfortunately. Something to consider for his next vehicle.

Vasil bit back a curse as he saw men jump out of the garbage truck, with AK-47s. More trucks, with more men, followed the truck in. More of the distinctive weapons. It had to be the local Vory. But their ‘protection’ money had been paid this month already, providing cover that this was actually just a normal shipping company, not a branch of the FSB. So why? No, it had to be because of Ceres. Somehow, the damned Emperor had tracked him, but decided to use criminals, instead of coming himself.

His assistant burst into his office, wide-eyed. “Director Bondarev! We are under attack!”

“I see that, you idiot!” He shouldn’t have snapped at the woman, perhaps, but panic wouldn’t do anything at this point. He picked up his desk phone, and dialed the intercom for the building. “This is Director Bondarev. Response Plan Black. Cleaner teams, burn all files, destroy all servers. All others, use of deadly force authorized.”

He wasn’t a fool. He’d always known that, someday, the Special Projects directorate might come under attack. So, he’d put contingencies in place. Response Plan Back was the ‘scorched earth’ option. All files, both paper and digital, would be destroyed. All personnel would focus on either that, or fighting until their last breath, to give the ‘cleaners’ more time. And he? He would go to the basement, where the detonator was kept for the plastic explosives that were literally put into the walls while the concrete was being poured. Nothing would be left for an enemy to gloat over, or to use against the Motherland.

He took the emergency stairs. They might have been on the fifth floor, but there was no time to bother with the elevator. Waiting for it, and potentially getting trapped, was unacceptable.

He got to the third floor when he saw men bursting into the stairwell below, on the first floor. They were wearing basic body armor under heavy coats, with helmets and ballistic masks. Cocky bastards weren’t even trying to hide what they were doing.

The door on the second floor opened. More of his people, this time, with their service weapons. One of them had even picked up a shotgun from one of the security stations. Vasil grinned as they opened fire with practiced accuracy, far better than the gangsters who thought that spraying bullets everywhere was better than actually knowing how to hit a target.

He was down next to his people, pistol barking in his hand as he moved. As he paused to reload, his breath caught as he realized that their weapons weren’t doing anything to the attackers. Even the shotgun blasts were just bouncing off magical shields, invisible until they were struck. “Damn them! Where’s Dernov? We need a mage to break these shields!”

Whatever the guards were going to say was cut off by another burst of fire from the AKs below. The woman next to him caught two rounds in the shoulder. Not fatal. However, instead of blood, there was a zapping sound, of electricity discharging. The woman fell to the ground, like a puppet with its strings cut.

Taser bullets? Vasil’s brain quit working for a moment, as he tried to wrap his head around that bit of insanity. More cracks of electricity, and more of his people were down. Down, but not dead. Oh. This was definitely Ceres’s doing. They wanted prisoners, not corpses!

That was unacceptable. Dying for the Motherland was fine. He welcomed it. But the [Slave Brand] that the damn Emperor would no doubt put on him would force him to betray his country! He refused to let that happen. He took a breath, and placed his pistol to his head.

Zap. Zap. Zap.

Three rounds hit him, center mass. The electricity caused his hand to jerk, pulling the gun from his temple as it went off. Dimly, he felt pain as his knees sunk to the ground. Grazed. Not fatal. He had failed.

And then the darkness took him.