The most famous was a Soviet-era system known as Perimeter. The Soviets had always been afraid of an American first strike. They knew they had enough nuclear weapons to destroy every man, woman, and child in the United States a thousand times over, but under certain scenarios, if the Americans launched first, the Russian early warning system gave the Kremlin just four minutes to issue a retaliatory strike. If they failed to respond in that time, Moscow would be obliterated while all its nuclear missiles were still in their silos.

To protect against this, they built a system that guaranteed that if Moscow was ever hit, a retaliatory strike would always be launched against the United States, even if everyone in the Kremlin was dead.

To achieve this, seismic sensors were installed deep under the Russian capital. In the event of a nuclear attack, the sensors would detect the strike, and automatically launch a number of satellites across the Soviet Union. The satellites were preprogrammed with top-level General Staff launch codes, and thirty minutes after reaching orbit, would transmit those codes to every Soviet nuclear bunker capable of responding.

Unless the satellites were recalled by the Kremlin during those thirty minutes, which would not happen if the Kremlin had been destroyed, there was no way to stop the launch codes being transmitted.

In effect, it meant that if Moscow was ever destroyed, the rest of the world would go down with it.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, perimeter remained operational, continuing to guarantee mutually assured destruction right up to the present day.

Inside the GRU, this led to the term Dead Hand being used to describe the special group that was authorized to do anything necessary to protect the nation’s political leadership. This included a list of people inside Russia, hundreds long, who would automatically be assassinated if anyone ever struck at the president internally.

It was the reason there’d never been an uprising in Moscow against the ruling regime. Everyone in the Kremlin knew about the group, and how ruthlessly it would protect the president and his cabal of billionaire oligarchs who controlled the country.

The group was extremely brutal, operating more like a South American drug cartel than an intelligence service. It ruled by fear, hunting and killing anyone who threatened the group or the president politically. Opposition politicians, members of the Russian parliament, even judges of the highest courts in the land, had been brutally murdered in their homes, along with their families.

The group didn’t play by the rules.

It made examples of its victims.

And no one dared question its methods or challenge its objectives.

To challenge the Dead Hand, was to guarantee an assassin was on his way.

The president of Russia had been in power for over twenty years, and likely would be for twenty more, despite constitutional restraints limiting his tenure to two consecutive six year terms.

And no one would challenge that in a serious way.