Aleksei had earned his fortune during the privatization period after the fall of the Soviet Union, accumulating great wealth through private holdings in the oil sector. While several oligarchs had fallen out of Moscow’s favor throughout the years amid public outcry, Aleksei had weathered the storm. While his fortune had grown, so had his greed, and he’d ventured into another market: private security companies.

In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq and the continued occupation of Afghanistan, Russia had learned several lessons from observing Western forces and military doctrine, but the most important one had been simple—privatizing the military through the use of contractors was tremendously profitable and allowed a country to covertly exercise its foreign policy objectives with somewhat-plausible deniability. Like Ray-Ray, Aleksei was a self-proclaimed pioneer, and he’d founded the Patriotic Sons of Perun, named after the Slavic mythological god of war.

Within three years, the Sons, as they were colloquially referred to in the private-military-and-security-company community, were the largest Russian private fighting force, operating in Africa, the Middle East, and South America. Aleksei was eager to increase both his wealth and his personal reputation, and while he was simultaneously spreading the foreign policy objectives of the Kremlin, he was also turning a handsome profit by engaging in business ventures that he’d identified on his own. It was the latter activity that had landed him squarely in the crosshairs of the CIA, quite literally.

The trend in African countries plagued with civil strife was to outsource personal security for entrenched dictators or even so-called democratically elected leaders, which made the Democratic Republic of the Congo an ideal deployment for more than one hundred of Aleksei’s finest Sons. In addition to serving as security advisers to Congo’s president, the advisers also secured exclusive gold- and diamond-mining rights from the resource-rich nation.

While all of this had gained the attention of the international press, it would have just raised eyebrows had it not been for the murder of a freelance reporter and his thirty-six-year-old cameraman. While the reporter—a British journalist who’d written bylines with the BBC, the AP, Reuters, and Sky—was legitimate, the “cameraman” was a CIA case officer and the nephew of the deputy director for counterterrorism at Langley.