Prologue

Morning. It was morning. After over three hours of lying still in the snow, Nikita felt it was safe to stand. Surrounding him were the bloodied and bullet-riddled corpses of Chinese and American soldiers, all strewn about the camp like toys in a young child's play room. A little less than ten hours ago this massacre was known as the Artillery Overlook, situated atop the Chugiak Mountains. If Nikita's homeland wasn't supporting the enemies of this nation, he would have gladly visited this place on vacation; the view was amazing. Every morning the sun rose above the horizon, casting a golden glow over all of Anchorage and providing a view untouched by the rising bloodshed of the Resource Wars. Spetsnaz GRU Kapitán Nikita Shevchenko stumbled to his feet, glancing around. The frigid winter wind whipped across his face, turning his cheeks a shade of cherry red. Luckily, Nikita was used to freezing winters, as he had grown up in Leningrad as a factory worker's boy. He lived in fairly bad conditions inside of a run-down old flat, preferring to wander the streets rather than cope with the violent fights that occurred between his mother and father. There, he became friends with many of the younger local Commu-Socialist Party members, eventually being integrated into their ranks and taught the ways of Communism.

Adorned in a thick snowsuit, Shevchenko blended quite well with his surroundings so long as he stuck close to the thicker brush. As he trudged down the hill, he pulled his hood and face mask close, checking his primary weapon as he did so. The gun itself was a compacted version of the AS-VAL Sniper Rifle, decked out with an integrated suppressor and a snow-caked 4x Scope. Surprisingly, this particular weapon was not used very often by any specific branches of the Soviet Armed Forces; not even by the VDV, a paratrooper outfit the gun was originally manufactured for. Eventually Kapitán Shevchenko reached a beaten path leading down the back side of the mountain, furthering the notion that US forces had carved their own network of trails leading to and from their field headquarters. He sighs. I need to find my men, and quick.

Within the next twenty minutes, Nikita reached the bottom, quite winded after jogging all the way down while carrying almost 50 to 100 pounds of gear in all. His nose wrinkles in disgust as the smell of gunpowder and corpses begins to get stronger; willing him forward through the fresh aftermath of the previous night’s skirmish. “My god…”

Still noxious after a multitude of encounters with the day’s body count, Nikita follows the path of carnage all the way back to where he believes is the Peoples' Liberation Army’s forward operations post; a medium-sized base located deep in the heart of the Chinese-occupied city of Anchorage.

TBC