Baker Mischief Book 4
Political Thriller
Date Published: 06-10-2025
What would happen if a man of integrity, calm judgment, and firm conservative principles were elected our President? Would he do better than what we have? Or might he discover that behind America’s expressed principles something still lingers from the Fall? That behind our longing for justice, for community, for fairness, for freedom, for beauty, proportion, for the things that nurture all that is good, Something is still out there?
Let’s see.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Inauguration Day +2
Kyiv, noon
Wednesday noon, two days later, cameras on
the plaza just off the Dniepr River and facing a large city park focused on the
Palace. Filling the park were ranks of
Russian infantry, and filling the streets for a mile were armored personnel
carriers and tanks. In the square before the palace, “Constitution Square,” a
ground crew waited for President Putin’s arrival by helicopter. The city was
curiously quiet. The Russian troops and mechanized units seemed unusually alert
at the emptiness. At dawn, special units had arrived across the river, crossed
the Metro Bridge, occupied the rooftops around the palace, and maintained
overwatch. Drones of various sizes circled overhead, remotely controlled from
scores of miles away.
As President Putin’s helicopter landed,
television screens across the Russian Federation showed him disembarking, and
in split-screen, the doors of the palace opening. The Ukrainian president and
his wife, he in a business suit and heavy topcoat, she in a dress and heavy
jacket and fur-lined cowl, stood outside the doors, hand in hand. They stepped
forward, hand in hand, down the long walkway to meet the Russian president at
the open gate, a hundred feet away.
As they reached the gate, the conqueror
awaited on the other side.
At that moment, for all the watchers around
the world, the broadcast ended.
Forty miles away, the Commander-in-Chief of
the Armed Forces of Ukraine, a general few in the West knew much about, had
breathed a prayer of thanks for his president and had lifted his hand from the
detonator button on a truck-mounted communications unit. His aides, waiting
outside the truck, were weeping. He stepped to the door and looked over his
men. “President ‘Steadfast’ has left us. Remember him and his wife. They died
for us.”
In a nearby windowless building surrounded
by armed Marines and, further out, by Ukrainian soldiers, the American
ambassador and his senior intelligence staff were still wondering what was
going on. President Nepokhytnyy had ordered them out of Kyiv by noon the day
before, under escort of Ukrainian forces. They’d not had an easy time getting
even this far, because every road and every train was jammed with city dwellers
heading west. It was as though Kyiv was emptying itself out.
Just seconds after noon, the building
rattled and dust came off picture frames and out of wall-hung tapestries. A
Marine captain flung open the door and shouted to the ambassador, “Sir, you’ve
got to see this! Quickly, Mr. Ambassador!” Outside, a deep, sharp noise pulsed
once.
The ambassador rushed up a half-dozen steps
to the entrance and out past the solid door. The captain pointed east. “Sir, that’s a mushroom cloud from a nuclear
weapon. We saw the flash. That’s Kyiv, sir.”
“God almighty,” the ambassador breathed.
“Get me some comms. I need to talk to President Martin.”
Dr. Richard Sherry is the author of the Baker Mischief series, including A Month of Sundays (2022) ; Mondays, Mondays (2023) ; and First Tuesday 2024. The political thriller series introduces retired political science professor Dr. Ed Baker, determined to open up American politics to daylight. He is almost always up against both the law and forces attempting to conceal their influence on American life. In A Month of Sundays, Baker uncovers who owns senators up for election in 2020 and releases their emails to the voters in their states. In Mondays, Mondays, he reveals a "voting bloc" in the Supreme Court and who is influencing them. In First Tuesday, Baker and his former students look at the influential forces behind the 2024 presidential election, with surprising results.
Richard released a memoir in 2020, The Long Run: Meditations on Marriage, Dementia, Caregiving, and Loss (2020), about his first wife's illness and death.
Richard is a retired college professor and administrator. He resides in Minnesota and winters in Arizona with his wife Marjorie Mathison Hance, author of the North lakes Murder Mystery Series.
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