Shepherd One

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When it comes to selling nuclear weapons on the black market, Yorgi Perchenko holds an exclusive franchise.

Once a KGB operative who transitioned to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service at the end of the Cold War, he quickly became the assistant director of Directorate S which included thirteen departments responsible for preparing and planting illegal agents abroad, conducting terror operations and sabotage in foreign countries, and promoting biological espionage.

Now at the age of seventy-four and with his best years behind him, Yorgi Perchenko found his forced retirement less than stimulating. The one thing that made his life tolerable was the chilled bottle of Cristall Vodka.

On a farm located on the outskirts of Volgograd, Russia, about 600 meters east of the ice-cold flow of the Volga River, Perchenko sat in a barn that had grown infirm with age. The walls canted slightly but not dangerously so, and the roof held the grand openings that allowed shafts of light to filter down onto a floor carpeted with hay. Outside, a Peregrine falcon circled high over the pines keening while Perchenko sat in an old wooden chair beneath the old junctions of the barn-house beams. On the floor beside him sat a bottle of vodka, the bottle more than half full, the glass in his hand more than half empty.

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