Nikita Khrushchev arrives in Stalingrad to coordinate defense of the city and demands ideas from his subordinates on how to improve morale. The vehicle's occupant, Commissar Danilov, hides among numerous bodies, coincidentally next to Vasily, who uses his marksmanship skills to kill all German soldiers nearby and grant them both safety. Later, a tank shell hits and incapacitates a car. Forced into a suicidal charge without a rifle, Vasily barely survives the onslaught.
Zaitsev is now a soldier in the Red Army and finds himself on the front lines of the Battle of Stalingrad. The timeline then shifts to 1942, following the invasion of the Soviet Union the year before. Only the pursuit of power remains.A young Vasily Zaitsev is taught how to shoot with a hunting rifle by his grandfather, in the Ural Mountains. An environment in which liberty, nationality, and loyalty are meaningless. In doing so, he finds himself walking an impossible tightrope: Keep the man alive, but also use him as bait to uncover a traitor who has seemingly unlimited access to government secrets.Īs the attacks on Ward become increasingly dire, Rapp and Kennedy are dragged into a world where the lines between governments, multinational corporations, and the hyper-wealthy fade. When Kennedy discovers evidence of a mole scouring the Agency’s database for sensitive information on Nicholas Ward, the world’s first trillionaire, she convinces Rapp to take a job protecting him.
Cunning and autocratic, he feels no loyalty to America’s institutions and is distrustful of the influence Rapp and CIA director Irene Kennedy have in Washington. Mitch Rapp has worked for a number of presidents over his career, but Anthony Cook is unlike any he’s encountered before.