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.
EXCERPT
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.
Contact Links
Purchase Links
https://mybook.to/WednesdayAfter
