Taken at four.
The boy never knew his mother’s name.
Never got to meet his father.
Kidnapped and held hostage.
At some point, the trail went cold.
Swapped from safe house to safe house. Swapped between and among other look-alike children, he was never found again.
Confused why he was being raised by savages.
Irina—that is, Vladislova—never quite made a good mom.
In fact, she despised him, and he could never quite comprehend why.
She exhibited signs of bipolar disorder and perhaps even schizophrenia, so he figured she was sick. So he forgave her for what he began to call “her episodes.”
What it really was, was plain hatred and domestic violence.
He was accustomed to it at that point, but she really nailed the point home one afternoon.
Her shattering his skull at fourteen, during the first few weeks of his sophomore year of high school, did more than just hurt him.
Without a single word uttered by either of them, the boy quietly began to understand that even though he had no recollection of where he came from, he did not belong to these people.
A star pupil faded in that moment and retreated into the nights of New York.
The neglect in the prior years was one thing. He didn’t really mind.
No parent-teacher meetings were ever attended.
Seventy absences in seventh or eighth grade went unnoticed.
This time, he refused to spend time at home, too.
It never really felt like home anyway.
You become trapped in your own loop—a cycle of violence—in your mind after a childhood like that.
With time, he wisened.
After leaving home at seventeen, he never quite felt free from the bondage of his mind.
All war—every war—is “fought up here,” some soldiers say, pointing to their own temples.
This much is true:
The boy, now a young man, kept shedding people he accumulated in his life, as that made him feel better.
Made him perform better.
However, this made him susceptible to the next stage of his life, where he would find himself trapped in a new kind of bondage:
Psychological Hybrid Asymmetric Warfare.
Campaigns waged on the United States of America.
At some point, thrown into the thick of it—practically clueless—he began to make sense of it all and began to piece together the vast scale of the operations conducted by foreign adversaries and homegrown domestic threats on United States soil.
He began to feel like a prisoner of war.
No matter what he did, he could not escape it.
Any and all means against the U.S. somehow always fell onto his plate.
Like a spearhead, he was always there on the frontier of the ever-developing reality on the ground.
Then a team appeared.
He was no longer alone.
But in command.
Every success brought ever-increasing authority to the young man.
Never calling himself a soldier, mostly he would say:
“Just ensuring everything is in order.”
Or:
“Just supervising.”
“Control, do you read me?”
“Loud and clear, Konstantin,” the control and command center would respond.