War against New Dawn

From left to right: Greetje Aalderik being tortured by New Dawn, 2021, Pavel Chernenko playing with a toy, Dimitri Petrenko raids a New Dawn hideout, 2021, Soo-jin Chong massacring New Dawn operatives in Korea, 2021, Spetsnaz operatives hunting down New Dawn operatives in Syria, 2022, a unit of Russian Spetsnaz soldiers patrolling Palmyra, Syria, 2023, a Babylon Coalition assassin grappling with a New Dawn gunman in New York City, 2022, a Dutch plainsclothes policeman brawling against a New Dawn operative in the Netherlands, 2023, Jeff Grigg in hand-to-hand combat against a New Dawn operative in Italy, 2023, Dominika Fashkova in a firefight against New Dawn terrorists in Hamburg, 2023, Bradley Houghton hides from New Dawn assassins in a knife shop, 2023.

## General information

### Place

New York City, New York, USAIndonesia

Europe

### Outcome

Conflict ongoing:* New Dawn almost exterminated by Pavel Chernenko

## Major Events

### Major incidents

Operation Red DwarfKidnapping of Adile Izzet

## Combatants

### Allied Combatants

Task Force ReaperApollyon

Chapter X

United States Department of Defense

Central Intelligence Agency

National Security Agency

MI6

MI5

New York City Police Department

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Belgian Federal Police

Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE)

Ministry of State Security

GRU

SVR

New York City Police Department

Special Investigations Agency

### Enemy combatants

New DawnSupported by:

Turkish Mafia

Indonesian Premans

Triads

Japanese Yakuza

## Commanders

### Allied Commanders

Pavel ChernenkoPamela M. Rogers

Soo-Jin Chong

Apollyon:

* Vassilios Vasiliellis
* Panikos Trainallis
* Magda Tripolelli
* Rea Christou
* Thalia Stathouli
* Tasoula Zaridi
* Natalia Zaridi
* Lia Michaelelli
* Joyce C. Murphy

The Petrenko brothers:

* Vladimir Petrenko
* Dimitri Petrenko

Hung San-Ha

Sagong Min-Su

Svetlana Sokolova

Ilya Demchenko

Sevda Akbay

Belgian Police:

* Greetje Alderik

### Enemy commanders

Charles White (KIA)Wirahadi Fang

Head of the Russian Mafia

Don of the Italian Mafia

## Strength

### Allied Strength

New York City police officersCIA agents

NSA agents

MI6 agents

SVR agents

GRU agents

## Casualties and losses

### Enemy casualties

Heavy

The **War against New Dawn** is an ongoing conflict that began in winter of 2020. It was kick-started when New Dawn, an international terrorist organization, launched a massive cyber-attack against the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, US Army Cyber Command, National Security Agency, the Russian GRU, the Russian SVR, and many other intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and military organizations.

## Background

### Christmas Eve Cyber-Attack

At midnight on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2020, a massive cyberattack targeting various various national militaries, intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies caught the world by storm. Within a matter of hours, the US Army Cyber Command, the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI Cyber Division New York Police Department, MI6, MI5, SVR, the Chinese Ministry of State Security, Belgian police, and the French DGSE were breached, and the personnel files of millions of intelligence personnel, police officers and military soldiers were compromised.

Alarmed by the scale of the cyber-attack, the various countries of the world scrambled to find the aggressor, and locate the persons responsible for this brazen attack.

Three weeks later, in 2021, a man named Kevin Carson was arrested in the United Kingdom. Finding that he had fled from the United States of America a week after the attacks happened, Kevin was extradaited to the United States, where he eventually confessed to having been a mastermind of the cyber-attack.

What he said next stunned the US government, and by extension the world: he claimed that the cyber-attacks on the various countries' militaries, law enforcement and intelligence agencies was a prelude to something even bigger, meant to start a war.

### Kevin Carson liberated

While being transferred to a federal prison in New York City, a group of anti-government "anarchists" ambushed the US police convoy transporting Kevin to a federal penitentiary and broke him free, killing thousands of NYPD officers in a bloody shootout.

### New Dawn emerges

Days later, an international terrorist group named New Dawn came forward, claiming responsibility for both the Christmas Eve cyber-attack and the liberation of Kevin Carson. In an ominous warning, they threatened to "completely obliterate" the major superpowers of the world as punishment for the so-called "mistreatment" of less fortunate countries worldwide.

## The Course of the War

### SIA investigation

The Greater Republic of Korea wanted to know the origin of the cyberweapon used in the cyber-attack, since some of its effects were recognized by various Korean agents within the SIA. To that, they deployed Hung San-Ha to Indonesia to investigate. Posing as a journalist, Hung San-Ha was able to uncover evidence that the cyber-weapon was actually US in origin, and that the cyberweapon had been stolen from the United States Armed Forces. In a private conversation, she called her sister, a Korean freelance assassin named  Soo-Jin Chong, urging her to pursue this lead.
Unfortunately, her cover was blown and she was captured by New Dawn before she could alert her superiors of her findings.

### Discovering the weapon

At the same time as the SIA investigation, Pavel Chernenko, a Russian teenager vacationing in Europe for Winter Break, ran into Joyce Murphy, a seemingly ordinary tourist. While chatting with the Russian boy, Joyce noticed a mysterious man carrying a thumb drive.

Unbeknownst to Pavel, Joyce had connections to h an international circle of hackers named Apollyon. In a phone call with her friend, a Greek teenager named Iosif Biratos, she revealed what she saw. Isoif and a couple of his comrades later spotted the man again selling the thumb drive to someone else.

Their suspicions increased even further and eventually Isoif and his men decided to steal the thumb drive to discover its contents. To cover their tracks, Isoif hired a cat burglar named Trudy I. Webster to assist them in pickpocketing the drive. At about 6:30 PM in the evening, on December 26, 2020, Trudy, guided by Isoif and the rest of Apollyon, broke into the buyer's apartment in Belgium, and stole the thumb drive. During exfil, they crossed paths with government agent Pamela M. Rogers, who was also searching for the thumb drive. Managing to evade Pamela, Trudy escaped and delivered the thumb drive to Joyce for analysis.

The theft caught the attention of Wirahadi Fang, head of the Indonesian Premans and an asset for New Dawn. To that end, he dispatched a team of hitmen to kill the thief and recover the thumb drive.

Upon analyzing the thumb drive, Apollyon realized that it contained the cyber-weapon itself. They began to test the cyber-weapon in a series of white hat hacking sessions to see how effective the weapon was at destroying and crippling entire websites. The test results led them to the conclusion that they had found the cyber-weapon in question and needed to deliver it to the authorities.

## The War (2021-2022)

### Belgian Hostage Crisis

On January 5, 2021, Belgian police raided the Apollyon hideout in Belgium, leading to all its occupants being arrested. Greetje Aalderik, a Dutch-born Belgian policewoman, personally questioned Isoif, Joyce and Trudy about their motive for stealing the thumb drive. Joyce told Greetje about the selling of the thumb drive, recounting that after the sale was made, the buyer was overheard talking about a place called The Hive, which the team had searched on Google Maps the night after the theft. Joyce then offered to help the police find it in exchange for a lesser prison sentence.
Joyce led Greetje to the building that Google Maps had indicated, only to be ambushed and captured by New Dawn operatives. Greetje was immediately incapacitated and captured while Joyce was able to temporarily evade capture and call Pavel to alert him to the situation, before being captured as well.
Seeing that her line was still connected, Pavel attempted to bargain with Joyce's kidnappers for her life.
When this failed, he threatened the captors instead. The captors laughed off Pavel's threats and taunted him, before destroying Joyce's phone.

With the two women in captivity, New Dawn attempted to torture Joyce and Greetje for information on the cyberweapon's whereabouts. When the two women remained tight lipped, their captors proceeded to kidnap a young girl named Adile Izzet and Greetje's father Kees, before issuing an ultimatum: Joyce and Greetje had six days to reveal the location of the thumb drive. If they still refused to divulge its location, Joyce would be sold as a sex slave to the Indonesian Premans while Kees, Vassilios and Greetje would be killed.
The captors also threatened Pavel by sending him a video of themselves torturing Joyce and Greetje as part of an attempt to blackmail him into staying quiet about the whole affair. Unbeknownst to New Dawn, however, this action did exactly the opposite: rather than sucessfully scaring Pavel into backing down, they instead provoked him into starting a war against the terrorist organization.

Shaken and enraged, Pavel immediately went to work investigating the kidnapping. After seeing a television news report about the kidnapping, he noted that the kidnapping and the Christmas Eve cyber-attack happened days apart, leading him to realize a connection between the two. With this information, Pavel immediately went to investigating both the kidnapping and the cyber-attack. He later overheard a suspicious conversation between two men that mentioned an entirely new plot against the West codenamed "Operation Red Dawn", as well as plans to sell Joyce to the Russian mafia in exchange for the cyberweapon. This led Pavel to the conclusion that Joyce was going to be traded in exchange for the cyberweapon. Conflicted about what to do, Pavel consulted with his girlfriend Yolanda Lawson, who urged him to go to the police.

One day, he overheard Belgian policeman Jan-Bart Kwant talking about his partner Greetje, who'd gone missing. He learned that Greetje was accompanying an "American informant" to a place called "The Hive". Remembering his last conversation with Joyce, Pavel immediately approached Jan-Bart and told him both what Joyce had said to him before she'd been taken, and the suspicious conversation he heard the previous day. However, he admitted he did not know what "The Hive" was.

### The beginning of war

Two days after Joyce and Greetje were kidnapped, two men allegedly connected to the kidnapping were found tortured to death in their apartment. Police investigating the crime scene found the words "For Joyce and Pavel" spraypainted on the walls. Upon hearing the news, a confused Pavel wondered if the perpetrator was someone close to both Joyce and Pavel. When questioned by police about the matter, Pavel let slip his suspicions that the killer had to be a friend of both Joyce and himself.

### Pavel's War

Following this, Pavel reached out to some friends of his, Russian brothers Vladimir, Dimitri, and Yuri Petrenko, and informed them of the situation. Dimitri, the middle child of the brothers and one of Pavel's closest friends, told him that he actually anticipated that New Dawn would try such a thing, considering the recent events involving the cyberweapon used in the Christmas Eve cyberattack last year. Out of concern for his safety, Dimitri advised Pavel to lay low while the Petrenko brothers investigated the matter themselves.
Dimitri's brother Yuri eventually discovered the plot by the Greek hackers allied with Joyce to steal the cyberweapon after overhearing Greek hacker sisters Natalia and Tasoula Zaridi speaking with fellow hackers Magda Tripolelli, Rea Christou, and Panikos Trainallis about Joyce's kidnapping and hatching a plan to rescue her. He alerted Pavel to this development, but was suddenly ambushed and killed in a shootout between a New Dawn hit squad and unknown gunmen before he could divulge any more information.

Reeling from the sudden death of his brother, Vladimir and Dimitri decided to join Pavel's crusade against New Dawn.
Pavel was later contacted by Lisa R. Moring, an asset for Apollyon, and her partner Ilya Demchenko, who happened to be a friend of Pavel's. Both of them urged Pavel to meet with them at a night club in Luembourgh that evening. Upon his arrival at the nightclub, Ilya and Lisa told Pavel that prior to his murder, Yuri Petrenko had sent him an email claiming that the cyber-attack on December 24, 2020 was merely a "rehearsal" for a much bigger operation against the West. They also claimed that the people within New Dawn was also running a human trafficking ring, with many prominent members using young women as currency to buy the cyberweapon.
Remembering the conversation he'd overheard with Joyce two days before her kidnapping, Pavel was able to put the pieces together and asked Ilya for help in dismantling the human trafficking ring.
Obliging, Ilya told him that the cyber-weapon had been re-stolen by New Dawn, thanks to a mole in the Belgian police force, who was tracked to a flat in Strassen. Mere minutes after his interaction with Ilya and Lisa, Pavel received a phone call from Wirahadi Fang, who again threatened Pavel by reminding him that he would have Greetje, Kees, and Vassilios killed if he ever tried to interfere with New Dawn's plot.
Undeterred, Pavel went to the flat in Strassen as indicated by Ilya. There, he found the man who had originally bought the cyber-weapon, identifying himself as Bas Hekman. Bas was overheard mentioning that he had the cyberweapon in his hands and that he would be delivering the cyberweapon to Wirahadi within the next few hours.

Moments after ending his conversation, Bas was ambushed by a female cat burglar named Ghost Moon who subdued him, and then tried to torture him for the location of the thumb drive contaning the computer worm and any information regarding the nature of New Dawn's plot against the West. Bas kept his mouth shut, and in a fury, the thief killed him and ransacked the flat for the thumb drive.

After she found it, the thief pocketed the drive, but was surprised by Pavel. Holding the thief at gunpoint, Pavel demanded that she hand over the drive, but Ghost Moon claimed that she was an undercover agent with orders from the United States government to return the cyber-weapon to the United States of America. Just then, New Dawn members who heard Bas' pained screams entered the apartment in an attempt to rescue him but were seconds too late. Pavel and Ghost Moon fought their way out of the premises. After escaping the premises, Ghost Moon escaped into the night with the thumb drive, but not before blackmailing Pavel into staying quiet about what he saw.

Unbeknownst to her, Pavel recorded the murder and the theft on video.
Following this, Pavel showed Ilya, Dimitri, and Vladimir the footage, announcing his plans to show the footage to the authorities in order to expose New Dawn's operation and as a bid to get the Belgian authorities to investigate the terror plot. Moments later, however, Pavel was apprehended by the Belgian police, who informed him that he had been considered a suspect for Bas Hekman's murder.

In order to clear his name, Pavel showed the police the footage he recorded that night. This led to the police immediately releasing Pavel after realizing that they got the wrong man. Following his release, Pavel took a walk through the streets of Strassen, contemplating his next move. He then got another text from Ilya, asking him to meet up at the same night club they'd met the previous night.

Upon his arrival at the nightclub, Ilya told him that New Dawn had found out about his and Lisa's statuses as moles for Apollyon and would be coming to kill them soon. He also revealed that a New Dawn member, Viktor Yakimenko, had been spying on him and that he was overheard talking to an anonymous colleague on the phone about Ilya, much to his concern. Minutes later, Ilya fell ill, his drink having been poisoned. Pavel offered to call an ambulance, Ilya instead revealed that Viktor had poisoned his drink and had gone to the bathroom, lamenting that New Dawn had finally found him. He died before he could say anything else. Pavel called the police nontheless, before going to the bathroom to confront VIktor. Following a brief knife fight, Pavel began interrogating Viktor, who revealed that a mole in the police force was responsible for re-stealing the thumb drive. Before he could say anything else, a Thai assassin named Fire Ant arrived, with orders from Wirahadi to assassinate Pavel. Pavel was able to use Viktor as a human shield before hiding in one of the toilet blocks. Scanning the bathrooms, Fire Ant patiently waited for Pavel to make a mistake and give himself away. However, Pavel was able to trick Fire Ant into killing one of his own men, before Pavel and Ghost Moon tag-teamed Fire Ant in a two-on-one fistfight. During the melee, Fire Ant was able to unmask the cat burglar, revealing herself as Sevda Akbay, a young mother and a member of the Babylon Coalition. Surprised that he had been fighting a woman the whole time, Fire Ant abruptly hesitated, allowing Pavel to overpower him. Alarmed by Pavel's combat prowess and his usage of advanced hand-to-hand combat techniques atypical of a mere teenager, Fire Ant realized that Pavel was a bigger threat than he anticipated and attempted to finish Pavel off, but only succeeded in wounding him before being forced to abort the mission when Pavel tried to kill him with an axe.

Following the fistfight, Pavel interrogated Sevda on why she was helping him, only to learn that Dimitri Petrenko had sent her to aid Pavel, and that it was Dimitri who told Sevda to recover the thumb drive from New Dawn.

Taking Pavel to an apartment in the city owned by her friend Ipek Babacan, Sevda revealed that Dimitri Petrenko was the one who'd originally reached out to the Babylon Coalition to assist Pavel in his quest. She then revealed that New Dawn had kidnapped her daughter Adile Akbay, thus explaining her own involvement in the war on New Dawn. After Pavel recovered from his gunshot wound, he requested guns and equipment, deciding to take the war to New Dawn's doorstep.
As Pavel planned his next move, New Dawn sent him another video of Joyce. Curiously, unlike the last video (which showed New Dawn torturing Joyce and Greetje), this video showed a female New Dawn operative seemingly protecting Joyce from the brutality of her captors, covering her eyes while another terrorist tortured Greetje. Pavel recognized the man as Raul Paulo, a member of Los Zetas, a particularly violent drug cartel from Mexico. A closer analysis of the woman's actions towards Joyce led Pavel to suspect that the woman in the video was either sympathetic to Joyce or a mole for another organization that had been inserted into New Dawn as a double agent. When Dimitri Petrenko was shown the footage, he theorized that some kind of "reverse Stockholm Syndrome" was going on between Joyce and the female terrorist. However, he was confused as to how Raul Paulo was able to become an associate of New Dawn. Sevda explained this away as an example of New Dawn recruiting "pretty much everybody".
Later that same day, Pavel got a text from Joyce, who claimed that the sympathetic female terrorist who shielded her eyes in the torture video had given her a cellphone for her to use. She was able to leak the location where New Dawn was holding her captive, and directions to get to the place. Pavel texted her back, promising that he would come and save her, before getting a call from the female "terrorist", asking him to meet with her later that evening at an address that she sent him via text.

Upon arriving at the apartment, he found the sympathetic female "terrorist" being held captive in her own apartment by masked men. While hiding from the intruders, Pavel overheard the two men mention that the woman was an undercover Spanish police officer. Acting on this information, Pavel killed the two men and rescued the woman. The Spanish cop directed Pavel to a warehouse.