From my 1st novel

Here is the main baddie from my first novel. *And the Tide Turns* it takes places in an alternate history where the Cold War lingers on longer, and the United States is on the brink of a second Civil War:

Gernot:

In the year 2054, the world stood fractured. The once-mighty United States teetered on the brink of collapse, torn apart by ideological warfare between its Red and Blue states. Its people, exhausted and bitter, had retreated into their echo chambers, while its leaders squabbled over the scraps of a once-united vision. Meanwhile, in the frozen expanse of a starving and embittered Russia, the seeds of a bold plan had taken root.

Gernot was born in 2029 in a dilapidated Moscow tenement. His childhood was a bleak tableau of scarcity, where breadlines snaked endlessly through the city’s icy streets, and whispers of the “great betrayal” filled every home.

For the Russians, the post-Cold War promises of prosperity had long faded, replaced by a grim new reality: an America-dominated global economy that had left them in the dust.

Gernot’s parents, once loyal citizens, grew increasingly radicalized, filling his mind with stories of how the West had strangled Russia’s future.

By the time Gernot turned 20, his parents were gone—his father to cirrhosis and his mother to malnutrition during a particularly harsh winter. With nothing left to lose, he joined the remnants of Russia’s intelligence apparatus. It was there that his brilliance for strategy, languages, and psychological manipulation was recognized, and he was given command of his own private group called The Red Hand that operated in the shadows of the Kremlin.

Gernot comes into some old journal written by an Australian scientist who was a good friend of Nikolai Tesla. In these entries Gernot and his crew were able to figure out how to travel into the past, however it was traveling into the future that Gernot was interested in. why conquer the past and change his future so that he does not exist? He wished to learn from the scientist the method to travel into the future and bring back with him weapons and intelligence to win a war in his current era.

Gernot’s Perspective:

For Gernot, the mission was more than duty; it was salvation. He had seen the hunger in his sister’s sunken cheeks, the desperation in his neighbors’ eyes as they burned furniture to keep warm, and the hopelessness of a nation trapped in the shadow of its former glory. To him, America wasn’t just a rival—it was the architect of his people’s suffering.

“They preach freedom while they hoard the world’s wealth,” his handler once said, and Gernot believed every word. The Red Hand taught him to see the United States as a decadent empire, too absorbed in its own internal squabbles to notice the havoc it had wrought on the rest of the world.

But Gernot wasn’t blind to the dangers. Time travel was a Pandora’s box, and each mission into the past came with greater risks of destabilizing the future. Yet he pressed on, even as whispers spread of unforeseen consequences—vanishing agents, ripples in the timeline that erased entire villages, and strange anomalies that hinted at something darker beneath the fabric of time itself.

I could go on and on about Gernot and his motivations but I’d love for you to read them yourselves. And the Tide Turns is available on Amazon. If time travel is not your thing, check out On the Hit List. A roaring comedic story in the vein of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off meets Super Bad meets The Hangover. And if that doesn’t tickle thy pickle. My latest a semi-police procedural character drama about a real life LAPD detective called In the Hunt is available too.