“I’m hoping to get from your take on the recent security breach at the Defense Ministry. The one attributed to Russian hackers. And, of course, a printable quote to go with it,” Vitus said.
The young journalist was a good soul, whenever he wrote a piece on IT-security, he would make sure to get a quote from Mark. This PR was priceless for Sanders so he would be happy to pick up the tab for anything from a four-euro beer at Mittelbar to a two-hundred-euro steak dinner at Grill Royal for Vitus.
Mark recited what he had learned about the hacks from the various blogs who picked up the news first. He pointed out where the weaknesses really lay. The root causes were not so much technical in nature but rather management problems.
The IT-departments of the various arms of government in Germany never really overcame their birth defects. With the personal computer revolution reaching Europe in the 1980s, enthusiastic civil servants in their early twenties had started using computers. They had written programs themselves that would run on local hard drives and make this or that process faster or less tiresome. Sometimes they had done so with the blessing of their superiors, sometimes not.
Anyhow, as German civil servants they were employed for life and almost guaranteed a pre-defined career track. Their superior knowledge of the programs had not added to their job security or helped them advance faster but had rather pushed them into a niche where their only motivation was to work less for the same money.
At this time, they were in their late fifties counting down the months to retirement. As the software industry evolved and even saw a few revolutions, like cloud computing, they kept building their own systems mostly based on what they knew and not what was the best and latest. Add to that an irrational obsession with data privacy and the individual IT-department head’s quirks and one can easily understand why the worst job in the world is selling state-of-art govtech in Germany.
“Well, you kinda always echo the same line when it comes to the government. But, I guess, I can use some of what you said,” Vitus said slightly disappointed. A journalist needs news, not the same truth over and over again.
“Okay, I’ll give you a spicy quote to go with it,” Mark said. Vitus clicked his pen twice and listened.
Mark took a deep breath before starting his quote, “It is absolutely shameful that the government of a major European country is less capable of protecting its secrets than some of my mid-cap corporate clients. The government seriously needs to rethink its make-or-buy decisions. So far the systems their civil servants made were sub-standard.”
Vitus grinned and feverishly scribbled the words into his Moleskine notebook.
The publication of these words would make sure that Mark Sanders would never get a German government contract ever, but it would resonate well with potential corporate clients. They thought along the same lines and wondered how their tax euros were put to work.
The conversation now switched to more general topics. Vitus not only was Springer’s cybercrime-specialist but also frequently wrote on topics concerning Eastern Europe. Sometimes he would write about political, sometimes about social issues. Recently, cybercrime and Russia more and more overlapped in his articles. Western Europe, especially Germany, had seen an unprecedented number of hacks originating from St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Vitus downed the last swig of his large Bitburger. “You know, it still bothers me that we couldn’t tell the full story on the Panama Files back in the day. You still have an unredacted copy of the data, don’t you?”
Mark looked around a little nervous and gritted his teeth. He whispered, “We really shouldn’t be discussing this in the middle of a bar filled with journalists.”
“Right,” Vitus also lowered his voice to a whisper. “Anyway, you and Svetlana launched my career when you handed me the scoop. Although I only got the watered down version of the data and shared the booty with the International Investigative Journalists’ Committee, that story made me. A junior like me never would have got the chance to work on it otherwise.”
Sanders forced a smile and looked at the beermat he was nestling. “No need to thank anybody. You were the best to do the work that needed doing.” He looked up at Amberger. “Besides, you repaid me a hundredfold already.”
Then Mark looked around again. “But, yeah, it still bothers me, too. The full picture completely focused in on the right people would have changed the world. It would definitely have saved those Polish soldiers’ lives.”
Right after Mlada, Svetlana, had taken Sanders into confidence, he in turn looked out for a trustworthy and hungry journalist to bring the scoop. Mlada and Sanders fed him the information piecemeal and over the course of a few weeks. In the end, the Panama Files became a worldwide journalistic effort.
Both sat silently, staring at their empty glasses. Sanders broke the silence, “Or it might have been the end of the world as we know it.”
Eight
Defense Minister Startsev entered the wood-paneled room with the long conference table and the thick velvet curtains. He had been in this room thousands of times and spoken millions of words to the man who occupied it. Today, he had bad news, which always made his guts revolt when entering the stateroom of the Russian president.
He looked at the man who sat at a large desk at the far end of the enormous room. Above him hung a coat-of-arms of a white double-headed eagle with a red breastplate showing Saint George slaying the dragon. The president was reading in a file, made some notes, and motioned Startsev to sit without looking up.
After a minute, the president looked up at his senior cabinet member. He had his usual droopy expression that the world had learned not to mistake as a sign of weakness or lack of intellect. In his twentieth year at the helm of the world’s most feared nuclear power, most people read this face as one of arrogance and contempt. The Russian media tended to describe the look as assertive.
Startsev started to speak and made a conscious effort to sound well prepared and confident. “Our signals intelligence shows clearly that Poland is mobilizing her troops. Trains with heavy ordnance, tanks, and artillery, are heading east. Their fleet is patrolling the coastline, and over fifty percent of the TDF have been activated under the guise of a flash exercise. The Ukrainians had been at high alert for the past five years. No change there, but we see a lot of encrypted traffic between Warsaw and Kiev. The consensus assessment by our analysts at SVR and GRU is that our neighbors have allied and are preparing a strike to retake the Donbas.”
The President took in this information without any show of emotion.
Startsev cleared his throat and continued, “My suggestion is not to react publicly before the shooting starts. We currently have the upper hand in the affair of the dead Polish soldiers, our possession of Crimea is de facto uncontested. We have nothing to gain from an active role in a shooting war with a NATO-country. On the contrary, we would lose the plausible deniability we have worked so hard to uphold until now.”
Still no reaction on the president’s part.
“The total cost of supporting the People’s Republics was nearly one billion dollars last year. The revenue of Russian businesses with the region sums up to merely 680 million. One could call this a loss-making project.” Now Startsev mustered up all his confidence for his final pitch. “I say, we cut our losses and move our personnel and materiel back across the border. When the shooting starts, we slander the fascist government in Kiev for killing their own people and the Poles for further destabilizing the region.”
“Da,” said the president, nodded briefly, and then refocused his attention to a greenish folder on his desk.
✽✽✽
The sun shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows of McKinsey & Company’s Warsaw office from a south-westerly direction. The management consultants worked in a hyper-modern building on Plac Piłsudskiego with a view over Ogród Saski, a beautiful park.
The tall, blue-eyed man in the white Jermyn Street shirt got up from his Herman Miller chair and took his su
it jacket off a coat hanger in the corner of his glass cube. He put the jacket on with an exhausted expression on his face.
Dr. Michał Karasek ran his right hand through his short salt-and-pepper hair and had a last look at the open Outlook application. He was satisfied to find his email inbox empty and folded the black laptop shut.
While he put the computer into a black leather bag, he glanced out the window to Plac Piłsudskiego which essentially was a large parade ground. At its western end, at the tree line of the park, stood the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Two Honor Guards were on watch around the clock next to the eternal flame that burned high inside the central colonnade. The three lone colonnades that are now the monument honoring those who died for the freedom of the Poles was all that was left of the Pałac Saski, the Saxon Palace, after the Warsaw Uprising.
On normal days, Michał rode to work by bike, but that week he used an UberBlack for the short commute every evening. Since the orders to report to his Territorial Defense Force posting had come two days earlier, he had burned the midnight oil to be able to hand over his current project to a co-worker in the Singapore office. This woman he had only met by video-conference would finish the Big Data analyses that the thirty-seven-year-old with a Ph.D. in Statistics was tasked with. On his last day at home, he would reward himself, his wife, and two children with spending a quiet evening at home. A nice dinner and games would help them get through the two weeks he would be away.
✽✽✽
As the flat meadows of central Poland rolled by under a bright blue sky, Michał Karasek listened to the soothingly regular thump of the tracks. He was slightly bored half an hour into his train ride. As per his orders, he had left his smartphone at home, and in the rush to catch his 5:55 a.m. train he had forgotten to buy something to read.
Getting up after less than four hours of sleep was tough. Michał had showered quickly and had put on his battle dress. With his wife right behind, her head on his arm, he had silently opened the door to his children’s room and had looked at the two. They had been fast asleep and looked very peaceful.
Yet, the tired volunteer soldier smiled. The Berlin-Warszawa-Express was Michał’s favorite train in Poland. It was nothing special, old German railway cars refurbished to a not really modern style pulled by an electric engine. The EuroCity train was comfortable enough, but he did not like it for its comfort, he liked it for the memories it carried.
Almost sixteen years earlier Michał had spent a year abroad at Viadrina University in Frankfurt-on-Oder, and he had taken that train to commute between school, his home in Poznań, and Warsaw where his girlfriend had lived.
Frankfurt-on-Oder, the ‘little Frankfurt’ was not to be confused with the German banking hub in the western half of the country. At the beginning of his stay, Michał had viewed Frankfurt as a small, slightly run-down East German town on the Polish border with a small university that had an excellent Statistics department. A year later it had become the place where he had forged lifelong friendships.
The university housing office had made a lottery among students to move into their newly refurbished five-room co-living apartments. When August-Bebel-Straße number 43 Apt. 0 had turned out to go to four Polish occupants they had decided to put a token German into the place. Promoting German-Polish cultural exchange is a key goal of the university. And this had been how Michał met Kuba, Paweł, Jacek, and Mark Sanders, the German.
Michał had arrived with his suitcase and his PC one afternoon, a few days before the start of the summer term. Just as he had started to get settled in the small furnished private room, there was a knock on the door. He had opened.
“Hallo, ich bin Mark,” the broad-shouldered guy said and held up two half-liter cans of Bitburger beer. Mark had told him, he had been alone in the apartment for two days and had been happy for some company.
After the others had moved in, the five started to eat dinner together most nights. Usually, Jacek had made Spaghetti Bolognese with lots of garlic. Beer had always flowed freely. After the second beer, the Poles had often grown tired of speaking German and had switched to Polish. Michał had registered with bemusement that Mark’s initial dismay over this had turned into a strong motivation to pick up a few words after he had started dating a pretty Polish girl.
The gang of five had had a lot of classes together and become practically inseparable. The months went by, they studied, went swimming in the nearby lake, drank, partied, and picked up girls. They very often made the short walk across the bridge to the bars and clubs in Słubice. The Polish town had been a district of Frankfurt before Stalin redrew Central Europe’s borders and cut the small town in two even smaller ones.
When Michał recognized the first bit of familiar landscape outside the window, he started to mentally prepare for the flash exercise with the company he commanded in the 12th Territorial Defense Brigade. He did not have much to go on. His orders had been to report to the barracks, inspect his troops, and do the usual warm up drills to help them make the switch between civilian and military life. He would learn everything else in the officers’ briefing scheduled for noon that day.
Kapitan Michał Karasek got off the train at Poznań’s main station and headed for the olive-drab communist-era bus. A Territorials private stood next to the front door with a clipboard. He saluted sloppily and checked off Michał’s name on a list. Captain Karasek let it slide, the youngster would get shaped up by his CO in the next two weeks.
✽✽✽
Sitting at his MacBook Air, Mark Sanders wrote up an offer for a small client. Nothing exciting but he could have Svetlana do the standard security audit at the mid-sized tax advisory. She would certainly be bored to death, but he was sure he could appease the hacker by giving her the lion’s share of the budget. She will probably call it compensation for suffering, Sanders thought and chuckled.
He sent the offer and checked his inbox. There were two new client inquiries, they both mentioned Vitus’ article and complimented Mark for the quote. Seemed like it hit the spot. Vitus used it just as spicy as Mark had given it. He decided to call Vitus on his cell phone.
“Amberger,” Vitus took the call after five rings. He was hard to hear over the wind noise on his end of the line.
“Hey, it’s Mark. Just wanted to let you know, I am getting a lot of feedback on your article,” Mark shouted against the noise that filled his headset.
Vitus shouted back, “That’s great. My editor loved your quote. He insisted on bringing it and even told me to make a stronger point versus your friends in civil service, too.” The call dropped.
A minute later Vitus called back. “Hey, I am in Poland covering this flash exercise of their weekend warriors. Will be back next week, let’s talk then.”
Mark was surprised to hear that the TDF were exercising. Usually, his friend Michał sent him pictures before even leaving the house. He was very proud to be a captain with the Territorials.
“Alright. Just remember not to call them weekend warriors. They hate that!” Mark was cut off again before he could lecture Vitus about the legacy of the Home Army, the Armia Krajowa.
✽✽✽
Michał was a Poznaniak by birth. Even though he was not allowed to carry his cell phone, he would definitely call his mother from the landline in the barracks sometime during the week. If he got an evening off or after the exercise, he would drop by her house in the well-to-do Stary Grunwald neighborhood of Poznań.
He was the CO of the 140 men of 4th Company of the 121st Light Infantry Battalion in the 12th Territorial Defense Brigade. The company consisted of three platoons with three twelve-man squads each plus officers, NCOs, and company staff soldiers. He had no women in his company, which was rather unusual. Michał did not mind much. While he had made good experiences with mixed teams in civilian life, he was happy not having to worry too much about sexual harassment or love troubles among his subordinates. Military life meant being together with the same people for weeks in a small space without any breaks.
Add to that the planned physical exhaustion and sleep deprivation. This environment was stressful enough as it was.
Michał entered the stuffy conference room in the battalion’s staff building a few minutes before noon. The plywood-and-metal tables and chairs must have been older than him. At the head of the table was a visibly old video-conferencing system. Its large LCD screen also served for presentations. Currently, it showed the TDF insignia, a white eagle with a golden crown sitting atop a shield with a golden Kotwica, the anchor formed by a letter P and a rounded W.
After a quick informal hello the officers sat down around the table, and the battalion commander welcomed his officers.
“We can proudly state that one objective of our flash exercise has already been achieved,” the colonel started off with the good news. “The headcount shows zero AWOL. Three privates and two non-commissioned officers are absent but accounted for. They called in sick and will see their nearest military physician later today. This is a testament to your good leadership in past exercises, Panowie.”
The officers knocked on the tables for applause.
“Before I continue with the objectives of our exercise and a preliminary schedule, I need to point out that everything you will hear and see in this room is top secret and only to be shared on a need-to-know basis,” the colonel said with a sincere voice.
The company commanders looked at each other slightly puzzled and then turned back to their superior. Exercises of the TDF were not particularly secret. Usually, they were classified confidential, two full security clearance levels lower.
The colonel continued, “As of tomorrow morning, a joint Polish-Ukrainian force will kick off a mission to re-establish order in the Donbas region. Their objective is to drive any forces not loyal to the Ukrainian state out of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. The operation is designated Eagle Strike and estimated to last three weeks plus x.”
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