Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  The minister of defense proposed to carefully avoid civilian casualties and destruction of foreign investments in the two countries.

  The Chief of the General Staff tried hard to make everyone in the room consider going to war carefully. Arguments for and against were weighed.

  The decisive point was that Russian society had been carefully crafted to be coherent, fiercely nationalist, and decidedly anti-Western. They themselves, with the help of the state-controlled media and education system, had made this fire burn in the hearts of the people. Unlike liberal and open societies, the one of their making could not simply let this go.

  “A war may not serve our financial interests, but we are not in a position to let the fascists get away with murdering Russian children,” the minister of enlightenment summed up the kleptocrats’ dilemma.

  They agreed, that failure to react with resolve and a show of strength would quickly lead to an erosion of their power. Losing their firm grip on the country’s institutions and people would be catastrophic. It would become impossible to keep the extent and the basis of their personal wealth secret. An outright revolution would be a possible outcome. A likely outcome, even. Each and every one of them felt their stomachs turn at the thought of what the furor of their compatriots was capable of.

  They all had heard the stories from the time of terror following the Red October. On the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of Tsar Nicholas II death one year earlier, the media had extensively reported on the execution of the Romanovs. A large part of the imperial family was annihilated, including the tsar’s aunt, an Orthodox nun and founder of hospitals and orphanages. Men of the Cheka, members of the Bolshevik secret police, had tossed her and her entourage into a coal pit and threw two hand grenades after them. When they had realized that not everybody had died right away, they had set the pit on fire.

  The kleptocrats were caught in a corner. The decision was made in the early morning hours. Russia would go to war against Poland and Ukraine.

  Twelve

  Svetlana and Mark sat in a nondescript meeting room, both worked on their respective laptops. Their client had reserved the room for their project, a routine security audit.

  Junghanns Partners, a mid-sized tax-advisory firm, had about a hundred people working on three floors of a building on Hackescher Markt in Berlin’s Mitte district.

  Svetlana had heavily complained about the dullness of the task. Only after Mark had raised her per diem considerably, she had accepted. For him, it was not a big problem to give her a bigger share of the small budget. Two out of three such dull projects led to more challenging and more profitable work afterward. The clients quickly felt the need to invest into security when confronted with the vulnerability of their systems.

  “Okay, I need to get out of this boring place with its boring people and boring systems setup,” Svetlana groaned.

  Mark looked at the clock on the wall, it was 2:35 p.m., and decided they both should leave early. She was unproductive when in a foul mood, and outside the weather was glorious. He could spend the afternoon with his son in the park. “Sure, let’s wrap up for the day,” he said.

  Svetlana looked a bit surprised at first, then celebrated her early Feierabend with a smile.

  Mark looked out the fourth-floor window while putting on his suit jacket.

  A local train hissed past below. The Museum Island looked magnificent with its colonnaded buildings. The sun reflected off the river Spree. The golden cross atop the impressive dome of the Cathedral gleamed. A riverboat crawled upstream, the tourists on the upper deck looking in all directions, pointing here and there at one of the hundreds of interesting things to see, taking pictures with their smartphones and compact cameras.

  The view into James-Simon-Park was far less elating. A group of fifty or so people was protesting in front of the Polish Institute. They had probably chosen this spot for the added visibility. Protesting in front of the Polish Embassy based in a quiet residential street would have gone largely unnoticed.

  The younger ones had short hair and dull expressions on their faces. Some of them were wrapped in Russian flags. Their heads were bent downwards, their eyes fixed on the smartphones in their hands. Most were in their late sixties and seventies. They wore hats of the East German National Peoples’ Army or long disbanded Communist Party organizations. One man sat on a bench, holding on to his cane. His worn-out, brown suit jacket was heavy with medals.

  Cardboard signs with names and pictures of children lay on the ground, red grave lights stood on the edges of the cardboard. Some banners had political statements, mostly anti-American. Other posters demanded that Germany leave NATO and the European Union to join the Eurasian Union alongside Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan instead.

  The protest was a silent one. After five days of anti-Polish speeches by screeching voices amplified by bullhorns, the City of Berlin had threatened to revoke the permit for the protest by the Initiative for Peace and Friendship with Russia.

  It remained unclear what pushed the otherwise sluggish civil servants into action. It might have been the complaints of the Poles, the business-owners of the area, or the one filed by the post-Communist Party councilman who owned a penthouse overlooking the Museum Island.

  “The eastalgic nutcases are still there,” Mark sighed. As a West German he had never understood how people could have feelings of loss for a regime that murdered, tortured, suppressed free speech, and turned the country into a poorhouse. As a side effect, they sympathized with the modern-day incarnation of such a regime in Russia. This eastern nostalgia must be a variant of Stockholm Syndrome, he thought.

  He turned around. Svetlana had already guessed his question. “I checked our insurance this morning before coming here. All good. You just keep your phone charged and that go-bag handy.”

  She got up from her chair and grabbed a baggy and long, yet stylish, cardigan from the chair next to her. Her breasts pushed against the light fabric of the tight blouse as she raised her arms to let the thin Merino wool slide down on her shoulders. The button band was bent outward, the small gap revealed a stretch of transparent black lace. The bean counters’ project leader would probably have died at this sight, Mark thought.

  For the onsite work, Mark had insisted on a meeting room for their exclusive use instead of desks in the open space office his client had suggested. In his experience, both the client’s employees and his team were less productive when Svetlana was seated in an open space. The client’s people would look up at the slightest move their gorgeous contractor made, and Svetlana would quickly get annoyed by precisely that behavior. She had done her part and dressed conservatively, hence the baggy cardigan that covered her from knees to shoulders. Mark had done his, and managed to get them into a closed-off room.

  Once on the street, Svetlana shook off the cardigan and put it on top of her handbag. She smiled and waved goodbye then walked off in the elfin way that Mark adored so much.

  ✽✽✽

  The large LED displays in the long stretched arrivals corridor of Warsaw’s Chopin Airport showed a canned five-minute news show that was updated every two hours. It showed a video of people throwing fists into the air. The bilingual caption, Polish and English, read ‘Moscow protests go into their second week, still over 100,000 on the streets’.

  As the passengers just off the Aeroflot flight from Moscow walked toward the exit, they could follow the program almost uninterrupted. The change of captions was timed so that a person walking at normal speed would be able to read every caption on the monitors spaced about twenty yards apart. The next one continued ‘Polish and Ukrainian presidents meet in Luhansk, apologize jointly for the tragic accident’.

  A group of broad shouldered men in black suits passed the last monitor before the passport control for non-European Union nationals. The third caption in the series read ‘Russian foreign minister tweets refusal to accept apologies’. It was accompanied by a screenshot of the politician’s Twitter feed. After immigrat
ion, the men dispersed into the crowd waiting near the baggage carousel.

  The loudspeakers cracked. “Paging passenger Sergei Krug, passenger Sergei Krug, incoming on Aeroflot flight SU2002 from Moscow. Please proceed to the baggage inspection office next to belt number five,” a woman’s voice said first in Polish then English.

  One of the five men turned his head at the announcement, listened stone-faced, then walked toward the last belt in the hall.

  The baggage inspector stood over a closed black suitcase. He was a short, thin man with a mustache and looked a few years over fifty. “Mister Krug,” he half asked when Shashka reached the counter.

  “Da,” was the tight-lipped answer.

  “Sir, could you please open your suitcase for inspection?”

  Shashka was visibly annoyed but did as he was asked.

  The inspector looked inside. A long bayonet lay on top of a black coverall, a few striped T-shirts, and a pair of combat boots. “This weapon, sir, why did you bring it with you to Poland?” The inspector tried to be friendly to the impressive Russian.

  “I checked bag, should not be problem to bring collector’s item into country, no?” Shashka said, still hardly suppressing his annoyance. He turned his head, realizing that two police officers with HK MP5 submachine guns were standing nearby. He quickly collected himself and forced an apologetic look. “Sorry, flight was long. This is bayonet for SVT-40 rifle. From Great Patriotic War. It is gift for business partner, yes? He collector of Red Army and Polish Army things.”

  The inspector was satisfied with the answer after having had a quick look at the weapon. It was in an excellent condition and could easily pass as a collectible.

  Poland’s capital, Warsaw, is also the country’s center of economic activity. It is a bustling and quickly growing metropolis, home to Eastern Europe’s largest banks, media and telecommunications holdings, and large concerns in all branches of business. It also has the region’s most productive startup scene that rivals Berlin’s and London’s.

  Over 40,000 passengers arrive at Chopin airport every day, most of them travel for business. This day, a Tuesday, was especially busy. Quite undetectably, 5,000 additional passengers had arrived. All were men in their twenties and thirties. They came in on commercial flights from Astana in Kazakhstan, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Minsk in Belarus, Yerevan in Armenia, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad, and also via the hourly shuttle planes from hubs like Frankfurt and London.

  The number of tourists also spiked that day. Rather sorry looking Soviet-era coach buses with Belarusian license plates arrived in droves since the morning. The dilapidated regional trains arriving every hour from the border town of Terespol also spilled out men in unusual numbers. Most of them wore tracksuits and sneakers. All carried heavy-looking sports bags. Yet, they were hardly noticeable once they had dispersed in the city center. After all, nearly ten million tourists visit the city every year. Also, it is the first stop for immigrants from Belarus and Ukraine to look for work.

  ✽✽✽

  The last two planes to land at Warsaw Chopin on this Tuesday were two cargo planes owned by an Azerbaijani charter company. Coming from Beijing, they had reported a refueling in Kazakhstan on their flight plan, not surprising with over one hundred tons of cargo each. According to their manifests, they were carrying a load of especially heavy batteries for electric car production in the Poznań Volkswagen works. The flights had been scheduled less than a day in advance. Unusual, but the airport management is happy for any cargo plane taking one of the plenty night slots of the airport that is working at full capacity during the daytime.

  Both planes were Antonov AN-124, a majestic shoulder winged aircraft with a wingspan of over two hundred forty feet. Its cargo hold is almost twice as wide as a Boeing 747’s and even wider than the U.S. Air Force’s C-17’s. Its four giant jet engines propel a payload of up to 150 tons and an additional eighty-eight passengers forward at a ground speed of 500 miles per hour.

  The planes touched down on the twelve-thousand-foot-long runway 15/33 at 11:51 and 11:59 p.m., then taxied to the cargo terminal at the very end of the runway. The two enormous aircraft filled three parking spaces marked on the ground with red lines. The flight crew sat in their cockpits looking out to the blue building with the word cargo written on it in white letters.

  Four customs officials and two ramp agents left the building. They split into two groups of three and approached the portside cabin doors. Both aircraft had lowered the built-in entrance stairs. Seconds after the three-man teams had entered the respective planes several loud pops echoed from the fuselages. The fire of suppressed weapons in a tight metallic space. The Polish-Ukrainian-Russian War, for lack of a better name, had produced six casualties in its first minute.

  ✽✽✽

  The night crew at the cargo terminal consisted of three ramp agents, four customs officials, and five security guards. Six men were outside with the late arrivals, the others sat lazily in the crew room and watched TV. The next perimeter patrol around the fence would not be due before the end of the game show.

  Six men with hats, earmuffs, and safety vests approached the building. With the brims of their hats pulled low they were easily visible but not recognizable despite the bright lights. The holes in their uniforms could not be seen either. One of their number waved back at one of the TV watchers who had raised his hand inside.

  When the group entered the room, the ramp agent had just got up to use the bathroom. When he saw that these were not his crewmates but complete strangers he had only managed to utter the words ‘co jest kurwa, what the fuck’. He was hit in the chest with a burst of automatic fire from an SR-2 Veresk submachine gun. The other five men shared his fate within seconds.

  The squad leader took out a sturdy looking smartphone and typed the command ‘advance squad anna, cargo terminal, area secure’ in Russian into the device with both hands. The same second, both Antonovs started to spill out soldiers wearing black coveralls and body armor. They also wore ski masks under their helmets which slightly muffled the voices of squad leaders ordering their men into position. They put up a defense perimeter around the aircraft and stood by while the huge noses and additional ramps at the rear of the fuselages folded open.

  ✽✽✽

  In the passenger terminal, the cleaners were busy. The hums of floor cleaning machines and clangs of trash cans meeting the rims of collection carts sounded all over the not so empty building. Some four hundred men in suits loitered on the airside and landside parts of the building. A quite unusual sight at this time of night.

  Two late flights out had been canceled at the last minute, SU2003 to Moscow and KC1195 to Astana in Kazakhstan. Normally, they would be given vouchers for the Marriot Courtyard right outside the airport, but the local representatives of both airlines were nowhere to be found. With no one to authorize and organize the vouchers, the men were stranded. None of them seemed to mind much. They sat quietly and read newspapers, some talked among themselves.

  The airport security at nights consisted of three separate entities cooperating via a simple digital radio network. Both in the North Hall and the South Hall, a skeleton crew sat in a small room between airside and landside and monitored the CCTV feeds for their respective sector. The two CCTV operators were civilians hired through a security company. Two policemen were on standby to rotate with the two policemen who patrolled the halls. The shift leader was also police. The third entity was the night crew of Okęcie police station three hundred yards outside the terminal.

  In the South Hall security office, four men were doing what they were always doing. The policemen were reclining on comfortable chairs, playing on their smartphones or dozing. The civilians had their eyes on the array of monitors.

  At 00:43 the CCTV screens went black from one second to the next. As protocol dictates, the shift leader ordered his men on patrol and notified the two-man team outside of the outage.

  As the landside door slammed shut, he heard muffled groans on the ot
her side. After a short rattle of keys the door swung back open and six rounds from a Walther P99 pistol killed him and the civilians who were trying to reboot the CCTV system. Two men in black coveralls entered the room.

  The airside door swung open, and a man in a suit saluted Sergeant Major Krug, code name Shashka. He reported that the roaming patrol in the South Hall had been neutralized. Shashka nodded and took out a sturdy smartphone that chirped. A new post appeared in a feed, it read ‘advance squad boris, north hall, area secure’.

  He typed in a few letters. An artificial intelligent application proposed commands much like the predictive text application of civilian smartphones. His post read ‘advance squad vasily, south hall, area secure’ and was added to the feed. The smartphone in Shashka’s huge hand chirped again three times. The posts read ‘advance squad galina, tower, area secure’, ‘advance squad dmitry, military wing, area secure’, and ‘advance squad elena, police station, area secure’.

  Shashka’s feed contained all field reports relevant for his role as commander of ‘advance squad vasily’. On a second tab, he could look at the next objectives for his unit. The satellite smartphone was connected to the Russian Special Forces Network, nicknamed SemFoNi. The Russian army’s phonetic alphabet spelled SFN as Semyon Fyodor Nikolai.

  In SemFoNi a pre-programmed mission plan was ticked off by the posts. Using typed commands that autocompleted according to the operative’s role and mission status had proven faster than having soldiers navigate through a visual mission plan. Plus, they could at any time report unpredicted incidents. The mission plan would then be updated by a planner supervised by the operation commander, and new objectives would simultaneously go out to all squad leaders in the theater. The system could also be used one-handed or with voice-commands and, if necessary, anybody in the mission network could call anybody else on a secure line.