He moved to the living room, slumped onto the couch, and put the wireless Apple AirPods into his ears. This was not the call in the night he was dreading so much, but it needed immediate attention nonetheless. Svetlana was not one to panic easily. When she sounded panicky, it was for a good reason.
“Hey, what’s up?” the tired man mumbled.
“It’s not on the news, yet, but the Russians have taken Kiev and Warsaw,” the voice on the other side announced matter-of-factly.
“Fuck, how?” Mark could not believe it.
“Well, however they did it, they did it.” Svetlana sounded serious and made an effort to keep her voice low.
“How do you know, I mean, how can you be sure?” Mark was not sleepy anymore. He had a vague idea how Svetlana could know of a war on Central European soil before anybody in the news community, but he needed to confirm it was really happening.
“A guy I know, a Ukrainian hacker slash activist, he called me via TLKS just now and sent pictures from Kiev via a very peculiar setup of TOR over satellite. I didn’t get it, really. But the guy is serious, he’s no nutcase.” Svetlana relayed what she had learned, and the two discussed what this would mean for them. Svetlana’s opinion would be the one that really counted.
“To be honest, I have no fucking clue,” she answered the question what they should do now.
Mark buried his head in his hands. An AirPod fell out his right ear. He put it back in and got up from the couch to walk around the room, his eyes fixated on the small credenza by the wall where he hid his go bag and the 9 mm Glock he had been given for protection.
Mark tried to think of the most imminent problem for the people in Kiev and apparently Warsaw as well. “Is there any way you can fix the communications?” he asked. “It might help get information to the outside world, and people can get organized to run, hide, fight, whatever they decide to do.”
Svetlana needed a while to think about it. She was sure, she could get into the communications systems of Poland if they were still up.
“Look, I can get in as long as they have not been switched off at the central networking nodes of the various providers. Once the net is down, you have to physically move there and reboot the whole shebang. Even if they are still on but somehow blocked by outsiders, it would only take minutes for them to find out that there’s a troublemaker around. It would draw a lot of attention to us. We can’t risk that.”
“Yeah, I see.” Mark saw no other sensible thing to do. “Well, if this were a business problem and I didn’t know what to do, I would do everything to get a picture that points me toward a solution. That’s what we need to do now, get a clear picture.”
The other end was silent. “Yeah, I don’t have a better idea,” Svetlana answered a few seconds later. “I will dig in and see if there is anything compromising us around the SVR and GRU systems. Check and check again on our insurance policy.”
Mark blew out some air. “Good, and I will call Vitus. He’ll be on the story, and he is the best guy to get information fast if we give him a starting point. Can you forward the pictures from Kiev and a contact? If your friend is an activist, he probably won’t mind the publicity.”
Svetlana laughed. “No, he sure won’t mind. He is the kind who wants everybody to know, he is the smartest kid on the block.”
✽✽✽
“Sorry, I have no time, man,” Vitus shouted into his headset. He sat on his Vespa, a small Italian scooter, and raced toward Berlin Mitte.
“Listen!” Mark shouted back. “I have pictures from Kiev. Talk to me, and you’ll get them exclusive plus a way to talk to a guy on the ground.”
Vitus stopped the scooter on Leipziger Straße opposite Marion-Gräfin-Dönhoff-Platz.
“Are you kidding? Are you fucking kidding?” He could not believe that anybody had information from inside Ukraine.
The oldest hand among his colleagues had done the modern equivalent of sounding a general alarm at night. He had always babbled about the really fundamental stuff happening on shortwave, not Twitter.
Everybody on the staff laughed behind his back about the old fart who refused to go with the times. If he hadn’t been a ‘decorated veteran journalist’ and a close friend of the publisher, he would have been sent into early retirement years ago. But nobody had pictures or first-hand information, not even the oldtimer who had happened to listen in on the desperate cries for help from the Ukrainian General Staff.
“I’m listening,” Vitus said once he had got his mind around the possibilities of this scoop.
✽✽✽
Bonifacy Pułaski was an old school guy himself, a veteran soldier. As the ‘first soldier’ of an aspiring regional power in Europe, though, he had embraced technology and techniques of espionage.
He did go with the times, but when he entered his situation room, he needed a few seconds to get a grip on the sight. Women with thick hair barely tamed into ponytails and men with man buns and long beards were sitting at the workstations and doing what soldiers of a communications platoon do.
Bilinski had lightly tapped his arm as if to tell him something. By then he had already reminded himself of the official cover for this facility and waved the military intelligence general off.
“Attention,” the duty officer shouted a little too late. He had been very focused on the information he got in and the need to coordinate the various stations.
Pułaski made a step forward. “Soldiers, I am not going to say dzień dobry because sure as hell, nothing is good about this day.”
He made a pause and tried to find a more positive note, which was not easy. “Our country is under attack, an attack like we have never seen before, but still one based on principles which previous generations of Poles had to endure and fight before us.”
Again, he made a pause because he felt that these twenty-somethings, though well educated, lacked the understanding of what he meant. They had not stood outside the shipyard in Gdańsk and listened to Lech Wałęsa’s speeches about freedom of speech, freedom to choose your representatives in fair elections, freedom to choose your profession, freedom to join the army, or not. They heard about it in school and on TV, but the Poland they grew up in was a much better Poland than that of the Soviet-directed regime during his early life.
“In 1939, after only twenty years of independence, our nation was raped by the Hitlerowcy.” He used the alternate term for Nazis, Hitlerites. “Then the genereation of my parents and your grandparents, had to endure the equally horrible experience of seeing our nation being ripped in two halves by Stalin’s Red Army.”
Now he needed to recollect himself and control his own emotions. It was undoubtedly the hardest speech he ever had to give. His audience in the room were a mere forty or so people, to him it felt like forty million.
“After that, we, that is my parents’ and my generations, spent over forty years behind an Iron Curtain in a system that deprived us of the basic human right, of the right to self-determination, and condemned our smart and resourceful people to poverty. This day, today, a system just like that one is again casting a shadow over our nation. And not just ours, we know of our Ukrainian allies and our troops in Luhansk and Donetsk that they are under duress as well. We have to expect a Europe-wide war once our NATO allies take action as they promised us in the North Atlantic Treaty. This is not a mere attack on us, on our country but on the values we people of Europe live by. It’s an attack on freedom and self-determination themselves. But the attackers will fail. We will not give up, what you and I, our compatriots from the early days of our nation up to this day and also our friendly neighbors in the West and East have fought so hard for. We will fight. We fight for our freedom and for theirs.” He punched the air to underline his determination to give the Russians back a taste of their bitter medicine and then some.
The officers and non-coms in the room cheered and threw hats into the air. They had fought in Afghanistan, and they knew how hard and how scary fighting was. But they also saw in t
hat country, turned into a savage society first by the Soviets and then by the Taliban, that the fight would be worth it.
Pułaski promised himself to not quit until he had freed his people or died trying.
Sixteen
Mark and Svetlana had decided to wrap up the project as fast as possible and get themselves prepared. They had no idea for what. Their feeling was, they needed to find exactly that out and take it from there.
✽✽✽
When Mark came home from the debrief with his client, he found Ofelia glued to the TV. She watched a report on the developments in Poland on a random station. They all ran nothing but reports on the first war in Central Europe in over seventy years. It was still before five p.m.. Apparently, Ofelia had left work early.
Mark had entered their condominium without a word. He stood in the door to the family room, watched for a moment, and felt he had to say something. “Fortunately, Xandi is still too young to get any of this. I wouldn’t know how to explain this madness to him.” He sat down next to his wife and took her hand.
Ofelia kept staring at the screen and nodded. “I am so grateful that my family completely emigrated back in eighty-nine.” Then she turned. “But our friends. Bad enough to worry about our friends. Have you heard anything from Michał and Natalia?”
“Nothing. No answer on Facebook or WhatsApp. When I call, some voice tells me there is no connection.” Mark was sure Michał would be with the Territorials. He did not want to mention it.
Every half hour, the station summarized what little information about the fighting was available. Apparently, sometime between 1:15 and 1:20 in the morning, the electric grids of Warsaw and Kiev broke down leaving both cities in a blackout. The respective police forces called in reserves and went on patrol to prevent looting.
Presumably undetected by the armed forces an army-strength invasion force entered Warsaw and engaged with Police and later Polish infantry. Neither the Polish government nor the General Staff could be reached by any means of communication. The power was said to be still out throughout the city and communications networks completely inaccessible, too.
The report continued with a few grainy stills from Kiev, olive blobs that only a trained eye could make out to be armored personnel carriers. The name below the pictures was the name of the activist that Svetlana had spoken to. Apparently, the hysteric, highly distorted voice in the background was his. It was telling an interviewer that Russian troops have taken control of the center of the Ukrainian capital.
The OECD mission to East Ukraine reported massive artillery fire in the area. Satellite connection to the mission was lost after less than a minute into the report.
“An ‘invasion force’ is strangely vague terminology,” Mark wondered out loud.
Ofelia nodded with her mouth open in disbelief. “Yeah, it can’t be against journalistic standards to name the Russians. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not the Swiss Guard, right?”
“Right,” Mark said absent-mindedly, typing on his phone. He tried to get something more tangible from Vitus. After their short call in the morning, he had not heard back. They agreed to exchange any information they could get their hands on. It was not like Vitus at all to break a promise. Mark started to get a little worried.
“The German security cabinet met this morning to discuss the situation,” the TV anchor said. “The heads of state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are scheduled to hold an emergency meeting in Brussels late this evening.”
The American president was expected to attend via video-conference. It was unclear if the Polish president could be reached. Some more on the workings of NATO in such situations was retold.
The correspondent from Brussels, whose turn it was to speak now, expected that NATO will invoke Article 5 during the evening’s meeting. That article, the correspondent explained again, is the cornerstone of the defense alliance. “An armed attack against one or more NATO members shall be considered an attack against them all,” he recited the key phrase of the collective defense clause.
You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us. The Russians know that, so why are they messing with the Poles? Mark thought.
The news anchors were filling the time between newly arriving footage from political pundits mostly with oddly naïve speculation. The woman was a blonde in her fifties. She turned to her male counterpart. “Peter, do you think, this could be a Russian answer to recent attacks on their western border?”
“That might well be. We need to remember, a Ukrainian missile destroyed a school and killed a number of people, mostly children less than two weeks ago.” While he spoke, they showed pictures of the flower heaps in front of the school and also the Russian embassy in Berlin. “The death of these children has led to the biggest mass protests in Moscow since 2011. There were also protests in our country. Germans, Germans of Russian decent, and Russian immigrants have gathered by the thousands in Berlin and other large cities, mostly in front of Polish consulates and institutes.” A few pictures of the crowd in front of the Polish Institute in Berlin were shown. They were from the early days of the protest when it was still loud and the crowd some four hundred people strong. Mark recognized the old man with the medals on his chest. The old man seems to be a tough customer, Mark thought.
“I can’t take it anymore, this stupid war,” Ofelia exclaimed. She got up and stood in front of the couch looking at her husband.
He looked up to her quizzically.
“Let’s go out. I need to get out of the house. We’ll take Xandi and go to Felice.”
“Okay, baby,” Mark agreed. He knew his wife, when she had that look and that sound in her voice, arguing would lead nowhere. He was hungry anyway, a pasta dish from their favorite Italian eatery seemed very tempting.
✽✽✽
Bonifacy Pułaski was pleased with the performance of the crew in his situation room. Their non-regulation haircuts and beards aside, this was a first-rate outfit. For about ten hours, he had coordinated the immediate defensive action in the theater. The crew established contact with Air Force Command who had successfully relocated to the 32nd Command and Control Center in Kraków. The Admiralty was still missing, all of them.
He knew, his men and women would have to hold positions until NATO units reinforced them, by themselves they would not be able to win a war against this much stronger enemy.
Bilinski had in the meantime assembled a skeleton cyber intelligence crew working together remotely from various locations in the country to fill in for his incapacitated Warsaw team.
Under normal circumstances, Pułaski would be in the middle of the room watching the screens, giving orders to his battle groups and tap right into the information stream constantly. Given that these were extremely unusual circumstances, even for a state of war, he decided to have a few hours of focused analysis with Bilinski. He got sitreps, situation reports, every half hour in his ready room and when significant pieces of information from the field came in.
“We had one fringe scenario for a Russian attack that roughly resembles what we’re seeing now,” Bilinski said. “Most of NATO’s attention was always aimed at the Baltic States. It was, quite reasonably, assumed that the ethnic-Russian population there would provide the excuse for border conflicts or even outright annexation. The NATO Response Force always had their sights on the Suwałki Gap. We believed that the Russians would close off supply routes into the Baltic States on this short stretch between Belarus and Kaliningrad.”
Pułaski nodded.
“But that’s not happening,” the younger general continued. “The 18th Recon is telling us that the Belarusian border is completely quiet. It’s as if they had quit being loyal. All we see is coming out of Kaliningrad, and it’s coming our way south not north.”
“Exactly, and then they got us by the balls in Warsaw,” Pułaski grunted.
“Yes,” Bilinski continued. “From the pattern of early police reports these APCs and infantry must have come in through the a
irport. Air traffic control reported two AN-124, civilian ones, landing just before midnight. Then five more, during the blackout but before 0200 hours. After this, they started a regular airlift. Our Patriot systems on the city perimeter had been neutralized by that time, and our fighters were not up in the air, yet. The flight path of the airlift transports does cross Belarusian airspace.”
“Kurwa, so they used the same trick twice,” Pułaski observed. “The Crimean invasion started with an IL-76 radioing a mayday and insisting on an emergency landing. As soon as it was down, paratroopers took over the airport and more planes landed.”
“Do you think we can assume they are going to stick to the same tactics we have seen in Ukraine?” Bilinski asked his superior. “I always thought their bag of tricks was deeper than that.”
Pułaski had thought so, too. “Well, this one worked, they adjusted it to the size of their objective and local requirements. We can safely assume that they took out the power in Warsaw and in Kiev and somehow they also managed to take out our independent power supply at HQ.”
“Yes, and that is very exciting.” Bilinski pulled up a report by his interim cyber command on a tablet. “There was an external attack on our power grid in the capital region. It was caused by a highly sophisticated version of the ‘Crash Override’ malware. It re-opens circuit breakers after they have been shut by an operator. This causes substations to de-energize. I am not an engineer, I think of it as making a fuse blow on purpose and on a city-wide scale.”
“This affected civilian power and communications systems but not the government network,” Pułaski said.
“No.” Bilinski swiped down the five-page report. “The Belweder and Headquarters have probably been hit by an EMP-cannon. It creates an electromagnetic pulse that overloads electric circuits. I have seen the Americans play with one that could stop cars dead. The one that hit us must have been much more powerful to be able to fry a building of that size.”
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