Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  “Kein Problem, Gunther. I’m happy to talk to you, now,” Mark said slightly puzzled. Improv theater was not exactly his strong point.

  The policemen stood there, hands in their tactical vests. “You reported a break-in, mein Herr,” policeman number two started.

  Gunther interrupted him. “Officers, really, I am truly sorry. At age seventy one starts forgetting things. Let me explain. We were supposed to meet here. Because of the early hour, I had given him the keys for the gate and so forth. But I had simply forgotten about it.”

  The policemen said nothing.

  Gunther saw they were not quite convinced, yet. “It’s all fine. As a member of the club, he has every right to be here, and we had agreed to take the boat out.” Gunther gesticulated wildly with his hands. “Really, no need to complicate things. I’m sorry.”

  “What about the broken lock at the outbuilding?” policeman number one asked.

  “The lock needed fixing anyway, it was loose in the frame. Maybe the wind pushed it open during the night,” the old groundskeeper tried to explain.

  Number one took a few steps back up the path and leaned around the corner, looked around the small building, the boat racks, the trees, then at Gunther, and at Mark. “Ach, alright. Armin, come, we’ll call in a false alarm and get breakfast.”

  Number two nodded to the two men and followed his partner up the path. Number one wished them a good day.

  Mark and Gunther watched them walk around the corner.

  “Thank you, Gunther. I’m really sorry, and I’ll fix everything.” Mark embraced the old man he had not seen in over seven years.

  Gunther returned the hug and slapped the younger man on the back. “Boy, oh boy, you made my morning really shitty. A neighbor, also a club member, called me in the middle of the night. I jumped out of bed and raced here. Got me a speeding ticket on the way for damn sure. All this would have been a lot easier if you had called ahead.” Gunther was a tiny bit pissed off, that was easy to tell. “But well, if you fix it, there’s no need to make a fuss about it. Let’s get coffee, and you tell me what the heck you were doing.”

  Mark told him the story more or less from the beginning, how he was angry at the crazy policies of the government and how his friend was trapped between the German police and the Russians. The story ended with a few hundred soldiers being able to cross the border as civilians and the unexpected reunion of two rowing club members.

  “Now, that’s a story you don’t hear every day,” Gunther said while he poured coffee into a mug with the club logo. He handed it to Mark. “I wouldn’t want to be in a Russian prisoner of war camp. My father never was much of a talker. He started telling me about some of the things he lived through in one of these shortly before he died in 1998. You know, in communist times it was a non-topic, nobody spoke about what the Russians did around here or what happened to the POWs.”

  Even though Mark felt a powerful urge to find Ofelia and Michał, he thought it better to stay on the good side of the loyal old man to whom he was now greatly indebted. So the two drank coffee and chatted a bit about what had happened in the years since they had last exercised together.

  After twenty minutes Mark excused himself and told Gunther, he had to go find his wife and son. He promised to pay the repairs plus a generous donation to the club and left.

  ✽✽✽

  “This is gold,” Vitus said to the photographer as they sat down together in the University’s cafeteria. Sleepy students were stumbling into the place complaining about the fighter plane that woke them up way too early in the morning.

  “I’m pretty sure, I got a few good shots, probably even with the face of the crazy guy in the boat,” the photographer said and handed Vitus his Canon camera. “Have a look while I hit the head.”

  Vitus took the camera and clicked through the images. There were hundreds. With the powerful lens it had probably made very clear pictures of Mark’s face, even from a distance. Vitus deleted every frontal shot of Mark and his Polish friend. He hoped the photographer would take his time in the restroom. Fortunately, he was gone for over five minutes, and the guy had decided to get in line for coffee also. That gave Vitus the time he needed plus a little extra to look for a shot he would buy on behalf of Axel Springer Publishing.

  “Look, I would want something of an action shot to go with the article. Maybe the boat as it swerved right with a lot of wake foam, something like that.” Vitus told the photographer as he returned with two mugs of steaming, black coffee.

  The guy took the memory card out of his camera and inserted it into his beat-up laptop. “Sure, we’ll find something like that.” He clicked on the icon for the card drive. The bottom bar of the window read ‘89 files’.

  “I’ll be damned, I could swear I had a lot more pictures on here,” he wondered.

  “Hey, I don’t have much time. Need to write up my piece, you know. Let’s find what I’m looking for and talk about your fee,” Vitus tried to distract the man next to him from investigating the loss of files further.

  Eventually, they found a shot that matched Vitus’ general description and started talking money. They agreed on a fee for the half day’s work, the syndication royalties had already been agreed upfront. So it was a done deal. Vitus pocketed the memory card.

  “Look, the internet in here is not too good. I will send the picture and article in from outside. You’ll get a Dropbox-link with the pics for own your archive. Okay?” Vitus tried to get rid of the photographer.

  “No worries, I’ll add twenty euros for the cost of the chip to my invoice,” the photographer said, packed up his things, and said good bye.

  ✽✽✽

  Feliks Sergeevich Kedrov was in a foul mood. He had been given clear instructions by the president himself to soften Berka up. Now the president demanded an explanation what took him so long.

  As young officers in the KGB, he and the now-president had been rivals of sorts. Both were stationed in different countries, Kedrov in Poland and his competitor in Germany.

  The slightly older man who would become Supreme Commander-in-Chief hauled in better results during the critical years near the end of communist reign in Eastern Europe. The men who managed the transition behind the scenes were delighted that a lot of the East German communist party’s funds, real estate, and other possessions, as well as their networks of influence in East Germany survived the ‘Wild East’ period between 1989 and 1991. The renamed Party for Socialism and Democracy retained billions of deutschmarks, hard currency, and their corporate holdings in media and printing businesses.

  Also, the moneys and real estate of the Soviet communist party on German soil remained untouched, the most prominent example being the Russian House on Berlin’s prestigious Friedrichstraße which ultimately made a fortune for a few communists turned capitalists.

  Many funds, East German and Soviet party money, vanished, paper trails were cut off, numbered accounts, gold, and pieces of art disappeared in the dark.

  In Poland, on the other hand, the communist party and its two successor parties had lost all moneys, real estate, and any other possessions to the new republic’s treasury. They were expropriated by decree of the Polish parliament in an attempt to sanction the forty-five years of plundering of the Polish economy by the communists. The members of the Polish Solidarity movement were relentless in uncovering money and valuables. In the critical weeks during 1990 thousands of volunteers, ordinary people, occupied party buildings all over the country so that no valuables could be removed or archives destroyed.

  Having failed where his rival had succeeded was a severe setback for Kedrov’s career. At first, he had resented his new leader and hoped he would soon vanish like the ones before. But someday during the past twenty years, he had realized that his livelihood and probably also his health depended on being on the good side of this powerful man. He had even started to crave his attention and his approval.

  ✽✽✽

  “‘Mystery man saves Poles’,
not exactly Vitus’ best work,” Svetlana’s voice echoed out of the car audio system.

  “Nah, come on, he saved me, and I will never be able to repay him for it,” Michał injected himself into the conversation. He stopped playing peekaboo with Xandi on the back seat and leaned forward between the front seats.

  “That must be Michał speaking,” Svetlana said matter-of-factly.

  “Right, and you must be Svetlana. Mark has told me a lot about you, only good things of course,” Michał half shouted. Getting out of the life-threatening situation gave him a high despite his lack of sleep during the last seventy-two hours.

  “Mark has told me exactly nothing about you,” Svetlana replied coldly.

  Michał said nothing.

  “Okay, everybody, let’s focus on the really important things. What can you tell me, Svetlana?” Mark stopped the frosty exchange.

  It was still before 8 a.m., and they had just exited the Autobahn. The Nissan now trailed along at exactly 70 kilometers per hour, the speed limit on the road leading to Berlin’s city center.

  Xandi demanded attention with an assertive ‘wuh’.

  “Tak, your wujek is here with you, buddy,” uncle Michał went back to entertaining the boy with a picture book he had found in the backseat.

  “Alright, so far no photos with your faces have shown up anywhere. I will monitor media outlets and social media for the rest of the day and see that pictures get lost ASAP, as soon as posted.” Svetlana chuckled at her pun. Humor was not exactly her strong point.

  “Thank you, Svetlana,” Mark said. “What about our insurance policy? Anything I need to know before going to my home?”

  “Checked that. No change. Go home and get some sleep. Svetlana over and out.” A beep announced that the call had been ended by the other party.

  “A charming young lady, that one,” Michał observed.

  “She’s a good person,” Ofelia said. “Just more at ease communicating with computers than with people.”

  Ofelia opened DIE WELT’s mobile page on her iPhone browser. Mark’s story was the headliner, as was to be expected. She read out loud. “The unknown hero made quite an entrance. He crossed the border with a racing boat and distributed clothing among the stranded soldiers.”

  “Unknown hero. Well, his words,” Mark said and smiled sheepishly.

  “You are a hero, baby,” Ofelia said and continued reading. “The man was not a minute too early on the scene. Unconfirmed rumors among refugees are that Russian infantry had already started entering the town from the east. It is confirmed by this reporter that a Russian fighter plane made a very low altitude pass over the border town mere minutes after the event.”

  “It’s possible that the Russians were close. We ran into at least a battalion of paratroopers outside Rzepin,” Michał commented from the back.

  “Rzepin? What would they possibly want there?” Mark asked incredulously.

  “The train station,” Michał explained. “They can cut off any supplies from Germany and at the same time make sure their own trains from Szczecin pass eastward unmolested.”

  “Huh, makes sense,” Ofelia commented.

  The car made its way up Danziger Straße. They were already close to home where all four would get some rest after the very early, adrenaline-rich morning.

  “What did you do with your guns and stuff?” Mark asked Michał as they turned left onto Prenzlauer Allee joining the dense commuter traffic into Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district.

  “We put them in a safe place where we’ll pick them up again once we go back,” Michał replied without any indication of wanting to share more details.

  “Okay, good,” Mark said and changed the topic to breakfast. He proposed that Ofelia call in sick and they get fresh rolls and croissants from a bakery, then take a nap. He would drive Michał to the embassy in the afternoon.

  Twenty-Four

  After a particularly nice breakfast à la Ofelia, Michał’s adrenaline rush gave way to a sugar high. Once that passed, around one p.m., he fell asleep on the couch from pure exhaustion. Mark and Ofelia decided to let him get some rest and took Xandi to their bedroom to chill a little on the bed.

  Mark was not able to sleep. He was worried that he had overexposed himself. For years, his strategy to deal with the latent threat to his family was to keep a low profile as much as his station in life and his business allowed. Plus, to mitigate the residual risk, he had learned basic PERSEC skills, personal security, and had made them an integral part of his daily habits. He had started to learn Krav Maga, an incredibly effective and easy set of self-defense skills. He had accepted the Glock as a gift, and even though in Germany it was illegal to own an unregistered firearm, let alone walk around with one, he took it out into the woods every other week to practice.

  A friend owned a hunting cabin in Brandenburg and let him use it every now and then. There, deep in the forest, Mark had built an amateur version of Hogan’s Alley. With the silencer on, a passerby might think the series of double taps and single shots were the sound of somebody chopping wood or a woodpecker suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

  All this was not at all in Mark’s nature. He did like shooting very much, it was the one thing he had liked about his military service, but shooting to kill was not in him. He also enjoyed the time in the forest, and whenever he shot a nice pattern into the makeshift plywood targets, he felt satisfaction. Still, he was not a soldier, and he never wanted to be one.

  Ofelia was right, he was a teddy bear. And why not? He worked hard and smart. He supported his wife in her career and raised his son to the best of his ability. He also liked to chill with a beer in the park just like the next guy. If he could rub a lamp and ask only one wish from the genie, he would ask, “I want to live my life in peace.”

  Yet, his reality was a different one, he had already done damage to a regime that he despised years ago. He had already paid a price for it but still expected more fallout. His fear of retaliation was not irrational. In fact, other people who had done less damage had suffered worse. They had exposed themselves writing books, starting protests, running for office, while he had kept himself in the dark as much as possible.

  Now he had exposed himself without much of a second thought to save a friend from certain death or worse. Only now, in his bed, did he realize that his actions earlier in the day had put himself and his family in danger. Ofelia was on board, no doubt about that. And that was a great relief. Her comment about her ‘teddy bear turning grizzly’ was proof that this good woman was on his side no matter what. Her going out to break containers open was proof that she took her promise of being with him for better and for worse very seriously.

  He had an uneasy feeling that the worst was yet to come.

  ✽✽✽

  “We, the Russian people, want peace more than anything else in the world. During the last one hundred years, we have been attacked by fascists and extremists multiple times. Yet, every time, we have prevailed,” the Russian president stated in his ‘live plus sixty seconds’ interview on the RN network.

  This trick of delaying the live stream by a minute allowed to cut ahs and uhs, as well as mishaps. This was easy to do, the president was not a man of many facial expressions. And if necessary, a cut to the interviewer’s attentive face could always be injected into the video stream. As a result, the president sounded absolutely flawless. Commercial and news breaks every five minutes allowed making up for lost time.

  “Gospodin Prezident, I think it is absolutely remarkable that our forces have defeated NATO so quickly. As a citizen, I would like to thank you personally, for keeping our country safe.” The flawlessly beautiful, brunette anchor went out of her way to express her feelings, real or not, toward the powerful man opposite her.

  “Thank you, Tatyana Semyonovna. A man is, of course, flattered to receive such praise from a woman as remarkable as you,” the president charmed the anchor as much as the audience, male or female. “But, to be fair, we did not defeat NA
TO. In fact, we seek no battles with NATO. We did not start this war, it was imposed on us by two fascist regimes, the Ukranian and Polish. All we did, was to put these regimes in their place and neutralize a severe threat to our nation’s security.”

  “To the whole region’s security, in my humble opinion,” the anchor said and crossed her legs. Her short skirt revealed nicely toned feminine thighs. “What would have been next? Maybe an attempt to take Crimea or Kaliningrad? It is not a secret that our country’s adversaries are unhappy with our ability to put a fleet to sea even in the deep winter. They would like us to be weak and incapable for most of the year.” She made all this sound very rational in her low, thoughtful voice.

  “Tatyana Semyonovna, you are not only beautiful but also smart. Your studies of political science at Moscow State University have paid off. You are right in your assessment of the threats to our nation and the intentions of our adversaries.” The president praised the young woman in another move to also charm the audience.

  The anchor blushed. “Now, would you say the war is over?” she posed her next pre-arranged question.

  “I want it to be over, Tatyana Semyonovna. It is good to no one. Not to the Polish people, who certainly did not want this war either, nor to the Ukrainians, our Slavic brother people, nor to us. War costs lives and money. While of course the lives are priceless and cannot be regained, the money is missing in our budget. We need to make up for the losses somehow so that we can continue to educate our children, build streets and hospitals.”

  The president continued that the aggressors would have to pay the price and that while wanting peace, he still had an obligation his people to seek justice for the aggressive acts of the fascists in Warsaw and Kiev.

  ✽✽✽

  Michał woke up screaming.

  Mark ran into to the living room at once. “Tej, spoko, you’re safe,” he said half in Poznaniak dialect, half in German while grabbing his long-time friend’s hands.