The colonel bent down into a corner and fumbled a red plastic bucket from the top of a stack of ten. “Take this,” he said and handed the unusual captain the bucket.
“What’s this for?” Bravlin asked.
“Just hold on to it for a while, please,” the colonel answered and led the man down a stairwell.
They were in a run-down, long-abandoned repair works. In communist times, the Polish railway had repaired the Moscow-built railway and subway cars there. What once was a place of work for almost ten thousand was now used by only about a hundred men from GRU.
As Popov and Bravlin reached the bottom of the stairs, a rat hushed past Smagin’s military boots. The colonel led the way through a long, straight corridor. The younger man noticed the screams from behind the steel doors in the basement. They were men’s and women’s voices screaming in seemingly incredible pain.
“Oh, you are torturing people here,” he said and let out a few giggles. “Isn’t this a bit cliché, you know, dirty torture chambers, the rats, and all.”
“You apparently watched too many American TV shows, Comrade Captain,” the colonel said. “They always show clinically clean interrogation rooms in their crime shows.” Popov shook his head.
The pair stopped walking.
“That’s nonsense. If it’s clean, the guy thinks he is in a regular facility with rules and such. Regular means three meals, eight hours of sleep, being released at some point. If he thinks like that, that’s bad.” The colonel’s voice now sounded more like a teacher’s than a soldier’s.
“The key to getting a subject to spill every secret is to alter his reality, you need to control the cosmos he lives in. When he eats, when he sleeps, the rhythm of his life must depend on the interrogator. The subject must know that you own his fate. He must feel afraid and helpless. You need to make clear that nobody knows where he is, nobody will come along and end the madness, he must lose all hope. This can be achieved best by strapping him to a dilapidated dentist’s chair in a stinking, rat-infested basement where death reeks out of every corner. The screams of the other inmates add to his sense of being lost. We record every session, sometimes we use the tapes to stress inmates when we have too little people to do, let’s call it live performances.” The colonel seemed very proud of his expertise in the matter of interrogation. Smagin had listened to him attentively. The colonel motioned a sergeant to open a door on the right.
Smagin looked inside and immediately raised the plastic bucket to his chest. He threw up his lunch. The pork chop with potatoes and kapusta, cabbage, tasted just as bad the second time as they had the first in the Army cookhouse. The sergeant closed the door again, he and the colonel shared a look.
“You see, the only hope we allow around here is the little sliver of hope the interrogator gives his subject that he, or in this case she, might go back home if they spill their guts.”
Smagin caught his breath and lowered the bucket. “So, she will be allowed to leave,” he asked.
The colonel leaned over to his ear and whispered. “Of course not. We can’t have anybody running around talking about this unspeakable cruelty. The suka, the bitch, lives as long as we want, not a second longer.”
Smagin suppressed another fit of vomiting. The sergeant opened the door again. Smagin took a good look at the redhead in her late twenties. She lay in a pool of blood, urine, and stool. The room reeked of decaying bodily fluids and burnt skin. She was missing a few teeth. Then the bulky torturer flipped a switch, and she screamed in agony. He flipped it off after half a second.
A long nail had been driven into her right forearm and another one into her left shin. She was nailed to the wooden workbench she lay on. A thick red wire was connected to the nail in her arm, a thick blue wire led from her shin first to the switch, then up to the ceiling where it merged with the red into an industrial 400 Volt plug.
The bulky man in a striped army undershirt and camouflage pants held the switch in his hand and looked at the woman. “Where is your base, name your comrades, this is your last chance,” he said in heavily accented English. “Next time, I leave it on, and you die.”
She moved her lips and muttered something incomprehensible.
Her torturer leaned closer to her mouth.
“Chuj Ci w dupę,” the woman whispered and burst into a crazy fit of laughter.
The interrogator flipped the switch and did not turn it off before the woman passed out. The smell of burnt flesh filled the air. He switched off the current and cursed. Then Shashka turned around and took notice of Popov and Smagin. He ordered the sergeant to take the woman away and prepare her for another round the next day.
✽✽✽
“Let’s hope the Amis and the Brits have our backs for real this time. The Germans are sitting on their thumbs, it’s just disgusting,” Ofelia heard her father say on the phone in Polish.
Mark overheard him saying it, Ofelia always had her speaker volume up to the max. He looked up from his iPad and turned his head, she made an apologetic face. “He’s right you know,” he said and refocused on the web page of DIE WELT.
“Mark says you’re right, tato,” Ofelia shouted into her phone while her father rambled on.
“Yes, of course, I am. Say hello from me. Hello, Mark,” the voice in the speaker said. “From me, too, hello Mark,” a female voice shouted in the background, Ofelia’s mother.
Mark grinned and told Ofelia to say hello back. He went to the refrigerator with a chuckle and felt the bottle of Médoc he had put in ten minutes earlier. He was satisfied with the temperature of the bottle and put it on the kitchen counter.
While his wife was quietly listening to her father, he fetched the corkscrew from the drawer and went to work. He popped his head into the living room.
Ofelia formed her hand as if she held the neck of a bottle and popped back her head. The gesture meant ‘need wine now’.
“We have Szczecin back,” her father suddenly shouted. Ofelia turned her head away from her phone. “CNN says we have it back.”
The cork made a loud pop as Mark pulled it out of the bottle.
“That’s great,” Ofelia cheered. “Honey, we have Szczecin back. Turn on the TV. CNN.”
Mark tasted the wine and took it to the coffee table. He poured two glasses, looked for the remote and opened the CNN app on their Fire TV.
“After a daring offensive by Territorial Defense Forces from behind enemy lines, an air-strike assisted by a new Airbus Defense drone swarm, and the largest coordinated landing operation of Polish and British paratroopers since World War II, the westernmost port in Poland is back in Polish hands,” the CNN anchor was beside himself. He felt exalted to be reporting this unexpected turn of events. It seemed like the Poles were gaining the upper hand. In any case, they had the initiative, they were the offensive team now.
The anchor took a sheet of paper from a hand appearing on his left. “This just in. The Danish defense ministry has issued a statement that the Fehmarn Belt and the Øresund are closed as of midnight tonight. The Royal Danish Navy and Royal Danish Air Force will enforce a strict policy of non-passage for any vessel that is not part of the allied effort in Poland. That will include commercial vessels, ships currently in passage will be escorted out of the area. Also, a no-fly zone shall be enforced over the whole western Baltic from the borders of Danish territorial waters off Bornholm to the Polish coast in the south.”
Mark and Ofelia both looked at the screen which now switched to stock footage from Operation Market Garden, the Polish-British effort to land paratroopers in the Netherlands in 1945. It had been a gigantic failure.
Mark secretly hoped that Xandi would remain asleep despite the commotion in the living room. He thought again of the men and women serving on both sides. While nobody was talking about the death toll yet, he knew that blood was shed, and not too little. Yet, he pushed away the sad thoughts and joined Ofelia and her parents in the joy of winning back a part of their Polish fatherland.
CNN educ
ated them further that on the southern front Polish and American artillery, as well as armored forces, were advancing north. They also learned that Germany was indeed contributing, the Joint Task Force which NATO had pulled into Lithuania as a reaction to the Polish-Ukrainian campaign four weeks earlier was headed by a German general and reinforced by another battalion of Bundeswehr infantry. The Joint Task Force would secure the Lithuanian border together with the Lithuanian Armed Forces.
“Well, one thumb is out, now,” Mark sneered.
✽✽✽
“Captain Anatoli Yevgenievich Smagin, codename Bravlin, GRU 6th Directorate, pleased to meet you,” the short, bespectacled Smagin said to the bulky non-com. He held out his hand.
Shashka looked at the unsoldierly looking man, then saluted. “Sergeant Major Sergei Ivanovich Krug, codename Shashka, GRU 22nd Special Purpose Brigade.” He did not shake the short man’s hand and looked at Colonel Popov instead.
“Shashka? Sergeant Major, I have heard a lot about your work. You may not have heard of my codename yet, but maybe of my work. I was the one who turned off the lights in the White House during a public cabinet meeting,” Smagin said with a smug look and his back straightened for the first time since he had arrived at the black site. “You remember, last year when the other guy was still president. He joked it was the NSA, but really, it was me.” Bravlin let out a few hyena-like laughs.
The colonel cleared his throat. “Shashka, this man has been ordered here by the Director of GRU himself at the express request of General Kuvayev,” the colonel started with an undertone that clearly said ‘you know what I mean’.
Shashka nodded. “I understand, Comrade Colonel.”
“He will be attached to your group. While he is superior in rank, you will be nonetheless heading the operations. He is there as a,” the colonel was looking for the right word, “well, civilians would say consultant.”
“I understand, Comrade Colonel.”
“My role is very clear to me, Comrades. I am sure I can produce great results with the right support of your group,” Smagin interrupted.
The colonel looked at the younger man with raised eyebrows.
Shashka said nothing.
“The first things I need, are all the electronic devices of the people you have apprehended up until now,” he said. “I will also need their identities, papers would be very good, identity cards, driver’s licenses, credit cards, whatever you found on them or in their residences,” he continued with a rapid-fire voice. “Don’t worry, having my infrastructure set up tomorrow will be fine. Until then I will work from my quarters, please have the devices and the papers collected and sent there.”
The colonel and Shashka stood there silently.
“That’s all,” Smagin nodded and grinned.
Thirty-Three
“Good morning, Comrade Colonel,” Bravlin saluted with a surprisingly straight back. He had worked most of the night with the devices GRU had captured from suspected TDF members and supporters.
He had gotten a bucketful of electronic junk, handed over by a private. The devices had either been damaged by the violent arrest or in some cases on purpose by the Territorials just before they got captured or killed. Some phones had a sort of kill-switch app installed which completely destroyed the phone’s memory and thus erased any apps, social media, messaging, and email accounts, and the like.
Shashka entered the room in the colonel’s wake.
“Good morning, Comrade Sergeant Major,” the GRU hacker said and nodded.
“Please sit, I will cut right to the chase,” he motioned them to two chairs in front of a large LED screen. They were in a former office of the railway works. The windows went out to the shop floor, which now mostly served as a parking garage for the various MPVs GRU used to pick up suspects.
Smagin had set up a local network for himself, a connection to Russian GRU systems was established for him via a secure satellite connection. Outside the wall of the small office, a diesel generator rumbled to provide energy for the IT set-up and the satellite transmitter on a light military truck parked right next to it.
“This is a map of Warsaw. Apparently, we have captured or killed part of a cell that was responsible for the ambush on the embassy. The redhead I saw yesterday, for example, she was a sniper. Her phone was most revealing, and I’m not talking about the dicey pics she has sent to various men in the last three months. She was quite something.” The hyena-like laughs interrupted his presentation but were not reciprocated by the two other men.
Smagin cleared his throat, the colonel’s and Shashka’s blank looks made him nervous. “I retrieved the location data from the mobile devices and plotted it on a map of Warsaw and surroundings. I was able to also retrieve GPS positions for the devices even from the time the networks were down. You know, whenever one of them tries to get a signal, a GPS position is noted in the internal memory. This only allows to plot a sporadic fix for the user but better than nothing,” he fired off his work report until the colonel’s raised hand cut him off.
“Make it understandable and make it short. Give us just the information Sergeant Major Krug needs to apprehend the perpetrators.” The colonel was not at all impressed by Smagin’s tech talk.
“Very well. From her movements and the movements of the people in the group as well as other mobile phone users in Warsaw, I could discern the locations of two safe houses or maybe storage locations. Additionally, I could compile a list of twenty more people who have either spent considerable time at one of these locations or who have crossed paths with these captured individuals more than coincidence would suggest. I eliminated children, spouses, and neighbors to get a clearer picture and avoid false positives.” Bravlin let that sink in for a moment and then handed the two soldiers a few sheets of paper each.
“Here are the positions of the safe houses, and this is a printout of the list of names and addresses,” he said. “You can commence operations. Make sure to get me more devices from the new captures. There are a lot more things I can do with a little more time and undamaged devices.”
✽✽✽
The rainy day was quite welcome to Mark. He had gotten a long list of questions from the Hamburg shipping company regarding his offer. Most notably they were asking for the team’s experience and credentials, references of past projects with comparable requirements, and a proposal how to reduce the cost by at least ten percent without changing the scope and the deliverable.
Xandi would have to play on the home office’s carpet. He did not seem to mind, he was crawling around and apparently enjoying himself. Sometimes he would look up at his father, probably wondering what he was doing staring at this silvery box on the desk. Perhaps he was wondering why his father seemed to have so little fun during playtime.
Mark’s phone buzzed. A secure call on TLKS from Svetlana.
“Hi there, what’s up,” he greeted his coworker.
“Weird stuff is happening on the Death Star,” she said with a sinister voice. “The Vpoiskakh is lighting up like a Christmas tree. They put in twenty Polish nationals within just a few minutes. I guess they’re hunting this guerilla group.”
“Fuck. These guerillas are Territorial Defense Force, they are reserve soldiers, fathers, mothers, like Michał,” Mark explained. “How do you think they’ll treat them.”
“My opinion? Once they pick them up, they’ll disappear forever,” Svetlana stated firmly.
“Can you come over? I’d like to have a look at it. There’s got to be a way to block the SVR’s cogwheels.”
Svetlana agreed to come over and ended the call.
Mark opened DIE WELT’s website to get an update on the Polish offensive. The reporting was not exactly thorough. He switched to CNN’s website which told him only little more. Apparently, it was still, or again, difficult to gather independent information about the progress of the war.
It seemed, the landing operation on the Western Baltic was successful, and Denmark vigorously enforced the block
ade of the waters connecting the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The Russians had lost access to Szczecin, and that made it likely they would lose the whole western part of Poland. Russia would also not be able to bring additional ships into the theater from their Northern Fleet or the Black Sea Fleet. The CNN reporter droned on about the significance of this win.
In the meantime, Britain, the U.S., and Denmark had made their support of the Poles official, so did Czech and Slovakia. The Kraków Alliance, as it was called for the place of the signing of the accords, however, was not the mighty NATO. The United States were hindered in bringing troops into the theater because the German chancellor and the Bundestag still stalled.
The chancellor kept blathering about a peaceful solution. The extreme left opposition heavily criticized the use of the U.S. bases in Germany as hubs for the American military machine. The extreme right organized protests outside NATO bases. Burdened with these restrictions, the most powerful military in the world was not able to play its best game.
While the world press did not spare the German officials with criticism, first and foremost the Bundeskanzlerin, the domestic press was struggling to find a consensus.
In times of business going as usual, this might have been a sign of healthy freedom of the press. In times of clear and present danger, though, it was odd and confusing for the political leaders whose habit of following public opinion had become the primary driver of their political agenda.
Cause and effect were easy to see when one looked at the major policy changes in the second decade of the 21st century. Fukushima, the chancellor forced a shutdown of all nuclear power plants until 2020. Corrupt exhaust management software in diesel cars, a widespread ban of diesel engines from inner cities was put in place. The consequences came at a high price for the German middle-class. Electricity was three times more expensive in Germany than most other European countries. Diesel owners lost tens of thousands of dollars of their savings because the vehicles were impossible to sell.
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