Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  With the press also trying to gauge public sentiment, so as not to lose valuable advertising deals, a spiral of indecisiveness paralyzed the country’s elite.

  Nobody wanted to take a clear stand. Europe’s leading economy and largest country by population sat there like the three wise monkeys, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

  The loud voices were the ones on the extreme right and on the extreme left, both sides opposed a German contribution to the war effort. Even the arguments were the same, which the politicians on both sides ignored best as possible.

  Mark Sanders had already given up on his countrymen. He had tried to raise his voice in social media during the Fukushima craze and the refugee crisis, which only earned him hateful comments by people he had earlier thought to be insightful or willing to discuss. Apparently, they were neither.

  The feeling of being helpless in this crisis came back to him, and it made him mad. He was mad at the German government and at himself.

  If the war had started five or six years earlier, back when he had no family to care for, he might have gone and volunteered to fight. A lot of smart people had done such things. Hemingway fought in the Spanish Civil War, so did de Saint-Exupéry and Orwell. But now, he could not. He had a family, he had to think of them first.

  The next half hour he sat on the carpet with Xandi crawling around and over him. He sat there thinking about what he could do to help. The ringing doorbell announced a possibility to get involved.

  ✽✽✽

  Three GAZ Tigr utility vehicles crawled along ulica Kwitnąca in Warsaw’s Chomiczówka neighborhood. The street is amply named. During springtime, the trees on both sides of the road are full of blossoms in all possible colors. Behind the beautiful trees, less pretty communist blocks rise fifteen stories and more into the sky.

  At the street’s far end lies the Warsaw Babice airstrip. This former military airport had been repurposed as an airstrip for amateur pilots during the 1990s. An aeroclub and a skydiving school were its most active users since. It was also home to a rescue helicopter crew, and every now and then, the vast terrain would be used for concerts of the likes of Michael Jackson, AC/DC, and Madonna.

  Since the beginning of the war, however, another, much more active user group had taken over the airfield, the Russian Air Force.

  While the concrete runway was too short for transport planes and fighter jets, its thousand-meter-long grass strip was perfect for helicopters to be kept ready for operations. The small buildings of the aeroclub and the skydiving school, right next to the grass strip, were equally perfect for the helicopter crews to repose between sorties. Currently, twelve Mi-24 Hind gunships stood there armed with AT-6 Spiral anti-tank missiles.

  The three Tigrs crawled up to the last of the communist high-rise buildings. The drivers did their best to keep out of sight of the residents. Three squads of Spetsnaz in body armor and armed with automatic weapons left the vehicles. They advanced to the entrance of the building, shattered the glass of the door, pushed the inside door handle, and went in. As is usually the case in these leftovers from communist times, the elevator was not working. The soldiers would not have used it anyway. They swiftly made their way up the stairwell to the thirteenth floor.

  Between the eighth and ninth, a boy came running down the stairs then froze right in front of the point man. He turned, tried to run, but the soldier grabbed him by his hoodie and put a gloved hand over the boy’s mouth and nose. Another man took point while the soldier waited on the stairs for the boy to become unconscious. He dumped the limp, skinny body into the eighth-floor corridor and then assumed the rear-guard position.

  The soldiers positioned themselves next to the entrance of apartment 1304, a two-bedroom with a balcony overlooking the airfield. Inside they heard the thumping and screeching of heavy boots on a linoleum floor, probably six men. The new point man, a sergeant signaled six adversaries inside.

  An enlisted man with a heavy ram came forward. On signal, he took a wide swing and smashed the thin wooden door with the first blow. He took a step back, the point man threw a flash-bang into the place. The detonation echoed off the cheap, thin concrete walls. From right and left of the door, soldiers jumped in with their submachine guns raised.

  The point man went first. A man in camouflage BDU came out of the bathroom with a nine millimeter in his hand. The Pole died from a three-round burst into the chest. At the end of the short corridor, in the living room, three men tried to regain their balance. One reached for an AK-74 and managed to shoot an automatic burst into the wall above the point man. This insurgent, too, was struck down by a three-round burst. The two others were shot by the number two and three men entering the seventy-square-meter workers’ box.

  The balcony door stood open and swung slowly closed behind the white curtains. The point man of the GRU squad slowly advanced across the living room. It mainly consisted of a large Samsung 4K television in the center of a very ugly dark oak wall unit, a convertible couch on which typically the parents slept and a glass coffee table. Two doors went off the living room, both revealed girly bed sheets and boy band posters. Apparently, this had been home to a family with two daughters before the war.

  The point man was highly alert, he had number two and three go off into the girls’ rooms. He kept his submachine gun raised at the balcony door. The apartment was completely silent. Then he heard a metallic click. He stopped in front of the large TV set, his gun still raised and trained on the balcony door.

  A hand grenade crashed through the glass.

  “Granata,” the point man shouted and dove into one of the girl’s rooms. On the balcony, a bald man in camouflage BDUs pushed his short, muscular body off the balcony railing. His arms went out wide, like a skydiver trying to slow his descent.

  The grenade exploded near the coffee table, and shards of metal, glass, and wood thrashed through the place. The wall unit collapsed, a handful of books fell to the floor, the TV toppled over and landed screen down on the linoleum floor. Fluffs of white polyester from the couch sailed through the room like thick snowflakes on a winter’s day.

  None of the Spetsnaz saw what happened to the madman who jumped from the balcony. They had seen him jump and assumed no one would survive a thirteen-floor drop. They were almost right.

  He landed in one of the trees lining the street below. As his body crashed through the top branches, his skydiver posture slowed the impact slightly before his head bumped into one of the main branches of the oak tree. For a second, his limp body rested on the strong branch, then slowly slid off, and the unconscious Territorial landed on the pavement.

  A small delivery truck just passed by as he hit the sidewalk under the thick canopy of the tree. Its brakes screeched. The two men inside did not hesitate for a second. They immediately got out of the cab and ran over to the unconscious soldier. They had no idea how badly hurt he might be, and on a typical day they would simply have called an ambulance. Under the particular circumstances, Warsaw being under occupation, they knew the man would die right there or be killed by the next Russian soldier who came along. So, they decided to take the risk and move his body without any regard for any potential damage they might add to his obviously long and hard fall. They put him into the back of the van as carefully as possible and drove off.

  After the flakes from the couch had settled, an all-clear was given from inside and repeated among the soldiers on the corridor. While still alert for potential dangers, every one of the men visibly relaxed. The sergeant who walked point jogged to the balcony to take a look. He could not see much, just the top of a mighty tree. After a moment of thought, he ordered Boris-squad to go down and search for the body, then took out his sturdy smartphone and typed a mission report into the SemFoNi app.

  ✽✽✽

  Colonel Popov and Bravlin, the GRU 6th Directorate hacker, sat next to the screen which mirrored the operations planner’s SemFoNi feed. The report was brief and concise, as always. The last line of the feed read ‘raid
squads anna-boris-vasily, chom safehouse, area secured’. A chirp later, another post appeared. It read ‘raid squad anna, six opp kia, one opp mia, rpgs and automatic weapons secured, electronic devices secured’.

  “Yes,” Smagin hissed and turned his head toward Popov who was playing with a tablet computer. “They need to bring the electronics to me as fast as possible. As long as the insurgents know nothing about the fate of their comrades, I might be able to infiltrate their network.”

  Popov typed a few commands on the software keyboard of his tablet. “They will bring the devices here right away.”

  ✽✽✽

  “This hospital report is the only tidbit of information we have so far on the fate of our Chomiczówka group. They had been preparing the strike on the Babice airstrip. One of the men jumped from the balcony into a tree. Thirteen floors. He will probably live,” General Bilinski said. He swiped an app closed on his tablet computer.

  The Chief of General Staff Bonifacy Pułaski took in the bad news with a grunt.

  “It seems, the Russians have managed to penetrate at least one of our stay-behind cells. Of course, we anticipated some cells to be found out. We took extra care to keep them compartmentalized,” Bilinski continued his report. “Two other cells have been neutralized in the last ten hours that were just starting their operations. This should not have happened. The compartmentalization should have prevented this.”

  “Kurwa mać!” the general cursed and got up from his chair. “I knew we were much dependent on this asymmetric advantage we had created for ourselves. But how is it possible, that losing these three cells, this one guerrilla operation gone wrong has set our advance back by a whole three days versus the plan?”

  “They were key operations, Panie Generale,” Bilinski sighed. “In Warsaw, we are spread thin with stay-behind agents. Taking out one cell would have been enough to get us into trouble. With all three out of play, the Russians had both, the tanks and the gunships, available to halt the advance of our mechanized force at Grójec.”

  “What is your take on this, Bilinski? How did they get the information on our stay-behind program and who is part of it?”

  “Our security specialists are sure that there was no breach of our systems,” the younger general assured his superior. “The servers at HQ and at Gizycko had been wiped clean when we evacuated. Our backups in NATO and in Kraków were not penetrated. Yet, you are right, that would be the easiest explanation for losing more than just one cell.”

  ✽✽✽

  Mark opened the door with Alexander on his left arm. The boy had grown a little restless or rather impatient with his glum father. He kept patting Mark’s shoulder and wobbling up and down. The kid had apparently expected more fun this afternoon.

  Svetlana pushed inside and closed the door behind her. She seemed a little nervous, which was absolutely not the way she usually comported herself. Once the door was closed and she saw the little boy, her eyes lit up.

  “Sasha, my little darling, you are cute as a button,” she warbled. “Can I have him for a minute, please?”

  Alexander lit up similarly and kept wobbling on Mark’s arm, now with both hands stretched out towards the beautiful woman.

  “Sure, he seems to be happy to see you, too,” Mark answered.

  The three went into the living room and sat down on the couch. Svetlana and Xandi were in another dimension. She smelled his hair, closed her eyes, and held her breath as if she had taken a puff on a joint.

  Alexander sat on her lap, his right hand pulled her shirt open and revealed black lace under the beauty mark on her left breast.

  Mark watched the scene. Attaboy, he thought.

  Then, before he got too distracted, he asked Svetlana for her laptop so he could have a look at her new findings.

  “So, we can assume these twenty people to be TDF,” Mark stated dryly, “but what can we do to help them?” He turned to look at Svetlana who had by now gotten control of Xandi’s searching hands. She kissed the boy on the head repeatedly which he seemed to like just as well.

  “These twenty are probably dead already. In Poland, I guess, GRU is the executive agency for these BOLOs. GRU don’t play around,” she stated unemotionally. “I asked myself the same question on my way here. My only idea is, we could use our insurance policy to warn the next ones on their list.”

  “We could do that. We could indeed,” Mark nodded and stared out the window into the rainy afternoon. “How much do we expose ourselves if we do?”

  Svetlana followed his gaze into the gray. “I don’t want to sound too cocky, but my trojan has carried data out of their system every night in the past three years. I didn’t get caught. On their server side, I won’t have to change a thing. On my anonymous Turkish server, I will make a few simple changes to delimit the warning system from us to everybody, or maybe to everybody with a Polish nationality or Polish phone number. Something like that. The rest will work as advertised. An automated, anonymous voice call will go out to inform the target of the danger. We can only hope he gets it and gets the fuck out.”

  “Right, but there’s a human factor. Would a Territorial listen to an artificial voice with an anonymous number that says ‘You are Robert Nowak, your current location is ulica Nowakowska 11, you are in danger, leave this location immediately’?” Mark pursed his lips and blew some air through his nostrils. He rubbed his right hand across his mouth and nose.

  “We can’t go put out billboards ‘Get a call in the night, GTFO and win your life’,” Svetlana said. “We’ll just have to trust this thing to sell itself.”

  “Yeah, as if that had ever worked,” Mark sneered. “I’ll try to get word to Michał, maybe he can do some selling and increase the impact. If we stick our heads out, it should at least be worth our while.”

  “Agreed,” Svetlana said and returned her attention to the little boy on her lap. Mark asked Svetlana to stay so both could talk to Ofelia about the plan. Her well-being was just as much on the line as Mark’s and Svetlana’s, so she should at least get a vote. He went to his home office to finish the FAQ for his prospective client and left the child with his coworker. Both seemed to enjoy each other’s company very much, why ruin their playtime with boring adult stuff?

  Thirty-Four

  “I promise to keep us safe, kochanie. Trust me,” Mark said. Ofelia was less than thrilled to be part of a conspiracy against the Russian occupation in Poland. She had discussed the topic at length with her husband in the home office while Svetlana had tended to Alexander in the living room. In the end, she came around but insisted that Mark give their family’s safety an absolute priority. He should not take any more risks than necessary.

  “Let’s go and talk to Svetlana. She’ll get right to it,” Mark said and in passing kissed his wife’s head.

  ✽✽✽

  “Blyad, another junk pile,” Smagin complained to Popov. “I need devices that did not fall under a moving tank, please.” He filed through the pile on his desk. The bundle of a screen, keyboard, and DVD drive he fished out was hardly recognizable as a laptop anymore.

  “A hand grenade went off in the living room,” Popov said and shrugged.

  “Khorosho, I’ll go to work,” the hacker said. With two fingers, Smagin picked a few chips, SD cards, and solid-state drives out of the pile. He seemed a little happier to find the SIM cards of the smartphones undamaged.

  “From the geo-tags of pictures, the internal memory of the phones, and the SIM cards I can track the movements of the group your men neutralized,” Smagin said as he continued to rummage through the pile, now using both hands. “I might be able to single out a handful of supporters and co-conspirators for you to pick up tomorrow with this pile of junk,” Smagin conceded. “But with working phones, I could find a way to send a trojan to other insurgents and civilian supporters. That would give us much more insight into their network and their plans.”

  Popov looked at him and nodded. “I understand. I will brief our operators on the importanc
e of this detail once more.” He had already begun to walk toward the door, then changed his mind and turned to the still rummaging Smagin. “I offer you a deal, Captain. You get us those targets before midnight tonight, and we get you undamaged electronics. Guaranteed.”

  “Where did the guarantee come from?” the hacker asked looking slightly puzzled.

  “If we get them while they’re sleeping, 0400 hours is my favorite time, they offer much less resistance, and they don’t have time to destroy their gadgets,” the colonel grinned.

  ✽✽✽

  The Chinese-made smartphone danced on the nightstand to the guitar riff from Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water in constant repetition. The ring tone volume was up to the maximum. A loud banging from the other side of the concrete wall and a muffled ‘make it stop, kurwa, or I’ll kick your teeth in’ later the young man rolled out of his bed to pick up his phone and look at the screen. The call app read ‘anonymous caller’. He tapped to accept.

  A mechanical voice, female but clearly a call robot, started talking in something almost sounding like Polish. “You are Łukasz Szymanski, you are at 10 ulica Zamenhofa in Warszawa, Polska. You are in danger, leave your location immediately. Your phone is monitored, discard your phone.” Then the call ended.

  “Co kurwa,” he looked at his phone and scratched his behind. “That was creepy.”

  His phone chirped and announced a text message. Magda duże cycki, Magda big tits, wrote ‘You awake? Come upstairs. Need a little stress relief’ followed by an eggplant and a peach emoji and a winking smiley face.

  Łukasz smirked. “Thank you, fucking telemarketing creeps, you scored for me tonight.” He put on the jeans that were lying on the floor next to his bed and slid into his flip-flops. He let the door of his dorm room fall closed behind him as he trolled down the long neon-lit corridor toward the elevator.