Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

Captain Kryska peeked around the half-open door. “Panie Generale, sorry for bothering you so early but we have an interesting report from one of our Warsaw cells, Bombel’s cell.”

  “Well, let’s hear it,” Bilinski said.

  “They engaged a raid squad, two Tigrs, a ten man opposition. They were successful, zero losses on our side, a near total loss for the opposition. One man in a Tigr got away, the others are dead.”

  “Let me guess, they got a threat call before.”

  “They did, three of the four cell members got the same call, at the same minute,” Kryska repeated what he had read in the cell leader’s action report. “It’s some sort of automated calling system. They sent me the three different numbers the calls originated from. The prefixes were from Turkey, the Philippines, and Finland. I ran a quick-and-dirty check, none of the numbers exist.”

  “Dobra, I think I should talk to a few people, maybe one of our allies forgot to tell us about the nature of their support.” Bilinski dismissed the captain and went to his private bathroom. He brushed his teeth, he was still feeling groggy, but his mood had lifted considerably. If someone had successfully hacked into GRU, that was big and interesting news. If that someone was on their side, it was even bigger and better news. He would quickly talk to Pułaski and get his permission to confer with the heads of the intelligence agencies of their allies, first the Americans and the British.

  ✽✽✽

  Ofelia waltzed into the bedroom with Xandi on her arm. It was just past seven a.m., the little man did not much care if it was Sunday. His circadian rhythm was firmly set to wake up a quarter to seven. “Wakey, wakey,” she warbled.

  Mark opened one eye and looked at his wife walking toward the bed in her panties and matching tank top. Yummy, he thought. If she had been alone, he would have pulled her into bed for sure. With the boy in the room, though, the sexual energy evaporated in a split-second.

  Mark sat up in bed and held out both arms. Ofelia put Xandi on the foot end of the bed, and the little one started crawling across Mark’s legs. He took his father’s index fingers and lifted himself up, balanced on the left thigh and then with his left foot stepped on Mark’s man parts.

  His groan coincided with the chirp of an incoming TLKS message. Mark rolled over to the right, and Xandi dropped off his lap to land in the middle of the bed. Rolling back to the left, Mark fumbled his phone off the nightstand. The message was from Svetlana and read ‘Busy weekend, 28 calls out’. Wow, that’s a pretty steep growth from six calls the night before, Mark thought.

  “What’s up, baby?” Ofelia asked her surprised-looking husband.

  “Twenty-eight calls, up from six last night.”

  “Wow, that’s a pretty steep growth.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Mark said and rolled to his side. “We’re doing the right thing, kochanie. I mean, warning these people is the least we can do.”

  “I see it the same way,” Ofelia sighed. “I’m worried, nonetheless. You know.”

  “I know,” Mark ended the conversation and got up.

  ✽✽✽

  The Tigr’s engine screamed as it drove up to the old railroad works building. There were scratches and round chips in the camouflage paint all over the vehicle from the rain of bullets, the Spetsnaz Sergeant Major had dodged.

  Shashka braked hard as the vehicle entered the shop floor through the half-open shutter door. He got out, his face was red, all clenched, neck muscles taut. Primeval rage oozed out of his every pore.

  Bravlin turned around at the screech of the brakes and looked at the menacing figure approaching his office like a rabbit at a snake. He knew this was not good news, but he had no idea where to turn or what else to do.

  The partition door flew open, and the glass shattered into a thousand pieces as the handle hit the wall. The bulky soldier made two more steps toward the terrified hacker, grabbed his neck with his massive left hand, and pushed him backward onto the desk. Papers, pens, and all sorts of electronic devices fell off the table as it rocked under the weight of the two struggling men.

  Bravlin fought the grip with both hands but to no avail. His feet kicked in all directions.

  Shashka slowly pulled the bayonet from its scabbard and pushed the tip towards Bravlin’s carotid artery. The pale skin broke, and a small drop of blood emerged from under the steel.

  “Please,” the hacker groaned breathlessly.

  “Sergeant Major, what is going on here?” Colonel Popov stormed into the office. “Let go of the captain,” he ordered.

  Shashka did not pay any attention to the colonel. His eyes were still showing the same uncontrollable rage. “I lost two squads this morning when I led them into an ambush. An ambush that you told us to go into, you little rat.”

  “Let go of him, Krug. That’s an order,” the colonel shouted right into Shashka’s ear.

  “I do not like losing men,” the big, angry soldier hissed into the small hacker’s ear. Then he let go.

  Smagin gasped for air and inspected the pinprick on his neck with his hand. A little smear of blood stained his index and middle fingers. A band-aid would easily take care of it. “Blyad, you wanted to kill me, Shashka?” He looked at his fingers again and held them up for the two other men to see. “You wanted to kill me.” No question mark this time.

  ✽✽✽

  After mass, Ofelia decided to go home and get some alone time. Mark knew she needed it. Maybe she would take a nice long bath in their kidney-shaped tub for two. He brushed away the frustration that he had had no opportunity for some sweet and slow morning sex with his beautiful wife this weekend.

  Mark had improvised a route from their church through the cobblestone streets of Winsviertel, past Özgür’s Späti to his favorite bench at the foot of the Bunkerberg.

  The sun shone through the canopy of leaves here and there. A lot of rustle in the underbrush suggested squirrels playing around busily. The park was bustling on this hot mid-June Sunday. It was easily over eighty degrees, cloudless sky, Kaiserwetter, weather worthy of emperors.

  Groups of people passed by, hiking up to the former flak tower’s roof to enjoy the view, take photos, or to sit on rugs and throw some lamb chops on a cheap gas station grill.

  He had Xandi’s stroller parked facing the street exit, a cold Bitburger in the cupholder, and glanced up and down the trail in twenty-second intervals as he read the fat Sunday edition of DIE WELT. Same procedure as every day.

  Even though he had many threat assessments to make, he got to browse over most of the paper and read some of the articles. He was not pressed for time, Xandi quietly watched the passing people and marveled at the colors of their clothes, the sounds of the foreign languages they spoke, and the variety of smells that followed them.

  When Sanders was half-way through an article on yet another anti-Polish protest by Germany’s extreme right, two black-clad fellows entered his peripheral vision. They walked up the trail, they were less than fifty yards out. Keeping the paper up, he shifted from peripheral vision to central vision. The picture cleared. They approached leisurely, two men in suits and ties in a park of a residential area on a hot day. One of them carried a newspaper, it was also a fat Sunday edition, it was rolled not folded.

  A picture like that does not fit the scene. It is easy to hide a weapon in a rolled up paper, a blackjack or a suppressed 9 mm. Clearly, high threat potential and for Mark a cue to GTFO.

  But he remained calm, one of the two men in black was John Smith. CIA still do have the decency not to shoot civilians in broad daylight without a good reason, he thought. He kept on pretending to read his newspaper. He remembered his last encounter with Smith at the Hamburg main station. Mark’s thoughts jumped to the bomb briefly, it was still a weapon that could end the war, or start a new one. A worse one.

  Smith closed in while the other man stayed at a distance, just standing, looking with his dark aviator sunglasses on.

  Very subtle, Mark thought.

  Smith slowed
his approach and looped around the stroller. When he was right in front of Sanders, he held out his hand and said, “Thomas Hardy, pleased to meet you.”

  Thirty-Seven

  Mark Sanders looked over the rim of the paper, his mouth open and eyebrows raised in incredulous surprise. “Like the Victorian writer?” he asked.

  Hardy tilted his head and smiled a pain-filled smile. “Yeah, my high-school years sucked. We had to read Tess in tenth grade. A story about rape and teen pregnancy is not exactly something you want to be associated with. Kinda the ultimate turnoff.”

  Mark folded the newspaper and shook Hardy’s hand.

  “That year, I couldn’t get a date for prom. Our AP English teacher hated my guts. After that ordeal, the feeling was perfectly mutual.”

  “I already wanted to ask you if that was a fake name again, but a story like that and the look on your face. Nobody could fake that.” Mark chuckled.

  “Sit down, Mister Thomas Hardy,” Mark moved over and gestured to the empty part of the bench. Looking Hardy in the eyes, he said, “I appreciate the gesture very much. But you and I, we’re not friends. Probably we’re never going to be friends. You better know that before you tell me whatever you came to tell me.” Mark had a feeling what this surprise visit was about.

  ✽✽✽

  Shashka had let go of Smagin. Not because Colonel Popov had ordered him. No, he had wanted to make the Poles pay. To find the enemy, he knew he needed the hacker and his tools.

  “I swear, Colonel Popov, Shashka, this ambush was no oversight on my part,” Smagin pleaded. “The Poles must have had some tipoff.”

  “Who would tip them off?” Shashka asked provocatively.

  “I do not know, but I will find out,” the hacker promised.

  “You do that,” Popov barked. “You have until tomorrow to find out and make sure we can resume operations safely.”

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel,” Smagin shouted standing at attention. “I will report to you tomorrow morning at 0800 hours with my findings and a proposal.”

  The Colonel and Shashka left the room without wasting any further words.

  Smagin breathed out in relief as the now windowless door slammed shut behind his superior and the Sergeant Major who had almost cut his head off. “Witek, fucking son of a bitch. That’s who tipped them off,” the hacker realized his oversight. Feeling elated and on a winning streak, he had ignored the picture sent to multiple confiscated devices during the previous evening. He rummaged through the pile of devices he had taken off his analysis array trying to remember which ones had chirped just the minute he had wanted to go to rest. He laid the whole pile neatly out on the desk, and one by one turned them on. His algorithm had already broken the passcodes and switched off the phones’ securities. He walked along the line of phones, tapped the TLKS icon on each of the screens and once he reached the end of the row he walked back the same path. On each device, he scrolled through the list of messages trying to find the entry labeled ‘Witek’. He could not find it.

  “Fuck, no, no, no,” he quietly swore and closed his eyes. “The fucking message had an expiration date. Blyad, blyad, blyad,” he said banging his small, white fists on the desk and then with both arms he swept the smartphones off the table. They clanked on the floor, some screens cracked, some battery bays popped open, and plastic lids skidded across the concrete floor.

  The otherwise overconfident hacker scolded himself for his negligence. How could he have been so stupid and not investigate the message immediately? In hindsight, it was obvious that a coded message had been hidden in the picture file with a steganographic algorithm. It would have taken a while to decode, but now without the file, it would be impossible. He had to find another way to get his neck out of the noose.

  ✽✽✽

  A man in shorts with a well-groomed, blond beard came into view from the lower end of the trail. He was not short, not tall, somewhere in the middle, but very fit. Under an open plaid shirt he wore a white tee. Wireless headphones, Apple AirPods to be precise, protruded from his ears. He was your regular lumbersexual hipster. Mark remembered having seen the same man outside Özgür’s earlier in the day.

  The two men on the bench did not speak as long as the hipster was within earshot. Hardy made eye contact with the curious Alexander. The boy sat in his stroller and smiled at the CIA officer. Hardy smiled back and waved at the little man before he turned back to speak to his father.

  “I merely came to express the sincere thanks of the United States of America on behalf of their ally, the Republic of Poland to you and, I’m guessing, the beautiful and mysterious Mlada. Or does she prefer being called Miss Svetlana Belyakova?”

  “She doesn’t care what you call her,” Mark replied dryly. “But, hey, I’m sure she would say you’re welcome.”

  “So it is you two.” Hardy leaned back and slapped his knee. “Gee, you created a lot of confusion within the intelligence community. Everybody in Western Europe is running around like headless chickens, even the lazy BND cyber-guys checked in on this fine Sunday morning.” Hardy chuckled. Then his tone changed and sounded more reflective. “Alright, now it’s my problem to explain to Langley and our friends in the community how two civilians could hack the fucking GRU and why they are fighting on the side of the good people in Poland.”

  “I wish you didn’t, Hardy,” Mark said. “The fewer people are aware, the better.”

  “Well, people are already aware. The SWW Chief, that’s Polish military intelligence, is a General Bilinski. He’s asking around half the world on semi-official channels. It’s a big thing because nobody got into GRU before. You can’t possibly believe this is going to blow over. Everybody will want in for a piece of the prize.”

  “We don’t have much to offer. We’re actually not even inside GRU. Our cheat for the Poles is just bycatch of our own insurance policy. Apparently, the Russian services are much more into sharing than yours. They run their political and military BOLO’s on the same system. That’s where we sit and listen.”

  “So, it’s not the grand prize then, but still a prize worth pursuing,” Hardy shrugged.

  “Am I reading between your lines that you haven’t told anyone, yet?” Mark asked.

  “Damn right, I haven’t. Except, that fellow over there isn’t stupid.” He pointed at the second man in black who stood motionlessly about thirty yards down the trail. “He knows, I wouldn’t take a stroll on such a busy Sunday just to make new friends.”

  Mark shrugged. “Why’d you bring him at all?”

  “Protection, Sanders,” Hardy replied. “I wouldn’t want to stand in front of a couple of Russian embassy guys without some backup.”

  “So you think, I should get some protection as well?”

  “You better.”

  “Are you going to give me protection, like to a defector in a spy novel?”

  Hardy had half-expected the question. He took a deep breath before he started his long answer. “That wouldn’t be doing you a favor. Standard procedure is to haul your family stateside. We dump you in a small house in a small town in some flyover state with two years worth of cash and a new identity. After two years of frugal living, you’ll have to get by yourselves, without your business, without your wife’s career, without your families and friends.”

  Hardy continued to explain that only high-level sources from inside foreign services get showered in cash and favors based on the perceived value of the information they bring over. That is KGB colonels and above in spy novel terms. A self-employed consultant could not expect anything like that. Sanders would get the bare minimum and Hardy would even have to go to bat to get it. In the long run, he would be better off laying low, maybe getting a bodyguard on the open market.

  “A self-employed consultant running around with a bodyguard in Berlin is the total opposite of laying low,” Mark sneered. “Having been around this city for that long, you should know that.”

  “Well, there’s not much I can do. Sorry,” Hardy said apol
ogetically. “You have the Glock, and I believe you’ve been practicing with it,” he half-asked.

  Sanders briefly thought of his improvised Hogan’s Alley out there in the Brandenburg forests and nodded.

  “You got good at shooting?” Hardy asked.

  Mark nodded.

  “Keep it handy. Inside that newspaper is something that might help you skip town if necessary,” Hardy said pointing at the rolled up Sunday edition he had put on the bench between himself and Sanders. “Hamburg license plates. Leftovers from an op a couple of months back. They’re registered to an agency front corporation, the technical certification is valid another year and a half, and they have pretty strong magnets on the back. Just pop them on top of your own and get out of Dodge City. They will stick on even through one of these ankle-deep Berlin potholes.”

  “Cool. Will the agency also foot the bill for speeding tickets with these plates?” Mark joked.

  “Guess so, they don’t ask questions as long as you don’t kill anyone.”

  A sudden rush of anger overcame Sanders. “Terrific, Hardy,” he hissed. “I wouldn’t kill anyone unless they wanted to kill me or my family first. I wouldn’t even be in this situation if your fucking politicians had let us use our bomb back when we had the opportunity. The fucking kleptocrats of Moscow would need fake plates and a Glock to get out of Dodge then, not this harmless self-employed consultant.”

  “Okay, you’re not wrong, Sanders,” the CIA man conceded. “But you’re not completely right either. Our government was, and still is, of the opinion that the operation you proposed was too dangerous. After the USSR fell, all sorts of scary things came creeping out of the Red Army’s secret basements. Nuclear weapons, biological, chemical, shit that never made the news. Back in the day we, the West as a whole, were very busy whacking all those scary monster moles. The Russians let us, they invited us, showed us everything. That was then. Next time will be worse simply because the Russians don’t want us around anymore. And once the monsters are in the world and in the hands of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Iranians, or whoever is the highest bidder, then Tel-Aviv kaputt, Berlin kaputt, Washington kaputt, everything kaputt.”