The men cheered. It had been a while since they last had a beer and the promise of a Lech pilsner from their hometown lifted their fighting spirit. Michał was a less than perfect motivational speaker, but his men did not fight for him anyway. They fought for themselves. They fought for their freedom. He knew it, they knew it, everybody was fine with it.
A single man at the back of the crowd started singing ‘Poland has not yet perished, so long as we still live’ and by the third line the all the men joined in and sang the anthem at the top of their lungs.
Michał also sang along hoping that the promised American and British reinforcements would arrive, he had already stopped expecting to see a Bundeswehr uniform anywhere around.
Reinforcements or not, the next morning the largest offensive of the war would begin and decide the fate of their nation, and their personal fates. The infantrymen sang all four stanzas of the Polish national anthem and the chorus. When they came to the lines ‘Like Czarniecki to Poznań, after the Swedish annexation’ their voices cracked. Yet, they finished the text down to the last chorus line.
✽✽✽
The hacker from GRU’s 6th Directorate, Bravlin, sat in his office in front of his computer. The LED screens on the wall showed a loop of lines moving around Poland. It looked like a game of Snake with multiple players laid over a map of the country.
Colonel Popov opened the door and stepped in. He was alone.
Captain Smagin got up and saluted sloppily. “Comrade Colonel, good to see you.”
The colonel nodded and pointed at the screen. “This is your bucket brigade, da?” He stood, looked at the screen, and listened to Smagin’s explanations with one ear. What he saw was slightly off-topic for the outfit he was running in Warsaw. Nonetheless, it was significant news if the Polish insurgents used Germany as a Rückzugsraum and ran supply lines across the border.
“The line branches out here and there, usually near the front lines. Nowy Tomyśl is a current example, if you care to look here,” Smagin pointed at the monitor to a place a little way west of Poznań.
✽✽✽
Just after lunchtime, Mark decided to wake Svetlana. He had walked back home after not getting anywhere on his own.
He and Xandi had played a bit in the Volkspark. Then when a mom had come along with her daughter of a similar age, the little one enjoyed the fresh air and the company of a blonde, blue-eyed girl. Mark had measured up the mother, he judged her too puffy for a Russian assassin. Then he conned her into looking after both kids while he sat on a bench off the play area doing some work. That’s what he had explained to the baffled woman anyway.
Now, back in his home office, Mark called Svetlana via TLKS. He hoped she was up and herself. It was close to two p.m. already. She had had enough opportunity to catch up on her beauty sleep, not that she needed it.
“Guten Morgen, Mark,” she said sounding still quite exhausted. “Hold on, I need my second cup of coffee.”
Mark heard her putting down the phone and walking away from it. It the distance, he could hear a clank and then elfin steps back toward the microphone. Mark decided that it was the sound of naked feet on a wooden floor and smirked.
“Okay, go,” she said.
“I’ve stared at the list for half a day now, and I’m not really able to single anyone out. Nothing sticks out, except two addresses with a ‘care of’ note added. These two are candidates, but they might also be your next-door expat short-term sublet.
“We should check them out, I guess,” she sighed.
“Yeah, but before we do, I’d like to go over the list together with you,” Mark insisted. “See if we can come up with something else.”
“Okay, as long as I can keep my eyes closed and feed my system with coffee.”
“Sure, I’ll read a name and you’ll say something.”
“Fine, let’s go.”
Mark read a couple of names, most were of English or German provenance, some sounded Slavic which is a perfectly normal ingredient in the Berlin hodgepodge of cultures. Svetlana’s most frequent answer was ‘nope’ followed by ‘boring’.
“Hans-Kevin Wagenmüller,” Mark read.
“Gee, someone should have his parents arrested and shot. Next,” Svetlana exclaimed.
Mark chuckled and continued, “Stefan Rasinek.”
“Boring.”
“Christian Wolf,” Mark read and then waited for a reaction.
“Wait a minute,” Svetlana seemed to suddenly wake up from her semi-conscious state. “Again.”
“Christian Wolf, really? He gets you excited?”
“No, this guy sounds even more boring than the others. Read the one before again.”
“Stefan Rasinek.”
“Stefan Rasinek, Stepan Rasinek, Stepan Razin, Stenka Razin,” she suddenly sounded excited. “He is something like a Russian Robin Hood, a folk hero. Shostakovich wrote a cantata and Shukshin wrote a novel about him,” she explained.
“Shostakovich rings a bell but who’s Shukshin?” Mark asked.
Svetlana paused to search for the name she had dug up from her memory. “A writer and movie director, he also played in some films in the fifties and sixties. In Soviet times, he was quite popular. Pretty good looking feller. My mom liked him.”
Mark said nothing. Svetlana seemed to look up more information.
“The name of Shukshin’s book about Stenka Razin is ‘Ya Prishel Dat Vam Volyu’. It means I came to give you freedom,” she read from Vasily Shukshin’s Wikipedia page.
“Sounds just like our self-confident, libertarian hacker slash billionaire slash revolutionary,” Mark concluded.
Forty-Two
“So, again, we are left to fight alone, like in 1939, and in 1945,” Kamila Berka sighed. General Pułaski stood there in the presidential suite of the Kraków Sheraton and looked at the first lady without much show of emotion.
“We are not alone, the Americans and British keep their promises, the Czech and Slovak sluggishly do as well. The Germans are the big disappointment, the chancellor proposed new negotiations in the Normandy Format.”
“Gówno, shit,” the otherwise quite well-spoken first lady said.
“True,” the general conceded. “This Normandy Format has never produced any result except for the French and the Germans to feel important.”
“So we fight alone,” Kamila said.
“Like I said, no,” the general repeated. “We have materiel coming across the German border clandestinely. We also have British and American divisions joining the offensive starting in the morning. The Danish sent troops, too.”
Sebastian Berka’s off-script performance had produced more questions than answers for the European heads of state. While many confirmed their sympathy and support for a return of a whole Poland to the EU and to NATO, they made clear that they needed more time to propose next steps to their parliaments.
✽✽✽
A warm drizzle had wet the streets since around noon. Just before 3 p.m., a semi-spontaneous rally of almost one hundred thousand protesters came together on Moscow’s Bolotny Island. On Bolotnaya Square to be more precise.
The people had shared the call to action via TLKS, just the time and place. There was no slogan, no program, no list of speakers. The city had denied a permit for the rally. All the more reason to find the number of protesters astonishing. Usually, people shied away from protests without permit as those were nearly guaranteed to end bloody.
People with banners and posters hurried across Tretyakovskiy Most, a pedestrian-only bridge connecting the island with the southern districts of the city. Some of the banners read ‘End the war, bring home our sons’. This was obviously a demand of the Mothers’ Solidarity Committee, one of the largest sub-groups participating in the protest. ‘Free speech now’ was another often-read demand.
Some posters were a variation of the famous Obama poster from his first campaign. A stylized stencil portrait in red, beige, and blue of Pyotr Dernov. Just like with the original,
various versions circulated. Some had ‘hope’, others ‘change’ written below the face. Dernov seemed to be everywhere, on the Obama-style poster, on Orthodox-style icons, as a name on banners, in the chants of groups of young people.
Sergei, a short, skinny first-year student of Applied Mathematics at Moscow State University. He had fought hard for being able to follow his passion for numbers and computers. His fifty-year-old mother, a widow, was not able to support him. Actually, she had counted on him to support her with income working in a job in their home town beyond the Ural. But he had insisted on going to university, earn a degree, and then work in the software industry.
He had told her, he could maybe even go abroad and work in America or Germany. He would be able to send home much more money this way than he could ever make on a factory floor. This was a striking argument. His mother could see his time in Moscow without income as an investment. She could send him potatoes and vegetables from their garden, otherwise, he would have to get by on the state-sponsored scholarship of 1,600 roubles a month, about twenty-five dollars.
Sergei was in the first row of protesters. He had heard a rumor that Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grandmaster and political activist, would speak in front of the crowd later. He could not get any confirmation of the rumor. The phone network was down, either because of too many phones logged into the cells or because it was jammed by the police. But if it were true, he wanted to be as close as possible to his idol.
Riot police squads had positioned themselves around the square, shields up but at a distance from the protesters. They did nothing, just stood there staring at the masses.
The network was down, so were the two-way radios the organizers of the protest had brought along. Apparently, electronic signals were indeed jammed.
Suddenly, as if they were one organism, the riot police started banging their blackjacks on their shields in a threatening rhythm. Drums of war. After a few bangs, they advanced in one line toward the crowd. Most protesters froze at the sight and sound of the approaching police, they stopped chanting and just stood there with their banners and posters.
People started to get nervous. They were afraid of being hit, or worse, kicked to the ground and trampled to death in the chaos that now was sure to ensue. Sergei, like the others, at first just stared at the thumping police in their dark blue uniforms, black boots, with the shields and helmets, the knee and elbow protectors. Left and right, young men and women moved backward toward the center of the square, a huddle of a hundred thousand.
At some point, Sergei found himself a yard outside the withdrawing crowd. He stood there, short, skinny, white from the days spent alone in front of his computer. The line of riot police approached him, blackjacks raised, shields up. He walked toward them, which did not impress the policemen at all. Two slow steps, they were five yards away. Then he exploded and made three quick steps before he tackled the policeman with his chest, his hands aiming for the blackjack. Surprised by the audacity of the weakly nerd, the officer stumbled backward and slipped on the wet cobblestone. He fell flat on his back.
Sergei got back on his feet. He grabbed the black baton and tried to wrestle it out of the bulky man’s gloved hand. He might have succeeded to take it if the policeman had not slung the leather sling around his wrist. Sergei pulled, to no avail, the blackjack was firmly connected to the man’s wrist.
By this time more riot police had come from a second line under the trees around the square. Five of them formed a circle around Sergei, one hit him in the back of his knees with his blackjack. He fell down, directly under the boots of the policemen.
✽✽✽
Pointing at the large map spread out on the hood of a Tarpan, the TDF major explained the order of battle for the Battle of Poznań. British mechanized forces would move along A2, the Autostrada Wolności, the Highway of Freedom. The TDF infantry would advance along rural road 307 and unite with the mechanized forces east of the village Buk. From there on they would together move toward the city. First contact with the enemy was expected soon after, in the outskirts of the capital of the Greater Poland province.
The American, Danish, and Polish Air Forces would support their advance with air strikes. The major pointed out the new drone system which seemed to magnify the impact of a fighter by a factor of two or three.
Kapitan Karasek listened carefully. Some of his peers asked questions and raised issues concerning the lack of this or that. He just listened, he had no shortage of ammunition and no lack of people. His 4th Company had fared comparatively well during past week’s fighting.
They had helped secure the Rzepin railway hub and push the Russian forces back along the A2 and the parallel railroad tracks. Other than that they had done quite a lot of logistics support, moving men and materiel toward the front lines. It was not what they were trained for. There was not much glory in it. But it needed doing. So they did it.
When he had told his men, that some of the shipments were going to the stay-behind army, the insurgents behind enemy lines, their motivation to do the work had increased significantly. It was not a lie, he had just continued a rumor that was floating around anyway. If it helped his men do the job, it was just as good as the truth. Maybe even better.
✽✽✽
Roman Konstantinovich Kuvayev was just about to leave GRU headquarters when an aide of the colonel general ran after him and asked him to wait.
“Comrade General,” the young captain said. “Could you please come back up. There is a Colonel Popov on the line with news on the insurgent network in Poland.”
Together they jogged back through the lobby to the elevators and then along the corridor to the Head of GRU’s office. The colonel general looked sideways when they stepped through the door. The captain held the door open and then went back outside closing the door behind himself.
Kuvayev walked into view of the video-conferencing system. He could see Popov on the screen, whom he had known for years, also Sergeant Major Krug, a highly decorated Spetsnaz operative, whom he had met on several occasions. There was also a man he had never seen before.
“Comrade General,” Popov greeted Kuvayev. “Good you could join, this might speed things up. I already started sharing some disturbing news which we probably should bring to attention at ministerial level.”
“Comrade Colonel, happy to know there is a good man like you on the ground. Let’s get right down to business if it is so urgent,” Kuvayev said.
“Yes,” Popov cleared his throat. “This is Captain Smagin, codename Bravlin, from GRU’s 6th Directorate. Sergeant Major Krug you will recognize.”
Kuvayev nodded.
“The captain has found evidence of a supply line reaching from Germany into occupied Poland, Warsaw specifically. We believe the insurgents bring their weapons, explosives, and also new fighters across the German border.” Then the colonel waited for a reaction.
“That is indeed disturbing news. I will share it with the president and the cabinet as soon as possible, together with the Comrade Colonel General of course,” Kuvayev said and then turned toward his successor. “Please produce a briefing and then come to the Kremlin. I will set up a meeting with the president and the foreign minister.”
The Head of GRU nodded. Kuvayev thanked all participants and stormed out of the office. His problems had just grown worse. If there were indeed a line of supplies from Germany, he would be tasked to take care of it. It added to his troubles with the RN-websites still down and the hunt for Dernov.
✽✽✽
“Yep, this is it,” Mark said as Mlada maneuvered the DriveNow BMW 1-Series into a parking space just outside Motzstraße 1, the address to which Stefan Rasinek had ordered soup from the Georgian restaurant. They hoped to be right and find Pyotr Dernov under this alias.
Unlike on Prenzlauer Berg’s streets, it was easy to find a parking space on Motzstraße. On both sides of the street, there were wide parking bays painted on the blacktop. Quite typical for Berlin, the buildings were mostly f
ive-story fin-de-siècle houses with ornaments all across the renovated façade. Number 1 was no exception. It was the first house of the street directly adjacent to the Neues Schauspielhaus on Nollendorfplatz.
Mark remembered the building, it had been converted from a theater into a posh night club named Goya during the early 2000s. It went permanently out of business in 2014 after several relaunches. At the time Berlin was still the poor kind of sexy, not posh at all. Times change.
They got out of the car, the automatic system locked it as soon as both doors were closed. With a few taps on her smartphone, Mlada removed the maintenance flag in the DriveNow system.
“So, you still want to go in alone?” Mark asked.
“Yeah, together we look too much like cops or worse. He might get nervous or suspicious of us. Let me talk to him nerd to nerd, and then I’ll call you up to join us.”
“Alright,” Mark said and sat down on a concrete bollard. “I’ll wait here.”
✽✽✽
A white van leisurely crawled along ulica Kwitnąca in Warsaw’s Chomiczówka neighborhood. The men in coveralls sitting in the crew cab looked at the large tree in front of the communist workers’ boxes on the left side. They had all heard the story of the Territorial who had jumped from the 13th-floor balcony to escape a Russian raid squad and survived.
They drove on past the tree to their destination at the very end of the street, the seven-story 1990s apartment complex with scaffolding on its southern façade. A Polish actor had bought the two top floors recently, just before the war. He had started renovations, most notably adding a rooftop deck with a Jacuzzi. The work had stopped when the Russian invasion drained the capital’s working population.
The crew checked in with the security guard at the gate. He let them pass and told them which parking space was assigned to them in the garage.
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