Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  ✽✽✽

  “Do I need to worry?” Ofelia asked over dinner. Mark had not opened a bottle of wine tonight. Instead, he told his wife about the progress Dernov and Svetlana had made during the day. He had also told her about his own adventure at the embassy. His shoulder was still a little sore from the wrestling match with the marine.

  “No, but we need to be on our toes. When we set off the bomb, all kinds of weird things could happen. We are going to piss off a lot of,” Mark paused to think of a non-threatening, yet, true adjective, “ruthless men.”

  “These men will have other things to worry about than us, I mean the three of us specifically when the shit hits the fan. Right?” she would not let her husband off the hook, yet.

  “I’m sure they will worry about their own skin first, their money second, and if they have anything resembling a heart, their families third,” Mark counted on his fingers. “We should be somewhere far down the list. That is, if they even ever learn about our involvement at all. Dernov will have to worry a lot more. He’ll be the fan distributing the shit.”

  And yet, I better pull out the go bag from the chimney tonight, Mark thought as a remedy to the queasy feeling in his stomach as he discounted the fallout for his family.

  “Okay, but I’d feel better if you pulled out the go-bag from the chimney tonight,” Ofelia said as she got up to clear the table.

  ✽✽✽

  “The 12th Territorial Defense Brigade and the British and Danish armored divisions that opened up the western front are encircled in the outskirts of Poznań. They are in control of the airport, but with the ring shrinking every hour, they will nonetheless have to surrender within two days. The 1st Varsovian Armored Brigade with the Slovaks and the Americans are not progressing as planned. In essence, we’re back to trench war in the East,” General Pułaski summed up the less than perfect progress of the offensive.

  “The Bundeskanzlerin alone has cost us as many lives as a whole SS brigade in 1944,” Kamila Berka commented the front report in her hands. “Two thousand dead in one day.” She raised her hand to cover her mouth. Agnieszka sat beside her. Her eyes were watery, yet, they betrayed her growing rage at the occupation force.

  “She’s just her usual self,” President Berka sighed. “I always said she was weak and slow.”

  “The Americans would be able to deploy much faster if they could use the land routes and the former Red Army airstrips in East Germany,” Pułaski said. “Yet, with the Belarusians now fighting alongside the Russians we would still be inferior in numbers.”

  That moment, the door to the hotel conference room opened, and Brigadier Bilinski entered. He sat down looking at his superior who had just finished his sentence.

  “What is it, Bilinski?” Pułaski asked.

  “The Russians sent a team of assassins to Berlin. The CIA station chief in Berlin has determined they are after our stay-behind logistics people.”

  “The ones that got this mysterious call in the morning? This odd thing you told me about earlier?” Agnieszka asked.

  “Exactly, Pani Agnieszko, this CIA source helping us out of their own volition has alerted their Berlin station of this change of location.”

  “How can we protect our people in Berlin?” Sebastian Berka asked.

  “They have already left their locations. The call had prompted them to do so. We will need to find new safe houses for them, which is a bit of trouble in the short term but nothing for you worry about.”

  “Alright, thank you for the update, Bilinski,” Pułaski said and returned to the evening debrief agenda.

  ✽✽✽

  “So this is veal and lamb?” Smagin asked looking at the soft triangle wrapped in aluminum foil that the janitor had just handed him together with two thin white napkins and an ice cold can of Berlin beer.

  “Yes, Comrade Captain, minced meat of veal and lamb grilled on a skewer. It comes in a thick, lightly toasted pita bread with salad and a tasty, slightly spicy sauce. I took the liberty to get you a beer as well. The locals prefer this combination very much,” Mikhail Yevgenievich said as if he were a maître d’ at a fancy restaurant explaining the plat du jour and recommending a wine to go with it.

  One beer won’t hurt, Smagin thought. Yet, he told the janitor he would not drink while on duty. He thanked him and unwrapped the warm and crispy sandwich. In the meantime, his comrades had all gone to the embassy lunch hall. Smagin was alone with his Döner and would maybe watch a movie while he ate, then take a nap before the commencement of the operation.

  ✽✽✽

  The black canvas bag sat on a small bench in the corridor of Mark’s condominium like a fat cat on a thin brick wall. The fake plates Hardy had given him stuck out of a side pocket.

  What’s Hardy’s deal? Mark thought. The CIA man had saved him, threatened him, wanted to befriend him, berated him like a schoolboy, and threw him out. Their relationship was the oddest of relationships.

  Mark walked over to the small sideboard just outside the bedroom door and plugged the charger into his phone. Just as he turned around, a chirp announced a message. Svetlana had sent a last status update. It read ‘D. says tomorrow after double checking and getting his release team onboard. We both happy with test results. Night, S.’.

  Mark briefly thought about the stunning Russian woman’s plans for the night. She had talked about dinner with this girl she liked and staying overnight. The thought of what these two might be doing after their meal lingered with him until he fell asleep.

  ✽✽✽

  At precisely 2305 the gates of the Russian embassy opened, and ten black SUVs and luxury sedans spilled out into the dark of night. Most headed east toward Leipziger Straße and Alexanderplatz with final destinations in Prenzlauer Berg, Pankow, and Hohenschönhausen. Some also went west toward the Tiergarten park with destinations in the Moabit district.

  Popov, Krug, and Smagin watched the dots move across a digital map of the city. A SemFoNi feed with ten updates, the ten teams’ orders, was displayed on a second screen. Smagin acted as mission planner, Colonel Popov as mission commander with Sergeant Major Krug as second in command.

  Krug wore a headset connected to a digital radio clipped on the belt next to his bayonet. He had opened his shirt collar and disposed of the tie. His blue-striped army undershirt shone through the thin white fabric of the shirt. The shoulder holster holding his handgun and two extra magazines hardly cut into the taut white fabric.

  “Raid squad Anna will be the first seeing action. Schönhauser Allee is but a few minutes away from here,” Smagin said. The three looked at the dot reaching the address on the short stretch of the long avenue between its beginning at Torstraße and the distinctive triangle which is Senefelderplatz. The dot drove past the upside down raindrop that marked the target address.

  “What’s that? Why are they driving past it?” Popov asked nervously.

  Smagin tapped on his keyboard, and the map view changed to satellite. He also zoomed in on the target address. “The street is split, Comrade Colonel. They have to turn around at Senefelderplatz to drive up to the house on the left side.” He zoomed back out and turned the view back to map.

  “Good, they should stick to the rules of the road. We don’t want any attention whatsoever,” the colonel said looking at Shashka.

  Shashka said nothing.

  All three refocused their attention at the dot now in front of number 181, a house with a glass front on the corner of the small, cobblestoned Fehrbelliner Straße and the four-lane Schönhauser Allee.

  The SemFoNi feed moved down and made room for an update. ‘Raid squad anna, entering target object’ read the new entry. With one eye on the map and the still moving dots and the other on the feed, the three GRU men stood there, tense and silent.

  ‘Raid squad anna, target object abandoned, RTB’ appeared in the feed. The two operators announced their return to base.

  “Blyad, the first hole is dry,” Popov cursed.

  “Tsentr for Anna,
Anna squad, report,” Krug spoke into his headset.

  He immediately received an answer, he pulled the headset out of the radio and the voice from the other side started talking. “Comrade Sergeant Major, this is Anna, we picked the locks on the two doors in front and in the courtyard. We ascended to the second floor by foot, peeked into the object with our borescope. Then we rang the bell. When after the third time no one answered we picked the lock on the apartment door as well. The two rooms plus kitchen and bathroom were clear. There was not much in it, a TV, a couch, a bed, some sheets. We captured two cell phones. Everything stank of marijuana and cigarette smoke but the smell was stale. We suspect the subjects had left the object between ten and fifteen hours earlier.”

  “Moabit is next,” Smagin pointed at the updated feed that announced raid squad galina entering the target object. The three GRU men again stared at the screen in tense silence. From time to time, Popov glanced at the time stamp in the upper right corner of the screen. One minute, two minutes, three minutes passed, then an update appeared. It read ‘Raid squad galina, target object abandoned, RTB’.

  Krug unclipped the radio from his belt. “Tsentr, Galina, report,” he spoke into the handset.

  Galina squad’s report matched Anna’s less the stale marijuana smoke. The Moabit apartment was empty, some sheets on a mattress were there and cell phones left behind.

  Popov stood there, fuming with rage.

  Krug said nothing.

  They watched the next reports come in. Boris squad reported from a homeless shelter in Hohenschönhausen which they had trouble finding in the first place. The other crews all the way through to Konstantin also reported back failure to acquire a target.

  “Blyad, blyad, blyad! Smagin, explain this to me!” Popov was beside himself.

  “I, Comrade Colonel,” Smagin stuttered. “I don’t have an explanation. I uploaded the profiles into the Vpoiskakh as is our SOP. I always follow the standard operating procedures.”

  Popov grabbed the backrest of Smagin’s office chair and pulled the weakly captain around. He leaned on both armrests, left and right of his underperforming subordinate, and screamed at his face. “You better come up with a real answer, or I will let the Sergeant Major castrate you with his bayonet and let him have your shriveled balls as a midnight snack.”

  Forty-Six

  Thick sweat beads ran down Anatoly Smagin’s forehead as he sat at his workstation with the first set of cell phones brought back by raid squad Anna.

  He almost panicked when he discovered that the phones had been wiped clean, presumably by a kill-switch app. He had seen one of those on a phone captured in Warsaw.

  Then he realized that the SIM cards were still in their slots. It would be a matter of an hour or less to get access to the German phone networks and find more information there. Phone companies in Germany were required by law to store subscriber meta-data, like incoming and outgoing calls, IP-addresses of websites visited and apps used. A treasure trove of personal information once you get your hands on it.

  Raid squads Galina and Boris were next to drop off their booty. These phones were just the same, wiped clean. Only the SIM remained to keep up the appearance of the phone being turned on and in use at the location Smagin had entered into the Vpoiskakh system.

  Once he had hacked into the databases Germany’s largest mobile provider fed its meta-data into, he checked the accounts of the SIM cards he had on his table. He opened multiple queries and put them one next to the other on his screen. He could now compare the records. He hoped to find a pattern just by looking at the data. There were not enough data points to run through an algorithm. With these phones, only a handful of calls had been made in the past weeks, the IP-addresses also hinted at only very few online services used. It seemed, these groups of Polish insurgents kept a low profile and high discipline.

  He stared at the screen. Then he saw it, right at the top of the incoming call lists. Calls from several numbers from countries as far as Thailand and South Africa. While the numbers all differed, the timestamp was exactly the same, down to the second, 03:03:03.

  “What is this?” he asked himself. He took off his glasses and rubbed his dry eyes. Then it hit him like a hammer.

  “Blyad, someone hacked the Vpoiskakh system,” he screamed. He tapped frantically on his keyboard to access the system with his user account. Then he opened a messenger app that GRU 6th Directorate members use to communicate among each other. He needed to find someone with administrator status. If he was right, the Russian intelligence community had been hacked.

  ✽✽✽

  “Ecki just called in a report from outside the Eckkneipe he hangs out at with the Russian janitor,” Everett said as he entered Hardy’s office.

  “What’s he say?” Hardy asked the much younger officer. The Berlin station chief had deep bags under his eyes. He had not slept well lately, and the current escalation of things had kept him in his office far longer than was healthy for a man his age.

  “Ecki said this guy was super excited about something and in an unusually swell mood. He started inviting Ecki for drinks which is completely out of character for the guy,” Everett set the stage. “And here it comes. Once filled up to the rim, he told Ecki that twenty or more Russian Spetsnaz were already in Berlin and that the Russian Armed Forces were preparing to strike here in the city. A rant about the supremacy of the Russian way followed which Ecki had to sit through before he could call this in.”

  “Terrific,” Hardy grunted. “So the handful of guys our source saw boarding the plane in Minsk were just the tip of the iceberg. They have more people in town.”

  Everett nodded. “My best guess is the others are mercenaries, ex-Spetsnaz freelancing for Volking Group. We had some unconfirmed hints at high-level operators living in Germany. You remember the op in winter when we tried to infiltrate the Sistema schools run by some ex-KGB guys.”

  “Good guess,” Hardy said. “Get one of the NSA guys on the line. I want police band and emergency calls monitored live. Put a rookie in some rags and let him sit down on Behrenstraße with a coffee and a sandwich. I want to know about every vehicle in and out of the Russian embassy. Let’s raise some hell with the Verfassungsschutz counterespionage guys. Everything goes through you.”

  “On it, boss,” Everett acknowledged his orders.

  “And lucky me, I’ll wake the ambassador and have him tell the Kanzlerin about the foxes in her chicken coop.”

  ✽✽✽

  Bravlin, as Captain Smagin was called by his peers, was working as if his life depended on it now. Actually, it did.

  The adrenaline made him highly concentrated, focused on the task at hand, but also aggressive. He constantly switched back and forth between the Vpoiskakh log files on one screen and the group chat with admins from GRU, SVR, and FSB. They, too, had become highly nervous after Bravlin’s calling-in of a suspected breach. In the chat, they commented on apparent anomalies in the logs.

  At some point aggression trumped concentration. Bravlin banged both fists on his desk like a five-year-old demanding french fries for breakfast. “This is fucking going nowhere,” he shouted at his computer.

  Bravlin decided to go another way and think outside the box. He let the others continue their search in the haystack that were the log files of one of the largest intelligence gathering systems of the world. Hundreds of thousands of operators worldwide performing dozens of millions of tasks per day produced billions of data points to look at. He instead would sit back for a minute and think like a potential attacker.

  “What do I want to get out of the system?” he asked aloud. “BOLOs, new bulletins,” he answered his own question.

  “Why do I want those,” he asked aloud again. “To see if someone I want to protect is in there and give him a head start. It works like a tripwire alarm.”

  “Who would I want to protect?” He got up from his chair. “The insurgents. Or myself. Both would make sense depending on who the hacker is.”

&nb
sp; “Would the Polish intelligence services be able to hack our system?” He rubbed his chin. “Not with half the country without power and most of their people dead or captured.” He looked around the room, then walked to the window and looked out into the summer night. “The Americans could have caught up with our kung fu, or it’s someone completely different. A hacktivist. He would have to be really good, though.”

  He nervously tapped against the windowpane. “But the who is not the starting point, it’s the endpoint. The starting point is the what and why, this leads me to the how, finally the who.”

  Bravlin got back to his keyboard, and instead of the log files, he started analyzing the executables and config files of the system. He asked himself how he would query the BOLO data to find a specific lookout bulletin or a bulletin that meets specific criteria. He then hypothesized how he would smuggle out the query results without being detected. After some attempts that led nowhere, he finally found a tiny executable file that did not belong. It lay in a sub-directory that was essentially an unofficial trash-bin used by the admins to park old and redundant code just in case anybody would want to look at it again. Yet, the bin was on the live server and the files in it could interact with the live system. He cursed the developers and admins for this stupidity.

  ✽✽✽

  Kapitan Michał Karasek sat dead-tired in the waiting area of Poznań-Ławica airport. After a murderous march east with Russian defenders in every village, his 4th Company had been tasked to secure the main terminal building. British troops guarded the cargo terminal, and Danish anti-aircraft defenses were just being set up to protect the runway and hangars. The battalion commander had made clear that holding the airport was key for the whole brigade’s survival. They had to hold their ground until American troops would attack the encirclement they were trapped in. If the Americans could open a supply route for materiel and men to reinforce the allied forces, they would be okay. If not, they would die or be captured by a cruel enemy.