Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  The smartphones transmitted on a Virtual Private Network via the local civilian networks where available but would fall back on a satellite connection when local networks were down or otherwise inaccessible.

  The security cameras came back online. The screens showed men in suits moving purposefully through the halls. On some screens, dead policemen could be seen. A rotary floor cleaning machine wobbled through an empty hall and stopped when the plug at the end of the long power cord snapped out of the wall socket. One of the men in suits operated the surveillance system now, and he zapped through each of the 140 cameras. Every now and then some or other lifeless figure with gloved hands clutching a mop appeared on one of the screens.

  One monitor showed a door at the far end of the hall on the airside. Two men opened the double doors. Men in coveralls pushing carts with crates entered the hall. They were immediately met by other men wearing suits. They opened the containers and handed the contents out to a disciplined line of suits that formed in seconds. Every one in the terminal was given a helmet and body armor, a Kalazhnikov AK-74, and a backpack containing ammunition, grenades, and flashbangs. The suits were also given black coveralls. Shashka ordered one of his squad to go and fetch a set of armor and a rifle for him.

  More men with crates arrived in the hall and handed out rocket-propelled grenades and MANPADS, man-portable air-defense systems.

  Outside the terminal, on the airside, captured airport vehicles from passenger buses to baggage tractors were used to ferry troops to their designated stations at the perimeter fence. Ten VPK Volk armored multipurpose vehicles came to a stop. Each Volk MPV can carry nine soldiers plus driver. So, groups of nine found their respective drivers using SemFoNi. Each car now had two fully armed squads on board.

  Thirteen

  Bonifacy Pułaski, the victorious general, could not sleep. It was 0111 hours, and he sat at a large desk made out of dark wood polished to a shine. He had decided that if he could not get the necessary rest, then at least he should get some tedious chores done. In front of him lay a pile of sealed envelopes marked personal-confidential.

  He took a letter opener and opened the envelopes in one go without looking inside. The opener was heavy and made from silver. A close friend had given it to him after his promotion to four-star general. He had claimed that it once had belonged to Tadeusz Kościuszko, hero of the American Revolutionary War, designer of the fortifications at West Point, and freedom fighter during the Russian occupation of Eastern Poland. It was old and showed Native American motifs. Its providence seemed plausible, but for Pułaski the value of the gift derived more from who had given it to him that who it had once belonged to. He never tried to backcheck on its past.

  The grandfather clock by the wall of his study showed a quarter past one when he reached into the first envelope. Then the lights went out.

  Pułaski turned around and looked out the window. The whole neighborhood was dark. He got up and walked to the large French windows and realized that the glow of the city that normally shone like a halo was gone. Gradually, with his eyes adjusting to the dark, he started to see a myriad of stars. Before he could begin to enjoy the unusual sight, he returned to his desk and picked up the receiver of his desk phone. No signal. He went over to a clothes rack in the corner of the room and fumbled inside his uniform jacket. He pulled out a smartphone, picked the contact ‘Central Command Switchboard’, and held the phone to his ear. Nothing. The screen announced ‘No signal’.

  “Ale gówno, shit, nothing’s working,” the enraged general said to himself. Then pulled the door open and screamed into the hallway. “Alarm, get up!”

  The sergeant of the night watch came running at once and saluted. In a room at the end of the hallway, three more soldiers of his personal protection detail got up from their cots and ran toward the general.

  Right across from his study, a door opened slowly. A woman in rose silk pajamas appeared and asked what was going on. Pułaski told his wife about the blackout and asked her to go back to bed. He would drive over to Central Command to see what was going on. She quickly accepted the proposition, yawned and closed the door.

  The sergeant had witnessed the conversation and ordered one of the soldiers to fetch the car and the others to take position at the exit of the residence.

  ✽✽✽

  Two Volk MPV with their lights off came to a halt at a bend on a forest road. Two squads got off, and the vehicles continued slowly around the bend.

  An RPG streaked through the night for about fifty yards and hit a small hut next to a gate. It exploded and ripped the right half of the gate open. In the distance, the ratatat automatic fire echoed off the trees.

  Three metal cylinders flew through the air and landed in the center of a clearing between two large military trucks.

  Soldiers left the container on the flatbed trailer of the first truck and ran toward the missile launchers on the second flatbed. The three flashbangs exploded and blinded the air defense operators.

  The first Volk sped forward and ripped off the left half of the iron gate. The driver braked hard, yet, he could not avoid running over one of the semi-conscious soldiers on the ground. The MPV’s back door flew open, and a squad stormed out. They opened fire on the few remaining Polish soldiers in the small air defense compound.

  The second MPV drove up to the two trailers, and a squad jumped off. They unloaded grey bricks, then placed them on the trailers. They connected the plastic explosives with red wire and a remote-controlled detonator. The Russian vehicles turned around, waited for the operatives to board and sped off. Just seconds after they vanished behind the bend in the road, two gigantic explosions lit the sky. Four even brighter secondary explosions followed as the missiles of the Patriot air defense system went off inside their tubes.

  On the passenger seat of the leading vehicle a non-commissioned officer typed into his smartphone ‘assault platoon anna, pyry air defense, target neutralized’. Right after he posted a chirp announced a new post, ‘assault platoon boris, zagorze air defense, target neutralized’.

  ✽✽✽

  In Warsaw, a series of faint rumbles could be heard, but not by General Pułaski. The roar of the Diesel engine was too loud as the aged, olive-drab Landrover Defender sped through the city. It was marked ŻW for Żandarmeria Wojskowa, military police. The blue-and-red light bar on its roof flashed silently.

  The only building lit and somewhat alive on ulica Rakowiecka was the General Staff headquarters. The Defender pulled up to the gate. A guard walked up to the window, looked inside, and waved for the gate to open.

  Left and right of the gate GROM A-Squadron soldiers wearing body armor and armed with submachine guns stood guard. As the car entered the parking lot, Pułaski noticed that the pillboxes left and right were manned, and soldiers were piling sandbags onto wheelbarrows. At least some things are working as expected, he thought to himself.

  In the parking lot, he noticed the two brand new Enok armored MPV that had been given to the Polish forces as test vehicles by Mercedes Benz.

  ✽✽✽

  On runway 15/33 five more chartered Antonov cargo planes landed before 0200 hours. They unloaded GAZ Tigr infantry mobility vehicles with machine guns mounted on top and the new Krymsk variant of the BTR-90 armored personnel carrier. This new platform combines the reliability of the much-feared amphibious BTR-90 with a hybrid drive that is silent when running on battery power. It can also be used as an unmanned ground vehicle. Two of the Krymsk APCs had an experimental electromagnetic weapon installed on the turret instead of the usual 30mm cannon.

  ✽✽✽

  Four more GROM soldiers guarded the entrance to the north wing. When Pułaski entered the building, the duty officer, a captain, greeted him immediately with an impeccable salute. “Panie Generale, the power is out in the whole Masovian Province also the phone systems. We have assembled reports best we could via satellite phone connections from units throughout the country and abroad. General Bilinski is waiting for you
upstairs.”

  The captain walked the general toward the situation room and continued his briefing on the way. As they entered, the Head of Military Intelligence turned toward the door and saluted his superior. Then he nodded to a sergeant who immediately started tapping on a keyboard and the secure video-conferencing system came online. On the screen the picture of President Sebastian Berka appeared. He looked very tired and very nervous.

  “Panie Prezydencie,” the general started.

  “Thank goodness, at least you I could get hold of. I had cars sent to the homes of the cabinet members. So far no one showed up,” the apparently highly frustrated Berka barked.

  “I just arrived at HQ. Let me quickly summarize what we know. The whole province is affected by a blackout. However, we can rule out a nuclear attack as a source for the outage. The devices on the government network run on an uninterruptible power supply, and they function properly. No abnormal seismic activity or radioactive pollution was monitored,” Pułaski said and gave Berka a few seconds to let that sink in. He was sure that the president was equally relieved that this worst of fears had not materialized.

  Bilinski cut in, “Our fledgling Cyber Command is convinced that this is a Russian hack of our power grid. They want to blind us. Kiev has been similarly affected, and we only have contact with our troops via satellite phone. They report massive shelling and rocket fire in the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts.”

  “Kurwa, that figures, these sons of bitches aren’t content with hacking a few computers,” Berka interrupted.

  Pułaski reminded the president of the standard operating procedures for a state of emergency. Polish MiG-29 and F-16 would start patrolling above the capital and along the borders within minutes. With the reduced capability to communicate this may take longer than planned. All units of the military were already mobilized for the Ukraine campaign and kept on high alert status until now. The TDF were still on their posts.

  Berka summoned Pułaski to the Belweder for a meeting of the Government Crisis Management Team, GCMT. Assembling this cabinet-level team also was standard operating procedure during disaster or conflict. As they were clearly entering a war with Moscow, the first soldier of Poland would have to join also.

  Pułaski was just about to acknowledge to be on his way in thirty minutes when the screen went black. The connection was lost.

  “What happened?” the general asked.

  The sergeant typed frantically on his keyboard and said, “We are not able to re-establish the connection with Belweder Palace. Their power must be out, or their network connection.”

  ✽✽✽

  President Sebastian Berka sat in his pitch black office and barked at the night-time secretary.

  She tried to reboot the video-conference. Then walked over to the light switch. She flicked it several times, to no avail. She looked at her smartphone, it was also dead. “I don’t know what happened, we have no power,” she shouted across the room.

  “Impossible, we have a generator,” Berka shouted back. Then he heard distant shots.

  Together with the secretary, he ran out of his office to the other side of the building. In the courtyard, he saw two eight-wheeled military vehicles parked at an angle. One had a cannon that moved in his direction. The other had a weird shaped thing mounted on its turret, it reminded him of a small satellite dish sitting on top of a long tube. Thick cables led to a large square structure on the tail of the vehicle.

  Seven soldiers climbed out of the first vehicle. Shots came from the first floor below. The soldiers returned fire.

  Berka and his secretary ducked, they heard glass shatter and groans from inside the building. Apparently, some men of the GROM unit guarding the Belweder were hit.

  “These are not our soldiers,” the secretary whispered.

  “No, obviously not,” Berka replied still crouching on the floor.

  Unlike the White House or the Chancellery in Berlin, the Belweder is not equipped with fancy bunkers and tunnels. It is a relatively small nineteenth-century palace converted into a representative government office and retrofitted with equipment for the purpose. Berka’s predecessor had moved the seat of the president here from the actual Pałac Prezydencki in 2011. He had purportedly decided to move in honor of the early presidents of Poland.

  The presidential palace about two miles away was a much larger and more modern structure with an underground facility for disasters. Berka cursed his predecessor for his sentimentality and himself for not having reversed the decision. The central staircase being the only way out, and his small protection force probably dead, he had no options but to stay low and hope to survive.

  ✽✽✽

  “Alarm, alarm, alarm,” a voice in the corridor shouted. Immediately after, a high pitched siren sounded.

  Kapitan Michał Karasek sat upright in his bunk. He was still in his barracks with his duffel packed and waiting in the corner of his small private room. At one p.m. the next day, he had planned to be on a train home. He cursed the idiot who scheduled a drill for the last night of a two-week exercise. Then he realized that a drill without his knowing would not be happening, he was the company commander after all. “Kurwa”, he screamed and jumped out of bed.

  He was in battle dress and boots within twenty seconds, as per regulation hung a wool blanket over the window, and ran out. At his end of the long corridor, the commissioned and non-commissioned officers had private rooms. At the opposite end, the enlisted men had dorm rooms with six bunks each.

  The duty officer that day was a private first class, a freshman at Poznań’s business school, Akademia Ekonomiczna. His Poseidon diver’s watch told him that sixty seconds had elapsed. He stopped turning the crank of the alarm siren.

  Michał ran up to him. “Kapral Wolf, what’s going on?”

  The tall, skinny man startled, turned around and reported. “Kapitanie, melduję, I just got a call from the staff building. The Russians are attacking. We have orders to blackout the barracks and be ready for deployment at 0300 hours. This is not a drill.” The private was entirely out of breath.

  Michał looked down the corridor, the enlisted men were lined up left and right, full battle dress, helmets and backpacks at their feet. Great, two weeks of drills and this is the first time they got it right, he thought.

  Behind him, his lieutenant and his non-coms were standing by. He turned and passed on the orders. He looked at his Omega Seamaster. It showed 2:37 a.m.. They had twenty-three minutes to get the three platoons organized, weapons handed out and all men into the trucks. If this is a joke, someone’ll have a great laugh. If not, we better hurry.

  Michał’s lieutenant walked the corridor and gave a quick speech making clear that this is not a drill. The leader of 3rd Platoon, a staff sergeant, ran upstairs to give the same speech and order his men to go to the armory. First Platoon was waiting for the lieutenant’s orders. The leader of 2nd Platoon ran off to order his men to drive the trucks out of the garages.

  Twenty-one minutes later 140 men of the 4th Company of the 121st Light Infantry Battalion sat in the back of German-made Mercedes 1017A and Polish-made Star 266 trucks. Theirs were lined up behind the trucks of 3rd Company on the compound’s central avenue.

  Michał got into the Tarpan utility vehicle waiting for him in front of the company building. At 0300 hours precisely, PFC Wolf threaded the Tarpan into the convoy in front of the first 4th Company truck.

  A distant bang announced the presence of an aircraft breaking the sound barrier. Ours or theirs? Michał asked himself.

  Fourteen

  Pułaski waited for Bilinski and his specialists to find out what had happened to the connection to the presidential office. He went over to the duty officer and held out his hand. “Well done, Kapitanie! You and your men adapted to the unusual situation, found creative ways to get vital information for fulfilling your orders, and kept your heads. Please extend my regards to your team.”

  The slightly surprised captain thanked him and gave him an upda
te on the building defenses. In addition to manning the pillboxes, they had set up machine guns on all four corners of the compound’s roofs and put four men with MANPADS and RPGs on the roof of the central wing as well.

  Headquarters was still blind and mostly deaf. A non-com monitoring the police band on a radio scanner held up his hand. The captain went over to hear his report.

  “Melduję, police cars report hostile contacts with military vehicles all over the southern part of the city. A squad car was shot up with a heavy machine gun. We have enemy forces inside Warsaw,” the sierżant summarized.

  “They are heading here, if they are not already outside,” Bilinski concluded.

  Pułaski ordered the duty officer to maximize the building defenses and also to get a satellite phone, assault rifles, ample ammunition, body armor, and rations for six men lasting at least three days. He also told him he would require four of his men armed and in body armor as well as the keys for the two Enok armored MPVs outside in the yard. He should also find a German MG3 to mount on one of the Enoks. Pułaski was not convinced, his last wish could be granted, but hoped for the best.

  Mercedes had not been thoughtful enough to fit the vehicles with a gun carriage that could hold the Polish UKM-2000 machine gun. With hundreds of former Bundeswehr vehicles in service, Poland had acquired about six hundred MG3s. Pułaski prayed for having one somewhere in this building.

  Then the lights went out. Only a lone laptop in front of a female sergeant cast a little light into the windowless room. The chatter of automatic fire could be heard through the long corridors.