Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  Twenty-Nine

  The river Bug flowed calmly, its surface glittered in the moonlight. Here, near the border crossing between Polish Terespol and Belarusian Brest, the river was about fifty yards wide. The railroad bridge with its single track was about a hundred yards long, in addition to the river, it also crossed a marsh on the Polish side. Russian soldiers were on guard duty on both ends of the bridge. They walked back and forth across the tracks and stopped to smoke a cigarette every now and then.

  About six feet below the surface of the calm river, just above the sandy bottom, two black-clad bodies drifted with the slow current. The rebreather apparatus strapped to their chests made almost no sound, hardly any bubbles tickled upward to the surface. The divers were floating along face up and could discern light and shadow beyond the surface but not much more. This was not exactly great recreational diving in the greenish, muddy water. The visibility was just good enough for them to know when they reached their destination. Both surfaced slowly and quietly next to two pillars of the railroad bridge.

  The concrete foundations of the steel pillars reached about four feet above the waterline. Even for the fit soldiers of the GROM B Squadron, the maritime element of the Cichociemni, this was too high to climb silently, especially with the breathing gear on their chest.

  The two divers instead unpacked electronic detonators from their watertight packaging, connected them to the four bricks of C4 in olive-drab satchels. Then, with a powerful stroke of their fins, they rose about a foot and a half out of the water and pushed the assembled and armed explosive devices onto the concrete next to one of the four steel I-beams. With the reverse movement, they sank below the waterline and let the lead weights on their hips drag them below. The drop-off was hardly any louder than the splashes of two fish jumping at the same time.

  ✽✽✽

  The German resort town Ahlbeck used to be one of the favorite vacation spots of bourgeoisie and nobility alike before the World War I ended the Kaiserreich, Imperial Germany. Since the early 2000s, the beautiful fin-de-siècle villas on the boardwalk and overlooking the white-sand beach were meticulously refurbished in the original style and now provide comfortable and not too expensive lodging for weekend travellers from Berlin and other parts of Germany.

  Crickets chirped in the distance, a light breeze blew inland.

  Six young men and women with small backpacks strolled along the boardwalk, apparently enjoying the warm, moonlit night. They took little notice of the plaque commemorating the few days famous writer Thomas Mann once spent in a house near the end of the boardwalk between the famous Seebrücke, the Ahlbeck pier, and the point where Germany now ends and Poland begins. The plaque educated the interested reader that the most celebrated German writer of the 20th century had finished work on ‘The Magic Mountain’ in this stately villa.

  Since the beginning of the war, the little border town had suffered severely. Cancellations threatened to completely kill the local economy which is wholly dependent on tourism.

  On a typical June night, the gang of youngsters would have found themselves in the company of a dozen or more other couples enjoying the romantic atmosphere. Today, with a war going on just a few hundred yards beyond the pine forest, they were the only people around.

  The girls giggled as the group approached the Russian army checkpoint about five hundred yards outside Ahlbeck. Two skinny conscripts with shaved heads manned the makeshift border control post.

  “Halt, wer da? Who is it?” one of them had learned a few words of German from his grandfather. The old man had served in East Germany for a spell. The youngster was hoping to find some Mädchen to try his lines on, but hardly any German, let alone a pretty girl, had come near his post in the week since he had arrived. The second conscript aimed a searchlight directly at the group. The girls squeaked in startled surprise.

  “Stehenbleiben, freeze,” conscript number one shouted pointing his AK-74 at the group. He noticed that the two girls in the group were indeed very pretty and very nice to look at with their short skirts and overknee stockings. Not as pretty as the Russian girls but they were here and not a thousand miles away in Moscow. They seemed slightly older than he was, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. While they had startled at first, they made no attempt to hide behind their boyfriends, friends, or whatever the boys were to them. His mind managed to think a little and hope a little.

  To him, the Western hipster boys looked gay with their irregular haircuts and skinny jeans. The girls seemed adventurous. This was maybe a chance to improve his German language skills.

  “Hallo, huhu,” the blonde girl said now holding hands with the brunette. They took a few small steps ahead while the boys stayed put. “Ich bin Angelica, das ist Samantha.” They both smiled past the searchlight, eyes slightly squinted. The brunette put her hand into the tiny purse she carried in addition to the backpack.

  Conscript number two immediately raised his rifle, it made a clacking sound in the silent night.

  The brunette quickly pulled a smartphone out of the purse and held it out in front of her. “Nur ein Handy, keine Angst. It’s just a phone, don’t be afraid,” she said in German and in English. She had a slight accent in both languages.

  “Selfie? Internet?” the blonde stammered hoping the words would be universally understood. The girls made a few careful steps toward the checkpoint with the phone held out in front of them.

  Conscript number one smiled and lowered his rifle. “Ja, gut. Mädchen, komm,” he waved them closer.

  “Boris, blyad, are you out of your mind, stop it with the fucking German,” conscript number two said.

  “Come on, Sasha, they are just two pretty girls who want a photo with two war heroes,” Boris laughed. He walked over to Sasha, turned the searchlight off, and pushed the other soldier’s AK’s barrel down gently. “Let’s give them what they want and maybe we can ask a favor back. Don’t be stupid, look at them.”

  Sasha lowered his rifle and nodded. “Khorosho, but quick, if we get into trouble I will kick your ass.”

  “Gut, komm,” Boris said and waved the girls closer.

  The brunette turned around and threw the phone to the closest boy behind her. The girls giggled again, shook their hair around a little and pulled their skirts into position. They made a few grimaces and shot photos in different poses, leaning forward, on one leg, with their backs to the camera, heads turned around. They had good fun.

  “Jetzt, Kuß,” Boris said and made a kissing sound. He pulled the blonde closer. She put both hands on his chest and pushed him back.

  “Okay, ja, a kiss and a photo. I will send the photo to you. Is that good?” she negotiated.

  Boris did not want to force her too much. He let go of her and reluctantly agreed. He could send the photo to his buddies at home and make up a good story to go with it. Better than nothing.

  The blonde and the brunette exchanged a look and a nod. They arranged the two conscripts in the middle and gestured that they would kiss them on the cheek for the camera.

  While that was something of a disappointment for Boris, he let it happen. Still, better than nothing.

  Both girls fingered at their skirts and overknee stockings, they pulled the former down and the latter up. Then they posed like 1950s pinup girls, bent slightly forward, on their toes, buttocks pushed outward, one hand holding their respective conscript’s arm and putting a kiss on their cheeks with pointed lips. The flash lit the checkpoint for a quarter of a second.

  The two Russian boys hardly realized what happened when the two girls pushed the six-inch blades exactly into their victims’ kidneys, exactly at the same moment. The girls’ hands previously on the arms snapped up to cover the soldiers’ mouths, and they applied the knives a second time to their necks. The Russian boys hardly made a sound, blood silently gushed out their mouths and their carotid artery.

  Two of the four hipster boys jumped forward and caught the falling bodies. They immediately pulled them behind a bush and started undress
ing them. The other two took the AK-74s and secured the trail.

  The two girls took a moment to catch their breaths, it was the first time they had killed, and they both were surprised and a little scared how easy it had been. They hugged and stayed like this for a minute until the two boys returned from behind the bush.

  Samantha took out her phone and started texting. “Okay, chłopaki,” she said to their former entourage, two of which were now in Russian battle dress. “I made the report, we’ll leave the rest to you now.”

  “Sure thing, be safe,” said the tallest of the four.

  The two girls walked back to Ahlbeck. Angelica, the blonde, swiped through the pictures. “Oh, look, this one’s actually quite cute,” she said to the brunette in Polish. “Too bad we can’t post them.”

  In the opposite direction, quite silently, groups of camouflage-clad men approached the checkpoint and crossed the border into the Polish seaside resort Świnoujście.

  ✽✽✽

  “Operation Eagle Storm is go,” Pułaski said and looked straight into his laptop’s camera. The five uniformed men on the screen acknowledged. One of them was Hartmut Rauschenberg. He wished good luck, and all five logged off the encrypted video-conferencing system.

  The Polish general took a significant risk. He had set a plan in motion that might give his people their freedom and sovereignty back. If it didn’t work, he might become the man who started World War III. The thought weighed heavily on his shoulders.

  Bilinski sat opposite in the visitor’s chair of the general’s temporary ready room.

  “I hate this feeling,” the old soldier said. “If there had been more time for preparation I would like this plan a lot better.” He looked across his desk at the Head of Military Intelligence, his closest confidant.

  The younger general pursed his lips and nodded. “I agree. It would feel better, but nevertheless you made the right call to act fast,” he said in a reassuring tone. “The window to hit the Russians may be too small for comfort, but it’s the only one we have. We got through day one with only small losses, we’ve got our president back, and we have the support of some of our allies.”

  “Yes, we did well so far,” Pułaski agreed. “You should go and get some sleep. We’ll have a tough day tomorrow. Please get the latest reports from the Wolin island group and the river Bug group and forward them to my tablet. I’ll go to the hospital to see the president. His daughter told me, he would not speak to anyone but her and her mother. He did mention my name, though.”

  “That sounds promising,” Bilinski said.

  Pułaski took his hat from the credenza. “Yes, I hope we can present him to the world tomorrow before the political animals come out and mess up our plan.”

  ✽✽✽

  Rzepin is not much more than a train station and a few strip clubs to the hundreds of thousands of train passengers passing through the small town every year. Most of them drive past, some change from one of the southbound trains to an eastbound one, hardly anyone ever gets off to stay.

  All these people fail to take in the little gems of Reppen, as it was called while it still belonged to the Margrave of Brandenburg. If a traveler asked one of its almost seven thousand inhabitants, they would probably point out the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church built in the mid-13th century in the late-Romanesque style or the Piast oak, a six-hundred-year-old tree with a circumference of 241 inches.

  The town’s less than perfect image largely stemmed from the drab train station and its immediate surroundings. Eden Night Club is in walking distance of the station, right across the street of the Rzeptrans container terminal where trucks unload their containers to be transferred onto train cars. There is also Gospoda U Ciotki Maliny, Auntie Malina’s Inn, which serves fatty food to hungry truckers.

  Before the war, business was good for these establishments. Actually, the symbiotic relationship of the three brought quite a few jobs and tax złotys to the small town.

  Business was not that good during the previous weeks, though. The Romanian professionals had fled the brothel as soon as the Russian paratroopers had shown up. With cross-border trade dropping to zero the container terminal and the inn lost their business, too.

  All three places were repurposed by the Russian military. The brothel was converted into officers’ quarters, the inn served fatty food to soldiers instead of truckers, and the container terminal was now a terminal for materiel of the Russian army.

  In the dark of night, the large lot was deserted but for the occasional patrol. Forty-five BTR-90 armored personnel carriers and twenty-nine T-73 main battle tanks stood there behind a wire mesh fence.

  Seven figures in battle dress with white-and-red armbands emerged from the pine forest. They cut through the wire mesh and jogged across the tracks. Hiding behind a BTR, they waited for the next patrol to pass by.

  Two Russian privates with their AK-74s in their hands, the sling draped around their necks leisurely walked their round. The outfit’s commanding officer had reacted to the attacks in Warsaw and other cities by doubling the frequency of patrols to four per hour and ordering helmets plus body armor for the patrols.

  His soldiers did not complain to his face, but the additional workload and the weight of the gear did not make them happy at all. They silently complied, but like most soldiers then complained while on the job. The two walking past the BTRs were no exception. They smoked and talked all through their hour-long walk around the terminal. The topic revolved about how stupid it was to carry that weight in a warm night like that and in the light of the fact that Rzepin hardly qualified as a terrorist target.

  When they had passed the last BTR, and before the first T-73 came up, two tall men snuck up on them from behind. They each held a garrote made from two solid pieces of wood connected by a thin wire, a treble string from a grand piano.

  Once they were directly behind their foes, they looped the garrotes into a large noose like the Greek letter alpha, they raised their hands and in an almost parallel, very fast, downward movement slung the wires over the two Russians’ heads. Once the wires touched the necks, they threw apart their arms like bodybuilders working out on a cross cable machine.

  The nooses tightened so fast, the two guards could not get their hands inside the loop. Gasping for air the Russians tried to get their fingers between their necks and the wires. The attackers kneed them down, and they fell forward. The noose tightened further. Just seconds later, the guards lost consciousness and died.

  The wire had cut off the air supply and blood flow to the brain immediately when pulled tight around the neck. Once the men were down on their knees, and their attackers increased pressure, the wire also cut into their respective larynges and their carotid arteries. Blood gushed out from under the helmets.

  The two soldiers with the white-and-red armbands dragged the limp bodies by the garrotes around the front of the battle tank. The wire cut deeper into the flesh, but the strong neck muscles and the vertebrae held the heads on the bodies. The rifles, now buried under the weight of men and armor, made loud scratching noises on the blacktop.

  “Shush, kurwa,” a woman’s voice whispered. “Get them up, damn it.”

  Two other men jogged up to the scene and lifted the dead Russians’ legs. The AK’s now dangled from their necks and still scratched on the surface of the lot. The four men reacted by moving them faster and at the earliest opportunity sloppily dropping the bodies next to the front sprocket wheel of the T-73.

  “Okay, be quick, go,” the woman commanded.

  All six men walked up to the woman who was holding a cardboard box, reached inside, and each pulled four beer cans out. The cans that had once contained sixteen ounces of Polish lager were green, and each had an almost foot-long silvery ribbon sticking out of the opening.

  Holding them with both hands, they jogged the length of the row of armored vehicles and placed the cans on the rears of the BTRs’ hulls.

  The soldier at the far end of the row lit a road flare. The re
ddish flame hissed as it burnt at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The soldier jogged the length of the twenty-four BTR-90s and lit the magnesium ribbon on each of the beer cans. The magnesium ribbons burned bright white but in complete silence.

  The group hastily walked back the way they had come with their AK-74s raised, prepared for the next patrol that might eventually show up.

  As the group crawled through the hole in the fence one by one, bright orange-and-yellow flames erupted over the armored vehicles. Small red sparks flew in all directions. The thermite reaction produced molten iron which ate through the steel plates covering the engine compartment and fuel tanks at over 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The scene looked like a chain of twenty-four little volcanoes breaking out and spilling lava on an olive landscape.

  In seven out of the twenty-four personnel carriers the improvised incendiary devices cut open the sides of the fuel tanks. The diesel immediately caught fire. Black columns of smoke rose from the palm-sized holes that were still glowing red-hot on the edges. The fuel would be burning for quite some time, and the smoke would be visible for miles.

  A siren sounded. A platoon of soldiers got moving at the far end of the large lot where the inn was. Two of the four hourly patrols were the first on the scene. The four soldiers carefully slunk up between another row of APCs. They looked out for the intruders but saw nothing except the red afterglow of molten metal on the blacktop and heard nothing except the rustling of the diesel fires.

  Thirty

  The psychiatric hospital in Radom is a small building complex south of the city in the middle of a residential area close to the road to Kraków. In the early morning hours, an elderly watchman sat in the guard house. He read a newspaper. The iron gate was closed.

  The guard had been briefed regarding the presence of a platoon of soldiers on the hospital grounds but not why they were in this relatively insignificant regional hospital for mental health.