Another Man's Freedom Fighter Read online

  Another Man’s Freedom Fighter

  Joseph Carter

  Copyright © 2019 by Joseph Carter and nu publishing

  All rights reserved.

  We promote copyright as a fuel for creativity, diverse voices, free speech, and a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying this edition of the book and complying with copyright laws. Please do not copy, scan, distribute, or otherwise reproduce any part of this book without express written permission. By doing so you support the author and the publishers of this book to continue their work.

  You can contact the author and the publishers via below websites:

  www.josephcarterbooks.com

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  1st Edition, 2019

  ISBN (E-book): 978-3-9820641-0-9

  Cover design by JD Cover Designs

  Cover photograph © by bluejayphoto/iStock/Getty Images and TomasSereda/iStock/Getty Images

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, brands or trademarks, places, events, locales, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual businesses or products, brands or trademarks, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  To my beloved wife, without her this would not have been possible.

  Acknowledgements

  My special thanks go out to my good friends, who supported me with their opinions and their knowledge,

  most of all Michał and Paweł.

  Being an addict of thrillers since an early age, this fledgling author stands on the shoulders of giants:

  Ian Fleming, Lee Child, Tom Clancy, Philip Kerr, Robert Ludlum, John le Carré, Olen Steinhauer, Anthony Horowitz, Mark Greany, and many more.

  Some of this book’s topics have been excellently researched and packaged into thrilling non-fiction books by Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, Masha Gessen, Boris Reitschuster, Karen Dawisha, Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud, as well as Erich Schmidt-Eenboom and Ulrich Stoll.

  The makers of and contributors to Grammarly, Wikipedia, Youtube, and Google Maps make a writer’s life significantly more comfortable and cost-effective.

  Freedom is not a given. We all work to bring it about for ourselves and others every day.

  Safety, too, is not a given. Being able to sit down and write a possibly controversial story, then go out for dinner, and return home safely to a warm bed in the night is a luxury provided by the men and women in the police force, intelligence agencies, and armed forces.

  To all: Thank you.

  “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

  - John Stuart Mill

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Epilogue

  About The Author

  Prologue

  Porucznik Arkadiusz Susłowski, a lieutenant in the Polish special forces unit GROM, bolted out of the forest and ran diagonally across the muddy field toward a patch of trees. He needed cover. Badly.

  A mix of rain and sweat was running down his forehead. His thighs were burning from almost two hour’s worth of running zigzag through ghost villages and forests. It would be two more clicks, and about fifteen minutes until he reached his extraction point. A Polish-made PZL W-3 helicopter would pick him up in the northernmost tip of the demilitarized zone between the breakaway Luhansk People’s Republic and the rest of Ukraine. If he could make it there alive, that is.

  His special reconnaissance mission was successful, but success came at a high price. Arek’s sierżant had died hunched over the satellite transmitter uploading video and other data to SHAPE. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe is NATO’s strategic command center. A split second after a chirp had confirmed completion of the upload, a high-velocity round from a sniper rifle had cut first through the sergeant’s neck and then through the transmitter’s screen. The two other non-coms on the team had died while they were in retreat. Judging from the muzzle flashes in the woods it had been only a small opposition force of six or seven, but a very well trained one. They had detected and killed the A-Team of the Cichociemni, the Silent Unseen. GROM are Poland’s elite special forces, the best of the best.

  Arek’s left leg gave way. He heard two rounds fired behind, and fell face forward into the mud. His leg did not hurt. In fact, he did not feel it at all. But he did feel his HK416 carbine faintly pressing against his body armor. He heard quick steps behind him. Probably four opponents, he estimated. They would have their sights trained on him, fingers on the triggers. Impossible odds in a wide open field, lying face down. He knew his HK would still fire even though it was bathed in mud, but he had emptied the magazine a few minutes earlier.

  He forced himself up. Nie, Arek, nie chcesz umrzeć z twarzą w gównie, he said to himself. No, he decided that he would not die lying face down in shit. He got up best he could. He put his weight on his good leg and slowly turned around to look his opponents in the eyes. He expected them to tell him to surrender, to lay down his arms.

  They said nothing.

  He thought of the Glock 17 in his thigh holster. Impossible odds. It took only a split second to decide, he would die standing. He drew. Another two-round burst. One bullet hit into the shoulder piece of his body armor and one into his right biceps. He fell backward on his butt.

  Still no verbal communication.

  The biggest of the four took a few purposeful steps toward Arek. He was about six-two and easily two hundred fifty pounds of pure muscle. He shouldered his AN-94 assault rifle and Arek could make out a round insignia on his right arm. It was the bat logo of the Spetsnaz GRU, the special forces of the Russian military intelligence service.

  The bulky Russian operator knelt down next to the bleeding officer. The other three followed with their rifles trained on the Polish soldier.

  “You made it farther than most people I have hunted,” he said in heavily accented English. “I respect you for that.”

  His left hand wrapped around Arek’s neck. “But then, you have killed two of my men. I do not like losing men.”

  With his right hand, he pulled a long knife out of a black metal scabbard. He held it in front of Arek’s eyes. It was a sturdy weapon. Its wood grip was attached to the steel blade with large screws. The crossguard had a hole in it. It was a bayonet. It looked old. It looked like it was from the Second World War.

  The Russian’s steel-blue eyes locked onto Arek’s as the
blade slowly pierced through the Pole’s carotid artery. He took his time pushing the nine-inch blade all the way in.

  One

  “Fuck,” Mark Sanders shouted when the huge brown-and-black shape flashed into his peripheral vision. He barely managed to bring the stroller to a stop.

  “Fuck yourself, asshole,” screamed the woman on the three-wheeled contraption with the deep cargo bed in front. The two children standing upright in the brown box between the front wheels leaned out left and right to look back past their mother. She sped along, ignoring a red light at the next corner.

  “Fuck yourself, fuck yourself,” the children chanted joyously. Their voices faded slowly as the cargo bike continued racing down Prenzlauer Allee.

  Dit is Berlin, wa? This is Berlin, alright, Mark thought.

  Still standing in the same spot, Mark let out a deep breath and slowly lifted the white linen cloth he used to protect his sleeping son from the May sun. Alexander was lying still, his head slightly turned to the right, eyes closed. The most peaceful sight in the world. Mark smiled and whispered, “We won’t let any crazy chick on a bike annoy us. Right, buddy?”

  It was just past two p.m., time for Mark and little Xandi to get their daily exercise. Mark had made it a habit of walking at least five miles every day at as brisk a pace as the city traffic would allow.

  He was reasonably fit for his thirty-eight years. At six-three and 223 pounds he had gotten slightly puffy, but he could still do twenty push-ups pretty easily and swim one thousand meters in under twenty-four minutes. For him, the German Swimming Federation’s minimum standard for amateur competitions was the gold standard for personal fitness. His black hair had grayed at the sides, but if you asked him, he did not feel any different than he did at age twenty-eight.

  Today’s exercise route was different from yesterday’s. He rotated them randomly by rolling a pair of dice. The only predictable points for anybody to meet father and son would be in front of their home and at the Späti across the street from Volkspark Friedrichshain. Both were unavoidable fixed points. That Späti was the only convenience store with a ramp and wide enough aisles to take the stroller inside.

  “Hallo Mark, wie geht’s?” Özgür said and smiled. The Kurdish owner always greeted his regular customer like a friend. “The usual for you?”

  “Yeah, I need my daily bread,” was Mark’s slightly ironic reply as he pulled a large, ice-cold bottle of Bitburger beer out of the glass fridge. Özgür handed him a copy of DIE WELT in the compact format. He paid, put the bottle in the stroller’s cup holder, tucked the newspaper under his arm, and exchanged a few friendly words with Özgür. The conversation ended with a short exchange about how well the new camera and panic button system was working. Mark had recommended it.

  Before actually entering the park, Sanders circled around the block once more. Occasionally, he stood in front of a shop window for a second or two to glance around casually. Sometimes he passed delivery cars with open back doors, he always checked the reflection in the glass and the paint. Watching his six had become a deeply ingrained habit.

  The park bench always came with the route. Today it was an S-curved wood bench at the foot of the Great Bunkerberg. It had a waist-high stone wall and a very steep hill with lots of trees right behind it. Impossible to be surprised from behind.

  To the right, he had a straight line of sight into the wide walking trail. To the left, there was a wide bend in the trail leading up to the roof of the World War II flak tower now buried under rocks, dirt, and trees. He could see about fifty yards to his right and thirty yards to his left before the curve impaired his view.

  Straight ahead were trees and underbrush. He heard squirrels rustling through the branches and leaves. Maybe really they were rats, but he preferred them to be squirrels. The sun shone through the thick, green canopy here and there, a slight breeze cooled the unusually hot day.

  Mark took the brown bottle and wiped off the beads of condensation. He opened the beer with a key, closed his eyes, took the first swig, and consciously enjoyed the tickling sensation on his tongue and the roof of his mouth made by the carbonized liquid. That first swig was one of the highlights of his day. He parked Xandi’s stroller facing right so he could reach the cup holder without changing position. Plus, it was the direction that led him directly out of the park and onto the busy street.

  While reading, Mark made sure to glance right and left, up and down the trail, in intervals no longer than twenty seconds. It had already become a deeply ingrained habit to watch for a pair of eyes paying too much attention to his son or someone not fitting in with the surroundings. These were usually signs to GTFO, get the fuck out.

  A young woman walked down the Bunkerberg trail lost in thought. He saw her right when she came around the bend. She was in her twenties, slim, brunette bob, tight white tank top, torn black jeans, and red Converse sneakers. She held something black in her right hand. A white cable led up to her earphones, it was some kind of smartphone or MP3-player. No threat.

  She noticed that he was watching her casually over the rim of the paper. She casually smiled as she passed, more to herself than at him.

  Mark’s newspaper told him more of what he had already been reading about the weeks and months before. Sanctions on Russian products were prolonged, and off-shore accounts belonging to Russian Persons of Influence were frozen. He could understand that. The conflict in Ukraine was still not resolved, partly due to the Russian government’s hardly hidden sabotage of the peace process.

  A Russian oligarch acquired a majority share in one of England’s top soccer clubs. He could not understand that. Apparently, the gentleman from St. Petersburg had obtained a British passport in the late 1990s and had more than enough money in Western banks to make such extravagant investments.

  Mark remembered the number 18,509,800,000 in connection with that name and that this particular biznesmen had large holdings in a concern trading coal and non-precious metals. Unlike their American counterparts, Russian billionaires were pretty low tech people. Mark knew more about that than he really wanted to know.

  The compact format of DIE WELT was a short read, but it gave an excellent digest of the previous day’s events around the world. Mark folded the newspaper neatly, placed it to his right on the bench, and weighed it down with a small rock. He left it there for the next guy to read.

  I’m a lucky man, Mark thought while taking the last sip of his beer. He had been born in one of the most advanced countries in the world to a German mother and an American father, both English language teachers.

  When he compared his life to his parents’, he realized that he had gotten ahead in the world. He had left a mark in the digital industry that was at home in Berlin since the early 2000s as a co-founder of several innovative companies.

  Compared to his grandparents who had still dug up potatoes and milked cows for a living in the 1940s, he sure was living comfortably. He did not have to worry about how to feed the family like Oma, his grandmother. Neither did he have to worry surviving the next day in the Soviet POW camp like Opa, his grandfather.

  A comfortable life, but not without worries. He was not a millionaire and not able to just live his life as a Privatier. He did have to work for a living, and he worked hard when he had a gig. After he had been forced out of the last company he had co-founded, he had lost most of his money. To feed his family, he fell back to freelancing as a digital security consultant. He worked mostly for large corporate clients or clients with especially sensitive information like high-tech product designs, formulas for new drugs, or financial data. Rarely he also took work from government or semi-public organizations.

  This line of work was extremely well paid, and Mark was extremely good at it. He was not a hacker, but he could build a specialist team of data security engineers within two weeks and get them to work efficiently on a specific client project. He was the conduit between the business problem and the technical solution. His share in a gig would usually be in the
six-figures for seven to nine months’ work. Nice work if you can get it.

  At the beginning of the year, though, Mark had hit a dry spell. Over four months without a gig was an unusually long time, and that was a source of worry. His wife Ofelia’s executive salary and the government-sponsored parenthood leave for tending to his ten-month-old son kept the family afloat for the moment.

  He thought back to the week before his eighteenth birthday when he had made his decision to keep the German and refusing the American citizenship. He considered that was a good decision. Under German law, he had been forced to choose on the day of becoming an adult.

  The burgundy colored passport was positively ugly, and as a German national he was conscripted into the Bundeswehr, Germany’s armed forces for ten months of service. The one thing, to Mark, that more than made up for it was the fact that as a German he automatically had resident’s rights in all member states of the European Union. He had made good use of this.

  He had studied in Sweden and Poland. He had worked in France. In the past two years, he had worked for clients in Finland, the UK, and Spain. With his Polish-born wife he had enjoyed making short trips to Italy and Greece, go scuba diving in Malta, and horseback riding in Provence. Before they had had their son, they would sometimes even do it at a whim, deciding to go on Monday morning and already sitting on the Spanish Steps on Friday evening. They both loved Europe’s rich culture, history, and variety of foods. They tried to take all three in as often and as much as possible.

  Even though Mark did feel increasingly milked by the social-democratic government, he also enjoyed the peace of mind that the paid parenthood leave and unemployment benefits gave. More importantly, he lived in a society where he could say what he wanted and did not have to worry about being thrown into prison on made-up charges. He thought of the German political class as mostly incompetent, and he was not shy about saying so.