Daniel 6: Extraction Orders
The extraction list is nothing to do with friendship.
It seems to affect them more than it affects me. I mean, what do they expect? We're in the wild west. This is where you begin to see actual freedom. But it's not exactly what people think it is. Mais'ke isn't just about weapons. Now we've got emotions and doubt and complexity and more risk - perceived risk - that, without knowledge of certain truth, is becoming debilitating.
The admin building in Dnipro that Marianna put us on to is a Command post for a nasty piece of work, Ostap Ivanovich Kravchenko, the Commander of Right Sector, an extreme Nazi volunteer force. Kravchenko also served in Aidar. He is the command bridge between the two groups and why both units are here.
The ammo dump has slaves there. Marko is the trafficker, as far as we can tell. He is directly connected to Kravchenko, at least a supplier to him. The slaves are Ukrainian, some definitely from Donbass. You don't need to import pork when you live on a pig farm. It's easy for the darkness within mankind to thrive in chaos. There’s at least 8 prisoners at Mais’ke but that's all we know. Marko was proving to be a real cunt and a massive shit magnet. He refers to his wares as “stingers” and “javelins”. Nothing else. He was careful to limit what he said.
We don't know if Marianna knows about Marko's true work. If she doesn't, then we might be able to trust her and the extraction is simpler. If she does and she's in on it with them, we can only guess what that means. At the extreme, we could be walking into a massive trap, but equally we could just be paranoid. We are safe right now because almost no one knows who we are. We operate in the shadows and we kill in them. Now we have been ordered to extract all 24 of Marianna's “eyes”. How do we do that and stay in the shadows?
“Dani, if we’re not careful we could be played. One of Marianna's lot could be a plant to get to us, regardless of whether Marianna’s trustworthy.” Spiker was the most circumspect in situations like this.
“What, you’re not satisfied with Home’s vetting and verification?” I asked sarcastically.
“Not when I could be captured, tortured or killed. Are you?”
“No. If you think I am going to put us at risk for the sake of some careful work, you can think again. We look after each other. We are the rope.” I knew that would set the tone. The first brick of the foundation was laid.
Mental exhaustion. We're all overthinking. We're paranoid about getting caught, betrayed, worse.
Spiker has us back in the bathroom to try again. To try and work out how to extract our cargo.
“What's the simplest task list we can make? I think it's this:
Isolate cargo
Clean cargo
Move cargo
Defeat checkpoints
Dump cargo
Get back or get out
“At some point, extracting the cargo is going to look like an extraction. Anyone tailing is going to realise. An alarm will get triggered. We've spent hours thinking about sneaky plans to totally avoid being detected. It’s exhausting because we are trying to think of everything and we can’t. We can’t even be sure of Marianna. Let's go back to simplicity. Let's go back to basics. What are we, fundamentally?”
“Soldiers with orders?” says Ol.
“Hunters, killers,” is my answer.
“Yes,” says Spiker. “So let us embrace our nature. Let us embrace the freedom that this place affords us.”
The cargo’s value isn’t expressed overtly in Home’s briefing. They are all of Russian descent, extraction or nationals living in Ukraine. Three of them are senior technical personnel at the hydroelectric power stations around Dnipro. With their families they count for 11 people of 24. Another is in banking - medium level executive at PrivatBank with spouse. One biologist and husband - a chemist - both employed at Dnipropetrovsk State Regional Diagnostic Veterinary Laboratory. Then a single virologist, two medics married to each other with three kids, and a single Bio-informatician with two kids, all listed as working in Dnipropetrovsk Regional Hospital.
The extraction list gives us what we need to contact them directly if we wanted to, enabling us to cut Marianna out as a go between. Each family has been vetted by Home, as has Marianna, and they all show passes. Marianna is still a pass despite her connection to Marko.
The extraction list is nothing to do with friendship. It’s a large defection of technical people all into medium to heavy shit. There must be more of this kind of extraction occurring; this cannot not be the first. The SBU and other agencies will be all over these people, possibly with other agencies in tow. This means that as soon as we appear and start interacting with the cargo, we are exposed.
Our greatest strength is our anonymity and secrecy. After those are gone, our ability to wage kinetic and asymmetric warfare comes next.