Daniel 02 - Fluid Dynamics
I don’t have the patience for her, yet I can lie in wait for days and weeks.
I was at the park in Pavlohrad. My turn to do our intel send. Not far from that entrance there was a bench. There were multiple fixed wifi connections combined with mixed moving signals that together meant the Voice could mask and split the payload across all those connections. The Voice was fastened underneath the bench so I could walk away and observe it. The others wouldn’t do this, it was off the Standard Op. I was the boss and I was alone, so I could do what the fuck I wanted. If the send was actually compromised or detected, at least I wouldn’t be sat with it if someone came to collect. If it drew some interest, I could observe from a safe distance and make a tactical decision, including following to recover the Voice somehow. If the others saw me do this here, they’d consider it a massive infraction.
I walked out into the park straight across the grass. I always had a massive feed when I did a send. Usually top notch shit but I decided to slum it to remind myself of how shit life could be. I was dragging three bags of garbage to my solo picnic: a KFC, sushi and a heavily loaded kebab. I plumped down on the grass about 50m from the bench. Any prick who tried to approach me to try something there stuck out. I munched some fried chicken despite the guaranteed, instantaneous and radical underwhelmingness that I knew it would be. I couldn’t bring myself to finish the piece, it was such utter junk. I had a whole bucket that I just threw into the grass. It deserved nothing but contempt and so did anything that scavenged what I discarded. I should have puked it up.
The sushi wasn’t good enough. No sushi you can take out of somewhere ever is. But as a mop for soy and wasabi, it was instantly better than the shit KFC peddles. I drew out the fish and rice and saved the sashimi till the end. Figures passed in and out of the park - strolling, lolling, running - along the paths. Few strayed on to the grass. No one dared to come out as deep as me.
The kebab’s only redeeming feature was the maillard charring of the lamb. The pitta was tired, the cabbage just raw and the rest of the veg flaccid, hidden by a lazy attempt at a sauce under a dressing. Of all the ways it could have been put together, the kebab was just a piece of dog shit that belonged at the foot of a tree in a puddle of piss. That junk was beneath me and only marginally better than battery chicken. It just went to show that the world is full of dummies who’ll put any old shit in their bodies.
I’d been away from home for 6 months this time.
“Home”.
One of the irreconcilable differences between Vera and me is that for me, home could be anywhere. For her, it is that building full of those things. I can’t keep up with what’s in there anymore. Just her and Misha, and the things that I’d put there at the beginning are enough for my memories. Trying to catch up on new junk is just a facile, boring waste of time.
“Oh, let me show you the new bedding!” she said one time I went back.
“Why don’t you fucking burn the new bedding and do something good?” I couldn’t help it. What I meant was that of all the things we could have done, looking at bedsheets was the pitiful nothing. We could have danced, fucked, talked about some place to go see, or about Misha and her. Looking at bedding? Fucking please. She didn’t get it and she was at the verge of tears within ten minutes of me getting back. It got squared away in the end. I was just too lazy and too slow to pretend I gave a shit and bury my contempt.
It’s not that I don’t care about that home. It infuriates me to find it a dump or with stuff rearranged or out of place. I fixed that problem by calling ahead and getting cleaners in before I return. They have photos to work off to get the place in decent order. Of course, Vera just took it as a personal slight and more evidence of my weirdness but it saved her any effort. If it was her house then it was mine. Yet she ignores what I want for the brief time I’m there. She can’t give for just that short time. She lacks the grace to be grateful. Perhaps she knew I was doing it for me, not us. It was always different though. They were always different to how they were in my mind.
When you set out to walk across a desert - to cross an expanse - you proceed one step at a time. Take enough steps and you’ll reach the other side. This expanse - this desert between us - only grows wider. We cannot take enough steps to diminish the distance. I don’t even think I have the patience, yet I can lie in wait for days and weeks. If I tried to tell her what I’ve been doing, she wouldn’t give a shit anyway. She is so selfish she would just be silent. She doesn’t even ask in any meaningful way. Yet I ask, I listen, I interact, I question, about all of her life and things and pettiness. Except for new bedsheets.
Misha’s becoming a bit of a disappointment. He has his routine and I know he can remember it and do it. He managed fine when I watched him at home. When I got screen time with him we would go through it but he lacked focus and couldn’t complete a session unless I was there. I only have two more years till his seventh birthday to fix his character. It’s a serious burden. How to fix him without sacrificing myself? Maybe I’ll just see where I am by the time he’s seven and if he is irredeemable I can try again. Maybe replace them both. As long as it happens in the right way, I can minimise the fallout. If I’m just reasonable enough but just distant enough she’ll trip or stumble. As long as she crosses the line in the right way, I could manage her. There are people and things and circumstances that could be introduced or put in her way. She was fragile enough for me to steer her in the right directions at first. It was her fault we were like this anyway. She said it was an accident but they all do. At least I have the decency to lay a trap and not lie to my victims about it. And I’m merciful enough to ensure that the traps I lay bring an end.
It wasn’t all bad, she wasn’t bad. She was simple, sheltered. In a way, I could begin to escape into that until the boredom took hold. But that was what leave was for. Just long enough until you get bored of “home”, then you can leave again and go home.
A tidy woman with tightly curled, dyed honey blonde hair sat down on the bench, above the laptop. 50m would take me about 7 seconds in a sprint from sitting. I could kill her with a single hit at that speed but my motion would alert her almost from the start. I imagined her being a lone operator, thinking she was as skilled as me. Gutsy enough to have remained in the park on the path looking “normal” as she departed low key with her prize instead of taking the nearest exit into a team vehicle and burning off.
How could I stalk my prey?
50m to my left was a line of bushes that lead back to the park entrance, near the bench. I’d casually walk in that direction, as though I was heading away from her. Once her back was turned I’d accelerate out of her eyeline to the bushes. I’d strip off down to the running kit I had on underneath, put on my cap, headphones and sunglasses. She’d be at least 200 yards away from the next exit to the park, and I’d be able to still see her. I’d sprint along behind the bushes to the bench exit, up the street to the next park entrance and re-enter at a casual jog to locate her, approaching head-on. She wouldn’t recognise me. Her throat would be exposed and a running chop is fatal but not instantaneous. I’d have to consider the proximity of others. If it was quiet I could strike like that and fluidly push her crumpling body straight into the bushes to the side of the path that lined the outer wall. Hard enough and she’d be out of obvious sight in a flash. I’d have the dexterity to recover the shoulder bag with the laptop all in one move. I’d sprint away, slip back behind the bushes at the other entrance, redress and escape at the other end of the park…
In the corner of the coffee shop with my back to the wall I reviewed the information from Home that came in after the send completed in the park. Reading it alone gave me extra time to think about what I wanted and how to do it. That gave me an advantage in managing the lads and steering them. Not guaranteed, but still an advantage.
There was combined intel on Mais’ke and the admin building; what we thought and more that built towards violence. A strike loomed.
Home was committed to Marianna and her friends so we would probably have to extract them without explanation. A hand off to one of three DPR agents around Donetsk was sufficient. Marianna’s friends were vetted and verified but not via us. Marianna was likely more than we knew, or used to be.
Minimal explanation of the extraction suggested that the cargo was likely of greater value than just sources. Their profiles would come when we got authorisation. We started prepping the vans in anticipation. If the cargo was valuable, this wasn’t going to be a straight collect and deliver. And anyway, I wanted a higher performance operation to prove my point to command and justify a move up the chain soon.
The ammo dump at Mais’ke wasn’t for destruction. Yet. We could relax on that.
Getting closer to the end of a stint always made me feel like there was increasing scope for violence. We’d leave soon and the whole scene could be reset by the time we came back. We could be in a different area next time around. It was simply a question of not being too exposed, too messy, too entwined with things that mattered publicly by the time we ended a stint and were extracted.
If our prey is dark then it’s easier to hunt it. Less people miss it or love it or acknowledge it or speak about it. We were waiting to hear how dark our prey around the ammo dump might be.
And there, on the penultimate page of analysis lay a glimpse into true darkness. I could already imagine how this would play out. It was the chance to step into the abyss and climb back out again.
We are the rope.
“Stan, read out the full order again?” Ol wanted to be clear.
20 HVTs on site now. Intel picture and HVT location will change. Consider possibilities for a/multiple strikes. Advise first work-up in 24 hours with varied method and support options, further info in 24 hours.
We were in the bathroom after my send in the park, going over the latest from Home. My second time through it. Home’s instructions were to anticipate killing a list of 20 High Value Targets who were at the dump in Mais’ke.
“Any free thoughts?” I asked. Brain dump time. It was the end of our fourth week. Only two more left till we extracted.
“Bomb Mais’ke now. They’re all there with tons of weapons.” snapped Ol. Sometimes stating the obvious is the right thing to do but at this point in time dropping a bomb on Mais’ke would have been an “invasion”. The Western press were still saying we were intending to invade. We were still running “exercises on the border”.
“Blowing the dump is totally off the cards. Next.” My rejection was final.
“Issues include variable timing, short notice, multiple targets going to multiple places, combat capability, our limited manpower, preserving fully covert status.” Spiker was reading off some notes he'd already made.
More from Ol. “I’ll add our mobility. Whether we tail, intercept or ambush the targets. Having enough intel to enable us to do any of them effectively. External resources. Honestly, Dani, 20’s a nonsense number for four of us. We can’t just kill those specific targets while they’re sleeping in the dump, either. That’s like blowing the dump. There’s what… 45 troops there?”
Stan chimed in. “Whatever size of engagement we’re in, can we contain it and how? If there’s overspill or an escape, how critical would that be?”
Four people killing 20 plus was asymmetric and we needed to gain advantage and exert control.
“Are we going pro-active or reactive? Can we get all 20 of them to move together to one place at the same time and exploit that? Is there already something in their diaries or can we spoof them? Might need Home to do that properly,” said Spiker. His suggestion could turn the tables for us considering the complexities we were facing and the disadvantage we were at.
“OK, so we’re very fluid at the moment. Let’s have a nice lunch, mull things over and have another brain dump later.” I said. This was just that loose early phase of working out a plan. We only knew a bit, and only had questions. All part of the process. Cooking and eating always made things better.
“They’re probably the vaguest and most imbalanced orders I’ve had,” said Ol. “They’re literally saying to spitball any old idea, but targets could go anywhere at any time and we might not have the help we would want. It sounds like a kid wrote that. Don’t you think that sounds ridiculous? Weird, even?”
“All the authenticators are green. If it’s a spoof, we’d never know looking at this. We should call on the link and direct authenticate.” Stan replied.
They were both right. We didn’t talk about the orders for a while. Lunch got squared away. French onion soup, beef bourguinon and a glass of St. Emilion. I made notes as things occurred to me. I sent Spiker out to verify the orders by secure voice call. It came back green.
We reckoned that Home had chanced these targets in Mais’ke, couldn’t predict their movements, couldn’t fully control them and wanted us to help generate ideas. We listed out high level options and requests. Things were so vague and unbalanced with the minimal info we had that we just made a fantasy list that didn’t really answer Home’s request:
Bomb now in situ
Scrub intel to establish HVTs’ schedules & coming movements, plan strikes accordingly
Create/compel a movement we control, to a place/route we control to set kill(s)
Strikes are resource- and geo-limited. Air power most flexible. Provide that flex or suffer limited strikes.
Advise of all available ground and air units over foreseeable time frame for planning.
Advise all friendly civilian helo lift options from present position.
The vagaries seemed to affect them more than they affected me. I mean, what did they expect? We were in the wild west where you begin to see actual freedom. But that freedom wasn’t exactly what people thought it would be. It was predatory freedom and slavery for prey. Mais'ke wasn't just about weapons.
We got more info back from Home 10 hours later. The admin building in Dnipro that Marianna put us on to was a command post for a nasty piece of work, Ostap Ivanovich Kravchenko. He was Commander of Right Sector, an extreme Nazi volunteer force. Kravchenko had also served in Aidar. He was the command bridge between the two groups and why both Right Sector and Aidar were at the dump. Kravchenko was probably keeping the weapons in the family by training Right Sector in his way of stealing a lot of expensive shit without going too far, then sending him his fat take. But that wasn’t the darkness. Not by a long shot.
The ammo dump had slaves there. Marko was the trafficker, as far as Home could tell. He was directly connected to Kravchenko, at least a supplier to him. The slaves were all 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 were at least 8 prisoners at Mais’ke but that's all we knew. Marko was proving to be a real cunt and a massive shit magnet. He referred 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 can still trust her. 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’re safe right now because almost no one knows who or where we are. We operate in the shadows and we kill in them.
“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’m going to put us at risk for the sake of some careful work, 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.
Then we got a proper job. Home ordered us to extract Marianna’s eyes.
“What's the simplest task list we can make?” Stan asked. “I think it's this:
Isolate cargo
Clean cargo
Move cargo
Evade or defeat checkpoints
Dump cargo
Get back or get out
“At some point,” he went on, “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’re 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?” said Ol.
“Hunters, killers,” was my answer.
“Yeah,” said Spiker. “So we should embrace our nature. Let’s embrace the freedom that this place affords us.”
The cargo’s value wasn’t expressed overtly in Home’s briefing. They were all of Russian descent, extraction or nationals living in Ukraine. Two of them were senior technical personnel at the hydroelectric power stations around Dnipro with a kid. Another was in banking - medium level executive at PrivatBank with spouse and kid. Then a virologist and her spouse and two kids, and two medics - husband and wife - with two kids, all listed as working in Dnipropetrovsk Regional Hospital.
The extraction list gave us what we needed to contact them directly if we wanted to, enabling us to cut Marianna out as a go between. Each family was vetted by Home, as was Marianna. Despite her connection to Marko the human trafficker, Marianna still passed vetting.
The extraction list was nothing to do with friendship. It was a defection of technical people all into medium to heavy shit. There must have been more of this kind of extraction occurring; this couldn’t have been the first. Their knowledge would feed Home with more intel than just what they’d given Marianna and us. The Ukrainian SBU and other agencies must’ve been all over these people. That meant as soon as we appeared and started interacting with the cargo, we’d be exposed.
Our greatest strength was our anonymity and secrecy. After those were gone, our ability to wage kinetic and asymmetric warfare would be tested. The importance of the cargo meant this was going to take a lot more than 24 hours of planning.
There was a problem if we made a problem. If we didn’t make a problem, we could be behind the curve and get killed. The problem was the possible connection between the HVT kill job and the extraction job. We didn’t know if Marianna was anything to do with Marko’s trafficking and therefore possibly actually in with the Nazi groups. If she was, we might be getting played by Marianna who could be leading us into a trap and drawing out all four of us via the extraction. One way of dealing with this was to cut Marianna out of the extraction and go direct to the cargo to set up and initiate the extraction. Home had given us the cargo’s contact details and identities so we didn’t need Marianna to access the cargo. With the extraction complete, we would start the kill job. Marianna could be kept clear of that completely. Marko was on the list so best we never let her know. If we had to extract Marianna, we could actually be extracting a dirty or corrupt source, or even a double agent. That alone was bad for us and Home. The easy option was to just do a compartmentalised set of jobs and leave it for Home to work out what Marianna was. All we had to do was focus on not getting caught or killed in each of the jobs, then get out. That’s what everyone else would have done - taken the easy option.
That didn’t fit with my game plan. I wanted to get on and up by being able to prove higher performance in the field. I was down that road and needed to prove the case I’d started to build.
We’d been working in Ukraine for 4 years. There was a steady build up of operators establishing intel networks all over the place. It started after the coup. Moscow was intent on solid intel to manage whatever developed. There was deep covert work and there was active “consultancy” giving support to the resistance. That involved actual fighting. Donetsk airport had been the first big kick off but that was before I got here.
We started off spending variable amounts of time in the field. Minimum was 3 months with a two week break, in overlapping teams who could keep long term ops going. The maximum time was undefined. Sometimes we’d be working for 6 months or more, until we got exhausted or told to leave. That’s fine for a while, but I got interested in other things that I needed time to work on. Promotion was a way to spend less time in the field that lowered my chances of being captured, tortured and killed, as well as letting me get into other things.
I worked out how long I liked to spend in the field, then I put together a management proposal for “High Performance of Field Teams”. I pulled together bits of operational analysis, examples of my team’s best work, and stuff from the business and academic worlds that supported my argument for a suggested 6-week cycle. If command looked at it the way I wanted them to, it made enough sense to try it and see if we performed better on a shorter 6-week cycle. If command looked at it the way I knew it should be looked at, they’d see I was just cherry picking to push my agenda. But command fell for it and actually gave us the cycle as a trial; this was our third block on the “six weeks on, two weeks off” cycle. If we got good results again this time, I’d look like I knew what I was talking about. It was all a total con but God loves a tryer. If I kept it up, I could eventually roll out the cycle to more teams and probably recruit more field teams. If I got a promotion to run the whole process that would’ve been funny - the guy who created the bullshit goes on to run all the bullshit so it never ends. That’s life and that’s the Army. It’s up to others to spot and call out bullshit. If you can’t see it or you go along with it, then you get what you deserve.
Stan, Ol and Spiker didn’t know my whole game. They were along for the ride, seeing how the 6-week cycle made them feel. So far, so good. If they didn’t dislike it, they wouldn’t necessarily object and that was all I needed. Less time in the field per year was less risk of death for them too, and that’s what they were getting by going along. If command perceived that field teams somehow “worked harder” when out in the field on this cycle, then fine. As long as I got enough results and made the write ups sound like they were really hard work, then that was command’s perception taken care of. If the system changed because people bought in to my bullshit I’d win.
It was amusing to see who I could win over and how easily. It was just a different form of transaction and manipulation. If I could transact and manipulate in the field, then Home was fair game too. If they knocked it back then I’d step up my bullshitting game. Being told “no” by command is nothing compared to the “no” of a bullet or knife or worse.
I needed a higher performance result from this stint so that I could attribute our achievements to the shorter field cycle. If I managed to do the extraction, prove whether Marianna was trustworthy or not, and complete the kill job, all in an integrated way, that would be the higher performance result I could take to command.
The question was how to join all of the jobs together to find out what Marianna really was - a trustworthy source, in league with traffickers or even a double agent - while completing all of the jobs. If we didn’t integrate the jobs we’d be leaving open the question of what Marianna was and potentially delivering her Home to make her someone else’s problem. That, in my game of bullshit, was lower performance.
Two vans that we’d decorated with decals matching the farm vans were set up for the extraction. They were loaded up with black weapon crates that had a hide space in them big enough for half the cargo in each. We’d chopped up some crates so the hide space was totally hidden. It looked like a solid block of crates from every side. Black material lining the space meant you couldn’t see into the hide through any gaps. We had to pull out two crates to access the space. We’d be extracting the cargo in two mobile bombs while disguised as Army officers with an SBU escort. We’d take the skirmish BMW as the escort. That was before we’d worked out the pick-up.
We suspected the cargo was high value enough to be under close surveillance by either the police, the SBU or someone else. If we didn’t take care of that surveillance at or before cargo pick-up, we’d never pull off the extraction. If we didn’t pull that off, we wouldn’t be around to do the kill job. We wouldn’t be going home.
If Marianna was a double agent she would tell her handlers an extraction was coming. We’d get sold out somewhere along the way even if we took care of the initial close surveillance. So far, she knew extraction was on the cards, but nothing more.
“We could take an upfront risk,” I suggested. “We could test Marianna, preferably in more than one way. We could test her by using her, and again by interrogating her. Those tests will help us decide whether to do the pick-up or not.” Eyebrows raised.
“You said ‘take upfront risk’. I don’t like that but go on.” Spiker’s heckles were up as normal.
“We use Marianna to initiate the extraction. That tests her by giving her the means to know what the pick-up will be, but not how it will run, where it will go or anything about the handover. If she’s a double, she’ll sell us out at that point and the pick-up might be compromised to stop the cargo being moved and catch us. She won’t have any more information past the pick-up. If her handlers want to intervene after the pick-up, they’d have to let the pick-up happen, tail us and intercept en route. In that case, they’re likely to hold off on close surveillance at the pick-up. Lack of close surveillance there is a form of warning to us.”
“Alright…” Stan mulled. “So that’s upfront risk not just because we increase our chances of getting killed at the pick-up by telling Marianna and her handlers about it, but also in getting tailed and killed en route. You’re not selling this. You’re just increasing risk. If we leave Marianna out of this, we don’t introduce these problems.”
“I sort of see his point,” said Ol. “The cargo should come with close surveillance anyway that we have to deal with to clean the cargo. Without Marianna involved, surveillance should still be there. If we find out Marianna’s dirty, we can walk away or replan."
“And, now that Marianna knows an extraction is in play…” said Stan, “testing her might increase our confidence of being able to pull off the extraction by proving she’s trustworthy.”
“Yep. If Marianna wasn’t possibly involved with Marko’s shit, I wouldn’t be worried about her, but now I am. There’s more about how we test Marianna.” I said. Their silence was enough to keep going.
It was an overly elaborate idea with quite a few contingencies, but it was worth floating. We would get Marianna to deliver invites to the cargo to initiate the extraction. Those instructions would be a means to test Marianna’s initial trustworthiness. Then, we’d abduct Marianna and subject her to interrogation before the pick-up, to test her a second time. If she was clean, we’d put her back and keep going with the extraction. If she was dirty, we’d know to abandon the extraction and rethink or cancel everything else.
“What’s your plan for this first test then?” If Spiker could be convinced, the others were likely to follow along.
We could initiate the extraction by getting Marianna to distribute sealed invites to the cargo. The invites could be uniquely tamper proofed and marked. Before the pick-up, we could abduct Marianna in disguise. If Marianna tampered with the invites to access and read any of them we could detect it before the pick-up. We could interrogate her about the extraction and Marko, then either put her back or clean up. We could check the invites again for tampering when we met the cargo, which would be an additional confirmation of Marianna. Employing a very short time frame would make it harder for Marianna to pass the invites to a third party who could manipulate them on her behalf. We could tail her anyway to watch how she delivered the invites and spot anything dodgy.
“We’ve not been told to extract Marianna. She’s staying in country, even if she’s going east to family under her own steam. If we don’t involve her at all, she can’t damage us. You’re also saying you don’t trust Home’s vetting even though they know about her and Marko and says she’s clean?” Spiker wasn’t buying it.
“But Marianna knows an extraction is in the pipeline,” I repeated. “That’s enough to fuck up the extraction if the bad guys know as well. They’ll just wait and wait and wait for any of the cargo to be moved then jump us. Testing Marianna increases our confidence going into the pick-up. I’m bothered about maximising our chances of extracting the cargo without getting killed, factoring or ruling out Marianna’s possible untrustworthiness.”
“Right. So the invites are about the pick-up and extraction. The interrogation covers that plus her and Marko and Aidar,” said Stan. He was getting it.
“How do we do the invites?” Spiker asked.
We would invite all of the cargo to a single pick-up event at very short notice. The invites would be marked with a radio isotope UV tracking dust that would mark the skin of anyone who touched it for at least 24 hours. We could test Marianna’s hands for any sign of the tracking dust so we knew if she’d touched any of the invites. She wouldn’t try to open them if she was trustworthy. We’d package each invite in a commercial, tamper proof sealed plastic envelope that we would make unique in a few ways. We could put pin pricks in a specific position on an edge seam, very subtly UV mark another point on an edge, internally glue the inside edges with UV superglue and seal them with not just the standard sealing strip but also extra UV dyed superglue. If anyone opened the envelopes, they would destroy them. All the unique modifications and markings we installed on them would mean that if someone used a new envelope, we’d be able to spot some or all the missing modifications at the pick-up when we inspected the envelopes. All of that would tell us something about Marianna and something about the pick-up.
“What if Marianna uses gloves?” Spiker asked. “She would pass the first tamper test.”
“The envelope will still have to be changed when she repackages the invite.” I said. “We’d see that change in envelope at pick-up. That would still give us a chance to abort and limit our losses.”
“But by then, the pick-up will be in play and we could be in a firefight. That doesn’t save us.” Spiker said.
“Overall,” I reassured them, “we still increase our confidence at the pick-up. The envelopes’ integrity re-confirms Marianna, to a degree. We can design the pick-up to minimise our exposure. Let’s go back over the task list.”
Stan wrote it out, adding extra steps.
Prep cargo vehicles and cover story - DONE
Acquire decoy vehicles
Position vehicles & gear
Prep invites
Dead drop Marianna with invites
Surveil Marianna’s delivery
Abduct & Interrogate Marianna
Return/Clean Marianna
Isolate cargo
Clean cargo
Load cargo
Move cargo
Evade or defeat checkpoints
Handover cargo
Exfil
“Jesus, this is a lot of work for a cargo run.” Spiker wasn’t onboard yet.
It took 9 hours and two meals to come up with a full plan. Rabbit and wild boar was on the menu. Booze was suspended indefinitely.
We’d agreed to test Marianna. The next night, she’d receive the invites in her dead drop. We’d watch her place and use a one man tail and drone to watch her delivering the invites. A few hours after she’d delivered, Stan and Ol would disguise as SBU as pick her up for an interrogation that would really fuck with her psychologically but not physically. We would take her as far as was reasonable in a very short time. Then we’d either dump her and run the extraction or get rid of her and abort. She’d never met the others so with them disguised, my relationship with her wouldn’t be impacted by the interrogation in any way we didn’t plan.
The extraction location was key. The cargo was invited to a remembrance service at the Lotskamensʹkyy cemetery in Dnipro at 18:30 the day after they got the invites. The timeframe was deliberately short. The invites told them to arrive in taxicabs because there was no parking and to wear flat shoes because the service was on grass. The whole invite and envelope was needed for access.
The remembrance service was how we collected, funnelled and isolated the cargo, while drawing out any surveillance. We’d take out the surveillance around the cemetery at high speed.
We had lead- and copper-lined Faraday boxes in each van, to isolate any device signals from any network. We had a fairly large one to clean the cargo. The others were like lunchboxes. The cargo would be cleaned of all items and devices before being loaded into the two cargo vans. Two decoy vans would leave false trails to confuse any security who would eventually find the dead surveillance and initiate a pursuit.
The cargo pair would head for Donetsk with minimum stops. The decoy pair would do their thing then catch up. We’d use the ZALA to monitor for any signs of an advance team or surveillance at the cemetery then it would give us intel throughout the job. That would give us dynamic routing options. We could fly the ZALA along the route as we moved and recover it if needed. All this meant that we’d be in a four vehicle convoy - two cargo vans, one empty ZALA van and the BMW. We could ditch the ZALA van if we really had to.
The handover point was somewhere in or around Donetsk. For security, we’d only firm up the location once we were en route, relatively close. There were three DPR resistance agents in the vicinity for handover, so we had options. Once the handover was done, we would exfil by driving back by a different route to the hide in Pavlohrad to get on with the kill job.
Sleep was going to be seriously limited because we had so much work between the four of us and one driver per vehicle. Alert pills would help with that when the time came. We had a few costume changes to perform as well. One look for the pick-up, another look for the decoys, another look for the cargo run.
Through Home we ordered resources: two plain, dark decoy vans from our supplier in Dnipro; intel products including an activated transfer order from the SBU to mask our cargo run in case we got stopped. It was assigned to my stolen SBU identity, Borislav Kulyk. He was a real agent whose ID I’d stolen. Home had some access to the SBU systems and the ability to spoof some documents that would stand up to modest checking. We were fully equipped for combat because of our disguises as Army and SBU, plus the loadouts of the cargo vans, but fighting was an absolute last resort for us to simply escape and live. If things went kinetic, the cargo would die. If the vans were hit, they’d go up and we’d all die. We had a snoop each, which was a powerful subterfuge tool.
From our fleet we pulled the grey ZALA van, dark blue Skirmish BMW and the two prepped black cargo vans. The skirmish BMW 5 series was for flexibility. “Skirmish” meant that every seat and headrest, doors, footwells, trunk section and hood was reinforced with 10mm thick steel plates to provide limited protection from gunfire. Front and back windshields were laminated for some better bullet resistance. It’s imperfect but it’s generally effective at limiting side fire and can stop fire from the rear because there are two layers of armour - the trunk and then the seats. It’s enough to escape a brief assault if you’re lucky and don’t get hit through the side windows. Run flat tyres are standard on all our vehicles unless handling is key.
Our supplier dropped the decoy vans in two units at the lock-up garages 300m west of the Lotskamensʹkyy cemetery. That was where the cargo would get loaded. We headed over to Dnipro to start getting set up under cover of darkness.
The cemetery was well-placed in Dnipro and small, only about 250m north-south and 100m east-west. Lotsmans’ka St runs north-south along the eastern side of the cemetery. This is the only access road and where the cabs will obviously pull up. Two dead-end lanes run east-west on the north and south sides of the cemetery. It backs onto gardens to the west. A distance of about 300m west on foot got us to the complex of lock-up garages where the cargo vans would be parked.
We had to position the vehicles and launch the ZALA. At the lock-ups, Stan and Ol switched over the cargo vans with the decoys then parked the decoys at the bottom end of the southerly dead-end lane by the cemetery, where we could mask them in the bushes and undergrowth. That location was our temporary base. Spiker and I took the ZALA van and BMW over the bridge to Shlyakhova St, to an area of clear ground by the river. We launched the drone from there at 2330, kicking off the 20 hour flight time. We left the ZALA van there, parked away from the road and hoped it’d be there when we returned for it. We took the ZALA’s launch rack out and hid it in the grass so that if the van was stolen, we’d still have what we needed to operate the ZALA.
At midnight, we were all back by the cemetery with the BMW and two decoy vans. The ZALA was in a hold pattern overhead. We broke out our first on-the-job meal of meatballs and spaghetti, each enjoying what would have been considered a double helping. There was a burrata each, focaccia bread, extra sweet cherry tomatoes and kombucha to go with it. When we’d finished, we all set out to walk the route from the vans to the lock-ups. We’d be running the cargo along this route and had to do it as fast as possible with no hindrances. From the vans it was straight west, through a wire fence that we cut but left in place to be pulled back later. That got us into a long garden, past two houses to Sadova Street. We turned right to head north on Sadova Street for a short way to number 30, then turned left into that driveway, heading straight west again all the way through the gardens until we hit the bottom fence that we cut to get through to the lock-up complex. Security lights on the way were minimal as long as we stuck to the edges of the driveways. We marked GPS points on our wrist mounts at key points, just in case to avoid disorientation when we did it for real. In the complex, we walked the route straight to the units where the cargo vans were stashed and opened the hide spaces up so they were ready to receive the cargo. We agreed to bring the vans to the fence and load right there, instead of walking the cargo down to the units. We walked the route back to the cemetery to get some rest and thinking time in the vehicles. With nothing immediate to do, I nodded off on the floor of the van.
“Dani! Dani!” Stan was shoving me awake. “Get the fuck up! Major update.”
I sprang awake. In the field, any alert was serious. It was 5:37AM. Spiker was on our datalink console that gave us a secure, satellite-only link to Home.
“Info and orders,” he said, handing me the console.
The screen read:
Critical Alert 24/02/22 0500 UKR/KIEV
Special Military Operation commenced in Ukraine. Friendly forces ingressing Ukraine. Combat operations in effect. Advances from north, west and south. Primer attached.
Order Update 24/02/22
Immediate effect: commence extraction of SINGER. Extract to X1 ASAP, method your discretion. Caution SMO modifications. Advise any & all contingencies to current tasks.
SINGER was Marianna. X1 was the extraction drop at Donetsk. Home wanted all cargo in the same place.
“Oh, that’s nice.” I said. Inside, I was thinking, Oh fuck. I sat still for ten seconds as my mind raced. “Any thoughts?” I asked. Might as well push it back on them first.
We’d just invaded Ukraine. A wave of chaos was rolling in from three directions. We had literally zero idea how that would affect anything and everything. Donetsk was a good way from the border and our forces wouldn’t be there in the next 24 hours, but there’d be all sorts of movements amongst the Ukrainians to meet our boys and start fighting. That could make the extraction run hell, or easy if everyone was looking east, north and south at Russian tanks.
“We’ve got to take a 78-year-old with us now. She ain’t going in the hide spaces.” Ol said. “And how are we going to manage her after interrogation?”
“What’s this mean for alerting Marko?” said Stan. “We’ve based everything around testing her but putting her back to keep Marko calm. Now we have to pinch her and then come back for the kill job with him on alert if he knows she’s gone.”
“The kill job’s not the priority,” I said. “Extraction is. We have her to add and manage. We can worry about the kill job later. It might get binned and we haven’t firmed up those orders anyway. Until we hear otherwise, fuck the kill job. Anyway, the invasion means all weapons and methods are on the table. We might just bomb the fucking dump and wipe all of those cunts out.”
We spent an hour pulling in more information, watched Putin announcing the “SMO”, scanned the news feeds and rethought our plans. The invasion was a shock and a surprise to many, even to us in a way, but we got over it in ten seconds. Home’s primer showed the bare minimum overview of the invasion fronts but nothing in our remit changed except for Marianna. When we sat and thought it all through, almost nothing needed to change except for how we managed her after the interrogation. Instead of dumping her near home, we had to keep her with us. What we had lined up for her meant we’d need her docile all the way to Donetsk. At least that was the easiest option until we came up with something better.
We had about 12 hours until we would bring the ZALA in for a refuel up by the river where we’d left the van, then put it back up. Marianna would check her dead drop from 8PM. We needed to drop the invites there and then Ol would tail her at distance with drone overwatch. When she’d done the deliveries, we’d give her a few hours and then grab her, probably just after she woke up at 6AM. We’d do the interrogation, drug her and keep her with us in the BMW or ZALA van. She wouldn’t have to be fully sedated, just well out of it and docile. We had all the kit for that to use on the cargo anyway. We’d have plenty of time to be ready for the extraction at 1830 that night. We hoped that whatever chaos had just been unleashed wouldn’t make it to us before we made it to Donetsk. Home still expected us to complete the extraction. It was another factor that would go into my report and make us look like even better performers.