For Klara Hedevig, it was just a usual Tuesday. Christmas had come and gone and now it was time to get back to work. She was up before the sun, keeping the curtains drawn as she prepared a thermos of blackcurrant herbal tea and toasted rye crispbread with foraged jam — routine, austere, and very Swedish.
From her third-floor apartment in Innerstad, the old walled city portion of Visby, Klara tracked foot and vehicle traffic along a minor route that NATO contractors had been using to reach the Gotlands Regemente (P18) depot. Using a thermal monocular and spotting scope mounted behind a discreet wool curtain, she logged plate numbers, convoy time stamps, and fuel resupply intervals, then coded her notes into her Coastal Weather Drift database. All entries appeared as wind vectors and temperature records from a weather buoy, shared weekly to a cloud repository hosted in Tallinn.
Just before dawn, Klara donned snow boots and winter gear for a short “migratory overwintering survey” of marshland just south of Visby Harbor. She carried with her thermal binoculars with birding overlays, a standard Leica scope, and a backpack-mounted omni-antenna disguised as a folded bird blind frame — used to passively scan for encrypted VHF comms from new SHORAD nodes.
Along her way, Klara encountered local joggers, retired birders, and a curious border collie or two. She greeted everyone warmly. They were all used to her habits by now. In a waterproof Rite in the Rain notebook, she jotted “bird notes.”
Having completed her cold-weather recon of equipment staging, she headed back home, defrosted her boots, and walked the few blocks over to her day job at the Baltic Resilience & Renewables Initiative. She sat down on the yoga ball seat at her upcycled desk, stretched her back, and cracked her knuckles.
She knew she had two actual grant proposals to write that day, but before she did that, Klara followed her usual ritual. She opened her laptop, logged in to a VPN, used a TOR browser to further obscure her IP address, opened the DuckDuckGo search engine, and logged in to her usual birding messaging boards. She typed up some of her real observations from her morning walk. “I spotted a small group of Bohemian waxwings near the cemetery this morning. I estimate approximately thirty females and twenty males.” Her message also held code words for her handler to interpret. She clicked through some of the other posts until she discovered one that interested her.
Klara logged into her Tuta email account, which was fully end-to-end encrypted, including subject lines and metadata. There, in the drafts folder, was a new email waiting for her to read.
Viktor Mikhailov, her GRU/SVR handler, also knew the password to her account and had typed up a note for her. Because the email was never sent to anyone, it was basically impossible for any intelligence agencies to intercept. This was one of the main ways they had communicated for the last ten years or so.
“It is time to move ahead with the advertising campaigns for the Baltic Wings Festival,” he wrote. “Anders Ulfsson, the director of Gotland’s Visit Gotland office, has made assurances that the Baltic Wings Festival will be listed on the high-traffic Nature Events calendar. Should he give you any trouble or insist on any unreasonable vetting procedures, remind him of how much he loves skiing and ask him how he enjoyed his all-expenses paid trip to Courchevel 1850 in France.
“Further, I have approved your request for funds to rent that cluster of cabins on Fårö Island,” Viktor continued. “Once that site is set up, we will begin to send some of our preliminary RVs with equipment your way. They will camp at Lauters Hamn and make individual drop runs to our cabins with supplies.”
Klara gleefully turned on the advertising blitz she had arranged for the festival and opened up the registration. Soon, the money would begin pouring in, and the groundwork would finally be laid for one hundred GRU/SVR agents to flood the island all at once, traveling with various legitimate NGOs under passports from Germany, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland.
