Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

For that reason, there is a whole welcoming committee waiting for them in Riga, including the Czech ambassador to Latvia and the military attaché. All the civilians are to take a military plane to Prague. Around midnight Urban takes a taxi from Ruzyně airport and gets off in Střešovice, two streets away from cousin Tina’s house. He does not want to wake her up. He wants this to be a surprise, if she’s at home.

He walks a few streets. He unlocks the gate quietly and carefully, then the house door and enters the hall. On the coat rack by the French window there’s something shiny. Urban goes closer to the coat rack. He gropes and touches an officers’ overcoat with epaulettes and stripes on the sleeves. He’s stunned. It feels as if someone has stabbed him in the heart with a long knife and then twisted it slowly in the wound.

Urban leaves the house and his head spins as if he were drunk. Under a cover in the courtyard his BMW is parked. Urban opens the gate and drives the car into the street. He drops the house keys in the letter box. He spots the curtain in Tina’s bedroom window twitching.

He has no reason to wait: he starts the car and drives towards Letná to get a room in the Hotel Belveder.

It’s near morning when he falls asleep in the hotel room, sleeping nervously, waking up every once in a while, desperately jealous, only to fall asleep again for a moment, tired by the journey home.

In the morning he has breakfast in the restaurant, drinking plain black coffee, and in the Slovak daily Práca that he chanced to find on the newspaper table, he reads an interesting article:

The Slovak Archipelago and the End of the Czech Dream

Three years ago, a gang of Junjans treacherously raided a peaceful fishing hamlet Habovka, populated by Slovak immigrants, or rather, kidnapped hostages, and murdered several dozen local inhabitants, mostly women and children, when the men were away fishing. The Slovak population of the Junjan Archipelago went on a mass protest against this crime and their demonstration ended in a massacre. The coastal Slovaks rose in an uprising against the dictator Hüğottynünđ Űrģüll, and Slovaks from the city slums joined them. The dictatorial couple, Hüğottynünđ and Karķla Űrģüll, were on the run. At their instigation, specially trained mercenary regiments paid out of the profits of the Junjan mafia spread over all the states of the former Warsaw Pact, began a reign of terror in Junja. Units commanded by Tökörnn Mäodna shot some 500 people, including 80 children, in Ćmirçăpoļ alone. The dead were taken out of the city and thrown on heaps. Anyone still alive was burnt alive. In Űrģüllpoļ, today known as New Bystrica, it was even worse. Slovaks, lead by the legendary guerrilla leaders Todor and Telgarth, now the self-appointed ruler of the Slovak Empire, chanced to arrest the Khan and his wife. Mäodna’s well-armed units literally went out of their minds. Murdering Slovaks without mercy, they tried to re-conquer the capital with the aim of freeing the Khan. It was only due to a superior force of the Slovak units, reinforced at a decisive moment by a surprise appearance by the Royal Czech Army and Marines, that these highly trained killers were overwhelmed. The mercenaries comprised Russian and Ukrainian veterans from Afghanistan, former IRA terrorists, Arab veterans from Hamas and the PLO and Romanian Securitate killers, in other words, humanity’s élite. Isolated mercenary units continued to terrorise the whole country, knowing that they had nothing to lose. Therefore, in March, the Slovak Front of Liberation, shortly after a brief trial, had the former Junjan Khan Hüğottynünđ Űrģüll and the former Prime Minister Okhlann Üncmüñć executed in front of television cameras. The Khan’s wife Karķla Űrģüll was sentenced to life in a labour camp. As Emperor Telgarth I stated, the anger of the Slovak people was great. In a television commentary to this outlandish and shocking execution it was said that any mercenary Junjan soldier caught would be executed in a manner to make them envy Hüğottynünđ Űrģüll and Okhlann Üncmüñć their easy and relatively painless death.

Results were quick. Terrorist resistance weakened considerably and the Slovaks gained the upper hand for good. Members of mercenary units knew that if the Slovak people captured them, they would die a horrible death: they tried at all costs to escape from the archipelago. However, this was prevented by a blockade of the island set up by the provisional Prime Minister Geľo Todor-Lačný-Dolniak. No aeroplane could take off or land on the former Junjan, now Slovak Archipelago without thorough inspection. The air space around Junja was under 24-hour surveillance by the Royal Czech Air Force. Aircraft that for any reason did not heed coded messages were shot down without mercy. Ships were prevented from sailing in either direction by a sea blockade of the archipelago, operated by Czech submarines. Telgarth’s régime gradually rounded up the scattered mercenaries and executed them in a manner that outdid the wildest imagination. The Czech side vainly protested against this, as they pursued their strategic aim of restoring the former Czechoslovakia, this time not with Central European Slovaks, but with Junjan Slovaks. After a bankrupt and broken up Russia, no longer capable of anything, not even effectively defending its interests in the northern seas or in China, which distanced itself from the conflict, a new significant superpower was intended to emerge as an effective counterweight both to the USA and to a united Western Europe.

The Czechs Protect the “Shark”

Tökörnn Mäodna (real name: Paraskiv Cojanescu) was before 1989 a captain in the Securitate, the Romanian Secret Service. After the demise of the Ceauşescu regime, he left Romania and became a hitman and a mercenary. He was finally appointed Hüğottynünđ Űrģüll’s chief of security. During the civil war in Junja, he led the mercenary units and was the Slovak guerrillas’ most serious adversary. Even his name horrified people. His nickname was “Shark,” because he loved capturing Slovak fighters and brutally torturing them. According to witness statements, he himself tortured and killed several people, including a Slovak priest. After the mercenaries’ final defeat, he disappeared into parts unknown. Soon a hunt to capture him was organized.

The news that Tökörnn Mäodna had been living in strict secrecy in the Czech Kingdom almost all the time since the government mercenaries’ defeat was not so surprising in the light of preceding events. The Czechs caught the Shark when he tried to leave the archipelago in a fishing boat. In the period of “friendship,” the Czechs would hand over all captured mercenaries and prominent Junjans to the Slovaks for merciless, even bestial punishment, Mäodna fell into their hands at the time when tension and enmity reigned between the allies. So Mäodna was not handed over, and even his capture was kept secret.

The future fate of Mäodna may be controversial. It is certain that he will escape punishment. At the moment, the Royal Czech Secret Service is interrogating him. Mäodna is planning to undergo plastic surgery and will return under a new name to his original homeland, Romania, where he would like to live on modest savings deposited in Switzerland.

Untraditional Methods in the Service of the Securitate

We now broach a topic that has nothing to do with Junja, but is the reason for Mäodna’s interrogation by the Royal Czech Secret Service. “Look, back then nobody in Romania had to be tortured or killed,” Shark begins his narrative. “It wasn’t our aim. Quite the contrary. We had to win a man over to our side and persuade him of the justice of our cause. We used all available methods, which is normal. It’s always has been, is being and will be done, under any government, no matter how democratic. We even used non-traditional methods, such as parapsychology. Professors and specialists of the famous Bucharest School of Sabotage have studied paranormal phenomena. Their graduates are truly dangerous, since they use paranormal phenomena for their work. The most skilful of them are the Arabs. Even in Junja we used hypnosis, brainwashing and African witch doctor practices. They say that a person leaves his body during those sessions and in spirit, he can go wherever he wants and see whatever he wants. Then he returns to his body as if nothing happened. We would not shirk even from Saharan magician practices. They can control their people over distances of thousands of kilometres and order them through their thoughts. You know, Ceauşescu was a great lover of gold, precious stones, but also of paranormal phenomena. Entire teams of Securitate were researching strange things that would seem almost laughable to a layman.”