[Sweden]: Exercise Black Raven

[Connor]

Exercise Black Raven Directorate 47 (D47) Department of Defence

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Official Operation Order​

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Swedish Department of Defence
Directorate 47, Stockholm
Operation Order
November 2006
TOP SECRET - D47 EYES ONLY​

Situation Report
In light of evolving hybrid threat environment, asymmetric warfare, foreign subversion, state-sponsored sabotage and non-conventional domestic incursions the Kingdom of Sweden has faced a marked increase in high-complexity national security risks. These threats are deep rooted throughout the world, particularly towards controversial Swedish territorial claims worldwide which include, but are not limited to, South Africa and Antarctica. Existing frameworks domestically , while effective in conventional enforcement and intelligence gathering, have proven insufficient in addressing these emerging threats. A classified review conducted by the National Security Council, within the Executive Office of the Prime Minister, identified systemic gaps in Sweden's response to irregular warfare and state-aligned paramilitary disruptions.

As such, following their recommendations, approval was given for the formation of a specialised entity exclusively for the intelligence interests of the Kingdom of Sweden: Directorate 47 which will run as a clandestine, compartmentalised operational directorate tasked with defending national security through direct, pre-emptive and covert counteraction. This agency, whilst primarily civilian, will include a specialist field operations section responsible for tactical paramilitary operations and covert action - the personnel for which have been hand selected from the Swedish Army for special operations training. This exercise will include: covert special operations, direct action, crisis response, influence operations, disinformation and information warfare, human intelligence, cyber intelligence gathering, data analysis, logistics, technical surveillance, communications and command support.

Belligerents
Kingdom of Sweden v.

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Objectives
EBR/0/P/06 - COMPLETE - Initiation of Directorate 47 (D47) candidates.
EBR/1a/P/06 - COMPLETE - Selection process for Tactical Interventions Division (RAVEN)
EBR/1b/P/06 - IN PROGRESS - Selection process for Strategic Influence Division (PHOENIX).
EBR/1c/P/06 - IN PROGRESS - Intelligence Reconnaissance Division (OWL).
EBR/1d/P/06 - IN PROGRESS - Operational Support Division (FALCON).
REDACTED

Campaign Register
REDACTED

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Live Deployment

Directorate 47​

│
├── Tactical Interventions Division (RAVEN)
│ ├─ Team Alpha
│ ├─ Team Bravo
│ ├─ Team Charlie
│ └─ Training and Development Cell
│
├── Strategic Influence Division (PHOENIX)
│ ├─ PsyOps and Disinformation Cell
│ └─ Media and Cyber Influence Cell
│
├── Intelligence Reconnaissance Division (OWL)
│ ├─ HUMINT Operations Cell
│ ├─ Cyber Intelligence Cell
│ └─ Analysis Cell
│
└── Operational Support Division (FALCON)
├─ Secure Communications Cell
├─ Logistics and Field Support Cell
└─ Technical Surveillance and Electronics Cell

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Copyright © Swedish Armed Forces, Kingdom of Sweden
All information is subject to the Swedish Document Classification and Security Act 1995​

 

[Connor]

[CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET - D47 EYES ONLY]
[LOCATION: UNDISCLOSED MILITARY SITE – BRATTHOLMEN, NORWAY]
[TIME: 04H15M]
[WEATHER: OVERCAST, -2C, LIGHT SNOWFALL]
[EXERCISE BLACK RAVEN - PHASE ZERO: INITIATION]

An initial two hundred personnel had been hand-selected by seniors within the Swedish Department of Defence from the shadows of the Swedish Army. They're drawn from special forces, reconnaissance battalions, cyber intelligence, psychological operation cells. Some had combat experience in Africa, others had spent an unreasonable amount of their time in the freezing deep Artic/Antarctic in a variety of different overseas military installations and temporary operating positions. Each and every one of them had been hand-selected to join a brand new intelligence agency: Directorate 47. An elite task force. Yet, not a single one of them were told what was to come and how this initiation was about to completely change their lives.

This was not a transfer. This was a total disappearance from life as they knew it.

There were no briefings, no introductions and no orders. One by one, each and every one of them were abducted. They were each engulfed by black bags over their heads which totally obscured the outside world before they were bundled into civilian hire vehicles, each missing their registration plates or any identifying marks. Some found themselves ripped from their homes, attacked in public bathrooms, sedated during flights, removed from logistics convoys or grabbed straight out of their barracks during night watch rotations. They all vanished without any paperwork, without a trace and their personnel files rapidly redacted, doctored, closed and sealed, classified at the highest possible level to appear genuine. Their families were informed of a temporary reassignment but even their closest friends and colleagues were told nothing of what was about to come... and it was likely they'd probably never see them again. They needed a new life.

Having been driven to Brattholmen, Norway they would find themselves on Swedish sovereign territory surrounded by Norway on every single directional border. But that meant nothing as they were soon to wake to total violence and isolation. The bags were ripped from their heads with brute force by what they would soon learn to be the command team of this newly formed unit. Floodlights decorating the courtyard would sear into their eyes whilst they unsuitably dressed bodies shook in the cold - they'd be wearing nothing but grey joggers, stood barefoot on ice-covered concrete. It was dark and the wind cut straight through their bodies, letting them feel the chill right through to their bones. As they looked around they'd see not5hing but concrete, wire, steel, walls and the blinding floodlights. No markings, no flags, no indication of where they were at all. One candidate would turn, in a desperate attempt to look for an escape route as they still remained clueless as to what had happened. Within seconds, a baton would crack across his bare ribs, causing him to fall down to the harsh concrete floor in a ball of pain before he was then dragged away. The rest remained, stood frozen, standing into ranks that'd been drilled into them from their Diverse Combat Readiness Program from the army. Not that any of that mattered here.

The distinct clap of smart business shoes across the concrete would draw their attention to the silhouette of a precisely professionally dressed male, shadowed by the training personnel on both side of him. He would clear his throat before addressing the clearly terrified crowd: "Gentlemen, your lives have just changed. You have each been hand selected for a brand new agency." His voice was calm, but without any warms. It cut through the wind like a scalpel but nonetheless the crowd listened intently as the only possible source of any information. "This agency does not exist in public records. You do not exist in public records. From today onwards your history, your rank and your name mean nothing."

He would take a moment to let the silence set it, walking from his original position through the ranks of personnel.

"Each one of you need to remember that from today, you aren't here to serve, you're here to endure. You will be broken, reshaped and reborn as something entirely new. The new generation. The first generation of a project that will never be acknowledged. Directorate 47."

Murmurs would rumble through the crowd, nothing loud enough for any of the training staff to notice but an underlying tone of disbelief and confusion would be immediately apparent. With that, the silhouette would raise a hand. The training team would immediately spring into action, long extendable batons let off a crack as they rack to their full length. The wave of black-clad instructors would rush into the crowd like a riot, batons striking muscles and bones forcing the candidates to the floor where they were trampled and forced into submission. The pain was unnecessary, but pure, systematic and unrelenting. But then, as quickly as it started, the chaos would stop. Several candidates would writhe around the floor in pain, snow clinging to their skin and having been absorbed into their orifices. Blood regularly being spit across the concrete.

The man in the suit would speak again in his calm dulcet tone: "This is the first minute of your first day." he says, scanning the crowd carefully "There is no safe word. There is no union or bond. You can stick the Geneva Convention up your tight Swedish arseholes. I want results... and I'll get them"

He steps across one of the candidates, continuing his speech "Over the coming months, you will be tested in ways that violate every contention of military training. You'll be interrogated, tortured, starved and psychologically fractures. No because I enjoy it, but because I want to make warriors out of each and every one of you. One day you will understand exactly why" another pause as the wind whistles through the courtyard "Some of you will learn to influence foreign regimes through disinformation, some of you will hack their grids, rock their politics, blackmail their leaders and some of you will make people simply disappear... then you will disappear. Directorate 47 does not fight wars." he turns to face a set of black doors, the training team separating to create a tunnel towards them.

"You now belong to the black" he said, without looking back, slowly now walking towards the black doors "Prove you deserve to remain in it."

The man in the suit would disappear into the abyss, along with the training team. Without any command, one by one, the candidates would stand, limp and crawl towards the doors. Some bleeding, many bruised and every single one of them humiliated. Those that couldn't make it were left behind. The doors would slam shut behind the final candidate, they were now within the confines of the most secretive agency Sweden had ever known.

 

[Connor]

[CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET - D47 EYES ONLY]
[LOCATION: UNDISCLOSED MILITARY SITE – BRATTHOLMEN, NORWAY]
[TIME: 06H45M]
[EXERCISE BLACK RAVEN - PHASE ONE: SELECTION]

Daybreak never really came in Brattholmen, only an endless swirl of snow under the floodlights and the low drone of the wind battering across the wire-topped walls and the echo of machinery powering the facility. They still had no clue where they were, and to ensure the integrity and secrecy of the agency, they weren't to know that the training was infact taking place on the grounds of an old farm and ranch. The candidates had survived the first couple of hours, some barely. A few had passed out from the exposure, others had stayed upright through sheer force of will, teeth chattering and skin burning with the freezing wind wrapping around them. There was no shelter or respite, just the next phase. Selection.

Inside, the candidates were now recruits, and the command staff were watching them carefully to separate them into the most appropriate cells for their skillset. The blinding lights in the hall were set to full brightness and sub-zero water cannons would erupt from mounted scaffolds in the ceiling, dousing each and everyone of of the candidates in sheets of freezing cold water. The intention was to wash them of the blood and dirt they'd accumulated outside and give them a fresh wash for the next stages of this intensive course. Within seconds of the cannons stopping, followed by a loud mechanical boom, the doors at the opposite end of the hall would fly open and the swarm of instructors would come back out to join then, they'd bark orders with a vicious undertone, dragging those on the floor to their feet and metaphorically kicking them into action. They were clear: get up and move. Those that refused? They were struck hard and fast with a steel baton across their calves, slammed up against the wall and firearms pushed into their ribs. One of the candidates had even vomited, catching the vomit in his cupped hands and running with it, entirely out of fear of what might happen if he'd left it to project over the floor. This phase wasn't just about their obedience under disorientation, it was about endurance when every part of them wanted to give up.

The first three days of this exercise were referred to as 'the strip'. Every candidate, regardless of their background, was systematically broken down, names were banned, personal histories were liabilities. Each and every on of them were assigned a number and nothing more. Fuck your rank. Everyone was equal on the strip.

Beyond the induction hall, there were a number of blocks decorating a vast yard which were referred to as evaluation blocks. They were marked by large hand-painted symbols: a ravel, a phoenix, an owl and a falcon. Each symbol aligned with the future divisions of Directorate 47, though the recruits had absolutely no idea. They were simply moved, by force where required, from block to block. Tested in complete exhaustion against unknown standard, all while instructors observed silently from observation points behind glass.

In Block Raven, candidates were forced through back-to-back close quarters battle simulations inside freezing, lightless kill houses. Ammunition were paintballs, there were no safety briefs and they all remained in only their grey joggers throughout. Targets were hostile roleplayers in balaclavas using paint rounds with riot-level force. They hurt, bruised and crippled when a shot landed.

Within Block Phoenix, they were given shoddy distorted mission briefings and dropped into stages foreign villages manned by actors speaking unfamiliar languages. They were tasked with spreading misinformation, turning the actors against eachother and staging fake operations. Every inch of their behaviours were filmed and reviewed in real-time.

Block Owl pushed the intellectual elite past their limits. Cyber specialists were locked in cold, steel rooms with nothing but dead consoles and instructed to hack their way out. It wasn't your average high street escape room, there were no hints and no manuals. Pressure was applied with safe gas leaks within the room which instilled utter fear in the candidates who were clueless to the fact it was just uncomfortable rather than damaging. Flickering lights, white noise and water leaks only made the objective more intense. The room had speakers hung throughout which, on occasion, would broadcast false claims that candidates had died.

Block Falcon demanded a sensible resourcefulness. Candidates were blindfolded and dropped into snowfields with a broken radio, a torn and burned map, and a small amount of food. They had a number of hours to extract to a recovery zone. Failure meant a night outside.

Sleep for the candidates would take place in one hour intervals every twenty hours. Food was cold and tasteless, on occasions only being given expired military rations. Some would get fed nothing at all, with the instructors desperately waiting to track how long it would take for them to beg, barter or steal their way to better health. Violence was not punished, but monitored. Some would find themselves rewarded for the most obscure things, only adding to the utter confusion through the entirety of the training program. They were being shaped... shaped into weapons... weapons that Sweden needed. Despite the heavily intense exercise, each candidate would also be monitored for their welfare and, where required, extracted for only essential medical attention before being thrown back to the lions. The instructors of D47 sought pure human instinct, not the trained military mind.

 

[Connor]

[CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET - D47 EYES ONLY]
[LOCATION: BLOCK RAVEN EVALUATION COMPOUND – BRATTHOLMEN, NORWAY]
[TIME: 14H20M]
[EXERCISE BLACK RAVEN - PHASE ONE: SELECTION / RAVEN BLOCK]

The smell in Block Raven was slowly becoming unbearable, the stench of sweat, cold steel and fried blood lingered like smoke through the freezing cement corridors of Block Raven.A narrow hallway down the centre of the building led into a darkened preparation room illuminated by only red emergency strips. There were no obvious instructors present, although they were watching every movement of the recruits, but there was a rack of rubber rifles, rolls of gauze and a steel door which locked behind them. As soon as the candidates entered the block, they were committed and the almost-unnecessary violence began immediately.

In the first chamber of the block was a make-shift kill house, designed to mimic a civilian apartment block. However, to make it just slightly more unbelievable, it had been flooded ankle-deep with freezing water. The walls were paper-thin and made from dense insulation board, barely enough to muffle the stifling screams of previous runs that'd already made their way through. To make it even more difficult, they were shifted between sessions, rooms sealed and others booby-trapped without warning, lighting was varied in each room between blinding white and total darkness. The instructors watched from the safety of a control room behind one-way glass, observing every single movement with clinical scrutiny. There was no doubt, pain was the primary teacher. As the rounds went on, custom made wax-coated round modified to break skin and fracture ribs under close impact would scream through the air. This was live fire in spirit if not in bullet. Those who hesitated at the breach point were thrown in, others ran the maze at a full sprint, raw adrenaline fighting off the cold as flashes of movement triggered panicked, undisciplined gunfire. This of course went punished and the penalties were harsh... shooting a civilian roleplayer meant being dragged back to the start and forced to run the kill house again - civilians given permission to return fire at will. Every inch of Block Raven was signed to breed controlled aggression.

No protective gear was issued. Hands would soon find themselves torn and splintered from prying open doors, knuckles would be cracked from impact and knees bled from sliding into hard corners. Some lost fingernails, some broke bones, others just couldn't hack it at all. Those that it was possible to, would just get some painkillers before being reinserted to the next round. It was a lesson: performance did not stop for injury.

This block wasn't just about tactics, the instructors had built scenarios that simulated civilian panic, suicide bombers, crying children, wounded allies, friendly fire, complex political situations, changing dynamics and a wealth of other obscure, difficult scenarios. Roleplayers, many of them Swedish operatives from specialist units throughout the Armed Forces, played these parts with relentless realism. Screams echoed through the block at all hours. Sometimes the recruits found themselves faced with a hostage situation where every option was a moral compromise: pull the trigger, save the mission... but kill a civilian. Freeze, and let the target escape. Neither was punished outright, or particularly wrong, but everything was recorded. The instructors watched their ethics erode in real time.

Beyond the killhouse, the recruits rotated into the punishment yard: a wide, ice-covered obstacle course manned by instructors in padded 'red man' suits - padded gear. Failure to complete an evolution meant immediate recapture and forced combat. Recruits were pitted one-on-one against each other in unarmed fights and on occasion with multiple round back-to-back. They were not stopped until blood was drawn or... better yet... total unconsciousness. Choking a recruit unconscious was not only acceptable, it was applauded. There were no rules.

Fireteam endurance drills took place in the snow-clad fields surrounding the perimeter wall. Four-man teams were handed 50kg dummy loads, assigned target grids across deep power, and given eight hours to extract, avoid detection, and recover a simulated casualty - all while under surveillance drones. Any violation of noise, light discipline, or directional error triggered a mock ambush. Flashbangs were often fired from snow banks, smoke simulated artillery and roleplayed enemy units hunted them with dogs and cold flares. Some panicked and broke into a sprint - those who did were intercepted by aggressors and captured where they were then stripped, bound and dumped back at the block for interrogation simulations. There was no warm, no camaraderie. You trained alone - even in a team.

Recruits would begin hoarding scraps of protein bars, sneaking minutes of sleep between sessions, speaking in coded looks rather than words. The temperature was dropped, despite it already being minus twelve. Every step was agony.

The block continued with a variety of different training experiences: digging holes in frozen dirt using only mess tins, standing inside those holes barefoot and half-naked through ten-hour snowstorms - towers with no windows, stripped staircases and only one exit where they would have to escape roleplayers armed with shock batons to complete their mission objective of extracting a hostage dummy blind, barefoot and hearing distorted by enemy radar chatter - psychological conditioning where recruits were provided photographs of family members where mock phone calls, screams behind closed doors and fake extraction footage would lead them to believe a family member had a bomb vest strapped to themselves, screaming for help. The recruits were handed a firearm and ordered to execute them in order to prevent intelligence compromise.

This wasn't all. Confession circuits, endurance circuits of unimaginable difficulty through barbed wire, animal fat, chains and strobes, kill courses where they had to remain totally silent, betrayal tests and explosion recovery drills. The recruits were pushed through a hellish gauntlet - it wasn't just their strength or combat tested, it was their instinct, ruthlessness, resilience, deception, emotional control and improvisation.

 

[Connor]

[CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET - D47 EYES ONLY]
[LOCATION: BLOCK PHOENIX EVALUATION COMPOUND – BRATTHOLMEN, NORWAY]
[TIME: 22H10M]
[EXERCISE BLACK RAVEN - PHASE ONE: SELECTION / PHOENIX BLOCK]


Block Phoenix was a different type of beast entirely. The block was colder inside that it was outside, a sprawling complex of stark concrete walls with layers upon layers of graffiti in foreign languages, blacked-out windows of thick tar-like paint and endless doors that lead no nowhere in particular. It was here the recruits were funnelled after enduring the brutality of Ravel, many still showing signs of excruciating physical injury; some limping into the black, law and hollow-eyed, they bodies battered but their minds not broken quite yet. This block wasn't about the body, it was about the pure ability to manipulate, deceive and destroy truth itself. The recruits weapon wasn't a rifle in this block, it was a whisper.

The whole block was riddled with surveillance equipment but again no visible instructors and orders were minimal. A flashing red strobe and a crackling loudspeaker would be the only slight resemblance to some instruction which would appear suddenly and without any warning at all.

The riot room: where recruits were hoarded into crude mock urban environments where pretend streets were decorated with graffiti-smears, derelict cafes, ruined press rooms populated by dozens of civilian roleplayers speaking a mix of Russian, Arabic and Finnish dialects. The objective here was short and sweet: 'undermine the government' no briefing, no support, no tactics, no mission plan. Just a slowly ticking clock and chaos. Hidden throughout were cameras recording every move as candidates deployed manipulated slogans, distributed forged leaflets and exploited tribal grievances. The instructors were looking for strategic, gentle, sociopathic-style subtlety where recruits turned neighbour against neighbour creating false hierarchies, blaming invented outsiders for orchestrated issues. The most capable of the recruits managed total collapse of local order within an hour whilst those who failed were isolated, publicly identified as informants and beaten by the crowds with rubber batons. This room lined them up perfectly for their next task.

Next was the crisis broadcast simulator where recruits were given approximately ninety minutes to develop a complete disinformation campaign around a fabricated terrorist attack in Europe. They had access to raw footage, AI voice generators (however primitive the technology was), news ticker templates and public domain databases. The best of the candidates edited believable news segments showing support for the attacks, doctored a fabricated whistleblower lead or even had mock news posted under false agency name. Ethical lines were deliberately and very intentionally blurred. Failure meant seeing their own campaigns dissected on a projection wall for all to see - highlighting their errors, missed opportunities and weaknesses. This humiliation was a core development tool where recruits were told if they could not manipulate the truth, they were undoubtedly part of the enemy's narrative.

After a relentless twelve hours in riot simulators the candidates were dragged, kicked and pushed into the next stages of their tests. Darkened rooms resembling intelligence command centres gave refuge to the recruits as they were each assigned a hostile nations media profile before being ordered simply to destabilise it. Infront of them they had nothing but a laptop and a phone. No training. They had to teach themselves and learn in the moment - scraping through metadata, uploading mock satellite imagery, hacking social influencers, creating fake casualties and redirecting unrest via faked call-in radio broadcasts. These rooms would torment the mind, being intentionally sweltering hot and flooded with deafening white noise. In some cases, other recruits were brought to another side, developing counter-ops to attempt to track, expose and reverse their narratives in real time. The results were absolute chaos and accounts were seized and reputations totally destroyed. One recruit fabricated an online protest which developed such a movement it triggered a full digital blackout across the exercise's communications network. Other recruits however, stared blankly at social media pages and news outlets offering little in the way of any 'movement' aside from the anxiety-inducing desire to vomit. Psychological conditioning in these rooms was easy, the windowless black boxes allowed instructors to bombard the recruits with contradictory mission intel and mock audio of agents dying due to inaccurate reporting. They were forced to watch footage of their families being infiltrated by enemy agents, doctored to look disturbingly real. They were simply told to make a decision, even if on occasion these decisions included remote drone strikes or kill orders on suspected enemy vehicles which their family may be within. The moral traps never stopped.

Throughout this mentally demanding block sleep deprivation was weaponised with finesse. They were kept awake for, on occasion, in excess of thirty six hours and given a dossier of fictional resistance fighter and told to build their online persona from birth to death. Every year of life accounted for with photos, schooling, ideology, arrest records, even fabricated social media. The objective here was blatant: convince a foreign journalist to cover their story on a live call. The journalist was a roleplayer, obviously, but the performance still had to be perfect as missing a detail would cause the call to end with a simulated arrest and execution... played though loud speakers for all to hear. Those that succeeded were rewarded. Those who failed were dragged out into the cold, screamed at in languages they never knew existed and locked into isolation chambers that randomly pumped chemical scents like smoke, burning flesh or perfume engineered to unmoor them psychologically.

The final trial of Phoenix was known amongst the training team as 'the mirror'. Recruits were divided into cells, fed contradictory intelligence and dropped into a massive staged urban environment. A three story compound with market stalls, a checkpoint, rebel graffiti and dozens of roleplayers with unpredictable behaviours. Their job was to orchestrate a local uprising without revealing they were operatives. This is where all the training came together: influence, chaos, loyalty and deep moral ambiguity. They had to infiltrate the social networks of the town, locate faction leaders, manipulate them, trigger violence and escape blame - all under live fire painted rounds and drones filming from above. Some were killed in action, not literally, marked with red power and dragged into vans. Others vanished during the night, purged entirely.

By the end of the seventh day, nobody spoke openly anymore. Recruits wrote in shorthand, communicated in glances and moved in shadows. Some had visibly aged. Others had lost any sense of self at all. They were exhausted and broken, but alive. That set them apart.

They were each becoming architects of narrative warfare, minds sharpened into blades and eyes emptied of innocence. Soon, the best of them would move on to Phoenix Division proper - and the world would never know their names.

 

[Connor]

[CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET - D47 EYES ONLY]
[LOCATION: BLOCK OWL EVALUATION COMPOUND – BRATTHOLMEN, NORWAY]
[TIME: 03H45M]
[EXERCISE BLACK RAVEN - PHASE ONE: SELECTION / OWL BLOCK]

Black Owl was never officially acknowledged by name within the exercise. Even among the instructors, it was often referred to only in code or implication and didn't advertise its presence with signate; it was buried behind a narrow unlit tunnel barely wide enough for two recruits to pass through shoulder-to-shoulder. Inside, the air was stale with an odour like aging paper and chemical preservatives... combined with the undeniable smell of mould. The lighting was permanently dimmed to simulate long-term isolated environments. But, unlike the moral disintegration of Pheonix, this block was about precision and wasn't designed to simply break people. It was built with the view to separate those who didn't already think like a machine. It existed to weaponise intelligence.

One by one the recruits had been handpicked by this stage for possessing traits that couldn't simply be taught: analytical speed, memory retention under pressure and an eerie ability to separate emotion from reality. These weren't the bruised, blood-smeared combatants that survived killhouses. These were the calculators, interpretors who under stood silence as a language and contradition as a signal. Once inside, they were issued identical grey fatigues, stripped of all insignia. The walls were painted matte black to suppress light reflection. In here, no names were used. The room itself resembled a data centre converted into a psychological warfare chamber. It was chilled to keep the processors cool and the minds cooler, its walls pulsed with fibre lines and CCTV feeds from thousands of simulated conflict zones. All identities were anonymised in the internal network under numerical codenames. Every interaction was logged from here in, catalogued and audited by an overseer. All orders were issued through corrupted file dumps, audio distortions and code injections. It was never clear what was real.

The first part of the training saw recruits confined to steel pods outfitted with nothing but a military-grade laptop, a one-way line to the overseer and a shifting series of encrypted data packets. No interface and definitely no assistance. The expectation was that they code their own toolkits from scratch to include packet sniffers, memory scrapers, sandbox evaders and using operating systems designed to resist documentation. If the recruits were unable to decrypt the daily challenge, the laptop permanently locked and the overseer corrupted the recruits records forcing them to start from scratch. Some undoubtedly failed over, and over again - silenced to start again. Some began to speak in hex. They didn't sleep. They were the pinnacle of 'fucking nerds'.

Other stages included the injection into vast wargame theatre simulations which encompassed entire segments of hostile-state digital infrastructure. Government websites, election servers, power grids, consular communication channels, logistics nodes, biometric registries and even fake Global Assembly databases. All of which recreated with extreme realism to add to the immersion. Fragments of vulnerability reports or aged intelligence intercepts gave recruits some guidance, but their objective was clear: find a way in, change the outcome and do not get caught. There were no resets, it needed to simulate real-life, a mistake could mean triggering a simulated lockdown of an embassy, a denial of service attack on a hospital or the full-scale digital collapse of a nations internal security framework. Each failure triggered a cascading escalation of war, often including drone strikes, biological retaliation or political collapse. Every single one linked to a recruits error and observed by the overseer. Cyberwarfare was not theoretical, a lesson D47 needed to know.

Many of the recruits took the overseer by surprise with their abilities. The tasks saw to the simulation of redirected test-launch data in South Asian nuclear commands, the hacking of live satellite feeds to convince analysts a rival nation had fired first, others rerouted financial flows to non-state actor under the guise of humanitarian payments to spark a full diplomatic breakdown.

Integrating the cyber offensive into the field was essential. Here, the digital met the physical. Recruits were each embedded into mission environments with zero prior briefing. Urban zones were constructed complete with checkpoint networks, embassy mock-ups, working CCTV, biometric gates and power systems. All they had on them was a backpack, a cable spool and a command node disguised as a mobile phone. They simply needed to infiltrate and disable an entire city's digital nervous system.

The exploitation needed to happen in layers by tapping into traffic light subnets to trigger civilian gridlock. Black out sections of the city to sow panic. Highjack local media systems to broadcast falsified statements from government officials. Deploy misinformation to law enforcement that redirected real-time security responses away from key locations. All while being totally undetected. The limits were endless. The overseer observed some impressive tactics: one recruit has used a dead operatives retinal scan from old security footage to bypass biometric gates. Another had simulated engagement against a live UAV platform, spoofing GPS signals and successfully redirecting the drone into a restricted area. This was all simulated, of course, but they weren't just hacks they're performing - they were acts of war. But the recruits acted in the dark. Plausible deniability.

The field. HUMINT was a key part of D47's mission and the training for it was not skipped upon. The digital war had taught the recruits how to destabilise systems, now they would destabilise people.

Here, the recruits recruited to manipulate and control human sources inside a simulation zone. Dozens of roleplayers included journalists, embassy staff, intelligence officers, political dissidents, private contractors and were seeded throughout a three-story mock city with full internal life cycles: working hours, public records, social media and encrypted devices. Every single one of these roleplayers held fragments sensitive intelligence. Some were bait, others were under surveillance, a few were tasked with attempts to recruit the recruits.

Each candidate was issued a false identity and given the objective of building a stable source network in a hostile foreign capital without detection.

The recruits learned how to profile targets via digital shadowing, how to identify signs of desperation loneliness and ambition: psychological hooks. Recruitment was rarely done in person, most began through social media direct messages with anonymous tips and carefully orchestrated chance encounters. Memory was key. Essentially when it came to cover stories and passing intelligence without physical contact. Towards the end of this section recruits were forced to choose between two sources. One was real, one was totally fabricated. If they misidentified the real one, a simulated assassination followed. If they correctly identified and recruited them, the agent would betray a government system from within - corrupting classified files, planting surveillance malware and falsifying chain-of-command.

Manipulating servers was easy. Manipulating people to betray their own country required more than skill. Something much colder.