The world turned in its accustomed way — courts, trade, and tides — and yet, beneath its familiar rotation, a new and more dangerous motion had begun. The Operation Nid de Coucou moved from patient design to frenzied execution. What had once been inked plans on Versailles' polished desks now flowed as men, money, and mischief: sails unfurled in Portsmouth, pamphlets printed in Amsterdam, hushed messengers slipping through night-watch gates. In the space of months the Ghost Cell widened its reach: the Australian trap deepened, while Unit 141 continued to open a second front in Europe.
Even those who had birthed the scheme felt the operation outpace its makers — not least after the announcement that the old order in Prussia had changed with Frederick's death on 17 August 1786. Old certainties crumbled, and opportunity smelled like gunpowder.
In the north of Paris, in a cabin whose shutters never matched and whose chimneys always smoked at odd hours, the Dauphin's clandestine headquarters took on the rhythm of a war room. Jean Dupri paced like a conductor, his shadow passing across a table strewn with charts, manifest lists, and coded dispatches. Around him, the "Spectres" moved — couriers, former gunners, a surgeon who knew the geography of disease. Candles burned low; ink stained palms.
"Tempo," Dupri said once, snapping the air with a knuckle. "Faster. They mistake our patience for indecision. We will punish them for that pride."
He read the briefings with an appetite for detail. He signed directives with a quiet hand that made men obey. The plan had originally been singular and elegant: sabotage the First Fleet so that the newborn colony would be crippled at its birth. But reports from the north carried new possibility. The United Provinces, long a patchwork of trade and politics, stirred. Merchants muttered about tariffs; guilds muttered about rights. Patriots spoke in coffeehouses of rights and of the Stadhouder's burdens. It was not merely a rebellion; it was a draft for contagion.
Dupri and his men recognized the chance: two blades at once might cut deeper than one. It was a new operation, baptized in whispers as Gladio,that would fan the flames in the Low Countries. The Dauphin's logic was simple and cold: Britain's empire could be weakened by an engineered failure at sea and a manufactured conflagration on land would help in the future.
So they accelerated. Recruits were moved, papers altered, ships creaked beneath new weights. By the end of 1786 the tempo was feverish.
The decision to move on the European front was not taken lightly. It required new men, different methods, and a willingness to let statecraft become chaos.
Sabotage the Fleet (Operation "Nid de Coucou") — continue the work at Portsmouth: materials, tools, provisions, and personnel all to be compromised so that the voyage itself would be an instrument of decline.
Infiltrate and Radicalize (Operation "Gladio" ) — insert ideologues and provocateurs into Dutch Patriot circles to turn reformist energy into uncompromising militancy, to make diplomacy impossible and to invite overreaction.
Dupri, 051, and the Dauphin divided the work with military calm. Kermarec and Dufour, the master carpentry and coopering agents who had won their places aboard the First Fleet, remained central to the Portsmouth plot. Meanwhile, two new faces — known only by their numbers, 072 and 221 — were chosen for the Netherlands. One to write, one to plan: 072 the ideologue who would craft pamphlets venomous enough to edge men toward insurrection, 221 the strategist who would choreograph the strikes that would force repression and thus fracture any hope of peaceful reform.
The gamble was audacious. If both threads succeeded, a brittle British economy and an inflamed continental policy would find themselves vulnerable at the same time. The Ghost Cell did not want a revolution so much as a collapse of momentum: a colony that could not feed itself, a province that could not reconcile. In both cases, dependence and fatigue would follow.
Winter in Portsmouth was bitter and honest. Masts creaked, pulleys groaned, and the fleet's hulls smelled of tar and iron. Under that honest exterior, Kermarec worked like a patient sculptor. On the Sirius, the ship that carried supplies and symbolic weight for Britain's venture, he was the quiet Breton who knew how wood breathed. He supervised the installation of beams in convict quarters and the fitting of ventilation shafts. Each adjustment was slight: the hatch that closed a fraction more than it should, the small rebate that trapped moisture against a seam. None were overt acts of sabotage; each was an educated corruption of best practice.
Dufour, aboard the Supply, performed his own craft. Coopers are artists of containment. The skins of barrels, the tongues of staves, the pitched seams that hold life-sustaining water — all were his domain. He chose the staves that had been stored against a damp wall, convincing the foreman that minor blemishes were tolerable. He substituted inferior oak where better wood would have endured the ocean's breath. He sealed lids using too little pitch, left bilges insufficiently drained, and marked certain casks with innocuous signs that would later be read by other agents in the chain.
Beyond the physical sabotage that would gnaw at the Fleet for months, Kermarec and Dufour also compromised comfort and morale. Their placement of weaker fixtures ensured that the convict quarters would become stifling wombs of heat and disease; their selection of weaker barrels guaranteed that water would sour early. The men they had been trained to play — the convicts and the ordinary sailors — would become less resilient. Supplies would break, temper would fray, discipline would wobble. The voyage would be an attrition of bodies and minds before any foreign shore was reached.
And yet, to watch either man work was to see devotion. They measured, they cut, they repaired with an artisan's eye. Their craft hid their intent. Sabotage, they believed, should be invisible lest it be traced back to them. They were, in all ways, craftsmen of ruin: their tools left no fingerprints.
If Portsmouth was a theater of wood and water, Amsterdam became a theater of ink and public breath. The Patriot movement in the United Provinces was a mosaic of civic pride and economic discontent. Merchants chafed; guilds demanded rights; officers found new language to question authority. Into that brew slipped 072, with paper and pen.
He rented a small room above a printshop in the Jordaan district, where the smell of ink was familiar and the noise of presses gave cover to conspiratorial conversations. His pamphlets were written with a clarity that betrayed a mind trained in rhetoric: straightforward sentences, sharp metaphors, and a steady repetition of the same core grievance — that the Stadtholder's house, hereditary and titled, had become a drain on liberty and commerce alike. 072's work did not merely criticize; it poisoned the possibility of compromise. Where reasonable Patriots had once debated enlightened reform, his tracts made moderation appear cowardice.
They moved fast, printed in small runs, slipped under the doors of coffeehouses and trading guilds. 072 wrote not as an outside agitator but with the voice of a betrayed son. He appealed to merchants' ledgers and soldiers' honor, to widows' losses and dockworkers' sores. In the span of weeks, the tone in many circles shifted. Moderation faded into rhetoric of righteous struggle. The center could not hold when language had been turned to a blade.
Parallel to 072's work, 221 staged the visceral theater that would catalyze change. He organized strikes at key warehouses, incited fistfights outside stadtholderian gatherings, and coordinated attacks on minor outposts of the Orange party. These were not mere vandalism; they were calculated provocations. Each assault had a script: hit a small, symbolic target hard enough to invite repressiveness, but not so broadly as to unify opposition against the attackers. The desired result was twofold — to delegitimize the House of Orange's capacity for peaceful governance and to force a crackdown that would radicalize the previously undecided.
221 did not share his plans in broad daylight. He met in backrooms, with tradesmen and disgruntled officers, using cryptic phrases and maps with red pins. The techniques were old: messenger relays, false identities, staged retreats. But his main skill was timing. He knew when an affront would cause fury and when it would sponge up the attention of the capital away from maritime movements that the Ghost Cell needed. His strikes were quick and merciless, and Europe's rumor mill did the rest.