Commander-in-Chief

9

Kaliningrad Oblast is a strange artifact of the Second World War: a Russian province that is not connected to the rest of Russia. It was created out of the redrawing of German borders, when Stalin demanded for himself the German Baltic seaport of Königsberg and the territory around it.

For nearly fifty years the sequestration of the province from the rest of the Soviet Union served as a strategic benefit for Moscow. Bordered by Poland to the south and east, and Lithuania to the north and east, Kaliningrad Oblast was nestled between Soviet client states, so there was minimal threat of losing it to the West, and it gave the Navy of the USSR easy access to the Baltic. Their Baltic fleet became their most strategically important, as it patrolled waters bordering several NATO nations.

Kaliningrad was called the most militarized place on earth during the Cold War, because the Soviets staged so many armaments and troops throughout the oblast, ready to defend the Iron Curtain or attack south through Poland and into Germany.

But after the fall of the Union, the fact that tiny Kaliningrad hung out alone, surrounded by nations no longer obligated to the whims of Moscow, made it extremely vulnerable. And then, when Poland joined NATO in 1999, the segregation of the half-million Russians living hundreds of miles from the Russian mainland became a significant issue indeed. And when Lithuania joined NATO in 2004 along with Estonia and Latvia, the Kremlin went apoplectic, as this meant a Russian province and home to their Baltic Fleet was now surrounded by NATO member states.

These days the oblast was, essentially, a forward operating base for the Russian military, because Valeri Volodin had spent the last three years pouring troops and matériel into the province en masse as his relationship with the West became more adversarial. The Baltic Fleet had been beefed up with new ships, new missiles, and new naval infantry battalions, all of which threatened both land and sea around the Baltic. The naval air base at Chkalovsk, just a few miles north of Kaliningrad City, housed the Baltic Fleet Air Force, a naval aviation detachment of Su-27 Flanker fighters as well as helicopters, antisubmarine platforms, and transport aircraft. The most robust airfield in the oblast, however, was fifty miles east of Kaliningrad City, at Chernyakhovsk. Here Su-24 Fencers and MiG-31 Foxhounds lived in hardened bunkers and patrolled the skies over the oblast and west over the Baltic Sea.

Getting all this equipment and personnel into Kaliningrad was no easy feat, but the Russians had it figured out. Supplies were brought in by air transport, of course, but that was only a small fraction of the military needs of the oblast. Since the Russian mainland did not border its most western province, Moscow hashed out an agreement with both Belarus and Lithuania, stipulating that Russia be allowed unrestricted access to Kaliningrad. Russia and Belarus were close allies, but Moscow’s deteriorating relations with all the Baltic nations caused the rail and highway transit routes through Lithuania to become a potential flashpoint for another European war.

The situation had worsened to the point that many said it was only a matter of time before Volodin threatened Lithuania directly, and after Russia’s one-day attack of Estonia and their armed annexation of the Crimea, many Kremlin watchers determined it would take nothing more than a railroad strike in Lithuania or well-attended protests in Poland for Russia to send troops into their neighbors to establish a permanent corridor to Kaliningrad with the stated purpose of ensuring transit to their western province.

And if they did this, it didn’t take an expert to know that the reverberations would reach far beyond the Baltics.

Lithuania was a NATO member state, and one of the major founding principles of NATO’s charter was the concept of “collective self-defense.” This was embodied in the charter’s Article Five. “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense… will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith… such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

During the Cold War it was presumed that any attack of any NATO country would be part of an all-out Soviet invasion of the West, so the prospects of NATO’s being drawn into a regional war it didn’t want by Article Five were slim. But now, as small NATO nations in Central Europe found themselves in the crosshairs of Valeri Volodin, NATO leaders across Europe had become shaky, to put it mildly.

France, for example, wasn’t crazy about the idea of fighting a nation with 310 nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to defend the honor of tiny Lithuania.

It was clear that Volodin wanted more territory, and it was somewhat less clear, but still reasonable to assume, that Volodin did not want war with NATO. His Kremlin had become incredibly adept at taking the political temperature of the NATO countries and then waging a kind of “hybrid war” in the Baltic, careful to keep their actions just below the threshold of an Article Five violation — or, more precisely, below the threshold of what the NATO nations could plausibly deny was an Article Five violation.

But across the Atlantic, President of the United States Jack Ryan was pushing for tougher reactions against Russia. He had suggested, both publicly and privately to NATO leadership, that the organization’s indecisive moves and nonconfrontational stance to virtually all provocations by Russia was only encouraging a full-on attack. There was nothing stopping Russia from coming over the Lithuanian border, save the prospect of NATO countermeasures, so Ryan quite reasonably felt Europe’s feeble responses to Volodin’s threat and low-intensity action only encouraged him to do more.

It also kept Lithuania in a constant state of frustration and uncertainty. Recent polls in the small Baltic nation showed most citizens believed their country would be invaded by Russia within the next year.

All it would take would be that one spark, and the low-intensity hybrid action Volodin had been waging could morph into a full-on military invasion.

The troop train rumbled west over Belarus’s border with Lithuania, passing by the immigration-control buildings and the lines of fences shortly before midnight. It continued on without slowing, and the border guards from both nations barely gave it a glance.

On board were nearly four hundred soldiers, most from the 7th Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment, but among them were a few dozen members of the 25th Coastal Missile brigade and a mishmash of men and women from other Kaliningrad-based forces returning from leave.

Two dozen Kaliningrad Oblast government workers returning from vacation in Russia rounded out the personnel on the train, riding exclusively in the first-class cars in the rear.

The train also carried several military trucks, mostly Army GAZ light cargo vehicles and heavier Ural Typhoon mine-resistant vehicles, along with more than twenty tons of ordnance ranging from handgun rounds for the Army to 130-millimeter high explosive shells for the Navy’s AK-130, a massive auto-fire cannon used by the destroyers in the Baltic Fleet.

To the average Lithuanian there was no outward clue this twenty-car train passing in the middle of the night through their nation was carrying Russian military forces and their equipment; it looked much like any other train coming from the east and heading to the west. But anyone around here who followed the news was well aware that Russia had the right to transit Lithuania on the way to Kaliningrad.

There had been a mutual agreement that said in exchange for Lithuania being allowed to board and inspect the trains whenever they wanted, the Russians were allowed to inspect Lithuanian border security facilities, but the agreement fell by the wayside when Valeri Volodin came to power.

The Russians would pass through, they would show the Lithuanians nothing, and the Lithuanians would just have to get used to it.

The Lithuanian government had not gotten used to it. Not at all. But they had learned to pick their battles with the regional powerhouse to the east, and they let the trains pass. They were never allowed to stop inside Lithuania; stations along the route were lined with guards, and the trains were always followed a few minutes behind by three high-rail inspection trucks to check for anything or anyone left behind.

A minute before the Russian military train passed through Vilnius Central Station, a pair of nearly identical gray Ford Transit vans drove along the Švitrigailos rail overpass due west of the station. The vehicle in front pulled to the curb slowly, then stopped, and then the van in back, fifty meters behind its twin, did the same. Simultaneously, men climbed out of the front passenger seats of the two vans, then they jogged out into the middle of the street with flashlights in their hands.

The man in the rear turned to the south; the man in front looked north.

There was no one else on the overpass at this time of night, but had there been, they would have reported that the men who leapt from the vans wore identical black armbands with two lances crossing each other. It would mean nothing to any potential witnesses, because few people in Lithuania would recognize the insignia of the Polish People’s Lancers, a small civilian paramilitary outfit based in Łódź, Poland.

While the first pair stood ready to block the overpass from any traffic, the side doors of the two vans opened simultaneously and two more men jumped out of each vehicle. These men, also wearing the Polish Lancers insignia, immediately turned back around into their vehicles and hefted large, long metal devices. These they carried over to the sidewalk near the overpass railing.

Again, no one outside of the men from the vans saw any of this, but if they had, they would need to know their military weapons and perhaps a bit of history to recognize the Soviet-era B-10 smooth-bore recoilless rifles, first put into service in the 1950s and taken out of service by most modern armies by the early nineties.

The two big metal cannons had wheels, but they were not placed on the ground until they were almost in position by the overpass railing overlooking the rail line below. Then they were rolled left and right, oriented generally on a fixed point on the train tracks between the overpass and the station in the distance.

Each B-10 possessed a simple optical sight fixed to the left of the long 82-millimeter barrels, and one man on each gun used the sight to refine the weapon’s positioning a bit more. They were not precise, but they didn’t have to be. They were aiming at a point just two hundred meters away.

The big diesel engine of the twenty-car Russian military train on its way to Kaliningrad rumbled through Vilnius Central Station after the two guns had stopped moving. The men on the overpass watched it approach, pulling the long train behind it. They waited a few seconds more, then they heard a call on the radios they wore hooked to their belts.

“Atak!” The command was in Polish.

The two recoilless rifles fired almost simultaneously.

The diesel engine at the front of the train took two direct hits of high-explosive shells, and although it did not disintegrate or flip off the tracks, it was knocked out of commission instantly, its two-man crew was killed, and several of its rail wheels were damaged. The derailment came, but it did not come until the engine was almost directly under the overpass. Though the damage had been less than any of the attackers expected, they reloaded and aimed again quickly; the gun on the left fired down onto the ninth railcar, and the gun on the right sent an HE shell into the eleventh.

Two more direct hits tore into both cars.

The B-10s were reloaded a second time, this time aimed farther back along the long train. The recoilless rifle on the north side of the overpass managed to miss its target by a dozen feet, but the high-explosive round sent thousands of bits of shrapnel into the fourteenth car, killing and maiming almost as many as if the shell had hit the roof of the train.

While the attack was under way, a taxi with a passenger in the back on its way to the train station turned onto the Švitrigailos Street overpass. The driver slammed on his brakes as a man in the road waved a flashlight, and an instant later, a pair of flashes near the railing ahead on the right illuminated the entire area. Both the driver and the passenger saw the men and the small artillery pieces, and they heard the detonations down below on the train tracks.

The sixth and final shell fired by the men wearing the Polish civilian paramilitary insignia did the most damage. This 82-millimeter projectile impacted on the sixteenth car, and just by luck this car housed, among other items, a dozen 100-millimeter naval gun rounds. They did not all detonate, surprisingly, but the four that did created a colossal secondary detonation that affected seven other cars on the tracks.

The attackers didn’t know it, but they had the time to fire at least two more salvos, because the police at the station checkpoint had taken cover, thinking somehow the passing Russian train was attacking them, so they were only just orienting themselves to the situation when the assault ended.

The two Ford Transit vans raced off to the south one minute, twenty-seven seconds after the first round was fired, leaving both B-10 recoilless rifles there on the overpass, still smoking from the attack.

The two witnesses in the cab mentioned the black armband worn by the man wielding the flashlight in the road, and its distinctive crossed-lance crest. Within half an hour of the attack, officials of the Lithuanian State Security Department were huddled over computers, running searches of known insignias, all the while fighting the panic that locals had just started a war with the biggest and baddest actor in the region.

But when they found a match for the symbol worn on the arms of the attackers, the men and women of the Lithuanian SSD blew out sighs of muted relief, and they scratched their heads in confusion, unsure how this news would play out.

They had the identity of their culprits, or they thought they had anyway, but they found themselves more than surprised that a few farmers from Poland would do something of this magnitude against the fucking Russians.