Commander-in-Chief

12

Thirty-eight-year-old American Peter Branyon considered himself to be the luckiest man in the intelligence business. Not because he’d uncovered any particular nugget of information that would change the world. No, that hadn’t happened yet. But simply because of his current position. He was station chief in Vilnius, Lithuania, and it seemed like fate had given him one hell of a good opportunity to shine.

He’d come a long way in a short time, and he was smart enough to realize he hadn’t completely made it on his merits. A year earlier, one of the top men in the Ukrainian Intelligence Service was caught spying for the Russians, but not before he had passed on the names of many of the top CIA officers working in Ukraine.

As a result of this outing of CIA officers, dozens of men and women, all of them experts in the region and most of them Russian speakers, were recalled to the United States. Consequently, their roles had to be filled by CIA officers whose identities had not been revealed to the Russians. A massive reshuffling happened at the CIA’s Near East desk. The former chief of Lithuania Station was promoted to the more important Ukraine Station, and a case officer in Vilnius was promoted to run the CIA operation in Lithuania.

This man’s tenure at the top of Lithuania Station did not work out. He was a field man, fair to good in his role as a case officer but completely unable to manage an office full of case officers from the top, delegate with authority, and administrate effectively. He was brash and direct to the point of being rude, and consequently lousy at building liaison relationships with the Lithuanians. Within a few months of his taking over, the new CoS had alienated longtime partners and delivered no real guidance or discipline over the men and women in his station who were out in the field, running agents and operations in the nation.

Langley belatedly recognized they had the wrong man for the job, so they demoted the CoS back to case officer, moved him to Jakarta, and then they went looking for his replacement.

And they found Peter Branyon in Buenos Aires.

Branyon had been CoS in Argentina only a few months, but before that he made a name for himself in Chile and Brazil. He was a hard-charging case officer, able to recruit and manage many agents, and his work running a network of Chilean embassy staff at the Chinese embassy in Santiago had won him the appreciation of Langley. An operation he managed in São Paulo involved bugging business-class hotels and recruiting tipsters at an executive airport, and it led to solid intelligence material on many visiting government employees of several nations, including breaking up a Russian SVR operation to plant listening devices in the U.S. embassy and an Al-Qaeda terrorist plot against a synagogue in the city.

Pete Branyon earned his way to the top of the Argentina Station, no doubt about that, but the Lithuania posting had fallen in his lap only due to the misfortune of others. Any Central European nation was a huge posting for a young CIA station chief, but the Baltic was the center of the action these days, and for a number of reasons, Lithuania was the star of them all.

And that was even before somebody killed a bunch of Russian soldiers in the heart of the nation’s capital and blew up a natural gas facility on the coast.

Branyon told himself that although he might have lucked his way into his present predicament, he was going to make the most of it and prove that he merited the post.

To that end, in only seven weeks in the position Branyon had taught himself an impressive amount of Lithuanian, he’d taken a tiny and inefficient network of informants in the eastern part of the small nation and whipped them into shape personally. He acted not just as a station chief, but also as a case officer, unafraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty, and unwilling to sit at his desk in the embassy all day. But unlike the last station chief, Branyon led from the front, had no problem delegating a dozen different jobs to a dozen case officers under him, and had no compunction about demanding hard work and discipline from all his staff.

Branyon wasn’t really supposed to be as hands-on as he was, but he was getting things done, sending back nightly cables to Langley about his quick progress in the station.

The only ding on his time here was a worry by others about his personal security. He was CoS, and he was sitting in cars in gas stations a mile from the Kaliningrad border, or walking down blind dark alleys in the capital, looking to meet with petty criminals who might have information to sell about shady foreign elements in the city.

After some prodding from the CIA security office, Branyon accepted a bodyguard, but only under the condition his was to be a low-profile version of personal security. Greg Donlin was a forty-seven-year-old ex-SEAL, and a longtime CIA security officer, with stints all over Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He could work low-pro, just an MP5K hanging under his arm and hidden by his jacket and a subcompact Glock pistol under his shirt, a hidden radio earpiece that linked 24/7 to both the CIA security office and the Marine guard force at the embassy.

It wasn’t much protection for a chief of station who enjoyed hanging out in bandit country. Donlin would have preferred three or four guys with him, but Branyon said he didn’t want to wander the streets with a half-dozen other dudes like a goddamned boy band about to take the stage.

So Donlin worked alone keeping Branyon alive.

It was just dawn now, below freezing here in Vilnius, and Peter Branyon made a mental note to buy a thicker coat as soon as he could. His jacket was barely keeping his body heat in, and it was just October. By December he figured he’d be dead up here in Lithuania, found frozen stiff on the sidewalk after trying to walk to work.

He looked next to him to his security man, and he saw Greg was feeling it, too.

Donlin was from California, and Branyon from New Mexico. This was the first autumn in the Baltic for either man, and their first winter was just around the corner. Neither man was accustomed to the cold, and they both hated it with a passion.

Branyon looked his security officer over for another second and said, “I guess the reason I’m station chief and you’re not is because I’m smart enough to button my coat.”

Donlin sniffed, rubbed his red nose. “I’d love to button my coat, but I can’t. Got to have quick access to my piece, because my station chief insists on standing on a train platform out in the open.”

Branyon chuckled. “Okay, how about we go down to the train and warm our hands on a smoldering artillery shell?” He headed off down the platform, closer to the derailed Russian train.

“You’re just full of great ideas today, aren’t you, Chief?”

Branyon approached the massive crime scene; the cold air was full of the scent of burnt fuel and plastic, the sound of construction equipment and men hard at work cutting the dead out of the wreckage. He saw a small cluster of men in trench coats right next to a car torn open as if by a giant can opener, and he recognized the man in the middle. Branyon made his way through the group and up next to his local counterpart, the Vilnius director of the Valstybės Saugumo Departamentas, the State Security Department. The man held a cigarette in one hand and a telephone in the other, and he stood talking into his phone alongside the tracks as a dead Russian soldier was carried out in a blue body bag.

Branyon didn’t wait for the man to stop speaking into the phone before greeting him. “Morning, Linus. You’ve had a busy week.”

Linus Sabonis, head of the SSD, hung up the phone and shook Branyon’s hand. “Peter, nice to see you down here, but I hope you’ve just come as a friend of Lithuania. I hope Washington did not send you to investigate this. Everyone knows already who is responsible. All the people with one half brain know Russia did this to themselves.”

Branyon looked into the twisted mass of barely distinguishable items in the center of a train car. He saw some smoldering wreckage, but it gave off no warmth. “I’m just here to poke around. I had to see this for myself.”

Donlin kept his head moving in all directions, even up on the overpass nearby.

Branyon also looked above. The weapons there had been roped off, and there were guards standing around them, even though morning traffic was allowed to traverse the overpass. “Those are B-10s, right?”

“That’s right,” Linus said. “But don’t get any bad ideas. The Lithuanian Land Force can vouch for every one of those old things in our inventory.”

“What about Poland?”

Linus sighed. “No, Peter. Don’t be fooled by Russia. Even if those weapons turn out to be from Poland, it is still just a Russian ruse.”

Branyon shrugged. “I know I’m the new guy around these parts, but you’ll forgive me if I go where the facts lead. Everybody is saying Russia did this to foment the conflict, and you may be right. We just don’t know for sure yet.”

Linus said, “I know your government is looking for answers, but just look at who benefits from this. There are Russian troops to our east in Belarus, and west in Kaliningrad. The Russians have spent the past years putting a lot of troops and equipment very close to our western border. With this attack here, they have all the excuse they need to come over and say hello.”

Peter Branyon said, “We’re with you, Linus.”

“Is NATO with us?”

“You know I don’t speak for NATO.”

The director of the SSD nodded slowly and took a drag on his cigarette. “I know you don’t. I only hope you guys know that we do not trust NATO to come to our aid. Maybe America will help like they did in Estonia, like you guys are doing in Ukraine. But France, Spain, Italy? Forget about it. They are sorry they let us join their little group, and they will bow to Russia, let it do whatever it wants, even if they fill our skies with paratroopers.”

Branyon shrugged. “That sounds like an Article Five violation. They’ll have to come if that happens.”

Linus shook his head. “No. NATO will just say the Russians are only coming in for a visit.”

Branyon knew Linus was probably right, and he also knew he never had to worry about this sort of thing in Buenos Aires. The idea that Brazil would invade his host nation was laughable.

But here nobody was laughing about the prospect of the skies filling with Russian troops under parachute canopies.

Branyon said, “Tell you what, Linus. Let’s you and me work our asses off to keep our governments aware of the situation around here. That’s all we can control, so let’s stick to that.”

Linus nodded and puffed on his cigarette, then motioned to the train. Another body bag was being removed, and the sun glowed in the east over low buildings and factories. “You and I are standing on ground zero, my friend. This piece of train track. Believe me, people will look back and say this was the beginning of it all.”

Linus and his entourage turned and headed back up the tracks toward the station.

Branyon looked at his security officer. “What do you say we take a drive to the eastern border today? I want to see what our agents there say about the news coming out of Belarus.”

Donlin sighed a little. “What do you say you let one of your case officers handle your network on the Belarusan border?”

“It will be fine, Greg. We’ll be back before lunch.”

In a resigned voice the security officer said, “Not worried about lunch. Worried about Little Green Men.”

Branyon give Donlin a wink. “We see some Little Green Men, I’ll be the first guy in the country to turn around and run.”

“And I’ll be the second.”