Commander-in-Chief

22

After a nine-hour flight from Baltimore, Ding Chavez and Dominic Caruso arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, during a mid-morning rain shower. There to meet them at the airport’s fixed-base operator was Herkus Zarkus, a thirty-one-year-old American of Lithuanian descent. Herkus was a technician for the CIA-linked company with a contract to install high-speed Internet service throughout the southern half of Lithuania.

Though Herkus wasn’t a spy himself, he held a security clearance and he had been read in on Ding and Dom’s mission, at least as far as his responsibility in it. He knew it was his job to take the two American contractors wherever they needed to go, both in Vilnius and in the countryside, and make sure their cover as fiber-optic linemen remained sound.

The two Campus operators loaded their bags into a van with the name DATAPLANET on the side, and all three men climbed in for the ride into town from the airport. While Herkus drove he explained that he had served in the U.S. Army with an electronic system maintenance military operational specialty. After working a few years in a support unit for 10th Special Forces Group, he left the service to go back to school for an advanced degree in electrical engineering.

After he graduated he was heavily recruited for the job with DataPlanet, a Maryland-based fiber-optics technology company that worked government contracts around Central Europe installing and upgrading fiber-optic networks. He was surprised that the company pulled out all the stops to get him on board, but as soon as he accepted the position he was let in on the fact DataPlanet actually had an affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency. Herkus found out he had been head-hunted not only because of his job-related education and work experience, but also because of the security clearances he’d held in the Army.

DataPlanet would have been a nearly perfect CIA front, but it had, in fact, started organically and only later become involved with U.S. intelligence. A CIA officer noticed an opportunity in the company and, over time, developed an informal “relationship” with the owners, themselves former defense contractors with high security clearances. Most of the work the firm did overseas was unrelated to the mission of the U.S. intelligence community, but from time to time CIA and NSA electronic intelligence specialists accompanied men like Herkus Zarkus into the field, using the lineman-technician cover to move virtually anywhere in Central European nations where Russian intelligence had many eyes and ears. And while the company techs and the intelligence operatives actually did install the high-tech networks in houses, towns, and buildings, they also sometimes added a few optional extras to the nets, allowing electronic surveillance in parts of the world where Agency techs working out of embassies would not have been able to avoid scrutiny by opposition intelligence services.

In this case, it had been explained to the technician that his two “tag-alongs” would not be doing any technical work of an electronic intelligence nature on this op. They would, instead, simply need to go to a number of different locations and take pictures with a special camera.

On the flight over, Dom and Ding had watched an hourlong video that served as a crash course on working as fiber-optic technicians. After this they sat through three more hours of Lithuanian language study, which was effectively nil, but they did learn a couple dozen phrases that might prove useful in a pinch.

Chavez spoke Russian, but here in Lithuania only seven percent of the population spoke Russian daily. That said, Russian was understood by many here, and Ding’s Lithuanian was only what he had on his iPhone translator and what little he’d picked up on the flight over.

Herkus brought the men to his office in the center of town, and here they had coffee and chatted for a while, then he got down to business, showing the men a PowerPoint presentation on the legitimate work they’d be doing here in the region. It was straightforward, and not too terribly technical, because Herkus himself would be with them every step of the way.

They needed to know only the basics so they could act naturally in their covers and get on with the real reason they were over here in the first place.

In the late afternoon they piled back into the DataPlanet van and drove through the city, ending up on the third floor of an old building in the Old Town. This was a CIA safe house. Herkus had been instructed to drop the men off here and then pick them up for work early the next morning.

Dom and Ding had just gotten their luggage into their rooms when there was a knock at the door. Dom looked through the peephole to see two men wearing blue jeans and insulated jackets.

“Yeah?” he asked through the door.

One of the men answered, “Mary Pat sent me over. You should be getting a text to that effect just about any second.”

Dom checked his phone and saw nothing, but Chavez entered the foyer of the apartment, looking at his phone. “It’s okay. Just got a text from Clark. It’s the CoS.”

Caruso opened the door and let the men in.

“You must be Dom,” one of the men said. He extended a hand. “Pete Branyon. Good to meet you, and welcome to Lithuania or, as we like to call it, tomorrow’s ground zero.”

The CIA chief of station Vilnius, Peter Branyon, entered the room with his security officer, Greg Donlin. After shaking Dom’s hand, he walked toward Chavez. “I’m Pete. Domingo, it’s an honor to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

Branyon said, “When I got the cable that you’d be coming over to help, I was surprised, to say the least. But since you come on the recommendation from the DNI, that’s good enough for me. Mary Pat Foley’s office is all the bona fides I need.”

Branyon and the two newcomers sat down in the small living room, while Donlin stood near the window, keeping one eye on the street outside.

Branyon said, “We swept this apartment for bugs just before you arrived. We’ll do it every day, just to be sure, but we don’t expect you’ll garner too much attention from the opposition.”

Ding said, “Can you fill us in on the situation?”

“Sure,” Branyon replied. “As I’m sure you know from the news, Valeri Volodin has convinced a sizable portion of his nation that Ukraine is inhabited by Nazis, all Russia’s neighbors want to destroy them, and American spies are running amok here in Lithuania.” He chuckled. “I’m pretty sure none of that is true, but I can promise that third assertion is absolute bullshit. We aren’t running amok, we are barely treading water. We spend all our time trying to keep tabs on Russia’s spies on the ground here, and working to discern Russia’s intentions.”

Ding said, “I’m sure you’ve been told, but we’ve been given an assignment by the DNI. But when we’re not doing that, we’re available to help your station any way we can. Our cover is fiber-optic linemen, so we should have pretty good freedom of movement.”

“Yeah, DataPlanet can get you guys anywhere you need to go. They are one hell of an asset. Me and the rest of my covered case officers can’t go anywhere without doing a lengthy SDR, but DataPlanet is so ubiquitous around here the Russians don’t bother with them.”

Chavez said, “Mary Pat told us your station was a little short-staffed.”

Branyon said, “We were barely able to keep up with our work as it was, then the LNG regasification facility on the coast was blown up. A few days later, the Russian train transport was attacked here in Vilnius. Now we’re up to our eyeballs in problems and marching orders from Langley. Half the world thinks Lithuania is looking like it is going to be the epicenter of the next war.”

“Anything we can do to help out your station?” Dom asked.

“I know you guys have plenty of work to do, but it sure wouldn’t hurt for us to have a couple more sets of eyes looking out for Little Green Men near the border.”

“Which border?” Dom asked.

“A damn good question. Russia could send sappers in from either the east or the west, since Belarus is to the east and Kaliningrad is to the west. But my main concern is the east. Belarus is friendly with Russia, as I’m sure you guys know, so even though Kaliningrad has a lot of Russian troops on our western border, if there is an invasion Russia would be idiots not to hit from both directions. If you guys are laying cable to the east it will put you in the little villages and on the highways close to the Belarusan border. Just keep an eye out. We have a network of agents in the towns there by the border, but the rules say you guys can’t have any involvement with agents, so I’ll keep working that myself.”

Ding said, “Sorry, Pete, it’s not my place to say, but you are the CoS. Is it really a good idea for you to be traveling near the border?”

Branyon shrugged. “I’m a hell of a good case officer. Just because I’m station chief doesn’t mean I can’t still get out into the populace. I do my SDRs, I move light and low-profile, so I don’t have much to worry about.” He nodded toward Donlin. “Greg here keeps me safe.”

Greg Donlin had barely spoken, but he said, “I keep warning him about the dangers. He keeps overruling.”

Chavez said, “Well, okay, but if you need any help from us involving your PERSEC, just shout.”

Branyon raised an eyebrow. “You guys aren’t carrying weapons, are you?”

“No,” Dom said quickly. “I think my partner is talking about help getting you away from a fight.”

Ding nodded. “Yeah, Dom and I aren’t here to go up against Russia’s Army. I guess we’ll just have to leave that to Greg.”

Greg Donlin sighed. “I’ve got a pistol, but I’m an armored division or two short if I have to fight the Russians.”

The men laughed, a moment of gallows humor, nothing more, because if Russia decided it wanted to move into Lithuania, there wasn’t a damn thing anybody sitting in this little living room could do to stop it.