Commander-in-Chief

65

At eleven-thirty p.m. Chavez stood outside a locked metal gate under the archway of Pete Branyon’s apartment on Ligoninės in Vilnius Old Town. Behind him was an open parking lot, and beyond that a small park, its trees bare in the cold. On the far side of the park was a row of old buildings, and in one of them, from what Ding had learned from Lithuanian intelligence, were an unknown number of foreigners who had been conducting surveillance on the building.

There was speculation as to whether these men were waiting to see if Branyon returned, or possibly even seeking information on the two men who’d managed to rescue Branyon the day before. Ding thought it could be the latter, since these men were obviously working with the Russians, and the Russians had probably assured the men they were watching all foreign intelligence operations in the area.

They would have been surprised by the fast rescue of the CIA man, and probably very troubled by the fact they didn’t have as good an understanding of the opposition as they had thought.

Branyon’s home would be as good a place as any to be on the lookout for his mysterious protectors.

Ding took his time looking up and down the quiet street, lit only by the glow of streetlamps; then he unlocked the gate with a key provided to him by the deputy chief of station. He drew his pistol, then entered alone, disappearing under the arch. This led him to the small center court of the building, and here he took a stairwell to Branyon’s apartment on the second floor.

In his earpiece Ding heard, “Okay, you’ve left my line of sight.”

“Roger that,” Ding said, and he kept climbing.

Dom Caruso was tucked under a graffiti-covered alcove on the same street as the men watching Branyon’s house, just below and thirty yards to the right of their position. He sat cross-legged, a half-consumed bottle of beer in his hand and three more waiting alongside it. He was dressed like a bum, or what he thought a bum might look like in Lithuania, although he hadn’t been here long enough to really know. He wore an old coat he’d bought at an outdoor flea market that afternoon, and an old felt cap, and he’d darkened the three-day growth of stubble on his face with charcoal, giving him more of a beard than he really had.

Most of the time Dom just sat there and nursed his beer, but he stole quick looks here and there with his binoculars and his FLIR monocular, both taken out of the inside of his coat each time he used them. On the first scan after Ding went into the building, Dom took a moment to center his glass on the Land Cruiser that Chavez had driven up in. It was parked in the lot near the entrance to Branyon’s building, and through his binoculars Dom could make out the bullet holes even all the way over here. His hidden earpiece had a sophisticated microphone built in that allowed him to transmit even whispers to Ding’s earpiece. He held his beer up to his mouth and said, “Driving over in a shot-up vehicle was a bit much, don’t you think?”

As Chavez climbed the stairs he chuckled softly. “Nobody ever accused me of being subtle. We know there is a lot of oppo, and we know they are trained tactically… but we don’t know if they are very smart.”

“Fair enough,” said Dom. “Carry on.”

When Ding arrived at Branyon’s apartment he began to turn on lights, telegraphing the fact he was there to the mysterious opposition, in case they hadn’t noticed him.

Dom remained in the dark, scanning the area, searching for any signs of life.

Five minutes after Chavez entered the apartment, Dom saw two men walking through the park. One had a bottle in his hand, and they staggered a little while they walked, but Dom kept his eyes on them anyhow, in case it was a ruse.

The men kept going, and they walked out of the scene without ever looking in the direction of Chavez’s location.

Another few minutes passed. Dom was switching between his regular binoculars, which worked fine here because of the streetlamps, and his FLIR monocular, which helped him scan all the windows, rooftops, and dark alcoves around the square for heat signatures, just in case someone was lurking there.

Ding opened the blinds on the second floor, then looked out over the little park.

Dom said, “Dude, you are silhouetting yourself. Giving them a target.”

Ding replied, “I’m trying to get them to take the bait.” He closed the blinds after a few seconds and turned out a light in the kitchen.

Caruso saw nothing that aroused any suspicions. He said, “If the watchers in the apartment on my left are interested, they should be looking at you right now.”

Just then, Dom heard a car start in the parking lot on the far end of the alcove behind him. He knew this lot was used by people in the buildings all up and down this side of the street, meaning one of the unknown opposition team members might be behind the wheel. Dom quickly made sure all his gear was well tucked away, and he moved into the doorway of a hair salon next to the alcove.

Seconds later, a vehicle pulled into the tunnel from the parking lot behind. It had its lights off, and it stopped at the back of the tunnel, just idling there in position.

Dom said, “Okay, Ding. You called it. I’ve got some kind of a hatchback vehicle idling in the dark near my poz. Looks like two inside, but can’t confirm that.”

Ding said, “It’s about damn time. I was thinking about making myself a sandwich.” Then he added, “Keep an eye out for others.”

“You’ve been spotted by the other side… Why wait around until a whole busload shows up?”

“I want to make it look good. I’m going to sit it out for a couple more minutes, then I’ll roll out of here. You follow anybody following me.”

“Got it,” Dom said, and he sipped his beer.

Dom had a 2011 Honda CBR250R street bike parked against the curb a half-block up the street. It was an entry-level bike, nothing that was going to outrun any fighter planes, but for the twisting turning streets of Vilnius, it was agile, small, and, most important, it would not stand out.

After five minutes more Ding turned off the rest of the lights in Peter Branyon’s apartment, then he appeared in the archway at the front of the building carrying two suitcases. These he put in the back of the Land Cruiser, before climbing behind the wheel.

Dom watched all this, and whispered behind his beer. “What’s in the suitcases?”

“Just some books I threw in to make them look heavy. Do I still have eyes on me?”

“Affirm. The car is on my left, twenty-five feet away, but I’m tucked into a doorway and out of their line of sight. I won’t be able to go back to my bike until they take off after you.”

“Okay,” Ding said. “But watch out for other vehicles. If they have the manpower and they are interested enough in who I am and what I’m doing, then they’ll do a multicar surveillance package. Honestly, I’d just as soon get as many of these fuckers in one place at one time, lead them all into the police roadblock.”

“Roger that,” Dom said, and just as he transmitted he heard several car doors shut in the parking lot on the far side of the tunnel. “Careful what you wish for, Ding. You’re about to be leading a parade.”

Minutes later, Chavez drove off from the other side of the park, turning his bullet-pocked Land Cruiser in the direction of Caruso and the opposition vehicles, then turning right.

As soon as he disappeared, three vehicles emerged from the passageway through the building on Dom’s left. A gray Škoda hatchback, a black Ford four-door, and a black BMW SUV.

“Okay, Ding,” Dom said. “I’ve got three vehicles following you.” He described the vehicles as he rushed to his motorcycle.

“The BMW was in back, right?” Chavez asked over the net.

“How’d you know?”

“The Škoda and the Ford are full of labor, the Beamer is management. No team leader is going to sit in the back of a piece-of-shit hatchback while his muscle drives a BMW.”

Dom whistled gently into his mike. “You have been doing this too long.”

“Tell me about it,” Ding said. “Catch up to us, but don’t let them see you.”

Chavez had to drive through late-night Vilnius pretending he did not see the three vehicles behind him. The men inside, assuming this was part of the same force he and Caruso had encountered at the border the night before, had proven themselves to be well trained with their weapons. But they were not terribly good at surveillance.

Chavez couldn’t lose the three-car tail. The entire objective to this mission was to lead them to a police roadblock on the Drujos highway, just east of the Old Town. The location had been selected because it was close enough to the city that Chavez and Caruso felt confident there was little risk the tail would give up and just return to their apartment, and far enough away from homes, apartments, and public spaces that a shootout would not create a massive bloodbath of civilians.

Chavez spoke in a normal voice in the Land Cruiser, knowing Dom would hear him in his earpiece. “I’m two klicks out from the roadblock. Still just the three vehicles tailing me?”

Dom had to speak louder, as he was riding on the bike, but his helmet muted much of the noise from the engine and the wind. “Affirmative. They are all lined up and following you like you’re the Pied Piper.”

“Good, keep an eye out for any joiners. We don’t know how many of these guys there are, and we don’t know their operational relationship with the Russians in the area, if any.”

“Roger that.”

The plan Chavez and Caruso had ironed out with the ARAS unit in charge of manning the roadblock to take down the foreign operators was for Chavez to drive his Land Cruiser under the pedestrian bridge over the four-lane road, then continue on past Vitebsko, a small street that ran off to the left. Once he passed, six ARAS police cruisers, each with two officers inside, would race out into the highway and block the road. Another half-dozen men would be up on the pedestrian bridge over the highway, armed with powerful spotlights, HK G36 rifles, and Benelli shotguns.

There were eighteen in the ARAS force in total, not ideal as far as Chavez was concerned, but it appeared the group following him in three cars would not be anticipating the ambush, so he thought the plan reasonable considering the threat.

Traffic was virtually nonexistent on this stretch of the highway now, and both Chavez and Caruso were thankful for this. The ARAS roadblock would catch anyone driving by once it was sprung, so if the men in the three cars tailing Chavez decided to fight it out, civilians might well be caught in the crossfire if there had been much traffic.

Ding called Dom over his earpiece. “Okay, I can see the pedestrian bridge ahead. You need to back off now so you don’t end up downrange if the shooting starts.”

Caruso did as Chavez instructed, slowing his motorcycle to a crawl on the road. He watched the taillights of the BMW SUV, the third of the three vehicles in the tail, get farther and farther away.

Dom decided to proactively block the road so no one else got closer. He turned his bike around, and shined the headlight back toward any oncoming traffic. And he pulled out a flashlight from his jacket. He climbed off his bike and stepped into the next lane, then began waiting for cars.

Chavez passed under the pedestrian bridge that represented the opening jaw of the Lithuanian federal antiterrorist team’s trap, and he kept rolling through, passing Vitebsko Street on his left, and continuing on. He looked in his rearview mirror and saw the lights of the first vehicle behind him, some 150 yards back. It was racing right into the trap.

The gray Škoda passed first under the pedestrian bridge, and just as it did so, a row of Lithuanian police cars raced out in front of it, covered all four lanes, and screeched to a halt. The Škoda skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, and behind it, the black Ford four-door did the same.

Men leapt from the police cars, swinging rifles out in front of them and leveling them toward the three vehicles, while just behind the Škoda and the Ford, the black BMW X3 pulled to a more controlled stop, just west of the pedestrian bridge that ran above the highway. Men on the bridge flashed lights on all three vehicles, some of them facing east to the two cars pinned in and others facing west to the BMW in the rear.

Eighteen men in black body armor and holding rifles or shotguns began yelling at the three drivers to turn off their engines.

The BMW was the first vehicle to move. Its tires screeched as it was put in reverse and the accelerator stomped to the floor. Men on the bridge yelled down to the driver, ordering him to halt, but the SUV launched backward, surrounded by the smoke from its tires. An officer on the bridge fired a shotgun blast at the hood of the vehicle in an attempt to knock it out of action, but the vehicle kept moving backward.

An order was initiated by the on-scene commander to open fire on the BMW, but before he’d finished giving the order, gunfire erupted simultaneously from both the Škoda and the Ford, two vehicles that were just twenty-five to fifty feet from the ARAS roadblock. Shooters inside the cars fired through the windshield and out the side windows, surprising the police force with both the audaciousness of the act and the volume of fire.

Black-clad ARAS men standing behind their vehicles returned fire, men on the bridge all shifted to the east to shoot down on the Škoda and the Ford, and the BMW, after receiving only one ineffectual shotgun blast, was all but forgotten. It raced backward out of the area, picking up speed as it backed westward in the eastbound lane.

Ding Chavez pulled the Land Cruiser over to the side of the road a quarter-mile from the roadblock. He heard the first boom of a shotgun, then the chatter of automatic rifles, and finally a cacophony of various weapons, easily twenty-five in number, all firing at the same time.

“Holy shit, Dom! It’s gone loud!”

“I hear it,” Caruso confirmed. He was a half-mile from the roadblock, and three-quarters of a mile from Chavez. “We can’t approach without running the risk of being targeted by the bad guys and ARAS.”

“Right. Stay right where you are. Watch out for any squirters.”

“Too late, Chavez,” Caruso said instantly. “The black Beamer is coming my way!”

Chavez slammed his hand into the wheel of the car. Ding had an MP5 nine-millimeter submachine gun on the seat next to him, and Dom, who was driving the motorcycle, was only armed with a borrowed Beretta nine-millimeter pistol, but there was no way Chavez could even get to Dom to help him without driving through the middle of the gun battle. He said, “Get off the road and out of their way. If you can, tail them, but do not engage.”

“Understood.”

Chavez slammed his hand again, feeling impotent parked here along the highway, but then an idea hit him. He put the Land Cruiser in gear and then stomped on the gas, looking for a place to make a left off the highway. As he did this he flipped on the moving map on the Toyota’s multifunction display. “Dom, I’m going to try and make my way through town back in your direction. You keep me posted on where they are going.”

“Roger, they are passing me right now. I’m going to get behind them, and stick on them like glue.”

The X3 had turned around by the time it passed Dom a minute earlier, but it continued driving the wrong way, west in the eastbound lane. A few other vehicles had been on the highway, all of which had run off into the median or at least slammed on their brakes as the BMW and the motorcycle chasing it passed.

Chavez had instructed Caruso to stay out of sight of the men he was following, but there was no chance of that. Dom’s headlight was the one vehicle behind the BMW, as traffic had been stopped by the roadblock a mile back. Dom instead just kept far enough behind the BMW that he felt they’d have a hard time shooting him from the back window, and close enough to them that he could see where they were going. He hoped they’d pull off this road and into the bustle and narrower streets of the city, where he could be a little more discreet about his surveillance.

And Dom got his wish almost immediately. The X3 made a hard right turn at speed onto Aušros Vartų, a one-lane street that ran like a spine through the center of Vilnius’s hilly and warrenlike Old Town. Dom followed into the turn, then tightened up on them so he didn’t lose them. Dom and Ding’s rented flat was only a few hundred yards from here, so he knew the area just well enough to know there were dozens if not hundreds of archways, breezeways, narrow alleys, and covered parking lots in which they could hide.

He spoke loud enough in his helmet for Ding to receive his transmission. “We’re off the highway, heading north through the Old Town. Don’t know if he has a destination or if he’s just trying to shake me.”

Chavez came over the net an instant later. “I’m hauling ass your way. If you can vector me in front of them I can try to pick up the tail.”

Dom said, “Dude, you’re the guy with the GPS, I’m the guy on the bike trying to read eight-syllable road signs at forty miles an hour.”

Chavez said, “Point taken, Dom. Just give me north, south, east, or west, and let me know what you see. I’ll try to figure it out from my map.”

Dom followed the BMW north through the Old Town. It had slowed to the speed limit but was clearly still trying to find a way out of the area, because it made a series of conflicting turns that led in various directions. Dom called them out to Ding one at a time, and Ding was even able to pan the map on his Land Cruiser’s display over to the neighborhood and reroute Dom so he could give the occupants of the SUV the impression they had lost him.

Dom followed along with Ding’s instructions, taking a parallel alley to the road the X3 was on, but when he came out on the other side, the black SUV wasn’t there.

“Shit!” shouted Dom. “I’ve lost him.”

Ding was using his map to help Dom while he drove closer to the area. “It’s okay, there’s only one way he could have left that road. Turn around, make a left on Subačiaus, and then another immediate left on Kazimiero.”

Dom did as instructed, only to find himself in a perfectly dark, winding cobblestone passage. “He’s not here.”

Ding said, “Stay on that road, he’s got to be in front of you.”

Dom opened up the throttle, raced forward along the cobblestones at breakneck speed. He shot under a pair of passageways where the buildings that ran right up to the side of the pavement connected above the narrow road.

After thirty seconds of racing through the dark, he looked to his right and saw the reflection of the BMW’s taillights parked in the courtyard of a building. He started to slow to turn around, but he’d barely begun to do so when the BMW shot back out in the street, heading the other way. As it made the turn, just seventy-five feet behind Caruso, a single shot cracked in the narrow passageway. Feet above Dom’s head, two-hundred-year-old masonry exploded from the wall of a building.

Dom took off after them, going back the way they had come. Another burst of gunfire kicked up sparks on the cobblestones in front of the motorcycle. Dom slowed and then turned hard through a covered archway that ran under a building, then shot out on the other side. Here there was a staircase that ran down in the direction the BMW had been traveling, so Dom began bouncing down it on his bike. “They are shooting at me. You see any other parallel routes where I can stay out of their line of fire?”

Ding vectored him off the stairs and back toward a road that headed to the south. Just as Dom raced onto the road, he saw the BMW in front of him, not fifty yards ahead on a one-lane cobblestone path with ancient walls tight on both sides. “Got them! South on Dvasios, they’re hauling ass!”

“South on Dvasios?” Ding asked. “You sure?”

“Yeah, why?”

“’Cause I’m heading north on Dvasios, and I’m hauling ass, too!”

“I don’t know how long this road is, but you’d better plan on—”

Dom stopped speaking when he looked beyond the BMW in front of him and saw a big SUV race around the bend with its lights off. Both vehicles were doing fifty, and they were too close to avoid each other.

Ding Chavez had driven all over the Old Town in the past five minutes trying to put himself in front of Caruso and the vehicle he was tailing. And now he had finally done it, but he wasn’t sure of his plan. When he was only twenty-five yards away from impact he let go of the wheel, dropped sideways across the center console of the Land Cruiser, and tucked his head down into the passenger seat. At the same time, he hit the brakes, but did not slam on them. He only wanted to slow down the impact to a survivable speed.

The crash with the big BMW SUV was violent. Chavez’s body was wrenched sideways; glass shattered and metal tore like paper. The airbags in the Toyota had deployed, but they did so over Chavez, who was lying sideways with his head in the passenger seat. They deflated instantly by design, so Chavez sat up quickly with the MP5 in his hands. He leveled it over the dashboard, trained it on the vehicle in front of him.

The radiator of the big Land Cruiser was torn apart and hot steam erupted into the air, fogging the view between Chavez and any potential targets, but after a few seconds to take in the scene, he saw the driver of the BMW, just eight feet or so in front of him, fighting to get his deflated airbag out of his face, and his pistol up and out the shattered windshield.

Chavez flipped off the safety of his submachine gun and opened fire, raking the man in the head with nine-millimeter full-metal-jacketed rounds.

The front passenger got a shot off at Chavez but missed. Chavez used the muzzle flash to find his target through the heavy steam and smoke, and he fired several times, then he ducked down to avoid any return fire.

He unbuckled his seat belt, opened his driver’s-side door, and bailed out, dropping all the way to the ground. Once he hit the hard cobblestones, with the smell of radiator fluid and engine oil prevalent in the cold night air, he swung his MP5 around and toward the BMW.

A man in blue jeans and a heavy coat had bailed from the back of the BMW, and was just now climbing off the ground, pulling a pistol from inside his jacket. Chavez leveled his weapon at the man. “Don’t move!”

The man moved and Ding shot him in the forehead, sending him falling back onto the cobblestones.

“Shit!” Ding said. He needed at least one of these men alive.

He clambered up to his feet now, thankful that his body was cooperating and he’d not been injured in the crash, then he carefully moved around the wreckage of the BMW, spinning around the back, low with his weapon up.

A man had been crawling from the crash on his hands and knees, and he was now in the middle of the one-lane road, thirty feet away.

Dom Caruso knelt over the injured man, his knee in the man’s back, his Beretta pistol pressed against his skull. He looked up to Ding. “Hey, look what I found.”

The last five minutes had been a logistical nightmare, but Chavez and Caruso had the wounded gunman alone, just the way they wanted him.

The only operable vehicle was the Honda motorcycle, so Dom climbed back on and drove over to the man lying in the street. The man had a broken ankle — somehow he’d injured it in the backseat of the BMW in the crash — and he was unable to walk or even stand, so once they searched him for weapons Ding secured his hands with tape, blindfolded him, and then put him on the back of Dom’s motorcycle. Dom drove off to the south, with instructions from Ding to find a place for an in extremis interrogation.

Just on the other side of Daukšos, a main east-west artery a block away from the crash site, Dom motored up a private drive of a section of beat-up-looking old apartment buildings. Here, behind a parking lot and a row of garbage cans, he found a freestanding building the size of a one-car garage. It didn’t look like it had been used in decades — it was surrounded by overgrown weeds and the window glass was broken out — but when he kicked in the loose wooden door and looked over the space with his flashlight, he saw the room would do for a short conversation.

Ding had been on foot, so he showed up five minutes later, out of breath from jogging. By then Dom had the man’s coat and shirt stripped off him, and a flashlight balanced on the sill of a boarded-up window so it shined directly on him.

The man shivered and moaned in pain from his grotesquely swollen ankle, but Dom had done nothing to help him.

Ding entered the little room, looked around, then ripped off the blindfold. The man blinked several times, then looked around.

As far as Ding was concerned, the man looked like he could have been Russian. He was in his thirties, with a scruffy beard and mustache just a few shades more red than his auburn hair. He had a square jaw Chavez could make out even through the beard, and a flat nose like he was a boxer who lost a lot more fights than he won.

He had no tattoos or other distinguishing marks on his torso or arms.

“Do you speak English?” Chavez asked. The bare-chested man just looked up at the two Americans without reply, blinking from the 180-lumen flashlight in his face.

Dom knelt down over him now. Got in his face. In a voice designed to convey menace, he said, “Do. You. Speak. English?”

The man just shook his head a little, like he didn’t understand, but he said nothing.

Dom sighed. “What do we do with him?”

From behind, Chavez replied, “He’s worthless. Cut his dick off, shoot him in the head, and throw him in the river.”

Dom nodded. “You got it.”

“No! I speak English!” The man shouted it in a heavy accent, his eyes wide with horror.

“Would you look at that?” Dom said with a smile. “He’s a quick study.”

“I’ve been teaching that ten-second crash course in English for thirty years,” Chavez replied, and he knelt down in front of the wounded man. “Okay, boss. Your buddies all made their choices, now it’s your turn. Do you want to live or do you want to die?”

The man said, “I want to live.” He seemed certain in his choice.

“Good,” said Chavez. “First, you’re Russian?”

“Russian? No. From Serbia. We are all Serb.” His eyes looked down a moment. “Were all Serb.”

“Serb?” Dom said in surprise. “We’re a thousand miles from Belgrade.”

“But you are working for FSB?” Chavez said.

“No.”

“Who trained you?”

“Serbian Army.”

“Bullshit,” Chavez said. “You’ve got Spetsnaz training.”

The man said nothing for a moment, until Dom said, “The river’s only two blocks away.”

The wounded man changed his tune instantly. “Yes, there were thirty of us, trained in Russia. Tenth GRU Spetsnaz Brigade in Krasnodar.”

“What are you doing here?”

The man shrugged. “We were fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Chetnik Battalion. The best men in our unit were taken to Russia for Spetsnaz training, and then told we would be going to the Baltic for destabilizing operations.” He looked up at the men. “You said you wouldn’t kill me.”

“You tell us the truth, and we’ll take you to the hospital.”

“How can I trust you?”

“You know you can trust me to put a bullet in your eye like I did to your buddies.”

The man looked down for a minute. “They told us Russia would attack. We were the vanguard.”

Caruso said, “You tried to kidnap the American last night in Tabariškės.”

He shook his head. “Other men in my unit. Not me.”

Now Dom asked, “Did you blow up the Independence?”

“The what?”

Chavez and Caruso both thought the man looked genuinely confused by the question.

Chavez said, “What about the train?”

“Wha… what train?”

Caruso said, “That looked like bullshit,” confirming what Chavez was himself thinking.

Chavez said, “What’s your name?”

“Luka.”

“Look, Luka. You can’t be lying to us. I just killed three men. At this point, killing one more would actually make things easier. We don’t have a car. I really don’t feel like carrying you to the hospital.”

Luka laid his head on the ground. “We were ordered to fire on the Russian troop transport. To wear the badge of the Polish People’s Lancers.”

Dom just mumbled softly. “Bingo.”

A minute later, Ding left the little shack and stood in the dark. He called Linus Sabonis’s mobile phone, ready to tell him to pick up the Serbian prisoner and give him the intel he just learned, but Sabonis didn’t answer. He called back again, and again it went to voice mail.

Frustrated, Ding called Sabonis’s second-in-command. He answered on the fifth ring. Ding started to tell him what was going on, but he didn’t even get to the part where they tailed the BMW away from the roadblock before the man interrupted him.

“I’m sorry, I have to go.”

Ding was surprised by the man’s nonchalance. “You’ve got something more important going on?”

“Actually, yes.” There was a slight pause. “Russian troops from Kaliningrad have entered Lithuania.” The man hung up.

Ding reentered the shack and looked at Dom. He said, “It’s showtime, brother. We are officially in a nation under attack.”

Dom looked down to Luka. “You’re on your own, asshole. Crawl down to the street and get a taxi to take you to the hospital, or else wait for the Russian tanks to save your ass. We’re outta here.”

“I’m hurt! I can’t walk!”

“Sucks to be you,” Caruso said, and he and Chavez left the injured man in the shack without another word.