Commander-in-Chief

66

Everyone thought the Russian attack on Lithuania would begin with rockets launched from over the border from Belarus and Kaliningrad, followed by tanks and troops moving through border crossings along the highway. Attack aircraft and helicopters, it was assumed, would support the ground forces, and artillery would pound the way ahead.

But the opening salvo was something quite different indeed.

A previously scheduled Russian military train passing through Lithuania came to an unscheduled stop at a railway yard in the Paneriai forest, just southwest of Vilnius, not far from the airport. Because of the Russian train’s movement down the line, the massive rail yard’s normal security had been augmented by a platoon of Lithuanian Land Force riflemen, but these thirty men plus the dozen or so lightly armed security guards were no match for ninety-six tier-one Special Forces commandos from Russia’s Directorate “A” of the FSB Special Purpose Center on board the train. The dedicated counterterrorism unit was known in Russia as “Spetsgruppa A,” or Special Team Alpha, but around the world they were known as “Alpha Group.” These were the “Little Green Men” who had shown up in eastern Ukraine the year before, and the men Lithuanians had reported seeing near the borders for the past few weeks. Most of these sightings were erroneous; there were a few cross-border incursions, but the Little Green Men had waited till now to begin their direct action inside Lithuania’s borders.

The ninety-six members of Alpha Group on this train had been given two crucial missions for this first night of the invasion. Forty-eight of the men would climb into vehicles waiting here in the yard and drive into the capital itself. They would break into eight six-man fire teams and begin quickly blocking roads, initiating checkpoints, and essentially showing themselves to the citizens of Vilnius as they headed to work in the morning. The Russians wanted to instill chaos in the nation, to give the impression the invasion itself had already made it into the capital before anyone knew they were at war. Eight separate teams working in eight predetermined choke points could make the news by dawn and grind the city, and perhaps the entire country, to a halt by mid-morning.

Like much of Russia’s hybrid war, the operation was mostly for show, to create an impression of facts on the ground in order to change the actual facts on the ground.

The other forty-eight men of Alpha Group had a more direct operation planned. They, too, would climb into vehicles staged here at the station and then race to the east, taking back roads through the forest for the two and a half miles to Vilnius International Airport. Here they would break into four twelve-man units, with individual objectives. Two teams would hit opposite ends of the airfield to draw away the guard force and engage any military presence, while teams three and four would attack the terminal itself from opposite entrances, taking over the building and then setting up defensive positions in the shopping mall — sized space. The two fire teams would then attempt to link up and take over the control tower, thereby dominating the airport.

If all went according to plan, Russian follow-on troops from GRU (military intelligence) Spetsnaz units would land before dawn, resupplying and reinforcing the Alpha Group men already on site.

But first the Russians had to get off the train and to the airport. The Lithuanian troops defending the area were at first just confused by the fact that the big Russian train seemed to be slowing down as it approached the small station building in the center of the rail yard. The platoon commander’s first order was for his second-in-command to call someone back at base to ask what was going on. It wasn’t until the yard’s security force, men who were used to the Russian train sailing through the station at 100 kilometers an hour, dove to the ground and hid themselves behind railcars and cinder-block walls that the Land Force soldiers had a clue that they were in danger.

The soldiers followed the security men to defensive positions, albeit slowly, and when the Russian men in black began to leap from the still-moving train, firing on anything that moved in the station, the twenty-three-year-old commander of the Lithuanian platoon realized he didn’t have to wait for base to get back to him with orders.

He understood. The fucking war everyone in the nation had been talking about had just begun, right before his eyes.

Alpha Group snipers climbed onto the roof of several railcars and trained their long rifles, Sako TRG 22s outfitted with infrared scopes, on the scene before them. Within seconds they were picking off targets around the station and farther back in the rail yard, while below them the expert assaulters of Alpha Group began leapfrogging maneuvers to get distance from the train.

A Lithuanian machine gun began to bark from the roof of the station, raking the train with 7.62-millimeter rounds. One Russian was hit squarely in the elbow, ripping his arm off at the joint and spinning him to the ground, where he would bleed to death in minutes.

But the big FN-MAG machine gun, the Lithuanians’ most potent weapon at the scene against the now ninety-five invaders, was silenced after making the single kill. An assaulter on the ground lobbed a forty-millimeter high-explosive grenade from the underslung launcher below his Kalashnikov, and his shot landed perfectly in the sandbagged position, killing the Lithuanian gunner and wounding his reloader.

Within two minutes of the first shot at the rail yard, the lead squad of Alpha Group assaulters reached the station, having crossed several open tracks. They were down two men, and four other Russians lay dead or wounded on the tracks behind, but once the assaulters penetrated the station, the surviving Lithuanians, soldiers and security guards alike, were in full retreat, heading toward a pair of large warehouses to the northeast and then into the forest beyond.

The Russians did not pursue them; their orders were to conserve ammo; only the snipers remained on the train cars to scan with their infrared scopes to keep guard against a counterattack. While they did this, the assaulters rushed to a locked gate to the northwest of the station, shot it open with a shotgun blast, and then entered a large storage parking lot. Here, twenty brand-new Volvo XC-90 SUVs sat waiting for delivery to car dealerships all over the Baltic on two Peterbilt car carriers. Russia’s FSB men working for a logistics company in Sweden had purposefully held up customs paperwork, keeping the vehicles stuck in port in Klaipėda until the day before yesterday, thereby timing their arrival by train here for delivery.

The commander of the Alpha Group men had multiple sets of keys, and he passed them out to the drivers. The operators jammed themselves and their heavy equipment into the Volvos, using all three rows of seats and every cubic inch of cargo space to do so, then the twenty vehicles left the station, minus the dead and wounded they lost in the infiltration operation.

Lieutenant Colonel Rich Belanger got word about the successful infiltration of Russian Special Forces the way he normally learned about fast-moving intelligence in the field. Piecemeal and with as much conjecture and false reporting as genuine actionable intel. His Marines were all positioned to the east of Vilnius, they didn’t hear a word about the action at the train station until thirty minutes after the attack, and by that point the surviving Russian commandos were well clear of the station. No one knew where they had gone, but Lieutenant Colonel Rich Belanger realized that as troubling as enemy action behind him was, he needed to stay focused on his mission, the one thing he had some control over. The Belarusan border ten miles in front of him, and the 25,000 Russian troops positioned there.

The Lithuanians would just have to sort out the Russian deep-penetration mission on their own.