Commander-In-Chief

  He had put on an air of nonchalance with both his bodyguard and the two contractors shadowing him this evening, but the fact was he wasn’t taking this lightly at all. He knew he was pushing his luck being here now, and the last thing he wanted to do was hang out here after dark. But his cell of agents here near the border was more important than ever. Not just because they could send him information in advance of an invasion, but if NATO did not rush up and save the day, if the Russians poked holes in the eight-foot-tall wire fence that was the only thing separating a hundred villages like this from the Sixth Army, then this cell would be absolutely crucial working behind the lines in Russian-held Lithuania.

  He had to be here, he had to do this, and if he got his ass shot off in the process—well, he told himself, he’d ignored his dad’s advice to go to dental school, so it would be his own damn fault.

  Dom Caruso and Ding Chavez sat in their black Toyota Land Cruiser, parked on a hill 550 yards to the west of the mustard-colored church. Chavez had pulled off the main road and up a hill into an abandoned junkyard, then continued out into an open field, finally stopping in a copse of trees. He turned off the engine and listened to the sound of the rain on the roof of the vehicle.

  Through the enhancement of the 500-millimeter lens of his camera propped in the partially open window, Dom could easily make out the scene to the northeast of their position: Branyon leaning on the hood of the white Mercedes SUV with an umbrella in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and his close protection officer disappearing alone into the church.

  Dom said, “Can you freakin’ believe it? The CIA station chief heading all the way out here in the boonies like this?”

  Chavez agreed. “I know why he’s doing it, but it’s the wrong call.”

  “I guess he thinks he’s invincible.”

  “All we can do is hope he is. If there are Little Green Men out here, or any of the local pro-Russian civilians, knowing that the Agency chief for the entire country is wandering around this remote area with a target on his head is almost too good to pass up.”

  Dom asked, “Do we want to think about moving closer? Just in case?”

  Chavez held his own camera up now, focused in on the church in the distance. “No. Branyon was right about us not entering the village. If there are bad guys around, we’d be made in two seconds flat. Plus, I like our view here. If we break off to get closer we’ll lose sight of him for two or three minutes. Let’s just keep watch.”

  Within a few seconds, however, Dom noticed a pair of big covered flatbed trucks pulling out of a tree line due south of the village. They began moving over fallow farmland, three hundred yards east of the church. They seemed to be heading directly toward Branyon and Donlin in the middle of the village, and they were increasing speed over the mud and tilled earth.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked. Chavez had been looking up the road to the west, but he oriented his camera on the trucks. Quickly he said, “Call Donlin.”

  Caruso lowered his camera and yanked his phone from his jacket. Quickly he dialed Greg Donlin’s number. He held the phone to his ear for several seconds, then checked it.

  “Can’t get a signal.”

  “Use the sat phone.”

  Dom spun around, grabbed his Maxpedition bag, and yanked it into the front seat with him. His Thuraya phone was in its waterproof case in an inner pocket. “It’s going to take me a minute to get through.”

  Ding just watched the trucks get closer through the rain. “Do it, anyway. We don’t know for sure what’s happening.”

  • • •

  Branyon stood up from the hood of the SUV, turned around and looked back over his shoulder. He saw a row of homes with white fences in front of them, and a line of big oak trees behind them. He thought he heard the noise of a vehicle somewhere back there, which was strange, because he’d been here before, he’d studied the map, and he knew it was nothing but farmland on the south side of the trees.

  Just then, a single gunshot cracked inside the church, spinning Branyon’s head in the direction of the noise. The cigarette flew from his mouth and he threw the umbrella to the side. His hand went inside his jacket and formed around the butt of his compact Glock 26 pistol, but before he could draw it the front door of the church flew open and Greg Donlin appeared in the doorway at a run. He shouted, “Get out of here!”

  Branyon ran around to the driver’s side, jumped behind the wheel, and fired up the engine. Directly in front of him Donlin ran through the cemetery in front of the church, his own pistol pointed back behind him at the door.

  From the darkened doorway came a flash, then the pounding beat of a single rifle shot. Donlin stumbled in his run, then he fell onto the gravel of the drive. His body stilled.

  “Fuck!” Branyon screamed, then he threw the Mercedes into gear and spun the tires, racing forward, trying to get to Donlin. He had no plan for pulling the big man into the vehicle while under fire from less than one hundred feet away, but he was operating on impulse now.

  Another burst of gunfire came out of the church. Branyon assumed whoever was there was shooting at him, as the Mercedes was only twenty-five yards from the front door. But looking at Donlin’s still form lying facedown in the drive, illuminated by the headlights of the Mercedes, Branyon saw mud and rock kicked up around him.

  Someone was firing an automatic rifle, not at Branyon or his SUV, but at Donlin’s body.

  Pete Branyon saw his bodyguard’s lifeless form kick up with the impact of the bullets. Blood splattered the brown gravel around him.

  The CIA station chief screamed again in fury, then stomped down hard on the brake pedal, skidding on the loose gravel and puddles of water. He threw the SUV into reverse and punched the gas, backed down the drive and into the street, then executed a three-point turn and shoved the gear shift into first. Stomping the gas to the floor now, he took off to the west.

  He made it less than seventy-five yards. At the first intersection a large truck with a canvas bed top appeared around a building on his left, and it slammed into the left front of the Mercedes SUV, spinning it around on the street. Branyon’s head smacked the door pillar by his head so hard he saw stars in front of his eyes.

  The Mercedes stalled out in the middle of the intersection. Branyon was dazed, but he was still able to draw his Glock 26. He raised it at the movement in the headlights in front of him, but just as he did so, the passenger-side window exploded on his right. He turned to point his weapon at the noise, expecting to see an armed man there taking aim, but instead he saw something else.

  In the front passenger seat, just a foot or so from where Branyon sat behind the wheel, was a flash-bang grenade. The pull ring was missing.

  The device exploded in the confined space, blinding Branyon with light and disorienting his ears with a shrieking ring.

  • • •

  Chavez and Caruso watched helplessly as the action unfolded 550 yards away. It was tough to see the entire scene in the poor light and heavy rain, but when the CIA station chief was dragged from his vehicle by several men in civilian dress and carried in front of the headlights of the Mercedes, both Chavez and Caruso saw movement in Branyon’s arms and legs.

  Chavez said, “He’s alive!”

  Caruso spoke through a jaw tight with frustration. “A fucking kidnapping.”

  Chavez said, “And those aren’t local yokels. That was slick as bird shit.”

  “Spetsnaz,” Dom said.

  “Or something like them,” Chavez agreed. “We can’t lose visibility till we see which direction they’re heading.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  Chavez fired up the engine of the Land Cruiser. “Donlin’s dead. We go after Branyon.”

  “Roger that.”

  The two canvas-covered trucks headed east down the main road out of the village, directly toward the tree line, which was no longe
r visible to the Americans in the low light. But they didn’t need to see the trees to know the fence line separating Lithuania from Belarus was just beyond, and they didn’t have to jump to any great conclusions to figure out what was happening.

  Pete Branyon was being taken back over the border.

  Chavez threw the Land Cruiser into gear and launched forward, heading down the hill through the center of the farmland that ran along south of the village. “If we don’t run into any natural obstacles we can beat them to the border.”

  Dom asked, “Are we going to shoot it out with Spetsnaz?”

  Chavez said, “If the Russians get the CoS they will know the name of every U.S. asset in this country. When they take Lithuania they can scour the nation to remove all our eyes and ears.”

  Dom nodded as they bounced along the uneven ground, splashing through low mud puddles and up over small levees dividing the fields. He struggled to grab one of the rifles in the backseat. Once he had it in his hand he said, “We’re not going to let that happen.”

  49

  Chavez and Caruso had spent the last five minutes slamming around the inside of their Land Cruiser as it hurtled along through a rain-soaked pasture just a quarter-mile from Lithuania’s border with Belarus. Even though they wore their seat belts, their upper torsos and appendages had been battered by the impacts of the relentless crashing as the big off-road-capable vehicle dipped and lurched and splashed and skidded along.

  They drove without their lights, which had not been such a problem just five minutes earlier, but the last of the light was leaving the sky now, and as Chavez looked from behind the wheel toward the scene in front of him, he realized he was about one minute away from leaving the open field and plunging into a dense forest, and at that point he had to either flip on his headlights or slow down considerably.

  He didn’t want to slow, but he sure as hell did not want to turn on his lights, because the two big trucks were dead ahead, following a road that led due south to the border, and there was no one else out here. Turning on the Land Cruiser’s headlights would reveal the presence of the Americans to Branyon’s kidnappers.

  Ding saw where they were going, and he wished he could have just veered to his right, to continue along the field to a convergence point with the trucks. But he realized that this wasn’t possible. A small creek, not more than fifteen feet wide, twisted through the farmland just this side of the road Branyon was being taken along, and the only way to reach the road from where Ding now drove was to cross a small bridge right in front of him.

  This meant he’d have to pull onto the road a couple hundred yards behind the Russians and then just chase them. It looked from here like it was a gravel surface, but even on gravel Chavez felt confident he could overtake the trucks, if given enough time.

  His problem, however, was that the road entered the forest soon after the bridge, and neither he nor Dom had any idea what they would find in the forest between them and the border fence.

  And their troubles didn’t end there. As soon as they took off in pursuit of Branyon, Dom had tried to call the U.S. embassy in Vilnius. He wanted them to send help in the form of local police, national military, or even U.S. embassy Marines or CIA security officers.

  But his phone still would not get a signal. After trying twice while he bounced along as a passenger in the vehicle, he stowed his mobile and pulled out his sat phone. He fired it up and dialed the embassy, but to his astonishment, this signal would not go through, either.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me! No sat signal, either! Are we on the fucking moon?”

  Chavez kept driving, his eyes wide to catch as much light as possible in case he needed to avoid anything in the pasture in front of him. “They jammed it.”

  “Jammed it?”

  “Yeah. Somebody has to have a big piece of equipment to jam a sat phone, or else they have to be close.”

  Dom said, “Maybe that’s what all those foreigners people reported seeing have been up to. They could have planted remote jammers in the towns along the border. Ready to switch them on the moment the shit hits the fan.” He slipped his sat phone back into his coat now. “It’s just us, then.”

  “Yep,” Chavez confirmed.

  “How many did you count in that group?”

  Ding thought it over for a second. “Including drivers . . . eight to ten.”

  “That’s what I came up with.” He blew out a long sigh. “Jesus.”

  Chavez had to slow during the last thirty seconds before he arrived at the little bridge over the creek because visibility was so bad, but once he got over the bridge and onto the gravel north-south road, he was able to pick up the pace. The taillights of the rear truck were close to three hundred yards ahead now, so Chavez increased the speed of the Land Cruiser. Through the rain he could barely see his way ahead, but he just concentrated on holding the wheel steady and making sure those lights in the distance did not stop abruptly.

  As Chavez drove, Dom said, “If they have a way through the border fence already prepared, then they are just going to drive on through. Are we going over the border after them?”

  “No,” Chavez said. “That would be suicide. You know they’ll have people there ready to reseal the border, and we’d be driving right into them.” After saying this Chavez stepped down even harder on the pedal, speeding his Land Cruiser up, desperate to reach Branyon and his captors before it was too late.

  Dom had been looking at the map of the area, and he spoke up when they were just a few hundred yards from entering the forest. “The border is two hundred yards beyond the trees. You think these kidnappers will set security?”

  Chavez thought about it for a moment, then began to slow down. “Yeah, good call. Those guys are well trained. If they have to park and get over that fence somehow, they’ll know to have someone watching their six.”

  Instead of pulling over to the side of the road, Ding just came to a complete stop in the middle of the lane, the grille of the big SUV just inside the start of the trees. They sat there for a moment, rolling down their windows to listen for any noise.

  They heard nothing but the steady rain.

  Caruso disabled the interior light before they quietly opened their doors; then each man climbed out with a rifle in his hand and a Glock 17 pistol jammed in his waistband. They both reached into their gym bags and pulled out two extra magazines for the rifle and one more for the pistol, and stowed the added gear in various pockets.

  Each of the two Campus operators now had ninety rounds of rifle ammo and fifty-two rounds of pistol ammunition. This would be a lot of ammo for most any imaginable scenario, but neither Caruso nor Chavez felt confident in their ability to defeat eight to ten well-trained operators with their weapons in hand.

  Still, they both knew they needed to get moving. They pushed their way into the trees going just west of the north-south road, planning to skirt anyone left on the gravel road as a sentry to watch for approaching traffic.

  As they moved through the woods the rain picked up dramatically. It obscured their vision ahead, but they also knew the rain made it tougher for the opposition to see or hear, so they welcomed the bad weather.

  After just three minutes of quiet movement, Caruso grabbed Chavez by his forearm and both men dropped to their knees. He said, “Lights ahead.”

  Ding squinted into the darkness; he saw nothing, but he trusted Caruso’s eyes over his own, since Caruso was fifteen years younger.

  Both men slung their rifles on their backs, reached into their packs, and pulled out monoculars. Ding’s was a fat rubber device that looked like half of a set of waterproof binoculars, with a battery pack on the bottom. It was a FLIR scope, capable of picking up heat sources in darkness or behind thin concealment.

  Dom’s device was a three-power fourth-generation night-vision monocular. It rendered the blacked-out area in front of him in soft green hue
s. The image was essentially two-dimensional, but it provided excellent illumination in the darkness.

  At first all either man saw was more trees, but after another two minutes to get into position, they arrived fifty yards away from the two trucks, finding them parked in front of a small cabin in the trees. Next to the cabin, a tiny barn was open on both sides.

  And just beyond the two trucks and the two structures, Dom saw the eight-foot-high metal fence that separated Belarus from Lithuania.

  The Campus men crawled forward a little more, just until they each had a good position on the floor of the forest—Ding behind a large pine tree, and Dom down behind a fat root system sticking out of the mud at the base of a partially felled maple.

  The men were a dozen feet from each other, but close enough to see hand signals or converge quickly if they needed to speak.

  Chavez held his FLIR monocular up to his eye. As soon as he directed it in the right area, he saw several men running along next to the cabin. The motion had drawn his attention, but when the men disappeared around the other side, he lost them, so he scanned back toward the location of the two trucks. The first vehicle seemed to be empty except for a driver sitting behind the wheel. The second vehicle also had a driver, but in the back, through the canvas wall of the vehicle, Ding could make out a large luminescent blob in his optic. He knew this would be several men, at least three or four, sitting close together on the bench in the back of the vehicle.

  He assumed Branyon would be in the middle of the pack, surrounded by kidnappers.

  Chavez estimated there were ten men at this location other than Branyon, which was the high end of their earlier estimate, but at least it meant the kidnappers had not picked up any more gunmen who’d been back here waiting for the trucks to return.

  • • •

  While Chavez had been scanning the driveway and the house and barn with his FLIR, Caruso had been using his night-vision monocular to look at the fence line in the distance. It was only sixty or seventy yards away from where he now lay, so he had a decent view of all of it except the portion he could not see on the other side of the house.