Commander-In-Chief

  As near as Dom could tell, there was no breach in the fence at all.

  He crawled over to Chavez. “You can’t see the fence through that, can you?”

  “Not at all. I see people, and I see warm truck engines. That’s it.”

  Caruso nodded. “Well, I don’t think these fuckers have cut a hole in the fence. You think they are going to climb it?”

  Just as he asked this, both men could hear the noise from an engine, its low rumble growing out of the sound of the heavy rain.

  The men put their optics back up to their eyes and trained them on the scene. Three men removed Branyon from the rear vehicle. His arms were bound behind his back and he wore a bag over his head.

  And beyond the fence, a large truck pulling a trailer came into view. On the trailer was a crane with a basket: a medium-sized cherry picker. The truck began a slow process of backing through the mud in the heavy rain, positioning the trailer right up to the metal fence.

  Chavez said, “There’s your answer.”

  Caruso cussed. “Shit. They’re about to take him over. We’re going to have to engage them right now.”

  “Yeah,” replied Chavez. Quickly, he reached into his Maxpedition bag and retrieved a roll of duct tape. He laid his rifle on the wet ground, quietly removed a long strip of the tape, and began to wrap his infrared monocular onto the left side of the weapon.

  Caruso watched this for a moment. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Poor man’s nightscope, I guess. Better than nothing.”

  Caruso said, “If you are trying to make it a scope, why aren’t you putting it on top of the weapon?”

  “I still need to use the iron sights, for distance. This will be helpful for close in. I’ll aim left when I shoot.”

  Caruso shrugged, took tape from Ding’s roll, and attached his night-vision monocular to his simple Kalashnikov rifle in the same fashion.

  As he did this, Chavez said, “We need to separate. It might make them think there are more of us.”

  Caruso nodded. “Okay. You’re a better shot than me. I’ll move off to the west, try to flank them and get a little closer.”

  Chavez whispered, “I’ll move closer to the road, I’ll have a more complete sightline on their poz there. I’ll engage from seventy-five yards or so, any further out in these conditions and I might hit the CoS. I’ll wait till I see as many of them together and as close to the light as possible, and then I’m going to open fire, left to right. You follow my lead, shooting right to left.

  “Watch out for Branyon, okay?”

  Caruso looked to Chavez. “We can’t let him fall into the Russians’ hands.”

  Chavez shook his head. “Don’t even think about it. I’m not shooting a CIA officer, and neither are you. You do have a green light on any combatant you see. Do what you have to do.”

  Dom nodded slowly. “Roger that, Ding.” And then he held out a hand to Ding. “Let’s do it.”

  The two men slapped hands and pounded fists. Chavez said, “Sixty seconds. On my ‘Go.’ Don’t fuck it up.”

  Dom rolled off to the right and began to crawl away quickly with his rifle on his back.

  50

  Pete Branyon knew his ribs were broken, several, in fact, all on his right side. He could feel an awkward and painful catch every time he took even a shallow breath. He had a broken tooth, at least one, and as bad as this was, it was even worse because he had a gag in his mouth and had been working for five minutes to dispel the tooth through the fabric before he swallowed it. This, and a blow to his nose that left it swollen and bloody, had made Branyon concentrate on little besides breathing for the past few minutes.

  He finally managed to use his tongue to push the broken tooth fragment out through the gag in his mouth. It made its way out onto his lower lip and became stuck there on the thick blood that had been pouring out of his nose.

  He’d taken a rifle butt to the side of his head ten minutes earlier for trying to escape out the back of the moving truck. The broken ribs came in the initial assault, when he’d been dragged out of his Mercedes disoriented and he’d had the side of his body slammed on the running board of the SUV.

  He didn’t remember how he hurt his nose, which meant it might have been when the flash-bang rendered him stupid for a good ten seconds. Hell, for all he knew he’d caught a fist or a rifle butt right to the snout the moment the men reached in for him.

  And now, through the pain and the continued disorientation, he understood the kidnappers’ plan. They were going to lower a cherry picker over the metal fence between Belarus and Lithuania, toss him in it, and pull him back over.

  God damn it, Branyon thought. His concern about his own situation was secondary; in fact, he wasn’t thinking about it at all at the moment. Instead, running through his mind now were the names of all the agents in his network, the CIA NOC officers under him, the Lithuanian SSD intelligence operatives he’d worked with in the nation, and dozens of other agents and assets, and codes, safe houses, and other compromising information.

  He knew he couldn’t let them take him over the border. At least not while he was still alive.

  As they pushed him toward the cherry picker, his shoulders still wrenched halfway out of their sockets with his arms tight behind his back, he decided he’d try to break away again, to make another run for it, this time through these dark woods. He knew he wouldn’t get fifty feet, but he thought he just might get lucky and coax one of these amped-up armed men to raise his rifle and fire at the escaping prisoner.

  Dead men told no tales, and Branyon knew he had a lot of tales in his head.

  Twenty feet from the border fence, one of the two men with a hand on his shoulder loosened his grip for a moment. Branyon had been submissive since they’d beat him during his escape attempt in the truck, and his compliance had led the one man into relaxing his guard now that at least half a dozen other men were standing around.

  Branyon took two more steps through the mud, then ducked his head and slammed his left shoulder hard into the man who was holding his arm tight, simultaneously breaking away from the first man. He knocked the man on his left to the wet ground with the hard blow, then turned away from the fence and the armed men standing around, and he began to run down the gravel road, back in the direction the trucks had come from.

  • • •

  Ding had pulled the key fob for the Toyota Land Cruiser out of his pocket. He used his other hand to line his weapon up on the cluster of four men next to the border fence, some twenty-five feet away from the cherry picker, and he pressed the remote engine start on the fob.

  A second later the lights of the Land Cruiser, two hundred yards back through the trees, illuminated the scene, casting distant ghostly shadows through the trees. Instantly some of the men by the fence turned and looked in the direction of the light.

  Others were running after a man who himself was running in Chavez’s direction on the gravel road.

  Ding realized it was Branyon, and he realized the men behind him would have him in seconds.

  There wasn’t much illumination, but there was enough to help Chavez line the front blade sight of his AK-47 up on the group of men. He flipped the fire selector switch down to semiautomatic, and he opened fire.

  • • •

  Dom Caruso knew the light from the Land Cruiser was Chavez’s “Go,” his cue to engage. Dom had moved himself much farther to the west than he had planned to, but the noise of the heavy rain and the relatively clean forest floor made it easier for him to move than he’d expected.

  As the gunfire started from Chavez’s side, Caruso was about to engage the man closest to him. But just then both trucks began moving. They lurched forward, toward the men by the cherry picker, either so they could climb in or else to provide cover for them.

  Quickly, Caruso got an idea. He centered his front blade on t
he driver of the first vehicle, then he squeezed off a single round. At fifty-five yards he hit the man in the right temple, toppling him dead against his driver’s-side window and spilling him to the floor of his cab.

  His truck continued to roll toward the other men. Caruso knew this would be an added distraction for the nine gunmen, a distraction he, Chavez, and Branyon could use right about now.

  He slipped his right thumb on his weapon’s fire selector lever, and he flipped it up to the fully automatic setting. Just as intense gunfire began, all in the direction of Ding Chavez, Dom Caruso leveled the rifle on a group of men lying prone in front of the fence, and he pressed the trigger.

  • • •

  Chavez found himself flat on his face behind a tree. He was impressed as hell with the quality of the shooting of the men some seventy yards away. They’d seen his muzzle flashes through the trees and pinned him down in mere seconds.

  Realizing he didn’t have any choice but to withdraw, he launched to his feet and began to run through the woods, zigzagging as he retreated. He heard the chatter of gunfire back behind him, and the hot zings of bullets whizzing past, but he continued his run for five full steps before diving forward and sliding between two more trees. Here he went flat, spun around, and used his FLIR taped to the side of his rifle.

  He saw men prone in the distance, and he saw others on their knees, most firing off toward the west in Dom Caruso’s direction. The muzzle flashes were huge in Chavez’s optic.

  He also saw one other form, lying on the east side of the gravel road, crouched down in a small gulley. The man had both hands behind his back. Chavez knew it had to be Pete Branyon.

  After seeing this, Chavez rolled out on the other side of the pine he hid behind and he finished off his magazine in fully automatic fire, spraying the area by the fence with the other gunmen. When his weapon went dry, he tucked tight behind the tree and began reloading from his last magazine.

  • • •

  When he only had a few rounds left in his second mag, Caruso peered quickly through the night-vision monocular and saw a man climb out of the cabin of the cherry picker and raise his head above the metal fence. He pointed a pistol in the direction Branyon had run, back near the gravel road. Caruso moved his eye to his sight, lined it up on the flash of the man’s handgun, and moved his weapon a fraction of an inch to the right. He squeezed off three rounds just as fast as he could control his AK’s recoil.

  Checking his scope again, Caruso didn’t see anyone peering over the fence there. He knew he couldn’t be sure if he’d hit the operator of the cherry picker, or if there was anyone else who knew how to work the machine, but he had a feeling he’d bought Branyon some time.

  Dom clicked his last magazine into place as he ran through the woods, back toward Chavez, Branyon, and the Land Cruiser.

  • • •

  Pete Branyon lay facedown in the mud as crashing gunfire rocked all around. Right in front of him one of his kidnappers lay on his side, desperately holding a wound on his neck with his hand as blood spurted between his fingers.

  Branyon had never been in a gun battle; he’d never seen a man die. He couldn’t believe the ungodly noise of everything going off around him, and he saw no way out of this for himself. He wasn’t sure who was shooting back at his attackers, but he thought briefly about standing up in the middle of the fire, hoping he might get shot in the head so he wouldn’t be dragged over the border.

  But he stopped himself. Somebody in the trees was fighting like hell on his behalf; he realized the least he could do in return was not commit fucking suicide in the middle of the battle.

  • • •

  Chavez had been leapfrogging through the trees, moving to his right now, away from Branyon, trying to draw attention and fire from the restrained man lying in the little gulley. Chavez would move only three or four steps at a time, then drop flat, roll behind some sort of cover, and pop out to aim. The forest was thick enough that he could not just reach his weapon back around toward the shack and the trucks and spray—the bullets would just hit other trees. Instead, he picked his targets, using muzzle flashes to guide him, then he’d squeeze off three or four rounds in the direction of the flashes. He knew he was expelling ammunition too fast for the number of attackers, but by creating consistent muzzle flashes in a number of different locations in these woods, he felt he could give the men the impression they were facing more opposition, and this might help encourage them to keep their heads down and slow their return fire.

  He made one more bound to the right, slid on the ground, and aimed toward the muzzle flashes in the distance. He squeezed the trigger of the AK-47, and the weapon did not fire.

  He was out of ammo.

  Just then Chavez heard a noise in the trees on his right. He reached down to the Glock 17 jammed in his jeans and drew it, but before he could level it at the approaching sound he heard someone call out to him.

  “Hold fire, brother! It’s me.”

  Caruso slid up next to him in the thick mud and wet, matted leaves. He was holding his pistol in his hand as well. “You hit?”

  “I’m good, but these bastards sure can shoot.”

  Just then a massive chunk of pine bark blew off the trunk three feet above Caruso’s head. Both men ducked lower.

  “No shit,” Caruso said. “We’ve thinned the herd. I think there are four or five left. Have you seen the CoS?”

  “Yeah. Down in a gulley just off the road. Alive, the last time I saw him.”

  “What do you want to do?” Dom asked.

  Chavez didn’t hesitate. He pulled the key fob out of his pocket and put it in Caruso’s hand. “You’re faster, I shoot better.”

  “So?”

  “I’m going for Branyon, you’re going for the truck. Turn the lights off and roll up to fifty yards from the cabin. I’ll be there with Branyon . . . or neither of us are coming. If you don’t see us when you get there, take off and don’t look back.”

  Dom just said, “Sure I will,” and he began to run through the trees back in the direction of the Land Cruiser.

  Chavez had no confidence Caruso would just leave if Chavez and Branyon didn’t show up at the rally point. No, Caruso would fight until his last breath to save his teammate and the CoS.

  Chavez reloaded the Glock, leapt to his feet, and began leapfrogging through the trees back in the direction of Pete Branyon.

  • • •

  Branyon struggled out of the ditch with his arms secured behind his back during a lull in the shooting, then rolled into the trees on his right. He was fifty feet away from where he’d heard the last gunfire behind him at the fence, which wasn’t far at all, but at least he felt like the way forward was clear of gunmen.

  Just as he stood to run, constrained by the bindings on his wrists behind his back, he heard a new volley of fire, coming from multiple rifles, all behind him.

  He decided to drop in his run, but he had to do this with care with his hands behind his back. Just as he began to lower down, he heard the banging and ripping sounds of bullets tearing into the trees around him.

  He fell to his knees and pitched himself forward. Then he felt an incredible blow to his right shoulder—so hard it spun him around and he landed on his back on the wet ground.

  It took a moment to realize he’d been shot, but when he did he found himself surprisingly calm about it. He just lay there, staring into the black above, feeling the rain on his face, and waiting for the pain to grow right where he’d felt the dull blow.

  But there was no pain.

  He heard new gunfire now, closer, on the other side. Seconds later he saw the flashes of light as someone stood over him, shooting. He couldn’t make out the image, the light had blinded him, but he felt spent cartridges bouncing off his chest, and he wondered why it was he couldn’t feel the bullets tearing into his body.

  What he di
d feel now, however, was a hand, grabbing him by his injured shoulder. Suddenly an electric pain came from nowhere, blinding him, as he was lifted off the ground by someone grabbing him at his wound.

  He found himself on his feet now. Someone was pulling him backward for a moment, coaxing him on, and all the while the gunfire continued from the pistol in the hand of the man directing him.

  Branyon ran as fast as he could, using the other man for balance as he tried to stay upright on the unsteady footing.

  He and the other man must have run for thirty seconds before the man yanked Branyon to a stop alongside the gravel road.

  Sporadic gunfire back by the cabin continued, but the CoS realized the man with him was no longer returning fire.

  “Shoot!” Branyon shouted.

  “I’m out of ammo. Our ride should be here any sec. Hey, are you hit? There’s blood all over my hand.”

  Branyon recognized the voice of Domingo Chavez.

  In the darkness a black vehicle slid to a stop right next to them. As soon as it did, Branyon heard a car door open, and then he heard the sound of a bullet shattering the windshield.

  Chavez pushed him into the backseat, then leapt in on top of him, slamming right into Branyon’s torn shoulder.

  The CIA chief of station screamed in agony.

  Chavez said, “Go!”

  And then the black vehicle revved, spun mud and water, and began racing to the north in reverse.

  Branyon tried to climb up to a sitting position, but Chavez covered him with his body and held him down. “Stay put, Branyon! We’re not out of this yet!”

  • • •

  The Land Cruiser took five rounds to the grille, the engine, and the windshield before Caruso backed out of the forest and spun around, then turned on the headlights and stomped on the gas. They raced north on the gravel road that would take them back to Tabariškės, and from there they could hit the two-lane blacktop road that led all the way back to Vilnius.