Commander-In-Chief

  “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  “And Bob.” He looked back to Burgess.

  “Sir?”

  “Keep an eye on this general in Odessa. If you remember, Patton wasn’t involved in D-Day, but he sure as hell was involved a few months later, killing Germans at the Battle of the Bulge.”

  “I take your meaning, Mr. President.”

  • • •

  The deployment of the Black Sea Rotational Force had been discussed for days, so when the orders came down through the Marine Corps Commandant to MARFOREUR, the Marine Forces Europe, at its HQ in Germany, the lieutenant colonel in charge of the BSRF, only had to give the “Go” order.

  Lieutenant Colonel Rich Belanger was the battalion commander for the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment of the 1st Marine Division. Known as the Darkhorse Battalion, 3/5 had spent the last fifteen years fighting counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East. At forty-seven, Belanger was a quarter-century older than the majority of his men. Defending his nation for so long would give him a different perspective from that of his younger men in most situations, but now his age had a special relevance. Back when Belanger was a young “butter bar” lieutenant, he spent virtually all his time getting drilled in the ins and outs of Soviet doctrine and Eastern Bloc military hardware. In the late eighties there was no secret who the principal enemy of the United States was, and where a potential war would likely be fought.

  But for the young men in his battalion now, the world looked very different. Belanger’s Marines with battle experience had learned the savageries of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet it was an altogether different kind of enemy, terrain, and warfare from what they would experience here in Central Europe if the Russians invaded a NATO country.

  From the moment Belanger knew the storied Darkhorse Battalion would assume watch in the Black Sea Rotational Force, he’d gone to work on retraining and altering the mind-set of his Marines, impressing on them the different type of fighting they would do, because he alone appreciated what they were getting into.

  Afghanistan sucked. The enemy was real and the threats were pervasive. That said, nobody in Afghanistan ever talked about enemy tanks, or worse, enemy air.

  Here in Europe, with Russia as an adversary, tanks and air was pretty much all anyone talked about.

  A different kind of enemy altogether.

  An insurgent’s IED in Afghanistan could take out a squad, but a battery of Russian 2S19 artillery could take out a company.

  As soon as he was given the heads-up that his force and his force alone might be heading into eastern Lithuania, Belanger did the unexpected. He spent almost all his time with his logistics and supply units, and left the finishing touches of precombat checks to his company commanders.

  He gave his infantry leaders a detailed intent on what he wanted them to do, and trusted them to take care of business. Then he focused on freeing up the critical equipment he knew no one in EUCOM’s area of operations would be willing to part with.

  He knew this coming fight demanded a lot more of the big stuff.

  He ordered his logistics and supply officers to get every antitank weapon they could lay their hands on. He chastised the logistics officer personally for his lack of audacity in the first twelve hours, put him on the shit list for taking his time, and told him he’d better get cracking and get creative immediately.

  It worked.

  One week later the Darkhorse had extra TOW missiles, extra Stingers, more machine-gun ammo, extra 120-millimeter and 81-millimeter high-explosive mortar rounds, and loads of smoke rounds. The logistics officer had somehow even teased out a stash of old Romanian land mines.

  Lieutenant Colonel Rich Belanger’s logistics officer had spent virtually every moment of the past week “augmenting” his battalion, both officially, by obtaining additional tanks positioned in Stuttgart but unattached to NATO, and unofficially, by procuring everything from extra encrypted radios to bandages from wherever he and his staff could scrounge them. They even “borrowed” extra American Javelin antitank missiles that had been stored in U.S. Army forward munitions bunkers.

  Belanger looked down the final list of all the goodies his logistics officer had brought him, then looked up from his desk with a smile.

  “You need me to sign for all this, Captain?”

  The captain shook his head. “Probably better if you didn’t.”

  With a wink Belanger said, “I like your style. You’re off my shit list.”

  Belanger knew he’d be getting some phone calls later, but he also knew it was easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.

  • • •

  When the time finally came to pull the trigger to move into Lithuania, the Darkhorse Battalion moved faster and fatter than Belanger’s wildest dreams. Days earlier they relocated to Poland, to within three hundred miles of their forward deployment positions, and this gave BSRF the option of “organic lift.” Belanger task-organized his battalion so they could arrive in the battle space ready to deploy and fight immediately if need be.

  The battalion consisted of a headquarters and service company, a weapons company, and three rifle companies: India, Kilo, and Lima. Their tanks had been moved to the Polish border two days earlier, along with the vehicles attached to the Headquarters and Service Company, so it was only a three-hour drive to Vilnius.

  A dozen tilt-rotor V-22 Ospreys and six C-130 Hercules cargo planes landed at airports in Vilnius, Paluknys, and Molėtai, beginning at midnight, with Harrier jets and Cobra helicopters flying combat air support during the lift to protect them if the Russians moved air over the border. Belanger didn’t know how long he’d have the air cover, but he appreciated it on the ingress, unsure what he would find when he got into position.

  The remainder of the H&S Company, along with the beans, bullets, and Band-Aids, traveled in up-armored Humvees and seven-ton trucks from Poland. This ground force did not have a rifle company with them, but all Marine Corps units were trained to protect themselves, even the diesel mechanics and bulk-fuel operators who drove H&S’s trucks. The Corps believed every Marine was a rifleman first, and the truckers always thought of themselves as riflemen and machine gunners who also knew how to turn wrenches, and not the other way around.

  Rich Belanger did not travel with his H&S company. He entered Lithuania on the third Osprey to pass into Lithuanian airspace, and he wore the same basic loadout as the rest of his men: an M4 carbine, eight thirty-round magazines, a Beretta M9 pistol, and body armor.

  The security of this operation had been as solid as the military could possibly make it, but there was no way to move twelve hundred Marines and their equipment into a nation the size of Lithuania, employing civilian airports, overflying cities, and rolling Humvees and tanks down the roads without the enemy getting wind of it. Belanger knew the Russians would be aware of this surprise deployment long before dawn rose over Moscow, and he wondered what this would mean for him and his men. Would the Sixth Army return to Russia from Belarus in the east, and go back to their barracks in Kaliningrad, or would the arrival of the Marines have the opposite effect, encouraging the Russians to attack when they would not have otherwise?

  Belanger had been given the GPS coordinates to use for positioning created by the EARLY SENTINEL program at the NGA, although as far as he knew this was just information created by Pentagon planners, typical in any such deployment. Still, the specificity of the deployment order was a surprise to Belanger, his company commanders, and their lieutenants.

  Belanger held his men back from these positions, however, and moved instead to positions just north of Vilnius. There were three camps in total, one for each of his three rifle companies; each camp also contained supporting tanks, Cobra gunships, and platoons of antitank weapons and mortars from the weapons company. From here they could quickly move into even more advanced staging areas, as intelligence about the location of the Russ
ian forces on the other side of the border improved.

  As soon as it was decided just where the Russian armor spearheads would breach the border, Belanger would task his three companies accordingly, filling in behind and around the meager Lithuanian forces already at the border and doing all they could to ready themselves for the Russians’ assault.

  Three hours after arriving in the country, Belanger paced around his command center. It was a high school gymnasium, and a hell of a lot nicer than most places where he’d worked on his half-dozen tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Still, Rich Belanger knew he was in range of Russian missile batteries inside Belarus, as well as ballistic missile batteries in Kaliningrad.

  As he paced, he thought over his tactical situation. He was the battle-space commander, but the reality was he knew if he stayed in fixed positions to fight, he and his twelve hundred men would be little more than a speed bump against the Russian onslaught.

  Political forces would dictate Belanger’s long-term prospects, but in the short term, he was in charge of his own destiny, and he knew there was only one way to success, one chance to outlive his opponents for the next seventy-two hours.

  Shoot and scoot.

  He knew he and his battalion would live longer if they kept moving, but for now, they just needed that critical piece of information that would tell them where to move to.

  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 aft
er 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.