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 Russian 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.