Chavez spoke in a normal voice in the Land Cruiser, knowing Dom would hear him in his earpiece. “I’m two klicks out from the roadblock. Still just the three vehicles tailing me?”
Dom had to speak louder, as he was riding on the bike, but his helmet muted much of the noise from the engine and the wind. “Affirmative. They are all lined up and following you like you’re the Pied Piper.”
“Good, keep an eye out for any joiners. We don’t know how many of these guys there are, and we don’t know their operational relationship with the Russians in the area, if any.”
“Roger that.”
The plan Chavez and Caruso had ironed out with the ARAS unit in charge of manning the roadblock to take down the foreign operators was for Chavez to drive his Land Cruiser under the pedestrian bridge over the four-lane road, then continue on past Vitebsko, a small street that ran off to the left. Once he passed, six ARAS police cruisers, each with two officers inside, would race out into the highway and block the road. Another half-dozen men would be up on the pedestrian bridge over the highway, armed with powerful spotlights, HK G36 rifles, and Benelli shotguns.
There were eighteen in the ARAS force in total, not ideal as far as Chavez was concerned, but it appeared the group following him in three cars would not be anticipating the ambush, so he thought the plan reasonable considering the threat.
Traffic was virtually nonexistent on this stretch of the highway now, and both Chavez and Caruso were thankful for this. The ARAS roadblock would catch anyone driving by once it was sprung, so if the men in the three cars tailing Chavez decided to fight it out, civilians might well be caught in the crossfire if there had been much traffic.
Ding called Dom over his earpiece. “Okay, I can see the pedestrian bridge ahead. You need to back off now so you don’t end up downrange if the shooting starts.”
Caruso did as Chavez instructed, slowing his motorcycle to a crawl on the road. He watched the taillights of the BMW SUV, the third of the three vehicles in the tail, get farther and farther away.
Dom decided to proactively block the road so no one else got closer. He turned his bike around, and shined the headlight back toward any oncoming traffic. And he pulled out a flashlight from his jacket. He climbed off his bike and stepped into the next lane, then began waiting for cars.
Chavez passed under the pedestrian bridge that represented the opening jaw of the Lithuanian federal antiterrorist team’s trap, and he kept rolling through, passing Vitebsko Street on his left, and continuing on. He looked in his rearview mirror and saw the lights of the first vehicle behind him, some 150 yards back. It was racing right into the trap.
The gray Škoda passed first under the pedestrian bridge, and just as it did so, a row of Lithuanian police cars raced out in front of it, covered all four lanes, and screeched to a halt. The Škoda skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, and behind it, the black Ford four-door did the same.
Men leapt from the police cars, swinging rifles out in front of them and leveling them toward the three vehicles, while just behind the Škoda and the Ford, the black BMW X3 pulled to a more controlled stop, just west of the pedestrian bridge that ran above the highway. Men on the bridge flashed lights on all three vehicles, some of them facing east to the two cars pinned in and others facing west to the BMW in the rear.
Eighteen men in black body armor and holding rifles or shotguns began yelling at the three drivers to turn off their engines.
The BMW was the first vehicle to move. Its tires screeched as it was put in reverse and the accelerator stomped to the floor. Men on the bridge yelled down to the driver, ordering him to halt, but the SUV launched backward, surrounded by the smoke from its tires. An officer on the bridge fired a shotgun blast at the hood of the vehicle in an attempt to knock it out of action, but the vehicle kept moving backward.
An order was initiated by the on-scene commander to open fire on the BMW, but before he’d finished giving the order, gunfire erupted simultaneously from both the Škoda and the Ford, two vehicles that were just twenty-five to fifty feet from the ARAS roadblock. Shooters inside the cars fired through the windshield and out the side windows, surprising the police force with both the audaciousness of the act and the volume of fire.
Black-clad ARAS men standing behind their vehicles returned fire, men on the bridge all shifted to the east to shoot down on the Škoda and the Ford, and the BMW, after receiving only one ineffectual shotgun blast, was all but forgotten. It raced backward out of the area, picking up speed as it backed westward in the eastbound lane.
Ding Chavez pulled the Land Cruiser over to the side of the road a quarter-mile from the roadblock. He heard the first boom of a shotgun, then the chatter of automatic rifles, and finally a cacophony of various weapons, easily twenty-five in number, all firing at the same time.
“Holy shit, Dom! It’s gone loud!”
“I hear it,” Caruso confirmed. He was a half-mile from the roadblock, and three-quarters of a mile from Chavez. “We can’t approach without running the risk of being targeted by the bad guys and ARAS.”
“Right. Stay right where you are. Watch out for any squirters.”
“Too late, Chavez,” Caruso said instantly. “The black Beamer is coming my way!”
Chavez slammed his hand into the wheel of the car. Ding had an MP5 nine-millimeter submachine gun on the seat next to him, and Dom, who was driving the motorcycle, was only armed with a borrowed Beretta nine-millimeter pistol, but there was no way Chavez could even get to Dom to help him without driving through the middle of the gun battle. He said, “Get off the road and out of their way. If you can, tail them, but do not engage.”
“Understood.”
Chavez slammed his hand again, feeling impotent parked here along the highway, but then an idea hit him. He put the Land Cruiser in gear and then stomped on the gas, looking for a place to make a left off the highway. As he did this he flipped on the moving map on the Toyota’s multifunction display. “Dom, I’m going to try and make my way through town back in your direction. You keep me posted on where they are going.”
“Roger, they are passing me right now. I’m going to get behind them, and stick on them like glue.”
The X3 had turned around by the time it passed Dom a minute earlier, but it continued driving the wrong way, west in the eastbound lane. A few other vehicles had been on the highway, all of which had run off into the median or at least slammed on their brakes as the BMW and the motorcycle chasing it passed.
Chavez had instructed Caruso to stay out of sight of the men he was following, but there was no chance of that. Dom’s headlight was the one vehicle behind the BMW, as traffic had been stopped by the roadblock a mile back. Dom instead just kept far enough behind the BMW that he felt they’d have a hard time shooting him from the back window, and close enough to them that he could see where they were going. He hoped they’d pull off this road and into the bustle and narrower streets of the city, where he could be a little more discreet about his surveillance.
And Dom got his wish almost immediately. The X3 made a hard right turn at speed onto Aušros Vartų, a one-lane street that ran like a spine through the center of Vilnius’s hilly and warrenlike Old Town. Dom followed into the turn, then tightened up on them so he didn’t lose them. Dom and Ding’s rented flat was only a few hundred yards from here, so he knew the area just well enough to know there were dozens if not hundreds of archways, breezeways, narrow alleys, and covered parking lots in which they could hide.