Ding had been on foot, so he showed up five minutes later, out of breath from jogging. By then Dom had the man’s coat and shirt stripped off him, and a flashlight balanced on the sill of a boarded-up window so it shined directly on him.
The man shivered and moaned in pain from his grotesquely swollen ankle, but Dom had done nothing to help him.
Ding entered the little room, looked around, then ripped off the blindfold. The man blinked several times, then looked around.
As far as Ding was concerned, the man looked like he could have been Russian. He was in his thirties, with a scruffy beard and mustache just a few shades more red than his auburn hair. He had a square jaw Chavez could make out even through the beard, and a flat nose like he was a boxer who lost a lot more fights than he won.
He had no tattoos or other distinguishing marks on his torso or arms.
“Do you speak English?” Chavez asked. The bare-chested man just looked up at the two Americans without reply, blinking from the 180-lumen flashlight in his face.
Dom knelt down over him now. Got in his face. In a voice designed to convey menace, he said, “Do. You. Speak. English?”
The man just shook his head a little, like he didn’t understand, but he said nothing.
Dom sighed. “What do we do with him?”
From behind, Chavez replied, “He’s worthless. Cut his dick off, shoot him in the head, and throw him in the river.”
Dom nodded. “You got it.”
“No! I speak English!” The man shouted it in a heavy accent, his eyes wide with horror.
“Would you look at that?” Dom said with a smile. “He’s a quick study.”
“I’ve been teaching that ten-second crash course in English for thirty years,” Chavez replied, and he knelt down in front of the wounded man. “Okay, boss. Your buddies all made their choices, now it’s your turn. Do you want to live or do you want to die?”
The man said, “I want to live.” He seemed certain in his choice.
“Good,” said Chavez. “First, you’re Russian?”
“Russian? No. From Serbia. We are all Serb.” His eyes looked down a moment. “Were all Serb.”
“Serb?” Dom said in surprise. “We’re a thousand miles from Belgrade.”
“But you are working for FSB?” Chavez said.
“No.”
“Who trained you?”
“Serbian Army.”
“Bullshit,” Chavez said. “You’ve got Spetsnaz training.”
The man said nothing for a moment, until Dom said, “The river’s only two blocks away.”
The wounded man changed his tune instantly. “Yes, there were thirty of us, trained in Russia. Tenth GRU Spetsnaz Brigade in Krasnodar.”
“What are you doing here?”
The man shrugged. “We were fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Chetnik Battalion. The best men in our unit were taken to Russia for Spetsnaz training, and then told we would be going to the Baltic for destabilizing operations.” He looked up at the men. “You said you wouldn’t kill me.”
“You tell us the truth, and we’ll take you to the hospital.”
“How can I trust you?”
“You know you can trust me to put a bullet in your eye like I did to your buddies.”
The man looked down for a minute. “They told us Russia would attack. We were the vanguard.”
Caruso said, “You tried to kidnap the American last night in Tabariškės.”
He shook his head. “Other men in my unit. Not me.”
Now Dom asked, “Did you blow up the Independence?”
“The what?”
Chavez and Caruso both thought the man looked genuinely confused by the question.
Chavez said, “What about the train?”
“Wha… what train?”
Caruso said, “That looked like bullshit,” confirming what Chavez was himself thinking.
Chavez said, “What’s your name?”
“Luka.”
“Look, Luka. You can’t be lying to us. I just killed three men. At this point, killing one more would actually make things easier. We don’t have a car. I really don’t feel like carrying you to the hospital.”
Luka laid his head on the ground. “We were ordered to fire on the Russian troop transport. To wear the badge of the Polish People’s Lancers.”
Dom just mumbled softly. “Bingo.”
A minute later, Ding left the little shack and stood in the dark. He called Linus Sabonis’s mobile phone, ready to tell him to pick up the Serbian prisoner and give him the intel he just learned, but Sabonis didn’t answer. He called back again, and again it went to voice mail.
Frustrated, Ding called Sabonis’s second-in-command. He answered on the fifth ring. Ding started to tell him what was going on, but he didn’t even get to the part where they tailed the BMW away from the roadblock before the man interrupted him.
“I’m sorry, I have to go.”
Ding was surprised by the man’s nonchalance. “You’ve got something more important going on?”
“Actually, yes.” There was a slight pause. “Russian troops from Kaliningrad have entered Lithuania.” The man hung up.
Ding reentered the shack and looked at Dom. He said, “It’s showtime, brother. We are officially in a nation under attack.”
Dom looked down to Luka. “You’re on your own, asshole. Crawl down to the street and get a taxi to take you to the hospital, or else wait for the Russian tanks to save your ass. We’re outta here.”
“I’m hurt! I can’t walk!”
“Sucks to be you,” Caruso said, and he and Chavez left the injured man in the shack without another word.
66
Everyone thought the Russian attack on Lithuania would begin with rockets launched from over the border from Belarus and Kaliningrad, followed by tanks and troops moving through border crossings along the highway. Attack aircraft and helicopters, it was assumed, would support the ground forces, and artillery would pound the way ahead.
But the opening salvo was something quite different indeed.
A previously scheduled Russian military train passing through Lithuania came to an unscheduled stop at a railway yard in the Paneriai forest, just southwest of Vilnius, not far from the airport. Because of the Russian train’s movement down the line, the massive rail yard’s normal security had been augmented by a platoon of Lithuanian Land Force riflemen, but these thirty men plus the dozen or so lightly armed security guards were no match for ninety-six tier-one Special Forces commandos from Russia’s Directorate “A” of the FSB Special Purpose Center on board the train. The dedicated counterterrorism unit was known in Russia as “Spetsgruppa A,” or Special Team Alpha, but around the world they were known as “Alpha Group.” These were the “Little Green Men” who had shown up in eastern Ukraine the year before, and the men Lithuanians had reported seeing near the borders for the past few weeks. Most of these sightings were erroneous; there were a few cross-border incursions, but the Little Green Men had waited till now to begin their direct action inside Lithuania’s borders.
The ninety-six members of Alpha Group on this train had been given two crucial missions for this first night of the invasion. Forty-eight of the men would climb into vehicles waiting here in the yard and drive into the capital itself. They would break into eight six-man fire teams and begin quickly blocking roads, initiating checkpoints, and essentially showing themselves to the citizens of Vilnius as they headed to work in the morning. The Russians wanted to instill chaos in the nation, to give the impression the invasion itself had already made it into the capital before anyone knew they were at war. Eight separate teams working in eight predetermined choke points could make the news by dawn and grind the city, and perhaps the entire country, to a halt by mid-morning.