Like much of Russia’s hybrid war, the operation was mostly for show, to create an impression of facts on the ground in order to change the actual facts on the ground.
The other forty-eight men of Alpha Group had a more direct operation planned. They, too, would climb into vehicles staged here at the station and then race to the east, taking back roads through the forest for the two and a half miles to Vilnius International Airport. Here they would break into four twelve-man units, with individual objectives. Two teams would hit opposite ends of the airfield to draw away the guard force and engage any military presence, while teams three and four would attack the terminal itself from opposite entrances, taking over the building and then setting up defensive positions in the shopping mall — sized space. The two fire teams would then attempt to link up and take over the control tower, thereby dominating the airport.
If all went according to plan, Russian follow-on troops from GRU (military intelligence) Spetsnaz units would land before dawn, resupplying and reinforcing the Alpha Group men already on site.
But first the Russians had to get off the train and to the airport. The Lithuanian troops defending the area were at first just confused by the fact that the big Russian train seemed to be slowing down as it approached the small station building in the center of the rail yard. The platoon commander’s first order was for his second-in-command to call someone back at base to ask what was going on. It wasn’t until the yard’s security force, men who were used to the Russian train sailing through the station at 100 kilometers an hour, dove to the ground and hid themselves behind railcars and cinder-block walls that the Land Force soldiers had a clue that they were in danger.
The soldiers followed the security men to defensive positions, albeit slowly, and when the Russian men in black began to leap from the still-moving train, firing on anything that moved in the station, the twenty-three-year-old commander of the Lithuanian platoon realized he didn’t have to wait for base to get back to him with orders.
He understood. The fucking war everyone in the nation had been talking about had just begun, right before his eyes.
Alpha Group snipers climbed onto the roof of several railcars and trained their long rifles, Sako TRG 22s outfitted with infrared scopes, on the scene before them. Within seconds they were picking off targets around the station and farther back in the rail yard, while below them the expert assaulters of Alpha Group began leapfrogging maneuvers to get distance from the train.
A Lithuanian machine gun began to bark from the roof of the station, raking the train with 7.62-millimeter rounds. One Russian was hit squarely in the elbow, ripping his arm off at the joint and spinning him to the ground, where he would bleed to death in minutes.
But the big FN-MAG machine gun, the Lithuanians’ most potent weapon at the scene against the now ninety-five invaders, was silenced after making the single kill. An assaulter on the ground lobbed a forty-millimeter high-explosive grenade from the underslung launcher below his Kalashnikov, and his shot landed perfectly in the sandbagged position, killing the Lithuanian gunner and wounding his reloader.
Within two minutes of the first shot at the rail yard, the lead squad of Alpha Group assaulters reached the station, having crossed several open tracks. They were down two men, and four other Russians lay dead or wounded on the tracks behind, but once the assaulters penetrated the station, the surviving Lithuanians, soldiers and security guards alike, were in full retreat, heading toward a pair of large warehouses to the northeast and then into the forest beyond.
The Russians did not pursue them; their orders were to conserve ammo; only the snipers remained on the train cars to scan with their infrared scopes to keep guard against a counterattack. While they did this, the assaulters rushed to a locked gate to the northwest of the station, shot it open with a shotgun blast, and then entered a large storage parking lot. Here, twenty brand-new Volvo XC-90 SUVs sat waiting for delivery to car dealerships all over the Baltic on two Peterbilt car carriers. Russia’s FSB men working for a logistics company in Sweden had purposefully held up customs paperwork, keeping the vehicles stuck in port in Klaipėda until the day before yesterday, thereby timing their arrival by train here for delivery.
The commander of the Alpha Group men had multiple sets of keys, and he passed them out to the drivers. The operators jammed themselves and their heavy equipment into the Volvos, using all three rows of seats and every cubic inch of cargo space to do so, then the twenty vehicles left the station, minus the dead and wounded they lost in the infiltration operation.
Lieutenant Colonel Rich Belanger got word about the successful infiltration of Russian Special Forces the way he normally learned about fast-moving intelligence in the field. Piecemeal and with as much conjecture and false reporting as genuine actionable intel. His Marines were all positioned to the east of Vilnius, they didn’t hear a word about the action at the train station until thirty minutes after the attack, and by that point the surviving Russian commandos were well clear of the station. No one knew where they had gone, but Lieutenant Colonel Rich Belanger realized that as troubling as enemy action behind him was, he needed to stay focused on his mission, the one thing he had some control over. The Belarusan border ten miles in front of him, and the 25,000 Russian troops positioned there.
The Lithuanians would just have to sort out the Russian deep-penetration mission on their own.
67
Chavez and Caruso neared the airport at two-thirty a.m., riding in tandem on the motorcycle with only the Maxpedition shoulder bags they’d used during their operation this evening. They had other gear at their safe house in the Old Town of Vilnius, but they had decided to bypass it and expedite their escape from Lithuania. The men were well versed enough in OPSEC that there wouldn’t be anything in the safe house that could lead back to them, and the laptops and other electronics were encrypted and set up by Gavin Biery so that he could wipe their drives remotely if called on to do so.
Leaving a safe house behind without scouring it wasn’t optimal, but considering the fragmented news about an attack under way somewhere in the country, Chavez opted to pull the plug on his operation here and concentrate on exfiltrating the country while he still could.
The two men pulled over next to a grated storm drain a few blocks from the airport and disassembled the weapons they’d been given by the SSD. As Ding let go of the receiver of the MP5 and listened to it splash below him, he said, “I wish we had time to go find Herkus Zarkus and give him these weapons. Couldn’t hurt to have a backup or two.”
Caruso tossed the pieces of his pistol in the water as well. “Realistically, the only thing we could do for him is knock him on the head and Shanghai him out of here.”
They left their motorcycle in the lot next to the airport terminal and headed in to the security desk, and here the stress on the faces of the armed officers made it plain they knew their nation had come under attack. Just like Chavez and Caruso, however, these men had no real information. They just assumed the invasion had begun far to the west at the Kaliningrad border, or else twenty-five miles away at the Belarusan border. Bad news, to be sure, but none of them suspected they were in imminent danger.
The Americans explained they had a jet waiting for them at the airport FBO and a call was made from the terminal, and soon the men were directed through a metal detector and sent on their way.