The fact Hart had the details down cold did not necessarily mean he understood the psychology of his enemy, and his captain wanted to make sure he was ready for war. War did not always follow conventional wisdom, or even rational behavior.
Hagen said, “Weps, you’re the best-trained USW officer in the fleet and you’re on my ship. I’m going to work you like a damn dog until this is over, and you are going to push everyone here, including me, if necessary, to fight these Russians the right way. Are we clear on that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now those Kilos hit all four of those ships during darkness last night. Doesn’t mean they’ll wait till nightfall to come back out, but they are going to be looking for every advantage they can find. If they hit again, it might not be till tonight. So I want you rested.”
A few minutes later Hart ate chow in the officers’ mess. He was tucked into a corner by himself, a half-eaten chicken salad sandwich on his plate and two large paperback books in his lap. On the bottom was his old dog-eared copy of the RP 33, the Fleet Oceanographic and Acoustic Reference Manual, a sort of bible of undersea science from a submarine and antisubmarine warfare practitioner’s perspective. He basically knew the damn thing by heart, but he kept it close by all the time for quick reference.
On top of this was the latest edition of Introduction to Physical Oceanography. As he ate his sandwich he perused this, looking up some salinity equations he might need in this part of the Baltic.
Hart would read for a few hours, doing his best to push every bit of information needed for prosecuting an undersea target in these waters to the ready reserve in his brain. Antisubmarine warfare moves fast, he knew, and seconds counted. If he ran into one of those Kilos tonight, Hart didn’t want to have to pull out a pair of dog-eared books to remind himself what to do.
The troop transport train infiltration of Russian Spetsnaz forces into Vilnius County was eighteen hours old, and though the results were far short of the Russians’ H-Hour+18 objective for the op, the plan did achieve the desired effect of wreaking havoc on the Lithuanian population. Rumors of battalions of Russians in the capital city were broadcast on radio and television, on social media, and throughout the foreign press.
As was often the case with late-breaking news, the truth was quite different from the reality. By seven a.m. at the airport terminal and tower, Russian troops were overpowered after a firefight with a combined force of ARAS federal counterterror operators and a company of elite military Special Purpose Unit troops. The Russians had better training, as well as solid defensive positions, but the Lithuanians had the advantage in sheer numbers and equipment, as well as massive amounts of tear gas.
Twenty-one of the Russians were killed in the three-hour-long battle, compared with forty-five Lithuanians, most in the initial attack and a disastrous counterattack conducted by well-motivated but outclassed airport security staff.
The airport remained closed for most of the day due to damage to the radars on the roof of the terminal as well as the persistent cloud of tear gas that hung in the stairwells of the control tower, but once the Russians lost control of the facility, the Russian troop transports circling to the east over Belarus were forced to return to the airport in Smolensk with their airborne troops.
The Spetsnaz operation to temporarily hold choke points throughout the capital city had fared better than the airport operation. Here, more than forty men reached their objective waypoints, causing pandemonium during the morning rush hour as small-scale gun battles between Russian Alpha Group and Lithuanian police seemed to flare up all over the city.
But here again, the Russian operation fell short of its goals. The unit’s orders had been to spend two hours out in the streets creating chaos, and then melt away to a large wooded park in the north of the city, where a group of Serbian paramilitaries specially trained for the mission would be waiting with stolen vehicles, clothing, medical equipment, and other resupply. The Serbians had been infiltrated a week earlier with tourist visas, and as recently as twelve hours before the Russian military train arrived in the country, the Serbs had sent word that all was ready. But when the twenty-six surviving Russian special-operations troops arrived at their rally point in the parking lot next to the forest, they found only six Serbians in three vehicles, little in the way of supplies, and a story about how their mission had been undone by a police ambush the evening before where a dozen of their ranks had been killed or wounded.
As the remnants of the Russian and Serbian Spetsnaz men tried to exfiltrate the park, they were confronted by a company-sized element of Lithuanian Land Force volunteers, poorly trained and outfitted young men who had only numbers on their side.
In the ensuing bloodbath the combined Spetsnaz unit killed more than fifty men but suffered heavy losses itself. The few surviving Spetsnaz, all Russian, retreated bloody and broken into the park when their ammunition ran out.
71
Lieutenant Colonel Rich Belanger had spent most of his first full day careening around in a light armored vehicle from his attached Light Armored Reconnaissance platoon, checking on all his Marines’ preparations. He stopped at his companies’ command posts to visit with each commander.
The CP of India Company, called “Diesel,” was an old farmhouse with the men dug in out front in the woods. The CP of Kilo Company, “Sledgehammer,” was in the rear in reserve with the tanks, ready to go into the counterattack when ordered. Lima Company, called “Havoc,” was south of the others, in the woods in ambush positions looking out onto the E28, the main east-west highway that conventional wisdom said the Russians would use to drive straight through to Vilnius.
The weapons company, who used the call sign “Vandal,” had their heavy M2 .50-caliber machine guns spread among the three companies and their 120-millimeter and 81-millimeter mortars well to the rear of the battalion, prepared to fire a hail of steel rain over the lines and onto the Russian advance. The Vandal commander, during combat, would move into the Darkhorse combat command center, where he would control all his fires, including air and mortars. Also in the CP, Darkhorse’s intelligence officer had just gotten the satellite comm systems up and running, and was trying to download the latest intelligence from EUCOM.
By early afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Belanger, whose call sign was “Darkhorse 6,” was confident his battalion was ready for a fight, but his concerns extended far beyond the twelve hundred men under his command. Small sporadic pockets of Lithuanian Land Force troops continued to surge forward, all over the eastern part of the country, without any real direction as far as he could discern from their attached exchange officers.
They moved around from south of Vilnius to halfway up to the Latvian border, and Belanger had been concerned he would be rushed into action only to be slowed down by having to push his way through roads clogged by their aging vehicles still trying to make it to the border regions or, even worse, by civilian refugees fleeing rearward in the face of the Russian advance.
And that was just one of his many burdens today. The USMC colonel in charge of him, the Black Sea Rotational Force commander, had tasked his intelligence officer with a lot of additional collection duties. Among the most pressing was keeping the BSRF regimental headquarters up-to-date with the latest information out of Vilnius.
All morning long and into the afternoon, Belanger’s intel officer passed word to the regiment back in Stuttgart about a force of enemy sappers who had snuck in on one of the cargo trains and set about conducting sabotage operations in the city.