Finally, the intelligence officer called Belanger in his LAV C2 as he was touring the company engagement areas and suggested Lithuanian army reports had begun to coincide with the news reports they’d been watching on the Internet and CNN. Only a few Russian saboteurs remained; they had been flushed out and into the woods north of the city. Their infiltration game in Lithuania appeared to be over.
On television the Lithuanian government displayed a couple dozen Russian prisoners standing outside at the airport. Heads down in defeat, arms zip-tied behind their backs.
Belanger took one look at them and knew they were Alpha Group men, the best Russia had to offer. While most laypeople in Lithuania took their victory over the Russian commando unit as a sign that their nation could take anything the Russians had to dish out, the Marine lieutenant colonel had a more sober take on the news.
The fact the Russians had a hundred Alpha Group men they could sacrifice on what looked to be little more than a suicide mission into the center of Lithuania before the war even kicked off told Belanger that Russia had thousands of different GRU and Interior Ministry Spetsnaz troops to work with on the front lines. Troops he was certain to meet in the next hours or days, because he knew there were a lot more of those black-clad bastards just over the border in front of him.
Word came down through intel channels that some analysts at the Pentagon had identified a stretch of Belarusan border almost seventy-five kilometers long where the Russian army was mustering; this was likely where they would breach the border. Any farther north or south and they would find themselves away from trafficable roads, or too far from Vilnius, their main objective in the country.
Within this expanse there were four main arteries bisecting the border, and while Russian tanks didn’t need to adhere to roads to attack, their truck-bound infantry, their supply, and the Russian heavy artillery would necessarily proceed on one or more of these roads, so it stood to reason the attack would emanate from one of these areas. Without the infantry, artillery, and a steady source of supply, the tanks would have a tough time in the thick forests and broken fields of Lithuania.
This narrowed down the location of the attack even further, Belanger and his intel officer surmised. To the extent Belanger had divided Darkhorse Battalion into three self-sufficient sections and placed them in three distinct locations near the four roads, they were prepared.
One rifle company could not stop a division-strength Russian invasion, of course, but Belanger had to have someone ready to engage the enemy while the intelligence officers checked the satellite data and confirmed this was, in fact, the spearhead of the Russian invasion, so the rest of his forces could maneuver onto the Russian advance.
The call he had been expecting for twelve hours finally came from EUCOM at dusk. Overhead platform surveillance of enemy troops in Belarus indicated a push to the border was under way, and it was happening in two places simultaneously: on the other side of the border from the Lithuanian town of Magunai in the north, and straight along highway E28, which led from Minsk to Vilnius.
Instantly Lieutenant Colonel Belanger knew his battalion would have to fight on two fronts, fifty kilometers apart. He dreaded it, but he would have to split his forces.
One half of all Lithuania’s meager resistance force was already largely set up at the E28 at the crossing; it was Belarus’s closest point to Vilnius, so the area was already defended by Land Force soldiers with World War II — era 105-millimeter howitzers, a few newer 155-millimeter howitzers from Germany, and dozens of mortars of different sizes. There were thousands of troops already in trenches, and sandbagged emplacements along the roads, but the space was wide-open enough for Russian tanks to use the fields and pastures to make their way toward the capital.
Belanger knew they could mow right over the Lithuanians unless the defenders received a lot of help from Darkhorse.
No, the local defense wasn’t sufficient, but Belanger kept his India Company, along with a platoon from his weapons company and a few tanks and Cobra helicopter gunships, in the south at the predefined locations given to him from the EARLY SENTINEL deployment program. Each antitank missile, each mortar, each heavy machine gun, and each rifle squad was assigned a ten-digit grid and an azimuth of fire. Fighting holes were dug, equipment was moved under cover, and machine-gun and heavy-weapon range cards were drawn up to support integrated defenses.
Kilo and Lima infantry companies, and some heavy guns and antitank rockets and missiles from the weapons company, were ordered north to Magunai, where they were given defensive positions throughout the city and in the nearby farms and forests. Lima was in front, within sight of the Belarusan border, and Kilo stayed to the southwest, ready as Belanger’s counterattack force, or to race all the way down to help India if absolutely necessary.
Belanger’s intel officer identified that the expected northern breach zone for the Russians was virtually undefended by Lithuania, so the Marines would have to do the lion’s share of the work to stop the Russian attack.
Belanger moved his forward command post into a supporting position behind his Lima Company, then ordered forward air controllers, plus a few JTACs — joint terminal attack controllers, scrounged from other units — to be split among all his company’s strong-point defensive locations.
By nine p.m. the Marines of India Company in the southern positions got word through their Lithuanian counterparts that they were seeing a mass of lights over the border from hundreds of vehicles. To the north, near Lima’s zone and near Belanger’s command post, they were able to see a wide glow over the rolling farmland as the Russian armor moved into position.
Belanger himself stood in the third-story science lab of a shuttered elementary school in Magunai, as close to the front lines as any battlefield commander could possibly be. The lead elements of his battalion, his scout snipers, were in Prienai, one mile to the east, but his main force was spread out in the streets and houses and shops and out into the farmland of the tiny hamlet all around him. His heavy and medium mortars were a kilometer down a gravel road behind him, set behind a copse of trees.
Right in front of Darkhorse, intelligence estimates suggested there could be as many as eighty Russian T-90s, each complete with state-of-the-art targeting computers, night and thermal vision, explosive reactive armor, and sights that could see well out to ten kilometers. Belanger had studied anti-Soviet doctrine, and in the coming fight he was going to need all the information those old men in his Marine antiarmor schools had taught him. Most of those old-timers had fought in the Gulf War against second-generation T-72s. Hell, he’d seen a load of T-72s himself while fighting insurgents in Iraq, but they were all burnt out and picked clean by the Bedouins.
Belanger realized he had one thing in his favor, though. The same thing that had saved the bacon of his Army brothers in Bastogne. Amazing U.S. and coalition air support. Harriers, F-18s, and Cobra and Apache gunships were his for the tasking. And now, as the light grew in the east, he was fucking certain he would have a lot of work for them to do very soon.
A voice came over the radio set from his radioman’s backpack.
“Havoc Six, Banshee Two, over?”
Belanger had been looking at a digital map with his operations officer, but he turned when he heard the call. Belanger knew Banshee Two was one of his best scout sniper teams, headed by Sergeant McFarland. They were positioned in a grove of trees next to an open field two kilometers from Lima Company’s defensive positions in Prienai and a kilometer from his present spot in the forward command post.