In the front passenger seat, just a foot or so from where Branyon sat behind the wheel, was a flash-bang grenade. The pull ring was missing.
The device exploded in the confined space, blinding Branyon with light and disorienting his ears with a shrieking ring.
Chavez and Caruso watched helplessly as the action unfolded 550 yards away. It was tough to see the entire scene in the poor light and heavy rain, but when the CIA station chief was dragged from his vehicle by several men in civilian dress and carried in front of the headlights of the Mercedes, both Chavez and Caruso saw movement in Branyon’s arms and legs.
Chavez said, “He’s alive!”
Caruso spoke through a jaw tight with frustration. “A fucking kidnapping.”
Chavez said, “And those aren’t local yokels. That was slick as bird shit.”
“Spetsnaz,” Dom said.
“Or something like them,” Chavez agreed. “We can’t lose visibility till we see which direction they’re heading.”
“Then what do we do?”
Chavez fired up the engine of the Land Cruiser. “Donlin’s dead. We go after Branyon.”
“Roger that.”
The two canvas-covered trucks headed east down the main road out of the village, directly toward the tree line, which was no longer visible to the Americans in the low light. But they didn’t need to see the trees to know the fence line separating Lithuania from Belarus was just beyond, and they didn’t have to jump to any great conclusions to figure out what was happening.
Pete Branyon was being taken back over the border.
Chavez threw the Land Cruiser into gear and launched forward, heading down the hill through the center of the farmland that ran along south of the village. “If we don’t run into any natural obstacles we can beat them to the border.”
Dom asked, “Are we going to shoot it out with Spetsnaz?”
Chavez said, “If the Russians get the CoS they will know the name of every U.S. asset in this country. When they take Lithuania they can scour the nation to remove all our eyes and ears.”
Dom nodded as they bounced along the uneven ground, splashing through low mud puddles and up over small levees dividing the fields. He struggled to grab one of the rifles in the backseat. Once he had it in his hand he said, “We’re not going to let that happen.”
49
Chavez and Caruso had spent the last five minutes slamming around the inside of their Land Cruiser as it hurtled along through a rain-soaked pasture just a quarter-mile from Lithuania’s border with Belarus. Even though they wore their seat belts, their upper torsos and appendages had been battered by the impacts of the relentless crashing as the big off-road-capable vehicle dipped and lurched and splashed and skidded along.
They drove without their lights, which had not been such a problem just five minutes earlier, but the last of the light was leaving the sky now, and as Chavez looked from behind the wheel toward the scene in front of him, he realized he was about one minute away from leaving the open field and plunging into a dense forest, and at that point he had to either flip on his headlights or slow down considerably.
He didn’t want to slow, but he sure as hell did not want to turn on his lights, because the two big trucks were dead ahead, following a road that led due south to the border, and there was no one else out here. Turning on the Land Cruiser’s headlights would reveal the presence of the Americans to Branyon’s kidnappers.
Ding saw where they were going, and he wished he could have just veered to his right, to continue along the field to a convergence point with the trucks. But he realized that this wasn’t possible. A small creek, not more than fifteen feet wide, twisted through the farmland just this side of the road Branyon was being taken along, and the only way to reach the road from where Ding now drove was to cross a small bridge right in front of him.
This meant he’d have to pull onto the road a couple hundred yards behind the Russians and then just chase them. It looked from here like it was a gravel surface, but even on gravel Chavez felt confident he could overtake the trucks, if given enough time.
His problem, however, was that the road entered the forest soon after the bridge, and neither he nor Dom had any idea what they would find in the forest between them and the border fence.
And their troubles didn’t end there. As soon as they took off in pursuit of Branyon, Dom had tried to call the U.S. embassy in Vilnius. He wanted them to send help in the form of local police, national military, or even U.S. embassy Marines or CIA security officers.
But his phone still would not get a signal. After trying twice while he bounced along as a passenger in the vehicle, he stowed his mobile and pulled out his sat phone. He fired it up and dialed the embassy, but to his astonishment, this signal would not go through, either.
“You’ve got to be kidding me! No sat signal, either! Are we on the fucking moon?”
Chavez kept driving, his eyes wide to catch as much light as possible in case he needed to avoid anything in the pasture in front of him. “They jammed it.”
“Jammed it?”
“Yeah. Somebody has to have a big piece of equipment to jam a sat phone, or else they have to be close.”
Dom said, “Maybe that’s what all those foreigners people reported seeing have been up to. They could have planted remote jammers in the towns along the border. Ready to switch them on the moment the shit hits the fan.” He slipped his sat phone back into his coat now. “It’s just us, then.”
“Yep,” Chavez confirmed.
“How many did you count in that group?”
Ding thought it over for a second. “Including drivers… eight to ten.”
“That’s what I came up with.” He blew out a long sigh. “Jesus.”
Chavez had to slow during the last thirty seconds before he arrived at the little bridge over the creek because visibility was so bad, but once he got over the bridge and onto the gravel north-south road, he was able to pick up the pace. The taillights of the rear truck were close to three hundred yards ahead now, so Chavez increased the speed of the Land Cruiser. Through the rain he could barely see his way ahead, but he just concentrated on holding the wheel steady and making sure those lights in the distance did not stop abruptly.
As Chavez drove, Dom said, “If they have a way through the border fence already prepared, then they are just going to drive on through. Are we going over the border after them?”
“No,” Chavez said. “That would be suicide. You know they’ll have people there ready to reseal the border, and we’d be driving right into them.” After saying this Chavez stepped down even harder on the pedal, speeding his Land Cruiser up, desperate to reach Branyon and his captors before it was too late.
Dom had been looking at the map of the area, and he spoke up when they were just a few hundred yards from entering the forest. “The border is two hundred yards beyond the trees. You think these kidnappers will set security?”
Chavez thought about it for a moment, then began to slow down. “Yeah, good call. Those guys are well trained. If they have to park and get over that fence somehow, they’ll know to have someone watching their six.”
Instead of pulling over to the side of the road, Ding just came to a complete stop in the middle of the lane, the grille of the big SUV just inside the start of the trees. They sat there for a moment, rolling down their windows to listen for any noise.
They heard nothing but the steady rain.
Caruso disabled the interior light before they quietly opened their doors; then each man climbed out with a rifle in his hand and a Glock 17 pistol jammed in his waistband. They both reached into their gym bags and pulled out two extra magazines for the rifle and one more for the pistol, and stowed the added gear in various pockets.