Commander-In-Chief (36 page)

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.”

C
havez 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.

Each of the two Campus operators now had ninety rounds of rifle ammo and fifty-two rounds of pistol ammunition. This would be a lot of ammo for most any imaginable scenario, but neither Caruso nor Chavez felt confident in their ability to defeat eight to ten well-trained operators with their weapons in hand.

Still, they both knew they needed to get moving. They pushed their way into the trees going just west of the north-south road, planning to skirt anyone left on the gravel road as a sentry to watch for approaching traffic.

As they moved through the woods the rain picked up dramatically. It obscured their vision ahead, but they also knew the rain made it tougher for the opposition to see or hear, so they welcomed the bad weather.

After just three minutes of quiet movement, Caruso grabbed
Chavez by his forearm and both men dropped to their knees. He said, “Lights ahead.”

Ding squinted into the darkness; he saw nothing, but he trusted Caruso’s eyes over his own, since Caruso was fifteen years younger.

Both men slung their rifles on their backs, reached into their packs, and pulled out monoculars. Ding’s was a fat rubber device that looked like half of a set of waterproof binoculars, with a battery pack on the bottom. It was a FLIR scope, capable of picking up heat sources in darkness or behind thin concealment.

Dom’s device was a three-power fourth-generation night-vision monocular. It rendered the blacked-out area in front of him in soft green hues. The image was essentially two-dimensional, but it provided excellent illumination in the darkness.

At first all either man saw was more trees, but after another two minutes to get into position, they arrived fifty yards away from the two trucks, finding them parked in front of a small cabin in the trees. Next to the cabin, a tiny barn was open on both sides.

And just beyond the two trucks and the two structures, Dom saw the eight-foot-high metal fence that separated Belarus from Lithuania.

The Campus men crawled forward a little more, just until they each had a good position on the floor of the forest—Ding behind a large pine tree, and Dom down behind a fat root system sticking out of the mud at the base of a partially felled maple.

The men were a dozen feet from each other, but close enough to see hand signals or converge quickly if they needed to speak.

Chavez held his FLIR monocular up to his eye. As soon as he directed it in the right area, he saw several men running along next to the cabin. The motion had drawn his attention, but when the men disappeared around the other side, he lost them, so he scanned
back toward the location of the two trucks. The first vehicle seemed to be empty except for a driver sitting behind the wheel. The second vehicle also had a driver, but in the back, through the canvas wall of the vehicle, Ding could make out a large luminescent blob in his optic. He knew this would be several men, at least three or four, sitting close together on the bench in the back of the vehicle.

He assumed Branyon would be in the middle of the pack, surrounded by kidnappers.

Chavez estimated there were ten men at this location other than Branyon, which was the high end of their earlier estimate, but at least it meant the kidnappers had not picked up any more gunmen who’d been back here waiting for the trucks to return.

•   •   •

W
hile Chavez had been scanning the driveway and the house and barn with his FLIR, Caruso had been using his night-vision monocular to look at the fence line in the distance. It was only sixty or seventy yards away from where he now lay, so he had a decent view of all of it except the portion he could not see on the other side of the house.

As near as Dom could tell, there was no breach in the fence at all.

He crawled over to Chavez. “You can’t see the fence through that, can you?”

“Not at all. I see people, and I see warm truck engines. That’s it.”

Caruso nodded. “Well, I don’t think these fuckers have cut a hole in the fence. You think they are going to climb it?”

Just as he asked this, both men could hear the noise from an engine, its low rumble growing out of the sound of the heavy rain.

The men put their optics back up to their eyes and trained them
on the scene. Three men removed Branyon from the rear vehicle. His arms were bound behind his back and he wore a bag over his head.

And beyond the fence, a large truck pulling a trailer came into view. On the trailer was a crane with a basket: a medium-sized cherry picker. The truck began a slow process of backing through the mud in the heavy rain, positioning the trailer right up to the metal fence.

Chavez said, “There’s your answer.”

Caruso cussed. “Shit. They’re about to take him over. We’re going to have to engage them right now.”

“Yeah,” replied Chavez. Quickly, he reached into his Maxpedition bag and retrieved a roll of duct tape. He laid his rifle on the wet ground, quietly removed a long strip of the tape, and began to wrap his infrared monocular onto the left side of the weapon.

Caruso watched this for a moment. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Poor man’s nightscope, I guess. Better than nothing.”

Caruso said, “If you are trying to make it a scope, why aren’t you putting it on top of the weapon?”

“I still need to use the iron sights, for distance. This will be helpful for close in. I’ll aim left when I shoot.”

Caruso shrugged, took tape from Ding’s roll, and attached his night-vision monocular to his simple Kalashnikov rifle in the same fashion.

As he did this, Chavez said, “We need to separate. It might make them think there are more of us.”

Caruso nodded. “Okay. You’re a better shot than me. I’ll move off to the west, try to flank them and get a little closer.”

Chavez whispered, “I’ll move closer to the road, I’ll have a more complete sightline on their poz there. I’ll engage from seventy-five yards or so, any further out in these conditions and I might hit
the CoS. I’ll wait till I see as many of them together and as close to the light as possible, and then I’m going to open fire, left to right. You follow my lead, shooting right to left.

“Watch out for Branyon, okay?”

Caruso looked to Chavez. “We can’t let him fall into the Russians’ hands.”

Chavez shook his head. “Don’t even think about it. I’m not shooting a CIA officer, and neither are you. You do have a green light on any combatant you see. Do what you have to do.”

Dom nodded slowly. “Roger that, Ding.” And then he held out a hand to Ding. “Let’s do it.”

The two men slapped hands and pounded fists. Chavez said, “Sixty seconds. On my ‘Go.’ Don’t fuck it up.”

Dom rolled off to the right and began to crawl away quickly with his rifle on his back.