Commander-In-Chief (52 page)

•   •   •

D
om Caruso ran a thirty-minute surveillance-detection route after his operation to plant the tracker on Salvatore’s backpack and the surveillance software on his mobile phone. His route took him past both Chavez and Ryan, who each sat alone in outdoor late-night cafés drinking beer.

Once the team was convinced Dom was in the clear, they all returned to their safe house on Rue du Commerce.

Dom said, “It’s not the most understated way to plant a bug on someone, but it will work. I had him convinced I was just a street criminal who had followed him into the john.”

Chavez said, “You made a good call and did a good job.”

“Thanks,” Dom said, then held up a wad of euros. “And I scored sixty-five euros. Do we need to tell Gerry, or can I order us a couple of pizzas for dinner tomorrow?”

It was a joke, at which Chavez laughed, but Jack was already watching Salvatore’s position on his laptop. “He’s back in his room at the Stanhope.” He then checked the app on his phone that informed him of any use of the man’s mobile. “The RAT did its job. We’ve got visibility on both audio and text messaging, but he hasn’t used either yet.”

“What about photos, e-mails, that sort of stuff?” Chavez asked.

Jack looked at all the apps on Salvatore’s phone, visible now on Jack’s laptop. “There’s not a single picture on his phone from Brussels. But he’s got cameras with him, so that doesn’t mean he’s not
up here doing some sort of recon. And he doesn’t even have an e-mail app on this thing. Either he’s one hell of a Luddite—”

Dom said, “Or he’s practicing operational security.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “He didn’t impress me with his tradecraft at all in Rome, but this might be a different kind of op. We’ll just have to keep watching him to see what he gets himself into.”

V
lad Kozlov stood in the doorway of Terry Walker’s bedroom, remaining stone-faced while Walker tearily said good night to his wife and son over the walkie-talkie.

The routine had been set since Kozlov’s second night here in the islands. Each evening at seven-thirty he and his four security men would deliver Walker and Limonov back to the rented villa on the top of Saint Bernard’s Hill, where Kozlov immediately checked in with the two men maintaining the safe house. Then all six Steel Securitas men would split into two-man teams. Two would sleep while two held inner security in the villa and two more patrolled the grounds.

Limonov would eat something and retire to his room, then Kozlov would enter Walker’s room, hand him the walkie-talkie for three minutes for him to communicate with his family. Once three minutes was up, he’d take the device and leave the room, locking Walker inside for the night.

Tonight had been no different from all the others until he returned to the kitchen to pour himself a vodka from the freezer. As soon as he lifted it to his lips, his phone rang.

“Allo?”

He recognized the voice of President Valeri Volodin. “Give me a report.”

Kozlov hadn’t heard from the Russian president personally since before he and Limonov had left London.

He cleared his throat quickly. “Things are proceeding as planned, Mr. President.”

“Walker is giving you no trouble?”

“None.”

“And Limonov? He is proceeding as advertised?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So . . . no problems at all?”

“No, sir. Well . . . yes. We did have a security issue, but it has been dealt with.”

“I pay you so that we do
not
have security issues.”

“My apologies, Mr. President, but you pay me to deal with them. A man, an American, took a special interest in the boat where we are holding the family of Walker. I sent mercenaries to warn him off, but he persisted. When it became clear he was going to be a problem, we eliminated the problem very quietly.”

“Who was he?”

“Undetermined, but we made sure he was alone. He is out of the picture now, there is nothing to worry about.”

Volodin barked angrily. “Don’t be a fool, Kozlov, he will have confederates who will come looking for him.”

“If they do, they will not suspect us, and they will not find us.”

“Listen to me! I order you to bring in more help. You know this is a matter of particular interest to me. If anything happens to this operation—”

“Nothing can or will happen, Mr. President.”

“You interrupt me again and I will have Grankin send someone down to slice your tongue out of your mouth.”

A short pause.
“Izvaneetya.”
Sorry.

“If anything happens to this operation, I will hold you responsible. You can imagine what that means.”

“I can, Mr. President. I will contact specialists who will add support,
another
layer of support, to assist in our operation here in the British Virgin Islands.”

“You will do it now.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

•   •   •

T
he Sikorsky MH-60 Romeo helicopter moved slowly, just barely more than a hover five hundred feet over the blue water of the eastern Baltic. The gray of the helo blended with the gray skies above, a nice feature for an aircraft that did not want to advertise its location to anyone on the surface, or anyone below the surface looking through a periscope.

This helicopter, call sign Casino One-One, did not own the sky here; it shared it with its sister helicopter, Casino One-Two, which patrolled twenty-three miles to the west.

The role of both helos was submarine detection, classification, tracking, and ultimately, destruction. To achieve this aim, every few minutes Casino One-One descended to within five hundred feet of the surface, lowered an AN/AQS-22 airborne low-frequency sonar from an umbilical, and dipped it below the ocean surface. The active sonar signal searched the waters for the two submarines identified the evening before.

So far neither helo had turned up any contacts beyond the surface ships in the area, of which there were many.

Each time Casino One-One turned back to the east on its pattern, the two-man, one-woman crew could plainly see the rescue mission continuing in the waters closer to the Lithuanian coast. Four ships had been sunk in a three-hour period the previous evening, and seeing evidence of the slaughter that had taken place on the ocean surface the night before instilled in the flight crew of Casino One-One a special dedication to the mission at hand.

They lived on a surface ship, after all, and their home was coming this way.

The
James Greer
(DDG-102) had no role in the rescue-and-recovery mission of the four Lithuanian naval vessels; that was left to others. The guided missile destroyer was the most dangerous threat to the Russian subs in the water, so it, and its two MH-60 Romeos, would focus on detecting, controlling, and engaging the enemy.

There were some assumptions made in this search by the American warship. For one, Russia’s Baltic Fleet was known to have a Lada submarine, but it was currently undergoing repairs at the port of Kaliningrad. This meant the two advanced Kilo submarines, called Varshavyankas by the Russians, were the likely culprits of the five torpedo attacks of the previous two days.

Knowing the identities of the targets meant knowing their offensive and defensive capabilities. The Kilo fired Type 53-65 torpedoes, which had an effective range of 25,000 meters. This meant the two MH-60 Romeos had to dip the waters in a wide arc more than fifteen miles in front of its destroyer to ensure their ship was safe from lurking hunters.

At present the
Greer
was nearly twenty miles to the northwest of its two helicopters, so the MH-60 Romeos served as the vanguard with room to spare.

The
James Greer
itself had an impressive array of equipment to hunt for undersea threats.

A hull sonar, a multifunction towed array, as well as variable-depth sonar that could dip below the various thermal layers submarines use to hide. All systems were currently configured to passive so the
James Greer
did not give away its location to the enemy, but since the Romeos were using active sonar, there was little doubt the Kilos knew there was a new component to the surface warfare hunt for them, and they would react accordingly.

That meant either they would run, they would hide, or they would attack.

Casino One-One made another dip into the ocean, and again the sensor operator on board reported negative contact. The Romeos were getting closer to Russia’s waters off Kaliningrad, and the pilot of Casino One-One suspected the Kilos had bolted for the safety of their territory, but he didn’t let his guard down for a moment. A Kilo lurking below him could possibly hear his rotors, and either descend deeper and run away or surface and attack the Romeo. It was known that Russian Kilos carried SA-14 man-portable air-defense systems, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that could be launched by an operator standing in the conning tower.

The Kilos weren’t just a threat to surface ships. Casino One-One’s captain knew that his aircraft could fall prey to a Russian sub as well.

•   •   •

C
ommander Scott Hagen read his latest op orders from Sixth Fleet Command in Naples, and he blew out a long sigh. He’d have to classify the information as part good news, and part bad, but he told himself if nothing else it would light a fire under his butt, and the butts of his crew.

As if they needed more incentive for finding a pair of submarines that might just kill them.

The USS
Normandy
, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, and the USS
Mustin
, an Arleigh Burke–class guided missile destroyer one generation older than the
James Greer
, were at this moment racing to join up with a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship in the North Sea. Already with the amphibious assault ship were a San Antonio–class amphibious transport dock ship, and a Harpers Ferry–class dock landing ship. The five vessels would form into an amphibious ready group, and then sail together around the Jutland Peninsula, through the Øresund Strait between Denmark and Sweden, and then finally into the Baltic.

It would take them two and a half days to arrive in the waters around Lithuania, and Commander Hagen knew that while the arrival of the big cruiser and the potent guided missile destroyer would be a tremendous help in the approaching fight against Russia’s Baltic Fleet, the fact these two ships would be arriving just ahead of two thousand U.S. Marines on three other ships meant Hagen damn well needed to have these waters safe enough for an amphibious landing by the time the task force arrived.

And to that end he’d called for one of his junior officers. A knock at the door to his stateroom got his attention, and he looked up to see a fresh-faced lieutenant with blond hair and a nervous expression. Hagen had read the man’s file again this afternoon, and he knew the man was thirty, but to Hagen he looked like he could have been sixteen.

Now even the LTs are starting to look like kids,
he said to himself.
You’re getting old, Scott.

“Come on in, Weps. Take a seat.”

Lieutenant Damon Hart did as directed, sitting on the chair in front of his captain’s desk.

“I saw you in the CIC around midnight. You’ve been working all night?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll keep this brief, and when I’m done with you I want you to get some chow and hit the rack. I need you ready when we get closer to Russian waters.”

“We’re going in after them, sir?”

“Not as of yet. But since they’ve been coming out after the Lithuanians, there’s no reason to think they’re going to stay in their territorial waters when we get close.”

“No, sir. But I can’t believe they’d really want to mess with us. Our torpedoes are better, we have air assets that can take them out at standoff range. I know their diesel boats are hard to find, but if they come out to play, even for just a second, we’ll annihilate them. They know this, so there’s no way they’d do that.”

“I like your optimism, but you need to dispel any reliance on logic here. I’m sure the captains of those Kilos know we have a better weapons platform than they do. But you don’t know what their orders are. For all we know, Moscow is on the horn with those Kilos right now demanding they make an undersea banzai charge right up our gut.”

The lieutenant nodded, chastened. Damon Hart was a graduate of the Navy’s new Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center, a Top Gun program for surface warfare officers chosen to be the best of the best, who were then given training to hone their skills to an even sharper point. Then they were sent back out into the fleet, with a mission to bring the level of naval combat up all over the Navy.

Hart’s actual job here on the
James Greer
was as a warfare tactics instructor. It was his job to make certain every surface warfare officer on the ship knew everything he needed to know about every enemy weapon, tactic, and procedure, as well as U.S. Navy doctrine for finding and destroying undersea threats.

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.

•   •   •

T
he 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.