by Mark Greaney
To the average Lithuanian there was no outward clue this twenty-car train passing in the middle of the night through their nation was carrying Russian military forces and their equipment; it looked much like any other train coming from the east and heading to the west. But anyone around here who followed the news was well aware that Russia had the right to transit Lithuania on the way to Kaliningrad.
There had been a mutual agreement that said in exchange for Lithuania being allowed to board and inspect the trains whenever they wanted, the Russians were allowed to inspect Lithuanian border security facilities, but the agreement fell by the wayside when Valeri Volodin came to power.
The Russians would pass through, they would show the Lithuanians nothing, and the Lithuanians would just have to get used to it.
The Lithuanian government had not gotten used to it. Not at all. But they had learned to pick their battles with the regional powerhouse to the east, and they let the trains pass. They were never allowed to stop inside Lithuania; stations along the route were lined with guards, and the trains were always followed a few minutes behind by three high-rail inspection trucks to check for anything or anyone left behind.
• • •
A minute before the Russian military train passed through Vilnius Central Station, a pair of nearly identical gray Ford Transit vans drove along the Švitrigailos rail overpass due west of the station. The vehicle in front pulled to the curb slowly, then stopped, and then the van in back, fifty meters behind its twin, did the same. Simultaneously, men climbed out of the front passenger seats of the two vans, then they jogged out into the middle of the street with flashlights in their hands.
The man in the rear turned to the south; the man in front looked north.
There was no one else on the overpass at this time of night, but had there been, they would have reported that the men who leapt from the vans wore identical black armbands with two lances crossing each other. It would mean nothing to any potential witnesses, because few people in Lithuania would recognize the insignia of the Polish People’s Lancers, a small civilian paramilitary outfit based in Łódź, Poland.
While the first pair stood ready to block the overpass from any traffic, the side doors of the two vans opened simultaneously and two more men jumped out of each vehicle. These men, also wearing the Polish Lancers insignia, immediately turned back around into their vehicles and hefted large, long metal devices. These they carried over to the sidewalk near the overpass railing.
Again, no one outside of the men from the vans saw any of this, but if they had, they would need to know their military weapons and perhaps a bit of history to recognize the Soviet-era B-10 smooth-bore recoilless rifles, first put into service in the 1950s and taken out of service by most modern armies by the early nineties.
The two big metal cannons had wheels, but they were not placed on the ground until they were almost in position by the overpass railing overlooking the rail line below. Then they were rolled left and right, oriented generally on a fixed point on the train tracks between the overpass and the station in the distance.
Each B-10 possessed a simple optical sight fixed to the left of the long 82-millimeter barrels, and one man on each gun used the sight to refine the weapon’s positioning a bit more. They were not precise, but they didn’t have to be. They were aiming at a point just two hundred meters away.
The big diesel engine of the twenty-car Russian military train on its way to Kaliningrad rumbled through Vilnius Central Station after the two guns had stopped moving. The men on the overpass watched it approach, pulling the long train behind it. They waited a few seconds more, then they heard a call on the radios they wore hooked to their belts.
“Atak!” The command was in Polish.
The two recoilless rifles fired almost simultaneously.
The diesel engine at the front of the train took two direct hits of high-explosive shells, and although it did not disintegrate or flip off the tracks, it was knocked out of commission instantly, its two-man crew was killed, and several of its rail wheels were damaged. The derailment came, but it did not come until the engine was almost directly under the overpass. Though the damage had been less than any of the attackers expected, they reloaded and aimed again quickly; the gun on the left fired down onto the ninth railcar, and the gun on the right sent an HE shell into the eleventh.
Two more direct hits tore into both cars.
The B-10s were reloaded a second time, this time aimed farther back along the long train. The recoilless rifle on the north side of the overpass managed to miss its target by a dozen feet, but the high-explosive round sent thousands of bits of shrapnel into the fourteenth car, killing and maiming almost as many as if the shell had hit the roof of the train.
While the attack was under way, a taxi with a passenger in the back on its way to the train station turned onto the Švitrigailos Street overpass. The driver slammed on his brakes as a man in the road waved a flashlight, and an instant later, a pair of flashes near the railing ahead on the right illuminated the entire area. Both the driver and the passenger saw the men and the small artillery pieces, and they heard the detonations down below on the train tracks.
The sixth and final shell fired by the men wearing the Polish civilian paramilitary insignia did the most damage. This 82-millimeter projectile impacted on the sixteenth car, and just by luck this car housed, among other items, a dozen 100-millimeter naval gun rounds. They did not all detonate, surprisingly, but the four that did created a colossal secondary detonation that affected seven other cars on the tracks.
The attackers didn’t know it, but they had the time to fire at least two more salvos, because the police at the station checkpoint had taken cover, thinking somehow the passing Russian train was attacking them, so they were only just orienting themselves to the situation when the assault ended.
The two Ford Transit vans raced off to the south one minute, twenty-seven seconds after the first round was fired, leaving both B-10 recoilless rifles there on the overpass, still smoking from the attack.
The two witnesses in the cab mentioned the black armband worn by the man wielding the flashlight in the road, and its distinctive crossed-lance crest. Within half an hour of the attack, officials of the Lithuanian State Security Department were huddled over computers, running searches of known insignias, all the while fighting the panic that locals had just started a war with the biggest and baddest actor in the region.
But when they found a match for the symbol worn on the arms of the attackers, the men and women of the Lithuanian SSD blew out sighs of muted relief, and they scratched their heads in confusion, unsure how this news would play out.
They had the identity of their culprits, or they thought they had anyway, but they found themselves more than surprised that a few farmers from Poland would do something of this magnitude against the fucking Russians.
10
President of the United States Jack Ryan wasn’t sleeping much these days. The pressures of the job and the physical requirement that the chief executive be present for an ungodly amount of meetings, photo opportunities, official functions, state dinners, diplomatic trips, and the like meant getting eight consecutive hours a night was a rarity, if not a pipe dream for the leader of the free world.
And that was in times without any particular crisis or calamity affecting the nation. In the past year Jack Ryan had endured an enormous succession of emergencies, from hurricanes on the eastern seaboard, to Russian invasions of its neighbors, to terror attacks on Middle Eastern consulates, to coups in South America.
And then there was the big one—the event that defined the past twelve months for the President: North Korea’s assassination attempt of Ryan himself.
The heavy burdens of serving as the nation’s President made catching a reasonable number of hours of sleep all but impossible, but it was this nearly successful attempt on his life several months back, a
nd the continued pain resulting from it, that made his nighttime hours difficult now.
He’d broken his collarbone and suffered some soft-tissue damage in his shoulder during the attack, along with a concussion. The effects of the concussion dissipated in a few days, but even after surgery and a daily physical-therapy regimen, often overseen by his loving but incredibly persistent wife, he found himself waking throughout the night with stiffness and soreness, if not jolting pain.
Cathy Ryan had explained it this way to her husband on more than one occasion: “Face it, Jack. Getting blown up can be tough on the human body.”
Ryan’s physical therapy had been a part of his daily routine in the months since surgery; today he was just finishing up his monotonous afternoon ritual of spinning an arm-pedal exerciser in the gym in the White House living quarters. Although this machine wasn’t particularly difficult or challenging, his surgeon had told him he needed to spend twenty minutes a day on it to prevent a frozen shoulder after the surgery. His shoulder was getting better, slowly but surely, so Ryan followed his doctor’s orders and added the arm-pedal machine to the end of his regular daily routine.
Ryan had worked up a sweat on the treadmill before sitting down at the arm machine this afternoon, and this is what Cathy noticed when she peeked in.
“You okay, Jack?”
“Not really.”
She came in and stood behind him, began rubbing his shoulders through his sweat-covered AIR FORCE ONE T-shirt. “The pain is flaring up?”
Ryan kept pedaling away with his arms, but he shook his head. “No, I’m suffering from acute boredom. I figure in the past month on this damn thing I’ve completed the Tour de France with my hands, and I didn’t even get to enjoy the French Alps.”
Cathy laughed, ended the shoulder rub with a tousling of her husband’s salt-and-pepper hair, checked her watch, then looked to Joe O’Hearn, Jack’s principal Secret Service agent. O’Hearn often worked out with his protectee in the residence, and right now he was doing barbell military presses in the corner. She said, “Joe, I have to go down to the formal dining room to check on the arrangements for tonight’s state dinner. He’s got seven minutes to go. Don’t let him slide.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As if Jack weren’t in the room, Cathy said, “You know how he is. He’ll try to charm you with conversation so he can take it easy the last few minutes. You need to watch out for that.”
O’Hearn smiled and did one more rep of the heavy bar. “I’m utterly uncharmable, ma’am.”
“Good. I watched Jack flirt with Andrea for many years. Always trying to get her to go easy on him when he wanted to do something he wasn’t supposed to do.” Andrea Price O’Day had been Jack’s lead agent, but she was badly injured in the assassination attempt. She’d be okay, eventually, but her career on the presidential detail, or any detail, for that matter, was over, and now O’Hearn was in the role Andrea had filled for so long.
O’Hearn regarded the First Lady’s comment. He deadpanned, “If your husband tries to flirt with me, ma’am, I’ll inform you immediately.”
Cathy laughed again, gave her husband’s shoulders one more squeeze, and headed back into the hall for the stairs. She was just out of earshot when the President said, “Joe, what happens in the White House gym stays in the White House gym.”
O’Hearn put the barbell down and toweled off. “Yes, sir.” And then, “But I think you should shoot for the full twenty minutes. It’s for your own good.”
Ryan grumbled and kept spinning the arm pedals.
But for only a minute more. Then the phone on the wall rang and O’Hearn snatched it up. “Gym.” After a moment he looked up to the President. “It’s DNI Foley for you, sir.”
“More like my reprieve from the governor,” Ryan said. He stopped pedaling, grabbed a towel off a rack, and began to rub his stiff shoulder while he took the phone from the Secret Service agent.
“It’s six p.m. on Saturday, Mary Pat. Something wrong?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. President. There has been an attack on a Russian troop transport train. Word is just coming in. Looks like there are multiple fatalities. Perhaps dozens.”
“Ukraine?” Ryan asked quickly. The assumption was reasonable; Russia and Ukraine had been fighting a protracted positional war for more than a year. But if this had happened in Ukraine, he wasn’t sure why the director of national intelligence was calling to let him know.
“No, sir.” A pause. “Vilnius.”
Ryan sat slowly in a chair by the phone. “Oh, boy.” Now it made sense why Foley was calling. He thought it over. “This is the sort of thing we’ve been worried about. Culprits?”
“Unknown, but it’s very early still. Of course, with the attack on the Baltic coast, one has to look at this Earth Movement organization, but this is a very different type of target.”
“Right. Bad guys have been coming out of the woodwork lately. Let’s get everyone in the Situation Room.” He looked at a clock on the wall. “Forty-five minutes.”
“I know you have the state dinner tonight with the Japanese prime minister at seven-thirty.”
“That’s right. I can’t duck out of that completely, but I’m going to need to multitask. Pop back and forth if I have to. Can you call Arnie for me and get the ball rolling on this while I get changed?”
“Of course. See you in forty-five.”
Ryan shrugged at O’Hearn after hanging up the phone. His right shoulder ached unnaturally as he did so. “Sorry, Joe. Gotta run.”
“You’re the President, Mr. President.”
• • •
Ryan wore his tuxedo as he hurried through the White House Situation Room, a five-thousand-square-foot collection of rooms on the ground floor of the West Wing. He’d just left the gym fifty minutes earlier, his shoulder hurt from the exercise and the injuries he’d received in Mexico, and his bow tie still hung untied on his shirt.
As he entered the conference room he was pleased to see he had a full house. Twelve seated in chairs around the table, and nearly that many others in chairs that ran along the wall on both sides. Four or five of the impromptu meeting’s attendees were also dressed formally. The state dinner was always a big deal, but other than the UK and Canada, no nation was closer to the United States than Japan, so the White House always kicked it up a few notches when the prime minister and his wife came for dinner.
Sitting just to the left of the head of the table was Secretary of State Scott Adler. He wore his tux and looked ready for the party, but he was hunched down, reading a cable to himself from his embassy in Vilnius. And the national security adviser, Joleen Robillio, sat next to him in an attractive gown, but she was huddled over her iPad, reading the latest from her staff on the incident.
Everyone rose when they saw the President enter, and he waved them back down and slid into his chair, which was at the head of the table, nearest the door.
“Those of us going to the state dinner will be there. On time. Let’s do this quick, set up things so we can get out of the way of those we’re leaving behind to do the heavy lifting tonight.”
He looked around the room at all the men and women of the military and Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Department of State, and the various intelligence services, all of whom would be tasked with staying either in the West Wing or at the Eisenhower Building next door, and no doubt working through this Saturday night.
Ryan said, “Damn inconvenient of whoever it was that hit that train at dinnertime in D.C. I’ll have the dining stewards bring everybody something from the state dinner.” He shrugged. “Beats pizza.”
He looked to Mary Pat Foley, who sat near the opposite end of the conference table. “Have we learned anything more about the incident?”
“Yes, and it’s not good. Two witnesses to the attack both report the terrorists wore armbands of the Poli
sh People’s Lancers.”
Jack looked around the room to see if anyone else recognized the name, because he sure didn’t. “What the hell is that?”
Foley said, “A small paramilitary outfit. Civilians. They are a nationalist, anti-Russian group, so that falls in line, generally speaking, with the possibility of being responsible for an attack on the Russian military, but so far we know of exactly zero violent attacks against the Russians committed by the Polish People’s Lancers. The attackers employed two”—she looked down at her notes—“B-10 recoilless rifles to fire on the train from an overpass near the Central Station. The weapons were then left at the scene. I suppose they decided it would take too long to get them out of there after the assault.”
“Have these Lancers released a statement? Either claiming responsibility or distancing themselves from it?”
“Neither. Not yet.”
Ryan cocked his head. “You’d think if they weren’t involved they’d not wait around to make that known.”
Secretary of Defense Robert Burgess was also in a tux. He shook his head. “Mr. President. It takes training and coordination to move a pair of small artillery pieces through the middle of a foreign city and then assault a particular moving train. From the little I know about the Lancers, they aren’t much more than weekend war-gamers. It’s basically a gun club. They do some camping in the woods and marching around. As Mary Pat said, they’ve never orchestrated any violent attacks anywhere against anybody. We found a few references in the newspaper in Łódź, Poland, where one of their more outspoken leaders made some threats against Russian speakers living in his neck of the woods, but other than some arrests for graffiti and demonstrating without a permit, they haven’t run afoul of the law. I find it hard to believe for one second they pulled this off.”