Commander-In-Chief

by Mark Greaney

  Caruso, Chavez, and Zarkus all wore identical uniforms, blue cold-weather coveralls, reflective vests, and orange helmets. Their vest had the name of their company written across the back, and they each wore a utility belt adorned with radios, tools, phones, and other gear.

  While Chavez stood next to Caruso, he consulted a tablet computer with the geo-coordinates sent by Mary Pat Foley’s office. Next to the GPS location, a small icon of an arrow directed him to move the tablet computer to the right two meters. He stepped the corresponding distance on the wet grass, and this put him just inside the tree line. The GPS coordinates on his tablet turned green.

  “Right here,” Dom said.

  Ding moved the tripod to exactly where Dom stood, and he turned the laser surveying device slowly, from left to right. The display on the device gave him a 360-degree reading of the direction of the lens, and Dom told him to turn to heading 098. Ding complied, and the heading marker turned green the moment he pointed his camera in the correct direction.

  “On it,” he said.

  “Mark it,” Dom instructed, still looking at his tablet.

  Chavez pressed a button on a remote device in his hand, the camera inside the laser surveying station took a series of high definition images, and Dom’s tablet signaled the data had been received with a green checkmark.

  “Got it,” Dom said.

  Ding called out to Herkus, who was just fifty feet away by the truck. “That’s it. Load it up.”

  While the Lithuanian American threw his rolls of cable back into the van, the two Campus men began breaking down their equipment, a process that they’d perfected in the past two days of long shifts. While Ding lifted the legs of the tripod out of the soft earth he said, “What was that, forty-nine?”

  Dom corrected him. “No. That’s an even fifty. We’ll hit sixty by the end of the day.”

  “Which means, at this speed, we’ll be done in ten days.”

  Dom helped Ding carry the big device back up a little rise toward the truck. “I hope Lithuania has ten days. I wonder if it would make us work faster if we knew what the hell we were doing.”

  Ding said, “I’ve been thinking it over.”

  “Any conclusions?”

  “Obviously, this is some sort of survey of the battle space. Not sure why they are just doing it now, or what’s different about this that makes it so classified. Normally, with an area like this they’d just have local forces send back images for the military planners. I don’t get all the subterfuge, but that’s not the thing that really confuses me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, if the Russians come, we assume they will take the Kaliningrad Corridor from Lithuania.”

  “Right. So?”

  “So we’re about thirty miles north of the corridor. That stretch of Belarus over there isn’t the quickest route to Lithuania’s capital, and it isn’t the closest point to link up with the Kaliningrad side.”

  “So your question is . . . why are we here?”

  Ding loaded the tripod, turned around in the road to remove his helmet, and started back for the front passenger seat. He looked up and said, “I have a feeling that is their question, too.”

  A four-door Toyota drove up the gravel road from the distant bend. Herkus started for the driver’s seat, but Ding said, “No, let’s take our time. Talk to these people and feel them out.”

  The car pulled up and three men and one woman climbed out. They were of varying ages, but they all looked confident.

  And suspicious.

  “Labas rytas,” Herkus called out to the group. Good morning.

  One of the group, a short, fat man in his fifties, waved back idly. Speaking Lithuanian, he asked, “What are you boys doing here?”

  Dom and Ding were both looking for the telltale signs of weapons printing under their jackets. Neither man saw anything, but with the thick coats the locals were wearing, it was difficult to be sure.

  Herkus said, “Fiber-optic maintenance and survey. We’re putting in super-high-speed Internet cables.”

  The man in charge of the little group nodded distractedly, still looking at the men and the equipment.

  “Is this your property?” Herkus asked.

  To that the man responded, “Do you have some identification?”

  The woman and two other men stood in the road, and their body language showed the Campus operators that they were most definitely on guard.

  Herkus pulled out his employee badge. “Some kind of a problem?”

  The man didn’t even look at the badge. “Where are you from?”

  “USA, but my parents are from here. Used to spend my summers near here when I was a kid.”

  The man nodded. “And them?”

  “We’re all Americans. Look, friend, what’s the—”

  “Tell them to say something in English.”

  Herkus cocked his head. “What?”

  One of the men in the road let his right hand slip inside his open coat. Dom saw this and moved close to the man, ready to drop him with a punch to the jaw if he saw a gun. “Don’t try it, asshole.”

  The hand stopped moving, slipped out of the coat. Shaking.

  The woman spoke in Lithuanian now. “Tell them to speak English.”

  Herkus looked to Dom and Ding. “Say something in English.”

  Dom said, “What do they want us to say?”

  The bald man turned to the woman. “You don’t think Spetsnaz can learn English?”

  Herkus tipped his head, then relaxed noticeably. Turning back to the Campus men, he said, “I get it. They are locals. They think we are Russians.”

  Ding slowly pulled his passport out of his coat. It said his name was Thomas Kendall, but it was as good a U.S. passport as any of these four rural Lithuanians had ever seen. Dom pulled his own identification out, giving his name as Andrew Martin. The four Lithuanians looked them over in the road, and collectively they breathed an audible sigh that was almost comical to the two Americans by the van.

  The relief was so complete the woman began to laugh. She spoke in halting English. “Sorry. We thought you are Little Green Men.”

  Dom looked down at his coveralls. “No, ma’am. We’re medium-sized blue men. We’re just here to work on the Internet.”

  The bald-headed man wasn’t smiling. “We don’t need Internet from America. We need tanks from America.”

  Chavez nodded. “Trust me, if I had a tank, I’d give it to you.”

  Dom said, “Why did you think you would find Little Green Men up here? Russia is threatening the south.”

  The woman replied, “That’s what we think, too. But the Green Men are already here.”

  “Wait. You’ve seen Russians? Are you sure?”

  “We are here our entire lives. We know when someone not belong here.”

  Dom and Ding looked at each other. They both knew they had to be careful to not give their cover away. Even though these locals weren’t the enemy, if rumor got out that a group of Americans wearing linemen’s uniforms were asking questions about the Russians, it wouldn’t take a spymaster to put together what was going on. And in rural communities such as here, rumors had a habit of spreading like wildfire. Ding said, “We don’t get paid enough to deal with Russians. Where did you see them?”

  “They were in Zalavas yesterday, near the border. Ten men, maybe more. Taking pictures.”

  Kind of like us, Dom thought but did not say.

  The woman continued. “We told police, but the Russians left before police came.”

  The three men in the DataPlanet uniforms broke away from the Lithuanian locals soon after and headed off to the next GPS coordinate on their list. They had planned on breaking off for lunch at noon, but the three men agreed it would be better for everyone if they just kept working as long as there was light to do so.
<
br />   They were more convinced than ever that Lithuania didn’t have ten days.

  29

  On Jack Ryan, Jr.’s fifth day of surveillance of the Luxembourg attorney Guy Frieden, he realized he had managed to reach a level of symbiosis with his target that he had never wanted to achieve. All week Jack had been taking bathroom breaks at the same time Frieden did. This was by necessity, of course; he had learned through uncomfortable missteps in the field that he needed to take advantage of every available opportunity to go when there was a lull in the action.

  But now as Jack zipped up his fly and washed his hands he realized his last few calls of nature had corresponded naturally with Frieden’s. His bladder had fallen into a rhythm with the man’s down the street.

  Jack found it both depressing and funny that his biology had melded sympathetically with his target’s, but he shook the feeling away and headed back into his dark little office.

  Not to watch Frieden so much—although that remained his main duty—but to get back to his computer.

  So far, the only interesting person who had come into contact with Frieden—physically, anyway—was Andrei Limonov. Jack had gotten no closer to the money-laundering network used by Mikhail Grankin, and it didn’t look like he would do so unless and until Gavin Biery cracked the man’s files.

  But while the objective that sent Jack to Luxembourg in the first place seemed—temporarily, at least—out of reach, he had been able to dig into Limonov and uncover a few things about the man’s patterns. He had no information at all about Blackmore Capital’s clientele, so he didn’t know if Limonov invested one thousand rubles for one million clients, or one billion rubles for a single client. But through his research he had succeeded in discovering that Blackmore Capital Partners of Moscow had just very recently opened an office on Callcott Street in the Kensington district of London.

  The computer techs at The Campus had successfully managed to tap into London’s municipal camera feeds on an operation there a year and a half earlier, so Jack logged on to a Campus portal that served as his way in. It was estimated there was a camera for every eleven citizens of the United Kingdom, and through the portal Jack had access to every cam in the nation.

  He tapped the address of Blackmore Capital into the program, and instantly he was shown the seven cameras within a one-block radius. One of these cameras even pointed right at the street and pavement in front of the little house with the gold BCP sign on the front door.

  He saw no activity on the street or obvious movement through the half-open blinds of the house.

  Between glances up to his monitor showing him the activity in Frieden’s office, Jack closed the program displaying the London CCTV feeds, and he began to research how Limonov and Kozlov had gotten to Luxembourg.

  He knew they’d first visited Frieden on Monday, so he looked at direct flights from both Moscow and London that arrived on that day. Through a Department of Homeland Security database, he checked passenger manifests on the airlines, but found nothing. If the men were traveling under their real names, they hadn’t flown commercial on that day. He widened the search, but still came up with nothing.

  The next step, he knew, was to check private aircraft. Luxembourg Airport was really the only potential location for a private flight to deposit someone into the city, so Jack pulled up a list of fixed-base operators working there. Within minutes he had a list of all the registered flights that came in on Sunday or Monday. There were seventy-three, which sounded like a lot to Jack until he considered the amount of money in play here in the city, at which point he realized it should come as no surprise that a bunch of people with private planes would come here to bank or to shop.

  Of these seventy-three, eight had come directly from Moscow and nine directly from London.

  Jack started with the London aircraft first, thinking it relevant that Limonov had opened an office there just a month earlier. He researched each plane to try to determine the owners and their passengers.

  This took a half-hour, and when he was finished there was only one plane, a Bombardier Global model 6000, that he could not identify. It had arrived in Luxembourg just ninety minutes before Limonov and Kozlov met with Frieden in his office and, according to civil aviation information, it was still at the FBO at Luxembourg Airport.

  Jack jotted the tail number down, not positive this was Limonov’s aircraft, but certain he had no other leads.

  He expected it to just return to London soon, so he wasn’t over the moon with his potential discovery. Perhaps the two Russians were meeting with other bankers here in Luxembourg, setting up some new network for a big player in the Kremlin. Jack knew short of switching his surveillance from Guy Frieden to Andrei Limonov, finding out which hotel he was staying at, and trying to get photos of the man with any other associates here in town, he had pretty much exhausted investigative potential.

  With a sigh of frustration he looked up at his monitor and saw that Frieden was putting on his coat. Jack checked his watch and saw it was after five p.m. He’d been working on Limonov all afternoon.

  It was time to call it a day.

  • • •

  Five minutes later Jack walked among the heavy pedestrian traffic on the Grand Rue, his mobile phone against his ear.

  “Gavin Biery” answered the voice on the other end.

  “Gavin, I just wanted to let you know that everyone here in Luxembourg is still talking about that dashing American who blew through town the other day.”

  “Ha. I’ll bet the natives have erected statues in my honor.”

  “There was already a Burger King here, so they’ll have to think of something else.”

  “Somebody’s in a joking mood. You must have found a new lead. What’s up?”

  “There’s a plane parked at the airport here. Privately owned. I drilled down into the ownership as deep as I could, but couldn’t find out too much. Still, I have a tail number. Will you be able to tell me when it leaves and where it goes?”

  “If it publicizes its route, you can watch it yourself. But if they BARR the flight, then I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and do some real work.”

  Jack knew what Gavin was telling him. While most private aircraft registered their flight numbers and destinations with air traffic authorities, certain private planes used the Block Aircraft Registration Request system to hide this information. Celebrities, corporations hoping to keep their competitors in the dark about their actions, and the über-wealthy who didn’t want anyone to know where they were simply requested their aircraft and destination information not be placed in the system.

  The Hendley Gulfstream used this service every time it went on missions for The Campus.

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed, “they might BARR it. But on the flight into Luxembourg they flew in the open.”

  Gavin said, “No worries either way, Ryan. Even if they try to hide it, I can probably find it. What kind of aircraft?”

  “A Bombardier Global Six-K.”

  “Shouldn’t be an issue. I can find your Bombardier if it takes off and tries to go ghost.”

  Jack said, “While I should probably just leave well enough alone and not ask you for details, I’m curious. How will you do it?”

  “The FAA uses ASDI, Aircraft Situation Display to Industry, which is just a big public database so everyone can see what plane is where. When you use an app like FlightAware, it gives you information on where a flight is, although that is class-two info, which means the data is five minutes old. ASDI class one is real-time . . . It’s what the people in the aircraft industry see.

  “BARR flights mean the aircraft disappears from the list, so we look for planes in the air that are not showing on ASDI, then employ advance machine learning and data analytics to suck info from other public sources. If I’m searching for a single plane I can find it by using times, refueling info, catering info, private car hire info
at the FBOs. Much of it is done automatically through the system. I can put in a flight number and then, within a certain time period, it will tell me exactly where to look for it. From there, all I have to do is download audio from the suspected airport and use a speech-to-text app, then do a rundown of aircraft landing there. I’ll check every one that doesn’t match ASDI and figure out who’s who.” Gavin chuckled. “The bad guys can’t hide from me.”

  “You’re awesome, Gav,” Jack said.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Pretty sure that’s impossible.”

  Gavin gave a satisfied snort. “What’s your tail number?”

  “November, two, six, Lima, Charlie.”

  “Got it. I’ll keep an eye on activity at Lux Airport. When it takes off we’ll track it, whether they try to go ghost or not.”

  Just then, Jack’s phone buzzed in his hand. He looked down and saw it was Ysabel calling. “Sorry, Gavin, I’d better take this. Keep me posted on the plane.”

  “Sure, Ryan. Tell her we all said hi.” Gavin hung up.

  Ryan shook his head and laughed, embarrassed that Gavin had seen through him so easily, but appreciative of the man’s powers of deduction all the same. Quickly he switched to the incoming call. “Hey, there. How are you?”

  “I’m great. Better than great, actually.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “I finished early. Got the info from the last art gallery this morning.”

  “That is great. Did you run into any problems?”

  “Everything went fine. You should hire me, I’m pretty good at this.”

  Jack laughed. “You are very good. Hey, since you’re done a day early, why don’t you try to get on a flight tonight? I just finished for the day. I can meet you at the airport and then we can—”