Commander-In-Chief

by Tom Clancy

  Chavez couldn’t lose the three-car tail. The entire objective to this mission was to lead them to a police roadblock on the Drujos highway, just east of the Old Town. The location had been selected because it was close enough to the city that Chavez and Caruso felt confident there was little risk the tail would give up and just return to their apartment, and far enough away from homes, apartments, and public spaces that a shootout would not create a massive bloodbath of civilians.

  • • •

  Chavez spoke in a normal voice in the Land Cruiser, knowing Dom would hear him in his earpiece. “I’m two klicks out from the roadblock. Still just the three vehicles tailing me?”

  Dom had to speak louder, as he was riding on the bike, but his helmet muted much of the noise from the engine and the wind. “Affirmative. They are all lined up and following you like you’re the Pied Piper.”

  “Good, keep an eye out for any joiners. We don’t know how many of these guys there are, and we don’t know their operational relationship with the Russians in the area, if any.”

  “Roger that.”

  The plan Chavez and Caruso had ironed out with the ARAS unit in charge of manning the roadblock to take down the foreign operators was for Chavez to drive his Land Cruiser under the pedestrian bridge over the four-lane road, then continue on past Vitebsko, a small street that ran off to the left. Once he passed, six ARAS police cruisers, each with two officers inside, would race out into the highway and block the road. Another half-dozen men would be up on the pedestrian bridge over the highway, armed with powerful spotlights, HK G36 rifles, and Benelli shotguns.

  There were eighteen in the ARAS force in total, not ideal as far as Chavez was concerned, but it appeared the group following him in three cars would not be anticipating the ambush, so he thought the plan reasonable considering the threat.

  Traffic was virtually nonexistent on this stretch of the highway now, and both Chavez and Caruso were thankful for this. The ARAS roadblock would catch anyone driving by once it was sprung, so if the men in the three cars tailing Chavez decided to fight it out, civilians might well be caught in the crossfire if there had been much traffic.

  Ding called Dom over his earpiece. “Okay, I can see the pedestrian bridge ahead. You need to back off now so you don’t end up downrange if the shooting starts.”

  Caruso did as Chavez instructed, slowing his motorcycle to a crawl on the road. He watched the taillights of the BMW SUV, the third of the three vehicles in the tail, get farther and farther away.

  Dom decided to proactively block the road so no one else got closer. He turned his bike around, and shined the headlight back toward any oncoming traffic. And he pulled out a flashlight from his jacket. He climbed off his bike and stepped into the next lane, then began waiting for cars.

  • • •

  Chavez passed under the pedestrian bridge that represented the opening jaw of the Lithuanian federal antiterrorist team’s trap, and he kept rolling through, passing Vitebsko Street on his left, and continuing on. He looked in his rearview mirror and saw the lights of the first vehicle behind him, some 150 yards back. It was racing right into the trap.

  The gray Škoda passed first under the pedestrian bridge, and just as it did so, a row of Lithuanian police cars raced out in front of it, covered all four lanes, and screeched to a halt. The Škoda skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, and behind it, the black Ford four-door did the same.

  Men leapt from the police cars, swinging rifles out in front of them and leveling them toward the three vehicles, while just behind the Škoda and the Ford, the black BMW X3 pulled to a more controlled stop, just west of the pedestrian bridge that ran above the highway. Men on the bridge flashed lights on all three vehicles, some of them facing east to the two cars pinned in and others facing west to the BMW in the rear.

  Eighteen men in black body armor and holding rifles or shotguns began yelling at the three drivers to turn off their engines.

  The BMW was the first vehicle to move. Its tires screeched as it was put in reverse and the accelerator stomped to the floor. Men on the bridge yelled down to the driver, ordering him to halt, but the SUV launched backward, surrounded by the smoke from its tires. An officer on the bridge fired a shotgun blast at the hood of the vehicle in an attempt to knock it out of action, but the vehicle kept moving backward.

  An order was initiated by the on-scene commander to open fire on the BMW, but before he’d finished giving the order, gunfire erupted simultaneously from both the Škoda and the Ford, two vehicles that were just twenty-five to fifty feet from the ARAS roadblock. Shooters inside the cars fired through the windshield and out the side windows, surprising the police force with both the audaciousness of the act and the volume of fire.

  Black-clad ARAS men standing behind their vehicles returned fire, men on the bridge all shifted to the east to shoot down on the Škoda and the Ford, and the BMW, after receiving only one ineffectual shotgun blast, was all but forgotten. It raced backward out of the area, picking up speed as it backed westward in the eastbound lane.

  • • •

  Ding Chavez pulled the Land Cruiser over to the side of the road a quarter-mile from the roadblock. He heard the first boom of a shotgun, then the chatter of automatic rifles, and finally a cacophony of various weapons, easily twenty-five in number, all firing at the same time.

  “Holy shit, Dom! It’s gone loud!”

  “I hear it,” Caruso confirmed. He was a half-mile from the roadblock, and three-quarters of a mile from Chavez. “We can’t approach without running the risk of being targeted by the bad guys and ARAS.”

  “Right. Stay right where you are. Watch out for any squirters.”

  “Too late, Chavez,” Caruso said instantly. “The black Beamer is coming my way!”

  Chavez slammed his hand into the wheel of the car. Ding had an MP5 nine-millimeter submachine gun on the seat next to him, and Dom, who was driving the motorcycle, was only armed with a borrowed Beretta nine-millimeter pistol, but there was no way Chavez could even get to Dom to help him without driving through the middle of the gun battle. He said, “Get off the road and out of their way. If you can, tail them, but do not engage.”

  “Understood.”

  Chavez slammed his hand again, feeling impotent parked here along the highway, but then an idea hit him. He put the Land Cruiser in gear and then stomped on the gas, looking for a place to make a left off the highway. As he did this he flipped on the moving map on the Toyota’s multifunction display. “Dom, I’m going to try and make my way through town back in your direction. You keep me posted on where they are going.”

  “Roger, they are passing me right now. I’m going to get behind them, and stick on them like glue.”

  • • •

  The X3 had turned around by the time it passed Dom a minute earlier, but it continued driving the wrong way, west in the eastbound lane. A few other vehicles had been on the highway, all of which had run off into the median or at least slammed on their brakes as the BMW and the motorcycle chasing it passed.

  Chavez had instructed Caruso to stay out of sight of the men he was following, but there was no chance of that. Dom’s headlight was the one vehicle behind the BMW, as traffic had been stopped by the roadblock a mile back. Dom instead just kept far enough behind the BMW that he felt they’d have a hard time shooting him from the back window, and close enough to them that he could see where they were going. He hoped they’d pull off this road and into the bustle and narrower streets of the city, where he could be a little more discreet about his surveillance.

  And Dom got his wish almost immediately. The X3 made a hard right turn at speed onto Aušros Vartų, a one-lane street that ran like a spine through the center of Vilnius’s hilly and warrenlike Old Town. Dom followed into the turn, then tightened up on them so he didn’t lose them. Dom and Ding’s rented flat was only a few hundred yards from here, so he kn
ew the area just well enough to know there were dozens if not hundreds of archways, breezeways, narrow alleys, and covered parking lots in which they could hide.

  He spoke loud enough in his helmet for Ding to receive his transmission. “We’re off the highway, heading north through the Old Town. Don’t know if he has a destination or if he’s just trying to shake me.”

  Chavez came over the net an instant later. “I’m hauling ass your way. If you can vector me in front of them I can try to pick up the tail.”

  Dom said, “Dude, you’re the guy with the GPS, I’m the guy on the bike trying to read eight-syllable road signs at forty miles an hour.”

  Chavez said, “Point taken, Dom. Just give me north, south, east, or west, and let me know what you see. I’ll try to figure it out from my map.”

  Dom followed the BMW north through the Old Town. It had slowed to the speed limit but was clearly still trying to find a way out of the area, because it made a series of conflicting turns that led in various directions. Dom called them out to Ding one at a time, and Ding was even able to pan the map on his Land Cruiser’s display over to the neighborhood and reroute Dom so he could give the occupants of the SUV the impression they had lost him.

  Dom followed along with Ding’s instructions, taking a parallel alley to the road the X3 was on, but when he came out on the other side, the black SUV wasn’t there.

  “Shit!” shouted Dom. “I’ve lost him.”

  Ding was using his map to help Dom while he drove closer to the area. “It’s okay, there’s only one way he could have left that road. Turn around, make a left on Subačiaus, and then another immediate left on Kazimiero.”

  Dom did as instructed, only to find himself in a perfectly dark, winding cobblestone passage. “He’s not here.”

  Ding said, “Stay on that road, he’s got to be in front of you.”

  Dom opened up the throttle, raced forward along the cobblestones at breakneck speed. He shot under a pair of passageways where the buildings that ran right up to the side of the pavement connected above the narrow road.

  After thirty seconds of racing through the dark, he looked to his right and saw the reflection of the BMW’s taillights parked in the courtyard of a building. He started to slow to turn around, but he’d barely begun to do so when the BMW shot back out in the street, heading the other way. As it made the turn, just seventy-five feet behind Caruso, a single shot cracked in the narrow passageway. Feet above Dom’s head, two-hundred-year-old masonry exploded from the wall of a building.

  Dom took off after them, going back the way they had come. Another burst of gunfire kicked up sparks on the cobblestones in front of the motorcycle. Dom slowed and then turned hard through a covered archway that ran under a building, then shot out on the other side. Here there was a staircase that ran down in the direction the BMW had been traveling, so Dom began bouncing down it on his bike. “They are shooting at me. You see any other parallel routes where I can stay out of their line of fire?”

  Ding vectored him off the stairs and back toward a road that headed to the south. Just as Dom raced onto the road, he saw the BMW in front of him, not fifty yards ahead on a one-lane cobblestone path with ancient walls tight on both sides. “Got them! South on Dvasios, they’re hauling ass!”

  “South on Dvasios?” Ding asked. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “’Cause I’m heading north on Dvasios, and I’m hauling ass, too!”

  “I don’t know how long this road is, but you’d better plan on—”

  Dom stopped speaking when he looked beyond the BMW in front of him and saw a big SUV race around the bend with its lights off. Both vehicles were doing fifty, and they were too close to avoid each other.

  • • •

  Ding Chavez had driven all over the Old Town in the past five minutes trying to put himself in front of Caruso and the vehicle he was tailing. And now he had finally done it, but he wasn’t sure of his plan. When he was only twenty-five yards away from impact he let go of the wheel, dropped sideways across the center console of the Land Cruiser, and tucked his head down into the passenger seat. At the same time, he hit the brakes, but did not slam on them. He only wanted to slow down the impact to a survivable speed.

  The crash with the big BMW SUV was violent. Chavez’s body was wrenched sideways; glass shattered and metal tore like paper. The airbags in the Toyota had deployed, but they did so over Chavez, who was lying sideways with his head in the passenger seat. They deflated instantly by design, so Chavez sat up quickly with the MP5 in his hands. He leveled it over the dashboard, trained it on the vehicle in front of him.

  The radiator of the big Land Cruiser was torn apart and hot steam erupted into the air, fogging the view between Chavez and any potential targets, but after a few seconds to take in the scene, he saw the driver of the BMW, just eight feet or so in front of him, fighting to get his deflated airbag out of his face, and his pistol up and out the shattered windshield.

  Chavez flipped off the safety of his submachine gun and opened fire, raking the man in the head with nine-millimeter full-metal-jacketed rounds.

  The front passenger got a shot off at Chavez but missed. Chavez used the muzzle flash to find his target through the heavy steam and smoke, and he fired several times, then he ducked down to avoid any return fire.

  He unbuckled his seat belt, opened his driver’s-side door, and bailed out, dropping all the way to the ground. Once he hit the hard cobblestones, with the smell of radiator fluid and engine oil prevalent in the cold night air, he swung his MP5 around and toward the BMW.

  A man in blue jeans and a heavy coat had bailed from the back of the BMW, and was just now climbing off the ground, pulling a pistol from inside his jacket. Chavez leveled his weapon at the man. “Don’t move!”

  The man moved and Ding shot him in the forehead, sending him falling back onto the cobblestones.

  “Shit!” Ding said. He needed at least one of these men alive.

  He clambered up to his feet now, thankful that his body was cooperating and he’d not been injured in the crash, then he carefully moved around the wreckage of the BMW, spinning around the back, low with his weapon up.

  A man had been crawling from the crash on his hands and knees, and he was now in the middle of the one-lane road, thirty feet away.

  Dom Caruso knelt over the injured man, his knee in the man’s back, his Beretta pistol pressed against his skull. He looked up to Ding. “Hey, look what I found.”

  • • •

  The last five minutes had been a logistical nightmare, but Chavez and Caruso had the wounded gunman alone, just the way they wanted him.

  The only operable vehicle was the Honda motorcycle, so Dom climbed back on and drove over to the man lying in the street. The man had a broken ankle—somehow he’d injured it in the backseat of the BMW in the crash—and he was unable to walk or even stand, so once they searched him for weapons Ding secured his hands with tape, blindfolded him, and then put him on the back of Dom’s motorcycle. Dom drove off to the south, with instructions from Ding to find a place for an in extremis interrogation.

  Just on the other side of Daukšos, a main east-west artery a block away from the crash site, Dom motored up a private drive of a section of beat-up-looking old apartment buildings. Here, behind a parking lot and a row of garbage cans, he found a freestanding building the size of a one-car garage. It didn’t look like it had been used in decades—it was surrounded by overgrown weeds and the window glass was broken out—but when he kicked in the loose wooden door and looked over the space with his flashlight, he saw the room would do for a short conversation.

  Ding had been on foot, so he showed up five minutes later, out of breath from jogging. By then Dom had the man’s coat and shirt stripped off him, and a flashlight balanced on the sill of a boarded-up window so it shined directly on him.

  The man shivered
and moaned in pain from his grotesquely swollen ankle, but Dom had done nothing to help him.

  Ding entered the little room, looked around, then ripped off the blindfold. The man blinked several times, then looked around.

  As far as Ding was concerned, the man looked like he could have been Russian. He was in his thirties, with a scruffy beard and mustache just a few shades more red than his auburn hair. He had a square jaw Chavez could make out even through the beard, and a flat nose like he was a boxer who lost a lot more fights than he won.

  He had no tattoos or other distinguishing marks on his torso or arms.

  “Do you speak English?” Chavez asked. The bare-chested man just looked up at the two Americans without reply, blinking from the 180-lumen flashlight in his face.

  Dom knelt down over him now. Got in his face. In a voice designed to convey menace, he said, “Do. You. Speak. English?”

  The man just shook his head a little, like he didn’t understand, but he said nothing.

  Dom sighed. “What do we do with him?”

  From behind, Chavez replied, “He’s worthless. Cut his dick off, shoot him in the head, and throw him in the river.”

  Dom nodded. “You got it.”

  “No! I speak English!” The man shouted it in a heavy accent, his eyes wide with horror.

  “Would you look at that?” Dom said with a smile. “He’s a quick study.”

  “I’ve been teaching that ten-second crash course in English for thirty years,” Chavez replied, and he knelt down in front of the wounded man. “Okay, boss. Your buddies all made their choices, now it’s your turn. Do you want to live or do you want to die?”

  The man said, “I want to live.” He seemed certain in his choice.

  “Good,” said Chavez. “First, you’re Russian?”

  “Russian? No. From Serbia. We are all Serb.” His eyes looked down a moment. “Were all Serb.”

  “Serb?” Dom said in surprise. “We’re a thousand miles from Belgrade.”

  “But you are working for FSB?” Chavez said.