Commander-In-Chief (49 page)

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.

•   •   •

D
ing 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.”

•   •   •

T
he 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 knew 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.

•   •   •

D
ing 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.”

•   •   •

T
he 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.

“No.”

“Who trained you?”

“Serbian Army.”

“Bullshit,” Chavez said. “You’ve got Spetsnaz training.”

The man said nothing for a moment, until Dom said, “The river’s only two blocks away.”

The wounded man changed his tune instantly. “Yes, there were thirty of us, trained in Russia. Tenth GRU Spetsnaz Brigade in Krasnodar.”

“What are you doing here?”

The man shrugged. “We were fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Chetnik Battalion. The best men in our unit were taken to Russia for Spetsnaz training, and then told we would be going to the Baltic for destabilizing operations.” He looked up at the men. “You said you wouldn’t kill me.”

“You tell us the truth, and we’ll take you to the hospital.”

“How can I trust you?”

“You know you can trust me to put a bullet in your eye like I did to your buddies.”

The man looked down for a minute. “They told us Russia would attack. We were the vanguard.”