Here he grabbed his cordless phone off his bedside table and headed straight to the bathroom, dialing a number from memory as he walked. He looked in the mirror while he waited for the connection to be made.
A man answered in Italian, with a thick foreign accent. “Prego?”
Salvatore touched his broken lip with the tip of a finger. He replied in English, “It’s him. You were right.”
“You’re sure?”
“I just drank a beer with him.”
“You what?”
“It’s fine. He does not suspect anything. The identity is confirmed.”
There was a long pause. Then, “You will find the money in your mail slot in the morning. We have more work for you.”
Salvatore was surprised by this. “For the same fee?”
A pause. “The fee is acceptable to us. But the work will be outside of Rome. In Brussels.”
“No problem.”
“Good. One week from now, maybe two. We’ll let you know.”
“Tutto bene.” Then, “Wait… there is something else.”
“Yes?”
“He is suspicious. He thinks someone is after him. And he’s ready. For trouble, I mean.”
Salvatore heard the man chuckle, then the line went dead.
9
Kaliningrad Oblast is a strange artifact of the Second World War: a Russian province that is not connected to the rest of Russia. It was created out of the redrawing of German borders, when Stalin demanded for himself the German Baltic seaport of Königsberg and the territory around it.
For nearly fifty years the sequestration of the province from the rest of the Soviet Union served as a strategic benefit for Moscow. Bordered by Poland to the south and east, and Lithuania to the north and east, Kaliningrad Oblast was nestled between Soviet client states, so there was minimal threat of losing it to the West, and it gave the Navy of the USSR easy access to the Baltic. Their Baltic fleet became their most strategically important, as it patrolled waters bordering several NATO nations.
Kaliningrad was called the most militarized place on earth during the Cold War, because the Soviets staged so many armaments and troops throughout the oblast, ready to defend the Iron Curtain or attack south through Poland and into Germany.
But after the fall of the Union, the fact that tiny Kaliningrad hung out alone, surrounded by nations no longer obligated to the whims of Moscow, made it extremely vulnerable. And then, when Poland joined NATO in 1999, the segregation of the half-million Russians living hundreds of miles from the Russian mainland became a significant issue indeed. And when Lithuania joined NATO in 2004 along with Estonia and Latvia, the Kremlin went apoplectic, as this meant a Russian province and home to their Baltic Fleet was now surrounded by NATO member states.
These days the oblast was, essentially, a forward operating base for the Russian military, because Valeri Volodin had spent the last three years pouring troops and matériel into the province en masse as his relationship with the West became more adversarial. The Baltic Fleet had been beefed up with new ships, new missiles, and new naval infantry battalions, all of which threatened both land and sea around the Baltic. The naval air base at Chkalovsk, just a few miles north of Kaliningrad City, housed the Baltic Fleet Air Force, a naval aviation detachment of Su-27 Flanker fighters as well as helicopters, antisubmarine platforms, and transport aircraft. The most robust airfield in the oblast, however, was fifty miles east of Kaliningrad City, at Chernyakhovsk. Here Su-24 Fencers and MiG-31 Foxhounds lived in hardened bunkers and patrolled the skies over the oblast and west over the Baltic Sea.
Getting all this equipment and personnel into Kaliningrad was no easy feat, but the Russians had it figured out. Supplies were brought in by air transport, of course, but that was only a small fraction of the military needs of the oblast. Since the Russian mainland did not border its most western province, Moscow hashed out an agreement with both Belarus and Lithuania, stipulating that Russia be allowed unrestricted access to Kaliningrad. Russia and Belarus were close allies, but Moscow’s deteriorating relations with all the Baltic nations caused the rail and highway transit routes through Lithuania to become a potential flashpoint for another European war.
The situation had worsened to the point that many said it was only a matter of time before Volodin threatened Lithuania directly, and after Russia’s one-day attack of Estonia and their armed annexation of the Crimea, many Kremlin watchers determined it would take nothing more than a railroad strike in Lithuania or well-attended protests in Poland for Russia to send troops into their neighbors to establish a permanent corridor to Kaliningrad with the stated purpose of ensuring transit to their western province.
And if they did this, it didn’t take an expert to know that the reverberations would reach far beyond the Baltics.
Lithuania was a NATO member state, and one of the major founding principles of NATO’s charter was the concept of “collective self-defense.” This was embodied in the charter’s Article Five. “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense… will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith… such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
During the Cold War it was presumed that any attack of any NATO country would be part of an all-out Soviet invasion of the West, so the prospects of NATO’s being drawn into a regional war it didn’t want by Article Five were slim. But now, as small NATO nations in Central Europe found themselves in the crosshairs of Valeri Volodin, NATO leaders across Europe had become shaky, to put it mildly.
France, for example, wasn’t crazy about the idea of fighting a nation with 310 nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to defend the honor of tiny Lithuania.
It was clear that Volodin wanted more territory, and it was somewhat less clear, but still reasonable to assume, that Volodin did not want war with NATO. His Kremlin had become incredibly adept at taking the political temperature of the NATO countries and then waging a kind of “hybrid war” in the Baltic, careful to keep their actions just below the threshold of an Article Five violation — or, more precisely, below the threshold of what the NATO nations could plausibly deny was an Article Five violation.
But across the Atlantic, President of the United States Jack Ryan was pushing for tougher reactions against Russia. He had suggested, both publicly and privately to NATO leadership, that the organization’s indecisive moves and nonconfrontational stance to virtually all provocations by Russia was only encouraging a full-on attack. There was nothing stopping Russia from coming over the Lithuanian border, save the prospect of NATO countermeasures, so Ryan quite reasonably felt Europe’s feeble responses to Volodin’s threat and low-intensity action only encouraged him to do more.
It also kept Lithuania in a constant state of frustration and uncertainty. Recent polls in the small Baltic nation showed most citizens believed their country would be invaded by Russia within the next year.
All it would take would be that one spark, and the low-intensity hybrid action Volodin had been waging could morph into a full-on military invasion.
The troop train rumbled west over Belarus’s border with Lithuania, passing by the immigration-control buildings and the lines of fences shortly before midnight. It continued on without slowing, and the border guards from both nations barely gave it a glance.