On board were nearly four hundred soldiers, most from the 7th Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment, but among them were a few dozen members of the 25th Coastal Missile brigade and a mishmash of men and women from other Kaliningrad-based forces returning from leave.
Two dozen Kaliningrad Oblast government workers returning from vacation in Russia rounded out the personnel on the train, riding exclusively in the first-class cars in the rear.
The train also carried several military trucks, mostly Army GAZ light cargo vehicles and heavier Ural Typhoon mine-resistant vehicles, along with more than twenty tons of ordnance ranging from handgun rounds for the Army to 130-millimeter high explosive shells for the Navy’s AK-130, a massive auto-fire cannon used by the destroyers in the Baltic Fleet.
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.