The soldier brightened. “Well, Darya, can you undo these restraints? I won’t try to escape. I promise.”
“Not yet, Valentin. Maybe in a little while if you continue being helpful.”
“I came in about six months ago, and it is just another routine job. I am no hero.”
Kyle Swanson glanced over at his fellow CIA agent. The man nodded in acknowledgment. She had the young soldier singing like a bird and was playing the good cop/bad cop routine all by herself. Swanson scribbled some notes of questions he wanted Anneli to ask after she finished the warm-up pitches. A quartermaster’s clerk was a much better catch than some common infantryman or cannon-cocking artillery shooter. This guy actually could see beyond the brim of his helmet because he filed and shuffled papers, wrote reports, hung around bulletin boards, transmitted instructions and received orders. Without realizing it, a clerk becomes a sponge for information, and this one would not need torture or waterboarding. Kyle made a note and passed it over.
Anneli read it and asked, “Valentin, you must be hungry. If I bring you some food and tea, can I trust you not to get violent when I undo the restraints?”
Serov looked at the two men over by the wall. He couldn’t escape anyway, so why bother? He didn’t even really want to go. “Yes, Darya,” he said, ready to agree to almost anything that would keep her nearby. It was a much better morning than being in that soggy barracks near the castle. The corporal was in love, but with a woman who coldly hated him and everything he represented, and was willing to eviscerate him on the spot. Anneli set about killing Corporal Valentin Serov with kindness and finding out about the Black Train that took away the only man she ever loved.
General Sir Frederick Ravensdale of Great Britain was what his American colleagues called a “warfighter.” The small and skinny lad who had started his boarding school education at Culford had matured into military heroism, and some thirty years later was the respected deputy supreme allied commander of NATO in Europe.
When he finished Exeter College at Oxford, Ravensdale entered the military and earned the sand-colored beret of the elite commando unit known as the 22 Special Air Services. The freshly minted lieutenant was part of D Squadron’s raid on Pebble Island during the Falklands War with Argentina in 1982. He was later wounded by a bomb in Northern Ireland and served in Germany during the Cold War. The career continued its upward trajectory during duty at the Ministry of Defence, and Ravensdale was a colonel in command of an armored brigade by the time of Kosovo, and later ran the United Kingdom’s 3rd Mechanised Division in Iraq. He received the fourth star of a full general upon his appointment to SACEUR. Along with the rank, he was a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and a Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Bath, a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order, and held numerous other accolades.
With that perfect pedigree, the easygoing general was popular on the international diplomatic circuit comprising member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A respected military historian, he had authored two books on strategy and tactics. He was very tall and still lean and handsome as he neared retirement. His wife had died of ovarian cancer ten years earlier, and his three children were grown and gone. So far, they had blessed him with five grandchildren, all of whom lived back in England. The little tykes did not know their grandfather was a famous and important man, and he enjoyed that leveling experience.
He thought about that during his long morning walk before reporting to his office. For him, retirement should be something to which he could look forward. He had a substantial income and would be paid handsomely on the lecture circuit, so there would be enough money, and his physicians pronounced him to be in excellent health. On the cool April morning, with the winds and rain from the past few days having died down, he was able to stride through the park and consider his options. They were few.
Should he hurry this thing along and keep pushing for Kyle Swanson to ignite the maelstrom? Or should the general try and slow things down, or even prevent the conflict, which would mean his own secret would be revealed? Was the best he could hope for an honorable death on the battlefield, or was that only a distant possibility for a desk-bound general? Would he risk ignominious arrest and a trial for treason, during which he would lose everything? Either way, General Sir Frederick Ravensdale, GCB, GBE, DSO, faced ruin.
Major Juozas Valteris stared west into the darkness from his perch atop a tracked infantry fighting vehicle of the Iron Wolf Mechanized Battalion, part of the Lithuanian Rapid Reaction Force. The 40mm cannon and coaxial machine gun were loaded and ready. Antitank guided missiles bristled from the hull and could go hot in an instant, if necessary. The orders from the joint staff had been clear that this was no training exercise.
The major had served in Afghanistan under NATO command, but this time he was on his homeland, and he had made sure that everyone in the seven-hundred-man battalion understood that basic fact. They were the tripwire against a possible Russian land attack out of Moscow-controlled Kaliningrad, a leftover enclave sandwiched between Lithuania on its east and Poland on its west. Everybody else in NATO was looking the other way, toward Russia itself, but Valteris and his men knew the threat they faced lay in the other direction, to the west. All that was needed was a spark and the Baltic States would be hurled into still another war.
By treaty, Russian military trains could transit Lithuania into Kaliningrad, and for the past months, the rail traffic had increased. The country was also the headquarters for the Russian Baltic Fleet and had been heavily militarized during the Soviet era, when several hundred thousand troops were stationed there. The major didn’t know the makeup of forces today, but that surprise exercise that the Russians were running to the north along Estonia and Latvia had spooked the Lithuanian high command enough to get the RBF up and moving.
This was no Ukraine, Major Valteris preached to his troops. They were not going to allow the Russian military to get as much as a toehold in Lithuania, no matter which direction they tried. There would be no victory for Moscow here. The men all knew the small force could not stop a full and determined attack. What they could do, and would do, was hold until their friends in NATO could come swarming in to clean up the mess. A spearhead of several thousand German, Dutch and Norwegian troops was the next line of defense. NATO jets were on call.
There was no movement on the far side of the border, no sounds of war machines clanking about, no maneuvering battalions of Russian soldiers, no thudding, telltale signatures of approaching helicopters, no booming guns from the artillery tubes at Rooster Cap Nowak, the forward Russian base only a few miles across Lake Vištytis. The silence did not translate into peace. He lowered his binos for a moment to check his personal weapon, a German-made assault rifle. His boys of the Iron Wolf hunkered down and prepared for whatever Tuesday might bring.
A somber Kyle Swanson and Anneli Kallasti were in the home of Colonel Thomas Markey of NATO and his wife, Jan Hollings of the CIA, all of them trying to read the intelligence tea leaves that might foretell the future. Each had a slightly different agenda, but a common purpose. The entire Russian border region was so tense that only a spark was needed to push things over the brink.
Jan Hollings was furious that Swanson had used Anneli without permission to snatch a Russian soldier. Anneli was mad that Corporal Valery Serov knew nothing about the disappearance of Brokk Mihailovich. The colonel was disturbed that defector Ivan Strakov was refusing to divulge any cyber-war information, and Kyle was troubled by his conclusion that Ivan might be telling the truth about a potential invasion. Together, they understood that the decisions they might make would reach far beyond the walls of the Markey living room in a neat Tallinn neighbornood.