He fondled her left breast, twirling the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. His grasp suddenly tightened, and she caught her breath as his fingers tightened. Dvornikov’s eyes narrowed, and his lips twisted into an evil leer. “You want a little pain, dear Sharon?”
There were three short, muted puffs! of sound, but the ex-KGB officer’s body jerked as if it had been hit by three consecutive hammer blows. Dvornikov’s right rib cage exploded in a cloud of gore and bright crimson, and his eyes grew wide in shock. He looked down at his side, saw bone and pieces of his right lung hanging out of his body, then turned to Greenfield. “Sharon, my love,” he croaked, blood flowing from his dying lips, “what did you do?” His eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped over.
She stayed on her back for several long moments, the smoking gun in her right hand, listening to his heavy, gurgling breathing. She did not move until the gurgling stopped. Dvornikov had forgotten about the gun that she had put in her coat pocket — his gun.
The sadistic bastard was finally dead.
When she felt strong enough to move, she crawled back to the desk and the pile of half-burnt papers lying on the floor. From what she could tell, these were Gabovich’s notes on the sale of three nuclear warheads to General Lieutenant Voshchanka of the Byelorussian Army and surveillance records on the location and technical-system setup for the SS-21s on which they were to be carried.
Sharon moved painfully to her feet, buttoned herself up, collected the papers, stuffed them in her coat pocket, and left the room. The Byelorussian Army’s attack was under way and the counterattack would be beginning shortly after sunset. If Voshchanka was going to make good on his threat to launch those missiles, he would do it then. She didn’t have much time, but there was still a chance. She had to get the papers to the U.S. Embassy there in Riga, have them decoded and translated, and hope they could lead the Marines to the location of the missiles.
The Osmanskaja Vozvysennost, or Osmansky Highlands, which lay between Minsk and Vilnius, was called the “Highway to Heaven” by the people of northern Byelorussia because the rugged, rolling glacial valleys, hills, and buttes led from the marshy, dark wetlands of central Byelorussia to the fertile, well-drained valleys and farmlands of Lithuania and the Baltic Sea region. But the Highlands were also rugged, rocky, windswept hills, which made it very difficult to bring wagons or heavily laden horses across it. As such, they were a favorite spot from which to stage an ambush. Between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, several key battles between the Lithuanian-Byelorussian defenders and foreign invaders were won because the defenders swept down from the Highlands to overwhelm the invaders traveling on the marshy, unprotected valley plains below.
Lithuania’s Grand Duke Gediminas’s main castle was built on a hill that was part of the western terminus of the Osmansky Highlands. The Iron Wolf Tower, the main guard tower of the castle, was perched atop the hill and was itself ten stories tall, making the tower the highest elevation in all of Lithuania, with enough visibility to see nearly fifty miles into Byelorussia north and south of the Highlands.
General Dominikas Palcikas had taken advantage of this and had put an old war-surplus Royal Navy Type 293 air-and-surface-search radar atop the main tower to track helicopters and vehicles traveling along the highways and lowlands. Because the radar was old and very unreliable, however, Palcikas, just like his warrior brethren of ages past, had not forgotten to keep human sentries up on the tower to keep watch and report any activity they saw.
Palcikas, being a student of history, assumed that all professional, Soviet-trained generals were the same. It was a surprise, then, for him to find General Voshchanka’s Home Brigade moving rapidly along the main east-west highway north of the Osmansky Highlands. All armies that have taken the “low road” through Byelorussia — the Teutonic knights, the Mongols, the Crusaders, even the Russian conquerors — have gotten nailed from defenders coming out of the Osmansky Highlands.
Of course this was now the age of helicopter and jet warfare, of tanks that could climb mountains and guns that could dig out even the most entrenched troops. So it was not going to be an easy fight.
“Radar contact, aircraft, numerous targets, bearing one-zero-three degrees, range twenty-eight nautical miles,” the radar controller in a van parked on the grounds of the Lower Castle reported via radio. “Heading westbound at eight knots. They’ll be over Vilnius East in a few minutes.”
Dominikas Palcikas, on board his Mil-8 assault/transport/command helicopter, nodded nervously when the report was relayed to him. The helicopter, along with twenty others belonging to his First Battalion, were parked atop Dokshitsy Butte, ten miles east of the Lithuanian border. The Mil-8 was a standard attack/assault craft, carrying ten security troops, a battle staff of four, and four 57-millimeter rocket pods, but Palcikas had it upgraded with extensive communications gear to serve as his forward command ship.
With his air-cavalry unit were about two thousand troops and a hundred vehicles, from tanks to armored personnel carriers to World War Il-era Jeeps, armed and ready to charge. “Ninety knots airspeed — could be attack helicopters,” Palcikas mused. “But if our patrols haven’t spotted the initial spearhead of tanks yet, those helicopters are probably scouts.
“No reports of attack helicopters up anywhere,” Colonel Zukauskas, Palcikas’ deputy commander, added. “Perhaps the American Marines’ raid on Smorgon was a success?”
“Perhaps,” Palcikas said with a dim smile. There was actually a lot of evidence that suggested that the Marines were very active in Byelorussia — the command team that was picked up by one of Palcikas’ helicopter cavalry companies, the unexplained return of the Marines to Fisikous, and the reports he heard about a large-scale explosion and fire at Smorgon Army Air Base itself.
But the Byelorussian Army that was advancing on Vilnius from Smorgon was still large and very powerful; they had as many scout helicopters as Lithuania had helicopters of any type, and they probably had as many mechanics and garbage collectors as Palcikas had trained soldiers. There was no way that Palcikas could hope to face Voshchanka’s army head-to-head. Voshchanka could lay waste to the city with ease, using just his helicopters …
… so Palcikas wasn’t going to face Voshchanka’s troops head-to-head. He had learned from long years of experience as well as from the realities of life that he had faced since becoming commander of Lithuania’s young army that he could not do anything he wanted. No amount of prayer, positive thinking, or planning was ever going to make the Byelorussian Army turn tail and run. Palcikas needed an alternate plan, and he was putting that plan into motion at that very moment.
Despite the speed advantages for Voshchanka’s troops of traveling on the superhighway that ran from Minsk to Vilnius, the one disadvantage lay in maneuvering — it was easy and convenient to leave the highway only in certain places. Trying to maneuver laterally once the convoy got moving was nearly impossible. Palcikas had decided to borrow a page from Byelorussia’s early history:
When the Mongol invaders swept across the territory toward the Baltic, the Rus inhabitants were able to cut off their supply lines as well as their rear and flanking guards by making lightning-fast hit-and-run attacks down from the Highlands, then escaping back into the rugged hills. Using his light tanks, armored personnel carriers, and assault/transport helicopters, that was precisely what Palcikas had planned — instead of trying to face the Byelorussian Army head-on at the border, he had moved his entire division from Vilnius, nearly six thousand troops, across the border into the Osmansky Highlands of Byelorussia and was now in position to attack the troop column’s flanks and rear. Visibility was poor, but through the cold, driving rain Palcikas could see the columns of tanks and armored vehicles speeding across the Minsk-Vilnius Highway westward.