Lobato and his crew were dropped only eight miles offshore, but it took them nearly an hour to reach the sandy shore north of Liepaja — they would stop the heavily muffled outboard engine every few minutes, and Lobato and his men would carefully scan the horizon, using PVS-5 night-vision goggles, checking for any sign of pursuit.
The assault team relied on their training and experience to filter out the noise of waves and water — and suppress their own fear and discomfort— and be ready to take action against any possible threat. Despite carefully donning their insulated “Mustang suits,” leaks were common, and the wet patches against their fire-resistant flight suits soon felt raw and numb from the wind-enhanced cold. Thick wool face masks and caps did little to protect against the wind-driven spray — they would hunker down as far as possible under the CRRC’s gunwales, exposing as little of their bodies as possible to the elements while constantly scanning all around them for signs of danger. The radio operator, using a small 5.5-pound Motorola MX-300 tactical radio, had to struggle to listen to the radio as well as scan his area of responsibility. Every sweep of a nearby lighthouse’s high-intensity white beam made the Marines tense up as they neared the shore, and Lobato was careful to keep that lighthouse as far away as possible.
Finally they heard the crashing of waves on the beach, and the assault team was ready to land. Every eye was trained on the beach, searching for anything that might be a threat — patrols were common, but civilians out for a late-night stroll were encountered even more frequently, and posed just as great a risk. Lobato made the decision to move the beaching spot an extra mile south because of an object that resembled a truck or large car parked near the coast highway, but otherwise their beachhead was clear.
With a soft hiss of sand, the CRRC slid onto Soviet soil. Immediately the Marines were out of the boat, ignoring the shock of cold water in their boots as they dragged the rubber raft out of the surf, across the fifty-yard-wide beach, and up onto a sandy ridge a few dozen yards from the coast highway. The CRRC was quickly buried in the sand and covered with brush, the area was policed and tracks erased, and the assault team spread out to search for threats along the highway.
Their task was only beginning-they had five miles to trek before reaching the extraction point.
“All air assets are up,” Knowlton relayed to Paul White in the number-two MISCO trailer, where the tactical communications gear was set up to monitor the mission. “All reporting in the green.”
White smiled: ten sophisticated aircraft, about thirty highly trained men, plus a three-hundred-million-dollar high-tech spy vessel, directly involved in an operation to extract a non-American individual from a republic in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In two hours they would all converge on the eastern Baltic and the game would be played to its conclusion. If you included the men and women of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, standing by in Norway and in the Mediterranean Sea, and the 93rd Air Force Special Operations Wing in England, there were nearly six thousand Americans involved in trying to get one man out of Lithuania.
Countering them, of course, was the awesome might of the CIS-Byelorussian Army, Air Force, and Navy in the occupied Baltic states. Even after wholesale troop withdrawals in recent years, there were still over fifty thousand foreign troops in the three Baltic republics themselves, plus over a half-million more Belarus troops within a few hours’ flying time.
The odds clearly were not in the Marines’ favor.
Only three things gave the Americans any chance for success — the speed, bravery, and stealth of the eight men who at that very moment Were setting foot on Lithuanian soil to put their hands on a Lithuanian peasant officer.
“Urgent message from PATRIOT,” Knowlton said, grabbing White’s attention. “That chopper is heading back to the target area. It’ll be on top of the assault team in ten minutes, maybe less.”
“Shit,” Paul White swore. They all knew the helicopter was going to be a factor. “Have PATRIOT relay the contact to the assault team. I’ll get on the horn to Colonel Kline.”
White hustled to the communications console and put his hand on the phone that was tied directly to the Amphibious Task Force commander, Marine Corps Colonel Albert Kline, commander of the 26th MEU’s (SOC) Ground Combat Element, on the amphibious-assault carrier Wasp—then stopped. What would he recommend? He had sent this team on its way knowing the helicopter, which had been dogging them for days, was in the area and would probably be a factor. Should White now recommend additional assets be brought in? One of the F-15’s escorting COMBAT TALONs could make short work of a helicopter, but it would blow the whole mission if the Gagarin radar ship saw it barreling in toward the coast.
No, they had to use the CV-22. “I need a status report from Ladybug,” White snapped. “Give me the location of WILEY COYOTE as well.”
The locations of both aircraft and an estimate of the CV-22’s aircraft’s fuel status were laid out for White on a chart in the MISCO trailer. The MC-13 °COMBAT TALON special-operations support aircraft was in its standby orbit seventy-five miles north, near the southern tip of the Swedish island of Gotland, well within view of the Gagarin-class spy ship but presently being left pretty much alone. The CV-22 was headed back to the Valley Mistress for refueling and rearming, sweeping well to the south and west to stay away from the Soviet radar ship.
White made the only decision he could: “Tell the MC-130 and the CV-22 that they need to perform an emergency rendezvous. I need Ladybug back in the target area without delay.” White himself found a plotter and a pair of dividers and, using a base refueling speed of 180 knots, computed a rough rendezvous point about forty-three miles west of Liepaja: “Clear COMBAT TALON for ‘music,’ and keep the escorts in the rendezvous area. Send it.”
“Pojorna, nas razyidinili, butti lubezni, paftariti, “the Marine assault-crew radio operator suddenly heard in Russian on the radio. It came over the receive-only command channel-a broadcast from PATRIOT, the E-3B AWACS radar plane. Translated, “Squad, reply not received, repeat message.” It was meant for Lobato and his crew, a warning message saying that the helicopter that had been working the target area was on its way and heading toward them. For maximum reliability, emergency radio messages from the AWACS to the assault crew were not scrambled or encoded with complex algorithms, which meant that intercepting and decoding a message was easier for the enemy-hence the code words in Russian.
The Marine carrying the radio moved quietly to Lobato’s side and passed the word to him, and Lobato nodded. They knew all about the helicopter, and Lobato had been expecting it — the wise play would be to assume the helicopter would arrive just as the Marines approached the target area. Lobato increased the assault team’s speed, still using extreme caution but picking up the pace slightly.
But he wasn’t expecting what happened next. The unit had traveled within one mile of the estimated pickup point when they heard the faint whupwhupwhupwhup of a helicopter in the distance.
The CIS helicopter that had been scouring the area for days looking for RAGANU was closing in on the Marines’ position.
“Message from PATRIOT,” the radio operator reported to Lobato. “The chopper is inbound, slowing to patrol speed.”
Lobato seethed: “Shit… we’re running out of time.” Lobato signaled the rest of the squad and they fanned out and headed for the pickup spot. The Marines hastily split up and dashed into the treelines on both sides of a small dirt road, carefully staying just within sight of each other, MP5 submachine guns at the ready.