The last big exfiltration he had done had been via high-speed boats out of Libya. Their Navy was easy to avoid and had they been forced to, even easier to outrun. The Russians, though, were in a completely different league.
It was said that it could take even longer to get out of Kaliningrad than to get in. Waits for exiting the country could run as long as five or more hours. It was why citizens of Kaliningrad preferred taking the buses, which have their own lanes at the borders.
On top of the problem of how they were going to get out, Harvath also had to plan for what they’d do if a member of the team were injured or captured, or if the authorities became aware of their presence and there was a tightening at the borders and an exclavewide manhunt. The sheer impossibility of it all was almost overwhelming.
It reminded Harvath of the beginnings of the OSS and the incredibly dangerous assignments its teams were sent on behind enemy lines. But at least when they jumped into foreign countries, they had local partisans on the ground whom they could link up with and get help from.
That wouldn’t be the case in Kaliningrad. As soon as Harvath and his team touched the ground, they’d be on their own. They’d have to secure their own transportation, do their own reconnaissance, and avoid detection every step of the way.
With the OSS in mind, Harvath decided to reapproach his problem. How would they have handled it?
While they were tough as hell and, when forced, underwent some amazingly grueling treks, they had always looked for the simplest answer first. If an ounce of courage could prevent a pound of hardship, they had gone the courage route.
The easiest places at which to cross over were the designated border checkpoints. Because Jasinski was Polish military intelligence, and because they might be coming in hot, he wanted to exit Kaliningrad into Poland, where she not only spoke the language, but also commanded some authority.
With that in mind, he studied the five Poland/Kaliningrad crossings. Starting at the Baltic Sea, he went one by one, heading east.
For the most part, they were practically interchangeable. They all cut through flat, open rural farmland. Not exactly ideal terrain for a covert crossing. But the very last, easternmost checkpoint was different.
In the Warmian-Masurian Province was the county of Goldap. A third the size of Gotland, its population was only slightly larger than that of the town of Visby.
It was bordered by the Szeskie Hills on one side and the Romincka Forest on the other. And running parallel to its border crossing was a nice, long lake. A third of it was on the Russian side of the border and the other two-thirds were on the Polish side. The minute Harvath saw it, he knew that was how they were getting out of Kaliningrad.
And as if he needed a sign that he had picked the right spot, when he saw the Romincka Forest running down the eastern side of the lake, it rang a bell with him.
Hermann Göring, the corpulent Nazi who oversaw the creation of the dreaded Gestapo and was a prime OSS target, had built a hunting lodge in the Romincka.
At one point the second-most-powerful man in Germany, Göring was sentenced to death by hanging at Nuremberg, but cheated the hangman by ingesting a cyanide capsule.
Of all the things Göring was infamous for, plundering the art of Jewish Holocaust victims, as well as art from museums across Europe, had ranked him at the top of the OSS’s Art Looting Investigation Unit’s “Red Flag List.” From France alone, it was reported that over twenty-five thousand railroad cars of stolen art and treasure had been shipped to Germany. His personal collection had been valued at more than $200 million.
Göring’s lodge in the Romincka, where he was believed to have showcased some of his stolen artwork, was known as the Reichsjägerhof Rominten. It served as his headquarters during Operation Barbarossa, when the Nazis attacked and invaded the Soviet Union.
Harvath would have liked to have been around to have seen Göring’s beloved lodge burned to the ground.
As it was, he’d have to take pleasure in sticking it to the Russians by using the lake for their escape.
On the western shore of the Polish side was a hotel and health spa. Because half his team would be needed to help coordinate their exfil, and because half were not HALO certified, Harvath decided that’s where they would be based. As guests of the hotel, they would have the perfect cover for exploring the lake and the areas around it.
With that settled, Harvath sat down with Haney and began to make an extensive list of everything the operation would require. He started with how much gear each team member could jump into Kaliningrad with, and then worked on honing it down to what was absolutely essential. It was going to be a bitch pulling the equipment together from various American military outposts in the region, but if anyone could make it happen, it was Haney.
He was, of course, disappointed not to be going into Kaliningrad, even though he was HALO qualified. He had suffered a leg injury during their assignment in Libya, and the team couldn’t risk his reinjuring it on this jump.
Jasinski wasn’t qualified, so she’d be staying back with Haney as part of the exfil element. Because of the water component involved in their escape, Harvath wanted Barton, a SEAL, to stay back and make sure all of it went off without a hitch.
The trio had already been dropped at Olsztyn-Mazury Airport, near the village of Syzmany. Their portion of the gear would be flown in via a military transport plane. Once it arrived, they would hook the trailers up to the SUVs they had rented and drive to their hotel on Lake Goldap.
Inserting with Harvath into Kaliningrad would be Ashby, Staelin, and Palmer. Morrison and Gage had remained back in Brussels with Nicholas to guard the compound and keep an eye on Kuznetsov until a CIA security team arrived to fly him to Landstuhl Medical Center for treatment.
Harvath would have preferred to be going into Kaliningrad with more operators, but the bigger their footprint, the greater their visibility. Four would have to do.
As the Gulfstream jet made its final approach into Šiauliai International Airport in Lithuania, Harvath went through everything again. He wanted every possible angle nailed down before they launched. And they needed to launch as soon as possible.
Not only was President Porter anxious for them to get to Tretyakov, but there was also the concern that Swedish intelligence could cover up what had happened on Gotland for only so long. At some point, Kuznetsov was going to miss a communications window and the GRU was going to get suspicious.
Did that mean Tretyakov would move or go into hiding? Harvath didn’t know, but he also didn’t want to find out. The sooner they got into Kaliningrad, the sooner they could get to him, and the sooner they could get out.
This operation had Harvath concerned on a variety of different levels, not the least of which was the speed at which it was moving. And when you were moving at such high speed, the slightest mistake could turn into the deadliest of events.
CHAPTER 61
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ŠIAULIAI, LITHUANIA
Šiauliai International Airport had once been one of the largest military air bases in the Soviet Union. Now, it was home to NATO’s Baltic Air Policing mission. It provided for the rapid scrambling of fighter jets and other aircraft to help protect the airspace over Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
As Harvath dropped the airstairs of the Gulfstream, he saw a familiar face waiting for him out on the tarmac.