Page 104 of Spymaster

ENTERINGLITHUANIANAIRSPACE

Harvath’s plan wasn’t simple. In fact, it was quite complicated. That meant there were a lot of ways in which it could go wrong.

According to Kuznetsov, Colonel Oleg Tretyakov was in Kaliningrad. Similar to the Vatican’s being its own state within Italy, Kaliningrad was an exclave—sovereign Russian territory, a minicountry cut off from Russia—right inside Europe.

Sandwiched in between NATO members Poland and Lithuania, Kaliningrad was tightly controlled and nearly impossible to get into. And, based on what Kuznetsov had revealed, it would be doubly difficult for Harvath.

Kuznetsov had recognized him back on Gotland because of the CCTV footage Johansson had recovered from Visby Hospital. That footage had been forwarded to Tretyakov and had likely been added to every Russian database.

The moment Harvath tried to access any Russian-controlled port of entry and his photograph or facial scan was run, he’d be taken into custody and the GRU alerted.

That meant the only way he could get into Kaliningrad was to sneak in.

He had thought about somehow smuggling the team in via trucks, but the Kaliningrad crossings resembled those at the U.S./Mexico border. There was a heavy dog presence at each one, and they had no problem holding people up for hours as they went vehicle by vehicle, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

The situation along the exclave’s rugged coastline wasn’t any better. As Kaliningrad was home to Russia’s Baltic fleet, the surface and subsurface patrols were extensive and around-the-clock.

With land and sea options out of the question, that left only one other possibility—air.

The plan was to conduct a High Altitude Low Opening, or HALO, parachute jump.

They would exit the aircraft over Lithuanian airspace and glide for several kilometers, popping their chutes and landing in a predetermined location in the Kaliningrad countryside.

From there, they would make their way into the city and search for Tretyakov. Everything up to that point was the easy part. Getting out of Kaliningrad was going to be something else entirely. Harvath had no idea how they were going to pull that off.

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.

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