Lieutenant General Raimonds Balderis was a former Special Forces officer; robust and exceptionally fit for a man in his late fifties. He spoke good, albeit accented English, the product of a year spent at the US Army War College in Carlisle, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “I’ve always enjoyed my dealings with the Brits, so it’s good to have you with us. These are dangerous times and we need all the help we can get. The Prime Minister and Cabinet have this morning ordered the mobilization of our National Armed Forces, including the National Guard, as a precautionary measure after yesterday’s events in Riga and the Latvian Russian Union’s call for Russian protection. I’m about to start a briefing in the Joint Command Center. I’d like you to sit in. And Miss Krauja, it’s important that you are there too. We need to maintain the closest links with your Service.”

Here, Morland could see, was a man who would remain steady under pressure. Latvia was going to need such hands on the tiller in the days to come.

Shortly afterward he was sitting with Krauja and just behind Balderis in the newly completed, high-tech briefing room, a product of Latvia’s recent modernization as a result of NATO membership.

The Joint HQ Chief of Staff, an impressively sharp, young-looking colonel, started his briefing. Morland asked Krauja why the colonel was speaking in English and she pointed out the staff and liaison officers from Latvia’s Baltic neighbors, Estonia and Lithuania, as well as two non-NATO neighbors, Finland and Sweden. English, she explained, was the only language that they all readily understood. And it was, of course, NATO’s lingua franca.

The Chief of Staff described the build-up of Russian forces on Latvia and Estonia’s borders under the guise of a “snap exercise,” with concentrations of armor from the lead elements of 1st Guards Tank Army now arriving in assembly areas west of Opochka and Velikeye Luki, near the Latvian border. He then confirmed the information Morland had heard from PJHQ, that two Spetsnaz brigades had arrived in Pskov, the base of 76th Guards Assault Landing Division.

He also confirmed that the Division’s lead regiment, 23rd Air Assault Regiment, had just completed an airborne exercise in the area of Nevel on the Belarus border, around fifty minutes’ flying time south of Pskov, sixty kilometers east of the Latvian border, making it a similar distance to Riga. Even more ominously, despite returning to its base at the end of the exercise, the Division was being maintained at high readiness and satellite surveillance was picking up signs of the outloading of ammunition and other logistic preparations.