8
Saturday, April 28
1333 hours
Waterfront Rise, front door
Middlebrough, England
Waterfront Rise, front door
Middlebrough, England
Roselli leaned back as the lead SAS breaker aimed
his shotgun against the front door’s upper hinges and squeezed the
trigger. The gun went off with a hollow boom . . . a boom repeated
an instant later as he slammed a second one-ounce slug into the
door’s second hinge. The door breaker rolled back out of the way,
chambering another round into his pump-action Mossburg, as the
three SAS troopers waiting to either side plunged ahead, the first
man up smashing the door aside and tossing in a stun grenade. Even
outside on the street, the chain-reaction explosion was deafening;
before the final echo had faded, the first man in the stick had
lunged into the door, cutting loose with a burst of full-auto fire
from his H&K subgun but never pausing for an instant as he
cleared the opening, closely followed by his mates in a
meticulously choreographed pas de trois that gave all three
men clear fields of fire in mutually supported directions.
“Go!” Roselli snapped, and Higgins, unrecognizable
in his hooded combat dress, mask, and goggles, swung his
sledgehammer in a wide sweep that shattered one of the street-level
windows. Sterling tossed a cardboard-bodied flashbang through the
opening, and the three men pressed back against the bricks of the
apartment as the explosions thundered inside.
Then Roselli was through the window, blinking into
the smoky near-darkness of a small parlor just off the apartment’s
entrance hallway. His mask was hot and close and narrowed his field
of view almost as sharply as night vision gear would have, and he
wished he could pull it off; but he concentrated on sweeping every
corner of the room. Enough light spilled in through the windows at
his back for him to see, but he pulled a flashlight off his vest
and held it ready, just in case.
There was one man already in the room, a
scruffy-looking tango in jeans and combat vest, writhing about on
the floor next to the door leading to the hallway, hands pressed to
his ears and blood streaming from his nose. Roselli took three
quick steps across the parlor floor, keeping the man beneath the
muzzle of his H&K as he kicked the FN FAL assault rifle lying
next to the man across the room. He kept the man covered as
Sterling slipped in close, knelt by the tango, and frisked him for
weapons. Normally, in a quick-moving assault, Roselli would have
shot the man dead and moved on, but this operation wasn’t hampered
by the need to protect hostages . . . and the intelligence provided
by live prisoners would be as useful as any documents they could
hope to find.
“He’s clean,” Sterling said, reaching into a vest
side pocket and extracting a clear plastic tie with one hand, as he
used the other to grab the tango’s right wrist and slam it into the
small of his back.
“Eagle Four-one,” Roselli said into his lip mike as
Sterling efficiently cuffed the stunned terrorist. “South parlor on
the ground floor secure. One prisoner.”
Over his radio, he heard a second report close on
the heels of his. “Eagle Two-two. Entrance achieved, second-floor
bedroom. One terr dead, one prisoner.”
“Eagle Three-one,” Sergeant Major Dunn’s voice
added. “Entry at the front door. Front passage secure. Two down
here.”
“Two-two, Three-one,” Roselli warned. “Coming in
from the parlor.”
“Come ahead.”
Roselli moved through the parlor door and into the
front hallway. The SAS men were already inside, deploying in
different directions, each with a flashlight held next to his
weapon, the beams probing through the haze and semidarkness. One
terrorist lay sprawled head-down on his back halfway up the stairs,
while another was draped over the banister on the landing above.
Both had been shot through the head. The entry teams, armed with
submachine guns, weren’t packing the explosive 7.62mm bullets used
by the snipers’ PM rifles to defeat the terrorists’ body
armor.
Burst-fire head shots at close range guaranteed an
instant kill.
Gunfire sounded upstairs, harsh, sharp, and
insistent. Seconds later, a tango in black jeans and a bulky
sweater appeared running along the landing, running blindly,
looking back over his shoulder, an M-16 in his hands as he fled
some unseen threat at his back. Roselli brought his H&K up to
his shoulder and triggered a three-round burst in the same instant
that Dunn and another SAS man did the same; the terrorist was
caught in a three-way crossfire of bullets that twisted him around,
sending him slamming hard against the landing’s banister. Wood
splintered and the man catapulted into empty air in a shower of
fragments, crashing heavily on the polished wood floor beside the
stairway.
Two more SAS men, ominous in solid black, anonymous
in their goggles and gas masks, appeared at the top of the landing.
“Second floor, clear,” said a voice over Roselli’s headset.
“Another down.”
“Back of the flat,” Dunn ordered, gesturing. “Down
the passage. Watch for ambush.”
Roselli moved deeper into the flat.
1334 hours
Waterfront Rise, top floor
Waterfront Rise, top floor
“I’m going downstairs,” Chun said, shouting to
make herself heard above the clatter of the helicopters hovering
low above the building’s roof. She hefted her weapon, an Uzi. From
the cacophony of explosions and muffled bursts of gunfire, mingled
with the shouts and screams of the defenders, it sounded as though
the attackers were storming up from the ground floor. She started
toward the door.
Katarina Holst screamed a warning, and Chun
whirled, seeking a target. Black shapes, like immense spiders, had
slid down next to the exterior of each window. Karl Steiner raised
his assault rifle, and gunfire stabbed in the dim light of the
room, thunderously full-auto, as he wildly sprayed the windows in a
shower of splintering wood and flying chips of plaster, but then
return fire was slashing in through all four windows, pinning
Steiner in a twisting, writhing dance before he pitched backward,
finger still clenched on the trigger as his weapon chewed a ragged
line of holes across the ceiling.
Something like a cardboard tube flew through an
open window, bounced once on the floor . . .
By reflexes honed through long training, Chun
squeezed her eyes shut, threw up her arms, and dropped to the
floor. The explosion of the flashbang was like nothing she’d ever
experienced before in her life, a chain of ear-shattering
concussions accompanied by a pulsing, strobing flash so bright it
burned bright red through her tightly closed eyelids. After the
first cracking explosion, she wasn’t even certain that she was
hearing anything anymore, but she could feel the continuing
detonations hammering at her body, slapping and clawing at her
clothing like a high-pressure blast from a fire hose.
When the concussions ceased, she opened her eyes.
Dimly, through a smoky red haze, she could see tall and bulky men
swinging through the windows, landing on the floor, unfastening
their rappelling ropes from the harnesses they wore over their
torsos. The ice-cold sweep of those emotionless goggles was like
the gaze of some huge and alien insect. The H&K MP5s strapped
to their bodies swept the room, seeking targets, seeking prey. One
of the commandos began unfolding a large, heavy blanket as soon as
he was free of his line. With practiced speed, he advanced on the
drum of burning records and threw the blanket over the top,
smothering the flames. In seconds, the smoke in the room grew
thicker, harsh white and choking, spilling from beneath the
blanket.
Chin stirred, battling the paralysis that seemed to
be pressing her down into the floor. They were trying to save the
records still burning in the fifty-five-gallon drum! Someone was
groaning on the floor close by, and Chun thought it must be
Steiner.
She fumbled for her Uzi. Damn . . . where was it?
She couldn’t find it, she’d dropped it, and the men in black were
bearing down on her like nightmares made flesh and blood. There was
a short, harsh, three-round burst of gunfire into one of her
compatriots—she couldn’t tell who. Another burst . . . and
Steiner’s groans were silenced. Katarina Holst struggled to rise,
an H&K in one hand, and one of the invaders triggered a burst
that tore into her throat and face like a scythe. Without a word or
even a sound, the German woman sagged back against a plaster wall
stained by her blood, her subgun slipping from limp fingers.
“This ’un’s dead,” one of the figures said, his
voice muffled by his mask.
“Here too.”
“Live one here,” another trooper said, bending over
Chun. Carefully, he kicked her Uzi well away from her outstretched
hand. “I don’t think so, lady,” he said. “Not today, anyway.”
She felt his gloved hands moving to her face, her
throat, checking for signs of life. She tried to back away and
found she had no strength at all. He seemed to be studying her face
closely.
With almost contemptuous ease, the man flipped her
over onto her stomach, grabbed her right hand, and pulled it into
the small of her back. She felt something thin and plastic snick
tight over her wrist . . . and then the process was repeated for
her left hand. Cuffed now, she was helpless. No . . . no,
no! It wasn’t supposed to end this way! Not with her a
prisoner of the capitalist bastards! Briefly she considered trying
to get to her feet and running; maybe they would shoot her, letting
her escape the ignominy of capture.
But someone was securing her ankles as well, taking
no chances with a potentially valuable prisoner. One of the men
stood over her with his ugly black H&K, speaking into the
microphone that must be hidden in that hideous mask. “Eagle
One-one. Main room, fourth floor secure. Four terrorists dead, one
captured. It’s the Korean bitch.”
She couldn’t hear the response, and at this point
she didn’t really care. One of her captors knelt beside her, and
after frisking her thoroughly and professionally for weapons,
turned her head to the side, and roughly probed the inside of her
mouth . . . searching, she supposed, for the inevitable hollow,
poison-filled tooth of spy fiction. It would have been funny if the
situation had not been so desperate. She tried to bite his finger,
but he was wearing heavy gloves. In the center of the room, two men
were removing the blanket from the fire, checking to make sure that
the flames had been smothered, while another carefully gathered up
the records on the desk that had not yet made it to the burn
barrel.
Gunfire sounded elsewhere in the building, and then
there was silence. Chun forced herself to relax, closing her eyes
to shut out the sight of the enemy soldiers guarding their
prizes.
This battle, the enemy had won . . . but the war
was not over yet.
She thought about Pak Chong Yong.
1345 hours
Outside the police perimeter
Waterfront Rise, Middlebrough
Outside the police perimeter
Waterfront Rise, Middlebrough
Murdock stood beside Colonel Wentworth and a
number of British army officers and security personnel. He was
still wearing his civilian clothing and felt out of place among all
the uniforms. The only other people in the immediate area in
civvies were obviously government types, “suits” in the parlance of
those like Murdock who claimed to work for a living.
Wentworth was holding a radio headset to his ear.
He looked up at Murdock and cracked a grin. “Right, that’s it,” he
said. “Building secure.”
“Excellent,” Murdock said. “Any casualties?”
“One of my boys was winged going into that upstairs
front room. Nothing serious.”
“Impressive. How long?”
The SAS colonel consulted his watch. “I make it
three minutes, forty seconds, give or take a few . . . ah, that’s
counting from the time I gave the order to the snipers to take down
the people on the roof.”
Speed was always the primary consideration in
operations like this. If the entry team was fast, the bad guys
didn’t have time to kill their hostages, if they were holding any.
Nor did they have time to coordinate their defense with one
another, or to prepare a stubborn defense against an attack that
could come from any or all directions at once.
Across the street, the British Army helicopters,
which had been holding their positions above the roofs of the line
of Middlebrough brownstones throughout the assault, were beginning
to move off. Murdock could see black-clad soldiers filing across
the roof and toward one of the machines, which dipped and swayed
each time another heavily laden man clambered aboard.
Other SAS men were leaving by a more traditional
route, exiting the flat’s front door and walking across the street.
Policemen and government agents were crowding in past them as they
left, hurrying to begin their investigations, and to get the
prisoners who were still under guard inside.
As they reached the police line and ducked beneath
the barricades erected along the street, three of the SAS troopers
veered away from the rest and approached Murdock. Roselli, Higgins,
and Sterling; Murdock recognized them even before they’d revealed
their faces.
“Well, gentlemen,” Murdock said as they began
divesting themselves of face masks and goggles and handing their
unexpended ordnance over to a pair of SAS arms experts. “Having
fun?”
“Hey, L-T!” Roselli said, his eyes lighting up.
“Too bad you missed all the fun!”
“When’d you get in, Skipper?” Sterling asked.
“Just a few minutes ago,” Murdock told them. “We
heloed in from Lakenheath. Came in over the harbor just in time to
see all the fireworks, and for a minute I thought one of you clowns
had touched off some stores. I didn’t find out it was a ruse until
I was on the ground.”
“Worked pretty neat, huh?” Higgins said, grinning.
His face was streaked with soot . . . or possibly it was blacking
off the rubber mask and goggles he’d been wearing. “Just like
clockwork.”
“Where’s Magic?”
“Up that way, someplace,” Sterling said. “He was
with the sniper team. Probably be along shortly.”
“So what was the take?”
“Eight prisoners, last I heard,” Roselli told him.
“Couple of them are wounded, though, and might not make it. One of
them is what’s-her-name. Kim. Or Chun.”
“Chun Hyon Hee,” Murdock said, nodding. “What about
the guy?”
“Pak? No sign of him. Of course, the Brits are
still going through the building. You should see some of the
high-tech gimmicks they’re using, looking for secret hidey-holes
and such.”
“Yeah, but they made us memorize the faces of a
bunch of terrs before we went in,” Sterling said. “They’ve got
bodies laid out in there like keys on piano, and they’re checking
all of’em real, real close. I didn’t see any other Orientals in the
lot. Just the Chun woman.”
“That’s not so good,” Murdock said. “The people in
Germany are pretty sure he’s here on some kind of an op. A big
one.”
“Shit, L-T. No idea what?”
“Not a clue. Maybe Ms. Chun can help us on
that.”
Roselli laughed. “That’s one mean-looking woman,
Skipper. I don’t think she’s going to tell us a damned
thing.”
“Maybe. We’ll let the MI5 boys worry about that.
Now . . . maybe you’d like to tell me what the hell you three were
doing getting yourselves involved in a firefight. I don’t recall
that being on the list of our assignments over here.”
“Aw, L-T,” Roselli said. He nodded toward
Wentworth, who was deep in conversation with a couple of suits
nearby. “We’ve been over all that with the colonel there. We were
just observing SAS tactics and deployments in the field.”
“Observing, huh? How many tangos did you observe to
death in there, Razor?”
“Only one, Skipper.” He raised his thumb and
forefinger, holding them half an inch apart. “And he was just a
little one.”
“Maybe I should’ve told you guys that tangos were
out of season over here, at least for SEALs.”
“Shit, L-T,” Higgins said with a grin. “You know as
well as we do that tangos are vermin. Open season, anywhere,
anytime, no limit.”
Murdock thought about his own take in Germany and
decided not to press the point.
“Besides,” Sterling said. “This was part of our
good neighbor policy. Hands across the sea, and all that.”
“And when hands don’t do the job,” Roselli added,
slapping the H&K MP5 still strapped against his combat vest, “a
few rounds of nine mike-mike work wonders. . . .”
1925 hours
Cranston Moors
North York, England
Cranston Moors
North York, England
It was very nearly dark when Pak pulled up to the
airfield’s gate and gave the password to the young PRF sentry in
camouflage fatigues and lugging a British Army-issue rifle who
challenged him. The sentry, one of the Provos, couldn’t have been
more than eighteen years old, and he certainly didn’t look alert
enough, or trained enough, to provide much of an obstacle should
the SAS decide to hit this place as well. Pak said nothing,
however, and merely nodded as the kid gave him a passable imitation
of a military salute.
That was another thing, Pak reflected as he drove
through the open gate. This make-believe that had infused the PRF
fighters, this notion that they were a real army with
uniforms and salutes and roll calls, might be good for morale, but
it also tended to breed overconfidence. Pak had gone along with the
idea hoping that the military forms and protocols might bring with
them some military discipline. While the PRF army, so called, was
somewhat better organized than a peasant mob, it still lacked the
steel and the precision of a decent fighting force.
No matter. Children such as the play-soldier at the
gate were expendable.
As expendable as the people he’d left behind in
Middlebrough.
He felt as bleak as the moor country he’d been
driving through for the past several hours. He’d left Hyon Hee,
knowing that she would have to face an assault by the enemy’s
military, knowing that she would sacrifice herself for the cause.
Love was not an emotion discussed or encouraged among members of
the North Korean Special Forces. The first several times he and
Hyon Hee had enjoyed sex together had been almost comical, with a
couple of army officers present in the room to make certain that
the properly detached and clinical nature of the exercise was
maintained.
The times after that had been better . . . enough
better that Pak knew he’d grown genuinely fond of her.
He wished he could have convinced her to come along
with him.
Pak Chong Yong had been on the run all day,
uncertain whether or not he’d been seen or followed. Slipping out
of the back of the Waterfront Rise apartment minutes after gunfire
had erupted at the front, he’d made his way to the ancient but
well-serviced speedboat moored at a jetty just outside the BGA
Consortium’s port facility fence. From there, it was a two-hour run
at a gentle and unsuspicious cruising pace to the landing at
Redcar, where a car had been left for just such emergencies as this
one. Four hours more, following a twisting and circuitous route in
case he was being followed, had brought him to Cranston Moor, where
the PRF maintained its field combat training center.
Once, Cranston Moor had been a military base, an
airfield for the other RAF, the one that had won the Battle
of Britain against the Nazi blitz. During the ’50s it had been
converted to a helicopter base for NATO antisubmarine missions over
the North Sea, and eventually had been sold to a developer, who’d
wanted to open a private flying club.
Several owners later, Cranston Moor had been
abandoned, a decaying symbol of the economic recession that
continued to dog England. Pak didn’t know who the current owner
was, or why he’d made the facilities available to the People’s
Revolution, and he didn’t really care. The ex-air base with its
single runway and its shabby, crumbling hangars and storage
buildings was perfect for the PRF’s needs. The nearest village was
Robin Hood’s Bay, ten miles off, and the nearest neighbors on this
wild and lonely stretch of North Country moor were perhaps half
that distance away. That meant no one would complain about the
frequent target practice that went on in one of the empty hangars,
as recruits learned how to handle automatic weapons. There was even
a grenade and explosives range on the moor out back.
The place was quiet today; Heinrich Adler had
ordered all activities that might attract unwanted attention from
the authorities suspended once the operation was under way. Even
the troops, normally training outdoors on the obstacle course or
standing to parade formation on the runway tarmac outside the
control tower, had been dispersed.
Pak had agreed that the order was an excellent
idea.
Pulling up to a parking area alongside one of the
hangars, Pak stopped the car and got out. The base looked,
felt deserted, despite the muffled roar of some machinery in
use somewhere close by. The empty feel to the place was as it
should be, of course. Only a few PRF troops stayed here all the
time, maintaining security and keeping casual visitors, hikers and
such, away. Adler had a healthy fear of American spy satellites,
and while the paramilitary activities at Cranston Moor were
officially explained as maneuvers and outings by one of Britain’s
numerous survivalist clubs, the PRF’s leadership didn’t want to
attract undue attention to what, after all, was supposed to
be an abandoned airfield.
“Pak!” a voice said behind him as he walked past
the hangar’s maintenance shack door. “You made it! Thank
God.”
“I made it,” Pak replied, while thinking that
God had nothing to do with it. A thoroughgoing and
completely pragmatic atheist, as would be expected of someone
raised since the age of six in one of Pyongyang’s strictest
military school-academies, he was frequently amused by Westerners’
pretended reliance on divine intervention.
Heinrich Frank Adler walked out of the maintenance
shack door, glancing back and forth as if to verify that Pak was
alone. He was a tall, rugged, Nordic man with sandy hair and an
engaging smile. Once he’d been a bronze medal winner on the East
German Army’s Olympic biathlon team, and it was rumored that he’d
also been a high-ranking member of that country’s notorious Stasi,
the secret police. In 1989, he’d been forced to go underground—even
further underground, that is, than he’d been already—to escape the
purges that had followed the collapse of the East German
government.
Adler had begun assembling the organization now
known as the People’s Revolutionary Front even before the formal
unification of the two Germanies. He still styled himself
“Colonel,” after the rank he claimed he’d held in the army. Pak
knew from intelligence sources in Pyongyang that Adler had never
actually been more than an unterfeldwebel, a sergeant.
“Come on inside.”
The door opened into a small area filled with
ancient tools, engine parts, and rubbish. Beyond was the aircraft
hangar proper, an enormous, open space that currently housed only a
single craft, an aging Westland Lynx Model 81 helicopter. Acquired
through the services of the same faceless man or men who owned
Cranston Moor, the helo was government surplus and showed the signs
of some years of rugged service with the Royal Navy.
Three men were at work on the machine now, wearing
masks and goggles as they applied spray painters to the aircraft’s
body, methodically changing the color scheme from the blue-gray of
the Royal Navy to a deep, glossy blue-black.
As always, Pak felt a rippling thrill when he saw
the helicopter, the centerpiece to this entire operation.
Very soon now, he thought, and my Hyon
Hee will be avenged.