Nucflash (11 page)

There was a loud, rippling plop, and one of the Irishmen standing by the southernmost window spun back into the room, a pair of smoking holes gaping in his black bulletproof vest, and the right side of his head a violent scarlet smear. Next to him, another Irishman fell back as glass and wood splintered above his head, the raised window sash shattering in multiple explosions, another blast punching through his left shoulder. Curtains and windowsills all down the line of windows popped and fluttered as though blasted by a hot and deadly wind. Chun felt something sting her, high on her left arm.

“It's the attack!” she yelled . . . but needlessly, for in the moment of gunfire, the far-off thump had swelled to an avalanche of sound, drowning out the sirens, drowning out the exploding rounds smashing through the windows, drowning out the whole world as helicopters thundered in low across the rooftops of Middlebrough from the east, from inland, opposite the direction of the fires and explosions.

So . . . that blast and all of the smoke had been a diversion after all.

A third gunman yelled something mindless and swung into an open window, his G3 assault rifle to his shoulder. Before he could trigger the weapon, however, his head and chest exploded in bloody fragments, the rifle's plastic stock shattered against his shoulder, and his scream of rage turned to sheer agony, abruptly cut short as he tumbled in a bloody heap onto the bare wooden floor.

Steiner leaped clear of the barrel, grabbing the Uzi submachine gun he'd left on the desk. Katarina Holst, standing at the back of the room with another RAF gunman, shrugged her H&K subgun's sling off her shoulder and dragged back the charging lever with a loud snick. The thump and scuff of boots on the roof sounded through the ongoing thunder of the helicopters above the building.

The door to the room burst open and another Provo burst in, his eyes wild. “Christ! We got a team on the roof an' another comin' in at the front door!”

Then a distant explosion sounded from somewhere downstairs, and all of the building's lights went out.

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.

 

“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.

 

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.