Nucflash (14 page)

“I don't think I want to know,” Murdock said. He was a warrior, a profession that frequently demanded brutality. Two days earlier he'd killed a man with precision and efficiency, and very nearly killed a woman the same way,
would
have killed her had he needed to.

But he didn't at all like this tinkering with a person's soul.

“We also had something faxed through from Wiesbaden, Lieutenant,” Dowling-Smythe said. “About those four people you pegged the other day.”

“Yes?” He'd been expecting a distillation on the dossiers of the people who'd attacked him and Inge. “Anything useful?”

He shrugged. “Not much. They say that there were fairly complete dossiers in the Komissar computer. The two men who were captured were small-time thugs. Members of a criminal gang based in Hamburg. Bank robbery, extortion, but never any connection with terrorism.”

“Freelancers,” Wentworth suggested. “Hired muscle.”

“A distinct possibility. Our source over there says they've questioned them, of course, but they claim not to know who they were working for. Their contact they knew simply as Ulrich.”

“Chances are they wouldn't know,” MacKenzie put in.

“True. But there was a difference with the other two.” Dowling-Smythe pulled a folded sheet of paper from the inside of his uniform jacket and handed it to Murdock. “This came through for you, Lieutenant. From someone named . . . Inge?”

Murdock smiled, accepting the sheet. “A friend.”

Swiftly, he scanned the faxed copy of a typewritten, singlespaced sheet. Inge's letter was curt and to the point, promising full dossiers to follow later.

“The man you killed, Lieutenant,” Dowling-Smythe continued as Murdock read, “was Rudie Waldemar. The woman you captured was Erna Berg. According to Komissar, those two were members of the old Red Army Faction beginning in the middle 1970s.”

“I thought as much,” Murdock said, continuing to scan the information. He'd already described the woman's H&K tattoo to both men.

“Lately, of course, the German RAF is pretty much dead. Has been for ten years or more. But this strongly suggests that there's something new afoot. We've been hearing rumors for some time that the RAF and some of the other old terrorist groups on the Continent were banding together into something called variously the People's Party or the People's Revolution.”

“This says that all four may have been working for something called the People's Revolutionary Front,” Murdock said. He looked up, handing the paper to MacKenzie. “Is there a connection between that and our North Korean friend in the next room?”

“Hard to say,” Wentworth said. He walked over to the two-way transparency and stared into the next window for a time. “We know that a large number of the terrs we put down in Middlebrough this afternoon were either known Provos—mostly hotheads who wouldn't accept the latest truce—or Red Army Faction. And both Waldemar and Berg were RAF once. I'd say it's a fair guess that the old RAF is changing its stripes, turning into the People's Revolution . . . that or it's backing the PRF, bankrolling it and providing personnel and shooters.”

“And importing two North Koreans with experience handling nuclear materials,” Murdock continued. “One of whom has been handling nuclear materials within the past few days.”

MacKenzie whistled.
“Fuck
, Skipper. I don't much like the sound of that!”

“I think,” Murdock said quietly, “that we'd better make a full and complete report to Washington.”

Inge Schmidt left her apartment, walking down the long hallway, turning into the foyer, and stepping out into the early morning sunshine. It was a glorious day, with a clear blue sky and the promise of an early spring.

She wondered if . . . no,
when
she would see Blake again.

The truth of the matter was that the American SEAL had really gotten to her, despite all of her promises to herself never to become emotionally involved again . . . not the way she'd been with Josef. Thinking about Blake, she couldn't help but remember the attack that evening, when she'd seen him take down three of their four attackers in the space of a couple of heartbeats.

She started. Glancing to her left, she saw Klaus Dengler's ironic smile as he leaned against the side of a trash dumpster, crisply dressed in a suit that betrayed the bulge of an automatic pistol beneath his jacket. “Hello, Klaus. All quiet?”

“So far.”

Dengler was a Section Three man, one of those assigned to provide security for Inge since the incident here on this very street three days before. It was nothing so obvious as a constant guard; someone was simply . . . always about, walking around the block, sitting in a car in the parking lot with a newspaper, or perhaps sitting on the front step, talking with a friend.

“Well, you can come on in to work now,” she told him. “I don't think anyone will steal the building while I'm gone.”

“Actually, Fraulein, I'll be following you in this morning.” He shrugged. “The boss wants it that way, until we know more about why those RAF thugs tried to get you the other night.”

“Well, I'll see you at work, then.” She walked toward her Renault, parked in her numbered space in the lot.

She heard a shoe scrape on the pavement behind her. She assumed it was Klaus . . . but something tickled at the back of her mind, a warning, a tremor of fear, and she turned. A stranger was there, a big man in a heavy overcoat, coming straight toward her and only a few feet away now. He was reaching beneath his unbuttoned coat, pulling something out. . . .

Turning sharply, she started to run, but two more men had appeared, one emerging from behind her car in the lot, the other moving rapidly toward her from across the street. That stopped her . . . and an instant later a hand closed on her upper arm. “Be perfectly silent, Miss Schmidt,” the man said in German.

She twisted hard, trying to gain the leverage she needed to break the hold, but something ice-cold and metallic pressed against the base of her neck. “Don't,” the man said.

“What is it? What do you want?”

“Some information. You will come with us.”

“Go to hell!” She opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.

The blow on the back of her head stunned her, an explosion of pain that made her gasp and turned her knees to jelly. Slumping forward, she felt the man in the raincoat grab her from behind, keeping her on her feet. She wanted to fight back, wanted to lash out, but the blow had stunned her to the point where she was having trouble coordinating any movement, or even managing to stand. “Help me,” he barked in German to one of the others.

She heard running footsteps. As they dragged her off the sidewalk, she was just able to turn her head. Expecting to see still more assailants, she was momentarily relieved, then horrified, to see Klaus Dengler running toward her, an H&K pistol already drawn from his shoulder holster.

Gunfire erupted from at least two different directions—the muffled, hissing chirps of sound-suppressed shots—and Dengler stumbled, took another three steps, then collapsed facedown onto the pavement.

“Klaus!
No!”
Even stunned, Inge could still twist and struggle in her captor's grasp. God, they'd shot down Klaus!

Shock warred with shock. Somehow, she found the strength to scream again, louder, and someone clamped a leather-gloved hand over her mouth. “None of that, Miss Schmidt,” he said in her ear. “Be a good girl and come with us and you will not be harmed. I am sorry about your friend, but . . . fortunes of war, yes?”

With a squeal of tires, a van careened around the corner, pulling up on the street opposite the parking lot, and her captors half dragged, half walked her across the road. Her eyes widened in terror. It was the same panel truck Blake had noticed the other night, the same vehicle that had carried the two “utilities men” to the attack in the parking lot. Desperate now, more desperate than she'd ever been in her life. She lashed out in a karate sidekick against one of the men holding her.

Her target yelped, then cursed; one of the others hit her again from behind, then propelled her forward, facedown onto a rug on the floor of the van. Someone else, a woman, she thought, was ready with handcuffs, securely locking her wrists together behind her back.

“You bastards—”

“Quiet, bitch.” A hand roughly yanked her hair, hard, forcing her head up and back. A wad of something—a roll of gauze, she thought—was jammed into her mouth. She tried to spit it out, but they were wrapping tape around her head and over the gauze, effectively gagging her. One of the men tossed her handbag in after her. Doors slammed. The van's engine gunned, and she felt the lurch of acceleration, followed by a right turn at the next intersection down the street.

A man kneeled beside her, rummaging through her handbag, then extracting the pistol she carried there. “Ah!” he said, smiling. “You were planning perhaps on using this on us?” Several of the others laughed.

The one who'd yanked her hair settled his weight across her buttocks, straddling her hips. Still tugging her hair back as he reached down over her shoulder, he fumbled with the front of her blouse, tearing buttons free, then reached his hand in and slipped it under her bra. Her skin crawled as he squeezed her breast, and she screamed into the gag, twisting back and forth, trying to throw her tormentor off.

“Johann!” The woman's voice snapped. “None of that!”

The hand lingered, then pinched her painfully before sliding out from under her clothing. “Shit, Felda,” the man said. “I wasn't hurting her. . . .”

“Ulrich said no rough stuff,” the man with her handbag said. “Leave her alone!”

Abruptly, the weight on her buttocks lifted and was gone. A blanket was dropped on top of her, smothering her in darkness.

In blackness, then, Inge sensed the van racing down the street. She tried to roll over, but someone dropped his legs heavily across her back, pinning her to the floor.

She was pretty sure from the turns she was sensing that they were headed toward the Autobahn, probably heading north.

Not that the knowledge helped her even the tiniest bit.

 

Murdock stood with Colonel Wentworth next to an HMMWV, the ubiquitous “hum-vee” of the NATO forces. They appeared to be standing on the main drag of a small town, with narrow streets and neat two- and three-story buildings. Wentworth held a stopwatch in one hand. Sergeant Major Dunn was with them, pressing the earphone of a headset speaker to his ear as he monitored the radio net.

The mock battle was already very nearly over. Murdock heard another muffled three-round burst . . . then one more . . . and then Dunn, still listening to the radio net, announced, “Exercise complete.”

Wentworth's thumb snicked the button on his stopwatch, and he peered at the final time with a skeptical stare. “Two-twenty-one,” he said. “Slow . . . damned slow!”

Dunn, meanwhile, changed channels on his radio and spoke into his pencil mike. “All right, Freddy. Send 'em on through!”

Two more hummers drove up a few minutes later, both crowded with men. As the vehicles creaked to a stop and the doors banged open, Murdock immediately recognized the passengers spilling from them and onto the street.

A young U.S. Navy lieutenant j.g. with a SEAL's Budweiser on dress whites totally at odds with Murdock's green fatigues snapped to attention and saluted crisply. “Good morning, Lieutenant! Gold Platoon reporting for duty!”

“Two Eyes,” Murdock said slowly, watching as seven enlisted sailors spilled into a rough line along the street. “What the hell is this?”

The j.g. was Ed DeWitt, known as “Two Eyes” for his position as “2IC,” the platoon's second-in-command. “I guess Washington decided you couldn't handle the SAS all by yourself, Skipper,” he said, grinning. He handed a bulky manila envelope to Murdock. “They sent us over to help you out.”

Dubiously, Murdock accepted the envelope, unwound the length of twine sealing the flap, and glanced briefly at the thick sheaf of orders inside. The cover sheet on top told him what he needed to know. Stripped of its Navyese jargon and bureaucratic circumlocutions, it informed him that NAVSPECWARGRU-2—that was the Navy's Special Warfare Group stationed at Norfolk—had been placed on alert pending the possible unfolding of a terrorist scenario somewhere in northern Europe. First Platoon, SEAL Seven, was directed to continue with its current mission—meaning the exchange training program with the SAS at Dorset—but to maintain an alert readiness state in anticipation of further orders. To this end, First Platoon's Gold Squad was being transferred from Norfolk to Dorset. Operational equipment and expendables would be arriving on a MACV flight at Lakenheath by late tomorrow.

There was no word as to what the terrorist scenario might be, but Murdock was certain that the intelligence reports filtering back both from the interrogation of the Korean woman at Lakenheath and from the BKA in Wiesbaden must have gotten someone back in CONUS pretty damned well stirred up.

And about time too. Too often, especially lately, the White House had been totally adrift when it came to reacting to developments overseas. Maybe this time someone back there had finally read an intel brief on smuggled nukes and been scared enough to forget about apple-polishing, ass-kissing, and sound bites on the evening news.