Nucflash (5 page)

“Nicely done,” he said. “I'm impressed.”

“GSG9 training includes a special driving course.”

Murdock's eyebrows raised. “I thought you worked for the BKA, Inge. You talk more like you're GSG9.”

Her face colored slightly. “I suppose that's because I always wanted to be GSG9. I started off with Bavarian Lander. I took the test for GSG9, and some of the early training, but failed the physical later on. Not enough upper body strength, they said.”

“They have female agents?”

“Not in the combat units,” she admitted. “But in some of the others. Reconnaissance and surveillance, for instance.” She wrinkled her nose. “And secretarial work, of course. But that was never what I wanted for myself. I had always wanted to be in a combat unit, since I first heard of the GSG9 when I was a girl. That must have been . . . oh, in the late seventies, sometime.” She laughed. “Am I giving away my age?”

“I won't bother to add up the years,” Murdock said.

“My! So gallant for an American! Anyway, I easily passed the test for BKA special agent, and when an opening came up for a liaison officer with the GSG, well, my interest in the group was well known. I am only one of quite a few agents, of course, who serve as go-betweens with the GSG9.” She sighed. “I would still rather be in GSG Operations.” She glanced at Murdock out of the corner of her eye, and frowned. “You're laughing at me.”

“Not at all.”

“Do you believe women should not be in combat?”

Murdock considered for a moment how best to answer. “I'll be honest with you, Inge, and say I really don't know. I've never for a moment doubted that a woman has every bit as much right to defend her home, her family, her country, or her ideas as a man. But integrating women fully into combat units carries a terrible price. I'm not sure we can afford it.”

She frowned. “What price?”

“Training . . . and testing criteria. You said you couldn't pass the GSG9 physical. Okay, the fact is, most women have less upper body strength than most men. Most women have greater overall endurance than most men, on a long march, say, but they can't lift as much, having more trouble chinning-up into a second-story window, and they'd be at a real disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat with a male opponent.”

“Not if the woman knows karate.”

Murdock laughed. “What are you, black belt?”

“Brown belt, second degree.”

“Good for you. Still, that doesn't have much to do with the real world.”

“But if a woman has trained until she is strong enough to do what is expected of her, then she should be allowed to do anything she wants, don't you think?”

“You know, Inge, I think my only real problem with the integration of women into combat is that in too many cases, the training requirements of the various services or units have been knocked down either so that women can qualify to fill a quota, or because requirements demanding great strength, especially great upper body strength, are perceived as somehow unfair. Combat is never fair,
life
is not fair . . . and the qualifications for the people who have to depend on one another to survive combat shouldn't be fair either. If a man can do a job better, more efficiently, with less risk to himself and the other members of his team, then a man should be in that slot, and to hell with political correctness or feminist rights.”

Inge was silent for a long time. “You are a very direct man,” she said at last. “You don't try to put an attractive coating on what you believe.”

“You asked me what I thought. . . .”

“I like honesty in a man,” she said. “Even when it is misguided. Here we are. . . .”

Inge lived in an apartment complex in the town of Rüsselsheim, midway between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt-am-Main, and only about ten kilometers from Frankfurt's Rhein-Main International Airport. The two of them went up to her apartment together. Murdock waited in her living room with a Dortmunder beer while Inge vanished into the bedroom to change, and he had time to learn from her bookshelves and record cabinet that she was interested in history—especially military history—martial arts, horses, cats, detective novels, and soft rock. Periodically, the sky would roar as a big jet flew overhead on its way to or from the airport nearby, and he wondered how she was able to sleep.

When Inge emerged from the bedroom a few moments later, the businesswoman's professional look was gone. The low-cut, high-slit evening dress she was wearing now, in a dark maroon set off by earrings and a single strand of pearls, was breathtaking on her figure. Her golden hair was down now, swirling delightfully across her bare shoulders.

“So,” she said as Murdock rose to his feet. “About that seafood . . .”

“SEALs generally catch their own seafood,” he told her. “Now if you'd said steak . . .”

“I know just the place. And not too far from here either.” It was still light outside as they emerged from the apartment building and started walking arm-in-arm across the parking lot to the place near the street where Inge had parked the car. The sun had set, but the sky was still fully light . . . light enough for Murdock to spot the gray Mercedes parked on the far side of the street and recognize it, with near certainty, as the car that had been following them on the Autobahn. He didn't say anything to Inge, but he did let go of her arm and fall back a half step behind her.

“What's wrong?” she asked him, slowing.

“Keep walking,” he said, glancing about. The Mercedes was empty. There was a lot of thick shrubbery in front of the apartment where attackers could wait unseen. There was also a panel truck parked next to Inge's car that hadn't been there before.

Murdock wasn't carrying a weapon. German gun laws were strict, and arranging for a foreigner to get a permit required so much red tape that he'd decided not to bother even trying. He was regretting that decision now.

Ahead, the back door to the panel truck banged open, and two men in utility workers' coveralls climbed out, glanced around the parking lot, then started walking directly toward Murdock and Inge. He couldn't tell if they were armed, though one was carrying something that looked like a toolbox. In fact, they could be—probably were—just what they appeared to be.
You're getting paranoid, Blake,
he told himself fiercely.

And yet there was that empty gray Mercedes parked on the street. Was it really the same car? Had it been following them earlier?

The safest move might be to simply turn around and go back to the apartment, a stronghold with a single entrance, easily defended. That might be a little difficult to explain to Inge—she would assume that he was interested in something other than a steak dinner—but Murdock was by nature a cautious man, his career in the Navy SEALs notwithstanding. And she'd seen the Mercedes too, back on the Autobahn.

But when Murdock glanced back over his shoulder, he saw two more figures, a man and a woman this time, stepping through the apartment building's front door and onto the walkway outside. The man was wearing sports clothes and a light jacket and was not obviously armed; the woman wore a T-shirt and jeans and carried a bulky, white canvas bag on an over-the-shoulder strap. Murdock and Inge had just been cut off from their retreat.

“Inge,” he said softly. “I think we may have some trouble.”

He felt her tense, saw her eyes flick back, then ahead, assessing the situation. “The people behind us are neighbors of mine,” she said. “They live right down the hall from me.”

And you're a paranoid son of a bitch
, Murdock thought, but he was fully alert now, the adrenaline pumping through his system in the heady rush of imminent combat.

Even if he wasn't yet positive that they were about to be attacked, it was still possible to apply two of the most important rules of combat when ambushed:
Don't stand still
and
do the unexpected
. Reaching down suddenly, he grabbed Inge's hand and turned her sharply aside. “Come on!”

“Blake!”

But she started to run with him. Then she stumbled, and Murdock cursed. She was wearing black high heels that hobbled her as effectively as a ball and chain.

The unexpected move alone, however, had been enough. Ahead, the two utility workers broke into a run.
“Inge! Kommen Sie zurück!”
the woman behind them called out. Turning, Murdock saw the woman pulling something small and black from the depths of her canvas bag . . . a handgun. And the man beside her had a pistol tucked into his waistband, its grip visible beneath the flapping hem of his jacket as he too started running.

The ambush had just been sprung.

The woman pointed her pistol at Murdock. “You!” she shouted in thickly accented English. “Both of you! Stop where you are!” A commercial jet thundered overhead, and Murdock realized that if the woman fired the gun, few of the people in any of the surrounding apartment buildings would even hear it.

“Lose those shoes!” Murdock snapped at Inge.

“But . . .”

“Ditch the shoes and
run
, damn it!”

If he'd been alone, he'd have had little problem avoiding the trap. With his SEAL conditioning, he was certain that he could outrun just about any army the opposition cared to send against him, and that woman would have to be one hell of a crack shot to hit a running man at ten meters with that snub-nosed revolver she was pointing at him. But he couldn't leave Inge. . . .

Likely, all four were armed, but the only one who had a weapon out and ready for action was the woman, and Murdock immediately tagged her as the most dangerous of the four. She and her companion were five meters off now, the utility men a bit further away in the other direction.

Always do the unexpected.
Murdock charged.

“Alt!”
the woman screamed. She was a hard-faced, shorthaired woman, with muscles that Murdock suspected had been honed with weight training. She brought the gun up to point at directly into Murdock's face, stiff-armed and one-handed.

Two mistakes—trying for a head shot against a moving target and trying for a one-handed stance like a gunfighter out of the mythical Wild West. Murdock sharply sidestepped, forcing her to pivot in an attempt to correct her aim, then lunged straight toward her, his left arm rolling up in a hard block, sweeping her gun hand aside as he stepped inside her reach. His right hand clenched, but when his right arm snapped forward, he carried the impact on the heel of his palm when it slammed squarely between the woman's small breasts, just at the bottom of her sternum. His follow-through was purely reflexive, his knee catching her between the legs so hard she was lifted from the pavement.

That particular blow was fully as incapacitating for a woman as for a man. The pistol was sent spinning through the air, and Murdock was past the woman before she could hit the ground, dropping his center of gravity, pivoting on his left foot, and bringing his right around in a savage roundhouse kick that caught the man in sports clothes squarely in his left kidney. The man
oofed
and went down, still fumbling at the pistol tucked into his waistband. Murdock snap-kicked him in the side of the head; there was an ugly snicking sound as the ball of his foot connected and the man's spine broke just below the base of his skull.

Spinning to face the remaining attackers, Murdock was just in time to see Inge, her shoes gone now, throw a hard forward kick into the groin of one of the utilities workers. The man gasped and doubled over, clutching himself; unfortunately, it was his partner who was carrying the tool kit and who was just pulling an Uzi submachine gun clear of the metal box's open lid.

The bad guys must have planned on muscle, numbers, and threat alone to force the two of them to come along, or they would have had their weapons out and ready instead of inaccessible. Murdock took three quick steps to the left and grabbed the man's gun hand, twisting him around and over into a wrist-breaker grip. Encumbered by the weapon in one hand and the toolbox in the other, the man screamed and dropped to his knees, toolbox and Uzi both clattering noisily onto the pavement. Murdock held him down, swinging his knee up hard to connect with the man's face. The scream broke off in a gurgle of pain; Murdock kneed him again, then released him, scooping up the Uzi as the man's body slumped to the sidewalk.

The guy Inge had kicked was still on his feet, but doubled over. Murdock walked over, grabbed his hair with his free hand, then slammed his knee up into his face. The woman was on her hands and knees, one hand clutching her abdomen, but she was trying to crawl toward her companion, and the weapon protruding from behind his belt. Murdock walked up behind her and jackhammered his fist down hard against the base of her neck, and she collapsed facedown on the pavement without a word or a sound.

The roar of an engine exploded nearby. Spinning, Uzi at the ready, Murdock saw the panel truck jump a curb and careen into the street, its back doors still flapping open. In an instant it had cornered at the next intersection with a squeal of outraged tires, and was out of sight. So . . . there'd been a fifth attacker, and he'd gotten away. Not good.

“You okay?” he asked Inge.

The BKA woman was still standing over the man she'd kicked, fists clenched at her sides, her maroon dress was very much the worse—or perhaps from Murdock's point of view, much the better—for wear. Her kick had ripped the slit in the side of the dress clear to her waist, and he could see a torn stocking and a thin strip of something sheer, black, and lacy riding high across the tanned skin of her hip. She was excited too, breathing hard in tight, rapid, almost panting gasps, and the surge of adrenaline to her system had triggered a physiological reaction that made it quite clear that she was not wearing a bra beneath the thin material of her dress. “Yes,” she said. She swallowed, then nodded her head. “I think so. God, Blake, you play rough.”