“Then they may already know something about Firestorm. What about the woman?”
“The one with the BKA? So far as I know, she is still in Wiesbaden. She has had a bodyguard assigned to her since the abduction attempt, but she is maintaining her old schedule. Are you suggesting that we try again to abduct her?”
“If she can tell us about the Americans, about why they are here, yes. And if she was giving the Americans information from the Wiesbaden computer about us and our operation, then it might be worthwhile to interrogate her. We could learn exactly what they know about us.”
“It would be risky. We mustn’t alert them to our interest in their activities too soon.”
Pak shrugged. “Having already gambled with one attempt, it will be worth the additional risk to try again. We have only another forty-eight hours, yes?”
“Less than that, now.”
“Then I suggest that you talk to your people in Germany. They could arrange it with a minimum of risk.”
“Very well. Where do you want her? Not here. And it wouldn’t be safe back at our Hamburg site.”
“No,” Pak agreed. “You will have to arrange to have her flown to the operation, once it begins. She could be kept aboard the Rosa. Or on one of the targets, once we have them secured.”
“Consider it done.”
2040 hours
Lakenheath
England
Murdock and Chief MacKenzie stood side by side in the close and darkened room, staring through the two-way mirror. Alone in the brightly lit room next door, the North Korean woman sat on a straight-backed chair, looking frail and alone in the institutional gray slacks and shirt she’d been given. The only other furniture in the room was an empty table and one other chair.
“She must know we have her under observation, Skipper,” MacKenzie said, watching her. He whispered, though the observation room was heavily soundproofed. “A mighty cool customer.”
“So,” Murdock said, turning to the other two men in the darkened spy chamber. “What have you learned so far?”
“That this lady is very well trained,” Major Dowling-Smythe said. “She’s not going to tell us a damned thing.”
“She’s already told us one thing unawares,” Wentworth told Murdock. “When they brought her in here, she was under some rather close scrutiny by some of your NEST chaps. They went over her and her clothing meticulously, with some fairly impressive equipment flown in from Washington just for the occasion.”
“And?” Murdock prompted. Knowing something about Chun’s background, he was the one who’d originally suggested summoning a NEST — a Nuclear Emergency Security Team — in the first place. The ultra-secret NESTs had been organized under the aegis of the U.S. Atomic Energy commission back in the 1970s, when it had first become apparent that the threat of nuclear terrorism might soon become a reality. They were trained to respond to any type of nuclear-related emergency, but their more secret tasks included monitoring for smuggled or hidden radioactive materials — such as the homemade nukes that might be employed by terrorists or by foreign nuclear powers.
“Your guess was right, Lieutenant,” Wentworth said. “Definite traces of radioactivity, more than could be explained by the background count. There wasn’t much, but their estimation was that she could well have been exposed to a secondary radiation source within the past few days… a week at the outside.”
“Secondary radiation?”
“She wasn’t in direct contact with plutonium or U235 or anything like that,” Dowling-Smythe explained. “But I gather the radiation from something like that can trigger secondary radiation in other materials if they’re dense enough.”
“Cascade radiation,” Wentworth added.
“That’s the stuff,” Dowling-Smythe said, nodding. “If they had a bomb that didn’t have real good shielding, for instance, she could’ve picked up a dose from the lead or whatever they had protecting it.”
“God help us,” Murdock said quietly. “Then they do have a bomb.”
“Not necessarily,” Wentworth said, shaking his head. “They could have plutonium, which they’re planning on dispersing with conventional high explosive… or by dumping it in someone’s water supply. Or she could simply have come in contact with something else that had been exposed to radiation. For all we know the woman’s just come back from having her chest X-rayed… ”
“Different kind of radiation here, Colonel,” Dowling-Smythe said. “And a lot stronger too.”
“Enough to pose a danger?” Murdock asked. “I mean, to people who’ve come in contact with her.”
“Your men weren’t at risk, Lieutenant,” Wentworth said. “We’re talking about very, very small doses.”
“Good.”
“This woman had a substantial and recent contact with a radioactive source,” Dowling-Smythe said. “The doctor who supervised her physical said she hadn’t received a lethal dose, but there was a definite possibility of complications down the line. Leukemia, that sort of thing.” He shuddered, his shoulders drawing up and forward as he shook his head back and forth. “If the North Koreans were involved in some sort of homegrown basement nuclear program, they must not be taking adequate precautions when they’re handling sensitive material. That’s scary.”
“These are scary people we’re dealing with, Major,” MacKenzie said.
“I take it you’ve tried the usual tricks on her,” Murdock said. “Tell her we got her boyfriend, that sort of thing.”
Wentworth nodded. “Oh, yes. Told her we knew all about the bomb too, but that’s such an old trick I’m surprised she didn’t just laugh at us. She’s just been sitting there and not saying a word.”
“What will you do?” Murdock asked.
“Oh, we’ll get her,” Wentworth promised. “Sooner or later, we’ll wear her down.”
“What, torture?” MacKenzie asked.
Wentworth looked pained. “Oh, please. What do you colonials take us for anyway?”
“Outright torture tends to be counterproductive,” Dowling-Smythe said, “especially when the person being interrogated is as well trained and mentally prepared as this one is. The victim tends to hang on for the sake of whatever he’s already suffered. No, we’ll wear her down bit by bit. Good cop, bad cop, that sort of thing, going on for hours on end. Disorientation, repeated questionings. Getting her to make small admissions, and building those into something more substantial.”
“The problem is,” Wentworth said, “is that all of that will take time. And standing back here watching her with the interrogators, I get the distinct impression that, well, time doesn’t matter for her.”
“What do you mean?” Murdock asked.
“Hard to put a name to it, Lieutenant. But I have the feeling that she figures she can stand anything because she won’t have to last through it for long. Do you know what I mean? Like she’s expecting a rescue.”
“Or,” Dowling-Smythe added, “because she knows that whatever it is she’s protecting, some operation, some mission, will be too far along for us to do anything about it before we could possibly break her. Since she knows she can hold out that long, she’s at peace with the world.”
“Maybe she thinks her friends will try to set up an exchange.”
“Could be,” Dowling-Smythe said. “Though your people back in Washington have shown a keen interest in this bird, Lieutenant. Fairly champing at the bit to have a go at her. Doubt that they’ll be too keen at letting her slip through their fingers.”
“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.”
10
Monday, April 30
0825 hours
Rüsselsheim, Federal Republic of Germany
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.
“Guten tag, Fräulein.”
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.
1140 hours
CQB house, 23 SAS Training Center
Dorset, England
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.
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