Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect

by Mark Greaney

  “Where were they from?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I guess they are Americans, because the American was the one who paid me and picked up the documents.”

  Jack shrugged. He wasn’t so sure. He asked, “And where were they going?”

  Skála cocked his head. “North Korea. Of course. I created paperwork claiming them to be Czech diplomats traveling to the mission in Pyongyang.”

  Jack said, “Somebody killed Hazelton in Vietnam and took the documents, but I don’t know who, and I don’t know why. I don’t even know if they made it to North Korea.”

  Skála surprised Ryan by saying, “They made it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because the North Koreans themselves came here, last week. They said they needed paperwork to get more people into North Korea. They offered big money. Said over time there would be dozens traveling. I tried to explain to them how dangerous it was for me. I almost got caught with the last batch of five I created. There was no way I would be able to pull off forging that many. But they wouldn’t listen. They got threatening. They were animals. I had no idea anything like this would happen.”

  Dom snorted. “So when you agreed to work with the North Koreans you never imagined you might be working with the North Koreans?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes I work for an organization in the U.S. that needs forged EU passports.”

  “Sharps Global Intelligence Partners?” Jack asked.

  Skála nodded. “Yes. They are the ones who came to me. I thought this would be the same as ever, but the man wanted the North Korean letters as well. I was surprised. I thought it was just for some cover story, I didn’t think they actually would be traveling there. The American paid me twice my normal rate, so I agreed.”

  “This was Hazelton?”

  “No. Another man. An Englishman. Thirties. Very polite. A pleasure to work with.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The day before I had them ready he called me. He’d taken ill, something he ate, he said, so another man from his company would meet me at the airport to collect them. I was told to package them up in a way he could not see the contents. This man was your friend. The big American. He took the documents and left.

  “I thought that was the end of it. Then North Koreans from the embassy here came, and they told me if I didn’t agree to work with them they would kill me. I agreed, but said I needed to wait a day before getting access to the passport-printing equipment. I used that day to hide.”

  “Why didn’t you run away? Why stay here?”

  “I wanted to run. Of course. But I couldn’t think of any place I could go without using friends for help. I was afraid of involving anyone else. They would have learned about the forgery. Anyway, I thought the North Koreans would give up after a day or two.”

  “But they didn’t, did they?”

  “They came back, two nights ago. I was in my hiding place. I know it was them, I heard their voices. Of course I don’t speak their language, but they sounded like the same men. They were here for a long time, but they didn’t find me.”

  Ryan looked around the room. “Wait. They were in your apartment?”

  “Yes, all over.”

  He and Dom exchanged a look.

  Skála saw the look. “What?”

  Dom just said, “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Jack stood back up. “They might have left a listening device. Something that would let them know if you came back.” He turned away from Skála and called Biery. “Gav. We still okay out there?”

  Biery replied confidently. “Quiet as a tomb.”

  “Okay,” Ryan replied. “We’ll be moving in five minutes. Eyes peeled.”

  “Roger.”

  —

  Seconds later, in the office building on nearby Baranova Street, Gavin Biery launched out of his chair. A knock at the door to the office made him jump up and spin around.

  He didn’t answer at first. He sat back down and willed whoever it was to go away, because he had a job to do and didn’t want to let the guys down.

  Another knock.

  He started to call Jack and Dom back, but he stopped himself. He would just ignore the knocking. He had wanted to be involved in fieldwork, after all; he couldn’t let Dom and Jack know he spooked every time someone rapped on the door.

  Another set of knocks came, but he focused his attention through the binoculars at the street below Skála’s apartment to make sure nothing was going on.

  He heard the rattling of keys now, and a key sliding into the lock of the door. He figured it was just the superintendent of the building, a woman named Gretta. She’d come by once before, and shaken her keys like that. He leapt to his feet and ran to the door. Even though Jack had placed a rubber door stopper to keep the door closed, Gavin figured if Gretta couldn’t get in she’d immediately start making problems. On his way through the kitchen, though, he picked up a steak knife, just in case, and slid it under the cuff of his shirt.

  Just as he did so the door opened and he saw Gretta entering alone. She was an older woman, she’d walked the men through the property when they arrived the day before, and he knew she was no threat. Under her arm he saw a square air filter.

  The woman didn’t speak English, but she was nice enough. With hand gestures and smiles she indicated what she wanted to do, and Gavin followed her through the large open office. When she wasn’t looking he pulled the knife from the cuff of his shirt and placed it on a desk, then he quickly caught up with her.

  The space in the corner of the big room where the Campus men had set up their surveillance was hidden from the rest of the room by stacked desks, but the heavyset American also positioned his body between his hide site and the woman while she opened the heating unit in a back utility closet.

  Soon she was finished and she headed for the kitchen and the exit with Gavin carefully walking alongside her. As she walked she looked around with some curiosity, Gavin noticed, but he imagined she was just wondering what the hell the Americans were doing here in the space. There was nothing on any of the desks, and other than a few water bottles and groceries in the kitchen and the one tenant walking oddly close to her, there was no sign of any activity in the unit.

  At the door, Gretta turned to try to communicate with Gavin. Normally he would have been helpful and done his part to bridge the language gap, but he knew he had to get back to his overwatch, so he just stood there, silent and more than a little annoyed-looking.

  Eventually, she gave up. With a frustrated smile she said, “Everything okay?”

  “Yes. Okay, Gretta. Everything is very okay. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, and Gavin closed the door inches from her smiling face. He turned and ran through the warehouse office, made it back around the desks and to his overwatch and looked into the binoculars mounted on the tripod.

  Thankfully, he saw no movement at the front of the apartment on Krišt’anova. He blew out a long sigh that was interrupted two-thirds of the way through when he gasped.

  Wait.

  A gray van was parked in the parking lot next to the apartment. Gavin had been looking at this same area for most of the past day. That van definitely had not been there before. He squinted into the binos and through the windshield of the van he could see a lone man behind the wheel.

  This didn’t look good.

  He connected with Ryan by hitting his PTT button in his pocket.

  “Ryan?”

  He heard someone push their own transmit button, but immediately he heard a shout in his headset. It was the unmistakable voice of Jack Ryan, Jr. “Gun!”

  The muffled thump of a gunshot followed a heartbeat later.

  25

  The team that hit Skála’s house weren’t tier-one operators, but they were well motivated, and as
far as Jack Ryan was concerned, there sure were a goddamned lot of them. The Czech Republic’s diplomatic relations with the DPRK meant North Korea had an embassy in Prague, although it was just a small, squat redbrick building way out west of the city in the suburban 6th district. But even though it was small and spare, it was staffed at any one time with more than a dozen members of Ri Tae-jin’s Reconnaissance General Bureau’s spies, and another dozen military security forces who did any work for RGB that was required.

  That meant twenty-four men were available for Ri’s mission in country, and one of those missions meant hunting for one Karel Skála, a Czech consular official with the ability to create travel documents to get scientists out of the West and into North Korea in furtherance of the DPRK’s fledgling rare earth minerals industry. Skála had gone into hiding. Most of the RGB officers at the embassy thought he’d fled the country, but when they paid a visit to his home two nights earlier they left a hidden microphone behind his television set, and twenty minutes ago when English-speaking voices were heard by the embassy RGB communications staff the order came for a team of six North Korean security agents to race to the building to see what was happening.

  While they were on the way they received a second call from their superior. This one notified them that Skála himself was in the building—he was talking to the Americans, discussing his relationship with North Korea, and suddenly their job changed from a capture mission to a kill mission.

  Only five of the men were armed—they carried CZ pistols, nine-millimeter weapons of a local manufacturer. The other man was the driver; he, like the others, had military martial-arts training and basic surveillance skills given to him by his nation’s spy services before he moved into the foreign posting.

  And more than firepower, the main weapon the North Koreans had was incentive. Failing their mission right now would be failing the Dae Wonsu, and all of these men knew the penalty for this could be their lives or the lives of their families. They would go up to that fifth-floor apartment and rip the three men there apart limb from limb if necessary, but they were determined not to go back to the embassy without getting the job done.

  —

  Caruso had stepped back into the master bedroom of Skála’s apartment to grab the young man a set of clothes. He and Ryan wanted the Czech man dressed and out of the building quickly in case the North Koreans had bugged the place, but Skála himself was still dazed from exhaustion and the blow to the head, and Dom decided it would take Skála longer to get himself together than either he or Jack wanted to wait, so Dom just randomly grabbed pants and shoes and a shirt, and then threw toiletries along with other odds and ends into a bag he found on a shelf.

  Ryan stood watch over Skála next to the entryway to the hall. The Czech consular official sat on his sofa facing the archway next to Ryan, which meant he was in the right position to have seen the men filing into the apartment first if he had only been looking in the right direction. Instead, his attention had been focused on the floor in front of him and the dizziness in his head. He did look up just in time to see two men in the archway; they were plainly Korean, and they were just two meters or so from the bearded American leaning against the wall, although they had not seen him yet.

  Skála blinked hard at the image, then he started to stand.

  Ryan was in the process of taking a call from Gavin Biery when he saw the movement and the astonished expression on Skála’s face, and he turned to see what had him so terrified. Jack saw only the tip of a handgun as it aimed through the archway on his left. He leapt toward it instinctively, tried to grab it or knock it away from its target.

  “Gun!” he shouted. The weapon fired, Ryan folded his right hand over the hot barrel, and his left arm swung in a wide haymaker. He connected with the side of a man’s head—he hadn’t even focused his eyes on the assailant because his attention was still on the pistol.

  A second gunshot cracked in the hallway of the apartment a few feet to his left. Ryan sensed rather than saw a large group of men bursting through the doorway there, and to keep himself out of the line of fire from their weapons he swung his now unconscious victim around so the man’s limp body would be positioned between himself and the attackers. Another shot came from less than ten feet away, and Ryan immediately felt the small man in his arms jolt—he’d been shot in the back.

  Ryan wanted to get his gun out of its Thunderwear holster and into the fight; he knew he could do it in one second in optimal conditions, but he was standing at one end of a hallway that was full of gunmen at the other end, protected only by a wounded or dead man held up in his arms. One second was an eternity in this situation—dropping his cover to jam his hand down the front of his pants to pull out his Smith & Wesson would certainly just result in him getting gunned down with his hand stuck down the front of his pants.

  Shouting men filed up the hall and a third booming handgun report sounded in the small space. The man in Ryan’s arms jerked again and Jack crouched tighter. He decided he’d have to at least try for his gun. But just as he let the man in his arms go to do this, out of the corner of his left eye he saw Dominic Caruso running into the living room from the back bedroom, his small black pistol high in a combat grip and pointed to the wall, behind which it looked like at least four or five North Koreans stood engaging Ryan, unaware of the man on their right.

  —

  Dominic couldn’t see any targets, but he could see his cousin crouched low with a spasming, bleeding man in his arms, and he heard the direction the last gunshot came from. He aimed his weapon to a point waist-high on the wall between himself and the hallway, and he pressed the trigger once, twice, three times, moving his aim laterally to the left toward the doorway while he moved his body laterally right toward his cousin and a better view of what was in the hall.

  Ejected cartridges from his pistol arced through the air and bounced on the floor of the living room while he moved.

  After five rounds he saw puffs of masonry and wallboard above his point of aim, and this told him the shooters there realized they were under fire from an unseen assailant on the other side of the wall and they had begun shooting back. Dom crouched lower and kept moving across the living room. He crossed in front of the crumpled body of Karel Skála on the floor in front of the sofa.

  He fired nine rounds just as he stepped into the hallway, his weapon locked open as he pulled the trigger on the back of a North Korean fleeing through the door out of the apartment and in to the hall that ran down the spine of the building. It appeared more than one assailant had retreated into the main hall, but there were two bodies lying still on the floor by the door, plus the dead man at Ryan’s feet.

  Dom stepped in front of Ryan, who was now down on one knee and drawing his weapon. Dom’s gun was empty, so he started to draw his one spare magazine from his Thunderwear holster. While doing so, however, he saw a North Korean lean back around into view from the main hallway, his pistol rising in front of him.

  “Down!” Dom heard from behind, and he dropped flat on his chest.

  Jack Ryan rose from his crouch over his cousin, his Smith & Wesson M&P Shield barking in his hand. The North Korean caught a nine-millimeter hollow-point round right in the forehead, an inch left of center, and he tumbled back, his pistol spinning through the air and bouncing into the hallway.

  After the gun settled and Jack’s hot brass finished spinning on the floor, it was eerily quiet in the apartment. The smell of gun smoke was pervasive and a heavy blue tinge hung in the air, the result of twenty or so rounds being fired from multiple weapons in such a small enclosed space.

  One of the men lying in front of Jack moved. His head lifted a little, and he reached out for a pistol lying on the legs of a dead man next to him.

  Jack fired once, hitting the man in the back of the neck. Blood sprayed down the hall with the impact of the round.

  Jack kept his gun trained on the open doorway. He said, “I
count four down. How many more?”

  Caruso reloaded quickly. “How the fuck should I know? I just got here.”

  Jack looked over to Skála now. His eyes were open and rolled back. “Damn it. Target’s dead.”

  Dom had his gun back in the fight and pointed toward the doorway. “Yep.”

  Jack connected with Biery. “Gavin? Are you still with us?”

  There was no reply.

  “Gavin, do you copy?”

  Nothing.

  Jack shouted now. “If you can hear me, we’ve got squirters coming your way! Do not come in this building!” He climbed to his feet. Shouting to his cousin he said, “Get Skála’s laptop!” and then took off, leaping over the dead bodies in front of him on his way out the door.

  —

  Gavin was stuck in a slow-moving elevator in the office building on Baranova Street, and he realized he’d lost his mobile connection with the guys right at the worst possible time. It occurred to him, too late, that he should have taken the stairs; as well as being a mobile phone dead zone, the elevator descended at a glacial pace.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” he shouted at himself.

  When he finally got down to street level he ran outside, then down the sidewalk toward Skála’s Krišt’anova Street apartment building. While he ran he looked down at his phone and redialed into the conference call to reestablish his connection with Jack and Dom.

  If they were still alive, that was. The gunfire he’d heard through his earpiece before he lost comms had been extraordinary, it sounded like a war was being fought in the building across the street.

  As soon as he heard the call answered, he looked up and saw an Asian man running out of Skála’s building, directly across the street from him. Gavin stopped in his tracks and watched him; the Asian shielded a pistol inside his coat. Several other people ran out of the building all around the armed man, unaware this was one of the people responsible for all the gunfire that had them running for their lives.

  Gavin said, “Jack? Dom?”