Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Now there were shouts on the stairs ahead, and the gunfire above grew heavier. Men on the radio started yelling. Eastling grabbed Wilhelm. “What’s happening?”

The Bundesgrenzschutz officer assigned to Ryan and Eastling said, “The team leader on the second floor has been shot!”

“ Second floor?”

Ryan heard the commotion of men shouting in the stairs, and he saw flashes from the big lights mounted on the top of their H&Ks as they came down; then a group of GSG 9 appeared in the hall. At first Ryan thought the entire force was in retreat, but within a few seconds he saw they were moving something heavy, pulling it with difficulty in the tight confines of the narrow hall. Their guns and other equipment were getting caught on one another’s gear, and they struggled with whatever they were carrying.

He knew it would be the wounded team leader.

They shouted in German as they passed, and Ryan and Eastling moved out of the way. Ryan caught a glimpse of the tactical officer being dragged by three of his colleagues. He was completely limp and appeared dead.

The men continued up the hall and then into the stairwell down to the ground floor.

There was another loud crash above him; this sounded like a frag grenade—Ryan had heard enough of them in the Marine Corps to recognize the noise. Plaster on the ceiling in the first-floor hallway rained down on Ryan and Eastling and Wilhelm, as well as the uniformed Landespolizei officers with them.

The walkie-talkies all around Jack were alive with crackling shouts and commands; he couldn’t make sense of any of it, but his impression was that something had gone drastically wrong and the situation upstairs had descended into utter chaos.

Seconds later, another group of black-clad officers appeared in the stairwell, dragging a wounded man along with them. In the light from flashlights, Ryan could see the wet blood on the man’s tunic.

Jack pushed himself tight against the wall to let them pass, but the officers stumbled while carrying the dead weight of the wounded man.

Ryan ran to the group, then reached down and took the wounded man under his arms. He lifted the man and began pulling him up the hall; the commando’s boots dragged on the linoleum flooring. Ryan was not encumbered with guns and ammunition as were the German paramilitaries, so he was able to move a little better and quicker than the others, and he yelled at the men, telling them to get back upstairs.

Whether or not they understood the words, they understood the danger their colleagues were in upstairs, so they turned to head back up to the raging fight, reloading their weapons on the way.

“Nick!” Jack shouted. “Help me!”

Eastling came over and took the wounded man by the legs and lifted, and together with Ryan got him to the stairwell. He was still alive, but apparently he had been shot in the face. His MP5 hung from a sling on his neck, and a rig full of magazines and grenades was strapped to his chest.

Nick and Jack wrestled with the weight of the man all the way down into the garage of the car repair shop, and here a team of two paramedics appeared with a stretcher. All four men struggled to get the wounded officer onto the gurney. A paramedic said something to Ryan; he could not understand, but he thought the man was asking him to remove the MP5, so he unfastened the sling and took the gun.

Ryan accompanied the wounded man and the paramedics all the way outside to the ambulance, but Eastling went back up the stairs, passing a third man coming down with a bullet wound in his arm, aided by a uniformed police officer.

The ambulance raced off, and Jack found himself in the street now; above him in the flat, gunfire crackled. More ambulances had pulled up and police stood in the street with their guns drawn, all looking up toward flashes of light in the windows. Jack didn’t know whom to hand the submachine gun to, so he just slung it over his shoulder until he could pass it off to Wilhelm.

He saw some uniformed policemen climbing the fire escape on the south side of the building; they had obviously been ordered up to help with the firefight that had continued much longer than anyone had expected.

Ryan ran back to the entrance of the garage, but now another team of paramedics had their gurney at the bottom of the stairs there, and they were loading the man with the injured shoulder onto the stretcher. Ryan wanted to get back to his position on the first floor, so he ran around the building to the fire escape, thinking he could just follow the cops up one flight and return to the hallway where he’d been two minutes earlier.

He headed up the fire escape, climbing the ladder to the stairs. As he started toward the window to the first-floor hallway, he heard a high-pitched hiss and he felt a pressure just in front of his face, and then brick exploded off the building two feet in front of him. The noise and pressure caused him to lose his footing and fall flat on the wet metal.

Even before he hit the cold, wet metal he knew he’d been shot at, and he also knew from the sound that this wasn’t someone upstairs firing down. He looked to the right; there was a four-story building across the street. Lights were on in some of the rooms, and Jack pressed himself flat into the wet fire escape landing as he scanned them, looking to see where the shot came from.

But another building was next to it, and, as they were on the corner, Jack realized his position was exposed to windows all the way up the street for two blocks.

There were so many damn windows to check, he had no idea where the gunshot had come from.

He stopped scanning. It occurred to him no sniper would fire from a room with its lights on, so he started looking for the dark windows. A half-second later he realized he needed to be looking for an open window, which cut the potential locations down even more.

What about that one?

A flash in a fourth-story corner window, right next to where he was looking, caught his attention. It was at least seventy-five yards away, halfway up the block. He did not hear a bullet pass, which told him the sniper in the window was using a suppressed rifle and, more important to Ryan, he was now shooting at someone else.

Jack fought to get the walkie-talkie out of the pocket of his jacket. He didn’t know how many of the police around here spoke English, but right now he didn’t care.

“Sniper! Outside, fourth floor of the gray building up the street! Second window from the corner.”

He was answered by a shout into the microphone.

“Wer spricht denn?” Who’s talking?

Ryan did not understand; he repeated his announcement, and then he crawled to the open window and dove inside. He hadn’t heard another round fired at him, but with all the noise coming from upstairs, he could not be sure.

In the living room of the three-bedroom flat on the top floor of the building, the GSG 9 operators still in the fight had themselves come to the conclusion that they were taking fire through the windows on the south side. When two of their number went down here, they at first thought the RAF gunmen in the back bedrooms were firing through the plaster walls. Indeed, in the light from their weapons they saw holes open on the wall, and they felt bullets and fragments of plaster as they passed. So GSG 9 fired back, dumping magazine after magazine of fully automatic fire in the direction of the threats in the bedrooms.

It was only when the third man in the living room went down with a gunshot to the back of his right shoulder, and pitched forward over a table in the middle of the room, that it became evident they were taking fire not just from the front, but from behind them on their right as well.

At that moment someone yelled “Sniper!” on the radio, and then he said something in English. “Sniper” was universal for these federal paramilitary officers, everyone knew the term, so although they could not understand the rest of the English, several of the men looked to their right and saw more glass shatter in the window as another bullet flew into the living room.