Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Marta had locked the door.

He ran around the outside of the building, looking for some other way in, but when he turned the corner he saw that Marta had left the building through a side door, and now she was running on the other side of the street.

“Marta!” he shouted at her as she raced through the rain, but she did not look back, she only kept running.

Jack chased after her as she disappeared down a darkened street called Am Nordhafen. She had at least fifty yards on him, and he had a feeling he wouldn’t catch her before she got where she was going.

The Berlin Wall was just two blocks away.

He shouted for her once more, this time while he raced behind her alongside the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal, a narrow concrete-lined waterway that ran along Ryan’s right as he neared the Berlin Wall.

Marta darted between buildings to her left now, Jack following her in the darkness across a vacant lot, but as he rounded an opening in a metal fence, he slipped in slick mud. It took him a moment to climb back to his feet, and by the time he did so, he’d lost sight of the German woman. Several buildings that ran along the open lot were all dark and vacant, and he saw a dozen blackened windows at ground level that she could have climbed through.

He called out to her, and his voice echoed off the buildings. “Marta? Don’t do this. I need you to trust me. We can help you.”

There was no response. He ran to a window, looked inside to a darkened room that smelled like sawdust and wet plaster, but he saw no trace of the German woman.

She had talked of using a tunnel to move into and out of East Berlin; he had no idea if it was anywhere near here, but he did know that he didn’t have a prayer of finding it in the black night.

He didn’t want to admit it at first, but slowly he came to the conclusion that the German woman was gone.

Jack stood there in the vacant lot for a full minute, and he noticed his wet hair for the first time, the mud on his pants, and the chill in the air. He walked back to the street, headed down to the corner, and stood there under a streetlight.

The Berlin Wall stood just a block ahead on Boyenstrasse, and beyond the outer wall were the glowing lights illuminating the death strip, a wide-open band between the wall and the backland wall on the eastern side. Inside the strip were automatic machine guns, and men with guns and dogs and searchlights were positioned on the far side of the wall.

Jack stood there, still coming to the realization that he’d lost the proof for his theory concerning the Morningstar case. A car pulled into view on Sellerstrasse, and then, just an instant later, the lights of a second vehicle appeared on Am Nordhafen. A third set of headlights moved across the bridge over the canal to his right.

It wasn’t lost on Jack that he had seen only three vehicles in the past ten minutes, yet now suddenly three cars were converging on the street corner where he stood.

He stepped back out of the light and moved up into the vacant lot.

A van raced south on Am Nordhafen, skidded at the intersection, and made a left. A second vehicle, the one crossing the bridge, also raced by the intersection just vacated by Ryan. He got a glimpse inside the sedan as it passed underneath the streetlight, and he saw four men inside. He didn’t know who they were, but he had the distinct impression both vehicles were racing into the area to hunt for Marta Scheuring.

Ryan turned to head back up Am Nordhafen, but he saw a figure standing on the sidewalk some seventy-five yards away. The man—Jack assumed he was male because the figure wore a bomber jacket and a riding cap—stood next to a metalworking shop. He was perfectly still and staring in Jack’s direction.

Jack crossed the street to the relative seclusion of some trees lining the Nordhafen, a wider area in the Berlin-Spandau canal used for docking and turning around barges. Before he stepped into the trees he looked back and saw that the man was gone. Jack thought he might have gone into the metal shop, although it was certainly closed at this time of night.

Wherever he was, Jack was certain the man had not crossed the street himself.

Jack walked north on the little path between the trees on his right and the waterway on his left. His plan right now was to make it back up to the Fennstrasse, the largest street in the area, and to find a taxi. He’d go directly back to the CIA station at Mission Berlin in Clay Headquarters, and there he would talk to Berlin’s CIA chief of station. He hoped the COS could rouse any assets in town to get out into the neighborhood to find Marta before she was found by the Russians, or the East Germans, or whoever the hell was after her now.

Jack began running, knowing time was of the essence.

But he did not get far. Two men in trench coats appeared from the trees in front of him and blocked his way forward.

Ryan stopped in his tracks.

It was dark, but Ryan could see the men were in their thirties; they had short, cropped hair and mustaches. One of the men asked, “Who are you?”

He had a strong German accent, but he’d spoken English, which Ryan found odd, although he knew it was possible they had heard him call out to Marta a minute before.

“Who are you ?” Jack replied.

“Polizei,” one said, but neither was wearing a uniform, and neither pulled out a badge.

“Sure you are.” Jack said this as he looked around him. He was alone here, in a secluded area. Behind him was a metal railing, beyond which was a six-foot drop into a frigid canal.

He would not be running away from these guys. He’d have to go through them.

“Show me your identification.” It was the same man talking.

What the hell? He was in West Berlin, not East Berlin. Ryan didn’t want to show these guys anything, but he reached into his coat pocket as if to comply.

His hand wrapped around the four-inch stiletto, and he clicked it open.

As he started to pull the knife from his coat, both men lunged at him; the first knocked the knife away, and the second got behind him and tried to pin his arms behind his back.

Ryan slammed his elbow back into the man behind, knocking him down, and then he kicked out at the man in front of him. His foot caught nothing but air, but he managed to make a little space for himself, so he turned around and charged at the man there, crashing into him, and the two of them slammed into the iron railing along the water. Jack threw a punch at the German; it grazed his chin without doing much damage, but it did serve to keep the man back for a moment. Jack advanced on him, had him backed up against the railing now, with no room to maneuver. He threw another punch that hit the man in the nose, and the mustached German fell in a heap along the footpath.

Ryan spun around now as fast as he could because he knew he’d left the second attacker somewhere behind him. As soon as he looked up, he saw the man was there on the footpath, ten feet away at most, and he was raising a small black pistol directly at Ryan’s head.

Ryan froze as he looked into the German’s cold eyes. They told him, without any doubt, that the man was about to shoot him dead.

He thought of his family.

As Jack tightened in anticipation of the shot, he saw movement on the gunman’s left—a dark figure appeared from the trees, running across the footpath at an incredible pace. The gunman noticed the movement out of the corner of this eye, and he started to turn his weapon in the direction of the figure, but his speed was no match for the oncoming threat.

The man in the bomber jacket and the racing cap slammed into the German attacker; his gun arm flew to the side and a shot cracked, flashed in the darkness. Jack Ryan leapt back and away from the blast, but he stumbled over the legs of the unconscious man behind him. He fell backward, his lower back hitting the footpath railing, and his momentum flipped him headlong over the side.