Tom Clancy - Command Authority

The man grabbed at his wound and cried out, but the second attacker moved past him and stabbed at Jack. Jack parried the strike away with his left hand, and realized at the same instant that he needed more room to maneuver. His back was to the door of the flat next to Oxley’s, so he donkey-kicked the door as hard as he could when the two Russians both lunged at him again, waving their blades.

The door flew in; Jack fell backward against it and tumbled on his back to the floor, dropping his knife in the process.

The men were above him now, and he kicked the wounded man in the inside of his knee, buckling the joint and sending him crashing to the floor.

Behind him, an elderly woman called out, not screaming in fear—rather, she was yelling in anger at the intrusion. Jack did not look back at her; all his attention was focused on dealing with the two knives sweeping the air toward him. He rolled to his right, just avoiding the curved blade of the second attacker, and as he shot back to his feet, he immediately had to spin away from a whipping blade.

The attacker missed, spun almost all the way around after his wild swing, and Jack stomped down on the back of the man’s leg, dropping him to his knees.

The second Russian struggled to climb back up off the floor. Jack could hear the woman shouting, as well as angry screams in Russian from the thug, but he concentrated on the closest armed man, who was now on his knees, facing away from him. Jack dove onto the man’s back, slamming him face-first into the floor. He took the Russian’s head in his hands and banged it down again, knocking the young Russian out cold.

The other man was up now, and Jack had his back to him. Jack knew his only defense was to leap back up to his feet and run out of the little flat. He did this, sprinting back into the hallway, and he heard the armed man right on his heels. Jack stopped in the hallway, dropped low, and spun around with a sweeping kick to the running man’s legs. The Russian was caught by surprise, and he fell onto Jack just outside the doorway.

Ryan and the Russian rolled around on the hallway floor, both men struggling desperately for the curved knife.

Victor Oxley had met the two men racing up to his flat when they were still in the front stairwell. His swing of the brass knuckles took the first man at the top of the stairs in the jaw and sent him tumbling all the way back down to the ground floor in a crumpled heap.

But the second man leapt to the right so his partner wouldn’t take him down in his fall, and then he continued to the top of the stairs, his knife out in front of him, maneuvering for an opening to stab the big fifty-nine-year-old Briton.

“Davay! Davay!” Oxley shouted at the younger Russian mafia assassin. Come on! Come on! The Russian was wary, clearly afraid to commit to a lunging attack with the knife against the bigger man with the bloody brass knuckles on his fist.

But finally he did come on. He stepped onto the landing with the first swing of the knife. He went for Oxley’s chest but struck nothing but air. Oxley took the opportunity to strike out himself, but his right hook missed its target as well.

Another jab by the knife caught the loose arm of Oxley’s sweater, cutting it through but missing flesh. Oxley threw himself at his attacker, slamming into him, chest to chest, using his left hand to keep the threatening knife from plunging into him. There on the landing between the ground floor and the first floor the two men, one in his early twenties, the other nearly sixty, wrestled in a bear hug. Oxley could not bring the brass knuckles into action because his arm was held up by the Russian, and the Russian could not put his knife to use because his wrist was held down by the Englishman.

Finally, Oxley got the man in the corner of the landing, and then, with brute strength and intense effort, he scooted the man across the three feet of wall to where he was pressed with his back to the plate-glass window overlooking the street from the landing. The attacker looked back over his shoulder quickly, realizing the danger he was in, but all he could do was try to pull his knife arm free of the vise-grip clench of Victor Oxley’s left hand.

The two men made brief eye contact. The Russian was afraid, the Englishman, exhausted but resolute.

Victor Oxley slammed his forehead into the face of the Russian assassin, and he kept pressing with it until the window glass shattered behind the Russian’s head, his head carried on back out the window, and the jagged glass below his neck cut into him, digging through skin and muscle and stabbing between cervical vertebrae, where the sharp glass then stabbed his spinal cord.

The knife fell from his hand, and Oxley let go, pushed off the man, then stepped back away from him.

The Russian flailed for a moment, eyes wide in terror and in pain, but then he fell off the broken glass and collapsed to the floor in an expanding pool of blood. Bloody broken glass rained down on his dying body as the window shattered completely and fell in.

Oxley reached out and put his hand on the banister to keep from collapsing. His heart felt like it could rip out of his chest with its next powerful beat. He sucked in a deep lungful of air, and only when he held it in did he hear a noise below him on the ground floor. He looked down to the bottom of the stairs and saw the man he’d punched in the face a minute earlier. Remarkably, the man had made it back to his feet, and now he stood there, wobbling a little, and he raised something out away from his body, pointing it at the big Englishman on the landing.

Oxley cocked his head. Slowly he raised his hands when he realized it was a gun.

A gun?

Oxley saw the muscles tighten in the neck of the Russian as he began to squeeze the trigger, then Oxley looked up quickly, above the gunman, alerted by sudden movement there.

Jack Ryan, Jr., appeared at the railing on the first-floor landing and launched himself over the banister, dropping ten feet straight down to the gunman below him. He crashed onto the man just as a wild shot rang out. Oxley lurched back; he thought he’d been hit at first, so loud and percussive was the crack of the bullet in the enclosed stairwell.

But he felt himself for blood and holes, and was relieved to find neither.

He looked down at the two men now, both fighting over the small pistol below him. Jack tried to tear it from the other man’s hand; instead the Russian slammed Jack to the floor and fell on top of him, the gun between them.

A second shot cracked, and the struggle continued for several seconds. Oxley started down the stairs, trying to get close enough to help, yet by the time he got to the ground floor, there was nothing for him to do but pull the dead body of the Russian off the very alive son of the President of the United States.

Ryan pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned back against the wall of the stairwell. Oxley, exhausted beyond anything he’d felt in decades, collapsed next to him.

For several seconds the two men just sat there, the sound of their near-hyperventilated breathing filling the small space.

Finally Jack was able to control his breathing just enough to mutter an understandable sentence: “What the fuck was that about these assholes not using guns?”

Oxley took his time responding, needing to catch his breath first. “What can I say? Haven’t been keeping up with the habits of the Seven Strong Men. Could be my information is somewhat out-of-date.”

“Yeah.”

Oxley regarded the dead man on the floor in front of him. Slowly his thick-bearded face tightened into a smile. “I’ll be damned, Ryan. You fight like your dad.”

Jack looked angrily at Oxley. “Meaning what, exactly?”