Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“It means I’m impressed. I took you for rich and lazy.”

“Again, your information is inaccurate.” Ryan was on his feet now. With difficulty, he pulled Oxley up as well. Ryan pointed to the man lying one half-floor above him. “Is he dead?”

“Done and dusted, mate.”

“Does that mean dead?”

Oxley said, “It does mean dead. What about the boys in the back?”

“One got away, the other is KO’d.”

Oxley looked at Ryan. He controlled his heavy breathing well enough to adopt a patronizing tone. “Well, now, you don’t suppose the unconscious bloke might be a bit useful, to us, do you? That is, of course, if you haven’t let him get away as well.”

Ryan lifted the gun off the floor and headed up the stairs.

A minute later, Jack had dragged the man up the hall into Oxley’s flat. He was no longer unconscious, but Jack could see evidence of a severe concussion in his eyes.

Oxley had made it upstairs himself, and here he ignored his elderly neighbor, who stood in the hallway and yelled at him and Ryan.

As the big Englishman entered his apartment, she shouted, “I’m calling the police!”

Oxley said, “I don’t give a toss what you do.” And with that, he slammed the door.

As soon as it shut, he turned to Ryan. “Don’t know ’bout you, mate, but I’m getting the fuck out of here.” He retrieved a half-filled duffel bag hanging from a hook by the door, then rushed over to the little dresser by his bed and began pulling out items and throwing them into the bag.

Jack had the gun on the Russian now. “I’ll drive you wherever you want to go. Like it or not, we are sort of in this together.”

Oxley didn’t seem to like it, but he had begun to accept it. With a short nod, he said, “We can take this bloke somewhere and see if he feels like having a conversation with us.” Oxley walked over to the man, slapped him across the face. “How about it, Ivan? You up for a chat?”

The man wobbled on his knees, he was still out of it, but Jack steadied him. Looking into the Russian’s eyes, he said, “Listen to me. We’re going down the stairs and we’re getting in my car. Just so you know, if I see any more of your friends I’m going to shoot you in the fucking head.”

The man just stared at Jack. Oxley repeated everything Jack said in Russian, and only then did the man nod distractedly.

Jack Ryan and Victor Oxley loaded the bleary-eyed Russian into the trunk of Ryan’s Mercedes, then hog-tied him with a length of rubber hose from the garden of Oxley’s building. When they were certain their prisoner was secure, Oxley and Ryan shut the trunk, and drove out of Corby just moments before wailing police cars pulled up in front of the ex–SAS officer’s apartment building.

Jack had suggested they go to London, and Oxley made no protest. Jack knew he couldn’t just be involved in the death of Russian mob goons without one hell of a lot of fallout, but he decided he’d wait till he got back to the capital before calling Sandy, his dad, the police, and anyone else who might be interested in the event. In the meantime, he would have Oxley alone in a car, and he’d hoped to use the time to dig into the man’s story.

But it didn’t work out that way. Oxley said he needed a few minutes to relax first. Jack was not two miles out of the city before he looked to his left and found Oxley sound asleep. Jack shook him, which woke him, but only long enough to convince Jack the man was not dead. He told Jack to bugger off for a while and let him recover from all the action, and Jack reluctantly obliged.

Ryan drove on, kept company by the nasal snore of the Englishman and the sound of the hog-tied would-be Russian assassin flailing around inside his trunk.

West Berlin was populous, prosperous, cosmopolitan, and educated. But it was not a city as much as it was an enclave. Though part of the Federal Republic of Germany, the city was completely surrounded by the socialist nation of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, a Soviet vassal state, and only seventy miles of double walls, guards, and guns encircling West Berlin separated two armies, two economies, and two belief systems.

In the East, they once claimed the Berlin Wall had been built to keep the citizens of West Berlin from slipping into the paradise of the DDR.

But by the mid-eighties, no reasonable person anywhere on the planet believed such nonsense.

Just five blocks north of the Berlin Wall, an automobile and moped repair shop occupied the entire ground floor of a four-story brick building on the busy corner of Sprengelstrasse and Tegeler Strasse. The building was in Wedding, in the former French sector of West Berlin, and the shop did a huge business with all the BMWs, Mercedeses, Opels, and Fords that passed through the neighborhood every day.

Above the ground-floor repair shop were the offices for the car care center, and above that was a large, mostly open room that served as an artist’s shared studio space. Here painters, sculptors, photographers, and woodworkers rented workbenches and floor space, and they worked on their craft throughout the day and into the evening.

Most evenings the last of the artists vacated the building well before midnight, but the building remained occupied. A small narrow staircase in a corner of the second floor led to the attic, and beyond the door at the top of the stairs, six men and women, all between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-three, lived together in a rustic but large three-bedroom flat. One of their number was a painter, and she had managed to obtain the accommodations virtually rent-free from the landlord of the building space, because although he was a wealthy landowner here in decidedly capitalist West Berlin, he had been a radical in the sixties, and he still shared in the ideals of the six young inhabitants of the attic flat.

The residents were members of the Rote Armee Fraktion, the Red Army Faction, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization formed here in Germany in 1970. The RAF attacked police, NATO personnel, and wealthy capitalists and their institutions, both here in Germany and in neighboring countries.

The flatmates’ security system here above the auto repair shop and the art studio was many-layered, though it was not particularly sophisticated. During the day, when the shop and studio were up and running, employees downstairs kept a lookout for any police or unknown vehicles on the street. At night, a guard dog in the repair shop would alert those sleeping above, although there were multiple false alarms each and every evening.

There were also trip wires set up on the staircases, attached to air horns, and one member in the flat was tasked to the night shift, essentially ordered to sit on the couch in the common room of the flat, watching TV with an old Walther MPL submachine gun on his or her lap and a pot of coffee on the stove in the kitchen.

For one of the most notorious terrorist organizations active in Europe for most of the past fifteen years, this did not amount to much in the way of security measures, but these six RAF guerrillas were not exactly at the pinnacle of the organization, and the organization was not exactly in its heyday.

The RAF had slipped out of the news in the past few years, and for this reason this cell of the organization had relaxed their guard. These were the days of the Third Generation of the Red Army Faction, and they had not been linked to any attempted lethal attacks since their failed 1981 rocketing of Ramstein Air Base and, before that, their 1979 unsuccessful assassination attempt on NATO commander Alexander Haig. The media characterized the RAF as demoralized, disorganized, and adrift, and the half-dozen young people who lived in the flat here in Wedding certainly appeared to be living down to that description.