Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

“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.