Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

—

Caruso had stepped back into the master bedroom of Skála’s apartment to grab the young man a set of clothes. He and Ryan wanted the Czech man dressed and out of the building quickly in case the North Koreans had bugged the place, but Skála himself was still dazed from exhaustion and the blow to the head, and Dom decided it would take Skála longer to get himself together than either he or Jack wanted to wait, so Dom just randomly grabbed pants and shoes and a shirt, and then threw toiletries along with other odds and ends into a bag he found on a shelf.

Ryan stood watch over Skála next to the entryway to the hall. The Czech consular official sat on his sofa facing the archway next to Ryan, which meant he was in the right position to have seen the men filing into the apartment first if he had only been looking in the right direction. Instead, his attention had been focused on the floor in front of him and the dizziness in his head. He did look up just in time to see two men in the archway; they were plainly Korean, and they were just two meters or so from the bearded American leaning against the wall, although they had not seen him yet.

Skála blinked hard at the image, then he started to stand.

Ryan was in the process of taking a call from Gavin Biery when he saw the movement and the astonished expression on Skála’s face, and he turned to see what had him so terrified. Jack saw only the tip of a handgun as it aimed through the archway on his left. He leapt toward it instinctively, tried to grab it or knock it away from its target.

“Gun!” he shouted. The weapon fired, Ryan folded his right hand over the hot barrel, and his left arm swung in a wide haymaker. He connected with the side of a man’s head—he hadn’t even focused his eyes on the assailant because his attention was still on the pistol.

A second gunshot cracked in the hallway of the apartment a few feet to his left. Ryan sensed rather than saw a large group of men bursting through the doorway there, and to keep himself out of the line of fire from their weapons he swung his now unconscious victim around so the man’s limp body would be positioned between himself and the attackers. Another shot came from less than ten feet away, and Ryan immediately felt the small man in his arms jolt—he’d been shot in the back.

Ryan wanted to get his gun out of its Thunderwear holster and into the fight; he knew he could do it in one second in optimal conditions, but he was standing at one end of a hallway that was full of gunmen at the other end, protected only by a wounded or dead man held up in his arms. One second was an eternity in this situation—dropping his cover to jam his hand down the front of his pants to pull out his Smith & Wesson would certainly just result in him getting gunned down with his hand stuck down the front of his pants.

Shouting men filed up the hall and a third booming handgun report sounded in the small space. The man in Ryan’s arms jerked again and Jack crouched tighter. He decided he’d have to at least try for his gun. But just as he let the man in his arms go to do this, out of the corner of his left eye he saw Dominic Caruso running into the living room from the back bedroom, his small black pistol high in a combat grip and pointed to the wall, behind which it looked like at least four or five North Koreans stood engaging Ryan, unaware of the man on their right.

—

Dominic couldn’t see any targets, but he could see his cousin crouched low with a spasming, bleeding man in his arms, and he heard the direction the last gunshot came from. He aimed his weapon to a point waist-high on the wall between himself and the hallway, and he pressed the trigger once, twice, three times, moving his aim laterally to the left toward the doorway while he moved his body laterally right toward his cousin and a better view of what was in the hall.

Ejected cartridges from his pistol arced through the air and bounced on the floor of the living room while he moved.

After five rounds he saw puffs of masonry and wallboard above his point of aim, and this told him the shooters there realized they were under fire from an unseen assailant on the other side of the wall and they had begun shooting back. Dom crouched lower and kept moving across the living room. He crossed in front of the crumpled body of Karel Skála on the floor in front of the sofa.

He fired nine rounds just as he stepped into the hallway, his weapon locked open as he pulled the trigger on the back of a North Korean fleeing through the door out of the apartment and in to the hall that ran down the spine of the building. It appeared more than one assailant had retreated into the main hall, but there were two bodies lying still on the floor by the door, plus the dead man at Ryan’s feet.

Dom stepped in front of Ryan, who was now down on one knee and drawing his weapon. Dom’s gun was empty, so he started to draw his one spare magazine from his Thunderwear holster. While doing so, however, he saw a North Korean lean back around into view from the main hallway, his pistol rising in front of him.

“Down!” Dom heard from behind, and he dropped flat on his chest.

Jack Ryan rose from his crouch over his cousin, his Smith & Wesson M&P Shield barking in his hand. The North Korean caught a nine-millimeter hollow-point round right in the forehead, an inch left of center, and he tumbled back, his pistol spinning through the air and bouncing into the hallway.

After the gun settled and Jack’s hot brass finished spinning on the floor, it was eerily quiet in the apartment. The smell of gun smoke was pervasive and a heavy blue tinge hung in the air, the result of twenty or so rounds being fired from multiple weapons in such a small enclosed space.

One of the men lying in front of Jack moved. His head lifted a little, and he reached out for a pistol lying on the legs of a dead man next to him.

Jack fired once, hitting the man in the back of the neck. Blood sprayed down the hall with the impact of the round.

Jack kept his gun trained on the open doorway. He said, “I count four down. How many more?”

Caruso reloaded quickly. “How the fuck should I know? I just got here.”

Jack looked over to Skála now. His eyes were open and rolled back. “Damn it. Target’s dead.”

Dom had his gun back in the fight and pointed toward the doorway. “Yep.”

Jack connected with Biery. “Gavin? Are you still with us?”

There was no reply.

“Gavin, do you copy?”

Nothing.

Jack shouted now. “If you can hear me, we’ve got squirters coming your way! Do not come in this building!” He climbed to his feet. Shouting to his cousin he said, “Get Skála’s laptop!” and then took off, leaping over the dead bodies in front of him on his way out the door.

—

Gavin was stuck in a slow-moving elevator in the office building on Baranova Street, and he realized he’d lost his mobile connection with the guys right at the worst possible time. It occurred to him, too late, that he should have taken the stairs; as well as being a mobile phone dead zone, the elevator descended at a glacial pace.

“Shit, shit, shit!” he shouted at himself.

When he finally got down to street level he ran outside, then down the sidewalk toward Skála’s Krišt’anova Street apartment building. While he ran he looked down at his phone and redialed into the conference call to reestablish his connection with Jack and Dom.

If they were still alive, that was. The gunfire he’d heard through his earpiece before he lost comms had been extraordinary, it sounded like a war was being fought in the building across the street.

As soon as he heard the call answered, he looked up and saw an Asian man running out of Skála’s building, directly across the street from him. Gavin stopped in his tracks and watched him; the Asian shielded a pistol inside his coat. Several other people ran out of the building all around the armed man, unaware this was one of the people responsible for all the gunfire that had them running for their lives.