Command Authority

64

After CIA analyst Jack Ryan donned the bulletproof vest over his shirt and tie, he was given a zip-up jacket with the word POLIZEI in gold on the back, and handed a radio by a Bundesgrenzschutz detective named Wilhelm.

At one a.m. they climbed into Wilhelm’s unmarked car and drove to a staging area just two blocks from the target location. Here the GSG 9 men stood by their armored vehicles and smoked, and several ambulances and more police vehicles, including a paddy wagon, were all parked in a darkened underground garage.

After a call through the radios, Wilhelm, Ryan, and Eastling — the other British intelligence officers remained behind in the theater — began walking up the street, passing local police who were now blocking off the streets in the neighborhood. Wilhelm led Ryan and Eastling along behind another group of armed uniformed police officers to yet another staging area, this one just across the street from the target building. Just as they arrived, the GSG 9 men came in their own vehicles, their trucks driving slowly up Sprengelstrasse with the lights extinguished, and the twenty-four commandos leapt out from the back of the trucks and lined up in two teams of twelve. One group unlocked the car repair shop door with a skeleton key, and the other used a portable ladder to gain access to the fire escape, and they began moving slowly up toward the roof. Inside the repair shop, a barking dog was silenced with a tranquilizer gun, and then this team headed up a staircase to the first-floor offices.

Now Wilhelm, Ryan, Eastling, and several uniformed state police officers crossed the street and entered the target building. They climbed the stairs to the offices on the first floor, and here they stood together in a hallway near the stairs up to the second-story artists’ studio. Just ahead of them, the GSG 9 team waited a minute at the stairs, and then they began moving up to the second floor, disappearing from view as they ascended into blackness.

Ryan leaned close to Eastling’s ear and said, “They know they are here to arrest the terrorists, right? We won’t be able to tie the attacks in Switzerland to the RAF if we end up with a room full of bodies.”

Eastling whispered back, “You’d be surprised what a room full of bodies can tell you.” He winked. “No stress, the shooters know to give the guerrillas every chance to surrender peacefully.” He put a hand up. “Of course, if the bad guys decide they want to shoot it out, these German commandos will kill everything that moves. That’s just what they do.”

The GSG 9 team moved up the stairs to the second floor and into the artists’ collective, and they found the space to be mostly open; there were a few partitioned-off areas here and there. Shelves of paint, rolling carts of art supplies, and easels with half-finished paintings were positioned around the room. Large windows on all four walls allowed the moonlight and glow from the streets below to filter in, so the German paramilitaries were able to head toward the narrow staircase to the top floor without using their flashlights. Many of the windows had been left open, so the room was cold and breezy.

When they were halfway across the floor, a transmission came from the leader of the team who had taken the fire escape to the roof. “Mannschaft Eins, fertig.” Team One, ready.

The team leader in the studio replied with a whisper, “Verstanden.” Understood.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the team leader looked up into the darkness. The door at the top of the stairs was open, and he saw a flickering dim glow, like that coming from a television screen somewhere in the flat above.

He turned around to face his team to give the hand signal to order them to prepare to assault up the staircase, but just as he raised his arm, the sound of a loud slap echoed in the room, and the team leader spun around to his right and fell, crashing into a rolling cart full of art supplies.

The crashing sound in the huge, nearly empty room sounded like a small bomb going off. Men dropped to their kneepads and scanned the room with the huge flashlights attached to the tops of their guns.

The closest men rushed to their leader and realized he’d been shot. He was facedown at the bottom of the stairs, and they assumed the bullet had come from the flat above, so two men fired their MP5s up into the flat to suppress the threat while others pulled their leader out of the line of fire.

Ulrike Reubens leapt from the couch when she heard something crashing into the rolling cart downstairs. This was not one of the rats that occasionally kept her jittery at night. The noise was too loud for that. No one had said anything to her about any of the studio renters staying late this evening.

Ulrike had just made it into the kitchen when the gunfire erupted in the stairwell in front of her. She leapt back in surprise, screamed, and fumbled with the MPL hanging over her shoulder.

An air horn began to blow on the stairs, which meant someone had tripped the wire on the way up. She raised her weapon in front of her just as she was bathed in a brilliant white light.

The first man through the doorway opened fire on the armed subject in front of him, perforating the woman with eight rounds of nine-millimeter NATO ammo. She crumpled to the ground before she fired a single shot from her gun.

Jack Ryan had expected the takedown of the RAF safe house to begin with the muffled sounds of detonating concussion grenades two floors above him. Instead, the stillness in the dark hallway where he waited was broken by multiple automatic weapons firing directly above where he crouched. Instantly, police radios began to crackle, and the shouts of men echoed from the studio through the stairwell.

Ryan and the men around him instinctively ducked lower to the floor. Wilhelm turned to Ryan and Eastling — he looked like he was trying to decide whether he should shepherd them back downstairs, as the fight was closer than he had expected.

Now there were shouts on the stairs ahead, and the gunfire above grew heavier. Men on the radio started yelling. Eastling grabbed Wilhelm. “What’s happening?”

The Bundesgrenzschutz officer assigned to Ryan and Eastling said, “The team leader on the second floor has been shot!”

“Second floor?”

Ryan heard the commotion of men shouting in the stairs, and he saw flashes from the big lights mounted on the top of their H&Ks as they came down; then a group of GSG 9 appeared in the hall. At first Ryan thought the entire force was in retreat, but within a few seconds he saw they were moving something heavy, pulling it with difficulty in the tight confines of the narrow hall. Their guns and other equipment were getting caught on one another’s gear, and they struggled with whatever they were carrying.

He knew it would be the wounded team leader.

They shouted in German as they passed, and Ryan and Eastling moved out of the way. Ryan caught a glimpse of the tactical officer being dragged by three of his colleagues. He was completely limp and appeared dead.

The men continued up the hall and then into the stairwell down to the ground floor.

There was another loud crash above him; this sounded like a frag grenade — Ryan had heard enough of them in the Marine Corps to recognize the noise. Plaster on the ceiling in the first-floor hallway rained down on Ryan and Eastling and Wilhelm, as well as the uniformed Landespolizei officers with them.

The walkie-talkies all around Jack were alive with crackling shouts and commands; he couldn’t make sense of any of it, but his impression was that something had gone drastically wrong and the situation upstairs had descended into utter chaos.

Seconds later, another group of black-clad officers appeared in the stairwell, dragging a wounded man along with them. In the light from flashlights, Ryan could see the wet blood on the man’s tunic.

Jack pushed himself tight against the wall to let them pass, but the officers stumbled while carrying the dead weight of the wounded man.

Ryan ran to the group, then reached down and took the wounded man under his arms. He lifted the man and began pulling him up the hall; the commando’s boots dragged on the linoleum flooring. Ryan was not encumbered with guns and ammunition as were the German paramilitaries, so he was able to move a little better and quicker than the others, and he yelled at the men, telling them to get back upstairs.

Whether or not they understood the words, they understood the danger their colleagues were in upstairs, so they turned to head back up to the raging fight, reloading their weapons on the way.

“Nick!” Jack shouted. “Help me!”

Eastling came over and took the wounded man by the legs and lifted, and together with Ryan got him to the stairwell. He was still alive, but apparently he had been shot in the face. His MP5 hung from a sling on his neck, and a rig full of magazines and grenades was strapped to his chest.

Nick and Jack wrestled with the weight of the man all the way down into the garage of the car repair shop, and here a team of two paramedics appeared with a stretcher. All four men struggled to get the wounded officer onto the gurney. A paramedic said something to Ryan; he could not understand, but he thought the man was asking him to remove the MP5, so he unfastened the sling and took the gun.

Ryan accompanied the wounded man and the paramedics all the way outside to the ambulance, but Eastling went back up the stairs, passing a third man coming down with a bullet wound in his arm, aided by a uniformed police officer.

The ambulance raced off, and Jack found himself in the street now; above him in the flat, gunfire crackled. More ambulances had pulled up and police stood in the street with their guns drawn, all looking up toward flashes of light in the windows. Jack didn’t know whom to hand the submachine gun to, so he just slung it over his shoulder until he could pass it off to Wilhelm.

He saw some uniformed policemen climbing the fire escape on the south side of the building; they had obviously been ordered up to help with the firefight that had continued much longer than anyone had expected.

Ryan ran back to the entrance of the garage, but now another team of paramedics had their gurney at the bottom of the stairs there, and they were loading the man with the injured shoulder onto the stretcher. Ryan wanted to get back to his position on the first floor, so he ran around the building to the fire escape, thinking he could just follow the cops up one flight and return to the hallway where he’d been two minutes earlier.

He headed up the fire escape, climbing the ladder to the stairs. As he started toward the window to the first-floor hallway, he heard a high-pitched hiss and he felt a pressure just in front of his face, and then brick exploded off the building two feet in front of him. The noise and pressure caused him to lose his footing and fall flat on the wet metal.

Even before he hit the cold, wet metal he knew he’d been shot at, and he also knew from the sound that this wasn’t someone upstairs firing down. He looked to the right; there was a four-story building across the street. Lights were on in some of the rooms, and Jack pressed himself flat into the wet fire escape landing as he scanned them, looking to see where the shot came from.

But another building was next to it, and, as they were on the corner, Jack realized his position was exposed to windows all the way up the street for two blocks.

There were so many damn windows to check, he had no idea where the gunshot had come from.

He stopped scanning. It occurred to him no sniper would fire from a room with its lights on, so he started looking for the dark windows. A half-second later he realized he needed to be looking for an open window, which cut the potential locations down even more.

What about that one?

A flash in a fourth-story corner window, right next to where he was looking, caught his attention. It was at least seventy-five yards away, halfway up the block. He did not hear a bullet pass, which told him the sniper in the window was using a suppressed rifle and, more important to Ryan, he was now shooting at someone else.

Jack fought to get the walkie-talkie out of the pocket of his jacket. He didn’t know how many of the police around here spoke English, but right now he didn’t care.

“Sniper! Outside, fourth floor of the gray building up the street! Second window from the corner.”

He was answered by a shout into the microphone.

“Wer spricht denn?” Who’s talking?

Ryan did not understand; he repeated his announcement, and then he crawled to the open window and dove inside. He hadn’t heard another round fired at him, but with all the noise coming from upstairs, he could not be sure.