Full Force and Effect

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.

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.

Gavin said, “Jack? Dom?”

Jack’s breathless response caused Gavin to blow out a sigh of relief. “We’re here. Do not approach the building, there is at least one squirter heading down toward the lobby.”

“Is a squirter a bad guy running away?”

“Yes.”

“I’m watching him now. He is getting into a gray van with a man behind the wheel. They are leaving the scene.”

“Just let them go. We’ll be down in thirty seconds. You need to get us packed up and ready to get the fuck out of here.”

Gavin spun around, began running back to the office building. “I’m on it.”

The team had their hide site broken down, packed up, and loaded into the Mercedes in ten minutes flat. While Jack pulled the vehicle out of the underground parking garage, doing his best to keep from burning rubber to get out of the neighborhood, Dom called Adara from the backseat. She answered on the first ring. “Yes?”

Dom knew the encryption on his phone was good, so he had no worries about watching what he said. “You aren’t going to believe this.”

“You need another in extremis departure?”

“It’s becoming a thing, isn’t it?”

“Any wounded?”

“Negative. We’re okay, but we’ve got to get out of here.”

“What’s the opposition?”

“North Korean. I don’t know anything more than that, and I doubt they know who we are, but the local police are going to be looking for two guys matching the description of Jack and I as soon as they start taking statements at the crime scene.”

“Crime scene?” Adara asked.

“One dead local. Our target. Four dead foreign nationals. North Koreans.”

“Jesus, Dom.”

“Shit got crazy.”

“Just get here and I’ll get you out of the country.”

“Roger that.”

Dom ended the call and slipped the phone back in his pocket. Ryan called out from behind the wheel. “What did Sherman say?”

“She said she’ll be ready.”

Gavin spoke up for the first time. “Guys, I’m so sorry.” He explained what happened with the arrival of the building superintendent. Dom wasn’t in the mood to listen, he just closed his eyes and leaned his head back, but Jack paid attention.

When Biery had explained himself, Jack said, “If you had let us know you were leaving your overwatch we could have been ready, Gavin. You see that, don’t you?”

Gavin said, “Yeah. I see. It happened so fast. I… didn’t want to alarm you.”

Dom kept his eyes closed and his head back, but he said, “You know what really alarmed me? The half-dozen bastards shooting at me.”

“I’m sorry,” Gavin repeated.

The remainder of the drive to the airport passed in silence.