Nucflash

1

Chief Machinist’s mate Tom Roselli—“Razor” to his comrades-at-arms in SEAL Team Seven — snuggled back in the deep, battered, and overstuffed sofa, working furiously at the ropes binding his wrists. His fingers were tingling; the guy who’d tied those knots had done a good, professional job of it. Roselli couldn’t budge them with his fingers, and his trademark Sykes-Fairbairn commando knife had been taken from him moments ago. “Don’t think you’ll be needin’ this, mate,” his captor had said with a cheerful grin. “Wouldn’t want you hurtin’ yourself, y’know!”

Roselli had replied with some rather vicious curses, but neither curses nor graphically detailed threats had had the least effect. He did still have another holdout blade his captors hadn’t found, but it was squirreled away in the heel of his left boot, and at this point it would take too long to work it free.

He hated being helpless, hated the feeling of not being in control of the situation. Early in his SEAL training, some years before, he and the other recruits, the tadpoles of his BUD/S class at Coronado, had been tied hand and foot and unceremoniously dumped into a twenty-foot-deep water tank. The exercise, called “drown-proofing,” had required the recruits to calmly sink to the bottom, push back to the surface for a breath, then repeat the process… and by doing so learning to control, then subdue, the bad-ass specter of panic. Panic, his BUD/S instructors had insisted, was what killed swimmers, not drowning. Helped along by their instructors, SEAL tads were soon donning masks and even swimming underwater, still with their wrists and ankles tied.

The only way Roselli had endured it was to push through, to overcome the handicap and the sense of abject helplessness and keep on going… which, of course, was precisely what the instructors had intended. It was just one part of the long process by which U.S. Navy SEALs were made.

But he never did learn to like it.

“Face it, Razor,” Jaybird Sterling said, watching his struggles from the other side of the room. “We’re here for the duration.”

“Screw that, Jaybird,” Roselli replied. He had to lean to one side a bit to see the other man, since a terrorist hung between them, swaying slightly back and forth. Five other terrorists were scattered about the furniture-cluttered room, paying no attention to their two captives. One was sprawled in the sofa at Roselli’s right side.

“How much longer, you think?” Sterling asked. “Man, I hate bein’ tied down!”

Roselli looked Sterling up and down. Like Roselli, Machinist’s Mate Second Class David Sterling was tightly tied hand and foot and was sitting in an overstuffed chair with his feet propped up on a low stool. “What bugs me isn’t the ropes, so much,” Roselli replied. He quirked a smile. “It’s the fact that the sadistic bastards put us in the comfy chairs!”

Jaybird looked puzzled, blinking through the clear plastic goggles he was wearing. “The what?”

“The comfy chairs.”

“Man, now I know you’re crackin’ up.”

“Don’t you watch Monty Python?”

“Monty who?”

“Never mind. Obviously you’ve never run into Monty Python, and trying to explain that would—”

A window at the far end of the room shattered, and a dark gray cardboard cylinder bounded into the room. “Eyes!” Roselli yelled, interrupting himself, and both men turned their heads and squeezed their eyes shut.

The flashbang grenade had a charge reduced to training specs, but nonetheless it detonated with a rippling chain of ear-splitting cracks and a strobing pulse of light so intense that Roselli could see the flash through tightly closed eyelids. By the time he was certain that the last charge had gone off and had opened his eyes once more, the room’s single door had splintered in time to the double concussion of twin shotgun blasts. The splinters were still flying as black-garbed men began spilling into the room, moving with an expert and long-practiced choreography that put a different armed man in every corner of the room in scant seconds. The harsh chuff-chuff-chuff of sound-suppressed Browning automatics blended together into a cacophony of hissing gunfire, and the “terrorists” began exploding in puffs of straw. Six bullets slammed in rapid succession into the straw dummy at Roselli’s right, five punching through its fatigue shirt and into what would have been its center of mass… though one show-off round exploded the head in a whirling flurry of yellow-white fragments. The dummy hanging from the rafters between Roselli and Sterling danced on its rope for a second, then collapsed to the floor as the rope suspending it was shot through. Another one propped up on the floor to Roselli’s left disintegrated, dropping a handful-sized hank of straw squarely on his head.

The gunmen were terrifying, garbed head to toe in black combat dress that included a hood tightly cinched over their heads, black gas masks and protective goggles that gave their faces the nightmarish, high-tech look of a squad of Darth Vaders with attitudes. They wore gloves and non-skid boots; two carried sound-suppressed Browning pistols, while two more wielded MP5SD3s — the H&Ks with the massive, integral silencer barrels that many SEALs preferred in closequarters hostage-rescue scenarios. The four men of the assault team were members of the British Special Air Service, the SAS. The room, properly the CQB, or Close Quarters Battle house, was more popularly known as the Killing House, a living-room mock-up designed to allow hostage-rescue units to practice their marksmanship and their target identification.

Sitting in the sofa, covered with straw, Roselli was delighted that they were as good at target ID as they’d claimed to be.

“Clear!” the first man into the room shouted, as he pivoted back and forth, his H&K held high and deadly, his voice muffled by the gas mask.

“Clear!” his number two called from the other side of the door, as he dropped an empty mag from his H&K and slapped another home with polished and professional ease.

“Clear!” a third called from behind Roselli’s sofa.

“Clear!”

For a moment the only movement in the room was the swinging of the shot-through rope, the only sound the rasp of the assault team’s breathing through the gas masks, and the heavy breathing of the two rescued “hostages.”

“Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition,” Roselli said loudly into the near silence.

Four masked, black-hooded heads pivoted toward the sound of his voice. “Beg your pardon, Yank?” one of the troopers said.

“Monty Python? The British comic group?”

No one said a word, and Roselli shook his head. “Damn, I though everyone in England would know about Monty Python!”

“Don’t mind him,” Jaybird told the puzzled hostage rescue team. “He never grew up. The guy specializes in obscure humor.”

“I’ll obscure your humor. How about getting us out of these ties, huh?”

Minutes later, Roselli and Sterling were outside in the mid-morning daylight once more, rubbing chafed wrists as they gathered with their hosts and the other two SEALs in the training exchange. Most of the U.S. Special Warfare units cross-trained occasionally with their opposite numbers in Europe, especially the German GSG9 and the world-famous British SAS, and the Navy SEALs were no exception. Four members of SEAL Seven’s Third Platoon had been assigned a three-week rotation with the Special Air Service’s 23rd Regiment. The other two SEALs in the program were Quartermaster First Class Martin Brown and Electrician’s Mate Second Class William Higgins.

“You okay, Razor?” Brown looked worried. “We heard a lot a’ shootin’ and lootin’ in there.”

“Your turn next, Magic,” Roselli favoring the big SEAL sniper with a sadistic grin. “You’re just gonna love this.”

“We call him Komissar,” their guide said. She was a dazzling, long-legged German blonde in a severe, gray business suit, whose English contained only a trace of an accent. “And he may be our most important weapon in fighting Euroterrorism.”

The two men trailing her through the gleaming corridors and warrens of the headquarters complex of the German BKA stopped and politely looked as she pointed out what was obviously, for her at least, the showpiece of the tour. Through the double-paned windows of an air-conditioned basement room, the black, white, and silver cabinets of a sprawling, mainframe computer could be seen.

Lieutenant Blake Murdock, the commanding officer of SEAL Seven’s Third Platoon, along with Master Chief Engineman George MacKenzie, had arrived in Wiesbaden the previous evening, on a space-available Air Force flight out of Lakenheath. Early that morning they’d reported to the ultramodern, glass and concrete complex on a hilltop in the suburbs outside of Wiesbaden that was the headquarters of the BKA, the Bundeskriminant, Germany’s Federal Investigation Department. Inge Schmidt, a BKA special agent, had been assigned by the department’s liaison bureau to show the two Navy SEALs around. For a change, both men were wearing civilian suits rather than either Navy dress uniforms or the more usual fatigues or combat dress, and both carried leather attaché cases. Murdock felt distinctly uncomfortable in his monkey suit, as he called it, and was looking forward to shedding jacket and tie at the earliest possible moment.

“We’ve heard a lot about Komissar,” Murdock said. “He’s the main reason we’re here, in fact. Some of the information you have squirreled away in here about German terrorist groups may be of importance to our current investigation. Especially your Red Army faction.”

“So the director told me,” the woman said. With a grand sweep of her arm, she indicated the gleaming, impeccably clean and shining cabinets that housed the BKA’s monster computer. “If there is information to be had anywhere on the Continent on the people you are researching, it is here, in Komissar’s data banks.”

“A little out of date, isn’t he?” MacKenzie observed.

“Mac…” Murdock said, warning edging his voice.

“Komissar” was a computer, a very large computer with a mainframe occupying a small, air-conditioned room in the BKA’s basement, and with terminals located throughout the office complex.

“He was installed during the late 1970s,” Inge said, sounding a bit defensive, almost as though a favorite child had just been harshly and unfairly criticized. “And he has been upgraded several times since. He currently stores some tens of millions of pages of information on terrorists and terrorist groups all over the world… focusing particularly on those individuals operating in Europe, of course. We may not have access to your American Super-Cray computers, but Komissar is more than powerful enough to do the job expected of him.”

“I’m sure the chief wasn’t criticizing your machine,” Murdock said diplomatically. “Or your methods.”

“No, ma’am,” the big SEAL added. “He’s just a lot bigger than what I’m used to back home.”

“And coming from a Texan,” Murdock said, “that’s quite an admission. In any case, we’ve found that the key to solving problems is never the technology. It’s the people.”

“That is most observant, Lieutenant,” Inge said, nodding. “And you’re right, of course. It is the people who make our system work. The BKA is one of the finest criminal investigation units in the world.”

“We were particularly interested in your cataloguing system,” Murdock said. “I was told you have a whole warehouse full of Stasi records.”

“More than one, in fact. We Germans, as I’m sure you’ve heard, can be meticulous record keepers.”

“I sometimes think record keeping will be our undoing,” a new voice said at their backs.

Turning, Murdock saw a young, athletic-looking man wearing neatly pressed combat fatigues. A sharpshooter’s badge was pinned to the left breast of his tunic, along with several medals that Murdock did not recognize.

“Oberleutnant Werner Hopke,” the man said said, extending a hand. “Grenzschutzgruppe Nine. You must be the American SEALs, though you seem to be out of uniform. I was expecting swim fins and wet suits.”

The GSG9 was German’s unique answer to the terrorism that had plagued West Germany in the seventies and eighties. The face of terrorism had changed, of course, along with the changing map of Europe during the past few years, but the GSG9 had maintained its status as one of the world’s elite counterterror and hostage-rescue units.

Murdock took the man’s hand. Hopke had a dry, firm grip. “Lieutenant Blake Murdock, United States Navy. And this is my partner in crime, Master Chief MacKenzie. As for the uniform, well, consider this camouflage dress for urban environments.”

Hopke chuckled. “GSG9 is forced to use protective coloration as well, Herr Lieutenant. My condolences. In any case, I am very pleased to meet you both. I have been assigned as your liaison with the Grenzschutzgruppe during your visit. Has our Inge been taking good care of you?”

“Our Inge?” MacKenzie asked. He turned to the woman. “You didn’t say you were with the GSG9.”

She laughed. “I’m not.”

“Miss Schmidt works closely with the Grenzschutzgruppe, however,” Hopke said. “She is, ah, I suppose a computer technician might say she is our primary interface with Komissar. Sometimes I think she is Komissar, which is why mere mortals like us don’t have a chance to get to know her better.”

“Possibly,” Inge told him, with a flirtatious lift of her chin, “you simply haven’t found the proper program to run on me.”

“Ah, tell me about the Euro-terror groups,” Murdock said brusquely. He could sense the chemistry flowing between Schmidt and Hopke, and thought it best to get the conversation back onto strictly professional grounds.

“What did you need to know?” Hopke asked.

Murdock exchanged glances with the other SEAL, then looked Hopke in the eye. “What is your clearance, Herr Leutnant?”

“Blue three.”

“Miss Schmidt?”

“Blue four.”

“Maverick Lance,” Murdock said.

Hopke’s face immediately tightened. “Perhaps,” he said slowly, “this should be discussed in a secure area.”

Murdock nodded. “I couldn’t agree more.”

“Come with me.”

Turning, the four of them left the BKA basement room and the glassed-in Wiesbaden computer. There were some secrets that even Komissar was not yet privy to.