Nucflash

5

The door banged open and Pak strode to the room, his anger tightly marshaled behind the impassive round mask of his face. The bedroom was cluttered with torn posters on the walls, empty beer and soda cans on the floor, and piles of laundry, cast-off clothing, and dirty sheets.

O’Malley lay naked in the bed with two naked women, the dark-haired one astride his hips, the other one at his side. As Pak stormed in, closely followed by Chun Hyon Hee and Gunther Weiss, both women screamed and rolled off the Provo man, clutching at the scattered sheets.

“What the bloody hell?” O’Malley shouted, heaving himself up from the pillow on his elbows.

Pak drew his weapon, a North-Korean-manufactured Type 68 automatic pistol equipped with a long, blunt sound suppressor.

“Kim!” O’Malley shouted, trying to scramble over the legs of one of the screaming women and onto the floor. None of the people here knew Pak’s real name, of course. “Kim, you son of a bitch, have you gone completely nuts?”

“Take them aside,” Pak told Chun, gesturing at the two women with the pistol. “By the wall. Keep them quiet. You!” He swung the pistol to aim it squarely at O’Malley’s head. “Out of the bed. Over there. Face to that wall and hands up!”

O’Malley complied, but his face was flushed dark red with a barely contained fury. “Kim, what the hell is this?”

“Who are they?” Pak demanded. The women’s screams had died down to broken sobs and whimpers now. Chun had them on their knees, hands behind their heads, and was standing before them with her own pistol out. Weiss stood guard impassively in the doorway with an unsilenced 9mm Browning Hi-Power.

“Huh?” O’Malley blinked. “Who?”

“The women, you fool! Who are they? Where did they come from?”

“Aw, fer the love of—”

Pak jammed the muzzle of his pistol hard into O’Malley’s left kidney. The man gasped and flinched. “Christ! Y’can’t just come in here and—”

“You would be surprised at what I can do,” Pak said coldly. “Now, for the last time. Who are these women and where did they come from?”

“Th’ brunette’s, uh, Sharon, and the blonde’s… what is it, honey? Patty?”

“P-Patricia Summers,” the woman said from the other side of the room.

Chun rapped her sharply in the side of her head with her pistol, and both women screamed again. “Silence!” Chun said. “He was not talking to you!”

“Where did you find them, O’Malley?”

“At a fuckin’ pub! God damn it, Kim, I jus’ brought ’em home fer a little—”

“You knew the rules. No contact with anyone outside the group until the operation was well under way!”

“But the operation is under way! C’mon, Kim! Lighten up, man!”

“Turn around. Keep your hands above your head.”

Slowly, O’Malley did as he was told. The man was scared, but Pak could easily read the anger still in his face. He needed to be broken, and quickly. “Weiss!”

“Yes, sir,” the German said.

“Come here.”

The man walked across from the open door. “Sir?”

“Place your gun to O’Malley’s head. If he makes any move, any move at all which I do not first tell him to make, shoot him.”

“My pleasure.”

“Spread your legs,” Pak said, addressing O’Malley again.

“Huh?”

“Spread your legs apart! Do not make me repeat myself!”

The anger was nearly all gone now, drained away with the color in the Provo terrorist’s face. His eyes were very wide now, and sweat was beading on his forehead and along his upper lip. Slowly, bit by bit, he inched his legs to either side, his spine pressed against the wall at his back, until his bare feet were about three feet apart.

Slowly, Pak lowered his pistol down the centerline of the man’s torso. The man’s eyes squeezed shut and his breath came in short, hard gasps. With great deliberation, Pak pressed the muzzle of the sound suppressor sharply against O’Malley’s penis, which was still ludicrously encased within the glistening wet sheath of a condom.

“O, Christ, oh, God, please, no, no, no…”

“I should simply shoot you,” Pak said quietly. “You appear unable to accept simple discipline, and your actions have endangered our entire operation.”

“It was a mistake, oh, God-Jesus-Mary please, don’t, it was a mistake—”

“On the other hand, I could simply hurt you in such a way that you would not break our rules in this manner again. Which punishment would you prefer?”

“Please, Jesus God, you don’t have to do this, please… ” The man was crying openly now, and his knees were threatening to give way.

“Stop babbling. Now, tell me what I want to know, or I will castrate you here and now. Who are these women? Where did you meet them?”

“I swear to God, Kim, they’re just a couple of whores! They don’t mean nothin’! I picked them up at the King’s Bull in town! I swear! I swear!”

“Prostitutes? How much did you pay them?”

“I ain’t paid ’em yet! But, but they said we could have a great party if I gave ’em a twenty each.”

“Forty pounds?”

“Yeah! Yeah, that’s right!”

Pak sighed. “No wonder you people can’t win your war with the English. You are so easily distracted. Did you approach them? Or did they approach you?”

“Huh? Hell, I don’t know. They were at the bar and I come up to ’em and started talkin’ ’em up, y’know? So yeah, I guess I approached them.”

“Did they suggest you bring them back here?”

“Uh, I, uh—”

He jabbed the muzzle of the gun forward, hard. “Tell me!”

“They wanted to go to a fuckin’ hotel, okay? But I said I had a place here! I thought it would be okay! That’s God’s truth, Kim! I swear it! I didn’t think it would be any harm, I swear to God I didn’t!”

Pak lifted the gun away from O’Malley’s genitals and took a step back. As he did so, the condom fell away with a wet plop, followed by a dribble of urine. Then the terrorist lost control of his bowels, and Pak wrinkled his nose in disgust. These filthy oegugin had no self-discipline at all.

“I believe you,” he said, and he squeezed the trigger. Pak’s gun jerked with a loud but muffled thud, as a neat red hole appeared just above O’Malley’s left eye, and a splatter of blood and brains exploded across the wall behind his head.

Behind him, the two women kneeling in front of Chun screamed again. Weiss gave Pak a leering grin. “So what are we going to do about these two lovelies, eh?”

Pak ignored him. “Kot hasipsiyo, ” he told Chun. “Do it now.”

Chun shot the brown-haired one, the sound-suppressed shot hitting her in the face, knocking her sprawling back against the wall with a scarlet splash of blood. With a flash of scissoring bare legs, the yellow-haired woman leaped up from the floor and bowled Chun aside, racing for the bedroom door.

“Stop her! ” Pak screamed. Spinning, he raised his pistol and fired twice, both shots missing the woman and punching neat side-by-side holes through the open wooden door. Beside him Weiss raised the Browning and snapped off another shot, this one explosively loud in the confines of the room. Chun was already racing after the fleeing prisoner. “Ai ch’am!” Damn it! Everything was coming apart, the situation completely out of control. “Don’t let her get away!”

Patty Summers sprinted for her life. Out the door as gunfire crashed behind her, down the stairs and to the right… down the stairs again. As she rounded the bottom of the flight, she heard again that horrible, chirping thud of a silenced gunshot, and the banister a few inches to her right shattered in whirling chips of varnished wood.

If she remembered the layout of this place right, she was still on the first floor up… but now she could hear the pounding of feet coming up the stairs from below, and she knew they were going to catch her before she could get anywhere near the front door.

Directly in front of her was a door, a big set of French double doors, in fact, with tall, curtained windows.

“You!” a voice bellowed behind her. “Stop right there!”

She leaped forward, propelled by all the terror that had driven her from that bloody room. Bringing her arm up to protect her face, she hit the flimsy door full-on, smashing through the windows in an explosion of shattering glass and splintering wood.

Through the disintegrating door, she slammed into the iron railing of the balcony beyond and very nearly went over. She caught herself, though, just as a gunshot rang out from inside the house. The street twelve feet below was quiet, midnight dark save for the pools of illumination beneath the street lamps and the distant movement of traffic headlights on the main highway. The early April night air was bitterly cold on her bare skin, and for the briefest of moments, she hesitated.

Then she glimpsed movement on the pavement up the street, a shadow beneath a street lamp with an oddly shaped head. Was it?… yes! A bobby! Never, in her line of work, had Patricia Summers been so happy to see a policeman.

“Help me!” she shrieked. “Please!…”

Glass crunched underfoot behind her. Someone was coming through the shattered door to the balcony. Then another gunshot exploded close behind her, and she felt something like a red-hot wire sear through her flesh high on her right side. Without waiting for another shot, without even looking, she vaulted the railing. There was a dizzying rush of air past her body as she fell… and then she slammed into grass and soft earth with a thud that drove the breath from her lungs. She’d fallen about twelve feet, she guessed, and with a clumsy landing at the end of it, but at least she’d missed the wrought-iron fence topped by sharp spikes that lined the plot of earth where she’d landed. Quickly she scrambled to her feet, intending to run toward the policeman, only to have her ankle turn beneath her weight and pitch her to the ground once more.

“There she is!”

Rolling onto her back, she looked up at the balcony. The Oriental woman was there, looking as cold and as hard as ice. Beside her was a man with some kind of automatic weapon — she didn’t know what kind, only that it looked dangerous. He started to aim at her, but the Oriental woman held up a hand. Had they seen the bobby up the street?

The woman was aiming her silenced pistol.

Patricia screamed as loud and as hard as she could and rolled away from the fence, banging up hard against the building’s wall. She thought she heard the thump of the pistol, but she couldn’t be sure; this close to the building, though, she didn’t think the people inside could see her, and if they couldn’t see her, they couldn’t shoot her.

Her ankle burned like fire; she must have twisted it in her fall. Her side was burning where a bullet had scratched her, and she was bleeding from a dozen minor cuts she must have picked up coming through the window. Rising again, still screaming as loud as she could to attract attention, any attention, she began hobbling toward the street, leaning heavily against the wall. There was a gate in the iron fence ahead, a gate with a latch just opposite the building’s front door, but to reach it, she would have to leave the relative shelter of the wall and run for the street.

At twenty-eight, Patricia Summers was a survivor. Her dad had walked out on a family of six kids when she was just five, her mother thrown out of work during the big recession in the seventies; Mum had struggled along on the dole for a while but eventually lost herself in a bottle. With no education beyond the fifth grade, Patricia had supported herself and the other kids doing what work she could find. The promise of a career as a model — as if you had a chance at modeling without going to school! — had turned out to be the come-on for a London “escort service.” It wasn’t long after that before she’d been exchanging sex for money.

She didn’t like it, but life was a bitch whether you liked it or not… and no matter what happened, she was not going to follow Mum into that bottle. Patricia knew how to do what had to be done, and she knew how to make quick decisions without second thoughts. The name of the game was survival.

Steeling herself, she took a deep breath, then lunged for the gate. The latch was stiff and her hand slippery with her own blood. She fumbled it twice… damn! Damn! Come on!…

With a grinding crack the gate swung open and Patricia dashed through. She could hear the lock on the front door of the house being turned. If only her ankle…

Shit! She was down again, on her hands and knees, but she kept crawling. Could they see her from the balcony? Were they shooting at her? She didn’t stop to look, but kept crawling.

“’Ere now, miss!” an authoritarian voice said from the darkness just ahead. “What’s the idea?”

It was the bobby, jogging toward her across the pavement.

Damn it, did all bobbies carry guns nowadays? She couldn’t remember. Once, back in gentler, more innocent days, the British police has never been armed, but in recent years that had changed, especially in the rougher parts of England’s cities.

But was this one armed? She desperately prayed that he was.

“Watch out!” she screamed. “They’ve got guns! They’re trying—”

She was interrupted by a long, staccato burst of fire off the balcony from which she’d just fallen. Ricochets whined off the street a few feet away, and a fleck of broken stone stung her cheek. With a smooth, powerful movement, the police officer swept her up in his arms, spun about, and dashed down the pavement. Automatic gunfire followed them, stabbing at them through the dark… then abruptly ceased.

Moments later, in a sheltered doorway down the street, the bobby hung his overcoat over her shoulders and proceeded to question her. She told him everything, not even lying when he asked her what she and Sharon had been doing in the pub when O’Malley had picked them up, and minutes after that she could hear the wailing of approaching sirens.

Poor Sharon…

“Well, miss,” the bobby said. She was shivering violently now, despite the heavy coat, and he guided her to the stoop within the doorway and made her sit down. “I guess that’s one trick you’ll always remember, eh?”

“Not if I can help it,” she said, and then she started crying. God, how she wanted to forget the sight of Sharon’s ruined face.

Someone was shaking Roselli by the shoulder. When he opened his eyes, a flashlight was glaring in his eyes. “What the fuck?”

“Sorry, mate,” a Britisher’s voice said from the blackness behind the light. “Rise and shine. We got a hot flash in a few minutes ago. Briefing in thirty, and you Yanks are invited.”

Roselli groped in the darkness for his watch on the tiny nightstand next to his rack and peeled back the Velcro cover. When he squinted at them hard, the luminous digits told him what he already knew… that it was zero-dark-thirty in military parlance and entirely too early for civilized people to be up and about.

SEALs, however, never thought of themselves as civilized, and neither, evidently, did their SAS hosts. As he swung his legs over the side of the rack and set them on the cold linoleum deck, his tormenter straightened to shake Magic Brown, occupying the upper rack above Roselli’s head.

“What’s up, Razor?” Jaybird asked from across the aisle that divided the barracks into two long lines of double-decker bunks. He was already half dressed, pulling his fatigues from the seabag hanging at the head of his rack.

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Roselli replied, mimicking the Brits. “I suppose that’s why God invented briefings.”

“If this is another exercise,” “Professor” Higgins said from his bunk, “I’m going to vote that we declare war on England without delay.”

The briefing room was tucked away in one corner of the Dorset HQ complex, not far from the barracks, a wood-floored room half filled with folding metal chairs. Roselli, Higgins, Brown, and Sterling had arrived to find several SAS officers and noncoms already present, including Major Roger Dowling-Smythe and Sergeant Major Dunn, both of whom had supervised the CQB exercise, now impeccable in neatly pressed and creased fatigues. SAS Colonel Howard Wentworth was there as well, as was a rather plain man in civilian clothes, who had the look that Roselli had come to associate with intelligence people worldwide.

On a tripod at Wentworth’s back was a corkboard to which several photographs had been attached. Roselli recognized them as photos he’d seen a few days ago… security shots from Heathrow Airport of a couple of possible North Korean agents. The L-T had flown over to Wiesbaden to talk to the Germans about those two.

“Gentlemen,” Wentworth said, standing, a few moments after the Americans had found places for themselves and sat down. “This morning, about three hours ago, the Middlebrough police picked up a girl fleeing from a row house on the west end of the city. Shots were fired from the building.

“Normally, this would be a matter for the local police to handle, but it happens that the young woman in question was able to identify both O’Malley, late of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and these two Koreans, Major Pak and Captain Chun… though according to their passports, they seem to be calling themselves Mr. and Mrs. Kim these days.

“This is something of a major break for our side. You see, it seems that Pak, his girlfriend, and O’Malley, who was his primary contact in this country, all gave our security people the slip two days ago.” He glanced at the intelligence man, who looked away, clearly discomfited. “We still don’t know what happened, but I gather that some highly placed ministers were quietly contemplating hara-kiri with the knowledge that two potentially dangerous enemy agents were wandering loose around the countryside, presumably in the company of some equally dangerous people from across the Irish Sea.”

A murmur of low-voiced conversation rose in the room as the SAS troopers passed comments back and forth. Roselli heard one young man mutter darkly about a “bloody cock-up.”

“In any case, we have them now. We suspect that this flat in Middlebrough is a safe house run by the Provos. From the woman’s description, there were at least five people living there, probably more. It’s a big house, four stories, and it could hold quite a mob. Most of the people she saw there were armed, and of course the bobby was able to confirm the presence of automatic weapons, though he wasn’t able to tell what kind.

“Also, according to the woman, O’Malley is now dead. Apparently, well, it was O’Malley who brought the young lady in question and a girlfriend of hers home, and it seems that was a breach of the house rules. O’Malley was shot by Pak. Pak’s girlfriend shot our informant’s friend, but the informant was able to make a break for it and escape out onto the street, where she, ah, attracted the notice of the police.

“Naturally, the police were called in. The officer who picked up the girl reported being taken under fire, and there were reports of gunfire called in from other houses in the neighborhood. The police have cordoned off the area and are trying to open up communications with the people inside. They still don’t have a good idea about how many people we have inside, or how well armed they might be.

“As of zero four hundred hours this morning, the Minister of Defense has put this unit on full alert, and I am calling a Class One stand-to. We have the helos loading now at the field. We will deploy A Troop, full takedown kit and harness, to a staging area two miles from the scene. Any questions?”

Roselli raised his hand. “Sir. Any chance us SEALs could tag along?”

Wentworth grinned at him. “Absolutely. I can’t promise you a combat slot, but at least this will give you Yanks a chance to see how the SAS does things in the real world. Any other questions? Okay, let’s move out!”