Nucflash

7

“Okay, right,” Wentworth said. “This is the way we’ll do it. Hoskins… you’ll have the first crack at them. Take your stick in on the helos. We’ve spotted two hostiles on the roof… about here. We’ll hit them with snipers from across the road as you approach. Your boys should be able to abseil to the roof without opposition.”

“Right.”

“Jenkins.”

“Sir.”

“Your troop will take up position ahead of H-hour here, in the flat adjacent to the target. We’ve already quietly evacuated this whole section of the street, of course, and boys from S-section have been in there all morning, very, very quietly taking bricks out of the wall.”

“They have a boroscope in place yet?”

“Not yet. There’s always a chance your prey is going to notice that little black straw poking through his wall. Our lads have it down to the plaster, though, and you’ll be able to take a quick look around before you go in.”

“Right, sir.”

“Dunn.”

“Sir.”

“Your boys will knock at the front door, then take the ground floor. We expect the heaviest concentration of enemy firepower to be there.” Pulling several of the architectural blueprints to the top of the stack, he unrolled one to show the ground-floor plans. “You’ll want to have a close look at these before jump-off,” Wentworth continued. “Just inside the front door, here, you’ll be facing a stairway up and down, with a landing overlooking the front lobby. Make enough noise there, and it might distract them, keep them from investigating upstairs.”

“You can count on us, Colonel.”

“Potter, you’ve got the fourth stick. You’ll be in reserve across the street. I’ll either throw you in where you’re needed, or use you for the mop-up afterward. I’ll also expect you to manage the sniper team.”

“Yes, sir.” Sergeant Major Christopher Potter sounded a bit disappointed at being left out of the initial assault.

“What about us, Colonel?” Roselli said.

“What about you? If you’re thinking of coming along, forget it. Your bosses would flame my arse if anything happened to you boys.”

“Shit, Colonel,” Brown said. “We lose SEALs in training accidents all the time. This don’t look no different to me.”

“Yeah,” Jaybird said, echoing the sentiment. “It’s a piece of cake.”

“Look, Colonel,” Roselli said. “Tell you what. Brown here is one of the best snipers in the whole SEAL program. We call him ‘Magic.’ Give him a Barrett .50 or an M21 and he can reach out and touch someone from a thousand meters. You could put him with your snipers, as an extra set of eyes, couldn’t you?”

“Well, I suppose… ”

“Of course you could! And as for the rest of us, I suggest you let us tag along with Sergeant Major Dunn. I agree that we might get in the way with the other groups. We haven’t trained with you as a unit, and we might turn left when you’re expecting us to turn right. That sort of thing is especially tricky working out of choppers or crowding through a narrow opening, like the one you’re going to put in the wall.

“But that team going in the front door. You want them making noise, and you need some extra muscle, if they’re going in against the enemy’s strong point, right?”

“Well…”

“And look here.” He dragged his finger across the blueprint of the flat’s ground floor. “You don’t have anyone on these front windows at street level. Sure, your snipers could cover those windows, but you have a hell of a lot of windows to watch all over the building… and when the attack goes down, they’ll be keeping their eye on the bad guys up on the roof anyway. Me and the Professor and Jaybird could cover those windows, maybe even break through and take the main defenses from the flank. Furthermore—”

“Enough.”

“But—”

“Enough, Roselli! Let me think a moment.”

Roselli knew when to shut up. Wentworth considered his arguments for several long seconds, studying the ground-floor blueprints.

“Very well,” he said at last. “I was worried about being stretched as thin as we were on this op, and you make some good points. Your sniper will report to Color Sergeant Barnes here. I think he’ll be able to provide you with an extra L96 out of stores. Is that satisfactory, Mr. Brown?”

Magic’s teeth flashed white against his dark face. “Very. Sir.”

“The rest of you can go with Sergeant Major Dunn. However, I want it perfectly clear that he is in command of this assault. If he tells you to stay back or get down or get the hell out, I expect you to obey. Clear?”

“Clear,” Roselli said, and Higgins and Sterling echoed him.

“Mr. Billingsly, break out some weapons for our SEAL friends. H&Ks okay by you gentlemen?”

“Weapon of choice,” Higgins said.

“They’ll be just fine,” Roselli added.

“Very well,” Wentworth said. “Remember, now, we’re going to play this one by the book. Advantage goes to the defender, and we have to assume the opposition will be well dug in and ready for us. Let’s go over the layout of the place now… ”

Chun upended a cardboard box on the now-empty desk, spilling out a stack of manila folders. Each held neatly stapled stacks of closely typewritten papers, photographs, and newspaper clippings, a scrapbook record of terrorist coups stretching from Spain to Sweden, from Northern Ireland to the Gaza Strip. “Is this the last of them?” she asked Katarina Holst.

“I think so. The basement is empty now, except for the extra vests and military gear, and there’s not much we can do about that.”

“These things are so heavy.” Chun patted the bulletproof vest she was wearing, wishing that she could take it off, knowing that if she did so it would be a bad example for the men. It seemed to be dragging her slight frame into the floor. “But you’re sure everyone has been issued one?”

Holst took a double handful of folders off the spilled pile on the desk and dumped them into the flames. Steiner poked at them with a meter-long length of steel pipe. “Everyone,” she said. “Not that it will help us that much when the time comes.”

Chun heard something close to despair in the German woman’s voice. She wanted to tell her to be strong, that death should be welcomed if it brought the opportunity to kill the fascist enemies of the People’s Revolution, but once again, it wasn’t wise to show softness to the men.

She longed for the siege to be over…

A thunderous boom sounded outside, loud enough to make the walls of the flat tremble and the windows to rattle in their frames.

“What the hell was that?” Steiner cried. Turning from the burn barrel, he rushed toward the front windows.

“Karl!” Holst screamed. “Nein, get down! Get away from the window!”

“It’s okay,” one of the men already at the window called back. “Something just went up like fireworks in the dockyard across the street!”

Chun stayed well back from the window, but she moved to one side so that she could see what the man was pointing at. A jet-black pillar of smoke was rising in an angry pall above the waterfront, uncoiling like a vast snake as it was caught by the gentle offshore breeze.

“My God,” Holst said, staring.

“What do you think” Steiner asked. “Helicopter crash?”

“Ammo explosion, more likely.” Hoist laughed. “The bastards must have ignored their own no-smoking signs!”

“Don’t be too certain of that,” Chun warned. In the distance, a fire siren went off. Beyond the waterfront, well over the water, a military-looking helicopter was edging closer to the shore, apparently checking out the explosion. “It could also be a diversion.”

Part of her specific training for this mission had been a careful study of the tactics and methods of the units who might be among the opposition. In 1977, four PFLP terrorists — two men and two women — had hijacked a Lufthansa with seventynine passengers after their takeoff from Majorca and flown them to the airport at Mogadishu, Somalia. Twenty-eight German GSG9 commandos, with two British SAS along as advisors, had stormed the aircraft with stun grenades, killing three hijackers and wounding and capturing the fourth. The attack had been launched in the middle of the night after an explosion and fire had been set off on the runway some hundreds of meters off the nose of the aircraft. Most of the hijackers had been clumped together in the plane’s cockpit watching the fire when the commandos had blasted their way on board.

It was good to know the enemy and his methods.

“Everybody watch your sectors,” Steiner snapped. Reaching into his hip pocket, he pulled out a small two-way radio and extended the antenna. “Ricky! O’Brien! What is your situation?”

“Ay, an’ it looks to be a whopping big explosion over ’cross the road,” a voice with a rich Irish brogue replied, crackling over the radio. “Lots o’ people runnin’ around there, as bright as the Belfast marketplace after a nice an’ juicy bombing! There’s an eggbeater up, Brit military job, but I think it’s just lookin’ over the situation, y’know?”

Chun glanced toward the ceiling. The two men Steiner had posted up on the roof with assault rifles that morning were supposed to be two of his best, one German RAF and one ex-Provo. But she had been up there once and knew just how little cover the rooftop provided. Those men would be the first to die if the enemy tried an assault, but they were invaluable where they were as early warning against anything the opposition might try.

“Keep your eyes open, O’Brien,” Steiner told him. “It could be a diversion. I want to know the second you see a black uniform, a helicopter approaching the flat, anything.”

“You got it, Karl. But it looks to us like they’ve got all they can handle across the way tryin’ to put that fire out!”

Magic Brown peered through the bulky sniperscope of the L96 PM rifle, which rested on its bipod on the concrete ledge of the Port Authority building’s roof area and snugged up comfortably against his shoulder and cheek. From six hundred meters away, the two targets stood out as clear and as sharp as they might have at thirty feet. Both appeared to be wearing combat vests, probably with heavy Kevlar panels slipped into the inside pockets. Both were carrying American-made M-16 assault rifles with extended banana-clip magazines. Through the scope, Brown could see them looking intently off to the right, watching the carefully orchestrated consternation in the dockyard northeast of the sniper’s position. The target on the right was standing up, carelessly leaning with his shoulder against a brick chimney and holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes; the other was lying flat on his stomach, holding a two-way radio and peering across the ridge of the peak of the roof.

“Chicks, this is Nest,” a voice said in Brown’s radio headset.

“Nest,” the observer lying to Brown’s left replied. He was the coordinator for the entire sniper team, which consisted of Brown and five British SAS shooters. “Go.”

“Target traffic ended,” the anonymous voice said. “Stand by.”

The terrorist with the radio had been speaking into it, but according to the British army people monitoring the terrs’ radio traffic, his report had just been concluded.

“Target,” the voice said.

“Chick One, on the right,” another voice said.

“Chick Two, on the right.”

“Chick Three, on the right.”

“And Four, I’ve got the left.”

“Chick Five, left.”

“Chick Six,” Brown said, carefully drawing down on the terrorist with the radio, on the left. From this angle, with the target lying behind the pitch of the apartment building’s roof, he could see the man’s head, shoulders, and part of his back. It would have to be a head shot — rarely the preferred shot for a good sniper. A good hit meant an instant kill… but getting that hit was far more difficult than a shot against center-ofmass. “On the left.”

“Chicks, you are clear for maximum force on my mark,” the controller’s emotionless voice said. Fire sirens wailed in the distance, rapidly growing closer. “And four, and three, and two, and one, and fire!”

Six Accuracy International PM sniper rifles, all equipped with long, sound-suppressor extensions on their muzzles, hiss-thumped in near-perfect unison. The standing man lurched suddenly, two puffs of smoke shredding the front of a vest bulletproof against small-arms ammo, but not against highpower explosive rounds. A third explosion, silent at this range, gouged a fist-sized crater out of the bricks just beyond his face. That was why head shots were risky… and why sniper kills were backed up by multiple shooters. The body jerked back against the chimney, bounced off, then tumbled forward in a lifeless sprawl across the peak of the roof.

At the same instant, three explosive rounds slammed into the terrorist lying to the left. One was low, nicking the peak of the roof in a cloud of splintering shingle and ridge beam; the other two detonated inside the man’s skull, erupting in a bright red spray as his head exploded. The body jerked once, then slumped where it lay, motionless.

“Nest, Chicks,” the SAS observer reported. “Two terrs down on the roof. Roof clear.”

“Roger that. Shift to target area two.”

Brown had already worked the bolt on his rifle, chambering another round from the box magazine, then dragged his sight picture away from the two bodies on the roof to the line of open windows on the building’s upper floor. He could only see one tango there, lurking in the shadows behind the corner of the nearest window, but he didn’t have a very good angle on the opening. It did look like the fire inside was out, for the haze of smoke that had been emerging from the upstairs room all morning was thinning out.

He wondered if that meant that all of the terrorist documents the SAS hoped to seize had been destroyed already, and the assault was to be for nothing.

Well… nothing but the offing or the capture of some major bad dudes. In Magic Brown’s opinion, that was reason enough to go in.

“Chicks, Nest. What do you have?”

“One target, Area Two,” the observer reported.

“Any reaction?”

“Negative reaction at this time.”

“Hold one, Chicks.”

The fire sirens were growing in volume second by second. Somewhere behind the Port Authority building, a bright red fire truck wheeled up to the blaze that was still pouring clouds of dense, black, oily smoke into the sky above the Middlebrough waterfront. Brown saw some movement at a curtain behind one of the windows, too sharp to be the wind.

“Nest, Chicks,” the voice of the observer reported in Brown’s headset. “Two targets, Area Two. Scratch that… three targets.”

“Steady, Chicks,” the command center warned. “Wait for the birds… ”

Brown could hear them now, the far-off thumpeta-thumpeta of helicopter rotors, just barely audible above the much louder screech of the fire sirens. Almost as if to add emphasis, another explosion went off with a dull whoomp in the open area north of the Port Authority. The wind was changing now, shifting over out of the north, and bringing with it an acrid bite of the oily smoke that brought tears to Brown’s eyes. The curtains moved again…

“Chicks, Nest” sounded over Brown’s headset. “You are now clear for Target Two.” The thumping sound of the helicopter rotors was growing louder as the fire sirens dwindled, the one emerging almost seamlessly from the other. The terrorists would hear the helicopters’ approach any second now, but the fire control officer had to delay the snipers’ fire until the last possible instant. “And five, and four…”

Chun turned away from the window suddenly, stepping back into the room. She was certain now that she could hear something else, a dull and familiar thumping like a drumbeat behind the sirens.

Steiner was using a meter-long length of pipe to stir the fire in the barrel in the center of the room.

“I suggest you stay in radio contact with—”

There was a loud, rippling plop, and one of the Irishmen standing by the southernmost window spun back into the room, a pair of smoking holes gaping in his black bulletproof vest, and the right side of his head a violent scarlet smear. Next to him, another Irishman fell back as glass and wood splintered above his head, the raised window sash shattering in multiple explosions, another blast punching through his left shoulder. Curtains and windowsills all down the line of windows popped and fluttered as though blasted by a hot and deadly wind. Chun felt something sting her, high on her left arm.

“It’s the attack!” she yelled… but needlessly, for in the moment of gunfire, the far-off thump had swelled to an avalanche of sound, drowning out the sirens, drowning out the exploding rounds smashing through the windows, drowning out the whole world as helicopters thundered in low across the rooftops of Middlebrough from the east, from inland, opposite the direction of the fires and explosions.

So… that blast and all of the smoke had been a diversion after all.

A third gunman yelled something mindless and swung into an open window, his G3 assault rifle to his shoulder. Before he could trigger the weapon, however, his head and chest exploded in bloody fragments, the rifle’s plastic stock shattered against his shoulder, and his scream of rage turned to sheer agony, abruptly cut short as he tumbled in a bloody heap onto the bare wooden floor.

Steiner leaped clear of the barrel, grabbing the Uzi submachine gun he’d left on the desk. Katarina Holst, standing at the back of the room with another RAF gunman, shrugged her H&K subgun’s sling off her shoulder and dragged back the charging lever with a loud snick. The thump and scuff of boots on the roof sounded through the ongoing thunder of the helicopters above the building.

The door to the room burst open and another Provo burst in, his eyes wild. “Christ! We got a team on the roof an’ another comin’ in at the front door!”

Then a distant explosion sounded from somewhere downstairs, and all of the building’s lights went out.