Nucflash (12 page)

Across the street, the British Army helicopters, which had been holding their positions above the roofs of the line of Middlebrough brownstones throughout the assault, were beginning to move off. Murdock could see black-clad soldiers filing across the roof and toward one of the machines, which dipped and swayed each time another heavily laden man clambered aboard.

Other SAS men were leaving by a more traditional route, exiting the flat's front door and walking across the street. Policemen and government agents were crowding in past them as they left, hurrying to begin their investigations, and to get the prisoners who were still under guard inside.

As they reached the police line and ducked beneath the barricades erected along the street, three of the SAS troopers veered away from the rest and approached Murdock. Roselli, Higgins, and Sterling; Murdock recognized them even before they'd revealed their faces.

“Well, gentlemen,” Murdock said as they began divesting themselves of face masks and goggles and handing their unexpended ordnance over to a pair of SAS arms experts. “Having fun?”

“Hey, L-T!” Roselli said, his eyes lighting up. “Too bad you missed all the fun!”

“When'd you get in, Skipper?” Sterling asked.

“Just a few minutes ago,” Murdock told them. “We heloed in from Lakenheath. Came in over the harbor just in time to see all the fireworks, and for a minute I thought one of you clowns had touched off some stores. I didn't find out it was a ruse until I was on the ground.”

“Worked pretty neat, huh?” Higgins said, grinning. His face was streaked with soot . . . or possibly it was blacking off the rubber mask and goggles he'd been wearing. “Just like clockwork.”

“Where's Magic?”

“Up that way, someplace,” Sterling said. “He was with the sniper team. Probably be along shortly.”

“So what was the take?”

“Eight prisoners, last I heard,” Roselli told him. “Couple of them are wounded, though, and might not make it. One of them is what's-her-name. Kim. Or Chun.”

“Chun Hyon Hee,” Murdock said, nodding. “What about the guy?”

“Pak? No sign of him. Of course, the Brits are still going through the building. You should see some of the high-tech gimmicks they're using, looking for secret hidey-holes and such.”

“Yeah, but they made us memorize the faces of a bunch of terrs before we went in,” Sterling said. “They've got bodies laid out in there like keys on piano, and they're checking all of'em real, real close. I didn't see any other Orientals in the lot. Just the Chun woman.”

“That's not so good,” Murdock said. “The people in Germany are pretty sure he's here on some kind of an op. A big one.”

“Shit, L-T. No idea what?”

“Not a clue. Maybe Ms. Chun can help us on that.”

Roselli laughed. “That's one mean-looking woman, Skipper. I don't think she's going to tell us a damned thing.”

“Maybe. We'll let the MI5 boys worry about that. Now . . . maybe you'd like to tell me what the hell you three were doing getting yourselves involved in a firefight. I don't recall that being on the list of our assignments over here.”

“Aw, L-T,” Roselli said. He nodded toward Wentworth, who was deep in conversation with a couple of suits nearby. “We've been over all that with the colonel there. We were just observing SAS tactics and deployments in the field.”

“Observing, huh? How many tangos did you observe to death in there, Razor?”

“Only one, Skipper.” He raised his thumb and forefinger, holding them half an inch apart. “And he was just a little one.”

“Maybe I should've told you guys that tangos were out of season over here, at least for SEALs.”

“Shit, L-T,” Higgins said with a grin. “You know as well as we do that tangos are vermin. Open season, anywhere, anytime, no limit.”

Murdock thought about his own take in Germany and decided not to press the point.

“Besides,” Sterling said. “This was part of our good neighbor policy. Hands across the sea, and all that.”

“And when hands don't do the job,” Roselli added, slapping the H&K MP5 still strapped against his combat vest, “a few rounds of nine mike-mike work wonders. . . .”

 

It was very nearly dark when Pak pulled up to the airfield's gate and gave the password to the young PRF sentry in camouflage fatigues and lugging a British Army-issue rifle who challenged him. The sentry, one of the Provos, couldn't have been more than eighteen years old, and he certainly didn't look alert enough, or trained enough, to provide much of an obstacle should the SAS decide to hit this place as well. Pak said nothing, however, and merely nodded as the kid gave him a passable imitation of a military salute.

That was another thing, Pak reflected as he drove through the open gate. This make-believe that had infused the PRF fighters, this notion that they were a
real
army with uniforms and salutes and roll calls, might be good for morale, but it also tended to breed overconfidence. Pak had gone along with the idea hoping that the military forms and protocols might bring with them some military discipline. While the PRF army, so called, was somewhat better organized than a peasant mob, it still lacked the steel and the precision of a decent fighting force.

No matter. Children such as the play-soldier at the gate were expendable.

As expendable as the people he'd left behind in Middlebrough.

He felt as bleak as the moor country he'd been driving through for the past several hours. He'd left Hyon Hee, knowing that she would have to face an assault by the enemy's military, knowing that she would sacrifice herself for the cause. Love was not an emotion discussed or encouraged among members of the North Korean Special Forces. The first several times he and Hyon Hee had enjoyed sex together had been almost comical, with a couple of army officers present in the room to make certain that the properly detached and clinical nature of the exercise was maintained.

The times after that had been better . . . enough better that Pak knew he'd grown genuinely fond of her.

He wished he could have convinced her to come along with him.

Pak Chong Yong had been on the run all day, uncertain whether or not he'd been seen or followed. Slipping out of the back of the Waterfront Rise apartment minutes after gunfire had erupted at the front, he'd made his way to the ancient but well-serviced speedboat moored at a jetty just outside the BGA Consortium's port facility fence. From there, it was a two-hour run at a gentle and unsuspicious cruising pace to the landing at Redcar, where a car had been left for just such emergencies as this one. Four hours more, following a twisting and circuitous route in case he was being followed, had brought him to Cranston Moor, where the PRF maintained its field combat training center.

Once, Cranston Moor had been a military base, an airfield for the
other
RAF, the one that had won the Battle of Britain against the Nazi blitz. During the '50s it had been converted to a helicopter base for NATO antisubmarine missions over the North Sea, and eventually had been sold to a developer, who'd wanted to open a private flying club.

Several owners later, Cranston Moor had been abandoned, a decaying symbol of the economic recession that continued to dog England. Pak didn't know who the current owner was, or why he'd made the facilities available to the People's Revolution, and he didn't really care. The ex-air base with its single runway and its shabby, crumbling hangars and storage buildings was perfect for the PRF's needs. The nearest village was Robin Hood's Bay, ten miles off, and the nearest neighbors on this wild and lonely stretch of North Country moor were perhaps half that distance away. That meant no one would complain about the frequent target practice that went on in one of the empty hangars, as recruits learned how to handle automatic weapons. There was even a grenade and explosives range on the moor out back.

The place was quiet today; Heinrich Adler had ordered all activities that might attract unwanted attention from the authorities suspended once the operation was under way. Even the troops, normally training outdoors on the obstacle course or standing to parade formation on the runway tarmac outside the control tower, had been dispersed.

Pak had agreed that the order was an excellent idea.

Pulling up to a parking area alongside one of the hangars, Pak stopped the car and got out. The base looked,
felt
deserted, despite the muffled roar of some machinery in use somewhere close by. The empty feel to the place was as it should be, of course. Only a few PRF troops stayed here all the time, maintaining security and keeping casual visitors, hikers and such, away. Adler had a healthy fear of American spy satellites, and while the paramilitary activities at Cranston Moor were officially explained as maneuvers and outings by one of Britain's numerous survivalist clubs, the PRF's leadership didn't want to attract undue attention to what, after all, was
supposed
to be an abandoned airfield.

“Pak!” a voice said behind him as he walked past the hangar's maintenance shack door. “You made it! Thank God.”

“I made it,” Pak replied, while thinking that
God
had nothing to do with it. A thoroughgoing and completely pragmatic atheist, as would be expected of someone raised since the age of six in one of Pyongyang's strictest military school-academies, he was frequently amused by Westerners' pretended reliance on divine intervention.

Heinrich Frank Adler walked out of the maintenance shack door, glancing back and forth as if to verify that Pak was alone. He was a tall, rugged, Nordic man with sandy hair and an engaging smile. Once he'd been a bronze medal winner on the East German Army's Olympic biathlon team, and it was rumored that he'd also been a high-ranking member of that country's notorious Stasi, the secret police. In 1989, he'd been forced to go underground—even further underground, that is, than he'd been already—to escape the purges that had followed the collapse of the East German government.

Adler had begun assembling the organization now known as the People's Revolutionary Front even before the formal unification of the two Germanies. He still styled himself “Colonel,” after the rank he claimed he'd held in the army. Pak knew from intelligence sources in Pyongyang that Adler had never actually been more than an
unterfeldwebel,
a sergeant.

“Come on inside.”

The door opened into a small area filled with ancient tools, engine parts, and rubbish. Beyond was the aircraft hangar proper, an enormous, open space that currently housed only a single craft, an aging Westland Lynx Model 81 helicopter. Acquired through the services of the same faceless man or men who owned Cranston Moor, the helo was government surplus and showed the signs of some years of rugged service with the Royal Navy.

Three men were at work on the machine now, wearing masks and goggles as they applied spray painters to the aircraft's body, methodically changing the color scheme from the blue-gray of the Royal Navy to a deep, glossy blue-black.

As always, Pak felt a rippling thrill when he saw the helicopter, the centerpiece to this entire operation.

Very soon now
, he thought,
and my Hyon Hee will be avenged.

The rumble of the generators and spray painter air compressors was deafeningly loud within the enclosed space of the hangar, and as the two of them walked across the hangar floor toward a small office in the back, Adler had to pitch his voice louder to make himself heard.

“I was afraid you'd all been taken,” he told Pak. “Have you been listening to the news these past few hours?”

“No. The car had no radio. In any case, I would have expected a news blackout as soon as any assault was begun. Have you heard anything?”

Adler nodded. “Came over the television on the BBC evening news an hour ago. The government claims the Army assaulted a flat in Middlebrough, but the details are still sketchy. Was it the SAS?”

Pak shrugged. “I wasn't there to see. But I would be surprised if it was not. Did they identify who they were attacking?”

“Just ‘presumed IRA terrorists,' though the announcer also mentioned the Red Army Faction once. Typical news botchup.”

“They won't know yet. About the People's Revolution.”

“If by ‘they' you mean the government, I doubt that they would tell the press anything anyway. The BBC was taking a lot of wild guesses on this one, none of them particularly accurate.”

“It would be helpful to know just how much the government does know,” Pak said thoughtfully.

“Know your enemy,” Adler said. “Say, where's your girlfriend? Did she get out of Waterfront Rise with you?”

“She . . . we thought it best that she stay behind, to ensure that incriminating documents were destroyed. Some of the papers you people insisted on keeping include sensitive information that could have led the authorities here.”

Adler nodded, admiring the calm, the analytical detachment in Pak's voice. The man was cold as ice. “I know. Maybe that was a mistake, keeping those records . . . but what we're trying to do here, it's so big. We needed to keep track of the details, or else something small would have tripped us up.”

Past the helicopter and the painting crew, the noise wasn't so bad. Adler opened the door to the office and ushered Pak through.

Inside was a desk piled with papers that would, if inspected, demonstrate that Cranston Moor was indeed a small private airfield that tended to struggle along in the red, with far more bills than income. A bulletin board on the wall by the door included cards advertising flying and skydiving clubs. On the adjacent wall was a detailed topological map of the area, a calendar hanging beneath a photograph of a World War II Spitfire in flight, and several pinups of provocatively posed naked women torn from various pornographic magazines.