The cops led the way. They walked past the front of the line of vehicles and turned right up a side street. We followed in silence. Finally they stopped and pointed out the car. It was well away from the nearest streetlamp but we could just make out the dent and the mud-covered number plate. We returned, walking out of step, although the composition soles of our boots made no real sound on the pavement. As we passed the streetlamp I got a better look at the houses. Unlike the chaotic jumble of low dwellings we’d passed on the way, these had two floors and all seemed to be built to the same pattern. The area had probably been developed quite recently. We reached the end of the street. I congratulated the cops on finding the car in such a remote place, and said it was very important. Then I told them they could leave it to us now, but they should come back with some of their colleagues and wait here quietly. There’d be some loud bangs when we went into action and we’d need them to keep the situation under control if it brought the neighbours out.
God knows how my Spanish accent sounded to them, but they nodded, got into their car and drove away.
I turned to Ferenczi. “Okay, you can send your team in. Maximum stealth.”
He nodded and went off to brief his men.
Cliff, Sam, and I waited while the recon team worked their way along the street with infra-red detectors and directional microphones. Ten minutes later they came back to report to the Major.
“Okay, boss, we found the house. It’s two up from where the car’s parked. No lights in the houses each side, steady breathing from those, probably families asleep. Target house has lights on upstairs, puts out quite a bit of infra-red and we heard some moaning. That’s it all right.”
Ferenczi said, “Observation point?”
“There’s a house th’other side of the street. From there we’ll get a good line of sight for laser listeners on the closed windows and acoustic dishes on the open ones.”
I intervened. “Okay, take that house over, but no noise. Show the people inside a lot of money and drive them somewhere fancy. They can all have a nice comfortable night in a hotel, courtesy of the Embassy. You have a Spanish-speaker with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Use him.”
“It’s a ‘her’.”
“Even better. What’s at the rear of the target house?”
“It’s built up against the hill, so out back there’s only the upper floor windows.”
“What about the roof?”
He nodded – he knew what I was driving at. “Pitch is shallow with a slight overhang. No chimney or anything to get a rope around but it’s close to that hill, so you could bridge the gap. You got a ladder or a pole?”
“Yeah, we’ve got one.”
“There y’go.”
“Thanks.”
Fereczi issued some instructions and his team moved off, carrying their equipment. Two minutes later I couldn’t see or hear anything of them.
They worked fast. Within half an hour the inhabitants of the house opposite had been moved and I was standing in the darkened front bedroom watching the guys in here at work. Both windows were open and they’d set up two tripods, a laser listening device mounted on one and an acoustic dish on the other. The operators sat on folding stools with headphones on.
Ferenczi came over. He spoke in a low voice – the street outside was quiet, and whispers carry.
“We have more accurate infra-red readings off those rooms opposite. The reading on the right is way higher.”
“Any idea how many in there?”
“Can’t say exactly, but between six and twelve. Looks like that’s where they’re keeping your girls. No voices from that window, just a few moans.”
“Okay, we’ll have to play it safe and assume there’s a man in with them. What about the other window?”
“We’re getting more from the acoustic monitoring than the lasers. We picked up two distinct male voices, both from that side.”
I crossed to one of the open windows and looked up at the roof overhang. It would be easy enough to swing in from there. I went back to Ferenczi.
“All right, we’ve got enough. Stand your men down and I’ll brief mine. We’re ready to roll.”
6
Countless training exercises had familiarized my guys with this type of operation down to the last detail. Now they were enjoying the prospect of doing it for real.
I went back to the bedroom of the observation house opposite the target to watch the action from there. We didn’t need the listening devices any more, so recon cleared the stuff away and I put two snipers in position at the open windows, one in this room and one in the next. It was a last resort, but if we had to use them those guys could hit a mosquito at this range.
The air was cool and even in a city this size it was very quiet at this hour. I was wearing night-vision goggles, switched from image intensification to infra-red, and I could see the bright green glows of my men as they emerged. The ones carrying grenade launchers moved silently into position on the hill behind and onto the street in front. Four more assembled on the roof, their machine pistols slung round their necks. The rest stationed themselves near the grenade launchers and on either side of the house. Everything was ready and the countdown began.
Ten… nine… eight…
Then I heard something I didn’t want to hear: the unmistakeable sound of a loosened tile sliding across the roof. It seemed to be going on for ever and I prayed it would lodge somewhere. It didn’t; it tipped over, dropped, and smashed. The noise was as loud as a gunshot. In my helmet set I heard the two captains calling an immediate suspension. I saw rapid movements from the men at the front and sides, and in a few seconds they’d melted out of sight. The guys on the roof were frozen in place. Minutes passed.
A new glow appeared at the front door; it had been opened a crack. I waited. The crack widened. A figure appeared, half-crouched, a pistol in his hand. The sniper on my left glanced my way, but I shook my head. The man at the door looked left and right and stepped further out. It would be hard for him to see anything; the moon had set more than an hour ago, and the distant streetlamp shed very little light up here. Then I heard a cat miaow. I was pretty sure it was one of my guys, but it was really convincing. The man straightened up and went back in. I realized I’d been holding my breath.
The men with the grenade launchers came cautiously back into the street and the others deployed as before. The ones on the roof got into position. The countdown restarted.
Three… two… one.
The first wave of grenade launchers fired and sent flashbangs in, front and back. The upper rooms flared brilliantly and there was an ear-splitting series of reports, followed by multiple echoes that almost buried the sound of glass showering onto the ground below. The launchers fired again and the lower windows blew out, followed by another volley of echoes. The second wave now fired good-nites, and they sailed through all the broken windows and detonated with dull thumps. The outlines on the roof disappeared together as the men swung into the rooms front and back. Moments later lights went on in the front rooms, and on the hill behind I could see the glow from the rooms at the rear. All rooms taken.
Then shots, the short snaps of a sidearm followed by two bursts of three from a machine pistol. Silence. A light came on behind the front door and it opened. Cliff Marshall was standing there. I went down the stairs two at a time.
I shouted, “Anyone hurt?”
Cliff was breathing heavily. His mask was hanging around his neck now – the anaesthetic gas would have dissipated very quickly. “One of the gang was in the kitchen,” he said. “At the back. Came out shooting. Caught Morris.”
“Is he—?”
I stopped short as Morris appeared, coming slowly down the stairs supported by Coutts. He gave me a wan smile.
“I’m okay, sir,” he said, and pointed to a tear in the body armour. “Knocked the breath out of me, is all.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. He’d have a lovely bruise tomorrow but t
he armour had done its job. “No other casualties?”
“Just the one who did it,” Morris replied, pointing to the side of the stairs where a gang member was folded in a tangle of limbs. I didn’t even bother to check him. The machine pistols were loaded with frangible ammunition to avoid any risk of shoot-through. A hit from a round like that is not recoverable, and this guy had taken several.
Coutts led Morris outside for some air and I went upstairs. On the landing I found a dazed gang member in the firm grip of two of my squad, their masks dangling, while a third frisked him thoroughly. They fastened his wrists behind his back and started to move him out. I was about to go into the bedroom, the one where we suspected the girls were being held, when two more of my men came out escorting another gang member, his hands already tied behind him.
“Any more in there?” I asked.
“Just the girls, Colonel.”
I went in and did a quick count: ten of them. Six were lying on the floor or trying to raise themselves. Four had made it to a sitting position. Two of the four were just blinking their eyes, another was holding her head, and yet another was trying to clear her ears with her little fingers. That one was lighter-skinned, and she was wearing an embroidered blouse, unbuttoned, and blue trousers. I went over and squatted next to her.
“Fiona?”
She looked up, squinted, and retracted her head as if to get a clearer view of where the voice was coming from. It was a movement I’d seen on old drunks, but never on a sober seventeen-year-old. Her eyes came into focus and she scooped back thick chestnut hair.
“Fiona, I’m Colonel Jim Slater, Special Assignment Force. You’re safe now.”
She looked at me for a moment, then she started to cry. She didn’t bury her face in her hands, she just sat there noiselessly, still staring at me, mouth slack, the tears running down her cheeks.
“Take it easy, now.” I helped her to her feet, kept an arm round her shoulder. “Did they hurt you at all?”
She just sobbed and, as if I’d reminded her, she drew her blouse together over her bra and fumbled with the buttons, trying to fasten them.
I looked around. Most of the other girls were sitting or trying to stand now, pulling down the hems of their skirts or buttoning up their dresses. If nothing else they could get these guys for kidnap, false imprisonment, and sexual assault, maybe even rape.
Cliff was standing in the doorway. “Ambulances are on the way, Jim. And police have already moved up, ready to take those goons off our hands.”
“Good work. Get a few men to help these girls downstairs. I’m going to call the Ambassador and General Harken.”
I made the first call. The Ambassador picked up immediately – he must have been waiting by the phone all night – and I gave him the good news. I heard what must have been his wife in the background, saying “Is she all right?” and his reply “Yes” and there was a great sob of relief. He returned to me.
“Where is Fiona now?”
“She’ll be taken to hospital with nine other girls. Don’t be alarmed, sir, it’s standard procedure.”
“Colonel, I don’t have the words to thank you—”
“Sir, you’ll have to excuse me, but there’s still a lot to do here.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course. Well, thank you, and thank your men for me.”
“I will.”
I clicked off and stood there, thinking for a moment. Did I say enough? Physically I didn’t think his daughter was seriously harmed, but she was badly shaken and she’d probably need psychiatric support. All that would come out later; right now the Ambassador and his wife would just be glad to have her back in one piece. I placed the second call. Harken sounded pleased.
“Nice going, Jim. I’ll pass that on. Now get your people out of there. We don’t want to outstay our welcome, do we?”
I went downstairs. The flashbangs and gunfire had woken the entire neighbourhood and lights were on in every house. They illuminated the scene outside, which had the curious effect of enlarging the space, so that the street now felt wider and the houses more compact. A knot of residents had gathered, coats donned hastily over their nightwear, to see what was going on. They were being held back by a police cordon.
Two groggy gang members were manhandled into the back of police cars. I had a fair idea what was in store for them, but the cops wouldn’t learn much of any value. These people were just links in a chain and they wouldn’t know anything beyond the location where they were required to deliver their human freight for the next pickup. Even if they gave that away it wouldn’t help. With the amount of publicity this was going to generate in a few hours’ time the pickup point would be abandoned long before anyone could get near it, and even that was assuming it was inside the border.
Two police cars drove away with their sirens wailing, which at this time of the morning seemed more like a declaration of triumph than an actual necessity.
The ambulances arrived and the girls, most of them still unsteady, were loaded into them. They took off. The sound of the vehicles died away, leaving everyone with a feeling of anti-climax.
I found Ferenczi. “First class operation, Major. My compliments to you and your men. I’ll see that a commendation comes through at a high level.”
“No problem, glad it worked out well.” He looked around him. “Now it’s all over I guess we can exfil.”
“Sure, you go ahead. I’m going to get my squad to do the same.”
They’d already mustered in the street as I went over.
“Okay, guys, great job. The Ambassador sends his thanks and congratulations. Let’s pull out.”
Sam Govind came over to me. “Could we hang on a bit longer, Jim?”
“Problem, Sam?”
“Yeah, one of the guys is missing.”
“Okay,” I said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “We’ll give it another few minutes.”
I wasn’t too bothered. The man could be taking a leak or something.
Five minutes later I looked at my watch again and clicked my tongue. It was shortly after six o’clock and the sky was already glowing pink.
I said to Sam, “This man is a goddamned nuisance. I want to get going. I’ve a good mind to leave him to make his own way back. Who is it, anyway?”
“Sergeant Bill Archer.”
I pictured him right away: stocky guy, very strong, flat nose, deep-set eyes, shaved head. He’d been with the SAF for several years. Attaching names to faces was something I was good at – I acquired the skills way back. You needed to know things like that when you were taking command of a new troop: it meant you could assign tasks to specific people and it made them feel like individuals instead of numbers. But when I saw this particular face again I was going to give him a right royal—
A tall soldier was jogging up the street towards us. He was camo’d but I knew who he was by the rangy way he moved.
“Colonel,” he acknowledged, with a slight dip of the head, then immediately spoke to Sam. “Captain, one of the all-terrains has been taken.”
Sam’s mouth dropped open. “What do you mean, ‘taken’? I left you and Sergeant Michaels in charge of them.”
“Sir, he was SAF. He strolled along the line of vehicles, then quickly got into one. Sergeant Michaels said,” he paused, glanced at me and licked his lips, “excuse me, sir, he said ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’ but the man didn’t reply. He just closed the door and drove off fast.”
Sam closed his eyes. “Don’t tell me: it was Sergeant Archer.”
“Yes, sir, it was.”
Sam murmured, “What the hell’s he playing at?”
I caught the soldier by the arm. “Viktor, you said ‘He strolled along the line of vehicles’. What was in the vehicle he took?”
“Armaments, mainly, sir. Multirifles, boxes of ammunition, grenades—“
“What kind of grenades?”
“All kinds: standard, flashbangs, good-nites, incendaries.”
I turned to Sam.
“He selected that vehicle on purpose. We need to find him fast.”
“I know, Jim, but where’s he gone?”
I looked down the street, biting my lip. The men were standing casually in groups, chatting, waiting for the order to pull out. I raised my voice.
“Who saw Sergeant Archer after the operation?”
Three hands went up.
“Over here.” They came forward. I couldn’t make out who they were through all the black camo. “All right, what was he doing?”
They shrugged. One said, “We were helping the girls out of the house.”
“And…?”
Another said, “He’s right in front of me going downstairs, supporting this girl with an arm round her waist, talking quietly to her. She’s more with it than the others, and she’s telling him what went on up there. From what I can hear, the bastards interfered with them, all of them.”
“How did Archer seem?”
“Angry, real angry. We all were. They were only kids, some of them.” He paused, then added, “He was swearing a lot.”
“Was that unusual?”
He looked at his companions, and one said, “I’d say so, yeah. The guy’s pretty laid back as a rule.”
Then all heads jerked round. Soldiers know the sound of ordnance and what we’d heard was a grenade, no question about it. There was a second explosion, and it wasn’t that far away.
I was already running. “Everyone to the vehicles!”
7
Our convoy threaded its way through a tangle of streets. We drove as fast as we dared, but some of the local inhabitants were already on the move and the last thing we wanted now was an accident involving a pedestrian. My driver hardly needed to be told where to go: the sky in that direction was a bright orange and it wasn’t from the sunrise. Ten minutes later we saw smoke pouring from the end of a street and drew to a halt. I hopped down and walked forward, and through gaps in the smoke I could see a line of houses, all burning fiercely. I went back to speak to the two captains.
The Reich Legacy: A Jim Slater novel (The Jim Slater series Book 3) Page 3