Victor Oxley slammed his forehead into the face of the Russian assassin, and he kept pressing with it until the window glass shattered behind the Russian’s head, his head carried on back out the window, and the jagged glass below his neck cut into him, digging through skin and muscle and stabbing between cervical vertebrae, where the sharp glass then stabbed his spinal cord.
The knife fell from his hand, and Oxley let go, pushed off the man, then stepped back away from him.
The Russian flailed for a moment, eyes wide in terror and in pain, but then he fell off the broken glass and collapsed to the floor in an expanding pool of blood. Bloody broken glass rained down on his dying body as the window shattered completely and fell in.
Oxley reached out and put his hand on the banister to keep from collapsing. His heart felt like it could rip out of his chest with its next powerful beat. He sucked in a deep lungful of air, and only when he held it in did he hear a noise below him on the ground floor. He looked down to the bottom of the stairs and saw the man he’d punched in the face a minute earlier. Remarkably, the man had made it back to his feet, and now he stood there, wobbling a little, and he raised something out away from his body, pointing it at the big Englishman on the landing.
Oxley cocked his head. Slowly he raised his hands when he realized it was a gun.
A gun?
Oxley saw the muscles tighten in the neck of the Russian as he began to squeeze the trigger, then Oxley looked up quickly, above the gunman, alerted by sudden movement there.
Jack Ryan, Jr., appeared at the railing on the first-floor landing and launched himself over the banister, dropping ten feet straight down to the gunman below him. He crashed onto the man just as a wild shot rang out. Oxley lurched back; he thought he’d been hit at first, so loud and percussive was the crack of the bullet in the enclosed stairwell.
But he felt himself for blood and holes, and was relieved to find neither.
He looked down at the two men now, both fighting over the small pistol below him. Jack tried to tear it from the other man’s hand; instead the Russian slammed Jack to the floor and fell on top of him, the gun between them.
A second shot cracked, and the struggle continued for several seconds. Oxley started down the stairs, trying to get close enough to help, yet by the time he got to the ground floor, there was nothing for him to do but pull the dead body of the Russian off the very alive son of the President of the United States.
Ryan pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned back against the wall of the stairwell. Oxley, exhausted beyond anything he’d felt in decades, collapsed next to him.
For several seconds the two men just sat there, the sound of their near-hyperventilated breathing filling the small space.
Finally Jack was able to control his breathing just enough to mutter an understandable sentence: “What the fuck was that about these assholes not using guns?”
Oxley took his time responding, needing to catch his breath first. “What can I say? Haven’t been keeping up with the habits of the Seven Strong Men. Could be my information is somewhat out-of-date.”
“Yeah.”
Oxley regarded the dead man on the floor in front of him. Slowly his thick-bearded face tightened into a smile. “I’ll be damned, Ryan. You fight like your dad.”
Jack looked angrily at Oxley. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“It means I’m impressed. I took you for rich and lazy.”
“Again, your information is inaccurate.” Ryan was on his feet now. With difficulty, he pulled Oxley up as well. Ryan pointed to the man lying one half-floor above him. “Is he dead?”
“Done and dusted, mate.”
“Does that mean dead?”
Oxley said, “It does mean dead. What about the boys in the back?”
“One got away, the other is KO’d.”
Oxley looked at Ryan. He controlled his heavy breathing well enough to adopt a patronizing tone. “Well, now, you don’t suppose the unconscious bloke might be a bit useful, to us, do you? That is, of course, if you haven’t let him get away as well.”
Ryan lifted the gun off the floor and headed up the stairs.
—
A minute later, Jack had dragged the man up the hall into Oxley’s flat. He was no longer unconscious, but Jack could see evidence of a severe concussion in his eyes.
Oxley had made it upstairs himself, and here he ignored his elderly neighbor, who stood in the hallway and yelled at him and Ryan.
As the big Englishman entered his apartment, she shouted, “I’m calling the police!”
Oxley said, “I don’t give a toss what you do.” And with that, he slammed the door.
As soon as it shut, he turned to Ryan. “Don’t know ’bout you, mate, but I’m getting the fuck out of here.” He retrieved a half-filled duffel bag hanging from a hook by the door, then rushed over to the little dresser by his bed and began pulling out items and throwing them into the bag.
Jack had the gun on the Russian now. “I’ll drive you wherever you want to go. Like it or not, we are sort of in this together.”
Oxley didn’t seem to like it, but he had begun to accept it. With a short nod, he said, “We can take this bloke somewhere and see if he feels like having a conversation with us.” Oxley walked over to the man, slapped him across the face. “How about it, Ivan? You up for a chat?”
The man wobbled on his knees, he was still out of it, but Jack steadied him. Looking into the Russian’s eyes, he said, “Listen to me. We’re going down the stairs and we’re getting in my car. Just so you know, if I see any more of your friends I’m going to shoot you in the fucking head.”
The man just stared at Jack. Oxley repeated everything Jack said in Russian, and only then did the man nod distractedly.
—
Jack Ryan and Victor Oxley loaded the bleary-eyed Russian into the trunk of Ryan’s Mercedes, then hog-tied him with a length of rubber hose from the garden of Oxley’s building. When they were certain their prisoner was secure, Oxley and Ryan shut the trunk, and drove out of Corby just moments before wailing police cars pulled up in front of the ex–SAS officer’s apartment building.
Jack had suggested they go to London, and Oxley made no protest. Jack knew he couldn’t just be involved in the death of Russian mob goons without one hell of a lot of fallout, but he decided he’d wait till he got back to the capital before calling Sandy, his dad, the police, and anyone else who might be interested in the event. In the meantime, he would have Oxley alone in a car, and he’d hoped to use the time to dig into the man’s story.
But it didn’t work out that way. Oxley said he needed a few minutes to relax first. Jack was not two miles out of the city before he looked to his left and found Oxley sound asleep. Jack shook him, which woke him, but only long enough to convince Jack the man was not dead. He told Jack to bugger off for a while and let him recover from all the action, and Jack reluctantly obliged.
Ryan drove on, kept company by the nasal snore of the Englishman and the sound of the hog-tied would-be Russian assassin flailing around inside his trunk.
63
Thirty years earlier
West Berlin was populous, prosperous, cosmopolitan, and educated. But it was not a city as much as it was an enclave. Though part of the Federal Republic of Germany, the city was completely surrounded by the socialist nation of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, a Soviet vassal state, and only seventy miles of double walls, guards, and guns encircling West Berlin separated two armies, two economies, and two belief systems.
In the East, they once claimed the Berlin Wall had been built to keep the citizens of West Berlin from slipping into the paradise of the DDR.
But by the mid-eighties, no reasonable person anywhere on the planet believed such nonsense.
Just five blocks north of the Berlin Wall, an automobile and moped repair shop occupied the entire ground floor of a four-story brick building on the busy corner of Sprengelstrasse and Tegeler Strasse. The building was in Weddin
g, in the former French sector of West Berlin, and the shop did a huge business with all the BMWs, Mercedeses, Opels, and Fords that passed through the neighborhood every day.
Above the ground-floor repair shop were the offices for the car care center, and above that was a large, mostly open room that served as an artist’s shared studio space. Here painters, sculptors, photographers, and woodworkers rented workbenches and floor space, and they worked on their craft throughout the day and into the evening.
Most evenings the last of the artists vacated the building well before midnight, but the building remained occupied. A small narrow staircase in a corner of the second floor led to the attic, and beyond the door at the top of the stairs, six men and women, all between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-three, lived together in a rustic but large three-bedroom flat. One of their number was a painter, and she had managed to obtain the accommodations virtually rent-free from the landlord of the building space, because although he was a wealthy landowner here in decidedly capitalist West Berlin, he had been a radical in the sixties, and he still shared in the ideals of the six young inhabitants of the attic flat.
The residents were members of the Rote Armee Fraktion, the Red Army Faction, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization formed here in Germany in 1970. The RAF attacked police, NATO personnel, and wealthy capitalists and their institutions, both here in Germany and in neighboring countries.
The flatmates’ security system here above the auto repair shop and the art studio was many-layered, though it was not particularly sophisticated. During the day, when the shop and studio were up and running, employees downstairs kept a lookout for any police or unknown vehicles on the street. At night, a guard dog in the repair shop would alert those sleeping above, although there were multiple false alarms each and every evening.
There were also trip wires set up on the staircases, attached to air horns, and one member in the flat was tasked to the night shift, essentially ordered to sit on the couch in the common room of the flat, watching TV with an old Walther MPL submachine gun on his or her lap and a pot of coffee on the stove in the kitchen.
For one of the most notorious terrorist organizations active in Europe for most of the past fifteen years, this did not amount to much in the way of security measures, but these six RAF guerrillas were not exactly at the pinnacle of the organization, and the organization was not exactly in its heyday.
The RAF had slipped out of the news in the past few years, and for this reason this cell of the organization had relaxed their guard. These were the days of the Third Generation of the Red Army Faction, and they had not been linked to any attempted lethal attacks since their failed 1981 rocketing of Ramstein Air Base and, before that, their 1979 unsuccessful assassination attempt on NATO commander Alexander Haig. The media characterized the RAF as demoralized, disorganized, and adrift, and the half-dozen young people who lived in the flat here in Wedding certainly appeared to be living down to that description.
—
It was just past one a.m. on a Friday morning, and cell member Ulrike Reubens was on the couch in the common room, kept awake by coffee and nicotine and a new VHS cassette player connected to the television. She was engrossed in a bootleg tape of Meryl Streep and Cher in Silkwood, and as she sat there in the dark watching the grainy video she thumbed the fire mode selector switch up and down on her gun, a small manifestation of her fury at the American government for their criminal use of nuclear power and their lack of concern for the welfare of the proletariat, as portrayed in the movie.
In the two large bedrooms down the hall off the common room, several more men and women slept. Four of them were members of the RAF—a fifth member, Marta Scheuring, had left town suddenly a few days earlier.
Although the symbol of the RAF was a black H&K MP5 submachine gun displayed over a red star, in truth none of the inhabitants of this apartment actually owned an MP5. Instead, they all had older fifties-era machine pistols or revolvers, which were nowhere as state-of-the-art as the MP5 but were, at least, within easy reach where they slept. Four others in the apartment, three women and a man, were bedding down with lovers in the cell, and although all of these hangers-on knew they were in the presence of urban guerrillas, they had no concerns for their personal safety, because this cell of the RAF had been living here a long time with no trouble at all from the police.
Ulrike Reubens finished watching the credits of Silkwood, then she climbed off the couch and over to the VCR and hit the rewind button so she could watch it again. While she waited for the movie to restart, she walked into the kitchen to pour herself another cup of coffee, because she was certain she was going to be in for a long, boring night.
—
CIA analyst Jack Ryan stood in a makeshift command center set up in a dormant concert hall on Ostender Strasse, six blocks away from the RAF safe house. Although he was here with Nick Eastling and his team of MI6 counterintelligence men, and although there were easily fifty German police officers and detectives around him, as well as some characters he was certain were West German intelligence officials, he felt much as he had felt in Switzerland: alone and forgotten by those around him.
Eastling stood with his men on the other side of the big room. The German authorities conferred with the Brits, but other than some initial greetings and introductions, Ryan was mostly ignored by the Germans. He sat to the side on the edge of the stage and waited for something to happen.
It had been a long day. They’d flown out of Zurich at eight a.m., arriving in Frankfurt, Germany, just ninety minutes later, and there they’d caught a shuttle to Bonn, the West German capital. At the British embassy, Ryan had been given a small office with a secure line with which he could contact Langley, while Eastling and his men went into nearly a full day of meetings with officials from the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, West Germany’s domestic security services, and the Bundesgrenzschutz, the West German federal border guard, which served as the national police force.
By four p.m. the diplomatic part of the operation was complete, and it had been a success. The British had successfully talked the Germans into raiding the RAF safe house in Berlin. It would be a German mission, all the way, but once the takedown of the property was complete, Eastling and his fellow British intelligence officers would be allowed to exploit any intelligence recovered.
While in Bonn, Jack made a secure call to Jim Greer, and the two of them decided to ask Judge Arthur Moore to contact the director of the BfV to formally request the CIA be allowed to tag along as a witness and adviser. Jack had relayed his doubts about the intelligence to Greer, but at this point there was little Jack, or the CIA, for that matter, could do but go along for the ride.
Ryan knew using Langley to go directly to the West Germans would piss Eastling off, but he did not care. Nick Eastling had tried to push Ryan out of the investigation in Switzerland. Ryan was determined Eastling was not going to do the same here in Germany.
By seven p.m. the six SIS men and Ryan were on a Learjet to Berlin, and by ten p.m. they sat in on a planning meeting with the German authorities.
At midnight they were taken to the theater just blocks away from where German police were quietly and carefully beginning a cover cordon operation around the suspected terrorists.
Now Jack sipped awful coffee from a service set up by the German police assisting with the operation. It immediately made his stomach burn; he’d not eaten all day.
As he sat there on the edge of the stage he heard several big vehicles pull up outside. There was a bustle in the lobby soon after, and then the door to the lobby opened.
Jack looked up and saw that the shooters had arrived.
The uniformed police here at the command center treated the tactical team with deference, and the Germans wearing suits—Ryan suspected they were all either BfV intelligence officers or BGS detectives—livened up quite a bit as the hour of the raid drew closer.
The shooters were members of Grenzschutzgruppe 9, Border Guard Group 9, Wes
t Germany’s most elite unit of paramilitary operators. Ryan counted two dozen, all in black and carrying heavy cases, which they placed around the large main stage of the theater.
GSG 9 was a relatively new organization, formed after the tragedy of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, when it became abundantly clear to West Germany that the country did not possess the tactics, equipment, or caliber of personnel necessary to combat the recent phenomenon of international terrorism. When an eight-man cell of Black September terrorists kidnapped members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, the German police allowed them to fly on two Huey helicopters to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, where they would then—according to their demands, anyway—board a 727 that would fly them to Cairo.
At the airport, with hours to prepare, members of the German police set up to ambush the terrorists as they moved with their hostages from the helicopters to the jet.
And in this task, the Germans proved themselves to be almost comically incompetent. Five policemen were designated as snipers, though none had sniper training, and they were given rifles without scopes and placed around the airport without radios, with instructions to wait for a signal to fire.
Another six police officers were armed and placed inside the 727 with orders to shoot it out with the terrorists, but just as the two helicopters landed, these six cops decided they didn’t particularly care for their orders, so they ran away without notifying their command.
The helicopters landed, and the Black September terrorists realized quickly the airplane on the tarmac was cold and dark, and the Germans weren’t planning on flying anybody anywhere, so they knew they had walked into a trap. Quickly the eight terrorists shot out the few lights the Germans had pointing at them, and the snipers who were not really snipers found themselves firing blindly in the vicinity of the hostages.
It took hours for the battle to end, and when it did, one policeman and nine hostages lay dead along with most of the terrorists.
After this debacle, the German government ordered the creation of a designated federal anti-terrorist unit, and, within just a few years, GSG 9 became one of the preeminent tier-one units in the world.
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