The woman didn’t speak English, but she was nice enough. With hand gestures and smiles she indicated what she wanted to do, and Gavin followed her through the large open office. When she wasn’t looking he pulled the knife from the cuff of his shirt and placed it on a desk, then he quickly caught up with her.
The space in the corner of the big room where the Campus men had set up their surveillance was hidden from the rest of the room by stacked desks, but the heavyset American also positioned his body between his hide site and the woman while she opened the heating unit in a back utility closet.
Soon she was finished and she headed for the kitchen and the exit with Gavin carefully walking alongside her. As she walked she looked around with some curiosity, Gavin noticed, but he imagined she was just wondering what the hell the Americans were doing here in the space. There was nothing on any of the desks, and other than a few water bottles and groceries in the kitchen and the one tenant walking oddly close to her, there was no sign of any activity in the unit.
At the door, Gretta turned to try to communicate with Gavin. Normally he would have been helpful and done his part to bridge the language gap, but he knew he had to get back to his overwatch, so he just stood there, silent and more than a little annoyed-looking.
Eventually, she gave up. With a frustrated smile she said, “Everything okay?”
“Yes. Okay, Gretta. Everything is very okay. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” she said, and Gavin closed the door inches from her smiling face. He turned and ran through the warehouse office, made it back around the desks and to his overwatch and looked into the binoculars mounted on the tripod.
Thankfully, he saw no movement at the front of the apartment on Krišt’anova. He blew out a long sigh that was interrupted two-thirds of the way through when he gasped.
Wait.
A gray van was parked in the parking lot next to the apartment. Gavin had been looking at this same area for most of the past day. That van definitely had not been there before. He squinted into the binos and through the windshield of the van he could see a lone man behind the wheel.
This didn’t look good.
He connected with Ryan by hitting his PTT button in his pocket.
“Ryan?”
He heard someone push their own transmit button, but immediately he heard a shout in his headset. It was the unmistakable voice of Jack Ryan, Jr. “Gun!”
The muffled thump of a gunshot followed a heartbeat later.
25
The team that hit Skála’s house weren’t tier-one operators, but they were well motivated, and as far as Jack Ryan was concerned, there sure were a goddamned lot of them. The Czech Republic’s diplomatic relations with the DPRK meant North Korea had an embassy in Prague, although it was just a small, squat redbrick building way out west of the city in the suburban 6th district. But even though it was small and spare, it was staffed at any one time with more than a dozen members of Ri Tae-jin’s Reconnaissance General Bureau’s spies, and another dozen military security forces who did any work for RGB that was required.
That meant twenty-four men were available for Ri’s mission in country, and one of those missions meant hunting for one Karel Skála, a Czech consular official with the ability to create travel documents to get scientists out of the West and into North Korea in furtherance of the DPRK’s fledgling rare earth minerals industry. Skála had gone into hiding. Most of the RGB officers at the embassy thought he’d fled the country, but when they paid a visit to his home two nights earlier they left a hidden microphone behind his television set, and twenty minutes ago when English-speaking voices were heard by the embassy RGB communications staff the order came for a team of six North Korean security agents to race to the building to see what was happening.
While they were on the way they received a second call from their superior. This one notified them that Skála himself was in the building — he was talking to the Americans, discussing his relationship with North Korea, and suddenly their job changed from a capture mission to a kill mission.
Only five of the men were armed — they carried CZ pistols, nine-millimeter weapons of a local manufacturer. The other man was the driver; he, like the others, had military martial-arts training and basic surveillance skills given to him by his nation’s spy services before he moved into the foreign posting.
And more than firepower, the main weapon the North Koreans had was incentive. Failing their mission right now would be failing the Dae Wonsu, and all of these men knew the penalty for this could be their lives or the lives of their families. They would go up to that fifth-floor apartment and rip the three men there apart limb from limb if necessary, but they were determined not to go back to the embassy without getting the job done.
Caruso had stepped back into the master bedroom of Skála’s apartment to grab the young man a set of clothes. He and Ryan wanted the Czech man dressed and out of the building quickly in case the North Koreans had bugged the place, but Skála himself was still dazed from exhaustion and the blow to the head, and Dom decided it would take Skála longer to get himself together than either he or Jack wanted to wait, so Dom just randomly grabbed pants and shoes and a shirt, and then threw toiletries along with other odds and ends into a bag he found on a shelf.
Ryan stood watch over Skála next to the entryway to the hall. The Czech consular official sat on his sofa facing the archway next to Ryan, which meant he was in the right position to have seen the men filing into the apartment first if he had only been looking in the right direction. Instead, his attention had been focused on the floor in front of him and the dizziness in his head. He did look up just in time to see two men in the archway; they were plainly Korean, and they were just two meters or so from the bearded American leaning against the wall, although they had not seen him yet.
Skála blinked hard at the image, then he started to stand.
Ryan was in the process of taking a call from Gavin Biery when he saw the movement and the astonished expression on Skála’s face, and he turned to see what had him so terrified. Jack saw only the tip of a handgun as it aimed through the archway on his left. He leapt toward it instinctively, tried to grab it or knock it away from its target.
“Gun!” he shouted. The weapon fired, Ryan folded his right hand over the hot barrel, and his left arm swung in a wide haymaker. He connected with the side of a man’s head — he hadn’t even focused his eyes on the assailant because his attention was still on the pistol.
A second gunshot cracked in the hallway of the apartment a few feet to his left. Ryan sensed rather than saw a large group of men bursting through the doorway there, and to keep himself out of the line of fire from their weapons he swung his now unconscious victim around so the man’s limp body would be positioned between himself and the attackers. Another shot came from less than ten feet away, and Ryan immediately felt the small man in his arms jolt — he’d been shot in the back.
Ryan wanted to get his gun out of its Thunderwear holster and into the fight; he knew he could do it in one second in optimal conditions, but he was standing at one end of a hallway that was full of gunmen at the other end, protected only by a wounded or dead man held up in his arms. One second was an eternity in this situation — dropping his cover to jam his hand down the front of his pants to pull out his Smith & Wesson would certainly just result in him getting gunned down with his hand stuck down the front of his pants.
Shouting men filed up the hall and a third booming handgun report sounded in the small space. The man in Ryan’s arms jerked again and Jack crouched tighter. He decided he’d have to at least try for his gun. But just as he let the man in his arms go to do this, out of the corner of his left eye he saw Dominic Caruso running into the living room from the back bedroom, his small black pistol high in a combat grip and pointed to the wall, behind which it looked like at least four or five North Koreans stood engaging Ryan, unaware of the man on their right.