“Quite right,” Hopke agreed. “We will know more when we have interrogated the prisoners.” He looked back and forth between Inge and Murdock. “In any case, perhaps you two would like to resume your evening together?”
“I think Inge might like to get some rest,” Murdock said.
“Nonsense!” All evidence of the shock that had threatened her earlier was gone. She seemed animated and very much alive. “After what we’ve just been through? I’m hungrier than ever now. That steak we were talking about sounds wonderful!”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, L-T,” MacKenzie warned. “Suppose they try again.”
“About that gun,” Murdock said, turning to Hopke.
“What kind do you prefer?”
“I don’t suppose the Federal Republic would go along with me packing a shotgun. Or an M-16.”
“How about something concealable?”
“First choice would be a .45 Colt. After that, just about anything in semi-auto and .45 caliber.”
“I will see what can be done.” Hopke removed his suit jacket, revealing a shoulder holster rig which he began unbuckling as he spoke. “In the meantime, why don’t you take this. Just don’t get caught with it until I can put the proper paperwork through.”
“This,” was an H&K P9S, a 9mm double-action semiautomatic with a nine-round magazine. Tucked into its holster with a Velcro strap and positioned under Murdock’s left arm, it hardly showed at all when he put his jacket back on.
“Great,” he said, shrugging, then moving his arms back and forth to settle the harness comfortably into place. “Of course, some official backup might be nice too.”
“I’ll see what we can do.” He grinned suddenly. “Why do I have the feeling, Herr Murdock, that you are making of yourself a target?”
“I’m not really. And I wouldn’t deliberately use Inge here for bait either. But my feeling at the moment is that no place we go is going to be all that safe.” He shrugged. “Who knows? The guy in the panel truck may organize another try with some of his buddies. If we’re ready for them when they do, so much the better.”
The Cattle Baron was a pseudo-American restaurant located on the Büdingenstrasse in Wiesbaden. As Inge had promised, the steak was excellent, and both of them were hungry.
Their conversation, however, remained centered on things professional. At first, Inge was interested in the aspects of SEAL training. “Drown-proofing” fascinated her, though she thought the sink-or-swim mentality seemed a bit barbaric. The idea of tying a man hand and foot and throwing him into the deep end of the pool, literally to sink or swim…
Later, their conversation had grown more technical, with Inge probing Murdock’s thoughts on nuclear proliferation… especially now, with the old Soviet empire gone.
“We’ve been especially concerned about the possibility of radicals in the former Soviet states getting hold of nuclear warheads before they can be disassembled or shipped back to Russia,” she told him. “Even a so-called battlefield weapon, a tactical nuclear artillery shell, for instance, could kill tens of thousands of people, ruin a fair-sized city, and be extremely hard to track.”
It was, Murdock reflected, not exactly light dinner conversation, but it was a topic he was keenly interested in. “Everybody said the world would be a safer place with the collapse of Soviet Communism, that we could enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ with all the money we’d save cutting back on our military expenditures. Stupid idea that, fit only for liberal, anti-military politicians and other assorted half-wits. I certainly don’t want the Soviets back — never did — but at least they kept pretty good track of their nukes.”
“You believe the current owners of the warheads do not?” Murdock shrugged and kept cutting the steak on the plate in front of him. “There are just too damned many nukes, and too many people with reasons to sell them or steal them.”
Inge nodded thoughtfully. “It sounds as though the — what is the expression? The nuclear genie has escaped its bottle.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“So,” Inge said. “What is the answer? How can we stop the proliferation? What will happen if we don’t?”
Murdock didn’t reply right away. Looking past Inge’s shoulder, he spotted MacKenzie, seated at a table across the restaurant with Lieutenant Hopke, and caught his eye. Mac nodded slightly but gave no other sign of having noticed Murdock. There was at least one other BKA team in the room too, Murdock knew, but they were good, and he hadn’t been able to spot them.
Good backup, just in case. Chances were, though, now that they were ready for them, the RAF wouldn’t try again, not in the same way, at least. The other patrons of the restaurant were going on with their meals, talking about weather or opera, the latest scandal in parliament or love, unaware of the topic being discussed at at least one of the tables.
“I really don’t know, Inge,” Murdock said. “Used to be, I thought the old nuclear balance of power would be enough. You know, they won’t nuke us because then we’ll nuke them. How do you nuke a terrorist group, though? You can’t. You can’t even nuke the country that sponsored the terrorists, because it’s their government that’s bad, not the people. Hell, most of the population of North Korea is one step removed from outright slavery.
“Later I thought SDI was the answer. You know, what the press called ‘Star Wars’? But then the Russians folded and it was peace-dividend time, and everyone in Congress was scrambling for the easy kills, looking for money for welfare and free health insurance. Hell, even if we had a perfect ballistic missile defense, chances are those terrorist nukes would come by way of freighter or submarine or even a moving van coming across the border from Mexico, not in the warhead of an SS-19.
“I’m very, very much afraid that things have simply gone too far. One of these days pretty soon now, we’re going to lose a city.”
“I never took you for the fatalistic sort, Blake.”
“I’m hardly that. I’ll fight as long as I can, I’ll fight whoever I’m told to fight to stop the holocaust. But I’m also a realist. In my line of work, you have to be.”
“I know what you mean. Working with Komissar, you can often begin assembling a larger picture in your own mind while you are still feeding the machine with the snippets and fragments. For a long time now, there have been, well, hints of something very large, some operation involving many of the old terror groups, and it has left me with a dreadful foreboding. Like knowing that something terrible is about to happen, and being unable to do a thing about it.”
Even with much of their conversation centering on what was for both of them shop talk, their relationship, their mutual feelings of camaraderie and comfortable closeness had deepened considerably by the time they reached Inge’s apartment again, at just past twelve-thirty in the morning. She asked him in to have a drink and he accepted, with Mac waiting for him in a rented car outside. After two drinks more, she asked him to spend the night. Murdock signaled MacKenzie from her apartment’s balcony with a flashlight, a quick-beamed longshort-short — not Morse for the letter “D,” but an old Navy whistle or horn signal meaning, “Cast off and stand clear.” MacKenzie replied with an affirmative flash from his headlights and drove off a few moments later.
When Murdock turned away from the window, Inge was waiting for him, beautifully, gloriously naked.
5