“This ’un’s dead,” one of the figures said, his voice muffled by his mask.
“Here too.”
“Live one here,” another trooper said, bending over Chun. Carefully, he kicked her Uzi well away from her outstretched hand. “I don’t think so, lady,” he said. “Not today, anyway.”
She felt his gloved hands moving to her face, her throat, checking for signs of life. She tried to back away and found she had no strength at all. He seemed to be studying her face closely.
With almost contemptuous ease, the man flipped her over onto her stomach, grabbed her right hand, and pulled it into the small of her back. She felt something thin and plastic snick tight over her wrist… and then the process was repeated for her left hand. Cuffed now, she was helpless. No… no, no! It wasn’t supposed to end this way! Not with her a prisoner of the capitalist bastards! Briefly she considered trying to get to her feet and running; maybe they would shoot her, letting her escape the ignominy of capture.
But someone was securing her ankles as well, taking no chances with a potentially valuable prisoner. One of the men stood over her with his ugly black H&K, speaking into the microphone that must be hidden in that hideous mask. “Eagle One-one. Main room, fourth floor secure. Four terrorists dead, one captured. It’s the Korean bitch.”
She couldn’t hear the response, and at this point she didn’t really care. One of her captors knelt beside her, and after frisking her thoroughly and professionally for weapons, turned her head to the side, and roughly probed the inside of her mouth… searching, she supposed, for the inevitable hollow, poison-filled tooth of spy fiction. It would have been funny if the situation had not been so desperate. She tried to bite his finger, but he was wearing heavy gloves. In the center of the room, two men were removing the blanket from the fire, checking to make sure that the flames had been smothered, while another carefully gathered up the records on the desk that had not yet made it to the burn barrel.
Gunfire sounded elsewhere in the building, and then there was silence. Chun forced herself to relax, closing her eyes to shut out the sight of the enemy soldiers guarding their prizes.
This battle, the enemy had won… but the war was not over yet.
She thought about Pak Chong Yong.
Murdock stood beside Colonel Wentworth and a number of British army officers and security personnel. He was still wearing his civilian clothing and felt out of place among all the uniforms. The only other people in the immediate area in civvies were obviously government types, “suits” in the parlance of those like Murdock who claimed to work for a living.
Wentworth was holding a radio headset to his ear. He looked up at Murdock and cracked a grin. “Right, that’s it,” he said. “Building secure.”
“Excellent,” Murdock said. “Any casualties?”
“One of my boys was winged going into that upstairs front room. Nothing serious.”
“Impressive. How long?”
The SAS colonel consulted his watch. “I make it three minutes, forty seconds, give or take a few… ah, that’s counting from the time I gave the order to the snipers to take down the people on the roof.”
Speed was always the primary consideration in operations like this. If the entry team was fast, the bad guys didn’t have time to kill their hostages, if they were holding any. Nor did they have time to coordinate their defense with one another, or to prepare a stubborn defense against an attack that could come from any or all directions at once.
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.”