But he never did learn to like it.
“Face it, Razor,” Jaybird Sterling said, watching his struggles from the other side of the room. “We’re here for the duration.”
“Screw that, Jaybird,” Roselli replied. He had to lean to one side a bit to see the other man, since a terrorist hung between them, swaying slightly back and forth. Five other terrorists were scattered about the furniture-cluttered room, paying no attention to their two captives. One was sprawled in the sofa at Roselli’s right side.
“How much longer, you think?” Sterling asked. “Man, I hate bein’ tied down!”
Roselli looked Sterling up and down. Like Roselli, Machinist’s Mate Second Class David Sterling was tightly tied hand and foot and was sitting in an overstuffed chair with his feet propped up on a low stool. “What bugs me isn’t the ropes, so much,” Roselli replied. He quirked a smile. “It’s the fact that the sadistic bastards put us in the comfy chairs!”
Jaybird looked puzzled, blinking through the clear plastic goggles he was wearing. “The what?”
“The comfy chairs.”
“Man, now I know you’re crackin’ up.”
“Don’t you watch Monty Python?”
“Monty who?”
“Never mind. Obviously you’ve never run into Monty Python, and trying to explain that would—”
A window at the far end of the room shattered, and a dark gray cardboard cylinder bounded into the room. “Eyes!” Roselli yelled, interrupting himself, and both men turned their heads and squeezed their eyes shut.
The flashbang grenade had a charge reduced to training specs, but nonetheless it detonated with a rippling chain of ear-splitting cracks and a strobing pulse of light so intense that Roselli could see the flash through tightly closed eyelids. By the time he was certain that the last charge had gone off and had opened his eyes once more, the room’s single door had splintered in time to the double concussion of twin shotgun blasts. The splinters were still flying as black-garbed men began spilling into the room, moving with an expert and long-practiced choreography that put a different armed man in every corner of the room in scant seconds. The harsh chuff-chuff-chuff of sound-suppressed Browning automatics blended together into a cacophony of hissing gunfire, and the “terrorists” began exploding in puffs of straw. Six bullets slammed in rapid succession into the straw dummy at Roselli’s right, five punching through its fatigue shirt and into what would have been its center of mass… though one show-off round exploded the head in a whirling flurry of yellow-white fragments. The dummy hanging from the rafters between Roselli and Sterling danced on its rope for a second, then collapsed to the floor as the rope suspending it was shot through. Another one propped up on the floor to Roselli’s left disintegrated, dropping a handful-sized hank of straw squarely on his head.
The gunmen were terrifying, garbed head to toe in black combat dress that included a hood tightly cinched over their heads, black gas masks and protective goggles that gave their faces the nightmarish, high-tech look of a squad of Darth Vaders with attitudes. They wore gloves and non-skid boots; two carried sound-suppressed Browning pistols, while two more wielded MP5SD3s — the H&Ks with the massive, integral silencer barrels that many SEALs preferred in closequarters hostage-rescue scenarios. The four men of the assault team were members of the British Special Air Service, the SAS. The room, properly the CQB, or Close Quarters Battle house, was more popularly known as the Killing House, a living-room mock-up designed to allow hostage-rescue units to practice their marksmanship and their target identification.
Sitting in the sofa, covered with straw, Roselli was delighted that they were as good at target ID as they’d claimed to be.
“Clear!” the first man into the room shouted, as he pivoted back and forth, his H&K held high and deadly, his voice muffled by the gas mask.
“Clear!” his number two called from the other side of the door, as he dropped an empty mag from his H&K and slapped another home with polished and professional ease.
“Clear!” a third called from behind Roselli’s sofa.
“Clear!”
For a moment the only movement in the room was the swinging of the shot-through rope, the only sound the rasp of the assault team’s breathing through the gas masks, and the heavy breathing of the two rescued “hostages.”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition,” Roselli said loudly into the near silence.
Four masked, black-hooded heads pivoted toward the sound of his voice. “Beg your pardon, Yank?” one of the troopers said.
“Monty Python? The British comic group?”
No one said a word, and Roselli shook his head. “Damn, I though everyone in England would know about Monty Python!”
“Don’t mind him,” Jaybird told the puzzled hostage rescue team. “He never grew up. The guy specializes in obscure humor.”
“I’ll obscure your humor. How about getting us out of these ties, huh?”
Minutes later, Roselli and Sterling were outside in the mid-morning daylight once more, rubbing chafed wrists as they gathered with their hosts and the other two SEALs in the training exchange. Most of the U.S. Special Warfare units cross-trained occasionally with their opposite numbers in Europe, especially the German GSG9 and the world-famous British SAS, and the Navy SEALs were no exception. Four members of SEAL Seven’s Third Platoon had been assigned a three-week rotation with the Special Air Service’s 23rd Regiment. The other two SEALs in the program were Quartermaster First Class Martin Brown and Electrician’s Mate Second Class William Higgins.
“You okay, Razor?” Brown looked worried. “We heard a lot a’ shootin’ and lootin’ in there.”
“Your turn next, Magic,” Roselli favoring the big SEAL sniper with a sadistic grin. “You’re just gonna love this.”
“We call him Komissar,” their guide said. She was a dazzling, long-legged German blonde in a severe, gray business suit, whose English contained only a trace of an accent. “And he may be our most important weapon in fighting Euroterrorism.”
The two men trailing her through the gleaming corridors and warrens of the headquarters complex of the German BKA stopped and politely looked as she pointed out what was obviously, for her at least, the showpiece of the tour. Through the double-paned windows of an air-conditioned basement room, the black, white, and silver cabinets of a sprawling, mainframe computer could be seen.
Lieutenant Blake Murdock, the commanding officer of SEAL Seven’s Third Platoon, along with Master Chief Engineman George MacKenzie, had arrived in Wiesbaden the previous evening, on a space-available Air Force flight out of Lakenheath. Early that morning they’d reported to the ultramodern, glass and concrete complex on a hilltop in the suburbs outside of Wiesbaden that was the headquarters of the BKA, the Bundeskriminant, Germany’s Federal Investigation Department. Inge Schmidt, a BKA special agent, had been assigned by the department’s liaison bureau to show the two Navy SEALs around. For a change, both men were wearing civilian suits rather than either Navy dress uniforms or the more usual fatigues or combat dress, and both carried leather attaché cases. Murdock felt distinctly uncomfortable in his monkey suit, as he called it, and was looking forward to shedding jacket and tie at the earliest possible moment.
“We’ve heard a lot about Komissar,” Murdock said. “He’s the main reason we’re here, in fact. Some of the information you have squirreled away in here about German terrorist groups may be of importance to our current investigation. Especially your Red Army faction.”