Command Authority (50 page)

M
arta and Jack moved together slowly through the darkened building. On the first floor, Jack turned to go to the fire escape, but Marta said, “No. Follow me.”

Jack followed her down another flight of stairs, all the way to the automotive shop on the ground floor of the building. There were a few dim bulbs glowing here, enough for the two of them to easily make their way to a utility room on the northwest side of the building. A narrow wooden staircase led down to the basement. Marta pulled a cord in the center of the room and a bare lightbulb revealed a washer and dryer. Next to these was a metal hatch in the wall.

“What’s this?” Jack asked.

“This was a coal chute back before the war. We use it to come and go in case the police are watching the front of the building.”

Marta opened the chute; it made a muffled scraping sound, but Jack knew the police on the far side of the building would not have heard a thing. She crawled out first, and Jack followed.

Jack found himself standing in a paved space between two buildings. There was barely room to walk.

Marta said, “Our building survived the war, but this building on the left came after. They built it so close that on a map it looks like they are connected. The stupid pigs don’t even know about this alley.”

They made their way through the dark, narrow space for a minute, moving between apartment buildings, and then they came out on a footpath next to Sparrstrasse.

Once they arrived at the street, Jack said, “We need to hail a taxi.”

Marta said, “A taxi? You don’t have a car?”

“No. I came on foot.”

“What kind of a spy are you?”

“I didn’t say I was a spy.”

Marta looked terrified again. It was clear to Ryan she was afraid of being out on the street. She said, “It’s one in the morning. Here in Wedding, at this time, the only chance is on Fennstrasse. That’s three or four blocks away.”

“Let’s go, then.”

She hesitated. Ryan saw tremors in her hands. Finally she said, “This way.”

Jack held his sore right forearm with his left hand as they walked together past a small empty park. He kept his eyes shifting from the apartment buildings on his right to the woman walking on his left. He saw a pay phone and thought about calling someone at Mission Berlin to come pick them up, but decided against it, figuring they could make it to Clay Headquarters faster by taxi, and he didn’t want to wait around out here for a ride.

—

I
t was pitch dark in the Sparrplatz, the block-wide green space next to where Jack and Marta walked in the freezing rain, so they could not see the lone man watching them from the trees next to the run-down basketball court. He stood still and silent until they made a right on Lynarstrasse and disappeared from view, then he moved out of the park, passing wide of the glow of a streetlight as he walked on the pavement they had crossed thirty seconds earlier.

He wore a leather bomber jacket, a riding cap, and leather gloves. Anyone watching from the street might note that, even though the rain was heavy enough to warrant one, the man had no umbrella, but he was otherwise unremarkable and impossible to identify.

The man turned on Lynarstrasse just as Jack Ryan and Marta Scheuring made a left on Tegeler Strasse in front of him.

The man picked up the pace and ducked his neck deeper in his bomber jacket to ward off the rain and the chill.

—

J
ack was beginning to worry about Marta. Her nerves were getting the best of her as they walked alone in the rain, as if the darkness between streetlamps was terrorizing her anew. And each time a vehicle passed, she recoiled in terror and looked to Jack for comfort.

They spotted a passing taxi on Fennstrasse, but it drove right past them as they tried to flag it down. A second cab already had a late-night fare, so it rolled by as well. Jack was getting frustrated; he didn’t like walking the nearly empty streets, more because of the danger Marta was in than any thoughts of his own safety.

Marta saw the headlights of an approaching vehicle before Jack did, for the simple reason that Jack was too busy watching Marta to have his eyes focused four blocks up the road.

When Jack did look, he could not tell what sort of vehicle it was. “Is that a taxi?” Jack asked, and he looked back to Marta, and realized she had stopped walking.

“Das weiss ich nicht,”
she said. Her eyes were locked on the headlights, and they were wide in terror.

“Marta, relax,” Jack said, and he stepped to the curb, ready to flag down the car.

But it was not a taxi. It was a large white van.

And it began to slow down as it neared them. It pulled to a stop along the sidewalk in the middle of the block, not fifty feet away.

A side door slid open loudly.

“It’s him!” she said, her voice panic-stricken.

Marta Scheuring turned and ran.

Jack started to do the same, but as he started following after her he looked back over his shoulder. A huge stack of newspapers, all lashed together with cord and wrapped in clear plastic, flew out of the open door of the van. The newspapers slammed to the ground at the front door of an all-night market.

A moment later, a man stepped out of the market, gave the van a quick wave, then lifted the newspapers and returned to his warm and dry store.

The van drove off down the street.

Jack called out to Marta: “It’s okay!” He blew out a sigh of relief, but only until he realized Marta Scheuring was gone.

He saw the door to an apartment building closing just yards away; he raced for it and tried to follow her through, but the door would not reopen.

Marta had locked the door.

He ran around the outside of the building, looking for some other way in, but when he turned the corner he saw that Marta had left the building through a side door, and now she was running on the other side of the street.

“Marta!” he shouted at her as she raced through the rain, but she did not look back, she only kept running.

Jack chased after her as she disappeared down a darkened street called Am Nordhafen. She had at least fifty yards on him, and he had a feeling he wouldn’t catch her before she got where she was going.

The Berlin Wall was just two blocks away.

He shouted for her once more, this time while he raced behind her alongside the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal, a narrow concrete-lined waterway that ran along Ryan’s right as he neared the Berlin Wall.

Marta darted between buildings to her left now, Jack following her in the darkness across a vacant lot, but as he rounded an opening in a metal fence, he slipped in slick mud. It took him a moment to climb back to his feet, and by the time he did so, he’d lost sight of the German woman. Several buildings that ran along the open lot were all dark and vacant, and he saw a dozen blackened windows at ground level that she could have climbed through.

He called out to her, and his voice echoed off the buildings. “Marta? Don’t do this. I need you to trust me. We can help you.”

There was no response. He ran to a window, looked inside to a darkened room that smelled like sawdust and wet plaster, but he saw no trace of the German woman.

She had talked of using a tunnel to move into and out of East Berlin; he had no idea if it was anywhere near here, but he did know that he didn’t have a prayer of finding it in the black night.

He didn’t want to admit it at first, but slowly he came to the conclusion that the German woman was gone.

Jack stood there in the vacant lot for a full minute, and he noticed his wet hair for the first time, the mud on his pants, and the chill in the air. He walked back to the street, headed down to the corner, and stood there under a streetlight.

The Berlin Wall stood just a block ahead on Boyenstrasse, and beyond the outer wall were the glowing lights illuminating the death strip, a wide-open band between the wall and the backland wall on the eastern side. Inside the strip were automatic machine guns, and men with guns and dogs and searchlights were positioned on the far side of the wall.

Jack stood there, still coming to the realization that he’d lost the proof for his theory concerning the Morningstar case. A car pulled into view on Sellerstrasse, and then, just an instant later, the lights of a second vehicle appeared on Am Nordhafen. A third set of headlights moved across the bridge over the canal to his right.

It wasn’t lost on Jack that he had seen only three vehicles in the past ten minutes, yet now suddenly three cars were converging on the street corner where he stood.

He stepped back out of the light and moved up into the vacant lot.

A van raced south on Am Nordhafen, skidded at the intersection, and made a left. A second vehicle, the one crossing the bridge, also raced by the intersection just vacated by Ryan. He got a glimpse inside the sedan as it passed underneath the streetlight, and he saw four men inside. He didn’t know who they were, but he had the distinct impression both vehicles were racing into the area to hunt for Marta Scheuring.

Ryan turned to head back up Am Nordhafen, but he saw a figure standing on the sidewalk some seventy-five yards away. The man—Jack assumed he was male because the figure wore a bomber jacket and a riding cap—stood next to a metalworking shop. He was perfectly still and staring in Jack’s direction.

Jack crossed the street to the relative seclusion of some trees lining the Nordhafen, a wider area in the Berlin-Spandau canal used for docking and turning around barges. Before he stepped into the trees he looked back and saw that the man was gone. Jack thought he might have gone into the metal shop, although it was certainly closed at this time of night.

Wherever he was, Jack was certain the man had not crossed the street himself.

Jack walked north on the little path between the trees on his right and the waterway on his left. His plan right now was to make it back up to the Fennstrasse, the largest street in the area, and to find a taxi. He’d go directly back to the CIA station at Mission Berlin in Clay Headquarters, and there he would talk to Berlin’s CIA chief of station. He hoped the COS could rouse any assets in town to get out into the neighborhood to find Marta before she was found by the Russians, or the East Germans, or whoever the hell was after her now.

Jack began running, knowing time was of the essence.

But he did not get far. Two men in trench coats appeared from the trees in front of him and blocked his way forward.

Ryan stopped in his tracks.

It was dark, but Ryan could see the men were in their thirties; they had short, cropped hair and mustaches. One of the men asked, “Who are you?”

He had a strong German accent, but he’d spoken English, which Ryan found odd, although he knew it was possible they had heard him call out to Marta a minute before.

“Who are
you
?” Jack replied.

“Polizei,”
one said, but neither was wearing a uniform, and neither pulled out a badge.

“Sure you are.” Jack said this as he looked around him. He was alone here, in a secluded area. Behind him was a metal railing, beyond which was a six-foot drop into a frigid canal.

He would not be running away from these guys. He’d have to go through them.

“Show me your identification.” It was the same man talking.

What the hell?
He was in West Berlin, not East Berlin. Ryan didn’t want to show these guys anything, but he reached into his coat pocket as if to comply.

His hand wrapped around the four-inch stiletto, and he clicked it open.

As he started to pull the knife from his coat, both men lunged at him; the first knocked the knife away, and the second got behind him and tried to pin his arms behind his back.

Ryan slammed his elbow back into the man behind, knocking him down, and then he kicked out at the man in front of him. His foot caught nothing but air, but he managed to make a little space for himself, so he turned around and charged at the man there, crashing into him, and the two of them slammed into the iron railing along the water. Jack threw a punch at the German; it grazed his chin without doing much damage, but it did serve to keep the man back for a moment. Jack advanced on him, had him backed up against the railing now, with no room to maneuver. He threw another punch that hit the man in the nose, and the mustached German fell in a heap along the footpath.

Ryan spun around now as fast as he could because he knew he’d left the second attacker somewhere behind him. As soon as he looked up, he saw the man was there on the footpath, ten feet away at most, and he was raising a small black pistol directly at Ryan’s head.

Ryan froze as he looked into the German’s cold eyes. They told him, without any doubt, that the man was about to shoot him dead.

He thought of his family.

As Jack tightened in anticipation of the shot, he saw movement on the gunman’s left—a dark figure appeared from the trees, running across the footpath at an incredible pace. The gunman noticed the movement out of the corner of this eye, and he started to turn his weapon in the direction of the figure, but his speed was no match for the oncoming threat.

The man in the bomber jacket and the racing cap slammed into the German attacker; his gun arm flew to the side and a shot cracked, flashed in the darkness. Jack Ryan leapt back and away from the blast, but he stumbled over the legs of the unconscious man behind him. He fell backward, his lower back hitting the footpath railing, and his momentum flipped him headlong over the side.

Jack cried out as he fell, and he tried to reach out to grab something on his way down, but he hit the water several feet below. As he broke the surface, the cold enveloped him. He flailed in the black water; he had no sense of up and down as the cold shocked his system and disoriented him.

Jack’s head came out of the water; he spit out a mouthful of water and sucked cold air. He was ready to dive back down below the water to avoid gunfire, but he looked up and saw no one at the railing.

Then, for just an instant, he saw the man in the bomber jacket. His hat was gone, but all Jack could tell was that he was a white male with a beard and mustache. The man put his foot on the bottom rail, and he looked like he was going to leap over and dive into the water next to Jack.

A second gunshot rang out. The man on the rail stopped in mid-movement, he raised his hands and turned around, and then he disappeared from view.

Ryan felt himself losing feeling in his arms and legs; he kicked ferociously and waved his arms around in an attempt to swim to the edge of the canal. After just a moment he realized the current was pulling him to the south. In the space of just a few seconds he’d already drifted ten yards. He looked down the canal and saw a bridge just another fifty yards on. One of the side spans entering the water near the abutment would be in reach if he just went with the flow, so he concentrated on not drowning and let the water take him.

—

I
t took Ryan nearly five minutes to make it back up to street level. By now West German police cars were all over Am Nordhafen, after multiple residents of nearby apartment buildings had reported the gunfire. Most had reasonably assumed someone had been caught in the death strip of the Berlin Wall and shot by East German border guards, but quickly it became clear the noise had come from two blocks within the West German side of the border.

Ryan staggered up to the first patrol car parked by the bridge. Through chattering teeth he told the men he was an American diplomat, and he’d been attacked by two men, one of whom had a pistol.

As far as Jack knew, a Good Samaritan had saved him, but as for what had happened to the man in the bomber jacket, he had no clue.

He was given a blanket and told he’d be taken to the hospital, but Jack insisted they drive him back to the point where it happened instead.

Here they found no trace of either the Good Samaritan or the attackers, and soon the police insisted on taking Ryan to get checked out by medical personnel. He talked them into taking him straight to Clay Headquarters, where he would have access to American medical facilities to get the gash in his forearm treated, but only because he wanted to alert the CIA to everything that had happened in the past hour.

Jack wanted them to do whatever they could to help both Marta and the man who saved his life, because, he feared, they were both now in the hands of the East Germans.