Chapter 21:
A possibly boring chapter. Some background from Tom Clancy's Patriot Games to give you guys an insight to the long, bitter Ryan-Miller enmity.
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"No-ooo!" Frank gasped in horror as Shane Miller grabbed hold of Katie's jaw.
The young girl whimpered and tried to scream as her captor shoved the barrel of his gun into her mouth. Instantly she froze; too petrified to struggle any further. She shut her eyes in terror as drops of tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Shane! Please! NO," Frank's tensed voice came again, almost choking. He felt sick at the sight of the gun in the girl's mouth. Shane Miller shot him a look of disgust.
"This was what her dad did to mine a long time ago. I'm just returning the deed," Miller's voice was tight and laced with hatred. Some twenty-five years ago, that was exactly how Jack Ryan Sr. and Sean Miller stood on the deck of Baltimore Harbor, with Jack Ryan holding a gun in the senior Miller's mouth.
Neither Shane nor Katie was in this world yet to witness the incident, but they had sure heard about it from their families. It had been a long history between the two families, ever since Jack Ryan, long before his presidency days, had by chance, foiled an assassination attempt on the Prince of Wales while he was vacationing in London. Timothy and Sean Miller, both members of the Ulster Liberation Army, then, were leading the attack on the royal family and the Senior Ryan had pulled two gunshots onto Timothy Miller's chest, killing him right on the spot. Sean Miller had been captured by the authorities and sentenced to life imprisonment, but he later escaped while on his way to Albany Prison, with some help from his fellow ULA members.
That incident sparked the beginning of the bitter enmity between the two families, Sean Miller and the ULA had launched a couple attacks in the year that followed. The attacks were partly to avenge Timothy Miller's death, and partly also to undermine public and specifically American support for the IRA, as the ULA had wanted take over the IRA leadership. In the first attack, Miller had seriously injured Ryan's wife, and almost killed his eldest daughter, Sally. (Sally was Ryan's first-born, and his only child then.) Nine months later, the ULA made a second attack, and the enmity was almost put to rest for good, when the authorities caught up with Miller on the decks of Baltimore Harbor.
You don't talk to snakes… you kill snakes…
CIA analyst Jack Ryan had reached Sean Miller on the decks before the Marines and the state troopers arrested him. In his anger for the injuries that Miller had caused his wife and daughter, he had pushed Miller back against the metal wall of a container, his forearm across the man's neck. Savoring the feel of the man's throat on his wrist, he had brought up the pistol and forced it into Sean's mouth. His eyes bored into Sean's as he tightened his finger on the trigger…
And now, a little more than twenty-five years later, young Shane Miller was doing to Katie Ryan just what her father did to his. The girl sat paralyzed in fear, feeling Shane's grip on her throat, and the cold gun metal against the wall of her mouth.
Next to Katie, Frank Hardy swallowed. "But her father – he didn't shoot, did he?" he asked Shane. No, he answered his own question. The older Miller had lived long enough to father a son, so Ryan Sr. could not have pulled the trigger then. Also, Shane did say something about his father being shot by Katie's brother just two years ago. So, by some way or other, Sean Miller must have escaped death, as well as jail time.
Frank looked at Shane cautiously. His voice had sounded calm, but his stomach was all in knots. His heart was in his throat and he felt like heaving. But there was nothing he could do. Even the slightest movement might drive Shane to pull the trigger, and blow the girl's brains out. No, the only thing he could do now is to keep talking, and hope that all the talk would distract Shane and prevent him from being too trigger-friendly.
Shane Miller threw him a dirty glance.
"Were you the one who blew up my van too?" Frank asked, making a divert to maneuver for time by prolonging the conversation.
"Your van!" Shane gave a mocking laugh "Everyone thinks it's your van that got bombed, even the police. Believe me, it was a perfect cover up when things didn't work according to plan. No one knew I was after the Ryans. But no, Frank. It wasn't your van. It was her car. It was supposed to blow her up on her way home. She was just lucky she wasn't in it. Your van caught fire when the car blew up, not the other way round. Fortunately, no one knew."
"You beast!" cried Frank in his mind. All the same he bit hard on his tongue, not wanting to provoke Shane in any way.
"Okay, enough of talk now," Shane said, and he cocked the gun.
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p/s: We don't own the Prince, nor the ULA, nor the assassination attempt, nor anything that happened twenty-five years ago; not even the gun Jack Ryan held in Sean Miller's mouth. We only own the present conditions surrounding Frank, Shane and Katie.