by Tom Clancy
“So, to you they’re just criminals?”
A nod, and a serious expression. “Terrorism is a crime. That’s dogma at the FBI, where I came up. And these four who got killed yesterday in Switzerland were criminals. Unfortunately for them, the Swiss police have assembled and trained what appears to be an excellent, professional special-operations team.”
“How would you rate the takedown?”
“Pretty good. The TV coverage shows no errors at all. All the hostages were rescued, and the criminals all were killed. That’s par for the course in an incident like this. In the abstract, you would like to take the criminals down alive if possible, but it is not always possible—the lives of the hostages have absolute priority in a case like this one.”
“But the terrorists, don’t they have rights—”
“As a matter of principle, yes, they do have the same rights as other criminals. We teach that at the FBI, too, and the best thing you can do as a law enforcement officer in a case like this one is to arrest them, put them in front of a judge and jury, and convict them, but remember that the hostages are innocent victims, and their lives are at risk because of the criminals’ actions. Therefore, you try to give them a chance to surrender—really, you try to disarm them if you can.
“But very often you do not have that luxury,” Henriksen went on. “Based on what I saw on TV from this incident, the Swiss police team acted no differently than what we were trained to do at Quantico. You only use deadly force when necessary—but when it’s necessary, you do use it.”
“But who decides when it’s necessary?”
“The commander on the scene makes that decision, based on his training, experience, and expertise.” Then, Henriksen didn’t go on, people like you second-guess the hell out of him for the next couple of weeks.
“Your company trains local police forces in SWAT tactics, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does. We have numerous veterans of the FBI HRT, Delta Force, and other ‘special’ organizations, and we could use this Swiss operation as a textbook example of how it’s done,” Henriksen said—because his was an international corporation, which trained foreign police forces as well, and being nice to the Swiss wouldn’t hurt his bottom line one bit.
“Well, Mr. Henriksen, thanks for joining us this morning. International terrorism expert William Henriksen, CEO of Global Security, Inc., an international consulting firm. It’s twenty-four minutes after the hour.” In the studio, Henriksen kept his calm, professional face on until five seconds after the light on the nearest camera went out. At his corporate headquarters, they would have already taped this interview to add to the vast library of such things. GSI was known over most of the world, and their introductory tape included snippets from many such interviews. The floor director walked him off the set to the makeup room, where the powder was removed, then let him walk himself out to where his car was parked.
That had gone well, he thought, going through the mental checklist. He’d have to find out who’d trained the Swiss. He made a mental note to have one of his contacts chase that one down. If it were a private company, that was serious competition, though it was probably the Swiss army—perhaps even a military formation disguised as policemen—maybe with some technical assistance from the German GSG-9. A couple of phone calls should run that one down.
Popov’s four-engine Airbus A-340 touched down on time at JFK International. You could always trust the Swiss to do everything on time. The police team had probably even had a schedule for the previous night’s activities, he thought whimsically. His first-class seat was close to the door, which allowed him to be the third passenger out, then off to claim his bags and go through the ordeal of U.S. Customs. America, he’d long since learned, was the most difficult country to enter as a foreigner—though with his minimal baggage and nothing-to-declare entry, the process was somewhat easier this time. The customs clerks were kind and waved him right through to the cabstand, where, for the usual exorbitant fee, he engaged a Pakistani driver to take him into town, making him wonder idly if the cabbies had a deal with the customs people. But he was on an expense account—meaning he had to get a receipt—and, besides, he had ensured that day that he could afford such things without one, hadn’t he? He smiled as he gazed at the passing urban sprawl. It got thicker and thicker on the way to Manhattan.
The cab dropped him off at his apartment house. The flat was paid for by his employer, which made it a tax-deductible business expense for them—Popov was learning about American tax law—and free for him. He spent a few minutes dumping his dirty laundry and hanging up his good clothes before heading downstairs and having the doorman flag a cab. From there it was another fifteen minutes to the office.
“So, how did it go?” the boss asked. There was an odd buzz in the office, designed to interfere with any listening devices that a corporate rival might place. Corporate espionage was a major factor in the life of this man’s company, and the defenses against it were at least as good as those the KGB had used. And Popov had once believed that governments had the best of everything. That was certainly not true in America.
“It went much as I expected. They were foolish—really rather amateurish, despite all the training we gave them back in the eighties. I told them to feel free to rob the bank as cover for the real mission—”
“Which was?”
“To be killed,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich replied at once. “At least, that is what I understood your intentions to be, sir.” His words occasioned a smile of a sort Popov wasn’t used to. He made a note to check the stock value of the bank. Had the intention of this “mission” been to affect the standing of the bank? That didn’t seem very likely, but though he didn’t need to know why he was doing these things, his natural curiosity had been aroused. This man was treating him like a mercenary, and though Popov knew that was precisely what he’d become since leaving the service of his country, it was vaguely and distantly annoying to his sense of professionalism. “Will you require further such services?”
“What happened to the money?” the boss wanted to know.
A diffident reply: “I’m sure the Swiss will find a use for it.” Certainly his banker would. “Surely you did not expect me to recover it?”
A shake of the boss’s head. “No, not really, and it was a trivial sum anyway.”
Popov nodded his understanding. Trivial sum? No Soviet-employed agent had ever gotten so much in a single payment—the KGB had always been niggardly in its payments to those whom it gave money, regardless of the importance of the information that had earned it—nor had the KGB ever been so casual in disposing of cash in any amount. Every single ruble had to be accounted for, else the bean-counters at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square would bring down the devil’s own wrath on the field officer who’d been so lax in his operations! The next thing he wondered about was how his employer had laundered the cash. In America if you deposited or withdrew so little as ten thousand dollars in cash, the bank was required to make a written record of it. It was supposedly an inconvenience for drug dealers, but they managed to work with it nevertheless. Did other countries have similar rules? Popov didn’t know. Switzerland did not, he was sure, but that many banknotes didn’t just materialize in a bank’s vaults, did they? Somehow his boss had handled that, and done it well, Popov reminded himself. Perhaps Ernst Model had been an amateur, but this man was not. Something to keep in mind, the former spy told himself in large, red, mental letters.
There followed a few seconds of silence. Then: “Yes, I will require another operation.”
“What, exactly?” Popov asked, and got the answer immediately. “Ah.” A nod. He even used the correct word: operation. How very strange. Dmitriy wondered if he’d be well advised to check up on his employer, to find out more about him. After all, his own life was now in pawn to him—and the reverse was true as well, of course, but the other man’s life was not an immediate concern to Popov. How hard would it be? To one who owned a computer and a modem, it was no longer
difficult at all . . . if one had the time. For now, it was clear, he’d have but one night in his apartment before traveling overseas again. Well, it was an easy cure for jet lag.
They looked like robots, Chavez saw, peering around a computer-generated corner. The hostages, too, but in this case the hostages were computer-generated children, all girls in red-and-white striped dresses or jumpers—Ding couldn’t decide which. It was clearly a psychological effect programmed into the system by whoever had set up the parameters for the program, called SWAT 6.3.2. Some California-based outfit had first produced this for Delta Force under a DOD contract overseen by RAND Corporation.
It was expensive to use, mainly because of the electronic suit he wore. It was the same weight as the usual black mission suit—lead sheets sewn into the fabric had seen to that—and everything down to the gloves was filled with copper wires and sensors that told the computer—an old Cray YMP—exactly what his body was doing, and in turn projected a computer-generated image into the goggles he wore. Dr. Bellow gave the commentary, playing the roles of bad-guy leader and good-guy advisor in this particular game. Ding turned his head and saw Eddie Price right behind him and Hank Patterson and Steve Lincoln across the way at the other simulated corner—robotic figures with numbers on them to let him know who was who.
Chavez pumped his right arm up and down three times, calling for flash-bangs, then peered around the corner one more time—• at his chair, Clark saw the black line appear on the white corner, then hit the 7 key on his computer keyboard—
• bad-guy #4 trained his weapon on the gaggle of schoolgirls—
“Steve! Now!” Chavez ordered.
Lincoln pulled the pin on the flash-bang. It was essentially a grenade simulator, heavy in explosive charge to produce noise and magnesium powder for a blinding flash—simulated for the computer program—and designed to blind and disorient through the ear-shattering blast, which was loud enough to upset the inner ear’s mechanism for balance. That sound, though not quite as bad, came through their earphones as well, along with the white-out of their VR goggles. It still made them jump.
The echo hadn’t even started to fade when Chavez dived into the room, weapon up and zeroing in on Terrorist #1, the supposed enemy leader. Here the computer system was faulty, Chavez thought. The European members of his team didn’t shoot the way the Americans did. They pushed their weapons forward against the double-looped sling, actually extending their H&Ks before firing them. Chavez and the Americans tended to tuck them in close against the shoulder. Ding got his first burst off before his body hit the floor, but the computer system didn’t always score this as a hit—which pissed Ding off greatly. He didn’t ever miss, as a guy named Guttenach had discovered on finding St. Peter in front of him without much in the way of warning. Hitting the floor, Chavez rolled, repeated the burst, and swung the MP-10 for another target. His earphones produced the too-loud report of the shots (the SWAT 6.3.2 program for some reason didn’t allow for suppressed weapons). To his right, Steve Lincoln and Hank Patterson were in the room and shooting at the six terrorists. Their short, controlled bursts rang in his ears, and in his VR goggles, heads exploded into red clouds quite satisfactorily—• but bad guy #5 depressed his trigger, not at the rescuers, but rather at the hostages, which started going down until at least three of the Rainbow shooters took him out at once—
• “Clear!” Chavez shouted, jumping to his feet and going to the images of the bad guys. One, the computer said, was still residually alive, albeit bleeding from the head. Ding kicked his weapon loose, but by that time #4’s shade had stopped moving.
“Clear!” “Clear!” shouted his team members.
“Exercise concluded,” Clark’s voice told them. Ding and his men removed their Virtual Reality goggles to find a room about double the size of a basketball court, and entirely absent of objects, empty as a high-school gym at midnight. It took a little getting used to. The simulation had been of terrorists who’d taken a kids’ school—evidently a girls’ school, for greater psychological effect.
“How many did we lose?” Chavez asked the ceiling.
“Six killed and three wounded, the computer says.” Clark entered the room.
“What went wrong?” Ding asked, suspecting he knew what the answer was.
“I spotted you looking around the corner, boy,” Rainbow Six answered. “That alerted the bad guys.”
“Shit,” Chavez responded. “That’s a program glitch. In real life I’d use the mirror rig, or take this Kevlar hat off, but the program doesn’t let us. The flash-bangs would have gone in clean.”
“Maybe,” John Clark allowed. “But your score on this one is a B-minus.”
“Gee, thanks, Mr. C,” the Team-2 leader groused. “Next you gonna say our shooting was off?”
“Yours was, the machine says.”
“God damn it, John! The program doesn’t simulate marksmanship worth a damn, and I will not train my people to shoot in a way the machine likes instead’a doing it the way that puts steel on target!”
“Settle down, Domingo. I know your troops can shoot. Okay, follow me. Let’s watch the replay.”
“Chavez, why did you take this way in?” Stanley asked when everyone was seated.
“This doorway is wider, and it gives a better field of fire—”
“For both sides,” Stanley observed.
“Battlefields are like that,” Ding countered. “But when you have surprise and speed going for you, that advantage conveys also. I put my backup team on the back door, but the configuration of the building didn’t allow them to participate in the takedown. Noonan had the building spiked. We had good coverage of the bad guys, and I timed the assault to catch them all in the gym—”
“With all six guns colocated with the hostages.”
“Better that than to have to go looking for them. Maybe one of them could flip a grenade around a corner and kill a bunch of the Barbie dolls. No, sir, I thought about coming in from the back, or doing a two-axis assault, but the distances and timing factors didn’t look good to me. Are you saying I’m wrong, sir?”
“In this case, yes.”
Bullshit, Chavez thought. “Okay, show me what you think.”
It was as much a matter of personal style as right and wrong, and Alistair Stanley had been there and done that as much as any man in the world, Ding knew. So he watched and listened. Clark, he saw, did much the same.
“I don’t like it,” Noonan said, after Stanley concluded his presentation. “It’s too easy to put a noisemaker on the doorknob. The damned things only cost ten bucks or so. You can buy one in any airport gift shop—people use them on hotel doors in case somebody tries to come in uninvited. We had a case in the Bureau when a subject used one—nearly blew the whole mission on us, but the flash-bang on the outside window covered the noise pretty well.”
“And what if your spikes didn’t give us positions on all the subjects?”
“But they did, sir,” Noonan countered. “We had time to track them.” In fact the training exercise had compressed the time by a factor of ten, but that was normal for the computer simulations. “This computer stuff is great for planning the takedowns, but it falls a little flat on other stuff. I think we did it pretty well.” His concluding sentence also announced the fact that Noonan wanted to be a full member of Team-2, not just their techno-weenie, Ding thought. Tim had been spending a lot of time in the shooting range, and was now the equal of any member of the team. Well, he’d worked the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team under Gus Werner. He had the credentials to join the varsity. Werner had been considered for the Six job on Rainbow. But then, so had Stanley.
“Okay,” Clark said next, “let’s roll the tape.”
That was the nastiest surprise of all. Terrorist #2, the computer said, had taken his head shot and spun around with his finger depressed on the trigger of his AK-74, and one of his rounds had neatly transfixed Chavez’s head. Ding was dead, according to the Cray computer, because the theoretic
al bullet had gone under the brim of his Kevlar helmet and transited right through his brain. The shock of it to Chavez had surprising magnitude. A random event generated by the computer program, it was also quite real, because real life did include such random events. They’d talked about getting Lexan visors for their helmets, which might or might not stop a bullet, but had decided against it because of the distortion it would impose on their sight, and therefore their shooting . . . maybe we need to re-think that one, Chavez told himself. The bottom line of the computer’s opinion was simple: if it was possible, then it could happen, and if it could, sooner or later, it would, and somebody on the team would have to drive to a house on post and tell a wife that she’d just become a widow. Because of a random event—bad luck. A hell of a thing to tell somebody who’d just lost a husband. Cause of death, bad luck. Chavez shivered a little at the thought. How would Patsy take it? Then he shook it off. It was a very low order of probability, mathematically right down there with being hit by lightning on a golf course or being wasted in a plane crash, and life was risk, and you avoided the risks only by being dead. Or something like that. He turned his head to look at Eddie Price.
“Unforgiving things, dice,” the sergeant major observed with a wry smile. “But I got the chappie who killed you, Ding.”
“Thanks, Eddie. Makes me feel a lot better. Shoot faster next time?”
“I shall make a point of it, sir,” Price promised.