by Tom Clancy
But things were already leaving Gassman’s hands. The senior Thompson executive was on his cell phone, talking with his corporate headquarters, a call quickly bucked up to his own chairman, caught in a sidewalk café having a pleasant lunch that the call aborted instantly. This executive called the Defense Minister, and that got things rolling very rapidly indeed. The report from the Thompson manager on the scene had been concise and unequivocal. The Defense Minister called him directly and had his secretary take all the notes they needed. These were typed up and faxed to both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, and the latter called his Spanish counterpart with an urgent request for confirmation. It was already a political exercise, and in the Defense Ministry another phone call was made.
“Yes, this is John Clark,” Rainbow Six said into the phone. “Yes, sir. Where is that exactly . . . I see . . . how many? Okay. Please send us whatever additional information you receive. . . . No, sir, we cannot move until the host government makes the request. Thank you, Minister.” Clark changed buttons on his phone. “Al, get in here. We have some more business coming in.” Next he made the same request of Bill Tawney, Bellow, Chavez, and Covington.
The Thompson executive still in Worldpark assembled his people at a food stand and polled them. A former tank officer in the French army, he worked hard and quickly to bring order from chaos. Those employees who still had their children, he set aside. Those who did not, he counted, and determined that thirty-three children were missing, along with one or maybe two children in wheelchairs. The parents were predictably frantic, but he got and kept them under control, then called his chairman again to amplify his initial report on the situation. After that he got some paper on which to compile a list of names and ages, keeping his own emotions under control as best he could and thanking God that his own children were too old to have made this trip. With that done, he took his people away from the castle, found a park employee and asked where he might find phones and fax machines. They were all escorted through a wooden swinging door, into a well-disguised service building and down into the underground, then walked to the alternate park command post, where they met Mike Dennis, still holding the folder with his welcoming speech for the Thompson group and trying to make some sense of things.
Gassman arrived just then, in time to see the fax machine transmitting a list of the known hostages to Paris. Not a minute later, the French Defense Minister called. It turned out that he knew the senior Thompson executive, Colonel Robert Gamelin, who’d headed the development team for the LeClerc battle tank’s second-generation fire-control system a few years before.
“How many?”
“Thirty-three from our group, perhaps a few more, but the terrorists seem to have selected our children quite deliberately, Monsieur Minister. This is a job for the Legion,” Colonel Gamelin said forcefully, meaning the Foreign Legion’s special-operations team.
“I will see, Colonel.” The connection broke.
“I am Captain Gassman,” the guy in the strange hat said to Gamelin.
“Bloody hell, I took the family there last year,” Peter Covington said. “You could use up a whole fucking battalion retaking the place. It’s a bloody nightmare, lots of buildings, lots of space, multilevel. I think it even has an underground service area.”
“Maps, diagrams?” Clark asked Mrs. Foorgate.
“I’ll see,” his secretary replied, leaving the conference room.
“What do we know?” Chavez asked.
“Not much, but the French are pretty worked up, and they’re requesting that the Spanish let us in and—”
“This just arrived,” Alice Foorgate said, handing over a fax and leaving again.
“List of hostages—Jesus, they’re all kids, ages four to eleven . . . thirty-three of them . . . holy shit,” Clark breathed, looking it over, then handing it to Alistair Stanley.
“Both teams, if we deploy,” the Scotsman said immediately.
“Yeah.” Clark nodded. “Looks that way.” Then the phone beeped.
“Phone call for Mr. Tawney,” a female voice announced on the speaker.
“This is Tawney,” the intel chief said on picking up the receiver. “Yes, Roger . . . yes, we know, we got a call from—oh, I see. Very well. Let me get some things done here, Roger. Thank you.” Tawney hung up. “The Spanish government have requested through the British embassy in Madrid that we deploy at once.”
“Okay, people,” John said, standing. “Saddle up. Christ, that was a fast call.”
Chavez and Covington ran from the room to head for their respective team buildings. Then Clark’s phone rang again. “Yeah?” He listened for several minutes. “Okay, that works for me. Thank you, sir.”
“What was that, John?”
“MOD just requested an MC-130 from the First Special Ops Wing. They’re chopping it to us, along with Malloy’s helo. Evidently, there’s a military airfield about twenty clicks from where we’re going, and Whitehall is trying to get us cleared into it.” And better yet, he didn’t have to add, the Hercules transport could lift them right out of Hereford. “How fast can we get moving?”
“Less than an hour,” Stanley replied after a second’s consideration.
“Good, ’cuz that Herky Bird will be here in forty minutes or less. The crew’s heading out to it right now.”
“Listen up people,” Chavez was saying half a click away as he walked into the team’s bay. “We got a job. Boots and saddles, people. Shag it.”
They started moving at once for the equipment lockers before Sergeant Patterson raised the obvious objection: “Ding, Team-1’s the go-team. What gives?”
“Looks like they need us both for this ride, Hank. Everybody goes today.”
“Fair ’nuff.” Patterson headed off to his locker.
Their gear was already packed, always set up that way as a matter of routine. The mil-spec plastic containers were wheeled to the door even before the truck arrived to load them up.
Colonel Gamelin got the word before Captain Gassman did. The French Defense Minister called him directly to announce that a special-operations team was flying down at the request of the Spanish government, and would be there in three hours or less. He relayed this information to his people, somewhat to the chagrin of the Spanish police official, who then called his own minister in Madrid to inform him of what was happening, and it turned out that the minister was just getting the word from his own Foreign Ministry. Additional police were on the way, and their orders were to take no action beyond the establishment of a perimeter. Gassman’s reaction to being whip-sawed was predictable disorientation, but he had his orders. Now with thirty of his cops on the scene or on the way, he ordered a third of them to move inward, slowly and carefully, toward the castle on the surface, while two more did the same in the underground, with their weapons holstered or on safe, and with orders not to fire under any circumstances, an instruction more easily given than followed.
Things had come well to this point, René thought, and the park command center was better than anything he’d hoped for. He was learning to use the computer system to select TV cameras that seemed to cover the entire grounds, from the parking lots to the waiting areas for the various rides. The pictures were in black and white, and once a venue was selected he could zoom and pan the camera to find anything he wished. There were twenty monitors set on the walls of the office, each of them linked by a computer terminal to at least five cameras. Nobody would get close to the castle without his knowledge. Excellent.
In the secretaries’ room just through the door, Andre had the children sitting on the floor in one tight little knot, except for the two in their wheelchairs, whom he’d placed against the wall. The children were uniformly wide-eyed and frightened-looking, as well they might be, and at the moment they were quiet, which suited him. He’d slung his submachine gun over his shoulder. It wasn’t needed at the moment, was it?
“You will stay still,” he told them in French, then backed to the door into the c
ommand center. “One,” he called.
“Yes, Nine,” René answered.
“Things are under control here. Time to make a call?”
“Yes,” One agreed. He took his seat and picked up a phone, then examined the buttons, and finding a likely one, he pressed it.
“Yes?”
“Who is this?”
“I am Mike Dennis. I am managing director of the park.”
“Bien, I am One, and I am now in command of your Worldpark.”
“Okay, Mr. One. What do you want?”
“You have the police here?”
“Yes, they are here now.”
“Good. I will speak with their commander then.”
“Captain?” Dennis waved. Gassman took the three steps to his desk.
“I am Captain Dario Gassman of the Guardia Civil.”
“I am One. I am in command. You know that I have taken over thirty hostages, yes?”
“Sí, I am aware of this,” the captain replied, keeping his voice as calm as circumstances allowed. He’d read books and had training on talking with hostage-holding terrorists, and now wished that he’d had a lot more of it. “Do you have a request for me?”
“I do not make requests. I will give you orders to be carried out at once, and have you relay orders to others. Do you understand?” René asked in English.
“Sí, comprendo.”
“All of our hostages are French. You will establish a line of communication with the French embassy in Madrid. My orders are for them. Please keep in mind that none of our hostages are citizens of your country. This affair is between us and the French. Do you understand that?”
“Señor One, the safety of those children is my responsibility. This is Spanish soil.”
“Be that as it may,” One replied, “you will open a telephone link to the French embassy at once. Let me know when it is done.”
“I must first of all relay your request to my superiors. I will get back to you when I have my instructions from them.”
“Quickly,” René told him, before hanging up.
It was noisy in the back. The four Allison engines screamed, as they accelerated the MC-130 down the runway, then the aircraft rotated abruptly, jumping into the sky for its flight to Spain. Clark and Stanley were in the communications compartment forward, listening as best they could with their heavily insulated headphones to information coming to them, disjointed and fragmentary as usual. The voice promised maps and plans when they got there, but there was no additional information on the number or identity of the terrorists—they were working on that, the voice told them. Just then, a fax arrived from Paris via the American 1st Spec-Operations Wing headquarters, which had secure communications equipment currently linked to Hereford. It was just another list of the hostages, and this time Clark took the time to read the names, and part of his mind tried to conjure up faces to go with them, knowing he’d be wrong in every case, but doing it even so. Thirty-three children sitting in an amusement-park castle surrounded by men with guns, number at least six, maybe ten, maybe more; they were still trying to develop that information. Shit, John thought. He knew that some things couldn’t be hurried, but nothing in this business ever went fast enough, even when you were doing it all yourself.
Aft the men slipped off their seat belts and started suiting up in their black Nomex, saying little to one another while the two team leaders went forward to find out what they could. Back ten minutes later to dress themselves, Chavez and Covington tilted their heads in the typical what-the-hell expression that their troopers recognized as news that was something other than good. The team leaders told their men what little they knew, and the expressions were transferred to the shooters, along with neutral thoughts. Kids as hostages. Over thirty of them probably, and maybe more, held by an unknown number of terrorists, nationality and motivation still unknown. As a practical matter, they knew nothing about how they’d be used, except that they were going somewhere to do something, which they’d find out about once they got there. The men settled back into their seats, re-buckled their belts, and said little. Most closed their eyes and affected trying to sleep, but mainly they didn’t sleep, merely sat with eyes closed, seeking and sometimes finding an hour’s peace amid the screeching noise of the turboprop engines.
“I require your fax machine number,” One said to the French ambassador, speaking in his native language instead of English.
“Very well” was the reply, followed by the number.
“We are sending you a list of political prisoners whose release we require. They will be released immediately and flown here on an Air France airliner. Then my people, our guests, and I will board the aircraft and fly with them to a destination that I will give to the pilot of our aircraft after we board it. I advise you to accede to our demands rapidly. We have little patience, and if our demands are not met, we will be forced to kill some of our hostages.”
“I will forward your request to Paris,” the ambassador said.
“Good, and be sure to tell them that we are not in a patient mood.”
“Oui, I will do that as well,” the diplomat promised. The line went dead and he looked at his immediate staff, the deputy chief of mission, his military attaché, and the DGSE station chief. The ambassador was a businessman who had been awarded this embassy as a political favor, since the proximity of Paris and Madrid did not require a seasoned member of the diplomatic service for the post. “Well?”
“We will look at the list,” the DGSE man answered. A second later, the fax machine chirped, and a few seconds after that, the curled paper emerged. The intelligence officer took it, scanned it, and handed it over. “Not good,” he announced for the others in the room.
“The Jackal?” the DCM said. “They will never—”
“ ‘Never’ is a long time, my friend,” the spook told the diplomat. “I hope these commandos know their business.”
“What do you know about them?”
“Nothing, not a single thing.”
“How long?” Esteban asked René.
“They will take time,” One replied. “Some will be real, and some will be creative on their part. Remember that their strategy is to lengthen the process as much as possible, to tire us, to wear us down, to weaken our resolve. Against that we have the ability to force the issue by killing a hostage. That is not a step to be taken lightly. We have selected our hostages for their psychological impact, and we will need to consider their use carefully. But above all, we must control the pace of events. For now, we will let them take their time while we consolidate our position.” René walked to the corner to see how Claude was doing. There was a nasty gash on his upper arm from that fool of a Roman soldier, the only thing that had gone wrong. He was sitting on the floor, holding a bandage over it, but the wound was still bleeding. Claude would need stitches to close it properly. It was bad luck, but not that serious, except to Claude, who was still in considerable pain from the wound.
Hector Weiler was the park physician, a general surgeon trained at the University of Barcelona who spent most of his time putting Band-Aids on skinned knees and elbows, though there was a photo on his wall of the twins he’d delivered once upon a time after a pregnant woman had been foolish enough to ride the Dive Bomber—there was now a very emphatic sign at the entrance warning against that. For all that, he was a skilled young doctor who’d done his share of work in his medical school’s emergency room, and so this wasn’t his first gunshot victim. Francisco was a lucky man. At least six shots had been fired at him, and though the first three had merely resulted in fragment-peppering on his left arm, one of the second bursts had hurt his leg badly. A broken tibia would take a long time to heal for a man of his years, but at least it was broken fairly high up. A break lower down could take six months to heal, if ever.
“I could have killed him,” the centurion groused through the anesthesia. “I could have taken his head off, but I missed!”
“Not with the first one,” Weiler observed,
seeing the red crust on the sword that now lay atop his scutum in the corner of the treatment room.
“Tell me about him,” Captain Gassman ordered.
“Forties, early forties,” de la Cruz said. “My height plus ten or twelve centimeters, lightly built. Brown hair, brown beard, some speckles of gray in it. Dark eyes. Uzi machine gun. White hat,” the former sergeant reported, biting off his words. The anesthesia he’d been given was not enough for all the pain, but he had to tell what he knew, and accepted the discomfort as the physician worked to get the leg set. “There were others. I saw four others, maybe more.”
“We think ten or so,” Gassman said. “Did he say anything?”
De la Cruz shook his head. “Nothing I heard.”