by Tom Clancy
“Who are they?” the surgeon asked, not looking up from his work.
“We think they are French, but we are not sure,” the captain of the Guardia Civil answered.
It was hardest of all for Colonel Malloy. Crossing the English Channel, he headed south-southwest at a steady cruising speed of 150 knots. He’d stop at a French military airfield outside Bordeaux for refueling, since he lacked the external fuel tanks used for ferrying the Night Hawk long distances. Like nearly all helicopters, the Night Hawk didn’t have an autopilot, forcing Malloy and Lieutenant Harrison to hand-fly the aircraft all the way. It made for stiffness since the helicopter wasn’t the most comfortable aircraft in the world to sit in, but both were used to it and used to grumbling about it as they switched off the controls every twenty minutes or so. Three hours to get where they were going. In the back was their crew chief, Sergeant Jack Nance, now just sitting and looking out the plastic windows as they crossed over the French coast, cruising at two thousand feet over a fishing port filled with boats.
“This got laid on in a hurry,” Harrison remarked over the intercom.
“Yeah, well, I guess Rainbow lives on a short fuse.”
“You know anything about what’s happening?”
“Not a clue, son.” The helmeted head shook left and right briefly. “You know, I haven’t been to Spain since I deployed on Tarawa back in . . . 1985, I think. I remember a great restaurant in Cádiz, though . . . wonder if it’s still there. . . .” And with that the crew lapsed back into silence, the chopper nose down and pulling south under its four-bladed rotor while Malloy checked the digital navigation display every few seconds.
“Diminishing returns,” Clark observed, checking the latest fax. There was nothing new on it, just data already sent being rearranged by some helpful intelligence officer somewhere. He left Alistair Stanley to handle that, and walked aft.
There they were, the Rainbow team, almost all of them looking as if asleep, but probably just chimped down, as he’d done with 3rd SOG more than a generation before, just pretending to sleep, eyes closed and powering their minds and bodies down, because it made no sense to think about things you didn’t know jack shit about, and tension sapped the strength even when your muscles were idle. So, your defense against it was to make your body turn off. These men were smart and professional enough to know that the stress would come in its own good time, and there was no point in welcoming it too soon. In that moment John Clark, long before a Chief SEAL, U.S. Navy, was struck with the honor he held, commanding such men as these. The thought had surprising impact, just standing there and watching them do nothing, because that’s what the best people did at a time like this one, because they understood what the mission was, because they knew how to handle that mission, every step of the way. Now they were heading out on a job about which they’d been told nothing, but it had to be something serious because never had teams -1 and -2 both gone out. And yet they treated it like another routine training mission. They didn’t make men better than these, and his two leaders, Chavez and Covington, had trained them to a razor’s edge of perfection.
And somewhere ahead were terrorists holding children hostage. Well, the job wouldn’t be an easy one, and it was far too soon for him to speculate on how it would play out, but John knew anyway that it was better to be here on this noisy Herky Bird than it would be in that theme park still a half an hour ahead, for soon his men would open their eyes and shuffle out, bringing their boxed combat gear with them. Looking at them, John Clark saw Death before his eyes, and Death, here and now, was his to command.
Tim Noonan was sitting in the right-side forward corner of the cargo area, playing with his computer, with David Peled at his side. Clark went over to them and asked what they were doing.
“This hasn’t made the newswire services yet,” Noonan told him. “I wonder why.”
“That’ll change in a hurry,” Clark predicted.
“Ten minutes, less,” the Israeli said. “Who’s meeting us?”
“Spanish army and their national police, I just heard. We’ve been authorized to land . . . twenty-five minutes,” he told them, checking his watch.
“There, Agence France-Press just started a flash,” Noonan said, reading it over for possible new information. “Thirty or so French kids taken hostage by unknown terrorists—nothing else except where they are. This isn’t going to be fun, John,” the former FBI agent observed. “Thirty-plus hostages in a crowded environment. When I was with Hostage Rescue, we sweated this sort of scenario. Ten bad guys?” he asked.
“That’s about what they think, but it isn’t confirmed yet.”
“Shitty chemistry on this one, boss.” Noonan shook his head in worry. He was dressed like the shooters, in black Nomex and body armor, with his holstered Beretta on his right hip, because he still preferred to think of himself as a shooter rather than a tech-weenie, and his shooting, practiced at Hereford with the team members, was right on the line . . . and children were in danger, Clark reflected, and child-in-danger was perhaps the strongest of all human drives, further reinforced by Noonan’s time in the Bureau, which regarded child crimes as the lowest of the low. David Peled took a more distant view, sitting there in civilian clothing and staring at the computer screen like an accountant examining a business spreadsheet.
“John!” Stanley called, heading aft with a new fax. “Here’s what they’re asking for.”
“Anybody we know?”
“Il’ych Ramirez Sanchez is at the top of the list.”
“Carlos?” Peled looked up. “Someone really wants that schmuck?”
“Everybody’s got friends.” Dr. Bellow sat down and took the fax, scanning it before handing it over to Clark.
“Okay, doc, what do we know?”
“We’re dealing with ideological ones again, just like Vienna, but they have a definite fixed objective, and these ‘political’ prisoners . . . I know these two, from Action Directe, the rest are just names to me—”
“I got it,” Noonan said, calling up his roster of known terrorists and inputting the names off the fax. “Okay, six Action Directe, eight Basques, one PFLP currently held in France. Not a long list.”
“But a definite one,” Bellow observed. “They know what they want, and if they have children as hostages, they really want them out. The selection of hostages is designed to put additional political pressure on the French government.” That wasn’t exactly a surprising opinion, and the psychiatrist knew it. “Question is, will the French government deal at all?”
“They have, in the past, bargained quietly, off the stage,” Peled told them. “Our friends may know this.”
“Kids,” Clark breathed.
“The nightmare scenario,” Noonan said with a nod. “But who has the stones to whack a kid?”
“We’ll have to talk with them to see,” Bellow responded. He checked his watch and grunted. “Next time, a faster airplane.”
“Be cool, doc,” Clark told him, knowing that Paul Bellow would have the toughest job from the moment they landed and got to the objective. He had to read their minds, evaluate the terrorists’ resolve, and hardest of all, predict their actions, and he, like the rest of the Rainbow team, didn’t know anything of consequence yet. Like the rest of the team, he was like a sprinter in the starting blocks, poised to go, but having to wait for the gun to fire. But unlike the others, he was not a shooter. He could not hope for the emotional release they would have if they went into action, for which he quietly envied the soldiers. Children, Paul Bellow thought. He had to figure a way to reason with people he didn’t know, in order to protect the lives of children. How much rope would the French and Spanish governments let him have? He knew that he’d need some rope to play with, though how much depended on the mental state of the terrorists. They’d deliberately chosen children, and French children at that, to maximize the pressure on the government in Paris . . . and that had been a considered act . . . which forced him to think that they’d be willing to
kill a child despite all the taboos associated with such an act in any normal human mind. Paul Bellow had written and lectured the world over on people like this, but somewhere deep inside his own mind he wondered if he truly understood the mentality of the terrorist, so divorced was it from his own supremely rational outlook on reality. He could simulate their thinking, perhaps, but did he truly understand it? That was not a question he wanted to pose to himself right now, with plugs stuffed in his ears to protect his hearing and his equilibrium from the punishing noise of the MC-130’s engines. And so he, too, sat back and closed his eyes and commanded his mind into a neutral setting, seeking a respite from the stress sure to come in less than an hour.
Clark saw what Bellow did, and understood it for what it was, but that option didn’t exist for Rainbow Six, for his was the ultimate responsibility of command, and what he saw before his eyes were the faces he’d made up to go with the names on the fax sheet he held in his hand. Which ones would live? Which would not? That responsibility rested on shoulders not half so strong as they appeared.
Kids.
“They have not gotten back to me yet,” Captain Gassman said into the telephone, having initiated the call himself.
“I have not yet given you a deadline,” One replied. “I would like to think that Paris values our goodwill. If that is not the case, then they will soon learn to respect our resolve. Make that clear to them,” René concluded, setting the phone down and breaking the contact.
And so much for calling them to establish a dialogue, Gassman said to himself. That was one of the things he was supposed to do, his training classes and all the books had told him. Establish some sort of dialogue and rapport with the criminals, even a degree of trust that he could then exploit to his benefit, get some of the hostages released in return for food or other considerations, erode their resolve, with the ultimate aim of resolving the crime without loss of innocent life—or criminal life for that matter. A real win for him meant bringing them all before the bar of justice, where a robed judge would pronounce them guilty and sentence them to a lengthy term as guests of the Spanish government, there to rot like the trash they were. . . . But the first step was to get them talking back and forth with him, something that this One person didn’t feel the need to do. This man felt comfortably in command of the situation . . . as well he might, the police captain told himself. With children sitting in front of his guns. Then another phone rang.
“They have landed, and are unloading now.”
“How long?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Half an hour,” Colonel Tomas Nuncio told Clark, as the car started rolling. Nuncio had come by helicopter from Madrid. Behind him, three trucks of the Spanish army were loading up the equipment off the plane and would soon start down the same road with his people aboard.
“What do we know?”
“Thirty-five hostages. Thirty-three of them are French children—”
“I’ve seen the list. Who are the other two?”
Nuncio looked down in distaste. “They seem to be sick children in the park as part of a special program, the ones sent here—you started it in America, how do you say . . .”
“Make-A-Wish?” John asked.
“Yes, that is it. A girl from Holland and a boy from England, both in wheelchairs, both reportedly quite ill. Not French like the others. I find that strange. All the rest are children of workers for Thompson, the defense equipment company. The leader of that group called on his own to his corporate headquarters, and from there the news went high up in the French government, explaining the rapid response. I have orders to offer you all the assistance my people can provide.”
“Thank you, Colonel Nuncio. How many people do you have on the scene now?”
“Thirty-eight, with more coming. We have an inner perimeter established and traffic control.”
“Reporters, what about them?”
“We are stopping them at the main gate to the park. I will not give these swine a chance to speak to the public,” Colonel Nuncio promised. He’d already lived up to what John expected of the Guardia Civil. The hat was something out of another century, but the cop’s blue eyes were ready for the next one, cold and hard as he drove his radio car out onto the interstate-type highway. A sign said that Worldpark was but fifteen kilometers away, and the car was moving very fast now.
Julio Vega tossed the last Team-2 box aboard the five-ton truck and pulled himself aboard. His teammates were all there in the back, with Ding Chavez taking the right-front seat of the truck next to the driver, as commanders tended to do. Eyes were all open now and heads perked up, checking out the surrounding terrain even though it had no relevance to the mission. Even commandos could act like tourists.
“Colonel, what sort of surveillance systems are we up against?”
“What do you mean?” Nuncio asked in reply.
“The park, does it have TV cameras spread around? If it does,” Clark said, “I want us to avoid them.”
“I will call ahead to see.”
“Well?” Mike Dennis asked his chief technician.
“The back way in, no cameras there until they approach the employee parking lot. I can turn that one off from here.”
“Do it.” Dennis got on Captain Gassman’s radio to give directions for the approaching vehicles. He checked his watch as he did so. The first shots had been fired three and a half hours before. It only felt like a lifetime. Giving the directions, he walked to the office coffee urn, found it empty, and cursed as a result.
Colonel Nuncio took the last exit before the one that went into the park, instead breaking off onto a two-lane blacktop road and slowing down. Presently they encountered a police car whose occupant, standing alongside it, waved them through. Two minutes more, and they were parked outside what appeared to be a tunnel with a steel door sitting partially open. Nuncio popped open his door, and Clark did the same, then walked quickly into the entrance.
“Your Spanish is very literate, Señor Clark. But I cannot place your accent.”
“Indianapolis,” John replied. It would probably be the last light moment of the day. “How are the bad guys talking to you?”
“What language, you mean? English so far.”
And that was the first good break of the day. For all his expertise, Dr. Bellow’s language skills were not good, and he would take point as soon as his car arrived, in about five minutes.
The park’s alternate command center was a mere twenty meters inside the tunnel. The door was guarded by yet another Civil Guard, who opened it and saluted Colonel Nuncio.
“Colonel.” It was another cop, John saw.
“Señor Clark, this is Captain Gassman.” Handshakes were exchanged.
“Howdy. I am John Clark. My team is a few minutes out. Can you please update me on what’s happening?”
Gassman waved him to the conference table in the middle of the room whose walls were lined with TV cameras and other electronic gear whose nature was not immediately apparent. A large map/diagram of the park was laid out.
“The criminals are all here,” Gassman said, tapping the castle in the middle of the park. “We believe there to be ten of them, and thirty-five hostages, all children. I have spoken with them several times. My contact is a man, probably a Frenchman, calling himself One. The conversations have come to nothing, but we have a copy of their demands—a dozen convicted terrorists, mainly in French custody, but some in Spanish prisons as well.”
Clark nodded. He had all this already, but the diagram of the park was new. He was first of all examining sight-lines, what could be seen and what could not. “What about where they are, blueprints, I mean.”
“Here,” a park engineer said, sliding the castle blueprints on the table. “Windows here, here, here, and here. Stairs and elevators as marked.” Clark referenced them against the map. “They have stair access to the roof, and that’s forty meters above street level. They have good line of sight everywhere, down all the streets.”
“That’s easy. The Dive Bomber ride, top of the first hill. You’re damned near a hundred fifty meters high there.”
“That’s nearly five hundred feet,” Clark said, with some measure of incredulity.
“Biggest ’coaster in the world, sir,” the engineer confirmed. “People come from all over to ride this one. The ride sits in a slight depression, about ten meters, but the rest of it’s pretty damned tall. If you want to perch somebody, that’s the spot.”
“Good. Can you get from here to there unseen?”
“The underground, but there’re TV cameras in it—” He traced his hand over the map. “Here, here, here, and another one there. Better to walk on the surface, but dodging all the cameras won’t be easy.”
“Can you turn them off?”
“We can override the primary command center from here, yes—hell, if necessary, I can send people out to pull the wires.”
“But if we do that, it might annoy our friends in the castle,” John noted. “Okay, we need to think that one through before we do anything. For the moment,” Clark told Nuncio and Gassman, “I want to keep them in the dark on who’s here and what we’re doing. We don’t give them anything for free, okay?”
Both cops nodded agreement, and John saw in their eyes a desperate sort of respect. Proud and professional as they were, they had to feel some relief at having him and his team on the scene to take charge of the situation, and also to take over the responsibility for it. They could get credit for supporting a successful rescue operation, and they could also stand back and say that whatever went wrong wasn’t their fault. The bureaucratic mind was part and parcel of every government employee in the known world.
“Hey, John.”
Clark turned. It was Chavez, with Covington right behind him. Both team leaders strode in, wearing their black assault gear now, and looking to the others in the room like angels of death. They came to the conference table and started looking at the diagrams.