by Tom Clancy
René set the phone down and stood. “My friends, Il’ych is coming. The French have granted our demands.”
“He looks like a happy camper,” Noonan said, eyes locked on the black-and-white picture. The one who had to be Mr. One was standing now, walking toward another of the subjects, and they appeared to shake hands on the fuzzy picture.
“They’re not going to lie down and take a nap,” Bellow warned. “If anything, they’re going to be more alert now.”
“Yeah, I know,” Chavez assured him. But if we do our job right, it doesn’t matter how alert they are.
Malloy headed back to the airfield for refueling, which took half an hour. While there he heard what was going to happen in another hour. In the back of the Night Hawk, Sergeant Nance set up the ropes, set to fifty feet length exactly, and hooked them into eyebolts on the chopper’s floor. Like the pilots, Nance, too, had a pistol holstered on his left side. He never expected to use it, and was only a mediocre shot, but it made him feel like part of the team, and that was important to him. He supervised the refueling, capped the tank, and told Colonel Malloy the bird was ready.
Malloy pulled up on the collective, brought the Night Hawk into the air, then pushed the cyclic forward to return to Worldpark. From this point on, their flight routine would be changing. On arriving over the park, the Night Hawk didn’t circle. Instead it flew directly over the castle every few minutes, then drew off into the distance, his anticollision strobe lights flashing as he moved around the park grounds, seemingly at random, bored with the orbiting he’d done before.
“Okay, people, let’s move,” Chavez told his team. Those directly involved in the rescue operation headed out into the underground corridor, then out to where the Spanish army truck stood. They boarded it, and it drove off, looping around into the massive parking lot.
Dieter Weber selected a sniper perch opposite Sergeant Johnston’s position, on top of the flat roof of a theater building where kids viewed cartoons, only a hundred twenty meters from the castle’s east side. Once there, he unrolled his foam mat, set up his rifle on the bipod, and started training his ten-power scope over the castle’s windows.
“Rifle Two-Two in position,” he reported to Clark.
“Very well, report as necessary, Al?” Clark said, looking up.
Stanley looked grim. “A sodding lot of guns, and a lot of children.”
“Yeah, I know. Anything else we could try?”
Stanley shook his head. “It’s a good plan. If we try outside, we give them too much maneuvering space, and they will feel safer in this castle building. No, Peter and Ding have a good plan, but there’s no such bloody thing as a perfect one.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I want to be there, too. This command stuff sucks the big one.”
Alistair Stanley grunted. “Quite.”
The parking lot lights all went off at once. The truck, also with lights out, stopped next to a light standard. Chavez and his team jumped out. Ten seconds later, the Night Hawk came in, touching down with the rotor still turning fast. The side doors opened, and the shooters clambered aboard and sat down on the floor. Sergeant Nance closed one door, then the other.
“All aboard, Colonel.”
Without a word, Malloy pulled the collective and climbed back into the sky, mindful of the light standards, which could have wrecked the whole mission. It took only four seconds to clear them, and he banked the aircraft to head back toward the park.
“A/C lights off,” Malloy told Lieutenant Harrison.
“Lights off,” the copilot confirmed.
“We ready?” Ding asked his men in the back.
“Goddamn right, we are,” Mike Pierce said back. Fucking murderers, he didn’t add. But every man on the bird was thinking that. Weapons were slung tight across their chests, and they had their zip-lining gloves on. Three of the men were pulling them tight on their hands, a show of some tension on their part that went along with the grim faces.
“Where is the aircraft?” One asked.
“About an hour and ten minutes out,” Dr. Bellow replied. “When do you want your bus?”
“Exactly forty minutes before the aircraft lands. It will then be refueled while we board it.”
“Where are you going?” Bellow asked next.
“We will tell the pilot when we get aboard.”
“Okay, we have the bus coming now. It will be here in about fifteen minutes. Where do you want it to come?”
“Right to the castle, past the Dive Bomber ride.”
“Okay, I will tell them to do that,” Bellow promised.
“Merci.” The phone went dead again.
“Smart,” Noonan observed. “They’ll have two surveillance cameras on the bus all the way in, so we can’t use it to screen a rescue team. And they probably plan to use the mountaineer technique to get the hostages aboard.” Tough shit, he didn’t add.
“Bear, this is Six,” Clark called on the radio.
“Bear copies, Six, over.”
“We execute in five minutes.”
“Roger that, we party in five.”
Malloy turned in his seat. Chavez had heard the call and nodded, holding up one hand, fingers spread.
“Rainbow, this is Six. Stand-to, repeat stand-to. We commence the operation in five minutes.”
In the underground, Peter Covington led three of his men east toward the castle stairwells, while the park engineer selectively killed off the surveillance cameras. His explosives man set a small charge on the fire door at the bottom and nodded at his boss.
“Team-1 is ready.”
“Rifle Two-One is ready and on target,” Johnston said.
“Rifle Two-Two is ready, but no target at this time,” Weber told Clark.
“Three, this is One,” the scanner crackled in the command room.
“Yes, One,” the man atop the castle replied.
“Anything happening?”
“No, One, the police are staying where they are. And the helicopter is flying around somewhere, but not doing anything.”
“The bus should be here in fifteen minutes. Stay alert.”
“I will,” Three promised.
“Okay,” Noonan said. “That’s a time-stamp. Mr. One calls Mr. Three about every fifteen minutes. Never more than eighteen, never less than twelve. So—”
“Yeah.” Clark nodded. “Move it up?”
“Why not,” Stanley said.
“Rainbow, this is Six. Move in and execute. Say again, execute now!”
Aboard the Night Hawk, Sergeant Nance moved left and right, sliding the side doors open. He gave a thumbs-up to the shooters that they returned, each man hooking up his zip-line rope to D-rings on their belts. All of them turned inward, getting up on the balls of their feet so that their backsides were now dangling outside the helicopter.
“Sergeant Nance, I will flash you when we’re in place.”
“Roger, sir,” the crew chief replied, crouching in the now-empty middle of the passenger area, his arms reaching to the men on both sides.
“Andre, go down and look at the courtyard,” René ordered. His man moved at once, holding his Uzi in both hands.
“Somebody just left the room,” Noonan said.
“Rainbow, this is Six, one subject has left the command center.”
Eight, Chavez thought. Eight subjects to take down. The other two would go to the long-riflemen.
The last two hundred meters were the hard ones, Malloy thought. His hands tingled on the cyclic control stick, and as many times as he’d done this, this one was not a rehearsal. Okay . . . He dropped his nose, heading toward the castle, and without the anticollision lights, the aircraft would only be a shadow, slightly darker than the night—better yet, the four-bladed rotor made a sound that was nondirectional. Someone could hear it, but locating the source was difficult, and he needed that to last only a few more seconds.
“Rifle Two-One, stand by.”
“Rifle Two-One is on target, Six,” Johnston reported. His breathing
regularized, and his elbows moved slightly, so that only bone, not muscle, was in contact with the mat under him. The mere passage of blood through his arteries could throw his aim off. His crosshairs were locked just forward of the sentry’s ear. “On target,” he repeated.
“Fire,” the earpiece told him.
Say good night, Gracie, a small voice in his mind whispered. His finger pushed back gently on the set trigger, which snapped cleanly, and a gout of white flame exploded from the muzzle of the rifle. The flash obscured the sight picture for a brief moment, then cleared in time for him to see the bullet impact. There was a slight puff of gray-looking vapor from the far side of the head, and the body dropped straight down like a puppet with cut strings. No one inside would hear the shot, not through thick windows and stone walls from over three hundred meters away.
“Rifle Two-One. Target is down. Target is down. Center head,” Johnston reported.
“That’s a kill,” Lieutenant Harrison breathed over the intercom. From the helicopter’s perspective, the destruction of the sentry’s head looked quite spectacular. It was the first death he’d ever seen, and it struck him as something in a movie, not something real. The target hadn’t been a living being to him, and now it would never be.
“Yep,” Malloy agreed, easing back on the cyclic. “Sergeant Nance—now!”
In the back, Nance pushed outward. The helicopter was still slowing, nose up now, as Malloy performed the rocking-chair maneuver to perfection.
Chavez pushed off with his feet, and went down the zip-line. It took less than two seconds of not-quite free-fall before he applied tension to the line to slow his descent, and his black, rubber-soled boots came down lightly on the flat roof. He immediately loosed his rope, and turned to watch his people do the same. Eddie Price ran over to the sentry’s body, kicked the head over with his boot, and turned, making a thumbs-up for his boss.
“Six, this is Team-2 Lead. On the roof. The sentry is dead,” he said into his microphone. “Proceeding now.” With that, Chavez turned to his people, waving his arms to the roof’s periphery. The Night Hawk was gone into the darkness, having hardly appeared to have stopped at all.
The castle roof was surrounded by the battlements associated with such places, vertical rectangles of stone behind which archers could shelter while loosing their arrows at attackers. Each man had one such shelter assigned, and they counted them off with their fingers, so that every man went to the right one. For this night, the men looped their rappelling ropes around them, then stepped into the gaps. When all of them were set up, they held up their hands. Chavez did the same, then dropped his as he kicked off the roof and slid down the rope to a point a meter to the right of a window, using his feet to stand off the wall. Paddy Connolly came down on the other side, reached to apply his Primacord around the edges, and inserted a radio-detonator on one edge. Then Paddy moved to his left, swinging on the rope as though it were a jungle vine to do the same to one other. Other team members took flash-bang grenades and held them in their hands.
“Two-Lead to Six—lights!”
In the command center, the engineer again isolated the power to the castle and shut it off.
Outside the windows, Team-2 saw the windows go dark, and then a second or two later the wall-mounted emergency lights came on, just like miniature auto headlights, not enough to light the room up properly. The TV monitors they were watching went dark as well.
“Merde,” René said, sitting and reaching for a phone. If they wanted to play more games, then he could—he thought he saw some movement outside the window and looked more closely—
“Team-2, this is lead. Five seconds . . . five . . . four . . . three—” At “three,” the men holding the flash-bangs pulled the pins and set them right next to the windows, then turned aside. “—. . . two . . . one . . . fire!”
Sergeant Connolly pressed his button, and two windows were sundered from the wall by explosives. A fraction of a second later, three more windows were blown in by a wall of noise and blazing light. They flew across the room in a shower of glass and lead fragments, missing the children in the corner by three meters.
Next to Chavez, Sergeant Major Price tossed in another flash-bang, which exploded the moment it touched the floor. Then Chavez pushed outward from the wall, swinging into the room through the window, his MP-10 up and in both hands. He hit the floor badly, falling backward, unable to control his balance, then felt Price’s feet land on his left arm. Chavez rolled and jolted to his feet, then moved to the kids. They were screaming with alarm, covering their faces and ears from the abuse of the flash-bangs. But he couldn’t worry about them just yet.
Price landed better, moved right as well, but turned to scan the room. There. It was a bearded one, holding an Uzi. Price extended his MP-10 to the limit of the sling and fired a three-round burst right into his face from three meters away. The force of the bullet impacts belied the suppressed noise of the shots.
Oso Vega had kicked his window loose on leg-power alone, and landed right on top of a subject, rather to the surprise of both, but Vega was ready for surprises, and the terrorist was not. Oso’s left hand slammed out, seemingly of its own accord, and hit him in the face with enough force to split it open into a bloody mess that a burst of three 10-mm rounds only made worse.
René was sitting at his desk, the phone in his hand, and his pistol on the tabletop before him. He was reaching for it when Pierce fired into the side of his head from six feet away.
In the far corner, Chavez and Price skidded to a stop, their bodies between the terrorists and the hostages. Ding came to one knee, his weapon up while his eyes scanned for targets, as he listened to the suppressed chatter of his men’s weapons. The semidarkness of the room was alive now with moving shadows. Loiselle found himself behind a subject, close enough to touch him with the muzzle of his submachine gun. This he did. It made the shot an easy one, but sprayed blood and brains all over the room.
One in the corner got his Uzi up, and his finger went down on the trigger, spraying in the direction of the children. Chavez and Price both engaged him, then McTyler as well, and the terrorist went down in a crumpled mass.
Another had opened a door and raced through it, splattered by bullet fragments from a shooter whose aim was off and hit the door. This one ran down, away from the shooting, turning one corner, then another—and tried to stop when he saw a black shape on the steps.
It was Peter Covington, leading his team up. Covington had heard the noise of his steps and taken aim, then fired when the surprised-looking face entered his sights. Then he resumed his race topside, with four men behind him.
That left three in the room. Two hid behind desks, one holding his Uzi up and firing blindly. Mike Pierce jumped over the desk, twisting in midair as he did so, and shot him three times in the side and back. Then Pierce landed, turned back and fired another burst into the back of his head. The other one under a desk was shot in the back by Paddy Connolly. The one who was left stood, blazing away wildly with his weapon, only to be taken down by no fewer than four team members.
Just then the door opened, and Covington came in. Vega was circulating about, kicking the weapons away from every body, and after five seconds shouted: “Clear!”
“Clear!” Pierce agreed.
Andre was outside, in the open and all alone. He turned to look up at the castle.
“Dieter!” Homer Johnston called.
“Yes!”
“Can you take his weapon out?”
The German somehow read the American’s mind. The answer was an exquisitely aimed shot that struck Andre’s submachine gun just above the trigger guard. The impact of the .300 Winchester Magnum bullet blasted through the rough, stamped metal and broke the gun nearly in half. From his perch four hundred meters away, Johnston took careful aim, and fired his second round of the engagement. It would forever be regarded as a very bad shot. Half a second later, the 7-mm bullet struck the subject six inches below the sternum.
For A
ndre, it seemed like a murderously hard punch. Already the match bullet had fragmented, ripping his liver and spleen as it continued its passage, exiting his body above the left kidney. Then, following the shock of the initial impact, came a wave of pain. An instant later, his screech ripped across the 100 acres of Worldpark.
“Check this out,” Chavez said in the command center. His body armor had two holes in the torso. They wouldn’t have been fatal, but they would have hurt. “Thank God for DuPont, eh?”
“Miller Time!” Vega said with a broad grin.
“Command, this is Chavez. Mission accomplished. The kids—uh oh, we got one kid hurt here, looks like a scratch on the arm, the rest of ’em are all okay. Subjects all down for the count, Mr. C. You can turn the lights back on.”
As Ding watched, Oso Vega leaned down and picked up a little girl. “Hello, querida. Let’s find your mamacita, eh?”
“Rainbow!” Mike Pierce exulted. “Tell ’em there’s a new sheriff in town, people!”
“Bloody right, Mike!” Eddie Price reached into his pocket and pulled out his pipe and a pouch of good Cavendish tobacco.
There were things to be done. Vega, Pierce, and Loiselle collected the weapons, safed them, and stacked them on a desk. McTyler and Connolly checked out the restrooms and other adjacent doors for additional terrorists, finding none. Scotty waved to the door.
“Okay, let’s get the kids out,” Ding told his people. “Peter, lead us out!”
Covington had his team open the fire door and man the stairway, one man on each landing. Vega took the lead, holding the five-year-old with his left arm while his right continued to hold his MP-10. A minute later, they were outside.
Chavez stayed behind, looking at the wall with Eddie Price. There were seven holes in the corner where the kids had been, but all the rounds were high, into the drywall paneling. “Lucky,” Chavez said.