by Tom Clancy
“Price, this is Chavez,” his radio announced next.
“Yes, Ding.”
“What’s the situation?”
“We have two or three prisoners, a van with an unknown number of subjects in it, and Christ knows what else. I am trying to find out now. Out.” And that concluded the conversation.
“Game face, Domingo,” Clark said, sitting in the left-front seat of the Jaguar.
“I fuckin’ hear you, John!” Chavez snarled back.
“Corporal—Mole, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” the driver said, without moving his eyes a millimeter.
“Okay, Corporal, get us up on his right side. We’re going to shoot out his right-front tire. Let’s try not to eat the fucking truck when that happens.”
“Very good, sir” was the cool reply. “Here we go.”
The Jag leaped forward, and in twenty seconds was alongside the Volvo diesel truck. Clark and Chavez lowered their windows. They were doing over seventy miles per hour now, as they leaned out of their speeding automobile.
A hundred meters ahead, Sean Grady was in a state of rage and shock. What the devil had gone wrong? The first burst from his people’s weapons had surely killed a number of his black-clad enemies, but after that—what? He’d formulated a good plan, and his people had executed it well at first—but the goddamned phones! What had gone wrong with those? That had ruined everything. But now things were back under some semblance of control. He was ten minutes away from the shopping area where he’d park and leave the car, disappear into the crowd of people, then walk to another parking lot, get in another rental car, and drive off to Liverpool for the ferry ride home. He would get out of this, and so would the lads in the truck behind him—he looked in the mirror. What the hell was that?
Corporal Mole had done well, first maneuvering to the truck’s left, then slowing and darting to the right. That caught the driver by surprise.
In the backseat, Chavez saw the face of the man. Very fair-skinned and red-haired, a real Paddy, Domingo thought, extending his pistol and aiming at the right-front wheel.
“Now!” John called from the front seat. In that instant, their driver swerved to the left.
Paul Murphy saw the auto jump at him and instinctively swerved hard to avoid it. Then he heard gunfire.
Clark and Chavez fired several times each, and it was only a few feet of distance to the black rubber of the tire. Their bullets all hit home just outside the rim of the wheel, and the nearly-half-inch holes deflated the tire rapidly. Scarcely had the Jaguar pulled forward when the truck swerved back to the right. The driver tried to brake and slow, but that instinctive reaction only made things worse for him. The Volvo truck dipped to the right, and then the uneven braking made it worse still, and the right-side front-wheel rim dug into the pavement. This made the truck try to stop hard, and the body flipped over, landed on its right side, and slid forward at over sixty miles per hour. Strong as the body of the truck was, it hadn’t been designed for this, and when the roll continued, the truck body started coming apart.
Corporal Mole cringed to see his rearview mirror filled with the sideways truck body, but it got no closer, and he swerved left to make sure it didn’t overtake him. He allowed the car to slow now, watching the mirror as the Volvo truck rolled like a child’s toy, shedding pieces as it did so.
“Jesuchristo!” Ding gasped, turning to watch. What could only have been a human body was tossed clear, and he saw it slide up the blacktop and pinwheel slowly as it proceeded forward at the same speed as the wrecked truck.
“Stop the car!” Clark ordered.
Mole did better than that, coming to a stop, then backing up to within a few meters of the wrecked truck. Chavez jumped out first, pistol in both hands and advancing toward the vehicle. “Bear, this is Chavez, you there?”
“Bear copies,” came the reply.
“See if you can get the car, will ya? This truck’s history, man.”
“Roger that, Bear is in pursuit.”
“Colonel?” Sergeant Nance said over the intercom.
“Yeah?”
“You see how they did that?”
“Yeah—think you can do the same?” Malloy asked.
“Got my pistol, sir.”
“Well, then it’s air-to-mud time, people.” The Marine dropped the collective again and brought the Night Hawk to a hundred feet over the road. He was behind and down-sun from the car he was following. Unless the bastard was looking out the sunroof, he had no way of knowing the chopper was there.
“Road sign!” Harrison called, pulling back on the cyclic to dodge over the highway sign telling of the next exit on the motorway.
“Okay, Harrison, you do the road. I do the car. Yank it hard if you have to, son.”
“Roger that, Colonel.”
“Okay, Sergeant Nance, here we go.” Malloy checked his speed indicator. He was doing eighty-five in the right outside lane. The guy in the Jag was leaning on the pedal pretty hard, but the Night Hawk had a lot more available power. It was not unlike flying formation with another aircraft, though Malloy had never done it with a car before. He closed to about a hundred feet. “Right side, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.” Nance slid the door back and knelt on the aluminum floor, his Beretta 9-mm in both hands. “Ready, Colonel. Let’s do it!”
“Ready to tank,” Malloy acknowledged, taking one more look at the road. Damn, it was like catching the refueling hose of a Herky Bird, but slower and a hell of a lot lower . . .
Grady bit his lip, seeing that the truck was no longer there, but behind him the road was clear, and ahead as well at the moment, and it was a mere five minutes to safety. He allowed himself a relaxing breath, flexed his fingers on the wheel, and blessed the workers who’d built this fine fast car for him. Just then his peripheral vision caught something black on his left. He turned an inch to look—what the hell—
“Got him!” Nance said, seeing the driver through the left-rear passenger-door window and bringing his pistol up. He let it wait, while Colonel Malloy edged another few feet and then—
—resting his left arm on his knee, Nance thumbed back the hammer and fired. The gun jumped in his hand. He brought it down and kept pulling the trigger. It wasn’t like on the range at all. He was jerking the gun badly despite his every effort to hold it steady, but on the fourth round, he saw his target jerk to the right.
The glass was shattering all around him. Grady didn’t react well. He could have slammed on the brakes, and that would have caused the helicopter to overshoot, but the situation was too far outside anything he’d ever experienced. He actually tried to speed up, but the Jaguar didn’t have all that much acceleration left. Then his left shoulder exploded in fire. Grady’s upper chest cringed from nerve response. His right hand moved down, causing the car to swerve in that direction, right into the steel guardrail.
Malloy pulled on the collective, having seen at least one good hit. In seconds, the Night Hawk was at three hundred feet, and the Marine turned to the right and looked down to see a wrecked and smoking car stationary in the middle of the road.
“Down to collect him?” the copilot asked.
“Bet your sweet ass, son,” Malloy told Harrison. Then he looked for his own flight bag. His Beretta was in there. Harrison handled the landing, bringing the Sikorsky to a rest fifty feet from the car. Malloy turned the lock on his seat-belt buckle and turned to exit the aircraft. Nance jumped out first, ducking under the turning rotor as he ran to the car’s right side. Malloy was two seconds behind him.
“Careful, Sergeant!” Malloy screamed, slowing his advance on the left side. The window was gone except for a few shards still in the frame, and he could see the man inside, still breathing but not doing much else behind the deployed air bag. The far window was gone as well. Nance reached into it, found the handle and pulled it open. It turned out that the driver hadn’t been using his seat belt. The body came out easily. And there on the backseat, Malloy saw, was a Russian-m
ade rifle. The Marine pulled it out and safed it, before walking to the other side of the car.
“Shit,” Nance said in no small amazement. “He’s still alive!” How had he managed not to kill the bastard from twelve feet away? the sergeant wondered.
Back at the hospital, Timothy O’Neil was still in his van wondering what to do. He thought he knew what had happened to the engine. There was a three-quarter-inch hole in the window on the left-side door, and how it had managed to miss his head was something he didn’t know. He saw that one of the Volvo trucks and Sean Grady’s rented Jaguar were nowhere to be seen. Had Sean abandoned him and his men? It had happened too fast and totally without warning. Why hadn’t Sean called to warn him of what he did? How had the plan come apart? But the answers to those questions were of less import than the fact that he was in a van, sitting in a parking lot, with enemies around him. That he had to change.
“Lieber Gott,” Weber said to himself, seeing the wounds. One Team-1 member was surely dead, having taken a round in the side of his head. Four others right here were hit, three of them in the chest. Weber knew first aid, but he didn’t need to know much medicine to know that two of them needed immediate and expert attention. One of those was Alistair Stanley.
“This is Weber. We need medical help here at once!” he called over his tactical radio. “Rainbow Five is down!”
“Oh, shit,” Homer Johnston said next to him. “You’re not foolin’, man. Command, this is Rifle Two-One, we need medics and we need them right the fuck now!”
Price heard all that. He was now thirty yards from the van, Sergeant Hank Patterson at his side, trying to approach without being seen. To his left he could see the imposing bulk of Julio Vega, along with Tomlinson. Off to the right he could see the face of Steve Lincoln. Paddy Connolly would be right with him.
“Team-2, this is Price. We have subjects in the van. I do not know if we have any inside the building. Vega and Tomlinson, get inside and check—and be bloody careful about it!”
“Vega here. Roger that, Eddie. Moving now.”
Oso reversed directions, heading for the main entrance with Tomlinson in support, while the other four kept an eye on that damned little brown truck. The two sergeants approached the front door slowly, peering around corners to look in the windows, and seeing only a small mob of very confused people. First Sergeant Vega poked a finger into his own chest and pointed inside. Tomlinson nodded. Now Vega moved quickly, entering the main lobby and sweeping his eyes all around. Two people screamed to see another man with a gun, despite the difference in his appearance. He held up his left hand.
“Easy, folks, I’m one of the good guys. Does anybody know where the bad guys are?” The answer to this question was mainly confusion, but two people pointed to the rear of the building, in the direction of the emergency room, and that made sense. Vega advanced to the double doors leading that way and called on his radio. “Lobby is clear. Come on, George.” Then: “Command, this is Vega.”
“Vega, this is Price.”
“Hospital lobby is clear, Eddie. Got maybe twenty civilians here to get looked after, okay?”
“I have no people to send you, Oso. We’re all busy out here. Weber reports we have some serious casualties.”
“This is Franklin. I copy. I can move in now if you need me.”
“Franklin, Price, move in to the west. I repeat, move in from the west.”
“Franklin is moving in to the west,” the rifleman replied. “Moving in now.”
“His pitchin’ career’s over,” Nance said, loading the body into the Night Hawk.
“Sure as hell, if he’s a lefty. Back to the hospital, I guess,” Malloy strapped into the chopper and took the controls. Inside a minute, they were airborne and heading east for the hospital. In the back, Nance strapped their prisoner down tight.
It was a hell of a mess. The driver was dead, Chavez saw, crushed between the large wheel and the back of his seat from when the truck had slammed into the guardrail, his eyes and mouth open, blood coming out the latter. The body tossed out of the back was dead as well, with two bullet holes in the face. That left a guy with two broken legs, and horrible scrapes on his face, whose pain was masked by his unconsciousness.
“Bear, this is Six,” Clark said.
“Bear copies.”
“Can you pick us up? We have an injured subject here, and I want to get back and see what the hell’s going on.”
“Wait one and I’ll be there. Be advised we have a wounded subject aboard, too.”
“Roger that, Bear.” Clark looked west. The Night Hawk was in plain view, and he saw it alter course and come straight for his position.
Chavez and Mole pulled the body onto the roadway. It seemed horrible that his legs were at such obviously wrong angles, but he was a terrorist, and got little in the way of solicitude.
“Back into the hospital?” one of the men asked O’Neil.
“But then we’re trapped!” Sam Barry objected.
“We’re bloody trapped here!” Jimmy Carr pointed out. “We need to move. Now!”
O’Neil thought that made sense. “Okay, okay. I’ll pull the door, and you lads run back to the entrance. Ready?” They nodded, cradling their weapons. “Now!” he rasped, pulling the sliding door open.
“Shit!” Price observed from a football field away. “Subjects running back into the hospital. I counted five.”
“Confirm five of them,” another voice agreed on the radio circuit.
Vega and Tomlinson were most of the way to the emergency room now, close enough to see the people there but not the double glass doors that led outside. They heard more screams. Vega took off his Kevlar helmet and peeked around the corner. Oh, shit, he thought, seeing one guy with an AKMS. That one was looking around inside the building—and behind him was half the body of someone looking outward. Oso nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand came down on his shoulder. He turned. It was Franklin, without his monster rifle, holding only his Beretta pistol.
“I just heard, five bad guys there?”
“That’s what the man said,” Vega confirmed. He waved Sergeant Tomlinson to the other side of the corridor. “You stick with me, Fred.”
“Roge-o, Oso. Wish you had your M-60 now?”
“Fuckin’ A, man.” As good as the German MP-10 was, it felt like a toy in his hands.
Vega took another look. There was Ding’s wife, standing now, looking over to where the bad guys were, pregnant as hell in her white coat. He and Chavez went back nearly ten years. He couldn’t let anything happen to her. He backed off the corner and tried waving his arm at her.
Patsy Clark Chavez, M.D., saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a soldier dressed all in black. He was waving to her, and when she turned the waves beckoned her to him, which struck her as a good idea. Slowly, she started moving to her right.
“You, stop!” Jimmy Carr called angrily. Then he started moving toward her. Unseen to his left, Sergeant George Tomlinson edged his face and gun muzzle around the corner. Vega’s waves merely grew more frantic, and Patsy kept moving his way. Carr stepped toward her, bringing his rifle up—
—as soon as he came into view, Tomlinson took aim, and seeing the weapon aimed at Ding’s wife, he depressed the trigger gently, loosing a three-round burst.
The silence of it was somehow worse than the loudest noise. Patsy turned to look at the guy with the gun when his head exploded—but there was no noise other than the brushlike sound of a properly suppressed weapon, and the wet-mess noise of his destroyed cranium. The body—the face was sprayed away, and the back of his head erupted in a cloud of red—then it just fell straight down, and the loudest sound was the clatter of the rifle hitting the floor, loosed from the dead hands.
“Come here!” Vega shouted, and she did what she was told, ducking and running toward him.
Oso grabbed her arm and swung her around like a doll, knocking her off her feet and sending her sliding across the tile floor. Sergeant
Franklin scooped her up and ran down the corridor, carrying her like a toy. In the main lobby he found the hospital security guard, and left her with him, then ran back.
“Franklin to Command. Dr. Chavez is safe. We got her to the main lobby. Get some people there, will ya? Let’s get these fucking civilians evacuated fast, okay?”
“Price to Team. Where is everyone? Where are the subjects?”
“Price, this is Vega, we are down to four subjects. George just dropped one. They are in the emergency room. Mrs. Clark is probably still there. We hear noises, there are civilians in there. We have their escape route closed. I have Tomlinson and Franklin here. Fred’s only got a pistol. Unknown number of hostages, but as far as I can tell we’re down to four bad guys, over.”
“I’ve got to get down there,” Dr. Bellow said. He was badly shaken. People had been shot within a few feet of him. Alistair Stanley was down with a chest wound, and at least one other Rainbow trooper was dead, along with three additional wounded, one of those serious-looking.
“That way.” Price pointed to the front of the hospital. A Team-1 member appeared, and headed that way as well. It was Geoff Bates, one of Covington’s shooters from the SAS, fully armed, though he hadn’t taken so much as a single shot yet today. He and Bellow moved quickly.
Somehow Carr had died without notice. O’Neil turned and saw him there, his body like the stem for a huge red flower of blood on the dingy tile floor. It was only getting worse. He had four armed men, but he couldn’t see around the corner twenty feet away, and surely there were armed SAS soldiers there, and he had no escape. He had eight other people nearby, and these he could use as hostages, perhaps, but the danger of that game was dramatically obvious. No escape, his mind told him, but his emotions said something else. He had weapons, and his enemies were nearby, and he was supposed to kill them, and if he had to die, he’d damned well die for The Cause, the idea to which he’d dedicated his life, the idea for which he’d told himself a thousand times he was willing to die. Well, here he was now, and death was close, not something to be considered in his bed, waiting for sleep to come, or drinking beer in a pub, discussing the loss of some dedicated comrades, the brave talk they all spoke when bravery wasn’t needed. It all came down to this. Now danger was here, and it was time to see if his bravery was a thing of words or a thing of the belly, and his emotions wanted to show the whole bloody world that he was a man of his word and his beliefs . . . but part of him wanted to escape back to Ireland, and not die this day in an English hospital.