by Tom Clancy
“Yeah,” Berg admitted. “I still feel shitty about it, though.”
“You should see my side of the house,” Killgore observed.
“I suppose,” Steve Berg responded diffidently.
The overnight flight had come out of Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, an hour’s drive from Fort Bragg. The Boeing 757 touched down in an overcast drizzle to begin a taxi process almost as long as the flight itself, or so it often seemed to the passengers, as they finally came to the US Airways gate in Heathrow’s Terminal 3.
Chavez and Clark had come up together to meet him. They were dressed in civilian clothes, and Domingo held a card with “MALLOY” printed on it. The fourth man off was dressed in Marine Class-As, complete to his Sam Browne belt, gold wings, and four and a half rows of ribbons on the olive-colored uniform blouse. His blue-gray eyes saw the card and came to it as he half-dragged his canvas bag with him.
“Nice to be met,” Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Malloy observed. “Who are you guys?”
“John Clark.”
“Domingo Chavez.” Handshakes were exchanged. “Any more bags?” Ding asked.
“This is all I had time to pack. Lead on, people,” Colonel Malloy replied.
“Need a hand with that?” Chavez asked a man about six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than himself.
“I got it,” the Marine assured him. “Where we going?”
“Chopper is waiting for us. Car’s this way.” Clark headed through a side door, then down some steps to a waiting car. The driver took Malloy’s bag and tossed it in the “boot” for the half-mile drive to a waiting British army Puma helicopter.
Malloy looked around. It was a crummy day to fly, the ceiling about fifteen hundred feet, and the drizzle getting a little harder, but he was not a white-knuckle flyer. They loaded into the back of the helicopter. He watched the flight crew run through the start-up procedure professionally, reading off their printed checklist, just as he did it. With the rotor turning, they got on the radio for clearance to lift off. That took several minutes. It was a busy time at Heathrow, with lots of international flights arriving to deliver business people to their work of the day. Finally, the Puma lifted off, climbed to altitude, and headed off in an undetermined direction to wherever the hell he was going. At that point, Malloy got on the intercom.
“Can anybody tell me what the hell this is all about?”
“What did they tell you?”
“Pack enough underwear for a week,” Malloy replied, with a twinkle in his eye.
“There’s a nice department store a few miles from the base.”
“Hereford?”
“Good guess,” Chavez responded. “Been there?”
“Lots of times. I recognized that crossroads down there from other flights. Okay, what’s the story?”
“You’re going to be working with us, probably,” Clark told him.
“Who’s ‘us,’ sir?”
“We’re called Rainbow, and we don’t exist.”
“Vienna?” Malloy said through the intercom. The way they both blinked was answer enough. “Okay, that looked a little slick for cops. What’s the makeup of the team?”
“NATO, mainly Americans and Brits, but others, too, plus an Israeli,” John told him.
“And you set this up without any rotorheads?”
“Okay, goddamnit, I blew it, okay?” Clark observed. “I’m new at this command stuff.”
“What’s that on your forearm, Clark? Oh, what rank are you?”
John pulled back on his jacket, exposing the red seal tattoo. “I’m a simulated two-star. Ding here is a simulated major.”
The marine examined the tattoo briefly. “I’ve heard of those, but never seen any. Third Special Operations Group, wasn’t it? I knew a guy who worked with them.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dutch Voort, retired about five-six years ago as a full-bird.”
“Dutch Voort! Shit, haven’t heard that name in a while,” Clark replied at once. “I got shot down with him once.”
“You and a bunch of others. Great aviator, but his luck was kinda uneven.”
“How’s your luck, Colonel?” Chavez asked.
“Excellent, sonny, excellent,” Malloy assured him. “And you can call me Bear.”
It fit, both men decided of their visitor. He was Clark’s height, six-one, and bulky, as though he pumped barbells for fun and drank his share of beer afterward. Chavez thought of his friend Julio Vega, another lover of free weights. Clark read over the medals. The DFC had two repeat clusters on it, as did the Silver Star. The shooting iron also proclaimed that Malloy was an expert marksman. Marines liked to shoot for entertainment and to prove that like all other Marines they were riflemen. In Malloy’s case, a Distinguished Rifleman, which was as high as the awards went. But no Vietnam ribbons, Clark saw. Well, he would have been too young for that, which was another way for Clark to realize how old he’d grown. He also saw that Malloy was about the right age for a half-colonel, whereas someone with all those decorations should have made it younger. Had Malloy been passed over for full-bird colonel? One problem with special operations was that it often put one off the best career track. Special attention was often required to make sure such people got the promotions they merited—which wasn’t a problem for enlisted men, but frequently a big one for commissioned officers.
“I started off in search-and-rescue, then I shipped over to Recon Marines, you know, get ’em in, get ’em out. You gotta have a nice touch. I guess I do.”
“What are you current in?”
“H-60, Hueys, of course, and H-53s. I bet you don’t have any of those, right?”
“ ’Fraid not,” Chavez said, immediately and obviously disappointed.
“Air Force 24th Special Operations Squadron at RAF Mildenhall has the MH-60K and MH-53. I am up to speed on both if you ever borrow them. They’re part of 1st Special Operations Wing, and they’re based both here and in Germany, last time I checked.”
“No shit?” Clark asked.
“No shit, Simulated General, sir. I know the wing commander, Stanislas Dubrovnik, Stan the Man. Great helo driver. He’s been around the block a few dozen times if you ever need a friend in a hurry.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What else you know how to fly?”
“The Night Stalker, of course, but not many of them around. None based over here that I know of.” The Puma turned then, circling, then flaring to settle into the Hereford pad. Malloy watched the pilot’s stick work and decided he was competent, at least for straight-and-level stuff. “I’m not technically current on the MH-47 Chinook—we’re only allowed to stay officially current on three types—technically I’m not current on Hueys either, but I was fucking born in a Huey, if you know what I mean, General. And I can handle the MH-47 if I have to.”
“The name’s John, Mr. Bear,” Clark said, with a smile. He knew a pro when he saw one.
“I’m Ding. Once upon a time I was an 11-Bravo, but then the Agency kidnapped my ass. His fault,” Chavez said. “John and I been working together a while.”
“I suppose you can’t tell me the good stuff, then. Kinda surprised I never met you guys before. I’ve delivered a few spooks here and there from time to time, if you know what I mean.”
“Bring your package?” Clark asked, meaning his personnel file.
Malloy patted his bag. “Yes, sir, and very creative writing it is, if I do say so.” The helicopter settled down. The crew chief jumped out to pull the sliding doors open. Malloy grabbed his bag, stepped down, and walked to the Rover parked just off the pad. There the driver, a corporal, took Malloy’s bag and tossed it in the back. British hospitality, Malloy saw, hadn’t changed very much. He returned the salute and got in the rear. The rain was picking up. English weather, the colonel thought, hadn’t changed much either. Miserable place to fly helicopters, but not too bad if you wanted to get real close without being seen, and that wasn’t too awful, was it? The Rover
jeep took them to what looked like a headquarters building instead of his guest housing. Whoever they were, they were in a hurry.
“Nice office, John,” he said, looking around on the inside. “I guess you really are a simulated two-star.”
“I’m the boss,” Clark admitted, “and that’s enough. Sit down. Coffee?”
“Always,” Malloy confirmed, taking a cup a moment later. “Thanks.”
“How many hours?” Clark asked next.
“Total? Sixty-seven-forty-two last time I added it up. Thirty-one hundred of that is special operations. And, oh, about five hundred combat time.”
“That much?”
“Grenada, Lebanon, Somalia, couple of other places—and the Gulf War. I fished four fast-mover drivers out and brought them back alive during that little fracas. One of them was a little exciting,” Malloy allowed, “but I had some help overhead to smooth things out. You know, the job’s pretty boring if you do it right.”
“I’ll have to buy you a pint, Bear,” Clark said. “I’ve always been nice to the SAR guys.”
“And I never turn down a free beer. The Brits in your team, ex-SAS?”
“Mainly. Worked with ’em before?”
“Exercises, here and over at Bragg. They are okay troops, right up there with Force Recon and my pals at Bragg.” This was meant to be generous, Clark knew, though the local Brits might take slight umbrage at being compared to anyone. “Anyway, I suppose you need a delivery boy, right?”
“Something like that. Ding, let’s run Mr. Bear through the last field operation.”
“Roge-o, Mr. C.” Chavez unrolled the big photo of the Schloss Ostermann on Clark’s conference table and started his brief, as Stanley and Covington came in to join the conference.
“Yeah,” Malloy said when the explanation ended. “You really did need somebody like me for that one, guys.” He paused. “Best thing would be a long-rope deployment to put three or four on the roof . . . right about . . . here.” He tapped the photo. “Nice flat roof to make it easy.”
“That’s about what I was thinking. Not as easy as a zip-line, but probably safer,” Chavez agreed.
“Yeah, it’s easy if you know what you’re doing. Your boys will have to learn to land with soft feet, of course, but nice to have three or four people inside the castle when you need ’em. From how good the takedown went, I imagine your people know how to shoot and stuff.”
“Fairly well,” Covington allowed, in a neutral voice.
Clark was taking a quick rifle through Malloy’s personnel file, while Chavez presented his successful mission. Married to Frances née Hutchins Malloy, he saw, two daughters, ten and eight. Wife was a civilian nurse working for the Navy. Well, that was easy to fix. Sandy could set that up at her hospital pretty easy. LTC Dan Malloy, USMC, was definitely a keeper.
For his part, Malloy was intrigued. Whoever these people were, they had serious horsepower. His orders to fly to England had come directly from the office of CINC-SNAKE himself, “Big Sam” Wilson, and the people he’d met so far looked fairly serious. The small one, Chavez, he thought, was one competent little fucker, the way he’d walked him through the Vienna job, and, from examining the overhead photo, his team must have been pretty good, too, especially the two who’d crept up to the house to take the last bunch of bad guys in the back. Invisibility was a pretty cool gig if you could bring it off, but a fucking disaster if you blew it. The good news, he reflected, was that the bad guys weren’t all that good at their fieldcraft. Not trained like his Marines were. That deficiency almost canceled out their viciousness—but not quite. Like most people in uniform, Malloy despised terrorists as cowardly sub-human animals who merited only violent and immediate death.
Chavez next took him to his team’s own building, where Malloy met his troops, shook hands, and evaluated what he saw there. Yeah, they were serious, as were Covington’s Team-1 people in the next building over. Some people just had the look, the relaxed intensity that made them evaluate everyone they met, and decide at once if the person was a threat. It wasn’t that they liked killing and maiming, just that it was their job, and that job spilled over into how they viewed the world. Malloy they evaluated as a potential friend, a man worthy of their trust and respect, and that warmed the Marine aviator. He’d be the guy whom they had to trust to get them where they needed to be, quickly, stealthily, and safely—and then get them out in the same way. The remaining tour of the training base was pure vanilla to one schooled in the business. The usual buildings, simulated airplane interiors, three real railroad passenger cars, and the other things they practiced to storm; the weapons range with the pop-up targets (he’d have to play there himself to prove that he was good enough to be here, Malloy knew, since every special-ops guy was and had to be a shooter, just as every Marine was a rifleman). By noon they were back in Clark’s headquarters building.
“Well, Mr. Bear, what do you think?” Rainbow Six asked.
Malloy smiled as he sat down. “I think I’m seriously jet lagged. And I think you have a nice team here. So, you want me?”
Clark nodded. “I think we do, yes.”
“Start tomorrow morning?”
“Flying what?”
“I called that Air Force bunch you told us about.
They’re going to lend us an MH-60 for you to play with.”
“Neighborly of them.” That meant to Malloy that he’d have to prove that he was a good driver. The prospect didn’t trouble him greatly. “What about my family? Is this TAD or what?”
“No, it’s a permanent duty station for you. They’ll come over on the usual government package.”
“Fair ’nuf. Will we be getting work here?”
“We’ve had two field operations so far, Bern and Vienna. There’s no telling how busy we’ll be with for-real operations, but you’ll find the training regimen is pretty busy here.”
“Suits me, John.”
“You want to work with us?”
The question surprised Malloy. “This is a volunteer outfit?”
Clark nodded. “Every one of us.”
“Well, how about that. Okay,” Malloy said. “You can sign me up.”
“May I ask a question?” Popov asked in New York.
“Sure,” the boss said, suspecting what it would be.
“What is the purpose of all this?”
“You really do not need to know at this time” was the expected reply to the expected question.
Popov nodded his submission/agreement to the answer. “As you say, sir, but you are spending a goodly amount of money for no return that I can determine.” Popov raised the money question deliberately, to see how his employer would react.
The reaction was genuine boredom: “The money is not important.”
And though the response was not unexpected, it was nonetheless surprising to Popov. For all of his professional life in the Soviet KGB, he’d paid out money in niggardly amounts to people who’d risked their lives and their freedom for it, frequently expecting far more than they’d ever gotten, because often enough the material and information given was worth far more than they’d been paid for it. But this man had already paid out more than Popov had distributed in over fifteen years of field operations—for nothing, for two dismal failures. And yet, there was no disappointment on his face, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich saw. What the hell was this all about?
“What went wrong in this case?” the boss asked.
Popov shrugged. “They were willing, but they made the mistake of underestimating the skill of the police response. It was quite skillful indeed,” he assured his employer. “More so than I expected, but not that great a surprise. Many police agencies across the world have highly trained counterterror groups.”
“It was the Austrian police? . . .”
“So the news media said. I did not press my investigation further. Should I have done so?”
A shake of the head. “No, just idle curiosity on my part.”
So, you don’t care if the
se operations succeed or fail, Popov thought. Then, why the hell do you fund them? There was no logic to this. None at all. That would have been—should have been—troubling to Popov, yet it was not seriously so. He was becoming rich on these failures. He knew who was funding the operations, and had all the evidence—the cash—he needed to prove it. So, this man could not turn on him. If anything, he must fear his employee, mustn’t he? Popov had contacts in the terrorist community and could as easily turn them against the man who procured the cash, couldn’t he? It would be a natural fear for this man to hold, Dmitriy reflected.
Or was it? What, if anything, did this man fear? He was funding murder—well, attempted murder in the last case. He was a man of immense wealth and power, and such men feared losing those things more than they feared death. It kept coming down to the same thing, the former KGB officer told himself: What the hell was this all about? Why was he plotting the deaths of people, and asking Popov to—was he doing this to kill off the world’s remaining terrorists? Did that make sense? Using Popov as a stalking horse, an agent provocateur, to draw them out and be dealt with by the various countries’ highly trained counterterror teams? Dmitriy decided that he’d do a little research on his employer. It ought not to be too hard, and the New York Public Library was only two kilometers distant on Fifth Avenue.
“What sort of people were they?”
“Whom do you mean?” Popov asked.
“Dortmund and Fürchtner,” the boss clarified.
“Fools. They still believed in Marxism-Leninism. Clever in their way, intelligent in the technical sense, but their political judgment was faulty. They were unable to change when their world changed. That is dangerous. They failed to evolve, and for that they died.” It wasn’t much of an epitaph, Popov knew. They’d grown up studying the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and all the rest—the same people whose words Popov had studied through his youth, but even as a boy Popov had known better, and his world travels as a KGB officer had merely reinforced his distrust for the words of those nineteenth century academicians. His first flight on an American-made airliner, chatting in a friendly way with the people next to him, had taught him so much. But Hans and Petra—well, they’d grown up within the capitalist system, sampled all of its wares and benefits, and nevertheless decided that theirs was a system bereft of something that they needed. Perhaps in a way they’d been as he had been, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, just dissatisfied, wanting to be part of something better—but, no, he’d always wanted something better for himself, whereas they’d always wanted to bring others to Paradise, to lead and rule as good communists. And to reach that utopian vision, they’d been willing to walk through a sea of innocent blood. Fools. His employer, he saw, accepted his more abbreviated version of their lost lives and moved on.