by Tom Clancy
"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.
"Somewhat," Sergeant Major Price agreed. "That's the one we both engaged, Ding. He was just firing, not aiming-and maybe at us, not them, I think."
"Good job, Eddie."
"Indeed," Price agreed. With that they both walked outside, leaving the bodies behind for the police to collect. "Command, this is Bear, what's happening, over."
"Mission accomplished, no friendlies hurt. Well done. Bear," Clark told him.
"Roger and thank you, sir. Bear is RTB. Out. I need to take a piss," the Marine told his copilot, as he horsed the Night Hawk west for the airfield.
Homer Johnston fairly ran down the steps of the Dive Bomber ride, carrying his rifle and nearly tripping three times on the way down. Then he ran the few hundred meters to the castle. There was a doctor there, wearing a white coat and looking down at the man Johnston had shot.
"How is he?" the sergeant asked when he got there. It was pretty clear. The man's hands were holding his belly, and were covered with blood that looked strangely black in the courtyard lighting.
"He will not survive," Dr. Weiler said. Maybe if they were in a hospital operating room right now, he'd have a slim chance, but he was bleeding out through the lacerated spleen., and his liver was probably destroyed as well… And so, no, absent a liver transplant, he had no chance at all, and all Weiler could do was give him morphine for the pain. He reached into his bag for a syringe.
"That's the one shot the little girl," Johnston told the doctor. "I guess my aim was a little off," he went on, looking down into the open eyes and the grimacing face that let loose another moaning scream. If he'd been a deer or an elk, Johnston would have finished him off with a pistol round in the head or neck, but you weren't supposed to do that with human targets. Die slow, you fuck, he didn't say aloud. It disappointed Johnston that the doctor gave him a pain injection, but physicians were sworn to their duty, as he was to his.
"Pretty low," Chavez said, coming up to the last living terrorist.
"Guess I slapped the trigger a little hard," the rifleman responded.
Chavez looked straight in his eyes. "Yeah, right. Get your gear."
"In a minute." The target's eyes went soft when the drug entered his bloodstream, but the hands still grabbed at the wound, and there was a puddle of blood spreading from under his back. Finally, the eyes looked up at Johnston one last time.
"Good night, Gracie," the rifleman said quietly. Ten seconds later, he was able to turn away and head back to the Dive Bomber to retrieve the rest of his gear.
There were a lot of soiled underpants in the medical office, and a lot of kids still wide-eyed in shock, having lived through a nightmare that all would relive for years to come. The Rainbow troopers fussed over them. One bandaged the only wound, a scratch really, on a young boy.
Centurion de la Cruz was still there, having refused evacuation. The troops in black stripped off their body armor and set it against the wall, and he saw on their uniform jackets the jump wings of paratroopers, American, British, and German, along with the satisfied look of soldiers who'd gotten the job done.
"Who are you?" he asked in Spanish.
"I'm sorry, I can't say," Chavez replied. "But I saw what you did on the videotape. You did well, Sergeant."
"So did you, ah?…"
"Chavez. Domingo Chavez."
"American?"
"Si. "
"The children, were any hurt?"
"Just the one over there."
"And the-criminals?"
"They will break no more laws, amigo. None at all," Team2 Lead told him quietly.
"Bueno. " De la Cruz reached up to take his hand. "It was hard?"
"It is always hard, but we train for the hard things, and my men are-"
"They have the look," de la Cruz agreed.
"So do you." Chavez turned. "Hey, guys, here's the one who took 'em on with a sword."
"Oh, yeah?" Mike Pierce came over. "I finished that one off for you. Balky move, man." Pierce took his hand and shook it. The rest of the troopers did the same.
"I must-I must-" De la Cruz stood and hobbled out the door. He came back in five minutes later, following John Clark, and holding-
"What the hell is that?" Chavez asked.
"The eagle of the legion, VI Legio Victrix, " the centurion told them, holding it in one hand. "The victorious legion. Senor Dennis, con permiso?"
"Yes, Francisco," the park manager said with a serious nod.
"With the respect of my legion, Senor Chavez. Keep this in a place of honor."
Ding took it. The damned thing must have weighed twenty pounds, plated as it was with gold. It would be a fit trophy for the club at Hereford. "We will do that, my friend," he promised the former sergeant, with a look at John Clark.
The stress was bleeding off now, to be followed as usual by elation and fatigue. The troopers looked at the kids they'd saved, still quiet and cowed by the night, but soon to be reunited with their parents. They heard the sound of a bus outside. Steve Lincoln opened the door, and watched the grown-ups leap out of it. He waved them through the door, and the shouts of joy filled the room.
"Time to leave," John said. He, too, walked over to shake hands with de la Cruz as the troops filed out.
Out in the open, Eddie Price had his own drill to complete. His pipe now filled, he took a kitchen match from his pocket and struck it on the stone wall of the medical office, lighting the curved briar pipe for a long, victorious puff as parents pushed in, and others pushed out, holding their children, many weeping at their deliverance.
Colonel Gamelin was standing by the bus and came over. "You are the Legion?" he asked.
Louis Loiselle handled the answer. "In a way, monsieur," he said in French. He looked up to see a surveillance camera painted directly at the door, probably to record the event, the parents filing out with their kids, many pausing to shake hands with the Rainbow troopers. Then Clark led them off, back to the castle, and into the underground. On the way the Guardia Civil cops saluted, the gestures returned by the special-ops troopers.
CHAPTER 16
DISCOVERY
The successful conclusion of the Worldpark operation turned out to be a problem for some, and one of them was Colonel Tomas Nuncio, the senior officer of the Guardia Civil on the scene. Assumed by the local media to be the officer in command of the operation, he was immediately besieged with requests for details of the operation, along with videotapes for the TV reporters. So successful had he been in isolating the theme park from press coverage that his superiors in Madrid themselves had little idea what had taken place, and this also weighed on his decision. So the colonel decided to release Worldpark's own video coverage, deeming this to be the most innocuous footage po
ssible, as it showed very little. The most dramatic part had been the descent of the shooting team from the helicopter to the castle roof, and then from the roof of the castle to the control-room windows, and that, Nuncio decided, was pure vanilla, lasting a mere four minutes, the time required for Paddy Connolly to place his line charges on the window frames and move aside to detonate them. Nothing of the shooting inside the room had been taped, because the terrorists had themselves wrecked the surveillance camera inside the facility. The elimination of the castle-roof sentry had been taped, but was not released due to the gruesome nature of his head wound, and the same was true of the killing of the last of them, the one named Andre who had killed the little Dutch girl which scene had also been recorded, but was withheld for the same reason. The rest was all let go. The distance of the cameras from the actual scene of action prevented the recognition, or even the sight of the faces of the rescue team, merely their jaunty step, outside, many of them carrying the rescued children that, he decided, could harm or offend no one, least of all the special-operations team from England, who now hid one of the tricornio hats from his force to go along with the eagle of Worldpark's notional VI Legion as a souvenir of their successful mission.
And so, the black-and-white video was released to CNN, Sky News, and other interested news agencies for broadcast around the world, to give substance to the commentary of various reporters who'd assembled at Worldpark's main gate, there to comment at great and erroneous length about the expertise of the Guardia Civil's special action team dispatched from Madrid to resolve this hateful episode at one of the world's great theme parks.
It was eight o'clock in the evening when Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov saw it in his New York apartment, as he smoked a cigar and sipped a vodka neat while his VCR taped it for later detailed examination. The assault phase, he saw, was both expert and expected in all details. The flashes of light from the explosives used were dramatic and singularly useless for showing him anything, and the parade of the rescuers as predictable as the dawn, their springy steps, their slung weapons, and their arms full of small children. Well, such men would naturally feel elation at the successful conclusion of such a mission, and the trailing footage showed them walking off to a building, where there must have been a physician to take care of the one child who'd sustained a minor injury during the operation, as the reporters said. Then, later, the troops had come outside, and one of them had swiped an arm against the stone wall of the building, lighting a match, which he used…
… to light a pipe…To light a pipe, Popov saw. He was surprised at his own reaction to that. He blinked hard, leaning forward in his seat. The camera didn't zoom in, but the soldier/policeman in question was clearly smoking a curved pipe, puffing the smoke out every few seconds as he spoke with his comrades,.. doing nothing dramatic, just talking unrecorded words calmly, as such men did after a successful mission, doubtless discussing who had done what, what had gone according to plan and what had not. It might as easily lave been in a club or bar, for trained men always spoke the same way in those circumstances, whether they were soldiers or doctors or football players, after the stress of the job was concluded, and the lessons-learned phase began. It was the usual mark of professionals, Popov knew. Then the picture changed, back to the face of some American reporter who blathered on until the break for the next commercial, to be followed, the anchorman said, by some political development or other in Washington. With that, Popov rewound the tape, ejected it, and then reached for a different tape. He inserted it into the VCR, then fast forwarded to the end of the incident in Bern, through the takedown phase and into the aftermath where… yes, a man had lit a pipe. He'd remembered that from watching from across the street, hadn't he?
Then he got the tape of the press coverage from the Vienna incident, and… yes, at the end a man had lit a pipe. In every case it was a man of about one hundred eighty centimeters in height, making much the same gesture with the match, holding the pipe in exactly the same way, gesturing to another with it in exactly the same manner, the way men did with pipes…
"… ahh, nichevo, " the intelligence officer said to himself in the expensive high-rise apartment. He spent another half an hour, cueing and rerunning the tapes. The clothing was the same in every case. The man the same size, the same gestures and body language, the same weapons slung the same way, the same everything, the former KGB officer saw. And that meant the same man… in three separate countries.
But this man was not Swiss, not Austrian, and not Spanish. Next Popov backed off his deductive thoughts, searching for other facts he could discern from the visual information he had there. There were other people visible in all the tapes. The pipe smoker was often attended by another man, shorter than he, to whom the pipe smoker appeared to speak with some degree of friendly deference. There was another around, a large, muscular one who in two of the tapes carried a heavy machine gun, but in the third, carrying a child, did not. So, he had two and maybe a third man on the tapes who had appeared in Bern, Vienna, and Spain. In every case, the reporters had credited the rescue to local police, but no, that wasn't the truth, was it? So. who were these people who arrived with the speed and decisiveness of a thunderbolt-in three different countries… twice to conclude operations that he had initiated, and once to settle one begun by others-and who they had been, he didn't know nor especially care. The reporters said that they'd demanded the release of his old friend, the Jackal. What fools. The French would as soon toss Napoleon's corpse from Les Invalides as give up that murderer, ll'ych Ramirez Sanchez, named with Lenin's own patronymic by his communist father. Popov shook that thought off. He'd just discovered something of great importance. Somewhere in Europe was a special-operations team that crossed international borders as easily as a businessman flying in an airliner, that had freedom to operate in different countries, that displaced and did the work of local police… and did it well, expertly… and this operation would not hurt them, would it? Their prestige and international acceptability would only grow from the rescue of the children at Worldpark…
"Nichevo, " he whispered to himself again. He'd learned something of great importance this night, and to celebrate he poured himself another vodka. Now he had to follow it up. How? He'd think that one over, sleeping on the thought, trusting his trained brain to come up with something.
They were nearly home already. The MC- 130 had picked them up and flown the now relaxed team back to Fereford, their weapons re-packed in the plastic carrying cases, their demeanor not the least bit tense. Some of the men were cutting up. Others were explaining what they'd done to team members who'd not had the chance to participate directly. Mike Pierce, Clark saw, was especially animated in his conversation with his neighbor. He was now the Rainbow kill-leader. Homer Johnston was chatting with Weber-they'd come to some sort of deal, something agreed between them. Weber had taken a beautiful but out-of policy shot to disable the terrorist's Uzi, allowing Johnston to-of course, John told himself, he didn't just want to kill the bastard who'd murdered the little girl. He'd wanted to hurt the little prick, to send him off to hell with a special, personal message. He'd have to talk to Sergeant Johnston about that. It was outside of Rainbow policy. It was unprofessional. Just killing the bastards was enough. You could always trust God to handle the special treatment. But well, John told himself he could understand that, couldn't he? There had once been that little bastard called Billy to whom he'd given a very special interrogation in a recompression chamber, and though he remembered it with a measure of pain and shame, at the time he'd felt it justified… and he'd gotten the information he'd needed at the time, hadn't he? Even so, he'd have to talk with Homer, advise him never to do such a thing again. And Homer would listen, John knew. He'd exorcised the demons once, and once, usually, was enough. It must have been hard for him to sit at his rifle, watching the murder of a child, the power to avenge her instantly right there in his skilled hands, and yet do nothing. Could you have done that, John? Clark asked himself, not really knowing w
hat the answer was in his current, exhausted state. He felt the wheels thump down on the Hereford runway, and the props roar into reverse pitch to slow the aircraft.
Well, John thought, his idea, his concept for Rainbow was working out rather well, wasn't it? Three deployments, three clean missions. Two hostages killed, one before his team deployed to Bern, the other just barely after their arrival in the park, neither one the result of negligence or mistake on the part of his men. Their mission performance had been as nearly perfect as anything he'd ever seen. Even his fellow animals of 3rd SOG in Vietnam hadn't been this good, and that was something he'd never expected to say or even think. The thought came suddenly, and just as unexpectedly came the near-need for tears, that he might have the honor to command such warriors as these, to send them out and bring them back as they were now, smiling as they stood, hoisting their gear on their shoulders and walking to the open rear cargo door on the Herky Bird, behind which waited their trucks. His men.
"The bar is open!" Clark called to them, when he stood.
"A little late, John." Alistair observed." If the door's locked, we'll have Paddy blow it," Clark insisted, with a vicious grin.
Stanley considered that and nodded. "Quite so, the lads have earned a pint or two each." Besides which, he knew how to pick locks.
They walked into the club still wearing their ninja suits, and found the barman waiting. There were a few others in the club as well, mainly SAS troopers sipping at their last-call pints. Several of them applauded when the Rainbow team came in, which warmed the room. John walked to the bar, leading his men and ordering beer for all.
"I do love this stuff," Mike Pierce said a minute later, taking his Guinness and sipping through the thin layer of foam.
"Two, Mike?" Clark asked.
"Yeah." He nodded. "The one at the desk, he was on the phone. Tap-tap," Pierce said, touching two fingers to the side of his head. "Then another one, shooting from behind a desk. I jumped over and gave him three on the fly. Landed, rolled, and three more in the back of the head. So long, Charlie. Then one more, got a piece of him, along with Ding and Eddie. Ain't supposed to like this part of the job. I know that-but, Jesus, it felt good to take those fuckers down. Killin' kids, man. Not good. Well, they ain't gonna be doing any more of that, sir. Not with the new sheriff in town."