by Tom Clancy
“Niner-Two-Zero, Niner-Two-Zero, this is Agent Carney again.”
“Carney, this is Rainbow.” Clark paused. “Captain, is this radio link secure?”
“It’s encrypted, yes.”
John almost swore at himself for violating radio discipline. “Okay, Carney, what’s happening?”
“Stand by for the Director.” There was a click and a brief crackle. “John?” a new voice asked.
“Yes, Dan.”
“What gives?”
“Three of them, Spanish-speaking, not real smart. We took them down.”
“Alive?”
“That’s affirmative,” Clark confirmed. “I told the pilot to head for RCAF Gander. We’re due there in—”
“Niner-zero minutes,” the copilot said.
“Hour and a half,” John went on. “You want to have the Mounties show up to collect our bad boys, and call Andrews. We need transport on to London.”
He didn’t have to explain why. What ought to have been a simple commercial flight of three officers and two wives had blown their identities, and there was little damned sense in having them hang around for everyone aboard to see their faces—most would just want to buy them drinks, but that wasn’t a good idea. All the effort they’d gone to, to make Rainbow both effective and secret, had been blown by three dumbass Spaniards—or whatever they were. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police would figure that one out before handing them over to the American FBI.
“Okay, John, let me get moving on that. I’ll call René and have him get things organized. Anything else you need?”
“Yeah, send me a few hours of sleep, will ya?”
“Anything you want, pal,” the FBI Director replied with a chuckle, and the line went dead. Clark took the headset off and hung it on the hook.
“Who the hell are you?” the captain demanded again. The initial explanation hadn’t been totally satisfactory.
“Sir, my friends and I are air marshals who just happened to be aboard. Is that clear, sir?”
“I suppose,” Garnet said. “Glad you made it. The one who was up here was a little loose, if you know what I mean. We were damned worried there for a while.”
Clark nodded with a knowing smile. “Yeah, so was I.”
They’d been doing it for some time. The powder-blue vans—there were four of them—circulated throughout New York City, picking up homeless people and shuttling them to the dry-out centers run by the corporation. The quiet, kindly operation had made local television over a year ago, and garnered the corporation a few dozen friendly letters, then slid back down below the horizon, as such things tended to do. It was approaching midnight, and with dropping autumn temperatures, the vans were out, collecting the homeless throughout central and lower Manhattan. They didn’t do it the way the police once had. The people they helped weren’t compelled to get aboard. The volunteers from the corporation asked, politely, if they wanted a clean bed for the night, free of charge, and absent the religious complications typical of most “missions,” as they were traditionally called. Those who declined the offer were given blankets, used ones donated by corporate employees who were home sleeping or watching TV at the moment—participation in the program was voluntary for the staff as well—but still warm, and waterproofed. Some of the homeless preferred to stay out, deeming it to be some sort of freedom. More did not. Even habitual drunkards liked beds and showers. Presently there were ten of them in the van, and that was all it could hold for this trip. They were helped aboard, sat down, and seat-belted into their places for safety purposes.
None of them knew that this was the fifth of the four vans operating in lower Manhattan, though they found out something was a little different as soon as it started moving. The attendant leaned back from the front seat and handed out bottles of Gallo burgundy, an inexpensive California red, but a better wine than they were used to drinking, and to which something had been added.
By the time they reached their destination, all were asleep or at least stuporous. Those who were able to move were helped from one truck into the back of another, strapped down in their litter beds, and allowed to fall asleep. The rest were carried and strapped down by two pairs of men. With that task done, the first van was driven off to be cleaned out—they used steam to make sure that whatever residue might be left was sterilized and blasted out of the van. The second truck headed uptown on the West Side Highway, caught the curling ramp for the George Washington Bridge, and crossed the Hudson River. From there it headed north through the northeast corner of New Jersey, then back into New York State.
It turned out that Colonel William Lytle Byron was already in the air in a USAF KC-10 on a course track almost identical to, and only an hour behind, the United 777. It altered course northward for Gander as well. The former P-3 base had to wake up a few personnel to handle the inbound jumbos, but that was the least of it.
The three failed hijackers were blindfolded, hog-tied, and laid on the floor just forward of the front row of first-class seats, which John, Ding, and Alistair appropriated. Coffee was served, and the other passengers kept away from that part of the aircraft.
“I rather admire the Ethiopians’ approach to situations like this,” Stanley observed. He was sipping tea.
“What’s that?” Chavez asked tiredly.
“Some years ago they had a hijacking attempt on their national flag carrier. There happened to be security chaps aboard, and they got control of the situation. Then they strapped their charges in first-class seats, wrapped towels around their necks to protect the upholstery, and cut their throats, right there on the aircraft. And you know—”
“Gotcha,” Ding observed. Nobody had messed with that airline since. “Simple, but effective.”
“Quite.” He set his cup down. “I hope this sort of thing doesn’t happen too often.”
The three officers looked out the windows to see the runway lights just before the 777 thumped down at RCAF Gander. There was a muted series of cheers and a smattering of applause from aft. The airliner slowed and then taxied off to the military facilities, where it stopped. The front-right door was opened, and a scissors-lift truck moved to it, slowly and carefully.
John, Ding, and Alistair unsnapped their seat belts and moved toward the door, keeping an eye on the three hijackers as they did so. The first aboard the aircraft was a RCAF officer with a pistol belt and white lanyard, followed by three men in civilian clothes who had to be cops.
“You’re Mr. Clark?” the officer asked.
“That’s right.” John pointed. “There’s your three—suspects, I think the term is.” He smiled tiredly at that. The cops moved to deal with them.
“Alternate transport is on the way, about an hour out,” the Canadian officer told him.
“Thank you.” The three moved to collect their carry-on baggage, and in two cases, their wives. Patsy was asleep and had to be awakened. Sandy had gotten back into her book. Two minutes later, all five of them were on the ground, shuffling into one of the RCAF cars. As soon as they pulled away, the aircraft started moving again, taxiing to the civilian terminal so that the passengers could get off and stretch while the 777 was serviced and refueled.
“How do we get to England?” Ding asked, after getting his wife bedded down in the unused ready room.
“Your Air Force is sending a VC-20. There will be people at Heathrow to collect your bags. There’s a Colonel Byron coming for your three prisoners,” the senior cop explained.
“Here are their weapons.” Stanley handed over three airsick bags with the disassembled pistols inside. “Browning M-1935s, military finish. No explosives. They really were bloody amateurs. Basques, I think. They seem to have been after the Spanish ambassador to Washington. His wife was in the seat next to mine. Señora Constanza de Monterosa—the wine family. They bottle the most marvelous clarets and Madeiras. I think you will find that this was an unauthorized operation.”
“And who exactly are you?” the cop asked. Clark handled it.
“We can’t answer that. You’re sending the hijackers right back?”
“Ottawa has instructed us to do that under the Hijacking Treaty. Look, I have to say something to the press.”
“Tell them that three American law enforcement officers happened to be aboard and helped to subdue the idiots,” John told him.
“Yeah, that’s close enough,” Chavez agreed with a grin. “First arrest I ever made, John. Damn, I forgot to give them their rights,” he added. He was weary enough to think that enormously funny.
They were beyond filthy, the receiving team saw. That was no particular surprise. Neither was the fact that they smelled bad enough to gag a skunk. That would have to wait. The litters were carried off the truck into the building, ten miles west of Binghamton, New York, in the hill country of central New York State. In the clean room, all ten were sprayed in the face from a squeeze bottle much like that used to clean windows. It was done one at a time to all of them, then half were given injections into the arm. Both groups of five got steel bracelets, numbered 1 to 10. Those with even numbers got the injections. The odd-numbered control group did not. With this task done, the ten homeless were carried off to the bunk room to sleep off the wine and the drugs. The truck which had delivered them was already gone, heading west for Illinois and a return to its regular duties. The driver hadn’t even known what he’d done, except to drive.
CHAPTER 1
MEMO
The VC-20B flight was somewhat lacking in amenities—the food consisted of sandwiches and an undistinguished wine—but the seats were comfortable and the ride smooth enough that everyone slept until the wheels and flaps came down at RAF Northholt, a military airfield just west of London. As the USAF G-IV taxied to the ramp, John remarked on the age of the buildings.
“Spitfire base from the Battle of Britain,” Stanley explained, stretching in his seat. “We let private business jets use it as well.”
“We’ll be back and forth outta here a lot, then,” Ding surmised at once, rubbing his eyes and wishing for coffee. “What time is it?”
“Just after eight, local—Zulu time, too, isn’t it?”
“Quite,” Alistair confirmed, with a sleepy grunt.
Just then the rain started, making for a proper welcome to British soil. It was a hundred-yard walk to the reception building, where a British official stamped their passports and officially welcomed them to his country before going back to his breakfast tea and newspaper.
Three cars waited outside, all of them black Daimler limousines, which headed off the base, then west, and south for Hereford. This was proof that he was a civilian bureaucrat, Clark told himself in the lead car. Otherwise they’d have used helicopters. But Britain wasn’t entirely devoid of civilization. They stopped at a roadside McDonald’s for Egg McMuffins and coffee. Sandy snorted at the cholesterol intake. She’d been chiding John about it for months. Then she thought about the previous night.
“John?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Who were they?”
“Who, the guys on the airplane?” He looked over and got a nod. “Not sure, probably Basque separatists. It looked like they were after the Spanish ambassador, but they screwed up big-time. He wasn’t aboard, just his wife.”
“They were trying to hijack the airplane?”
“Yep, they sure were.”
“Isn’t that scary?”
John nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, it is. Well, would have been scarier if they were competent, but they weren’t.” An inner smile. Boy, did they ever pick the wrong flight! But he couldn’t laugh about it now, not with his wife sitting next to him, on the wrong side of the road—a fact that had him looking up in some irritation. It felt very wrong to be on the left side of the road, driving along at . . . eighty miles per hour? Damn. Didn’t they have speed limits here?
“What’ll happen to them?” Sandy persisted.
“There’s an international treaty. The Canadians will ship them back to the States for trial—Federal Court. They’ll be tried, convicted, and imprisoned for air piracy. They’ll be behind bars for a long time.” And they were lucky at that, Clark didn’t add. Spain might well have been a little more unpleasant about it.
“First time in a long time something like that happened.”
“Yep.” Her husband agreed. You had to be a real dolt to hijack airplanes, but dolts, it appeared, were not yet an endangered species. That was why he was the Six of an organization called Rainbow.
There is good news and there is bad news, the memo he’d written had begun. As usual, it wasn’t couched in bureaucratese; it was a language Clark had never quite learned despite his thirty years in CIA.
With the demise of the Soviet Union and other nation states with political positions adverse to American and Western interests, the likelihood of a major international confrontation is at an all-time low. This, clearly, is the best of good news.
But along with that we must face the fact that there remain many experienced and trained international terrorists still roaming the world, some with lingering contacts with national intelligence agencies—plus the fact that some nations, while not desirous of a direct confrontation with American or other Western nations, could still make use of the remaining terrorist “free agents” for more narrow political goals.
If anything, this problem is very likely to grow, since under the previous world situation, the major nation states placed firm limits on terrorist activity—these limits enforced by controlled access to weapons, funding, training, and safe-havens.
It seems likely that the current world situation will invert the previous “understanding” enjoyed by the major countries. The price of support, weapons, training, and safe-havens might well become actual terrorist activity, not the ideological purity previously demanded by sponsoring nation states.
The most obvious solution to this—probably—increasing problem will be a new multinational counterterrorist team. I propose the code name Rainbow. I further propose that the organization be based in the United Kingdom. The reasons for this are simple: • The U.K. currently owns and operates the Special Air Service, the world’s foremost—that is, most experienced—special-operations agency.
• London is the world’s most accessible city in terms of commercial air travel—in addition to which the SAS has a very cordial relationship with British Airways.
• The legal environment is particularly advantageous, due to press restrictions possible under British law but not American.
• The long-standing “special relationship” between American and British governmental agencies.
For all of these reasons, the proposed special-operations team, composed of U.S., U.K., and selected NATO personnel, with full support from national-intelligence services, coordinated at site. . . .
And he’d sold it, Clark told himself with a wispy smile. It had helped that both Ed and Mary Pat Foley had backed him up in the Oval Office, along with General Mickey Moore and selected others. The new agency, Rainbow, was blacker than black, its American funding directed through the Department of the Interior by Capitol Hill, then through the Pentagon’s Office of Special Projects, with no connection whatsoever to the intelligence community. Fewer than a hundred people in Washington knew that Rainbow existed. A far smaller number would have been better, but that was about the best that could be expected.
The chain of command was a little baroque. No avoiding that. The British influence would be hard to shake—fully half of the field personnel were Brits, and nearly that many of the intel weenies, but Clark was the boss. That constituted a major concession from his hosts, John knew. Alistair Stanley would be his executive officer, and John didn’t have a problem with that. Stanley was tough, and better yet, one of the smartest special-operations guys he’d ever met—he knew when to hold, when to fold, and when to play the cards. About the only bad news was that he, Clark, was now a REMF—worse, a suit. He’d have an office and two secretaries instead of going out to run with the big do
gs. Well, he had to admit to himself, that had to come sooner or later, didn’t it?
Shit. He wouldn’t run with the dogs, but he would play with them. He had to do that, didn’t he, to show the troops that he was worthy of his command. He would be a colonel, not a general, Clark told himself. He’d be with the troops as much as possible, running, shooting, and talking things over.
Meanwhile, I’m a captain, Ding was telling himself in the next car behind, while eagerly taking in the countryside. He’d only been through Britain for layovers at Heathrow or Gatwick, and never seen the land, which was as green as an Irish postcard. He’d be under John, Mr. C, leading one of the strike teams, and in effective rank, that made him a captain, which was about the best rank to have in the Army, high enough that the NCOs respected you as worthy of command, and low enough that you weren’t a staff puke and you played with the troops. He saw Patsy was dozing next to him. The pregnancy was taking it out of her, and doing so in unpredictable ways. Sometimes she bubbled with activity. Other times, she just vegetated. Well, she was carrying a new little Chavez in her belly, and that made everything okay—better than okay. A miracle. Almost as great as the miracle that here he was back doing what he’d originally been trained for—to be a soldier. Better yet, something of a free agent. The bad news was that he was subject to more than one government—suits that spoke multiple languages—but that couldn’t be helped, and he’d volunteered for this to stay with Mr. C. Someone had to look after the boss.
The airplane had surprised him quite a bit. Mr. C hadn’t had his weapon handy—what the hell, Ding thought, you bother to get a permit that allows you to carry a weapon on a civilian airliner (about the hardest thing you can wish to have) and then you stash your weapon where you can’t get at it? Santa Maria! even John Clark was getting old. Must have been the first operational mistake he’d made in a long time, and then he’d tried to cover it by going cowboy on the takedown. Well, it had been nicely done. Smooth and cool. But overly fast, Ding thought, overly fast. He held Patsy’s hand. She was sleeping a lot now. The little guy was sapping her strength. Ding leaned over to kiss her lightly on the cheek, softly enough that she didn’t stir. He caught the driver’s eye in the mirror and stared back with a poker expression. Was the guy just a driver or a team member? He’d find out soon enough, Chavez decided.