by Tom Clancy
“I am putting together a good staff,” David said, setting his tea down. “I need three to five weeks to assemble all the equipment I need.”
“Faster,” Clark responded at once.
David shook his head. “Not possible. Much of our electronics items can be purchased off the shelf, as it were, but some will have to be custom-made. The orders are all placed,” he assured his boss, “with high-priority flags—from the usual vendors. TRW, IDI, Marconi, you know who they are. But they can’t do miracles, even for us. Three to five weeks for some crucial items.”
“SAS are willing to hire anything important to us,” Stanley assured Clark from his end of the table.
“For training purposes?” Clark asked, annoyed that he hadn’t found out the answer to the question already.
“Perhaps.”
Ding cut the run off at three miles, which they’d done in twenty minutes. Good time, he thought, somewhat winded, until he turned to see his ten men about as fresh as they’d been at the beginning, one or two with a sly smile for his neighbors at their wimpy new leader.
Damn.
The run had ended at the weapons range, where targets and arms were ready. Here Chavez had made his own change in his team’s selection. A longtime Beretta aficionado, he’d decided that his men would use the recent .45 Beretta as their personal sidearms, along with the Hechler & Koch MP-10 submachine gun, the new version of the venerable MP-5, chambered instead for the 10-mm Smith & Wesson cartridge developed in the 1980s for the American FBI. Without saying anything, Ding picked up his weapon, donned his ear-protectors, and started going for the silhouette targets, set five meters away. There, he saw, all eight holes in the head. But Dieter Weber, next to him, had grouped his shots in one ragged hole, and Paddy Connolly had made what appeared to be one not-so-ragged hole less than an inch across, all between the target’s eyes, without touching the eyes themselves. Like most American shooters, Chavez had believed that Europeans didn’t know pistols worth a damn. Evidently, training corrected that, he saw.
Next, people picked up their H&Ks, which just about anyone could shoot well because of the superb diopter sights. Ding walked along the firing line, watching his people engage pop-up steel plates the size and shape of human heads. Driven up by compressed air, they fell back down instantly with a metallic clang. Ding ended up behind First Sergeant Vega, who finished his magazine and turned.
“Told you they were good, Ding.”
“How long they been here?”
“Oh, ’bout a week. Used to running five miles, sir,” Julio added with a smile. “Remember the summer camp we went to in Colorado?”
Most important of all, Ding thought, was the steady aim despite the run, which was supposed to get people pumped up, and simulate the stress of a real combat situation. But these bastards were as steady as fucking bronze statues. Formerly a squad leader in the Seventh Light Infantry Division, he’d once been one of the toughest, fittest, and most effective soldiers in his country’s uniform, which was why John Clark had tapped him for a job in the Agency—and in that capacity he’d pulled off some tense and tough missions in the field. It had been a very long time indeed since Domingo Chavez had felt the least bit inadequate about anything. But now quiet voices were speaking into his ear.
“Who’s the toughest?” he asked Vega.
“Weber. I heard stories about the German mountain school. Well, they be true, ’mano. Dieter isn’t entirely human. Good in hand-to-hand, good pistol, damned good with a rifle, and I think he could run a deer down if he had to, then rip it apart barehanded.” Chavez had to remind himself that being called “good” in a combat skill by a graduate of Ranger school and Fort Bragg’s special-operations schools wasn’t quite the same as from a guy in a corner bar. Julio was about as tough as they came.
“The smartest?”
“Connolly. All those SAS guys are tops. Us Americans have to play a little catchup ball. But we will,” Vega assured him. “Don’t sweat it, Ding. You’ll keep up with us, after a week or so. Just like it was in Colorado.”
Chavez didn’t really want to be reminded of that job. Too many friends lost in the mountains of Colombia, doing a job that their country had never acknowledged. Watching his men finish off their training rounds told him much about them. If anyone had missed a single shot, he failed to notice it. Every man fired off exactly a hundred rounds, the standard daily regimen for men who fired five hundred per working week on routine training, as opposed to more carefully directed drill. That would start tomorrow.
“Okay,” John concluded, “we’ll have a staff meeting every morning at eight-fifteen for routine matters, and a more formal one every Friday afternoon. My door is always open—including the one at home. People, if you need me, there’s a phone next to my shower. Now, I want to get out and see the shooters. Anything else? Good. We stand adjourned.” Everyone stood and shuffled out the door. Stanley remained.
“That went well,” Alistair observed, pouring himself another cup of tea. “Especially for one not accustomed to bureaucratic life.”
“Shows, eh?” Clark asked with a grin.
“One can learn anything, John.”
“I hope so.”
“When’s morning PT around here?”
“Oh-six-forty-five. You plan to run and sweat with the lads?”
“I plan to try,” Clark answered.
“You’re too old, John. Some of those chaps run marathons for recreation, and you’re closer to sixty than to fifty.”
“Al, I can’t command those people without trying, and you know that.”
“Quite,” Stanley admitted.
They awoke late, one at a time, over a period of about an hour. For the most part they just lay there in bed, some of them shuffling off to the bathroom, where they also found aspirin and Tylenol for the headaches they all had, along with showers, which half of them decided to take and the other half to forgo. In the adjoining room was a breakfast buffet that surprised them, with pans full of scrambled eggs, pancakes, sausage and bacon. Some of them even remembered how to use napkins, the people in the monitoring room saw.
They met their captor after they’d had a chance to eat breakfast. He offered all of them clean clothes, after they got cleaned up.
“What is this place?” asked the one known to the staff only as #4. It sure as hell wasn’t any Bowery mission he was familiar with.
“My company is undertaking a study,” the host said from behind a tightly fitting mask. “You gentlemen will be part of that study. You will be staying with us for a while. During that time, you will have clean beds, clean clothes, good food, good medical care, and”—he pulled a wall panel back—“whatever you want to drink.” In a wall alcove which the guests remarkably had not yet discovered were three shelves of every manner of wine, beer, and spirit that could be purchased at the local liquor store, with glasses, water, mixes, and ice.
“You mean we can’t leave?” Number 7 asked.
“We would prefer that you stay,” the host said, somewhat evasively. He pointed to the liquor cabinet, his eyes smiling around the mask. “Anyone care for a morning eye-opener?”
It turned out that it wasn’t too early in the morning for any of them, and that the expensive bourbons and ryes were the first and hardest hit. The additional drug in the alcohol was quite tasteless, and the guests all headed back to their alcove beds. Next to each was a TV set. Two more decided to make use of the showers. Three even shaved, emerging from the bathroom looking quite human. For the time being.
In the monitoring room half a building away, Dr. Archer manipulated the various TV cameras to get close-ups on every “guest.”
“They’re all pretty much on profile,” she observed. “Their blood work ought to be a disaster.”
“Oh, yeah, Barb,” Dr. Killgore agreed. “Number Three looks especially unwell. You suppose we can get him slightly cleaned up before . . . ?”
“I think we should try,” Barbara Archer, M.D., thought. “We can�
�t monkey with the test criteria too much, can we?”
“Yeah, and it’d be bad for morale if we let one die too soon,” Killgore went on.
“ ‘What a piece of work is man,’ ” Archer quoted, with a snort.
“Not all of us, Barb.” A chuckle. “Surprised they didn’t find a woman or two for the group.”
“I’m not,” replied the feminist Dr. Archer, to the amusement of the more cynical Killgore. But it wasn’t worth getting all worked up over. He looked away from the battery of TV screens, and picked up the memo from corporate headquarters. Their guests were to be treated as guests—fed, cleaned up, and offered all the drink they could put away consistent with the continuance of their bodily functions. It was slightly worrisome to the epidemiologist that all their guest-test-subjects were seriously impaired street alcoholics. The advantage of using them, of course, was that they wouldn’t be missed, even by what might have passed for friends. Few had any family members who would even know where to look for them. Fewer still would have any who would be surprised by the inability to locate them. And none, Killgore judged, had so much as one who would notify proper authorities on the inability to find them—and even if that happened, would the New York City Police care? Not likely.
No, all their “guests” were people written off by their society, less aggressively but just as finally as Hitler had written off his Jews, though with somewhat more justice, Archer and Killgore both thought. What a piece of work was man? These examples of the self-designated godlike species were of less use than the laboratory animals they were now replacing. And they were also far less appealing to Archer, who had feelings for rabbits and even rats. Killgore found that amusing. He didn’t much care about them either, at least not as individual animals. It was the species as a whole that mattered, wasn’t it? And as far as the “guests” were concerned, well, they weren’t even good examples of the substandard humans whom the species didn’t need. Killgore was. So was Archer, her goofy political-sexual views notwithstanding. With that decided, Killgore returned to making a few notes and doing his paperwork. Tomorrow they’d do the physical examinations. That would be fun, he was sure.
CHAPTER 2
SADDLING UP
The first two weeks started off pleasantly enough. Chavez was now running five miles without any discomfort, doing the requisite number of push-ups with his team, and shooting better, as well as about half of them, but not as well as Connolly and the American Hank Patterson, both of whom must have been born with pistols in their cribs or something, Ding decided after firing three hundred rounds per day to try to equal them. Maybe a gunsmith could play with his weapon. The SAS based here had a regimental armorer who might have trained with Sam Colt himself, or so he’d heard. A little lighter and smoother on the trigger, perhaps. But that was mere pride talking. Pistols were secondary weapons. With their H&K MP-10s, every man could put three quick aimed rounds in a head at fifty meters about as fast as his mind could form the thought. These people were awesome, the best soldiers he’d ever met—or heard about, Ding admitted to himself, sitting at his desk and doing some hated paperwork. He grunted. Was there anyone in the world who didn’t hate paperwork?
The team spent a surprising amount of time sitting at their desks and reading, mainly intelligence stuff—which terrorist was thought to be where, according to some intelligence agency or police department or money-grubbing informer. In fact the data they pored over was nearly useless, but since it was the best they had, they pored over it anyway as a way of breaking the routine. Included were photos of the world’s surviving terrorists. Carlos the Jackal, now in his fifties, and now settled into a French maximum-security prison, was the one they’d all wanted. The photos of him were computer-manipulated to simulate his current-age appearance, which they then compared with real-life photos from the French. The team members spent time memorizing all of them, because some dark night in some unknown place, a flash of light might reveal one of these faces, and you’d have that long to decide whether or not to double-tap the head in question—and if you had the chance to bag another Carlos ll’ych Ramirez Sanchez, you wanted to take it, ’cuz then, Ding’s mind went on, you’d never be able to buy a beer in a cop or special-ops bar again anywhere in the world, you’d be so famous. The real hell of it was, this pile of trash on his desk wasn’t really trash after all. If they ever bagged the next Carlos, it would be because some local cop, in São Paolo, Brazil, or Bumfuck, Bosnia, or wherever, heard something from some informant or other, then went to the proper house and took a look, and then had his brain go click from all the flyers that filled cophouses around the world, and then it would be up to the street savvy of that cop to see if he might arrest the bastard on the spot—or, if the situation looked a little too tense, to report back to his lieutenant, and just maybe a special team like Ding’s Team-2 would deploy quietly, and take the fucker down, the easy way or the hard way, in front of whatever spouse or kids there might be, ignorant of daddy’s former career . . . and then it would make CNN with quite a splash. . . .
That was the problem with working at a desk. You started daydreaming. Chavez, simulated major, checked his watch and rose, headed out into the bullpen, and handed off his pile of trash to Miss Moony. He was about to ask if everyone was ready, but they must have been, because the only other person to ask was halfway to the door. On the way, he drew his pistol and belt. The next stop was what the Brits called a robing room, except there were no robes, but instead coal-black fatigue clothes, complete with body armor.
Team-2 was all there, mostly dressed a few minutes early for the day’s exercise. They were all loose, relaxed, smiling, and joking quietly. When all had their gear on, they went to the arms room to draw their SMGs. Each put the double-looped sling over his head, then checked to see that the magazine was full, sliding each into the proper port on the bottom of the weapon, and working the bolt back to the safe position, then snugging the weapon to make sure that each fitted to the differing specifications of each individual shooter.
The exercises had been endless, or as much so as two weeks could make them. There were six basic scenarios, all of which could be played out in various environments. The one they hated most was inside the body of a commercial aircraft. The only good thing about that was the confinement forced on the bad guys—they wouldn’t be going anywhere. The rest was entirely bad. Lots of civilians in the fire arcs, good concealment for the bad guys—and if one of them really did have a bomb strapped to his body—they almost always claimed to—well, then all he had to have was the balls to pull the string or close the switch, and then, if the bastard was halfway competent, everyone aboard was toast. Fortunately, few people chose death in that way. But Ding and his people couldn’t think like that. Much of the time terrorists seemed to fear capture more than death—so your shooting had to be fast and perfect, and the team had to hit the aircraft like a Kansas tornado at midnight, with your flash-bangs especially important to stun the bastards into combat-ineffectiveness so that the double-taps were aimed at nonmoving heads, and hope to God that the civilians you were trying to rescue didn’t stand up and block the shooting range that the fuselage of the Boeing or Airbus had suddenly become.
“Team-2, we ready?” Chavez asked.
“Yes, sir!” came the chorused reply.
With that, Ding led them outside and ran them half a mile to the shooting house, a hard run, not the fast jog of daily exercises. Johnston and Weber were already on the scene, on opposite corners of the rectangular structure.
“Command to Rifle Two-Two,” Ding said into his helmet-mounted microphone, “anything to report?”
“Negative, Two-Six. Nothing at all,” Weber reported.
“Rifle Two-One?”
“Six,” Johnston replied, “I saw a curtain move, but nothing else. Instruments show four to six voices inside, speaking English. Nothing else to report.”
“Roger,” Ding responded, the remainder of his team concealed behind a truck. He took a final look at
the layout of the inside of the building. The raid had been fully briefed. The shooters knew the inside of the structure well enough to see it with their eyes closed. With that knowledge, Ding waved for the team to move.
Paddy Connolly took the lead, racing to the door. Just as he got there, he let go of his H&K and let it dangle on the sling while he pulled the Primacord from the fanny-pack hanging down from his body armor. He stuck the explosive to the door frame by its adhesive and pushed the blasting cap into the top-right corner. A second later, he moved right ten feet, holding the detonator control up in his left hand, while his right grabbed the pistol grip of his SMG and brought it up to point at the sky.
Okay, Ding thought. Time to move. “Let’s go!” he shouted at the team.
As the first of them bolted around the truck, Connolly thumbed the switch, and the door frame disintegrated, sending the door flying inward. The first shooter, Sergeant Mike Pierce, was less than a second behind it, disappearing into the smoking hole with Chavez right behind him.
The inside was dark, the only light coming through the shattered doorway. Pierce scanned the room, found it empty, and then lodged himself by the doorway into the next room. Ding ran into that first, leading his team—
—there they were, four targets and four hostages—
Chavez brought his MP-10 up and fired two silenced rounds into the left-most target’s head. He saw the rounds hit, dead-center in the head, right between the blue-painted eyes, then traversed right to see that Steve Lincoln had gotten his man just as planned. In less than a second, the overhead lights came on. It was all over, elapsed time from the Primacord explosion, seven seconds. Eight seconds had been programmed for the exercise. Ding safed his weapon.