by Tom Clancy
“Goddamnit, John!” he said to the Rainbow commander.
Clark stood, smiling at the target to his left, less than two feet away, the two holes drilled well enough to ensure certain, instant death. He wasn’t wearing any protective gear. Neither was Stanley, at the far end of the line, also trying to show off, though Mrs. Foorgate and Mrs. Montgomery were, in their center seats. The presence of the women surprised Chavez until he reminded himself that they were team members, too, and probably eager to show that they, too, belonged with the boys. He had to admire their spirit, if not their good sense.
“Seven seconds. That’ll do, I guess. Five would be better,” John observed, but the dimensions of the building pretty much determined the speed with which the team could cover the distance. He walked across, checking all the targets. McTyler’s target showed one hole only, though its irregular shape proved that he’d fired both rounds as per the exercise parameters. Any one of these men would have earned a secure place in 3rd SOG, and every one was as good as he’d ever been, John Clark thought to himself. Well, training methods had improved markedly since his time in Vietnam, hadn’t they? He helped Helen Montgomery to her feet. She seemed just a little shaky. Hardly a surprise. Being on the receiving end of bullets wasn’t exactly what secretaries were paid for.
“You okay?” John asked.
“Oh, quite, thank you. It was rather exciting. My first time, you see.”
“My third,” Alice Foorgate said, rising herself. “It’s always exciting,” she added with a smile.
For me, too, Clark thought. Confident as he’d been with Ding and his men, still, looking down the barrel of a light machine gun and seeing the flashes made one’s blood turn slightly cool. And the lack of body armor wasn’t all that smart, though he justified it by telling himself he’d had to see better in order to watch for any mistakes. He’d seen nothing major, however. They were damned good.
“Excellent,” Stanley said from his end of the dais. He pointed “You—uh—”
“Patterson, sir,” the sergeant said. “I know, I kinda tripped coming through.” He turned to see that a fragment of the door frame had been blasted through the entrance to the shooting room, and he’d almost stumbled on it.
“You recovered nicely, Sergeant Patterson. I see it didn’t affect your aim at all.”
“No, sir,” Hank Patterson agreed, not quite smiling.
The team leader walked up to Clark, safing his weapon on the way.
“Mark us down fully mission-capable, Mr. C,” Chavez said with a confident smile. “Tell the bad guys they better watch their asses. How’d Team-1 do?”
“Two-tenths of a second faster,” John replied, glad to see the diminutive leader of -2 deflate a little. “And thanks.”
“What for?”
“For not wasting your father-in-law.” John clapped him on the shoulder and walked out of the room.
“Okay, people,” Ding said to his team, “let’s police up the brass and head back for the critique.” No fewer than six TV cameras had recorded the mission. Stanley would be going over it frame by frame. That would be followed by a few pints at the 22nd’s Regimental NCO club. The Brits, Ding had learned over the previous two weeks, took their beer seriously, and Scotty McTyler could throw darts about as well as Homer Johnston could shoot a rifle. It was something of a breach of protocol that Ding, a simulated major, hoisted pints with his men, all sergeants. He had explained that away by noting that he’d been a humble staff sergeant squad leader himself before disappearing into the maw of the Central Intelligence Agency, and he regaled them with stories of his former life in the Ninjas—stories that the others listened to with a mixture of respect and amusement. As good as the 7th Infantry Division had been, it wasn’t this good. Even Domingo would admit to that after a few pints of John Courage.
“Okay, Al, what do you think?” John asked. The liquor cabinet in his office was open, a single-malt Scotch for Stanley, while Clark sipped at a Wild Turkey.
“The lads?” He shrugged. “Technically very competent. Marksmanship is just about right, physical fitness is fine. They respond well to obstacles and the unexpected, and, well, they didn’t kill us with stray rounds, did they?”
“But?” Clark asked with a quizzical look.
“But one doesn’t know until the real thing happens. Oh, yes, they’re as good as SAS, but the best of them are former SAS. . . .”
Old-world pessimism, John Clark thought. That was the problem with Europeans. No optimism, too often they looked for things that would go wrong instead of right.
“Chavez?”
“Superb lad,” Stanley admitted. “Almost as good as Peter Covington.”
“Agreed,” Clark admitted, the slight on his son-in-law notwithstanding. But Covington had been at Hereford for seven years. Another couple of months and Ding would be there. He was pretty close already. It was already down to how many hours of sleep one or the other had had the night before, and pretty soon it would be down to what one or the other had eaten for breakfast. All in all, John told himself, he had the right people, trained to the right edge. Now all he had to do was keep them there. Training. Training. Training.
Neither knew that it had already started.
“So, Dmitriy,” the man said.
“Yes?” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov replied, twirling his vodka around in the glass.
“Where and how do we begin?” the man asked.
They’d met by a fortunate accident, both thought, albeit for very different reasons. It had happened in Paris, at some sidewalk café, tables right next to each other, where one had noted that the other was Russian, and wanted to ask a few simple questions about business in Russia. Popov, a former KGB official, RIF’ed and scouting around for opportunities for entering the world of capitalism, had quickly determined that this American had a great deal of money, and was therefore worthy of stroking. He had answered the questions openly and clearly, leading the American to deduce his former occupation rapidly—the language skills (Popov was highly fluent in English, French, and Czech) had been a giveaway, as had Popov’s knowledge of Washington, D.C. Popov was clearly not a diplomat, being too open and forthright in his opinions, which factor had terminated his promotion in the former Soviet KGB at the rank of Colonel—he still thought himself worthy of general’s stars. As usual, one thing had led to another, first the exchange of business cards, then a trip to America, first class on Air France, as a security consultant, and a series of meetings that had moved ever so subtly in a direction that came more as a surprise to the Russian than the American. Popov had impressed the American with his knowledge of safety issues on the streets of foreign cities, then the discussion had moved into very different areas of expertise.
“How do you know all this?” the American had asked in his New York office.
The response had been a broad grin, after three double vodkas. “I know these people, of course. Come, you must know what I did before leaving the service of my country.”
“You actually worked with terrorists?” he’d asked, surprised, and thinking about this bit of information, even back then.
It was necessary for Popov to explain in the proper ideological context: “You must remember that to us they were not terrorists at all. They were fellow believers in world peace and Marxism-Leninism, fellow soldiers in the struggle for human freedom—and, truth be told, useful fools, all too willing to sacrifice their lives in return for a little support of one sort or another.”
“Really?” the American asked again, in surprise. “I would have thought that they were motivated by something important—”
“Oh, they are,” Popov assured him, “but idealists are foolish people, are they not?”
“Some are,” his host admitted, nodding for his guest to go on.
“They believe all the rhetoric, all the promises. Don’t you see? I, too, was a Party member. I said the words, filled out the bluebook answers, attended the meetings, paid my Party dues. I did all I had to do, but
, really, I was KGB. I traveled abroad. I saw what life was like in the West. I much preferred to travel abroad on, ah, ‘business’ than to work at Number Two Dzerzhinsky Square. Better food, better clothes, better everything. Unlike these foolish youths, I knew what the truth was,” he concluded, saluting with his half-full glass.
“So, what are they doing now?”
“Hiding,” Popov answered. “For the most part, hiding. Some may have jobs of one sort or another—probably menial ones, I would imagine, despite the university education most of them have.”
“I wonder . . .” A sleepy look reflected the man’s own imbibing, so skillfully delivered that Popov wondered if it were genuine or not.
“Wonder what?”
“If one could still contact them . . .”
“Most certainly, if there were a reason for it. My contacts”—he tapped his temple—“well, such things do not evaporate.” Where was this going?
“Well, Dmitriy, you know, even attack dogs have their uses, and every so often, well”—an embarrassed smile—“you know . . .”
In that moment, Popov wondered if all the movies were true. Did American business executives really plot murder against commercial rivals and such? It seemed quite mad . . . but maybe the movies were not entirely groundless. . . .
“Tell me,” the American went on, “did you actually work with those people—you know, plan some of the jobs they did?”
“Plan? No,” the Russian replied, with a shake of the head. “I provided some assistance, yes, under the direction of my government. Most often I acted as a courier of sorts.” It had not been a favored assignment; essentially he’d been a mailman tasked to delivering special messages to those perverse children, but it was duty he’d drawn due to his superb field skills and his ability to reason with nearly anyone on nearly any topic, since the contacts were so difficult to handle once they’d decided to do something. Popov had been a spook, to use the Western vernacular, a really excellent field intelligence officer who’d never, to the best of his knowledge, been identified by any Western counterintelligence service. Otherwise, his entry into America at JFK International Airport would hardly have been so uneventful.
“So, you actually know how to get in touch with those people, eh?”
“Yes, I do,” Popov assured his host.
“Remarkable.” The American stood. “Well, how about some dinner?”
By the end of dinner, Popov was earning $100,000 per year as a special consultant, wondering where this new job would lead and not really caring. One hundred thousand dollars was a good deal of money for a man whose tastes were actually rather sophisticated and needed proper support.
It was ten months later now, and the vodka was still good, in the glass with two ice cubes. “Where and how? . . .” Popov whispered. It amused him where he was now, and what he was doing. Life was so very strange, the paths you took, and where they led you. After all, he’d just been in Paris that afternoon, killing time and waiting for a meet with a former “colleague” in DGSE. “When is decided, then?”
“Yes, you have the date, Dmitriy.”
“I know whom to see and whom to call to arrange the meeting.”
“You have to do it face-to-face?” the American asked, rather stupidly, Popov thought.
A gentle laugh. “My dear friend, yes, face-to-face. One does not arrange such a thing with a fax.”
“That’s a risk.”
“Only a small one. The meet will be in a safe place. No one will take my photograph, and they know me only by a password and codename, and, of course, the currency.”
“How much?”
Popov shrugged. “Oh, shall we say five hundred thousand dollars? In cash, of course, American dollars, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, that will depend on what our . . . our friends prefer,” he added, just to make things clear.
The host scribbled a quick note and handed the paper across. “That’s what you need to get the money.” And with that, things began. Morals were always variable things, depending on the culture, experiences, and principles of individual men and women. In Dmitriy’s case, his parent culture had few hard-and-fast rules, his experiences were to make use of that fact, and his main principle was to earn a living—
“You know that this carries a certain degree of danger for me, and, as you know, my salary—”
“Your salary just doubled, Dmitriy.”
A smile. “Excellent.” A good beginning. Even the Russian Mafia didn’t advance people as quickly as this.
Three times a week they practiced zip-lining from a platform, sixty feet down to the ground. Once a week or so they did it for-real, out of a British Army helicopter. Chavez didn’t like it much. Airborne school was one of the few things he’d avoided in his Army service—which was rather odd, he thought, looking back. He’d done Ranger school as an E-4, but for one reason or other, Fort Benning hadn’t happened.
This was the next best or worst thing. His feet rested on the skids as the chopper approached the drop-site. His gloved hands held the rope, a hundred feet long in case the pilot misjudged something. Nobody trusted pilots very much, though one’s life so often depended on them, and this one seemed pretty good. A little bit of a cowboy—the final part of the simulated insertion took them through a gap in some trees, and the top leaves brushed Ding’s uniform, gently to be sure, but in his position, any touch was decidedly unwelcome. Then the nose came up on a powerful dynamic-braking maneuver. Chavez’s legs went tight, and when the nose came back down, he kicked himself free of the skid and dropped. The tricky part was stopping the descent just short of the ground—and getting there quickly enough so as not to present yourself as a dangling target . . . done, and his feet hit the ground. He tossed the rope free, snatched up his H&K in both hands, and headed off toward the objective, having survived his fourteenth zip-line deployment, the third from a chopper.
There was a delightfully joyous aspect to this job, he told himself as he ran along. He was being a physical soldier again, something he’d once learned to love and that his CIA duties had mainly denied him. Chavez was a man who liked to sweat, who enjoyed the physical exertion of soldiering in the field, and most of all loved being with others who shared his likes. It was hard. It was dangerous: every member of the team had suffered a minor injury or other in the past month—except Weber, who seemed to be made of steel—and sooner or later, the statistics said, someone would have a major one, most probably a broken leg from zip-lining. Delta at Fort Bragg rarely had a complete team fully mission-capable, due to training accidents and injuries. But hard training made for easy combat. So ran the motto of every competent army in the world. An exaggeration, but not a big one. Looking back from his place of cover and concealment, Chavez saw that Team-2 was all down and moving—even Vega, remarkably enough. With Oso’s upper-body bulk, Chavez always worried about his ankles. Weber and Johnston were darting to their programmed perches, each carrying his custom-made scope-sighted rifle. Helmet-mounted radios were working, hissing with the digitized encryption system so that only team members could understand what was being said . . . Ding turned and saw that everyone was in his pre-briefed position, ready for his next move-command . . .
The Communications Room was on the second floor of the building whose renovations had just been completed. It had the usual number of teletype machines for the various world news services, plus TV sets for CNN, and Sky News, and a few other broadcasts. These were overseen by people the Brits called “minders,” who were overseen in turn by a career intelligence officer. The one on this shift was an American from the National Security Agency, an Air Force major who usually dressed in civilian clothes that didn’t disguise his nationality or the nature of his training at all.
Major Sam Bennett had acclimated himself to the environment. His wife and son weren’t all that keen on the local TV, but they found the climate agreeable, and there were several decent golf courses within easy driving distance. He jogged three miles every morning to let the local collect
ion of snake-eaters know he wasn’t a total wimp, and he was looking forward to a little bird-shooting in a few weeks. Otherwise, the duty here was pretty easy. General Clark—that’s how everyone seemed to think of him—seemed a decent boss. He liked it clean and fast, which was precisely how Bennett liked to deliver it. Not a screamer, either. Bennett had worked for a few of those in his twelve years of uniformed service. And Bill Tawney, the British intelligence team boss, was about the best Bennett had ever seen—quiet, thoughtful, and smart. Bennett had shared a few pints of beer with him over the past weeks, while talking shop in the Hereford Officers’ Club.
But duty like this was boring most of the time. He’d worked the basement Watch Center at NSA, a large, low-ceiling room of standard office sheep-pens, with mini-televisions and computer printers that gave the room a constant low buzz of noise that could drive a man crazy on the long nights of keeping track of the whole fucking world. At least the Brits didn’t believe in caging all the worker bees. It was easy for him to get up and walk around. The crew was young here. Only Tawney was over fifty, and Bennett liked that, too.
“Major!” a voice called from one of the news printers. “We have a hostage case in Switzerland.”
“What service?” Bennett asked on the way over.
“Agence France-Press. It’s a bank, a bloody bank,” the corporal reported, as Bennett came close enough to read—but couldn’t, since he didn’t know French. The corporal could and translated on the fly. Bennett lifted a phone and pushed a button.
“Mr. Tawney, we have an incident in Bern, unknown number of criminals have seized the central branch of the Bern Commercial Bank. There are some civilians trapped inside.”