by Tom Clancy
“What else, Major?”
“Nothing at the moment. Evidently the police are there.”
“Very well, thank you, Major Bennett.” Tawney killed the line and pulled open a desk drawer, to find and open a very special book. Ah, yes, he knew that one. Then he dialed the British Embassy in Geneva. “Mr. Gordon, please,” he told the operator.
“Gordon,” a voice said a few seconds later.
“Dennis, this is Bill Tawney.”
“Bill, haven’t heard from you in quite a while. What can I do for you?” the voice asked pleasantly.
“Bern Commercial Bank, main branch. There seems to be a hostage situation there. I want you to evaluate the situation and report back to me.”
“What’s our interest, Bill?” the man asked.
“We have an . . . an understanding with the Swiss government. If their police are unable to handle it, we may have to provide some technical assistance. Who in the embassy liases with the local police?”
“Tony Armitage, used to be Scotland Yard. Good man for financial crimes and such.”
“Take him with you,” Tawney ordered. “Report back directly to me as soon as you have something.” Tawney gave his number.
“Very well.” It was a dull afternoon in Geneva anyway. “It will be a few hours.”
And it will probably end up as nothing, they both knew. “I’ll be here. Thank you, Dennis.” With that, Tawney left his office and went upstairs to watch TV.
Behind the Rainbow Headquarters building were four large satellite dishes trained on communications satellites hovering over the equator. A simple check told them which channel of which bird carried Swiss television satellite broadcasts—as with most countries, it was easier to go up and back to a satellite than to use coaxial land-lines. Soon they were getting a direct newsfeed from the local station. Only one camera was set up at the moment. It showed the outside of an institutional building—the Swiss tended to design banks rather like urban castles, though with a distinctly Germanic flavor to make them appear powerful and forbidding. The voice was that of a reporter talking to his station, not to the public. A linguist stood by to translate.
“ ‘No, I have no idea. The police haven’t talked to us yet,’ ” the translator said in a dull monotone. Then a new voice came on the line. “Cameraman,” the translator said. “Sounds like a cameraman—there’s something—”
—with that the camera zoomed in, catching a shape, a human shape wearing something over his head, a mask of sorts—
“What kind of gun is that?” Bennett asked.
“Czech Model 58,” Tawney said at once. “So it would seem. Bloody good man on the camera.”
“ ‘What did he say?’ That was the studio to the reporter,” the translator went on, hardly looking at the picture on the TV screen. “ ‘Don’t know, couldn’t hear with all the noise out here. He shouted something, didn’t hear it.’ Oh, good: ‘How many people?’ ‘Not sure, the Wachtmeister said over twenty inside, bank customers and employees. Just me and my cameraman here outside, and about fifteen police officers that I can see.’ ‘More on the way, I imagine,’ reply from the station.” With that the audio line went quiet. The camera switched off, and shuffling on the audio line told them that the cameraman was moving to a different location, which was confirmed when the picture came back a minute later from a very different angle.
“What gives, Bill?” Tawney and Bennett turned to see Clark standing there behind them. “I came over to talk to you, but your secretary said you had a developing situation up here.”
“We may,” the Intelligence section chief replied. “I have the ‘Six’ station in Geneva sending two men over now to evaluate it. We do have that arrangement with the Swiss government, should they decide to invoke it. Bennett, is this going out on commercial TV yet?”
Bennett shook his head. “No, sir. For the moment they’re keeping it quiet.”
“Good,” Tawney thought. “Who’s the go-team now, John?”
“Team-2, Chavez and Price. They’re just finishing up a little exercise right now. How long before you think we declare an alert?”
“We could start now,” Bill answered, even though it was probably nothing more than a bank robbery gone bad. They had those in Switzerland, didn’t they?
Clark pulled a mini-radio from his pocket and thumbed it on. “Chavez, this is Clark. You and Price report to communications right now.”
“On the way, Six” was the reply.
“I wonder what this is about,” Ding observed to his command sergeant major. Eddie Price, he’d learned in the past three weeks, was as good a soldier as he was ever likely to meet: cool, smart, quiet, with plenty of field experience.
“I expect we’ll find out, sir,” Price responded. Officers felt the need to talk a lot, he knew. Proof of that came at once.
“How long you been in, Eddie?”
“Nearly thirty years, sir. I enlisted as a boy soldier—age fifteen, you see. Parachute Regiment,” he went on, just to avoid the next question. “Came over to SAS when I was twenty-four, been here ever since.”
“Well, Sar Major, I’m glad to have you with me,” Chavez said, getting in the car for the drive to the Headquarters Building.
“Thank you, sir,” the sergeant major replied. A decent chap, this Chavez, he thought, perhaps even a good commander, though that remained to be seen. He could have asked his own questions, but, no, that wasn’t done, was it? Good as he was, Price didn’t know much about the American military yet.
You oughta be an officer, Eddie, Ding didn’t say. In America this guy would have been ripped from his unit, kicking and screaming or not, and shipped off to OCS, probably with a college degree purchased by the Army along the way. Different culture, different rules, Chavez told himself. Well, it gave him a damned good squad sergeant to back him up. Ten minutes later, he parked in the back lot and walked into the building, following directions up to Communications.
“Hey, Mr. C, what gives?”
“Domingo, there’s a chance we may have a job for you and your team. Bern, Switzerland. Bank robbery gone bad, hostage situation. All we know now.” Clark pointed both of them at the TV screens. Chavez and Price stole swivel chairs and moved them close.
If nothing else, it was good as a practice alert. The preplanned mechanisms were now moving. On the first floor, tickets had already been arranged on no fewer than four flights from Gatwick to Switzerland, and two helicopters were on the way to Hereford to ferry his men to the airport with their equipment. British Airways had been alerted to accept sealed cargo—inspecting it for the international flight would just have gotten people excited. If the alert went further, Team-2 members would change into civilian clothes, complete with ties and suit jackets. Clark thought that a little excessive. Making soldiers look like bankers was no easy task, was it?
“Not much happening now,” Tawney said. “Sam, can you roll the tapes from earlier?”
“Yes, sir.” Major Bennett keyed one up and hit the play button on the remote.
“Czech 58,” Price said immediately. “No faces?”
“Nope, that’s the only thing we have on the subjects,” Bennett replied.
“Odd weapon for robbers,” the sergeant major noted. Chavez turned his head. That was one of the things he had yet to learn about Europe. Okay, hoods here didn’t use assault rifles.
“That’s what I thought,” Tawney said.
“Terrorist weapon?” Chavez asked his squad XO.
“Yes, sir. The Czechs gave away a lot of them. Quite compact, you see. Only twenty-five inches long, manufactured by the Uhersky Broad works. Seven-point-six-two /thirty-nine Soviet cartridge. Fully automatic, selector switch. Odd thing for a Swiss bandit to use,” Price said once more for emphasis.
“Why?” Clark asked.
“They make far better weapons in Switzerland, sir, for their territorials—their citizen soldiers stow them in their closets, you see. Should not be all that difficult to steal several.”
The b
uilding shook then with the sound of helicopters landing not too far away. Clark checked his watch and nodded approval at the timing.
“What do we know about the neighborhood?” Chavez asked.
“Working on that now, old boy,” Tawney answered. “So far, just what the TV feed shows.”
The TV screen showed an ordinary street, devoid of vehicular traffic at the moment because the local police had diverted cars and buses away from the bank. Otherwise, they saw ordinary masonry buildings bordering an ordinary city street. Chavez looked over at Price, whose eyes were locked on the pictures they were getting—two now, because another Swiss TV station had dispatched a camera team there, and both signals were being pirated off the satellite. The translator continued to relay the remarks of the camera crews and reporters on the scene to their respective stations. They said very little, about half of it small-talk that could have been spoken from one desk to another in an office setting. One camera or the other occasionally caught the movement of a curtain, but that was all.
“The police are probably trying to establish communications with our friends on a telephone, talk to them, reason with them, the usual drill,” Price said, realizing that he had more practical experience with this sort of thing than anyone else in the room. They knew the theory, but theory wasn’t always enough. “We shall know in half an hour if this is a mission for us or not.”
“How good are the Swiss cops?” Chavez asked Price.
“Very good indeed, sir, but not a great deal of experience with a serious hostage event—”
“That’s why we have an understanding with them,” Tawney put in.
“Yes, sir.” Price leaned back, reached into his pocket, and took out his pipe. “Anyone object?”
Clark shook his head. “No health Nazis here, Sergeant Major. What do you mean by a ‘serious’ hostage event?”
“Committed criminals, terrorists.” Price shrugged. “Chaps stupid enough to put their lives behind the chips on the gaming table. The sort who kill hostages to show their resolve.” The sort we go in after and kill, Price didn’t have to add.
It was an awful lot of brain-power to be sitting around doing nothing, John Clark thought, especially Bill Tawney. But if you had no information, it was difficult to make pontifical pronouncements. All eyes were locked on the TV screens, which showed little, and Clark found himself missing the inane drivel that one expected of TV reporters, filling silence with empty words. About the only interesting thing was when they said that they were trying to talk to the local cops, but that the cops weren’t saying anything, except that they were trying to establish contact with the bad guys, so far unsuccessfully. That had to be a lie, but the police were supposed to lie to the media and the public in cases like this—because any halfway competent terrorist would have a TV set with him, and would have somebody watching it. You could catch a lot by watching TV, else Clark and his senior people would not be watching it either, would they?
The protocol on this was both simple and complex. Rainbow had an understanding with the Swiss government. If the local police couldn’t handle it, they’d bump it up to the canton—state—level, which would then decide whether or not to bump it one more step to the central national government, whose ministerial-level people could then make the Rainbow call. That entire mechanism had been established months before as part of the mandate of the agency that Clark now headed. The “help” call would come through the British Foreign Office in Whitehall, on the bank of the Thames in central London. It seemed like a hell of a lot of bureaucracy to John, but there was no avoiding it, and he was grateful that there was not an additional level or two. Once the call was made, things got easier, at least in the administrative sense. But until the call was made, the Swiss would tell them nothing.
One hour into the TV vigil, Chavez left to put Team-2 on alert. The troops, he saw, took it calmly, readying gear that needed to be seen to, which was not very much. The TV feed was routed to their individual desktop sets, and the men settled back in their swivel chairs to watch quietly as their boss went back to Communications, while the helicopters sat idle on the pad outside Team-2’s area. Team-1 went on standby alert as well, in case the helicopters taking -2 to Gatwick crashed. The procedures had been completely thought through—except, John thought, by the terrorists.
On the TV screen, police milled about, some at the ready, most just standing and watching. Trained police or not, they were little trained for a situation like this, and the Swiss, while they had considered such an event—everyone in the civilized world had—had taken it no more seriously than, say, the cops in Boulder, Colorado. This had never happened before in Bern, and until it did, it would not be part of the local police department’s corporate culture. The facts were too stark for Clark and the rest to discount. The German police—as competent as any in the world—had thoroughly blown the hostage rescue at Fürstenfeldbrück, not because they had been bad cops, but because it had been their first time, and as a result some Israeli athletes hadn’t made it home from the 1972 Munich Olympiad. The whole world had learned from that, but how much had they learned? Clark and the rest all wondered at the same time.
The TV screens showed very little for another half hour beyond an empty city street, but then a senior police officer walked into the open, holding a cellular phone. His body language was placid at first, but it started to change, and then he held the cell phone close to his ear, seeming to lean into it. His free hand came up about then, placatingly, as though in a face-to-face conversation.
“Something’s wrong,” Dr. Paul Bellow observed, which was hardly a surprise to the others, especially Eddie Price, who tensed in his chair, but said nothing as he puffed on his pipe. Negotiating with people like those controlling the bank was its own little art form, and it was one this police superintendent—whatever his rank was—had yet to learn. Bad news, the sergeant major thought, for one or more of the bank customers.
“ ‘Was that a shot?’ ” the translator said, relaying the words of one of the reporters on the scene.
“Oh, shit,” Chavez observed quietly. The situation had just escalated.
Less than a minute later, one of the bank’s glass doors opened, and a man in civilian clothes dragged a body onto the sidewalk. It seemed to be a man, but his head, as both the cameras zoomed in on the scene from different angles, was a red mass. The civilian got the body all the way outside and froze the moment he set it down.
Move right, go to your right, Chavez thought as loudly as he could from so far away. Somehow the thought must have gotten there, for the unnamed man in his gray overcoat stood stock-still for several seconds, looking down, and then—furtively, he thought—went to the right.
“ ‘Somebody’s shouting from inside the bank,’ ” the translator relayed.
But whatever the voice had shouted, it hadn’t been the right thing. The civilian dove to his right, away from the double glass doors of the bank and below the level of the plate-glass bank windows. He was now on the sidewalk, with three feet of granite block over his head, invisible from the interior of the building.
“Good move, old man,” Tawney observed quietly. “Now, we’ll see if the police can get you into the clear.”
One of the cameras shifted to the senior cop, who’d wandered into the middle of the street with his cell phone, and was now waving frantically for the civilian to get down. Brave or foolish, they couldn’t tell, but the cop then walked slowly back to the line of police cars—astonishingly, without being shot for his troubles. The cameras shifted back to the escaped civilian. Police had edged to the side of the bank building, waving for the man to crawl, keep low, to where they were standing. The uniformed cops had submachine guns out. Their body language was tense and frustrated. One of the police faces looked to the body on the sidewalk, and the men in Hereford could easily translate his thoughts.
“Mr. Tawney, a call for you on Line Four,” the intercom called. The intelligence chief walked to a phone and punched the proper bu
tton.
“Tawney . . . ah, yes, Dennis . . .”
“Whoever they are, they’ve just murdered a chap.”
“We just watched it. We’re pirating the TV feed.” Which meant that Gordon’s trip to Bern was a waste of time—but no, it wasn’t, was it? “You have that Armitage chap with you?”
“Yes, Bill, he’s going over to talk to their police now.”
“Excellent. I will hold for him.”
As though on cue, a camera showed a man in civilian clothes walking to the senior cop on the scene. He pulled out an ID folder, spoke briefly with the police commander, and walked away, disappearing around the corner.
“This is Tony Armitage, who’s this?”
“Bill Tawney.”
“Well, if you know Dennis, I expect you’re a ‘Six’ chap. What can I do for you, sir?”
“What did the police tell you?” Tawney hit the speaker switch on the phone.
“He’s out of his depth by several meters or so. Said he’s sending it up to the canton for advice.”
“Mr. C?” Chavez said from his chair.
“Tell the choppers to spool up, Ding, you’re off to Gatwick. Hold there for further instructions.”
“Roger that, Mr. C. Team-2 is moving.”
Chavez walked down the stairs with Price behind him, then jumped into their car, which had them at Team-2’s building in under three minutes.
“People, if you’re watching the telly, you know what’s happening. Saddle up, we’re choppering to Gatwick.” They’d just headed out the door when a brave Swiss cop managed to get the civilian to safety. The TV showed the civilian being hustled to a car, which sped off at once. Again the body language was the important thing. The assembled police, who had been standing around casually, were standing differently now, mainly crouched behind the cover of their automobiles, their hands fingering their weapons, tense but still unsure of what they ought to do.
“It’s going out live on TV now,” Bennett reported. “Sky News will have it on in a few.”
“I guess that figures,” Clark said. “Where’s Stanley?”