by Tom Clancy
“Mein Herrgott!” the pilot gasped, looking back.
Gerhardt Dengler looked dead as well, his face fairly covered on its left side with a mask of dripping red, his open eyes looking like doorknobs. The sight shook Price for a moment, until he saw the eyes blink, but the mouth was wide open, and the man seemed not to be breathing. Price reached down to flip off the belt buckle, then let Johnston pull the man clear of the aircraft. Little Man made it one step before falling to his knees. Johnston poured his canteen over the man’s face to rinse off the blood. Then he unloaded his rifle and set it on the ground.
“Nice work, Eddie,” he told Price.
“And that was a bloody good shot, Homer.”
Sergeant Johnston shrugged. “I was afraid the gal would get in the way. Another couple of seconds and I wouldn’t’ve had shit. Anyway, Eddie, nice work coming out of the aircraft and doing him before I could get number two off.”
“You had a shot on him?” Price asked, safing and holstering his pistol.
“Waste of time. I saw his brains come out from your first.”
The cops were swarming in now, plus a covey of ambulances with blinking blue lights. Captain Altmark arrived at the helicopter, with Chavez at his side. Experienced cop that he was, the mess inside the Sikorsky made him back away in silence.
“It’s never pretty,” Homer Johnston observed. He’d already had his look. The rifle and bullet had performed as programmed. Beyond that, it was his fourth sniper kill, and if people wanted to break the law and hurt the innocent, it was their problem, not his. One more trophy he couldn’t hang on the wall with the muley and elk heads he’d collected over the years.
Price walked toward the middle group, fishing in his pocket for his curved briar pipe, which he lit with a kitchen match, his never-changing ritual for a mission completed.
Mike Pierce was assisting the hostages, all sitting for the moment while Steve Lincoln stood over them, his MP-10 out and ready for another target. But then a gaggle of Austrian police exploded out the back door, telling him that there were no terrorists left inside the building. With that, he safed his weapon and slung it over his shoulder. Lincoln came up to the elderly gent.
“Well done, sir,” he told Klaus Rosenthal.
“What?”
“Using the knife on his hand. Well done.”
“Oh, yeah,” Pierce said, looking down at the mess on the grass. There was a deep cut on the back of its left hand. “You did that, sir?”
“Ja” was all Rosenthal was able to say, and that took three breaths.
“Well, sir, good for you.” Pierce reached down to shake his hand. It hadn’t really mattered very much, but resistance by a hostage was rare enough, and it had clearly been a gutsy move by the old gent.
“Amerikaner?”
“Shhh.” Sergeant Pierce held a finger up to his lips. “Please don’t tell anyone, sir.”
Price arrived then, puffing on his pipe. Between Weber’s sniper rifle and someone’s MP-10 burst, this subject’s head was virtually gone. “Bloody hell,” the sergeant major observed.
“Steve’s bird,” Pierce reported. “I didn’t have a clear shot this time. Good one, Steve,” he added.
“Thank you, Mike,” Sergeant Lincoln replied, surveying the area. “Total of six?”
“Correct,” Eddie answered, heading off toward the house. “Stand by here.”
“Easy shots, both of ’em,” Tomlinson said in his turn, surrounded by Austrian cops.
“Too tall to hide,” Loiselle confirmed. He felt like having a smoke, though he’d quit two years before. His hostages were being led off now, leaving the two terrorists on the lush green grass, which their blood, he thought, would fertilize. Blood was good fertilizer, wasn’t it? Such a fine house. A pity they’d not have the chance to examine it.
Twenty minutes later, Team-2 was back at the assembly point, changing out of their tactical clothes, packing their weapons and other gear for the ride back to the airport. The TV lights and cameras were running, but rather far away. The team was relaxing now, the stress bleeding off with the successful completion of their mission. Price puffed on his pipe outside the van, then tapped it out on the heel of his boot before boarding it.
CHAPTER 8
COVERAGE
The television coverage was out before Team-2 flew into Heathrow. Fortunately, the video of the event was hampered by the Schloss’s great size and the fact that the Staatspolizei kept the cameras well away from events, and on the wrong side of the building. About the only decent shot was of a team member lighting a pipe, followed by Captain Wilhelm Altmark’s summary of events for the assembled reporters. A special and heretofore secret team of his country’s federal police had dealt efficiently with the incident at Schloss Ostermann, he said, rescuing all of the hostages—no, unfortunately, no criminals had been arrested. All of this was taped for later use by Bill Tawney’s staff off Austrian State Television, Sky News, and every other European news service that made use of the story. Though the British Sky News service had managed to get its own camera to Vienna, the only difference between its coverage and that of the locals was the angle. Even the various learned commentaries were essentially the same: specially trained and equipped police unit; probably with members of Austria’s military; decisive action to resolve the incident with no injuries to the innocent victims; score one more, they didn’t quite say, for the good guys. The bad guys’ identities weren’t put out with the initial reports. Tracking them down would be a police function, and the results would be fed to Tawney’s intelligence section, along with the debriefs of the victims.
It had been a very long day for the Team-2 members, all of whom went home to sleep on arrival back at Hereford, with notification from Chavez that they’d dispense with morning PT the next day. There wasn’t even time for a congratulatory set of beers in the local NCO Club—which in any case was closed by the time they got home.
On the flight home, Chavez noted to Dr. Bellow that despite the fitness of his people the fatigue factor was pretty high—more so than on their occasional night exercises. Bellow replied that stress was the ultimate fatigue generator, and that the team members were not immune to stress, no matter what their training or fitness. That evidently included himself, since after making the pronouncement, Bellow turned and slipped off to sleep, leaving Chavez to do the same after a glass of red Spanish wine.
It was the lead news story in Austria, of course. Popov caught the first bit of it live in a Gasthaus, then more in his hotel room. He sipped orange schnapps while he applied his keen, professional eye to the screen. These anti-terror groups all looked pretty much the same, but that was to be expected, since they all trained to do the same thing and worked out of the same international manual—first promulgated by the English with their Special Air Service commandos, then followed by the German GSG-9, and then the rest of Europe, followed by the Americans—down to the black clothing, which struck Popov as theatrical, but they all had to wear something, and black made more sense than white clothing, didn’t it? Of more immediate interest, there in the room with him was the leather attaché case filled with D-mark banknotes, which he would take to Bern the following day for deposit in his account before flying back to New York. It was remarkable, he thought as he switched the TV off and pulled the bedclothes up, two simple jobs, and he now had just over one million American dollars in his numbered and anonymous account. Whatever his employers wanted him to accomplish for them, he was being well compensated for it, and they didn’t seem overly concerned by the expense. So much the better that the money went to a good cause, the Russian thought.
“Thank God,” George Winston noted. “Hell, I know that guy. Erwin’s good people,” the Secretary of the Treasury said on his way out of the White House, where the cabinet meeting had run very long.
“Who did the takedown?”
“Well—” That caught him short. He wasn’t supposed to say, and wasn’t supposed to know. “What did the news say?”
“Local cops, Vienna police SWAT team, I guess.”
“Well, I suppose they learned up on how to do it,” SecTreas opined, heading toward his car with his Secret Service detail.
“The Austrians? Who’d they learn it from?”
“Somebody who knows how, I guess,” Winston replied, getting into the car.
“So, what’s the big deal about it?” Carol Brightling asked the Secretary of the Interior. To her it looked like another case of boys and their toys.
“Nothing, really,” the Secretary replied, her own protective detail guiding her to the door of her official car. “Just that what they showed on TV, it was a pretty good job of rescuing all those people. I’ve been to Austria a few times, and the cops didn’t strike me as all that great. Maybe I’m wrong. But George acts like he knows more than he’s telling.”
“Oh, that’s right, Jean, he’s ‘inner cabinet,’ ” Dr. Brightling observed. It was something those in the “outer cabinet” didn’t like. Of course, Carol Brightling wasn’t technically in the cabinet at all. She had a seat against the wall instead of around the table, there only in case the issues of the meeting required a scientific opinion, which they hadn’t today. Good news and bad news. She got to listen in on everything, and she took her notes on all that happened in the ornate, stuffy room that overlooked the Rose Garden, while the President controlled the agenda and the pace—badly in today’s case, she thought. Tax policy had taken over an hour, and they’d never gotten to use of national forests, which came under the Department of the Interior, which issue had been postponed to the next meeting, a week away.
She didn’t have a protective detail, either, not even an office in the White House itself. Previous Presidential Science Advisors had been in the West Wing, but she’d been moved to the Old Executive Office Building. It was a larger and more comfortable office, with a window, which her basement office in the White House would not have had, but though the OEOB was considered part of the White House for administrative and security purposes, it didn’t have quite the prestige, and prestige was what it was all about if you were part of the White House staff. Even under this President, who worked pretty hard to treat everyone the same and who wasn’t into the status bullshit—there was no avoiding it at this level of government. And so, Carol Brightling clung to her right to have lunch in the White House Mess with the Big Boys and Big Girls of the Administration, and grumbled that to see the President except at his request, she had to go through the Chief of Staff and the appointments secretary to get a few minutes of His Valuable Time. As though she’d ever wasted it.
A Secret Service agent opened the door for her with a respectful nod and smile, and she walked into this surpassingly ugly building, then turned right to her office, which at least overlooked the White House. She handed her notes to her (male, of course) secretary on the way in for transcription, then sat down at her desk, finding there a new pile of papers to be read and acted upon. She opened her desk drawer and got herself a starlight mint to suck on as she attacked the pile. Then on reflection she lifted her TV controller and turned her office television to CNN for a look at what was happening around the world. It was the top of the hour, and the lead story was the thing in Vienna.
God, what a house was her first thought. Like a king’s palace, a huge waste of resources for one man, or even one large family, to use as a private residence. What was it Winston had said of the owner? Good people? Sure. All good people lived like wastrels, glomming up precious resources like that. Another goddamned plutocrat, stock trader, currency speculator, however he earned the money to buy a place like that—and then terrorists had invaded his privacy. Well, gee, she thought, I wonder why they picked him. No sense attacking a sheep farmer or truck driver. Terrorists went after the moneyed people, or the supposedly important ones, because going for ordinary folks had little in the way of a political point, and these were, after all, political acts. But they hadn’t been as bright as they ought to have been. Whoever had picked them had . . . picked them to fail? Was that possible? She supposed that it was. It was a political act, after all, and such things could have all manner of real purposes. That brought a smile, as the reporter described the attack by the local police SWAT team—unfortunately not shown, because the local cops hadn’t wanted cameras and reporters in the way—then the release of the hostages, shown in closeup to let people share the experience. They’d been so close to death, only to be released, saved by the local cops, who’d really only restored to them their programmed time of death, because everything died, sooner or later. That was Nature’s plan, and you couldn’t fight Nature . . . though you could help her along, couldn’t you? The reporter went on to say that this had been the second terrorist incident in Europe over the last couple of months, both of them failures due to adroit police action. Carol remembered the attempted robbery in Bern, another botch . . . a creative one? She might have to find that out, though in this case a failure was as useful as—no, more useful than—a success, for the people who were planning things. That thought brought a smile. Yes. It was more useful than a success, wasn’t it? And with that she looked down at a fax from Friends of the Earth, who had her direct number and frequently sent her what they thought was important information.
She leaned back in her comfortable high-backed chair to read it over twice. A good bunch of people with the right ideas, though few listened to them.
“Dr. Brightling?” Her secretary stuck his head in the door.
“Yes, Roy?”
“You still want me to show you those faxes—like the one you’re reading, I mean?” Roy Gibbons asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“But those people are card-carrying nuts.”
“Not really. I like some of the things they do,” Carol replied, tossing the fax in her trash can. She’d save their idea for some future date.
“Fair enough, doc.” The head disappeared back into the outer office.
The next thing in her pile was pretty important, a report of procedures for shutting down nuclear power reactors, and the subsequent safety of the shut-down reactor systems: how long before environmental factors might attack and corrode the internal items, and what environmental damage could result from it. Yes, this was very important stuff, and fortunately the index appended to it showed data on individual reactors across the country. She popped another starlight mint into her mouth and leaned forward, setting the papers flat on the desktop so that she could stare straight down at them for reading purposes.
“This seems to work,” Steve said quietly.
“How many strands fit inside?” Maggie asked.
“Anywhere from three to ten.”
“And how large is the overall package?”
“Six microns. Would you believe it? The packaging is white in color, so it reflects light pretty well, especially UV radiation, and in a water-spray environment, it’s just about invisible.” The individual capsules couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, and only barely with an optical microscope. Better still, their weight was such that they’d float in air about the same as dust particles, as readily breathable as secondhand smoke in a singles bar. Once in the body, the coating would dissolve, and allow release of the Shiva strands into the lungs or the upper GI, where they could go to work.
“Water soluble?” Maggie asked.
“Slowly, but faster if there’s anything biologically active in the water, like the trace hydrochloric acid in saliva, for example. Wow, we could have really made money from the Iraqis with this one, kiddo—or anybody who wants to play bio-war in the real world.”
Their company had invented the technology, working on an NIH grant designed to develop an easier way than needles to deliver vaccines. Needles required semiskilled use. The new technique used electrophoresis to wrap insignificantly tiny quantities of protective gel around even smaller amounts of airborne bioactive agents. That would allow people to ingest vaccines with a simple drink rather than the more commonly used method of inoculation. If t
hey ever fielded a working AIDS vaccine, this would be the method of choice for administering it in Africa, where countries lacked the infrastructure to do much of anything. Steve had just proven that the same technology could be used to deliver active virus with the same degree of safety and reliability. Or almost proven it.
“How do we proof-test it?” Maggie asked.
“Monkeys. How we fixed for monkeys in the lab?”
“Lots,” she assured him. This would be an important step. They’d give it to a few monkeys, then see how well it spread through the laboratory population. They’d use rhesus monkeys. Their blood was so similar to humans’.
Subject Four was the first, as expected. He was fifty-three years old and his liver function was so far off the scale as to qualify him for a high place on the transplant list at the University of Pittsburgh. His skin had a yellowish cast in the best of circumstances, but that didn’t stop him from hitting the booze harder than any of their test subjects. His name, he said, was Chester something, Dr. John Killgore remembered. Chester’s brain function was about the lowest in the group as well. He watched TV a lot, rarely talked to anyone, never even read comic books, which were popular with the rest, as were TV cartoons—watching the Cartoon Channel was among their most popular pastimes.
They were all in hog heaven, John Killgore had noted. All the booze and fast food and warmth that they could want, and most of them were even learning to use the showers. From time to time, a few would ask what the deal was here, but their inquiries were never pressed beyond the pro-forma answer they got from the doctors and security guards.
But with Chester, they had to take action now. Killgore entered the room and called his name. Subject Four rose from his bunk and came over, clearly feeling miserable.
“Not feeling good, Chester?” Killgore asked from behind his mask.