by Tom Clancy
“Stomach, can’t keep stuff down, feel crummy all over,” Four replied.
“Well, come along with me and we’ll see what we can do about that, okay?”
“You say so, doc,” Chester replied, augmenting the agreement with a loud belch.
Outside the door, they put him in a wheelchair. It was only fifty yards to the clinical side of the installation. Two orderlies lifted Number Four into a bed, and restrained him into it with Velcro ties. Then one of them took a blood sample. Ten minutes later, Killgore tested it for Shiva antibodies, and the sample turned blue, as expected. Chester, Subject Number Four, had less than a week to live—not as much as the six to twelve months to which his alcoholism had already limited him, but not really all that much of a reduction, was it? Killgore went back inside to start an IV into his arm, and to calm Chester down, he hung a morphine drip that soon had him unconscious and even smiling slightly. Good. Number Four would soon die, but he would do so in relative peace. More than anything else, Dr. Killgore wanted to keep the process orderly.
He checked his watch when he got back to his office/ viewing room. His hours were long ones. It was almost like being a real physician again. He hadn’t practiced clinical medicine since his residency, but he read all the right journals and knew the techniques, and besides, his current crop of patient/victims wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Tough luck, Chester, but it’s a tough world out there, Steve thought, going back to his notes. Chester’s early response to the virus had been a little unsettling—only half the time programmed—but it had been brought about by his grossly reduced liver function. It couldn’t be helped. Some people would get hit sooner than others because of differing physical vulnerabilities. So the outbreak would start unevenly. It shouldn’t matter in the eventual effects, though it would alert people sooner than he hoped it would. That would cause a run on the vaccines Steve Berg and his shop were developing. “A” would be widely distributed after the rush to manufacture it. “B” would be more closely held, assuming that he and his team could indeed get it ready for use. “A” would go out to everybody, while “B” would go only to those people who were supposed to survive, people who understood what it was all about, or who would accept their survival and get on with things with the rest of the crew.
Killgore shook his head. There was a lot of stuff left to be done, and as usual, not enough time to do it.
Clark and Stanley went over the takedown immediately upon their arrival in the morning, along with Peter Covington, still sweaty from his morning workout with Team-1. Chavez and his people would just be waking up after their long day on the European mainland.
“It was a bloody awful tactical situation. And Chavez is right,” Major Covington went on. “We need our own helicopter crews. Yesterday’s mission cried out for that, but we didn’t have what we needed. That’s why he had to execute a poor plan and depend on luck to accomplish it.”
“He could have asked their army for help,” Stanley pointed out.
“Sir, we both know that one doesn’t commit to an important tactical move with a helicopter crew one doesn’t know and with whom one has not worked,” Covington observed, in his best Sandhurst grammar. “We need to look at this issue immediately.”
“True,” Stanley agreed, looking over at Clark.
“Not part of the TO and E, but I see the point,” Rainbow Six conceded. How the hell had they overlooked this requirement? He asked himself. “Okay, first let’s figure all the chopper types we’re likely to see, and then find out if we can get some drivers who’re current in most of them.”
“Ideally, I’d love to have a Night Stalker—but we’d have to take it with us everywhere we go, and that means—what? A C-5 or a C-17 transport aircraft assigned to us at all times?” Stanley observed.
Clark nodded. The Night Stalker version of the McDonnell-Douglas AH-6 Loach had been invented for Task Force 160, now redesignated the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—SOAR—based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. They were probably the wildest and craziest bunch of aviators in the world, who worked on the sly with brother aviators from selected other countries—Britain and Israel were the two most often allowed into the 160 compound at Campbell. In a real sense, getting the choppers and flight crews assigned to Rainbow would be the easy part. The hard part would be getting the fixed-wing transport needed to move the chopper to where they needed it. It’d be about as hard to hide as an elephant in a schoolyard. With Night Stalker they’d have all manner of surveillance gear, a special silent rotor—and Santa on his fucking sleigh with eight tiny reindeer, Clark’s mind went on. It would never happen, despite all the drag he had in Washington and London.
“Okay, I’ll call Washington for authorization to get some aviators on the team. Any problem getting some aircraft here for them to play with?”
“Shouldn’t be,” Stanley replied.
John checked his watch. He’d have to wait until 9:00 A.M. Washington time—2:00 P.M. in England—to make his pitch via the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was the routing agency for Rainbow’s American funding. He wondered how Ed Foley would react—more to the point, he needed Ed to be an enthusiastic advocate. Well, that ought not to be too hard. Ed knew field operations, after a fashion, and was loyal to the people at the sharp end. Better yet, Clark was asking after they’d had a major success, and that usually worked a lot better than a plea for help after a failure.
“Okay, we’ll continue this with the team debrief.” Clark stood and went to his office. Helen Montgomery had the usual pile of papers on his desk, somewhat higher than usual, as this one included the expected thank-you telegrams from the Austrians. The one from the Justice Minister was particularly flowery.
“Thank you, sir,” John breathed, setting that one aside.
The amazing part of this job was all the admin stuff. As the commander of Rainbow, Clark had to keep track of when and how money came in and was spent, and he had to defend such things as the number of gun rounds his people fired every week. He did his best to slough much of this off on Alistair Stanley and Mrs. Montgomery, but a lot of it still landed on his desk. He had long experience as a government employee, and at CIA he’d had to report in endless detail on every field operation he’d ever run to keep the desk weenies happy. But this was well beyond that, and it accounted for his time on the firing range, as he found shooting a good means of stress relief, especially if he imagined the images of his bureaucratic tormentors in the center of the Q-targets he perforated with .45-caliber bullets. Justifying a budget was something new and foreign. If it wasn’t important, why fund it at all, and if it was important, why quibble over a few thousand bucks’ worth of bullets? It was the bureaucratic mentality, of course, all those people who sat at their desks and felt that the world would collapse around them if they didn’t have all their papers initialed, signed, stamped, and properly filed, and if that inconvenienced others, too bad. So he, John Terrence Clark, CIA field officer for more than thirty years, a quiet legend in his agency, was stuck at his expensive desk, behind a closed door, working on paperwork that any self-respecting accountant would have rejected, on top of which he had to supervise and pass judgment on real stuff, which was both more interesting and far more to the point.
And it wasn’t as though his budget was all that much to worry about. Less than fifty people, total, scarcely three million dollars in payroll expense, since everyone was paid the usual military rate, plus the fact that Rainbow picked up everyone’s housing expense out of its multigovernment funding. One inequity was that the American soldiers were better paid than their European counterparts. That bothered John a little, but there was nothing he could do about it, and with housing costs picked up—the housing at Hereford wasn’t lavish, but it was comfortable—nobody had any trouble living. The morale of the troops was excellent. He’d expected that. They were elite troopers, and that sort invariably had a good attitude, especially since they trained almost every day, and soldiers loved to train
almost as much as they loved to do the things they trained for.
There would be a little discord. Chavez’s Team-2 had drawn both field missions, as a result of which they’d swagger a little more, to the jealous annoyance of Peter Covington’s Team-1, which was slightly ahead on the team/team competition of PT and shooting. Not even a cat’s whisker of difference, but people like this, as competitive as any athletes could ever be, worked damned hard for that fifth of a percentage point, and it really came down to who’d had what for breakfast on the mornings of the competitive exercises, or maybe what they’d dreamed about during the night. Well, that degree of competition was healthy for the team as a whole. And decidedly unhealthy for those against whom his people deployed.
Bill Tawney was at his desk as well, going over the known information on the terrorists of the night before. The Austrians had begun their inquiries with the German Federal Police Office—the Bundes Kriminal Amt—even before the takedown. The identities of Hans Fürchtner and Petra Dortmund had been confirmed by fingerprints. The BKA investigators would jump onto the case hard that day. For starters, they’d trace the IDs of the people who’d rented the car that had been driven to the Ostermann home, and search for the house in Germany—probably Germany, Tawney reminded himself—that they’d lived in. The other four would probably be harder. Fingerprints had already been taken and were being compared on the computer scanning systems that everyone had now. Tawney agreed with the initial assessment of the Austrians that the four spear-carriers had probably been from the former East Germany, which seemed to be turning out all manner of political aberrants: converts from communism who were now discovering the joys of nazism, lingering true believers in the previous political-economic model, and just plain thugs who were a major annoyance to the regular German police forces.
But this had to be political. Fürchtner and Dortmund were—had been, Bill corrected himself—real, believing communists all their lives. They’d been raised in the former West Germany to middle-class families, the way a whole generation of terrorists had, striving all their active lives for socialist perfection or some such illusion. And so they had raided the home of a high-end capitalist . . . seeking what?
Tawney lifted a set of faxes from Vienna. Erwin Ostermann had told the police during his three-hour debrief that they’d sought his “special inside codes” to the international trading system. Were there such things? Probably not, Tawney judged—why not make sure? He lifted his phone and dialed the number of an old friend, Martin Cooper, a former “Six” man who now worked in Lloyd’s ugly building in London’s financial district.
“Cooper,” a voice said.
“Martin, this is Bill Tawney. How are you this rainy morning?”
“Quite well, Bill, and you—what are you doing now?”
“Still taking the Queen’s shilling, old man. New job, very hush-hush, I’m afraid.”
“What can I do to help you, old man?”
“Rather a stupid question, actually. Are there any insider channels in the international trading system? Special codes and such things?”
“I bloody wish there were, Bill. Make our job here much easier,” replied the former station chief for Mexico City and a few other minor posts for the British Secret Intelligence Service. “What exactly do you mean?”
“Not sure, but the subject just came up.”
“Well, people at this level do have personal relationships and often trade information, but I take it you mean something rather more structured, an insider-network marketplace sort of thing?”
“Yes, that’s the idea.”
“If so, they’ve all kept it a secret from me and the people I work with, old man. International conspiracies?” Cooper snorted. “And this is a chatty mob, you know. Everyone’s into everyone else’s business.”
“No such thing, then?”
“Not to my knowledge, Bill. It’s the sort of thing the uninformed believe in, of course, but it doesn’t exist, unless that’s the mob who assassinated John Kennedy,” Cooper added with a chuckle.
“Much what I’d thought, Martin, but I needed to tick that box. Thanks, my friend.”
“Bill, you have any idea on who might have attacked that Ostermann chap in Vienna?”
“Not really. You know him?”
“My boss does. I’ve met him once. Seems a decent bloke, and bloody smart as well.”
“Really all I know is what I saw on the telly this morning.” It wasn’t entirely a lie, and Martin would understand in any case, Tawney knew.
“Well, whoever did the rescue, my hat is off to them. Smells like SAS to me.”
“Really? Well, that wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”
“Suppose not. Good hearing from you, Bill. How about dinner sometime?”
“Love to. I’ll call you next time I’m in London.”
“Excellent. Cheers.”
Tawney replaced the phone. It seemed that Martin had landed on his feet after being let go from “Six,” which had reduced its size with the diminution of the Cold War. Well, that was to be expected. The sort of thing the uninformed believe in, Tawney thought. Yes, that fit. Fürchtner and Dortmund were communists, and would not have trusted or believed in the open market. In their universe, people could only get wealthy by cheating, exploiting, and conspiring with others of the same ilk. And what did that mean? . . .
Why had they attacked the home of Erwin Ostermann? You couldn’t rob such a man. He didn’t keep his money in cash or gold bars. It was all electronic, theoretical money, really, that existed in computer memories and traveled across telephone wires, and that was difficult to steal, wasn’t it?
No, what a man like Ostermann had was information, the ultimate source of power, ethereal though it was. Were Dortmund and Fürchtner willing to kill for that? It appeared so, but were the two dead terrorists the sort of people who could make use of such information? No, they couldn’t have been, because then they would have known that the thing they’d sought didn’t exist.
Somebody hired them, Tawney thought. Somebody had sent them out on their mission. But who?
And to what purpose? Which was even a better question, and one from which he could perhaps learn the answer to the first.
Back up, he told himself. If someone had hired them for a job, who could it have been? Clearly someone connected to the old terror network, someone who’d know where they were and whom they’d known and trusted to some degree, enough to risk their lives. But Fürchtner and Dortmund had been ideologically pure communists. Their acquaintances would be the same, and they would certainly not have trusted or taken orders from anyone of a different political shade. And how else could this notional person have known where and how to contact them, win their confidence, and send them off on a mission of death, chasing after something that didn’t really exist? . . .
A superior officer? Tawney wondered, stretching his mind for more information than he really had. Someone of the same political bent or beliefs, able to order them, or at least to motivate them to do something dangerous.
He needed more information, and he’d use his SIS and police contacts to get every scrap he could from the Austrian/German investigation. For starters, he called Whitehall to make sure he got full translations of all the hostage interviews. Tawney had been an intelligence officer for a long time, and something had gotten his nose to twitch.
“Ding, I didn’t like your takedown plan,” Clark said in the big conference room.
“I didn’t either, Mr. C, but without a chopper, didn’t have much choice, did I?” Chavez replied with an air of self-righteousness. “But that’s not the thing that really scares me.”
“What is?” John asked.
“Noonan brought this one up. Every time we go into a place, there are people around—the public, reporters, TV crews, all of that. What if one of them has a cell phone and calls the bad guys inside to tell them what’s happening? Real simple, isn’t it? We’re fucked and so are some hostages.”
“We
should be able to deal with that,” Tim Noonan told them. “It’s the way a cell phone works. It broadcasts a signal to tell the local cell that it’s there and it’s on, so that the computer systems can route an incoming call to it. Okay, we can get instrumentation to read that, and maybe to block the signal path—maybe even clone the bad guys’ phone, trap the incoming call and bag the bastards outside, maybe even flip ’em, right? But I need that software, and I need it now.”
“David?” Clark turned to Dave Peled, their Israeli techno-genius.
“It can be done. I expect the technology exists already at NSA or elsewhere.”
“What about Israel?” Noonan asked pointedly.
“Well . . . yes, we have such things.”
“Get them,” Clark ordered. “Want me to call Avi personally?”
“That would help.”
“Okay, I need the name and specifications of the equipment. How hard to train the operators?”
“Not very,” Peled conceded. “Tim can do it easily.”
Thank you for that vote of confidence, Special Agent Noonan thought, without a smile.
“Back to the takedown,” Clark commanded. “Ding, what were you thinking?”
Chavez leaned forward in his chair. He wasn’t just defending himself; he was defending his team. “Mainly that I didn’t want to lose a hostage, John. Doc told us we had to take those two seriously, and we had a hard deadline coming up. Okay, the mission as I understand it is not to lose a hostage. So, when they made it clear they wanted the chopper for transport, it was just a matter of giving it to them, with a little extra put in. Dieter and Homer did their jobs perfectly. So did Eddie and the rest of the shooters. The dangerous part was getting Louis and George up to the house so they could take down the last bunch. They did a nice ninja job getting there unseen,” Chavez went on, gesturing to Loiselle and Tomlinson. “That was the most dangerous part of the mission. We had them in a light-well and the camo stuff worked. If the bad guys had been using NVGs, that would have been a problem, but the additional illumination off the trees—from the lights the cops brought in, I mean—would have interfered with that. NVGs flare a lot if you throw light their way. It was a gamble,” Ding admitted, “but it was a gamble that looked better than having a hostage whacked right in front of us while we were jerking off at the assembly point. That’s the mission, Mr. C, and I was the commander on the scene. I made the call.” He didn’t add that his call had worked.