by Tom Clancy
“As long as you don’t blow the depth perception and run us right into the friggin’ wall,” Chavez observed. That remark earned him a turned head and a pained expression.
“My boy, we do try to avoid that. Ain’t nobody does the rocking chair maneuver better ’n me, people.”
“It’s hard to get right,” Clark observed.
“Yes, it is,” Malloy agreed, “but I know how to play the piano, too.”
The man was not lacking in confidence, they saw. Even the lieutenant in the left seat thought he was a little overpowering, but he was taking it all in anyway, especially watching how Malloy used the collective to control power as well as lift. Twenty minutes later, they were back on the ground.
“And that’s about how it’s done, people,” Malloy told them, when the rotor stopped turning. “Now, when do we start real training?”
“Tomorrow soon enough?” Clark asked.
“Works for me, General, sir. Next question, do we practice on the Night Hawk, or do I have to get used to flying something else?”
“We haven’t worked that out yet,” John admitted.
“Well, that does have a bearing on this stuff, y’know. Every chopper has a different feel, and that matters on how I do my deliveries,” Malloy pointed out. “I’m at my best on one of those. I’m nearly as good with a Huey, but that one’s noisy in close and hard to be covert with. Others, well, I have to get used to them. Takes a few hours of yankin’ and bankin’ before I feel completely comfortable.” Not to mention learning where all the controls were, Malloy didn’t add, since no two aircraft in the entire world had all the dials, gauges, and controls in the same places, something aviators had bitched about since the Wright Brothers. “If we deploy, I’m risking lives, mine and others, every time I lift off. I’d prefer to keep those risks to a minimum. I’m a cautious guy, y’know?”
“I’ll work on that today,” Clark promised.
“You do that.” Malloy nodded, and walked off to the locker/ready room.
Popov had himself a fine dinner in an Italian restaurant half a block from his apartment building, enjoyed the crisp weather in the city, and puffed on a Montecristo cigar after he got back to his flat. There was still work to do. He’d obtained videotapes of the news coverage of both of the terrorist incidents he’d instigated and wanted to study them. In both cases, the reporters spoke German—the Swiss kind, then Austrian—which he spoke like a native (of Germany). He sat in an easy chair with the remote control in his hand, occasionally rewinding to catch something odd of passing interest, studying the tapes closely, his trained mind memorizing every detail. The most interesting parts, of course, were those showing the assault teams who’d finally resolved both incidents with decisive action. The quality of the pictures was poor. Television simply didn’t make for high-quality imagery, especially in bad lighting conditions and from two hundred meters away. With the first tape, that of the Bern case, there was no more than ninety seconds of pre-action pictures of the assault team—this part had not been broadcast during the attack, only afterward. The men moved professionally, in a way that somehow reminded the Russian of the ballet, so strangely delicate and stylized were the movements of the men in the black clothing, as they crept in from left and right . . . and then came the blindingly swift action punctuated by jerky camera movements when the explosives went off—that always made the cameramen jump. No sound of gunfire. So their firearms were silenced. It was done so that the victims could not learn from the sound where the shots had come from—but it had not really been a matter of importance in this case, since the terrorist/criminals had been dead before the information could have done them any good. But that was how it was done. This business was as programmed as any professional sport, with the rules of play enforced by deadly might. The mission over in seconds, the assault team came out, and the Bern city police went in to sort out the mess. The people in black acted unremarkably, he saw, like disciplined soldiers on a battlefield. No congratulatory handshakes or other demonstrations. No, they were too well-trained for that. No one even did so much as light a cigarette . . . ah, one did seem to light a pipe. What followed was the usual brainless commentary from the local news commentators, talking about this elite police unit and how it had saved all the lives of those inside, und soweiter, Popov thought, rising to switch tapes.
The Vienna mission, he saw, had even poorer TV coverage, due to the physical conditions of the chap’s house. Quite a nice one, actually. The Romanovs might have had such a fine country house. Here the police had ruthlessly controlled the TV coverage, which was perfectly sensible, Popov thought, but not overly helpful to him. The taped coverage showed the front of the country house with boring regularity, punctuated by the monotonous words of the TV reporter repeating the same things endlessly, telling his viewers that he was unable to speak very much with the police on the scene. The tape did show the movement of vehicles, and showed the arrival of what had to be the Austrian assault team. Interestingly, they appeared to be dressed in civilian clothing upon their arrival, and changed soon thereafter into their battle dress . . . it looked green for this team . . . no, he realized, green overgarments over black regular dress. Did that mean anything? The Austrians had two men with scope-sighted rifles who rapidly disappeared into cars, which must have taken them behind the Schloss. The assault-team leader, not a very large man, much like the one Popov thought had headed the team in Bern, was seen from a great distance going over papers—the map/diagram/plans of the house and grounds, no doubt. Then, shortly before midnight, all of them had disappeared, leaving Popov to look at a tape of the dwelling illuminated by huge light standards, accompanied by more idiotic speculation by a singularly ill-informed TV journalist. . . . and then, just after midnight, came the distant pop of a rifle, followed by two more pops, silence, and then frantic activity by the uniformed police in the camera’s field of view. Twenty of them raced into the front door carrying light machine guns. The reporter had then talked about a sudden burst of activity, which the thickest of viewers would have seen for themselves, followed by more nothing-at-all, and then the announcement that all the hostages were alive, and all the criminals dead. Another passage of time, and the green-and-black-clad assault team appeared again. As with Bern, there were no overt signs of self-congratulation. One of the assault team seemed to be puffing on a pipe, as he walked to the van that had brought them to the scene and stowed his weapons, while another of them conferred briefly with a civilian-clothed policeman, probably the Captain Altmark who’d had field command of the incident. The two must have known each other, their exchange of words was so brief before the paramilitary police team departed the scene, just as at Bern. Yes, both of the counterterror units trained from exactly the same book, Popov told himself again.
Later press coverage spoke of the skill of the special police unit. That had happened in Bern, too, but it was surprising in neither case, since reporters also spoke the same drivel, regardless of language or nationality. The words used in the statement by the police were almost identical. Well, someone had trained both teams, perhaps the same agency. Perhaps the German GSG-9 group, which, with British help, had ended the airplane incident at Mogadishu over twenty years before, had trained the forces of countries that shared their language. Certainly the thoroughness of the training and the coldness of demeanor of the assault teams struck Popov as very German. They’d acted like machines both before and after the attacks, arriving and leaving like ghosts, with nothing left behind but the bodies of the terrorists. Efficient people, the Germans, and the Germanic policemen whom they trained. Popov, a Russian by birth and culture, had little love for the nation that had once killed so many of his countrymen, but he could respect them and their work, and the people they killed were no loss to the world. Even when he’d helped to train them as an active-duty officer of the Soviet KGB, he’d not cared much for them, nor had anyone else in his agency. They were, if not exactly the useful fools Lenin had once spoken about, then trained attack
dogs to be unleashed when needed, but never really trusted by those who semicontrolled them. And they’d never really been all that efficient. About the only thing they’d really accomplished was to force airports to install metal detectors, inconveniencing travelers all over the world. Certainly they’d made life hard on the Israelis, but what, really, did that country matter on the world stage? And even then, what had happened? If you forced countries to adapt to adverse circumstances, it happened swiftly. So, now, El Al, the Israeli airline, was the safest and most secure in the world, and policemen the world over were better briefed on whom to watch and to examine closely—and if everything else failed, then the policemen had special counterterror units like those who’d settled things in Bern and Vienna. Trained by Germans to kill like Germans. Any other terrorists he sent out to do evil work would have to deal with such people. Too bad, Popov thought, turning his TV back to a cable channel while the last tape rewound. He hadn’t learned much of anything from reviewing the tapes, but he was a trained intelligence officer, and therefore a thorough man. He poured himself an Absolut vodka to drink neat—he missed the superior Starka brand he would have had in Russia—and allowed his mind to churn over the information while he watched a movie on the TV screen.
“Yes, General, I know,” Clark said into the phone at 1:05 the next afternoon, damning time zones as he did so.
“That comes out of my budget, too,” General Wilson pointed out. First, CINC-SNAKE thought, they ask for a man, then they ask for hardware, and now, they are asking for funding, too.
“I can try to help with that through Ed Foley, sir, but the fact of the matter is that we need the asset to train with. You did send us a pretty good man,” Clark added, hoping to assuage Wilson’s renowned temper.
It didn’t help much. “Yes, I know he’s good. That’s why he was working for me in the first goddamned place.”
This guy’s getting ecumenical in his old age, John told himself. Now he’s praising a Marine—rather unusual for an Army snake-eater and former commander of XVIII Airborne Corps.
“General—sir, you know we’ve had a couple of jobs already, and with all due modesty, my people handled them both pretty damned well. I have to fight for my people, don’t I?”
And that calmed Wilson down. They were both commanders, they both had jobs to do, and people to command—and defend.
“Clark, I understand your position. I really do. But I can’t train my people on assets that you’ve taken away.”
“How about we call it time-sharing?” John offered, as a further olive branch.
“It still wears out a perfectly good Night Hawk.”
“It also trains up the crews for you. At the end of this, you may just have a primo helicopter crew to bring down to Bragg to work with your people—and the training expense for your operation is just about nothing, sir.” And that, he thought, was a pretty good play.
At MacDill Air Force Base, Wilson told himself that this was a losing proposition. Rainbow was a bulletproof operation, and everyone knew it. This Clark guy had sold it first of all to CIA, then to the President himself—and sure enough, they’d had two deployments, and both had worked out, though the second one had been pretty dicey. But Clark, clever as he was, and good commander that he seemed to be, hadn’t learned how to run a unit in the modern military world, where half the time was spent managing money like some goddamned white-socked accountant, instead of leading from the front and training with the troops. That’s what really rankled Sam Wilson, young for a four-star, a professional soldier who wanted to soldier, something that high command pretty well precluded, despite his fitness and desire. Most annoying of all, this Rainbow unit promised to steal a lot of his own business. The Special Operations Command had commitments all over the world, but the international nature of Rainbow meant that there was now somebody else in the same line of work, whose politically neutral nature was supposed to make their use a lot more palatable to countries that might need special services. Clark might just put him out of business in a real sense, and Wilson didn’t like that at all.
But, really, he had no choice in the matter, did he?
“Okay, Clark, you can use the aircraft so long as the parent unit is able to part with it, and so long as its use by you does not interfere with training and readiness with that parent unit. Clear?”
“Yes, sir, that is clear,” John Clark acknowledged.
“I need to come over to see your little circus,” Wilson said next.
“I’d like that a lot, General.”
“We’ll see,” Wilson grumbled, breaking the connection.
“Tough son of a bitch,” John breathed.
“Quite,” Stanley agreed. “We are poaching on his patch, after all.”
“It’s our patch now, Al.”
“Yes, it is, but you mustn’t expect him to like that fact.”
“And he’s younger and tougher than me?”
“A few years younger, and I personally would not wish to cross swords with the gentleman.” Stanley smiled. “The war appears to be over, John, and you appear to have won.”
Clark managed a smile and a chuckle. “Yeah, Al, but it’s easier to go into the field and kill people.”
“Quite.”
“What’s Peter’s team doing?”
“Long-line practice.”
“Let’s go and watch,” John said, glad to have an excuse to leave his desk.
“I want to get out of this place,” he told his attorney.
“I understand that, my friend,” the lawyer replied, with a look around the room. It was the law in France, as in America, that conversations between clients and attorneys were privileged, and could not be recorded or used in any way by the state, but neither man really trusted the French to abide by that law, especially since DGSE, the French intelligence service, had been so instrumental in bringing Il’ych to justice. The DGSE was not known for its willingness to abide by the rules of civilized international behavior, as people as diverse as international terrorists and Greenpeace had learned to their sorrow.
Well, there were other people talking in this room, and there were no obvious shotgun microphones here—and the two had not taken the seats offered by the prison guards, opting instead for one closer to the windows because, they’d said, they wanted the natural light. Of course, every booth could easily be wired.
“I must tell you that the circumstances of your conviction do not lend themselves to an easy appeal,” the lawyer advised. This wasn’t exactly news to his client.
“I am aware of that. I need you to make a telephone call.”
“To whom?”
The Jackal gave him a name and a number. “Tell him that it is my wish to be released.”
“I cannot be part of a criminal act.”
“I am aware of that as well,” Sanchez observed coldly. “Tell him also that the rewards will be great.”
It was suspected, but not widely known for certain, that Il’ych Ramirez Sanchez had a goodly sum of money squirreled away as a result of his operations while a free man. This had come mainly as a result of his attack on the OPEC ministers in Austria almost twenty years earlier, which explained why he and his group had been so careful not to kill anyone really important, despite the political flap that would have caused—all the better for him to gain notice and acclaim at the time. Business was business, even for his sort of people. And someone had paid his own legal bills, the attorney thought.
“What else do you expect me to tell him?”
“That is all. If he has an immediate reply, you will convey it to me,” the Jackal told him. There was still an intensity to his eyes, something cold and distant—but even so, right there looking deep into his interlocutor and telling him what must be.
For his part, the attorney asked himself again why he’d taken on this client. He had a long history of championing radical causes, from which notoriety he’d gained a wide and lucrative criminal practice. There was an attendant element of danger involved, o
f course. He’d recently handled three major drug cases, and lost all three, and those clients hadn’t liked the idea of spending twenty or more years in prison and had expressed their displeasure to him recently. Might they arrange to have him killed? It had happened a few times in America and elsewhere. It was a more distant possibility here, the lawyer thought, though he’d made no promises to those clients except to do his best for them. It was the same with Carlos the Jackal. After his conviction, the lawyer had come into the case to look at the possibilities of an appeal, and made it, and lost—predictably. The French high courts held little clemency for a man who’d done murder on the soil of France, then essentially boasted of it. Now the man had changed his mind and decided petulantly that he didn’t enjoy prison life. The lawyer knew that he’d pass along the message, as he had to, but did that make him part of a criminal act?
No, he decided. Telling an acquaintance of his client that the latter wanted out of prison—well, who would not wish to be liberated? And the message was equivocal, it held many possible meanings. Help on another appeal, revelation of new, exculpatory evidence, anything at all. And besides, whatever Sanchez asked him to do here was privileged information, wasn’t it?
“I will pass along your message,” he promised his client.
“Merci.”
It was a beautiful thing to watch, even in the dark. The MH-60K Night Hawk helicopter came in at about thirty miles per hour, almost two hundred feet over the ground, approaching the range building from the south, into the wind, traveling smoothly, not at all like a tactical deployment maneuver. But under the helicopter was a dark nylon rope, about one hundred fifty feet long, barely visible with the best of NVGs, and at the end of it were Peter Covington, Mike Chin, and another Team-1 member, dangling free below the black Sikorsky in their black ninja suits. The helicopter proceeded in so evenly and smoothly, as though on tracks, until the nose of the aircraft crossed the building’s wall. Then the nose came up, and the aircraft flared, slowing rapidly. Below the aircraft, the people attached to the rope swept forward, as though on a child’s swing, and then, at the limit of the arc, they swung backward. The backward swing froze them still in the air, their rearward velocity almost exactly matching the remaining forward motion of the helicopter, and then they were on the roof, almost as though they’d stepped off a stationary object. Instantly, Covington and his men unclipped their quick-release attachments and dropped down. The negligible speed difference between their feet and the stationary roof made for no noise at all. Scarcely had this been done when the helicopter nosed down, resuming its forward flight, and anyone on the ground would scarcely have known that the aircraft had done anything but fly at a steady pace over the building. And at night, it was nearly invisible, even with night-vision goggles.