by Tom Clancy
“Yes, Mike, excuse me.”
“You okay, Andre? You looked a little upset about something.”
“I did? No . . . Mike, no, I am fine. Just a long night for me.”
“Okay.” Dennis patted him on the shoulder. “Busy day planned. How long you been with us?”
“Two weeks.”
“Like it here?”
“It is a unique place to work.”
“That’s the idea, Andre. Have a good one.”
“Yes, Mike.” He watched the American boss walk quickly away, toward the castle and his office. Damned Americans, they expected everyone to be happy all the time, else something must be wrong, and if something went wrong, it had to be fixed. Well, Andre told himself, something was wrong, and it would be fixed this very day. But Mike wouldn’t like that very much, would he?
One kilometer away, Jean-Paul transferred his weapons from his suitcase to his backpack. He’d ordered room service to bring breakfast in, a big American breakfast, he’d decided, since it might have to stand him in good stead for most of this day, and probably part of another. Elsewhere in this hotel and other hotels in the same complex, the others would be doing the same. His Uzi submachine gun had a total of ten loaded magazines, with six more spares for his 9-mm pistol, and three fragmentation hand grenades in addition to his radio. It made for a heavy backpack, but he wouldn’t be carrying it all day. Jean-Paul checked his watch and took one final look at his room. All the toiletries were recently bought. He’d wiped all of them with a damp cloth to make sure he left no fingerprints behind, then the table and desktops, and finally his breakfast dishes and silverware. He didn’t know if the French police might have his prints on file somewhere, but if so, he didn’t want to give them another set, and if not, why make it easy for them to start a file? He wore long khaki trousers and a short-sleeve shirt, plus the stupid white hat he’d bought the previous day. It would mark him as just one more guest in this absurd place, totally harmless. With all that done, he picked up his backpack and walked out the door, taking a final pause to wipe the doorknob both inside and outside before walking to the elevator bank. He pressed the DOWN button with a knuckle instead of a fingertip, and in a few seconds was on his way out the hotel door and walking casually to the train station, where his room key-card was his passport to the Worldpark Transportation System. He took off the backpack to sit down and found himself joined in the compartment by a German, also carrying a backpack, with his wife and two children. The backpack bumped loudly when the man set it on the seat next to him.
“My Minicam,” the man explained, in English, oddly enough.
“I, also. Heavy things to carry about, aren’t they?”
“Ah, yes, but this way we will have much to remember from our day in the park.”
“Yes, you will,” Jean-Paul said in reply. The whistle blew, and the train lurched forward. The Frenchman checked his pocket for his park ticket. He actually had three more days of paid entry into the theme park. Not that he’d need it. In fact, nobody in the area would.
“What the hell?” John mumbled, reading the fax on the top of his pile. “Scholarship fund?” And who had violated security? George Winston, Secretary of the Treasury? What the hell? “Alice?” he called.
“Yes, Mr. Clark,” Mrs. Foorgate said on coming into his office. “I rather thought that would cause a stir. It seems that Mr. Ostermann feels it necessary to reward the team for rescuing him.”
“What’s the law on this?” John asked next.
“I haven’t a clue, sir.”
“How do we find out?”
“A solicitor, I imagine.”
“Do we have a lawyer on retainer?”
“Not to my knowledge. And you will probably need one, a Briton and an American as well.”
“Super,” Rainbow Six observed. “Could you ask Alistair to come in?”
“Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER 14
SWORD OF THE LEGION
The company outing for Thompson CSF had been planned for some months. The three hundred children had been working overtime to get a week ahead in their schoolwork, and the event had business implications as well. Thompson was installing computerized control systems in the park—it was part of the company’s transition from being mainly a military-products producer to a more generalized electronics-engineering firm—and here their military experience helped. The new control systems, with which Worldpark management could monitor activities throughout the establishment, were a linear development of data-transfer systems developed for NATO ground forces. They were multilingual, user-friendly gadgets that transmitted their data through ether-space rather than over copper land-lines, which saved a few million francs, and Thompson had brought the systems in on time and on budget, which was a skill that they, like many defense contractors all over the globe, were struggling to learn.
In recognition of the successful fulfillment of the contract to a high-profile commercial customer, senior Thompson management had cooperated with Worldpark to arrange this company picnic. Everyone in the group, children included, wore red T-shirts with the company logo on the front, and for the moment they were mainly together, moving toward the center of the park in a group escorted by six of the park Trolls, who were dancing their way to the castle with their absurdly large bare-feet shoes and hairy head-bodies. The group was further escorted by legionnaires, two wolfskin-wearing signifers bearing cohort standards, and the one lion-skinned aquilifer, carrying the gold eagle, the hallowed emblem of the VI Legio Victrix, now quartered at Worldpark, Spain, as its antecedent had been under the Emperor Tiberius in 20 A.D. The park employees tasked to be part of the resident legion had developed their own esprit, and took to their marching with a will, their Spanish-made spatha swords scabbarded awkwardly, but accurately, high up on their right sides, and their shields carried in their left hands. They moved in a group as proudly as their notional Victrix or “victorious” legion had once done twenty centuries before—their predecessors once the first and only line of defense for the Roman colony that this part of Spain had been.
About the only thing the group didn’t have was a coterie of people leading them with flags, which was mainly a Japanese affectation, anyway. After the first day’s ceremonies, the Thompson people would wander off on their own, and enjoy their four days here as normal tourists.
Mike Dennis watched the procession on his office TV monitors while he gathered his notes. The Roman soldiers were a signature item for his theme park, and, for some reason or other, had proven to be wildly popular, enough so that he’d recently increased their number from fifty to over a hundred and established a trio of centurions to command them. You could spot them by the sideways plumes on their helmets instead of the fore-and-aft on the helms of the ordinary legionnaires. The guys in the outfit had taken to real sword practice, and it was rumored that some of the swords actually had edges, which Dennis hadn’t bothered to verify and which he’d have to put a stop to if he did. But anything that was good for employee morale was good for the park, and it was his practice to let his people run their departments with minimal interference from his command center in the castle. He used his computer mouse to zoom in on the approaching mob. They were about twenty minutes early, and that was . . . oh, yeah, it was Francisco de la Cruz leading the parade. Francisco was a retired sergeant in the Spanish army’s paratroops, and the guy just grooved to leading parades and such, didn’t he? Tough-looking old bastard, over fifty, with burly arms and so heavy a beard—Worldpark allowed mustaches but not beards for its employees—that he had to shave twice a day. The little kids found him intimidating, but Francisco had a way of scooping them up like a bearish grandfather and putting them instantly at ease—the kids especially liked playing with his red horsehair plume. Dennis made a mental note to have lunch with Francisco sometime soon. He ran his little department well, and deserved some attention from topside.
Dennis pulled the manila folder from his action tray. He had to give a welcoming s
peech to the Thompson guests, to be followed by music from one of the park’s roving bands and a parade of the Trolls, then dinner in the castle restaurant. He checked his watch and rose, heading for the corridor that led to a disguised passage with a “secret” door into the castle courtyard. The architects for this place had been handed a blank check, and they’d utilized the Gulf oil money well, though the castle wasn’t totally authentic. It had fire escapes, sprinklers, and structural steel, not just blocks piled up and mortared together.
“Mike?” a voice called. The park manager turned.
“Yeah, Pete?”
“Telephone, it’s the chairman calling.”
The executive turned and hustled back to his office, still clutching his prepared speech.
Francisco—Pancho to his friends—de la Cruz was not a tall man, only five-seven, but wide across the chest, and his pillarlike legs made the ground shake when he marched, stiff-legged, as an historian had told him was the custom of the legions. His iron helmet was heavy, and he could feel the flopping of the plume atop it. His left arm held the large and heavy scutum, the shield of the legionnaire that reached almost from neck to ankles, made of glue-laminated wood, but with a heavy iron boss in the center in the image of the Medusa, and metal edges. The Romans, he’d long since learned, had been tough soldiers to march into battle with this heavy gear—almost sixty pounds of it at full load with food and mess kit, about what he’d marched with as a soldier in the field. The park had duplicated all of it, though the quality of the metal was surely better than that which had been produced in the blacksmith shops of the Roman empire. Six young boys had formed up on him, emulating his heavy-footed march. De la Cruz liked that. His own sons were now in the Spanish army, following in their father’s footsteps, just as these French boys were now doing. For de la Cruz the world was in its proper shape.
Only a few meters away, it was getting that way as well for Jean-Paul, René, and Esteban, the last of them with a cloud of balloons affixed to his wrist, selling one even now. The others were all wearing their white Worldpark hats, all getting into position around the crowd. None of the terrorists were wearing the red Thompson shirts, though doing so would not have been all that difficult. Instead, they wore black Worldpark shirts to go with the hats, and all but Esteban and Andre were also wearing backpacks, like so many other visitors to Worldpark.
The Trolls had everyone in place a few minutes early, they all saw. The adults were joking among themselves, and the children pointing and laughing, their faces illuminated with joy that would soon change to something else, some racing around the taller adults, playing games of hide-and-seek within the crowd . . . and two were in wheelchairs—no, Esteban saw, they were not part of the Thompson group. They wore their special-access buttons, but not the red shirts.
Andre saw those guests, too. One was the little dying Dutch girl from the previous day and one other . . . English by the look of his father, pushing the wheelchair up to the castle and through the crowd. Yes, they’d want both of those. So much the better that these two weren’t French, wasn’t it?
Dennis had sat down at his desk. The call required detailed information that he’d had to call up on his computer. Yes, quarterly park revenues were 4.1 percent over projections. . . . Yes, the slow season had turned out to be somewhat less slow than they’d expected. Unusually favorable weather, Dennis explained, was the explanation, and one couldn’t count on that, but things were going smoothly, except for some computer problems on two of the rides. Yes, they had some software engineers in the back-lot area working on that right now. . . . Yes, that was warranty coverage from the manufacturer, and the manufacturer’s representatives were being entirely cooperative—well, they should, as they were bidding on two more mega-rides whose designs would make the entire world take a breathless step back, Dennis told the chairman, who hadn’t seen the proposals yet, and would on his next trip to Spain in three weeks. They’d be doing TV shows about conception and design on these two, Dennis promised the chairman, especially for the American cable-channel market, and wouldn’t it be something if they increased their draw of American patrons—stealing guests from the Disney empire, which had invented the theme park. The Saudi chairman, who’d initially invested in Worldpark because his children loved to ride things that he had trouble even looking at, was enthusiastic about the proposed new attractions, enough so that he didn’t ask about them, willing to be surprised by Dennis when the time came.
“What the hell?” Dennis said over the phone, looking up when he heard it.
Everyone jumped at the noise, the shattering staccato of Jean-Paul’s submachine gun, firing a long burst up into the air. In the castle courtyard, people turned and cringed instinctively at the same time, as they first saw the one bearded man aiming upward and swinging his weapon, which ejected a brief shower of brass cases into the air. Being untrained civilians, they did little for the first few seconds but look in shock, without even time to show real fear yet—
—and when they turned to see the shooter in their midst—those around him drawing instinctively away instead of trying to grab him—and the others withdrawing their weapons from their backpacks, at first just bringing them out without firing—waiting a beat or so—
Francisco de la Cruz was standing behind one of the others, and saw the weapon coming out even before the first one fired. His brain recognized the unfriendly yet familiar shape of an Israeli Uzi nine-millimeter submachine gun, and his eyes locked on it, reporting direction and distance, and that this was something that didn’t belong in his park. The shock of the moment lasted only that long, and then his twenty-plus years of uniformed service flashed into his consciousness, and two meters behind that bearded criminal, he started moving.
Claude’s eyes caught the movement, and he turned to see—what was this? A man wearing Roman armor and the strangest of headgear was moving toward him. He turned to face the threat and—
• Centurion de la Cruz acted on some sort of soldierly instinct that had transformed itself in time and place from the era to which his uniform belonged to where he was this noon. His right hand pulled the spatha from its scabbard high up on his right side, and the shield came up, its center iron boss aimed at the muzzle of the Uzi as the sword came straight in the air. He’d had this sword custom-made by a distant cousin in Toledo. It was formed of laminated carbon steel, just as the sword of El Cid had once been, and it had an edge fit to shave with, and he was suddenly a soldier again, and for the first time in his career, he had an armed enemy before him and a weapon in his hand, and the distance was less than two meters now, and gun or not, he was going to—
• Claude fired off a quick burst, just as he had learned so many times, into the center of mass of his advancing target, but that happened to be the three-centimeter-thick iron boss of the scutum, and the bullets deflected off it, fragmenting as they did so—
• de la Cruz felt the impact of the fragments peppering his left arm, but the stings of insects would have felt worse as he closed, and his right sword-arm came left, then right, slashing in a way the spatha was not designed for, but the razor’s edge in the last twenty centimeters near the point did the rest, catching the cabron’s upper arm and laying it open just below the end of the short sleeve, and for the first time in his life, Centurion Francisco de la Cruz drew blood in anger—
• Claude felt the pain. His right arm moved, and his finger depressed the trigger, and the long burst hit the oncoming shield low and right of the boss. Three bullets hit de la Cruz’s left leg, all below the knee, through the metal greaves, one of them breaking the tibia, causing the centurion to scream in pain as he went down, his second, lethal slash of the sword missing the man’s throat by a whisker. His brain commanded his legs to act, but he had only one working leg at the moment, and the other failed him utterly, causing the former paratrooper to fall to the left and forward—
Mike Dennis ran to the window instead of using the TV monitors. Others were watching those, and the tak
e from the various cameras was being recorded automatically in a bank of VCRs elsewhere in the park. His eyes saw, and though his brain didn’t believe, it was there, and impossible as it was, it had to be real. A number of people with guns were surrounding the sea of red shirts, and they herded them now, like sheepdogs, inward and toward the castle courtyard. Dennis turned:
“Security lockdown, security lockdown now!” he called to the man on the master control board, and with a mouse click the castle’s doors were all dead-bolted.
“Call the police!” Dennis ordered next. That was also pre-programmed. An alarm system fired off a signal to the nearest police barracks. It was the robbery-alert signal, but that would be sufficient for the moment. Dennis next lifted a desk phone and punched in the police number from the sticker on his phone. The one emergency contingency they’d planned for was a robbery of their cash room, and since that would necessarily be a major crime committed by a number of armed criminals, the park’s internal response to the signal was also pre-programmed. All park rides would be stopped at once, all attractions closed, and shortly people would be instructed to return to their hotel rooms, or to the parking lot, because the park was closing due to an unexpected emergency . . . The noise of the machine guns would have carried a long way, Dennis thought, and the park guests would understand the urgency of the moment.
This was the amusing part, Andre thought. He donned a spare white hat from one of his comrades and took the gun that Jean-Paul had packed for him. A few meters away, Esteban cut the balloons loose from his hand, and they soared into the air as he, too, took up his weapon.
The children were not as overtly frightened as their parents were, perhaps thinking that this also was one of the magic things to be expected at the park, though the noise hurt their little ears and had made them jump. But fear is contagious, and the children quickly saw that emotion in their parents’ eyes, and one by one they held tight to hands and legs, looking about at the adults who were moving quickly now, around the red-shirted crowd, holding things that looked like . . . guns, the boys recognized the shape from their own toys, which these clearly were not.