by Tom Clancy
René was in command. He moved toward the castle entrance, clear of the nine others who were holding the crowd in place. Looking around, he could see others outside the perimeter of his group, looking in, many crouching down now, hiding, taking what cover there was. Many of them were taking pictures, some with television cameras, and some of those would be zooming in to catch his face, but there was nothing he could do about that.
“Two!” he called. “Select our guests!”
“Two” was Jean-Paul. He approached a knot of people roughly, and first of all grabbed the arm of a four-year-old French girl.
“No!” her mother screamed. Jean-Paul pointed his weapon at her, and she cringed but stood her ground, holding both shoulders of the child.
“Very well,” “Two” told her, lowering his aim. “I will shoot her, then.” In less than a second, the muzzle of his Uzi was against the little girl’s light-brown hair. That made the mother scream all the louder, but she pulled her hands back from her child.
“Walk over there,” Jean-Paul told the child firmly, pointing to Juan. The little girl did so, looking back with an open mouth at her stunned mother, while the armed man selected more children.
Andre was doing the same on the other side of the crowd. He went first of all to the little Dutch child. Anna, her special-access name tag read. Without a word, he pushed Anna’s father away from the wheelchair and shoved it off toward the castle.
“My child is ill,” the father protested in English.
“Yes, I can see that,” Andre replied in the same language, moving off to select another sick child. What fine hostages these two would make.
“You bloody swine!” this one’s mother snarled at him. For her trouble she was clubbed by the extended stock of Andre’s Uzi, which broke her nose and bathed her face in blood.
“Mummy!” a little boy screamed, as Andre one-handed his chair up the ramp to the castle. The child turned in his chair to see his mother collapse. A park employee, a street-sweeper, knelt down to assist her, but all she did was scream louder for her son: “Tommy!”
To her screams were soon added those of forty sets of parents, all of them wearing the red T-shirts of the Thompson company. The small crowd withdrew into the castle, leaving the rest to stand there, stunned, for several seconds before they moved off, slowly and jerkily, down to Strada España.
“Shit, they’re coming here,” Mike Dennis saw, still talking on the phone to the captain commanding the local Guardia Civil barracks.
“Get clear,” the captain told him immediately. “If there is a way for you to leave the area, make use of it now! We need you and your people to assist us. Leave now!”
“But, goddamnit, these people are my responsibility.”
“Yes, they are, and you can take that responsibility outside. Now!” the captain ordered him. “Leave!”
Dennis replaced the phone, turning then to look at the fifteen-person duty staff in the command center. “People, everybody, follow me. We’re heading for the backup command center. Right now,” he emphasized.
The castle, real as it appeared, wasn’t real. It had been built with the modern conveniences of elevators and fire stairwells. The former were probably compromised, Dennis thought, but one of the latter descended straight down to the underground. He walked to that fire door and opened it, waving for his employees to head that way. This they did, most with enthusiasm for escaping this suddenly dangerous place. The last tossed him keys on the way through, and when Dennis left, he locked this door behind him, then raced down the four levels of square-spiral stairs. Another minute and he was in the underground, which was crowded with employees and guests hustled out of harm’s way by Trolls, Legionnaires, and other uniformed park personnel. A gaggle of park-security people were there, but none of them were armed with anything more dangerous than a radio. There were guns in the counting room, but they were under lock, and only a few of the Worldpark employees were trained and authorized to use them, and Dennis didn’t want shots to be fired here. Besides, he had other things to do. The alternate Worldpark command post was actually outside the park grounds, just at the end of the underground. He ran there, following his other command personnel north toward the exit that led to the employees’ parking lot. That required about five minutes, and Dennis darted in the door to see that the alternate command post was double-manned now. His own alternate desk was vacant, and the phone already linked to the Guardia Civil.
“Are you safe?” the captain asked.
“For now, I guess,” Dennis responded. He keyed up his castle office on his monitor.
“This way,” Andre told them. The door was locked, however. He backed off and fired his pistol at the doorknob, which bent from the impact, but remained locked, movies to the contrary. Then René tried his Uzi, which wrecked that portion of the door and allowed him to pull it open. Andre led them upstairs, then kicked in the door to the command center—empty. He swore foully at that discovery.
“I see them!” Dennis said into the phone. “One man—two—six men with guns—Jesus, they have kids with them!” One of them walked up to a surveillance camera, pointed his pistol, and the picture vanished.
“How many men with guns?” the captain asked.
“At least six, maybe ten, maybe more. They have taken children hostage. You get that? They’ve got kids with them.”
“I understand, Señor Dennis. I must leave you now and coordinate a response. Please stand by.”
“Yeah.” Dennis worked other camera controls to see what was happening in his park. “Shit,” he swore with a rage that was now replacing shock. Then he called his chairman to make his report, wondering what the hell he would say when the Saudi prince asked what the hell was going on—a terrorist assault on an amusement park?
In his office, Captain Dario Gassman called Madrid to make his first report of the incident. He had a crisis plan for his barracks, and that was being implemented now by his policemen. Ten cars and sixteen men were now racing down the divided highway from various directions and various patrol areas, merely knowing that Plan W had been implemented. Their first mission was to establish a perimeter, with orders to let no one in or out—the last part of which would soon prove to be utterly impossible. In Madrid other things were happening while Captain Gassman walked to his car for the drive to Worldpark. It was a thirty-minute drive for him, even with lights and siren, and the drive gave him the chance to think in relative peace, despite the noise from under the hood. He had sixteen men there or on the way, but if there were ten armed criminals at Worldpark, that would not be enough, not even enough to establish an inner and outer perimeter. How many more men would he need? Would he have to call up the national response team formed a few years ago by the Guardia Civil? Probably yes. What sort of criminals would hit Worldpark at this time of day? The best time for a robbery was at closing time, even though that was what he and his men had anticipated and trained for—because that was the time all the money was ready, bundled and wrapped in canvas bags for transfer to the bank, and guarded by park personnel and sometimes his own . . . that was the time of highest vulnerability. But no, whoever this was, they had chosen the middle of the day, and they’d taken hostages—children, Gassman reminded himself. So, were they robbers or something else? What sort of criminals were they? What if they were terrorists . . . they had taken hostages . . . children . . . Basque terrorists? Damn, what then?
But things were already leaving Gassman’s hands. The senior Thompson executive was on his cell phone, talking with his corporate headquarters, a call quickly bucked up to his own chairman, caught in a sidewalk café having a pleasant lunch that the call aborted instantly. This executive called the Defense Minister, and that got things rolling very rapidly indeed. The report from the Thompson manager on the scene had been concise and unequivocal. The Defense Minister called him directly and had his secretary take all the notes they needed. These were typed up and faxed to both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, and the latt
er called his Spanish counterpart with an urgent request for confirmation. It was already a political exercise, and in the Defense Ministry another phone call was made.
“Yes, this is John Clark,” Rainbow Six said into the phone. “Yes, sir. Where is that exactly . . . I see . . . how many? Okay. Please send us whatever additional information you receive. . . . No, sir, we cannot move until the host government makes the request. Thank you, Minister.” Clark changed buttons on his phone. “Al, get in here. We have some more business coming in.” Next he made the same request of Bill Tawney, Bellow, Chavez, and Covington.
The Thompson executive still in Worldpark assembled his people at a food stand and polled them. A former tank officer in the French army, he worked hard and quickly to bring order from chaos. Those employees who still had their children, he set aside. Those who did not, he counted, and determined that thirty-three children were missing, along with one or maybe two children in wheelchairs. The parents were predictably frantic, but he got and kept them under control, then called his chairman again to amplify his initial report on the situation. After that he got some paper on which to compile a list of names and ages, keeping his own emotions under control as best he could and thanking God that his own children were too old to have made this trip. With that done, he took his people away from the castle, found a park employee and asked where he might find phones and fax machines. They were all escorted through a wooden swinging door, into a well-disguised service building and down into the underground, then walked to the alternate park command post, where they met Mike Dennis, still holding the folder with his welcoming speech for the Thompson group and trying to make some sense of things.
Gassman arrived just then, in time to see the fax machine transmitting a list of the known hostages to Paris. Not a minute later, the French Defense Minister called. It turned out that he knew the senior Thompson executive, Colonel Robert Gamelin, who’d headed the development team for the LeClerc battle tank’s second-generation fire-control system a few years before.
“How many?”
“Thirty-three from our group, perhaps a few more, but the terrorists seem to have selected our children quite deliberately, Monsieur Minister. This is a job for the Legion,” Colonel Gamelin said forcefully, meaning the Foreign Legion’s special-operations team.
“I will see, Colonel.” The connection broke.
“I am Captain Gassman,” the guy in the strange hat said to Gamelin.
“Bloody hell, I took the family there last year,” Peter Covington said. “You could use up a whole fucking battalion retaking the place. It’s a bloody nightmare, lots of buildings, lots of space, multilevel. I think it even has an underground service area.”
“Maps, diagrams?” Clark asked Mrs. Foorgate.
“I’ll see,” his secretary replied, leaving the conference room.
“What do we know?” Chavez asked.
“Not much, but the French are pretty worked up, and they’re requesting that the Spanish let us in and—”
“This just arrived,” Alice Foorgate said, handing over a fax and leaving again.
“List of hostages—Jesus, they’re all kids, ages four to eleven . . . thirty-three of them . . . holy shit,” Clark breathed, looking it over, then handing it to Alistair Stanley.
“Both teams, if we deploy,” the Scotsman said immediately.
“Yeah.” Clark nodded. “Looks that way.” Then the phone beeped.
“Phone call for Mr. Tawney,” a female voice announced on the speaker.
“This is Tawney,” the intel chief said on picking up the receiver. “Yes, Roger . . . yes, we know, we got a call from—oh, I see. Very well. Let me get some things done here, Roger. Thank you.” Tawney hung up. “The Spanish government have requested through the British embassy in Madrid that we deploy at once.”
“Okay, people,” John said, standing. “Saddle up. Christ, that was a fast call.”
Chavez and Covington ran from the room to head for their respective team buildings. Then Clark’s phone rang again. “Yeah?” He listened for several minutes. “Okay, that works for me. Thank you, sir.”
“What was that, John?”
“MOD just requested an MC-130 from the First Special Ops Wing. They’re chopping it to us, along with Malloy’s helo. Evidently, there’s a military airfield about twenty clicks from where we’re going, and Whitehall is trying to get us cleared into it.” And better yet, he didn’t have to add, the Hercules transport could lift them right out of Hereford. “How fast can we get moving?”
“Less than an hour,” Stanley replied after a second’s consideration.
“Good, ’cuz that Herky Bird will be here in forty minutes or less. The crew’s heading out to it right now.”
“Listen up people,” Chavez was saying half a click away as he walked into the team’s bay. “We got a job. Boots and saddles, people. Shag it.”
They started moving at once for the equipment lockers before Sergeant Patterson raised the obvious objection: “Ding, Team-1’s the go-team. What gives?”
“Looks like they need us both for this ride, Hank. Everybody goes today.”
“Fair ’nuff.” Patterson headed off to his locker.
Their gear was already packed, always set up that way as a matter of routine. The mil-spec plastic containers were wheeled to the door even before the truck arrived to load them up.
Colonel Gamelin got the word before Captain Gassman did. The French Defense Minister called him directly to announce that a special-operations team was flying down at the request of the Spanish government, and would be there in three hours or less. He relayed this information to his people, somewhat to the chagrin of the Spanish police official, who then called his own minister in Madrid to inform him of what was happening, and it turned out that the minister was just getting the word from his own Foreign Ministry. Additional police were on the way, and their orders were to take no action beyond the establishment of a perimeter. Gassman’s reaction to being whip-sawed was predictable disorientation, but he had his orders. Now with thirty of his cops on the scene or on the way, he ordered a third of them to move inward, slowly and carefully, toward the castle on the surface, while two more did the same in the underground, with their weapons holstered or on safe, and with orders not to fire under any circumstances, an instruction more easily given than followed.
Things had come well to this point, René thought, and the park command center was better than anything he’d hoped for. He was learning to use the computer system to select TV cameras that seemed to cover the entire grounds, from the parking lots to the waiting areas for the various rides. The pictures were in black and white, and once a venue was selected he could zoom and pan the camera to find anything he wished. There were twenty monitors set on the walls of the office, each of them linked by a computer terminal to at least five cameras. Nobody would get close to the castle without his knowledge. Excellent.
In the secretaries’ room just through the door, Andre had the children sitting on the floor in one tight little knot, except for the two in their wheelchairs, whom he’d placed against the wall. The children were uniformly wide-eyed and frightened-looking, as well they might be, and at the moment they were quiet, which suited him. He’d slung his submachine gun over his shoulder. It wasn’t needed at the moment, was it?
“You will stay still,” he told them in French, then backed to the door into the command center. “One,” he called.
“Yes, Nine,” René answered.
“Things are under control here. Time to make a call?”
“Yes,” One agreed. He took his seat and picked up a phone, then examined the buttons, and finding a likely one, he pressed it.
“Yes?”
“Who is this?”
“I am Mike Dennis. I am managing director of the park.”
“Bien, I am One, and I am now in command of your Worldpark.”
“Okay, Mr. One. What do you want?”
“You have the police here?”
<
br /> “Yes, they are here now.”
“Good. I will speak with their commander then.”
“Captain?” Dennis waved. Gassman took the three steps to his desk.
“I am Captain Dario Gassman of the Guardia Civil.”
“I am One. I am in command. You know that I have taken over thirty hostages, yes?”
“Sí, I am aware of this,” the captain replied, keeping his voice as calm as circumstances allowed. He’d read books and had training on talking with hostage-holding terrorists, and now wished that he’d had a lot more of it. “Do you have a request for me?”
“I do not make requests. I will give you orders to be carried out at once, and have you relay orders to others. Do you understand?” René asked in English.
“Sí, comprendo.”
“All of our hostages are French. You will establish a line of communication with the French embassy in Madrid. My orders are for them. Please keep in mind that none of our hostages are citizens of your country. This affair is between us and the French. Do you understand that?”
“Señor One, the safety of those children is my responsibility. This is Spanish soil.”
“Be that as it may,” One replied, “you will open a telephone link to the French embassy at once. Let me know when it is done.”
“I must first of all relay your request to my superiors. I will get back to you when I have my instructions from them.”