by Tom Clancy
“Do you recommend that?” the Minister asked.
“I am not sure yet. I haven’t spoken with them, and until I do I cannot get a feel for what they’re all about. For the moment, I must assume that we are dealing with serious, dedicated people who are willing to kill hostages.”
“Children?”
“Yes, Minister, we must consider that a real threat,” the doctor told him. That generated a silence that lasted for a full ten seconds by the wall clock Bellow was staring at.
“I must consider this. I will call you later.”
“Thank you, sir.” Bellow hung up the phone and looked up at Clark.
“So?”
“So, they don’t know what to do. Neither do I yet. Look, John, we’re up against a number of unknowns here. We do not know much about the terrorists. No religious motivation, they’re not Islamic fundamentalists. So I can’t use religion or God or ethics against them. If they’re ideological Marxists, they’re going to be ruthless bastards. So far they haven’t been really communicative. If I can’t talk to them, I got bupkis.”
“Okay, so, what’s our play?”
“Put ’em in the dark for starters.”
Clark turned: “Mr. Dennis?”
“Yes?”
“Can we cut the electricity to the castle?”
“Yes,” the park engineer answered for his boss.
“Do it, doc?” John asked Bellow, getting a nod. “Okay, pull the plug now.”
“Fair enough.” The engineer sat at a computer terminal and worked the mouse to select the power-control program. In a few seconds, he isolated the castle and clicked the button to turn their electricity off.
“Let’s see how long this takes,” Bellow said quietly.
It took five seconds. Dennis’s phone rang.
“Yes?” the park manager said into the speakerphone.
“Why did you do that?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. The lights went off.”
Dr. Bellow leaned over the speaker. “I am Dr. Bellow. Who am I talking to?”
“I am One. I am in control of Worldpark. Who are you?”
“My name is Paul Bellow, and I have been asked to speak with you.”
“Ah, you are the negotiator, then. Excellent. Turn the lights back on immediately.”
“Before we do that,” Bellow said calmly, “I would like to know who you are. You have my name. I do not have yours.”
“I told you that. I am One. You will call me Mr. One,” the voice replied evenly, devoid of excitement or anger.
“Okay, Mr. One, if you insist, you can call me Paul.”
“Turn the electricity back on, Paul.”
“In return for which you will do what, Mr. One?”
“In return for which I will abstain from killing a child—for the moment,” the voice added coldly.
“You do not sound like a barbarian, Mr. One, and the taking of a child’s life is a barbaric act—and also one calculated to make your position more difficult, not less so.”
“Paul, I have told you what I require. Do it immediately.” And then the line went dead.
“Oh, shit,” Bellow breathed. “He knows the playbook.”
“Bad?”
Bellow nodded. “Bad. He knows what we’re going to try to do, on my side, I mean.”
“Andre,” René called from his desk. “Select a child.”
He’d already done that, and pointed to the little Dutch girl, Anna, in her wheelchair, wearing her special-access button. René nodded his approval. So, the other side had a physician talking to him. The name Paul Bellow meant nothing to him, but the man would be a Spanish psychiatrist, probably one experienced or at least trained in negotiations. His job would be to weaken their resolve, ultimately to get them to surrender and so condemn themselves to life in prison. Well, he’d have to see about that. René checked his watch and decided to wait ten minutes.
Malloy eased back on the cyclic control, flaring his helicopter for landing where the fuel truck was parked. There were five soldiers there, one of them waving orange-plastic wands. In another few seconds, the Night Hawk touched down. Malloy killed the engines, and watched the rotor slow as Sergeant Nance opened the side door and hopped out.
“Time for some crew rest?” Lieutenant Harrison asked over the intercom.
“Right,” Malloy snorted, opening his door to climb down. He walked to what looked like an officer standing a few yards away, answering his salute when he got there to shake hands. Malloy had an urgent request to make.
“The trick will be to get close enough,” Covington said.
“Yeah.” Chavez nodded. They’d circulated carefully to the other side of the castle now. They could hear the Dive Bomber ride running behind them. There was a good forty meters of open ground all around the castle, doubtless planned by the main architect of the park to give the structure primacy of place. It did that, but it didn’t give Ding and Peter much to work with. Both men took their time, examining everything from the little man-made streams to the bridges over them. They could see the windows into the command center where the terrorists were, and the line of sight was just too damned good, even before they considered the task of racing up the interior stairs—and those were probably covered by men with guns.
“They don’t make it easy for us, do they?” Covington observed.
“Well, that’s not their job, is it?”
“How’s the recon going?” Clark asked over the encrypted radio circuit.
“Pretty well done, Mr. C,” Chavez replied. “Malloy in yet?”
“Just landed.”
“Good, ’cuz we’re gonna need him if we gotta go in.”
“Two groups, up and down,” Covington added. “But we need something to tell us about that room.”
The Spanish officer, an army major, nodded instant agreement and waved to some people in the helicopter hangar. They trotted over, got their orders, and trotted back. With that done, Malloy headed to the hangar, too. He needed a men’s room. Sergeant Nance, he saw, was heading back with two thermos jugs. Good man, the Marine thought, he knew how important coffee was at a time like this.
“That camera is dead. They shot it out,” Dennis said. “We have a tape of him doing it.”
“Show me,” Noonan commanded.
The layout of the room was not unlike this one, Tim Noonan saw in the fifty seconds of tape they had. The children had been herded to the corner opposite the camera. Maybe they’d even stay there. It was not much, but it was something. “Anything else? Audio systems in the room, a microphone or something?”
“No,” Dennis replied. “We have phones for that.”
“Yeah.” The FBI agent nodded resignedly. “I have to figure a way to spike it, then.” Just then the phone rang.
“Yes, this is Paul,” Bellow said instantly.
“Hello, Paul, this is One. The lights remain out. I told you to restore power. It has not been done. I tell you again, do it immediately.”
“Working on that, but the police here are fumbling around some.”
“And there is no one from the park there to assist you? I am not a fool, Paul. I say it one last time, turn the electricity back on immediately.”
“Mr. One, we’re working on it. Please be a little patient with us, okay?” Bellow’s face was sweating now. It started quite suddenly, and though he knew why, he hoped that he was wrong.
“Andre,” René said, doing so mistakenly before he killed the phone line.
The former park security guard walked over to the corner. “Hello, Anna. I think it is time for you to go back to your mother.”
“Oh?” the child asked. She had china-blue eyes and light brown hair, nearly blond in fact, though her skin had the pale, delicate look of parchment. It was very sad. Andre walked behind the chair, taking the handles in his hands and wheeling her to the door. “Let’s go outside, mon petit chou,” he said as they went through the door.
The elevat
or outside had a default setting. Even without electricity it could go down on battery power. Andre pushed the chair inside, flipped off the red emergency-stop switch, and pressed the 1 button. The doors closed slowly, and the elevator went down. A minute later, the doors opened again. The castle had a wide walk-through corridor that allowed people to transit from one part of Worldpark to another, and a mosaic that covered the arching walls. There was also a pleasant westerly breeze, and the Frenchman wheeled Anna right into it.
“What’s this?” Noonan asked, looking at one of the video monitors. “John, we got somebody coming out.”
“Command, this is Rifle Two-One, I see a guy pushing a wheelchair with a kid in it, coming out the west side of the castle.” Johnston set his binoculars down and got on his rifle, centering the crosshairs on the man’s temple, his finger lightly trouching the set-trigger. “Rifle Two-One is on target, on the guy, on target now.”
“Weapons tight” was the reply from Clark. “I repeat, weapons are tight. Acknowledge.”
“Roger, Six, weapons tight.” Sergeant Johnston took his finger out of the trigger guard. What was happening here?
“Bugger,” Covington said. They were only forty meters away. He and Chavez had an easy direct line of sight. The little girl looked ill in addition to being scared; she was slumped to her left in the chair, trying to look up and back at the man pushing her. He was about forty, they both thought, a mustache but no beard, average-normal in height, weight, and build, with dark eyes that displayed nothing. The park was so quiet now, so empty of people, that they could hear the scrape of the rubber tires on the stone courtyard.
“Where is Momma?” Anna asked in English she’d learned in school.
“You will see her in a moment,” Nine promised. He wheeled her around the curving entrance to the castle. It circled around a statue, took a gentle upward and clockwise turn, then led down to the courtyard. He stopped the chair in the middle of the path. It was about five meters wide, and evenly paved.
Andre looked around. There had to be policemen out here, but he saw nothing moving at all, except for the cars on the Dive Bomber, which he didn’t have to look at to see. The familiar noise was enough. It really was too bad. Nine reached into his belt, took out his pistol, and—
“—Gun, he’s got a pistol out!” Homer Johnston reported urgently. “Oh, fuck, he’s gonna—”
—The gun fired into Anna’s back, driving straight through her heart. A gout of blood appeared on the flat child chest, and her head dropped forward. The man pushed the wheelchair just then, and it rolled down the curving path, caroming off the stone wall and making it all the way into the flat courtyard, where it finally stopped.
Covington drew his Beretta and started to bring it up. It would not have been an easy shot, but he had nine rounds in his pistol, and that was enough, but—
“Weapons tight!” the radio earpiece thundered. “Weapons tight! Do not fire,” Clark ordered them.
“Fuck!” Chavez rasped next to Peter Covington.
“Yes,” the Englishman agreed. “Quite.” He holstered his pistol, watching the man turn and walk back into the shelter of the stone castle.
“I’m on target, Rifle Two-One is on target!” Johnston’s voice told them all.
“Do not fire. This is Six, weapons are tight, goddamnit!”
“Fuck!” Clark snarled in the command center. He slammed his fist on the table. “Fuck!” Then the phone rang.
“Yes?” Bellow said, sitting next to the Rainbow commander.
“You had your warning. Turn the electricity back on, or we will kill another,” One said.
CHAPTER 15
WHITE HATS
“There was nothing we could have done, John. Not a thing,” Bellow said, giving voice to words that the others didn’t have the courage to say.
“Now what?” Clark asked.
“Now I guess we turn the electricity back on.”
As they watched the TV monitors, three men raced to the child. Two wore the tricornio of the Guardia Civil. The third was Dr. Hector Weiler.
Chavez and Covington watched the same thing from a closer perspective. Weiler wore a white lab coat, the global uniform for physicians, and his race to reach the child ended abruptly as he touched the warm but still body. The slump of his shoulders told the tale, even from fifty meters away. The bullet had gone straight through her heart. The doctor said something to the cops, and one of them wheeled the chair down and out of the courtyard, turning to go past the two Rainbow members.
“Hold it, doc,” Chavez called, walking over to look. In this moment Ding remembered that his own wife held a new life in her belly, even now probably moving and kicking while Patsy was sitting in their living room, watching TV or reading a book. The little girl’s face was at peace now, as though asleep, and he could not hold his hand back from touching her soft hair. “What’s the story, doc?”
“She was quite ill, probably terminal. I will have a file on her back at my office. When these children come here, I get a summary of their condition should an emergency arise.” The physician bit his lip and looked up. “She was probably dying, but not yet dead, not yet completely without hope.” Weiler was the son of a Spanish mother and a German father who’d emigrated to Spain after the Second World War. He’d studied hard to become a physician and surgeon, and this act, this murder of a child, was the negation of all that. Someone had decided to make all his training and study worthless. He’d never known rage, quiet and sad though it was, but now he did. “Will you kill them?”
Chavez looked up. There were no tears in his eyes. Perhaps they’d come later, Domingo Chavez thought, his hand still on the child’s head. Her hair wasn’t very long, and he didn’t know that it had grown back after her last chemotherapy protocol. He did know that she was supposed to be alive, and that in watching her death, he had failed to do that which he’d dedicated his life to doing. “Sí,” he told the doctor. “We will kill them. Peter?” He waved at his colleague, and together they accompanied the others to the doctor’s office. They walked over slowly. There was no reason to go fast now.
“That’ll do,” Malloy thought, surveying the still-wet paint on the side of the Night Hawk. POLICIA, the lettering said. “Ready, Harrison?”
“Yes, sir. Sergeant Nance, time to move.”
“Yessir.” The crew chief hopped in, buckled his safety belt, and watched the pilot go through the startup sequence. “All clear aft,” he said over the intercom, after leaning out to check. “Tail rotor is clear, Colonel.”
“Then I guess it’s time to fly.” Malloy applied power and lifted the Night Hawk into the sky. Then he keyed his tactical radio. “Rainbow, this is the Bear, over.”
“Bear, this is Rainbow Six, reading you five by five, over.”
“Bear’s in the air, sir, be there in seven minutes.”
“Roger, please orbit the area until we tell you otherwise.”
“Roger that, sir. I’ll notify when we commence the orbit. Out.” There was no particular hurry. Malloy dipped the nose and headed into the gathering darkness. The sun was almost down now, and the park lights in the distance were all coming on.
“Who is this?” Chavez asked.
“Francisco de la Cruz,” the man replied. His leg was bandaged, and he looked to be in pain.
“Ah, yes, we saw you on the videotape,” Covington said. He saw the sword and shield in the corner and turned to nod his respect at the seated man. Peter lifted the spatha and hefted it briefly. At close range it would be formidable as hell, not the equal of his MP-10, but probably a very satisfying weapon for all that.
“A child? They kill a child?” de la Cruz asked.
Dr. Weiler was at his file cabinet. “Anna Groot, age ten and a half,” he said, reading over the documents that had preceded the little one. “Metastatic osteosarcoma, terminally ill. . . . Six weeks left, her doctor says here. Osteo, that is a bad one.” Against the wall, the two Spanish cops lifted the body from the chair and laid
it tenderly on the examining table, then covered it with a sheet. One looked close to tears, blocked only by the cold rage that made his hands tremble.
“John must feel pretty shitty about now,” Chavez said.
“He had to do it, Ding. It wasn’t the right time to take action—”
“I know that, Peter! But how the fuck do we tell her that?” A pause. “Doc, you have any coffee around here?”
“There.” Weiler pointed.
Chavez walked to the urn and poured some into a foam cup. “Up and down, sandwich ’em?”
Covington nodded. “Yes, I think so.”
Chavez emptied the cup and tossed it into a waste-basket. “Okay, let’s get set up.” They left the office without another word and made their way in the shadows back to the underground, thence to the alternate command center.
“Rifle Two-One, anything happening?” Clark was asking when they walked in.
“Negative, Six, nothing except shadows on the windows. They haven’t put a guy on the roof yet. That’s a little strange.”
“They’re pretty confident in their TV coverage,” Noonan thought. He had the blueprints of the castle in front of him. “Okay, we are assuming that our friends are all in here . . . but there’s a dozen other rooms on three levels.”
“This is Bear,” a voice said over the speaker Noonan had set up. “I am orbiting now. What do I need to know, over?”
“Bear, this is Six,” Clark replied. “The subjects are all in the castle. There’s a command-and-control center on the second floor. Best guess, everybody’s there right now. Also, be advised the subjects have killed a hostage—a little girl,” John added.
In the helicopter, Malloy’s head didn’t move at the news. “Roger, okay, Six, we will orbit and observe. Be advised we have all our deployment gear aboard, over.”