by Tom Clancy
“. . . ahh, nichevo,” the intelligence officer said to himself in the expensive high-rise apartment. He spent another half an hour, cueing and rerunning the tapes. The clothing was the same in every case. The man the same size, the same gestures and body language, the same weapons slung the same way, the same everything, the former KGB officer saw. And that meant the same man . . . in three separate countries.
But this man was not Swiss, not Austrian, and not Spanish. Next Popov backed off his deductive thoughts, searching for other facts he could discern from the visual information he had there. There were other people visible in all the tapes. The pipe smoker was often attended by another man, shorter than he, to whom the pipe smoker appeared to speak with some degree of friendly deference. There was another around, a large, muscular one who in two of the tapes carried a heavy machine gun, but in the third, carrying a child, did not. So, he had two and maybe a third man on the tapes who had appeared in Bern, Vienna, and Spain. In every case, the reporters had credited the rescue to local police, but no, that wasn’t the truth, was it? So, who were these people who arrived with the speed and decisiveness of a thunderbolt—in three different countries . . . twice to conclude operations that he had initiated, and once to settle one begun by others—and who they had been, he didn’t know nor especially care. The reporters said that they’d demanded the release of his old friend, the Jackal. What fools. The French would as soon toss Napoleon’s corpse from Les Invalides as give up that murderer. Il’ych Ramirez Sanchez, named with Lenin’s own patronymic by his communist father. Popov shook that thought off. He’d just discovered something of great importance. Somewhere in Europe was a special-operations team that crossed international borders as easily as a businessman flying in an airliner, that had freedom to operate in different countries, that displaced and did the work of local police . . . and did it well, expertly . . . and this operation would not hurt them, would it? Their prestige and international acceptability would only grow from the rescue of the children at Worldpark . . .
“Nichevo,” he whispered to himself again. He’d learned something of great importance this night, and to celebrate he poured himself another vodka. Now he had to follow it up. How? He’d think that one over, sleeping on the thought, trusting his trained brain to come up with something.
They were nearly home already. The MC-130 had picked them up and flown the now relaxed team back to Hereford, their weapons re-packed in the plastic carrying cases, their demeanor not the least bit tense. Some of the men were cutting up. Others were explaining what they’d done to team members who’d not had the chance to participate directly. Mike Pierce, Clark saw, was especially animated in his conversation with his neighbor. He was now the Rainbow kill-leader. Homer Johnston was chatting with Weber—they’d come to some sort of deal, something agreed between them. Weber had taken a beautiful but out-of-policy shot to disable the terrorist’s Uzi, allowing Johnston to—of course, John told himself, he didn’t just want to kill the bastard who’d murdered the little girl. He’d wanted to hurt the little prick, to send him off to hell with a special, personal message. He’d have to talk to Sergeant Johnston about that. It was outside of Rainbow policy. It was unprofessional. Just killing the bastards was enough. You could always trust God to handle the special treatment. But—well, John told himself he could understand that, couldn’t he? There had once been that little bastard called Billy to whom he’d given a very special interrogation in a recompression chamber, and though he remembered it with a measure of pain and shame, at the time he’d felt it justified . . . and he’d gotten the information he’d needed at the time, hadn’t he? Even so, he’d have to talk with Homer, advise him never to do such a thing again. And Homer would listen, John knew. He’d exorcised the demons once, and once, usually, was enough. It must have been hard for him to sit at his rifle, watching the murder of a child, the power to avenge her instantly right there in his skilled hands, and yet do nothing. Could you have done that, John? Clark asked himself, not really knowing what the answer was in his current, exhausted state. He felt the wheels thump down on the Hereford runway, and the props roar into reverse pitch to slow the aircraft.
Well, John thought, his idea, his concept for Rainbow was working out rather well, wasn’t it? Three deployments, three clean missions. Two hostages killed, one before his team deployed to Bern, the other just barely after their arrival in the park, neither one the result of negligence or mistake on the part of his men. Their mission performance had been as nearly perfect as anything he’d ever seen. Even his fellow animals of 3rd SOG in Vietnam hadn’t been this good, and that was something he’d never expected to say or even think. The thought came suddenly, and just as unexpectedly came the near-need for tears, that he might have the honor to command such warriors as these, to send them out and bring them back as they were now, smiling as they stood, hoisting their gear on their shoulders and walking to the open rear cargo door on the Herky Bird, behind which waited their trucks. His men.
“The bar is open!” Clark called to them, when he stood.
“A little late, John,” Alistair observed.
“If the door’s locked, we’ll have Paddy blow it,” Clark insisted, with a vicious grin.
Stanley considered that and nodded. “Quite so, the lads have earned a pint or two each.” Besides which, he knew how to pick locks.
They walked into the club still wearing their ninja suits, and found the barman waiting. There were a few others in the club as well, mainly SAS troopers sipping at their last-call pints. Several of them applauded when the Rainbow team came in, which warmed the room. John walked to the bar, leading his men and ordering beer for all.
“I do love this stuff,” Mike Pierce said a minute later, taking his Guinness and sipping through the thin layer of foam.
“Two, Mike?” Clark asked.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “The one at the desk, he was on the phone. Tap-tap,” Pierce said, touching two fingers to the side of his head. “Then another one, shooting from behind a desk. I jumped over and gave him three on the fly. Landed, rolled, and three more in the back of the head. So long, Charlie. Then one more, got a piece of him, along with Ding and Eddie. Ain’t supposed to like this part of the job. I know that—but, Jesus, it felt good to take those fuckers down. Killin’ kids, man. Not good. Well, they ain’t gonna be doing any more of that, sir. Not with the new sheriff in town.”
“Well, nice going, Mr. Marshal,” John replied, with a raised-glass salute. There’d be no nightmares about this one, Clark thought, sipping his own dark beer. He looked around. In the corner, Weber and Johnston were talking, the latter with his hand on the former’s shoulder, doubtless thanking him for the fine shot to disable the murderer’s Uzi. Clark walked over and stood next to the two sergeants.
“I know, boss,” Homer said, without being told anything. “Never again, but goddamn, it felt good.”
“Like you said, never again, Homer.”
“Yes, sir. Slapped the trigger a little hard,” Johnston said, to cover his ass in an official sense.
“Bullshit,” Rainbow Six observed. “I’ll accept it—just this once. And you, Dieter, nice shot, but—”
“Nie wieder. Herr General. I know, sir.” The German nodded his submission to the moment. “Homer, Junge, the look on his face when you hit him. Ach, that was something to see, my friend. Good for the one on the castle roof, too.”
“Easy shot,” Johnston said dismissively. “He was standing still. Zap. Easier ’n throwing darts, pal.”
Clark patted both on the shoulder and wandered over to Chavez and Price.
“Did you have to land on my arm?” Ding complained lightly.
“So, next time, come through the window straight, not at an angle.”
“Right.” Chavez took a long sip of the Guinness.
“How’d it go?” John asked them.
“Aside from being hit twice, not bad,” Chavez replied. “I have to get a new vest, though.” Once hit, the vests were cons
idered to be ruined for further use. This one would go back to the manufacturer for study to see how it had performed. “Which one was that, you think, Eddie?”
“The last one, I think, the one who just stood and sprayed at the children.”
“Well, that was the plan, for us to stop those rounds, and that one went down hard. You, me, Mike, and Oso, I think, took him apart.” Whatever cop had recovered that body would need a blotter and a freezer bag to collect the spilled brains.
“That we did,” Price agreed as Julio came over.
“Hey, that was okay, guys!” First Sergeant Vega told them, pleased to have finally participated in a field operation.
“Since when do we punch our targets?” Chavez asked.
Vega looked a little embarrassed. “Instinct, he was so close. You know, probably could have taken him alive, but—well, nobody ever told me to do that, y’know?”
“That’s cool, Oso. That wasn’t part of the mission, not with a room full of kids.”
Vega nodded. “What I figured, and the shot was pretty automatic, too, just playin’ like we practice, man. Anyway, that one went down real good, jefe.”
“Any problem on the window?” Price wanted to know.
Vega shook his head. “Nah, gave it a good kick, and it moved just fine. Bumped a shoulder coming through the frame, but no problems there. I was pretty pumped. But you know, you shoulda had me cover the kids. I’m bigger, I woulda stopped more bullets.”
Chavez didn’t say that he’d worried about Vega’s agility—wrongly, as it had turned out. An important lesson learned. Bulky as Oso was, he moved lightly on his feet, far more so than Ding had expected. The bear could dance pretty well, though at 225 pounds, he was a little large for a tutu.
“Fine operation,” Bill Tawney said, joining the group.
“Anything develop?”
“We have a possible identification on one of them, the chap who killed the child. The French ran the photo through some police informants, and they think it might be an Andre Herr, Parisian by birth, thought to be a stringer for Action Directe once upon a time, but nothing definite. More information is on the way, they say. The whole set of photos and fingerprints from Spain is on its way to Paris now for follow-up investigation. Not all of the photos will be very useful, I am told.”
“Yeah, well, a burst of hollowpoints will rearrange a guy’s face, man,” Chavez observed with a chuckle. “Not a hell of a lot we can do about that.”
“So, who initiated the operation?” Clark asked.
Tawney shrugged. “Not a clue at this point. That’s for the French police to investigate.”
“Would be nice to know. We’ve had three incidents since we got here. Isn’t that a lot?” Chavez asked, suddenly very serious.
“It is,” the intelligence officer agreed. “It would not have been ten or fifteen years ago, but things had quieted down recently.” Another shrug. “Could be mere coincidence, or perhaps copycatting, but—”
“Copycat? I shouldn’t think so, sir,” Eddie Price observed. “We’ve given bloody little encouragement to any terr’ who has ambitions, and today’s operation ought to have a further calming effect on those people.”
“That makes sense to me,” Ding agreed. “Like Mike Pierce said, there’s a new sheriff in town, and the word on the street ought to be ‘don’t fuck with him’ even if people think we’re just local cops with an attitude. Take it a step further, Mr. C.”
“Go public?” Clark shook his head. “That’s never been part of the plan, Domingo.”
“Well, if the mission’s to take the bastards down in the field, that’s one thing. If the mission is to make these bastards think twice about raising hell—to stop terrorist incidents from happening at all—then it’s another thing entirely. The idea of a new sheriff in town might just take the starch out of their backs and put them back to washing cars, or whatever the hell they do when they’re not being bad. Deterrence, we call it, when nation-states do it. Will it work on a terrorist mentality? Something to talk with Doc Bellow about, John,” Chavez concluded.
And again Chavez had surprised him, Clark realized. Three straight successes, all of them covered on the TV news, might well have an effect on the surviving terrorists in Europe or elsewhere with lingering ambitions, mightn’t it? And that was something to talk to Paul Bellow about. But it was much too soon for anyone on the team to be that optimistic . . . probably, John told himself with a thoughtful sip. The party was just beginning to break up. It had been a very long day for the Rainbow troopers, and one by one they set their glasses down on the bar, which ought to have closed some time before, and headed for the door for the walk to their homes. Another day and another mission had ended. Yet another day had already begun, and in only a few hours, they’d be awakened to run and exercise and begin another day of routine training.
“Were you planning to leave us?” the jailer asked Inmate Sanchez in a voice dripping with irony.
“What do you mean?” Carlos responded.
“Some colleagues of yours misbehaved yesterday,” the prison guard responded, tossing a copy of Le Figaro through the door. “They will not do so again.”
The photo on the front page was taken off the Worldpark video, the quality miserably poor, but clear enough to show a soldier dressed in black carrying a child, and the first paragraph of the story told the tale. Carlos scanned it, sitting on his prison bed to read the piece in detail, then felt a depth of black despair that he’d not thought possible. Someone had heard his plea, he realized, and it had come to nothing. Life in this stone cage beckoned as he looked up to the sun coming in the single window. Life. It would be a long one, probably a healthy one, and certainly a bleak one. His hands crumpled the paper when he’d finished the article. Damn the Spanish police. Damn the world.
“Yes, I saw it on the news last night,” he said into the phone as he shaved.
“I need to see you. I have something to show you, sir,” Popov’s voice said, just after seven in the morning.
The man thought about that. Popov was a clever bastard who’d done his jobs without much in the way of questions . . . and there was little in the way of a paper trail, certainly nothing his lawyers couldn’t handle if it came to that, and it wouldn’t. There were ways of dealing with Popov, too, if it came to that.
“Okay, be there at eight-fifteen.”
“Yes, sir,” the Russian said, hanging up.
Pete was in real agony now, Killgore saw. It was time to move him. This he ordered at once, and two orderlies came in dressed in upgraded protective gear to load the wino onto a gurney for transport to the clinical side. Killgore followed them and his patient. The clinical side was essentially a duplication of the room in which the street bums had lounged and drunk their booze, waiting unknowingly for the onset of symptoms. He now had them all, to the point that booze and moderate doses of morphine no longer handled the pain. The orderlies loaded Pete onto a bed, next to which was an electronically operated “Christmas tree” medication dispenser. Killgore handled the stick, and got the IV plugged into Pete’s major vein. Then he keyed the electronic box, and seconds later, the patient relaxed with a large bolus of medication. The eyes went sleepy and the body relaxed while the Shiva continued to eat him alive from the inside out. Another IV would be set up to feed him with nutrients to keep his body going, along with various drugs to see if any of them had an unexpectedly beneficial effect on the Shiva. They had a whole roomful of such drugs, ranging from antibiotics—which were expected to be useless against this viral infection—to Interleukin-2 and a newly developed -3a, which, some thought, might help, plus tailored Shiva antibodies taken from experimental animals. None were expected to work, but all had to be tested to make sure they didn’t, lest there be a surprise out there when the epidemic spread. Vaccine-B was expected to work, and that was being tested now with the new control group of people kidnapped from Manhattan bars, along with the notional Vaccine-A, whose purpose was rather different from -B. The n
anocapsules developed on the other side of the house would come in very handy indeed.
As was being demonstrated even as he had the thought, looking down at Pete’s dying body. Subject F4, Mary Bannister, felt sick to her stomach, just a mild queasiness at this point, but didn’t think much of it. That sort of thing happened, and she didn’t feel all that bad, some antacids would probably help, and those she got from her medicine cabinet, which was pretty well stocked with over-the-counter medications. Other than that, she felt pretty mellow, as she smiled at herself in the mirror and liked what she saw, a youngish, attractive woman wearing pink silk jammies. With that thought, she walked out of her room, her hair glossy and a spring in her step. Chip was in the sitting room, reading a magazine slowly on the couch, and she made straight for him and sat down beside him.
“Hi, Chip.” She smiled.
“Hi, Mary.” He smiled back, reaching to touch her hand.
“I upped the Valium in her breakfast,” Barbara Archer said in the control room, zooming the camera in. “Along with the other one.” The other one was an inhibition reducer.
“You look nice today,” Chip told her, his words imperfectly captured by the hidden shotgun microphone.
“Thank you.” Another smile.
“She looks pretty dreamy.”
“She ought to be,” Barbara observed coldly. “There’s enough in her to make a nun shuck her habit and get it on.”
“What about him?”
“Oh, yeah—didn’t give him any steroids.” Dr. Archer had a little chuckle at that.
In proof of which, Chip leaned over to kiss Mary on the lips. They were alone in the sitting room.
“How’s her blood work look, Barb?”
“Loaded with antibodies, and starting to get some small bricks. She ought to be symptomatic in another few days.”
“Eat, drink, and be merry, people, for next week, you die,” the other physician told the TV screen.