by Tom Clancy
Hereford wasn’t exactly a sleepy community, but the vehicular traffic didn’t make it a bustling metropolis either. Grady was in his rented car, following the trucks to the objective, and going more slowly than usual, here in the far-left lane, because he’d anticipated thicker traffic and therefore a longer trip in terms of time. He could have moved off at a faster clip, and therefore started the mission earlier, but he was a methodical sort, and once his plan was drafted, he tended to stick to it almost slavishly. That way, everyone knew what had to happen and when, which made operational sense. For the unexpected, every team member carried a cellular phone with speed-dial settings for every other member. Sean figured they were almost as good as the tactical radios the soldiers carried.
There was the hospital. It sat at the bottom of a shallow slope. The parking lot didn’t seem to be very crowded. Maybe there weren’t many patients in their beds, or maybe the visitors were off having lunch before coming back to see their loved ones.
Dmitriy pulled his rental car over to the side of the through-road and stopped. He was half a kilometer or so from the hospital, and from the top of this hill, he could see two sides, the front and the side entrance for the hospital’s emergency room. He switched the motor off after lowering the power windows and waited to see what would happen next. On the backseat he had an inexpensive set of 7×35 binoculars purchased at an airport shop, and he decided to get them out. Next to him on the seat was his cellular phone, should he need it. He saw three heavy trucks pull up and stop close to the hospital in positions far nearer than his, but, like his spot, able to cover the front and the emergency side entrance.
It was then that Popov had a random thought. Why not call that Clark fellow at Hereford and warn him of what was to happen? He, Popov, didn’t want these people to survive the afternoon, did he? If they didn’t, then he’d have that five-million-plus American dollars, and then he could disappear from the face of the earth. The islands of the Caribbean appealed to him; he’d gone over some travel brochures. They’d have some British amenities—honest police, pubs, cordial people—plus a quiet, unhurried life, yet were close enough to America that he could travel there to manage his funds in whatever investment scheme he opted for . . .
But . . . no. There was the off chance that Grady would get away from this one, and he didn’t want to risk being hunted by that intense and vicious Irishman. No, it was better that he let this play out without his interference, and so he sat in the car, binoculars in his lap, listening to classical music on one of the regular BBC radio stations.
Grady got out of his Jaguar. He opened the boot, withdrew his parcel, and pocketed the keys. Timothy O’Neil dismounted his vehicle—he’d chosen a small van—and stood still, waiting for the other five men to join him. This they did after a few minutes. Timmy lifted his cell phone and thumbed the number-one speed-dial setting. A hundred yards away, Grady’s phone started chirping.
“Yes?”
“We are ready here, Sean.”
“Go on, then. We’re ready here as well. Good luck, lad.”
“Very well, we are moving in now.”
O’Neil was wearing the brown coveralls of a package deliveryman. He walked toward the hospital’s side entrance carrying a large cardboard box, followed by four other men in civilian clothes carrying boxes similar in size, but not in color.
Popov looked into his rearview mirror in annoyance. A police car was pulling over to the side of the road, and a few seconds later, a constable got out and walked to his car.
“Having a problem, sir?” the cop asked.
“Oh, no, not really—that is, I called the rental company, and they’re sending someone out, you see.”
“What went wrong?” the policeman asked.
“Not sure. The motor started running badly, and I thought it a good idea to pull over and shut it off. Anyway,” the Russian repeated, “I called into the company, and they’re sending someone to sort it out.”
“Ah, very good, then.” The police constable stretched, and it seemed as though he’d pulled over as much to get some fresh air as to render assistance to a stranded motorist. The timing, Popov thought, could have been better.
“Can I help you?” the desk clerk said.
“I have a delivery for Dr. Chavez, and Nurse”—he looked down at the slip of paper on the box, which seemed to him a clever bit of acting—“Clark. Are they in this afternoon?” Timmy O’Neil asked.
“I’ll fetch them,” the clerk said helpfully, heading back into the work area.
The IRA soldier’s hand slid along the inside of the lid, ready to flip the box open. He turned and nodded to the other four, who waited politely in line behind him. O’Neil thumbed his nose, and one of them—his name was Jimmy Carr—walked back outside. There was a police car there, a Range Rover, white with an orange stripe down the side. The policeman inside was eating a sandwich, taking lunch at a convenient place, in what American cops sometimes called “cooping,” just killing time when nothing was going on. He saw the man standing outside the casualty-receive entrance holding what looked like a flower box. Several others had just gone inside holding similar boxes, but this was a hospital, and people gave flowers to those inside of them . . . Even so . . . the man with the large white box was staring at his police automobile, as people often did. The cop looked back at him, mainly in curiosity, though his cop instincts were beginning to light up.
“I’m Dr. Chavez,” Patsy said. She was almost as tall as he was, O’Neil saw, and very pregnant beneath her starched white lab coat. “You have something for me?”
“Yes, doctor, I do.” Then another woman approached, and the resemblance was striking from the first moment he saw the two of them. They had to be mother and daughter . . . and that meant that it was time.
O’Neil flipped the top off the box and instantly extracted the AKMS rifle. He was looking down at it and missed the wide-eyed shock on the faces of the two women in front of him. His right hand withdrew one of the magazines and slapped it home into the weapon. Then he changed hands and let his right hand take hold of the pistol grip while his left slapped the bolt back into the battery position. The entire exercise hadn’t lasted two seconds.
Patsy and Sandy froze, as people usually did when suddenly confronted with weapons. Their eyes were wide and faces shocked. To their left, someone screamed. Behind this deliveryman, three others now held identical weapons, and faced outward, aiming at the others in the reception area, and a routine day in the Emergency Room changed to something very different.
Outside, Carr popped open his box, smiling as he aimed it at the police car only twenty feet away.
The engine was running, and the cop’s first instinct was to get clear and report in. His left hand slipped the selector into reverse, and his foot slammed down on the accelerator, causing the car to jolt backward.
Carr’s response was automatic. The weapon up, bolt back, he aimed and pulled the trigger, firing fifteen rounds into the automobile’s windscreen. The result was immediate. The Rover had been moving backward in a fairly straight line, but the moment the bullets started hitting, it swerved right, and ended up against the brick wall of the hospital. There it stopped, the pressure off the accelerator now. Carr sprinted over and looked inside to see that there was one less police constable in the world, and that, to him, was no great loss.
“What’s that?” It was the helpful roadside cop rather than Popov who asked the rhetorical question. It was rhetorical because automatic-weapons fire is not something to be mistaken for anything else. His head turned, and he saw the police car—an identical twin to his own—scream backward, then stop, and then a man walked up to it, looked, and walked away. “Bloody hell!”
Dmitriy Arkadeyevich sat still, now watching the cop who’d come to his unneeded assistance. The man ran back to his vehicle, reached inside and pulled out a radio microphone. Popov couldn’t hear what was said, but, then, he didn’t need to.
“We’ve got them, Sean,” O’Neil�
��s voice told him. Grady acknowledged the information, thumbed the end button and speed-dialed Peter Barry’s cell phone.
“Yes?”
“Timothy has them. The situation appears to be under control.”
“Okay.” And this call ended. Then Sean speed-dialed yet another number. “Hello, this is Patrick Casey. We have seized the Hereford community hospital. We are currently holding as hostages Dr. Chavez and Nurse Clark, plus numerous others. We will release our hostages if our demands are met. If they are not met, then it will be necessary for us to kill hostages until such time as you see the error of your ways. We require the release of all political prisoners held in Albany and Parkhurst prisons on the Isle of Wight. When they are released and seen to be released on the television, we will leave this area. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” the desk sergeant replied. He didn’t, but he had a tape of this call, and he’d forward the information to someone who would understand.
Carr took the casualty-receiving entrance; the Barry twins, Peter and Sam, walked through the inside of the building to the main entrance. Here things were somewhat chaotic. Carr’s initial fusillade hadn’t been heard clearly here, and most of the people had turned their heads to the rough direction of the noise, and on seeing nothing, had turned back to attend to their business. The hospital’s security guard, a man of fifty-five who was wearing something that looked like a police uniform, was heading for the door into the hospital proper when he saw the twins coming toward him with weapons in hand. The retired policeman managed to say, “What’s all this?”—the usual words of a British constable—before a jerk of one rifle muzzle convinced him to raise his hands and shut up. Sam grabbed his collar and shoved him back into the main lobby. There, people saw the weapons. Some screamed. A few made for the doors, and all of them got outside without being fired upon, since the Barry twins had enough to do already.
The police constable’s radio call from the side of the road generated a greater response than Grady’s phone call, especially with the report that a constable had been shot and probably killed in his car. The first reaction of the local superintendent was to summon all of his mobile units to the general area of the hospital. Only about half of them had firearms, and those were mainly Smith & Wesson revolvers—not nearly enough to deal with the reported use of machine guns. The death of the constable was established when an officer who had been parked near the hospital failed to report in, despite numerous calls over the police radio.
Every police station in the world has preset responses for various emergencies. This one had a folder labeled “Terrorism,” and the superintendent pulled it out, even though he had the contents memorized, just to make sure he didn’t forget anything. The top emergency number went to a desk in the Home Office, and he reported what little he knew to the senior civil servant there, adding that he was working to get more information and would report back.
The Home Office headquarters building, close to Buckingham Palace, housed the bureaucrats who had oversight over nearly every aspect of life in the British Isles. That included law enforcement, and in that building, too, was a procedures folder, which was pulled from its slot. In this one was a new page and a new number.
“Four-two-double-three,” Alice Foorgate said, on picking up the phone. This was the line used exclusively for important voice traffic.
“Mr. Clark, please.”
“Yes. Wait, please.”
“Mr. Clark, a call on double-three,” she said into the intercom.
“This is John Clark,” Rainbox Six said, lifting the receiver.
“This is Frederick Callaway at the Home Office. We have a possible emergency situation,” the civil servant said.
“Okay, where is it?”
“Just up the road from you, I’m afraid, the Hereford hospital. The voice which called in identified itself as Patrick Casey. That is a codename that the PIRA use to designate their operations.”
“Hereford Hospital?” John asked, his hand suddenly cold on the phone.
“That is correct.”
“Hold for a second. I want to get one of my people on this line.” John put his hand over the receiver. “Alice! Get Alistair on this one right now!”
“Yes, John?”
“Mr. Callaway, this is Alistair Stanley, my second-in-command. Please repeat what you just told me.”
He did so, then added, “The voice identified two hostages by name, a Nurse Clark, and a Dr. Chavez.”
“Oh, shit,” John breathed.
“I’ll get Peter’s team moving, John,” Stanley said.
“Right. Anything else, Mr. Callaway?”
“That is all we have now. The local police superintendent is attempting to gather more information at this time.”
“Okay, thank you. You can reach me at this number if you need me.” Clark replaced the receiver in its cradle. “Fuck,” he said quietly.
His mind was racing. Whoever had scouted out Rainbow had done so for a reason, and those two names had not been an accident. This was a direct challenge to him and his people—and they were using his wife and daughter as a weapon. His next thought was that he would have to pass command over to Al Stanley, and the next—that his wife and daughter were in mortal danger . . . and he was helpless.
“Christ,” Major Peter Covington muttered over his phone. “Yes, sir. Let me get moving here.” He stood and walked into his squad bay. “Attention, we have some business. Everyone get ready to move immediately.”
Team-1’s members stood and headed to their lockers. It didn’t seem like a drill, but they handled it as though it were. Master Chief Mike Chin was the first to be suited up. He came to see his boss, who was just putting on his body armor.
“What gives, skipper?”
“PIRA, local hospital, holding Clark’s and Ding’s wives as hostages.”
“What’s that?” Chin asked, blinking his eyes hard.
“You heard me, Mike.”
“Oh, shit. Okay.” Chin went back into the squad bay. “Saddle up, people, this ain’t no fuckin’ drill.”
Malloy had just sprinted to his Night Hawk. Sergeant Nance was already there, pulling red-flagged safety pins from their plug points and holding them up for the pilot to confirm the count.
“Looking good, let’s start ’er up, Lieutenant.”
“Turning one,” Harrison confirmed, as Sergeant Nance reboarded the aircraft and strapped on his move-around safety belt, then shifted to the left-side door to check the tail of the Night Hawk.
“Tail rotor is clear, Colonel.”
Malloy acknowledged that information as he watched his engine instruments spooling up. Then he keyed his radio again. “Command, this is Bear, we are turnin’ and burnin’. What do you want us to do, over?”
“Bear, this is Five,” Stanley’s voice came back, to Malloy’s surprise. “Lift off and orbit the local hospital. That is the site of the current incident.”
“Say again, Five, over.”
“Bear, we have subjects holding the local hospital. They are holding Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Chavez as hostages. They’ve identified both of them by name. Your orders are to lift off and orbit the hospital.”
“Roger, copy that. Bear is lifting off now.” His left hand pulled the collective, climbing the Sikorsky into the sky.
“Did I hear that right, Colonel?” Harrison asked.
“You must have. Fuck,” the Marine observed. Somebody was grabbing the tiger by the balls, Malloy thought. He looked down to see a pair of trucks speeding off the base, heading in the same direction as he. That would be Covington and Team-1, he thought. With a little more reflection, he took the Night Hawk to four thousand feet, called the local air-traffic-control center to tell them what he was doing, and got a transponder code so that they could track him properly.
There were four police vehicles there now, blocking the access to the hospital parking lots but doing nothing else, Popov saw through his binoculars. The constables inside were just
looking, all standing outside their cars, two of them holding revolvers but not pointing them at anything but the ground.
In one truck, Covington relayed the information he had. In the other, Chin did it. The troopers were as shocked as they had ever allowed themselves to be, having considered themselves and their families to be ipso facto immune to this sort of thing because nobody had ever been foolish enough to try something like this. You might walk up to a lion cage and prod him with a stick, but not when there weren’t any bars between you and him. And you never ever messed with the lion’s cubs, did you? Not if you wanted to be alive at sundown. This was family for all of them. Attacking the wife of the Rainbow commander was a slap in all their faces, an act of incomprehensible arrogance—and Chavez’s wife was pregnant. She represented two innocent lives, both of them belonging to one of the people with whom they exercised every morning and with whom they had the occasional pint in the evening, a fellow soldier, one of their team. They all flipped on their radios and sat back, holding their individual weapons, allowing their thoughts to wander, but not very far.
“Al, I have to let you run this operation,” John said, standing by his desk and preparing to leave. Dr. Bellow was in the room, along with Bill Tawney.
“I understand, John. You know how good Peter and his team are.”
A long breath. “Yeah.” There wasn’t much of anything else to say right then.
Stanley turned to the others. “Bill?”
“They used the right codename. ‘Patrick Casey’ is not known to the press. It’s a name they use to let us know that their operation is real—usually used with bomb threats and such. Paul?”
“Identifying your wife and daughter is a direct challenge to us. They’re telling us that they know about Rainbow, that they know who we are, and, of course, who you are, John. They’re announcing their expertise and their willingness to go all the way.” The psychiatrist shook his head. “But if they’re really PIRA, that means they’re Catholic. I can work on that. Let’s get me out there and establish contact, shall we?”