by Tom Clancy
“So, John Clark. We wait.”
“Yeah, we wait,” Rainbow Six agreed.
“You have a question for me?”
“Why did you call me?”
“We’ve met before.”
“Where?”
“In your building in Hereford. I was there with your plumber under one of my legends.”
“I wondered how you knew me by sight,” Clark admitted, sipping a beer. “Not many people from your side of the Curtain do.”
“You do not wish to kill me now?”
“The thought’s occurred to me,” Clark replied, looking in Popov’s eyes. “But I guess you have some scruples after all, and if you’re lying to me, you’ll soon wish you were dead.”
“Your wife and daughter are well?”
“Yes, and so is my grandson.”
“That is good,” Popov announced. “That mission was a distasteful one. You have done distasteful missions in your career, John Clark?”
He nodded. “Yeah, a few.”
“So, then, you understand?”
Not the way you mean, sport, Rainbow Six thought, before responding. “Yeah, I suppose I do, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich.”
“How did you find my name? Who told you?”
The answer surprised him. “Sergey Nikolay’ch and I are old friends.”
“Ah,” Popov managed to observe, without fainting. His own agency had betrayed him? Was that possible? Then it was as if Clark had read his mind.
“Here,” John said, handing over the sheaf of photocopies. “Your evaluations are pretty good.”
“Not good enough,” Popov replied, failing to recover from the shock of viewing items from a file that he had never seen before.
“Well, the world changed, didn’t it?”
“Not as completely as I had hoped.”
“I do have a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“The money you gave to Grady, where is it?”
“In a safe place, John Clark. The terrorists I know have all become capitalists with regard to cash money, but thanks to your people, those I contacted have no further need of money, do they?” the Russian asked rhetorically.
“You greedy bastard,” Clark observed, with half a smile.
The race started on time. The fans cheered the marathon runners as they took their first lap around the stadium, then disappeared out the tunnel onto the streets of Sydney, to return in two and a half hours or so. In the meantime, their progress would be followed on the Jumbotron for those who sat in the stadium seats, or on the numerous televisions that hung in the ramp and concourse areas. Trucks with remote TV transmitters rolled in front of the lead runners, and the Kenyan, Jomo Nyreiry, held the lead, closely followed by Edward Fulmer, the American, and Willem terHoost, the Dutchman, the leading trio not two steps apart, and a good ten meters ahead of the next group of runners as they passed the first milepost.
Like most people, Wil Gearing saw this on his hotel room TV as he packed. He’d be renting diving gear tomorrow, the former Army colonel told himself, and he’d treat himself to the best diving area in the world, in the knowledge that the oceanic pollution that was harming that most lovely of environments would soon be ending. He got all of his clothing organized in a pair of Tumi wheeled suitcases and set them by the door of the room. He’d be diving while all the ignorant plague victims flew off to their homes across the world, not knowing what they had and what they’d be spreading. He wondered how many would be lost to Phase One of the Project. Computer projections predicted anywhere from six to thirty million, but Gearing thought those numbers conservative. The higher the better, obviously, because the “A” vaccine had to be something that people all over the globe would cry out for, thus hastening their own deaths. The real cleverness of it was that if medical tests on the vaccine recipients showed Shiva antibodies, they’d be explained away by the vaccine—“A” was a live-virus vaccine, as everyone would know. Just a little more live than anyone would realize until it was a little too late.
It was ten hours later in New York, and there in the safe house Clark, Popov, Sullivan, and Chatham sat, watching network coverage of the Olympic games, like millions of other Americans. There was nothing else for them to do. It was boring for them all, as none were marathoners, and the steps of the leading runners were endlessly the same.
“The heat must be terrible to run in,” Sullivan observed.
“It’s not fun,” Clark agreed.
“Ever run in a race like this?”
“No.” John shook his head. “But I’ve had to run away from things in my time, mainly Vietnam. It was pretty hot there, too.”
“You were there?” Popov asked.
“A year and a half’s worth. Third SOG—Special Operations Group.”
“Doing what?”
“Mainly looking and reporting. Some real operations, raids, assassinations, that sort of thing, taking out people we really didn’t like.” Thirty years ago, John thought. Thirty years. He’d given his youth to one conflict, and his manhood to another, and now, in his approaching golden years, what would he be doing? Was it really possible, what Popov had told him? It seemed so unreal, but the Ebola scare had been real as hell. He remembered flying all over the world about that one, and he remembered the news coverage that had shaken his country to its very foundations—and he remembered the terrible revenge that America had taken as a result. Most of all, he remembered lying with Ding Chavez on the flat roof of a Tehran dwelling and guiding two smart-bombs in to take the life of the man responsible for it all, in the first application of the president’s new doctrine. But if this were real, if this “project” that Popov had told them about were what he said it was, then what would his country do? Was it a matter for law enforcement or something else? Would you put people like this on trial? If not, then—what? Laws hadn’t been written for crimes of this magnitude, and the trial would be a horrid circus, spreading news that would shake the foundations of the entire world. That one corporation could have the power to do such a thing as this . . .
Clark had to admit to himself that his mind hadn’t expanded enough to enclose the entire thought. He’d acted upon it, but not really accepted it. It was too big a concept for that.
“Dmitriy, why did you say they are doing this?”
“John Clark, they are druids, they are people who worship nature as though it were a god. They say that the animals belong in places, but people do not. They say they want to restore nature—and to do that they are willing to kill all of mankind. This is madness, I know, but it is what they told me. In my room in Kansas, they have videotapes and magazines that proclaim these beliefs. I never knew such people existed. They say that nature hates us, that the planet hates us for what we—all men—have done. But the planet has no mind, and nature has no voice with which to speak. Yet they believe that they do have these things. It’s amazing,” the Russian concluded. “It is as if I have found a new, mad religious movement whose god requires our deaths, human sacrifice, whatever you wish to call it.” He waved his hands in frustration at his inability to understand it.
“Do we know what this guy Gearing looks like?” Noonan asked.
“No,” Chavez said. “Nobody told me. I suppose Colonel Wilkerson knows, but I didn’t want to ask him.”
“Christ, Ding, is this whole thing possible?” the FBI agent asked next.
“I guess we’ll know in a few hours, man. I know something like this happened once before, and I know John and I helped take out the bastard who did it to us. On the technical side, I’d have to ask Patsy about it. I don’t know biology. She does.”
“Jesus,” Noonan concluded, looking over at the entrance to the pump room. The three of them headed over to a concession area and got half-liter cups of Coca-Cola, then sat down to watch the blue-painted door. People walked past it, but nobody actually approached it.
“Tim?”
“Yeah, Ding?”
“Do you have arrest powers for this?”
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br /> The FBI agent nodded. “I think so, conspiracy to commit murder, the crime originated in America, and the subject is an American citizen, so, yes, that should hold up. I can take it a step further. If we kidnap his ass and bring him to America, the courts don’t care how somebody got there. Once he’s in front of a United States District Court judge, how he came to be there doesn’t interest the court at all.”
“How the hell do we get him out of the country?” Chavez wondered next. He activated his cell phone.
Clark picked up the STU-4’s receiver. It took five seconds for Ding’s encryption system to handshake with his. A computerized voice finally said Line is secure, followed by two beeps. “Yeah?”
“John, it’s Ding. I got a question.”
“Shoot.”
“If we bag this Gearing guy, then what? How the hell do we get him back to America?”
“Good question. Let me work on that.”
“Right.” And the line went dead. The logical place to call was Langley, but, as it turned out, the DCI was not in his office. The call was routed to his home.
“John, what the hell is going on down there, anyway?” Ed Foley asked from his bed.
Clark told the DCI what he knew. That took about five minutes. “I have Ding staking out the only place this can be done, and—”
“Jesus Christ, John, is this for real?” Ed Foley asked, somewhat breathlessly.
“We’ll know if this Gearing guy shows up with a package containing the bug, I suppose,” Clark replied. “If he does, how do we get Ding, his people, and this Gearing guy back to the States?”
“Let me work on that. What’s your number?” John gave it to him and Ed Foley wrote it down on a pad. “How long have you known about this?”
“Less than two hours. The Russian guy is right here with me. We’re in an FBI safe house in New York City.”
“Is Carol Brightling implicated in this?”
“I’m not sure. Her ex-husband sure as hell is,” Clark answered.
Foley closed his eyes and thought. “You know, she called me about you guys a while back, asked a couple of questions. She’s the one who shook the new radios loose from E-Systems. She talked to me as though she was briefed in on Rainbow.”
“She’s not on my list, Ed,” John pointed out. He’d personally approved all of the people cleared into the Rainbow compartment.
“Yeah, I’ll look at that, too. Okay, let me check around and get back to you.”
“Right.” Clark replaced the receiver. “We have an FBI guy with the Sydney team,” he told the others.
“Who?” Sullivan asked.
“Tim Noonan. Know him?”
“Used to be tech support with HRT?”
Clark nodded. “That’s the guy.”
“I’ve heard about him. Supposed to be pretty smart.”
“He is. He saved our ass in Hereford, probably my wife and daughter, too.”
“So, he can arrest this Gearing mutt, nice and legal.”
“You know, I’ve never worried all that much about enforcing the law—mainly I enforce policy, but not law.”
“I suppose things are a little different with the Agency, eh?” Sullivan asked, with a smile. The James Bond factor never really goes away, even with people who are supposed to know better.
“Yeah, some.”
Gearing left his hotel, carrying a backpack like many of the other people on the street, and flagged a cab just outside. The marathon was about half an hour from its conclusion. He found himself looking around at the crowded sidewalks and all the people on them. The Australians seemed a friendly people, and what he’d seen of their country was pleasant enough. He wondered about the aborigines, and what might happen to them, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, and other such tribal groupings around the world, so removed from normal life that they wouldn’t be exposed to Shiva in any way. If fate smiled upon them, well, he decided, that was okay with him. These kinds of people didn’t harm Nature in any way, and they were insufficiently numerous to do harm even if they wanted to, which they didn’t, worshipping the trees and the thunder as the Project members did. Were there enough of them to be a problem? Probably not. The Bushmen might spread out, but their folkways wouldn’t allow them to change their tribal character very much, and though they’d increase somewhat in number, they’d probably not even do much of that. The same with the “abos” of Australia. There hadn’t been many of them before the Europeans had arrived, after all, and they’d had millennia to sweep over the continent. So the Project would spare many people, wouldn’t it? It was vaguely comforting to the retired colonel that Shiva would kill only those whose lifestyles made them the enemies of Nature. That this criterion included everyone he could see out the cab windows troubled him little.
The taxi stopped at the regular drop-off point by the stadium. He paid his fare plus a generous tip, got out, walked toward the massive concrete bowl. At the entrance, he showed his security pass and was waved through. There came the expected creepy feeling. He’d be testing his “B” vaccine in a very immediate way, first admitting the Shiva virus into the fogging system, and then walking through it, breathing in the same nano-capsules as all the other hundred-thousand-plus tourists, and if the “B” shot didn’t work, he’d be condemning himself to a gruesome death—but he’d been briefed in on that issue a long time ago.
“That Dutchman looks pretty tough,” Noonan said. Willem terHoost was currently in the lead, and had picked up the pace, heading for a record despite the weather conditions. The heat had taken its toll of many runners. A lot of them slowed their pace to get cold drinks, and some ran through pre-spotted water showers to cool off, though the TV commentators said that these had the effect of tightening up the leg muscles and were therefore not really a good thing for marathoners to do. But they took the relief anyway, most of them, or grabbed the offered ice-water drinks and poured them over their faces.
“Self-abuse,” Chavez said, checking his watch and reaching for his radio microphone. “Command to Tomlinson.”
“I’m here, boss,” Chavez heard in his earpiece.
“Coming in to relieve you.”
“Roger that, fine with us, boss,” the sergeant replied from inside the locked room.
“Come on.” Ding stood, waving for Pierce and Noonan to follow. It was just a hundred feet to the blue door. Ding twisted the knob and went inside.
Tomlinson and Johnston had hidden in the shadows in the corner opposite the door. They came out when they recognized their fellow team members.
“Okay, stay close and stay alert,” Chavez told the two sergeants.
“Roge-o,” Homer Johnston said on his way out. He was thirsty and planned to get himself something to drink, and on the way out he placed his hands over his ears, popping them open to rid himself of the pump noise.
The sound was annoying, Chavez realized in the first few minutes. Not overly loud, but constant, a powerful deep whirring, like a well-insulated automobile engine. It hovered at the edge of your consciousness and didn’t go away, and on further reflection made him think of a beehive. Maybe that was the annoying part of it.
“Why are we leaving the lights on?” Noonan asked.
“Good question.” Chavez walked over and flipped the switch. The room went almost totally dark, with just a crack of light coming in from under the steel fire door. Chavez felt his way to the opposite wall, managed to get there without bumping his head, and leaned against the concrete wall, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
Gearing was dressed in shorts and low-cut hiking boots, with short socks as well. It seemed the form of dress the locals had adopted for dealing with the heat, and it was comfortable enough, as was his backpack and floppy hat. The stadium concourses were crowded with fans coming in early for the closing ceremonies, and he saw that many of them were standing in the fog to relieve themselves from the oppressive heat of the day. The local weather forecasters had explained ad nauseam about how this version of the El
Niño phenomenon had affected the global climate and inflicted unseasonably hot weather on their country, for which they all felt the need to apologize. He found it all rather amusing. Apologize for a natural phenomenon? How ridiculous. With that thought he headed to his objective. In doing so, he walked right past Homer Johnston, who was standing, sipping his Coke.
“Any other places the guy might use?” Chavez worried suddenly in the darkness.
“No,” Noonan replied. “I checked the panel on the way in. The whole stadium fogging system comes from this one room. If it’s going to happen, it will happen here.”
“If it’s gonna happen,” Chavez said back, actually hoping that it would not. If that happened, they’d go back to Lieutenant Colonel Wilkerson and find out where this Gearing guy was staying, and then pay a call on him and have a friendly little chat.
Gearing spotted the blue door and looked around for security people. The Aussie SAS troops were easily spotted, once you knew how they dressed. But though he saw two Sydney policemen walking down the concourse, there were no army personnel. Gearing paused fifty feet or so from the door. The usual mission jitters, he told himself. He was about to do something from which there was no turning back. He asked himself for the thousandth time if he really wanted to do this. There were fellow human beings all around him, people seemingly just like himself with hopes and dreams and aspirations—but, no, those things they held in their minds weren’t like the things he held in his own, were they? They didn’t get it, didn’t understand what was important and what was not. They didn’t see Nature for what She was, and as a result they lived lives that were aimed only at hurting or even destroying Her, driving cars that injected hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, using chemicals that found their way into the water, pesticides that killed birds or kept them from reproducing, aiming spray cans at their hair whose propellants destroyed the ozone layer. They were killing Nature with nearly every act they took. They didn’t care. They didn’t even try to understand the consequences of what they were doing, and so, no, they didn’t have a right to live. It was his job to protect Nature, to remove the blight upon the planet, to restore and save, and that was a job he must do. With that decided, Wil Gearing resumed his walk to the blue door, fished in his pocket for the key and inserted it into the knob.