Games Of State (1996)

by Tom - Op Center 03 Clancy

  "Why do people always say that?" Stoll asked. "If 1 could, I would."

  Nancy said, "Matt, now you're getting on my nerves. Can it."

  He did, and they walked the rest of the way in silence.

  Hood watched the New Jacobin who had spoken, the man closest to the door. He had a thick black beard and mustache and was dressed in a gray sweatshirt, jeans, and boots. An assault rifle was tucked under his arm. He looked like he wouldn't hesitate to use it.

  The three were quiet until they walked through the doorway. Hood saw Hausen facing a brick wall, his hands pressed against it, his legs spread. One of the men was pointing a pistol up against the base of his skull.

  "Oh, shit," Stoll said as he entered the small, dark corridor.

  The three Americans were grabbed by two men each and pushed against the wall. Guns were placed against the backs of their heads. Hood moved his head slightly so he could see the man in charge. The New Jacobin was cool, standing sideways so he could see his prisoners and also look into the room.

  Beside him, Nancy was trembling slightly. To her right, Stoll was trembling even more. He was looking down the corridor as though weighing an escape.

  "We have a search warrant," Stoll said softly. "I thought this was all legal."

  The leader barked, "Tais-toi."

  "I'm not a commando," Stoll said. "None of us is. I'm just a computer guy!"

  "Quiet!"

  Stoll's mouth closed audibly.

  The New Jacobin leader studied them for a moment and then turned back to the doorway. He shouted for the last man to come out.

  Ballon yelled back in French, "When you let the others go, I'll come out."

  "No," said the New Jacobin. "You come out first."

  Ballon didn't answer this time. Clearly, he intended to leave the next move up to the enemy. And the next move was for the leader to nod toward Hausen. The New Jacobin standing behind the German grabbed his hair. Nancy screamed as the man walked him toward the door. Hood wondered if they were even going to give Ballon the chance to come out, or if they were just going to shoot the German and throw his body in and threaten to throw someone else in next.

  A gunshot popped from somewhere in the darkness, toward the door which led to the main corridor. It took a moment of searching before Hood could see that with all the shouting and shuffling, no one had heard Ballon's men remove the ornate knob from the door. They had a clear shot at everyone in this corridor.

  The man holding Hausen had fallen. He was squeezing his right thigh and crying. Hausen seized on the moment of confusion to run toward the door, in the direction from which the shot had come. None of the New Jacobins fired. Obviously, they feared being cut down if they did.

  Hausen opened the door and disappeared. There was no one on the other side. They must have seen him coming and taken cover.

  Hood didn't move. Though the man behind him was looking away, he still felt the pressure of the front sight and muzzle on the top of his neck.

  Perspiration trickled down his armpits and along the sides of his chest. His palms grew clammy against the cold brick wall and he promised himself that if he survived this he'd not only hug each member of his family for a good long time, but also Mike Rodgers. The man had spent his life surviving situations like these. Hood's respect for him suddenly grew very, very deep.

  As he was thinking that, his hands began to vibrate. No, Hood thought. Not just my hands. The old bricks themselves were beginning to tremble. Then the sky outside the barred windows brightened. The air itself seemed to rattle. And the New Jacobin leader shouted for his men to finish the job and leave.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Thursday, 11:15 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  The footsteps were gaining on them. But as Herbert wheeled himself through the woods, he wasn't thinking about them. He wasn't thinking about anything except what he had overlooked in the pressure of escaping from the camp. The key to survival, to victory.

  What the hell was that name?

  Jody grunted as they moved slowly through the dark. Herbert almost asked her to get behind him and kick him.

  I can't remember.

  He would. He had to. He couldn't let Mike Rodgers win this one. Rodgers and Herbert were both fans of military history, and they had debated the point many times over. If you had a choice, they had asked each other, would you rather go into battle with a small band of dedicated soldiers or an overwhelming force of conscripts.

  Rodgers invariably favored greater numbers, and there were strong arguments for both points of view. Herbert pointed out that Samson beat back the Philistines using only the jawbone of an ass. In the thirteenth century, Alexander Nevsky and his poorly armed Russian peasants repulsed the heavily armored Teutonic knights. In the fifteenth century, the small band of Englishmen who fought beside Henry V at Agincourt defeated vastly superior numbers of Frenchmen.

  But Rodgers had his examples as well. The brave band of Spartans were defeated by the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.; the Alamo fell to Santa Anna; and then there was the British 27th Lancers cavalry, the "Light Brigade" which was cut down in its self-defeating charge during the Crimean War.

  Add to the list of the doomed Robert West Herbert, he thought as he listened to the footfalls and cracking twigs. The guy who didn't have the goddamn brains enough to write down the name that could have saved them. At least he would die in good company. King Leonidas. Jim Bowie. Errol Flynn.

  Thinking about Flynn helped him stay loose as he psyched himself up to make a stand against all these enemies. He only hoped that Jody would run. The thought of fighting to save her gave him extra adrenaline.

  And then, because he wasn't thinking about it, the name he'd been trying to remember came back to him.

  "Jody, push me," he said.

  She had been walking beside him. She stopped and got behind him.

  "C'mon, push," he said. "We're going to get out of this. But we'll need time."

  Jody put her tired back and wounded shoulder into the effort. Herbert reached for his weapon.

  Unlike Flynn's doomed Major Vickers, Herbert was going to hold the enemy off. Though unlike Samson, he wasn't going to use the jawbone of an ass to do it.

  He was going to use a cellular phone.

  SIXTY-THREE

  Thursday, 5:15 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  The call was put through to Rodgers as he was waiting for an update from Colonel August.

  Bob Herbert was on a cellular phone. Rodgers switched on the speaker phone so Darrell, Martha, and Press Officer Ann Farris could hear.

  "I'm in the middle of a dark forest somewhere between Wunstorf and a lake," Herbert said. "The good news is, I've got Jody Thompson."

  Rodgers sat up straight and triumphantly drove a fist into the air. Ann jumped from her chair and clapped.

  "That's fabulous!" Rodgers said. He shot McCaskey a look. "You've done it while Interpol and the FBI are still asking questions and pissing off the German authorities. How can we help you, Bob?"

  "Well, the bad news is we've got a bunch of Nazi wannabes on our butts. You've got to find me a phone number. "

  Rodgers leaned toward the keyboard. He alerted John Benn with an F6/Enter/17. "Whose number, Bob?"

  Herbert told him. Rodgers asked him to hold on as he typed Hauptmann Rosenlocher, Hamburg Landespolizei.

  McCaskey had swung over to take a look. While Rodgers sent the number over to Benn, McCaskey jumped to another phone and called Interpol.

  "This Rosenlocher is a burr in the fur of the head Nazi," Herbert said, "and he may be the only man you can trust. From what I overheard he's in Hanover, I think. "

  "We'll find him and get him over to you," Rodgers said.

  "Sooner would be better than later," Herbert said. "We're pushing on, but we're losing ground to these guys. I can hear the cars. And if they find the bodies we left in our wake--"

  "I read you," Rodgers said. "Can you stay on the line?"

  "As long as Jody holds out I can," he said.
"She's dead on her feet."

  "Tell her to hang on," Rodgers said as he switched to the Geologue program. "You too." He brought up Wunstorf and looked over the terrain between the town and the lake. It was just as Herbert had described it. Trees and hills. "Bob, do you have any idea where you are? Can you give me any landmarks?"

  "It's black here, Mike. Far as I know, we may even have done a W.W. Corrigan."

  Wrong Way Corrigan, Rodgers thought. Herbert didn't want Jody to know they might be headed in the wrong direction.

  "Okay, Bob," Rodgers said. "We'll get you a fix on everyone's positions."

  McCaskey was still on the line with Interpol, so Rodgers called Stephen Viens himself. Even with light-intensification capabilities for night surveillance, Viens told him that the NRO satellites would require up to a half hour to pinpoint Herbert exactly. Rodgers pointed out that their lives might be at stake. Viens said, not dispassionately, that it would still take up to a half hour. Rodgers thanked him.

  The General studied the map. They were really out in the boondocks. And if Herbert could hear the pursuers, it was unlikely a car or even chopper could get to them in time.

  Rodgers looked over at McCaskey. "Have we got anything on that police officer yet?"

  "Working."

  Working. Rodgers always had a visceral reaction to that word: he hated it. He liked things to be done.

  He also hated giving bad news to people in the field. But bad news was better than ignorance, so he got back on the line.

  "Bob, NRO is trying to spot you. Maybe we can keep you moving away from the enemy. Meanwhile, we're still looking for the officer. Thing is, even if we find him it doesn't look like you're any place easy to get to."

  "Tell me about it," Herbert said. "Goddamn trees and hills everywhere."

  "Would it be better if you tried to flank the enemy?"

  "Negative," Herbert said. "The terrain is rough here, but it looks rockier on either side. We'd literally be crawling." He was silent for a moment. "But General? If you can at least find Rosenlocher, there is one thing you can try."

  Rodgers listened while Herbert extemporized. What the intelligence chief proposed was creative, ghoulish, and unlikely to succeed. But in the absence of anything else, it became their marching orders.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Thursday, 11:28 P.M., Toulouse, France

  There were ten closed-circuit surveillance cameras tucked two-atop-two in a closet in Dominique's office. Before the building had begun to rumble, he was sitting in his leather chair, calmly watching the activity in the corridor and in the computer room.

  The stupidity of these people, he'd been thinking as he watched them break into his system and find themselves cornered. Dominique would have been content to let them go if they hadn't gotten pushy and broken into his secret files. Ms. Bosworth didn't have that degree of skill, so it had to have been the other man who did it. Dominique hoped that man lived. He wanted to hire him.

  Even when the French commandos closed in on the New Jacobins in the corridor, Dominique wasn't concerned. He had sent word for other men to surround them. He had made certain that fully half of his hundred New Jacobins would be on the premises tonight. Nothing must go wrong with the downloading of his games.

  Dominique wasn't concerned about anything until the building began to shake. Then his high forehead wrinkled and his dark eyes blinked, batting away the reflection of the TV screens. Using the control panel built into his top desk drawer, he switched to external views of the compound. On the river side the black-and-white screen was awash with white light. Dominique turned down the contrast and watched as an aircraft settled down, its navigation lights burning brightly. It was an airplane whose engines had tilted into the vertical so it could descend like a helicopter. The parking lot had cars scattered here and there so the aircraft was unable to land. As it hovered fifteen feet up the hatch opened. A pair of rope ladders were unwound and troops climbed down. NATO troops.

  Dominique's mouth tensed. What is NATO doing here? he roared inside, though he knew the answer. It was a newly defined mission designed to get him.

  As twenty soldiers fell in on the asphalt of the parking lot, Dominique rang Alain Boulez. The former Paris police chief was waiting in the underground training area with the reserve force of New Jacobins.

  "Alain, have you been watching your monitors?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "It appears NATO has nothing better to do than to attack member nations. See that they are turned back and notify me aboard Boldness."

  "Absolutely."

  Dominique called his Operations Director. "Etienne, what is the status of the uploading?"

  "Concentration Camp is finished, M. Dominique. Hangin' with the Crowd will be out there by midnight."

  "I need it faster," Dominique said.

  "Sir, this was preset when we hid the program in--"

  "Faster," Dominique said. He switched off and punched up the pilot of his LongRanger helicopter. "Andre? I'm coming down. Ready Boldness."

  "At once, sir."

  Dominique clicked off. He stood and looked out at his collection of guillotines. They appeared ghostly in the glow of the TV screens. He heard one gunshot, then others.

  He thought of Danton about to be beheaded, saying to his executioners, "Thou wilt show my head to the people: it is worth showing." Yet even if the plant fell, the games would be uploaded and he would be free. He would fall back to one of the many national and international facilities he'd designated as backup sites. His plastics firm in Taiwan. His bank in Paris. His CD-PRESSING plant in Madrid.

  He shut down the TV screens, donned leather gloves, and walked briskly from his office toward the elevator. He was not retreating, he told himself. He was simply moving his headquarters. What a waste, he thought, if this first wild skirmish should claim him as a victim.

  The elevator took him to an underground passage which led to the landing field behind the factory. He entered the code in the door at the end. When it popped open, he snatched a New Jacobin pistol from the gun rack, then climbed the steep steps. The LongRanger helicopter was already warming up. Dominique walked along the tail boom assembly, ducked under the spinning rotor blades, and was greeted by one of his official Demain guards, who came running over.

  "Dominique, your factory guards are still not involved in this action. What do you want us to do?"

  Dominique replied, "Disassociate me from the New Jacobins. Make it seem as if they've come here uninvited to send the foreigners back home."

  The guard asked, "How can 1 do that, monsieur?"

  Dominique raised his pistol and shot the guard in the forehead. "By making it seem as if you resisted them," he said as he dropped the pistol and hopped from the boarding step into the cabin.

  "Let's go!" he said to the pilot as he entered the spacious cabin. He pulled the door shut.

  The flight deck was to his left. The copilot's seat was empty. In the main cabin, there were two rows of thickly cushioned seats. Dominique sat in the first one in front, beside the door. He didn't bother to buckle himself in as the helicopter rose.

  The pounding drone of the chopper seemed to rattle away his facade of equanimity. Dominique scowled angrily as he looked back at the bastide. The VTOL had begun to move toward the field from which he'd just taken off. The craft took up a large section of the field as it set down. The NATO soldiers were no longer in the parking lot. Dominique could see flashes of gunfire through the windows and in the compound.

  He felt violated. The soldiers were like Visigoths amok in an English church, destroying wantonly. He wanted to scream at them, "This is more than you understand! I am the manifest destiny of civilization!"

  The helicopter crossed the river. Then it circled back toward the bastide.

  Dominique yelled to be heard over the rotor. "Andre, what are you doing?"

  The pilot didn't answer. The chopper began to descend.

  "Andre? Andre!"

  The pilot said, "You told me over
the phone that you followed all my moves. But you missed one. The one where I came up to your pilot and hit the poor fellow with twenty-five years of anger."

  Richard Hausen turned and regarded Dominique. The Frenchman felt ice shoot down his back.

  "I took off to make room for the other craft," Hausen said. "Now you're going back, Gerard. Back twenty-five years, in fact."

  For a moment, Dominique considered an appropriate response. But only for a moment. As in Paris those many years ago, the idea of debate was pushed aside by the stench of Hausen's sanctimony. Dominique hated it. Just as he had hated it when Hausen had defended those girls.

  Losing control of the delicate balance between danger and need, between reason and desire, Dominique threw himself at Hausen with an inarticulate cry. He grabbed the German's hair from behind and pulled his head back, over the seat.

  Hausen screamed as Dominique yanked down hard, trying to break his neck. The German released the control stick and began clawing at the Frenchman's wrist. The chopper nosed down instantly and Dominique fell against the back of the pilot's seat. He released Hausen, who was thrown against the systems display.

  Groggy, his forehead bloodied, the German struggled to get his bearings. Pushing off the windshield, he managed to find the control stick.

  The chopper came out of its dive. As it did, Dominique slid around the pilot's seat. The headphones had fallen to the floor and he picked them up. With an eye on the control stick, Dominique slipped the cord around Hausen's neck and pulled tightly.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Thursday, 5:41 P.M., Washington, D. C.

  Mike Rodgers was studying a map of Germany on the computer when Darrell McCaskey looked over with a thumbs-up.

  "Got him!" said McCaskey. "Hauptmann Rosenlocher's on the line!"

  Rodgers picked up his phone. "Hauptmann Rosenlocher," Rodgers said, "do you speak English?"

  "Yes. Who is this?"

  "General Mike Rodgers in Washington, D.C. Sir, I'm sorry to be calling so late. It's about the attack on the movie set, the kidnapping."