Rainbow Six

by Tom Clancy

  And it wasn’t as though his budget was all that much to worry about. Less than fifty people, total, scarcely three million dollars in payroll expense, since everyone was paid the usual military rate, plus the fact that Rainbow picked up everyone’s housing expense out of its multigovernment funding. One inequity was that the American soldiers were better paid than their European counterparts. That bothered John a little, but there was nothing he could do about it, and with housing costs picked up—the housing at Hereford wasn’t lavish, but it was comfortable—nobody had any trouble living. The morale of the troops was excellent. He’d expected that. They were elite troopers, and that sort invariably had a good attitude, especially since they trained almost every day, and soldiers loved to train almost as much as they loved to do the things they trained for.

  There would be a little discord. Chavez’s Team-2 had drawn both field missions, as a result of which they’d swagger a little more, to the jealous annoyance of Peter Covington’s Team-1, which was slightly ahead on the team/team competition of PT and shooting. Not even a cat’s whisker of difference, but people like this, as competitive as any athletes could ever be, worked damned hard for that fifth of a percentage point, and it really came down to who’d had what for breakfast on the mornings of the competitive exercises, or maybe what they’d dreamed about during the night. Well, that degree of competition was healthy for the team as a whole. And decidedly unhealthy for those against whom his people deployed.

  Bill Tawney was at his desk as well, going over the known information on the terrorists of the night before. The Austrians had begun their inquiries with the German Federal Police Office—the Bundes Kriminal Amt—even before the takedown. The identities of Hans Fürchtner and Petra Dortmund had been confirmed by fingerprints. The BKA investigators would jump onto the case hard that day. For starters, they’d trace the IDs of the people who’d rented the car that had been driven to the Ostermann home, and search for the house in Germany—probably Germany, Tawney reminded himself—that they’d lived in. The other four would probably be harder. Fingerprints had already been taken and were being compared on the computer scanning systems that everyone had now. Tawney agreed with the initial assessment of the Austrians that the four spear-carriers had probably been from the former East Germany, which seemed to be turning out all manner of political aberrants: converts from communism who were now discovering the joys of nazism, lingering true believers in the previous political-economic model, and just plain thugs who were a major annoyance to the regular German police forces.

  But this had to be political. Fürchtner and Dortmund were—had been, Bill corrected himself—real, believing communists all their lives. They’d been raised in the former West Germany to middle-class families, the way a whole generation of terrorists had, striving all their active lives for socialist perfection or some such illusion. And so they had raided the home of a high-end capitalist . . . seeking what?

  Tawney lifted a set of faxes from Vienna. Erwin Ostermann had told the police during his three-hour debrief that they’d sought his “special inside codes” to the international trading system. Were there such things? Probably not, Tawney judged—why not make sure? He lifted his phone and dialed the number of an old friend, Martin Cooper, a former “Six” man who now worked in Lloyd’s ugly building in London’s financial district.

  “Cooper,” a voice said.

  “Martin, this is Bill Tawney. How are you this rainy morning?”

  “Quite well, Bill, and you—what are you doing now?”

  “Still taking the Queen’s shilling, old man. New job, very hush-hush, I’m afraid.”

  “What can I do to help you, old man?”

  “Rather a stupid question, actually. Are there any insider channels in the international trading system? Special codes and such things?”

  “I bloody wish there were, Bill. Make our job here much easier,” replied the former station chief for Mexico City and a few other minor posts for the British Secret Intelligence Service. “What exactly do you mean?”

  “Not sure, but the subject just came up.”

  “Well, people at this level do have personal relationships and often trade information, but I take it you mean something rather more structured, an insider-network marketplace sort of thing?”

  “Yes, that’s the idea.”

  “If so, they’ve all kept it a secret from me and the people I work with, old man. International conspiracies?” Cooper snorted. “And this is a chatty mob, you know. Everyone’s into everyone else’s business.”

  “No such thing, then?”

  “Not to my knowledge, Bill. It’s the sort of thing the uninformed believe in, of course, but it doesn’t exist, unless that’s the mob who assassinated John Kennedy,” Cooper added with a chuckle.

  “Much what I’d thought, Martin, but I needed to tick that box. Thanks, my friend.”

  “Bill, you have any idea on who might have attacked that Ostermann chap in Vienna?”

  “Not really. You know him?”

  “My boss does. I’ve met him once. Seems a decent bloke, and bloody smart as well.”

  “Really all I know is what I saw on the telly this morning.” It wasn’t entirely a lie, and Martin would understand in any case, Tawney knew.

  “Well, whoever did the rescue, my hat is off to them. Smells like SAS to me.”

  “Really? Well, that wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”

  “Suppose not. Good hearing from you, Bill. How about dinner sometime?”

  “Love to. I’ll call you next time I’m in London.”

  “Excellent. Cheers.”

  Tawney replaced the phone. It seemed that Martin had landed on his feet after being let go from “Six,” which had reduced its size with the diminution of the Cold War. Well, that was to be expected. The sort of thing the uninformed believe in, Tawney thought. Yes, that fit. Fürchtner and Dortmund were communists, and would not have trusted or believed in the open market. In their universe, people could only get wealthy by cheating, exploiting, and conspiring with others of the same ilk. And what did that mean? . . .

  Why had they attacked the home of Erwin Ostermann? You couldn’t rob such a man. He didn’t keep his money in cash or gold bars. It was all electronic, theoretical money, really, that existed in computer memories and traveled across telephone wires, and that was difficult to steal, wasn’t it?

  No, what a man like Ostermann had was information, the ultimate source of power, ethereal though it was. Were Dortmund and Fürchtner willing to kill for that? It appeared so, but were the two dead terrorists the sort of people who could make use of such information? No, they couldn’t have been, because then they would have known that the thing they’d sought didn’t exist.

  Somebody hired them, Tawney thought. Somebody had sent them out on their mission. But who?

  And to what purpose? Which was even a better question, and one from which he could perhaps learn the answer to the first.

  Back up, he told himself. If someone had hired them for a job, who could it have been? Clearly someone connected to the old terror network, someone who’d know where they were and whom they’d known and trusted to some degree, enough to risk their lives. But Fürchtner and Dortmund had been ideologically pure communists. Their acquaintances would be the same, and they would certainly not have trusted or taken orders from anyone of a different political shade. And how else could this notional person have known where and how to contact them, win their confidence, and send them off on a mission of death, chasing after something that didn’t really exist? . . .

  A superior officer? Tawney wondered, stretching his mind for more information than he really had. Someone of the same political bent or beliefs, able to order them, or at least to motivate them to do something dangerous.

  He needed more information, and he’d use his SIS and police contacts to get every scrap he could from the Austrian/German investigation. For starters, he called Whitehall to make sure he got full translations of all the h
ostage interviews. Tawney had been an intelligence officer for a long time, and something had gotten his nose to twitch.

  “Ding, I didn’t like your takedown plan,” Clark said in the big conference room.

  “I didn’t either, Mr. C, but without a chopper, didn’t have much choice, did I?” Chavez replied with an air of self-righteousness. “But that’s not the thing that really scares me.”

  “What is?” John asked.

  “Noonan brought this one up. Every time we go into a place, there are people around—the public, reporters, TV crews, all of that. What if one of them has a cell phone and calls the bad guys inside to tell them what’s happening? Real simple, isn’t it? We’re fucked and so are some hostages.”

  “We should be able to deal with that,” Tim Noonan told them. “It’s the way a cell phone works. It broadcasts a signal to tell the local cell that it’s there and it’s on, so that the computer systems can route an incoming call to it. Okay, we can get instrumentation to read that, and maybe to block the signal path—maybe even clone the bad guys’ phone, trap the incoming call and bag the bastards outside, maybe even flip ’em, right? But I need that software, and I need it now.”

  “David?” Clark turned to Dave Peled, their Israeli techno-genius.

  “It can be done. I expect the technology exists already at NSA or elsewhere.”

  “What about Israel?” Noonan asked pointedly.

  “Well . . . yes, we have such things.”

  “Get them,” Clark ordered. “Want me to call Avi personally?”

  “That would help.”

  “Okay, I need the name and specifications of the equipment. How hard to train the operators?”

  “Not very,” Peled conceded. “Tim can do it easily.”

  Thank you for that vote of confidence, Special Agent Noonan thought, without a smile.

  “Back to the takedown,” Clark commanded. “Ding, what were you thinking?”

  Chavez leaned forward in his chair. He wasn’t just defending himself; he was defending his team. “Mainly that I didn’t want to lose a hostage, John. Doc told us we had to take those two seriously, and we had a hard deadline coming up. Okay, the mission as I understand it is not to lose a hostage. So, when they made it clear they wanted the chopper for transport, it was just a matter of giving it to them, with a little extra put in. Dieter and Homer did their jobs perfectly. So did Eddie and the rest of the shooters. The dangerous part was getting Louis and George up to the house so they could take down the last bunch. They did a nice ninja job getting there unseen,” Chavez went on, gesturing to Loiselle and Tomlinson. “That was the most dangerous part of the mission. We had them in a light-well and the camo stuff worked. If the bad guys had been using NVGs, that would have been a problem, but the additional illumination off the trees—from the lights the cops brought in, I mean—would have interfered with that. NVGs flare a lot if you throw light their way. It was a gamble,” Ding admitted, “but it was a gamble that looked better than having a hostage whacked right in front of us while we were jerking off at the assembly point. That’s the mission, Mr. C, and I was the commander on the scene. I made the call.” He didn’t add that his call had worked.

  “I see. Well, good shooting from everybody, and Loiselle and Tomlinson did very well to get close undetected,” Alistair Stanley said from his place, opposite Clark’s. “Even so—”

  “Even so, we need helicopters for a case like this one. How the hell did we overlook that requirement?” Chavez demanded.

  “My fault, Domingo,” Clark admitted. “I’m going to call in on that today.”

  “Just so we get it fixed, man.” Ding stretched in his seat. “My troops got it done, John. Crummy setup, but we got it done. Next time, be better if things went a little smoother,” he conceded. “But when the doc tells me that the bad guys will really kill somebody, that tells me I have to take decisive action, doesn’t it?”

  “Depending on the situation, yes,” Stanley answered the question.

  “Al, what does that mean?” Chavez asked sharply. “We need better mission guidelines. I need to have it spelled out. When can I allow a hostage to get killed? Does the age or sex of the hostage enter into the equation? What if somebody takes over a kindergarten or a hospital maternity ward? You can’t expect us to disregard human factors like that. Okay, I understand that you can’t plan for every possibility, and as the commanders on the scene, Peter and I have to exercise judgment, but my default position is to prevent the death of a hostage if I can do it. If that means taking risks—well, it’s a probability measured against a certainty, isn’t it? In a case like that, you take the risk, don’t you?”

  “Dr. Bellow,” Clark asked, “how confident were you in your evaluation of the terrorists’ state of mind?”

  “Very. They were experienced. They’d thought through a lot of the mission, and in my opinion they were dead serious about killing hostages to show us their resolve,” the psychiatrist replied.

  “Then or now?”

  “Both,” Bellow said confidently. “These two were political sociopaths. Human life doesn’t mean much to that sort of personality. Just poker chips to toss around the table.”

  “Okay, but what if they’d spotted Loiselle and Tomlinson coming in?”

  “They would probably have killed a hostage and that would have frozen the situation for a few minutes.”

  “And my backup plan in that case was to rush the house from the east side and shoot our way in as quickly as possible,” Chavez went on. “The better way is to zip-line down from some choppers and hit the place like a Kansas tornado. That’s dangerous, too,” he conceded. “But the people we’re dealing with ain’t the most reasonable folks in the world, are they?”

  The senior team members didn’t like this sort of discussion, since it reminded them that as good as the Rainbow troopers were, they weren’t gods or supermen. They’d now had two incidents, both of them resolved without a civilian casualty. That made for mental complacency on the command side, further exacerbated by the fact that Team-2 had done a picture-perfect takedown under adverse tactical circumstances. They trained their men to be supermen, Olympic-perfect physical specimens, supremely trained in the use of firearms and explosives, and most of all, mentally prepared for the rapid destruction of human life.

  The Team-2 members sitting around the table looked at Clark with neutral expressions, taking it all in with remarkable equanimity because they’d known last night that the plan was flawed and dangerous, but they’d brought it off anyway, and they were understandably proud of themselves for having done the difficult and saved their hostages. But Clark was questioning the capabilities of their team leader, and they didn’t like that either. For the former SAS members among them, the reply to all this was simple, their old regimental motto: Who Dares, Wins. They’d dared and won. And the score for them was Christians ten, Lions nil, which wasn’t a bad score at all. About the only unhappy member of the team was First Sergeant Julio Vega. “Oso” carried the machine gun, which had yet to come into play. The long-riflemen, Vega saw, were feeling pretty good about themselves, as were the light-weapons guys. But those were the breaks. He’d been there, a few meters from Weber, ready to cover if a bad guy had gotten lucky and managed to run away, firing his weapon. He’d have cut him in half with his M-60—his pistol work in the base range was one of the best. There was killing going on, and he wasn’t getting to play. The religious part of Vega reproached the rest of him for thinking that way, which caused a few grumbles and chuckles when he was alone.

  “So, where does that leave us?” Chavez asked. “What are our operational guidelines in the case where a hostage is likely to get killed by the bad guys?”

  “The mission remains saving the hostages, where practicable,” Clark replied, after a few seconds’ thought.

  “And the team leader on the scene decides what’s practicable and what isn’t?”

  “Correct,” Rainbow Six confirmed.

  “So, we’re r
ight back where we started, John,” Ding pointed out. “And that means that Peter and I get all the responsibility, and all the criticism if somebody else doesn’t like what we’ve done.” He paused. “I understand the responsibility that comes along with being in command in the field, but it would be nice to have something a little firmer to fall back on, y’know? Mistakes will happen out there sooner or later. We know it. We don’t like it, but we know it. Anyway, I’m telling you here and now, John, I see the mission as the preservation of innocent life, and that’s the side I’m going to come down on.”

  “I agree with Chavez,” Peter Covington said. “That must be our default position.”

  “I never said it wasn’t,” Clark said, suddenly becoming angry. The problem was that there could well be situations in which it was not possible to save a life—but training for such a situation was somewhere between extremely difficult and damned near impossible, because all the terrorist incidents they’d have to deal with in the field would be as different as the terrorists and the sites they selected. So, he had to trust Chavez and Covington. Beyond that, he could set up training scenarios that forced them to think and act, in the hope that the practice would stand them in good stead in the field. It had been a lot easier as a field officer in the CIA, Clark thought. There he had always had the initiative, had almost always chosen the time and place of action to suit himself. Rainbow, however, was always reactive, responding to the initiative of others. That simple fact was why he had to train his people so hard, so that their expertise could correct the tactical inequity. And that had worked twice. But would it continue to work?