The men’s room was thirty feet down the corridor, in the opposite direction from the way security was approaching. I pointed toward the bathroom, waved the card in my hand at Fred, and we scampered toward the doorway marked HERREN. I reached it first, ran the card through the reader, and pulled at the door.
Nothing happened. I scanned it again. Bupkis. Nada.
Fred grabbed the fucking thing and tried, too. He had as much luck as I’d had.
Okay, what about some EEO? I took the card and scanned the door that read DAMEN, then pulled. The fucking thing opened. We slipped inside, found two stalls in the darkness, climbed aboard the toilets, and waited, breathing shallowly in the darkness.
I felt stupid hunkering there, like some fucking kid playing a goddamn game, wearing the fucking helmet and all the fucking gear, listening to me breathing and Fred breathing, and I told him so.
“Sei still!” he hissed back at me. “Be quiet.”
2323. We waited. And waited. And waited. This was getting old fast. Moreover, it is uncomfortable hunkering atop a fucking toilet seat, wearing thirty or so pounds of assault gear. You are hot. You are stiff from maintaining the same position for a long time. I let my mind wander so as not to fixate on my discomfort. I also remembered that my current position was a lot more tolerable than, say, sitting in thirty-degree water with a leak in my diving suit, or lying in a shit-filled canal in some Fifth World country, with malarial mosquitoes the size of dragonflies sucking on me.
2340. I heard voices approaching. I’d slipped the helmet askew so I could listen to the corridor sounds. They sure had taken their fucking time. But that’s the Krauts for you: methodical.
2343. I could hear the HERREN door being opened. There was a pause, some muffled Kraut that I couldn’t make out, and then the door was pushed shut.
I held my breath as the door three yards from where I hunkered clicked audibly. A swath of light cut into the bathroom and then the bright overheads were turned on. I blinked at the sudden light and hoped that whoever had made entry hadn’t heard my eyelids slamming. I heard the sound of shoes scuffing on tile, then as I looked, I saw a pair of polished black lace-ups, and gray trouser cuffs, as the security man walked past the stalls.
“Alles in Ordnung?” a nondescript voice asked matter-of-factly from the doorway.
“Ja,” came the answer from Herr Lace-Ups. You and I might quibble with what he said, because we know that alles was nicht in Ordnung, but this was one of those times when it’s better to take “Ja” for an answer, and just S2.
Which is exactly what I was doing when Herr Lace-Ups stopped just before he pulled out of my narrow frame of vision. That’s when I glanced down at the deck and saw what he saw.
Let me put this in KISS terms: there were overhead spotlights above each commode. I am a large Rogue, and I cast an extensive, dense, Roguish shadow. Ergo, I’d cast a shadow that traveled beyond the stall wall; a silhouette that didn’t match any of the others in the God-Damen pissoir. And remember: Krauts are methodical.
Herr Lace-Ups turned back toward me, and I heard the intake of breath that precedes what Billy Shakespeare used to call “various alarums and excursions.” I didn’t wait. I threw myself forward to catch Herr Lace-Ups as he opened the stall—and nearly knocked myself cold as he threw the door open, my heels caught on the toilet seat, and the edge of the door caught me in the forehead.
Oh fuck oh shit oh doom on Dickie. I tell ya, I could have gotten a job as a talent spotter for Louis B. Mayer right then, because I saw more fucking stars than ever worked at MGM, believe me.
It didn’t stop me, though. I flailed at him, grabbed a fistful of blue blazer, and tackled the sonofabitch as his eyes went wide when he saw moi coming at him. We crashed to the tile floor, making a lot of noise. Out of the corner of my eye I looked past the stars and saw Fred go toward the door and disappear into the corridor, heard a muffled thud outside, and knew that he’d stopped the second security man before the guy’d had any chance to do something adversely critical to our health and comfort.
I should learn to pay more attention to what I’m doing. As I was diverted, Herr Lace-Ups seized the initiative and tried to wriggle out of my arms so he could reach whatever he had on his belt and spray/slap/stun me with it.
We rolled across the tile as we grappled, hands finding hands, legs intertwined, seeking some sort of advantage. I was trying not to kill the asshole because there was no need to do so—and besides, killing him wasn’t the objective here. First of all, these two weren’t doing anything other than their jobs, and there was no reason for them to be caught in the crossfire between us and Lothar Beck. Second, killings would ruin the op. I wanted to provoke Lothar, not get him to call the police because a couple of his employees had been whacked during a second-rate burglary.
But it wasn’t easy holding myself back. Rolling across a tile floor with thirty pounds of bulky, lumpy, hard-edged combat equipment is fucking uncomfortable. And it’s noisy. And you never know what’s gonna happen if you don’t put an end to things as quickly and effectively as you can. And so, as I rolled atop him, I reached up and popped him one, snapping his head back hard onto the tile floor.
He went limp. I checked for pulse. He had one, and it was strong. But his shallow breathing and the soft spot on his skull told me I’d probably given him a hell of a concussion.
Well, TFB (look it up in the Glossary). I pulled myself to my feet and went after Fred.
I found der general in the corridor, taping the hands and feet of the second guard, who was also unconscious. “You okay?” I asked.
He looked up at me and finally nodded affirmatively. “But he saw my face, Richard. And yet I cannot kill him, you know that.”
The fact that the guard had seen Fred’s face was bad news. I didn’t mind being spotted, because I wanted Lothar coming after me. But Fred added a whole new Rünzel70 to the situation. Surprise: two targets are often easier to attack than one, especially when one of them is hampered by politics. And Fred was constrained by a whole passel of political limitations that I frankly didn’t give a shit about. But what’s done was done, and I’d adjust my op-plan to fit the circumstances.
Fred slowly pulled himself to his feet, then searched the inert security guard methodically until he came up with a master key-card. “Und now, we must mach schnell,” he said, gritting his teeth as he worked the kinks out from the sudden burst of activity.
I caught myself doing the same thing, trying to limber up my scarred, dinged, and not-so-young-anymore body. You know how pain makes me feel I’m alive. Well, tonight, I was very much alive. Here’s some SpecWar sooth for you: ops like these are for the young. And while Fred and I may be young in spirit and able to keep up with most any young pups when it comes to shooting & looting, the ol’ Rogue body just doesn’t respond as well as it did when we were pussy-chasing, screech-swilling, hell-raising lieutenants on the beach in St. Thomas.
14
0003. I CRACKED THE BATHROOM DOOR, WENT BACK inside, and taped up the unconscious Herr Lace-Ups, took his pepper spray and radio, and all his passkey cards. Then I eased back into the corridor. Was the poor schmuck still out cold? You bet. But was I about to assume he’d stay that way until Elvis had left the building? What am I, crazy?
0004. We tried every single one of the passkey cards carried by Herr Lace-Ups and his colleague—and came up dry. The target door remained locked. Fuck me, and fuck Hans, because time was now becoming a factor. Sooner or later, someone was gonna miss those two security dweebs and come looking for ’em—and they’d know exactly which floor to come to, because as I’ve said so many times before, the Krauts are a methodical bunch of assholes.
0007. Time crunch or no, it was still back to S1.71 Have I ever told you how much I hate S1? Actually, it wasn’t quite square one. It was desk three—the one I’d pried open just before we were interrupted. It was the secretary sitting behind that desk—at least that’s what I recalled—who’d opened the door for the blue-smo
cked trio. I retrieved the single passkey card from the center drawer, scampered to the locked door, and slid the card’s magnetic strip through the reader. The audible click told me I’d struck paydirt.
I turned the knob, pulled the door open, pushed Fred inside, then quietly closed the door behind us.
0008. I plucked my flashlight out of its pocket and played the light around the room. It was utilitarian compared to the opulence of the surrounding offices. Five metal desks, each with a computer on it, a series of file cabinets—two with combination locks—and a large wallboard completed the furnishings.
We started with the file cabinets. I pried the first of them open, laid my knife on top where it would be easily accessible for working on the next one, and started with the top file drawer. There were spreadsheets and what looked like databases, all neatly arranged in numbered files.
“What are they?” I whispered to Fred.
He shifted from examining the wallboard to the drawer I’d opened. “Don’t know. But it looks as if they’re sorted by postal zones,” he said. He held the minilight between his teeth and riffled through the deep drawer, his gloved hands fumbling with the thick files. “Zis iss some kind of political database, I think,” he said.
I let him sort files because he’d know better than I what to look for. Meanwhile, I began turning on the desktops.
Now I know what you’re going to say: that it is unlikely that anyone would leave important material on a computer without safeguarding it, either by using an encryption program, or at the very minimum, a password.
Gentle reader, welcome to the real world, where DGAS72 is a way of life.
Whether it’s White House memos, State Department cables, or the Pentagon’s most secret mission profiles, materials tend to be stored on computers sans safeguards. People don’t like to have to remember passwords. Indeed, they often write the passwords down and leave ’em in their desks. Or to make things easy for themselves (not to mention folks like me), they simply disable all the built-in security devices and make their computers user (and thief) friendly.
And so, despite my rusty German, it didn’t take me long to find a document that caused Fred’s eyes to go wide in shock. The desktop had an internal Zip drive. I popped the release and looked at the hundred-meg floppy. Two words were written on the label: OPTION DELTA. I slipped the disk into my pocket.
0015. We’d been in the room for what I considered a lifetime for this kind of op. Fred was flipping through files as quickly as he could. I’d found three more labeled disks, which were added to the one in my blouse pocket.
0016. I could see that time was really getting short: Fred checked his watch for the third time in thirty seconds and looked over at me. “We must go, Richard—the chopper starts its approach in three minutes.”
“Jawohl, mein general.” Shit, that was really cutting things close. I stopped what I was doing and started flipping computer switches to off.
0020. Back on the roof. We hunkered in the glow of the huge revolving disk. I heard the big Pave Lows as they swept up the Rhine, their huge engines reverbing off the city’s skyline. And then suddenly there was the Little Bird, flaring just off the northwest edge of the roof, the stabo lines dragging across the rough surface.
I sprinted toward the starboard line. I chased the line down, slipped the hook through my harness, wrapped my hands around the thick nylon, and let the rope take my weight.
Fred went for the port side. And came up holding his Schnüffler73 in his hand. The fucking rope was sliced where I’d cut it to release him as we’d come in.
I shouted, “Halt-halt-halt!” into the mike on my helmet, hoping to hell I hadn’t wrecked the fucking thing during my ground exercises with Herr Lace-Ups in the Damen. I dropped to my feet, hit the release on my harness, and rolled under the chopper skids.
“Fred—here!” I grabbed him by the stabo harness and pulled him starboard. “Pilot—drop one meter, now!”
There is a God. I knew it because the fucking mike was working: the Little Bird eased down a yard. I took all the slack I could, slid the stabo line through Fred’s chest straps, looped it once to secure him in position, then reattached myself to the end of the line.
It was right at that precise instant—when my hand brushed the empty sheath on my web gear—that I realized I’d left my beautiful fucking Taiho knife sitting atop the goddamn file cabinet. But this was no time to do anything about it. I slapped at the rope in frustration. “Raus-raus-raus—get the hell outta here!”
Easier said than done, friends. Let me pause long enough right here to explain one of the basic Roguish laws of physics: it is that every action has an equal and identical reaction.
You want to know what I’m trying to say.
Okay, I will be succinct. With the two of us hanging off opposite sides of the aircraft, the chopper was easily able to maintain its trim. Now, however, Fred and I, combined weight way over four hundred pounds including equipment, were suspended somewhat precariously below the right-hand skid of the small aircraft.
There is a precise, engineer’s technical term to describe our situation according to the laws of aerodynamics. That term is: “Fucked.”
Not that the pilot wouldn’t be able to fly the MH-6 like that. The fucking MH-6 is one of the most stable choppers ever designed. I saw an earlier version of one (designated as the AH-6) hit by ground fire when I was in Panama during the 1989 invasion. I was out of the Navy then, waiting to report to the federal prison camp at Petersburg, Virginia, to serve out my one-year sentence. To make some shekels to pay the lawyer, I took a contract with an unnamed government agency to snatch Manny Noriega’s bagman, an Israeli spook we code-named Ehud. At zero dark hundred on 20 December I hit Ehud’s apartment, but the spook had already skipped, along with a pair of duffel bags that DIA (oops—now you know who hired me) estimated held more than two billion dollars in negotiable bonds. How did Ehud know I was coming after him? Later we discovered he’d been given advance warning by his former colleagues at Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization.
Anyhow, when you lose your primary target, you should always have a secondary in your sights. Mine was a money-launderer named Calderon, who DIA’s analysts wanted to interrogate. And so, through happenstance (which is a polite way of saying Murphy’d fucked me), I ended up half a block away from the Modela prison just as a squad of Delta Force shooters snatched an American prisoner named Muse before Noriega’s goons could execute him.
As the Delta AH-6 lifted off the roof of Modela, the Panamanians shot the hell out of the sturdy little aircraft with everything from M-16s to a fucking RPG. But instead of dropping like a rock the way Blackhawks and Pave Lows tend to do, the Little Bird pilot was able to auto-gyro down. There were a lot of dings suffered, some of them serious. But everyone survived, including the rescued American hostage.
But that doesn’t make an unbalanced craft any easier to fly, especially in the nasty crosscurrents and wind shears you get in urban airspace. Oh, yeah: I could feel the pilot struggle with the controls as I tucked my knees so I’d clear the edge of the roofline. Suffice it to say that the return flight was a lot less pleasurable than the outgoing leg.
0145. We touched down in the Stadtwald just long enough to transfer into one of Fred’s unmarked Pave Lows. Then it was off again, for a twenty-eight-minute flight to KSK headquarters.
By the time my guys and Fred’s backup team arrived, Fred and I were already knee-deep in the intel we’d snatched. The more I saw, the less I liked it. I could take a couple of thousand words here to explain it all to you verbatim. But since there’s not a lot of time for that, lemme give you what I learned in a couple of quick bites.
• Bite One: Lothar’s analysts believed that the time was as ripe as Limburger cheese for a waaay-right-of-center, ultranationalistic Germany to reestablish Kraut political and economic control over the European continent. Their analysis indicated that the Russkies were too weak and fragmented to pose any credible threat to German
y, and that the rest of Europe had historically followed the German lead in matters politicoeconomic.
• Bite Two: the one real threat to this new German hegemony was the United States. But, the analysis went, U.S. attention was currently focused elsewhere and would remain so for the next nine to twelve months. There were domestic diversions (an ongoing scandal in the White House and the presidential and congressional campaigns). And there were foreign policy distractions: continual crises in the Far East (China flexing its muscle, Japan’s saggy-dick economy, and Pakistan and India playing dueling nukes all managed to complicate things). Then there’s the Middle East (Israel and the Palestinians; Iran, Iraq; Syria; Jordan), and a series of new and potentially dangerous crises brewing in the Caspian Sea region (Iranian-sponsored anti-Western activity in the wide swath of oil-rich geography from Tbilisi to Turkmenistan).
But how, you ask (yes, I hear you shouting out there), would Lothar and his allies accomplish their takeover of Germany? It’s a democracy these days, you say, and putsches are not easily accomplished.
You’re right. Good question, too. Here’s the answer. First of all, Germany is still reeling from its reunification. When Ronald Reagan went to Berlin and said, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” I don’t think that people realized that there could be negative ramifications as well as positive ones. But there are. While West Germany prospered in the fifty years after the war, the East was looted by the Soviets and by the Commie bastards like Heinz Hochheizer who kept the people enslaved. And so, the absorption of the vast and out-of-date East German infrastructure has been difficult. Unemployment is still high. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers currently living and working in Germany. Germany is a refuge for Turks, Greeks, Kurds, Romanians, Bulgarians, Croatians—you get the picture. And there is deep-seated resentment against these foreign workers. Enough resentment, in fact, so that more than a few foreigners have been killed here in Deutschland in the past few years.
Option Delta Page 23
