by Tom Clancy
“It all makes sense, Gus,” Paulson agreed. “But we don’t know. We go with this, then.” That part wasn’t a question.
“Yeah, and fast.”
“Okay.” Paulson turned and looked at the wall. They were using a pilot’s ready room. The cork on the walls, put there for sound-absorption, was also perfect for hanging maps and photos. The trailer, they all saw, was a cheap-o. Only a few windows, and of the two original doors, one had been boarded over. They assumed that the room near the remaining door was occupied by the “bad guys” while the other held the hostage. The one good thing about the case was that their opponents were professionals, and therefore somewhat predictable. They’d do the sensible thing in most cases, unlike common criminals, who only did things that occurred to them at the time.
Paulson switched his gaze to a different photo, then to the topographical map, and started picking his approach route. The high-resolution photographs were a godsend. They showed one man outside, and he was watching the road, the most likely route of approach. He’d walk around some, Paulson thought, but mostly he’d watch the road. So, the observer/ sniper team would approach overland from the other side.
“You think they’re city folks?” he asked Werner.
“Probably.”
“I’ll come in this way. Marty and I can approach to within four hundred yards or so behind this ridge, then come down along here parallel to the trailer.”
“Where’s your spot?”
“There.” Paulson tapped the best of the photos. “I’d say we should bring the machine gun in with us.” He explained why, and everyone nodded.
“One more change,” Werner announced. “We have new Rules of Engagement. If anybody even thinks that the hostage might be in danger, the bad guys go down. Paulson, if there’s one near him when we make the move, you take him down with the first shot, whether he’s got a weapon out or not.”
“Hold it, Gus,” Paulson objected. “There’s sure as hell going to be—”
“The hostage is important, and there is reason to suspect that any attempt to rescue him will result in his death—”
“Somebody’s been watching too many movies,” another team member observed.
“Who?” Paulson asked both quietly and pointedly.
“The President. Director Jacobs was on the phone, too. He’s got it in writing.”
“I don’t like it,” the rifleman said. “They will have somebody in there baby-sitting him, and you want me to blow him away whether he is threatening the hostage or not.”
“That’s exactly right,” Werner agreed. “If you can’t do it, tell me now.”
“I have to know why, Gus.”
“The President called him a priceless national asset. He’s the key man in a project important enough that he briefed the President himself. That’s why they kidnapped him, and the thinking is that if they see that they can’t have him, they won’t want us to have him either. Look at what they’ve done already,” the team leader concluded.
Paulson weighed this for a moment and nodded agreement. He turned to his backup man, Marty, who did the same.
“Okay. We have to go through a window. It’s a two-rifle job.”
Werner moved to a blackboard and sketched out the assault plan in as much detail as he could. The interior arrangement of the trailer was unknown, and much would depend on last-minute intelligence to be gathered on the scene by Paulson’s ten-power gunsight. The details of the plan were no different from a military assault. First of all, Werner established the chain of command—everyone knew it, but it was precisely defined anyway. Next came the composition of the assault teams and their parts of the mission. Doctors and ambulances would be standing by, as would an evidence team. They spent an hour, and still the plan was not as complete as any of them would like, but their training allowed for this. Once committed, the operation would depend on the expertise and judgment of the individual team members, but in the final analysis, such things always did. When they were finished, everyone started moving.
She decided on a small U-Haul van, the same-size vehicle as that used for mini-buses or small business deliveries. A larger truck, she thought, would take too long to fill with the proper boxes. These she picked up an hour later from a business called the Box Barn. It was something she’d never had to do before—all of her information transfers had been done with film cassettes that fitted easily into one’s pocket—but all she’d needed to do was look through the Yellow Pages and make a few calls. She purchased ten shipping crates made with wood edges and plastic-covered cardboard sides, all neatly broken down for easy assembly. The same place sold her labels to indicate what was inside, and polystyrene shipping filler to protect her shipment. The salesperson insisted on the latter. Tania watched as two men loaded her truck, and drove off.
“What do you suppose that is all about?” an agent asked.
“I suppose she wants to take something someplace.” The driver followed her from several hundred yards back while his partner called in agents to talk to the shipping company. The U-Haul van was far easier to track than a Volvo.
Paulson and three other men stepped out of the Chevy Suburban at the far end of a housing development about two thousand yards from the trailer. A child in the front yard stared at the men—two carrying rifles, a third carrying an M-60 machine gun as they walked into the woods. Two police cars stayed there after the Suburban drove off, and officers knocked on doors to tell people not to discuss what they had—or in most cases, hadn’t—seen.
One nice thing about pine trees, Paulson thought one hundred yards into the treeline, was that they dropped needles, not the noisy leaves that coated the western Virginia hills which he trudged every autumn looking for deer. He hadn’t gotten one this year. He’d had two good opportunities, but the bucks he’d seen were smaller than what he preferred to bring home, and he’d decided to leave them for next year while waiting for another chance that had never presented itself.
Paulson was a woodsman, born in Tennessee, who was never happier than when in the back country, making his way quietly through ground decorated with trees and carpeted with the fallen vegetation that covered the untended ground. He led the other three, slowly and carefully, making as little noise as possible—like the revenuers who’d finally convinced his grandfather to discontinue the production of mountain-brewed White Lightning, he thought without smiling. Paulson had never killed anyone in his fifteen years of service. The Hostage Rescue Team had the best-trained snipers in the world, but they’d never actually applied their craft. He himself had come close half a dozen times, but always before, he’d had a reason not to shoot. It would be different today. He was almost certain of that, and that made his mood different. It was one thing to go into a job knowing that a shooting was possible. In the Bureau that chance was always there. You planned for it, always hoping that it would not be necessary—he knew all too well what happened when a cop killed someone, the nightmares, the depression that rarely seemed to appear on TV cop shows. The doc was already flying out, he thought. The Bureau kept a psychiatrist on retainer to help agents through the time after a shooting, because even when you knew that there’d been no choice at all, the human psyche quails before the reality of unnecessary death and punishes the survivor for being alive when his victim is not. That was one price of progress, Paulson thought. It hadn’t always been so, and with criminals in most cases it still wasn’t. That was the difference between one community and the other. But what community did his target belong to? Criminal? No, they’d be trained professionals, patriots after the fashion of their society. People doing a job. Just like me.
He heard a sound. His left hand went up, and all four men dropped behind cover. Something was moving ... over to the left. It kept going left, away from their path. Maybe a kid, he thought, a kid playing in the woods. He waited to be sure it was heading away, then started moving again. The shooter team wore standard military camouflage clothing over their protective gear, the woodland pattern
’s blend of greens and browns. After half an hour, Paulson checked his map.
“Checkpoint One,” he said into his radio.
“Roger,” Werner answered from three miles away. “Any problems?”
“Negative. Ready to move over the first ridge. Should have the objective in sight in fifteen minutes.”
“Roger. Move in.”
“Okay. Out.” Paulson and his team formed line abreast to get to the first ridge. It was a small one, with the second two hundred yards beyond it. From there they’d be able to see the trailer, and now things went very slowly. Paulson handed his rifle to the fourth man. The agent moved forward alone, looking ahead to pick out the path that promised the quietest passage. It was mainly a question of looking where you walked rather than how, after all, something lost on city people who thought a forest floor was an invariably noisy place. Here there were plenty of rocky outcroppings, and he snaked his way among them and reached the second ridge in five minutes of nearly silent travel. Paulson snuggled up next to a tree and pulled out his binoculars—even these were coated with green plastic.
“’Afternoon, folks,” he said to himself. He couldn’t see anyone yet, but the trailer blocked his view of where he expected the outside man to be, and there were also plenty of trees in the way. Paulson searched his immediate surroundings for movement. He took several minutes to watch and listen before waving for his fellow agents to come forward. They took ten minutes. Paulson checked his watch. They’d been in the woods for ninety minutes, and were slightly ahead of schedule.
“Seen anyone?” the other rifleman asked when he came down at Paulson’s side.
“Not yet.”
“Christ, I hope they haven’t moved,” Marty said. “Now what?”
“We’ll move over to the left, then down the gully over there. That’s our spot.” He pointed.
“Just like on the pictures.”
“Everybody ready?” Paulson asked. He decided to wait a minute before setting off, allowing everyone a drink of water. The air was thin and dry here, and throats were getting raspy. They didn’t want anyone to cough. Cough drops, the lead sniper thought. We ought to include those in the gear ...
It took another half hour to get to their perches. Paulson selected a damp spot next to a granite boulder that had been deposited by the last glacier to visit the area. He was about twenty feet above the level of the trailer, about what he wanted for the job, and not quite at a ninety-degree angle to it. He had a direct view of the large window on its back end. If Gregory were there, this was where they expected him to be kept. It was time to find out. Paulson unfolded the bipod legs on his rifle, flipped off the scope covers, and went to work. He grabbed for his radio again, fitting the earpiece. He spoke in a whisper lower than that of the wind in the pine branches over his head.
“This is Paulson. We’re in place, looking now. Will advise.”
“Acknowledged,” the radio replied.
“Jeez,” Marty said first. “There he is. Right side.”
Al Gregory was sitting in an armchair. He had little choice in the matter. His wrists were cuffed in his lap—that concession had been made to his comfort—but his upper arms and lower legs were roped in place. His glasses had been taken away, and every object in the room had a fuzzy edge. That included the one who called himself Bill. They were taking turns guarding him. Bill sat at the far end of the room, just beyond the window. There was an automatic pistol tucked in his belt, but Gregory couldn’t tell the type, merely the unmistakable angular shape.
“What—”
“—will we do with you?” Bill completed the question. “Damned if I know, Major. Some people are interested in what you do for a living, I suppose.”
“I won’t—”
“I’m sure,” Bill said with a smile. “Now, we told you to be quiet or I’ll have to put the gag back. Just relax, kid.”
“What did she say the crates were for?” the agent asked.
“She said that her company was shipping a couple of statues. Some local artist, she said—a show in San Francisco, I think.”
There’s a Soviet consulate in San Francisco, the agent thought at once. But they can’t be doing that ... could they?
“Man-sized crates, you said?”
“You could put two people in the big ones, easy, and a bunch of little ones.”
“How long?”
“You don’t need special tools. Half an hour, tops.”
Half an hour ... ? One of the agents left the room to make a phone call. The information was relayed by radio to Werner.
“Heads up,” the radio earpiece announced. “We got a U-Haul truck—make that a small van—coming in off the main road.”
“We can’t see it from here,” Paulson groused quietly to Marty at his left. One problem with their location was that they couldn’t see all of the trailer, and could only catch glimpses of the road that led to it. The trees were too thick for that. To get a better view meant moving forward, but that meant a risk that they were unwilling to run. The laser rangefinder placed them six hundred and eleven feet from the trailer. The rifles were optimized for two-hundred-yard range, and their camouflage clothing made them invisible, so long as they didn’t move. Even with binoculars, the trees so cluttered the view that there were simply too many things for the human eye to focus on.
He heard the van. Bad muffler, he thought. Then he heard a metal door slam and the squeak of another opening. Voices came next, but though he could tell that people were talking, he couldn’t make out a single word.
“This should be big enough,” Captain Bisyarina told Leonid. “I have two of these and three of the smaller ones. We’ll use these to stack on top.”
“What are we shipping?”
“Statuary. There’s an art show three days from now, and we’re even going to make the crossing at the point nearest to it. If we leave in two hours, we’ll hit the border at about the right time.”
“You’re sure—”
“They search parcels coming north, not going south,” Bisyarina assured him.
“Very well. We’ll assemble the boxes inside. Tell Oleg to come out.”
Bisyarina went inside. Lenny was stationed outside since he knew more about working in the wilderness than the other two officers. While Oleg and Leonid carried the crates inside, she went into the back of the trailer to check on Gregory.
“Hello, Major. Comfortable?”
“I got another one,” Paulson said the moment she came into view. “Female, that’s the one from the photos—the Volvo one,” he said into the radio. “She’s talking to the hostage.”
“Three men now visible,” the radio said next. Another agent had a perch on the far side of the trailer. “They’re carrying crates inside the trailer. Say again, three male subjects. Female subject inside and out of sight.”
“That should be all of the subjects. Tell me about the crates.” Werner stood by the helicopter in a field several miles away, holding a diagram of the trailer.
“They’re broken down, not assembled. I guess they’re going to put ’em together.”
“Four’s all we know about,” Werner said to his men. “And the hostage is there ...”
“That ought to tie up two of them, assembling the crates,” one of the assault team said. “One outside, one with the hostage ... sounds good to me, Gus.”
“Attention, this is Werner. We’re moving. Everybody stand by.” He gestured to the helicopter pilot, who began the engine-start sequence. The HRT leader made his own mental check while his men boarded the helicopter. If the Russians tried to drive him away, his men could try to take them on the move, but that kind of van had windows only for the driver and passenger ... that meant that two or three of them would be out of sight ... and perhaps able to kill the hostage before his men could prevent it. His first instinct was right: They had to go now. The team’s Chevy Suburban with four men pulled onto the main road leading to the site.
Paulson flipped the safety off his
rifle, and Marty did the same. They agreed on what would happen next. Ten feet from them, the machine-gunner and his loader readied their weapon slowly, to mute the metallic sounds of the gun’s action.
“Never goes according to plan,” the number-two rifleman noted quietly.
“That’s why they train us so much.” Paulson had his crosshairs on the target. It wasn’t easy because the glass window reflected much light from the surrounding woods. He could barely make out her head, but it was a woman, and it was someone positively identified as a target. He estimated the wind to be about ten knots from his right. Applied over two hundred yards, that would move his bullet about two inches to the left, and he’d have to allow for that. Even with a ten-power scope, a human head is not a large target at two hundred yards, and Paulson swiveled the rifle slightly to keep her head transfixed on the crosshairs of his sight as she walked about. He wasn’t so much watching his target as the crosshair reticle of the sight itself, keeping it aligned with the target rather than the other way around. The drill he followed was automatic. He controlled his breathing, positioned himself on his elbows, and snugged the rifle in tight.
“Who are you?” Gregory asked.
“Tania Bisyarina.” She walked about to work the stiffness out of her legs.
“Are your orders to kill me?” Tania admired the way he’d asked that. Gregory wasn’t exactly the image of a soldier, but the important part was always hidden from view.
“No, Major. You will be taking a little trip.”
“There’s the truck,” Werner said. Sixty seconds from the road to the trailer. He lifted his radio. “Go go go!” The doors on the helicopter slid back and coiled ropes were readied. Werner crashed his fist down on the pilot’s shoulder hard enough to hurt, but the flyer was too busy to notice. He pushed down on the collective and dove the helicopter toward the trailer, now less than a mile away.
