by Tom Clancy
There were cheers on the street outside as the hostages came out. So, Popov thought, the terrorists he’d recruited were dead fools now. No real surprise there. The Swiss counterterror team had handled the job well, as one would expect of Swiss policemen. One of them came outside and lit a pipe—how very Swiss! Popov thought. The bugger probably climbs mountains for personal entertainment, too. Perhaps he was the leader. A hostage came up to him.
“Danke schön, danke schön!” the bank director said to Eddie Price.
“Bitte sehr, Herr Direktor,” the Brit answered, just about exhausting his knowledge of the German language. He pointed the man off to where the Bern police had the other hostages. They probably needed a loo more than anything else, he thought, as Chavez came out.
“How’d we do, Eddie?”
“Rather well, I should say.” A puff on his pipe. “An easy job, really. They were proper wallies, picking this bank and acting as they did.” He shook his head and took another puff. The IRA were far more formidable than this. Bloody Germans.
Ding didn’t ask what a “wally” was, much less a proper one. With that decided, he pulled his cell phone out and hit speed-dial.
“Clark.”
“Chavez.
“Did you catch it on TV, Mr. C?”
“Getting the replay now, Domingo.”
“We got all four, down for the count. No hostages hurt, except for the one they whacked earlier today. No casualties on the team. So, boss, what do we do now?”
“Fly on home for the debrief, lad. Six, out.”
“Bloody good,” Major Peter Covington said. The TV showed the team gathering up their equipment for the next thirty or so minutes, then they disappeared around the corner. “Your Chavez does seem to know his business—and so much the better his first test was an easy one. Confidence builder.”
They looked over at the computer-generated picture that Noonan had uploaded to them on his cellular phone system. Covington had predicted how the take-down would go, and made no mistakes.
“Any traditions I need to know about?” John asked, settling down, finally, and hugely relieved that there were no unnecessary casualties.
“We take them to the club for a few pints, of course.” Covington was surprised that Clark didn’t know about that one.
Popov was in his car, trying to navigate the streets of Bern before police vehicles blocked everything on their way back to their stations. Left there . . . two traffic lights, right, then through the square and . . . there! Excellent, even a place for him to park. He left his rented Audi on the street right across from the half-baked safe house Model had set up. Defeating the lock was child’s play. Upstairs, to the back, where the lock was just as easily dealt with.
“Wer sind sie?” a voice asked.
“Dmitriy,” Popov replied honestly, one hand in his coat pocket. “Have you been watching the television?”
“Yes, what went wrong?” the voice asked in German, seriously downcast.
“It does not matter now. It is time to leave, my young friend.”
“But my friends—”
“Are dead, and you cannot help them.” He saw the boy in the dark, perhaps twenty years of age, and a devoted friend of the departed fool, Ernst Model. A homosexual relationship, perhaps? If so, it would make things easier for Popov, who had no love for men of that orientation. “Come, get your things. We must leave and leave quickly.” There, there it was, the black-leather-clad suitcase with the D-marks inside. The lad—what was his name? Fabian something? Turned his back and went to get his parka, which the Germans called a Joppe. He never turned back. Popov’s silenced pistol came up and fired once, then again, quite unnecessarily, from three meters away. Making sure the boy was indeed dead, he lifted the suitcase, opened it to verify the contents, and then walked out the door, crossed the street, and drove to his downtown hotel. He had a noon flight back to New York. Before that he had to open a bank account in a city well suited for the task.
The team was quiet on the trip back, having caught the last flight back to England—this one to Heathrow rather than Gatwick. Chavez availed himself of a glass of white wine, again sitting next to Dr. Bellow, who did the same.
“So, how’d we do, doc?”
“Why don’t you tell me, Mr. Chavez,” Bellow responded.
“For me, the stress is bleeding off. No shakes this time,” Ding replied, surprised at the fact that his hand was steady.
“ ‘Shakes’ are entirely normal—the release of stress energy. The body has trouble letting it go and returning to normal. But training attenuates that. And so does a drink,” the physician observed, sipping his own glass of a nice French offering.
“Anything we might have done differently?”
“I don’t think so. Perhaps if we’d gotten involved earlier, we might have prevented or at least postponed the murder of the first hostage, but that’s never really under our control.” Bellow shrugged. “No, what I’m curious about is the motivation of the terrorists in this case.”
“How so?”
“They acted in an ideological way, but their demands were—not ideological. I understand they robbed the bank along the way.”
“Correct.” He and Loiselle had looked at a canvas bag on the bank’s floor. It had been full of notes, perhaps twenty-five pounds of money. That seemed to Chavez an odd way to count money, but it was all he had. Follow-up work by the Swiss police would count it up. The after-action stuff was an intelligence function, supervised by Bill Tawney. “So . . . were they just robbers?”
“Not sure.” Bellow finished off his glass, holding it up then for the stewardess to see and refill. “It doesn’t seem to make much sense at the moment, but that’s not exactly unknown in cases like this. Model was not a very good terrorist. Too much show, and not enough go. Poorly planned, poorly executed.”
“Vicious bastard,” Chavez observed.
“Sociopathic personality—more like a criminal than a terrorist. Those—the good ones, I mean—are usually more judicious.”
“What the hell is a good terrorist?”
“He’s a businessman whose business is killing people to make a political point . . . almost like advertising. They serve a larger purpose, at least in their own minds. They believe in something, but not like kids in catechism class, more like reasoned adults in Bible study. Crummy simile, I suppose, but it’s the best I have at the moment. Long day, Mr. Chavez,” Dr. Bellow concluded, while the stew topped off his glass.
Ding checked his watch. “Sure enough, doc.” And the next part, Bellow didn’t have to tell him, was the need for some sleep. Chavez hit the button to run his seat back and was unconscious in two minutes.
CHAPTER 4
AAR
Chavez and most of the rest of Team-2 woke up when the airliner touched down at Heathrow. The taxi to the gate seemed to last forever, and then they were met by police, who escorted them to the helo-pad for the flight back to Hereford. On the way through the terminal, Chavez caught the headline on an evening tabloid saying that Swiss police had dealt with a robbery-terrorist incident in the Bern Commercial Bank. It was somewhat unsatisfying that others got the credit for his successful mission, but that was the whole point of Rainbow, he reminded himself, and they’d probably get a nice thank-you letter from the Swiss government—which would end up in the confidential file cabinet. The two military choppers landed on their pad, and vans took the troops to their building. It was after eleven at night now, and all the men were tired after a day that had started with the usual PT and ended with real mission stress.
It wasn’t rest time yet, though. On entering the building, they found all the swivel chairs in the bullpen arranged in a circle, with a large-screen TV to one side. Clark, Stanley, and Covington were there. It was time for the after-action review, or AAR.
“Okay, people,” Clark said, as soon as they’d sat down. “Good job. All the bad guys are gone, and no good-guy casualties as part of the action. Okay, what did we do wrong?”
Paddy Connolly stood. “I used too much explosives on the rear door. Had there been a hostage immediately inside, he would have been killed,” the sergeant said honestly. “I assumed that the door frame was stouter than it actually was.” Then he shrugged. “I do not know how to correct for that.”
John thought about that. Connolly was having an attack of over-scrupulous honesty, one sure mark of a good man. He nodded and let it go. “Neither do I. What else?”
It was Tomlinson who spoke next, without standing. “Sir, we need to work on a better way to get used to the flash-bangs. I was pretty wasted when I went through the door. Good thing Louis took the first shot on the inside. Not sure I could have.”
“How about inside?”
“They worked pretty well on the subjects. The one I saw,” Tomlinson said, “was out of it.”
“Could we have taken him alive?” Clark had to ask.
“No, mon general.” This was Sergeant Louis Loiselle, speaking emphatically. “He had his rifle in hand, and it was pointing in the direction of the hostages.” There would be no talk about shooting a gun out of a terrorist’s hands. The assumption was that the terrorist had more than one weapon, and the backup was frequently a fragmentation grenade. Loiselle’s three-round burst into the target’s head was exactly on policy for Rainbow.
“Agreed. Louis, how did you deal with the flash-bangs? You were closer than George was.”
“I have a wife,” the Frenchman replied with a smile. “She screams at me all the time. Actually,” he said, when the tired chuckles subsided, “I had my hand over one ear, the other pressed against my shoulder, and my eyes closed. I also controlled the detonation,” he added. Unlike Tomlinson and the rest, he could anticipate the noise and the flash, which seemed a minor advantage, but a decisive one.
“Any other problems going in?” John asked.
“The usual,” Price said. “Lots of glass on the floor, hinders one’s footing—maybe softer soles on our boots? That would also make our steps quieter.”
Clark nodded, and saw that Stanley made a note.
“Any problems shooting?”
“No.” This was Chavez. “The interior was lighted, and so we didn’t need our NVGs. The bad guys were standing up like good targets. The shots were easy.” Price and Loiselle nodded agreement.
“Riflemen?” Clark asked.
“Couldn’t see shit from my perch,” Johnston said.
“Neither could I,” Weber said. His English was eerily perfect.
“Ding, you sent Price in first. Why?” This was Stanley.
“Eddie’s a better shot, and he has more experience. I trust him a little more than I trust myself—for now,” Chavez added. “It seemed to be a simple mission all the way around. Everyone had the interior layout, and it was an easy one. I split the objective into three areas of responsibility. Two I could see. The third only had one subject in it—that was something of a guess on my part, but all of our information supported it. We had to move in fast because the principal subject, Model, was about to kill a hostage. I saw no reason to allow him to do that,” Chavez concluded.
“Anyone take issue with that?” John asked the assembled group.
“There will be times when one might have to allow a terrorist to kill a hostage,” Dr. Bellow said soberly. “It will not be pleasant, but it will occasionally be necessary.”
“Okay, doc, any observations?”
“John, we need to follow the police investigation of these subjects. Were they terrorists or robbers? We don’t know. I think we need to find out. We were not able to conduct any negotiations. In this case it probably did not matter, but in the future it will. We need more translators to work with. My language skills are not up to what we need, and I need translators who speak my language, good at nuance and stuff.” Clark saw Stanley make a note of that, too. Then he checked his watch.
“Okay. We’ll go over the videotapes tomorrow morning. For now, good job, people. Dismissed.”
Team-2 walked outside into a night that was starting to fog up. Some looked in the direction of the NCO Club, but none headed that way. Chavez walked toward his house. On opening the door, he found Patsy sitting up in front of the TV.
“Hi, honey,” Ding told his wife.
“You okay?”
Chavez managed a smile, lifting his hands and turning around. “No holes or scratches anywhere.”
“It was you on the TV—in Switzerland, I mean?”
“You know I’m not supposed to say.”
“Ding, I’ve known what Daddy does since I was twelve,” Dr. Patricia Chavez, M.D., pointed out. “You know, Secret Agent Man, just like you.”
There was no sense in concealment, was there? “Well, Patsy, yeah, that was me and my team.”
“Who were they—the bad guys, I mean?”
“Maybe terrorists, maybe bank robbers. Not sure,” Chavez said, stripping off his shirt on the way to the bedroom.
Patsy followed him inside. “The TV said they were all killed.”
“Yep.” He took his slacks off and hung them in the closet. “No choice. They were about to kill a hostage when it went down. So . . . we had to go in and stop that from happening.”
“I’m not sure if I like that.”
He looked up at his wife. “I am sure. I don’t like it. Remember that guy when you were in medical school, the leg that got amputated, and you assisted in the surgery? You didn’t like it, did you?”
“No, not at all.” It had been an auto accident, and the leg just too mangled to save.
“That’s life, Patsy. You don’t like all the things you have to do.” With that, Chavez sat down on the bed and tossed his socks at the open-top hamper. Secret Agent Man, he thought. Supposed to have a vodka martini, shaken not stirred, now, but the movies never showed the hero going to bed to get sleep, did they? But who wants to get laid right after killing somebody? That was worth an ironic chuckle, and he lay back on top of the covers. Bond. James Bond. Sure. As soon as he closed his eyes, he saw again the sight-picture from the bank, and relived the moment, bringing his MP-10 to bear, lining up the sights on whoever the hell it was—Guttenach was his name, wasn’t it? He realized he hadn’t checked. Seeing the head right there in the ringed sight, and squeezing off the burst as routinely as zipping his pants after taking a leak. Puff puff puff. That fast, that quiet with the suppresser on the gun, and zap, whoever the hell he was, was dead as yesterday’s fish. He and his three friends hadn’t had much of a chance—in fact, they’d had no chance at all.
But the guy they’d murdered earlier hadn’t had a chance, either, Chavez reminded himself. Some poor unlucky bastard who’d happened to be in the bank, making a deposit, or talking to a loan officer, or maybe just getting change for a haircut. Save your sympathy for that one, Ding told himself. And the doctor Model had been ready to kill was now in his home, probably, with his wife and family, probably half-wasted on booze, or maybe a sedative, probably going through a really bad case of the shakes, probably thinking about spending some time with a shrink friend to help get him through the delayed stress. Probably feeling pretty fucking awful. But you had to be alive to feel something, and that beat the shit out of having his wife and kids sitting in the living room of their house outside Bern, crying their eyes out and asking why daddy wasn’t around anymore.
Yeah. He’d taken a life, but he’d redeemed another. With that thought, he revisited the sight-picture, remembering now the sight of the first round hitting the asshole just forward of the ear, knowing then that he was dead, even before rounds #2 and #3 hit, in a circle of less than two inches across, blowing his brains ten feet the other way, and the body going down like a sack of beans. The way the man’s gun had hit the floor, muzzle angled up, and thankfully it hadn’t gone off and hurt anyone, and the head shots hadn’t caused his fingers to spasm closed and pull the trigger from the grave—a real hazard, he’d learned in training. But still it was unsatisfactory. Better to get them alive and pick their bra
ins for what they knew, and why they acted the way they did. That way you could learn stuff you could use the next time—or, just maybe—go after someone else, the bastard who gave the orders, and fill his ass with ten-millimeter hollowpoints.
The mission hadn’t been perfect, Chavez had to admit to himself, but, ordered in to save a life, he’d saved that life. And that, he decided, would have to do for now. A moment later he felt the bed move as his wife lay beside him. He reached over for her hand, which she moved immediately to her belly. So, the little Chavez was doing some more laps. That, Ding decided, was worth a kiss, which he rolled over to deliver.
Popov, too, was settled into his bed, having knocked back four stiff vodkas while watching the local television news, followed by an editorial panegyric to the efficiency of the local police. As yet they weren’t giving out the identity of the robbers—that was how the crime was being reported, somewhat to Popov’s disappointment, though on reflection he didn’t know why. He’d established his bona fides for his employer . . . and pocketed a considerable sum of money in the bargain. A few more performances like this one and he could live like a king in Russia, or a prince in many other countries. He could know for himself the comfort he’d so often seen and envied while he was a field intelligence officer with the former KGB, wondering then how the hell his country could ever defeat nations which spent billions on amusement in addition to billions more on military hardware, all of which was better than anything his nation had produced—else why would he have so often been tasked to discovering their technical secrets? That was how he’d worked during the last few years of the Cold War, knowing even then who would win and who would lose.
But defection had never been an option. What was the point in selling out his country for a minor stipend and an ordinary job in the West? Freedom? That was the word the West still pretended to worship. What was the good of being able to wander around at liberty when you didn’t have a proper automobile in which to do it? Or a good hotel in which to sleep when one got there? Or the money to buy the food and drink one needed to enjoy life properly? No, his first trip to the West as an “illegal” field officer without a diplomatic cover had been to London, where he’d spent much of his time counting the expensive cars, and the efficient black taxis one took when too lazy to walk—his important movement had been in the “tube,” which was convenient, anonymous, and cheap. But “cheap” was a virtue for which he had little affection. No, capitalism had the singular virtue of rewarding people who had chosen the correct parents, or had been lucky in business. Rewarding them with luxury, convenience, and comfort undreamed of by the czars themselves. And that was what Popov had instantly craved, and wondered even then how he might get it. A nice expensive car—a Mercedes was the one he’d always desired—and a proper large flat close to good restaurants, and money to travel to places where the sand was warm and the sky blue, the better to attract women to his side, as Henry Ford must have done, he was sure. What was the point of having that sort of power without the will to use it?
