by Tom Clancy
Why the hell had she been taken in by this administration? Carol wondered. The answer was simple and obvious: politics. This president had tried valiantly to avoid such entanglements in his year and a half of holding office. And she was female, whereas the President’s team of insiders was almost entirely male, which had caused some comment in the media and elsewhere, which had befuddled the President in his political innocence, which had amused the press even more and given them a further tool to use, which had worked, after a fashion. And so she had been offered the appointment, and taken it, with the office in the Old Executive Office Building instead of the White House itself, with a secretary and an assistant, and a parking place on West Executive Drive for her fuel-efficient six-year-old Honda—the only Japanese-made car on that particular block, which nobody had said anything about, of course, since she was female, and she’d forgotten more about Washington politics than the President would ever learn. That was astounding when she thought about it, though she warned herself that the President was a notoriously quick learner. But not a good listener, at least as far as she was concerned.
The media let him get away with it. The lesson of that was that the media was nobody’s friend. Lacking convictions of its own, it just published what people said, and so she had to speak, off the record, on deep background, or just casually, to various reporters. Some, those who covered the Environment regularly, at least understood the language, and for the most part could be trusted to write their pieces the proper way, but they always included the other side’s rubbish science—yes, maybe your position has merit, but the science isn’t firm enough yet and the computer models are not accurate enough to justify this sort of action, the other side said. As a result of which, the public’s opinion—as measured in polls—had stagnated, or even reversed a little bit. The President was anything but an Environmental President, but the bastard was getting away with it—at the same time using Carol Brightling as political camouflage, or even political cover! That appalled her . . . or would have under other circumstances. But here she was, Dr. Brightling thought, zipping up her skirt before donning the suit-jacket, a senior advisor to the President of the United States. That meant she saw him a couple of times per week. It meant that he read her position papers and policy recommendations. It meant that she had access to the media’s top-drawer people, free to pursue her own agenda . . . within reason.
But she was the one who paid the price. Always, it was she, Carol thought, reaching down to scratch Jiggs’s ears as she made her way to the door. The cat would pass the day doing whatever it was that he did, mainly sleeping in the sun on the windowsill, probably waiting for his mistress to come home and feed him his Frisky treat. Not for the first time, she thought about stopping by a pet store and getting Jiggs a live mouse to play with and eat. A fascinating process to watch, predator and prey, playing their parts . . . the way the world was supposed to be; the way it had been for unnumbered centuries until the last two or so. Until Man had started changing everything, she thought, starting the car, looking at the cobblestoned street—still real cobbles for this traditional Georgetown address, with streetcar tracks still there, too—and brick buildings which had covered up what had probably been a pretty hardwood forest less than two hundred years before. It was even worse across the river, where only Theodore Roosevelt Island was still in its pristine state—and that was interfered with by the screech of jet engines. A minute later, she was on M Street, then around the circle onto Pennsylvania Avenue. She was ahead of the daily rush-hour traffic, as usual, heading the mile or so down the wide, straight street before she could turn right and find her parking place—they weren’t reserved per se, but everyone had his or her own, and hers was forty yards from the West Entrance—and as a regular, she didn’t have to submit to the dog search. The Secret Service used Belgian Malinois dogs—like brown German shepherds—keen of nose and quick of brain, to sniff at cars for explosives. Her White House pass got her into the compound, then up the steps into the OEOB, and right to her office. It was a cubbyhole, really, but larger than those of her secretary and assistant. On her desk was the Early Bird, with its clips of articles from various national newspapers deemed important to those who worked in this building, along with her copy of Science Weekly, Science, and, today, Scientific American, plus several medical journals. The environmental publications would arrive two days later. She hadn’t yet sat down when her secretary, Margot Evans, came in with the codeword folder on nuclear-weapons policy, which she’d have to review before giving the President advice that he’d reject. The annoying part of that, of course, was that she’d have to think to produce the position paper that the President would not think about before rejecting. But she couldn’t give him an excuse to accept, with great public reluctance, her resignation—rarely did anyone at this level ask to leave per se, though the local media had the mantras down and fully understood. Why not take it a step further than usual, and recommend the closure of the dirty reactor at Hanford, Washington? The only American reactor of the same design as Chernobyl—less a power reactor than one designed to produce plutonium—Pu239—for nuclear weapons, the worst gadget the mind of warlike men had ever produced. There were new problems with Hanford, new leaks from the storage tanks there, discovered before the leakage could pollute ground water, but still a threat to the environment, expensive to fix. The chemical mix in those tanks was horribly corrosive, and lethally toxic, and radioactive . . . and the President wouldn’t listen to that bit of sound advice either.
The science of her objections to Hanford was real, even Red Lowell worried about it—but he wanted a new Hanford built! Even this President wouldn’t countenance that!
With that reassuring thought, Dr. Brightling poured herself a cup of coffee and started reading the Early Bird, while her mind pondered how she’d draft her doomed recommendation to the President.
“So, Mr. Henriksen, who were they?” the morning anchor asked.
“We don’t know much beyond the name of the purported leader, Ernst Model. Model was once part of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the notorious German communist terrorist group from the ’70s and ’80s. He dropped out of sight about ten years ago. It will be interesting to learn exactly where he’s been hiding out.”
“Did you have a file on him during your time with the FBI Hostage Rescue Team?”
A smile to accompany the terse reply. “Oh, yeah. I know the face, but Mr. Model will now transfer to the inactive files.”
“So, was this a terrorist incident or just a bank robbery?”
“No telling as yet from press reports, but I would not entirely discount robbery as a motive. One of the things people forget about terrorists is that they have to eat, too, and you need money to do that. There is ample precedent for supposedly political criminals to break the law just to make money to support themselves. Right here in America, the CSA—the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, as they called themselves—robbed banks to support themselves. Baader-Meinhof in Germany used kidnappings to extort money from their victims’ corporate and family ties.”
“So, to you they’re just criminals?”
A nod, and a serious expression. “Terrorism is a crime. That’s dogma at the FBI, where I came up. And these four who got killed yesterday in Switzerland were criminals. Unfortunately for them, the Swiss police have assembled and trained what appears to be an excellent, professional special-operations team.”
“How would you rate the takedown?”
“Pretty good. The TV coverage shows no errors at all. All the hostages were rescued, and the criminals all were killed. That’s par for the course in an incident like this. In the abstract, you would like to take the criminals down alive if possible, but it is not always possible—the lives of the hostages have absolute priority in a case like this one.”
“But the terrorists, don’t they have rights—”
“As a matter of principle, yes, they do have the same rights as other criminals. We teach that at the FBI, too, a
nd the best thing you can do as a law enforcement officer in a case like this one is to arrest them, put them in front of a judge and jury, and convict them, but remember that the hostages are innocent victims, and their lives are at risk because of the criminals’ actions. Therefore, you try to give them a chance to surrender—really, you try to disarm them if you can.
“But very often you do not have that luxury,” Henriksen went on. “Based on what I saw on TV from this incident, the Swiss police team acted no differently than what we were trained to do at Quantico. You only use deadly force when necessary—but when it’s necessary, you do use it.”
“But who decides when it’s necessary?”
“The commander on the scene makes that decision, based on his training, experience, and expertise.” Then, Henriksen didn’t go on, people like you second-guess the hell out of him for the next couple of weeks.
“Your company trains local police forces in SWAT tactics, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does. We have numerous veterans of the FBI HRT, Delta Force, and other ‘special’ organizations, and we could use this Swiss operation as a textbook example of how it’s done,” Henriksen said—because his was an international corporation, which trained foreign police forces as well, and being nice to the Swiss wouldn’t hurt his bottom line one bit.
“Well, Mr. Henriksen, thanks for joining us this morning. International terrorism expert William Henriksen, CEO of Global Security, Inc., an international consulting firm. It’s twenty-four minutes after the hour.” In the studio, Henriksen kept his calm, professional face on until five seconds after the light on the nearest camera went out. At his corporate headquarters, they would have already taped this interview to add to the vast library of such things. GSI was known over most of the world, and their introductory tape included snippets from many such interviews. The floor director walked him off the set to the makeup room, where the powder was removed, then let him walk himself out to where his car was parked.
That had gone well, he thought, going through the mental checklist. He’d have to find out who’d trained the Swiss. He made a mental note to have one of his contacts chase that one down. If it were a private company, that was serious competition, though it was probably the Swiss army—perhaps even a military formation disguised as policemen—maybe with some technical assistance from the German GSG-9. A couple of phone calls should run that one down.
Popov’s four-engine Airbus A-340 touched down on time at JFK International. You could always trust the Swiss to do everything on time. The police team had probably even had a schedule for the previous night’s activities, he thought whimsically. His first-class seat was close to the door, which allowed him to be the third passenger out, then off to claim his bags and go through the ordeal of U.S. Customs. America, he’d long since learned, was the most difficult country to enter as a foreigner—though with his minimal baggage and nothing-to-declare entry, the process was somewhat easier this time. The customs clerks were kind and waved him right through to the cabstand, where, for the usual exorbitant fee, he engaged a Pakistani driver to take him into town, making him wonder idly if the cabbies had a deal with the customs people. But he was on an expense account—meaning he had to get a receipt—and, besides, he had ensured that day that he could afford such things without one, hadn’t he? He smiled as he gazed at the passing urban sprawl. It got thicker and thicker on the way to Manhattan.
The cab dropped him off at his apartment house. The flat was paid for by his employer, which made it a tax-deductible business expense for them—Popov was learning about American tax law—and free for him. He spent a few minutes dumping his dirty laundry and hanging up his good clothes before heading downstairs and having the doorman flag a cab. From there it was another fifteen minutes to the office.
“So, how did it go?” the boss asked. There was an odd buzz in the office, designed to interfere with any listening devices that a corporate rival might place. Corporate espionage was a major factor in the life of this man’s company, and the defenses against it were at least as good as those the KGB had used. And Popov had once believed that governments had the best of everything. That was certainly not true in America.
“It went much as I expected. They were foolish—really rather amateurish, despite all the training we gave them back in the eighties. I told them to feel free to rob the bank as cover for the real mission—”
“Which was?”
“To be killed,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich replied at once. “At least, that is what I understood your intentions to be, sir.” His words occasioned a smile of a sort Popov wasn’t used to. He made a note to check the stock value of the bank. Had the intention of this “mission” been to affect the standing of the bank? That didn’t seem very likely, but though he didn’t need to know why he was doing these things, his natural curiosity had been aroused. This man was treating him like a mercenary, and though Popov knew that was precisely what he’d become since leaving the service of his country, it was vaguely and distantly annoying to his sense of professionalism. “Will you require further such services?”
“What happened to the money?” the boss wanted to know.
A diffident reply: “I’m sure the Swiss will find a use for it.” Certainly his banker would. “Surely you did not expect me to recover it?”
A shake of the boss’s head. “No, not really, and it was a trivial sum anyway.”
Popov nodded his understanding. Trivial sum? No Soviet-employed agent had ever gotten so much in a single payment—the KGB had always been niggardly in its payments to those whom it gave money, regardless of the importance of the information that had earned it—nor had the KGB ever been so casual in disposing of cash in any amount. Every single ruble had to be accounted for, else the bean-counters at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square would bring down the devil’s own wrath on the field officer who’d been so lax in his operations! The next thing he wondered about was how his employer had laundered the cash. In America if you deposited or withdrew so little as ten thousand dollars in cash, the bank was required to make a written record of it. It was supposedly an inconvenience for drug dealers, but they managed to work with it nevertheless. Did other countries have similar rules? Popov didn’t know. Switzerland did not, he was sure, but that many banknotes didn’t just materialize in a bank’s vaults, did they? Somehow his boss had handled that, and done it well, Popov reminded himself. Perhaps Ernst Model had been an amateur, but this man was not. Something to keep in mind, the former spy told himself in large, red, mental letters.
There followed a few seconds of silence. Then: “Yes, I will require another operation.”
“What, exactly?” Popov asked, and got the answer immediately. “Ah.” A nod. He even used the correct word: operation. How very strange. Dmitriy wondered if he’d be well advised to check up on his employer, to find out more about him. After all, his own life was now in pawn to him—and the reverse was true as well, of course, but the other man’s life was not an immediate concern to Popov. How hard would it be? To one who owned a computer and a modem, it was no longer difficult at all . . . if one had the time. For now, it was clear, he’d have but one night in his apartment before traveling overseas again. Well, it was an easy cure for jet lag.
They looked like robots, Chavez saw, peering around a computer-generated corner. The hostages, too, but in this case the hostages were computer-generated children, all girls in red-and-white striped dresses or jumpers—Ding couldn’t decide which. It was clearly a psychological effect programmed into the system by whoever had set up the parameters for the program, called SWAT 6.3.2. Some California-based outfit had first produced this for Delta Force under a DOD contract overseen by RAND Corporation.
It was expensive to use, mainly because of the electronic suit he wore. It was the same weight as the usual black mission suit—lead sheets sewn into the fabric had seen to that—and everything down to the gloves was filled with copper wires and sensors that told the computer—an old Cray YMP—exactly what his
body was doing, and in turn projected a computer-generated image into the goggles he wore. Dr. Bellow gave the commentary, playing the roles of bad-guy leader and good-guy advisor in this particular game. Ding turned his head and saw Eddie Price right behind him and Hank Patterson and Steve Lincoln across the way at the other simulated corner—robotic figures with numbers on them to let him know who was who.
Chavez pumped his right arm up and down three times, calling for flash-bangs, then peered around the corner one more time—• at his chair, Clark saw the black line appear on the white corner, then hit the 7 key on his computer keyboard—
• bad-guy #4 trained his weapon on the gaggle of schoolgirls—
“Steve! Now!” Chavez ordered.
Lincoln pulled the pin on the flash-bang. It was essentially a grenade simulator, heavy in explosive charge to produce noise and magnesium powder for a blinding flash—simulated for the computer program—and designed to blind and disorient through the ear-shattering blast, which was loud enough to upset the inner ear’s mechanism for balance. That sound, though not quite as bad, came through their earphones as well, along with the white-out of their VR goggles. It still made them jump.
The echo hadn’t even started to fade when Chavez dived into the room, weapon up and zeroing in on Terrorist #1, the supposed enemy leader. Here the computer system was faulty, Chavez thought. The European members of his team didn’t shoot the way the Americans did. They pushed their weapons forward against the double-looped sling, actually extending their H&Ks before firing them. Chavez and the Americans tended to tuck them in close against the shoulder. Ding got his first burst off before his body hit the floor, but the computer system didn’t always score this as a hit—which pissed Ding off greatly. He didn’t ever miss, as a guy named Guttenach had discovered on finding St. Peter in front of him without much in the way of warning. Hitting the floor, Chavez rolled, repeated the burst, and swung the MP-10 for another target. His earphones produced the too-loud report of the shots (the SWAT 6.3.2 program for some reason didn’t allow for suppressed weapons). To his right, Steve Lincoln and Hank Patterson were in the room and shooting at the six terrorists. Their short, controlled bursts rang in his ears, and in his VR goggles, heads exploded into red clouds quite satisfactorily—• but bad guy #5 depressed his trigger, not at the rescuers, but rather at the hostages, which started going down until at least three of the Rainbow shooters took him out at once—
