by Tom Clancy
“Not as good at close range as at long,” Peter informed his colleague.
“Oh, never used it that way,” Ding had to admit. “But as a practical matter, once we get close, it’s decided. Our people don’t miss many targets.”
“True,” Covington conceded. Just then came the crack of a sniper rifle. Rainbow’s long-riflemen were practicing over on the thousand-yard range, competing to see who could fire the smallest group. The current leader was Homer Johnston, Ding’s Rifle Two-One, an eighth of an inch better than Sam Houston, Covington’s leading long-rifleman, at five hundred yards—at which range either could put ten consecutive shots inside a two-inch circle, which was considerably smaller than the human head both men practiced exploding with their hollow-point match rounds. The fact of the matter was that two misses from any of the Rainbow shooters in a given week of drills was remarkable, and usually explained by tripping on something in the shooting house. The riflemen had yet to miss anything, of course. The problem with their mission wasn’t shooting. It was getting in close enough—more than that, making a well-timed decision to move and take down the subjects, for which they most often depended on Dr. Paul Bellow. The shooting part, which they practiced daily, was the tensest part, to be sure, but also technically and operationally the easiest. It seemed perverse in that respect, but theirs was a perverse business.
“Anything on the threat board?” Covington asked.
“I was just heading over, but I doubt it, Peter.” Whatever bad guys were still thinking about making mischief somewhere in Europe had seen TV coverage of the Bern bank, and that would have calmed them down some, both team leaders thought.
“Very good, Ding. I have some paperwork to do,” Covington said, heading back inside his building. On that cue, Chin tossed his cigar into the smokers’ bucket and did the same.
Chavez continued his walk to the headquarters building, returning the salute of the door guard as he went inside. The Brits sure saluted funny, he thought. Once inside, he found Major Bennett at his desk.
“Hey, Sam,”
“Good morning, Ding. Coffee?” The Air Force officer gestured to his urn.
“No, thanks. Anything happening anywhere?”
A shake of the head. “Quiet day. Not even much in the way of crime.”
Bennett’s primary sources for normal criminal activity were the teleprinters for the various European news services. Experience showed that the services notified those who were interested about illegal activity more quickly than the official channels, which generally sent information via secure fax from the American or British embassies across Europe. With that input source quiet, Bennett was working on his computerized list of known terrorists, shifting through the photos and written summaries of what was positively known about these people (generally not much) and what was suspected (not much more).
“What’s this? Who’s that?” Ding asked, pointing at the computer.
“A new toy we’re using. Got it from the FBI. It ages the subject photos. This one is Petra Dortmund. We only have two photos of her, both almost fifteen years old. So, I’m aging her by fifteen years, playing with hair color, too. Nice thing about women—no beards,” Bennett observed with a chuckle. “And they’re usually too vain to pork up, like our pal Carlos did. This one, check out the eyes.”
“Not a girl I’d try to pick up in a bar,” Chavez observed.
“Probably a bad lay anyway, Domingo,” Clark said from behind. “That’s impressive stuff, Sam.”
“Yes, sir. Just set it up this morning. Noonan got it for me from Headquarters Division Technical Services. They invented it to help ID kidnap victims years after they disappeared. It’s been pretty useful for that. Then somebody figured that if it worked on children growing up, why not try it on grown-up hoods. Helped ’em find a top-ten bank robber earlier this year. Anyhow, here’s what Fräulein Dortmund probably looks like now.”
“What’s the name of her significant other?”
“Hans Fürchtner.” Bennett played with his computer mouse to bring up that photo. “Christ, this must be his high-school yearbook pictorial.” Then he scanned the words accompanying the photo. “Okay, likes to drink beer . . . so, let’s give him another fifteen pounds.” In seconds, the photo changed. “Mustache . . . beard . . .” And then there were four photos for this one.
“These two must get along just great,” Chavez noted, remembering his file on the pair. “Assuming they’re still together.” That started a thought moving, and Chavez walked over to Dr. Bellow’s office.
“Hey, doc.”
Bellow looked up from his computer. “Good morning, Ding. What can I do for you?”
“We were just looking at photos of two bad guys, Petra von Dortmund and Hans Fürchtner. I got a question for you.”
“Shoot,” Bellow replied.
“How likely are people like that to stay together?”
Bellow blinked a little, then leaned back in his chair. “Not a bad question at all. Those two . . . I did the evaluation for their active files. . . . They’re probably still together. Their political ideology is probably a unifying factor, an important part of their commitment to each other. Their belief system is what brought them together in the first place, and in a psychological sense they took their wedding vows when they acted out on it—their terrorist jobs. As I recall, they are suspected to have kidnapped and killed a soldier, among other things, and activity like that creates a strong interpersonal bond.”
“But most of the people, you say, are sociopaths,” Ding objected. “And sociopaths don’t—”
“Been reading my books?” Bellow asked with a smile. “Ever hear the one about how when two people marry they become as one?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So in a case like this, it’s real. They are sociopaths, but ideology gives their deviance an ethos—and that makes it important. Because of that, sharing the ideology makes them one, and their sociopathic tendencies merge. For those two, I would suspect a fairly stable married relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they were formally married, in fact, but probably not in a church,” he added with a smile.
“Stable marriage . . . kids?”
Bellow nodded. “Possible. Abortion is illegal in Germany—the Western part, I think, still. Would they choose to have kids? . . . That’s a good question. I need to think about that.”
“I need to learn more about these people. How they think, how they see the world, that sort of thing.”
Bellow smiled again, rose from his chair, and walked to his bookcase. He took one of his own books and tossed it to Chavez. “Try that for starters. It’s a text at the FBI academy, and it got me over here a few years ago to lecture to the SAS. I guess it got me into this business.”
“Thanks, doc.” Chavez hefted the book for weight and headed out the door. The Enraged Outlook: Inside the Terrorist Mind was the title. It wouldn’t hurt to understand them a little better, though he figured the best thing about the inside of a terrorist’s mind was a 185-grain 10-mm hollow-point bullet entering at high speed.
Popov could not give them a phone number to call. It would have been grossly unprofessional. Even a cellular phone whose ownership had been carefully concealed would give police agencies a paper—even deadlier today, an electronic—trail that they could run down, much to his potential embarrassment. And so he called them every few days at their number. They didn’t know how that was handled, though there were ways to step a long-distance call through multiple instruments.
“I have the money. Are you prepared?”
“Hans is there now, checking things out,” Petra replied. “I expect we can be ready in forty-eight hours. What of your end?”
“All is in readiness. I will call you in two days,” he said, breaking the connection. He walked out of the phone booth at Charles De Gaulle International Airport and headed toward the taxi stand, carrying his attaché case, which was largely full of hundred D-mark banknotes. He found himself impatient
for the currency change in Europe. The equivalent amount of euros would be much easier to obtain than the multiple currencies of Europe.
CHAPTER 7
FINANCE
It was unusual for a European to work out of his home, but Ostermann did. It was large, a former baronial schloss (translated as “castle,” though in this case “palace” would have been more accurate) thirty kilometers outside Vienna. Erwin Ostermann liked the schloss; it was totally in keeping with his stature in the financial community. It was a dwelling of six thousand square meters divided into three floors, on a thousand hectares of land, most of which was the side of a mountain steep enough to afford his own skiing slopes. In the summer, he allowed local farmers to graze their sheep and goats there . . . not unlike what the peasants once indentured to the schloss had done for the Herr, to keep the grass down to a reasonable height. Well, it was far more democratic now, wasn’t it? It even gave him a break on the complex taxes put in place by the left-wing government of his country, and more to the point, it looked good.
His personal car was a Mercedes stretch—two of them, in fact—and a Porsche when he felt adventurous enough to drive himself to the nearby village for drinks and dinner in the outstanding Gasthaus there. He was a tall man, one meter eighty-six centimeters, with regal gray hair and a trim, fit figure that looked good on the back of one of his Arabian horses—you couldn’t live in a home such as this one without horses, of course. Or when holding a business conference in a suit made in Italy or on London’s Savile Row. His office, on the second floor had been the spacious library of the original owner and eight of his descendants, but it was now aglow with computer displays linked to the world’s financial markets and arrayed on the credenza behind a desk.
After a light breakfast, he headed upstairs to his office, where three employees, two female and one male, kept him supplied with coffee, breakfast pastry, and information. The room was large and suitable for entertaining a group of twenty or so. The walnut-paneled walls were covered with bookshelves filled with books that had been conveyed with the schloss, and whose titles Ostermann had never troubled himself to examine. He read the financial papers rather than literature, and in his spare time caught movies in a private screening room in the basement—a former wine-cellar converted to the purpose. All in all, he was a man who lived a comfortable and private life in the most comfortable and private of surroundings. On his desk when he sat down was a list of people to visit him today. Three bankers and two traders like himself, the former to discuss loans for a new business he was underwriting, and the latter to seek his counsel on market trends. It fed Ostermann’s already sizable ego to be consulted on such things, and he welcomed all manner of guests.
Popov stepped off his airliner and walked onto the concourse alone, like any other businessman, carrying his attaché case with its combination lock, and not a single piece of metal inside, lest some magnetometer operator ask him to open it and so reveal the paper currency inside—terrorists had really ruined air travel for everyone, the former KGB officer thought to himself. Were someone to make the baggage-scanners more sophisticated, enough to count money inside carry-on baggage, for example, it would further put a dent in the business affairs of many people, including himself. Traveling by train was so boring.
Their tradecraft was good. Hans was at his designated location, sitting there, reading Der Spiegel and wearing the agreed-upon brown leather jacket, and he saw Dmitriy Arkadeyevich, carrying his black attaché case in his left hand, striding down the concourse with all the other business travelers. Fürchtner finished his coffee and left to follow him, trailing Popov by about twenty meters, angling off to the left so that they took different exits, crossing over to the parking garage by different walkways. Popov allowed his head to turn left and right, caught Hans on the first sweep and observed how he moved. The man had to be tense, Popov knew. Betrayal was how most of the people like Fürchtner got caught, and though Dmitriy was known and trusted by them, you could only be betrayed by someone whom you trusted, a fact known to every covert operator in the world. And though they knew Popov both by sight and reputation, they couldn’t read minds—which, of course, worked quite well for Popov in this case. He allowed himself a quiet smile as he walked into the parking garage, turned left, stopped as though disoriented, and then looked around for any overt signs that he was being followed before finding his bearings and moving on his way. Fürchtner’s car proved to be in a distant corner on the first level, a blue Volkswagen Golf.
“Guten Tag,” he said, on sitting in the right-front seat.
“Good morning, Herr Popov,” Fürchtner replied in English. It was American in character and almost without accent. He must have watched a lot of television, Dmitriy thought.
The Russian dialed the combinations into the locks of the case, opened the lid, and placed it in his host’s lap. “You should find everything in order.”
“Bulky,” the man observed.
“It is a sizable sum,” Popov agreed.
Just then suspicion appeared in Fürchtner’s eyes. That surprised the Russian, until he thought about it for a moment. The KGB had never been lavish in their payments to their agents, but in this attaché case was enough cash to enable two people to live comfortably in any of several African countries for a period of some years. Hans was just realizing that, Dmitriy saw, and while part of the German was content just to take the money, the smart portion of his brain suddenly wondered where the money had come from. Better not to wait for the question, Dmitriy thought.
“Ah, yes,” Popov said quietly. “As you know, many of my colleagues have outwardly turned capitalist in order to survive in my country’s new political environment. But we are still the Sword and Shield of the Party, my young friend. That has not changed. It is ironic, I grant you, that now we are better able to compensate our friends for their services. It turns out to be less expensive than maintaining the safe houses which you once enjoyed. I personally find that amusing. In any case, here is your payment, in cash, in advance, in the amount you specified.”
“Danke,” Hans Fürchtner observed, staring down into the attaché case’s ten centimeters of depth. Then he hefted the case. “It’s heavy.”
“True,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich agreed. “But it could be worse. I might have paid you in gold,” he joked, to lighten the moment, then decided to make his own play. “Too heavy to carry on the mission?”
“It is a complication, Iosef Andreyevich.”
“Well, I can hold the money for you and come to you to deliver it upon the completion of your mission. That is your choice, though I do not recommend it.”
“Why is that?” Hans asked.
“Honestly, it makes me nervous to travel with so much cash. The West, well, what if I am robbed? This money is my responsibility,” he replied theatrically.
Fürchtner found that very amusing. “Here, in Österreich, robbed on the street? My friend, these capitalist sheep are very closely regulated.”
“Besides, I do not even know where you will be going, and I really do not need to know—at this time, anyway.”
“The Central African Republic is our ultimate destination. We have a friend there who graduated Patrice Lumumba University back in the sixties. He trades in arms to progressive elements. He will put us up for a while, until Petra and I can find suitable housing.”
They were either very brave or very foolish to go to that country, Popov thought. Not so long before it had been called the Central African Empire, and had been ruled by “Emperor Bokassa I,” a former colonel in the French colonial army, which had once garrisoned this small, poor nation. Bokassa had killed his way to the top, as had so many African chiefs of state, before dying, remarkably enough, of natural causes—so the papers said, anyway; you could never really be sure, could you? The country he’d left behind, a small diamond producer, was somewhat better off economically than was the norm on the dark continent, though not by much. But then, who was to say that Hans and Petra would ever get
there?
“Well, my friend, it is your decision,” Popov said, patting the attaché case still open in Fürchtner’s lap.
The German considered that for half a minute or so. “I have seen the money,” he concluded, to his guest’s utter delight. Fürchtner lifted a thousand-note packet of the cash and riffled it like a deck of cards before putting it back. Next he scribbled a note and placed it inside the case. “There is the name. We will be with him starting . . . late tomorrow, I imagine. All is ready on your end?”
“The American aircraft carrier is in the eastern Mediterranean. Libya will allow your aircraft to pass without interference, but will not allow overflights of any NATO aircraft following you. Instead, their air force will provide the coverage and will lose you due to adverse weather conditions. I will advise you not to use more violence than is necessary. Press and diplomatic pressure has more strength today than it once did.”
“We have thought that one through,” Hans assured his guest.
Popov wondered briefly about that. But he’d be surprised if they even boarded an aircraft, much less got it to Africa. The problem with “missions” like this one was that no matter how carefully most of its parts had been considered, this chain was decidedly no stronger than its weakest link, and the strength of that link was all too often determined by others, or by chance, which was even worse. Hans and Petra were believers in their political philosophy, and like earlier people who’d believed so much in their religious faith so as to take the most absurd of chances, they would pretend to plan this “mission” through with their limited resources—and when you got down to it, their only resource was their willingness to apply violence to the world; and lots of people had that—and substitute hope for expectations, belief for knowledge. They would accept random chance, one of their deadliest enemies, as a neutral element, when a true professional would have sought to eliminate it entirely.
