Jack Ryan Books 7-12

by Tom Clancy

  And so their belief structure was really a blindfold, or perhaps a set of blinkers, which denied the two Germans the ability to look objectively at a world that had passed them by, and to which they were unwilling to adapt. But for Popov the real meaning of this was their willingness to let him hold the money. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich had adapted himself quite well to changing circumstances.

  “Are you sure, my young friend?”

  “Ja, I am sure.” Fürchtner closed the case, reset the locks, and passed it over to Popov’s lap. The Russian accepted the responsibility with proper gravity.

  “I will guard this carefully.” All the way to my bank in Bern. Then he extended his hand. “Good luck, and please be careful.”

  “Danke. We will get you the information you require.”

  “My employer needs that badly, Hans. We depend on you.” Dmitriy left the car and walked back in the direction of the terminal, where he’d get a taxi to his hotel. He wondered when Hans and Petra would make their move. Perhaps today? Were they that precipitous? No, he thought, they would say that they were that professional. The young fools.

  Sergeant First Class Homer Johnston extracted the bolt from his rifle, which he lifted to examine the bore. The ten shots had dirtied it some, but not much, and there was no erosion damage that he could see in the throat forward of the chamber. None was to be expected until he’d fired a thousand or so rounds, and he’d only put five hundred forty through it to this point. Still, in another week or so he’d have to start using a fiber-optic instrument to check, because the 7-mm Remington Magnum cartridge did develop high temperatures when fired, and the excessive heat burned up barrels a little faster than he would have preferred. In a few months, he’d have to replace the barrel, a tedious and fairly difficult exercise even for a skilled armorer, which he was. The difficulty was in matching the barrel perfectly with the receiver, which would then require fifty or so rounds on the known-distance range to make sure that it delivered its rounds as accurately as it was intended to do. But that was in the future. Johnston sprayed a moderate amount of Break-Free onto the cleaning patch and ran it through the barrel, back to front. The patch came out dirty. He removed it from the cleaning rod, then put a new one on the tip, and repeated the motion six times until the last patch came through totally clean. A final clean patch dried the bore of the select-grade Hart barrel, though the Break-Free cleaning solvent left a thin—not much more than a molecule’s thickness—coating of silicon on the steel, which protected against corrosion without altering the microscopic tolerances of the barrel. Finished and satisfied, he replaced the bolt, closing it on an empty chamber with the final act of pulling the trigger, which de-cocked the rifle as it dropped the bolt into proper position.

  He loved the rifle, though somewhat surprisingly he hadn’t named it. Built by the same technicians who made sniper rifles for the United States Secret Service, it was a 7-mm Remington Magnum caliber, with a Remington match-quality receiver, a select-grade Hart barrel, and Leupold ten-power Gold Ring telescopic sight, all married to an ugly Kevlar stock—wood would have been much prettier, but wood warped over time, whereas Kevlar was dead, chemically inert, unaffected by moisture or time. Johnston had just proven, again, that his rifle could fire at about one quarter of a minute of angle’s accuracy, meaning that he could fire three consecutive rounds inside the diameter of a nickel at one hundred yards. Someday somebody might design a laser weapon, Johnston thought, and maybe that could improve on the accuracy of this handmade rifle. But nothing else could. At a range of one thousand yards, he could put three consecutive rounds into a circle of four inches—that required more than a rifle. That meant gauging the wind for speed and direction to compensate for drift-deflection. It also meant controlling his breathing and the way his finger touched the two-and-a-half-pound double-set trigger. His cleanup tasks done, Johnston lifted the rifle and carried it to its place in the gun vault, which was climate-controlled, and nestled it where it belonged before going back to the bullpen. The target he’d shot was on his desk.

  Homer Johnston lifted it. He’d shot three rounds at 400 meters, three at 500, two at 700, and his last two at 900. All ten were inside the head-shape of the silhouette target, meaning that all ten would have been instantly fatal to a human target. He shot only cartridges that he’d loaded himself: Sierra 175-grain hollow-point boat-tailed match bullets traveling in front of 63.5 grains of IMR 4350 smokeless powder seemed to be the best combination for that particular rifle, taking 1.7 seconds to reach a target 1,000 yards downrange. That was an awfully long time, especially against a moving target, Sergeant Johnston thought, but it couldn’t be helped. A hand came down on his shoulder.

  “Homer,” a familiar voice said.

  “Yeah, Dieter,” Johnston said, without looking up from the target. He was in the zone, all the way in. Shame it wasn’t hunting season.

  “You did better than me today. The wind was good for you.” It was Weber’s favorite excuse. He knew guns pretty well for a European, Homer thought, but guns were American things, and that was that.

  “I keep telling you, that semiautomatic action doesn’t headspace properly.” Both of Weber’s 900-meter rounds were marginal. They would have incapacitated the target, but not definitely killed it, even though they scored as hits. Johnston was the best rifle in Rainbow, even better than Houston, by about half a cunt hair on a good day, Homer admitted to himself.

  “I like to get my second round off more quickly than you,” Weber pointed out. And that was the end of the argument. Soldiers were as loyal to their firearms as they were to their religions. The German was far better in rate of fire with his golliwog Walther sniper rifle, but that weapon didn’t have the inherent accuracy of a bolt-action and also fired a less-speedy cartridge. The two riflemen had debated the point over many a beer already, and neither would ever move the other.

  In any case, Weber patted his holster. “Some pistol, Homer?”

  “Yeah.” Johnston stood. “Why not?” Handguns were not serious weapons for serious work, but they were fun, and the rounds were free here. Weber had him faded in handguns by about one percent or so. On the way to the range, they passed Chavez, Price and the rest, coming out with their MP-10s, joking with one another as they passed. Evidently everyone had had a good morning on the range.

  “Ach,” Weber snorted, “anyone can shoot at five meters!”

  “Morning, Robert,” Homer said to the rangemaster. “Want to set up some Qs for us?”

  “Quite so, Sergeant Johnston,” Dave Woods replied, grabbing two of the American-style targets—called “Q targets” for the letter Q in the middle, about where the heart would be. Then he got a third for himself. A lavishly mustached color sergeant in the British Army military police regiment, he was pretty damned good with a 9-mm Browning. The targets motored down to the ten-meter line and turned sideways while the three sergeants donned their ear-protectors. Woods was, technically, a pistol instructor, but the quality of the men at Hereford made that a dull job, and as a result he himself fired close to a thousand rounds per week, perfecting his own skills. He was known to shoot with the men of Rainbow, and to challenge them to friendly competition, which, to the dismay of the shooters, was almost a break-even proposition. Woods was a traditionalist and held his pistol in one hand, as Weber did, though Johnston preferred the two-hand Weaver stance. The targets turned without warning, and three handguns came up to address them.

  The home of Erwin Ostermann was magnificent, Hans Fürchtner thought for the tenth time, just the sort of thing for an arrogant class-enemy. Their research into the target hadn’t revealed any aristocratic lineage for the current owner of this schloss, but he doubtless thought of himself in those terms. For now, Hans thought, as he turned onto the two-kilometer driveway of brown gravel and drove past the manicured gardens and bushes arranged with geometric precision by workers who were at the moment nowhere to be seen. Pulling up close to the palace, he stopped the rented Mercedes and turned right, as though look
ing for a parking place. Coming around the rear of the building, he saw the Sikorsky S-76B helicopter they’d be using later, sitting on the usual asphalt pad with a yellow circle painted on it. Good. Fürchtner continued the circuit around the schloss and parked in front, about fifty meters from the main entrance.

  “Are you ready, Petra?”

  “Ja” was her terse, tense reply. It had been years since either had run an operation, and the immediate reality of it was different from the planning they’d spent a week to accomplish, going over charts and diagrams. There were things they did not yet know for certain, like the exact number of servants in the building. They started walking to the front door when a delivery truck came up, arriving there just as they did. The truck doors opened, and two men got out, both carrying large boxes in their arms. One waved to Hans and Petra to go up the stone steps, which they did. Hans hit the button, and a moment later the door opened.

  “Guten Tag,” Hans said. “We have an appointment with Herr Ostermann.”

  “Your name?”

  “Bauer,” Fürchtner said. “Hans Bauer.”

  “Flower delivery,” one of the other two men said.

  “Please come in. I will call Herr Ostermann,” the butler—whatever he was—said.

  “Danke,” Fürchtner replied, waving for Petra to precede him through the ornate door. The deliverymen came in behind, carrying their boxes. The butler closed the door, then turned to walk left toward a phone. He lifted it and started to punch a button. Then he stopped.

  “Why don’t you take us upstairs?” Petra asked. There was a pistol in her hand aimed right into his face.

  “What is this?”

  “This,” Petra Dortmund replied with a warm smile, “is my appointment.” It was a Walther P-38 automatic pistol.

  The butler swallowed hard as he saw the deliverymen open their boxes and reveal light submachine guns, which they loaded in front of him. Then one of them opened the front door and waved. In seconds, two more young men entered, both similarly armed.

  Fürchtner ignored the new arrivals, and took a few steps to look around. They were in the large entrance foyer, its high, four-meter walls covered with artwork. Late Renaissance, he thought, noteworthy artists, but not true masters, large paintings of domestic scenes in gilt frames, which were in their way more impressive than the paintings themselves. The floor was white marble with black-diamond inserts at the joins, the furniture also largely gilt and French-looking. More to the point, there were no other servants in view, though he could hear a distant vacuum cleaner working. Fürchtner pointed to the two most recent arrivals and pointed them west on the first floor. The kitchen was that way, and there would doubtless be people there to control.

  “Where is Herr Ostermann?” Petra asked next.

  “He is not here, he—”

  This occasioned a movement of her pistol, right against his mouth. “His automobiles and helicopter are here. Now, tell us where he is.”

  “In the library, upstairs.”

  “Gut. Take us there,” she ordered. The butler looked into her eyes for the first time and found them far more intimidating than the pistol in her hand. He nodded and turned toward the main staircase.

  This, too, was gilt, with a rich red carpet held in place with brass bars, sweeping on an elegant curve to the right as they climbed to the second floor. Ostermann was a wealthy man, a quintessential capitalist who’d made his fortune trading shares in various industrial concerns, never taking ownership in one, a string-puller, Petra Dortmund thought, a Spinne, a spider, and this was the center of his web, and they’d entered it of their own accord, and here the spider would learn a few things about webs and traps.

  More paintings on the staircase, she saw, far larger than anything she’d ever done, paintings of men, probably the men who’d built and lived in this massive edifice, this monument to greed and exploitation . . . she already hated its owner who lived so well, so opulently, so publicly proclaiming that he was better than everyone else while he built up his wealth and exploited the ordinary workers. At the top of the staircase was a huge oil portrait of the Emperor Franz Josef himself, the last of his wretched line, who’d died just a few years before the even more hated Romanovs. The butler, this worker for the evil one, turned right, leading them down a wide hall into a doorless room. Three people were there, a man and two women, better dressed than the butler, all working away at computers.

  “This is Herr Bauer,” the butler said in a shaky voice. “He wishes to see Herr Ostermann.”

  “You have an appointment?” the senior secretary asked.

  “You will take us in now,” Petra announced. Then the gun came into view, and the three people in the anteroom stopped what they were doing and looked at the intruders with open mouths and pale faces.

  Ostermann’s home was several hundred years old, but not entirely a thing of the past. The male secretary—in America he would have been called an executive assistant—was named Gerhardt Dengler. Under the edge of his desk was an alarm button. He thumbed this hard and long while he stared at the visitors. The wire led to the schloss’s central alarm panel, and from there to the alarm company. Twenty kilometers away, the employees at the central station responded to the buzzer and flashing light by immediately calling the office of the Staatspolizei. Then one of them called the schloss for confirmation.

  “May I answer it?” Gerhardt asked Petra, who seemed to him to be in charge. He got a nod and lifted the receiver.

  “Herr Ostermann’s office.”

  “Hier ist Traudl,” the alarm company’s secretary said.

  “Guten Tag, Traudl. Hier ist Gerhardt,” the executive assistant said. “Have you called about the horse?” That was the phrase for serious trouble, called a duress code.

  “Yes, when is the foal due?” she asked, carrying on to protect the man on the other end, should someone be listening in on the line.

  “A few more weeks, still. We will tell you when the time comes,” he told her brusquely, staring at Petra and her pistol.

  “Danke, Gerhardt. Auf Wiederhören.” With that, she hung up and waved to her watch supervisor.

  “It is about the horses,” he explained to Petra. “We have a mare in foal and—”

  “Silence,” Petra said quietly, waving for Hans to approach the double doors into Ostermann’s office. So far, she thought, so good. There was even some cause for amusement. Ostermann was right through those double doors, doing the work he did as though things were entirely normal, when they decidedly were not. Well, now it was time for him to find out. She pointed to the executive assistant. “Your name is? . . .”

  “Dengler,” the man replied. “Gerhardt Dengler.”

  “Take us in, Herr Dengler,” she suggested, in a strangely childlike voice.

  Gerhardt rose from his desk and walked slowly to the double doors, head down, his movements wooden, as though his knees were artificial. Guns did that to people, Dortmund and Fürchtner knew. The secretary turned the knobs and pushed, revealing Ostermann’s office.

  The desk was huge, gilt like everything else in the building, and sat on a huge red wool rug. Erwin Ostermann had his back to them, head down examining some computer display or other.

  “Herr Ostermann?” Dengler said.

  “Yes, Gerhardt?” was the reply, delivered in an even voice, and when there was no response, the man turned in his swivel chair—

  —“What is this?” he asked, his blue eyes going very wide when he saw the visitors, and then wider still when he saw the guns. “Who—”

  “We are commanders of the Red Workers’ Faction,” Fürchtner informed the trader. “And you are our prisoner.”

  “But—what is this?”

  “You and we will be taking a trip. If you behave yourself, you will come to no harm. If you do not, you and others will be killed. Is that clear?” Petra asked. To make sure it was, she again aimed her pistol at Dengler’s head.

  What followed then could have been scripted in a movie
. Ostermann’s head snapped left and right, looking for something, probably help of some sort, which was not to be seen. Then he looked back at Hans and Petra and his face contorted itself into shock and disbelief. This could not be happening to him. Not here, not in his own office. Next came the outraged denial of the facts he could see before him . . . and then, finally, came fear. The process lasted five or six seconds. It was always the same. She’d seen it before, and realized that she’d forgotten how pleasurable it was to behold. Ostermann’s hands balled into fists on the leather surface of his desk, then relaxed as his body realized how powerless it was. Trembling would start soon, depending on how much courage he might have. Petra didn’t anticipate a great deal of that. He looked tall, even sitting down, thin—regal, even, in his white shirt with the starched collar and striped tie. The suit was clearly expensive, Italian silk, probably, finely tailored just for him. Under the desk would be custom-made shoes, polished by a servant. Behind him she could see lines of data marching upward on the computer screens. Here Ostermann was, in the center of his web, and scarcely a minute before he’d been totally at ease, feeling himself invincible, master of his fate, moving money around the world, adding to his fortune. Well, no more of that for a while—probably forever, though Petra had no intention of telling him that until the last possible second, the better to see the shock and terror on his regal face just before the eyes went blank and empty.

  She had forgotten how it was, Petra realized, the sheer joy of the power she held in her hands. How had she ever gone so long without exercising it?

  The first police car to arrive on the scene had been only five kilometers away on getting the radio call. Reversing direction and racing to the schloss had only taken three minutes, and now it parked behind a tree, almost totally concealed from the house.