Jack Ryan Books 7-12

by Tom Clancy

  “Ja! That is the one! And her partner is Hans Fürchtner,” Weber replied. “Komm raus, Petra,” he went on in his native language. “Komm mir, Liebchen.”

  Something was bothering her. It turned out to be difficult just to walk out of the Schloss onto the open rear lawn, though she could plainly see the helicopter with its blinking lights and turning rotor. She took a step or started to, her foot not wanting to make the move out and downward onto the granite steps, her blue eyes screwed up, because the trees east and west of the Schloss were lit so brightly by the lights on the far side of the house, with the shadow stretching out to the helicopter like a black finger, and maybe the thing that discomforted her was the deathlike image before her. Then she shook her head, disposing of the thought as some undignified superstition. She yanked at her two hostages and made her way down the six steps to the grass, then outward toward the waiting aircraft.

  “You sure of the ID, Dieter?” Chavez asked.

  “Ja, yes, I am, sir. Petra Dortmund.”

  Next to Chavez, Dr. Bellow queried the name on his laptop. “Age forty-four, ex-Baader-Meinhof, very ideological, and the word on her is that she’s ruthless as hell. That’s ten-year-old information. Looks like it hasn’t changed very much. Partner was one Hans Fürchtner. They’re supposed to be married, in love, whatever, and very compatible personalities. They’re killers, Ding.”

  “For the moment, they are,” Chavez responded, watching the three figures cross the grass.

  “She has a grenade in one hand, looks like a frag,” Homer Johnston said next. “Left hand, say again left.”

  “Confirmed,” Weber chimed in. “I see the hand grenade. Pin is in. I repeat, pin is in.”

  “Great!” Eddie Price snarled over the radio. Fürstenfeldbrück all bloody over again, he thought, strapped into the helicopter, which would be holding the grenade and the fool who might pull the bloody pin. “This is Price. Just one grenade?”

  “I only see the one,” Johnston replied, “no bulges in her pockets or anything, Eddie. Pistol in her right hand, grenade in her left.”

  “I agree,” Weber said.

  “She’s right-handed,” Bellow told them over his radio circuit, after checking the known data on Petra Dortmund. “Subject Dortmund is right-handed.”

  Which explains why the pistol is there and the grenade in her left, Price told himself. It also meant that if she decided to throw the grenade properly, she’d have to switch hands. Some good news, he thought. Maybe it’s been a long time since she played with one of the damned things. Maybe she was even afraid of things that went bang, his mind added hopefully. Some people just carried the damned things for visual effect. He could see her now, walking at an even pace toward the helicopter.

  “Male subject in view—Fürchtner,” Johnston said over the radio. “He has Big Man with him . . . and Brownie also, I think.”

  “Agree,” Weber said, staring through his ten-power sight. “Subject Fürchtner, Big Man, and Brownie are in sight. Fürchtner appears to be armed with pistol only. Starting down the steps now. Another subject at the door, armed with submachine gun, two hostages with him.”

  “They’re being smart,” Chavez observed. “Coming in groups. Our pal started down when his babe was halfway . . . we’ll see if the rest do that . . .” Okay, Ding thought. Four, maybe five, groups traversing the open ground. Clever bastards, but not clever enough . . . maybe.

  As they approached the chopper, Price got out and opened both side doors for loading. He’d already stashed his pistol in the map pocket of the left-side copilot’s door. He gave the pilot a look.

  “Just act normally. The situation is under control.”

  “If you say so, Englishman,” the pilot responded, with a rough, tense voice.

  “The aircraft does not leave the ground under any circumstances. Do you understand?” They’d covered that before, but repetition of instructions was the way you survived in a situation like this.

  “Yes. If they force me, I will roll it to your side and scream malfunction.”

  Bloody decent of you, Price thought. He was wearing a blue shirt with wings pinned on above the breast pocket and a name tag that announced his name as Tony. A wireless earpiece gave him the radio link to the rest of the team, along with a microphone chip inside his collar.

  “Sixty meters away, not a very attractive woman, is she?” he asked his teammates.

  “Brush your hair if you can hear me,” Chavez told him from his position. A moment later, he saw Price’s left hand go up nervously to push his hair back from his eyes. “Okay, Eddie. Stay cool, man.”

  “Armed subject at the door with three hostages,” Weber called. “No, no, two armed subjects with three hostages. Hostage Blondie is with this one. Old man and middle-aged woman, all dressed as servants.”

  “At least one more bad guy,” Ding breathed, and at least three more hostages to come. “Helicopter can’t carry all of them . . .” What were they planning to do with the extras? he wondered. Kill them?

  “I see two more armed subjects and three hostages inside the back door,” Johnston reported.

  “That’s all the hostages,” Noonan said. “Total of six subjects, then. How are they armed, Rifle One?”

  “Submachine guns, look like Uzis or the Czech copy of it. They are leaning toward the door now.”

  “Okay, I got it,” Chavez said, holding his own binoculars. “Riflemen, take aim on subject Dortmund.”

  “On target,” Weber managed to say first. Johnston swiveled to take aim a fraction of a second later, and then he froze still.

  The human eye is especially sensitive to movement at night. When Johnston moved clockwise to adjust the aim of his rifle, Petra Dortmund thought she might have seen something. It stopped her in her tracks, though she didn’t know what it was that had stopped her. She stared right at Johnston, but the ghillie suit just looked like a clump of something, grass, leaves, or dirt, she couldn’t tell in the semidarkness of green light reflecting off the pine trees. There was no man-shape to it, and the outline of the rifle was lost in the clutter well over a hundred meters away from her. Even so, she continued to look, without moving her gun hand, a look of curiosity on her face, not even visible alarm. Through Johnston’s gunsight, the sergeant’s open left eye could see the red strobe flashes from the helicopter’s flying lights blinking on the ground around him while the right eye saw the crosshair reticle centered just above and between Petra Dortmund’s eyes. His finger was on the trigger now, just barely enough to feel it there, about as much as one could do with so light a trigger pull. The moment lasted into several seconds, and his peripheral vision watched her gun hand most of all. If it moved too much, then . . .

  But it didn’t. She resumed walking to the helicopter, to Johnston’s relief, not knowing that two sniper rifles followed her head every centimeter of the way. The next important part came when she got to the chopper. If she went around the right side, Johnston would lose her, leaving her to Weber’s rifle alone. If she went left, then Dieter would lose her to his rifle alone. She seemed to be favoring . . . yes, Dortmund walked to the left side of the aircraft.

  “Rifle Two-Two off target,” Weber reported at once. “I have no shot at this time.”

  “On target, Rifle Two-One is on target,” Johnston assured Chavez. Hmm, let Little Man in first, honey, he thought as loudly as he could.

  Petra Dortmund did just that, pushing Dengler in the left-side door ahead of her, probably figuring to sit in the middle herself, so as to be less vulnerable to a shot from outside. A good theoretical call, Homer Johnston thought, but off the mark in this case. Tough luck, bitch.

  The comfort of the familiar surroundings of the helicopter was lost on Gerhard Dengler at the moment. He strapped himself in under the aim of Petra’s pistol, commanding himself to relax and be brave, as men did at such a time. Then he looked forward and felt hope. The pilot was the usual man, but the copilot was not. Whoever he was, he was fiddling with instruments as the
flight crew did, but it wasn’t him, though the shape of head and hair color were much the same, and both wore the white shirts with blue epaulets that private pilots tended to adopt as their uniforms. Their eyes met, and Dengler looked down and out of the aircraft, afraid that he’d give something away.

  Goodman, Eddie Price thought. His pistol was in the map pocket in the left-side door of the aircraft, well-hidden under a pile of flight charts, but easy to reach with his left hand. He’d get it, then turn quickly, bring it up and fire if it came to that. Hidden in his left ear, the radio receiver, which looked like a hearing aid if one saw it, kept him posted, though it was a little hard to hear over the engine and rotor sounds of the Sikorsky. Now Petra’s pistol was aimed at himself, or the pilot, as she moved it back and forth.

  “Riflemen, do you have your targets?” Chavez asked.

  “Rifle Two-One, affirmative, target in sight.”

  “Rifle Two-Two, negative, I have something in the way. Recommend switch to subject Fürchtner.”

  “Okay, Rifle Two-Two, switch to Fürchtner. Rifle Two-One, Dortmund is all yours.”

  “Roger that, lead,” Johnston confirmed. “Rifle Two-One has subject Dortmund all dialed in.” The sergeant re-shot the range with his laser. One hundred forty-four meters. At this range, his bullet would drop less than an inch from the muzzle, and his “battle-sight” setting of two hundred fifty meters was a little high. He altered his crosshairs hold to just below the target’s left eye. Physics would do the rest. His rifle had target-type double-set triggers. Pulling the rear trigger reduced the break-pull on the front one to a hard wish, and he was already making that wish. The helicopter would not be allowed to take off. Of more immediate concern, they couldn’t allow the subjects to close the left-side door. His 7-mm match bullet would probably penetrate the polycarbonate window in the door, but the passage would deflect his round unpredictably, maybe causing a miss, perhaps causing the death or wounding of a hostage. He couldn’t let that happen.

  Chavez was well out of the action now, commanding instead of leading, something he’d practiced but didn’t like very much. It was easier to be there with a gun in your hands than to stand back and tell people what to do by remote control. But he had no choice. Okay, he thought, we have Number One in the chopper and a gun on her. Number Two was in the open, two-thirds of the way to the chopper, and a gun on him. Two more bad guys were approaching the halfway point, with Mike Pierce and Steve Lincoln within forty meters, and the last two subjects still in the house, with Louis Loiselle and George Tomlinson in the bushes right and left of them. Unless the bad guys had set up overwatch in the house, one or more additional subjects to come out after the rest had made it to the chopper . . . very unlikely, Chavez decided, and in any case all the hostages were either in the open or soon would be—and rescuing them was the mission, not necessarily killing the bad guys, he reminded himself. It wasn’t a game and it wasn’t a sport, and his plan, already briefed to Team- 2’s members, was holding up. The key to it now was the final team of subjects.

  Rosenthal saw the snipers. It was to be expected, though it had occurred to no one. He was the head gardener. The lawn was his, and the odd piles of material left and right of the helicopter were things that didn’t belong, things that he would have known about. He’d seen the TV shows and movies. This was a terrorist incident, and the police would respond somehow. Men with guns would be out there, and there were two things on his lawn that hadn’t been there in the morning. His eyes lingered on Weber’s position, then fixed on it. There was his salvation or his death. There was no telling now, and that fact caused his stomach to contract into a tight, acid-laden ball.

  “Here they come,” George Tomlinson announced, when he saw two legs step out of the house . . . women’s legs, followed by a man’s, then two more sets of women’s . . . and then a man’s. “One subject and two hostages out. Two more hostages to go . . .”

  Fürchtner was almost there, heading to the right side of the helicopter, to the comfort of Dieter Weber. But then he stopped, seeing inside the open right-side door to where Gerhardt Dengler was sitting, and decided to go to the other side.

  “Okay, Team, stand by,” Chavez ordered, trying to keep all four groups juggled in the same control, sweeping his binoculars over the field. As soon as the last were in the open . . .

  “You, get inside, facing back.” Fürchtner pushed Brownie toward the aircraft.

  “Off target, Rifle Two-Two is off the subject,” Weber announced rather loudly over the radio circuit.

  “Re-target on the next group,” Chavez ordered.

  “Done,” Weber said. “I’m on the lead subject, group three.”

  “Rifle Two-One, report!”

  “Rifle Two-One tight on Subject Dortmund,” Homer Johnston replied at once.

  “Ready here!” Loiselle reported next from the bushes at the back of the house. “We have the fourth group now.”

  Chavez took a deep breath. All the bad guys were now in the open, and now it was time:

  “Okay, Lead to team, execute, execute, execute!”

  Loiselle and Tomlinson were already tensed to stand, and both fairly leaped to their feet invisibly, seven meters behind their targets, who were looking the wrong way and never had a clue what was going on behind them. Both soldiers lined up their tritium-lit sights on their targets. Both were pushing-dragging women, and both were taller than their hostages, which made things easy. Both MP-10 submachine guns were set on three-round burst, and both sergeants fired at the same instant. There was no immediate sound. Their weapons were fully suppressed by the design in which the barrel and silencer were integrated, and the range was too close to miss. Two separate heads were blown apart by multiple impacts of large hollow-point bullets, and both bodies dropped limp to the lush green grass almost as quickly as the cartridge cases ejected by the weapons that had killed them.

  “This is George. Two subjects dead!” Tomlinson called over the radio, as he started running to the hostages who were still walking toward the helicopter.

  Homer Johnston was starting to cringe as a shape entered his field of view. It seemed to be a female body from the pale silk blouse, but his sight picture was not obscured yet, and with his crosshair reticle set just below Petra Dortmund’s left eye, his right index finger pushed gently back on the set-trigger. The rifle roared, sending a meter-long muzzle flash into the still night air—• she’d just seen two pale flashes in the direction of the house, but she didn’t have time to react when the bullet struck the orbit just above her left eye. The bullet drove through the thickest part of her skull. It passed a few more centimeters and then the bullet fragmented into over a hundred tiny pieces, ripping her brain tissue to mush, which then exploded out the back of her skull in an expanding red-pink cloud that splashed over Gerhardt Dengler’s face—

  • Johnston worked the bolt, swiveling his rifle for another target; he’d seen the bullet dispatch the first.

  Eddie Price saw the flash, and his hands were already moving from the execute command heard half a second earlier. He pulled his pistol from the map pocket and dove out the helicopter’s autolike door, aiming it one-handed at Hans Fürchtner’s head, firing one round just below his left eye, which expanded and exploded out the top of his head. A second round followed, higher, and actually not a well-aimed shot, but Fürchtner was already dead, falling to the ground, his hand still holding Erwin Ostermann’s upper arm, and pulling him down somewhat until the fingers came loose.

  That left two. Steve Lincoln took careful aim from a kneeling position, then stopped as his target passed behind the head of an elderly man wearing a vest. “Shit,” Lincoln managed to say.

  Weber got the other one, whose head exploded like a melon from the impact of the rifle bullet.

  Rosenthal saw the head burst apart like something in a horror movie, but the large stubbly head next to his was still there, eyes suddenly wide open, and a machine gun still in his hand—and nobody was shooting at this one, stand
ing next to him. Then Stubble-Head’s eyes met his, and there was fear/hate/shock there, and Rosenthal’s stomach turned to sudden ice, all time stopped around him. The paring knife came out of his sleeve and into his hand, which he swung wildly, catching the back of Stubble-Head’s left hand. Stubble-Head’s eyes went wider as the elderly man jumped aside, and his one hand went slack on the forestock of his weapon.

  That cleared the way for Steve Lincoln, who fired a second three-round burst, which arrived simultaneously with a second rifle bullet from Weber’s semiautomatic sniper rifle, and this one’s head seemed to disappear.

  “Clear!” Price called. “Clear aircraft!”

  “Clear house!” Tomlinson announced.

  “Clear middle!” Lincoln said last of all.

  At the house, Loiselle and Tomlinson raced to their set of hostages and dragged them east, away from the house, lest there be a surviving terrorist inside to fire at them.

  Mike Pierce did the same, with Steve Lincoln covering and assisting.

  It was easier for Eddie Price, who first of all kicked the gun from Fürchtner’s dead hand and made a quick survey of his target’s wrecked head. Then he jumped into the helicopter to make sure that Johnston’s first round had worked. He needed only to see the massive red splash on the rear bulkhead to know that Petra Dortmund was in whatever place terrorists went to. Then he carefully removed the hand grenade from her rigid left hand, checked to make sure the cotter pin was still in place, and pocketed it. Last of all, he took the pistol from her right hand, engaged the safety and tossed that.