by Tom Clancy
Evidently so. People raced off the ride to rejoin the line to ride it again, except for those who bumbled off to recover their equilibrium, sometimes sweating, and twice, he’d seen, to vomit. A cleanup man with a mop and bucket stood by for that—not the choicest job in Worldpark. The medical-aid post was a few meters farther away, for those who needed it. Andre shook his head. It served the bastards right to feel ill after choosing to ride that hated symbol of fascism.
Jean-Paul, René, and Juan appeared almost together close to the entrance of the Time Machine, all sipping soft drinks. They and the five others were marked by the hats they’d bought at the entrance kiosk. Andre nodded to them, rubbing his nose as planned. René came over to him.
“Where is the men’s room?” he asked in English.
“Follow the signs,” Andre pointed. “I get off at eighteen hours. Dinner as planned?”
“Yes.”
“All are ready?”
“Entirely ready, my friend.”
“Then I will see you at dinner.” Andre nodded and walked off, continuing his patrol as he was paid to do, while his comrades walked about, some taking the time to enjoy the rides, he imagined. The park would be even busier tomorrow, he’d been told at the morning briefing session. Another nine-thousand-plus would be checking into the hotels tonight or tomorrow morning in preparation for the bank-holiday weekend in this part of Europe, for Good Friday. The park was set up for mobs of people, and his fellow security personnel had told him all manner of amusing stories about the things that happened here. Four months earlier, a woman had delivered twins in the medical post twenty minutes after riding the Dive Bomber, much to her husband’s surprise and the delight of Dr. Weiler—the children had been awarded lifetime passes to Worldpark on the spot, which had made the local TV news, part of the park’s genius for public relations. Maybe she’d named the boy Troll, Andre snorted, as he spotted one ahead. The Trolls were short-leg /massive-head costumes worn by petite females, he’d learned on coming to work. You could tell by the skinny legs that fit in to the huge feet-shoes they wore. There was even a water supply in the costume to make the monstrous lips drool . . . and over there was a Roman legionnaire dueling comically with a Germanic barbarian. One of them would alternately run from the other, usually to the applause of the people sitting down to watch the spectacle. He turned to walk over to the German Strasse, and was greeted by the oom-pah music of a marching band—why didn’t they play the Horst Wessel Lied? Andre wondered. It would have gone well with the damned green Stuka. Why not dress the band in SS black, maybe have compulsory shower baths for some of the guests—wasn’t that part of European history, too? Damn this place! Andre thought. The symbology was designed to incur the rage of anyone with the most rudimentary political awareness. But, no, the masses had no memory, no more than they had any understanding of political and economic history. He was glad they’d chosen this place to make their political statement. Maybe this would get the idiots to think, just a little bit, perhaps, about the shape of the world. The mis-shape, Andre corrected himself, allowing himself a very un-Worldpark frown at the sunny day and smiling crowds.
There, he told himself. That was the spot. The children loved it. There was a crowd of them there even now, dragging, pulling the hands of their parents, dressed in their shorts and sneakers, many wearing hats, with helium-filled balloons tied to their little wrists. And there was a special one, a little girl in a wheelchair, wearing the Special Wish button that told every ride attendant to allow her on without the need to stand in line. A sick one, Dutch from the style of her parents’ dress, Andre thought, probably dying from cancer, sent here by some charity or other modeled on the American Make-A-Wish Foundation, which paid for the parents to bring their dying whelp here for one first and last chance to see the Trolls and other cartoon characters, their rights licensed to Worldpark for sale and other exploitation. How brightly their sick little eyes shone here, Andre saw, on their quick road to the grave, and how solicitous the staff was to them, as though that mattered to anyone, this bourgeois sentimentality upon which the entire park was founded. Well. They’d see about all that, wouldn’t they? If there were ever a place to make a political statement, to bring the attention of all Europe and all the world to what really mattered, this was it.
Ding finished his first pint of beer. He’d have only one more. It was a rule that no one had written down and that no one had actually enforced, but by common agreement nobody on the teams had more than two at a time while the teams were on-call, as they almost always were—and besides, two pints of Brit beer were quite a lot, really. Anyway, all the members of Team-2 were home having dinner with their families. Rainbow was an unusual outfit in that sense. Every soldier was married, with a wife and at least one kid. The marriages even appeared to be stable. John didn’t know if that was a mark of special-operations troopers, but these two-legged tigers who worked for him were pussycats at home, and the dichotomy was both amazing and amusing to him.
Sandy served the main course, a fine roast beef. John rose to get the carving knife so that he could do his duty. Patsy looked at the huge hunk of dead steer and thought briefly about mad-cow disease, but decided that her mother had cooked the meat thoroughly. Besides, she liked good roast beef, cholesterol and all, and her mom was the world’s champ at making gravy.
“How’s it going at the hospital?” Sandy asked her physician daughter.
“OB is pretty routine. We haven’t had a single hard one in the last couple of weeks. I’ve kinda hoped for a placenta previa, maybe even a placenta abrupta to see if we have the drill down, but—”
“Don’t wish for those, Patsy. I’ve seen them happen in the ER. Total panic, and the OB better have his act together, or things can go to hell in a New York minute. Dead mother and a dead child.”
“Ever see that happen, Mom?”
“No, but I’ve seen it come close to that twice in Williamsburg. Remember Dr. O’Connor?”
“Tall, skinny guy, right?”
“Yeah.” Sandy nodded. “Thank God he was on duty for the second one. The resident came unglued, but Jimmy came in and took over. I was sure we’d lose that one.”
“Well, if you know what you’re doing—”
“If you know what you’re doing, it’s still tense. Routine is fine with me. I’ve done ER duty too long,” Sandy Clark went on. “I love a quiet night when I can get caught up on my reading.”
“Voice of experience,” John Clark observed, serving the meat.
“Makes sense to me,” Domingo Chavez agreed, stroking his wife’s arm. “How’s the little guy?”
“Kicking up a storm right now,” Patsy replied, moving her husband’s hand to her belly. It never failed, she saw. The way his eyes changed when he felt it. Always a warm, passionate boy, Ding just about melted when he felt the movement in her womb.
“Baby,” he said quietly.
“Yeah.” She smiled.
“Well, no nasty surprises when the time comes, okay?” Chavez said next. “I want everything to go routinely. This is exciting enough. Don’t want to faint or anything.”
“Right!” Patsy laughed. “You? Faint? My commando?”
“You never know, honey,” her father observed, taking his seat. “I’ve seen tough guys fold before.”
“Not this one, Mr. C,” Domingo noted with a raised eyebrow.
“More like a fireman,” Sandy said from her seat. “The way you guys just hang around ’til something happens.”
“That’s true,” Domingo agreed. “And if the fire never starts, it’s okay with us.”
“You really mean that?” Patsy asked.
“Yes, honey,” her husband told her. “Going out isn’t fun. We’ve been lucky so far. We haven’t lost a hostage.”
“But that’ll change,” Rainbow Six told his subordinate.
“Not if I have anything to say about it, John.”
“Ding,” Patsy said, looking up from her food. “Have you—I mean . . . I mean, hav
e you actually—”
The look answered the question, though the words were “Let’s not talk about that.”
“We don’t carve notches in our guns, Pats,” John told his daughter. “Bad form, you see.”
“Noonan came over today,” Chavez went on. “Says he’s got a new toy to look at.”
“What’s it cost?” John asked first of all.
“Not much, he says, not much at all. Delta just started looking at it.”
“What’s it do?”
“It finds people.”
“Huh? Is this classified?”
“Commercial product, and, no, it’s not classified at all. But it finds people.”
“How?”
“Tracks the human heart up to five hundred meters away.”
“What?” Patsy asked. “How’s it do that?”
“Not sure, but Noonan says the guys at Fort Bragg are going nuts—I mean, real enthusiastic about it. It’s called ‘Lifeguard’ or something like that. Anyway, he asked the headquarters snake people to send us a demo team.”
“We’ll see,” John said, buttering his roll. “Great bread, Sandy.”
“It’s that little bakery on Millstone Road. Isn’t the bread wonderful over here?”
“And everybody knocks Brit food,” John agreed. “The idiots. Just what I was raised with.”
“All this red meat,” Patsy worried aloud.
“My cholesterol is under one-seventy, honey,” Ding reminded her. “Lower than yours. I guess it’s all that good exercise.”
“Wait until you get older,” John groused. He was nudging two hundred for the first time in his life, exercise and all.
“No hurry here.” Ding chuckled. “Sandy, you are still one of the best cooks around.”
“Thanks, Ding.”
“Just so our brains don’t rot from eating this English cow.” A Spanish grin. “Well, this is safer than zip-lining out of the Night Hawk. George and Sam are still hurtin’. Maybe we ought to try different gloves.”
“Same ones the SAS uses. I checked.”
“Yeah, I know. I talked it over with Eddie, day ’fore yesterday. He says we have to expect training accidents, and Homer says that Delta loses a guy a year, dead, in training accidents.”
“What?” Alarm from Patsy.
“And Noonan says the FBI lost a guy once, zipping down from a Huey. Hand just slipped. Oops.” Team-2 Lead shrugged.
“Only security against that is more training,” John agreed.
“Well, my guys are right at the proper edge. Now I have to figure a way to keep them right there without breaking it.”
“That’s the hard part, Domingo.”
“I s’pose.” Chavez finished his plate.
“What do you mean, the edge?” Patsy asked.
“Honey, I mean Team-2 is lean and mean. We always were, but I don’t see us getting any better than we are now. Same with Peter’s bunch. Except for the two injuries, there isn’t room for any improvement I can see—’specially with Malloy on the team now. Damn, he knows how to drive a chopper.”
“Ready to kill people? . . .” Patsy asked dubiously. It was hard for her to be a physician, dedicated to saving life, and yet be married to a man whose purpose often seemed to be the taking of it—and Ding had killed someone, else he wouldn’t have suggested that she not think about it. How could he do that, and still turn to mush when he felt the baby inside her? It was a lot for her to understand, much as she loved her diminutive husband with the olive skin and flashing white smile.
“No, honey, ready to rescue people,” he corrected her. “That’s the job.”
“But how sure can we be that they will let them out?” Esteban asked.
“What choice will they have?” Jean-Paul replied. He poured the carafe of wine into the empty glasses.
“I agree,” Andre said. “What choice will they have? We can disgrace them before the world. And they are cowards, are they not, with their bourgeois sentimentality? They have no strength, not as we do.”
“Others have made the mistake of believing that,” Esteban said, not so much playing devil’s advocate as voicing worries that they all had to have, to one extent or another. And Esteban had always been a worrier.
“There has never been a situation like this. The Guardia Civil is effective, but not trained for a situation like this one. Policemen,” Andre snorted. “That is all. I do not think they will arrest any of us, will they?” That remark earned him a few smirks. It was true. They were mere policemen, accustomed to dealing with petty thieves, not dedicated political soldiers, men with the proper arms and training and dedication. “Did you change your mind?”
Esteban bristled. “Of course not, comrade. I simply counsel objectivity when we evaluate the mission. A soldier of the revolution must not allow himself to be carried away by mere enthusiasm.” Which was a good cover for his fears, the others thought. They all had them, the proof of which was their denial of that fact.
“We’ll get Il’ych out,” René announced. “Unless Paris is willing to bury a hundred children. That they will not do. And some children will get to fly to Lebanon and back as a result. On that we are agreed, are we not?” He looked around the table and saw all nine heads nod. “Bien. Only the children need foul their underpants for this, my friends. Not us.” That turned the nods into smiles, and two discreet laughs, as the waiters circulated around the restaurant. René waved for some more wine. The selection was good here, better than he could expect in an Islamic country for the next few years, as he dodged DGSE’s field intelligence officers, hopefully with more success than Carlos had enjoyed. Well, their identities would never be known. Carlos had taught the world of terrorism an important lesson. It did not pay to advertise. He scratched his beard. It itched, but in that itching was his personal safety for the next few years. “So, Andre, who comes tomorrow?”
“Thompson CSF is sending six hundred employees and their families here, a company outing for one of their departments. It could not be better,” the security guard told them. Thompson was a major French arms manufacturer. Some of the workers, and therefore their children, would be known and important to the French government. French, and politically important—no, it could not get much better than that. “They will be moving about as a group. I have their itinerary. They come to the castle at noon for lunch and a show. That is our moment, my friends.” Plus one other little addition Andre had decided on earlier in the day. They were always around somewhere, especially at the shows.
“D’accord?” René asked the people around the table, and again he got his nods. Their eyes were stronger now. Doubts would be set aside. The mission lay before them. The decision to undertake it was far behind. The waiter arrived with two new carafes, and the wine was poured around. The ten men savored their drinks, knowing they might be the last for a very long time, and in the alcohol they found their resolve.
“Don’t you just love it?” Chavez asked. “Only Hollywood. They hold their weapons like they’re knives or something, and then they hit a squirrel in the left nut at twenty yards. Damn, I wish I could do that!”
“Practice, Domingo,” John suggested with a chuckle. On the TV screen, the bad guy flew about four yards backward, as though he’d been hit with an anti-tank rocket instead of a mere 9-mm pistol round. “I wonder where you buy those.”
“We can’t afford them, O great accounting expert!”
John almost spilled his remaining beer at that one. The movie ended a few minutes later. The hero got the girl. The bad guys were all dead. The hero left his parent agency in disgust at their corruption and stupidity and walked off into the sunset, content at his unemployment. Yeah, Clark thought, that was Hollywood. With that comfortable thought, the evening broke up. Ding and Patsy went home to sleep, while John and Sandy did the same.
It was all a big movie set, Andre told himself, walking into the park an hour before it opened to the guests already piling up at the main gate. How very American, despite all the eff
ort that had gone into building the place as a European park. The whole idea behind it, of course, was American, that fool Walt Disney with his talking mice and children’s tales that had stolen so much money from the masses. Religion was no longer the opiate of the people. No, today it was escapism, to depart from the dull day-to-day reality they all lived and all hated, but which they couldn’t see for what it was, the bourgeois fools. Who led them here? Their children with their shrill little demands to see the Trolls and the other characters from Japanese cartoons, or to ride the hated Nazi Stuka. Even Russians, those who’d gotten enough money out of their shattered economy to throw it away here, even Russians rode the Stuka! Andre shook his head in amazement. Perhaps the children didn’t have the education or memory to appreciate the obscenity, but surely their parents did! But they came here anyway.
“Andre?”
The park policeman turned to see Mike Dennis, the chief executive officer of Worldpark, looking at him.
“Yes, Monsieur Dennis?”
“The name’s Mike, remember?” The executive tapped his plastic name tag. And, yes, it was a park rule that everyone called everyone else by his Christian name—something else doubtless learned from the Americans.
