Jack Ryan Books 7-12

by Tom Clancy

  “Two-Lead to Six—lights!”

  In the command center, the engineer again isolated the power to the castle and shut it off.

  Outside the windows, Team-2 saw the windows go dark, and then a second or two later the wall-mounted emergency lights came on, just like miniature auto headlights, not enough to light the room up properly. The TV monitors they were watching went dark as well.

  “Merde,” René said, sitting and reaching for a phone. If they wanted to play more games, then he could—he thought he saw some movement outside the window and looked more closely—

  “Team-2, this is lead. Five seconds . . . five . . . four . . . three—” At “three,” the men holding the flash-bangs pulled the pins and set them right next to the windows, then turned aside. “—. . . two . . . one . . . fire!”

  Sergeant Connolly pressed his button, and two windows were sundered from the wall by explosives. A fraction of a second later, three more windows were blown in by a wall of noise and blazing light. They flew across the room in a shower of glass and lead fragments, missing the children in the corner by three meters.

  Next to Chavez, Sergeant Major Price tossed in another flash-bang, which exploded the moment it touched the floor. Then Chavez pushed outward from the wall, swinging into the room through the window, his MP-10 up and in both hands. He hit the floor badly, falling backward, unable to control his balance, then felt Price’s feet land on his left arm. Chavez rolled and jolted to his feet, then moved to the kids. They were screaming with alarm, covering their faces and ears from the abuse of the flash-bangs. But he couldn’t worry about them just yet.

  Price landed better, moved right as well, but turned to scan the room. There. It was a bearded one, holding an Uzi. Price extended his MP-10 to the limit of the sling and fired a three-round burst right into his face from three meters away. The force of the bullet impacts belied the suppressed noise of the shots.

  Oso Vega had kicked his window loose on leg-power alone, and landed right on top of a subject, rather to the surprise of both, but Vega was ready for surprises, and the terrorist was not. Oso’s left hand slammed out, seemingly of its own accord, and hit him in the face with enough force to split it open into a bloody mess that a burst of three 10-mm rounds only made worse.

  René was sitting at his desk, the phone in his hand, and his pistol on the tabletop before him. He was reaching for it when Pierce fired into the side of his head from six feet away.

  In the far corner, Chavez and Price skidded to a stop, their bodies between the terrorists and the hostages. Ding came to one knee, his weapon up while his eyes scanned for targets, as he listened to the suppressed chatter of his men’s weapons. The semidarkness of the room was alive now with moving shadows. Loiselle found himself behind a subject, close enough to touch him with the muzzle of his submachine gun. This he did. It made the shot an easy one, but sprayed blood and brains all over the room.

  One in the corner got his Uzi up, and his finger went down on the trigger, spraying in the direction of the children. Chavez and Price both engaged him, then McTyler as well, and the terrorist went down in a crumpled mass.

  Another had opened a door and raced through it, splattered by bullet fragments from a shooter whose aim was off and hit the door. This one ran down, away from the shooting, turning one corner, then another—and tried to stop when he saw a black shape on the steps.

  It was Peter Covington, leading his team up. Covington had heard the noise of his steps and taken aim, then fired when the surprised-looking face entered his sights. Then he resumed his race topside, with four men behind him.

  That left three in the room. Two hid behind desks, one holding his Uzi up and firing blindly. Mike Pierce jumped over the desk, twisting in midair as he did so, and shot him three times in the side and back. Then Pierce landed, turned back and fired another burst into the back of his head. The other one under a desk was shot in the back by Paddy Connolly. The one who was left stood, blazing away wildly with his weapon, only to be taken down by no fewer than four team members.

  Just then the door opened, and Covington came in. Vega was circulating about, kicking the weapons away from every body, and after five seconds shouted: “Clear!”

  “Clear!” Pierce agreed.

  Andre was outside, in the open and all alone. He turned to look up at the castle.

  “Dieter!” Homer Johnston called.

  “Yes!”

  “Can you take his weapon out?”

  The German somehow read the American’s mind. The answer was an exquisitely aimed shot that struck Andre’s submachine gun just above the trigger guard. The impact of the .300 Winchester Magnum bullet blasted through the rough, stamped metal and broke the gun nearly in half. From his perch four hundred meters away, Johnston took careful aim, and fired his second round of the engagement. It would forever be regarded as a very bad shot. Half a second later, the 7-mm bullet struck the subject six inches below the sternum.

  For Andre, it seemed like a murderously hard punch. Already the match bullet had fragmented, ripping his liver and spleen as it continued its passage, exiting his body above the left kidney. Then, following the shock of the initial impact, came a wave of pain. An instant later, his screech ripped across the 100 acres of Worldpark.

  “Check this out,” Chavez said in the command center. His body armor had two holes in the torso. They wouldn’t have been fatal, but they would have hurt. “Thank God for DuPont, eh?”

  “Miller Time!” Vega said with a broad grin.

  “Command, this is Chavez. Mission accomplished. The kids—uh oh, we got one kid hurt here, looks like a scratch on the arm, the rest of ’em are all okay. Subjects all down for the count, Mr. C. You can turn the lights back on.”

  As Ding watched, Oso Vega leaned down and picked up a little girl. “Hello, querida. Let’s find your mamacita, eh?”

  “Rainbow!” Mike Pierce exulted. “Tell ’em there’s a new sheriff in town, people!”

  “Bloody right, Mike!” Eddie Price reached into his pocket and pulled out his pipe and a pouch of good Cavendish tobacco.

  There were things to be done. Vega, Pierce, and Loiselle collected the weapons, safed them, and stacked them on a desk. McTyler and Connolly checked out the restrooms and other adjacent doors for additional terrorists, finding none. Scotty waved to the door.

  “Okay, let’s get the kids out,” Ding told his people. “Peter, lead us out!”

  Covington had his team open the fire door and man the stairway, one man on each landing. Vega took the lead, holding the five-year-old with his left arm while his right continued to hold his MP-10. A minute later, they were outside.

  Chavez stayed behind, looking at the wall with Eddie Price. There were seven holes in the corner where the kids had been, but all the rounds were high, into the drywall paneling. “Lucky,” Chavez said.

  “Somewhat,” Sergeant Major Price agreed. “That’s the one we both engaged, Ding. He was just firing, not aiming—and maybe at us, not them, I think.”

  “Good job, Eddie.”

  “Indeed,” Price agreed. With that they both walked outside, leaving the bodies behind for the police to collect.

  “Command, this is Bear, what’s happening, over.”

  “Mission accomplished, no friendlies hurt. Well done, Bear,” Clark told him.

  “Roger and thank you, sir. Bear is RTB. Out. I need to take a piss,” the Marine told his copilot, as he horsed the Night Hawk west for the airfield.

  Homer Johnston fairly ran down the steps of the Dive Bomber ride, carrying his rifle and nearly tripping three times on the way down. Then he ran the few hundred meters to the castle. There was a doctor there, wearing a white coat and looking down at the man Johnston had shot.

  “How is he?” the sergeant asked when he got there. It was pretty clear. The man’s hands were holding his belly, and were covered with blood that looked strangely black in the courtyard lighting.

  “He will not survive,” Dr. Weiler said. Maybe
if they were in a hospital operating room right now, he’d have a slim chance, but he was bleeding out through the lacerated spleen, and his liver was probably destroyed as well. . . . And so, no, absent a liver transplant, he had no chance at all, and all Weiler could do was give him morphine for the pain. He reached into his bag for a syringe.

  “That’s the one shot the little girl,” Johnston told the doctor. “I guess my aim was a little off,” he went on, looking down into the open eyes and the grimacing face that let loose another moaning scream. If he’d been a deer or an elk, Johnston would have finished him off with a pistol round in the head or neck, but you weren’t supposed to do that with human targets. Die slow, you fuck, he didn’t say aloud. It disappointed Johnston that the doctor gave him a pain injection, but physicians were sworn to their duty, as he was to his.

  “Pretty low,” Chavez said, coming up to the last living terrorist.

  “Guess I slapped the trigger a little hard,” the rifleman responded.

  Chavez looked straight in his eyes. “Yeah, right. Get your gear.”

  “In a minute.” The target’s eyes went soft when the drug entered his bloodstream, but the hands still grabbed at the wound, and there was a puddle of blood spreading from under his back. Finally, the eyes looked up at Johnston one last time.

  “Good night, Gracie,” the rifleman said quietly. Ten seconds later, he was able to turn away and head back to the Dive Bomber to retrieve the rest of his gear.

  There were a lot of soiled underpants in the medical office, and a lot of kids still wide-eyed in shock, having lived through a nightmare that all would relive for years to come. The Rainbow troopers fussed over them. One bandaged the only wound, a scratch really, on a young boy.

  Centurion de la Cruz was still there, having refused evacuation. The troops in black stripped off their body armor and set it against the wall, and he saw on their uniform jackets the jump wings of paratroopers, American, British, and German, along with the satisfied look of soldiers who’d gotten the job done.

  “Who are you?” he asked in Spanish.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t say,” Chavez replied. “But I saw what you did on the videotape. You did well, Sergeant.”

  “So did you, ah? . . .”

  “Chavez. Domingo Chavez.”

  “American?”

  “Sí.”

  “The children, were any hurt?”

  “Just the one over there.”

  “And the—criminals?”

  “They will break no more laws, amigo. None at all,” Team-2 Lead told him quietly.

  “Bueno.” De la Cruz reached up to take his hand. “It was hard?”

  “It is always hard, but we train for the hard things, and my men are—”

  “They have the look,” de la Cruz agreed.

  “So do you.” Chavez turned. “Hey, guys, here’s the one who took ’em on with a sword.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Mike Pierce came over. “I finished that one off for you. Ballsy move, man.” Pierce took his hand and shook it. The rest of the troopers did the same.

  “I must—I must—” De la Cruz stood and hobbled out the door. He came back in five minutes later, following John Clark, and holding—

  “What the hell is that?” Chavez asked.

  “The eagle of the legion, VI Legio Victrix,” the centurion told them, holding it in one hand. “The victorious legion. Señor Dennis, con permiso?”

  “Yes, Francisco,” the park manager said with a serious nod.

  “With the respect of my legion, Señor Chavez. Keep this in a place of honor.”

  Ding took it. The damned thing must have weighed twenty pounds, plated as it was with gold. It would be a fit trophy for the club at Hereford. “We will do that, my friend,” he promised the former sergeant, with a look at John Clark.

  The stress was bleeding off now, to be followed as usual by elation and fatigue. The troopers looked at the kids they’d saved, still quiet and cowed by the night, but soon to be reunited with their parents. They heard the sound of a bus outside. Steve Lincoln opened the door, and watched the grown-ups leap out of it. He waved them through the door, and the shouts of joy filled the room.

  “Time to leave,” John said. He, too, walked over to shake hands with de la Cruz as the troops filed out.

  Out in the open, Eddie Price had his own drill to complete. His pipe now filled, he took a kitchen match from his pocket and struck it on the stone wall of the medical office, lighting the curved briar pipe for a long, victorious puff as parents pushed in, and others pushed out, holding their children, many weeping at their deliverance.

  Colonel Gamelin was standing by the bus and came over. “You are the Legion?” he asked.

  Louis Loiselle handled the answer. “In a way, monsieur,” he said in French. He looked up to see a surveillance camera pointed directly at the door, probably to record the event, the parents filing out with their kids, many pausing to shake hands with the Rainbow troopers. Then Clark led them off, back to the castle, and into the underground. On the way the Guardia Civil cops saluted, the gestures returned by the special-ops troopers.

  CHAPTER 16

  DISCOVERY

  The successful conclusion of the Worldpark operation turned out to be a problem for some, and one of them was Colonel Tomas Nuncio, the senior officer of the Guardia Civil on the scene. Assumed by the local media to be the officer in command of the operation, he was immediately besieged with requests for details of the operation, along with videotapes for the TV reporters. So successful had he been in isolating the theme park from press coverage that his superiors in Madrid themselves had little idea what had taken place, and this also weighed on his decision. So the colonel decided to release Worldpark’s own video coverage, deeming this to be the most innocuous footage possible, as it showed very little. The most dramatic part had been the descent of the shooting team from the helicopter to the castle roof, and then from the roof of the castle to the control-room windows, and that, Nuncio decided, was pure vanilla, lasting a mere four minutes, the time required for Paddy Connolly to place his line charges on the window frames and move aside to detonate them. Nothing of the shooting inside the room had been taped, because the terrorists had themselves wrecked the surveillance camera inside the facility. The elimination of the castle-roof sentry had been taped, but was not released due to the gruesome nature of his head wound, and the same was true of the killing of the last of them, the one named Andre who had killed the little Dutch girl—which scene had also been recorded, but was withheld for the same reason. The rest was all let go. The distance of the cameras from the actual scene of action prevented the recognition, or even the sight of the faces of the rescue team, merely their jaunty steps outside, many of them carrying the rescued children—that, he decided, could harm or offend no one, least of all the special-operations team from England, who now had one of the tricornio hats from his force to go along with the eagle of Worldpark’s notional VI Legion as a souvenir of their successful mission.

  And so, the black-and-white video was released to CNN, Sky News, and other interested news agencies for broadcast around the world, to give substance to the commentary of various reporters who’d assembled at Worldpark’s main gate, there to comment at great and erroneous length about the expertise of the Guardia Civil’s special-action team dispatched from Madrid to resolve this hateful episode at one of the world’s great theme parks.

  It was eight o’clock in the evening when Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov saw it in his New York apartment, as he smoked a cigar and sipped a vodka neat while his VCR taped it for later detailed examination. The assault phase, he saw, was both expert and expected in all details. The flashes of light from the explosives used were dramatic and singularly useless for showing him anything, and the parade of the rescuers as predictable as the dawn, their springy steps, their slung weapons, and their arms full of small children. Well, such men would naturally feel elation at the successful conclusion of such a mission, and the trailing footag
e showed them walking off to a building, where there must have been a physician to take care of the one child who’d sustained a minor injury during the operation, as the reporters said. Then, later, the troops had come outside, and one of them had swiped an arm against the stone wall of the building, lighting a match, which he used . . .

  . . . to light a pipe . . .

  To light a pipe, Popov saw. He was surprised at his own reaction to that. He blinked hard, leaning forward in his seat. The camera didn’t zoom in, but the soldier/policeman in question was clearly smoking a curved pipe, puffing the smoke out every few seconds as he spoke with his comrades . . . doing nothing dramatic, just talking unrecorded words calmly, as such men did after a successful mission, doubtless discussing who had done what, what had gone according to plan and what had not. It might as easily have been in a club or bar, for trained men always spoke the same way in those circumstances, whether they were soldiers or doctors or football players, after the stress of the job was concluded, and the lessons-learned phase began. It was the usual mark of professionals, Popov knew. Then the picture changed, back to the face of some American reporter who blathered on until the break for the next commercial, to be followed, the anchorman said, by some political development or other in Washington. With that, Popov rewound the tape, ejected it, and then reached for a different tape. He inserted it into the VCR, then fast-forwarded to the end of the incident in Bern, through the takedown phase and into the aftermath where . . . yes, a man had lit a pipe. He’d remembered that from watching from across the street, hadn’t he?

  Then he got the tape of the press coverage from the Vienna incident, and . . . yes, at the end a man had lit a pipe. In every case it was a man of about one hundred eighty centimeters in height, making much the same gesture with the match, holding the pipe in exactly the same way, gesturing to another with it in exactly the same manner, the way men did with pipes . . .