Support and Defend

by Tom Clancy

  His headset chirped in his ear, startling him. He accepted the call by pulling off his glove again and pressing a button on his phone with his thumb.

  “Albright?”

  “What the fuck, Caruso? You’re here? In Geneva?”

  “Actually, I’m outside the city, rolling through the Alps.

  Still headed southeast.”

  “What are you doing in Switzerland?”

  “Right now, I’m tailing your target. What are you doing still in Geneva?”

  “One of my teams got held up by the canton police. We think Ross was tipped off by locals somehow, and that’s why they were ready for us.”

  “Wouldn’t doubt it.”

  Albright asked, “How many are with you?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many men on your team?”

  “Team? There is no team. I’m flying solo. It’s just me. I’m on a BMW bike, chasing this bastard through a snowstorm.”

  “Bullshit. I know you are running an agency operation.”

  “Tell you what, when you catch up, you’ll see I’m alone, and then you can snag Ross and take all the glory.”

  “I’m en route with five men. The other trucks are headed north to pull off the police.”

  Dom passed through the small hamlet of Bonneville, but he was still on the A40 and Ross showed no hint of exiting the highway here. Dom gave Albright this information and Albright put Caruso on hold for some time so he could confer with his team. After a few minutes he came back on the line.

  “Okay, looks like you are ten minutes ahead of us, tops. They are heading straight into the mountains. With this shitty weather we’re not going to be able to call up air transport, but that’s actually good news. Ross and his people won’t be flying out of here. If you can keep up with them and lead us to them we’ll catch up, and we’ll fight them on the ground and end this thing this morning.”

  Dom had considered the weather and he came to the same conclusion. No helicopter pilot in the world would risk flying in this shit.

  “Any clue where they are going?”

  “In a few minutes they’ll be over the French border in Chamonix. From there it’s a right turn into the Italian Alps. I don’t know how that helps them, maybe they’ve got a safe house. Maybe they just need a bolt hole till the weather passes and they can fly out.”

  Caruso said, “If they exit the highway, it’s going to be about impossible for me to stay with them for long.”

  “Understood. We’re closing fast. I’ll call you when I can see you.”

  Caruso added one more thing. “There’s something you don’t know. At this point, Ross is unwitting in all this. I saw him try to make a run for it. The armed guys have him, and maybe Bertoli, at gunpoint.”

  Albright responded without hesitation. “That complicates things for Ross, but not for me. When we go in for the arrest I am treating everyone as hostile.”

  Dom nodded in his helmet as he drove. “Can’t say I blame you there.”

  46

  AS CARUSO AND ALBRIGHT suspected, Ross and his kidnappers left the highway in the French border town of Chamonix, and turned onto a road that lead to the Mont Blanc Tunnel, a 7.2-mile passage under Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe. On the other side was Italy.

  Dom quickly called Albright back and informed him of this before entering the tunnel, where his phone promptly became useless to him.

  Inside the Mont Blanc Tunnel, Dom immediately dropped almost a mile back from the white van so he wouldn’t be detected. When he exited the into Italy ten minutes later, he returned to the poor visibility of the snowstorm, and he could no longer see Ross’s vehicle ahead of him. He floored the bike to try and close the distance between himself and his target, and he tried to call Albright back to update him, but Dom found himself alternately in the basin of a narrow valley or racing through one of many more tunnels cut into the mountainsides, so he remained out of comms with the FBI team behind him.

  Fortunately, he caught a glimpse of the van in the distance, and he locked on to its taillights a few hundred yards away and concentrated on keeping a fixed distance.

  After traveling more than ten miles into Italy, the van pulled off the A5 and onto the SS26, a two-lane winding road that worked its way through the foothills on the northern wall of the valley.

  Soon after, Dom’s headset chirped in his ear.

  “Albright?”

  “Yeah. Okay, we’re right behind you. Saw your taillight as you turned onto the SS26. Ross is still in front of you?”

  “He’s a quarter-mile ahead, tops.”

  Albright said, “I want you to pull off at the next exit and shoot ahead of him through the town of Saint Maurice. That will get you out of our line of fire and ahead, in case we blow the felony stop and he squirts free.”

  “Understood,” Dom said. “I’ll go through the town and wait on the road ahead until I hear back from you.”

  Albright said, “You’re armed, right?”

  “Negative. I hope he doesn’t squirt, because I won’t be able to stop him. Good luck.”

  “Yep.” Albright hung up.

  ALBRIGHT AND HIS FIVE men traveled three to a vehicle in a pair of identical silver Ford Expeditions. They’d spent the last several minutes racing into and out of nearly a dozen mountain tunnels, where they sped up to over one hundred miles an hour, before slowing back down to fifty when they came out of the tunnels onto the slick streets. This tactic had allowed them to catch up to the fleeing American traitor, and now they could see his vehicle just fifty yards ahead as they entered yet another tunnel.

  Albright’s driver asked, “Want to do it in a tunnel or on the open road?”

  Albright said, “Open road. As shitty as the weather is, we can use it to get up on their ass undetected, and use the poor road conditions to help with the stop.”

  “Roger that.”

  Albright ordered the other Expedition to initiate the stop, so the agent driving the other truck waited until they left the tunnel and he was obscured in the storm, then he began advancing on the target vehicle.

  In both Expeditions the men clutched their short-barreled M4 carbines or, in Albright’s case, he put his hand on the grip of his SIG pistol in his waistband, and they readied themselves for the high-risk felony stop just a few seconds away.

  ETHAN ROSS HAD SPENT the last several minutes with his eyes fixed on Mohammed. The Iranian intelligence officer sat with his phone pressed to his ear almost constantly. He was conferring with someone, it sounded like it was Arabic and not Farsi, but Ethan could not be sure.

  Ross didn’t speak either language, but he had understood one thing Mohammed had said. After several loud almost angry outbursts, the Iranian said an unmistakable phrase in English.

  “Track my iPhone.”

  Ross and Bertoli exchanged a confused glance.

  While Mohammed barked into his mobile the driver of the van looked into the rearview mirror and shouted an alarm, again Ross had no understanding of what was being said, but he pieced it together when all the Iranians swiveled their heads around and looked behind them. Ross followed suit, and he saw a silver SUV racing up from behind in the left lane.

  Ross assumed it was nothing more than a crazy driver ignoring the awful conditions, but the Iranians began reaching for their weapons in their coats.

  Ross ducked down in his seat, still keeping his eyes out the window, and still expecting the vehicle to pass. But to his horror the silver SUV merged quickly into the van’s lane. The right-front quarter panel of the Ford truck made contact with the left rear quarter of the van briefly, knocking it gently.

  And that was all it took. The driver of the van shouted and Ross realized the man had lost control. The nose of the van angled to the left and the rear tires slid to the right. Soon everyone inside was grabbing on to something or someone, and the van began skating sideways on the two-lane road at over fifty miles an hour. Ross slammed into Bertoli as the van skidded one hundred e
ighty degrees; it showed no sign of slowing as it left the road and impacted a guardrail and scraped along it as it shot backward.

  At the end of the guardrail the van left the road and slid slowly backward down thirty-foot-long snow-covered hill. It stopped in a drift and teetered, finally tipping over, crashing down on its side in a foot of snow.

  Ross ended up on top of Gianna Bertoli and an Iranian in the back of the van. Mohammed and two Quds men were pressed together in front of them. Two more Iranians were in the second row, and in the front, the driver and the passenger were still strapped in their seats.

  Quickly men clambered over one another to get out through the driver’s-side doors. One after another they rolled off the side of the van and they dropped into the snow, taking cover behind the hood and the roof.

  Ross heard the back door of the van open behind him, and then he felt hands on his jacket, his belt, and even in his hair. Two men pulled him roughly out and into the snow. He screamed in pain as his hair was wrenched nearly out of the scalp.

  For a brief moment Ethan lay alone on his back by the rear of the van. From his position he had a view of the road above him, and he saw two silver Ford Expeditions parked there. Several men appeared; they crouched with rifles pointed down in his direction.

  Even though Ross lay on his back, he raised his hands high in the air.

  Just then someone grabbed him by his ankles and pulled him around the roof of the van, removing him from the line of fire.

  He looked around quickly. Gianna was sitting in the snow with her back against the van’s roof. She seemed dazed, and a black-and-blue bruise that covered her right cheek and eye socket told him she’d been injured in the crash of the van.

  The Iranian men in the ski jackets were all around. The two who had pulled him around the van joined up with the others, they knelt or squatted low behind the van, and they all held black pistols in their hands. They swiveled their heads back and forth between the road above them and Mohammed, down here behind the van on his knees.

  Ross looked at Mohammed now and realized the Iranian was, incredibly, still talking on his telephone.

  What the fuck?

  Just then he heard the squawk of a bullhorn. “Ethan Ross!

  Can you hear me?”

  Ross answered instinctively. “Yes!”

  “Tell your men to put down their weapons!”

  Ross was confused. He looked around him. My men? “They aren’t my men! I’m a prisoner!”

  The amplified voice said, “I want to see guns in the snow, now!”

  Bertoli crawled frantically over to Mohammed, grabbing at his arm and pulling the phone away from his ear. “We must surrender! My friends here in Italy will protect us! Please, don’t do anything—”

  Mohammed backhanded her with enough force to knock her onto her back, and he kept talking into his phone.

  From above the man with the loudspeaker said, “I need you to comply immediately or we will be forced to—”

  Mohammed shouted something in Farsi, and then, with no hesitation, his six men stepped out on either side of the van and opened fire uphill at the men in the road.

  Ross cowered into the fetal position and covered his ears. He closed his eyes. Hot brass ejected from the pistols and landed all around him.

  Gunfire from above boomed louder than the pistols.

  Within five seconds Ross felt a blow to his head. He opened his eyes and saw that an Iranian had fallen on top of him. He was dead where he fell, his black clad leg and ski boot lying atop of Ross.

  A man on the far side of the toppled van dropped to his knees and his pistol tumbled free. He clutched at his throat and Ethan watched as a geyser of blood spurted through his fingers. He let out a garbled cry, and then another spray of blood exploded out the back of his head. He flopped onto his back in the snow as the men next to him kept firing.

  DARREN ALBRIGHT POSITIONED HIMSELF at the rear axle of one of the Expeditions, keeping the vehicle between himself and the Iranians shooting. He had his SIG pistol in his hand, but the five HRT men were laying down withering fire on the armed men below.

  After thirty seconds of incessant shooting, there was a break in the gunfire. Albright saw that one of the HRT men had been hit, but he’d been dragged back to cover by another agent, and he appeared to be only lightly wounded. The others expertly moved wide on both sides of the road. Albright knew they would try to hit the men below from the flanks simultaneously. He covered their movement with his pistol, ready to lay down fire on anything that appeared from behind the toppled van.

  Albright was the first to hear the noise. He cocked his head and looked up to the sky as the faint but unmistakable thumping of a helicopter’s rotors filled the air. In this weather the helo was a surreal sound, and within seconds every last member of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team followed Albright’s gaze into the sky. The snowfall was heavy and constant, it seemed as if the clouds were no more than twenty feet above the ground.

  Albright brought his radio to his mouth. “That helo does not belong to us. Who the fuck is flying in this—”

  A blue-and-white helicopter appeared out of the gray soup just over the highway, less than a hundred yards away. It skimmed twenty feet off the road surface and as it closed on the two SUVs, and it pivoted ninety degrees, revealing an open sliding side door. Figures were visible moving inside. Like something from a nightmare, Albright saw flashes come from the helo’s interior, and he heard the quick staccato sounds of automatic gunfire.

  The first SUV on the road shook on its chases as copperjacketed lead tore through its aluminum skin.

  An FBI agent near Albright swung his weapon up toward the new threat, but he immediately spasmed and fell, blood erupting from his legs and lower torso and splattering across the snow-streaked highway.

  Albright dove for the deck and shouted into his mike.

  “Engage that fucking helo!”

  47

  A CELL OF SIX HEZBOLLAH operators from Lyon, France, sat strapped inside the Eurocopter EC145 that streaked sideways over the snowswept Italian highway. Five men were in the back, firing down on the Americans on the road with their mish mash of automatic weapons, while one man sat in the copilot’s seat and held his CZ nine-millimeter pistol to the head of the pilot.

  His name was Ajiz, he was leader of this cell and the oldest at twenty-four, and he had been in near-constant communication with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer running this operation for most of the past twenty-four hours.

  From the moment Mohammed Mobasheri arrived in Geneva and saw the welcome reception of ITP members, he decided he might need to snatch Ross out of the hands of the ITP to satisfy his mission parameters. To do this, he began planning on a way to effect the abduction. He was well aware the weather would be turning bad, the winter storm was all over the news because it was coming so late in the season, but he didn’t think he could take Ross overland all the way to the Mediterranean, a five-hour drive.

  Mohammed knew he needed a helicopter and a pilot, and with the approaching storm he decided he would need the best pilot available to travel in the miserable winter conditions. He did some Google research the previous afternoon and found a private helicopter rescue organization that operated in the area. Their helos were responsible for plucking injured climbers off of Mont Blanc, as well as other mountains in the Graian Alps, so he decided they would be best suited to the horrible conditions coming. He ordered the Lyon cell of Hezbollah men to hijack a helicopter and a pilot from the service and to have it meet him on the road outside of Geneva.

  More research showed Mobasheri that he could mask the flight of the helicopter on radar if it flew low through the alps, so he made the decision to move the transfer of Ross from the van to the helicopter to somewhere in the Aosta Valley, the nearest suitable location.

  The six Hezbollah operatives had arrived at the hanger of Mont Blanc Copter Services at ten o’clock that morning. Flight operations had been cancelled due to the snowstorm, but
the staff lived on the mountain, so they showed up to work for paperwork and routine maintenance. There was no security on the property, just a secretary at a desk, three maintenance men, two pilots, and a receptionist.

  Ajiz and his team took the entire staff at gunpoint into an office, where he demanded to know which of the two pilots had more experience. Neither man spoke up, but a photograph on the receptionist’s desk told Ajiz what he needed to know. Claudette, the thirty-year-old receptionist, was the daughter of the fifty-six-year-old pilot named Henri. The Hezbollah cell commander knew instantly he could use this to his advantage.

  The French pilot told the young Middle Easterners that they were mad if they thought anyone could fly in such poor visibility.

  The honest truth was no one in the Lyon cell wanted to fly in this weather any more than the Frenchman did, but they had their orders from Mohammed Mobasheri, and they knew failing to carry them out would mean a certain death sentence back in Lebanon for themselves and their families.

  The French pilot and his daughter were pulled into the hangar and the others were lashed with tie-down chains and locked together in a supply room off the hangar with padlocks from the storage doors. They weren’t killed, because Mohammed had passed orders on to Ajiz mandating that he keep them alive. He knew the pilot would need the incentive of believing he would be left alive at the end of the operation.

  Killing the others would tip him off that even his total compliance would not save him and his daughter.

  Ajiz ordered the pilot to fuel and preflight the largest craft in the hanger, a blue Eurocopter EC145, then he, his daughter, and the six Hezbollah operators from Lyon rolled it out into the heavy snow on a trailer.

  The pilot begged the armed men to reconsider, telling them they would all likely slam into a mountain before they accomplished whatever the hell it was they were planning. Ajiz just strapped in beside him and waved his gun while Claudette was placed in the back in the middle of the rest of the Lyon cell. Ajiz put on his headset and told the Frenchman they would be heading somewhere down in the valley, and he’d provide him more information soon.