by Tom Clancy
Dr. Bellow finished his review of the taped phone conversations and the known facts about Ernst Johannes Model. The man was a sociopath with a distinct tendency for violence. Suspected in seven murders personally committed and a few more in the company of others. Guttenach, a less bright individual of the same ilk, and two others, unknown. Richter, the escapee, had told them, unsurprisingly, that Model had killed the first victim himself, shooting him in the back of his head from close range and ordering Richter to drag him out. So, both the shooting and the demonstration of its reality to the police had been ill-considered . . . it all fit the same worrisome profile. Bellow keyed his radio.
“Bellow for Chavez.”
“Yeah, doc, this is Ding.”
“I have a preliminary profile on the subjects.”
“Shoot—Team, you listening?” There followed an immediate cacophony of overlapping responses. “Yeah, Ding.” “Copying, leader.” “Ja.” And the rest. “Okay, doc, lay it out,” Chavez ordered.
“First, this is not a well-planned operation. That fits the profile for the suspected leader, Ernst Model, German national, age forty-one, formerly of the Baader-Meinhof organization. Tends to be impetuous, very quick to use violence when cornered or frustrated. If he threatens to kill someone, we have to believe he’s not kidding. His current mental state is very, repeat, very dangerous. He knows he has a blown operation. He knows that his likelihood of success is slim. His hostages are his only assets, and he will regard them as expendable assets. Do not expect Stockholm Syndrome to set in with this case, people. Model is too sociopathic for that. Neither would I expect negotiations to be very useful. I think that it is very likely that an assault resolution will be necessary tonight or tomorrow.”
“Anything else?” Chavez asked.
“Not at this time,” Dr. Bellow replied. “I will monitor further developments with the local cops.”
Noonan had taken his time selecting the proper tools, and now he was creeping along the outside wall of the bank building, below the level of the windows. At every one of them, he raised his head slowly and carefully to see if the interior curtains allowed any view of the inside. The second one did, and there Noonan affixed a tiny viewing system. This was a lens, roughly the shape of a cobra’s head, but only a few millimeters across, which led by fiber-optic cable to a TV camera set in his black bag around the corner. He placed another at the lower corner of the bank’s glass door, then worked his way back, crawling feet first, slowly and laboriously, to a place where he could stand. That done, he walked all the way around the block to repeat the procedure from the other side of the building, where he was able to make three placements, one again on the door, and two on windows whose curtains were a touch shorter than they ought to have been. He also placed microphones in order to pick up whatever sound might be available. The large plate-glass windows ought to resonate nicely, he thought, though this would apply to extraneous exterior sounds as well as to those originating inside the building.
All the while, the Swiss TV crews were speaking with the senior on-site policeman, who spent a great deal of time saying that the terrorists were serious—he’d been coached by Dr. Bellow to speak of them with respect. They were probably watching television inside, and building up their self-esteem worked for the team’s purposes at the moment. In any case, it denied the terrorists knowledge of what Tim Noonan had done on the outside.
“Okay,” the techie said in his place on a side street. All the video displays were up and running. They showed little. The size of the lenses didn’t make for good imagery, despite the enhancement program built into his computer. “Here’s one shooter . . . and another.” They were within ten meters of the front of the building. The rest of the people visible were sitting on the white marble floor, in the center for easy coverage. “The guy said four, right?”
“Yeah,” Chavez answered. “But not how many hostages, not exactly anyway.”
“Okay, this is a bad guy, I think, behind the teller-places . . . hmph, looks like he’s checking the cash drawers . . . and that’s a bag of some sort. You figure they visited the vault?”
Chavez turned. “Eddie?”
“Greed,” Price agreed. “Well, why not? It is a bank, after all.”
“Okay.” Noonan switched displays on the computer screen. “I got blueprints of the building, and this is the layout.”
“Teller cages, vault, toilets.” Price traced his finger over the screen. “Back door. Seems simple enough. Access to the upper floors?”
“Here,” Noonan said. “Actually outside the bank itself, but the basement is accessible to them here, stairs down, and a separate exit to the alley in back.”
“Ceiling construction?” Chavez asked.
“Rebarred concrete slab, forty centimeters thick. That’s solid as hell. Same with the walls and floor. This building was made to last.” So, there would be no explosives-forced entry through walls, floor, or ceiling.
“So, we can go in the front door or the back door, and that’s it. And that puts number four bad guy at the back door.” Chavez keyed his radio. “Chavez for Rifle Two-Two.”
“Ja, Weber here.”
“Any windows in the back, anything in the door, peep-hole, anything like that, Dieter?”
“Negative. It appears to be a heavy steel door, nothing in it that I can see,” the sniper said, tracing his telescopic sight over the target yet again, and again finding nothing but blank painted steel.
“Okay, Eddie, we blow the rear door with Primacord, three men in that way. Second later, we blow the front glass doors, toss flash-bangs, and move in when they’re looking the wrong way. Two and two through the front. You and me go left. Louis and George go right.”
“Are they wearing body armor?” Price asked.
“Nothing that Herr Richter saw,” Noonan responded, “and nothing visible here—but there ain’t no head-protection anyway, right?” It would be nothing more than a ten-meter shot, an easy distance for the H&K shoulder weapons.
“Quite.” Price nodded. “Who leads the rear-entry team?”
“Scotty, I think. Paddy does the explosives.” Connolly was the best man on the team for that, and both men knew it. Chavez made an important mental note that the subteams had to be more firmly established. To this point he’d kept all his people in the same drawer. That he would have to change as soon as they got back to Hereford.
“Vega?”
“Oso backs us up, but I don’t think we’ll have much use for him on this trip.” Julio Vega had become their heavy-machine gunner, slinging a laser-sighted M-60 7.62-mm machine gun for really serious work, but there wasn’t much use for that now—and wouldn’t be, unless everything went totally to hell.
“Noonan, send this picture to Scotty.”
“Right.” He moved the mouse-pointer and started transmitting everything to the team’s various computers.
“The question now is when.” Ding checked his watch. “Back to the doc.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bellow had spent his time with Herr Richter. Three stiff shots had calmed him down nicely. Even his English had improved markedly. Bellow was walking him through the event for the sixth time when Chavez and Price showed up again.
“His eyes, they are blue, like ice. Like ice,” Richter repeated. “He is not a man like most men. He should be in a cage, with the animals at the zoo.” The businessman shuddered involuntarily.
“Does he have an accent?” Price asked.
“Mixed. Something of Hamburg, but something of Bavaria, too. The others, all Bavarian accents.”
“The Bundes Kriminal Amt will find that useful, Ding,” Price observed. The BKA was the German counterpart to the American FBI. “Why not have the local police check the area for a car with German license plates—from Bavaria? Perhaps there’s a driver about.”
“Good one.” Chavez left and ran over to the Swiss cops, whose chief got on his radio at once. Probably a dry hole, Chavez thought. But you didn’t know unti
l you drilled it. They had to have come here one way or another. Another mental note. Check for that on every job.
Roebling came over next, carrying his cell phone. “It is time,” he said, “to speak with them again.”
“Yo, Tim,” Chavez said over his radio. “Come to the rally point.”
Noonan was there in under a minute. Chavez pointed him to Roebling’s phone. Noonan took it, popped the back off, and attached a small green circuit board with a thin wire hanging from it. Then he pulled a cell phone from a thigh pocket and handed it over to Chavez. “There. You’ll hear everything they say.”
“Anything happening inside?”
“They’re walking around a little more, a little agitated, maybe. Two of them were talking face-to-face a few minutes ago. Didn’t look real happy about things from their gestures.”
“Okay. Everybody up to speed on the interior?”
“How about audio?”
The techie shook his head. “Too much background noise. The building has a noisy heating system—oil-fired hot water, sounds like—that’s playing hell with the window mikes. Not getting anything useful, Ding.”
“Okay, keep us posted.”
“You bet.” Noonan made his way back to his gear.
“Eddie?”
“Were I to make a wager, I’d say we have to storm the place before dawn. Our friend will begin losing control soon.”
“Doc?” Ding asked.
“That’s likely,” Bellow agreed with a nod, taking note of Price’s practical experience.
Chavez frowned mightily at that one. Trained as he was, he wasn’t really all that eager to take this one on. He’d seen the interior pictures. There had to be twenty, perhaps thirty, people inside, with three people in their immediate vicinity holding fully automatic weapons. If one of them decided fuck it and went rock-and-roll on his Czech machine gun, a lot of those people wouldn’t make it home to the wife and kiddies. It was called the responsibility of command, and while it wasn’t the first time Chavez had experienced it, the burden never really got any lighter—because the price of failure never got any smaller.
“Chavez!” It was Dr. Bellow.
“Yeah, doc,” Ding said, heading over toward him with Price in attendance.
“Model’s getting aggressive. He says he’ll kill a hostage in thirty minutes unless we get him a car to a helicopter pad a few blocks from here, and from there to the airport. After that, he kills a hostage every fifteen minutes. He says he has enough to last more than a few hours. He’s reading off a list of the important ones now. A professor of surgery at the local medical school, an off-duty policeman, a big-time lawyer . . . well, he’s not kidding, Ding. Thirty minutes from—okay, he shoots the first one at eight-thirty.”
“What are the cops saying back?”
“What I told them to say, it takes time to arrange all of that, give us a hostage or two to show good faith—but that’s what prompted the threat for eight-thirty. Ernst is coming a little unglued.”
“Is he serious?” Chavez asked, just to make sure he understood.
“Yeah, he sounds serious as hell. He’s losing control, very unhappy with how things turned out. He’s barely rational now. He’s not kidding about killing somebody. Like a spoiled kid with nothing under the tree on Christmas morning, Ding. There’s no stabilizing influence in there to help him out. He feels very lonely.”
“Super.” Ding keyed his radio. Not unexpectedly, the decision had just been made by somebody else. “Team, this is Chavez. Stand to. I say again, stand to.”
He’d been trained in what to expect. One ploy was to deliver the car—it’d be too small for all the hostages, and you could take the bad guys down on the way out with aimed rifle fire. But he had only two snipers, and their rifle bullets would blast through a terrorist’s head with enough leftover energy to waste two of three people beyond him. SMG or pistol fire was much the same story. Four bad guys was too many for that play. No, he had to take his team in, while the hostages were still sitting down on the floor, below the line of fire. These bastards weren’t even rational enough to want food which he might drug—or maybe they were smart enough to know about the Valium-flavored pizza.
It took several minutes. Chavez and Price crawled to the door from the left. Louis Loiselle and George Tomlinson did the same from the other side. At the rear, Paddy Connolly attached a double thickness of Primacord to the door frame, inserted the detonator, and stood away, with Scotty McTyler and Hank Patterson nearby.
“Rear team in place, Leader,” Scotty told them over the radio.
“Roger that. Front team is in place,” Chavez replied quietly into his radio transmitter.
“Okay, Ding,” Noonan’s voice came over the command circuit, “TV One shows a guy brandishing a rifle, walking around the hostages on the floor. If I had to bet, I’d say it’s our friend Ernst. One more behind him, and a third to the right side by the second wood desk. Hold, he’s on the phone now . . . okay, he’s talking to the cops, saying he’s getting ready to pick a hostage to whack. He’s going to give out his name first. Nice of him,” Noonan concluded.
“Okay, people, it’s gonna go down just like the exercises,” Ding told his troops. “We are weapons-free at this time. Stand by.” He looked up to see Loiselle and Tomlinson trade a look and a gesture. Louis would lead, with George behind. It would be the same for Chavez, letting Price take the lead with his commander immediately behind.
“Ding, he just grabbed a guy, standing him up—on the phone again, they’re going to whack the doctor first, Professor Mario Donatello. Okay, I have it all on Camera Two, he’s got the guy stood up. I think it’s show time,” Noonan concluded.
“Are we ready? Rear team, check in.”
“Ready here,” Connolly replied over the radio. Chavez could see Loiselle and Tomlinson. Both nodded curtly and adjusted their hands on their MP-10s.
“Chavez to team, we are ready to rock. Stand by. Stand by. Paddy, hit it!” Ding ordered loudly. The last thing he could do was cringe in expectation of the blast of noise sure to come.
The intervening second seemed to last for hours, and then the mass of the building was in the way. They heard it even so, a loud metallic crash that shook the whole world. Price and Loiselle had placed their flash-bangs at the brass lower lining of the door, and punched the switches on them as soon as they heard the first detonation. Instantly the glass doors disintegrated into thousands of fragments, which mainly flew into the granite and marble lobby of the bank in front of a blinding white light and end-of-the-world noise. Price, already standing at the edge of the door, darted in, with Chavez right behind, and going to his left as he entered.
Ernst Model was right there, his weapon’s muzzle pressed to the back of Dr. Donatello’s head. He’d turned to look at the back of the room when the first explosion had happened, and, as planned, the second one, with its immense noise and blinding flash of magnesium powder, had disoriented him. The physician captive had reacted, too, dropping away from the gunman behind him with his hands over his head, and giving the intruders a blessedly clear shot. Price had his MP-10 up and aimed, and depressed the trigger for a quick and final three-round burst into the center of Ernst Model’s face.
Chavez, immediately behind him, spotted another gunman, standing and shaking his head as though to clear it. He was facing away, but he still held his weapon, and the rules were the rules. Chavez double-tapped his head as well. Between the suppressors integral with the gun-barrels and the ringing from the flash-bangs, the report of the weapons was almost nil. Chavez traversed his weapon right, to see that the third terrorist was already on the floor, a pool of red streaming from what had been a head less than two seconds before.
“Clear!” Chavez shouted.
“Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!” the others agreed. Loiselle raced to the back of the building, with Tomlinson behind him. Before they’d gotten there, the black-clad figures of McTyler and Patterson appeared, their weapons immediately pointing
up at the ceiling: “Clear!”
Chavez moved farther left to the teller cages, leaping over the barrier to check there for additional people. None. “Clear here! Secure the area!”
One of the hostages started to rise, only to be pushed back down to the floor by George Tomlinson. One by one, they were frisked by the team members while another covered them with loaded weapons—they couldn’t be sure which was a sheep and which a goat at this point. By this time, some Swiss cops were entering the bank. The frisked hostages were pushed in that direction, a shocked and stunned bunch of citizens, still disoriented by what had happened, some bleeding from the head or ears from the flash-bangs and flying glass.
Loiselle and Tomlinson picked up the weapons dropped by their victims, cleared each of them, and slung them over their shoulders. Only then, and only gradually, did they start to relax.
“What about the back door?” Ding asked Paddy Connolly.
“Come and see,” the former SAS soldier suggested, leading Ding to the back room. It was a bloody mess. Perhaps the subject had been resting his head against the door frame. It seemed a logical explanation for the fact that no head was immediately visible, and only one shoulder on the corpse, which had been flung against an interior partition, the Czech M-58 rifle still grasped tightly in its remaining hand. The double thickness of Primacord had been a little too powerful . . . but Ding couldn’t say that. A steel door and a stout steel frame had demanded it.
“Okay, Paddy, nice one.”
“Thank you, sir.” The smile of a pro who’d gotten the job well and truly done.
