by Tom Clancy
“Vega, this is Price.”
“Hospital lobby is clear, Eddie. Got maybe twenty civilians here to get looked after, okay?”
“I have no people to send you, Oso. We’re all busy out here. Weber reports we have some serious casualties.”
“This is Franklin. I copy. I can move in now if you need me.”
“Franklin, Price, move in to the west. I repeat, move in from the west.”
“Franklin is moving in to the west,” the rifleman replied. “Moving in now.”
“His pitchin’ career’s over,” Nance said, loading the body into the Night Hawk.
“Sure as hell, if he’s a lefty. Back to the hospital, I guess,” Malloy strapped into the chopper and took the controls. Inside a minute, they were airborne and heading east for the hospital. In the back, Nance strapped their prisoner down tight.
It was a hell of a mess. The driver was dead, Chavez saw, crushed between the large wheel and the back of his seat from when the truck had slammed into the guardrail, his eyes and mouth open, blood coming out the latter. The body tossed out of the back was dead as well, with two bullet holes in the face. That left a guy with two broken legs, and horrible scrapes on his face, whose pain was masked by his unconsciousness.
“Bear, this is Six,” Clark said.
“Bear copies.”
“Can you pick us up? We have an injured subject here, and I want to get back and see what the hell’s going on.”
“Wait one and I’ll be there. Be advised we have a wounded subject aboard, too.”
“Roger that, Bear.” Clark looked west. The Night Hawk was in plain view, and he saw it alter course and come straight for his position.
Chavez and Mole pulled the body onto the roadway. It seemed horrible that his legs were at such obviously wrong angles, but he was a terrorist, and got little in the way of solicitude.
“Back into the hospital?” one of the men asked O’Neil.
“But then we’re trapped!” Sam Barry objected.
“We’re bloody trapped here!” Jimmy Carr pointed out. “We need to move. Now!”
O’Neil thought that made sense. “Okay, okay. I’ll pull the door, and you lads run back to the entrance. Ready?” They nodded, cradling their weapons. “Now!” he rasped, pulling the sliding door open.
“Shit!” Price observed from a football field away. “Subjects running back into the hospital. I counted five.”
“Confirm five of them,” another voice agreed on the radio circuit.
Vega and Tomlinson were most of the way to the emergency room now, close enough to see the people there but not the double glass doors that led outside. They heard more screams. Vega took off his Kevlar helmet and peeked around the corner. Oh, shit, he thought, seeing one guy with an AKMS. That one was looking around inside the building—and behind him was half the body of someone looking outward. Oso nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand came down on his shoulder. He turned. It was Franklin, without his monster rifle, holding only his Beretta pistol.
“I just heard, five bad guys there?”
“That’s what the man said,” Vega confirmed. He waved Sergeant Tomlinson to the other side of the corridor. “You stick with me, Fred.”
“Roge-o, Oso. Wish you had your M-60 now?”
“Fuckin’ A, man.” As good as the German MP-10 was, it felt like a toy in his hands.
Vega took another look. There was Ding’s wife, standing now, looking over to where the bad guys were, pregnant as hell in her white coat. He and Chavez went back nearly ten years. He couldn’t let anything happen to her. He backed off the corner and tried waving his arm at her.
Patsy Clark Chavez, M.D., saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a soldier dressed all in black. He was waving to her, and when she turned the waves beckoned her to him, which struck her as a good idea. Slowly, she started moving to her right.
“You, stop!” Jimmy Carr called angrily. Then he started moving toward her. Unseen to his left, Sergeant George Tomlinson edged his face and gun muzzle around the corner. Vega’s waves merely grew more frantic, and Patsy kept moving his way. Carr stepped toward her, bringing his rifle up—
—as soon as he came into view, Tomlinson took aim, and seeing the weapon aimed at Ding’s wife, he depressed the trigger gently, loosing a three-round burst.
The silence of it was somehow worse than the loudest noise. Patsy turned to look at the guy with the gun when his head exploded—but there was no noise other than the brushlike sound of a properly suppressed weapon, and the wet-mess noise of his destroyed cranium. The body—the face was sprayed away, and the back of his head erupted in a cloud of red—then it just fell straight down, and the loudest sound was the clatter of the rifle hitting the floor, loosed from the dead hands.
“Come here!” Vega shouted, and she did what she was told, ducking and running toward him.
Oso grabbed her arm and swung her around like a doll, knocking her off her feet and sending her sliding across the tile floor. Sergeant Franklin scooped her up and ran down the corridor, carrying her like a toy. In the main lobby he found the hospital security guard, and left her with him, then ran back.
“Franklin to Command. Dr. Chavez is safe. We got her to the main lobby. Get some people there, will ya? Let’s get these fucking civilians evacuated fast, okay?”
“Price to Team. Where is everyone? Where are the subjects?”
“Price, this is Vega, we are down to four subjects. George just dropped one. They are in the emergency room. Mrs. Clark is probably still there. We hear noises, there are civilians in there. We have their escape route closed. I have Tomlinson and Franklin here. Fred’s only got a pistol. Unknown number of hostages, but as far as I can tell we’re down to four bad guys, over.”
“I’ve got to get down there,” Dr. Bellow said. He was badly shaken. People had been shot within a few feet of him. Alistair Stanley was down with a chest wound, and at least one other Rainbow trooper was dead, along with three additional wounded, one of those serious-looking.
“That way.” Price pointed to the front of the hospital. A Team-1 member appeared, and headed that way as well. It was Geoff Bates, one of Covington’s shooters from the SAS, fully armed, though he hadn’t taken so much as a single shot yet today. He and Bellow moved quickly.
Somehow Carr had died without notice. O’Neil turned and saw him there, his body like the stem for a huge red flower of blood on the dingy tile floor. It was only getting worse. He had four armed men, but he couldn’t see around the corner twenty feet away, and surely there were armed SAS soldiers there, and he had no escape. He had eight other people nearby, and these he could use as hostages, perhaps, but the danger of that game was dramatically obvious. No escape, his mind told him, but his emotions said something else. He had weapons, and his enemies were nearby, and he was supposed to kill them, and if he had to die, he’d damned well die for The Cause, the idea to which he’d dedicated his life, the idea for which he’d told himself a thousand times he was willing to die. Well, here he was now, and death was close, not something to be considered in his bed, waiting for sleep to come, or drinking beer in a pub, discussing the loss of some dedicated comrades, the brave talk they all spoke when bravery wasn’t needed. It all came down to this. Now danger was here, and it was time to see if his bravery was a thing of words or a thing of the belly, and his emotions wanted to show the whole bloody world that he was a man of his word and his beliefs . . . but part of him wanted to escape back to Ireland, and not die this day in an English hospital.
Sandy Clark watched him from fifteen feet away. He was a handsome man, and probably a brave one—for a criminal, her mind added. She remembered John telling her more than once that bravery was a far more common thing than cowardice, and that the reason for it was shame. People went into danger not alone, but with their friends, and you didn’t want to appear weak in front of them, and so from the fear of cowardice came the most insane of acts, the successful ones later celebrated as
great heroism. It had struck her as the worst sort of cynicism on John’s part . . . and yet her husband was not a cynical man. Could it therefore be the truth?
In this case, it was a man in his early thirties, holding a weapon in his hands and looking as though he didn’t have a friend in the world—
—but the mother in her told Sandy that her daughter was probably safe now, along with her grandchild. The dead one had called after her, but now he was messily dead on the hospital floor, and so Patsy had probably gotten away. That was the best information of the day, and she closed her eyes to whisper a prayer of thanks.
“Hey, Doc,” Vega said in greeting.
“Where are they?”
Vega pointed. “Around this corner. Four of them, we think. George dropped one for the count.”
“Talk to them yet?”
Oso shook his head. “No.”
“Okay.” Bellow took a deep breath. “This is Paul,” he called loudly. “Is Timothy there?”
“Yes,” came the reply.
“Are you okay?—not wounded or anything, I mean,” the psychiatrist asked.
O’Neil wiped some blood from his face—the glass fragments in the van had made some minor cuts. “We’re all fine. Who are you?”
“I’m a physician. My name is Paul Bellow. What’s yours?”
“Timothy will do for now.”
“Okay, fine. Timothy, uh, you need to think about your situation, okay?”
“I know what that is,” O’Neil responded, an edge on his voice.
Outside, things were gradually becoming organized. Ambulances were on the scene, plus medical orderlies from the British Army. The wounded were being moved now, to the base hospital at Hereford where surgeons were waiting to treat them, and coming in were SAS soldiers, thirty of them, to assist the Rainbow troopers. Colonel Malloy’s helicopter set down on the pad at the base, and the two prisoners were taken to the military hospital for treatment.
“Tim, you will not be getting away from here. I think you know that,” Bellow observed, in as gentle a voice as he could manage.
“I can kill hostages if you don’t let me leave,” O’Neil countered.
“Yes, you can do that, and then we can come in on you and try to stop that from happening, but in either case, you will not be getting away. But what do you gain by murdering people, Tim?”
“The freedom of my country!”
“That is happening already, isn’t it?” Bellow asked. “There are peace accords, Tim. And Tim, tell me, what country ever began on a foundation of the murder of innocent people? What will your countrymen think if you murder your hostages?”
“We are freedom fighters!”
“Okay, fine, you are revolutionary soldiers,” the doctor agreed. “But soldiers, real soldiers, don’t murder people. Okay, fine, earlier today you and your friends shot it out with soldiers, and that’s not murder. But killing unarmed people is murder, Tim. I think you know that. Those people in there with you, are any of them armed? Do any of them wear uniforms?”
“So what? They are the enemy of my country!”
“What makes them enemies, Tim? Where they were born? Have any of them tried to hurt you? Have any of them hurt your country? Why don’t you ask them?” he suggested next.
O’Neil shook his head. The purpose of this was to make him surrender. He knew that. He looked around at his comrades. It was hard for all of them to meet the eyes of the others. They were trapped, and all of them knew it. Their resistance was a thing of the mind rather than of arms, and all of their minds held doubts to which they had as yet not given voice, but the doubts were there, and they all knew it.
“We want a bus to take us away!”
“Take you away to where?” the doctor asked.
“Just get us the bloody bus!” O’Neil screamed.
“Okay, I can talk to people about that, but they have to know where the bus is going to, so that the police can clear the roads for you,” Bellow observed reasonably. It was just a matter of time now. Tim—it would have been useful to know if he’d been truthful in giving out his real name, though Bellow was confident that he had indeed done that—wasn’t talking about killing, hadn’t actually threatened it, hadn’t given a deadline or tossed out a body yet. He wasn’t a killer, at least not a murderer. He thought of himself as a soldier, and that was different from a criminal, to terrorists a very important difference. He didn’t fear death, though he did fear failure, and he feared almost as much being remembered as a killer of the innocent. To kill soldiers was one thing. To murder ordinary women and children was something else. It was an old story for terrorists. The most vulnerable part of any person was his self-image. Those who cared what others thought of them, those who looked in mirrors when they shaved, those people could be worked. It was just a matter of time. They were different from the real fanatics. You could wear this sort down. “Oh, Tim?”
“Yes?”
“Could you do something for me?”
“What?”
“Could you let me make sure the hostages are okay? That’s something I have to do to keep my boss happy. Can I come around to see?”
O’Neil hesitated.
“Tim, come on, okay? You have the things you have to do, and I have the things I have to do, okay? I’m a physician. I don’t carry a gun or anything. You have nothing to be afraid of.” Telling them that they had nothing to fear, and thus suggesting that they were unnecessarily afraid, was usually a good card to play. There followed the usual hesitation, confirming that they were indeed afraid—and that meant Tim was rational, and that was good news for Rainbow’s psychiatrist.
“No, Tim, don’t!” Peter Barry urged. “Give them nothing.”
“But how will we get out of here, get the bus, if we don’t cooperate on something?” O’Neil looked around at the other three. Sam Barry nodded. So did Dan McCorley.
“All right,” O’Neil called. “Come back to us.”
“Thank you,” Bellow called. He looked at Vega, the senior soldier present.
“Watch your ass, doc,” the first sergeant suggested. To go unarmed into the lair of armed bad guys was, he thought, not very bright. He’d never thought that the doc had such stuff in him.
“Always,” Paul Bellow assured him. Then he took a deep breath and walked the ten feet to the corner, and turned, disappearing from the view of the Rainbow troopers.
It always struck Bellow as strange, to the point of being comical, that the difference between safety and danger was a distance of a few feet and the turning of one corner. Yet he looked up with genuine interest. He’d rarely met a criminal under these circumstances. So much the better that they were armed and he was not. They would need the comfortable feelings that came with the perception of power to balance the fact that, armed or not, they were in a cage from which there was no escape.
“You’re hurt,” Bellow said on seeing Timothy’s face.
“It’s nothing, just a few scratches.”
“Why not have somebody work on it for you?”
“It’s nothing,” Tim O’Neil said again.
“Okay, it’s your face,” Bellow said, looking and counting four of them, all armed with the same sort of weapon, AKMS, his memory told him. Only then did he count the hostages. He recognized Sandy Clark. There were seven others, all very frightened, by the look of them, but that was to be expected. “So, what exactly do you want?”
“We want a bus, and we want it quickly,” O’Neil replied.
“Okay, I can work on that, but it’ll take time to get things organized, and we’ll need something in return.”
“What’s that?” Timothy asked.
“Some hostages to be released,” the psychiatrist answered.
“No, we only have eight.”
“Look, Tim, when I deal with the people I have to go to—to get the bus you want, okay?—I have to offer them something, or why else should they give me anything to give you?” Bellow asked reasonably. “It’s how the game is played,
Tim. The game has rules. Come on, you know that. You trade some of what you have for some of what you want.”
“So?”
“So, as a sign of good faith, you give me a couple hostages—women and kids, usually, because that looks better.” Bellow looked again. Four women, four men. It would be good to get Sandy Clark out.
“And then?”
“And then I tell my superiors that you want a bus and that you’ve shown good faith. I have to represent you to them, right?”
“Ah, and you’re on our side?” another man asked. Bellow looked and saw that he was a twin, with a brother standing only a few feet away. Twin terrorists. Wasn’t that interesting?
“No, I won’t say that. Look, I am not going to insult your intelligence. You people know the fix you’re in. But if you want to get things, you have to deal for them. That’s the rule, and it’s a rule I didn’t make. I have to be the go-between. That means I represent you to my bosses, and I represent my bosses to you. If you need time to think it over, fine, I won’t be far away, but the faster you move on things, the faster I can move. I need you guys to think about that, okay?”
“Get the bus,” Timothy said.
“In return for what?” Paul asked.
“Two women.” O’Neil turned. “That one and that one.”
“Can they come out with me?” Bellow saw that Timothy had actually indicated Sandy Clark. This kid, O’Neil, was overwhelmed by the circumstances, and that was probably good, too.
“Yes, but get us that bloody bus!”
