“You will release Sean to us. He goes on the bus with us!”
“Timothy, he’s on an operating table right now, and he’s going to be there for hours. If they even attempted to move him now, the results could be lethal—they could kill the man, Tim. So, much as you might want it, that’s just not possible. It can’t happen. I’m sorry about that, but nobody can change it.”
His leader was a prisoner now? Tim O’Neil thought. Sean was captured? Strangely that seemed worse than his own situation. Even if he were in prison, Sean might come up with a way of freeing him, but with Sean on the Isle of Wight . . . all was lost, wasn’t it? But—
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“Tim, in a situation like this, I can’t lie. I’d just screw up. It’s too hard to be a good liar, and if you caught me in a lie, you’d never believe me again, and that would end my usefulness to my bosses and to you, too, wouldn’t it?” Again the voice of quiet reason.
“You said you’re a doctor?”
“That’s right.” Bellow nodded.
“Where do you practice?”
“Mainly here now, but I did my residency at Harvard. I’ve worked at four different places, and taught some.”
“So, your job is to get people like me to surrender, isn’t it?” Anger, finally, at the obvious.
Bellow shook his head. “No, I think of my job as keeping people alive. I’m a physician, Tim. I am not allowed to kill people or to help others to kill people. I swore an oath on that one a long time ago. You have guns. Other people around that corner have guns. I don’t want any of you to get killed. There’s been enough of that today, hasn’t there? Tim, do you enjoy killing people?”
“Why—no, of course not, who does?”
“Well, some do,” Bellow told him, deciding to build up his ego a little. “We call them sociopathic personalities, but you’re not one of them. You’re a soldier. You fight for something you believe in. So do the people back there.” Bellow waved to where the Rainbow people were. “They respect you, and I hope you respect them. Soldiers don’t murder people. Criminals do that, and a soldier isn’t a criminal.” In addition to being true, this was an important thought to communicate to his interlocutor. All the more so because a terrorist was also a romantic, and to be considered a common criminal was psychologically very wounding to them. He’d just built up their self-images in order to steer them away from something he didn’t want them to do. They were soldiers, not criminals, and they had to act like soldiers, not criminals.
“Dr. Bellow?” a voice called from around the corner. “Phone call, sir.”
“Tim, can I go get it?” Always ask permission to do something. Give them the illusion of being in command of the situation.
“Yeah.” O’Neil waved him away. Bellow walked back to where the soldiers were.
He saw John Clark standing there. Together they walked fifty feet into another part of the hospital.
“Thanks for getting my wife and little girl out, Paul.”
Bellow shrugged. “It was mainly luck. He’s a little overwhelmed by all this, and he’s not thinking very well. They want a bus.”
“You told me before,” Clark reminded him. “Do we give it to ’em?”
“We won’t have to do that. I’m in a poker game, John, and I’m holding a straight flush. Unless something screws up really bad, we have this one under control.”
“Noonan’s outside, and he has a mike on the window. I listened in on the last part. Pretty good, doctor.”
“Thanks.” Bellow rubbed his face. The tension was real for him, but he could only show it here. In with Timothy he had to be cool as ice, like a friendly and respected teacher. “What’s the story on the other prisoners?”
“No change. The Grady guy is being operated on—it’ll take a few hours, they say. The other one’s unconscious still, and we don’t have a name or ID on him anyway.”
“Grady’s the leader?”
“We think so, that’s what the intel tells us.”
“So he can tell us a lot. You want me there when he comes out of the OR,” Paul told Rainbow Six.
“You need to finish up here first.”
“I know. I’m going back.” Clark patted him on the shoulder and Bellow walked back to see the terrorists.
“Well?” Timothy asked.
“Well, they haven’t decided on the bus yet. Sorry,” Bellow added in a downcast voice. “I thought I had them convinced, but they can’t get their asses in gear.”
“You tell them that if they don’t, we’ll—”
“No, you won’t, Tim. You know that. I know that. They know that.”
“Then why send the bus?” O’Neil asked, close to losing control now.
“Because I told them that you’re serious, and they have to take your threat seriously. If they don’t believe you’ll do it, they have to remember that you might, and if you do, then they look bad to their bosses.” Timothy shook his head at that convoluted logic, looking more puzzled than angry now. “Trust me,” Paul Bellow went on. “I’ve done this before, and I know how it works. It’s easier negotiating with soldiers like you than with those damned bureaucrats. People like you can make decisions. People like that run away from doing it. They don’t care much about getting people killed, but they do care about looking bad in the newspapers.”
Then something good happened. Tim reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. A sure sign of stress and an attempt to control it.
“Hazardous to your health, boy,” Clark observed, looking at the TV picture Noonan had established. The assault plan was completely ready. Connolly had line charges set on the windows, both to open an entry path and to distract the terrorists. Vega, Tomlinson, and Bates, from Team-1, would toss flash-bangs at the same time and dart into the room to take the bad guys down with aimed fire. The only downside to that, as always, was that one of them could turn and hose the hostages as his last conscious act, or even by accident, which was just as lethal. From the sound of it, Bellow was doing okay. If these subjects had any brains at all, they’d know it was time to call it a day, but John reminded himself that he’d never contemplated life in prison before, at least not this immediately, and he imagined it wasn’t a fun thought. He now had a surfeit of soldierly talent at his disposal. The SAS guys who’d arrived had chopped to his operational command, though their own colonel had come as well to kibitz in the hospital’s main lobby.
“Tough day for all of us, isn’t it, Tim?” the psychiatrist asked.
“Could have been a better one,” Timothy O’Neil agreed.
“You know how this one will end, don’t you?” Bellow offered, like a nice fly to a brook trout, wondering if he’d rise to it.
“Yes, doctor, I do.” He paused. “I haven’t even fired my rifle today. I haven’t killed anyone. Jimmy did,” he went on, gesturing to the body on the floor, “but not any of us.”
Bingo! Bellow thought. “That counts for something, Tim. As a matter of fact, it counts for a lot. You know, the war will be over soon. They’re going to make peace finally, and when that happens, well, there’s going to be an amnesty for most of the fighters. So you have some hope. You all do,” Paul told the other three, who were watching and listening . . . and wavering, as their leader was. They had to know that all was lost. Surrounded, their leader captured, this could only end in one of two ways, with their deaths or their imprisonment. Escape was not a practical possibility, and they knew that the attempt to move their hostages to a bus would only expose them to certain death in a new and different way.
“Tim?”
“Yes?” He looked up from his smoke.
“If you set your weapons down on the floor, you have my word that you will not be hurt in any way.”
“And go to prison?” Defiance and anger in the reply.
“Timothy, you can get out of prison someday. You cannot get out of death. Please think about that. For God’s sake, I’m a physician,” Bellow reminded him. “I
don’t like seeing people die.”
Timothy O’Neil turned to look at his comrades. All eyes were downcast. Even the Barry twins showed no particular defiance.
“Guys, if you haven’t hurt anyone today, then, yes, you will go to prison, but someday you’ll have a good chance to get out when the amnesty is promulgated. Otherwise, you die for nothing at all. Not for your country. They don’t make heroes out of people who kill civilians,” he reminded them once again. Keep repeating, Bellow thought. Keep drumming it in. “Killing soldiers, yes, that’s something soldiers do, but not murdering innocent people. You will die for nothing at all—or you will live, and be free again someday. It’s up to you, guys. You have the guns. But there isn’t going to be a bus. You will not escape, and you have six people you can kill, sure, but what does that get for you, except a trip to hell? Call it a day, Timothy,” he concluded, wondering if some Catholic nun in grade school had addressed him that way.
It wasn’t quite that easy for Tim O’Neil. The idea of imprisonment in a cage with common criminals, having his family come to visit him there like an animal in a zoo, gave him chills . . . but he’d known that this was a possibility for years, and though he preferred the mental image of heroic death, a blazing gun in his hand firing at the enemies of his country, this American doctor had spoken the truth. There was no glory in murdering six English civilians. No songs would be written and sung about this exploit, no pints hoisted to his name in the pubs of Ulster . . . and what was left to him was inglorious death . . . life, in prison or not, was preferable to that sort of death.
Timothy Dennis O’Neil turned to look at his fellow PIRA soldiers and saw the same expression that they saw on his face. Without a spoken agreement, they all nodded. O’Neil safed his rifle and set it on the floor. The others did the same.
Bellow walked over to them to shake their hands.
“Six to Vega, move in now!” Clark called, seeing the picture on the small black-and-white screen.
Oso Vega moved quickly around the corner, his MP-10 up in his hands. There they were, standing with the doc. Tomlinson and Bates pushed them, not too roughly, against the wall. The former covered them while the latter patted them down. Seconds later, two uniformed policemen came in with handcuffs and, to the amazement of the soldiers, read them their legal rights. And just that easily and quietly, this day’s fighting was over.
CHAPTER 29
RECOVERY
The day hadn’t ended for Dr. Bellow. Without so much as a drink of water for his dry throat, he hopped into a green-painted British Army truck for the trip back to Hereford. It hadn’t ended for those left behind either.
“Hey, baby,” Ding said. He’d finally found his wife outside the hospital, surrounded by a ring of SAS troopers.
Patsy ran the ten steps to him and hugged her husband as tightly as her swollen abdomen allowed.
“You okay?”
She nodded, tears in her eyes. “You?”
“I’m fine. It was a little exciting there for a while—and we have some people down, but everything’s under control now.”
“One of them—somebody killed him, and—”
“I know. He was pointing a weapon at you, and that’s why he got himself killed.” Chavez reminded himself that he owed Sergeant Tomlinson a beer for that bit of shooting—in fact, he owed him a lot more than that, but in the community of warriors, this was how such debts were paid. But for now, just holding Patsy in his arms was as far as his thinking went. Tears welled up in his eyes. Ding blinked them away. That wasn’t part of his machismo self-image. He wondered what damage this day’s events might have had on his wife. She was a healer, not a killer, and yet she’d seen traumatic death so close at hand. Those IRA bastards! he thought. They’d invaded his life, and attacked noncombatants, and killed some of his team members. Somebody had fed them information on how to do it. Somewhere there was an information leak, a bad one, and finding it would be their first priority.
“How’s the little guy?” Chavez asked his wife.
“Feels okay, Ding. Really. I’m okay,” Patsy assured him.
“Okay, baby, I have to go do some things now. You’re going home.” He pointed to an SAS trooper and waved him over. “Take her back to the base, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant replied. Together they walked her to the parking lot. Sandy Clark was there with John, also hugging and holding hands, and the smart move seemed to be to take them both to John’s quarters. An officer from the SAS volunteered, as did a sergeant to ride shotgun, which in this case was not a rhetorical phrase. As usual, once the horse had escaped from the barn, the door would be locked and guarded. But that was a universal human tendency, and in another minute both women were being driven off, a police escort with them as well.
“Where to, Mr. C?” Chavez asked.
“Our friends were taken to the base hospital. Paul is there already. He wants to interview Grady—the leader—when he comes out of surgery. I think we want to be there for that.”
“Roger that, John. Let’s get moving.”
Popov was most of the way back to London, listening to his car radio. Whoever was briefing the media knew and talked too much. Then he heard that the leader of the IRA raiders had been captured, and Dmitriy’s blood turned to ice. If they had Grady, then they had the man who knew who he was, knew his cover name, knew about the money transfer, knew too damned much. It wasn’t time for panic, but it was damned sure time for action.
Popov checked his watch. The banks were still open. He lifted his cell phone and called Bern. In a minute, he had the correct bank officer on the line and gave him the account number, which the officer called up on his computer. Then Popov gave him the transaction code, and ordered the funds transferred into another account. The officer didn’t even express his disappointment that so much money was being removed. Well, the bank had plenty of deposits, didn’t it? The Russian was now richer by over five million dollars, but poorer in that the enemy might soon have his cover name and physical description. Popov had to get out of the country. He took the exit to Heathrow and ended up at Terminal Four. Ten minutes later, having returned his rental car, he went in and got the last first-class ticket on a British Airways flight to Chicago. He had to hurry to catch the flight, but made it aboard, where a pretty stewardess conveyed him to his seat, and soon thereafter the 747 left the gate.
“That was quite a mess,” John Brightling observed, muting the TV in his office. Hereford would lead every TV newscast in the world.
“They were unlucky,” Henriksen replied. “But those commandos are pretty good, and if you give them a break, they’ll use it. What the hell, four or five of them went down. Nobody’s ever pulled that off against a force like this one.”
Brightling knew that Bill’s heart was divided on the mission. He had to have at least some sympathy with the people he’d helped to attack. “Fallout?”
“Well, if they got the leader alive, they’re going to sweat him, but these IRA guys don’t sing. I mean, they never sing. The only pipeline they could possibly have to us is Dmitriy, and he’s a pro. He’s moving right now, probably on an airplane to somewhere if I know him. He’s got all sorts of false travel documents, credit cards, IDs. So, he’s probably safe. John, the KGB knew how to train its people, trust me.”
“If they should get him, would he talk?” Brightling asked.
“That’s a risk. Yes, he might well spill his guts,” Henriksen had to admit. “If he gets back, I’ll debrief him on the hazards involved. . . .”
“Would it be a good idea to . . . well . . . eliminate him?”
The question embarrassed his boss, Henriksen saw, as he prepared a careful and honest answer: “Strictly speaking, yes, but there are dangers in that, John. He’s a pro. He probably has a mailbox somewhere.” Seeing Brightling’s confusion, he explained, “You guard against the possibility of being killed by writing everything down and putting it in a safe place. If you don’t access the box every month or so, the info
rmation inside gets distributed according to a prearranged plan. You have a lawyer do that for you. That is a big risk to us, okay? Dead or alive, he can burn us, and in this case, it’s more dangerous if he’s dead.” Henriksen paused. “No, we want him alive—and under our control, John.”
“Okay, you handle it, Bill.” Brightling leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. They were too close now to run unnecessary risks. Okay, the Russian would be handled, put under wraps. It might even save Popov’s life—hell, he thought, it would save his life, wouldn’t it? He hoped that the Russian would be properly appreciative. Brightling had to be properly appreciative, too. This Rainbow bunch was crippled now, or at least badly hurt. It had to be. Popov had fulfilled two missions, he’d helped raise the world’s consciousness about terrorism, and thus gotten Global Security its contract with the Sydney Olympics, and then he’d helped sting this new counterterror bunch, hopefully enough to take them out of play. The operation was now fully in place and awaited only the right time for activation.
So close, Brightling thought. It was probably normal to have the jitters at moments like this. Confidence was a thing of distance. The farther away you were, the easier it was to think yourself invincible, but then you got close and the dangers grew with their proximity. But that didn’t change anything, did it? No, not really. The plan was perfect. They just had to execute it.
Sean Grady came out of surgery at just after eight in the evening, following three and a half hours on the table. The orthopod who’d worked on him was first-rate, Bellow saw. The humerus was fixed in place with a cobalt-steel pin that would be permanent and large enough that in the unlikely event that Grady ever entered an international airport in the future, he’d probably set off the metal detector while stark naked. Luckily for him the brachial plexus had not been damaged by the two bullets that had entered his body, and so he’d suffer no permanent loss of use of his arm. The secondary damage to his chest was minor. He’d recover fully, the British Army surgeon concluded, and so could enjoy full physical health during the lifelong prison term that surely awaited him.
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