Rainbow Six (1997) (73 page)

The packing done, Popov took his bags to the elevator, then down to the street level, where the apartment house’s doorman flagged him a cab for La Guardia, where he’d board the shuttle for Boston’s Logan International, and there to catch the Aer Lingus flight to Dublin. If nothing else, his work for Brightling had gotten him a lot of frequent-flyer miles, though with too many different airlines to be of real help. But they always flew him first-class, which KGB had never done, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought with a suppressed smile in the backseat of the cab. All he had to do, he reminded himself, was deal honestly with the PIRA. If the opportunity came to steal their money, then he’d take it. But he already knew one thing: they’d jump at the proposed operation. It was too good to pass up, and if nothing else, the PIRA had
élan.

 

 

Special Agent Patrick O’Connor looked over the information faxed from New York. The trouble with kidnapping investigations was time. No investigation ever ran quickly enough, but it was worse with kidnappings, because you knew that somewhere was a real person whose life depended upon your ability to get the information and act upon it before the kidnapper decided to end his nasty little game, kill the current hostage, and go grab another. Grab another? Yes, probably, because there had been no ransom demand, and that meant that whoever had snatched Mary Bannister off the street wasn’t willing to sell her back. No, he’d be using her as a toy, almost certainly for sexual gratification, until he tired of her, and then, probably, he’d kill her. And so, O’Connor thought himself to be in a race, albeit on a track he couldn’t see, and running against a stopwatch hidden in the hand of another. He had a list of Ms. Bannister’s local friends and associates, and he had his men and women out talking to them, hoping to turn up a name or a phone number that would lead them on to the next step in the investigation . . . but probably not, he thought. No, this case was all happening in New York. This young woman had gone there to seek her fortune in the bright city lights, like so many others. And many of them did find what they were seeking, which was why they went, but this one, from the outskirts of Gary, Indiana, had gone there without knowing what it was like in a big city, and lacked the self-protective skills one needed in a city of eight million . . .

. . . and she was probably already dead, O’Connor admitted quietly to himself, killed by whatever monster had snatched her off the street. There was not a damned thing he could do about it except to identify, arrest, and convict the creep, which would save others, but wouldn’t be worth a damn to the victim whose name titled the case file on his desk. Well, that was one of the problems of being a cop. You couldn’t save them all. But you did try to avenge them all, and that was something, the agent told himself, as he rose to get his coat for the drive home.

 

 

Chavez sipped his Guinness and looked around the club. The Eagle of the Legion had been hung on the wall opposite the bar, and people already went over to touch the wooden staff in respect. Three of his Team-2 people were at a table, drinking their brews and chatting about something or other with two of Peter Covington’s troops. The TV was on—snooker championships? Chavez wondered. That was a national event? Which changed into news and weather.

More El Niño stuff, Ding saw with a snort. Once it had just been called
weather,
but then some damned oceanographer had discovered that the warm/cold water mix off the coast of South America changed every few years, and that when it happened the world’s climate changed a little bit here and there, and the media had latched onto it, delighted, so it seemed, to have another label to put on things they lacked the education to understand. Now they said that the current rendition of the “El Niño Effect” was unusually hot weather in Australia.

“Mr. C, you’re old enough to remember. What did they say before this crap?”

“They called it unusually hot, cold, or seasonable weather, tried to tell you if it was going to be hot, cold, sunny, or rainy the next day, and then they told you about the baseball scores.” With rather less accuracy on the weather side, Clark didn’t say. “How’s Patsy doing?”

“Another couple of weeks, John. She’s holding up pretty well, but she bitches about how big her belly’s gotten to be.” He checked his watch. “Ought to be home in another thirty minutes. Same shift with Sandy.”

“Sleeping okay?” John went on.

“Yeah, a little restless when the little
hombre
rolls around, but she’s getting all she needs. Be cool, John. I’m taking good care of her. Looking forward to being a grandpa?”

Clark sipped at his third pint of the evening. “One more milestone on the road to death, I suppose.” Then he chuckled. “Yeah, Domingo, I am looking forward to it.”
I’ll spoil the shit out of this little bastard, and then just hand him back when he cries.
“Ready to be a pop?”

“I think I can handle it, John. How hard can it be? You did it.”

Clark ignored the implicit challenge. “We’re going to be sending a team down to Australia in a few weeks.”

“What for?” Chavez asked.

“The Aussies are a little worried about the Olympics, and we look pretty sexy ’cause of all the missions we’ve had. So, they want some of us to come on down and look over things with their SAS.”

“Their guys any good?”

Clark nodded. “So I am told, but never hurts to get an outside opinion, does it?”

“Who’s going down?”

“I haven’t decided yet. They already have a consulting company, Global Security, Ltd., run by a former FBI guy. Noonan knows him. Henriksen, something like that.”

“Have they ever had a terrorist incident down there?” Domingo asked next.

“Nothing major that I can remember, but, well, you don’t remember Munich in 1972, do you?”

Chavez shook his head. “Just what I’ve read about it. The German cops really screwed the pooch on that mission.”

“Yeah, I guess. Nobody ever told them that they’d have to face people like that. Well, now we all know, right? That’s how GSG-9 got started, and they’re pretty good.”

“Like the
Titanic,
eh? Ships have enough lifeboats because she didn’t?”

John nodded agreement. “That’s how it works. It takes a hard lesson to make people learn, son.” John set his empty glass down.

“Okay, but how come the bad guys never learn?” Chavez asked, finishing off his second of the evening. “We’ve delivered some tough lessons, haven’t we? But you think we can fold up the tents? Not hardly, Mr. C. They’re still out there, John, and they’re not retiring, are they? They ain’t learned shit.”

“Well, I’d sure as hell learn from it. Maybe they’re just dumber than we are. Ask Bellow about it,” Clark suggested.

“I think I will.”

 

 

Popov was fading off to sleep. The ocean below the Aer Lingus 747 was dark now, and his mind was well forward of the aircraft, trying to remember faces and voices from the past, wondering if perhaps his contact had turned informer to the British Security Service, and would doom him to identification and possible arrest. Probably not. They’d seemed very dedicated to their cause—but you could never be sure. People turned traitor for all manner of reasons. Popov knew that well. He’d helped more than his share of people do just that, changing their loyalties, betraying their countries, often for small amounts of cash. How much the easier to turn against an atheist foreigner who’d given them equivocal support? What if his contacts had come to see the futility of their cause? Ireland would not turn into a Marxist country, for all their wishes. The list of such nations was very thin now, though across the world academics still clung to the words and ideas of Marx and Engels and even Lenin. Fools. There were even those who said that Communism had been tried in the wrong country—that Russia had been far too backward to make those wonderful ideas work.

That was enough to bring an ironic smile and a shake of the head. He’d once been part of the organization called the Sword and Shield of the Party. He’d been through the Academy, had sat through all the political classes, learned the answers to the inevitable examination questions and been clever enough to write down exactly what his instructors wanted to hear, thus ensuring high marks and the respect of his mentors—few of whom had believed in that drivel any more than he had, but none of whom had found within themselves the courage to speak their real thoughts. It was amazing how long the lies had lasted, and truly Popov could remember his surprise when the red flag had been pulled down from its pole atop the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Gate. Nothing, it seemed, lived longer than a perverse idea.

One of the differences between Europe and America was that the former’s countries truly welcomed foreigners, while America, for all her hospitality, made entering the country remarkably inconvenient. Certainly the Irish erected no barriers, Popov saw, as his passport was stamped and he collected his luggage for an “inspection” so cursory that the inspector probably hadn’t noticed if the person carrying it was male or female. With that, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich walked outside and flagged a cab for his hotel. His reservation gave him a one-bedroom suite overlooking a major thoroughfare, and he immediately undressed to catch a few more hours of sleep before making his first call. His last thought before closing his eyes on this sunny morning was that he hoped the contact number hadn’t been changed, or compromised. If the latter, then he’d have to do some explaining to the local police, but he had a cover story, if necessary. While it wasn’t perfect, it would be good enough to protect a person who’d committed no crimes in the Republic of Ireland.

 

 

“Airborne, Airborne, have you heard?” Vega sang, as they began the final mile. “We’re gonna jump from the big-ass bird!”

It surprised Chavez that as bulky as First Sergeant Julio Vega was, he never seemed to suffer from it on the runs. He was a good thirty pounds heavier than any other Team-2 member. Any bigger across the chest and he’d have to get his fatigue shirts custom-made, but despite the ample body, his legs and wind hadn’t failed him yet. And so, today, he was taking his turn leading the morning run. . . . In another four minutes they could see the stop line, which they all welcomed, though none of them would admit it.

“Quick time
—march!”
Vega called, as he crossed the yellow line, and everyone slowed to the usual one-hundred-twenty steps per minute. “Left, left, your left your right your left!” Another half minute and: “Detail
. . . halt!”
And everyone stopped. There was a cough or two from those who’d had a pint or two too many the night before, but nothing more than that.

Chavez walked to the command position in front of the two lines of troopers. “Fall out,” he ordered, allowing Team-2 to walk to their building for a shower, having stretched and exercised all their muscles for the day. Later today they’d have another run through the shooting house for a live-fire exercise. It would be boring in content, since they’d already tried just about every possible permutation of hostages and bad guys. Their shooting was just about perfect. Their physical condition
was
perfect, and their morale was so high that they seemed bored. They were so confident in their abilities, they’d demonstrated them so convincingly in the field, firing real bullets into real targets. Even his time with the 7th Light Infantry Division had not given him such confidence in his people. They’d gotten to the point that the British SAS troopers, who had a long, proud history of their own, and who’d initially looked upon the Rainbow teams with a great degree of skepticism, now welcomed them into the club and even admitted they had things to learn from them. And
that
was quite a stretch, since the SAS had been the acknowledged world masters at special operations.

A few minutes later, showered and dressed, Chavez came out to the squad bay, where his people were at their individual desks, going over intelligence information from Bill Tawney and his crew, and checking out photos, many of them massaged by the computer systems to allow for the years since they’d originally been taken. The systems seemed to get better on a daily basis as the software evolved. A picture taken from an angle was now manipulated by the computer into a straight-on portrait shot, and his men studied them as they might examine photos of their own children, along with whatever information they had of who was suspected to be where, with what known or suspected associates, and so forth. It seemed a waste of time to Chavez, but you couldn’t run and shoot all day, and knowing the faces wasn’t a total waste of time. They
had
identified Fürchtner and Dortmund that way on their Vienna deployment, hadn’t they?

Sergeant Major Price was going over budget stuff, which he’d toss onto Ding’s desk for later examination, so that his boss could justify expenditures, and then maybe request some new training funds for some new idea or other. Tim Noonan was working away with his new electronic toys, and Clark was always, so it seemed, fighting money battles with CIA and other American agencies. That struck Chavez as a total waste of effort. Rainbow had been pretty bulletproof from the very beginning—Presidential sponsorship never hurt—and their missions hadn’t exactly diminished the credibility from which their funding derived. In another two hours, they’d go to the range for their daily expenditure of one hundred rounds of pistol and SMG ammunition, followed by the live-five exercise . . . another routine day. For “routine,” Ding often substituted “boring,” but that couldn’t be helped, and it was a hell of a lot less boring than it had been on field missions for CIA, most of which time had been spent sitting down waiting for a meet and/or filling out forms to describe the field operation for the Langley bureaucrats who demanded full documentation of everything that happened in the field because—because that was one of the rules. Rules at best enforced by people who’d been out there and done that a generation before and thought they still knew all about it, and at worst by people who didn’t have a clue, and were all the more demanding for that very reason. But the government, which tossed away billions of dollars every day, could often be so niggardly over a thousand or so, and nothing Chavez could do would ever change that.