Who were these people who stared at them as though they were objects, with guns in their hands like something from a movie . . . except that she and Gerhardt and the others were the bit players now. They couldn’t go to the kitchen to fetch beer and pretzels. They could only live the drama to its end. And so she wept quietly at her powerlessness, to the contempt of Petra Dortmund.
Homer Johnston was in his ghillie suit, a complex overall-type garment made of rags sewn into place on a gridded matrix, whose purpose was to make him appear to be a bush or a pile of leaves or compost, anything but a person with a rifle. The rifle was set up on its bipod, the hinged flaps on the front and back lenses of his telescopic sight flipped up. He’d picked a good place to the east of the helicopter pad that would allow him to cover the entire distance between the helicopter and the house. His laser rangefinder announced that he was 216 meters from a door on the back of the house and 147 meters from the front-left door of the helicopter. He was lying prone in a dry spot on the beautiful lawn, in the lengthening shadows close to the treeline, and the air brought to him the smell of horses, which reminded him of his childhood in the American northwest. Okay. He thumbed his radio microphone.
“Lead, Rifle Two-One.”
“Rifle Two-One, Lead.”
“In place and set up. I show no movement in the house at this time.”
“Rifle Two-Two, in place and set up, I also see no movement,” Sergeant Weber reported from his spot, two hundred fifty-six meters from Johnston. Johnston turned to see Dieter’s location. His German counterpart had selected a good spot.
“Achtung,” a voice called behind him. Johnston turned to see an Austrian cop approaching, not quite crawling on the grass. “Hier,” the man said, handing over some photos and withdrawing rapidly. Johnston looked at them. Good, shots of the hostages . . . but none of the bad guys. Well, at least he’d know whom not to shoot. With that, he backed off the rifle and lifted his green-coated military binoculars and began scanning the house slowly and regularly, left to right and back again. “Dieter?” he said over his direct radio link.
“Yes, Homer?”
“They get you the photos?”
“Yes, I have them.”
“No lights inside . . .”
“Ja, our friends are being clever.”
“I figure about half an hour until we have to go NVG.”
“I agree, Homer.”
Johnston grunted and turned to check the bag he’d carried in along with his rifle case and $10,000 rifle. Then he returned to scanning the building, patiently, like staking out a mountain deer trail for a big muley . . . a happy thought for the lifelong hunter . . . the taste of venison, especially cooked in the field over an open wood fire . . . some coffee from the blue, steel enamel pot . . . and the talking that came after a successful hunt . . . Well, you can’t eat what you shoot here, Homer, the sergeant told himself, settling back into his patient routine. One hand reached into a pocket for some beef jerky to chew.
Eddie Price lit his pipe on the far side of the dwelling. Not as big as Kensington Palace, but prettier, he thought. The thought disturbed him. It was something they’d talked about during his time in the SAS. What if terrorists—usually they thought of the Irish PIRA or INLA—attacked one of the Royal residences . . . or the Palace of Westminster. The SAS had walked through all of the buildings in question at one time or another, just to get a feel for the layout, the security systems, and the problems involved—especially after that lunatic had cracked his way into Buckingham Palace in the 1980s, walking into the Queen’s own bedchamber. He still had chills about that!
The brief reverie faded. He had the Schloss Ostermann to worry about, Price remembered, scanning over the blueprints again.
“Bloody nightmare on the inside, Ding,” Price finally said.
“That’s the truth. All wood floors, probably creak, lots of places for the bad guys to hide and snipe at us. We’d need a chopper to do this right.” But they didn’t have a helicopter. That was something to talk with Clark about. Rainbow hadn’t been fully thought through. Too fast on too many things. Not so much that they needed a helicopter as some good chopper crews trained in more than one type of aircraft, because when they deployed in the field, there was no telling what machines would be used by their host nation. Chavez turned: “Doc?”
Bellow came over. “Yes, Ding?”
“I’m starting to think about letting them out, walk to the helicopter behind the house, and taking them down that way rather than forcing our way in.”
“A little early for that, isn’t it?”
Chavez nodded. “Yeah, it is, but we don’t want to lose a hostage, and come midnight, you said, we have to take that threat seriously.”
“We can delay it some, maybe. My job to do that, over the phone.”
“I understand, but if we make a move, I want it to be in the dark. That means tonight. I can’t plan on having you talk them into surrender, unless you’re thinking different? . . .”
“Possible, but unlikely,” Bellow had to agree. He couldn’t even speak confidently about delaying the threatened midnight kill.
“Next, we have to see if we can spike the building.”
“I’m here,” Noonan said. “Tall order, man.”
“Can you do it?”
“I can probably get close unobserved, but there’s over a hundred windows, and how the hell can I get to the ones on the second and third floors? Unless I do a dangle from a chopper and come down on the roof . . .” And that meant making sure that the local TV people, who’d show up as predictably as vultures over a dying cow, turned their cameras off and kept them off, which then ran the risk of alerting the terrorists when the TV reporters stopped showing the building of interest. And how could they fail to note that a helicopter had flown thirty feet over the roof of the building, and might there be a bad guy on the roof, already keeping watch?
“This is getting complicated,” Chavez observed quietly.
“Dark and cold enough for the thermal viewers to start working,” Noonan said helpfully.
“Yeah.” Chavez picked up his radio mike. “Team, Lead, go thermal. Say again, break out the thermals.” Then he turned. “What about cell phones?”
Noonan could do little more than shrug. There were now something like three hundred civilians gathered around, well back from the Ostermann property and controlled by local police, but most of them had a view of the house and the grounds, and if one of them had a cell phone and someone inside did as well, all that unknown person outside had to do was dial his buds on the inside to tell them what was going down. The miracles of modern communication worked both ways. There were over five hundred cellular frequencies, and the gear to cover them all was not part of Rainbow’s regular kit. No terrorist or criminal operation had yet used that technique, to the best of their knowledge, but they couldn’t all be dumb and stay dumb, could they? Chavez looked over at the Schloss and thought again that they’d have to get the bad guys outside for this to work properly. Problem with that, he didn’t know how many bad guys he’d have to deal with, and he had no way of finding out without spiking the building to gather additional information—which was a dubious undertaking for all the other reasons he’d just considered.
“Tim, make a note for when we get back about dealing with cellular phones and radios outside the objective. Captain Altmark!”
“Yes, Major Chavez?”
“The lights, are they here yet?”
“Just arrived, ja, we have three sets.” Altmark pointed. Price and Chavez went over to look. They saw three trucks with attachments that looked for all the world like the lights one might see around a high-school football field. Meant to help fight a major fire, they could be erected and powered by the trucks that carried them. Chavez told Altmark where he wanted them and returned to the team’s assembly point.
The thermal viewers relied on difference in temperature to make an image. The evening was cooling down rapidly, and with it the stone wall
s of the house. Already the windows were glowing more brightly than the walls, because the house was heated, and the old-style full-length windows in the building’s many doors were poorly insulated, despite the large drapes that hung just inside each one. Dieter Weber made the first spot.
“Lead, Rifle Two-Two, I have a thermal target first floor, fourth window from the west, looking around the curtains at the outside.”
“Okay! That one’s in the kitchen.” It was the voice of Hank Patterson, who was hovering over the blueprints. “That’s number one! Can you tell me anything else, Dieter?”
“Negative, just a shape,” the German sniper replied. “No, wait . . . tall, probably a man.”
“This is Pierce, I have one, first floor, east side, second window from east wall.”
“Captain Altmark?”
“Ja?”
“Could you call Ostermann’s office, please? We want to know if he’s there.” Because if he were, there would be one or two bad guys in with him.
“Ostermann office,” a woman’s voice answered.
“This is Captain Altmark. Who is this?”
“This is Commander Gertrude of the Red Workers’ Faction.”
“Excuse me, I was expecting to speak to Commander Wolfgang.”
“Wait,” Petra’s voice told him.
“Hier ist Wolfgang.”
“Hier ist Altmark. We have not heard from you in a long time.”
“What news do you have for us?”
“No news, but we do have a request, Herr Commander.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“As a sign of good faith,” Altmark said, with Dr. Bellow listening in, a translator next to him. “We request that you release two of your hostages, from the domestic staff perhaps.”
“Wofür? So they can help you identify us?”
“Lead, Lincoln here, I have a target, northwest corner window, tall, probably male.”
“That’s three plus two,” Chavez observed, as Patterson placed a yellow circle sticker on that part of the prints.
The woman who’d answered the phone had remained on the line as well. “You have three hours until we send you a hostage, tot,” she emphasized. “You have any further requests? We require a pilot for Herr Ostermann’s helicopter before midnight, and an airliner waiting at the airport. Otherwise, we will kill a hostage to show that we are quite serious, and then thereafter, at regular intervals. Do you understand?”
“Please, we respect your seriousness here,” Altmark assured her. “We are looking for the flight crew now, and we have discussions underway with Austrian Airlines for the aircraft. These things take time, you know.”
“You always say that, people like you. We have told you what we require. If you do not meet those requirements, then their blood is on your hands. Ende,” the voice said, and the line went dead.
Captain Altmark was both surprised and discomforted by the cold decisiveness on the other end of the phone and by the abrupt termination of the call. He looked up at Paul Bellow as he replaced the receiver. “Herr Doktor?”
“The woman is the dangerous one. They’re both smart. They’ve definitely thought this one through, and they will kill a hostage to make their point, sure as hell.”
“Man-and-woman team,” Price was saying over the phone. “German, ages . . . late thirties, early forties as a guess. Maybe older. Bloody serious,” he added for Bill Tawney.
“Thanks, Eddie, stand by,” came the reply. Price could hear the fingers tapping on the keyboard.
“Okay, lad, I have three possible teams for you. Up-loading them now.”
“Thank you, sir.” Price opened his laptop again. “Ding?”
“Yeah?”
“Intelligence coming in.”
“We have at least five terrs in there, boss,” Patterson said, moving his finger around the prints. “Too quick for them to move around. Here, here, here, and two upstairs here. The placement makes sense. They probably have portable radios, too. The house is too big for them to communicate by shouting around at each other.”
Noonan heard that and went off to his radio-intercept equipment. If their friends were using hand-held radios, then their frequency range was well known, determined by international treaty in fact, probably not the military sets the team used, and probably not encrypted. In seconds he had his computerized scanner set up and working off multiple antennas, which would allow him to triangulate on sources inside the house. These were coupled into his laptop computer, already overlaid with a diagram of the Schloss. Three spear-carriers was about right, Noonan thought. Two was too few. Three was close to the right number, though the truck in front of the building could have easily held more. Two plus three, two plus four, two plus five? But they’d all be planning to leave, and the helicopter wasn’t all that big. That made the total terrorist count at five to seven. A guess, and they couldn’t go with a guess—well, they’d prefer not to—but it was a starting place. So many guesses. What if they were not using portable radios? What if they used cell phones? What if a lot of things, Noonan thought. You had to start somewhere, gather all the information you could, and then act on it. The problem with people like this was that they always decided the pace of the event. For all their stupidity and their criminal intent, which Noonan regarded as a weakness, they did control the pace, they decided when things happened. The team could alter it a little by cajolery—that was Dr. Bellow’s part—but when you got down to it, well, the bad guys were the only ones willing to do murder, and that was a card that made a noise when it came down on the table. There were ten hostages inside, Ostermann, his three business assistants, and six people who looked after the house and grounds. Every one of them had a life and a family and the expectation to keep both. Team-2’s job was to make sure that happened. But the bad guys still controlled too much, and this special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t like that very much. Not for the first time, he wished he was one of the shooters, able, in due course, to go in and execute the takedown. But, good as he was at weapons and the physical side, he was better trained on the technical aspects of the mission. That was his area of personal expertise, and he served the mission best by sticking with his instruments. He didn’t, however, have to like it.
“So, what’s the score, Ding?”
“Not all that good, Mr. C.” Chavez turned to survey the building again. “Very difficult to approach the building because of the open ground, therefore difficult to spike and get tactical intelligence. We have two primary and probably three secondary subjects who seem professional and serious. I’m thinking in terms of letting them out to go to the helicopter and taking them down then. Snipers in place. But with the number of subjects, this might not be real pretty, John.”
Clark looked at the display in his command center. He had continuous comm links with Team-2, including their computer displays. As before, Peter Covington was beside him to kibitz. “Might as well be a moated bloody castle,” the British officer had observed earlier. He’d also noted the need for helicopter pilots as a permanent part of the team.
“One other thing,” Chavez said. “Noonan says we need jamming gear for the cell phone freaks. We have a few hundred civilians around, and if one has a shoe phone, he can talk to our friends inside, tell them what we’re doing. No way in hell we can prevent that without jamming gear. Write that one down, Mr. C.”
“Noted, Domingo,” Clark replied, looking over at David Peled, his chief technical officer.
“I can take care of that in a few days,” Peled told his boss. Mossad had the right sort of equipment. Probably so did some American agencies. He’d find out in a hurry. Noonan, David told himself, was very good for a former policeman.
“Okay, Ding, you are released to execute at discretion. Good luck, my boy.”
“Gee, thanks, Dad” was the ironic reply. “Team-2, out.” Chavez killed the radio and tossed the microphone back at the box. “Price!” he called.
“Yes, sir.” The Sergeant Major
materialized at his side.
“We have discretionary release,” the leader told his XO.
“Marvelous, Major Chavez. What do you propose, sir?”
The situation had to be unfavorable, Ding told himself, if Price had reverted back to sirring him.
“Well, let’s see what we got in the way of assets, Eddie.”
Klaus Rosenthal was Ostermann’s head gardener, and at seventy-one the oldest member of the domestic staff. His wife was at home, he was sure, in her bed with a nurse in close attendance handling her medications, and worrying about him he was sure, and that worry could be dangerous to her. Hilda Rosenthal had a progressive heart condition that had invalided her over the past three years. The state medical system had provided the necessary care for her, and Herr Ostermann had assisted as well, sending a friend of his, a full professor from Vienna’s Algemeine Krankenhaus, to oversee the case, and a new drug-therapy treatment had actually improved Hilda’s condition somewhat, but the fear she’d be feeling for him now certainly would not help, and that thought was driving Klaus mad. He was in the kitchen along with the rest of the domestic staff. He’d been inside getting a glass of water when they’d arrived—had he been outside he might well have escaped and raised the alarm and so helped to aid his employer, who’d been so considerate to all his staff, and Hilda! But luck had been against that when these swine had stormed into the kitchen with their weapons showing. Young ones, late twenties, the close one, whose name Rosenthal didn’t know, was either a Berliner or from West Prussia, judging by his accent, and he’d recently been a skinhead, or so it appeared from the uniform-length stubble on his hatless head. A product of the DDR, the now-defunct East Germany. One of the new Nazis who’d grown out of that fallen communist nation. Rosenthal had met the old ones at Belzec concentration camp as a boy, and though he’d managed to survive that experience, the return of the terror of having one’s life continue only at the whim of a madman with cruel piglike eyes . . . Rosenthal closed his eyes. He still had the nightmares that went along with the five-digit number tattooed on his forearm. Once a month he still awoke on sweaty sheets after reliving the former reality of watching people march into a building from which no one ever emerged alive . . . and always in the nightmare someone with a cruel young SS face beckons to him to follow them in there, too, because he needs a shower. Oh, no, he protests in the dream, Hauptsturmführer Brandt needs me in the metalworking shop. Not today, Jude, the young SS noncom says, with that ghastly smile, Komm jetzt zum Brausebad. Every time he walks as bidden, for what else could one do, right to the door—and then every time he awakes, damp with perspiration, and sure that had he not awakened, he would not have awakened at all, just like all the people he’d watched march that way . . .