But it didn’t. She resumed walking to the helicopter, to Johnston’s relief, not knowing that two sniper rifles followed her head every centimeter of the way. The next important part came when she got to the chopper. If she went around the right side, Johnston would lose her, leaving her to Weber’s rifle alone. If she went left, then Dieter would lose her to his rifle alone. She seemed to be favoring . . . yes, Dortmund walked to the left side of the aircraft.
“Rifle Two-Two off target,” Weber reported at once. “I have no shot at this time.”
“On target, Rifle Two-One is on target,” Johnston assured Chavez. Hmm, let Little Man in first, honey, he thought as loudly as he could.
Petra Dortmund did just that, pushing Dengler in the left-side door ahead of her, probably figuring to sit in the middle herself, so as to be less vulnerable to a shot from outside. A good theoretical call, Homer Johnston thought, but off the mark in this case. Tough luck, bitch.
The comfort of the familiar surroundings of the helicopter was lost on Gerhard Dengler at the moment. He strapped himself in under the aim of Petra’s pistol, commanding himself to relax and be brave, as men did at such a time. Then he looked forward and felt hope. The pilot was the usual man, but the copilot was not. Whoever he was, he was fiddling with instruments as the flight crew did, but it wasn’t him, though the shape of head and hair color were much the same, and both wore the white shirts with blue epaulets that private pilots tended to adopt as their uniforms. Their eyes met, and Dengler looked down and out of the aircraft, afraid that he’d give something away.
Goodman, Eddie Price thought. His pistol was in the map pocket in the left-side door of the aircraft, well-hidden under a pile of flight charts, but easy to reach with his left hand. He’d get it, then turn quickly, bring it up and fire if it came to that. Hidden in his left ear, the radio receiver, which looked like a hearing aid if one saw it, kept him posted, though it was a little hard to hear over the engine and rotor sounds of the Sikorsky. Now Petra’s pistol was aimed at himself, or the pilot, as she moved it back and forth.
“Riflemen, do you have your targets?” Chavez asked.
“Rifle Two-One, affirmative, target in sight.”
“Rifle Two-Two, negative, I have something in the way. Recommend switch to subject Fürchtner.”
“Okay, Rifle Two-Two, switch to Fürchtner. Rifle Two-One, Dortmund is all yours.”
“Roger that, lead,” Johnston confirmed. “Rifle Two-One has subject Dortmund all dialed in.” The sergeant re-shot the range with his laser. One hundred forty-four meters. At this range, his bullet would drop less than an inch from the muzzle, and his “battle-sight” setting of two hundred fifty meters was a little high. He altered his crosshairs hold to just below the target’s left eye. Physics would do the rest. His rifle had target-type double-set triggers. Pulling the rear trigger reduced the break-pull on the front one to a hard wish, and he was already making that wish. The helicopter would not be allowed to take off. Of more immediate concern, they couldn’t allow the subjects to close the left-side door. His 7-mm match bullet would probably penetrate the polycarbonate window in the door, but the passage would deflect his round unpredictably, maybe causing a miss, perhaps causing the death or wounding of a hostage. He couldn’t let that happen.
Chavez was well out of the action now, commanding instead of leading, something he’d practiced but didn’t like very much. It was easier to be there with a gun in your hands than to stand back and tell people what to do by remote control. But he had no choice. Okay, he thought, we have Number One in the chopper and a gun on her. Number Two was in the open, two-thirds of the way to the chopper, and a gun on him. Two more bad guys were approaching the halfway point, with Mike Pierce and Steve Lincoln within forty meters, and the last two subjects still in the house, with Louis Loiselle and George Tomlinson in the bushes right and left of them. Unless the bad guys had set up overwatch in the house, one or more additional subjects to come out after the rest had made it to the chopper . . . very unlikely, Chavez decided, and in any case all the hostages were either in the open or soon would be—and rescuing them was the mission, not necessarily killing the bad guys, he reminded himself. It wasn’t a game and it wasn’t a sport, and his plan, already briefed to Team- 2’s members, was holding up. The key to it now was the final team of subjects.
Rosenthal saw the snipers. It was to be expected, though it had occurred to no one. He was the head gardener. The lawn was his, and the odd piles of material left and right of the helicopter were things that didn’t belong, things that he would have known about. He’d seen the TV shows and movies. This was a terrorist incident, and the police would respond somehow. Men with guns would be out there, and there were two things on his lawn that hadn’t been there in the morning. His eyes lingered on Weber’s position, then fixed on it. There was his salvation or his death. There was no telling now, and that fact caused his stomach to contract into a tight, acid-laden ball.
“Here they come,” George Tomlinson announced, when he saw two legs step out of the house . . . women’s legs, followed by a man’s, then two more sets of women’s . . . and then a man’s. “One subject and two hostages out. Two more hostages to go . . .”
Fürchtner was almost there, heading to the right side of the helicopter, to the comfort of Dieter Weber. But then he stopped, seeing inside the open right-side door to where Gerhardt Dengler was sitting, and decided to go to the other side.
“Okay, Team, stand by,” Chavez ordered, trying to keep all four groups juggled in the same control, sweeping his binoculars over the field. As soon as the last were in the open . . .
“You, get inside, facing back.” Fürchtner pushed Brownie toward the aircraft.
“Off target, Rifle Two-Two is off the subject,” Weber announced rather loudly over the radio circuit.
“Re-target on the next group,” Chavez ordered.
“Done,” Weber said. “I’m on the lead subject, group three.”
“Rifle Two-One, report!”
“Rifle Two-One tight on Subject Dortmund,” Homer Johnston replied at once.
“Ready here!” Loiselle reported next from the bushes at the back of the house. “We have the fourth group now.”
Chavez took a deep breath. All the bad guys were now in the open, and now it was time:
“Okay, Lead to team, execute, execute, execute!”
Loiselle and Tomlinson were already tensed to stand, and both fairly leaped to their feet invisibly, seven meters behind their targets, who were looking the wrong way and never had a clue what was going on behind them. Both soldiers lined up their tritium-lit sights on their targets. Both were pushing-dragging women, and both were taller than their hostages, which made things easy. Both MP-10 submachine guns were set on three-round burst, and both sergeants fired at the same instant. There was no immediate sound. Their weapons were fully suppressed by the design in which the barrel and silencer were integrated, and the range was too close to miss. Two separate heads were blown apart by multiple impacts of large hollow-point bullets, and both bodies dropped limp to the lush green grass almost as quickly as the cartridge cases ejected by the weapons that had killed them.
“This is George. Two subjects dead!” Tomlinson called over the radio, as he started running to the hostages who were still walking toward the helicopter.
Homer Johnston was starting to cringe as a shape entered his field of view. It seemed to be a female body from the pale silk blouse, but his sight picture was not obscured yet, and with his crosshair reticle set just below Petra Dortmund’s left eye, his right index finger pushed gently back on the set-trigger. The rifle roared, sending a meter-long muzzle flash into the still night air—• she’d just seen two pale flashes in the direction of the house, but she didn’t have time to react when the bullet struck the orbit just above her left eye. The bullet drove through the thickest part of her skull. It passed a few more centimeters and then the bullet fragmented into over a hundred tiny pieces, ripping her bra
in tissue to mush, which then exploded out the back of her skull in an expanding red-pink cloud that splashed over Gerhardt Dengler’s face—
• Johnston worked the bolt, swiveling his rifle for another target; he’d seen the bullet dispatch the first.
Eddie Price saw the flash, and his hands were already moving from the execute command heard half a second earlier. He pulled his pistol from the map pocket and dove out the helicopter’s autolike door, aiming it one-handed at Hans Fürchtner’s head, firing one round just below his left eye, which expanded and exploded out the top of his head. A second round followed, higher, and actually not a well-aimed shot, but Fürchtner was already dead, falling to the ground, his hand still holding Erwin Ostermann’s upper arm, and pulling him down somewhat until the fingers came loose.
That left two. Steve Lincoln took careful aim from a kneeling position, then stopped as his target passed behind the head of an elderly man wearing a vest. “Shit,” Lincoln managed to say.
Weber got the other one, whose head exploded like a melon from the impact of the rifle bullet.
Rosenthal saw the head burst apart like something in a horror movie, but the large stubbly head next to his was still there, eyes suddenly wide open, and a machine gun still in his hand—and nobody was shooting at this one, standing next to him. Then Stubble-Head’s eyes met his, and there was fear/hate/shock there, and Rosenthal’s stomach turned to sudden ice, all time stopped around him. The paring knife came out of his sleeve and into his hand, which he swung wildly, catching the back of Stubble-Head’s left hand. Stubble-Head’s eyes went wider as the elderly man jumped aside, and his one hand went slack on the forestock of his weapon.
That cleared the way for Steve Lincoln, who fired a second three-round burst, which arrived simultaneously with a second rifle bullet from Weber’s semiautomatic sniper rifle, and this one’s head seemed to disappear.
“Clear!” Price called. “Clear aircraft!”
“Clear house!” Tomlinson announced.
“Clear middle!” Lincoln said last of all.
At the house, Loiselle and Tomlinson raced to their set of hostages and dragged them east, away from the house, lest there be a surviving terrorist inside to fire at them.
Mike Pierce did the same, with Steve Lincoln covering and assisting.
It was easier for Eddie Price, who first of all kicked the gun from Fürchtner’s dead hand and made a quick survey of his target’s wrecked head. Then he jumped into the helicopter to make sure that Johnston’s first round had worked. He needed only to see the massive red splash on the rear bulkhead to know that Petra Dortmund was in whatever place terrorists went to. Then he carefully removed the hand grenade from her rigid left hand, checked to make sure the cotter pin was still in place, and pocketed it. Last of all, he took the pistol from her right hand, engaged the safety and tossed that.
“Mein Herrgott!” the pilot gasped, looking back.
Gerhardt Dengler looked dead as well, his face fairly covered on its left side with a mask of dripping red, his open eyes looking like doorknobs. The sight shook Price for a moment, until he saw the eyes blink, but the mouth was wide open, and the man seemed not to be breathing. Price reached down to flip off the belt buckle, then let Johnston pull the man clear of the aircraft. Little Man made it one step before falling to his knees. Johnston poured his canteen over the man’s face to rinse off the blood. Then he unloaded his rifle and set it on the ground.
“Nice work, Eddie,” he told Price.
“And that was a bloody good shot, Homer.”
Sergeant Johnston shrugged. “I was afraid the gal would get in the way. Another couple of seconds and I wouldn’t’ve had shit. Anyway, Eddie, nice work coming out of the aircraft and doing him before I could get number two off.”
“You had a shot on him?” Price asked, safing and holstering his pistol.
“Waste of time. I saw his brains come out from your first.”
The cops were swarming in now, plus a covey of ambulances with blinking blue lights. Captain Altmark arrived at the helicopter, with Chavez at his side. Experienced cop that he was, the mess inside the Sikorsky made him back away in silence.
“It’s never pretty,” Homer Johnston observed. He’d already had his look. The rifle and bullet had performed as programmed. Beyond that, it was his fourth sniper kill, and if people wanted to break the law and hurt the innocent, it was their problem, not his. One more trophy he couldn’t hang on the wall with the muley and elk heads he’d collected over the years.
Price walked toward the middle group, fishing in his pocket for his curved briar pipe, which he lit with a kitchen match, his never-changing ritual for a mission completed.
Mike Pierce was assisting the hostages, all sitting for the moment while Steve Lincoln stood over them, his MP-10 out and ready for another target. But then a gaggle of Austrian police exploded out the back door, telling him that there were no terrorists left inside the building. With that, he safed his weapon and slung it over his shoulder. Lincoln came up to the elderly gent.
“Well done, sir,” he told Klaus Rosenthal.
“What?”
“Using the knife on his hand. Well done.”
“Oh, yeah,” Pierce said, looking down at the mess on the grass. There was a deep cut on the back of its left hand. “You did that, sir?”
“Ja” was all Rosenthal was able to say, and that took three breaths.
“Well, sir, good for you.” Pierce reached down to shake his hand. It hadn’t really mattered very much, but resistance by a hostage was rare enough, and it had clearly been a gutsy move by the old gent.
“Amerikaner?”
“Shhh.” Sergeant Pierce held a finger up to his lips. “Please don’t tell anyone, sir.”
Price arrived then, puffing on his pipe. Between Weber’s sniper rifle and someone’s MP-10 burst, this subject’s head was virtually gone. “Bloody hell,” the sergeant major observed.
“Steve’s bird,” Pierce reported. “I didn’t have a clear shot this time. Good one, Steve,” he added.
“Thank you, Mike,” Sergeant Lincoln replied, surveying the area. “Total of six?”
“Correct,” Eddie answered, heading off toward the house. “Stand by here.”
“Easy shots, both of ’em,” Tomlinson said in his turn, surrounded by Austrian cops.
“Too tall to hide,” Loiselle confirmed. He felt like having a smoke, though he’d quit two years before. His hostages were being led off now, leaving the two terrorists on the lush green grass, which their blood, he thought, would fertilize. Blood was good fertilizer, wasn’t it? Such a fine house. A pity they’d not have the chance to examine it.
Twenty minutes later, Team-2 was back at the assembly point, changing out of their tactical clothes, packing their weapons and other gear for the ride back to the airport. The TV lights and cameras were running, but rather far away. The team was relaxing now, the stress bleeding off with the successful completion of their mission. Price puffed on his pipe outside the van, then tapped it out on the heel of his boot before boarding it.
CHAPTER 8
COVERAGE
The television coverage was out before Team-2 flew into Heathrow. Fortunately, the video of the event was hampered by the Schloss’s great size and the fact that the Staatspolizei kept the cameras well away from events, and on the wrong side of the building. About the only decent shot was of a team member lighting a pipe, followed by Captain Wilhelm Altmark’s summary of events for the assembled reporters. A special and heretofore secret team of his country’s federal police had dealt efficiently with the incident at Schloss Ostermann, he said, rescuing all of the hostages—no, unfortunately, no criminals had been arrested. All of this was taped for later use by Bill Tawney’s staff off Austrian State Television, Sky News, and every other European news service that made use of the story. Though the British Sky News service had managed to get its own camera to Vienna, the only difference between its coverage and that of the locals was the an
gle. Even the various learned commentaries were essentially the same: specially trained and equipped police unit; probably with members of Austria’s military; decisive action to resolve the incident with no injuries to the innocent victims; score one more, they didn’t quite say, for the good guys. The bad guys’ identities weren’t put out with the initial reports. Tracking them down would be a police function, and the results would be fed to Tawney’s intelligence section, along with the debriefs of the victims.
It had been a very long day for the Team-2 members, all of whom went home to sleep on arrival back at Hereford, with notification from Chavez that they’d dispense with morning PT the next day. There wasn’t even time for a congratulatory set of beers in the local NCO Club—which in any case was closed by the time they got home.
On the flight home, Chavez noted to Dr. Bellow that despite the fitness of his people the fatigue factor was pretty high—more so than on their occasional night exercises. Bellow replied that stress was the ultimate fatigue generator, and that the team members were not immune to stress, no matter what their training or fitness. That evidently included himself, since after making the pronouncement, Bellow turned and slipped off to sleep, leaving Chavez to do the same after a glass of red Spanish wine.
It was the lead news story in Austria, of course. Popov caught the first bit of it live in a Gasthaus, then more in his hotel room. He sipped orange schnapps while he applied his keen, professional eye to the screen. These anti-terror groups all looked pretty much the same, but that was to be expected, since they all trained to do the same thing and worked out of the same international manual—first promulgated by the English with their Special Air Service commandos, then followed by the German GSG-9, and then the rest of Europe, followed by the Americans—down to the black clothing, which struck Popov as theatrical, but they all had to wear something, and black made more sense than white clothing, didn’t it? Of more immediate interest, there in the room with him was the leather attaché case filled with D-mark banknotes, which he would take to Bern the following day for deposit in his account before flying back to New York. It was remarkable, he thought as he switched the TV off and pulled the bedclothes up, two simple jobs, and he now had just over one million American dollars in his numbered and anonymous account. Whatever his employers wanted him to accomplish for them, he was being well compensated for it, and they didn’t seem overly concerned by the expense. So much the better that the money went to a good cause, the Russian thought.