“The name’s John, Mr. Bear,” Clark said, with a smile. He knew a pro when he saw one.
“I’m Ding. Once upon a time I was an 11-Bravo, but then the Agency kidnapped my ass. His fault,” Chavez said. “John and I been working together a while.”
“I suppose you can’t tell me the good stuff, then. Kinda surprised I never met you guys before. I’ve delivered a few spooks here and there from time to time, if you know what I mean.”
“Bring your package?” Clark asked, meaning his personnel file.
Malloy patted his bag. “Yes, sir, and very creative writing it is, if I do say so.” The helicopter settled down. The crew chief jumped out to pull the sliding doors open. Malloy grabbed his bag, stepped down, and walked to the Rover parked just off the pad. There the driver, a corporal, took Malloy’s bag and tossed it in the back. British hospitality, Malloy saw, hadn’t changed very much. He returned the salute and got in the rear. The rain was picking up. English weather, the colonel thought, hadn’t changed much either. Miserable place to fly helicopters, but not too bad if you wanted to get real close without being seen, and that wasn’t too awful, was it? The Rover jeep took them to what looked like a headquarters building instead of his guest housing. Whoever they were, they were in a hurry.
“Nice office, John,” he said, looking around on the inside. “I guess you really are a simulated two-star.”
“I’m the boss,” Clark admitted, “and that’s enough. Sit down. Coffee?”
“Always,” Malloy confirmed, taking a cup a moment later. “Thanks.”
“How many hours?” Clark asked next.
“Total? Sixty-seven-forty-two last time I added it up. Thirty-one hundred of that is special operations. And, oh, about five hundred combat time.”
“That much?”
“Grenada, Lebanon, Somalia, couple of other places—and the Gulf War. I fished four fast-mover drivers out and brought them back alive during that little fracas. One of them was a little exciting,” Malloy allowed, “but I had some help overhead to smooth things out. You know, the job’s pretty boring if you do it right.”
“I’ll have to buy you a pint, Bear,” Clark said. “I’ve always been nice to the SAR guys.”
“And I never turn down a free beer. The Brits in your team, ex-SAS?”
“Mainly. Worked with ’em before?”
“Exercises, here and over at Bragg. They are okay troops, right up there with Force Recon and my pals at Bragg.” This was meant to be generous, Clark knew, though the local Brits might take slight umbrage at being compared to anyone. “Anyway, I suppose you need a delivery boy, right?”
“Something like that. Ding, let’s run Mr. Bear through the last field operation.”
“Roge-o, Mr. C.” Chavez unrolled the big photo of the Schloss Ostermann on Clark’s conference table and started his brief, as Stanley and Covington came in to join the conference.
“Yeah,” Malloy said when the explanation ended. “You really did need somebody like me for that one, guys.” He paused. “Best thing would be a long-rope deployment to put three or four on the roof . . . right about . . . here.” He tapped the photo. “Nice flat roof to make it easy.”
“That’s about what I was thinking. Not as easy as a zip-line, but probably safer,” Chavez agreed.
“Yeah, it’s easy if you know what you’re doing. Your boys will have to learn to land with soft feet, of course, but nice to have three or four people inside the castle when you need ’em. From how good the takedown went, I imagine your people know how to shoot and stuff.”
“Fairly well,” Covington allowed, in a neutral voice.
Clark was taking a quick rifle through Malloy’s personnel file, while Chavez presented his successful mission. Married to Frances née Hutchins Malloy, he saw, two daughters, ten and eight. Wife was a civilian nurse working for the Navy. Well, that was easy to fix. Sandy could set that up at her hospital pretty easy. LTC Dan Malloy, USMC, was definitely a keeper.
For his part, Malloy was intrigued. Whoever these people were, they had serious horsepower. His orders to fly to England had come directly from the office of CINC-SNAKE himself, “Big Sam” Wilson, and the people he’d met so far looked fairly serious. The small one, Chavez, he thought, was one competent little fucker, the way he’d walked him through the Vienna job, and, from examining the overhead photo, his team must have been pretty good, too, especially the two who’d crept up to the house to take the last bunch of bad guys in the back. Invisibility was a pretty cool gig if you could bring it off, but a fucking disaster if you blew it. The good news, he reflected, was that the bad guys weren’t all that good at their fieldcraft. Not trained like his Marines were. That deficiency almost canceled out their viciousness—but not quite. Like most people in uniform, Malloy despised terrorists as cowardly sub-human animals who merited only violent and immediate death.
Chavez next took him to his team’s own building, where Malloy met his troops, shook hands, and evaluated what he saw there. Yeah, they were serious, as were Covington’s Team-1 people in the next building over. Some people just had the look, the relaxed intensity that made them evaluate everyone they met, and decide at once if the person was a threat. It wasn’t that they liked killing and maiming, just that it was their job, and that job spilled over into how they viewed the world. Malloy they evaluated as a potential friend, a man worthy of their trust and respect, and that warmed the Marine aviator. He’d be the guy whom they had to trust to get them where they needed to be, quickly, stealthily, and safely—and then get them out in the same way. The remaining tour of the training base was pure vanilla to one schooled in the business. The usual buildings, simulated airplane interiors, three real railroad passenger cars, and the other things they practiced to storm; the weapons range with the pop-up targets (he’d have to play there himself to prove that he was good enough to be here, Malloy knew, since every special-ops guy was and had to be a shooter, just as every Marine was a rifleman). By noon they were back in Clark’s headquarters building.
“Well, Mr. Bear, what do you think?” Rainbow Six asked.
Malloy smiled as he sat down. “I think I’m seriously jet lagged. And I think you have a nice team here. So, you want me?”
Clark nodded. “I think we do, yes.”
“Start tomorrow morning?”
“Flying what?”
“I called that Air Force bunch you told us about.
They’re going to lend us an MH-60 for you to play with.”
“Neighborly of them.” That meant to Malloy that he’d have to prove that he was a good driver. The prospect didn’t trouble him greatly. “What about my family? Is this TAD or what?”
“No, it’s a permanent duty station for you. They’ll come over on the usual government package.”
“Fair ’nuf. Will we be getting work here?”
“We’ve had two field operations so far, Bern and Vienna. There’s no telling how busy we’ll be with for-real operations, but you’ll find the training regimen is pretty busy here.”
“Suits me, John.”
“You want to work with us?”
The question surprised Malloy. “This is a volunteer outfit?”
Clark nodded. “Every one of us.”
“Well, how about that. Okay,” Malloy said. “You can sign me up.”
“May I ask a question?” Popov asked in New York.
“Sure,” the boss said, suspecting what it would be.
“What is the purpose of all this?”
“You really do not need to know at this time” was the expected reply to the expected question.
Popov nodded his submission/agreement to the answer. “As you say, sir, but you are spending a goodly amount of money for no return that I can determine.” Popov raised the money question deliberately, to see how his employer would react.
The reaction was genuine boredom: “The money is not important.”
And though the response was not unexpected, it was nonetheless surprising
to Popov. For all of his professional life in the Soviet KGB, he’d paid out money in niggardly amounts to people who’d risked their lives and their freedom for it, frequently expecting far more than they’d ever gotten, because often enough the material and information given was worth far more than they’d been paid for it. But this man had already paid out more than Popov had distributed in over fifteen years of field operations—for nothing, for two dismal failures. And yet, there was no disappointment on his face, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich saw. What the hell was this all about?
“What went wrong in this case?” the boss asked.
Popov shrugged. “They were willing, but they made the mistake of underestimating the skill of the police response. It was quite skillful indeed,” he assured his employer. “More so than I expected, but not that great a surprise. Many police agencies across the world have highly trained counterterror groups.”
“It was the Austrian police? . . .”
“So the news media said. I did not press my investigation further. Should I have done so?”
A shake of the head. “No, just idle curiosity on my part.”
So, you don’t care if these operations succeed or fail, Popov thought. Then, why the hell do you fund them? There was no logic to this. None at all. That would have been—should have been—troubling to Popov, yet it was not seriously so. He was becoming rich on these failures. He knew who was funding the operations, and had all the evidence—the cash—he needed to prove it. So, this man could not turn on him. If anything, he must fear his employee, mustn’t he? Popov had contacts in the terrorist community and could as easily turn them against the man who procured the cash, couldn’t he? It would be a natural fear for this man to hold, Dmitriy reflected.
Or was it? What, if anything, did this man fear? He was funding murder—well, attempted murder in the last case. He was a man of immense wealth and power, and such men feared losing those things more than they feared death. It kept coming down to the same thing, the former KGB officer told himself: What the hell was this all about? Why was he plotting the deaths of people, and asking Popov to—was he doing this to kill off the world’s remaining terrorists? Did that make sense? Using Popov as a stalking horse, an agent provocateur, to draw them out and be dealt with by the various countries’ highly trained counterterror teams? Dmitriy decided that he’d do a little research on his employer. It ought not to be too hard, and the New York Public Library was only two kilometers distant on Fifth Avenue.
“What sort of people were they?”
“Whom do you mean?” Popov asked.
“Dortmund and Fürchtner,” the boss clarified.
“Fools. They still believed in Marxism-Leninism. Clever in their way, intelligent in the technical sense, but their political judgment was faulty. They were unable to change when their world changed. That is dangerous. They failed to evolve, and for that they died.” It wasn’t much of an epitaph, Popov knew. They’d grown up studying the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and all the rest—the same people whose words Popov had studied through his youth, but even as a boy Popov had known better, and his world travels as a KGB officer had merely reinforced his distrust for the words of those nineteenth century academicians. His first flight on an American-made airliner, chatting in a friendly way with the people next to him, had taught him so much. But Hans and Petra—well, they’d grown up within the capitalist system, sampled all of its wares and benefits, and nevertheless decided that theirs was a system bereft of something that they needed. Perhaps in a way they’d been as he had been, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, just dissatisfied, wanting to be part of something better—but, no, he’d always wanted something better for himself, whereas they’d always wanted to bring others to Paradise, to lead and rule as good communists. And to reach that utopian vision, they’d been willing to walk through a sea of innocent blood. Fools. His employer, he saw, accepted his more abbreviated version of their lost lives and moved on.
“Stay in the city for a few days. I will call you when I need you.”
“As you say, sir.” Popov stood and left the office and caught the next elevator to street level. Once there, he decided to walk south to the library with the lions in front. The exercise might clear his head, and he still had a little thinking to do. “When I need you” could mean another mission, and soon.
“Erwin? George. How are you, my friend?”
“It has been an eventful week,” Ostermann admitted. His personal physician had him on tranquilizers, which, he thought, didn’t work very well. His mind still remembered the fear. Better yet, Ursel had come home, arriving even before the rescue mission, and that night—he’d gotten to bed just after four in the morning, she’d come to bed with him, just to hold him, and in her arms he’d shaken and wept from the sheer terror that he’d been able to control right up to the moment that the man Fürchtner had died less than a meter to his left. There was blood and other tissue particles on his clothing. They’d had to be taken off for cleaning. Dengler had had the worst time of all, and wouldn’t be at work for at least a week, the doctors said. For his part, Ostermann knew that he’d be calling that Britisher who’d come to him with the security proposal, especially after hearing the voices of his rescuers.
“Well, I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you got through it okay, Erwin.”
“Thank you, George,” he said to the American Treasury Secretary. “Do you appreciate your bodyguards more today than last week?”
“You bet. I expect that business in that line of work will be picking up soon.”
“An investment opportunity?” Ostermann asked with a forlorn chuckle.
“I didn’t mean that,” Winston replied with an almost-laugh. It was good to laugh about it, wasn’t it?
“George?”
“Yeah?”
“They were not Austrian, not what the television and newspapers said—and they told me not to reveal this, but you can know this. They were Americans and British.”
“I know, Erwin, I know who they are, but that’s all I can say.”
“I owe them my life. How can I repay such a debt?”
“That’s what they are paid to do, my friend. It’s their job.”
“Vielleicht, but it was my life they saved, and those of my employees. I have a personal debt to pay them. Is there any way I might do something for them?”
“I don’t know,” George Winston admitted.
“Could you find out? If you ‘know about’ them, could you find out? They have children, do they not? I can pay for their education, set up a fund of some sort, could I not?”
“Probably not, Erwin, but I can look into it,” the SecTreas said, making a note on his desk. This would be a real pain in the ass for some security people, but there might well be a way, through some D.C. law firm, probably, to double-blind it. It pleased Winston that Erwin wanted to do this. Noblesse oblige was not entirely dead. “So, you sure you’re okay, pal?”
“Thanks to them, yes, George, I am.”
“Great. Thanks. Good to hear your voice, pal. See you next time I come over to Europe.”
“Indeed, George. Have a good day.”
“You, too. Bye.” Winston switched buttons on his phone. Might as well check into this right away. “Mary, could you get me Ed Foley over at the CIA?”
CHAPTER 10
DIGGERS
Popov hadn’t done this in ages, but he remembered how. His employer had been written about more than many politicians—which was only just, Popov thought, as this man did far more important and interesting things for his country and the world—but these articles were mainly about business, which didn’t help Popov much beyond a further appreciation of the man’s wealth and influence. There was little about his personal life, except that he’d been divorced. A pity of sorts. His former wife seemed both attractive and intelligent, judging by the photos and the appended information on her. Maybe two such intelligent people had difficulty staying together. If so, that was too bad for the woman, th
e Russian thought. Maybe few American men liked having intellectual equals under their roof. It was altogether too intimidating for the weak ones—and only a weak man would be troubled by it, the Russian thought.
But there was nothing to connect the man with terrorists or terrorism. He’d never been attacked himself, not even a simple street crime, according to the New York Times. Such things did not always make the news, of course. Perhaps an incident that had never seen the light of day. But if it had been so major as to change the course of his life—it would had to have become known, wouldn’t it?
Probably. Almost certainly, he thought. But almost was a troubling qualifier for a career intelligence officer. This was a man of business. A genius both in his scientific field and in running a major corporation. There, it seemed, was where his passions went. There were many photos of the man with women, rarely the same one twice, while attending various charity or social functions—all nice women, to be sure, Popov noted, like fine trophies, to be used and mounted on the wall in the appropriate empty space, while he searched after another. So, what sort of man was he working for?
Popov had to admit that he really didn’t know, which was more than troubling. His life was now in pawn to a man whose motivations he didn’t understand. In not knowing, he could not evaluate the operational dangers that attached to himself as a result. Should the purpose be discerned by others, and his employer discovered and arrested, then he, Popov, was in danger of arrest on serious charges. Well, the former KGB officer thought, as he returned the last of the periodicals to the clerk, there was an easy solution to that. He’d always have a bag packed, and two false identities ready to be used. Then, at the first sign of trouble, he’d get to an international airport and be off to Europe as quickly as possible, there to disappear and make use of the cash he’d banked. He already had enough to ensure a comfortable life for a few years, perhaps longer if he could find a really good investment counselor. Disappearing off the face of the earth wasn’t all that hard for one with proper training, he told himself, walking back out on Fifth Avenue. All you needed was fifteen or twenty minutes of warning. . . . Now how could he be sure to get that? . . .