John took a breath before trying out the swivel chair and decided to doff his jacket first. Sitting in a chair with a suit coat on was something he’d never really learned to enjoy. That was something a “suit” did, and being a “suit” wasn’t John’s idea of fun. He waved Alistair to the seat opposite the desk.
“Where are we?”
“Two teams fully formed. Chavez will have one. The other will be commanded by Peter Covington—just got his majority. Father was colonel of the 22nd some years ago, retired as a Brigadier. Marvelous lad. Ten men per team, as agreed. The technical staff is coming together nicely. We have an Israeli chap on that, David Peled—surprised they let us have him. He’s a bloody genius with electronics and surveillance systems—”
“And he’ll report back to Avi ben Jakob every day.”
A smile. “Naturally.” Neither office was under any illusions about the ultimate loyalty of the troops assigned to Rainbow. But, were they not capable of such loyalty, what good would they be? “David’s worked with SAS on and off for a decade. He’s quite amazing, contacts with every electronics corporation from San Jose to Taiwan.”
“And the shooters?”
“Top drawer, John. As good as any I’ve ever worked with.” Which was saying something.
“Intel?”
“All excellent. The chief of that section is Bill Tawney, a ‘Six’ man for thirty years, supported by Dr. Paul Bellow—Temple University, Philadelphia, was a professor there until your FBI seconded him. Bloody smart chap. Mind-reader, he’s been all over the world. Your chaps lent him to the Italians for the Moro job, but he refused to take an assignment to Argentina the next year. Principled, also, or so it would seem. He flies in tomorrow.”
Just then Mrs. Foorgate came in with a tray, tea for Stanley, coffee for Clark. “Staff meeting starts in ten minutes, sir,” she told John.
“Thanks, Alice.” Sir, he thought. Clark wasn’t used to being addressed like that. Yet another sign he was a “suit.” Damn. He waited until the heavy soundproofed door closed to ask his next question. “Al, what’s my status here?”
“General officer—brigadier at least, maybe a two-star. I seem to be a colonel—chief of staff, you see,” Stanley said, sipping his tea. “John, you know that there must be protocol,” he went on reasonably.
“Al, you know what I really am—was, I mean?”
“You were a navy chief boatswain’s mate, I believe, with the Navy Cross, Silver Star with a repeat cluster. Bronze star with Combat-V and three repeats, and three Purple Hearts. And all that’s before the Agency took you in and gave you no less than four Intelligence Stars.” Stanley said all this from memory. “Brigadier’s the least we can do, old man. Rescuing Koga and taking Daryei out were bloody brilliant jobs, in case I never told you. We do know a little bit about you, and your young Chavez—the lad has enormous potential, if he’s as good as I’ve heard. Of course, he’ll need it. His team is composed of some real stars.”
“Yo, Ding!” a familiar voice called. Chavez looked to his left in genuine surprise.
“Oso! You son of a bitch! What the hell are you doing here?” Both men embraced.
“The Rangers were getting boring, so I shipped up to Bragg for a tour with Delta, and then this came up on the scope and I went after it. You’re the boss for Team Two?” First Sergeant (E-8) Julio Vega asked.
“Sorta-kinda,” Ding replied, shaking the hand of an old friend and comrade. “Ain’t lost no weight, man, Jesu Christo, Oso, you eat barbells?”
“Gotta keep fit, sir,” replied a man for whom a hundred morning push-ups didn’t generate a drop of sweat. His uniform blouse showed a Combat Infantryman’s Badge and the silver “ice-cream cone” of a master parachutist. “You’re looking good, man, keeping up your running, eh?”
“Yeah, well, running away is an ability I want to keep, if you know what I mean.”
“Roge-o.” Vega laughed. “Come on, I’ll intro you to the team. We got some good troops, Ding.”
Team Two, Rainbow, had its own building—brick, single-story, and fairly large, with a desk for every man, and a secretary named Katherine Moony they’d all share, young and pretty enough, Ding noticed, to attract the interest of any unattached member of his team. Team Two was composed exclusively of NCOs, mainly senior ones, four Americans, four Brits, a German, and a Frenchman. He only needed one look to see that all were fit as hell—enough so that Ding instantly worried about his own condition. He had to lead them, and that meant being as good as or better than all of them in every single thing the team would have to do.
Sergeant Louis Loiselle was the nearest. Short and dark-haired, he was a former member of French parachute forces and had been detailed to DGSE some years before. Loiselle was vanilla, a utility infielder, good in everything but a nonspecialist specialist—like all of the men, a weapons expert, and, his file said, a brilliant marksman with pistol and rifle. He had an easy, relaxed smile with a good deal of confidence behind it.
Feldwebel Dieter Weber was next, also a paratrooper and a graduate of the German army’s Bergführer or Mountain Leader school, one of the physically toughest schools in any army in the world. He looked it. Blond-haired and fair-skinned, he might have been on an SS recruiting poster sixty years earlier. His English, Ding learned at once, was better than his own. He could have passed for American—or English. Weber had come to Rainbow from the German GSG-9 team, which was part of the former Border Guards, the Federal Republic’s counterterror team.
“Major, we have heard much about you,” Weber said from his six-three height. A little tall, Ding thought. Too large a target. He shook hands like a German. One quick grab, vertical jerk, and let go, with a nice squeeze in the middle. His blue eyes were interesting, cold as ice, interrogating Ding from the first. The eyes were usually found behind a rifle. Weber was one of the team’s two long-riflemen.
SFC Homer Johnston was the other. A mountaineer from Idaho, he’d taken his first deer at the age of nine. He and Weber were friendly competitors. Average-looking in all respects, Johnston was clearly a runner rather than an iron-pumper at his six-feet-nothing, one-sixty. He’d started off in the 101st Air-Mobile at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and rapidly worked his way into the Army’s black world. “Major, nice to meet you, sir.” He was a former Green Beret and Delta member, like Chavez’s friend, Oso Vega.
The shooters, as Ding thought of them, the guys who went into the buildings to do business, were Americans and Brits. Steve Lincoln, Paddy Connolly, Scotty McTyler, and Eddie Price were from the SAS. They’d all been there and done that in Northern Ireland and a few other places. Mike Pierce, Hank Patterson, and George Tomlinson mainly had not, because the American Delta Force didn’t have the experience of the SAS. It was also true, Ding reminded himself, that Delta, SAS, GSG-9, and other crack international teams cross-trained to the point that they might as well have married one another’s sisters. Every one of them was taller than “Major” Chavez. Every one was tough. Every one was smart, and with this realization came an oddly deflating feeling that, despite his own field experience, he’d have to earn the respect of his team and earn it fast.
“Who’s senior?”
“That’s me, sir,” Eddie Price said. He was the oldest of the team, forty-one, and a former color sergeant in the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, since spot-promoted to sergeant major. Like the rest in the bullpen, he was wearing nonuniform clothes, though they were all wearing the same nonuniform things, without badges of rank.
“Okay, Price, have we done our PT today?”
“No, Major, we waited for you to lead us out,” Sergeant Major Price replied, with a smile that was ten percent manners and ninety percent challenge.
Chavez smiled back. “Yeah, well, I’m a little stiff from the flight, but maybe we can loosen that up for me. Where do I change?” Ding asked, hoping his last two weeks of five-mile daily runs would prove to be enough—and he was slightly wasted by the flight.
“Follow me, sir.”
/> “My name’s Clark, and I suppose I’m the boss here,” John said from the head of the conference table. “You all know the mission, and you’ve all asked to be part of Rainbow. Questions?”
That startled them, John saw. Good. Some continued to stare at him. Most looked down at the scratch pads in front of them.
“Okay, to answer some of the obvious ones, our operational doctrine ought to be little different from the organizations you came from. We will establish that in training, which commences tomorrow. We are supposed to be operational right now,” John warned them. “That means the phone could ring in a minute, and we will have to respond. Are we able to?”
“No,” Alistair Stanley responded for the rest of the senior staff. “That’s unrealistic, John. We need, I would estimate, three weeks.”
“I understand that—but the real world is not as accommodating as we would like it to be. Things that need doing—do them, and quickly. I will start running simulations on Monday next. People, I am not a hard man to work with. I’ve been in the field, and I know what happens out there. I don’t expect perfection, but I do expect that we will always work for it. If we screw a mission up, that means that people who deserve to live will not live. That is going to happen. You know it. I know it. But we will avoid mistakes as much as possible, and we will learn the proper lessons from every one we make. Counterterrorism is a Darwinian world. The dumb ones are already dead, and the people out there we have to worry about are those who’ve learned a lot of lessons. So have we, and we’re probably ahead of the game, tactically speaking, but we have to run hard to stay there. We will run hard.
“Anyway,” he went on, “intelligence, what’s ready and what’s not?”
Bill Tawney was John’s age, plus one or two, John estimated, with brown, thinning hair and an unlit pipe in his mouth. A “Six” man—meaning he was a former (well, current) member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, he was a field spook who’d come inside after ten years working the streets behind the Curtain. “Our communications links are up and running. We have liaison personnel to all friendly services either here or in the corresponding capitals.”
“How good are they?”
“Fair,” Tawney allowed. John wondered how much of that was Brit understatement. One of his most important but most subtle tasks would be to decode what every member of his staff said when he or she spoke, a task made all the more difficult by linguistic and cultural differences. On inspection, Tawney looked like a real pro, his brown eyes calm and businesslike. His file said that he’d worked directly with SAS for the past five years. Given SAS’s record in the field, he hadn’t stiffed them with bad intel very often, if at all. Good.
“David?” he asked next. David Peled, the Israeli chief of his technical branch, looked very Catholic, rather like something from an El Greco painting, a Dominican priest, perhaps, from the fifteenth century, tall, skinny, hollow of cheek and dark of hair (short), with a certain intensity of eye. Well, he’d worked a long time for Avi ben Jakob, whom Clark knew, if not well then well enough. Peled would be here for two reasons, to serve as a senior Rainbow staffer, thus winning allies and prestige for his parent intelligence service, the Israeli Mossad, and also to learn what he could and feed it back to his boss.
“I am putting together a good staff,” David said, setting his tea down. “I need three to five weeks to assemble all the equipment I need.”
“Faster,” Clark responded at once.
David shook his head. “Not possible. Much of our electronics items can be purchased off the shelf, as it were, but some will have to be custom-made. The orders are all placed,” he assured his boss, “with high-priority flags—from the usual vendors. TRW, IDI, Marconi, you know who they are. But they can’t do miracles, even for us. Three to five weeks for some crucial items.”
“SAS are willing to hire anything important to us,” Stanley assured Clark from his end of the table.
“For training purposes?” Clark asked, annoyed that he hadn’t found out the answer to the question already.
“Perhaps.”
Ding cut the run off at three miles, which they’d done in twenty minutes. Good time, he thought, somewhat winded, until he turned to see his ten men about as fresh as they’d been at the beginning, one or two with a sly smile for his neighbors at their wimpy new leader.
Damn.
The run had ended at the weapons range, where targets and arms were ready. Here Chavez had made his own change in his team’s selection. A longtime Beretta aficionado, he’d decided that his men would use the recent .45 Beretta as their personal sidearms, along with the Hechler & Koch MP-10 submachine gun, the new version of the venerable MP-5, chambered instead for the 10-mm Smith & Wesson cartridge developed in the 1980s for the American FBI. Without saying anything, Ding picked up his weapon, donned his ear-protectors, and started going for the silhouette targets, set five meters away. There, he saw, all eight holes in the head. But Dieter Weber, next to him, had grouped his shots in one ragged hole, and Paddy Connolly had made what appeared to be one not-so-ragged hole less than an inch across, all between the target’s eyes, without touching the eyes themselves. Like most American shooters, Chavez had believed that Europeans didn’t know pistols worth a damn. Evidently, training corrected that, he saw.
Next, people picked up their H&Ks, which just about anyone could shoot well because of the superb diopter sights. Ding walked along the firing line, watching his people engage pop-up steel plates the size and shape of human heads. Driven up by compressed air, they fell back down instantly with a metallic clang. Ding ended up behind First Sergeant Vega, who finished his magazine and turned.
“Told you they were good, Ding.”
“How long they been here?”
“Oh, ’bout a week. Used to running five miles, sir,” Julio added with a smile. “Remember the summer camp we went to in Colorado?”
Most important of all, Ding thought, was the steady aim despite the run, which was supposed to get people pumped up, and simulate the stress of a real combat situation. But these bastards were as steady as fucking bronze statues. Formerly a squad leader in the Seventh Light Infantry Division, he’d once been one of the toughest, fittest, and most effective soldiers in his country’s uniform, which was why John Clark had tapped him for a job in the Agency—and in that capacity he’d pulled off some tense and tough missions in the field. It had been a very long time indeed since Domingo Chavez had felt the least bit inadequate about anything. But now quiet voices were speaking into his ear.
“Who’s the toughest?” he asked Vega.
“Weber. I heard stories about the German mountain school. Well, they be true, ’mano. Dieter isn’t entirely human. Good in hand-to-hand, good pistol, damned good with a rifle, and I think he could run a deer down if he had to, then rip it apart barehanded.” Chavez had to remind himself that being called “good” in a combat skill by a graduate of Ranger school and Fort Bragg’s special-operations schools wasn’t quite the same as from a guy in a corner bar. Julio was about as tough as they came.
“The smartest?”
“Connolly. All those SAS guys are tops. Us Americans have to play a little catchup ball. But we will,” Vega assured him. “Don’t sweat it, Ding. You’ll keep up with us, after a week or so. Just like it was in Colorado.”
Chavez didn’t really want to be reminded of that job. Too many friends lost in the mountains of Colombia, doing a job that their country had never acknowledged. Watching his men finish off their training rounds told him much about them. If anyone had missed a single shot, he failed to notice it. Every man fired off exactly a hundred rounds, the standard daily regimen for men who fired five hundred per working week on routine training, as opposed to more carefully directed drill. That would start tomorrow.
“Okay,” John concluded, “we’ll have a staff meeting every morning at eight-fifteen for routine matters, and a more formal one every Friday afternoon. My door is always open—including the one at home. People,
if you need me, there’s a phone next to my shower. Now, I want to get out and see the shooters. Anything else? Good. We stand adjourned.” Everyone stood and shuffled out the door. Stanley remained.
“That went well,” Alistair observed, pouring himself another cup of tea. “Especially for one not accustomed to bureaucratic life.”
“Shows, eh?” Clark asked with a grin.
“One can learn anything, John.”
“I hope so.”
“When’s morning PT around here?”
“Oh-six-forty-five. You plan to run and sweat with the lads?”
“I plan to try,” Clark answered.
“You’re too old, John. Some of those chaps run marathons for recreation, and you’re closer to sixty than to fifty.”
“Al, I can’t command those people without trying, and you know that.”
“Quite,” Stanley admitted.
They awoke late, one at a time, over a period of about an hour. For the most part they just lay there in bed, some of them shuffling off to the bathroom, where they also found aspirin and Tylenol for the headaches they all had, along with showers, which half of them decided to take and the other half to forgo. In the adjoining room was a breakfast buffet that surprised them, with pans full of scrambled eggs, pancakes, sausage and bacon. Some of them even remembered how to use napkins, the people in the monitoring room saw.
They met their captor after they’d had a chance to eat breakfast. He offered all of them clean clothes, after they got cleaned up.
“What is this place?” asked the one known to the staff only as #4. It sure as hell wasn’t any Bowery mission he was familiar with.