“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.
CHAPTER 24
CUSTOMS
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 Am
erican 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.
Colonel Malloy now had his own office in the headquarters building, since it had been decided that he was a Rainbow division commander. A staff-grade officer in the United States Marine Corps, he was accustomed to such nonsense, and he thought about hanging a dartboard on the wall for amusement when he wasn’t working. Work for him was driving his chopper—which, he reminded himself, he didn’t really have, since the one assigned to him was, at the moment, down for maintenance. Some widget was being replaced with a new and improved widget that would enhance his ability to do something of which he was not yet fully informed, but which, he was sure, would be important, especially to the civilian contractor, which had conceived of, designed, and manufactured the new and improved widget.
It could have been worse. His wife and kids liked it here, and Malloy liked it, as well. His was a skill position rather than a dangerous one. There was little hazard in being a helicopter pilot in a special-operations outfit. The only thing that worried him was hitting power lines, since Rainbow mainly deployed to operations in built-up areas, and in the past twenty years more helicopters had been lost to electrical power lines than to all known antiaircraft weapons around the world. His MH-60K didn’t have cable cutters, and he’d written a scathing memo on that fact to the commander of the 24th Special Operations Squadron, who had replied contritely with six photocopies of memos he’d dispatched to his parent-unit commander on the same issue. He’d explained further on that some expert in the Pentagon was considering the modification to the existing aircraft—which, Malloy thought, was the subject of a consulting contract worth probably $300,000 or so to some Beltway Bandit whose conclusion would be, Yes, that’s a good idea, couched in about four hundred pages of stultifying bureaucratic prose, which nobody would ever read but which would be enshrined in some archive or other for all time. The modification would cost all of three thousand dollars in parts and labor—the labor part would be the time of a sergeant who worked full-time for the Air Force anyway, whether actually working or sitting in his squad bay reading Playboy—but the rules were, unfortunately, the rules. And who knew, maybe in a year the Night Hawks would have the cable cutters.
Malloy grimaced and wished for his darts. He didn’t need to see the intelligence information. The faces of known or suspected terrorists were of no use to him. He never got close enough to see them. That was the job of the shooters, and division commander or not he was merely their chauffeur. Well, it could have been worse. At least he was able to wear his “bag,” or flight suit, at his desk, almost as though this were a proper organization of aviators. He got to fly four days or so out of seven, and that wasn’t bad, and after this assignment, his detailer had hinted, he might go on to command of VMH-1, and maybe fly the president around. It would be dull, but career-enhancing. It surely hadn’t hurt his old friend, Colonel Hank Goodman, who had just appeared on the star list, a fairly rare achievement for a rotor-head, since naval aviation, which was mainly helicopter drivers, was run, and run ruthlessly, by fast-movers in their jet-powered fixed-wing fighter bombers. Well, they all had prettier scarves. To amuse himself before lunch, Malloy pulled out his manual for the MH-60K and started to memorize additional information on engine performance, the kind of thing usually done by an engineering officer or maybe his crew chief, Sergeant Jack Nance.
The initial meeting took place in a public park. Popov had checked the telephone book and called the number for one Patrick X. Murphy just before noon.
“Hello, this is Joseph Andrews. I’m trying to find Mr. Yates,” he’d said.
That statement was followed by silence, as the man on the other end of the phone had searched his memory for the codephrase. It was an old one, but after ten seconds or so, he’d fished it out.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Andrews. We haven’t heard from you in some time.”
“I just arrived in Dublin this morning, and I’m looking forward to seeing him. How quickly can we get together?”
“How about one this afternoon?” And then had come the instructions.
So, here he was now, wearing his raincoat and wide-brimmed fedora hat, carrying a copy of the Irish Times in his right hand, and sitting on a particular bench close to an oak tree. He used the downtime to read the paper and catch up on what was happening in the world—it wasn’t very different from what he’d seen on CNN the previous day in New York … international news had gotten so dull since the demise of the Soviet Union, and he wondered how the editors of major newspapers had learned to deal with it. Well, people in Rwanda and Burundi were still slaughtering one another with obscene gusto, and the Irish were wondering aloud if soldiers from their army might be sent down as peacekeepers. Wasn’t that odd? Popov thought. They’d proven singularly unable to keep the peace at home, so why, then, send them elsewhere to do it?
“Joe!” a happy voice said out of his field of vision. He looked up to see a fortyish man with a beaming smile.
“Patrick!” Popov responded, standing, going over to shake hands. “It’s been a long time.” Very long, as he’d never met this particular chap before, though they exchanged greetings like old friends. With that, they walked off to O’Connell Street, where a car was waiting. Popov and his new friend got in the back, and the driver took off at once, not speeding, but checking his rearview mirror carefully as he took several random turns. “Patrick” in the back looked up for helicopters. Well, Dmitriy thought, these PIRA soldiers hadn’t lived to their current ages by being careless. For his part, Popov just sat back and relaxed. He might have closed his eyes, but that would have been overly patronizing to his hosts. Instead, he just stared forward. It was not his first time in Dublin, but except for a few obvious landmarks, he remembered little of the city. His current companions would not have believed that, since intelligence officers were supposed to have trained, photographic memories—which was true, but only to a point. It took forty minutes of weaving through the city until they came to a commercial building and looped around into an alley. There the car stopped, and they got out to enter a door in a blank brick wall.
“Iosef Andreyevich,” a voice said calmly in the darkness. Then a face appeared.
“Sean, it has been a long time.” Popov stepped forward, extending his hand.
“Eleven years and six months, to be exact,” Sean Grady agreed, taking the hand and shaking it warmly.
“Your trade-craft remains excellent.” Popov smiled. “I have no idea where we are.”
“Well, one must be careful, Iosef.” Grady waved. “Come this way, if you would.”
Grady directed him to a small room with a table and a few chairs. There was tea brewing. The Irish hadn’t lost their sense of hospitality, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich saw, removing his coat and dumping it on an armchair. Then he sat down.
“What can we do for you?” Grady asked. He was nearing fifty, Popov saw, but the eyes ret
ained their youth and their dedicated look, narrow, overtly without passion, but intense as ever.
“Before we get to that, how are things going for you, Sean?”
“They could be better,” Grady admitted. “Some of our former colleagues in Ulster have committed themselves to surrendering to the British Crown. Unfortunately, there are many who share those leanings, but we are working to persuade others to a more realistic point of view.”
“Thank you,” Popov said to the one who gave him a cup of tea. He took a sip before speaking. “Sean, you know, from the first time we met in Lebanon, I have respected your commitment to your ideals. I am surprised that so many others have wavered.”
“It’s been a long war, Iosef, and I suppose that not everyone can maintain his dedication. And more is the pity, my friend.” Again his voice was singularly devoid of emotion. His face wasn’t so much cruel as blank. He would have made a superb field intelligence officer, the Russian thought. He gave away nothing, not even the satisfaction he occasionally felt when he accomplished a mission. He’d probably showed as little passion when he’d tortured and murdered two British SAS commandos who’d made the mistake of letting down their guard just once. Such things had not happened often, but Sean Grady had achieved that most difficult of goals twice—at the cost, truth be told, of a bloody vendetta between the British Army’s most elite unit and Grady’s own cell of the PIRA. The SAS had killed no fewer than eight of his closest associates, and on one other occasion some seven years before they’d missed Grady only because his car had broken down on the way to a meeting—a meeting crashed by the SAS, who had killed three senior PIRA officials there. Sean Grady was a marked man, and Popov was certain that the British Security Service had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in their attempt to track him down and target him for another commando raid. This, like intelligence operations, was a very dangerous game for all the players, but most of all for the revolutionaries themselves. And now his own leadership was selling out, or so Grady must have thought. This man would never make peace with the British. He believed too firmly in his vision of the world, warped though it was. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin had possessed a face like this one, and the same single-mindedness of purpose, and the same total inability to compromise on strategic issues.