State of Siege o-6 Read online

  State of Siege

  ( op-center - 6 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Jeff Rovin

  Driven by greed, a group of U.N. peacekeeping soldiers becomes involved in activities on the wrong side of the law. When their tour of duty ends, the mayhem begins. Calling themselves the "Keepers," the rogue soldiers — outfitted with stolen U.N. arms and ammunition — devise a shocking scheme to get the world's attention… Meanwhile, Op-Center head Paul Hood has cleared out his desk. But his retirement is short-lived. Demanding one hundred million dollars in ransom, the Keepers have taken over the U.N. — where ambassadors from ten nations have gathered for a gala function at which Hood's daughter will perform. This time the Keepers have made it personal. And the Op-Center forces will strike with deadly vengeance…

  Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Jeff Rovin

  State of Siege

  Acknowledgments

  We would like to thank Jeff Rovin for his creative ideas and his invaluable contribution to the preparation of the manuscript. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Robert Youdelman, Esq., and the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan. As always, we would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of The William Morris Agency, our agent and friend, without whom this book would never have been conceived. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  — Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

  United Nations—The Security Council put the final touches yesterday on a written demand that Iraq cooperate with international arms inspectors — but threatens no force if Baghdad fails to comply.

  — Associated Press, November 5, 1998

  PROLOGUE

  Kampong Thom, Cambodia 1993

  She died while he held her under a brilliant dawn. Her eyelids closed softly, a faint breath rose from her delicate throat, and then she was gone.

  Hang Sary looked down at the pale face of the young woman. He looked at the grass and dirt in her wet hair and the cuts in her forehead and across her nose. He felt revulsion when he saw the red lipstick on her mouth, the rouge that had smeared across her cheek, and the charcoal-gray mascara that had run from her eyes to her ears.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Not even here, in a land where the concept of innocence was as foreign as the dream of peace.

  Phum Sary should not have died so young, and she should not have died like this. No one should die like this, lying in a windy rice field, the cool water muddy-red with their blood. But at least Phum had died knowing who it was that held her in his arms. At least she didn’t die as she’d probably lived most of her life, alone and uncherished. And though the search that Hang had never quite abandoned was over, he knew that another was about to begin.

  Hang’s knees were raised and his sister’s head was in his lap. He lightly touched the cold tip of her nose, the fine line of her jaw, her round mouth. A mouth that always used to smile, regardless of what she was doing. The girl felt so small and fragile.

  He pulled her arms from the water and laid them on the waist of her tight blue lamé dress. He cuddled her closer. He wondered if anyone had held her like this in ten years. Had she lived this horrible life the entire time? Had she finally had enough and decided that death was preferable?

  Hang’s long face tightened as he thought about her life. Then it exploded in tears. How could he have been so near and not have known it? He and Ty had been in the village, undercover, for nearly a week. Could he ever forgive himself for not having seen her in time to save her?

  Poor Ty would be inconsolable when she learned who this was. Ty had been in the camp reconnoitering, trying to find out who was behind this. She had radioed Hang to let him know that one of the women had apparently tried to escape shortly before sunrise, when the watch changed. She’d been chased and shot. Phum had taken the bullet in the side. She’d probably run, then walked until she could no longer move. Then she must have lain down here to look at the waning night sky. Phum used to look at the sky a great deal when she was a little girl. Ty wondered if that sky, the memories of a better time, had given his little sister any peace at the end.

  Hang slipped his trembling fingers through his sister’s long, black hair. He heard splashing in the distance. That would be Ty. He’d radioed his partner that he’d spotted the girl and saw her go down. She said she’d be there within a half hour. They had been hoping, at least, that she could give them a name, help them break the monstrous union that was destroying so many young lives. But that didn’t happen. Seeing him, Phum only had the strength to say his name. She died with her brother’s name and the hint of a smile on her bright red lips, not the name of the creature who had done this.

  Ty arrived and looked down. Dressed like a local peasant, she stood there with the wind whispering around her. And then she gasped. She knelt beside Hang and put her arms around him. Neither of them moved or spoke for several minutes. Then, slowly, Hang stood with his sister’s body in his arms. He carried her back toward the old station wagon that served as his field outpost.

  He knew they shouldn’t leave Kampong Thom now. Not when they were so close to getting what they needed. But he had to take his sister home. That was where she should be laid to rest.

  The sun quickly warmed and then baked his damp back. Ty opened the back of the station wagon and spread a blanket amid the cartons. Inside the boxes were weapons and radio equipment, maps and lists, and a powerful incendiary device. Hang wore the remote trigger hooked around his belt. If they were ever caught, he would destroy everything in the car. Then he would use the.357 Smith & Wesson he carried to take his own life. Ty would do likewise.

  With Ty’s help, Hang placed the body of his sister on the blanket. Gently, he folded her inside. Before leaving, he looked out across the field. It had been made sacred with her blood. But the land would not be clean until it was washed with the blood of those who had done this.

  It would be. However long it took, he vowed that it would be.

  ONE

  Paris, France

  Monday, 6:13 A.M.

  Seven years ago, during training for service with UNTAC — THE United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia — brash, adventuresome Lieutenant Reynold Downer of the 11th/28th Battalion, the Royal Western Australia Regiment, learned that there were three conditions that had to be met before a United Nations peacekeeping operation could be sent to any nation. It wasn’t something he’d ever wondered about or wanted to be a part of, but the Commonwealth of Australia felt differently.

  First, the fifteen member nations of the UN Security Council had to approve the operation and its parameters in detail. Second, since the United Nations does not have an army, member nations of the General Assembly had to agree to contribute troops as well as a force commander, who was put in charge of deployment and execution of the multinational army. Third, the warring nations had to consent to the presence of the PKO.

  Once there, the peacekeepers had three goals. The first was to establish and enforce a cease-fire while the warring parties sought peaceful solutions. The second was to create a buffer zone between the hostile factions. And the third was to maintain the peace. This included military action when necessary, de-mining the terrain so civilians could return to homes and to food and water supplies, and also providing humanitarian assistance.

  All of that was carefully explained to the light infantry troops during two weeks of training at Irwin Barracks, Stubbs Terrace, Karrakatta. Two weeks that consisted of learning local customs, politics, language, water purification, and how to drive slowly
, with one eye on the dirt roads, so you didn’t run over a mine. Also learning not to blush when you caught a glimpse of yourself in a powder blue beret and matching ascot.

  When the UN indoctrination was done—“the gelding,” as his commanding officer quite accurately described it — the Australian contingent was spread among the eighty-six cantonment sites in Cambodia. Australia’s own Lieutenant General John M. Sanderson was force commander of the entire UNTAC operation, which lasted from March 1992 to September 1993.

  The UNTAC mission was carefully designed to avoid armed conflict. UN soldiers weren’t supposed to shoot unless fired upon, and only then without escalating the hostilities. The deaths of any enlisted personnel were to be investigated by the local police, not by the military. Human rights were to be encouraged through education, not force. Apart from serving as a buffer, distributing food and offering health care were the PKO’s top priorities.

  To Downer, being in the field seemed less like a military operation than a carnival. Come on, you warring or downtrodden Third World peoples. Get your bread here, your penicillin, your clean water. The circus feeling was enhanced by tents that were topped with colorful banners and local gawkers who weren’t sure what to make of it all. Though many of them took what was offered, they looked like they wished it would just go away. Violence was an expected and understood part of their daily lives. Outsiders were not.

  There was so little to do in Cambodia that Colonel Ivan Georgiev, a high-ranking officer in the Bulgarian People’s Army, organized a prostitution ring. They were protected by officers of Pol Pot’s renegade National Army of Democratic Kampuchea, who needed foreign currency to buy arms and supplies and were paid 25 percent of the take. Georgiev ran the ring from tents erected behind his command post. Local girls came for what were supposed to be radio UNTAC language courses and stayed for an infusion of foreign currency. That was where Downer first met both Georgiev and Major Ishiro Sazanka. Georgiev said that the soldiers of Japan and Australia were his best customers, though the Japanese tended to get rough with the girls and had to be watched. “Polite sadists,” the Bulgarian had called them. Downer’s uncle Thomas, who had fought the Japanese as part of the 7th Australian Division in the Southwest Pacific, would have quarreled with that description. He didn’t find the Japanese at all polite.

  Downer helped to recruit new “language students” for the tents, while Georgiev’s other aides found different ways of getting girls to work for them — including kidnapping. The Khmer Rouge helped gather new girls whenever possible. Except for this sideline, Downer found Cambodia a bore. The United Nations guidelines were too soft, too restrictive. As he’d learned growing up on the docks of Sydney, there was only one guideline that mattered. Did some son of a bitch deserve a bullet in the head? If he did, pull the trigger and go home. If he didn’t, what the hell were you doing there?

  Downer took a last swallow of coffee and pushed the heavy mug back along the vinyl-covered card table. The coffee was good, black and bitter, the way he drank it in the field. It made him feel energized, ready to act. Maybe that wasn’t a good idea, here and now, where there was nothing to act against. But he liked the feeling anyway.

  The Australian looked at the watch on his sun-darkened wrist. Where the hell were they?

  The group was usually back by eight o’clock. How long did it take to make a videotape of something they’d videotaped six times already?

  The answer was that it took as long as Captain Vandal needed it to take. Vandal was in charge of this phase of the operation. And if the French officer weren’t so efficient, none of them would be here. Vandal was the one who got them all into the country, had acquired the hardware, had supervised the recon, and would get them out of here so they could start phase two of the operation, which would be run by Georgiev.

  Downer fished a graham cracker from an open box and snapped at it impatiently. The taste, the crispness, brought him back to his arms training in the outback. The unit lived on these things there.

  He looked around the small, dark apartment as he chewed. His soft blue eyes moved from the kitchen on the right to the TV across the room to the front door. Vandal had rented this place over two years before. The Frenchman admitted that luxury was not a consideration. The one-room, first-floor flat was located on a crooked little street just off the Boulevard de la Bastille, not far from the large bureau de poste. Apart from the location, the only thing that was important was that they be on the first floor of the building for a window escape if necessary. As Vandal had promised when the five of them pooled their savings for this operation, he would spend extravagantly only on forged documents, surveillance gear, and weapons.

  As the tall, powerfully built Downer brushed crumbs from his faded blue jeans, he glanced at the oversized duffel bags lying in a row between the TV and the window. He was baby-sitting the five lumpy bags filled with weapons. Vandal had done his job there. AK-47s, handguns, tear gas, grenades, a rocket launcher. All of them unmarked and untraceable, bought through Chinese arms dealers the Frenchman had met while the PKO was in Cambodia.

  God bless the United Nations, Downer thought.

  Tomorrow morning, shortly after dawn, the men would load the bags onto the truck they’d bought. Vandal and Downer would drop Sazanka, Georgiev, and Barone at the factory helipad and then time their departure so everyone could meet again later at the target.

  The target, Downer thought. So ordinary yet so vital to the rest of the operation.

  The Australian’s eyes returned to the table. There was a white ceramic bowl sitting beside the phone. The bowl was filled with black paste — burned diagrams and notes soaked in tap water. The notes contained everything from calculations about approximate tail winds and head winds at one thousand feet up at eight in the morning to traffic flow to the police presence on the Seine. Ashes could still be deciphered; wet ashes were useless.

  Just one more stinking day of this, he told himself.

  When the rest of the team returned, there’d be one more afternoon of studying videotapes, making sure they had everything covered for this phase of the operation. One more night of drawing maps for this part of the operation, then calculating flight times, bus schedules, street names, and the location of arms dealers in New York for the next phase. Just to make sure they’d memorized them all. And then there’d be one more dawn of burning everything they’d written so the police would never find it here or in the trash.

  Downer’s eyes drifted across the room to the sleeping bags on the floor. They sat in front of a sofa, the only other piece of furniture in the room. There was a big window fan in the room’s only window, and it had been running constantly during this heat wave. Vandal assured him that the hundred-plus temperatures were good for the plan. The target was vented, not air-conditioned, and the men inside were going to be a little more sluggish than usual.

  Not like us, Downer thought. He and his teammates had a goal.

  Downer thought of the four other ex-soldiers who were involved in the project. He’d met them all in Phnom Penh, and each of them had a very different, very personal reason for being here.

  A key rattled in the front door. Downer reached for his Type 64 silenced pistol, tucked in a holster hanging from the back of the wooden chair. He gently pushed the graham cracker box aside so he had a clear shot at the door. He remained seated. The only person other than Vandal who had a key was the superintendent. In the three times Downer had stayed at the apartment during the past year, the old man only came by when he was called — and sometimes not even then. If it were anyone else, they didn’t belong here, and they’d die. Downer half-hoped it was someone he didn’t know. He was in the mood to pull the trigger.

  The door opened and Etienne Vandal walked in. His longish brown hair was slicked back and he was wearing sunglasses, a video camera carrying case slung casually over his left shoulder. He was followed by the bald, barrel-chested Georgiev, the short and swarthy Barone, and the tall, broad-shouldered Sazanka. All of th
e men were wearing touristy T-shirts and blue jeans. They also wore the same, flat expressions.

  Sazanka shut the door. He shut it quietly, politely.

  Downer sighed. He slipped the firearm back in its holster. “How’d it go?” the Australian asked. Downer’s voice was still rich with the tight gutturals of western New South Wales.

  “Ewed ih gow?” Barone said, mimicking the Australian’s thick accent.

  “Stop that,” Vandal told him.

  “Yes, sir,” Barone replied. He threw the officer a casual salute and frowned at Downer.

  Downer didn’t like Barone. The cocky little man had something none of the other men possessed: an attitude. He acted as though everyone were a potential enemy, even his allies. Barone also had a good ear. He’d worked as a custodian at the American embassy when he was a teenager and had lost most of his accent. The one thing that kept Downer from lashing out at the younger man was they both knew that if the little Uruguayan ever crossed the line too far, the six-foot-four-inch Australian could and would pull him in two.

  Vandal put the case on the table and popped the tape from the camera. He walked over to the TV.

  “I think the surveillance went fine,” Vandal said.

  “The traffic patterns appear to be the same as they were last week. But we’ll compare the tapes, just to make sure.”

  “For the last time, I hope,” Barone said.

  “We all hope,” Downer said.

  “Yes, but I’m anxious to move,” the twenty-nine-year-old officer said. He did not say where he wanted to move. A group of foreigners meeting in a rundown flat never knew who might be eavesdropping.

  Sazanka sat silently on the sofa and untied his Nikes. He massaged his thick feet. Barone tossed him a bottled water from the refrigerator in the kitchenette. The Japanese grunted his thanks. Sazanka’s command of English was the weakest, and he tended to say very little. Downer shared his uncle’s view of the Japanese, and Sazanka’s silence made him happy. Ever since Downer was a child, Japanese sailors, tourists, and speculators had been all over the harbor in Sydney. If they didn’t act as though they owned it, they acted as though one day they would. Unfortunately, Sazanka could fly a variety of aircraft. The group needed his skills.