Rainbow Six Read online

  “Thank God,” George Winston noted. “Hell, I know that guy. Erwin’s good people,” the Secretary of the Treasury said on his way out of the White House, where the cabinet meeting had run very long.

  “Who did the takedown?”

  “Well—” That caught him short. He wasn’t supposed to say, and wasn’t supposed to know. “What did the news say?”

  “Local cops, Vienna police SWAT team, I guess.”

  “Well, I suppose they learned up on how to do it,” SecTreas opined, heading toward his car with his Secret Service detail.

  “The Austrians? Who’d they learn it from?”

  “Somebody who knows how, I guess,” Winston replied, getting into the car.

  “So, what’s the big deal about it?” Carol Brightling asked the Secretary of the Interior. To her it looked like another case of boys and their toys.

  “Nothing, really,” the Secretary replied, her own protective detail guiding her to the door of her official car. “Just that what they showed on TV, it was a pretty good job of rescuing all those people. I’ve been to Austria a few times, and the cops didn’t strike me as all that great. Maybe I’m wrong. But George acts like he knows more than he’s telling.”

  “Oh, that’s right, Jean, he’s ‘inner cabinet,’ ” Dr. Brightling observed. It was something those in the “outer cabinet” didn’t like. Of course, Carol Brightling wasn’t technically in the cabinet at all. She had a seat against the wall instead of around the table, there only in case the issues of the meeting required a scientific opinion, which they hadn’t today. Good news and bad news. She got to listen in on everything, and she took her notes on all that happened in the ornate, stuffy room that overlooked the Rose Garden, while the President controlled the agenda and the pace—badly in today’s case, she thought. Tax policy had taken over an hour, and they’d never gotten to use of national forests, which came under the Department of the Interior, which issue had been postponed to the next meeting, a week away.

  She didn’t have a protective detail, either, not even an office in the White House itself. Previous Presidential Science Advisors had been in the West Wing, but she’d been moved to the Old Executive Office Building. It was a larger and more comfortable office, with a window, which her basement office in the White House would not have had, but though the OEOB was considered part of the White House for administrative and security purposes, it didn’t have quite the prestige, and prestige was what it was all about if you were part of the White House staff. Even under this President, who worked pretty hard to treat everyone the same and who wasn’t into the status bullshit—there was no avoiding it at this level of government. And so, Carol Brightling clung to her right to have lunch in the White House Mess with the Big Boys and Big Girls of the Administration, and grumbled that to see the President except at his request, she had to go through the Chief of Staff and the appointments secretary to get a few minutes of His Valuable Time. As though she’d ever wasted it.

  A Secret Service agent opened the door for her with a respectful nod and smile, and she walked into this surpassingly ugly building, then turned right to her office, which at least overlooked the White House. She handed her notes to her (male, of course) secretary on the way in for transcription, then sat down at her desk, finding there a new pile of papers to be read and acted upon. She opened her desk drawer and got herself a starlight mint to suck on as she attacked the pile. Then on reflection she lifted her TV controller and turned her office television to CNN for a look at what was happening around the world. It was the top of the hour, and the lead story was the thing in Vienna.

  God, what a house was her first thought. Like a king’s palace, a huge waste of resources for one man, or even one large family, to use as a private residence. What was it Winston had said of the owner? Good people? Sure. All good people lived like wastrels, glomming up precious resources like that. Another goddamned plutocrat, stock trader, currency speculator, however he earned the money to buy a place like that—and then terrorists had invaded his privacy. Well, gee, she thought, I wonder why they picked him. No sense attacking a sheep farmer or truck driver. Terrorists went after the moneyed people, or the supposedly important ones, because going for ordinary folks had little in the way of a political point, and these were, after all, political acts. But they hadn’t been as bright as they ought to have been. Whoever had picked them had . . . picked them to fail? Was that possible? She supposed that it was. It was a political act, after all, and such things could have all manner of real purposes. That brought a smile, as the reporter described the attack by the local police SWAT team—unfortunately not shown, because the local cops hadn’t wanted cameras and reporters in the way—then the release of the hostages, shown in closeup to let people share the experience. They’d been so close to death, only to be released, saved by the local cops, who’d really only restored to them their programmed time of death, because everything died, sooner or later. That was Nature’s plan, and you couldn’t fight Nature . . . though you could help her along, couldn’t you? The reporter went on to say that this had been the second terrorist incident in Europe over the last couple of months, both of them failures due to adroit police action. Carol remembered the attempted robbery in Bern, another botch . . . a creative one? She might have to find that out, though in this case a failure was as useful as—no, more useful than—a success, for the people who were planning things. That thought brought a smile. Yes. It was more useful than a success, wasn’t it? And with that she looked down at a fax from Friends of the Earth, who had her direct number and frequently sent her what they thought was important information.

  She leaned back in her comfortable high-backed chair to read it over twice. A good bunch of people with the right ideas, though few listened to them.

  “Dr. Brightling?” Her secretary stuck his head in the door.

  “Yes, Roy?”

  “You still want me to show you those faxes—like the one you’re reading, I mean?” Roy Gibbons asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But those people are card-carrying nuts.”

  “Not really. I like some of the things they do,” Carol replied, tossing the fax in her trash can. She’d save their idea for some future date.

  “Fair enough, doc.” The head disappeared back into the outer office.

  The next thing in her pile was pretty important, a report of procedures for shutting down nuclear power reactors, and the subsequent safety of the shut-down reactor systems: how long before environmental factors might attack and corrode the internal items, and what environmental damage could result from it. Yes, this was very important stuff, and fortunately the index appended to it showed data on individual reactors across the country. She popped another starlight mint into her mouth and leaned forward, setting the papers flat on the desktop so that she could stare straight down at them for reading purposes.

  “This seems to work,” Steve said quietly.

  “How many strands fit inside?” Maggie asked.

  “Anywhere from three to ten.”

  “And how large is the overall package?”

  “Six microns. Would you believe it? The packaging is white in color, so it reflects light pretty well, especially UV radiation, and in a water-spray environment, it’s just about invisible.” The individual capsules couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, and only barely with an optical microscope. Better still, their weight was such that they’d float in air about the same as dust particles, as readily breathable as secondhand smoke in a singles bar. Once in the body, the coating would dissolve, and allow release of the Shiva strands into the lungs or the upper GI, where they could go to work.

  “Water soluble?” Maggie asked.

  “Slowly, but faster if there’s anything biologically active in the water, like the trace hydrochloric acid in saliva, for example. Wow, we could have really made money from the Iraqis with this one, kiddo—or anybody who wants to play bio-war in the real world.”

  Their company had invented
the technology, working on an NIH grant designed to develop an easier way than needles to deliver vaccines. Needles required semiskilled use. The new technique used electrophoresis to wrap insignificantly tiny quantities of protective gel around even smaller amounts of airborne bioactive agents. That would allow people to ingest vaccines with a simple drink rather than the more commonly used method of inoculation. If they ever fielded a working AIDS vaccine, this would be the method of choice for administering it in Africa, where countries lacked the infrastructure to do much of anything. Steve had just proven that the same technology could be used to deliver active virus with the same degree of safety and reliability. Or almost proven it.

  “How do we proof-test it?” Maggie asked.

  “Monkeys. How we fixed for monkeys in the lab?”

  “Lots,” she assured him. This would be an important step. They’d give it to a few monkeys, then see how well it spread through the laboratory population. They’d use rhesus monkeys. Their blood was so similar to humans’.

  Subject Four was the first, as expected. He was fifty-three years old and his liver function was so far off the scale as to qualify him for a high place on the transplant list at the University of Pittsburgh. His skin had a yellowish cast in the best of circumstances, but that didn’t stop him from hitting the booze harder than any of their test subjects. His name, he said, was Chester something, Dr. John Killgore remembered. Chester’s brain function was about the lowest in the group as well. He watched TV a lot, rarely talked to anyone, never even read comic books, which were popular with the rest, as were TV cartoons—watching the Cartoon Channel was among their most popular pastimes.

  They were all in hog heaven, John Killgore had noted. All the booze and fast food and warmth that they could want, and most of them were even learning to use the showers. From time to time, a few would ask what the deal was here, but their inquiries were never pressed beyond the pro-forma answer they got from the doctors and security guards.

  But with Chester, they had to take action now. Killgore entered the room and called his name. Subject Four rose from his bunk and came over, clearly feeling miserable.

  “Not feeling good, Chester?” Killgore asked from behind his mask.

  “Stomach, can’t keep stuff down, feel crummy all over,” Four replied.

  “Well, come along with me and we’ll see what we can do about that, okay?”

  “You say so, doc,” Chester replied, augmenting the agreement with a loud belch.

  Outside the door, they put him in a wheelchair. It was only fifty yards to the clinical side of the installation. Two orderlies lifted Number Four into a bed, and restrained him into it with Velcro ties. Then one of them took a blood sample. Ten minutes later, Killgore tested it for Shiva antibodies, and the sample turned blue, as expected. Chester, Subject Number Four, had less than a week to live—not as much as the six to twelve months to which his alcoholism had already limited him, but not really all that much of a reduction, was it? Killgore went back inside to start an IV into his arm, and to calm Chester down, he hung a morphine drip that soon had him unconscious and even smiling slightly. Good. Number Four would soon die, but he would do so in relative peace. More than anything else, Dr. Killgore wanted to keep the process orderly.

  He checked his watch when he got back to his office/ viewing room. His hours were long ones. It was almost like being a real physician again. He hadn’t practiced clinical medicine since his residency, but he read all the right journals and knew the techniques, and besides, his current crop of patient/victims wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Tough luck, Chester, but it’s a tough world out there, Steve thought, going back to his notes. Chester’s early response to the virus had been a little unsettling—only half the time programmed—but it had been brought about by his grossly reduced liver function. It couldn’t be helped. Some people would get hit sooner than others because of differing physical vulnerabilities. So the outbreak would start unevenly. It shouldn’t matter in the eventual effects, though it would alert people sooner than he hoped it would. That would cause a run on the vaccines Steve Berg and his shop were developing. “A” would be widely distributed after the rush to manufacture it. “B” would be more closely held, assuming that he and his team could indeed get it ready for use. “A” would go out to everybody, while “B” would go only to those people who were supposed to survive, people who understood what it was all about, or who would accept their survival and get on with things with the rest of the crew.

  Killgore shook his head. There was a lot of stuff left to be done, and as usual, not enough time to do it.

  Clark and Stanley went over the takedown immediately upon their arrival in the morning, along with Peter Covington, still sweaty from his morning workout with Team-1. Chavez and his people would just be waking up after their long day on the European mainland.

  “It was a bloody awful tactical situation. And Chavez is right,” Major Covington went on. “We need our own helicopter crews. Yesterday’s mission cried out for that, but we didn’t have what we needed. That’s why he had to execute a poor plan and depend on luck to accomplish it.”

  “He could have asked their army for help,” Stanley pointed out.

  “Sir, we both know that one doesn’t commit to an important tactical move with a helicopter crew one doesn’t know and with whom one has not worked,” Covington observed, in his best Sandhurst grammar. “We need to look at this issue immediately.”

  “True,” Stanley agreed, looking over at Clark.

  “Not part of the TO and E, but I see the point,” Rainbow Six conceded. How the hell had they overlooked this requirement? He asked himself. “Okay, first let’s figure all the chopper types we’re likely to see, and then find out if we can get some drivers who’re current in most of them.”

  “Ideally, I’d love to have a Night Stalker—but we’d have to take it with us everywhere we go, and that means—what? A C-5 or a C-17 transport aircraft assigned to us at all times?” Stanley observed.

  Clark nodded. The Night Stalker version of the McDonnell-Douglas AH-6 Loach had been invented for Task Force 160, now redesignated the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—SOAR—based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. They were probably the wildest and craziest bunch of aviators in the world, who worked on the sly with brother aviators from selected other countries—Britain and Israel were the two most often allowed into the 160 compound at Campbell. In a real sense, getting the choppers and flight crews assigned to Rainbow would be the easy part. The hard part would be getting the fixed-wing transport needed to move the chopper to where they needed it. It’d be about as hard to hide as an elephant in a schoolyard. With Night Stalker they’d have all manner of surveillance gear, a special silent rotor—and Santa on his fucking sleigh with eight tiny reindeer, Clark’s mind went on. It would never happen, despite all the drag he had in Washington and London.

  “Okay, I’ll call Washington for authorization to get some aviators on the team. Any problem getting some aircraft here for them to play with?”

  “Shouldn’t be,” Stanley replied.

  John checked his watch. He’d have to wait until 9:00 A.M. Washington time—2:00 P.M. in England—to make his pitch via the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was the routing agency for Rainbow’s American funding. He wondered how Ed Foley would react—more to the point, he needed Ed to be an enthusiastic advocate. Well, that ought not to be too hard. Ed knew field operations, after a fashion, and was loyal to the people at the sharp end. Better yet, Clark was asking after they’d had a major success, and that usually worked a lot better than a plea for help after a failure.

  “Okay, we’ll continue this with the team debrief.” Clark stood and went to his office. Helen Montgomery had the usual pile of papers on his desk, somewhat higher than usual, as this one included the expected thank-you telegrams from the Austrians. The one from the Justice Minister was particularly flowery.

  “Thank you, sir,” John breathed, setting tha
t one aside.

  The amazing part of this job was all the admin stuff. As the commander of Rainbow, Clark had to keep track of when and how money came in and was spent, and he had to defend such things as the number of gun rounds his people fired every week. He did his best to slough much of this off on Alistair Stanley and Mrs. Montgomery, but a lot of it still landed on his desk. He had long experience as a government employee, and at CIA he’d had to report in endless detail on every field operation he’d ever run to keep the desk weenies happy. But this was well beyond that, and it accounted for his time on the firing range, as he found shooting a good means of stress relief, especially if he imagined the images of his bureaucratic tormentors in the center of the Q-targets he perforated with .45-caliber bullets. Justifying a budget was something new and foreign. If it wasn’t important, why fund it at all, and if it was important, why quibble over a few thousand bucks’ worth of bullets? It was the bureaucratic mentality, of course, all those people who sat at their desks and felt that the world would collapse around them if they didn’t have all their papers initialed, signed, stamped, and properly filed, and if that inconvenienced others, too bad. So he, John Terrence Clark, CIA field officer for more than thirty years, a quiet legend in his agency, was stuck at his expensive desk, behind a closed door, working on paperwork that any self-respecting accountant would have rejected, on top of which he had to supervise and pass judgment on real stuff, which was both more interesting and far more to the point.