Rainbow Six Read online

  “Noonan, what can you do?”

  The FBI agent looked down at the blueprints, then over at the TV monitors. “I need to change,” he said, heading over to his equipment case and pulling out the green-on-green night gear. The best news he’d seen so far was that the castle windows made for two blind spots. Better yet, they could control the lights that bled energy into both of them. He walked over to the park engineer next. “Can you switch off these lights along here?”

  “Sure. When?”

  “When the guy on the roof is looking the other way. And I need somebody to back me up,” Noonan added.

  “I can do that,” First Sergeant Vega said, stepping forward.

  The children were whining. It had started two hours earlier and only gotten worse. They wanted food—something adults would probably not have asked for, since adults would be far too frightened to eat, but children were different somehow. They also needed to use the restroom quite a bit, and fortunately there were two bathrooms adjacent to the control room, and René’s people didn’t stop them from going—the restrooms had no windows or phones or anything to make escape or communication possible, and it wasn’t worth the aggravation to have the children soiling their pants. The children didn’t talk directly to any of his people, but the whining was real and growing. Well-behaved kids, else it would be worse, René told himself, with an ironic smile. He looked at the wall clock.

  “Three, this is One.”

  “Yes, One,” came the reply.

  “What do you see?”

  “Eight policemen, four pairs, watching us, but doing nothing but watching.”

  “Good.” And he set the radio down.

  “Log that,” Noonan said. He’d checked the wall clock. It was about fifteen minutes since the last radio conversation. He was in his night costume now, the two-shade greens they’d used in Vienna. His Beretta .45 automatic, with suppressor, was in a special, large shoulder holster over his body armor, and he had a backpack slung over one shoulder. “Vega, ready to take a little walk?”

  “You betcha,” Oso replied, glad at last to be doing something on a deployment. As much as he liked being responsible for the team’s heavy machine gun, he’d never gotten to use it, and, he thought, probably never would. The biggest man on the team, his hobby was pumping iron, and he had a chest about the dimensions of a half-keg of beer. Vega followed Noonan out the door, then outside.

  “Ladder?” the first sergeant asked.

  “Tool and paint shop fifty yards from where we’re going. I asked. They have what we need.”

  “Fair ’nuff,” Oso replied.

  It was a fast walk, dodging through a few open areas visible to the fixed cameras, and the shop they headed for had no sign on it at all. Noonan slipped the ground-bolted door and walked in. None of the doors, remarkably enough, were locked. Vega pulled a thirty-foot extension ladder off its wall brackets. “This ought to do.”

  “Yeah.” They went outside. Movement would now be trickier. “Noonan to command.”

  “Six here.”

  “Start doing the cameras, John.”

  In the command center, Clark pointed to the park engineer. There was danger here, but not much, they hoped. The castle command center, like this one, had only eight TV monitors, which were hard-wired into over forty cameras. You could have the computer simply flip through them in an automatic sequence, or select cameras for special use. With a mouse-click, one camera was disabled. If the terrorists were using the automatic sequence, as seemed likely, they probably would not notice that one camera’s take was missing during the flip-through. They had to get through the visual coverage of two of them, and the park engineer was ready to flip them off and on as needed. The moment a hand appeared in camera twenty-three’s field of view, the engineer flipped it off.

  “Okay, twenty-three is off, Noonan.”

  “We’re moving,” Noonan said. The first walk took them twenty meters, and they stopped behind a concession stand. “Okay, we’re at the popcorn building.”

  The engineer flipped twenty-three back on, and then turned off twenty-one.

  “Twenty-one is off,” Clark reported next. “Rifle Two-One, where’s the guy on the roof?”

  “West side, just lit up a smoke, not looking down over the edge anymore. Staying still at the moment,” Sergeant Johnston reported.

  “Noonan, you are clear to move.”

  “Moving now,” the FBI agent replied. He and Vega double-timed it across the stone slabs, their rubber-soled boots keeping their steps quiet. At the side of the castle was a dirt strip about two meters wide, and some large box-woods. Carefully, Noonan and Vega angled the ladder up, setting it behind a bush. Vega pulled the rope to extend the top portion, stopping it just under the window. Then he got between the ladder and the building, grabbed the treads and held them tight, pulling the ladder against the rough stone blocks.

  “Watch your ass, Tim,” Oso whispered.

  “Always.” Noonan went up quickly for the first ten feet, then slowed to a vertical crawl. Patience, Tim told himself. Plenty of time to do this. It was the sort of lie that men tell themselves.

  “Okay,” Clark heard. “He’s going up the ladder now. The roof guy is still on the opposite side, fat, dumb, and happy.”

  “Bear, this is Six, over,” John said, getting another idea.

  “Bear copies, Six.”

  “Play around a little on the west side, just to draw some attention, over.”

  “Roger that.”

  Malloy stopped his endless circling, leveled out, and then eased toward the castle. The Night Hawk was a relatively quiet aircraft for a helicopter, but the guy on the roof turned to watch closely, the colonel saw through his night-vision goggles. He stopped his approach at about two hundred meters. He wanted to get their attention, not to spook them. The roof sentry’s cigarette blazed brightly in the goggles. It moved to his lips, then away, then back, staying there.

  “Say hello, sweetie,” Malloy said over the intercom. “Jesus, if I was in a Night Stalker, I could spray your ass into the next time zone.”

  “You fly the Stalker? What’s it like?”

  “If she could cook, I’d fucking marry her. Sweetest chopper ever made,” Malloy said, holding hover. “Six, Bear, I have the bastard’s attention.”

  “Noonan, Six, we’ve frozen the roof sentry for you. He’s on the opposite side from you.”

  Good, Noonan didn’t say. He took off his Kevlar helmet and edged his face to the window. It was made of irregular segments held in place by lead strips, just like in the castles of old. The glass wasn’t as good as float-plate, but it was transparent. Okay. He reached into his backpack and pulled a fiber-optic cable with the same cobra-head arrangement he’d used in Bern.

  “Noonan to Command, you getting this?”

  “That’s affirmative.” It was the voice of David Peled. The picture he saw was distorted, but you quickly got used to that. It showed four adults, but more important, it showed a crowd of children sitting on the floor in the corner, close to two doors with labels—the toilets, Peled realized. That worked. That worked pretty well. “Looks good, Timothy. Looks very good.”

  “Okay.” Noonan glued the tiny instrument in place and headed down the ladder. His heart was racing faster than it ever did on the morning three-mile run. At the bottom, he and Vega both hugged the wall.

  The cigarette flew off the roof, and the sentry got tired of looking at the chopper, Johnston saw.

  “Our friend’s moving east on the castle roof. Noonan, he’s coming your way.”

  Malloy thought of maneuvering to draw the attention back, but that was too dangerous a play. He turned the helicopter sideways and continued his circling, but closer in, his eyes locked on the castle roof. There wasn’t much else he could do except to draw his service pistol and fire, but at this range it would be hard enough to hit the castle. And killing people wasn’t his job, unfortunately, Malloy told himself. There were times when he found the idea rather appealing
.

  “The helicopter annoys me,” the voice on the phone said.

  “Pity,” Dr. Bellow replied, wondering what response it would get. “But police do what police do.”

  “News from Paris?”

  “Regrettably not yet, but we hope to hear something soon. There is still time.” Bellow’s voice adopted a quiet intensity that he hoped would be taken for desperation.

  “Time and tide wait for no man,” One said, and hung up.

  “What’s that mean?” John asked.

  “It means he’s playing by the rules. He hasn’t objected to the cops he can see on the TV, either. He knows the things he has to put up with.” Bellow sipped his coffee. “He’s very confident. He figures he’s in a safe place, and he’s holding the cards, and if he has to kill a few more kids, that’s okay, because it’ll get him what he wants.”

  “Killing children.” Clark shook his head. “I didn’t think—hell, I’m supposed to know better, right?”

  “It’s a very strong taboo, maybe the strongest,” Dr. Bellow agreed. “The way they killed that little girl, though . . . there was no hesitation, just like shooting a paper target. Ideological,” the psychiatrist went on. “They’ve subordinated everything to their belief system. That makes them rational, but only within that system. Our friend Mr. One has chosen his objective, and he’ll stick to it.”

  The remote TV system, the park engineer saw, was really something. The objective lens now affixed to the castle window was less than two millimeters across at its widest point, and even if noticed, would be mistaken for a drop of paint or some flaw in the window glass. The quality of the image wasn’t very good, but it showed where people were, and the more you looked at it, the more you understood what initially appeared to be a black-and-white photograph of clutter. He could count six adults now, and with a seventh atop the castle, that left only three unaccounted for—and were all the children in view? It was harder with them. All their shirts were the same color, and the red translated into a very neutral gray on the black-and-white picture. There was the one in a wheelchair, but the rest blended together in the out-of-focus image. The commandos, he could see, were worried about that.

  “He’s heading back west again,” Johnston reported. “Okay, he’s at the west side now.”

  “Let’s go,” Noonan told Vega.

  “The ladder?” They’d taken it down and laid it behind the bushes on its side.

  “Leave it.” Noonan ran off in a crouch, reaching the concession structure in a few seconds. “Noonan to Command, time to do the cameras again.”

  “It’s off,” the engineer told Clark.

  “Camera twenty-one is down. Get moving, Tim.”

  Noonan popped Vega on the shoulder and ran another thirty meters. “Okay, take down twenty-three.”

  “Done,” the park engineer said.

  “Move,” Clark commanded.

  Fifteen seconds later, they were in a safe position. Noonan leaned against a building wall and took a long breath. “Thanks, Julio.”

  “Any time, man,” Vega replied. “Just so the camera gadget works.”

  “It will,” the FBI agent promised, and with that they headed back to the underground command post.

  “Blow the windows? Can we do that, Paddy?” Chavez was asking when they got there.

  Connolly was wishing for a cigarette. He’d quit years before—it was too hard on the daily runs to indulge—but at times like this it seemed to help the concentration. “Six windows . . . three or four minutes each . . . no, I think not, sir. I can give you two—if we have the time.”

  “How sturdy are the windows?” Clark asked “Dennis?”

  “Metal frames set into the stone,” the park manager said with a shrug.

  “Wait.” The engineer turned a page on the castle blueprints, then two more, and then a finger traced down the written portion on the right side. “Here’s the specs . . . they’re held in by grouting only. You should be able to kick them in, I think.”

  The “I think” part was not as reassuring as Ding would have preferred, but how strong could a window frame be with a two-hundred-pound man swinging into it with two boots leading the way?

  “What about flash-bangs, Paddy?”

  “We can do that,” Connolly answered. “It will not do the frames any good at all, sir.”

  “Okay.” Chavez leaned over the plans. “You’ll have time to blow two windows—this one and this one.” He tapped the prints. “We’ll use flash-bangs on the other four and swing in a second later. Eddie here, me here, Louis here. George, how’s the leg?”

  “Marginal,” Sergeant Tomlinson replied with painful honesty. He’d have to kick through a window, swing in, drop to a concrete floor, then come up shooting . . . and the lives of children were at stake. No, he couldn’t risk it, could he? “Better somebody else, Ding.”

  “Oso, think you can do it?” Chavez asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Vega replied, trying not to smile. “You bet, Ding.”

  “Okay, Scotty here, and Mike take these two. What’s the exact distance from the roof?”

  That was on the blueprints. “Sixteen meters exactly from the level of the roof. Add another seventy centimeters to allow for the battlements.”

  “The ropes can do that easily,” Eddie Price decided. The plan was coming together. He and Ding would have as their primary mission getting between the kids and the bad guys, shooting as they went. Vega, Loiselle, McTyler, and Pierce would be primarily tasked to killing the subjects in the castle’s command room, but that would be finally decided only when they entered the room. Covington’s Team-1 would race up the stairs from the underground, to intercept any subjects who ran out, and to back up Team-2 if something went wrong on their assault.

  Sergeant Major Price and Chavez looked over the blueprints again, measuring distances to be covered and the time in which to do it. It looked possible, even probable, that they could carry it off. Ding looked up at the others.

  “Comments?”

  Noonan turned to look at the picture from the fiber-optic gear he’d installed. “They seem to be mainly at the control panels. Two guys keeping an eye on the children, but they’re not worried about them—makes sense, they’re just kids, not adults able to start real resistance . . . but . . . it only takes one of these bastards to turn and hose them, man.”

  “Yeah.” Ding nodded. There was no denying or avoiding that fact. “Well, we have to shoot fast, people. Any way to string them out?”

  Bellow thought about that. “If I tell them the plane’s on the way . . . that’s a risk. If they think we’re lying to them, well, they could start taking it out on the hostages, but the upside is, if they think it’s about time to head for the airport, probably Mr. One will send a couple of his troops down to the underground—that’s the most likely way for them to leave the area, I think. Then, if we can play some more with the surveillance cameras, and get a guy in close—”

  “Yeah, pop them right away,” Clark said. “Peter?”

  “Get us within twenty meters and it’s a piece of cake. Plus, we kill the lights right before we hit. Disorient the bastards,” Covington added.

  “There’s emergency lights in the stairwells,” Mike Dennis said. “They click on when the power goes down—shit, there’s two in the command center, too.”

  “Where?” Chavez asked.

  “The left—I mean the northeast corner and the southwest one. The regular kind, two lights, like car headlights, they run off a battery.”

  “Okay, no NVGs when we go in, I guess, but we’ll still kill the lights right before we hit, just to distract them. Anything else? Peter?” Ding asked.

  Major Covington nodded. “It ought to work.”

  Clark observed and listened, forced to let his principal subordinates do all the planning and talking, leaving him only able to comment if they made a mistake, and they hadn’t done that. Most of all, he wanted to lift an MP-10 and go in with the shooters, but he couldn’t do that, and inw
ardly he swore at the fact. Commanding just wasn’t as satisfying as leading.

  “We need medics standing by in case the bad guys get lucky,” John said to Colonel Nuncio.

  “We have paramedics outside the park now—”

  “Dr. Weiler is pretty good,” Mike Dennis said. “He’s had trauma training. We insisted on that in case we have something bad happen here.”

  “Okay, we’ll have him stand-to when the time comes. Dr. Bellow, tell Mr. One that the French have caved, and their friends will be here. . . . What do you think?”

  “Ten-twenty or so. If they agree to that, it’s a concession, but the kind that will calm them down—should, anyway.”

  “Make the call, doc,” John Clark ordered.

  “Yes?” René said.

  “Sanchez is being released from Le Sante prison in about twenty minutes. Six of the others, too, but there’s a problem on the last three. I’m not sure what that is. They’ll be taken to De Gaulle International Airport and flown here on an Air France Airbus 340. We think they’ll be here by twenty-two-forty. Is that acceptable? How will we get you and the hostages to them for the flight out?” Bellow asked.

  “A bus, I think. You will bring the bus right to the castle. We will take ten or so of the children with us, and leave the rest here as a show of good faith on our part. Tell the police that we know how to move the children without giving them a chance to do something foolish, and any treachery will have severe consequences.”

  “We do not want any more children harmed,” Bellow assured him.

  “If you do as you are told, that will not be necessary, but understand,” René went on firmly, “if you do anything foolish, then the courtyard will run red with blood. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, One, I understand,” the voice replied.