Rainbow Six Read online

  “I know, boss,” Homer said, without being told anything. “Never again, but goddamn, it felt good.”

  “Like you said, never again, Homer.”

  “Yes, sir. Slapped the trigger a little hard,” Johnston said, to cover his ass in an official sense.

  “Bullshit,” Rainbow Six observed. “I’ll accept it—just this once. And you, Dieter, nice shot, but—”

  “Nie wieder. Herr General. I know, sir.” The German nodded his submission to the moment. “Homer, Junge, the look on his face when you hit him. Ach, that was something to see, my friend. Good for the one on the castle roof, too.”

  “Easy shot,” Johnston said dismissively. “He was standing still. Zap. Easier ’n throwing darts, pal.”

  Clark patted both on the shoulder and wandered over to Chavez and Price.

  “Did you have to land on my arm?” Ding complained lightly.

  “So, next time, come through the window straight, not at an angle.”

  “Right.” Chavez took a long sip of the Guinness.

  “How’d it go?” John asked them.

  “Aside from being hit twice, not bad,” Chavez replied. “I have to get a new vest, though.” Once hit, the vests were considered to be ruined for further use. This one would go back to the manufacturer for study to see how it had performed. “Which one was that, you think, Eddie?”

  “The last one, I think, the one who just stood and sprayed at the children.”

  “Well, that was the plan, for us to stop those rounds, and that one went down hard. You, me, Mike, and Oso, I think, took him apart.” Whatever cop had recovered that body would need a blotter and a freezer bag to collect the spilled brains.

  “That we did,” Price agreed as Julio came over.

  “Hey, that was okay, guys!” First Sergeant Vega told them, pleased to have finally participated in a field operation.

  “Since when do we punch our targets?” Chavez asked.

  Vega looked a little embarrassed. “Instinct, he was so close. You know, probably could have taken him alive, but—well, nobody ever told me to do that, y’know?”

  “That’s cool, Oso. That wasn’t part of the mission, not with a room full of kids.”

  Vega nodded. “What I figured, and the shot was pretty automatic, too, just playin’ like we practice, man. Anyway, that one went down real good, jefe.”

  “Any problem on the window?” Price wanted to know.

  Vega shook his head. “Nah, gave it a good kick, and it moved just fine. Bumped a shoulder coming through the frame, but no problems there. I was pretty pumped. But you know, you shoulda had me cover the kids. I’m bigger, I woulda stopped more bullets.”

  Chavez didn’t say that he’d worried about Vega’s agility—wrongly, as it had turned out. An important lesson learned. Bulky as Oso was, he moved lightly on his feet, far more so than Ding had expected. The bear could dance pretty well, though at 225 pounds, he was a little large for a tutu.

  “Fine operation,” Bill Tawney said, joining the group.

  “Anything develop?”

  “We have a possible identification on one of them, the chap who killed the child. The French ran the photo through some police informants, and they think it might be an Andre Herr, Parisian by birth, thought to be a stringer for Action Directe once upon a time, but nothing definite. More information is on the way, they say. The whole set of photos and fingerprints from Spain is on its way to Paris now for follow-up investigation. Not all of the photos will be very useful, I am told.”

  “Yeah, well, a burst of hollowpoints will rearrange a guy’s face, man,” Chavez observed with a chuckle. “Not a hell of a lot we can do about that.”

  “So, who initiated the operation?” Clark asked.

  Tawney shrugged. “Not a clue at this point. That’s for the French police to investigate.”

  “Would be nice to know. We’ve had three incidents since we got here. Isn’t that a lot?” Chavez asked, suddenly very serious.

  “It is,” the intelligence officer agreed. “It would not have been ten or fifteen years ago, but things had quieted down recently.” Another shrug. “Could be mere coincidence, or perhaps copycatting, but—”

  “Copycat? I shouldn’t think so, sir,” Eddie Price observed. “We’ve given bloody little encouragement to any terr’ who has ambitions, and today’s operation ought to have a further calming effect on those people.”

  “That makes sense to me,” Ding agreed. “Like Mike Pierce said, there’s a new sheriff in town, and the word on the street ought to be ‘don’t fuck with him’ even if people think we’re just local cops with an attitude. Take it a step further, Mr. C.”

  “Go public?” Clark shook his head. “That’s never been part of the plan, Domingo.”

  “Well, if the mission’s to take the bastards down in the field, that’s one thing. If the mission is to make these bastards think twice about raising hell—to stop terrorist incidents from happening at all—then it’s another thing entirely. The idea of a new sheriff in town might just take the starch out of their backs and put them back to washing cars, or whatever the hell they do when they’re not being bad. Deterrence, we call it, when nation-states do it. Will it work on a terrorist mentality? Something to talk with Doc Bellow about, John,” Chavez concluded.

  And again Chavez had surprised him, Clark realized. Three straight successes, all of them covered on the TV news, might well have an effect on the surviving terrorists in Europe or elsewhere with lingering ambitions, mightn’t it? And that was something to talk to Paul Bellow about. But it was much too soon for anyone on the team to be that optimistic . . . probably, John told himself with a thoughtful sip. The party was just beginning to break up. It had been a very long day for the Rainbow troopers, and one by one they set their glasses down on the bar, which ought to have closed some time before, and headed for the door for the walk to their homes. Another day and another mission had ended. Yet another day had already begun, and in only a few hours, they’d be awakened to run and exercise and begin another day of routine training.

  “Were you planning to leave us?” the jailer asked Inmate Sanchez in a voice dripping with irony.

  “What do you mean?” Carlos responded.

  “Some colleagues of yours misbehaved yesterday,” the prison guard responded, tossing a copy of Le Figaro through the door. “They will not do so again.”

  The photo on the front page was taken off the Worldpark video, the quality miserably poor, but clear enough to show a soldier dressed in black carrying a child, and the first paragraph of the story told the tale. Carlos scanned it, sitting on his prison bed to read the piece in detail, then felt a depth of black despair that he’d not thought possible. Someone had heard his plea, he realized, and it had come to nothing. Life in this stone cage beckoned as he looked up to the sun coming in the single window. Life. It would be a long one, probably a healthy one, and certainly a bleak one. His hands crumpled the paper when he’d finished the article. Damn the Spanish police. Damn the world.

  “Yes, I saw it on the news last night,” he said into the phone as he shaved.

  “I need to see you. I have something to show you, sir,” Popov’s voice said, just after seven in the morning.

  The man thought about that. Popov was a clever bastard who’d done his jobs without much in the way of questions . . . and there was little in the way of a paper trail, certainly nothing his lawyers couldn’t handle if it came to that, and it wouldn’t. There were ways of dealing with Popov, too, if it came to that.

  “Okay, be there at eight-fifteen.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Russian said, hanging up.

  Pete was in real agony now, Killgore saw. It was time to move him. This he ordered at once, and two orderlies came in dressed in upgraded protective gear to load the wino onto a gurney for transport to the clinical side. Killgore followed them and his patient. The clinical side was essentially a duplication of the room in which the street bums had lounged and drunk their booze, w
aiting unknowingly for the onset of symptoms. He now had them all, to the point that booze and moderate doses of morphine no longer handled the pain. The orderlies loaded Pete onto a bed, next to which was an electronically operated “Christmas tree” medication dispenser. Killgore handled the stick, and got the IV plugged into Pete’s major vein. Then he keyed the electronic box, and seconds later, the patient relaxed with a large bolus of medication. The eyes went sleepy and the body relaxed while the Shiva continued to eat him alive from the inside out. Another IV would be set up to feed him with nutrients to keep his body going, along with various drugs to see if any of them had an unexpectedly beneficial effect on the Shiva. They had a whole roomful of such drugs, ranging from antibiotics—which were expected to be useless against this viral infection—to Interleukin-2 and a newly developed -3a, which, some thought, might help, plus tailored Shiva antibodies taken from experimental animals. None were expected to work, but all had to be tested to make sure they didn’t, lest there be a surprise out there when the epidemic spread. Vaccine-B was expected to work, and that was being tested now with the new control group of people kidnapped from Manhattan bars, along with the notional Vaccine-A, whose purpose was rather different from -B. The nanocapsules developed on the other side of the house would come in very handy indeed.

  As was being demonstrated even as he had the thought, looking down at Pete’s dying body. Subject F4, Mary Bannister, felt sick to her stomach, just a mild queasiness at this point, but didn’t think much of it. That sort of thing happened, and she didn’t feel all that bad, some antacids would probably help, and those she got from her medicine cabinet, which was pretty well stocked with over-the-counter medications. Other than that, she felt pretty mellow, as she smiled at herself in the mirror and liked what she saw, a youngish, attractive woman wearing pink silk jammies. With that thought, she walked out of her room, her hair glossy and a spring in her step. Chip was in the sitting room, reading a magazine slowly on the couch, and she made straight for him and sat down beside him.

  “Hi, Chip.” She smiled.

  “Hi, Mary.” He smiled back, reaching to touch her hand.

  “I upped the Valium in her breakfast,” Barbara Archer said in the control room, zooming the camera in. “Along with the other one.” The other one was an inhibition reducer.

  “You look nice today,” Chip told her, his words imperfectly captured by the hidden shotgun microphone.

  “Thank you.” Another smile.

  “She looks pretty dreamy.”

  “She ought to be,” Barbara observed coldly. “There’s enough in her to make a nun shuck her habit and get it on.”

  “What about him?”

  “Oh, yeah—didn’t give him any steroids.” Dr. Archer had a little chuckle at that.

  In proof of which, Chip leaned over to kiss Mary on the lips. They were alone in the sitting room.

  “How’s her blood work look, Barb?”

  “Loaded with antibodies, and starting to get some small bricks. She ought to be symptomatic in another few days.”

  “Eat, drink, and be merry, people, for next week, you die,” the other physician told the TV screen.

  “Too bad,” Dr. Archer agreed. She showed the emotion one might display on seeing a dead dog at the side of the road.

  “Nice figure,” the man said, as the pajama tops came off. “I haven’t seen an X-rated movie in a long time, Barb.” A videotape was running, of course. The experimental protocol was set in stone. Everything had to be recorded so that the staff could monitor the entire test program. Nice tits, he thought, about the same time Chip did, right before he caressed them on the screen.

  “She was fairly inhibited when she got here. The tranquilizers really work, depressing them that way.” Another clinical observation. Things progressed rapidly from that point on. Both doctors sipped their coffee as they watched. Tranquilizers or not, the baser human instincts charged forward, and within five minutes Chip and Mary were humping madly away, with the usual sound effects, though the picture, blessedly, wasn’t all that clear. A few minutes later, they were lying side by side on the thick shag rug, kissing tiredly and contentedly, his hand stroking her breasts, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and regular as he rolled onto his back.

  “Well, Barb, if nothing else, we have a pretty good weekend getaway for couples here,” the man observed with a sly grin. “How long do you figure on his blood work?”

  “Three or four days until he starts showing antibodies, probably.” Chip hadn’t been exposed in the shower as Mary had.

  “What about the vaccine testers?”

  “Five with -A. We have three left as uncontaminated controls for -B testing.”

  “Oh? Who are we letting live?”

  “M2, M3, and F9,” Dr. Archer replied. “They seem to have proper attitudes. One’s a member of the Sierra Club, would you believe? The others like it outdoors, and they should be okay with what we’re doing.”

  “Political criteria for scientific tests—what are we coming to?” the man asked with another chuckle.

  “Well, if they’re going to live, they might as well be people we can get along with,” Archer observed.

  “True.” A nod. “How confident are you with -B?”

  “Very. I expect it to be about ninety-seven percent effective, perhaps a little better,” she added conservatively.

  “But not a hundred?”

  “No, Shiva’s a little too nasty for that,” Archer told him. “The animal testing is a little crude, I admit, but the results follow the computer model almost exactly, well within the testing-error criteria. Steve’s been pretty good on that side.”

  “Berg’s pretty smart,” the other doctor agreed. Then he shifted in his chair. “You know, Barb, what we’re doing here isn’t exactly—”

  “I know that,” she assured him. “But we all knew that coming in.”

  “True.” He nodded submission, annoyed at himself for the second thoughts. Well, his family would survive, and they all shared his love of the world and its many sorts of inhabitants. Still, these two people on the TV, they were humans, just like himself, and he’d just peeped in on them like some sort of pervert. Oh, yeah, they’d only done it because both were loaded with drugs fed to them through their food or in pill form, but they were both sentenced to death and—

  “Relax, will you?” Archer said, looking at his face and reading his mind. “At least they’re getting a little love, aren’t they? That’s a hell of a lot more than the rest of the world’ll get—”

  “I won’t have to watch them.” Being a voyeur wasn’t his idea of fun, and he’d told himself often enough that he wouldn’t have to watch what he’d be helping to start.

  “No, but we’ll know about it. It’ll be on the TV news, won’t it? But then it will be too late, and if they find out, their last conscious act will be to come after us. That’s the part that has me worried.”

  “The Project enclave in Kansas is pretty damned secure, Barb,” the man assured her. “The one in Brazil’s even more so.” Which was where he’d be going eventually. The rain forest had always fascinated him.

  “Could be better,” Barbara Archer thought.

  “The world isn’t a laboratory, doctor, remember?” Wasn’t that what the whole Shiva project was about, for Christ’s sake? Christ? he wondered. Well, another idea that had to be set aside. He wasn’t cynical enough to invoke the name of God into what they were doing. Nature, perhaps, which wasn’t quite the same thing, he thought.

  “Good morning, Dmitriy,” he said, coming into his office early.

  “Good morning, sir,” the intelligence officer said, rising to his feet as his employer entered the anteroom. It was a European custom, harkening back to royalty, and one that had somehow conveyed itself to the Marxist state that had nurtured and trained the Russian now living in New York.

  “What do you have for me?” the boss asked, unlocking his office door and going in.

  “Something very interestin
g,” Popov said. “How important it is I am not certain. You can better judge that than I can.”

  “Okay, let’s see it.” He sat down and turned in his swivel chair to flip on his office coffee machine.

  Popov went to the far wall, and slid back the panel that covered the electronics equipment in the woodwork. He retrieved the remote control and keyed up the large-screen TV and VCR. Then he inserted a videocassette.

  “This is the news coverage of Bern,” he told his employer. The tape only ran for thirty seconds before he stopped it, ejected the cassette, and inserted another. “Vienna,” he said then, hitting the PLAY button. Another segment, which ran less than a minute. This he also ejected. “Last night at the park in Spain.” This one he also played. This segment lasted just over a minute before he stopped it.

  “Yes?” the man said, when it was all over.

  “What did you see, sir?”

  “Some guys smoking—the same guy, you’re saying?”

  “Correct. In all three incidents, the same man, or so it would appear.”

  “Go on,” his employer told Popov.

  “The same special-operations group responded to and terminated all three incidents. That is very interesting.”

  “Why?”

  Popov took a patient breath. This man may have been a genius in some areas, but in others he was a babe in the woods. “Sir, the same team responded to incidents in three separate countries, with three separate national police forces, and in all three cases, this special team took over from those three separate national police agencies and dealt with the situation. In other words, there is now some special internationally credited team of special-operations troops—I would expect them to be military rather than policemen—currently operating in Europe. Such a group has never been admitted to in the open press. It is, therefore, a ‘black’ group, highly secret. I can speculate that it is a NATO team of some sort, but that is only speculation. Now,” Popov went on, “I have some questions for you.”