“We may,” the Intelligence section chief replied. “I have the `Six’ station in Geneva sending two men over now to evaluate it. We do have that arrangement with the Swiss government, should they decide to invoke it. Bennett, is this going out on commercial TV yet?”
Bennett shook his head. “No, sir. For the moment they’re keeping it quiet.”
“Good,” Tawney thought. “Who’s the go-team now, John?”
“Team-2, Chavez and Price. They’re just finishing up a little exercise right now. How long before you think we declare an alert?”
“We could start now,” Bill answered, even though it was probably nothing more than a bank robbery gone bad. They had those in Switzerland, didn’t they?
Clark pulled a mini-radio from his pocket and thumbed it on. “Chavez, this is Clark. You and Price report to communications right now.”
“On the way, Six” was the reply.
“I wonder what this is about,” Ding observed to his command sergeant major. Eddie Price, he’d learned in the past three weeks, was as good a soldier as he was ever likely to meet: cool, smart, quiet, with plenty of field experience.
“I expect we’ll find out, sir,” Price responded. Officers felt the need to talk a lot, he knew. Proof of that came at once.
“How long you been in, Eddie?”
“Nearly thirty years, sir. I enlisted as a boy soldier age fifteen, you see. Parachute Regiment,” he went on, just to avoid the next question. “Came over to SAS when I was twenty-four, been here ever since.”
“Well, Sar Major, I’m glad to have you with me.” Chavez said, getting in the car for the drive to the Headquarters Building.
“Thank you, sir,” the sergeant major replied. A decent chap, this Chavez, he thought, perhaps even a good commander, though that remained to be seen. He could have asked his own questions, but, no, that wasn’t done, was it? Good as he was, Price didn’t know much about the American military yet.
You oughta be an officer, Eddie, Ding didn’t say. In America this guy would have been ripped from his unit, kicking and screaming or not, and shipped off to OCS, probably with a college degree purchased by the Army along the way. Different culture, different rules, Chavez told himself. Well, it gave him a damned good squad sergeant to back him up. Ten minutes later, he parked in the back lot and walked into the building, following directions up to Communications.
“Hey, Mr. C, what gives?”
“Domingo, there’s a chance we may have a job for you and your team. Bern, Switzerland. Bank robbery gone bad, hostage situation. All we know now.” Clark pointed both of them at the TV screens. Chavez and Price stole swivel chairs and moved them close.
If ‘nothing else, it was good as a practice alert. The preplanned mechanisms were now moving. On the first floor, tickets had already been arranged on no fewer than four flights from Gatwick to Switzerland, and two helicopters were on the way to Hereford to ferry his men to the airport with their equipment. British Airways had been alerted to accept sealed cargo-inspecting it for the international flight would just have gotten people excited. If the alert went further, Team-2 members would change into civilian clothes, complete with ties and suit jackets. Clark thought that a little excessive. Making soldiers look like bankers was no easy task, was it?”Not much happening now,” Tawney said. “Sam, can you roll the tapes from earlier?”
“Yes, sir.” Major Bennett keyed one up and hit the play button on the remote.
“Czech 58,” Price said immediately. “No faces?”
“Nope, that’s the only thing we have on the subjects,” Bennett replied.
“Odd weapon for robbers,” the sergeant major noted. Chavez turned his head. That was one of the things he had yet to learn about Europe. Okay, hoods here didn’t use assault rifles.
“That’s what I thought,” Tawney said.
“Terrorist weapon?” Chavez asked his squad XO.
“Yes, sir. The Czechs gave away a lot of them. Quite compact, you see. Only twenty-five inches long, manufactured by the Uhersky Broad works. Seven-point-si-two/thirty-nine Soviet cartridge. Fully automatic, selector switch. Odd thing for a Swiss bandit to use,” Price said once more for emphasis.
“Why?” Clark asked.
“They make far better weapons in Switzerland, sir, for their territorials – their citizen soldiers stow them in their closets, you see. Should not be all that difficult to steel several.”The building shook then with the sound of helicopters landing not too far away. Clark checked his watch and nodded approval at the timing.
“What do we know about the neighborhood?” Chavez asked.
“Working on that now, old boy,” Tawney answered. “So far, just what the TV feed shows.”
The TV screen showed an ordinary street, devoid of vehicular traffic at the moment because the local police had diverted cars and buses away from the bank. Otherwise, they saw ordinary masonry buildings bordering an ordinary city street. Chavez looked over at Price, whose eyes were locked on the pictures they were getting two now, because another Swiss TV station had dispatched a camera team there, and both signals were being pirated off the satellite. The translator continued to relay the remarks of the camera crews and reporters on the scene to their respective stations. They said very little, about half of it small-talk that could have been spoken from one desk to another in an office setting. One camera or the other occasionally caught the movement of a curtain, but that was all.”The police are probably trying to establish communications with our friends on a telephone, talk to them, reason with them, the usual drill,” Price said, realizing that he had more practical experience with this sort of thing than anyone else in the room. They knew the theory, but theory wasn’t always enough. “We shall know in half an hour if this is a mission for us or not.”
“How good are the Swiss cops?” Chavez asked Price.
“Very good indeed, sir, but not a great deal of experience with a serious hostage event-”
“That’s why we have an understanding with them,” Tawney put in.
“Yes, sir.” Price leaned back, reached into his pocket, and took out his pipe. “Anyone object?”
Clark shook his head. “No health Nazis here, Sergeant Major. What do you mean by a `serious’ hostage event?”
“Committed criminals, terrorists.” Price shrugged. “Chaps stupid enough to put their lives behind the chips on the gaming table. The sort who kill hostages to show their resolve.” The sort we go in after and kill, Price didn’t have to add.
It was an awful lot of brain-power to be sitting around doing nothing, John Clark thought, especially Bill Tawney. But if you had no information, it was difficult to make pontifical pronouncements. All eyes were locked on the TV screens, which showed little, and Clark found himself missing the inane drivel that one expected of TV reporters, filling silence with empty words. About the only interesting thing was when they said that they were trying to talk to the local cops, but that the cops weren’t saying anything, except that they were trying to establish contact with the bad guys, so far unsuccessfully. That had to be a lie, but the police were supposed to lie to the media and the public in cases like this-because any halfway competent terrorist would have a TV set with him, and would have somebody watching it. You could catch a lot by watching TV, else Clark and his senior people would not he watching it either, would they?
The protocol on this was both simple and complex. Rainbow had an understanding with the Swiss government. If the local police couldn’t handle it, they’d bump it up to the canton-state level, which would then decide whether or not to bump it one more step to the central national government, whose ministerial-level people could then make the Rainbow call. That entire mechanism had been established months before as part of the mandate of the agency that Clark now headed. The “help” call would come through the British Foreign Office in Whitehall, on the bank of the Thames in central London. It seemed like a hell of a lot of bureaucracy to John, but there was no avoiding it, and he was grateful that there was not an additional level or two. Once the call was made, things got easier, at least in the administrative sense. But until the call was made, the Swiss would tell them nothing.
One hour into the TV vigil, Chavez left to put Team-2 on alert. The troops, he saw, took it calmly, readying gear that needed to be seen to, which was not very much. The TV feed was routed to their individual desktop sets, and the men settled back in their swivel chairs to watch quietly as their boss went back to Communications, while the helicopters sat idle on the pad outside Team-2’s area. Team-1 went on standby alert as well, in case the helicopters taking -2 to Gatwick crashed. The procedures had been completely thought through-except, John thought, by the terrorists.