All the while, the Swiss TV crews were speaking with the senior on-site policeman, who spent a great deal of time saying that the terrorists were serious – he’d been coached by Dr. Bellow to speak of them with respect. They were probably watching television inside, and building up their self-esteem worked for the team’s purposes at the moment. In any case, it denied the terrorists knowledge of what Tim Noonan had done on the outside.
“Okay,” the techie said in his place on a side street. All the video displays were up and running. They showed little. The size of the lenses didn’t make for good imagery, despite the enhancement program built into his computer. “Here’s one shooter . . . and another.” They were within ten meters of the front of the building. The rest of the people visible were sitting on the white marble floor, in the center for easy coverage. “The guy said four, right?”
“Yeah,” Chavez answered. “But not how many hostages, not exactly anyway.”
“Okay, this is a bad guy, I think, behind the teller places . . . hmph, looks like he’s checking the cash drawers . . . and that’s a bag of some sort. You figure they visited the vault?”
Chavez turned. “Eddie?”
“Greed,” Price agreed. “Well, why not? It is a bank, after all.”
“Okay.” Noonan switched displays on the computer screen. “I got blueprints of the building, and this is the layout.”
“Teller cages, vault, toilets.” Price traced his finger over the screen. “Back door. Seems simple enough. Access to the upper floors?”
“Here,” Noonan said. “Actually outside the bank itself, but the basement is accessible to them here, stairs down, and a separate exit to the alley in back.”
“Ceiling construction?” Chavez asked.
“Rebarred concrete slab, forty centimeters thick. That’s solid as hell. Same with the walls and floor. This building was made to last.” So, there would be no explosives-forced entry through walls, floor, or ceiling.
“So, we can go in the front door or the back door, and that’s it. And that puts number four bad guy at the back door.” Chavez keyed his radio. “Chavez for Rifle Two Two.”
“Ja, Weber here.”
“Any windows in the back, anything in the door, peephole, anything like that, Dieter?”
“Negative. It appears to be a heavy steel door, nothing in it that I can see,” the sniper said, tracing his telescopic sight over the target yet again, and again finding nothing but blank painted steel.
“Okay, Eddie, we blow the rear door with Primacord, three men in that way. Second later, we blow the front glass doors, toss flash-bangs, and move in when they’re looking the wrong way. Two and two through the front. You and me go left. Louis and George go right.”
“Are they wearing body armor?” Price asked.
Nothing that Herr Richter saw,” Noonan responded, “and nothing visible here-but there ain’t no head protection anyway, right?” It would be nothing more than a ten-meter shot, an easy distance for the H&K shoulder weapons.
“Quite.” Price nodded. “Who leads the rear-entry :cam?”
“Scotty, I think. Paddy does the explosives.” Connolly was the best man on the team for that, and both men knew it. Chavez made an important mental note that the subteams had to be more firmly established. To this point he’d kept all his people in the same drawer. That he would have to change as soon as they got back to Hereford.
“Vega?”
“Oso backs us up, but I don’t think we’ll have much use for him on this trip.” Julio Vega had become their heavy machine gunner, slinging a laser-sighted M-60 7.62-mm machine gun for really serious work, but there wasn’t much use for that now-and wouldn’t be, unless everything went totally to hell.
“Noonan, send this picture to Scotty.”
“Right.” He moved the mouse-pointer and started transmitting everything to the team’s various computers.
“The question now is when.” Ding checked his watch. “Back to the doe.”
“Yes, sir.” Bellow had spent his time with Herr Richter. Three stiff shots had calmed him down nicely. Even his English had improved markedly. Bellow was walking him through the event for the sixth time when Chavez and Price showed up again.
“His eyes, they are blue, like ice. Like ice,” Richter repeated. “He is not a man like most men. He should be in a cage, with the animals at the zoo.” The businessman shuddered involuntarily.
“Does he have an accent?” Price asked.
“Mixed. Something of Hamburg, but something of Bavaria, too. The others, all Bavarian accents.”
“The Bundes Kriminal Amt will find that useful, Ding,” Price observed. The BKA was the German counterpart to the American FBI. “Why not have the local police check the area for a car with German license plates-from Bavaria? Perhaps there’s a driver about.”
“Good one.” Chavez left and ran over to the Swiss cops, whose chief got on his radio at once. Probably a dry hole, Chavez thought. But you didn’t know until you drilled it. They had to have come here one way or another. Another mental note. Check for that on every job.
Roebling came over next, carrying his cell phone. “It is time,” he said, “to speak with them again.”
“Yo, Tim,” Chavez said over his radio. “Come to the rally point.”
Noonan was there in under a minute. Chavez pointed him to Roebling’s phone. Noonan took it, popped the back off, and attached a small green circuit board with a thin wire hanging from it. Then he pulled a cell phone from a thigh pocket and handed it over to Chavez. “There. You’ll hear everything they say.”
“Anything happening inside?”
“They’re walking around a little more, a little agitated, maybe. Two of them were talking face-to-face a few minutes ago. Didn’t look real happy about things from their gestures.”
“Okay. Everybody up to speed on the interior?”
“How about audio?”
The techie shook his head. “Too much background noise. The building has a noisy heating system-oil-bred hot water, sounds like that’s playing hell with the window mikes. Not getting anything useful, Ding.”
“Okay, keep us posted.”
“You bet.” Noonan made his way back to his gear.
“Eddie?”
“Were I to make a wager, I’d say we have to storm the place before dawn. Our friend will begin losing control soon.”
“Doc?” Ding asked.
“That’s likely,” Bellow agreed with a nod, taking note of Price’s practical experience.
Chavez frowned mightily at that one. Trained as he was, he wasn’t really all that eager to take this one on. He’d seen the interior pictures. There had to be twenty, perhaps thirty, people inside, with three people in their immediate vicinity holding fully automatic weapons. If one of them decided fuck it and went rock and-roll on his Czech machine gun, a lot of those people wouldn’t make it home to the wife and kiddies. It was called the responsibility of command, and while it wasn’t the first time Chavez had experienced it-, the burden never really got any lighter because the price of failure never got any smaller.
“Chavez!” It was Dr. Bellow.
“Yeah, doc,” Ding said, heading over toward him with Price in attendance.
“Model’s getting aggressive. He says he’ll kill a hostage in thirty minutes unless we get him a car to a helicopter pad a few blocks from here, and from there to the airport. After that, he kills a hostage every fifteen minutes. He gays he has enough to last more than a few hours. He’s reading off a list of the important ones now. A professor of surgery at the local medical school, an off-duty policeman, a big-time lawyer . . . well, he’s not kidding, Ding. Thirty minutes from–okay, he shoots the first one at eight thirty.”
“What are the cops saying back?”
“What I told them to say, it takes time to arrange all of that, give us a hostage or two to show good faith-but that’s what prompted the threat for eight-thirty. Ernst is coming a little unglued.”
“Is he serious?” Chavez asked, just to make sure he understood.
“Yeah, he sounds serious as hell. He’s losing control, very unhappy with how things turned out. He’s barely rational now. He’s not kidding about killing somebody. Like a spoiled kid with nothing under the tree on Christmas morning, Ding. There’s no stabilizing influence in there to help him out. He feels very lonely.”
“Super.” Ding keyed his radio. Not unexpectedly, the decision had just been made by somebody else. “Team. this is Chavez. Stand to. I say again, stand to.”
He’d been trained in what to expect. One ploy was to deliver the car – it’d be too small for all the hostages, and you could take the bad guys down on the way out with aimed rifle fire. But he had only two snipers, and their rifle bullets would blast through a terrorist’s head with enough leftover energy to waste two of three people beyond him. SMG or pistol fire was much the same story. Four bad guys was too many for that play. No, he had to take his team in, while the hostages were still sitting down on the floor, below the line of fire. These bastards weren’t even rational enough to want food which he might drug-or maybe they were smart enough to know about the Valium flavored pizza.