Homer Johnston was in his ghillie suit, a complex overall type garment made of rags sewn into place on a gridded matrix, whose purpose was to make him appear to be a bush or a pile of leaves or compost, anything but a person with a rifle. The rifle was set up on its bipod, the hinged flaps on the front and back lenses of his telescopic sight flipped up. He’d picked a good place to the east of the helicopter pad that would allow him to cover the entire distance between the helicopter and the house. His laser rangefinder announced that he was 216 meters from a door on the back of the house and 147 meters from the front-left door of the helicopter. He was lying prone in a dry spot on the beautiful lawn, in the lengthening shadows close to the treeline, and the air brought to him the smell of horses, which reminded him of his childhood in the American northwest. Okay. He thumbed his radio microphone.
Lead, Rifle Two-One.”
Rifle Two-One, Lead.”
“In place and setup. I show no movement in the house at this time.”
“Rifle Two-Two, in place and set up, I also see no movement,” Sergeant Weber reported from his spot, two hundred fifty-six meters from Johnston. Johnston turned to see Dieter’s location. His German counterpart. had selected a good spot.
“Achtung,” a voice called behind him. Johnston turned to see an Austrian cop approaching, not quite crawling on the grass.Hier, ” the man said, handing over some photos and withdrawing rapidly. Johnston looked at them. Good, shots of the hostages. . . but none of the bad guys. Well, at least he’d know whom not to shoot. With that, he backed off. the rifle and lifted his green-coated military binoculars and began scanning the house slowly and regularly, left to right and back again. “Dieter?” he said over his direct radio link.
“Yes, Homer?”
“They get you the photos?”
“Yes, I have them.”
“No lights inside…”
“Ja, our friends are being clever.”
“I figure about half an hour until we have to go NVG.”
“I agree, Homer.”
Johnston grunted and turned to check the bag he’d carried in along with his rifle case and $10,000 rifle. Then he returned to scanning the building, patiently, like staking out a mountain deer trail for a big muley . . . a happy thought for the lifelong hunter . . . the taste of venison, especially cooked in the field over an open wood fire . . . some coffee from the blue steel enamel pot . . . and the talking that came after a successful hunt… Well, you can’t eat what you shoot here, Homer, the sergeant told himself, settling back into his patient routine. One hand reached into a pocket for some beef jerky to chew.
Eddie Price lit his pipe on the far side of the dwelling. Not as big as Kensington Palace, but prettier, he thought: The thought disturbed him. It was something they’d talked about during his time in the SAS. What if terrorists-usually they thought of the Irish PIRA or INLA – attacked one of the Royal residences . . . or the Palace of Westminster. The SAS had walked through all of the buildings in question at o time or another, just to get a feed for the layout, the security systems, and the problems involved – especially after that lunatic had cracked his way into Buckingham Palace in the 1980s, walking into the Queen’s own bedchamber. He still had chills about that?
The brief reverie faded. He had the Schloss Ostermann to worry about, Price remembered, scanning over the blueprints again.
“Bloody nightmare on the inside, Ding,” Price finally said.
“That’s the truth. All wood floors, probably creak, lots of places for the bad guys to hide and snipe at us. We’d need a chopper to do this right.” But they didn’t have a helicopter. That was something to talk with Clark about. Rainbow hadn’t been fully thought through. Too fast on too many things. Not so much that they needed a helicopter as some good chopper crews trained in more than one type of aircraft, because when they deployed in the field, there was no telling what machines would be used by their host nation. Chavez turned:
“Doc?”
Bellow came over. “Yes, Ding?”
“I’m starting to think about letting them out, walk to the helicopter behind the house, and taking them down that way rather than forcing our way in.”
“A little early for that, isn’t it?” ‘
Chavez nodded. “Yeah, it is, but we don’t want to lose a hostage, and come midnight, you said, we have to take that threat seriously.”
“We can delay it some, maybe. My job to do that, over the phone.”
“I understand, but if we make a move, I want it to be in the dark. That means tonight. I can’t plan on having you talk them into surrender, unless you’re thinking different?…”
“Possible, but unlikely,” Bellow had to agree. He couldn’t even speak confidently about delaying the threatened midnight kill.
“Next, we have to see if we can spike the building.”
“I’m here,” Noonan said. “Tall order, man.”
“Can you do it?”
“I can probably get close unobserved, but there’s over a hundred windows, and how the hell can I get to the ones on the second and third floors? Unless I do a dangle from a chopper and come down on the roof . . .” And that meant making sure that the local TV people, who’d show up as. predictably as vultures over a dying cow, turned their cameras off and kept them off’, -which then ran the risk of alerting the terrorists when the TV reporters stopped showing the building of interest. And how could they fail to note that a helicopter had flown thirty feet over the roof of the building, and might there be a bad gay on the roof, already keeping watch?
“This is getting complicated,” Chavez observed quietly.
“Dark and cold enough for the thermal viewers to start working,.” Noonan said helpfully.
“Yeah.” Chavez picked up his. radio mike. “Team, Lead, go thermal. Say again, break out the thermals.” Then he turned. “What about cell phones?”
Noonan could do little more than shrug. There were now something like three hundred civilians gathered around, well back from the Ostermann property and controlled by local police, but most of them had a view of the house and the grounds, and if one of them had a cell phone and someone inside did as well, all that unknown person outside had to do was dial his buds on the inside to tell them what was going down.. The miracles of modern communication worked both ways. There were over five hundred cellular frequencies, and the gear to cover them all was not part of Rainbow’s regular kit. No terrorist or criminal operation had yet used that technique, to the best of their knowledge, but they couldn’t all be dumb and stay dumb, could they? Chavez looked over at the Schloss and thought again at they’d have to get the bad .guys outside for this t work properly. Problem with that, he didn’t know w many bad guys he’d have to deal with, and he no way of finding out without spiking the building to gather additional information which was a dubious undertaking for all the other reasons he’d just considered.
“Tim, make a note for when we get back about dealing with cellular phones and radios outside the objective. Captain Altmark!”
“Yes, Major Chavez?”
“The lights, are they here yet?”
“Just arrived, ja, we have three sets.” Altmark pointed. Price and Chavez went over to look. They saw three trucks with attachments that looked for all the world like the lights one might see around a high-school football field. Meant to help fight a major fire, they could be erected and powered by the trucks that carried them. Chavez told Altmark where he wanted them and returned to the team’s assembly point.
The thermal viewers relied on difference in temperature to make an image. The evening was cooling down rapidly, and with it the stone walls of the house. Already the windows were glowing more brightly than the walls, because the house was heated, and the old-style full-length windows in the building’s many doors were poorly insulated, despite the large drapes that hung just inside each one. Dieter Weber made the first spot. .
“Lead, Rifle Two-Two, I have a thermal target first floor, fourth window from the west, looking around the curtains at the outside:”
“Okay! That one’s in the kitchen..” It was the voice of Hank Patterson, who was hovering over the blueprints. “That’s number one! Can you tell me anything else, Dieter?”
“Negative, just a shape,” the German sniper replied. “No, wait . . . tall, probably a man.”
“This is Pierce, I have one, first floor, east side, second window from east wall.”