“Captain Altmark? Could you call Ostermann’s office, please? We want to know if he’s there.” Because if he were, there would be one or two bad guys in with him.
“Ostermann office,” a woman’s voice answered.
“This is Captain Altmark. Who is this?”
“This is Commander Gertrude of the Red Workers’ Faction.”
“Excuse me, I was expecting to speak to Commander Wolfgang.”
“Wait,” Petra’s voice told him.
“Hier ist Wolfgang. ”
“Hier ist Altmark. We have not heard from you in a long time.”
“What news do you have for us?”
“No news, but we do have a request, Herr Commander.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“As a sign of good faith,” Altmark said, with Dr. Bellow listening in, a translator next to him. “We request that you release two of your. hostages, from the domestic staff perhaps.”
“Wofur? So they can help you identify us?”
“Lead, Lincoln here, I have a target, northwest corner window, tall, probably male.”
“That’s three plus two,” Chavez observed, as Patterson placed a yellow circle sticker on that part of the prints.
The woman who’d answered the phone had remained on the line as well. “You have three hours until we send you a hostage, tot, ” she emphasized. “You have any further requests? We require a pilot for Herr Ostermann’s helicopter before midnight, and an airliner writing at the airport. Otherwise, we will kill a hostage to show at we are quite serious, and then thereafter, at regular intervals. Do you understand?”
“Please, we respect your seriousness here,” Altmark assured her. “We are looking for the flight crew now; and we have discussions underway with Austrian Airlines for the aircraft. These things take time, you know.” .
“You always say that, people like you. We have told you what we require. If you do not meet those requirements, then their blood is on your hands. Ende, ” the voice said, and the line went dead.
Captain Altmark was both-surprised and discomforted by the cold decisiveness on the other end of the phone and by the abrupt termination of the call. He looked up at Paul Bellow as he replaced the receiver. “Herr Doktor?”
“The woman is the dangerous one. They’re both smart. They’ve definitely thought this one through, and they will kill a hostage to make their point, sure as hell.”
“Man-and-woman team,” Price was saying over the phone. “German, ages . . . late thirties, early forties as a guess. Maybe older. Bloody serious,” he added for Bill Tawney.
“Thanks, Eddie, stand by,” came the reply. Price could hear the fingers tapping on the keyboard.
“Okay, lad, I have three possible teams for you. Uploading them now.”
“Thank you, sir.” Price opened his laptop again. “Ding?”
“Yeah?”
“Intelligence coming in.”
“We have at least five terrs in there, boss,” Patterson said, moving his finger around the prints. “Too quick for them to move around. Here, here, here,. and two upstairs here. The placement makes sense. They probably have portable radios, too. The house is too big for them to communicate by shouting around at each other.”
Noonan heard .that and went off to his radio-intercept equipment. If their friends were using hand-held radios, then their frequency range was well known, determined by international treaty in fact, probably not the military sets the team used, and probably not encrypted. In seconds he had his computerized scanner set up and working off multiple antennas, which would allow him to triangulate on sources inside the house. These were coupled into his laptop computer, already -overlaid with a diagram of the Schloss. Three spear-carriers was about right, Noonan thought. Two was too few. Three was close to the right number, though the truck in front of the building could have easily held more. Two plus three, two plus four, two plus five? But they’d all be planning to leave, and the helicopter wasn’t all that big. That made the total terrorist count at five to seven: A guess, and they couldn’t go with a guess-well, they’d prefer not to-but it was a starting place. So many guesses. What if they were not using portable radios? What if they used cell phones? What if a lot of things, Noonan thought. You had to start some where, gather all the information you could, and then act on it. The problem with people like this was that they always decided the pace of the event: For all their stupidity and their criminal intent, which Noonan regarded as a weakness, they did control the pace, they decided when things happened. The team could alter it a little by cajolery – that was Dr. Bellow’s part but when you got down to it, well, the bad guys were the only ones willing to do murder, and that was a card that made a noise when it came down on the table. There were ten hostages inside, Ostermann, his three business assistants, and six people who looked after the house and grounds. Every one of them had a life and a family and the expectation to keep both. Team-2’s job was to make sure that happened. But the bad guys still controlled too much, and this special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t like that very much. Not for the first time, he wish he was one of the shooters, able, in due course, to go in execute the takedown. But, good as he was, at weapons the physical side, he was better trained on the technical aspects of the mission. That was his area of personal expertise, and he served the mission best by sticking with his instruments. He didn’t, however, have to like it.
“So, what’s the score, Ding?”
“Not all that good, Mr. C.” Chavez turned to survey the building again. “Very difficult. to approach the building because of the open ground, therefore difficult to spike and get tactical intelligence. We have two primary and probably three secondary subjects who seem professional and serious. I’m thinking in terms of letting them out to go to the helicopter and taking them down then. Snipers in place. But with the number of subjects, this might not be real pretty, John.”
Clark looked at the display in his command center. He had continuous comm links with Team-2, including their computer displays. As before, Peter Covington was beside him to kibitz. “Might as well be a moated bloody castle,” the British officer had observed earlier. He’d also noted the need for helicopter pilots as a permanent part of the team.
“One other thing,” Chavez said. “Noonan says we need jamming gear for this cell phone freaks. We have a few hundred civilians around, and if one has a shoe phone, he can talk to our friends inside, tell them what we’re doing. No way in hell we can prevent that without jamming gear. Wine that one down, Mr. C.”
“Noted, Domingo,” Clark replied, looking over at David Peled, his chief technical officer.
“I can take care of that in a few days,” Peled told his boss. Mossad had the right sort of equipment. Probably so did some American agencies. He’d find out in a hurry. Noonan, David told himself, was very good for a former policeman.
“Okay, Ding, you are released to execute at discretion. Good luck, my boy.”
“Gee, thanks, Dad” was the ironic reply. “Team-2, out.” Chavez killed the radio and tossed the microphone back at the box. “Price!” he called.
“Yes, sir.” The Sergeant Major materialized at his side.
“We have discretionary release,” the leader told his XO.
“Marvelous, Major Chavez. What do you propose, sir?”
The situation had to be unfavorable, Ding told himself, if Price had reverted back to sirring him.
“Well, let’s see what we got- in the way of assets, Eddie.”
Klaus Rosenthal was Ostermann’s head gardener, and at seventy-one the oldest member of the domestic staff. His wife was at home, he was sure, in her bed with a nurse in close attendance handling her medications, and worrying about him he was sure, and that worry could be dangerous to her. Hilda Rosenthal had a progressive heart condition that had invalided her over the past three years. The state medical system had provided the necessary care for her, and Herr Ostermann had assisted as well; sending a friend of his, a full professor from Vienna’s Algemeine Krankenhaus, to oversee the case, and a new drug-therapy treatment had actually improved Hilda’s condition somewhat, but the fear she’d be feeling for him now certainly would not help, and that thought was driving Klaus mad. He was in the kitchen along with the rest of the domestic staff. He’d been inside getting a glass of water when they’d arrived-had he been outside he might well have escaped and raised the alarm and so helped to aid his employer, who’d been so considerate to all his staff, and Hilda! But luck had been against that when these swine had stormed into the kitchen with their weapons showing. Young ones, late twenties, the close one whose name Rosenthal didn’t know, was either a Berliner or from West Prussia, judging by his accent, and he’d recently been a skinhead, or so it appeared . the uniform-length stubble on his hatless head. A product of the DDR, the now-defunct East Germany. One of the new Nazis who’d grown out of that fallen communist nation. Rosenthal had met the old ones at Belzec concentration camp as a boy, and though had managed to survive that experience, the return of the terror of having one’s life continue only at the whim of a madman with cruel piglike eyes . . . Rosenthal closed his eyes. He still had the nightmares that went along with the five-digit number tattooed on his forearm. Once a month he still awoke on sweaty sheets after reliving the former reality of watching people march into a building from which no one ever emerged alive . . . and always in the nightmare someone with a cruel young SS face beckons to him to follow them in there, too, because he needs a shower. Oh, no, he protests in the dream, Hauptsturmfuhrer Brandt needs me in the metalworking shop. Not today, Jude, the young SS noncom says, with that ghastly smile, Komm jetzt zum Brausebad Every time. he walks as bidden, for what else could one do, right to the door-and then every time he awakes, damp with perspiration, and sure that had he not awakened, he would not have awakened at all, just like all the people he’d watched march that way.