They hesitated at the door, Johnston saw. Had to be a scary time for them, though how scary it was they would not and could not know. Too fucking bad, he, thought, centering the crosshair reticle on her face from over two hundred yards away-which distance was the equivalent of ten feet for – the rifleman. Come on out, honey,” he breathed. “We have something real special for you and your friends. Dieter?” he asked, keying his radio.
“On target, Homer,” ,Rifle Two-Two replied. “We know this face, I think : . . I cannot recall the name. Leader, Rifle Two-Two-”
“Rifle Two, Lead.”
“The female subject, we have seen her face recently. She is older now, but I know this face. Baader-Meinhof, Red Army Faction, one of those, I think, works with a man. Marxist, experienced terrorist, murderer . . . killed an American soldier, I think.” None of which was particularly breaking news, but a known face was a known face.
Price broke in, thinking about the computer-morphing program they’d played with earlier in the week. “Petra Dortmund, perhaps?”
“Ja! That is the one! And her partner is Hans Furchtner,” Weber replied. “Komm raus, Petra, ” he went on in his native language. “Komm mir, Liebchen.”
Something was bothering her. It turned out to be difficult just to walk out of the Schloss onto the open rear lawn, though she could plainly see the helicopter with its blinking lights and turning rotor. She took a step or started to, her foot not wanting to make the move out and downward onto the granite steps, her blue eyes screwed up, because the trees east and west of the Schloss were lit so brightly by the lights on the far side of the house, with the shadow stretching out to the helicopter like a black finger, and maybe the thing that discomforted her .was the deathlike image before her. . Then she shook her head, disposing of the thought as some undignified superstition. She yanked at her two hostages and made her way down the six steps to the grass, then outward toward the waiting aircraft.
“You sure of the ID, Dieter?” Chavez asked.
“Ja, yes, I am, sir. Petra Dortmund.”
Next to Chavez, Dr. Bellow queried the name on his laptop. “Age forty-four, ex-Baader-Meinhof, very ideological, and the word on her is that she’s ruthless as hell. That’s ten-year-old information. Looks like it hasn’t changed very much: Partner was one Hans Furchtner. They’re supposed to be married, in love, whatever, and very compatible personalities. They’re killers, Ding.”
“For the moment, they are,” Chavez responded, watching the three figures cross the grass.
“She has a grenade in one hand, looks like a frag,” Homer Johnston said next. “Left hand, say again left.”
“Confirmed,” Weber chimed in. “I see the hand grenade. Pin is in. I repeat, pin is in.”
“Great!” Eddie Price snarled over the radio. Fiirstenfeldbrick all bloody over again, he thought, strapped into the helicopter, which would be holding the grenade and the fool who might pull the bloody pin. “This is Price. Just one grenade?”
“I only see the one;” Johnston replied, “no bulges in her pockets or anything, Eddie. Pistol in her right hand, grenade in her left.”
“I agree,” Weber said.
“She’s right-handed,” Bellow told them over his radio circuit, after checking the known data on Petra Dortmund. “Subject Dortmund is right-handed.”
Which explains why the pistol is there and the grenade in her left, Price told himself. It also meant that if she decided to throw the grenade properly, she’d have to switch hands. Some good news, he thought. Maybe it’s been a long time since she played with one of the damned things. Maybe she was even afraid of things that went bang, his mind added hopefully. Some people just carried the damned things for visual effect. He could see her now, walking at an even pace toward the helicopter.
“Male subject in view – Furchtner,” Johnston said over the radio. “He has Big Man with him . . . and Brownie also, I think.
“Agree,” Weber said, staring through his ten-power sight. “Subject Furchtner, Big Man, and Brownie are in sight. Furchtner appears to be armed with pistol only. Starting down the steps now. Another subject at the door, armed with submachine gun, two hostages with him.”
“They’re being smart,” Chavez observed. “Coming in groups. Our pal started down when his -babe was halfway . . . we’ll see if the rest do that . . .” Okay, Ding thought. Four, maybe five, groups traversing the open ground. Clever bastards, but not clever enough . . . maybe.
As they approached the chopper, Price got out and opened both side doors for loading. He’d already stashed his pistol in the map pocket of the left-side copilot’s door. He gave the pilot a look.
“Just act normally. The situation is under control.”
“If you say so, Englishman,” the pilot responded, with a rough, tense voice.
“The aircraft does not leave the ground under any circumstances. Do you understand?” They’d covered that before, but repetition of instructions was the way you survived in a situation like this.
“Yes. If they force me, I will roll it to your side and scream malfunction.”
Bloody decent of you, Price thought. He was wearing a blue shirt with wings pinned on above the breast pocket and a name tag that announced his name as Tony. A wire less earpiece gave him the radio link to the rest of the team, along with a microphone chip inside his collar.
“Sixty meters away, not a very attractive woman, is she?” he asked his teammates.
“Brush your hair if you can hear me,” Chavez told him from his position. A moment later, he saw Price’s left hand go up, nervously to push his hair back from his eyes. “Okay, Eddie. Stay cool, man.”
“Armed subject at the door with three hostages,” Weber called. “No, no, two armed subjects with three hostages. Hostage Blondie is with this one. Old man and middle-aged woman, all dressed as servants.”
“At least one more bad guy,” Ding breathed, arid at least three more hostages to come. “Helicopter can’t carry all of them . . .” What were they planning to do with the extras? he wondered. Kill them?
“I see two more armed subjects and three hostages inside the back door,” Johnston reported.
“That’s all the hostages,” Noonan said. “Total of six subjects, then. How are they armed, Rifle One?”
“Submachine guns, look like Uzis or the Czech copy of it. They are leaning toward the door now.”
“Okay, I got it,” Chavez said, holding his own binoculars. “Riflemen, take aim on subject Dortmund.”
“On target,” Weber managed to say first. Johnston swiveled to take aim a fraction of a second later, and then he froze still.
The human eye is especially sensitive to movement at night. When Johnston moved clockwise to adjust the aim of his rifle, Petra Dortmund thought she might have seen something. It stopped her in her tracks, though she didn’t know what it was that had- stopped her. She stared right at Johnston, but the ghillie suit just looked like a clump of something, grass, leaves, or dirt, she couldn’t tell in the semidarkness of green light reflecting off the pine trees: There was no man-shape to it, and the outline of the rifle was lost in the clutter well over a hundred meters away from her. Even so, she continued to look, without moving her gun hand, a look of curiosity on her face, not even visible alarm. Through Johnston’s gunsight, the sergeant’s open left eye could see the red strobe flashes from the helicopter’s flying lights blinking on the ground around him while the right eye saw the crosshair reticle centered just above and between Petra Dortmund’s eyes. His finger was on the trigger now, just barely enough to -feel it there, about as much as one could do with so light a trigger pull. The moment lasted into several seconds, and his peripheral vision watched her gun hand most of all. If it moved too much, then . . .
But it didn’t. She resumed walking to the helicopter, to Johnston’s relief, not knowing that two sniper rifles followed her head every centimeter of the way. The next important part came when she got to the chopper. If she went around the right side, Johnston would lose her, leaving her to Weber’s rifle alone. If she went left, then Dieter would lose her to his rifle alone. She seemed to be favoring . . . yes, Dortmund walked to the left side of the aircraft. .
“Rifle Two-Two off target,” Weber reported at once. “I have no shot at this time.”
“On target, Rifle Two-One is on target,” Johnston assured Chavez. Hmm, let Little Man in first, honey, he thought as loudly as he could.
Petra Dortmund did just that, pushing Dengler in the left side door ahead of her, probably figuring to sit in the middle herself; so as to be less vulnerable to a shot from outside. A good-theoretical. call, Homer Johnston thought, but off the mark in this case. Tough luck, bitch.