That cleared the way for Steve Lincoln, who fired a second three-round burst, which arrived simultaneously with a second rifle bullet from Weber’s semiautomatic sniper rifle, and this one’s head seemed to disappear.
“Clear!” Price called. “Clear aircraft!”
“Clear house!” Tomlinson announced.
“Clear middle!” Lincoln said last of all.
At the house, Loiselle and Tomlinson raced to their set of hostages and dragged them east, away from the house, lest there be a surviving terrorist inside to fire at them.
Mike Pierce did the same, with Steve Lincoln covering and assisting.
It was easier for Eddie Price, who first of all kicked the gun from Furchtner’s dead hand and made a quick survey of his target’s wrecked head. Then he jumped into the helicopter to make sure that Johnston’s first round had worked. He needed only to see the massive red splash on the rear bulkhead to know that Petra Dortmund was in whatever place terrorists went to. Then he carefully removed the hand grenade from her rigid left hand, checked to make sure the cotter pin was still in place, and pocketed it. Last of all, he took the pistol from her right hand, engaged the safety and tossed that.
“Mein Herrgotd” the pilot. gasped, looking back.
Gerhardt Dengler looked dead as well, his face fairly covered on its left side with a mask of dripping red, his open eyes looking like doorknobs. The sight shook Price for a moment, until he saw the eyes blink, but the mouth was wide open, and the man seemed not to be breathing.
Price reached down to flip off the belt buckle, then let Johnston pull the man clear of the aircraft. Little Man made it one step before falling to his knees. Johnston poured his canteen over the man’s face to rinse off the blood. Then he unloaded his rifle and set it on the ground:
“Nice work, Eddie,” he told Price.
“And that was a bloody good shot, Homer.”
Sergeant Johnston shrugged. “I was afraid the gal would get in the way. Another couple of seconds and I wouldn’t’ve had shit. Anyway, Eddie, nice work coming out of the aircraft and doing him before I could get number two off.”
“You had a shot on him?” Price asked, safing and holstering his pistol.
“Waste of time. I saw his brains come out from your first.”
The cops were swarming in now, plus a covey of ambulances with blinking blue lights. Captain Altmark arrived at the helicopter, with Chavez at his side. Experienced cop that he was, the mess inside the Sikorsky made him back away in silence.
“It’s never pretty,” Homer Johnston observed. He’d already had his look. The rifle and bullet had performed as programmed. Beyond that; it was his fourth sniper kill, and if people wanted to break the law and hurt the innocent, it was their problem, not his. One more trophy he couldn’t hang on the wall with the muley and elk heads he’d collected over the years.
Price walked toward the middle group, fishing in his pocket for his curved briar pipe, which he lit with a kitchen match, his never-changing ritual for a mission completed.
Mike Pierce was assisting the hostages, all sitting for the moment while Steve Lincoln stood over them, his MP-10 out and ready for another target. But then a gaggle of Austrian police exploded out the backdoor, telling him that there were no terrorists left inside the building. With that, he safed his weapon and slung it over his shoulder. Lincoln came up to the elderly gent.
“Well done, sir;” he told Klaus Rosenthal.
“What?”
“Using the knife on his hand. Well done.”
“Oh, yeah,” Pierce said, looking down at the mess on the grass. There was a deep cut on the back of its left hand. “You did that, sir?”
“Ja” was all Rosenthal was able to say, and that took three breaths.
“Well, sir, good for you.” Pierce reached down to shake his hand. It hadn’t really mattered very much, but resistance by a hostage was rare enough, and it had clearly been a gutsy move by the old gent.
“Amerikaner?”
“Shhh.” Sergeant Pierce held a finger up to his lips. “Please don’t tell anyone, sir.”
Price arrived then; puffing on his pipe. Between Weber’s sniper rifle and someone’s MP-10 burst, this subject’s head was virtually gone. “Bloody hell,” the sergeant major observed.
“Steve’s bird,” Pierce reported. “I didn’t have a clear shot this time. Good one, Steve,” he added.
“Thank you; Mike,” Sergeant Lincoln replied, surveying the area. “Total of six?”
“Correct,” Eddie answered, heading off toward the house. “Stand by here.”
“Easy shots, both of ’em,” Tomlinson said in his turn, surrounded by Austrian cops.
“Too tall to hide,” Loiselle confirmed. He felt like having a smoke, though he’d quit two years before. His hostages were being led off now, leaving the two terrorists on the lush green grass, which their blood, he thought, would fertilize. Blood was good fertilizer, wasn’t it? Such a fine house. A pity they’d not have the chance to examine it.
Twenty minutes later, Team-2 was back at the assembly point, changing out of their tactical clothes, packing their weapons and other gear for the ride back to the airport. The TV lights and cameras were running, but rather far away. The team was relaxing now, the stress bleeding off with the successful completion of their mission. Price puffed on his pipe outside the van, then tapped it tut on the heel of his boot before boarding it.
CHAPTER 8
COVERAGE
The television coverage was out before Team-2 flew into Heathrow. Fortunately, the video of the event was hampered by the Schloss’s great size and the fact that the Staatspolizei kept the cameras well away from events, and on the wrong side of the building. About the only decent shot was of a team member lighting a pipe, followed by Captain Wilhelm Altmark’s summary of events for the assembled reporters. A special and heretofore secret team of his country’s federal police had dealt efficiently with the incident at Schloss Ostermann, he said, rescuing all of the hostages – no, unfortunately, no criminals had been arrested.
All of this was taped for later use by Bill Tawney’s staff off Austrian State Television, Sky News, and every other European news service that made use of the story. Though the British Sky News service had managed to get its own camera to Vienna, the only difference between its coverage and that of the locals was the angle Even the various learned commentaries were essentiallythe same specially trained and equipped police-unit; probably with members of Austria’s military; decisive action to resolve the incident with no injuries to the innocent victims; score one more, they didn’t quite say, for the good guys. The bad guys’ identities weren’t put out with the initial reports. Tracking them down would be a police function, and the results would be fed to Tawney’s intelligence section, along with the debriefs of the victims.
It had been a very long day for the-Team-2 members, all of whom went home to sleep on arrival back at Hereford, with notification from Chavez that they’d dispense with morning PT the next day. There wasn’t even time for a congratulatory set of beers in the local NCO Club – which in any case was closed by the time they got home:
On the flight home, Chavez noted to Dr. Bellow that despite the fitness of his people the fatigue factor was pretty high-more so than on their occasional night exercises. Bellow replied that stress was the ultimate fatigue generator, and that the team members were not immune to stress, no matter what their training or fitness. That evidently included himself, since after making the pronouncement, Bellow turned and slipped off to sleep, leaving Chavez to do the same after a glass of red Spanish wine.
It was the lead news story in Austria, of course. Popov caught the first bit of it live in a Gasthaus, then more in his hotel room. He sipped orange schnapps while he applied his keen, professional eye to the screen. These antiterror groups all looked pretty much the same, but that was to be expected, since they all trained to do the same thing and worked out of the same international manual first promulgated by the English with their Special Air Service commandos, then followed by the German GSG-9, and then the rest of Europe, followed by the Americans down to the black clothing, which struck Popov as theatrical, but they all had to wear something, and black made more sense than white clothing, didn’t it? Of more immediate interest, there in the room with him was the leather attaché case filled with Dmark banknotes, which he would take to Bern the following day for deposit in his account before flying back to New York. It was remarkable, he thought as he switched the TV off and pulled the bedclothes up, two simple jobs, and he now had just over one million American dollars in his numbered and anonymous account. Whatever his employers wanted him to accomplish for them, he was being well compensated for it, and they didn’t seem overly concerned by the expense. So much the better that the money went to a good cause, the Russian thought.