Andre walked about, seemingly in an aimless way, but actually in accordance with plans, both his and the park’s. He was being paid to look around and make arrangements while he smiled and told parents where their little darlings could relieve themselves.
“This will do it,” Noonan said, walking into the morning meeting.
“What’s ‘this’?” Clark asked. Noonan held up a computer floppy disk. “It’s just a hundred lines of code, not counting the installation stuff. The cells-the phone cells, I mean-all use the same computer program to operate. When we get to a place, I just insert this in their drives and upload the software. Unless you dial in the right prefix to make a call – 777, to be exact – the cell will respond that the number you’re calling is busy. So, we can block any cellular calls into our subjects from some helpful soul outside and also prevent them from getting out.”
“How many spare copies do you have?” Stanley asked.
“Thirty,” Noonan answered. “We can get the local cops to install them. I have instructions printed up in six languages.” Not bad, eh? Noonan wanted to say. He’d gone through a contact at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, to get it. Pretty good for just over a week’s effort. “It’s called Cellcop, and it’ll work anywhere in the world.”
“Good one, Tim.” Clark made a note. “Okay, how are the teams?”
“Sam Houston’s down with a sprained knee,” Peter Covington told Clark. “Hurt it coming down a zip-line. He can still deploy, but he won’t be running for a few days.”
“Team-2’s fully mission-capable, John,” Chavez announced. “George Tomlinson is a little slowed down with his Achilles tendon, but no big deal.”
Clark grunted and nodded, making a further note. Training was so hard here that the occasional injury was inevitable-and John well remembered the aphorism that drills were supposed to be bloodless combat, and combat supposed to be bloody drills. It was fundamentally a good thing that his troops worked as hard in practice as they did in the real thing-it said a lot for their morale, and just as much for their professionalism, that they took every aspect of life in Rainbow that seriously. Since Sam Houston was a long-rifleman, he really was about seventy percent mission capable, and George Tomlinson, strained tendon and all, was still doing his morning runs, gutting it out as an elite trooper should.
“Intel?” John turned to Bill Tawney.
“Nothing special to report,” the Secret Intelligence Service officer replied. “We know that there are terrorists still alive, and the various police forces are still doing their investigations to dig them out, but it’s not an easy job, and nothing promising appears to be underway, but . . .” But one couldn’t predict a break in a case. Everyone around the table knew that. This very evening someone of the class of Carlos himself could be pulled over for running a stop sign and be recognized by some rookie cop and snapped up, but you couldn’t plan for random events. There were still over a hundred known terrorists living somewhere in Europe probably, just like Ernst Model and Hans Furchtner, but they’d learned a not-very-hard lesson about keeping a low profile, adopting a simple disease, and keeping out of trouble. They had to make some greater or lesser mistake to be noticed, and the ones who made dumb mistakes were long since dead or imprisoned.
“How about cooperation with the local police agencies?” Alistair Stanley asked.
“We keep speaking with them, and the Bern and Viena missions have been very good press for us. Wherever something happens, we can expect to be summoned swiftly.”
“Mobility?” John asked next
“That’s me, I guess,” Lieutenant Malloy responded. “It’s working out well with the Ist Special Operations Wing. They’re letting me keep the Night Hawk for the time being, and I’ve got enough time on the British Puma that I’m current in it. If we have to go, I’m ready to go. I can get MC- 130 tanker support if I need it for a long deployment, but as a practical matter I can be just about anywhere in Europe in eight hours in my Sikorsky, with or without tanker support. Operational side, I’m comfortable with things. The troops here are as good as any I’ve seen, and we work well together. The only thing that worries me is the lack of a medical team.”
“We’ve thought about that. Dr. Bellow is our doc, and you’re up to speed on trauma, right, doc?” Clark asked.
“Fairly well, but I’m not as good as a real trauma surgeon. Also, when we deploy, we can get local paramedics to help out from police and fire services on the scene.”
“We did it better at Fort Bragg,” Malloy observed. “I know all our shooters are trained in emergency-response care, but a properly trained medical corpsman is a nice thing to have around. Doctor Bellow’s only got two hands,” the pilot noted. “And he can only be in one place at a time.”
“When we deploy,” Stanley said, “we do a routine Gallup to the nearest local casualty hospital. So far we’ve had good cooperation.”
“Okay, guys, but I’m the one who has to transport the wounded. I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I think we could do it a little better. I recommend a drill for that. We should practice it regularly.”
That wasn’t a bad idea, Clark thought. “Duly noted, Malloy. Al, let’s do that in the next few days.”
“Agreed,” Stanley responded with a nod.
“The hard part is simulating injuries,” Dr. Bellow told them. “There’s just no substitute for the real thing, but we can’t put our people in the emergency room. It’s too time wasteful, and they won’t see the right kind of injuries there.”
“We’ve had this problem for years,” Peter Covington said. “You can teach the procedures, but practical experience is too difficult to come by-”
“Yeah, unless we move the outfit to Detroit,” Chavez quipped. “Look, guys, we all know the right first-aid stuff, and Doctor Bellow is a doc. There’s only so much we have time to train for, and the primary mission is paramount, isn’t it? We get there and do the job, and that minimizes the number of wounds, doesn’t it?” Except to the bad guys, he didn’t add, and nobody really cared about them, and you couldn’t treat three 10-mmbullets in the head, even at Walter Reed. “I like the idea of training to evac wounded. Fine, we can do that, and practice first-aid stuff, but can we realistically go farther than that? I don’t see how.”
“Comments?” Clark asked. He didn’t see much past that, either.
“Chavez is correct . . . but you’re never fully prepared or fully trained,” Malloy pointed out. “No matter how much you work, the bad guys always find a way to dump something new on you. Anyway, in Delta we deploy with full medical-response team, trained corpsmen-experts, used to trauma care. Maybe we can’t afford to do that here, but that’s how we did it at Fort Bragg.”
“We’ll just have to depend on local support for that,” Clark said, closing the issue. “This place can’t afford to grow that much. I don’t have the funding.”
And that’s the magic word in this business, Malloy didn’t have to add. The meeting broke up a few minutes later, and with it the working day ended. Dan Malloy had grown accustomed to the local tradition of closing out a day at the club, where the beer was good and the company cordial. Ten minutes later, he was hoisting ajar with Chavez. This little greaser, he thought, really had his shit together.
“That call you made in Vienna was pretty good, Ding.”
“Thanks, Dan.” Chavez took a sip. “Didn’t have much of a choice, though. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.”
“Yep, that’s a fact,” the Marine agreed.
“You think we’re thin on the medical side . . . so do I, but so far that hasn’t been a problem.”
“So far you’ve been lucky, my boy.”
“Yeah, I know. We haven’t been up against any crazy ones yet.”
“They’re out there, the real sociopathic personalities, the ones who don’t care a rat’s ass about anything at all. Well, truth is, I haven’t seen any of them either except on TV. I keep coming back to the Ma’alot thing, in Israel twenty-plus years ago. Those fuckers wasted little kids just to show how tough they were – and remember what happened a while back with the President’s little girl. She was damned lucky that FBI guy was there. I wouldn’t mind buying that guy a beer.”
“Good shooting,” Chavez agreed. “Better yet, good timing. I read up on how he handled it-talking to them and all, being patient, waiting to make his move, then taking it when he got it.”
“He lectured at Bragg, but I was traveling that day. Saw the tape. The boys said he can shoot a pistol as well as anybody on the team-but better yet, he was smart.”