“The bar is open!” Clark called to them, when he stood.
“A little late, John.” Alistair observed.” If the door’s locked, we’ll have Paddy blow it,” Clark insisted, with a vicious grin.
Stanley considered that and nodded. “Quite so, the lads have earned a pint or two each.” Besides which, he knew how to pick locks.
They walked into the club still wearing their ninja suits, and found the barman waiting. There were a few others in the club as well, mainly SAS troopers sipping at their last-call pints. Several of them applauded when the Rainbow team came in, which warmed the room. John walked to the bar, leading his men and ordering beer for all.
“I do love this stuff,” Mike Pierce said a minute later, taking his Guinness and sipping through the thin layer of foam.
“Two, Mike?” Clark asked.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “The one at the desk, he was on the phone. Tap-tap,” Pierce said, touching two fingers to the side of his head. “Then another one, shooting from behind a desk. I jumped over and gave him three on the fly. Landed, rolled, and three more in the back of the head. So long, Charlie. Then one more, got a piece of him, along with Ding and Eddie. Ain’t supposed to like this part of the job. I know that-but, Jesus, it felt good to take those fuckers down. Killin’ kids, man. Not good. Well, they ain’t gonna be doing any more of that, sir. Not with the new sheriff in town.”
“Well, nice going, Mr. Marshal,” John replied, with a raised glass salute. There’d be no nightmares about this one, Clark thought, sipping his own dark beer. He looked around. In the corner, Weber and Johnston were talking, the latter with his hand on the former’s shoulder, doubtless thanking him for the fine shot to disable the murderer’s Uzi. Clark walked over and stood next to the two sergeants.
“I know, boss,” Homer said, without being told anything. “Never again, but goddamn, it felt good.”
“Like you said, never again, Homer.”
“Yes, sir. Slapped the trigger a little hard,” Johnston said, to cover his ass in an official sense.
“Bullshit,” Rainbow Six observed. “I’ll accept it -just this once. And you. Dieter nice shot. but . . .”
“Nie wieder. Herr General. I know, sir.” The German nodded his submission to the moment. “Homer, Junge, the look on his face when you hit him. Ach, that was something to see, my friend. Good for the one on the castle roof, too.”
“Easy shot,” Johnston said dismissively. “He was standing still. Zap. Easier ‘n throwing darts, pal.”
Clark patted both on the shoulder and wandered over to Chavez and Price.
“Did you have to land on my arm?” Ding complained lightly.
“So, next time, come through the window straight, not at an angle.”
“Right.” Chavez took a long sip of the Guinness.
“How’d it go?” John asked them.
“Aside from being hit twice, not bad,” Chavez replied. “I have to get a new vest, though.” Once hit, the vests were considered to be ruined for further use. This one would go back to the manufacturer for study to see how it had performed. “Which one was that, you think, Eddie?”
“The last one, I think, the one who just stood and sprayed at the children.”
“Well, that was the plan, for us to stop those rounds, and that one went down hard. You, me, Mike, and Oso, I think, took him apart.” Whatever cop had recovered that body would need a blotter and a freezer bag to collect the spilled brains. “That we did,” Price agreed as Julio came over.
“Hey, that was okay, guys!” First Sergeant Vega told them, pleased to have finally participated in a field operation.
“Since when do we punch our targets?” Chavez asked.
Vega looked a little embarrassed. “Instinct, he was so close. You know, probably could have taken him alive, but-well, nobody ever told me to do that, y’know?”
“That’s cool, Oso. That wasn’t part of the mission, not with a room full of kids.”
Vega nodded. “What I figured, and the shot was pretty automatic, too, just playin’ like we practice, man. Anyway, that one went down real good, jefe. ”
“Any problem on the window?” Price wanted to know.
Vega shook his head. “Nah, gave it a good kick, end it moved just fine. Bumped a shoulder coming through the frame, but no problems there. I was pretty pumped. But you know, you shoulda had me cover the kids. Fin bigger, I woulda stopped more bullets.”
Chavez didn’t say that he’d worried about d’ega’s agility wrongly, as it had turned out. An important lesson learned. Bulky as Osowas, he moved lightly on his feet, far more so than Ding had expected. The bear could dance pretty well, though at 225 pounds, he was G little large for a tutu.
“Fine operation,” Bill Tawney said, joining the group.
“Anything develop?”
“We have a possible identification on one of them, the chap who killed the child. The French ran the photo through some police informants, and they think it night be an Andre Herr, Parisian by birth, thought to be a stringer for Action Directe once upon a time, but nothing definite. More information is on the way, they say. The whole set of photos and fingerprints from Spain is on its way to Paris now for follow-up investigation. Not all of the photos will be very useful, I am told.”
“Yeah, well, a burst of hollowpoints will rearrange a guy’s face, man,” Chavez observed with a chuckle. “Not a hell of a lot we can do about that.”
“So, who initiated the operation?” Clark asked.
Tawney shrugged. “Not a clue at this point. That’s for the French police to investigate.”
“Would be nice to know. We’ve had three incidents since we got here. Isn’t that a lot?” Chavez asked, suddenly very serious.
“It is,” the intelligence officer agreed. “It would not have been ten or fifteen years ago, but things had quieted down recently.” Another shrug. “Could be mere coincidence, or perhaps copycatting, but-”
“Copycat? I shouldn’t think so, sir,” Eddie Prise observed. “We’ve given bloody little encouragement to any terr’ who has ambitions, and today’s operation ought to have a further calming effect on those people.”
“That makes sense to me,” Ding agreed. “Like Mike Pierce said, there’s a new sheriff in town, and the word on the street ought to be `don’t fuck with him’ even if people think we’re just local cops with an attitude. Take it a step further, Mr. C.”
“Go public?” Clark shook his head. “That’s never been part of the plan, Domingo.”
“Well, if the mission’s to take the bastards down in the field, that’s one thing. If the mission is to make these bastards think twice about raising hell-to stop terrorist incidents from happening at all-then it’s another thing entirely. The idea of a new sheriff in town might just take the starch out of their backs and put them back to washing cars, or whatever the hell they do when they’re not being bad. Deterrence, we call it, when nation-states do it. Will it work on a terrorist mentality? Something to talk with Doc Bellow about, John,” Chavez concluded.
And again Chavez had surprised him, Clark realized. Three straight successes, all of them covered on the TV news, might well have an effect on the surviving terrorists in Europe or elsewhere with lingering ambitions, mightn’t it? And that was something to talk to Paul Bellow about. But it was much too soon for anyone on the team to be that optimistic . . . probably, John told himself with a thoughtful sip. The party was just beginning to break up. It had been a very long day for the Rainbow troopers, and one by one they set their glasses down on the bar, which ought to have closed some time before, and headed for the door for the walk to their homes. Another day and another mission had ended. Yet another day had already b.-gun, and in only a few hours, they’d be awakened to run and exercise and begin another day of routine training. “Were you planning to leave us?” the jailer asked Inmate Sanchez in a voice dripping with irony.
“What do you mean?” Carlos responded.
“Some colleagues of yours misbehaved yesterday,” the prison guard responded, tossing a copy of Le Figaro through the door. “They will not do so again.”
The photo on the front page was taken off the Worldpark video, the quality miserably poor, but clear enough to show a soldier dressed in black carrying a child, and the first paragraph of the story told the tale. Carlos scanned it, sitting on his prison bed to read the piece in detail, then felt a depth of black despair that he’d not thought possible. Someone had heard his plea, he realized, and it had come to nothing. Life in this stone cage beckoned as he looked up to the sun coming in the single window. Life. It would be a long one, probably a healthy one, and certainly a bleak one. His hands crumpled the paper when he’d finished the article. Damn the Spanish police. Damn the world.