"Take us in, Herr Dengler," she-– suggested, in a strangely childlike voice.

   Gerhardt rose from his desk. and walked slowly to the double doors, head down., his movements wooden, as though his knees were artificial. Guns did that to people, Dortmund and Furchtner knew. The secretary turned the knobs and pushed, revealing Ostermann's office.

   The desk was huge, gilt like everything else in the building, and sat on a huge red wool rug. Erwin Ostermann had his back to them, head down examining some computer display or other.

   "Herr Ostermann?" Dengler said.

   "Yes, Gerhardt?" was the reply, delivered in an even voice, and when there was no response, the man turned in his swivel chair

   –"What is this?" he asked, his blue eyes going very. wide when he saw the visitors, and then wider still when he saw the guns. "Who-"

   "We are commanders of the Red Workers' Faction," Furchtner informed the trader. "And you are our prisoner." .

   "But what is this?"

   "You and we will be taking a trip. If you behave yourself, you will come to no harm. If you do not, you and others will be killed. Is that clear?" Petra asked. To make sure it was, she again aimed her pistol at Dengler's head.'

   What followed then could have been scripted in a movie. Ostermann's head snapped left and right, looking for something, probably help of some sort, which was not to be seen. Then he looked back at Hans and Petra and his face contorted itself into shock and disbelief. This could not be happening to him. Not here, not in his own office. Next came the outraged denial of the facts he could see before him... and then, finally, came fear. The process lasted five or six seconds. It was always the same. She'd seen it before, and realized that she'd forgotten how pleasurable it was to behold. Ostermann's hands balled into fists on the leather surface of his desk, then relaxed as his body realized how powerless it was. Trembling would start soon, depending on how much courage he might have. Petra didn't anticipate a great deal of that: He looked tall, even sitting down, thin-regal, even, in his white shirt with the starched collar and striped tie. The suit was clearly expensive, Italian silk, probably, finely tailored just for him. Under the desk would be custom-made shoes, polished by a servant. Behind him she could see lines of data marching upward. on the computer screens. Here Ostermann was, in the center of his web, and scarcely a. minute before he'd been totally at ease, feeling himself invincible, master of his fate, moving money around the world, adding to his fortune. Well, no more of that for a while-probably forever, though Petra had no intention of telling him that until the last possible second, the better to see the shock and terror on his regal face just before the eyes went blank and empty.

   She had forgotten how it was, Petra realized, the sheer joy of the power she held in her hands. How had she ever gone so long without exercising it?

   The first police car to arrive on the scene had been only five kilometers away on getting the radio call. Reversing direction and racing to the schloss had only taken three minutes, and now it parked behind a tree, almost totally concealed from the house.

   "I see a car and a delivery truck;" the officer told his. station chief, a captain. "No movement. Nothing else to be seen at the moment."

   "Very well," the captain replied. "Take no action of any kind, and report any new developments to me at once. I will be there in a few minutes."

   "Understood. Ende. "

   The captain replaced the microphone. He was driving to the scene himself, alone in his Audi radio car. He'd met Ostermann once, at some official function in Vienna. Just a shake of the hand and a few cursory words, but he knew what the man looked like, and knew his reputation as a wealthy, civic-minded individual who was an especially faithful supporter of the opera . . . and the children's hospital, wasn't he? . . . Yes, that had been the reason for the reception at the city hall. Ostermann was a widower; had lost his first wife to ovarian cancer five years earlier. Now, it was said, he had a new interest in his life named Ursel von Prime, a lovely dark-haired woman from an old family. That was the odd thing about Ostermann. He lived like a member of the nobility, but he'd come from humble roots. His father had been . . . an engineer, engine-driver actually, in the state railway, wasn't it? Yes, that was right. And so some of the old noble families had looked down on him, and to take care of that he'd bought social respectability with his charity work and his attendance at the opera. Despite the grandeur of his home, he lived fairly modestly. Little in the way of lavish entertaining. A quiet, modestly dignified man, and a very intelligent one, so they said of him. But now, his alarm company said, he had intruders in the house, Captain Willi Altmark told himself, taking the last turn and seeing the schloss. As often as he'd noticed lit in passing, he had to remind himself now of the physical circumstances. A huge structure . . . perhaps four hundred meters of clear grass lawn between it and the nearest trees. Not good. Approaching the house covertly would be extremely difficult. He pulled his Audi close to the marked police car on the scene, and got out carrying a pair of binoculars.

   "Captain," the first officer said by way of greeting.

   "Have you seen anything?"

   "No movement of any kind. Not even a curtain."

   Altmark took a minute to sweep his binoculars over the building, then lifted the radio mike to tell all units en route to come quietly and slowly so as not to alert the criminals inside. Then he got a radio call from his superior, asking for his assessment of the situation.

   "This may be a job for the military," Captain Altmark responded. "We know nothing at the moment. I can see an automobile and a truck. Nothing else. No gardeners out. Nothing. But I can only see two walls, and nothing behind the main house. I will get a perimeter set up as soon as additional units arrive."

   "Ja. Make certain that no one can see us," the commissioner told the captain, quite unnecessarily.

   "Yes, of course."

   Inside, Ostermann had yet to rise from his chair. He took a moment to close his eyes, thanking God that Ursel was in London at, the moment, having flown there in the private jet to do some shopping and meet with English friends. He'd hoped to join her there the following day, and now he wondered if he'd ever see his fiancée again. Twice he'd been approached by security consultants, an Austrian and a Brit. Both had lectured him on the implicit dangers of being so publicly rich, and told him how for a modest sum, less than £500,00 per year, he could greatly improve his personal security. The Britisher had explained that his people were all veterans of the SAS; the Austrian had employed Germans formerly of GSG-9. But he hadn't seen the need for employing gun-carrying commandos who would hover over him everywhere he went as though he were a -chief of state, taking up space and just sitting there like-like bodyguards, Ostermann told himself. As a trader in stocks, commodities, and international currencies he'd had his share of missed opportunities, but this one . . .

   "What do you want of me?"

   "We want your personal access codes to the international trading network," Furchtner told him. Hans was surprised to see the look of puzzlement on Ostermann's face.

   "What do you mean?"

   "The computer-access codes which tell you what is going on."

   "But those are public already. Anyone can have them," Ostermann objected.

   "Yes, certainly they are. That is why everyone has a house like this one." Petra managed an amused sneer.

   "Herr Ostermann," Ffrchtner said patiently. "We know there is a special network for people such as you, so that you can take advantage of special market conditions and profit by them. You think us fools?"

   The fear that transformed the trader's face amused his two office guests: Yes, they knew what they weren't supposed to know, and they knew they could force him to give over the information. His thoughts were plain on his face.

   Oh, my God, they think I have access to something that does not exist, and I will never be able to persuade them otherwise.

   "We know how people like you operate," Petra assured him, immediately confirming his fear. "How you capitalists share information and manipulate your 'free' markets for your own greedy ends. Well, you will share that with us-or you will die, along with your lackeys." She waved, her pistol at the outer office.

   "I see." Ostermann's face was now as pale as his white Turnbull and Asser shirt. He looked out to the anteroom. He could see Gerhardt Dengler there, his hands on the top of his desk. Wasn't there an alarm system there? Ostermann couldn't remember now, so rapidly was his mind running through the data-avalanche that had so brutally interrupted his day.

   The first order of police business was to check the license= plate numbers of the vehicles parked close to the house. The automobile, they learned at once, was a rental. The truck tags had been stolen two days before. A detective team would go to the car-rental agency immediately to see what they might learn there. The next call was made to one of Herr Ostermann's .business associates. The police needed to know how many domestic and clerical employees might be in the building along with the owner. That, Captain Altmark imagined, would take about an hour. He now had three additional police cars under his command. One of these looped around the property so that the two officers could park and approach from the rear on foot. Twenty minutes after arriving on the scene, he had a perimeter forming. The first thing he learned was that Ostermann owned a helicopter, sitting there behind the house. It was an American-made Sikorsky S-76B, capable of carrying a crew of two and a maximum of thirteen passengers that information gave him the maximum number of hostages to be moved and criminals to move them. The helicopter landing pad was two hundred meters from the house. Altmark fixed on that. The criminals would almost certainly want to use the helicopter as their getaway vehicle. Unfortunately, the landing pad was a good three hundred meters from the treeline. This meant that some really good riflemen were needed, but his preset response team had them.

   Soon after getting the information on the helicopter, one of his people turned up the flight crew, one at home, one at Schwechat International Airport doing some-paperwork with the manufacturer's representative for an aircraft modification. Good, Willi Altmark thought, the helicopter wasn't going anywhere just yet. But by then the fact that Erwin Ostermann's house had been attacked had perked up to the senior levels of government, and then he received a very surprising radio call from the head of the Stawspolizei.They barely made the flight – more precisely, the flight hadn't been delayed on their account: Chavez tightened his seat belt as the 737 pulled back from the jetway, and went over the preliminary briefing documents with Eddie Price. They'd just rolled off the tarmac when Price mated his portable computer with the aircraft's phone system. That brought up a diagram on his screen, with the caption "Schloss Ostermann."

   "So, who is this guy?" Chavez asked.

   "Coming in now, sir," Price replied. "A money-lender, it would-appear, rather a wealthy one, friend of the prime minister of his country. I guess that explains matters so far as we are concerned."

   "Yeah," Chavez agreed. Two in a row for Team-2 was what he thought. A little over an hour's flight time to Vienna, he thought next, checking his watch. One such incident was happenstance, Chavez told himself, but terrorist incidents weren't supposed to happen so closely together, were they? Not that there was a rulebook out there, of course, and even if there were such a thing, these people would have violated it. Still . . . but there was no time for such thoughts. Instead, Chavez examined the information coming into Price's laptop and started wondering how he'd deal with this new situation. Farther aft, his team occupied a block of economy seats and spent their time reading paperback books, hardly talking at all about the upcoming job, since they knew nothing to talk about except where they were going.

   "Bloody large perimeter for us to cover," Price observed, after a few minutes.

   "Any information on the opposition?" Ding asked, then wondered how it was that he was adopting Britspeak. Opposition? He should have said bad guys.

   "None," Eddie replied. "No identification; no word on their numbers."

   "Great," the leader of Team-2 observed, still staring sideways at the screen.

   The phones were trapped. Altmark had seen to that early on. Incoming calls were given busy signals, and outgoing calls would be recorded at the central telephone exchange-but there had been none, which suggested to Captain Altmark that the criminals were all inside; since they were not seeking external help. That could have meant they were using cellular phones, of course, and he didn't have the equipment to intercept those, though he did have similar traps on Ostermann's three known cellular accounts.

   The Staatspolizei now had thirty officers on the scene and a tight perimeter fully formed and punctuated by a four wheel armored vehicle, .hidden in the trees. They'd stopped one delivery truck from coming ire with -some overnight express mail, but no other vehicles had attempted to enter the properly. For one so wealthy, Ostermann did indeed lead a quiet and unassuming life, the captain thought. He'd expected a constant parade of vehicles.

   "Hans?"

   "Yes, Petra?"

   "The phones have not rung. We've been here for some time, but the phones have not rung."

   "Most of my work is on computer," Ostermann said, having noted the same discrepancy himself. Had Gerhardt gotten the word out? If he had done so, was that good? He had no way of knowing. Ostermann had long joked about how cutthroat his profession was, how every step he took had danger, because others out there would try to rob him blind if they ever got the chance . . . but not one of them had ever threatened his life, nor had any ever pointed a loaded gun at him or a member of his staff: Ostermann used his remaining capacity for objectivity to realize that this was a new and dangerous aspect to the world that he'd never seriously considered, about which he knew very little, and against which he had nothing in the way of defenses. His only useful talent at the moment was his ability to read faces and the minds behind them, and though he'd never encountered anyone even vaguely close to the man and woman in his office now, he saw enough to be more afraid than he'd ever been before. The man, and even more the woman, were willing to kill him without any pangs of conscience whatsoever, no more emotion than he showed when picking up a million dollars of American T-bills. Didn't they know. that his life had worth? Didn't they know that

   –no, Erwin Ostermann realized, they did not. They didn't know, and they didn't care. Worst of all, what they thought they did know wasn't true, and he would be hard pressed indeed to persuade them otherwise.

   Then, finally, a phone rang. The woman gestured for him to answer it.

   "Hier ist Ostermann, " he said on picking up the receiver. His male visitor did the same on another extension. "Herr Ostermann, I am Captain Wilhelm Altmark of the Staatspolizei. You have guests there, I understand."

   "Yes, I do, Captain," Ostermann replied.

   "Could I speak with them, please?" Ostermann merely looked at Hans Furchtner.

   "You took your time, Altmark," Hans said. "Tell me, how did you find out?"

   "I will not ask you about your secrets if you do not ask me about mine," the captain: replied coolly. "I would like to know who you are and what you wish."

   "I am Commander Wolfgang of the Red Workers' Faction."

   "And what is it you want?"

   "We want the release of several of our friends from various prisons, and transport to Schwechat International. We require an airliner with a range of more than five thousand kilometers and an international flight crew for a destination which we will make known when we board the aircraft. If we do not have these things by midnight, we will begin to kill some of our . . . our guests here in Schloss Ostermann. "'

   "I see. Do you have a list of the prisoners whose release you require?"

   Hans put one hand over the receiver and held the other out. "Petra, the list." She walked over and handed it to him. Neither seriously expected any cooperation on this. issue, but it was part of the game, and the rules had to be followed. They'd decided on the way in that they'd have to kill one hostage certainly, more probably two, before they got the ride to the airport. The man, Gerhardt Dengler, would be killed first, Hans thought, then one of the women secretaries. Neither he nor Petra really wanted to kill any of the domestic, help, they were genuine workers, not capitalist lackeys like the office staff: "Yes, here is the list, Captain Altmark . . ."

   "Okay," Price said, "we ha e a list of people we're expected to liberate for our friends." He turned the computer so that Chavez could see it

   "The usual suspects. Does this tell us anything, Eddie?"

   Price shook his head. "Probably not. You can get these names from a newspaper."

   "So, why do they do it?"

   "Dr. Bellow will explain that they have to, to show solidarity with their compatriots, when in fact they are all sociopaths who don't care a rip for anyone but themselves." Price shrugged. "Cricket has rules. So does terrorism and" Just then the captain of the airliner interrupted the revelation, and told everyone to put the seat backs up and tray tables away in preparation for landing.

   "Showtime soon, Eddie."

   "Indeed, Ding."

   "So, this is just solidarity bullshit?" Ding asked, tapping the screen.

   "Most likely, yes." With that, Price disconnected the phone line from his computer, saved his files, and shut the laptop down. Twelve rows aft, Tim Noonan did the same. All the Team-2 members started putting on their game faces as the British Airways 737 flared to land-in Vienna. Someone had called ahead to someone else. The airliner taxied very rapidly indeed to its assigned jetway, and out his window. Chavez could see a baggage truck with cops standing next to it waiting alongside the terminal.

   It was not an invisible event. A tower controller noted the arrival, having already noted a few minutes before that a Sabena flight scheduled in a slot ahead of the British aircraft had been given an unnecessary go-around order, and that a very senior police officer was in the tower, expressing interest in the British Airways flight. Then there was a second and very unnecessary baggage train with two police cars close by the A-4 jetway. What was this? he wondered. It required no great effort on his part to keep watch to learn more. He even had a pair of Zeiss binoculars.

   The stewardess hadn't received instructions to get Team-2 off more quickly than anyone else, but she suspected there was something odd about them... They'd arrived with out having been on her computerized manifest, and they were politer than the average business travelers. Their appearances were unremarkable, except all looked very fit, and all had arrived together in a single bunch, and headed to their seats in an unusually organized way. She had a job to do, however; as she opened the door into the jetway where, she saw, a uniformed policeman was waiting. He didn't smile or speak as she allowed the already-standing passengers to make their way off. Three from first class stopped just outside the aircraft, conferred with the policeman, then went out the door to the service stairs, which led directly to the tarmac. Being a serious fan of thriller and mystery novels, it was worth a look, she thought, to see who else went that way. The total was thirteen, and the number included all of the late-arriving passengers. She looked at their faces, most of which gave her a smile on the way out. Handsome faces, for the most part . . . more than that, manly ones, with expressions that radiated confidence, and something else, something conservative and guarded.

   "Au revoir, madam," the last one said as he passed, with a very Gallic evaluative sweep of her figure and a charming smile.

   "Christ, Louis," an American voice observed on the way out the side door. "You don't ever turn it off, do your"

   "Is it a crime to look at a pretty woman, George?" Loiselle asked, with a wink.

   "Suppose not. Maybe we'll catch her on the flip-side," Sergeant Tomlinson conceded. She was pretty, but Tomlinson was married with four kids: Louis Loiselle never turned it off. Maybe it came along with being French, the American thought. At the bottom, the rest of the team was waiting. Noonan and Steve Lincoln were supervising the baggage transfer. Three minutes later, Team-2 was in a pair of vans heading off the flight line with a p lice escort. This was noted by the tower controller, whose brother was a police reporter for a local paper. The cop who'd come to the tower departed without more than a danke to the controllers.

   Twenty minutes later, vans stopped outside the main entrance to Schloss Ostermann. Chavez walked over to the senior officer.

   "Hello, I am Major Chavez. This is Dr. Bellow, and Sergeant Major Price," he said, surprised to receive a salute from-

   "Captain Wilhelm Altmark," the man said.

  "What do we know?"

   "We know there are two criminals inside, probably more, but the number is unknown. You know what their demands are?"

   "Airplane to somewhere was the last I heard. Midnight deadline?" .

   "Correct, no changes in the past hour."

   "Anything-else. How will we got them to the airport?" Ding asked.

   "Herr Ostermann has a private helicopter and pad about two hundred meters behind the house."

   "Flight crew"

   "

   "We have them over there." Altmark pointed. "Our, friends have not yet asked for the flight, but that seems the most likely method of making-the transfer."

   "Who's been speaking with them?" Dr. Bellow asked from behind the shorter Chavez.

   "I have," Altmark replied.

   "Okay, we need to talk, Captain."

   Chevez headed over to a van where he could change along with the rest of the team. For this night's mission the sun was just setting-they wore not black but mottled green coveralls over their body armor. Weapons were issued and loaded, then selector switches went to the SAFE position. Ten minutes later, the team was outside and at the edge of the-treeline, everyone with binoculars, checking out the building.

   "I guess this here's the right side of the tracks," Homer Johnston observed. "Lotsa windows, Dieter."

   "Ja, " the German sniper agreed.

   "Where you want. us, boss?" Homer asked Chavez.

   "Far side, both sides, cross fire on the chopper pad. Right now, people, and when you're set up, give me radio calls to checkin. You know the drill."

   "Everything we see, we call to you, Herr Major, " Weber confirmed. Both snipers got their locked rifle cases and headed off to where the local cops had their cars.

   "Do we have a layout of the house?" Chavez asked Altmark.

   "Layout?" the Austrian cop asked.

   "Diagram, map, blueprints," Ding explained.

   "Ach, yes, here." Altmark led them to his car. Blueprints were spread on the hood. "Here, as you see, forty-six rooms, not counting the basements."

   "Christ," Chavez reacted at once. "More than one basement?"

   "Three. Two under the west wing-wine cellar and cold storage. East wing basement is unused. The doors down to it may be sealed. No basement under the center portion. The Schloss was built in the late eighteenth century. Exterior walls and-some interior ones are stone."

   "Christ, it's a frickin' castle," Difg'observed.

   "That is what the word Schloss means, Herr Major," Altmark informed him.

   "Doc?"

   Bellow came over. "From what Captain Altmark tells me, they've been pretty businesslike to this point. No hysterical threats. They gave a deadline of midnight for movement to the airport, else they say they will start killing hostages. Their language is German, with a German accent, you said, Captain?"

   Altmark nodded. "Ja, they are German, not Austrian.

   We have only one name, Herr Wolfgang-that is generally a Christian name, not a surname in our language, and we have no known criminal-terrorist by that name or pseudonym. Also, he said they're of the Red Workers' Faction, but we have no word from that organization either."

   Neither did Rainbow. "So, we don't know very much?" Chavez asked Bellow.

   "Not much at all, Din . Okay," the psychiatrist went on, "what does that mean? It means they are planning to survive this one. It me s they're serious businessmen in this game. If they threaten to do something, they will try to do it. They haven't killed anyone yet, and that also means they're pretty smart. No other demands made to this point. They will be coming, probably soon-"

   "How do you know that?" Altmark asked. The absence of demands to this point had surprised him.

   "When it gets dark, they'll be talking with us more. See how they haven't turned any lights on inside the building?"

   "Yes, and what does that mean

   "It means they think the darkness is their friend, and that means they will try to make use of it. Also, the midnight deadline. When, it gets dark, we'll be closer to that."

   "Full moon tonight," Price observed. "And not much cloud cover."

   "Yeah," Ding noted in some discomfort when he looked up at the sky. "Captain, do you have searchlights we can use?"

   "The fire department will have them," Altmark said.

   "Could you please order them brought here?"

   "Ja . . . Herr Doktor?"

   "Yes?" Bellow said.

   "They said that if they do not have those things done by midnight they will begin to kill hostages. Do you-"

   "Yes, Captain, we have to take that threat very seriously. As I said, these folks are acting like serious people, well trained and well-disciplined. We can make that work for us."

   "How?" Altmark asked. Ding answered.

   "We give them what they want, we let them think that they are in control . . . until it is time for us to take control. We feed their pride and their egos while we have to, and then, later, we stop doing it at a time that suits us."

   Ostermann's house staff was feeding the terrorists' bodies and their egos. Sandwiches had been made under the supervision of Ffrchtner's team and brought around by deeply frightened staff members. Predictably, Ostermann's employees were not in a mood to eat, though their guests were.

   Things had gone well to this point, Hans and Petra thought. They had their primary hostage under tight control, and his lackeys were now in the same room, with easy access to Ostermann's personal bathroom – hostages needed such access, and there was no sense in denying it to them. Otherwise, it stripped them of their dignity and made them desperate. That was inadvisable. Desperate people did foolish things, and what Hans and Petra needed at the moment was control over their every action.

   Gerhardt Dengler sat in a visitor's chair directly across the desk from his employer. He knew he'd gotten the police to respond, and, like his boss, he was now wondering if that was a good or a bad .thing. In another two years, he would have been ready to strike out on his own, probably with Ostermann's blessing. He'd learned much from his boss, the way a general's aide learns at the right hand of the senior officer. Though he'd been able to pursue his own destiny much more quickly and surely than a junior officer . . . what did he owe this man? What was required by this situation? Dengler was no more suited to this than Herr Ostermann was, but Dengler was younger, fitter . . .

   One of the secretaries was weeping silently, the tears trickling down her cheeks from fear and from the rage of having her comfortable life upset so cruelly. What was wrong with these two that they thought they could invade the lives of ordinary people and threaten them with death? And what could she do about it? The answer to that was . . . nothing. She was skilled at routing calls, processing voluminous paperwork, keeping track of Herr Ostermann's money ably that she was probably the best-paid secretary in the country – because Herr Ostermann was a generous boss, ways with a kind word for his staff. He'd helped her and her husband-a stonemason-with their investment the point that they would soon be millionaires in their own right. She'd been with him long before his first wife had died of cancer, had watched him suffer through that, unable to help him do anything to ease the horrible pain, and then she'd rejoiced at his discovery of Ursel von Prinze, who'd allowed Herr Ostermann to smile again ....

   Who were these people who stared at them as though they were objects, with guns in their hands like something from a movie . . . except that she and Gerhardt and the others were the bit players now. They couldn't go to the kitchen to fetch beer and pretzels. They could only live the drama to its end. And so she wept quietly at her powerlessness, to the contempt of Petra Dortmund.

   Homer Johnston was in his ghillie suit, a complex overall type garment made of rags sewn into place on a gridded matrix, whose purpose was to make him appear to be a bush or a pile of leaves or compost, anything but a person with a rifle. The rifle was set up on its bipod, the hinged flaps on the front and back lenses of his telescopic sight flipped up. He'd picked a good place to the east of the helicopter pad that would allow him to cover the entire distance between the helicopter and the house. His laser rangefinder announced that he was 216 meters from a door on the back of the house and 147 meters from the front-left door of the helicopter. He was lying prone in a dry spot on the beautiful lawn, in the lengthening shadows close to the treeline, and the air brought to him the smell of horses, which reminded him of his childhood in the American northwest. Okay. He thumbed his radio microphone.

   Lead, Rifle Two-One."

   Rifle Two-One, Lead."

   "In place and setup. I show no movement in the house at this time."

   "Rifle Two-Two, in place and set up, I also see no movement," Sergeant Weber reported from his spot, two hundred fifty-six meters from Johnston. Johnston turned to see Dieter's location. His German counterpart. had selected a good spot.

   "Achtung," a voice called behind him. Johnston turned to see an Austrian cop approaching, not quite crawling on the grass.Hier, " the man said, handing over some photos and withdrawing rapidly. Johnston looked at them. Good, shots of the hostages. . . but none of the bad guys. Well, at least he'd know whom not to shoot. With that, he backed off. the rifle and lifted his green-coated military binoculars and began scanning the house slowly and regularly, left to right and back again. "Dieter?" he said over his direct radio link.

   "Yes, Homer?"

   "They get you the photos?"

  "Yes, I have them."

   "No lights inside..."

   "Ja, our friends are being clever."

   "I figure about half an hour until we have to go NVG."

   "I agree, Homer."

   Johnston grunted and turned to check the bag he'd carried in along with his rifle case and $10,000 rifle. Then he returned to scanning the building, patiently, like staking out a mountain deer trail for a big muley . . . a happy thought for the lifelong hunter . . . the taste of venison, especially cooked in the field over an open wood fire . . . some coffee from the blue steel enamel pot . . . and the talking that came after a successful hunt... Well, you can't eat what you shoot here, Homer, the sergeant told himself, settling back into his patient routine. One hand reached into a pocket for some beef jerky to chew.

   Eddie Price lit his pipe on the far side of the dwelling. Not as big as Kensington Palace, but prettier, he thought: The thought disturbed him. It was something they'd talked about during his time in the SAS. What if terrorists-usually they thought of the Irish PIRA or INLA – attacked one of the Royal residences . . . or the Palace of Westminster. The SAS had walked through all of the buildings in question at o time or another, just to get a feed for the layout, the security systems, and the problems involved – especially after that lunatic had cracked his way into Buckingham Palace in the 1980s, walking into the Queen's own bedchamber. He still had chills about that?

   The brief reverie faded. He had the Schloss Ostermann to worry about, Price remembered, scanning over the blueprints again.

   "Bloody nightmare on the inside, Ding," Price finally said.

   "That's the truth. All wood floors, probably creak, lots of places for the bad guys to hide and snipe at us. We'd need a chopper to do this right." But they didn't have a helicopter. That was something to talk with Clark about. Rainbow hadn't been fully thought through. Too fast on too many things. Not so much that they needed a helicopter as some good chopper crews trained in more than one type of aircraft, because when they deployed in the field, there was no telling what machines would be used by their host nation. Chavez turned:

   "Doc?"

   Bellow came over. "Yes, Ding?"

   "I'm starting to think about letting them out, walk to the helicopter behind the house, and taking them down that way rather than forcing our way in."

   "A little early for that, isn't it?" '

   Chavez nodded. "Yeah, it is, but we don't want to lose a hostage, and come midnight, you said, we have to take that threat seriously."

   "We can delay it some, maybe. My job to do that, over the phone."

   "I understand, but if we make a move, I want it to be in the dark. That means tonight. I can't plan on having you talk them into surrender, unless you're thinking different?..."

   "Possible, but unlikely," Bellow had to agree. He couldn't even speak confidently about delaying the threatened midnight kill.

   "Next, we have to see if we can spike the building."

   "I'm here," Noonan said. "Tall order, man."

   "Can you do it?"

   "I can probably get close unobserved, but there's over a hundred windows, and how the hell can I get to the ones on the second and third floors? Unless I do a dangle from a chopper and come down on the roof . . ." And that meant making sure that the local TV people, who'd show up as. predictably as vultures over a dying cow, turned their cameras off and kept them off', -which then ran the risk of alerting the terrorists when the TV reporters stopped showing the building of interest. And how could they fail to note that a helicopter had flown thirty feet over the roof of the building, and might there be a bad gay on the roof, already keeping watch?

   "This is getting complicated," Chavez observed quietly.

   "Dark and cold enough for the thermal viewers to start working,." Noonan said helpfully.

   "Yeah." Chavez picked up his. radio mike. "Team, Lead, go thermal. Say again, break out the thermals." Then he turned. "What about cell phones?"

   Noonan could do little more than shrug. There were now something like three hundred civilians gathered around, well back from the Ostermann property and controlled by local police, but most of them had a view of the house and the grounds, and if one of them had a cell phone and someone inside did as well, all that unknown person outside had to do was dial his buds on the inside to tell them what was going down.. The miracles of modern communication worked both ways. There were over five hundred cellular frequencies, and the gear to cover them all was not part of Rainbow's regular kit. No terrorist or criminal operation had yet used that technique, to the best of their knowledge, but they couldn't all be dumb and stay dumb, could they? Chavez looked over at the Schloss and thought again at they'd have to get the bad .guys outside for this t work properly. Problem with that, he didn't know w many bad guys he'd have to deal with, and he no way of finding out without spiking the building to gather additional information which was a dubious undertaking for all the other reasons he'd just considered.

   "Tim, make a note for when we get back about dealing with cellular phones and radios outside the objective. Captain Altmark!"

   "Yes, Major Chavez?"

   "The lights, are they here yet?"

   "Just arrived, ja, we have three sets." Altmark pointed. Price and Chavez went over to look. They saw three trucks with attachments that looked for all the world like the lights one might see around a high-school football field. Meant to help fight a major fire, they could be erected and powered by the trucks that carried them. Chavez told Altmark where he wanted them and returned to the team's assembly point.

   The thermal viewers relied on difference in temperature to make an image. The evening was cooling down rapidly, and with it the stone walls of the house. Already the windows were glowing more brightly than the walls, because the house was heated, and the old-style full-length windows in the building's many doors were poorly insulated, despite the large drapes that hung just inside each one. Dieter Weber made the first spot. .

   "Lead, Rifle Two-Two, I have a thermal target first floor, fourth window from the west, looking around the curtains at the outside:"

   "Okay! That one's in the kitchen.." It was the voice of Hank Patterson, who was hovering over the blueprints. "That's number one! Can you tell me anything else, Dieter?"

   "Negative, just a shape," the German sniper replied. "No, wait . . . tall, probably a man."

   "This is Pierce, I have one, first floor, east side, second window from east wall."

   "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.

   There are many kinds of fear, and Klaus Rosenthal had the worst of all. His was the certainty that he would die at the hands of one of them, the bad Germans, the ones who simply didn't recognize or care about the humanity of others, and there was no comfort in the certainty of it

   And that kind wasn't all gone, wasn't all dead yet. One was right in his field of view, looking back at him, his machine gun in his hands, looking at Rosenthal and the others in the kitchen like Objekte, mere objects. The other staff members, all Christians, had never experienced this, but Klaus Rosenthal had, and he knew what to expect and knew that it was a certainty. His nightmare was real, risen from the past to fulfill his destiny, and then also kill Hilda, for her heart would not survive-and what could he do about it? Before, the first time, he'd been an orphaned boy apprenticed to a jeweler, where he'd learned to make fine metal items, which trade had saved his life which trade he'd never followed afterward, so horrid were the memories associated with it. Instead he found the peace of working in the soil, making living things grow pretty and healthy. He had the gift; Ostermann had recognized it and told him that he had a job for life at this Schloss. But that gift didn't matter to this Nazi with stubbly hair and a gun in his hands. Ding supervised the placement of the lights. Captain Altmark walked with him to each truck, then they both told the driver exactly where to go. When the light trucks were in place, and their light masts raised, Chavez returned to his team and sketched out the plan. It was after 11 now. It was amazing how fast time went when you needed more of it.

   The -helicopter crew was there, mostly sitting still, drinking coffee like good aviators, and wondering what the hell came next. It turned out that the copilot had a passing resemblance to Eddie Price, which Ding decided to make use of as a final backup part of his plan.

   At 11:20, he ordered the lights switched on. The front and both sides of the schloss were bathed in yellow-white light, but not the back, which projected a triangular shadow all the way to the helicopter and beyond into the trees..

   "Oso," Chavez said, "get over to Dieter and set up close to there."

   "Roger, 'mano." First Sergeant Vega hoisted his M-60 onto his shoulder and made his way through the woods.

   Louis Loiselle and George Tomlinson had the hardest part. They were dressed in their night greens. The coveralls over their black "ninja suits" looked like graph paper, light green background crosshatched in darker green lines, making blocks perhaps an eighth inch square. Some of the blocks were filled with the same dark green in random, squared-off patternless patterns. The idea dated back to World War II Luftwaffe night fighters whose .designers had decided that the night was dark enough, and that black painted fighter aircraft were Bier to spot because they were darker than the night itself. These coveralls worked in principle and in exercises. Now they'd see if they worked in the real world. The blazing lights would be aimed at, and somewhat over the Schloss, they'd serve to create an artificial well of darkness into which the green suits should disappear. They'd drilled it at Hereford often enough, but never with real lives at risk. That fact not-with-standing, Tomlinson and Loiselle moved out from different directions, keeping inside the triangular shadow all the way in. It took them twenty minutes of crawling.

   "So, Altmark," Hans Fiirchtner said at 11:45, "are the arrangements set, or must we kill one of our hostages in a few minutes?"

   "Please, do not do that, Herr Wolfgang. We have the helicopter crew on the way now, and we are working with the airline to get the aircraft released to us and ready for the flight. It is more difficult than you imagine to do these things."

   "In fifteen minutes we shall see how difficult it is, Herr Altmark." And the line went dead.

   Bellow didn't need a translator. The tone was enough. "He will do it," the psychiatrist told Altmark and Chavez. "The deadline is for real."

   "Get the flight crew out," Ding ordered at once. Three minutes later, a marked police car approached the helicopter. Two men got out and entered the Sikorsky as the car drove away. Two minutes after that, the rotor started turning. Then Chavez keyed his command microphone.

   "Team, this is Lead. Stand-to. I repeat, stand-to."

   "Excellent," Furchtner said. He could barely see the turning rotor, but the blinking flying lights told the tale. "So, we begin. Herr Ostermann, stand up."

   Petra Dortmund made her way downstairs ahead of the important hostages. She frowned, wondering if she should be disappointed that they'd not killed this Dengler person to show their resolve. That time could come later when they started the serious interrogation aboard the airliner and maybe Dengler knew all that Ostermann did. If so, killing him might be a tactical mistake. She activated her radio and called the rest of her people. They were assembling in the foyer as she came down the main staircase, along with the six hostages from the kitchen. No, she decided at the door, it would be better to kill a female hostage. That would have a greater impact on the police forces outside, all the more so if she were killed by another woman ....

   "Are you ready?" Petra asked, receiving nods from the other four of her crew. "It will go as we planned," she told them. These people were disappointing ideologically, despite their having grown up and been educated in a proper socialist country-three of them even had military training, which had included political indoctrination. But they knew their jobs, and had carried them out to this point. She could ask for little more. The house staff was coming in from the kitchen area. One of the cooks was having trouble walking, and that annoyed the stubble-headed swine, Rosenthal saw, as he stopped by the main food-preparation table. They were taking him, he knew, taking him to die, and as in his nightmare he was doing nothing! The realization came to him so suddenly as to cause a crippling wave of headachelike pain. His body twisted left, and he saw the table-and on it a small paring knife. His head snapped forward, saw the terrorists looking at Maria, the cook. In that moment; he made his decision, and snapped up the knife, tucking it up his right sleeve. Perhaps fate would give him a chance. If so, Klaus Rosenthal promised himself, this time he'd take it.

   "Team-2, this is Lead," Chavez said over the radio links. "We should have them start to come out shortly. Everybody check in." He listened to two le clicks first of all, from Loiselle and Tomlinson close to the Schloss, then the names.

   "Rifle Two-One," Homer Johnston said. His night vision system was now attached to his telescopic sight and trained rigidly on the building's main rear doors, as the rifleman commanded his breathing into a regular pattern. "Rifle Two-Two," Weber called in a second later.

   "Oso," Vega reported. He licked his lips as he brought his weapon up to his shoulder, his face covered with camouflage paint..

   "Connolly."

   "Lincoln.

   "McTyler."

   "Patterson."

   "Pierce:" They all reported from their spots on the grass.

   "Price," the sergeant major reported from the left-side front seat of the helicopter.

   "Okay, team, we are weapons-free. Normal rules of engagement in effect, Stay sharp, people," Chavez added. unnecessarily. It was hard for the commander to stop talking in such a case. His position was eighty yards away from the helicopter, marginal range for his MP-10, with his NVGs aimed at the building.

   "Door opening," Weber reported a fraction before Johnston.

   "I have movement," Rifle Two-One confirmed.

   "Captain Altmark, this is Chavez, kill the TV feed now," Ding ordered on his secondary radio."Ja, I understand," the police captain replied. He turned and shouted an order at the TV director. The cameras would stay on but would not broadcast, and the tapes from this point on were considered classified information. The signal going out on the airways now merely showed talking heads.

   "Door open now," Johnston said from his sniper perch. "I see one hostage, looks like a male cook, and a subject, female, dark hair, holding a pistol." Sergeant Johnston commanded himself to relax, taking his finger off the doubleset triggers of his rifle. He couldn't shoot now without a direct order from Ding, and that order would not come in such a situation. "Second hostage in view, it's Little Man," he said, meaning Dengler. Ostermann was Big Man, and the female secretaries were Blondie and Brownie, so named for their hair color. They didn't have photos for the domestic staff, hence no names for them. Known bad guys were "subjects."

   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.

   The comfort of the familiar surroundings of the helicopter was lost on Gerhard Dengler at the moment. He strapped himself in under the aim of Petra's pistol, commanding himself to relax and be brave; as men did at such a time. Then he looked forward and felt hope. The pilot was the usual man, -but the copilot was not. Whoever he was, he was fiddling with instruments as the flight crew did, but it wasn't him, though the shape of head and hair color were much the same, and both wore the white shirts with blue epaulets that private pilots tended– to adopt as their .uniforms. Their eyes met, and Dengler looked down and out of the aircraft, afraid that he'd give something away.

   Goodman, Eddie Price thought. His pistol was in the map pocket in the left-side door of the aircraft, well-hidden under a pile of flight charts, but easy to reach with his left hand. He'd get it, then turn quickly, bring it up and fire if it came to that. Hidden in his left ear, the radio receiver, which looked like a hearing aid if one saw it, kept him posted, though it was a little hard to hear over the engine and rotor sounds of the Sikorsky. Now Petra's pistol was aimed at himself, or the pilot, as she moved it back and forth.

   "Riflemen, do you have your targets?" Chavez-asked. "Rifle Two-One, affirmative, target in sight."

   "Rifle Two-Two, negative, I have something in the way. Recommend switch to subject Furchtner."

   "Okay, Rifle Two-Two, switch to Furchtner. Rifle Two-One, Dortmund is all yours."

   "Roger that, lead," Johnston confirmed. "Rifle TwoOne has subject Dortmund all dialed in." The sergeant reshot the range with his laser. One hundred forty-four meters. At this range, his bullet would drop less than an inch from the muzzle, and his "battle-sight" setting of two hundred fifty meters was a little high. He altered his crosshairs hold to just below the target's left eye. Physics would do the rest. His rifle had target-type double-set triggers. Pulling the rear trigger reduced the break-pull on the front one to a hard wish, and he was already making that wish. The helicopter would not be allowed to take off. Of more immediate concern, they couldn't allow the subjects to close the leftside door. His 7-mm match bullet Would probably penetrate the polycarbonate window in the door, but the passage would deflect his round unpredictably, maybe causing a miss, perhaps causing the death or wounding of a hostage. He couldn't let that happen.

   Chavez was well out of the action now, commanding instead of leading, something he'd practiced but didn't like very much. It was easier to be there with a gun in your hands than to stand back and tell people what to do by remote. control. But he had no choice. Okay, he thought, we have Number One in the chopper and a gun on her. Number Two was in the open, two-thirds of the way to the chopper, and a gun on him. Two more bad guys were approaching the halfway point, with Mike Pierce and Steve Lincoln within forty meters, and the last two subjects still in the house, with Louis Loiselle and George Tomlinson in the bushes right and left of them. Unless the bad guys had set up overwatch in the house, one or more additional subjects to come out after the rest had made it to the chopper . . . very unlikely, Chavez decided, and in any case all the hostages were either in the open or soon would be and rescuing them was the mission, not necessarily killing the bad guys, he reminded himself. It wasn't a game and it wasn't a sport, and his plan, already briefed to Team-2's members, was holding up. The key to it now was the final team of subjects.

   Rosenthal saw the snipers. It was to be expected, though it had occurred to no one. He was the head gardener. The lawn was his, and the odd piles of material left and right of the helicopter were things that didn't belong, things that he would have known about. He'd seen the TV shows and movies. This was a terrorist incident, and the police would respond somehow. Men with guns would be out there, and there were two things on his lawn that hadn't been there in the morning. His eyes lingered on Weber's position, then fixed on it. There was his salvation or his death. There was no telling now, and that fact caused his stomach to contract into a tight, acid-laden ball.

   "Here they come," George Tomlinson announced, when he saw two legs step out of the house . . . women's legs, followed by a man's, then two more sets of women's . . . and then a man's. "One subject and two hostages out. Two more hostages to go . . ."

   Furchtner was almost there, heading to the right side of the helicopter, to the comfort of Dieter Weber. But then he stopped, seeing inside the open right-side door to where Gerhardt Dengler was sitting, and decided to go to the other side.

   "Okay, Team, stand by," Chavez ordered, trying to keep all four groups juggled in the same control, sweeping his binoculars over the field. As soon as the last were in the open . . .

   "You; get inside, facing back." Furchtner pushed Brownie toward the aircraft.

   "Off target, Rifle Two-Two is off the subject," Weber announced rather loudly over the radio circuit.

   "Re-target on the next group," Chavez ordered.

   "Done," Weber said. "I'm on the lead subject, group three."

   "Rifle Two-One, report!"

   "Rifle Two-One tight on Subject Dortmund," Homer Johnston replied at once.

   "Ready here!" Loiselle reported next from the bushes at the back of the house. "We have the fourth group now."

   Chavez took a deep breath. All the bad guys were now in the open, and now it was time:

   "Okay, Lead to team, execute, execute, execute!"

   Loiselle and Tomlinson were already tensed to stand, and both fairly leaped to their feet invisibly, seven meters behind their targets, who were looking the wrong way and never had a clue what was going on behind them. Both soldiers lined up their tritium-lit sights on their targets. Both were pushing – dragging – women, and both were taller than their hostages, which made things easy. Both MP-1D submachine guns were set on three-round burst, and both sergeants fired at the same instant. There was no immediate sound. Their weapons were fully suppressed by the design in which the barrel and silencer were integrated, and the range was too close to miss. Two separate heads were blown apart by multiple impacts of large hollowpoint bullets, and both bodies dropped limp to the lush green grass almost as quickly as the cartridge cases ejected by the weapons that had killed them.

  "This is George. Two subjects dead!" Tomlinson called over the radio, as he started running to the hostages who were still walking toward the helicopter.

   Homer Johnston was starting to cringe as a shape entered his field of view. It seemed to be a female body from the pale silk blouse, but his sight picture was not obscured yet, and with his crosshair reticle set just below Petra Dortmund's left eye, his right index finger pushed gently back on the set-trigger The rifle roared, seeding a meter-long muzzle flash into the still night air

   –she'd just seen two pale flashes in the direction of the house, but she didn't have time to react when the bullet struck the orbit just above her left eye. The bullet drove through the thickest part of her skull. It passed a few more centimeters and then the bullet fragmented into over a hundred tiny pieces, ripping her brain tissue to mush, which then exploded out the back of her skull in an expanding red pink cloud that splashed over Gerhardt Dengler's face-

   –Johnston worked the bolt, swiveling his rifle for another target; he'd seen the bullet dispatch the first.

   Eddie Price saw the flash, and his hands were already moving from the execute command heard half a second earlier: He-pulled his pistol from the map-pocket and dove out the helicopter's autolike door, aiming it one-handed at Hans Furchtner's head, firing one round just below his left eye, which expanded and exploded out the top of his head. A second round followed, higher, and actually not a well-aimed shot, but Furchtner was already dead, falling to the ground, his hand still holding Erwin Ostermann's upper arm, and pulling him down somewhat until the fingers came loose.

   That left two. Steve Lincoln took careful aim from a kneeling position, then stopped as his target passed behind the head of an elderly man wearing a vest. "Shit," Lincoln managed to say.

   Weber got the other one, whose head exploded like a melon from the impact of the rifle bullet.

   Rosenthal saw the head burst apart like something in a horror movie, but the large stubbly head next to his was still there, eyes suddenly wide open, and a machine gun still in his hand – and nobody was shooting at this one, standing next to him. Then Stubble-Head's eyes met his, and there was fear/hate/shock there, and Rosenthal's stomach turned to sudden ice, all time stopped around him. The paring knife came out of his sleeve and into his hand, which he swung wildly, catching the back of Stubble-Head's left hand. Stubble-Head's eyes went wider as the elderly man jumped aside, and his one hand went slack on the forestock of his weapon.

   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.

   "Thank God," George Winston noted. "Hell, I know that guy. Erwin's good people," the Secretary of the Treasury said on his way out of the White House, where the cabinet meeting had run very long.

   "Who did the takedown?"

   "Well-" That caught him short. He wasn't supposed to say, and wasn't supposed to know. "What did the news say?"

   "Local cops, Vienna police SWAT team, I guess."

   "Well, I suppose they learned up on how to do it," SecTreas opined, heading toward his car with his Secret Service detail.

   "The Austrians? Who'd they learn it from?"

   "Somebody who knows how, I guess," Winston replied, getting into the car.

   "So, what's the big deal about it?" Carol Brightling asked the Secretary of the Interior. To her it looked like another case of boys and their toys.

   "Nothing, really," the Secretary replied, her own protective detail guiding her to the door of her official car. "Just that what they showed on TV, it was a pretty good job of rescuing all those people. I've been to Austria a few times, and the cops didn't strike me as all that great. Maybe I'm wrong. But George acts like he knows more than he's telling."

   "Oh, that's right, Jean, he's 'inner cabinet,' " Dr. Brightling observed. It was something those in the "outer cabinet" didn't like. Of course, Carol Brightling wasn't technically in the cabinet at all. She had a seat against the wall instead of around the table, there only in case the issues of the meeting required a scientific opinion, which they hadn't today. Good news and bad news. She got to listen in on everything, and she took her notes on all that happened in the ornate, stuffy room that overlooked the Rose Garden, while the President controlled the agenda and the pace-badly in today's case, she thought. Tax policy had taken over an hour, and they'd never gotten to use of national forests, which came under the Department of the Interior, which issue had been postponed to the next meeting, a week away.

   She didn't have a protective detail, either, not even an office in the White House itself. Previous Presidential Science Advisors had been in the West Wing, but she'd been moved to the Old Executive Office Building. It was a larger and more comfortable office, with a window, which her basement office in the White House would not have had, but though the OEOB was considered part of the white House for administrative and security purposes, it didn't have quite the prestige, and prestige was what it was all about if you were part of the White House staff: Even under this President, who worked pretty hard to treat everyone the same and who wasn't into the status bullshit – there was no avoiding it at this level of government. And so, Carol Brightling clung to her right to have lunch in the White House Mess with the Big Boys and Big Girls of the Administration, and grumbled that to see the President except at his request, she had to go through the Chief of Staff and the appointments secretary to get a few minutes of His Valuable Time. As though she'd ever wasted it. A Secret Service agent opened the door for her with a respectful nod and smile, and she walked into this surpassingly ugly building, then turned right to her office, which at least overlooked the White House. She handed her notes to her (male, of course) secretary on the way in for transcription, then sat down at her desk, fording there a new pile of papers to be read and acted upon. She opened her desk drawer and got herself a starlight mint to suck on as she attacked the ,pile. Then on reflection she lifted her TV controller and turned her office television to CNN for a look at what was happening around the world. It was the top of the hour, and the lead story was the thing in Vienna.

   God, what a house was her first thought. Like a king's palace, a huge waste of resources for one man, or even one large family, to use as a private residence. What was it Winston had said of the owner? Good people? Sure. All good people lived like wastrels, glomming up precious resources like that. Another goddamned plutocrat, stock trader, currency speculator, however he earned the money to buy a place like that-and then terrorists had invaded his privacy. Well, gee, she thought, I wonder why they picked him. No sense attacking a sheep farmer or truck driver. Terrorists went after the moneyed people, of the supposedly important ones, because going for ordinary folks had little in the way of a political point, and these were, after all, political acts. But they hadn't been as bright as they ought to have been. Whoever had picked them had . . picked them to fail? Was that possible? She supposed that it was. It was apolitical act, after all, and such thugs could have all manner of real purposes. That brought a smile, as the reporter described the attack by the local police SWAT team-unfortunately not shown, be cause the local cops hadn't wanted cameras and reporters in the way-then the release of the hostages, shown in closeup to let people share the experience. They'd been so close to death, only to be released, saved by the local cops, who'd really only restored to them their programmed time of death, because everything died, sooner or later. That was Nature's plan, and you couldn't fight Nature . . . though you could help her along, couldn't you? The reporter, went on to say that this had been the second terrorist incident in Europe over the last couple of months, both of them failures due to adroit police action. Carol remembered the attempted robbery in Bern, another botch . . . a creative one? She might have to find that out, though in this case a failure was as useful as-no, more useful than a success, for the people who were planning things. That thought brought a smile. Yes. It was more useful than a success, wasn't it? And with that she looked down at a fax from Friends of the Earth, who had her direct number and frequently sent her what they thought was important information.

   She leaned back in her comfortable high-backed chair to read it over twice. A good bunch of people with the right ideas, though few listened to them.

   "Dr. Brightling?" Her secretary stuck his head in the door.

   "Yes, Roy?" .

   "You still want me to show you those faxes-like the one you're reading, I mean?" Roy Gibbons asked.

   "Oh, yes-,,

   "But those people are card-carrying nuts."

   "Not really. I like some of the things they do," Carol replied, tossing the fax in her trash can. She'd save their idea for some future date.

   "Fair enough, doc." The head disappeared back into the outer office. The next thing in her pile was pretty important, a report of procedures for shutting down nuclear power reactors, and the subsequent safety of the shut-down reactor systems: how long before environmental factors might attack and corrode the internal items, and what environmental damage could result from it. Yes, this was very important stuff, and fortunately the index appended to it showed data on individual reactors across the country. She popped another starlight mint into her mouth and leaned forward, setting the papers flat on the desktop so that she could stare straight down at them for reading purposes.

   "This seems to work," Steve said quietly.

   "How many strands fit inside?" Maggie asked.

   "Anywhere from three to ten."

   "And how large is the overall package?"

   "Six microns. Would you believe it? The packaging is white in color, so it reflects light pretty well, especially UV radiation, and in a water-spray environment, it's just about invisible." The individual capsules couldn't be seen with the naked eye, and only barely with an optical microscope. Better still, their weight was such that they'd float in air about the same as dust particles, as readily breathable as secondhand smoke in a singles bar. Once in the body, the coating would dissolve, and allow release of the Shiva strands into the lungs or the upper GI, where they could go to work.

   "Water soluble?" Maggie asked.

   "Slowly, but faster if there's anything biologically active in the water, like the trace hydrochloric acid in saliva, for example. Wow, we could have really made money from the Iraqis with this one, kiddo – or anybody, who wants to play bio-war in the real world."

   Their company had invented the technology, working on an NIH grant designed to develop an easier way than needles to deliver vaccines. Needles required semiskilled use. The new technique used electrophoresis to wrap insignificantly tiny quantities of protective gel around even smaller amounts of airborne bioactive agents. That would allow people to ingest vaccines with a simple drink rather than the more commonly used method of inoculation. If they ever fielded a working AIDS vaccine, this would be the method of choice for administering it in Africa where countries lacked the infrastructure to do much of anything. Steve had just proven that the same technology could be used to deliver active virus with the same degree of safety and reliability. Or almost proven it.

   "How do we proof-test it?" Maggie asked.

   "Monkeys. How we fixed for monkeys in the lab?"

   "Lots," she assured him. This would be an important step. They'd give it to a few monkeys; then see how well it spread through the laboratory population. They'd use rhesus monkeys. Their blood was so similar to humans."

   Subject Four was the first, as expected. He was fifty-three years old and his liver function was so far off the scale as to qualify him for a high place on the transplant list at the University of Pittsburgh. His skin had a yellowish cast in the best of circumstances, but that didn't stop him from hitting the booze harder than any of their test subjects. His name, he said, was Chester something, Dr. John Killgore remembered. Chester's brain function was about the lowest in the group as well. He watched TV– a lot, rarely talked to anyone, never even read comic books, which were popular with the rest, as were TV .cartoons-watching the Cartoon Channel was among their most popular pastimes.

   They were all in hog heaven, John Killgore had noted. All the booze and fast food and warmth that they could want, and most of them were even learning to use the showers. From time to time, a few would ask what the deal was here, but their inquiries were never pressed beyond the pro-forma answer they got from the doctors and security guards.

   But with Chester; they had to take action now. Killgore entered the room and called his name. Subject Four rose from his bunk and came over; clearly feeling miserable.

   "Not feeling good, Chester?" Killgore asked from behind his mask.

   "Stomach, can't keep stuff down, feel crummy all over," Four replied.

   "Well, come along with me and we'll see what wa can do about that, okay?" , .

   "You say so, doc," Chester replied, augmenting= the agreement with a loud belch.

   Outside the door, they put him in a wheelchair. It was only fifty yards to the clinical side of the installation. Two orderlies lifted Number Four into a bed, and restrained him into it with– Velcro ties. Then one of them took a blood sample. Ten minutes later, Killgore tested it' for Shiva antibodies, and the sample turned blue, as expected. Chester, Subject Number Four, had less than a week to live not as much as the six to twelve months to which his alcoholism had already limited him, but not really all that much of a reduction, was it? Killgore went back inside to start an IV into his arm, and to calm Chester down; he hung a morphine drip that soon had him unconscious and even smiling slightly. Good. Number Four would soon die, but he would do so in relative peace. Mare than anything else, Dr. Killgore wanted to keep the process orderly.

   He checked his watch when he got back to his office/ viewing room. His hours were long ones. It was almost like being a real physician again. He hadn't practiced clinical medicine since his residency, but he read all the right journals and knew the techniques, and besides, his current crop of patient/victims wouldn't know the difference anyway. Tough luck, Chester, but ,it's a tough world out there, Steve Nought, going back to his notes. Chester's early response to the virus had been a little unsettling--only half the time programmed-but it had been brought about by his grossly reduced liver function. It couldn't, be helped. Some people would get hit sooner than others because of differing physical vulnerabilities, So the outbreak would start unevenly. It shouldn't matter in the eventual effects, though it would alert people sooner than he hoped it would. That would cause a run on the vaccines Steve Berg and his shop were developing. "A" would be widely distributed after the rush to manufacture it. "B" would be more closely held, assuming that he and his team could indeed get it ready for use. "A" would go out to everybody, while "B" would go only to those people who were supposed to survive, people who understood what it was all about, or who would accept their survival and get on with things with the rest of the crew.

   Killgore shook his head. There was a lot of stuff left to be done, and as usual, not enough time to do it.

   Clark and Stanley went over the takedown immediately upon their arrival in the morning, along with Peter Covington, still sweaty from his morning workout with Team-1. Chavez and his people would just be waking up after their long day on the European mainland.

   "It was a bloody awful tactical situation. And Chavez is right," Major Covington went on. "We need our own helicopter crews. Yesterday's mission cried out for that, but we didn't have what we needed: That's why he had to execute a poor plan and depend on luck to. accomplish it."

   –"He could have asked their army for help;" Stanley pointed out.

   "Sir, we both know that one doesn't commit to an important tactical move with a helicopter crew one doesn't know and with -whom one has not worked," Covington observed, in his best Sandhurst grammar. "We neat to look at this issue immediately."

   "True," Stanley agreed, looking over at Clark.

   "Not part of the TO and E, but I see the point," Rainbow Six conceded. How the hell had they overlooked this requirement? He asked himself. "Okay, first let's figure all the chopper types we're likely to see, and then find out if we can get some drivers who're current in most of them."

   "Ideally, I'd love to have a Night Stalker-but we'd have to take it with us everywhere we -go, and that means--what? A C5 or a C-17 transport aircraft assigned to us at all times?" Stanley observed.

   Clark nodded. The Night Stalker version of the McDonnell-Douglas AH-6 Loach had been invented for Task Force 160; now redesignated the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment-SOAR-based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. They were probably the wildest and craziest bunch of aviators in the world, who worked on the sly with brother aviators from selected other cauntries Britain and Israel were the two most often allowed into the 160 compound at Campbell. In a real sense, getting, the choppers and flight crews assigned to Rainbow would be the easy part. .The hard part would be getting the fixed wing transport needed to move the chopper to where they needed it. It'd be about as hard to hide as an elephant in a schoolyard. With Night Stalker they'd have all manner of surveillance gear, a special silent rotor-and Santa on his fucking sleigh with eight tiny reindeer, Clark's mind went on. It would never happen, despite all the drag he had in Washington and London.

   "Okay, I'll call Washington for authorization to get some aviators on the team. Any problem getting some aircraft here for them to play with?"

   "Shouldn't be," Stanley replied.

   John checked his watch. He'd have to wait until 9:00 A.M. Washington time-2:00 P.m. in England to make his pitch via the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which .was the routing agency for Rainbow's American funding. He wondered how Ed Foley would react-more to the point, he needed Ed to be an enthusiastic advocate. Well, that ought not to be too hard. Ed knew field operations, after a fashion, and was loyal to the people at the sharp end. Better yet, Clark was asking after they'd had a major sums, and that usually worked a lot better than a plea for help after a failure. .

   "Okay, we'll continue this with the team debrief." Clark stood and went to his office. Helen Montgomery had the usual pile of papers on his desk, somewhat higher than usual, as this one included the expected thank-you telegrams from the Austrians. The one from the Justice Minister was particularly flowery.

   "Thank you, sir," John breathed, setting that one aside.

   The amazing part of this job was all the admin stuff. As the commander of Rainbow, Clark had to keep track of when and how money came in and was spent, and he had to defendsuch things as the number of gun rounds his people fired every week. He did his best to slough much of this off on Alistair Stanley end Mrs. Montgomery, but a lot of it still leaded on his desk. He had long experience as a government employee, and at CIA he'd had to report in endless detail on every field operation he'd ever run to keep the desk weenies happy. But this was well beyond that, and it accounted for his time on the firing range, as he found shooting a good means of relief, especially if he imagined the images of his bureacratic tormentors in the center of the targets he perforated with .45-caliber bullets: Justifying a budget was something new and foreign. If it wasn't important, why fund it at all, and if it was important; why quibble oar a few thousand bucks' worth of bullets? It was the bureaucratic mentality, of course, all these people who sat at their desks and felt that the world would collapse around them if they didn't have ail their papers initialed, signed, stamped, and properly filed, and if that inconvenienced others, too bad. So he, John Terrence Clark, CIA field officer for more than thirty years, a quiet legend in has agency, was stuck at his expensive desk, behind a closed door, working on paperwork that any self respecting accountant would have rejected, on top of which he had to supervise and pass judgment on real stuff, which was both more interesting and far more to the point.

   And it wasn't as though his budget was all that much to worry about. Less than fifty people, total, scarcely three million dollars in payroll expense, since everyone was paid the usual military rate, plus the fact that Rainbow picked up everyone's housing expense out of its multi-government funding. One inequity was that the American soldiers were better paid than their European counterparts. That bothered John a little, but there was nothing he could do about it, and with housing costs picked up-the housing at Hereford wasn't lavish, but it was comfortable-nobody had any trouble living. The morale of the troops was excellent. He'd expected that. They were elite troopers, and that sort invariably had a good attitude, especially since they trained almost every day, and soldiers loved to train almost as much as they loved to do the things they trained for.

   There would be a little discord. Chavez's Team-2 had drawn both field missions, as a result of which they'd swagger a little more, to the jealous annoyance of Peter Covington'sTeam-1, which was slightly ahead on the team/team competition of PT and shooting. Not even a cat's whisker of difference, but people like this, as competitive as any athletes could ever be, worked damned hard for that fifth of a percentage point, and it really came down to who'd had what for breakfast on the mornings of the competitive exercises, or maybe what they'd dreamed about doing the night. Well, that degree of competition was healthy for the team as a whole. And decidedly unhealthy for those against whom his people deployed.

   Bill Tawney was at his desk as well, going over the known information on the terrorists of the night before. The Austrians had begun their inquiries with the German-Federal Police Office-the Bundes Kriminal Amt--even before the takedown. The identities of Hans Fiuchtner and Petra fund had been confirmed by fingerprints. The BKA investigators would jump onto the case hard that day. For starters, they'd trace the IDs of the people who'd rented the car that had been driven to the Ostermann home, and search for the house in Germany-probably Germany, Tawney reminded himself-that they'd lived in: The other four would probably be harder. Fingerprints had already been taken and were being compared on the computer scanning systems that everyone had now. Tawney agreed with the initial assessment of the Austrians that the four spear-carriers had probably been from the former East ` Germany, which seemed to be turning out all manner of political aberrants: converts from communism who were now discovering the joys of nazism, lingering true believers in the previous political-economic– model, and just plain thugs who were a major annoyance to the regular German police forces.

   But this had to be political. Furchtner and Dortmund were had been, Bill corrected himself-real, believing communists all their lives. They'd been raised in the former West Germany to middle-class families, the way a whole generation of terrorists had, striving all their active lives for socialist perfection or some such illusion. Anti so they had raided the home of a high-end capitalist . . . seeking what?

   Tawney lifted a set of faxes from Vienna. Erwin Ostermann had told the police during his three-hour debrief that they'd sought his "special inside codes" to the international trading system. Were there such things? Probably not, Tawney judged-why not make sure? He lifted his phone and dialed the number of an old friend, Martin Cooker, a former "Six" man who now worked in Lloyd's ugly building in London's financial district.

   "Cooper," a voice said.

   "Martin, this is Bill Tawney. How are you this rainy morning?"

   "Quite well, Bill, and you-what are you doing now?"