Jack Ryan 10 - Rainbow Six (75 page)

An English breakfast was much the same as an American one: bacon, eggs, toast, coffee-English breakfast tea for some-fuel for the coming day. Some of the troopers ate light, and some ate heavy, in accordance with their personal metabolic rates. By this time, all were in their day uniforms, ready to head off to their desks. Tim Noonan would be giving a lecture today on communications security. The new radios from E-Systems hardly needed the introduction, but Noonan wanted them to know everything about them, including how the encryption systems worked. Now the team members could talk back and forth, and anyone trying to listen in would hear only the hiss of static. The same had been true before, but the new portable radios, with their headsets and reed-thin microphones that hung out in front of their faces, were a great technical improvement, Noonan had told Chavez. Then Bill Tawney would brief them on any new developments in the intelligence and investigations on their three field deployments. After that came the before-lunch trip to the range for marksmanship practice, but today no live-fire/ live-target exercise. Instead they'd practice long-rope deployments from Malloy's Helicopter.

It promised to be a full, if routine, day for Rainbow. Chavez almost added “boring” to the description, but he knew that John worked hard to vary the routine, and, beides, you practiced the fundamentals, because they were, well, fundamental to getting the job done, the things you held on to when the tactical situation went to shit and you didn't have the time to think about what to do. By this time, every Team-2 member knew how every other member thought, and so, on exercises where the actual scenario was different from the tactical intelligence they'd been iven going in, somehow the team members just adapted, sometimes without words, every trooper knowing what his partner and the others in the team would do, as if they'd communicated by telepathy. That was the reward for the intensive, intellectually boring training. Team-2, and Peter Covington's Team-1, had evolved into living, thinking organisms whose parts just acted properly-and seemed to do so automatically. When Chavez thought about it, he found it remarkable, but on training exercises, it seemed as natural as breathing. Like Mike Pierce leaping over the desk in Worldpark. That hadn't been part of the training regimen, but he'd done it, and done it perfectly, and the only thing wrong was that his first burst hadn't taken his subject in the head, but instead had stitched down his back-causing wounds that would have been rapidly fatal - then followed it with a second burst that had blown the bastard's head apart. Boom. Zap. Splatter. And the other team members had trusted Pierce to cover his sector, and then, after cleansing it of opposition, to assist with others. Like the fingers of his hand, Chavez thought, able to form into a deadly fist, but also able to do separate tasks, because each finger had a brain. And they were all his men. That was the best part of all.

Getting the weapons was the easiest part. It struck outsiders as comical-Irishmen with guns were like squirrels with nuts, always stashing them, and sometimes forgetting where the hell they'd been stashed. For a generation, people had shipped arms to the IRA, and the IRA had cached them, mainly burying theirs for the coming time when the entire Irish nation would rise up under Provo leadership and engage the English invaders, driving them forever from the sacred soil of Ireland . . . or something like that, Grady thought. He'd personally buried over three thousand weapons, most of them Russian-made AKMS assault rifles, like this stash in a farm field in County Tipperary. He'd buried this shipment forty meters west of a large oak tree, over the hill from the farmhouse. They were two meters-six feet-down, deep enough that the farmer's tractor wouldn't hurt or accidentally unearth them, and shallow enough that getting them took only an hour's spadework. There were a hundred of them, delivered in 1984 by a helpful soul he'd first met in Lebanon, along with pre-loaded plastic magazines, twenty per rifle. It was all in a series of boxes, the weapons and the ammunition wrapped in greased paper, the way the Russians did it, to protect them against moisture. Most of the wrappings were still intact, Grady saw, as he selected carefully. He removed twenty weapons, tearing open each one's paper to check for rust or corrosion, working the bolts back and forth, and in every case finding that the packing grease was intact, the same as when the weapons had left the factory at Kazan. The AKMS was the updated version of the AK-47, and these were the folding-stock version, which were much easier to conceal than the full-size military shoulder weapon. More to the point, this was the weapon his people had trained on in Lebanon. It was easy to use, reliable, and concealable. Those characteristics made it perfect for the purpose intended. The fifteen he took, along with three hundred thirty-round magazines, were loaded into the back of the truck, and then it was time to refill the hole. After three hours, the truck was on its way to yet another farm, this one on the seacoast of County Cork, where there lived a farmer with whom Sean Grady had an arrangement.

Sullivan and Chatham were in the office before seven in the morning, beating the traffic and finding decent parking places for once. The first order of business was to use a computerized crisscross directory to track down the names and addresses from the phone numbers. That was quick. Next up was to meet with the three men who were reported to have known Mary Bannister and Anne Pretloe and interview them. It was possible that one of them was a serial killer or kidnapper. If the first, he would probably be a very clever and circumspect criminal. A serial killer was a hunter of human beings. The smart ones acted strangely like soldiers, first scouting out their victims, discerning their habits and weaknesses, and then moving in to use them as entertaining toys until the fun faded, and it was time to kill them. The homicide aspects of a serial killer's activities were not, strictly speaking, in the purview of the FBI, but the kidnapping was, if the killer had moved his victims across state lines, and since there was a state line only a few hundred yards from Manhattan, that was enough to allow the agents to look into it. They'd have to ask their questions carefully, and remember that a serial killer almost always had an elegant disguise, the better to win the trust of his victims. He'd be kind, maybe handsome, friendly, and totally nonthreatening-until it was too late, and at that point his victim was doomed. He was, both agents knew, the most dangerous of criminals.

Subject F4 was progressing rapidly. Neither the Interferon nor the Interleukin-3a had touched her Shiva strands, which were replicating with gusto, and in her case attacking her liver with ferocious speed. The same was true of her pancreas, which was disintegrating, causing a serious internal bleed. Strange, Dr. Killgore thought. The Shiva had taken its time to assert itself, but then once it had started affecting the test subject's body, it had gone to town, eating away like a glutton at a feast. Mary Bannister, he decided, had about five days left.

M7, Chip Smitton, was little better off. His immune system was doing its best, but Shiva was just too malignant for him, working more slowly than in F4, but just as inexorably.

F5, Anne Pretloe, was from the deep end of the gene pool. He'd bothered to take full medical histories of all the current crop of test subjects. Bannister had a family history of cancer - breast cancer had claimed her mother and grandmother, and he saw that Shiva was working rapidly in her. Might there be a correlation between vulnerability to cancer and infectious disease? Could that indicate that cancer was fundamentally a disease of the immune system, as many physicianscientists suspected? It was the stuff of a paper for the New England Journal of Medicine, might get himself some additional standing in his communitybut he didn't have the time, and anyway, by the time he published, there'd be few to read it. Well, it would be something to talk about in Kansas, because they'd still be practicing medicine there, and still working on the Immortality Project. Most of Horizon's best medical researchers were not really part of the Project, but they couldn't kill them, could they? And so, like many others, they'd find themselves beneficiaries of the Project's largesse. They would be allowing far more people than necessary to live-oh, sure, they needed the genetic diversity, and why not pick smart people who'd eventually understand why the Project had done what it had? And even if they didn't, what choice would they have but to live? All of them were earmarked for the -B vaccine Steve Berg had developed along with the lethal -A variant. In any case, his speculation had scientific value, even though it was singularly useless for the test subjects who now filled every available room in the treatment area. Killgore gathered his notes and started rounds, beginning with F4, Mary Bannister.

Only the heavy morphine dose made life tolerable for her. The dosage might have killed a healthy person, and would have been enough to delight the most hardened IV-drug user.

“How are we feeling this morning?” the doctor asked brightly.

“Tired . . . weak... crummy,” Mary Bannister replied.

“How's the pain, Mary?”

“It's there, but not so bad . . . mainly my stomach.” Her face was deathly pale from the internal bleeding, and the petechiae were sufficiently prominent on her face that she couldn't be allowed to use a mirror, lest the sight panic her. They wanted all the subjects to die comfortably. It would be far less trouble for everyone that way - a kindness not shown to other test subjects, Killgore thought. It wasn't fair, but it was practical. The lower animals they tested didn't have the capacity to make trouble, and there were no useful data on how to medicate them against pain. Maybe he'd develop some in Kansas. That would be a worthy use of his abilities, he thought, as he made another upward adjustment in F4's morphine drip . . . just enough to . . . yes, make her stuporous. He could show her the mercy he would have liked to have shown rhesus monkeys. Would they do animal experimentation in Kansas? There would be practical difficulties. Getting the animals to the labs would be very difficult in the absence of international air-freight service, and then there was the aesthetic issue. Many of the project members would not approve, and they had a point. But, damn it, it was hard to develop drugs and treatment modalities without some animal testing. Yes, Killgore thought, leaving one treatment room for another, it was tough on the conscience, but scientific progress had a price, and they were saving literally millions Of animals, weren't they? They'd needed thousands of animals to develop Shiva, and nobody had really objected to that. Another subject for discussion at the staff conference, he decided, entering M7's room.
“How are we feeling, Chip?” he asked.

They collectively thanked Providence for the lack of Garda in this part of County Cork. There was little crime. lifter all, and therefore little reason for them. The Irish national police were as efficient as their British colleagues, and their intelligence section unfortunately cooperated with the “Five” people in London, but neither service had managed to find Sean Grady-at least not after he'd identified and eliminated the informers in his cell. Both of hem had vanished from the face of the earth and fed the salmon, or whatever fish liked the taste of informer flesh. Grady remembered the looks on their faces as they protested their innocence right up until the moment they'd been thrown into the sea, fifteen miles offshore, with iron weights on their legs. Protested their innocence? Then why had the SAS never troubled his cell again after three serious attempts to eliminate them all? Innocence be damned.

They had half-filled a delightful provincial pub called The Foggy Dew, named after a favored rebel song, after several hours of weapons practice on the isolated coastal farm, which was too far from civilization for people to hear the distinctive chatter of automatic-weapons fire. It had required a few magazines each for his men to reassert their expertise with the AKMS assault rifles, but shoulder weapons were easily mastered, and that one more easily than most. Now they talked about nonbusiness matters, just a bunch of friends having a few pints. Most watched t he football game on the wall-hung telly. Grady did the same, but with his brain in neutral, letting it slide over the next mission, examining and reexamining the scene in his mind, thinking about how quickly the British or this new Rainbow group might arrive. The direction of their approach was obvious. He had that all planned for, and the more he went over his operational concept, the better he seemed to like it. He might well lose some people, but that was the cost of doing business for the revolutionary, and looking around the pub at his people, he knew that they accepted the risks just as readily as he did.

He checked his watch, subtracted five hours, and reached into his pocket to turn on his cell phone. He did this three times per day, never leaving it on for more than ten minutes at a time, as a security measure. He had to be careful. Only that knowledge-and some luck, he admitted to himself-had allowed him to carry on the war this long. Two minutes later, it rang. Grady rose from his seat and walked outside to take the call.

“Hello.”

“Sean, this is Joe.”

“Hello, Joe,” Grady said pleasantly. “How are things in Switzerland?”

“Actually, I'm in New York at the moment. I just wanted to tell you that the business thing we talked about, the financing, it's done,” Popov told him.

“Excellent. What of the other matter, Joe?”

“I'll be bringing that myself. I'll be over in two days. I'm flying into Shannon on my business jet. I should get in about six-thirty in the morning.”

“I shall be there to see you,” Grady promised.

“Okay, my friend. I will see you then.”

“Good-bye, Joe.”

“Bye, Sean.” And the line went dead. Grady thumbed off the power and replaced the phone in his pocket. If anyone had overheard it - not likely, since he could see all the way to the horizon, and there were no parked trucks in evidence . . . and, besides, if anyone knew where he was, they would have come after him and his men with a platoon of soldiers and/or police-all they would have heard was a business chat, brief, cryptic, and to the point. He went back inside.