Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (335 page)

The man who’d dragged the body out was one Hans Richter, a German national from Bonn who banked here for his Swiss-based trading business.

“Did you see their faces?” Price asked.

“Yes.” A shaky nod. Herr Richter’d had a very bad day to this point. Price selected known German terrorists and started flashing photos.

“Ja, ja,
that one. He is the leader.”

“You are quite sure?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Ernst Model, formerly of Baader-Meinhof, disappeared in 1989, whereabouts unknown.” Price scrolled down. “Four suspected operations to date. Three were bloody failures. Nearly captured in Hamburg, 1987, killed two policemen to make his escape. Communist-trained, last suspected to be in Lebanon, that sighting report is thin—very thin, it would seem. Kidnapping was his specialty. Okay.” Price scrolled down some more.

“That one . . . possibly.”

“Erwin Guttenach, also Baader-Meinhof, last spotted 1992 in Cologne. Robbed a bank, background also kidnapping and murder—oh, yes, he’s the chappie who kidnapped and killed a board member of BMW in 1986. Kept the ransom . . . four million D-marks. Greedy bugger,” Price added.

Bellow looked over his shoulder, thinking as fast as he could. “What did he say to you on the phone?”

“We have a tape,” the cop replied.

“Excellent! But I require a translator.”

“Doc, a profile on Ernst Model, quick as you can.” Chavez turned. “Noonan, can we get some coverage on the bank?”

“No problem,” the tech man replied.

“Roebling?” Chavez said next.

“Yes, Major?”

“Will the TV crews cooperate? We have to assume the subjects inside have a TV with them.”

“They will cooperate,” the senior Swiss cop replied with confidence.

“Okay, people, let’s move,” Chavez ordered. Noonan went off to his bag of tricks. Bellow headed around the corner with Herr Richter and another Swiss cop to handle the translation. That left Chavez and Price alone.

“Eddie, am I missing anything?”

“No, Major,” Sergeant Major Price replied.

“Okay, number one, my name is Ding. Number two, you have more experience in this than I do. If you have something to say, I want to hear it
right now,
got it? We ain’t in no fuckin’ wardroom here. I need your brains, Eddie.”

“Very well, sir—Ding.” Price managed a smile. His commander was working out rather nicely. “So far, so good. We have the subjects contained, good perimeter. We need plans of the building and information on what’s happening inside—Noonan’s job, and he seems a competent chappie. And we need an idea of what the opposition is thinking—Dr. Bellow’s job, and he is excellent. What’s the plan if the opposition just starts shooting out of hand?”

“Tell Louis, two flash-bangs at the front door, toss four more inside, and we blow in like a tornado.”

“Our body armor—”

“Won’t stop a seven-six-two Russian. I know,” Chavez agreed. “Nobody ever said it was safe, Eddie. When we know a little more, we can figure a real assault plan.” Chavez clapped him on the shoulder. “Move, Eddie.”

“Yes, sir.” Price moved off to join the rest of the team.

Popov hadn’t known that the Swiss police had such a well-trained counterterrorist squad. As he watched, the commander was crouching close to the front of the bank building, and another, his second-in-command, probably, was heading around the corner to the rest of the team. They were speaking with the escaped hostage—someone had walked him out of sight. Yes, these Swiss police were well trained and well-equipped. H&K weapons, it appeared. The usual for this sort of thing. For his own part, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov stood in the crowd of onlookers. His first impression of Model and his little team of three others had been correct. The German’s IQ was little more than room temperature—he’d even wanted a discussion of Marxism-Leninism with his visitor! The fool. Not even a young fool. Model was into his forties now and couldn’t use youthful exuberance as an excuse for his ideological fixation. But not entirely impractical. Ernst had wanted to see the money, $600,000 in D-marks. Popov smiled, remembering where it had been stashed. It was unlikely that Ernst would ever see it again. Killing the hostage so early—foolish, but not unexpected. He was the sort who’d want to show his resolve and ideological purity, as though anyone cared about that today! Popov grunted to himself and lit a cigar, leaning back against yet another bank building to relax and observe the exercise, his hat pulled down and collar turned up, ostensibly to protect himself from the gathering evening chill, but also to obscure his face. One couldn’t be too careful—a fact lost on Ernst Model and his three
Kameraden.

Dr. Bellow finished his review of the taped phone conversations and the known facts about Ernst Johannes Model. The man was a sociopath with a distinct tendency for violence. Suspected in seven murders personally committed and a few more in the company of others. Guttenach, a less bright individual of the same ilk, and two others, unknown. Richter, the escapee, had told them, unsurprisingly, that Model had killed the first victim himself, shooting him in the back of his head from close range and ordering Richter to drag him out. So, both the shooting and the demonstration of its reality to the police had been ill-considered . . . it all fit the same worrisome profile. Bellow keyed his radio.

“Bellow for Chavez.”

“Yeah, doc, this is Ding.”

“I have a preliminary profile on the subjects.”

“Shoot—Team, you listening?” There followed an immediate cacophony of overlapping responses. “Yeah, Ding.” “Copying, leader.”
“Ja.”
And the rest. “Okay, doc, lay it out,” Chavez ordered.

“First, this is not a well-planned operation. That fits the profile for the suspected leader, Ernst Model, German national, age forty-one, formerly of the Baader-Meinhof organization. Tends to be impetuous, very quick to use violence when cornered or frustrated. If he threatens to kill someone, we have to believe he’s not kidding. His current mental state is very, repeat,
very
dangerous. He knows he has a blown operation. He knows that his likelihood of success is slim. His hostages are his only assets, and he will regard them as expendable assets. Do
not
expect Stockholm Syndrome to set in with this case, people. Model is too sociopathic for that. Neither would I expect negotiations to be very useful. I think that it is very likely that an assault resolution will be necessary tonight or tomorrow.”

“Anything else?” Chavez asked.

“Not at this time,” Dr. Bellow replied. “I will monitor further developments with the local cops.”

Noonan had taken his time selecting the proper tools, and now he was creeping along the outside wall of the bank building, below the level of the windows. At every one of them, he raised his head slowly and carefully to see if the interior curtains allowed any view of the inside. The second one did, and there Noonan affixed a tiny viewing system. This was a lens, roughly the shape of a cobra’s head, but only a few millimeters across, which led by fiber-optic cable to a TV camera set in his black bag around the corner. He placed another at the lower corner of the bank’s glass door, then worked his way back, crawling feet first, slowly and laboriously, to a place where he could stand. That done, he walked all the way around the block to repeat the procedure from the other side of the building, where he was able to make three placements, one again on the door, and two on windows whose curtains were a touch shorter than they ought to have been. He also placed microphones in order to pick up whatever sound might be available. The large plate-glass windows ought to resonate nicely, he thought, though this would apply to extraneous exterior sounds as well as to those originating inside the building.

All the while, the Swiss TV crews were speaking with the senior on-site policeman, who spent a great deal of time saying that the terrorists were serious—he’d been coached by Dr. Bellow to speak of them with respect. They were probably watching television inside, and building up their self-esteem worked for the team’s purposes at the moment. In any case, it denied the terrorists knowledge of what Tim Noonan had done on the outside.

“Okay,” the techie said in his place on a side street. All the video displays were up and running. They showed little. The size of the lenses didn’t make for good imagery, despite the enhancement program built into his computer. “Here’s one shooter . . . and another.” They were within ten meters of the front of the building. The rest of the people visible were sitting on the white marble floor, in the center for easy coverage. “The guy said four, right?”

“Yeah,” Chavez answered. “But not how many hostages, not exactly anyway.”

“Okay, this is a bad guy, I think, behind the teller-places . . . hmph, looks like he’s checking the cash drawers . . . and that’s a bag of some sort. You figure they visited the vault?”

Chavez turned. “Eddie?”

“Greed,” Price agreed. “Well, why not? It
is
a bank, after all.”

“Okay.” Noonan switched displays on the computer screen. “I got blueprints of the building, and this is the layout.”

“Teller cages, vault, toilets.” Price traced his finger over the screen. “Back door. Seems simple enough. Access to the upper floors?”

“Here,” Noonan said. “Actually outside the bank itself, but the basement is accessible to them here, stairs down, and a separate exit to the alley in back.”

“Ceiling construction?” Chavez asked.

“Rebarred concrete slab, forty centimeters thick. That’s solid as hell. Same with the walls and floor. This building was made to last.” So, there would be no explosives-forced entry through walls, floor, or ceiling.

“So, we can go in the front door or the back door, and that’s it. And that puts number four bad guy at the back door.” Chavez keyed his radio. “Chavez for Rifle Two-Two.”

“Ja,
Weber here.”

“Any windows in the back, anything in the door, peep-hole, anything like that, Dieter?”

“Negative. It appears to be a heavy steel door, nothing in it that I can see,” the sniper said, tracing his telescopic sight over the target yet again, and again finding nothing but blank painted steel.

“Okay, Eddie, we blow the rear door with Primacord, three men in that way. Second later, we blow the front glass doors, toss flash-bangs, and move in when they’re looking the wrong way. Two and two through the front. You and me go left. Louis and George go right.”

“Are they wearing body armor?” Price asked.

“Nothing that Herr Richter saw,” Noonan responded, “and nothing visible here—but there ain’t no head-protection anyway, right?” It would be nothing more than a ten-meter shot, an easy distance for the H&K shoulder weapons.

“Quite.” Price nodded. “Who leads the rear-entry team?”

“Scotty, I think. Paddy does the explosives.” Connolly was the best man on the team for that, and both men knew it. Chavez made an important mental note that the subteams had to be more firmly established. To this point he’d kept all his people in the same drawer. That he would have to change as soon as they got back to Hereford.

“Vega?”

“Oso backs us up, but I don’t think we’ll have much use for him on this trip.” Julio Vega had become their heavy-machine gunner, slinging a laser-sighted M-60 7.62-mm machine gun for really serious work, but there wasn’t much use for that now—and wouldn’t be, unless everything went totally to hell.

“Noonan, send this picture to Scotty.”

“Right.” He moved the mouse-pointer and started transmitting everything to the team’s various computers.

“The question now is when.” Ding checked his watch. “Back to the doc.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bellow had spent his time with Herr Richter. Three stiff shots had calmed him down nicely. Even his English had improved markedly. Bellow was walking him through the event for the sixth time when Chavez and Price showed up again.

“His eyes, they are blue, like ice. Like ice,” Richter repeated. “He is not a man like most men. He should be in a cage, with the animals at the zoo.” The businessman shuddered involuntarily.

“Does he have an accent?” Price asked.

“Mixed. Something of Hamburg, but something of Bavaria, too. The others, all Bavarian accents.”

“The Bundes Kriminal Amt will find that useful, Ding,” Price observed. The BKA was the German counterpart to the American FBI. “Why not have the local police check the area for a car with German license plates—from Bavaria? Perhaps there’s a driver about.”

“Good one.” Chavez left and ran over to the Swiss cops, whose chief got on his radio at once. Probably a dry hole, Chavez thought. But you didn’t know until you drilled it. They had to have come here one way or another. Another mental note. Check for that on every job.

Roebling came over next, carrying his cell phone. “It is time,” he said, “to speak with them again.”

“Yo, Tim,” Chavez said over his radio. “Come to the rally point.”

Noonan was there in under a minute. Chavez pointed him to Roebling’s phone. Noonan took it, popped the back off, and attached a small green circuit board with a thin wire hanging from it. Then he pulled a cell phone from a thigh pocket and handed it over to Chavez. “There. You’ll hear everything they say.”

“Anything happening inside?”

“They’re walking around a little more, a little agitated, maybe. Two of them were talking face-to-face a few minutes ago. Didn’t look real happy about things from their gestures.”

“Okay. Everybody up to speed on the interior?”

“How about audio?”

The techie shook his head. “Too much background noise. The building has a noisy heating system—oil-fired hot water, sounds like—that’s playing hell with the window mikes. Not getting anything useful, Ding.”

“Okay, keep us posted.”

“You bet.” Noonan made his way back to his gear.

“Eddie?”

“Were I to make a wager, I’d say we have to storm the place before dawn. Our friend will begin losing control soon.”