Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (344 page)

“Those are bad for you,” Chavez noted.

“So’s what we do for a livin’, Ding. What part of L.A.?”

Ding told him.

“No kiddin’? Hell, I grew up half a mile from there. You were
Banditos
country.”

“Don’t tell me—”

The master chief nodded.
“Piscadores,
till I grew out of it. A judge suggested that I might like enlisting better ’n jail, and so I tried for the Marines, but they didn’t want me. Pussies,” Chin commented, spitting some tobacco off his cigar. “So, went through Great Lakes, they made me a machinist . . . but then I heard about the SEALs, an’, well, ain’t a bad life, y’know? You’re Agency, I hear.”

“Started off as an Eleven-Bravo. Took a little trip to South America that went totally to shit, but I met our Six on the job and he kinda recruited me. Never looked back.”

“Agency send you to school?”

“George Mason, just got my master’s. International relations,” Chavez replied with a nod. “You?”

“Yeah, shows, I guess. Psychology, just a bachelor’s, Old Dominion University. The doc on the team, Bellow. Smart son of a bitch. Mind-reader. I got three of his books at my place.”

“How’s Covington to work for?”

“Good. He’s been there before. Listens good. Thoughtful kinda guy. Good team here, but as usual, not a hell of a lot to do. Liked your takedown at the bank, Chavez. Fast and clean.” Chin blew smoke into the sky.

“Well, thank you, Master Chief.”

“Chavez!” Peter Covington came out the door just then. “Trying to steal my number-one?”

“Just found out we grew up a few blocks apart, Peter.”

“Indeed? That’s remarkable,” the Team-1 commander said.

“Harry’s aggravated his ankle some this morning. No big deal, he’s chewing some aspirin,” Chin told his boss. “He banged it up two weeks ago zip-lining down from the helo,” he added for Ding’s benefit.

Damn training accidents,
the chief didn’t have to add. That was the problem with this sort of work, they all knew. The Rainbow members had been selected for many reasons, not the least of which was their brutally competitive nature. Every man deemed himself to be in competition with every other, and each one of them pushed himself to the limit in everything. It made for injuries and training accidents—and the miracle was that they’d yet to place one of the team into the base hospital. It was sure to happen soon. The Rainbow members could no more turn that aspect of their personalities off than they could stop breathing. Olympic team members hardly had a tougher outlook on what they did. Either you were the very best, or you were nothing. And so every man could run a mile within thirty or forty seconds of the world record, wearing boots instead of track shoes. It did make sense in the abstract. Half a second could easily be the difference between life and death in a combat situation—worse, not the death of one of their own, but of an innocent party, a hostage, the person whom they were sworn to protect and rescue. But the really ironic part was that the Go-Team was not allowed heavy training for fear of a training accident, and so their skills degraded slightly over time—in this case, the two weeks of being stood-to. Three more days to go for Covington’s Team-1, and then, Chavez knew, it would be his turn.

“I hear you don’t like the SWAT program,” Chin said next.

“Not all that much. It’s good for planning movement and stuff, but not so good for the takedowns.”

“We’ve been using it for years,” Covington said. “Much better than it used to be.”

“I’d prefer live targets and MILES gear,” Chavez persisted. He referred to the training system the U.S. military often used, in which every soldier had laser-receivers mounted on his body.

“Not as good at close range as at long,” Peter informed his colleague.

“Oh, never used it that way,” Ding had to admit. “But as a practical matter, once we get close, it’s decided. Our people don’t miss many targets.”

“True,” Covington conceded. Just then came the
crack
of a sniper rifle. Rainbow’s long-riflemen were practicing over on the thousand-yard range, competing to see who could fire the smallest group. The current leader was Homer Johnston, Ding’s Rifle Two-One, an eighth of an inch better than Sam Houston, Covington’s leading long-rifleman, at five hundred yards—at which range either could put ten consecutive shots inside a two-inch circle, which was considerably smaller than the human head both men practiced exploding with their hollow-point match rounds. The fact of the matter was that two misses from any of the Rainbow shooters in a given week of drills was remarkable, and usually explained by tripping on something in the shooting house. The riflemen had yet to miss
anything,
of course. The problem with their mission wasn’t shooting. It was getting in close enough—more than that, making a well-timed decision to move and take down the subjects, for which they most often depended on Dr. Paul Bellow. The shooting part, which they practiced daily, was the tensest part, to be sure, but also technically and operationally the easiest. It seemed perverse in that respect, but theirs was a perverse business.

“Anything on the threat board?” Covington asked.

“I was just heading over, but I doubt it, Peter.” Whatever bad guys were still thinking about making mischief somewhere in Europe had seen TV coverage of the Bern bank, and that would have calmed them down some, both team leaders thought.

“Very good, Ding. I have some paperwork to do,” Covington said, heading back inside his building. On that cue, Chin tossed his cigar into the smokers’ bucket and did the same.

Chavez continued his walk to the headquarters building, returning the salute of the door guard as he went inside. The Brits sure saluted funny, he thought. Once inside, he found Major Bennett at his desk.

“Hey, Sam,”

“Good morning, Ding. Coffee?” The Air Force officer gestured to his urn.

“No, thanks. Anything happening anywhere?”

A shake of the head. “Quiet day. Not even much in the way of crime.”

Bennett’s primary sources for normal criminal activity were the teleprinters for the various European news services. Experience showed that the services notified those who were interested about illegal activity more quickly than the official channels, which generally sent information via secure fax from the American or British embassies across Europe. With that input source quiet, Bennett was working on his computerized list of known terrorists, shifting through the photos and written summaries of what was positively known about these people (generally not much) and what was suspected (not much more).

“What’s this? Who’s that?” Ding asked, pointing at the computer.

“A new toy we’re using. Got it from the FBI. It ages the subject photos. This one is Petra Dortmund. We only have two photos of her, both almost fifteen years old. So, I’m aging her by fifteen years, playing with hair color, too. Nice thing about women—no beards,” Bennett observed with a chuckle. “And they’re usually too vain to pork up, like our pal Carlos did. This one, check out the eyes.”

“Not a girl I’d try to pick up in a bar,” Chavez observed.

“Probably a bad lay anyway, Domingo,” Clark said from behind. “That’s impressive stuff, Sam.”

“Yes, sir. Just set it up this morning. Noonan got it for me from Headquarters Division Technical Services. They invented it to help ID kidnap victims years after they disappeared. It’s been pretty useful for that. Then somebody figured that if it worked on children growing up, why not try it on grown-up hoods. Helped ’em find a top-ten bank robber earlier this year. Anyhow, here’s what Fräulein Dortmund probably looks like now.”

“What’s the name of her significant other?”

“Hans Fürchtner.” Bennett played with his computer mouse to bring up that photo. “Christ, this must be his high-school yearbook pictorial.” Then he scanned the words accompanying the photo. “Okay, likes to drink beer . . . so, let’s give him another fifteen pounds.” In seconds, the photo changed. “Mustache . . . beard . . .” And then there were four photos for this one.

“These two must get along just great,” Chavez noted, remembering his file on the pair. “Assuming they’re still together.” That started a thought moving, and Chavez walked over to Dr. Bellow’s office.

“Hey, doc.”

Bellow looked up from his computer. “Good morning, Ding. What can I do for you?”

“We were just looking at photos of two bad guys, Petra von Dortmund and Hans Fürchtner. I got a question for you.”

“Shoot,” Bellow replied.

“How likely are people like that to stay together?”

Bellow blinked a little, then leaned back in his chair. “Not a bad question at all. Those two . . . I did the evaluation for their active files. . . . They’re probably still together. Their political ideology is probably a unifying factor, an important part of their commitment to each other. Their belief system is what brought them together in the first place, and in a psychological sense they took their wedding vows when they acted out on it—their terrorist jobs. As I recall, they are suspected to have kidnapped and killed a soldier, among other things, and activity like that creates a strong interpersonal bond.”

“But most of the people, you say, are sociopaths,” Ding objected. “And sociopaths don’t—”

“Been reading my books?” Bellow asked with a smile. “Ever hear the one about how when two people marry they become as one?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So in a case like this, it’s real. They
are
sociopaths, but ideology gives their deviance an ethos—and
that
makes it important. Because of that, sharing the ideology makes them one, and their sociopathic tendencies merge. For those two, I would suspect a fairly stable married relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they were formally married, in fact, but probably not in a church,” he added with a smile.

“Stable marriage . . . kids?”

Bellow nodded. “Possible. Abortion is illegal in Germany—the Western part, I think, still. Would they choose to have kids? . . . That’s a good question. I need to think about that.”

“I need to learn more about these people. How they think, how they see the world, that sort of thing.”

Bellow smiled again, rose from his chair, and walked to his bookcase. He took one of his own books and tossed it to Chavez. “Try that for starters. It’s a text at the FBI academy, and it got me over here a few years ago to lecture to the SAS. I guess it got me into this business.”

“Thanks, doc.” Chavez hefted the book for weight and headed out the door.
The Enraged Outlook: Inside the Terrorist Mind
was the title
.
It wouldn’t hurt to understand them a little better, though he figured the best thing about the inside of a terrorist’s mind was a 185-grain 10-mm hollow-point bullet entering at high speed.

Popov could not give them a phone number to call. It would have been grossly unprofessional. Even a cellular phone whose ownership had been carefully concealed would give police agencies a paper—even deadlier today, an electronic—trail that they could run down, much to his potential embarrassment. And so he called them every few days at their number. They didn’t know how that was handled, though there were ways to step a long-distance call through multiple instruments.

“I have the money. Are you prepared?”

“Hans is there now, checking things out,” Petra replied. “I expect we can be ready in forty-eight hours. What of your end?”

“All is in readiness. I will call you in two days,” he said, breaking the connection. He walked out of the phone booth at Charles De Gaulle International Airport and headed toward the taxi stand, carrying his attaché case, which was largely full of hundred D-mark banknotes. He found himself impatient for the currency change in Europe. The equivalent amount of euros would be much easier to obtain than the multiple currencies of Europe.

CHAPTER 7

FINANCE

It was unusual for a European to work out of his home, but Ostermann did. It was large, a former baronial
schloss
(translated as “castle,” though in this case “palace” would have been more accurate) thirty kilometers outside Vienna. Erwin Ostermann liked the
schloss;
it was totally in keeping with his stature in the financial community. It was a dwelling of six thousand square meters divided into three floors, on a thousand hectares of land, most of which was the side of a mountain steep enough to afford his own skiing slopes. In the summer, he allowed local farmers to graze their sheep and goats there . . . not unlike what the peasants once indentured to the
schloss
had done for the
Herr,
to keep the grass down to a reasonable height. Well, it was far more democratic now, wasn’t it? It even gave him a break on the complex taxes put in place by the left-wing government of his country, and more to the point, it looked good.

His personal car was a Mercedes stretch—two of them, in fact—and a Porsche when he felt adventurous enough to drive himself to the nearby village for drinks and dinner in the outstanding
Gasthaus
there. He was a tall man, one meter eighty-six centimeters, with regal gray hair and a trim, fit figure that looked good on the back of one of his Arabian horses—you couldn’t live in a home such as this one without horses, of course. Or when holding a business conference in a suit made in Italy or on London’s Savile Row. His office, on the second floor had been the spacious library of the original owner and eight of his descendants, but it was now aglow with computer displays linked to the world’s financial markets and arrayed on the credenza behind a desk.

After a light breakfast, he headed upstairs to his office, where three employees, two female and one male, kept him supplied with coffee, breakfast pastry, and information. The room was large and suitable for entertaining a group of twenty or so. The walnut-paneled walls were covered with bookshelves filled with books that had been conveyed with the
schloss,
and whose titles Ostermann had never troubled himself to examine. He read the financial papers rather than literature, and in his spare time caught movies in a private screening room in the basement—a former wine-cellar converted to the purpose. All in all, he was a man who lived a comfortable and private life in the most comfortable and private of surroundings. On his desk when he sat down was a list of people to visit him today. Three bankers and two traders like himself, the former to discuss loans for a new business he was underwriting, and the latter to seek his counsel on market trends. It fed Ostermann’s already sizable ego to be consulted on such things, and he welcomed all manner of guests.