Rainbow Six

CHAPTER 28

The money made it far easier. Instead of stealing trucks, they could buy them with cashier's checks drawn from an account set up by a person with false identification papers, who'd also been wearing a disguise at the time. The trucks were large Swedish made Volvo commercial vehicles, straight or nonarticulated trucks with canvas covers over the load area that proclaimed the names of nonexistent businesses.

The trucks came across the Irish Sea to Liverpool on commercial ferries, their interiors laden with cardboard cartons for refrigerators, and passed through British customs with no trouble, and from there it was just a matter of driving within the legal limit on the motorways. The trucks traveled in close formation through the West Country, and arrived near Hereford just before dusk. There, at a prearranged point, they all parked. The drivers dismounted at the local equivalent of a truck stop and headed for a pub.

Sean Grady and Roddy Sands had flown in the same day. They'd passed through customs/immigration control at Gatwick with false papers that had stood the test of time on numerous previous occasions, and again proved to their satisfaction that British immigration officers were blind as well as deaf and dumb. Both of them rented cars with false credit cards and drove west to Hereford, also along preplanned routes, and arrived at the same pub soon before the arriving trucks.

"Any problems?" Grady asked the Barry twins.

"None," Sam replied, accompanied by a nod from Peter. As always, the members of his unit made a show of sangfroid, despite the pre-mission jitters they all had to have. Soon everyone was there, and two groups, one of seven and one of eight, sat in booths, sipping their Guinness and chatting quietly, their presence not a matter of interest to pub regulars.

"They work pretty good," Malloy told Noonan, over a pint in the club. "E-Systems, eh?"

"Pretty good outfit. We used a lot of their hardware at HRT."

The Marine nodded. "Yeah, same thing in Special Operations Command. But I still prefer things with control wires and cables."

"Well, yeah, Colonel, sir, but kinda hard to do two paper cups and string out of a chopper, ain't it?"

"I ain't that backward, Tim." But it was good enough for a grin. "And I ain't never needed help doing a long wire deployment."

"You are pretty good at it." Noonan sipped at his beer. "How long you been flying choppers?"

"Twenty years-twenty-one come next October. You know, it's the last real flying left. The new fast-movers, hell, computers take a vote on whether they like what you're doing 'fore they decide to do it for you. I play with computers, games and e-mail and such, but damned if I'll over let them fly for me." It was an empty boast, or nearly so, Noonan thought. Sooner or later, that form of progress would come to rotary-wing aircraft, too, and the drivers would bitch, but then they'd accept it as they had to, and move on, and probably be safer and more effective as a result. "Waiting for a letter from my detailer right now," the colonel added.

"Oh? What for?"

"I'm in the running for CO of VMH-1."

"Flying the president around?" Malloy nodded. "Hank Goodman's got the job now, but he made star and so they're moving him up to something else. And somebody, I guess, heard that I'm pretty good with a stick."

"Not too shabby," Noonan said.

"Boring, though, straight and level all the time, no fun stuff," the Marine allowed, with a show of false distaste. Flying in VMH1 was an honor for a captain, and command of it was the Corps' way of showing confidence in his abilities. "I ought to know in another two weeks. Be nice to see some Redskins games in person again."

"What's up for tomorrow?"

"Right before lunch, practice low-level insertion, paperwork in the afternoon. I have to do a ton of it for the Air Force. Well, they own the damned aircraft, and they are nice about maintaining it and giving me a good flight crew. I bet airliner pilots don't have to do this, though." Those lucky bastards just had to fly, though their brand of flying was about as exciting as a paint-drying race, or maybe a grass-growing marathon.

Chavez hadn't yet gotten used to British humor, and as a result the series television on the local stations mainly bored him. He did have cable service, however, and that included The History Channel, which had become his favorite, if not Patsy's.

"Just one, Ding," she told him. Now that she was close to delivery time, she wanted her husband sober at all times, and that meant only one beer per night.

"Yes, honey." It was so easy for women to push men around, Domingo thought, looking at the nearly empty glass and feeling like another. It was great to sip beer in the club and discuss business matters in a comfortable, informal setting, and generally bond with his people but right now he was going no farther than fifty feet from his wife, except when he had to, and she had his beeper number when they were apart. The baby had dropped, whatever that meant-well, he knew it meant that delivery was imminent, but not what "dropped" signified. And now it meant that he could only have one beer per night, though he could be stone sober with three… maybe even four…

They sat in side-by-side easy chairs. Ding was trying both to watch TV and read intelligence documents. It was something he seemed able to do, to the amazed annoyance of his wife, who was reading a medical journal and making some marginal notes on the glossy paper.

It wasn't terribly different at the Clark home, though here a movie cassette was tucked into the VCR and was playing away.

"Anything new at the office?" Sandy asked.

At the office, John thought. She hadn't said that when he'd come back from out in the field. No, then it had been "Are you okay?" Always asked with a tinge of concern, because, though he'd never well, almost never-told her about the things he did in the field, Sandy knew that it was a little different from sitting at a desk. So, this was just one more confirmation that he was a REMF. Thanks, honey, he thought. "No, not really," he said. "How about the hospital?"

"A car accident right after lunch. Nothing major."'

"How's Patsy doing?"

"She'll be a pretty good doc when she learns to relax a little more. But, well, I've been doing ER for twenty-some years, right? She knows more than I do in the theoretical area, but she needs to learn the practical side a little better. But, you know, she's coming along pretty well."

"Ever think you might have been a doc?" her husband asked.

"I suppose I could have, but-wasn't the right time back then, was it?"

"How about the baby?"

That made Sandy smile. "Just like I was, impatient. You get to that point and you just want it to happen and be done with it."

"Any worries?"

"No, Dr. Reynolds is pretty good, and Patsy is doing just fine. I'm just not sure I'm ready to be a grandma yet," Sandy added with a laugh.

"I know what you mean, babe. Any time, eh?"

"The baby dropped yesterday. That means he's pretty ready."

"'He'?" John asked.

"That's what everybody seems to think, but we'll find out when it pops out."

John grumbled. Domingo had insisted that it had to be a son, handsome as his father was-and bilingual, jefe, he'd always added with that sly Latino grin. Well, he could have gotten worse as a son-in-law. Ding was smart, about the fastest learner he'd ever stumbled across, having risen from young staff sergeant 11-Bravo light-infantryman,.S. Army, to a respected field intelligence officer in CIA, with a master's degree from George Mason University… and now he occasionally mused about going another two years for his Ph.D. Maybe from Oxford, Ding had speculated earlier in the week, if he could arrange the off-time to make it possible. Wouldn't that be a kick in the ass - an East L.A. Chicano with a hood from Oxford University! He might end up DCI someday, and then he would really be intolerable. John chuckled, sipped his Guinness, and returned his attention to the television.

Popov told himself that he had to watch. He was in London again, checked into a medium-class hotel made from a bunch of row houses strung together and renovated. This one he had to see. It would be a first for a terrorist operation. They had a real plan, albeit suggested by Bill Henriksen, but Grady had jumped on the idea, and it certainly seemed a tactically sound concept, as long as they knew when to end it and run away. In any case, Dmitri wanted to see it happen, the better to know if he could then call the bank and recode the money into his own account and then… disappear from the face of the earth whenever he wished. It hadn't occurred to Grady that there were at least two people who could access the funds transferred. Perhaps Sean was a trusting soul, Popov thought, odd as that proposition sounded. He'd accepted the contact from his former KGB friend readily, and though he'd posed two major tests, the money and the cocaine, once they'd been delivered he'd stood right up to take the action promised. That was remarkable, now that Popov allowed himself to think about it. But he'd take his rented Jaguar saloon car to go and watch. It ought not to be overly hard, he thought, nor overly dangerous if he did it right. With that thought he tossed off his last Stolichnaya of the night and flipped off the light.

They woke up at the same time that morning. Domingo and Patricia in one home, and John and Sandra in another, opened their eyes at 5:30 when their alarms went off, and both couples adjusted their routine to the schedule of the day. The women had to be at the local hospital at 6:45 for the beginning of their 7:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.m. day shift in the emergency room, and so in both homes, the womenfolk got the bathroom first, while the men padded into the kitchen to feed the coffee machine and flip it on, then collect the morning papers from the front step, and turn the radios on to the BBC for the morning news. Twenty minutes later, the bathrooms and newspapers were exchanged, and fifteen minutes after that, the two couples sat down in the kitchen for breakfasts-though in Domingo's case, just a second cup of coffee, as he customarily breakfasted with his people after morning PT. In the Clark home, Sandy was experimenting with fried tomatoes, a local delicacy that she was trying to learn, but which her husband utterly rejected on principle as an American citizen. By 6:20, it was time for the women to dress in their respective uniforms, and for the men to do the same, and soon thereafter all left their homes to begin their different daily activities.

Clark didn't work out with the teams. He was, he'd finally admitted to himself, too old to sustain the full grind, but he showed up at roughly the same place and did roughly the same daily exercise. It wasn't very different from his time as a SEAL, though without the lengthy swim-there was a pool here, but it wasn't large enough to suit him. Instead, he ran for three miles. The teams did five, though… and, he admitted shamefully to himself, at a faster pace. For a man of his years, John Clark knew himself to be in superb physical shape, but keeping himself there got harder every day, and the next major milestone on his personal road to death had the number sixty on it. 1 t seemed so very odd that he was no longer the young piss and-vinegar guy he'd been when he'd married Sandy. It seemed as if someone had robbed him of something, but if it had happened, he'd never noticed it. It was just that one day he'd looked around and found himself different from what he'd thought himself to be. Not an agreeable surprise at all, he told himself, finishing his three miles, sweating over sore legs and needing his second shower of the day.

On the walk to headquarters, he saw Alistair Stanley setting out for his own morning exercise routine. A1 was younger than he by five years and probably still had the illusion of youth. They'd become good friends. Stanley had the instincts, especially for intelligence information, and was an effective field operator in his oddly laid-back British way. Like a spiderhole, John thought, Stanley didn't appear to be much of anything until you looked at his eyes, and even then you had to know what to look for. Goodlooking, rakish sort, blond hair still and a toothy smile, but like John he'd killed in the field, and like John he didn't have nightmares about it. In truth he had better instincts as a commander than Clark did, the latter admitted to himself-but only to himself. Both men were still as competitive as they'd been in their twenties, and neither gave praise away for free.

Finished with his shower, Clark walked to his office, sat down at his desk, and went over the morning paperwork, cursing it quietly for the time it required, and all the thought that had to go into such wasteful items as budgeting. Right in his desk drawer was his Beretta.45, proof that he wasn't just one more civil servant, but today he wouldn't have time to walk over to the range to practice the martial skills that had made him the commander of Rainbow-a position that ironically denied him the ability to prove he belonged. Mrs. Foorgate arrived just after eight, looked into her boss's office, and saw the frown she always saw when he was doing administrative work, as opposed to going over intelligence information or operational matters, which at least he appeared to find interesting. She came in to start his coffee machine, got the usual morning greeting-grunt, then returned to her desk. and checked the secure fax machine for anything that might have to go to the boss at once. There was nothing. Another day had started at Hereford.

Grady and his people were awake as well. They went through their breakfast routine of tea and eggs and bacon and toast, for the typical Irish breakfast was little different from the English. In fact, the countries were little different in any of their fundamental habits, a fact Grady and his people did not reflect upon. Both were polite societies. and extremely hospitable to visitors. Citizens in both countries smiled at one another, worked fairly hard at their jobs, largely watched the same TV, read the same sports pages, and played mainly the same sports, which in both countries were true national passions-and drank similar quantities of similar beers in pubs that could have easily been in one nation as another, down to the painted signs and names that identified them.

But they attended different churches, and had different accents seemingly so similar to outsiders-that sounded totally different to each of them. An ear for such things remained an important part of daily life, but global television was changing that slowly. A visitor from fifty years earlier would have noted the many Americanisms that had crept into the common language, but the process had been so gradual that those living through it took little note of the fact. It was a situation common to countrics with revolutionary movements. The differences were small to outside observers, but all the more magnified to those who advocated change, to the point that Grady and his people saw English similarities merely as camouflage that made their operations convenient, not as commonalties that might have drawn their nations closer. People with whom they might have shared a pint and a discussion of a particularly good football match were as alien to them as men from Mars, and therefore easy to kill. They were things, not "mates," and as crazy as that might have appeared to an objective third party, it was sufficiently inculcated into them that they took no more note of it than they did of the air on this clear, blue morning, as they moved to their trucks and cars, preparing for the day's mission.

At 10:30 A.M. Chavez and his team moved to the indoor range for marksmanship practice. Dave Woods was there, and had set the boxes of ammunition in the proper places for the Team-2 members. As before, Chavez decided to work on his pistol rather than the easier-to-use MP-10, which anyone with two functioning eyes and one working trigger finger could shoot well. As a result, he turned in the l0mm ammunition and swapped it for two boxes of.45ACP, U.S. made Federal "Hydra-Shok" premium ammo, with a huge hollowpoint in which one could nearly mix a drink, or so it seemed when you looked into them.

Lieutenant Colonel Malloy and his flight crew, Lieutenant Harrison and Sergeant Nance, walked in just as Team-2 started. They were armed with the standard American-military-issue Beretta M9, and fired full-metal-jacket 9-mm rounds as required by the Hague Convention-America had never signed the international treaty detailing what was proper and what was not on the battlefield, but America lived by the rules anyway. The special-operations people of Rainbow used different, more effective ammo, on the principle that they were not on a battlefield, but were, rather, engaging criminals who did not merit the solicitude accorded better-organized and -uniformed enemies. Anyone who thought about the issue found it slightly mad, but they knew that there was no hard-and-fast rule requiring the world to make sense, and shot the rounds they were issued. In the case of the Rainbow troopers, it was no less than a hundred rounds per day. Malloy and his crew got to shoot perhaps fifty rounds per week, but they weren't supposed to be shooters, and their presence here was merely a matter of courtesy. As it happened, Malloy was an excellent shot, though he fired his pistol one handed in the manner once taught by the U.S. military. Harrison and Nance used the more modern Weaver stance, both hands on the weapons. Malloy also missed the.45 of his youth, but the American armed services had gone to the smaller-diameter round to make the NATO countries happy, even though it made much smaller holes in the people whom you were supposed to shoot.

The girl was named Fiona. She was just about to turn five years old and had fallen off a swing at her day-care center. The wood chips there had scratched her skin, but it was also feared that she might have broken the radius in her left forearm. Sandy Clark held the arm while the child cried. Very slowly and carefully, she manipulated it, and the intensity of the child's tears didn't change. This wasn't broken… well, possibly a very minor green-stick fracture, but probably not even that.

"Let's get an X ray," Patsy said, handing over a grape sucker to the kid. It worked as well in England as it did in America. The tears stopped as she used her good right arm and teeth to rip off the plastic, then stuck the thing into her cute little mouth. Sandy used wetted gauze to clean off the arm. No need for stitches, just a few nasty scrapes that she'd paint with antiseptic and cover with two large Band-Aids.

This ER wasn't as busy as its American counterparts. For one thing, it was in the country, and there was less opportunity for a major injury-they'd had a farmer the previous week who'd come close to ripping his arm off with a farm implement, but Sandy and Patsy had been off-duty then. There were fewer severe auto accidents than in a comparable American area, because the Brits, despite their narrow roads and looser speed limits, seemed to drive more safely than Americans, a fact that had both of the American medics scratching their heads. All in all, duty here was fairly civilized. The hospital was overstaffed by American standards, and that made everyone's workload on the easy side of reasonable, somewhat to the surprise of both Americans. Ten minutes later, Patsy looked over the X ray and saw that the bones of Fiona's forearm were just fine. Thirty minutes after that, she was on her way back to day care, where it was time for lunch. Patsy sat down at her desk and went back to reading the latest issue of The Lancet, while her mother returned to her stand-up desk and chatted with a colleague. Both perversely wished for more work to do, though that meant pain for someone they didn't know. Sandy Clark remarked to her English friend that she hadn't seen a gunshot wound in her whole time in England. In her Williamsburg, Virginia, hospital they'd been almost a daily occurrence, a fact that somewhat horrified her colleagues but was just part of the landscape for an American ER nurse.

Hereford wasn't exactly a sleepy community, but the vehicular traffic didn't make it a bustling metropolis either. Grady was in his rented car, following the trucks to the objective, and going more slowly than usual, here in the far-left lane, because he'd anticipated thicker traffic and therefore a longer trip in terms of time. He could have moved off at a faster clip, and therefore started the mission earlier, but he was a methodical sort, and once his plan was drafted, he tended to stick to it almost slavishly. That way, everyone knew what had to happen and when, which made operational sense. For the unexpected, every team member carried a cellular phone with speeddial settings for every other member. Sean figured they were almost as good as the tactical radios the soldiers carried.

There was the hospital. It sat at the bottom of a shallow slope. The parking lot didn't seem to be very crowded. Maybe there weren't many patients in their beds, or maybe the visitors were off having lunch before coming back to see their loved ones.

Dmitriy pulled his rental car over to the side of the through-road and stopped. He was half a kilometer or so from the hospital, and from the top of this hill, he could see two sides, the front and the side entrance for the hospital's emergency room. He switched the motor off after lowering the power windows and waited to see what would happen next. On the backseat he had an inexpensive set of 7x35 binoculars purchased at an airport shop, and he decided to get them out. Next to him on the seat was his cellular phone, should he need it. He saw three heavy trucks pull up and stop close to the hospital in positions far nearer than his, but, like his spot, able to cover the front and the emergency side entrance.

It was then that Popov had a random thought. Why not call that Clark fellow at Hereford and warn him of what was to happen? He, Popov, didn't want these people to survive the afternoon, did he? If they didn't, then he'd have that five-million plus American dollars, and then he could disappear from the face of the earth. The islands of the Caribbean appealed to him; he'd gone over some travel brochures. They'd have some British amenities-honest police, pubs, cordial people-plus a quiet, unhurried life, Net were close enough to America that he could travel there to manage his funds in whatever investment scheme lie opted for…

But… no. There was the off chance that Grady would get away from this one, and he didn't want to risk being hunted by that intense and vicious Irishman. No, it was better that he let this play out without his interference, and so he sat in the car, binoculars in his lap, listening to classical music on one of the regular BBC radio stations.

Grady got out of his Jaguar. He opened the boot, withdrew his parcel, and pocketed the keys. Timothy O'Neil dismounted his vehicle - he'd chosen a small van - and stood still, waiting for the other five men to join him. This they did after a few minutes. Timmy lifted his cell phone it and thumbed the number-one speeddial setting. A hundred yards away, Grady's phone started chirping.

"Yes?"

"We are ready here, Sean."

"Go on, then. We're ready here as well. Good luck, lad."

"Very well, we are moving in now."

O'Neil was wearing the brown coveralls of a package deliveryman. He walked toward the hospital's side entrance carrying a large cardboard box, followed by four other men in civilian clothes carrying boxes similar in size, but not in color.

Popov looked into his rearview mirror in annoyance. A police car was pulling over to the side of the road, and a few seconds later, a constable got out and walked to his car.

"Having a problem, sir?" the cop asked.

"Oh, no, not really-that is, I called the rental company, and they're sending someone out, you see."

"What went wrong?" the policeman asked.

"Not sure. The motor started running badly, and I thought it a good idea to pull over and shut it off. Anyway," the Russian repeated, "I called into the company, and they're sending someone to sort it out."

"Ah, very good, then." The police constable stretched, and it seemed as though he'd pulled over as much to get some fresh air as to render assistance to a stranded motorist. The timing, Popov thought, could have been better.

"Can I help you?" the desk clerk said.

"I have a delivery for Dr. Chavez, and Nurse"-he looked down at the slip of paper on the box, which seemed to him a clever bit of acting-"Clark. Are they in this afternoon?" Timmy O'Neil asked.

"I'll fetch them," the clerk said helpfully, heading back into the work area.

The IRA soldier's hand slid along the inside of the lid, ready to flip the box open. He turned and nodded to the other four, who waited politely in line behind him. O'Neil thumbed his nose, and one of them-his name was Jimmy Carr-walked back outside. There was a police car there, a Range Rover, white with an orange stripe down the side. The policeman inside was eating a sandwich, taking lunch at a convenient place, in what American cops sometimes called "cooping," just killing time when nothing was going on. He saw the man standing outside the casualty-receive entrance holding what looked like a flower box. Several others had just gone inside holding similar boxes, but this was a hospital, and people gave flowers to those inside of them… Even so… the man with the large white box was staring at his police automobile, as people often did. The cop looked back at him, mainly in curiosity, though his cop instincts were beginning to light up.

"I'm Dr. Chavez," Patsy said. She was almost as tall as he was, O'Neil saw, and very pregnant beneath her starched white lab coat. "You have something for me?"

"Yes, doctor, I do." Then another woman approached, and the resemblance was striking from the first moment he saw the two of them. They had to be mother and daughter… and that meant that it was time.

O'Neil flipped the top off the box and instantly extracted the AKMS rifle. He was looking down at it and missed the wide-eyed shock on the faces of the two women in front of him. His right hand withdrew one of the magazines and slapped it home into the weapon. Then he changed hands and let his right hand take hold of the pistol grip while his left slapped the bolt back into the battery position. The entire exercise hadn't lasted two seconds.

Patsy and Sandy froze, as people usually did when suddenly confronted with weapons. Their eyes were wide and faces shocked. To their left, someone screamed. Behind this deliveryman, three others now held identical weapons, and faced outward, aiming at the others in the reception area, and a routine day in the Emergency Room changed to something very different.

Outside, Carr popped open his box, smiling as he aimed it at the police car only twenty feet away.

The engine was running, and the cop's first instinct was to get clear and report in. His left hand slipped the selector into reverse, and his foot slammed down on the accelerator, causing the car to jolt backward.

Carr's response was automatic. The weapon up, bolt back, he aimed and pulled the trigger, firing fifteen rounds into the automobile's windscreen. The result was immediate. The Rover had been moving backward in a fairly straight line, but the moment the bullets started hitting, it swerved right, and ended up against the brick wall of the hospital. There it stopped, the pressure off the accelerator now. Carr sprinted over and looked inside to see that there was one less police constable in the world, and that,, to him, was no great loss. "What's that?" It was the helpful roadside cop rather than Popov who asked the rhetorical question. It was rhetorical because automatic-weapons fire is not something to be mistaken for anything else. His head turned, and he saw the police car-an identical twin to his own-scream backward, then stop, and then a man walked up to it, looked, and walked away. "Bloody hell!"

Dmitriy Arkadeyevich sat still, now watching the cop who'd come to his unneeded assistance. The man ran back to his vehicle, reached inside and pulled out a radio microphone. Popov couldn't hear what was said, but, then, he didn't need to.

"We've got them, Sean," O'Neil's voice told him. Grady acknowledged the information, thumbed the end button and speeddialed Peter Barry's cell phone.

Yes?"

"Timothy has them. The situation appears to be under control.'"

"Okay." And this call ended. Then Sean speed-dialed yet another number. "Hello, this is Patrick Casey. We have seized the Hereford community hospital. We are currently holding as hostages Dr. Chavez and Nurse Clark, plus numerous others. We will release our hostages if our demands are met. If they are not met, then it will be necessary for us to kill hostages until such time as you see the error of your ways. We require the release of all political prisoners held in Albany and Parkhurst prisons on the Isle of Wight. When they are released and seen to be released on the television, we will leave this area. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand," the desk sergeant replied. He didn't, but he had a tape of this call, and he'd forward the information to someone who would understand.

Carr took the casualty-receiving entrance; the Barry twins, Peter and Sam, walked through the inside of the building to the main entrance. Here things were somewhat chaotic. Carr's initial fusillade hadn't been heard clearly here, and most of the people had turned their heads to the rough direction of the noise, and on seeing nothing, had turned back to attend to their business. The hospital's security guard, a man of fifty-five who was wearing something that looked like a police uniform, was heading for the door into the hospital proper when he saw the twins coming toward him with weapons in hand. The retired policeman managed to say, "What's all this?"-the usual words of a British constable-before a jerk of one rifle muzzle convinced him to raise his hands and shut up. Sam grabbed his collar and shoved him back into the main lobby. There, people saw the weapons. Some screamed. A few made for the doors, and all of them got outside without being fired upon, since the Barry twins had enough to do already.

The police constable's radio call from the side of the road generated a greater response than Grady's phone call, especially with the report that a constable had been shot and probably killed in his car. The first reaction of the local superintendent was to summon all of his mobile units to the general area of the hospital. Only about half of them had firearms, and those were mainly Smith amp; Wesson revolvers-not nearly enough to deal with the reported use of machine guns. The death of the constable was established when an officer who had been parked near the hospital failed to report in, despite numerous calls over the police radio.

Every police station in the world has preset responses for various emergencies. This one had a folder labeled "Terrorism," and the superintendent pulled it out. even though he had the contents memorized, just to make sure he didn't forget anything. The top emergency number went to a desk in the Home Office, and he reported what little he knew to the senior civil servant there, adding that he was working to get more information and would report back.

The Home Office headquarters building, close to Buckingham Palace, housed the bureaucrats who had oversight over nearly every aspect of life in the British Isles. That included law enforcement, and in that building, too, was a procedures folder, which was pulled from its slot. I n this one was a new page and a new number.

"Four-two-double-three," Alice Foorgate said, on picking up the phone. This was the line used exclusively for important voice traffic.

"Mr. Clark, please."

"Yes. Wait, please."

"Mr. Clark, a call on double-three," she said into the intercom.

"This is John Clark," Rainbox Six said, lifting the receiver.

"This is Frederick Callaway at the Home Office. We have a possible emergency situation," the civil servant said.

"Okay, where is it?"

"Just up the road from you, I'm afraid, the Hereford hospital. The voice which called in identified itself as Patrick Casey. That is a codename that the PIRA use to designate their operations."

"Hereford Hospital?" John asked, his hand suddenly cold on the phone.

"That is correct."

"Hold for a second. I want to get one of my people on this line." John put his hand over the receiver. "Alice! Get Alistair on this one right now!"

"Yes, John?"

"Mr. Callaway, this is Alistair Stanley, my second-in command. Please repeat what you just told me."

He did so, then added, "The voice identified two hostages by name, a Nurse Clark, and a Dr. Chavez."

"Oh, shit," John breathed. "I'll get Peter's team moving, John," Stanley said.

"Right. Anything else. Mr. Callaway?"

"That is all we have now. The local police superintendent is attempting to gather more information at this time."

"Okay, thank you. You can reach me at this number if you need me." Clark replaced the receiver in its cradle. "Fuck," he said quietly.

His mind was racing. Whoever had scouted out Rainbow had done so for a reason, and those two names had not been an accident. This was a direct challenge to him and his people-and they were using his wife and daughter as a weapon. His next thought was that he would have to pass command over to A1 Stanley, and the next-that his wife and daughter were in mortal danger… and he was helpless.

"Christ," Major Peter Covington muttered over his phone. "Yes, sir. Let me get moving here." He stood and walked into his squad bay. "Attention, we have some business. Everyone get ready to move immediately."

Team-I's members stood and headed to their lockers. It didn't seem like a drill, but they handled it as though it were. Master Chief Mike Chin was the first to be suited up. He came to see his boss, who was just putting on his body armor.

"What gives, skipper?"

"PIRA, local hospital, holding Clark's and Ding's wives as hostages."

"What's that?" Chin asked, blinking his eyes hard.

"You heard me, Mike."

"Oh, shit. Okay." Chin went back into the squad bay. '`Saddle up, people, this ain't no fuckin' drill."

Malloy had just sprinted to his Night Hawk. Sergeant Nance was already there, pulling red-flagged safety pins from their plug points and holding them up for the pilot to confirm the count.

"Looking good, let's start 'er up, Lieutenant."

"Turning one," Harrison confirmed, as Sergeant Nance reboarded the aircraft and strapped on his move-around safety belt, then shifted to the left-side door to check the tail of the Night Hawk.

"Tail rotor is clear, Colonel."

Malloy acknowledged that information as he watched his engine instruments spooling up. Then he keyed his radio again. "Command, this is Bear, we are turnin' and burnin'. What do you want us to do, over?"

"Bear, this is Five," Stanley's voice came back, to Malloy's surprise. "Lift off and orbit the local hospital. That is the site of the current incident."

"Say again, Five, over."

"Bear, we have subjects holding the local hospital. They are holding Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Chavez as hostages. They've identified both of them by name. Your orders are to lift off and orbit the hospital."

"Roger, copy that. Bear is lifting off now." His left hand pulled the collective, climbing the Sikorsky into the sky.

"Did I hear that right, Colonel?" Harrison asked.

"You must have. Fuck," the Marine observed. Somebody was grabbing the tiger by the balls, Malloy thought. He looked down to see a pair of trucks speeding off the base, heading in the same direction as he. That would be Covington and Team-1, he thought. With a little more reflection, he took the Night Hawk to four thousand feet, called the local air-traffic-control center to tell them what he was doing, and got a transponder code so that they could track him properly.

There were four police vehicles thereon, blocking the access to the hospital parking lots but doing nothing else, Popov saw through his binoculars. The constables inside were just looking, all standing outside their cars, two of them holding revolvers but not pointing them at anything but the ground.

In one truck, Covington relayed the information he had. In the other, Chin did it. The troopers were as shocked as they had ever allowed themselves to be, having considered themselves and their families to be ipso facto immune to this sort of thing because nobody had ever been foolish enough to try something like this. You might walk up to a lion cage and prod him with a stick, but not when there weren't any bars between you and him. And you never ever messed with the lion's cubs, did you? Not if you wanted to be alive at sundown. This was family for all of them. Attacking the wife of the Rainbow commander was a slap in all their faces, an act of incomprehensible arrogance-and Chavez's wife was pregnant. She represented two innocent lives, both of them belonging to one of the people with whom they exercised every morning and with whom they had the occasional pint in the evening, a fellow soldier, one of their team. They all flipped on their radios and sat back, holding their individual weapons, allowing their thoughts to wander, but not very far.

"Al, I have to let you run this operation," John said, standing by his desk and preparing to leave. Dr. Bellow was in the room, along with Bill Tawney.

"I understand, John. You know how good Peter and his team are."

A long breath. "Yeah." There wasn't much of anything else to say right then.

Stanley turned to the others. "Bill?"

"They used the right codename. `Patrick Casey' is not known to the press. It's a name they use to let us know that their operation is real-usually used with bomb threats and such. Paul?"

"Identifying your wife and daughter is a direct challenge to us. They're telling us that they know about Rainbow, that they know who we are, and, of course, who you are, John. They're announcing their expertise and their willingness to go all the way." The psychiatrist shook his head. "But if they're really PIRA, that means they're Catholic. I can work on that. Let's get me out there and establish contact, shall we?"

Tim Noonan was already in his personal car, his tactical gear in the back. At least this was easy for him. There were two cell-phone nodes in the Hereford area, and he'd been to both of them while experimenting with his lock-out software. He drove to the farther of the two first. It was a fairly typical setup, the usual candelabra tower standing in a fenced enclosure with a truck type trailer-called a caravan over here, he remembered. A car was parked just outside. Noonan pulled alongside and hopped out without bothering to lock it up. Ten seconds later, he pulled open the door to the caravan.

"What's this?" the technician inside asked.

"I'm from Hereford. We're taking this cell off-line right now."

"Says who?"

"Says me!" Noonan turned so that the guy could see the holstered pistol on his hip. "Call your boss. He knows who I am and what I do." And with no further talk, Noonan walked to the master-power panel and flipped the breaker, killing transmissions from the tower. Then he sat in front of the computer control system and inserted the floppy disk he'd carried in his shirt pocket. Two mouse clicks and forty seconds later the system was modified. Only a number with a 777 prefix would be accepted now.

The technician didn't have a clue, but did have the good sense not to dispute the matter with a man carrying a gun.

"Anybody at the other one-on the other side of town?" Noonan asked.

"No, that would be me if there's a problem-but there isn't."

"Keys." Noonan held his hand out.

"I can't do that. I mean, I do not have authorization to-"

"Call your boss right now," the FBI agent suggested, handing him the land-line receiver.

Covington jumped out of the truck near where some commercial trucks were parked. The police had established a perimeter to keep the curious at bay. He trotted over to what appeared to be the senior cop at the site.

"There they are," Sean Grady said over his phone to Timmy O'Neil. "Sure, and they responded quickly. Ever so formidable they look," he added. "How are things inside?"

"Too many people for us to control properly, Sean. I have the twins in the main lobby, Jimmy here with me, and Daniel is patrolling upstairs."

"What of your hostages?"

"The women, you mean? They're sitting on the floor. The young one is very pregnant, Sean. She could have it today, looks like."

"Try to avoid that, lad," Grady advised, with a smile. Things were going according to his plan, and the clock was running. The bloody soldiers had even parked their trucks within twenty meters of his own. It could scarcely have been better.

Houston's first name wasn't really Sam-his mother had named him Mortimer, after a favored uncle-but the current moniker had been laid on him during boot camp at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, eleven years before, and he hadn't objected. His sniper rifle was still in its boxy carrying case to safeguard it from shock, and he was looking around for a good perch. Where he was standing wasn't bad, the sergeant thought. He was ready for whatever the day offered. His rifle was a virtual twin to that used by his friend Homer Johnston, and his marksmanship was just as good, too-a little better, he'd quickly tell anyone who asked. The same was true of Rifle One-Two, Sergeant First Class Fred Franklin, formerly an instructor at the Army's marksmanship training unit at Fort Benning and a deadly shot out to a mile with his huge MacMillan.50 bolt-action rifle.

"What d'ya think, Sam?"

"I like it here, Freddy. How about you go to that knoll past the helo pad?"

"Looks good to me. Later." Franklin hoisted the case onto his shoulder and headed off that way.

"Those people scare me," Roddy Sands admitted over the phone.

"I know, but one of them is close enough to take out:t c once, Roddy. You take that job, lad."

"I will, Sean," Sands agreed from inside the cargo area of the big Volvo truck.

Noonan, now with the keys to the other site, was back in leis car and heading that way. The drive would take twenty minutes-no, more, he realized. Traffic was backing up on this "A"-class road, and though he had a gun on his hip, and even police identification, his car didn't have a siren and gumball machine-an oversight he himself had never considered, to his sudden and immediate rage. How the fuck had they forgotten that? He was a cop, wasn't he? He pulled to the shoulder, turned on his emergency flashers, and started leaning on the horn as he sped past the stopped cars.

Chavez didn't react much. Instead of looking angry or fearful, he just turned inward on himself. A small man, his body seemed to shrink even further before Clark's eyes. "Okay," he said finally, his mouth dry. "What are we doing about it?"

"Team-1 is there now, or should be. Al is running the operation. We're spectators."

"Head over?"

Clark wavered, which was unusual for him. The best thing to do, one part of his mind told him quietly, was to sit still, stay in his office and wait, rather than drive over and torture himself with knowledge that he couldn't do anything about. His decision to let Stanley run the operation was the correct one. He couldn't allow his actions to be affected by personal emotions. There were more lives at stake than his wife's and daughter's, and Stanley was a pro who'd do the right thing without being told. On the other hand, to stay here and simply listen to a phone or radio account was far worse. So he walked back to his desk, opened a drawer, and took out his Beretta.45 automatic. This he clipped to his belt at his right hip. Chavez, he saw, had his side arm as well.

"Let's go."

"Wait." Chavez lifted Clark's desk phone and called the Team-2 building.

"Sergeant Major Price," the voice answered.

"Eddie, this is Ding. John and I are going to drive over there. You're in command of Team-2."

"Yes, sir, I understand. Major Covington and his lads are as good as we are, sir, and Team-2 is suited up and ready to deploy."

"Okay, I have my radio with me."

"Good luck, sir."

"Thanks, Eddie." Chavez hung up. "Let's get going, John."

For this ride, Clark had a driver, but he had the same problem with traffic that Noonan was having, and adopted the same solution, speeding down the hard shoulder with his horn blowing and lights blinking. What should have been a ten-minute drive turned into double that.

"Who is this?"

"This is Superintendent Fergus Macleash," the cop on the other end of the phone circuit responded. "And you are?"

"Patrick Casey will do for now," Grady answered smugly. "Have you spoken with the Home Office yet?"

"Yes, Mr. Casey, I have." Macleash looked at Stanley and Bellow, as he stood at his command post, half a mile from the hospital, and listened to the speaker phone.

"When will they release the prisoners, as we demanded?"

"Mr. Casey, most of the senior people are out of the office having lunch at the moment. Mainly, the chaps in London I spoke to are trying to track them down and get them into the office. I haven't spoken with anyone in a position of authority yet, you see."

"I suggest that you tell London to get them in quickly. I am not by nature a patient man."

"I need your assurance that no one has been hurt," Macleash tried next.

"Except for one of your constables, no,no one has been hurt yet. That will change if you take action against us, and it will also change if you and your friends in London make us wait too long. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir, I do understand what you just said."

"You have two hours until we begin eliminating hostages. We have a goodly supply, you know."

"You understand, if you injure a hostage, that will change matters greatly, Mr. Casey. My ability to negotiate on your behalf will be greatly reduced if you cross that line."

"That is your problem, not mine" was the cold reply. "I have over a hundred people here, including the wife and daughter of your chief counterterrorist official. They will be the first to suffer for your inaction. You now have one hour and fifty-eight minutes to begin the release of every political prisoner in Albany and Parkhurst prisons. I suggest you get moving on that immediately. Good-bye." And the line went dead.

"He's talking tough," Dr. Bellow observed. "Sounds like a mature voice, in his forties, and he's confirmed that he knows who Mrs. Clark and Dr. Chavez are. We're up against a professional, and one with unusually good intelligence. Where could he have gotten it?"

Bill Tawney looked down at the ground. "Unknown, Doctor. We had indications that people were looking into our existence, but this is disquieting."

"Okay, next time he calls, I talk to him," Bellow said. "I'll see if I can calm him down some."

"Peter, this is Stanley," Rainbow Five called over his tactical radio.

"Covington here."

"What have you done to this point?"

"I have both riflemen deployed for overwatch and intelligence gathering, but I'm keeping the rest close. I'm waiting now for a building diagram. We have as yet no firm estimate of the number of subjects or hostages inside." The voice hesitated before going on. "I recommend that we consider bringing Team-2 in. This is a large building to cover with only eight men, should we have to move in."

Stanley nodded. "Very well, Peter. I will make the call."

"How we looking on gas?" Malloy asked, looking down as he orbited the hospital."A good three and a half hours, Colonel," Lieutenant Harrison answered.

Malloy turned to look into the cargo bay area of the night Hawk. Sergeant Nance had the zip-line ropes outside hooked into the eyebolts on the floor of the aircraft. lot work done, he sat in the jump seat between and behind the pilot/copilot seats, his pistol clearly visible in his shoulder holster, listening in on the tactical radio like everyone else.

"Well, we're going to be here for a while," the Marine said.

"Sir, what do you think about-"

"I think I don't like it at all, Lieutenant. Aside from that, we're better off not thinking very much." And that is a bullshit answer, as everyone aboard the Night Hawk knew. You might as well tell the world to stop turning as tell men in this situation to stop thinking. Malloy was looking down at the hospital, figuring approach angles for a long-wire or zip-line deployment. It didn't appear all that difficult to accomplish, should it become necessary.

The panoramic view afforded from flying above it all was useful. Malloy could see everything. Cars were parked everywhere, and some trucks were close to the hospital. The police cars were visible from their flashing blue lights, and they had traffic pretty well stopped - and elsewhere roads were clogged, at least those leading to the hospital. As usually happened, the roads leading away were de open. A TV truck appeared, as though by magic, setting up half a mile or so from the hospital, on the hilltop sere some other vehicles were stopped, probably rubbernecking, the Marine thought. It always happened, like vultures circling a carcass at Twenty-nine Palms. Very distasteful, and very human.

Popov turned when he heard the white TV truck stop, not ten meters from the rear bumper of his rented Jaguar. It had a satellite dish on the roof, and the vehicle had scarcely halted when men stepped out. One climbed the ladder affixed to the side and elevated the oddly angular dish. Another hoisted a Minicam, and yet another, evidently the reporter, appeared, wearing a jacket and tie. He chatted briefly with one of the others, then turned, looking down the hill. Popov ignored them.Finally, Noonan said to himself, pulling off the road at the other cell site. He parked his car, got out, and reached for the keys the technician had given him. Three minutes later, he uploaded his spoofing software. Then he donned his tactical radio set.

"Noonan to Stanley, over."

"This is Stanley."

"Okay, Al, I just cut off the other cell. Cell phones ought to be down now for this entire area."

"Very good, Tim. Come this way now."

"Roger, on the way." The FBI agent adjusted the headset, hanging the microphone exactly in front of his mouth and pushing the earpiece all the way in as he reentered his car and started off back toward the hospital. Okay, you bastards, he thought, try using your fucking phones now.

As usual in emergency situations, Popov noted, you couldn't tell what was happening. At least fifteen police vehicles were visible along with the two army trucks from the Hereford base. His binoculars didn't allow him to recognize any faces, but he'd seen only one of them close-up, and that was the chief of the unit, and he'd be in some command post or other rather than visible in the open, assuming that he was here at all, the intelligence officer reminded himself.

Two men carrying long cases, probably riflemen. had walked away from the camouflage-painted trucks, but they were nowhere to be seen now, though… yes, he saw, using his binoculars again, there was one, just a jump of green that hadn't been there before. How clever. He'd be a sniper, using his telescopic sight to look into windows and gather information, which he'd then radio to his commander. There was another one of them around somewhere as well, but Popov couldn't see him.

"Rifle One-Two to Command," Fred Franklin called in. "One-Two, this is Command," Covington responded.

"In position, sir, looking down, but I don't see anything at all in the windows on the ground level. Some movement of the curtains on the third floor, like people peeking out, but nothing else."

"Roger, thank you, continue your surveillance."

"Roger that. Rifle One-Two, out." Several seconds later, Houston reported similar news. Both men were in perches, with their ghillie suits disguising their positions.

"Finally," Covington said. A police car had just arrived, its occupant delivering blueprints of the hospital. Peter's gratitude died in a moment, when he looked at the first two pages. There were scores of rooms, most of them on the upper levels, in any of which a man with a gun could hide and have to be winkled out-worse, all of those rooms were probably occupied with real people, sick ones, whom a flash-bang might startle enough to kill. Now that he had the knowledge, its only immediate benefit was to show him just how difficult his mission would be.

"Sean?"

Grady turned. "Yes, Roddy?"

"There they are," Sands pointed out. The black-clad soldiers were standing behind their army trucks, only a few meters from the trucks the Irishmen had driven to the site.

"I only count six, lad," Grady said. "We're hoping for ten or so."

"It is a poor time to become greedy, Sean."Grady thought about that for a second, then checked his watch. He'd allotted forty-five to sixty minutes for this mission. Any more, he though, would give the other side too much time to get organized. They were within ten minutes of the lower limit. So far, things had gone according to plan. Traffic would be blocked on the roads, but only into the hospital, not away from it. He had his three large trucks, the van, and two private cars, all within fifty meters of where he was standing. The crucial part of the job was yet to begin, but his people all knew what to do. Roddy was right. It was time to wrap everything up and make his dash. Grady nodded at his subordinate, pulled out his cell phone, and hit the speed-dial button for Timothy O'Neil.

But it didn't work. Lifting the phone to his ear, all he heard was the fast-busy signal that announced that the call hadn't gone through properly. Annoyed, he thumbed end and redialed… and got the same result.

"What's this?…" he said, trying a third time. "Roddy, give me your phone."

Sands offered it, and Grady took it. They were all identical in make, and all had been identically programmed. He thumbed the same speed-dial command, and again got only the fast-busy response. More confused than angry, Grady nonetheless had a sudden empty feeling in his stomach. He'd planned for many things, but not for this. For the mission to work, he had to coordinate his three groups. They all knew what they were to do, but not when, not until he told them that it was time.

"Bloody…" Grady said quietly, rather to the surprise of Roddy Sands. Next Grady simply tried calling a mobile operator, but the same fast-busy signal resulted. "The bloody phones have stopped working."

"We haven't heard from him in a while," Bellow observed.

"He hasn't given us a phone number yet."

"Try this." Tawney handed over a handwritten list of numbers in the hospital. Bellow selected the main ER number and dialed it on his cell phone, making sure to start with the 777 prefix. It rang for half a minute before it was picked up.

"Yes?" It was an Irish-sounding voice, but a different one.

"I need to talk to Mr. Casey," the psychiatrist said, putting the call on speaker."He's not here right now" was the reply.

"Could you get him, please? I need to tell him something."

"Wait," the voice answered.

Bellow killed the microphone on the portable phone. "Different voice. Not the same guy. Where's Casey?"

"Some other place in the hospital, I imagine," Stanley offered, but the answer was dissatisfying to him when no voice came back on the phone line for several minutes.

Noonan had to explain who he was to two separate police checkpoints, but now the hospital was in sight. He called ahead on his radio, told Covington that he was five minutes away, and learned that nothing had changed.

Clark and Chavez dismounted their vehicle fifty yards from the green trucks that had brought Team-1 to the site. Team-2 was now on its way, also in another green painted British Army truck, with a police escort to speed their way through the traffic. Chavez was holding a collection of photographs of known PIRA terrorists that he'd snatched off the intelligence desk. The hard part, Ding found, was to keep his hands from shaking whether from fear or rage, he couldn't tell-and it required all the training he'd ever had to keep his mind on business rather than worrying about his wife and mother-in-law… and his unborn son. Only by looking down at the photos instead of up at the country was this possible, for in his hands he had faces to seek and kill, but the green grass around the hospital was merely empty landscape where there was danger. At times like this, the manly thing was to suck it in and pretend that you had it under control, but Chavez was learning now that while being brave for yourself was easy enough, facing danger to someone you loved was a very different situation, one in which courage didn't matter a damn, and all you could do was… nothing. You were a spectator, and nothing more, watching a contest of sorts in which lives dear to you were at grave risk, but in which you could not participate. All he could do was watch, and trust to the professionalism of Covington's Team-1. One part of his mind told him that Peter and his boys were as good as he and his own people were, and that if a rescue could be done, they would surely do it-but that wasn't the same as being there yourself, taking charge, and making the right things happen yourself. Sometime later today, Chavez thought, he would again hold his wife in his arms-or she and their unborn child would be taken forever from him. His hands gripped the computer-generated photographs, bending the edges, and his only comfort was in the weight of the pistol that hung in the hip-holster tucked into the waistband of his trousers. It was a familiar feeling, but one, his mind told him, which was useless at the moment, and likely to remain so.

"So, what do I call you?" Bellow asked, when the phone line became active again.

"You can call me Timothy."

"Okay," the doctor said agreeably, "I'm Paul."

"You're an American," O'Neil observed.

"That's right. And so are the hostages you're holding, Dr. Chavez and Mrs. Clark."

"So?"

"So, I thought your enemies were the Brits, not us Americans. You know that those two ladies are mother and daughter, don't you?" He had to know it, Bellow knew, and for that reason he could point it out as though giving away information.

"Yes," the voice replied. "Did you know that they are both Catholic, just like you?"

"No."

"Well, they are," Bellow assured him. "You can ask. Mrs. Clark's maiden name is O'Toole, as a matter of fact. She is an Irish-Catholic American citizen. What makes her your enemy, Timothy?"

"She's-her husband is-I mean-"

"He's also an Irish-Catholic American, and to the best of my knowledge he has never taken action of any kind against you or the people in your organization. That's why I have trouble understanding why you are threatening their lives."

"Her husband is the head of this Rainbow mob, and they kill people for the British government."

"No, actually, they do not. Rainbow is actually a NATO establishment. The last time we went out, we had to rescue thirty children. I was there, too. The people holding them murdered one of the kids, a little Dutch girl named Anna. She was dying, Timothy. She had cancer, but those people weren't very patient about it. One of them shot her in the back and killed her. You've probably seen it on TV. Not the sort of thing a religious person would do-not the sort of thing a Catholic would do, murdering a little girl like that. And Dr. Chavez is pregnant. I'm sure you can see that. If you harm her, what about her child? Not just a murder if you do that, Timothy. You're also aborting her unborn child. I know what the Catholic Church says about that. So do you. So does the government in the Republic of Ireland. Please, Timothy, will you please think about what you've threatened to do? These are real people, not abstractions, and the baby in Dr. Chavez's womb is also a real person, too. Anyway, I have something to tell Mr. Casey. Have you found him yet?" the psychiatrist asked.

"I-no, no, he can't come to the phone now."

"Okay, I have to go now. If I call this number again, will you be there to answer it?"

"Yes."

"Good. I'll call back when I have some news for you." Bellow punched the kill switch. "Good news. Different person, younger, not as sure of himself. I have something I can use on this one. He really is Catholic, or at least he thinks of himself that way. That means conscience and rules. I can work on this one," he concluded soberly but with confidence.

"But where is the other one?" Stanley asked. "Unless…"

"Huh?" Tawney asked.

"Unless he's not in there at all."

"Huh?" the doctor asked.

"Unless he's not bloody there. He called us before, but he hasn't talked to us in quite a while. Shouldn't he be doing so?"

Bellow nodded. "I would have expected that, yes."

"But Noonan has chopped the cell phones," Stanley pointed out. He switched an his tactical radio. "This is Command. Look around for someone trying to use a cellular telephone. We may have two groups of subjects here. Acknowledge."

"Command, this is Covington, roger."

"Fuck!" Malloy snarled in his circling helicopter.

"Take her down some?" Harrison asked.

The Marine shook his head. "No, up here they might not even notice us. Let's stay covert for a while."

"What the hell?" Chavez observed, looking at his father-in-law.

"Inside-outside?" John speculated.

Grady was at the point of losing his temper. He'd tried a total of seven times to make a call with his cell phone, only to find the same infuriating fast-busy response. He had a virtually perfect tactical situation, but lacked the ability to coordinate his teams. There they were, those Rainbow people, standing in a bunch not a hundred meters from the two Volvo trucks. This couldn't last, though. The local police would surely start securing the area soon. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty, perhaps as many as two hundred people now. standing in little knots within three hundred meters of the hospital. The time was right. The targets were there.

Noonan crested the hill and started driving down to where the team was, wondering what the hell he'd be able to do. Bugging the building, his usual job, meant getting close. But it was broad daylight, and getting close would be a mother of a task, probably beyond the range of possibility until nightfall.Well, at least he'd taken care of his primary function. He'd denied the enemy the chance to use cell phones-if they'd tried to, which he didn't know. He slowed the car for his approach, and saw Peter Covington in the distance conferring with his black-clad shooters.

Chavez and Clark were doing much the same thing, standing still a few yards from Clark's official car.

"The perimeter needs firming up," Ding said. Where had all these vehicles come from? Probably people who happened to be in the area when the shooting started. There was the usual goddamned TV van, its satellite dish erected, and what appeared to be a reporter speaking in front of a handheld Minicam. So, Chavez thought, now the danger to his family was a goddamned spectator sport.

Grady had to make a decision, and he had to make it now. If he wanted to achieve his goal and make his escape, it had to be now. His gun-containing parcel was sitting on the ground next to his rental car. He left it on the ground with Roddy Sands and walked to the farthest of the Volvo commercial trucks.

"Sean," a voice called from the cargo area, "the bloody phones don't work."

"I know. We begin in five minutes. Watch for the others, and then carry on as planned."

"Okay, Sean," the voice replied. To punctuate it, Grady heard the cocking of the weapons inside as he walked to the next, delivering the same message. Then the third. There were three men in each of the trucks. The canvas covers over the cargo areas had holes cut in them, like the battlements of a castle, and those inside had opened them slightly and were now looking at the soldiers less than a hundred meters away. Grady made his way back to his Jaguar. When he got there he checked his watch. He looked at Roddy Sands and nodded.

Team-2's truck was starting down the hill to the hospital. Noonan's car was directly in front of it now.

Popov was watching the whole area with his binoculars. A third military truck came into view. He looked at it and saw more men sitting in the back, probably reinforcements for the people already outside the hospital. He returned his attention to the area that already had soldiers. Closer examination showed… was that John Clark? he wondered. Standing away from the others. Well, if his wife were a hostage now, that made sense to let another-he had to have a second-in-command for his organization-command the operation. So, he'd just be standing there now, looking tense in his suit.

"Excuse me." Popov turned to see a reporter and a cameraman, and closed his eyes in a silent curse.

"Yes?"

"Could you give us your impressions of what is happening here? First of all, your name, and what causes you to be here."

"Well, I-my name-my name is Jack Smith," Popov said, in his best London accent. "And I was out here in the country-birding, you see. I was out here to enjoy nature, it's a nice day, you see, and-"

"Mr. Smith, have you any idea what is happening down there?"

"No, no, not really." He didn't take his eyes away from the binoculars, not wanting to give them a look at his face. Nichevo! There was Sean Grady, standing with Roddy Sands. Had he believed in God, he would have invoked His name at that moment, seeing what they were doing, and knowing exactly what they were thinking in this flashpoint in time.

Grady bent down and opened his parcel, removing the AKMS assault-rifle from it. Then he slapped in the magazine, extended the folding stock, and in one smooth motion stood to straight and brought it to his shoulder. A second later he took aim and fired into the group of black clad soldiers. A second after that, the men in the trucks did the same.

There was no warning at all. Bullets hit the side of the truck behind which they'd been sheltering, but before Team- I had the time to react, the bullets came in on their bodies. Four men dropped in the first two seconds. By that time, the rest had jumped away and down, their eyes looking around for the source of the fire.

Noonan saw them crumple, and it took a second or so of shock for him to realize what was happening. Then he spoke into his tactical radio: "Warning, warning, Team-1 is under fire from the rear!" At the same time his eyes were searching for the source-it had to be right there, in that big truck. The FBI agent floored his accelerator and dashed that way, his right hand reaching for his pistol.

Master Chief Mike Chin was down with a bullet in each sipper leg. The suddenness only made the pain worse. He'd been totally unprepared for this, and the pain paralyzed him for several seconds, until training reasserted itself, and he tried to crawl to cover. "Chin is hit, Chin is hit," lie gasped over the radio, then turned to see another Team1 member down, blood gushing from the side of his head.

Sergeant Houston's head snapped off his scope, and turned right with the sudden and unexpected noise of automatic-weapons fire. What the hell? He saw what appeared to be the muzzle of a rifle sticking out the side of one of the trucks, and he swung his rifle up and off the ground to the right to try to acquire a target. Roddy Sands saw the movement. The sniper was where he remembered, but covered as he was in his camouflage blanket, it was hard to track in on him. The movement Fixed that, and the shot was only about a hundred fifty meters. Holding low and left, he pulled the trigger and held it down, walking his rounds through the shape on the side of the hill, firing long, then pulling back down to hit at it again.

Houston got one round off, but it went wild as a bullet penetrated his right shoulder, blasting right through his body armor, which was sufficient to stop a pistol round but not a bullet from a rifle. Neither courage nor muscle strength could make broken bones work. The impact made his body collapse, and a second later, Houston knew that his right arm would not work at all. On instinct he rolled to his left, while his left hand tried to reach across his body for his service pistol, while he announced over the radio that he was hit as well. It was easier for Fred Franklin. Too far away for easy fire from one of the terrorists' weapons, he was also well concealed under his blanket. It took him a few seconds to realize what was going on, but the screams and groans over his radio earpiece told him that some team members had been badly hurt. He swept his scope sight over the area, and saw one gun muzzle sticking out the side of a truck. Franklin flipped off his safety, took aim, and loosed his first.50-caliber round of the fight. The muzzle blast of his own weapon shattered the local silence. The big MacMillan sniper rifle fired the same cartridge as the.50-caliber heavy machine gun, sending a two-ounce bullet off at?,700 feet per second, covering the distance in less than a third of a second and drilling a half-inch hole into the soft side of the truck, but there was no telling if it hit a target or not. He swept the rifle left, looking for another target. He passed over another big truck, and saw the holes in the cover, but nothing inside of them. More to the left-there, there was a guy holding a rifle and firing-off to where Sam was. Sergeant First Class Fred Franklin worked his bolt, loaded a second round, and took careful aim.

Roddy Sands was sure he'd hit his target, and was now trying to kill it. To his left, Sean was already back in his car, starting it for the getaway that had to begin in less than two minutes.

Grady heard the engine catch and turned to look back at his most trusted subordinate. He'd just gotten all the way around when the bullet hit, just at the base of Sands's skull. The huge.50 bullet exploded the head like a can of soup, and for all his experience as a terrorist, Grady had never seen anything like it. It seemed that only the jaw remained, as the body fell out of view, and Team-1 got its first kill of the day.

Noonan stopped his car inches from the third of the trucks. He dove out the right-side driver's door, and heard the distinctive chatter of Kalashnikov-type weapons. Those had to be enemies, and they had to be close. He held his Beretta pistol in both hands, looked for a second at the back of the truck and wondered how toyes! There was a ladder handle fixture on the rear door. He slipped a booted foot into it and climbed up, finding a canvas cover roped into place. He forced his pistol into his waistband and withdrew his K-Bar combat knife, slashing at the rope loops, getting a corner free. He lifted it with his left hand, looked inside and saw three men, facing left and doing aimed fire with their weapons. Okay. It never occurred to him to say or shout anything to them. Leaning in, his left hand holding the canvas clear, he aimed with his right hand. The first round was double-action, and his finger pulled the trigger slowly, and the head nearest to him snapped to its right, and the body fell. The others were too distracted by the noise of their own weapons to hear the report of the pistol. Noonan instantly adjusted his grip on the pistol and fired off a second round into the next head. The third man felt the body hit his, and turned to look. The brown eyes went wide. He jerked away from the side of the truck and brought his rifle to his left, but not quickly enough. Noonan fired two rounds into the chest, then brought his pistol down from recoil and fired his third right through the man's nose. It exited through his brain stem, by which time the man was dead. Noonan looked hard at all three targets, and, sure they were dead, jumped back off the truck and headed forward to the next. He paused to slap in a fresh magazine, while a distant part of his mind remarked on the fact that Timothy Noonan was on autopilot, moving almost without conscious thought.

Grady floored his car, hitting the horn as he did so. That was the signal for the others to get clear. That included the men inside the hospital, whom he'd been unable to alert with his cell phone.

"Jesus Christ!" O'Neil announced when the first rounds were fired. "Why the bloody hell didn't he-"

"Too late to worry, Timmy," Sam Barry told him, waving to his brother and running for the door. Jimmy Carr was there, and the final member of the inside team joined up ten seconds later, emerging from the door to the fire stairs.

"Time to go, lads," O'Neil told them. He looked at the two main hostages and thought to wave to them, but the pregnant one would only slow them down, and there were thirty meters to his van. The plan had come apart, though he didn't know why, and it was time to get the hell out of here.

The third military truck stopped a few yards behind Noonan's personal car. Eddie Price jumped out first, his MP10 up in his hands, then crouched, looking around to identify the noise. Whatever it was, it was happening too bloody fast, and there was no plan. He'd been trained for this as an ordinary infantryman, but that had been twenty years ago. Now he was a special-operations soldier, and supposed to know every step before he took it. Mike Pierce came down next to him.

"What the fuck's happening, Eddie?"

Just then, they saw Noonan jump down from the Volvo truck and swap out magazines on his pistol. The FBI agent saw them, and waved them forward.

"I suppose we follow him," Price said. Louis Loiselle appeared at Pierce's side and the two started off. Paddy Connolly caught up, reaching into his fanny pack for a flash-bang.

O'Neil and his four ran out the emergency-room entrance and made it all the way to their van without being spotted or engaged. He'd left the keys in, and had the vehicle moving before the others had a chance to close all the doors.

"Warning, warning," Franklin called over the radio. "We have bad guys in a brown van leaving the hospital, looks like four of them." Then he swiveled his rifle and took aim just aft of the left-front tire and fired.

The heavy bullet ripped through the fender as though it were a sheet of newspaper, then slammed into the iron block of the six-cylinder engine. It penetrated one cylinder, causing the piston to jam instantly, stopping the engine just as fast. The van swerved left with the sudden loss of engine power, almost tipping over to the right, but then slamming down and righting itself.

O'Neil screamed a curse and tried to restart the engine at once, with no result at all. The starter motor couldn't turn the jammed crankshaft. O'Neil didn't know why, but this vehicle was fully dead, and he was stuck in the open.

Franklin saw the result of his shot with some satisfaction and jacked in another round. This one was aimed at the driver's head. He centered his sight reticle and squeezed, but at the same moment the head moved, and the shot missed. That was something Fred Franklin had never done. He looked on in stunned surprise for a moment, then reloaded.

O'Neil was cut on the face by glass fragments. The bullet hadn't missed him by more than two inches, but the shack of it propelled him out of the driver's seat into the cargo area of the van. There he froze, without a clue as to what to do next.

Homer Johnston and Dieter Weber still had their rifles in the carrying cases, and since it didn't appear that either would have much chance to make use of them, right now they were moving with pistols only. In the rear of their team, they watched Eddie Price slash a hole in the rear cover of the second Volvo truck. Paddy Connolly pulled the pin on a flash-bang and tossed it inside. Two seconds later, the explosion of the pyro charge blew the canvas cover completely off the truck. Pierce and Loiselle jumped up, weapons ready in their hands, but the three men inside were stunned unconscious from the blast. Pierce jumped all the way in to disarm them, tossed their weapons clear of the truck, and kneeled over them.

In each of the three Volvo trucks, one of the armed men was also to be the driver. In the foremost of the three, this one was named Paul Murphy, and from the beginning he'd divided his time between shooting and watching Sean Grady's Jaguar. He saw that the car was moving and dropped his weapon to take the driver's seat and start the diesel engine. Looking up, he saw what had to be the body of Roddy Sands-but it appeared to be headless. What had happened? Sean's right arm came out of the window, waving in a circling motion for the truck to follow. Murphy slipped the truck into gear and pulled off to follow. He turned left to see the brown van Tim O'Neil had driven stopped cold in the hospital parking lot. His first instinct was to go down there and pick his comrades up,but the turn would have been difficult, and Sean was still waving, and so he followed his leader. In the back, one of his shooters lifted the rear flap and looked to see the other trucks, his AKMS rifle in his hands, but neither was moving, and there were men in black clothing there-

–One of those was Sergeant Scotty McTyler, and he had his MP-10 up and aimed. He fired a three-round burst at the face in the distance, and had the satisfaction to see a puff of pink before it dropped out of sight.

"Command, McTyler, we have a truck leaving the area with subjects aboard!" McTyler loosed another few rounds, but without visible effect, and turned away, looking for something else to do.

Popov had never seen a battle before, but that was what he watched now. It seemed chaotic, with people darting around seemingly without purpose. The people in blackwell, three were down at the truck from the initial gunfire, and others were moving, apparently in pursuit of the Jaguar, virtually identical with his, and the truck, now exiting the parking lot. Not three meters away, the TV reporter was speaking rapidly into his microphone, while his cameraman had his instrument locked on the events down the hill. Popov was sure it was exciting viewing for everybody in their sitting rooms. He was also sure that it was time for him to leave.

The Russian got back into his car, started the engine, and moved off, with a spray of gravel for the reporter in his wake.

"I got 'em. Bear's got 'em," Malloy reported, lowering his collective control to drop down to a thousand feet or so, his aviator's eyes looked on the two moving vehicles. "Anybody in command of this disaster?" the Marine asked next.

"Mr. C?" Ding asked.

"Bear, this is Six. I am in command now." Clark and Chavez sprinted back to Clark's official car, where both jumped in, and the driver, unbidden, started in pursuit. He was a corporal of military police in the British Army, and had never been part of the Rainbow team, which he'd always resented somewhat. But not now.

It wasn't much of a challenge. The Volvo truck was powerful, but no competition for the V-8 Jaguar racing up behind it.

Paul Murphy checked his mirror and was instantly confused. Coming up to join him was a Jaguar visually identical to the-he looked, yes, Sean was there, up in front of him. Then who was this? He turned to yell at the people in the back, but on looking, saw that one was down and clearly dead, a pool of blood sliding greasily across the steel floor of the truck. The other was just holding on.

"This is Price. Where is everyone? Where are the subjects?"

"Price, this is Rifle One-Two. I think we have one or more subjects in the brown van outside the hospital. I took the motor out with my rifle. They ain't going nowhere, Eddie."

"Okay." Price looked around. The local situation might even be under control or heading that way. He felt as though he'd been awakened by a tornado and was now looking at his wrecked farm and trying to make sense of what had taken place. One deep breath, and the responsibility of command asserted itself: "Connolly and Lincoln, go right. Tomlinson and Vega, down the hill to the left. Patterson, come with me. McTyler and Pierce, guard the prisoners. Weber and Johnston, get down to Team-1 and see how they are. Move!" he concluded.

"Price, this is Chavez," his radio announced next.

"Yes, Ding."

"What's the situation?"

"We have two or three prisoners, a van with an unknown number of subjects in it, and Christ knows what else. I am trying to find out now. Out." And that concluded the conversation.

"Game face, Domingo," Clark said, sitting in the left front seat of the Jaguar.

"I fuckin' hear you, John!" Chavez snarled back.

"Corporal-Mole, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir," the driver said, without moving his eyes a millimeter.

"Okay, Corporal, get us up on his right side. We're going to shoot out his right-front tire. Let's try not to eat the fucking truck when that happens."

"Very good, sir" was the cool reply. "Here we go."

The Jag leaped forward, and in twenty-seconds was alongside the Volvo diesel truck. Clark and Chavez lowered their windows. They were doing over seventy miles per hour now, as they leaned out of their speeding automobile.

A hundred meters ahead, Sean Grady was in a state of rage and shock. What the devil had gone wrong? The first burst from his people's weapons had surely killed a number of his black-clad enemies, but after that-what? He'd formulated a good plan, and his people had executed it well at first-but the goddamned phones! What had gone wrong with those? That had ruined everything. But now things were back under some semblance of control. He was ten minutes away from the shopping area where he'd park and leave his car, dissapear into the crowd of people, then walk to another parking lot, get in another rental car, and drive off to Liverpool for the ferry ride home. He would get out of this, and so would the lads in the truck behind him-he looked in the mirror. What the hell was that?

Corporal Mole had done well, first maneuvering to the truck's left, then slowing and darting to the right. That caught the driver by surprise.

In the backseat, Chavez saw the face of the man. Very fairskinned and red-haired, a real Paddy, Domingo thought, extending his pistol and aiming at the right-front wheel.

"Now!" John called from the front seat. In that instant, their driver swerved to the left.

Paul Murphy saw the auto jump at him and instinctively swerved hard to avoid it. Then he heard gunfire.

Clark and Chavez fired several times each, and it was only a few feet of distance to the black rubber of the tire. Their bullets all hit home just outside the rim of the wheel, and the nearly-half-inch holes deflated the tire rapidly. Scarcely had the Jaguar pulled forward when the truck swerved back to the right. The driver tried to brake and slow, but that instinctive reaction only made things worse for him. The Volvo truck dipped to the right, and then the uneven braking made it worse still, and the right-side front-wheel rim dug into the pavement. This made the truck try to stop hard, and the body flipped over, landed on its right side, and slid forward at over sixty miles per hour. Strong as the body of the truck was, it hadn't been designed for this, and when the roll continued, the truck body started coming apart.

Corporal Mole cringed to see his rearview mirror filled with the sideways truck body, but it got no closer, and he swerved left to make sure it didn't overtake him. He allowed the car to slow now, watching the mirror as the Volvo truck rolled like a child's toy, shedding pieces as it did so.

"Jesuchristo!" Ding gasped, turning to watch. What could only have been a human body was tossed clear, and he saw it slide up the blacktop and pinwheel slowly as it proceeded forward at the same speed as the wrecked truck.

"Stop the car!" Clark ordered.

Mole did better than that, coming to a stop, then backing up to within a few meters of the wrecked truck. Chavez jumped out first, pistol in both hands and advancing toward the vehicle. "Bear, this is Chavez, you there?"

"Bear copies," came the reply.

"See if you can get the car, will ya? This truck's history, man."

"Roger that, Bear is in pursuit."

"Colonel?" Sergeant Nance said over the intercom.

"Yeah?"

"You see how they did that?"

"Yeah-think you can do the same?" Malloy asked.

"Got my pistol, sir."

"Well, then it's air-to-mud time, people." The Marine dropped the collective again and brought the Night Hawk to a hundred feet over the road. He was behind and downsun from the car he was following. Unless the bastard was looking out the sunroof, he had no way of knowing the chopper was there.

"Road sign!" Harrison called, pulling back on the cyclic to dodge over the highway sign telling of the next exit on the motorway.

"Okay, Harrison, you do the road. I do the car. Yank it hard if you have to, son."

"Roger that, Colonel."

"Okay, Sergeant Nance, here we go." Malloy checked his speed indicator. He was doing eighty-five in the right outside lane. The guy in the Jag was leaning on the pedal pretty hard, but the Night Hawk had a lot more available power. It was not unlike flying formation with another aircraft, though Malloy had never done it with a car before. He closed to about a hundred feet. "Right side, Sergeant."

"Yes, sir." Nance slid the door back and knelt on the aluminum floor, his Beretta 9-mm in both hands. "Ready, Colonel. Let's do it!"

"Ready to tank," Malloy acknowledged, taking one more look at the road. Damn, it was like catching the refueling hose of a Herky Bird, but slower and a hell of a lot lower…

Grady bit his lip, seeing that the truck was no longer there, but behind him the road was clear, and ahead as well at the moment, and it was a mere five minutes to safety. He allowed himself a relaxing breath, flexed his fingers on the wheel, and blessed the workers who'd built this fine fast car for him. Just then his peripheral vision caught something black on his left. He turned an inch to look-what the hell-

"Got him!" Nance said, seeing the driver through the left rear passenger-door window and bringing his pistol up. He let it wait, while Colonel Malloy edged another few feet and then-resting his left arm on his knee, Nance thumbed back the hammer and fired. The gun jumped in his hand. He brought it down and kept pulling the trigger. It wasn't like on the range at all. He was jerking the gun badly despite his every effort to hold it steady, but on the fourth round, he saw his target jerk to the right.

The glass was shattering all around him. Grady didn't react well. He could have slammed on the brakes, and that would have caused the helicopter to overshoot, but the situation was too far outside anything he'd ever experienced. He actually tried to speed up, but the Jaguar didn't have all that much acceleration left. Then his left shoulder exploded in fire. Grady's upper chest cringed from nerve response. His right hand moved down, causing the car to swerve in that direction, right into the steel guardrail.

Malloy pulled on the collective, having seen at least one good hit. In seconds, the Night Hawk was at three hundred feet, and the Marine turned to the right and looked down to see a wrecked and smoking car stationary in the middle of the road.

"Down to collect him?" the copilot asked.

"Bet your sweet ass, son," Malloy told Harrison. Then he looked for his own flight bag. His Beretta was in there. Harrison handled the landing, bringing the Sikorsky to a rest fifty feet from the car. Malloy turned the lock on his seat-belt buckle and turned to exit the aircraft. Nance jumped out first, ducking under the turning rotor as he ran to the car's right side. Malloy was two seconds behind him.

"Careful, Sergeant!" Malloy screamed, slowing his advance on the left side. The window was gone except for a few shards still in the frame, and he could see the man inside, still breathing but not doing much else behind the deployed air bag. The far window was gone as well. Nance reached into it, found the handle and pulled it open. It turned out that the driver hadn't been using his seat belt. The body came out easily. And there on the backseat, Malloy saw, was a Russian-made rifle. The Marine pulled it out and safed it, before walking to the other side of the car.

"Shit," Nance said in no small amazement. "He's still alive!" How had he managed not to kill the bastard from twelve feet away? the sergeant wondered.

Back at the hospital, Timothy O'Neil was still in his van wondering what to do. He thought he knew what had happened to the engine. There was a three-quarter-inch hole in the window on the left-side door, and how it had managed to miss his head was something he didn't know. He saw that one of the Volvo trucks and Sean Grady's rented Jaguar were nowhere to be seen. Had Sean abandoned him and his men? It had happened too fast and totally without warning. Why hadn't Sean called to warn him of what he did? How had the plan come apart? But the answers to those questions were of less import than the fact that he was in a van, sitting in a parking lot, with enemies around him. That he had to change.

"Lieber Gott," Weber said to himself, seeing the wounds. One Team-1 member was surely dead, having taken a round in the side of his head. Four others right here were hit, three of them in the chest. Weber knew first aid, but he didn't need to know much medicine to know that two of them needed immediate and expert attention. One of those was Alistair Stanley.

"This is Weber. We need medical help here at once!" he called over his tactical radio. "Rainbow Five is down!"

"Oh, shit," Homer Johnston said next to him. "You're not foolin', man. Command, this is Rifle Two-One, we need medics and we need them right the fuck now!"

Price heard all that. He was now thirty yards from the van, Sergeant Hank Patterson at his side, trying to approach without being seen. To his left he could see the imposing bulk of Julio Vega, along with Tomlinson. Off to the right he could see the face of Steve Lincoln. Paddy Connolly would be right with him.

"Team-2, this is Price. We have subjects in the van. I do not know if we have any inside the building. Vega and Tomlinson, get inside and check-and be bloody careful about it!"

"Vega here. Roger that, Eddie. Moving now."

Oso reversed directions, heading for the main entrance with Tomlinson in support, while the other four kept an eye on that damned little brown truck. The two sergeants approached the front door slowly, peering around corners to look in the windows, and seeing only a small mob of very confused people. First Sergeant Vega poked a finger into his own chest and pointed inside. Tomlinson nodded. Now Vega moved quickly, entering the main lobby and sweeping his eyes all around. Two people screamed to see another man with a gun, despite the difference in his appearance. He held up his left hand.

"Easy, folks, I'm one of the good guys. Does anybody know where the bad guys are?" The answer to this question was mainly confusion, but two people pointed to the rear of the building, in the direction of the emergency room, and that made sense. Vega advanced to the double doors leading that way and called on his radio. "Lobby is clear. Come on, George." Then: "Command, this is Vega."

"Vega, this is Price."

"Hospital lobby is clear, Eddie. Got maybe twenty civilians here to get looked after, okay?"

"1 have no people to send you, Oso. We're all busy out here. Weber reports we have some serious casualties."

"This is Franklin. I copy. I can move in now if you need me."

"Franklin, Price, move in to the west. I repeat, move in from the west."

"Franklin is moving in to the west," the rifleman replied. "Moving in now."

"His pitchin' career's over," Nance said, loading the body into the Night Hawk.

"Sure as hell, if he's a lefty. Back to the hospital, I guess," Malloy strapped into the chopper and took the controls. Inside a minute, they were airborne and heading east for the hospital. In the back, Nance strapped their prisoner down tight.

It was a hell of a mess. The driver was dead, Chavez saw. crushed between the large wheel and the back of his seat from when the truck had slammed into the guardrail, his eyes and mouth open, blood coming out the latter. The body tossed out of the back was dead as well, with two bullet holes in the face. That left a guy with two broken legs,and horrible scrapes on his face, whose pain was masked by his unconsciousness.

"Bear, this is Six," Clark said.

"Bear copies."

"Can you pick us up? We have an injured subject here, and I want to get back and see what the hell's going on."

"Wait one and I'll be there. Be advised we have a wounded subject aboard, too."

"Roger that, Bear." Clark looked west. The Night Hawk was in plain view, and he saw it alter course and come straight for his position.

Chavez and Mole pulled the body onto the roadway. It seemed horrible that his legs were at such obviously wrong angles, but he was a terrorist, and got little in the way of solicitude.

"Back into the hospital?" one of the men asked O'Neil.

"But then we're trapped!" Sam Barry objected.

"We're bloody trapped here!" Jimmy Carr pointed out. "We need to move. Now!"

O'Neil thought that made sense. "Okay, okay. I'll pull the door, and you lads runback to the entrance. Ready?" They nodded, cradling their weapons. "Now!" he rasped, pulling the sliding door open.

"Shit!" Price observed from a football field away. "Subjects running back into the hospital. I counted five."

"Confirm five of them," another voice agreed on the radio circuit.

Vega and Tomlinson were most of the way to the emergency room now, close enough to see the people there but not the double glass doors that led outside. They heard more screams. Vega took off his Kevlar helmet and peeked around the corner. Oh, shit, he thought, seeing one guy with an AKMS. That one was looking around inside the building-and behind him was half the body of someone looking outward. Oso nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand came down on his shoulder. He turned. It was Franklin, without his monster rifle, holding only his Beretta pistol.

"I just heard. five bad guys there?"

"That's what the man said," Vega confirmed. He waved Sergeant Tomlinson to the other side of the corridor. "You stick with me, Fred."

"Roge-o, Oso. Wish you had your M-60 now?"

"Fuckin' A, man." As good as the German MP-10 was, it felt like a toy in his hands.

Vega took another look. There was Ding's wife, standing now, looking over to where the bad guys were, pregnant as hell in her white coat. He and Chavez went back nearly ten years. He couldn't let anything happen to her. He backed off the corner and tried waving his arm at her.

Patsy Clark Chavez, M.D., saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a soldier dressed all in black. He was waving to her, and when she turned the waves beckoned her to him, which struck her as a good idea. Slowly, she started moving to her right.

"You, stop!" Jimmy Carr called angrily. Then he started moving toward her. Unseen to his left, Sergeant George Tonlinson edged his face and gun muzzle around the corner. Vega's waves merely grew more frantic, and Patsy kept moving his way. Carr stepped toward her, bringing his rifle up-as soon as he came into view, Tomlinson took aim, and seeing the weapon aimed at Ding's wife, he depressed the trigger gently, loosing a three-round burst.

The silence of it was somehow worse than the loudest noise. Patsy turned to look at the guy with the gun when his head exploded-but there was no noise other than the brushlike sound of a properly suppressed weapon, and the wet-mess noise of his destroyed cranium. The body-the face was sprayed away, and the back of his head erupted in a cloud of red-then it just fell straight down, and the loudest sound was the clatter of the rifle hitting the floor, loosed from the dead hands.

"Come here!" Vega shouted, and she did what she was told, ducking and running toward him.

Oso grabbed her arm and swung her around like a doll, knocking her off her feet and sending her sliding across the tile floor. Sergeant Franklin scooped her up and ran down the corridor, carrying her like a toy. In the main lobby he found the hospital security guard, and left her with him, then ran back.

"Franklin to Command. Dr. Chavez is safe. We got her to the main lobby. Get some people there, will ya? Let's get these fucking civilians evacuated fast, okay?"

"Price to Team. Where is everyone? Where are the subjects?"

"Price, this is Vega, we are down to four subjects. George just dropped one. They are in the emergency room. Mrs. Clark is probably still there. We hear noises, there are civilians in there. We have their escape route closed. I have Tomlinson and Franklin here. Fred's only got a pistol. Unknown number of hostages, but as far as 1 can tell we're down to four bad guys, over."

"I've got to get down there," Dr. Bellow said. He was badly shaken. People had been shot within a few feet of him. Alistair Stanley was down with a chest wound, and at least one other Rainbow trooper was dead, along with three additional wounded, one of those serious-looking.

"That way." Price pointed to the front of the hospital. A Team1 member appeared, and headed that way as well. It was Geoff Bates, one of Covington's shooters from the SAS, fully armed, though he hadn't taken so much as a single shot yet today. He and Bellow moved quickly. Somehow Carr had died without notice. O'Neil turned and saw him there, his body like the stem for a huge red flower of blood on the dingy tile floor. It was only getting worse. He had four armed men, but he couldn't see around the corner twenty feet away, and surely there were armed SAS soldiers there, and he had no escape. He had eight other people nearby, and these he could use as hostages, perhaps, but the danger of that game was dramatically obvious. No escape, his mind told him, but his emotions said something else. He had weapons, and his enemies were nearby, and he was supposed to kill them, and if he had to die, he'd damned well die for The Cause, the idea to which he'd dedicated his life, the idea for which he'd told himself a thousand times he was willing to die. Well, here he was now, and death was close, not something to be considered in his bed, waiting for sleep to come, or drinking beer in a pub, discussing the loss of some dedicated comrades, the brave talk they all spoke when bravery wasn't needed. It all came down to this. Now danger was here, and it was time to see if his bravery was a thing of words or a thing of the belly, and his emotions wanted to show the whole bloody world that he was a man of his word and his beliefs… but part of him wanted to escape back to Ireland, and not die this day in an English hospital.

Sandy Clark watched him from fifteen feet away. He was a handsome man, and probably a brave one-for a criminal, her mind added. She remembered John telling her more than once that bravery was a far more common thing than cowardice, and that the reason for it was shame. People went into danger not alone, but with their friends, and you didn't want to appear weak in front of them, and so from the fear of cowardice came the most insane of acts, the successful ones later celebrated as great heroism. It had struck her as the worst sort of cynicism on John's part… and yet her husband was not a cynical man. Could it therefore be the truth?

In this case, it was a man in his early thirties, holding a weapon in his hands and looking as though he didn't have a friend in the world

–but the mother in her told Sandy that her daughter was probably safe now, along with her grandchild. The dead one had called after her, but now he was messily dead on the hospital floor, and so Patsy had probably gotten away. That was the best information of the day, and she closed her eyes to whisper a prayer of thanks.

"Hey, Doc," Vega said in greeting.

"Where are they?"

Vega pointed. "Around this corner. Four of them, we think. George dropped one for the count."

"Talk to them yet?"

Oso shook his head. "No."

"Okay." Bellow took a deep breath. "This is Paul," he called loudly. "Is Timothy there?"

"Yes," came the reply.

"Are you okay?-not wounded or anything, I mean," the psychiatrist asked.

O'Neil wiped some blood from his face - the glass fragments in the van had made some minor cuts. "We're all fine. Who are you?"

"I'm a physician. My name is Paul Bellow. What's yours?"

"Timothy will do for now."

"Okay, fine. Timothy, uh, you need to think about your situation, okay?"

"I know what that is," O'Neil responded, an edge on his voice.

Outside, things were gradually becoming organized. Ambulances were on the scene, plus medical orderlies from the British Army. The wounded were being moved now, to the base hospital at Hereford where surgeons were waiting to reat them, and coming in were SAS soldiers, thirty of hem, to assist the Rainbow troopers. Colonel Malloy 's helicopter set down on the pad at the base, and the two prisoners were taken to the military hospital for treatment.

"Tim, you will not be getting away from here. I think you know that," Bellow observed, in as gentle a voice as he could manage.

"I can kill hostages if you don't let me leave," O'Neil countered.

"Yes, you can do that, and then we can come in on you and try to stop that from happening, but in either case, you will not be getting away. But what do you gain by murdering people, Tim?"

"The freedom of my country!"

"That is happening already, isn't it?" Bellow asked.

"There are peace accords, Tim. And Tim, tell me, what country ever began on a foundation of the murder of innocent people? What will your countrymen think if you murder your hostages?"

"We are freedom fighters!"

"Okay, fine, you are revolutionary soldiers," the doctor agreed. "But soldiers, real soldiers, don't murder people. Okay, fine, earlier today you and your friends shot it out with soldiers, and that's not murder. But killing unarmed people is murder, Tim. I think you know that. Those people in there with you, are any of them armed? Do any of them wear uniforms?"

"So what? They are the enemy of my country!"

"What makes them enemies, Tim? Where they were born? Have any of them tried to hurt you? Have any of them hurt your country? Why don't you ask them?" he suggested next.

O'Neil shook his head. The purpose of this was to make him surrender. He knew that. He looked around at his comrades. It was hard for all of them to meet the eyes of the others. They were trapped, and all of them knew it. Their resistance was a thing of the mind rather than of arms, and all of their minds held doubts to which they had as yet not given voice, but the doubts were there, and they all knew it.

"We want a bus to take us away!"

"Take you away to where?" the doctor asked.

"Just get us the bloody bus!" O'Neil screamed.

"Okay, I can talk to people about that, but they have to know where the bus is going to, so that the police can clear the roads for you," Bellow observed reasonably. It was just a matter of time now. Tim-it would have been useful to know if he'd been truthful in giving out his real name, though Bellow was confident that he had indeed done that-wasn't talking about killing, hadn't actually threatened it, hadn't given a deadline or tossed out a body yet. He wasn't a killer, at least not a murderer. He thought of himself as a soldier, and that was different from a criminal, to terrorists a very important difference. He didn't fear death, though he did fear failure, and he feared almost as much being remembered as a killer of the innocent. To kill soldiers was one thing. To murder ordinary women and children was something else. It was an old story for terrorists. The most vulnerable part of any person was his self-image. Those who cared what others thought of them, those who looked in mirrors when they shaved, those people could be worked. It was just a matter of time. They were different from the real fanatics. You could wear this sort down. "Oh, Tim?"

"Yes?"

"Could you do something for me?"

"What?"

"Could you let me make sure the hostages are okay? That's something I have to do to keep my boss happy. Can I come around to see?"

O'Neil hesitated.

"Tim, come on, okay? You have the things you have to do, and I have the things I have to do, okay? I'm a physician. I don't carry a gun or anything. You have nothing to be afraid of." Telling them that they had nothing to fear, and thus suggesting that they were unnecessarily afraid, was usually a good card to play. There followed the usual hesitation, confirming that they were indeed afraid-and that meant Tim was rational, and that was good news for Rainbow's psychiatrist."No, Tim, don't!" Peter Barry urged. "Give them nothing."

"But how will we get out of here, get the bus, if we don't cooperate on something?" O'Neil looked around at the other three. Sam Barry nodded. So did Dan McCorley.

"All right," O'Neil called. "Come back to us."

"Thank you," Bellow called. He looked at Vega, the senior soldier present.

"Watch your ass, doc," the first sergeant suggested. To go unarmed into the lair of armed bad guys was, he thought, not very bright. He'd never thought that the doc had such stuff in him.

"Always," Paul Bellow assured him. Then he took a deep breath and walked the ten feet to the corner, and turned, disappearing from the view of the Rainbow troopers.

It always struck Bellow as strange, to the point of being comical, that the difference between safety and danger was a distance of a few feet and the turning of one corner. Yet he looked up with genuine interest. He'd rarely met a criminal under these circumstances. So much the better that they were armed and he was not. They would need the comfortable feelings that came with the perception of power to balance the fact that, armed or not, they were in a cage from which there was no escape.

"You're hurt," Bellow said on seeing Timothy's face.

"It's nothing, just a few scratches."

"Why not have somebody work on it for you?"

"It's nothing," Tim O'Neil said again.

"Okay, it's your face," Bellow said, looking and counting four of them, all armed with the same sort of weapon, AKMS, his memory told him. Only then did he count the hostages. He recognized Sandy Clark. There were seven others, all very frightened, by the look of them, but that was to be expected. "So, what exactly do you want?"

"We want a bus, and we want it quickly," O'Neil replied.

"Okay, I can work on that, but it'll take time to get things organized, and we'll need something in return."

"What's that?" Timothy asked.

"Some hostages to be released," the psychiatrist answered.

"No, we only have eight."

"Look, Tim, when I deal with the people I have to go to-to get the bus you want, okay?-I have to offer them something, or why else should they give me anything to give you?" Bellow asked reasonably. "It's how the game is played, Tim. The game has rules. Come on, you know that. You trade some of what you have for some of what you want."

"So?"

"So, as a sign of good faith, you give me a couple hostages-women and kids, usually, because that looks better." Bellow looked again. Four women, four men. It would be good to get Sandy Clark out.

"And then?"

"And then I tell my superiors that you want a bus and that you've shown good faith. I have to represent you to them, right?"

"Ah, and you're on our side?" another man asked. Bellow looked and saw that he was a twin, with a brother standing only a few feet away. Twin terrorists. Wasn't that interesting?

"No, I won't say that. Look, I am not going to insult your intelligence. You people know the fix you're in. But if you want to get things, you have to deal for them. That's the rule, and it's a rule I didn't make. I have to be the go between. That means I represent you to my bosses, and I represent my bosses to you. If you need time to think it over, fine, I won't be far away, but the faster you move on things, the faster I can move. I need you guys to think about that, okay?"

"Get the bus," Timothy said.

"In return for what?" Paul asked.

"Two women." O'Neil turned. "That one and that one."

"Can they come out with me?" Bellow saw that Timothy had actually indicated Sandy Clark. This kid, O'Neil, was overwhelmed by the circumstances, and that was probably good, too.

"Yes, but get us that bloody bus!"

"I'll do my best," Bellow promised, gesturing at the two women to follow him back around the corner.

"Welcome back, Doc," Vega said quietly. "Hey, great!" he added on seeing the two women. "Howdy, Mrs. Clark. I'm Julio Vega."

"Mom!" Patsy Chavez ran from her place of safety and embraced her mother. Then a pair of recently arrived SAS troopers took all of the women away.

"Vega to Command," Oso called.

"Price to Vega."

"Tell Six his wife and daughter are both safe."

John was back in a truck, heading to the hospital to take charge of the operation, with Domingo Chavez next to him. Both heard the radio call. In both cases, the heads dropped for a brief moment of relief. But there were six more hostages.

"Okay, this is Clark, what's happening now?"

In the hospital, Vega gave his radio set to Dr. Bellow.

"John? This is Paul."

"Yeah, Doc, what's happening now?"

"Give me a couple hours and I can give them to you, John. They know they're trapped. It's just a matter of talking them through. There's four of them now, all in their thirties, all armed. They now have six hostages. But I've spoken with their leader, and I can work with this kid, John."

"Okay, Doc, we'll be there in ten minutes. What are they asking for?"

"The usual," Bellow answered. "They want a bus to somewhere."John thought about that. Make them come outside, and he had riflemen to handle the problem. Four shots, child's play. "Do we deliver?"

"Not yet. We'll let this one simmer a little."

"Okay, Doc, that's your call. When I get there, you can fill me in more. See you soon. Out."

"Okay." Bellow handed the radio back to First Sergeant Vega. This soldier had a diagram of the ground floor pinned to the wall.

"The hostages are here," Bellow said. "Subjects are here and here. Two of them are twins, by the way, all male Caucs in their thirties, all carrying that folding-stock version of the AK-47."

Vega nodded. " 'Kay. If we have to move on them…"

"You won't, at least I don't think so. Their leader isn't a murderer, well, he doesn't want to be."

"You say so, Doc," Vega observed dubiously. But the good news was that they could flip a handful of flash-bangs around the corner and move in right behind them, bagging all four of the fuckers… but at the risk of losing a hostage,which was to be avoided if possible. Oso hadn't appreciated how ballsy this doctor was, walking up to four armed bad guys and talking to them-and getting Mrs. Clark released just like that. Damn. He turned to look at the six SAS guys who'd arrived, dressed in black like his people, and ready to rock if it came to that. Paddy Connolly was outside the building with his bag of tricks. The position was isolated, and the situation was pretty much under control. For the first time in an hour, First Sergeant Vega was allowing himself to relax a little.

"Well, hello, Sean," Bill Tawney said, recognizing the face at the Hereford base hospital. "Having a difficult day, are we?"

Grady's shoulder had been immobilized and would require surgery. It turned out that he'd taken a pair of 9-mm bullets in it, one of which had shattered the top of his left humerus, the long bone of the upper arm. It was a painful injury despite the medication given to him ten minutes before. His face turned to see an Englishman in a tie. Grady naturally enough took him for a policeman, and didn't say anything.

"You picked the wrong patch to play in today, my boy," Tawney said next. "For your information, you are now in the Hereford base military hospital. We will talk later, Sean." For the moment, an orthopedic surgeon had work to do, to repair the injured arm. Tawney watched an army nurse medicate him for the coming procedure. Then he went to a different room to speak to the one rescued from the wrecked truck.

This would be a merry day for all involved, the "Six" man thought. The motorway was closed with the two car smashes, and there were enough police constables about to blacken the landscape with their uniforms, plus the SAS and Rainbow people. Soon to be added were a joint mob of "Five" and "Six" people en route from London, all of whom would be claiming jurisdiction, and that would be quite a mess, since there was a written agreement between the U.S. and U.K. governments on the status of Rainbow, which hadn't been drafted with this situation in mind, but which guaranteed that the CIA Station Chief London would soon be here as well to officiate. Tawney figured he'd be the ringmaster for this particular circus and that maybe a whip, chair, and pistol might be needed.

Tawney tempered his good humor with the knowledge that two Rainbow troopers were dead, with four more wounded and being treated in this same hospital. People he vaguely knew, whose faces had been familiar, two of which he'd never see again, but the profit of that was Sean Grady, one of the most extreme PIRA members, now beginning what would surely be a lifetime of custody by Her Majesty's Government. He would have a wealth of good information, and his job would be to start extracting it.

"Where's the bloody bus?"

"Tim, I've talked to my superiors, and they're thinking about it."

"What's to think about?" ONeil demanded.

"You know the answer to that, Tim. We're dealing with government bureaucrats, and they never take action without covering their own backsides first."

"Paul, I have six hostages here and I can-"

"Yes, you can, but you really can't, can you? Timothy, if you do that, then the soldiers outside come storming in here, and that ends the situation, and you will be remembered forever as a killer of innocent people, a murderer. You want that, Tim? Do you really want that?" Bellow paused. "What about your families? Hell, what about how your political movement is perceived? Killing these people is a hard thing to justify, isn't it? You're not Muslim extremists, are you? You're Christians, remember? Christians aren't supposed to do things like that. Anyway, that threat is useful as a threat, but it's not very useful as a tool. You can't do that, Tim. It would only result in your death and your political damnation. Oh, by the way, we have Sean Grady in custody," Bellow added, with careful timing.

"What?" That, he saw, shook Timothy.

"He was captured trying to escape. He was shot in the process, but he'll survive. They're operating on him right now."

It was like pricking a large balloon, the psychiatrist saw. He'd just let some air out of his antagonist. This was how it was done, a little at a time. Too fast and he might react violently, but wear them down bit by bit, and they were yours. Bellow had written a book on the subject. First establish physical control, which meant containment. Then establish information control. Then feed them information, bit by precious bit, in a manner as carefully orchestrated as a Broadway musical. Then you had them. "You will release Sean to us. He goes on the bus with us!"

"Timothy, he's on an operating table right now, and he's going to be there for hours. If they even attempted to move him now, the results could be lethal-they could kill the man, Tim. So, much as you might want it, that's just not possible. It can't happen. I'm sorry about that, but nobody can change it."

His leader was a prisoner now? Tim O'Neil thought. Sean was captured? Strangely that seemed worse than his own situation. Even if he were in prison, Sean might come up with a way of freeing him, but with Sean on the Isle of Wight… all was lost, wasn't it? But-

"How do I know you're telling the truth?"

"Tim, in a situation like this, I can't lie. I'd just screw up. It's too hard to be a good liar, and if you caught me in a lie, you'd never believe me again, and that would end my usefulness to my bosses and to you, too, wouldn't it?" Again the voice of quiet reason.

"You said you're a doctor?"

"That's right." Bellow nodded.

"Where do you practice?"

"Mainly here now, but I did my residency at Harvard. I've worked at four different places, and taught some."

"So, your job is to get people like me to surrender, isn't it?" Anger, finally, at the obvious.

Bellow shook his head. "No, I think of my job as keeping people alive. I'm a physician, Tim. I am not allowed to kill people or to help others to kill people. I swore an oath on that one a long time ago. You have guns. Other people around that corner have guns. I don't want any of you to get killed. There's been enough of that today, hasn't there? Tim, do you enjoy killing people?"

"Why-no, of course not, who does?"

"Well, some do," Bellow told him, deciding to build up his ego a little. "We call them sociopathic personalities, but you're not one of them. You're a soldier. You fight for something you believe in. So do the people back there." Bellow waved to where the Rainbow people were. "They respect you, and I hope you respect them. Soldiers don't murder people. Criminals do that, and a soldier isn't a criminal." In addition to being true, this was an important thought to communicate to his interlocutor. All the more so because a terrorist was also a romantic, and to be considered a common criminal was psychologically very wounding to them. He'd just built up their self-images in order to steer them away from something he didn't want them to do. They were soldiers, not criminals, and they had to act like soldiers, not criminals.

"Dr. Bellow?" a voice called from around the corner. "Phone call, sir."

"Tim, can I go get it?" Always ask permission to do something. Give them the illusion of being in command of the situation.

"Yeah." O'Neil waved him away. Bellow walked back to where the soldiers were.

He saw John Clark standing there. Together they walked fifty feet into another part of the hospital.

"Thanks for getting my wife and little girl out, Paul."

Bellow shrugged. "It was mainly luck. He's a little overwhelmed by all this, and he's not thinking very well. They want a bus."

"You told me before," Clark reminded him. "Do we give it to 'em?"

"We won't have to do that. I'm in a poker game, John, and I'm holding a straight flush. Unless something screws up really bad, we have this one under control."

"Noonan's outside, and he has a mike on the window. I listened in on the last part. Pretty good, doctor."

"Thanks." Bellow rubbed his face. The tension was real for him, but he could only show it here. In with Timothy he had to be cool as ice, like a friendly and respected teacher. "What's the story on the other prisoners?"

"No change. The Grady guy is being operated on-it'll take a few hours, they say. The other one's unconscious still, and we don't have a name or ID on him anyway…"

"Grady's the leader?"

"We think so, that's what the intel tells us."

"So he can tell us a lot. You want me there when he comes out of the OR," Paul told Rainbow Six.

"You need to finish up here first."

"I know. I'm going back." Clark patted him on the shoulder and Bellow walked back to see the terrorists.

"Well?" Timothy asked.

"Well, they haven't decided on the bus yet. Sorry," Bellow added in a downcast voice. "I thought I had them convinced, but they can't get their asses in gear."

"You tell them that if they don't, we'll-"

"No, you won't, Tim. You know that. I know that. They know that."

"Then why send the bus?" O'Neil asked, close to losing control now.

"Because I told them that you're serious, and they have to take your threat seriously. If they don't believe you'll do it, they have to remember that you might, and if you do, then they look bad to their bosses." Timothy shook his head at that convoluted logic, looking more puzzled than angry now. "Trust me," Paul Bellow went on. "I've done this before, and I know how it works. It's easier negotiating with soldiers like you than with those damned bureaucrats. People like you can make decisions. People like that run away from doing it. They don't care much about getting people killed, but they do care about looking bad in the newspapers."

Then something good happened. Tim reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. A sure sign of stress and an attempt to control it.

"Hazardous to your health, boy," Clark observed, looking at the TV picture Noonan had established. The assault plan was completely ready. Connolly had line charges set on the windows, both to open an entry path and to distract the terrorists. Vega,Tomlinson, and Bates, from Team-1, would toss flash-bangs at the same time and dart into the room to take the bad guys down with aimed fire. The only downside to that, as always, was that one of them could turn and hose the hostages as his last conscious act, or even by accident, which was just as lethal. From the sound of it, Bellow was doing okay. If these subjects had any brains at all, they'd know it was time to call it a day, but John reminded himself that he'd never contemplated life in prison before, at least not this immediately, and he imagined it wasn't a fun thought. He now had a surfeit of soldierly talent at his disposal. The SAS guys who'd arrived had chopped to his operational command, though their own colonel had come as well to kibitz in the hospital's main lobby.

"Tough day for all of us, isn't it, Tim?" the psychiatrist asked.

"Could have been a better one," Timothy O'Neil agreed.

"You know how this one will end, don't you?" Bellow offered, like a nice fly to a brook trout, wondering if he'd rise to it.

"Yes, doctor, I do." He paused. "I haven't even fired my rifle today. I haven't killed anyone. Jimmy did," he went on, gesturing to the body on the floor, "but not any of us."

Bingo! Bellow thought. "That counts for something, Tim. As a matter of fact, it counts for a lot. You know, the war will be over soon. They're going to make peace finally, and when that happens, well, there's going to be an amnesty for most of the fighters. So you have some hope. You all do," Paul told the other three, who were watching and listening… and wavering, as their leader was. They had to know that all was lost. Surrounded, their leader captured, this could only end in one of two ways, with their deaths or their imprisonment. Escape was not a practical possibility, and they knew that the attempt to move their hostages to a bus would only expose them to certain death in a new and different way.

"Tim?"

"Yes?" He looked up from his smoke.

"If you set your weapons down on the floor, you have my word that you will not be hurt in any way."

"And go to prison?" Defiance and anger in the reply.

"Timothy, you can get out of prison someday. You cannot get out of death. Please think about that. For God's sake, I'm a physician," Bellow reminded him. "I don't like seeing people die."

Timothy O'Neil turned to look at his comrades. All eyes were downcast. Even the Barry twins showed no particular defiance.

"Guys, if you haven't hurt anyone today, then, yes. you will go to prison, but someday you'll have a good chance to get out when the amnesty is promulgated. Otherwise, you die for nothing at all, Not for your country. They don't make heroes out of people who kill civilians," he reminded them once again. Keep repeating, Bellow thought. Keep drumming it in. "Killing soldiers, yes, that's something soldiers do, but not murdering innocent people. You will die for nothing at all-or you will live, and be free again someday. It's up to you, guys. You have the guns. But there isn't going to be a bus. You will not escape, and you have six people you can kill, sure, but what does that get for you, except a trip to hell? Call it a day, Timothy," he concluded, wondering if some Catholic nun in grade school had addressed him that way.

It wasn't quite that easy for Tim O'Neil. The idea of imprisonment in a cage with common criminals, having his family come to visit him there like an animal in a zoo, gave him chills… but he'd known that this was a possibility for years, and though he preferred the mental image of heroic death, a blazing gun in his hand firing at the enemies of his country, this American doctor had spoken the truth. There was no glory in murdering six English civilians. No songs would be written and sung about this exploit, no pints hoisted to his name in the pubs of Ulster… and what was left to him was inglorious death… life, in prison or not, was preferable to that sort of death.

Timothy Dennis O'Neil turned to look at his fellow PIRA soldiers and saw the same expression that they saw on his face. Without a spoken agreement, they all nodded. O'Neil safed his rifle and set it on the floor. The others did the same.

Bellow walked over to them to shake their hands.

"Six to Vega, move in now!" Clark called, seeing the picture on the small black-and-white screen.

Oso Vega moved quickly around the corner, his MP-10 up in his hands. There they were, standing with the doc. Tomlinson and Bates pushed them, not too roughly, against the wall. The former covered them while the latter patted them down. Seconds later, two uniformed policemen came in with handcuffs and, to the amazement of the soldiers, read them their legal rights. And just that easily and quietly, this days fighting was over.