Chavez walked to the command position in front of the two lines of troopers. "Fallout," he ordered, allowing Team-2 to walk to their building for a shower, having stretched and exercised all their muscles for the day. Later today they'd have another run through the shooting house for a live-fire exercise. It would be boring in content, since they'd already tried just about every possible permutation of hostages and bad guys. Their shooting was just about perfect. Their physical condition was perfect, and their morale was so high that they seemed bored. They were so confident in their abilities, they'd demonstrated them so convincingly in the field, firing real bullets into real targets. Even his time with the 7th Light Infantry Division had not given him such confidence in his people. They'd gotten to the point that the British SAS troopers, who had a long, proud history of their own, and who'd initially looked upon the Rainbow teams with a great degree of skepticism, now welcomed them into the club and even admitted they had things to learn from them. And that was quite a stretch, since the SAS had been the acknowledged world masters at special operations.
A few minutes later, showered and dressed, Chavez came out to the squad bay, where his people were at their individual desks, going over intelligence information from Bill Tawney and his crew, and checking out photos, many of them massaged by the computer systems to allow for the years since they'd originally been taken. The systems seemed to get better on a daily basis as the software evolved. A picture taken from an angle was now manipulated by the computer into a straight-on portrait shot, and his men studied them as they might examine photos of their own children, along with whatever information they had of who was suspected to be where, with what known or suspected associates, and so forth. It seemed a waste of time to Chavez, but you couldn't run and shoot All day, and knowing the faces wasn't a total waste of time. They had identified Furchtner and Dortmund that way on their Vienna deployment, hadn't they?
Sergeant Major Price was going over budget stuff, which he'd toss onto Ding's desk for later examination, so that his boss could justify expenditures, and then maybe request some new training funds for some new idea or other. Tim Noonan was working away with his new electronic toys, and Clark was always, so it seemed, fighting money battles with CIA and other American agencies. That struck Chavez as a total waste of effort. Rainbow had been pretty bulletproof from the very beginning Presidential sponsorship never hurt-and their missions hadn't exactly diminished the credibility from which their funding derived. In another two hours, they'd go to the range for their daily expenditure of one hundred rounds of pistol and SMG ammunition, followed by the live-five exercise… another routine day. For "routine," Ding often substituted "boring," but that couldn't be helped, and it was a hell of a lot less boring than it had been on field missions for CIA, most of which time had been spent sitting down waiting for a meet and/or filling out forms to describe the field operation for the Langley bureaucrats who demanded full documentation of everything that happened in the field because-because that was one of the rules. Rules at best enforced by people who'd been out there and done that a generation before and thought they still knew all about it, and at worst by people who didn't have a clue, and were all the more demanding for that very reason. But the government, which tossed away billions of dollars every day, could often be so niggardly over a thousand or so, and nothing Chavez could do would ever change that.
Colonel Malloy now had his own office in the headquarters building, since it had been decided that he was a Rainbow division commander. A staff-grade officer in the United States Marine Corps, he was accustomed to such nonsense, and he thought about hanging a dartboard on the wall for amusement when he wasn't working. Work for him was driving his chopper - which, he reminded himself, he didn't really have, since the one assigned to him was, at the moment, down for maintenance. Some widget was being replaced with a new and improved widget that would enhance his ability to do something of which he was not yet fully informed, but which, he was sure, would be important, especially to the civilian contractor, which had conceived of, designed, and manufactured the new and improved widget.
It could have been worse. His wife and kids liked it here, and Malloy liked it, as well. His was a skill position rather than a dangerous one. There was little hazard in being a helicopter pilot in a special-operations outfit. The only thing that worried him was hitting power lines, since Rainbow mainly deployed to operations in built-up areas, and in the past twenty years more helicopters had been lost to electrical power lines than to all known antiaircraft weapons around the world. His MH-60K didn't have cable cutters, and he'd written a scathing memo on that fact to the commander of the 24th Special Operations Squadron, who had replied contritely with six photocopies of memos he'd dispatched to his parent-unit commander on the same issue. He'd explained further on that some expert in the Pentagon was considering the modification to the existing aircraft-which, Malloy thought, was the subject of a consulting contract worth probably $300,000 or so to some Beltway Bandit whose conclusion would be, Yes, that's a good idea, couched in about four hundred pages of stultifying bureaucratic prose, which nobody would ever read but which would be enshrined in some archive or other for all time. The modification would cost all of three thousand dollars in parts and labor-the labor part would be the time of a sergeant who worked full-time for the Air Force anyway, whether actually working or sitting in his squad bay reading Playboy-but the rules were, unfortunately, the rules. And who knew, maybe in a year the Night Hawks would have the cable cutters.
Malloy grimaced and wished for his darts. He didn't need to see the intelligence information. The faces of known or suspected terrorists were of no use to him. He never got close enough to see them. That was the job of the shooters, and division commander or not he was merely their chauffeur. Well, it could have been worse. At least he was able to wear his "bag," or flight suit, at his desk, almost as though this were a proper organization of' aviators. He got to fly four days or so out of seven, and that wasn't bad, and after this assignment, his detailer had hinted, he might go on to command of VMH-1, and maybe fly the president around. It would be dull, but career enhancing. It surely hadn't hurt his old friend, Colonel Hank Goodman, who had just appeared on the star list, a fairly rare achievement for a rotor-head, since naval aviation, which was mainly helicopter drivers, was run, and run ruthlessly, by fast movers in their jet powered fixed-wing fighter bombers. Well, they all had prettier scarves. To amuse himself before lunch, Malloy pulled out his manual for the MH-60K and started to memorize additional information on engine performance, the kind of thing usually done by an engineering officer or maybe his crew chief, Sergeant Jack Nance.
The initial meeting took place in a public park. Popov had checked the telephone book and called the number for one Patrick X. Murphy just before noon.
"Hello, this is Joseph Andrews. I'm trying to find Mr. Yates," he'd said.
That statement was followed by silence, as the man on the other end of the phone had searched his memory for the code phrase. It was an old one, but after ten seconds or so, he'd fished it out.
"Ah, yes, Mr. Andrews. We haven't heard from you in some time."
"I just arrived in Dublin this morning, and I'm looking forward to seeing him. How quickly. can we get together?"
"How about one this afternoon?" And then had come the instructions.
So, here he was now, wearing his raincoat and wide brimmed fedora hat, carrying a copy of the Irish Times in his right hand, and sitting on a particular bench close to an oak tree. He used the downtime to read the paper and catch up on what was happening in the world-it wasn't very different from what he'd seen on CNN the previous day in New York… international news had gotten so dull since the demise of the Soviet Union, and he wondered how the editors of major newspapers had learned to deal with it. Well, people in Rwanda and Burundi were still slaughtering one another with obscene gusto, and the Irish were wondering aloud if soldiers from their army might be sent down as peacekeepers. Wasn't that odd? Popov thought. They'd proven singularly unable to keep the peace at home, so why, then, send them elsewhere to do it?