Hector Weiler was the park physician, a general surgeon trained at the University of Barcelona who spent most of his time putting Band-Aids on skinned knees and elbows, though there was a photo on his wall of the twin she'd delivered once upon a time after a pregnant woman had been foolish enough to ride the Dive Bomber there was now a very emphatic sign at the entrance warning against that. For all that, he was a skilled young doctor who'd done his share of work in his medical school's emergency room, and so this wasn't his first gunshot victim. Francisco was a lucky man. At least six shots had been fired at him, and though the first three had merely resulted in fragment-peppering on his left arm, one of the second bursts had hurt his leg badly. A broken tibia would take a long time to heal for a man of his years, but at least it was broken fairly high up. A break lower down could take six months to heal, if ever.
"I could have killed him," the centurion groused through the anesthesia. "I could have taken his head off, but I missed!"
"Not with the first one," Weiler observed, seeing the red crust on the sword that now lay atop his scutum in the corner of the treatment room.
"Tell me about him," Captain Gassman ordered.
"Forties, early forties," de la Cruz said. "My height plus ten or twelve centimeters, lightly built. Brown hair, brown beard, some speckles of gray in it. Dark eyes. Uzi machine gun. White hat," the former sergeant reported, biting off his words. The anesthesia he'd been given was not enough for all the pain, but he had to tell what he knew, and accepted the discomfort as the physician worked to get the leg set. "There were others. I saw four others, maybe more."
"We think ten or so," Gassman said. "Did he say anything?"
De la Cruz shook his head. "Nothing I heard."
"Who are they?" the surgeon asked, not looking up from his work.
"We think they are French, but we are not sure," the captain of the Guardia Civil answered.
It was hardest of all for Colonel Malloy. Crossing the English Channel, he headed south-southwest at a steady cruising speed of 150 knots. He'd stop at a French military airfield outside Bordeaux for refueling, since he lacked the external fuel tanks used for ferrying the Night Hawk long distances. Like nearly all helicopters, the Night Hawk didn't have an autopilot, forcing Malloy and Lieutenant Harrison to hand-fly the aircraft all the way. It made for stiffness since the helicopter wasn't the most comfortable aircraft in the world to sit in, but both were used to it and used to grumbling about it as they switched off the controls every twenty minutes or so. Three hours to get where they were going. In the back was their crew chief, Sergeant Jack Nance, now just sitting and looking out the plastic windows as they crossed over the French coast, cruising at two thousand feet over a fishing port filled with boats.
"This got laid on in a hurry," Harrison remarked over the intercom.
"Yeah, well, I guess Rainbow lives on a short fuse."
"You know anything about what's happening?"
"Not a clue, son." The helmeted head shook left and right briefly. "You know, I haven't been to Spain since I deployed on Tarawa back in… 1985, I think. I remember a great restaurant in Cadiz, though… wonder if it's still there…" And with that the crew lapsed back into silence, the chopper nose down and pulling south under its four-bladed rotor while Malloy checked the digital navigation display every few seconds.
"Diminishing returns," Clark observed, checking the latest fax. There was nothing new on it, just data already sent being rearranged by some helpful intelligence officer somewhere. He left Alistair Stanley to handle that, and walked aft.
There they were, the Rainbow team, almost all of them looking as if asleep, but probably just chimped down, as he'd done with 3rd SOG more than a generation before, just pretending to sleep, eyes closed and powering their minds and bodies down, because it made no sense to think about things you didn't know jack shit about, and tension sapped the strength even when your muscles were idle. So, your defense against it was to make your body turn off. These men were smart and professional enough to know that the stress would come in its own good time, and there was no point in welcoming it too soon. In that moment John Clark, long before a Chief SEAL, U.S. Navy, was struck with the honor he held, commanding such men as these. The thought had surprising impact, just standing there and watching them do nothing, because that's what the best people did at a time like this one, because they understood what the mission was, because they knew how to handle that mission, every step of the way. Now they were heading out on a job about which they'd been told nothing, but it had to be something serious because never had teams -1 and -2 both gone out. And yet they treated it like another routine training mission. They didn't make men better than these, and his two leaders, Chavez and Covington, had trained them to a razor's edge of perfection.
And somewhere ahead were terrorists holding children hostage. Well, the job wouldn't be an easy one, and it was far too soon for him to speculate on how it would play out, but John knew anyway that it was better to be here on this noisy Herky Bird than it would be in that theme park still a half an hour ahead, for soon his men would open their eyes and shuffle out, bringing their boxed combat gear with them. Looking at them, John Clark saw Death before his eyes, and Death, here and now, was his to command.
Tim Noonan was sitting in the right-side forward corner of the cargo area, playing with his computer, with David Peled at his side. Clark went over to them and asked what they were doing.
"This hasn't made the newswire services yet," Noonan told him. "I wonder why."
"That'll change in a hurry," Clark predicted.
"Ten minutes, less," the Israeli said. "Who's meeting us?"
"Spanish army and their national police, I just heard. We've been authorized to land… twenty-five minutes," he told them, checking his watch.
"There, Agence France-Press just started a flash," Noonan said, reading it over for possible new information. "Thirty or so French kids taken hostage by unknown terrorists-nothing else except where they are. This isn't going to be fun, John," the former FBI agent observed. "Thirty-plus hostages in a crowded environment. When I was with Hostage Rescue, we sweated this sort of scenario. Ten bad guys?" he asked.
"That's about what they think, but it isn't confirmed yet.
"Shitty chemistry on this one, boss." Noonan shook his head in worry. He was dressed like the shooters, in black Nomex and body armor, with his holstered Beretta on his right hip, because he still preferred to think of himself as a shooter rather than a tech-weenie, and his shooting, practiced at Hereford with the team members, was right on the line… and children were in danger, Clark reflected, and child-in-danger was perhaps the strongest of all human drives, further reinforced by Noonan's time in the Bureau, which regarded child crimes as the lowest of the low. David Peled took a more distant view, sitting there in civilian clothing and staring at the computer screen like an accountant examining a business spreadsheet.