No, what a man like Ostermann had was information, the ultimate source of power, ethereal though it was. Were Dortmund and Furchtner willing to kill for that? It appeared so, but were the two dead terrorists the sort of people who could make use of such information? No, they couldn't have been, because then they would have known that the thing they'd sought didn't exist.
Somebody hired them, Tawney thought. Somebody had sent them out on their mission. But who?
And to what purpose? Which was-even a better question, and one from which he could perhaps learn the answer to the first.
Back up, he told himself. If someone had hired them for a job, who could it have been? Clearly someone connected to the old terror network, someone who'd know where they were and whom they'd known and trusted to some degree, enough to risk their lives. But -Fiirchtner and Dortmund had been ideologically pure communists. Their acquaintances would be the same, and they would certainly not have trusted or taken orders from anyone of a different political shade. And how else could this notional person have known where and how to contact them, win their confidence, and send them off on a mission of death; chasing after something that didn't really exist?…
A superior officer? Tawney wondered, stretching his mind for more information than he really had. Someone of the same political bent or beliefs, able to order them, or at least to motivate them to do something dangerous.
He needed more information; and he'd use his SIS and police contacts to get every scrap he could from the Austrian/German investigation. For starters, he called Whitehall to make sure he got full translations of all the hostage interviews. Tawney had been an intelligence officer for a long time, and something had gotten his nose to twitch.
"Ding, I didn't like your takedown plan," Clark said in the big conference room.
"I didn't either, Mr. C, but without a chopper, didn't have much. choice, did I?" Chavez replied with an air of self-righteousness. "But that's not the thing that really scares me."
"What is?" John asked.
"Noonan brought this one up. Every time we go into a place, there are people around - the public, reporters, TV crews, all of that. Wharf one of them has a cell phone and calls the bad guys inside to tell them what's happening? Real simple, isn't it? We're fucked and so are some hostages."
"We should be able to deal with that," Tim Noonan told them. "It's the way a cell phone works. It broadcasts a signal to tell the local cell that it's there and it's on, so that the computer systems can route an incoming call to it. Okay, we can get instrumentation to read that, and maybe to block the signal path-maybe even clone the bad guys' phone, trap the incoming call and bag the bastards outside, maybe even flip 'em, right? But I need that soft ware, and I need it now."
"David?" Clark turned to Dave Peled, their Israeli technogenius.
"It can be done. I expect the technology exists already at NSA or elsewhere."
"What about Israel?" Noonan asked pointedly.
"Well… yes, we have such things."
"Get them," Clark ordered. "Want me to call Avi personally?"
"That would help."
"Okay, I need the name and specifications of the equipment: How hard to train the operators?"
"Not very," Peled conceded. "Tim can do it easily."
Thank you for that vote of confidence, Special Agent Noonan thought, without a smile. "Back to the takedown," Clark commanded. "Ding, what were you thinking?"
Chavez leaned forward in his chair. He wasn't just defending himself; he was defending his team. "Mainly that I didn't want to lose a hostage, John. Doc told us we had to take those two seriously, and we had a hard deadline coming up. Okay, the mission as I understand it is not to lose a hostage. So, when they made it clear they wanted the chopper for transport, it was just a matter of giving it to them, with a little extra put in. Dieter and Homer did their jobs perfectly. So did Eddie and the rest of the shooters. The dangerous part was getting Louis and George up to the house so they could take down the last bunch. They did a nice ninja job getting there unseen," Chavez went on, gesturing to Loiselle and Tomlinson. "That was the most dangerous part of the mission. We had them in a light-well and the camo stuff worked. If the bad guys had been using NVGs, that would have been a problem, -but the additional illumination off the trees-from the lights the cops brought in, I mean-would have interfered with that. NVGs flare a lot if you throw light their way. It was a gamble;" Ding admitted, "but it was a gamble that looked better than having a hostage whacked right in front of us while we were jerking off at the assembly point. That's the mission, Mr. C, and I was the commander on the scene. I made the call." He didn't add that his call had worked.
"I see. Well, good shooting from everybody, and Loiselle and Tomlinson did very well, to get close undetected," Alistair Stanley said from his place, opposite Clark's: "Even so-"
"Even so, we need helicopters for a case like this one. How the hell did we overlook that requirement?" Chavez demanded.
"My fault, Domingo," Clark admitted. "I'm going to call in on that today.':
"Just so we get it fixed, man." Ding stretched in his seat. "My troops got it done, John. Crummy setup, but we got it done: Next time, be better if things went a little smoother," he cones. "But when the doc tells me that the bad guys will rally kill somebody, that tells me I have to take decisive action, doesn't it?"
"Depending on the situation, yes," Stanley answered the question.
"Al, what does that mean?" Chavez asked sharply. "We need better mission guidelines. I need to have it spelled out. When can I allow a hostage to get killed? Does the age or sex of the hostage enter into the equation? What if somebody takes over a kindergarten or a hospital maternity ward? You can't expect us to disregard human factors like that. Okay, I understand that yon can't plan for every possibility, and as the commanders on the scene, Peter and I have to exercise judgment,. but my default position is to prevent the death of a hostage if I can do it. If that means taking risks-well, it's a probability measured against a certainty, isn't it? In a case like that, you take the risk, don't you?"
"Dr. Bellow," Clark asked, "how confident were you in your evaluation of the terrorists' state of mind?"
"Very. They were experienced. They'd thought through a lot of the mission, and in my opinion they were dead serious about killing hostages to show us their resolve," the psychiatrist replied.
"Then or now?"
"Both," Bellow said confidently. "These two were political sociopaths. Human life doesn't mean much to that sort of personality. Just poker chips to toss around the table."
"Okay, but what if they'd spotted Loiselle and Tomlinson coming in?"
"They would probably have killed a hostage and that would have frozen the situation for a few minutes."
"And my backup plan in that case was to rush the house from the east side and shoot our way in as quickly as possible," Chavez went on. "The better way is to zipline down from some choppers and hit the place like a Kansas tornado. That's dangerous, too," he conceded. "But the people we're dealing with ain't the most reasonable folks in the world, are they?"
The senior team members didn't like this sort of discussion, since it reminded them that as good as the Rainbow troopers were, they weren't gods or supermen. They'd now had two incidents, both of them resolved without a civilian casualty. That made for mental complacency on the command side, further exacerbated by the fact that Team-2 had done a picture-perfect takedown under adverse tactical circumstances. They. trained their men to be supermen, Olympic-perfect physical specimens, supremely trained in the use of firearms and explosives, and most of all, mentally prepared for the rapid destruction of human life.