Later press coverage spoke of the skill of the special police unit. That had happened in Bern, too, but it was surprising in neither case, since reporters also spoke the same drivel, regardless of language or nationality. The words used in the statement by the police were almost identical. Well, someone had trained both teams, perhaps the same agency. Perhaps the German GSG-9 group, which, with British help, had ended the airplane incident at Mogadishu over twenty years before, had trained the forces of countries that shared their language. Certainly the thoroughness of the training and the coldness of demeanor of the assault teams struck Popov as very German. They'd acted like machines both before and after the attacks, arriving and leaving like ghosts, with nothing left behind but the bodies of the terrorists. Efficient people, the Germans, and the Germanic policemen whom they trained. Popov, a Russian by birth and culture, had little love for the nation that had once killed so many of his countrymen, but he could respect them and their work, and the people they killed were no loss to the world. Even when he'd helped to train them as an active-duty officer of the Soviet KGB, who'd not cared much for them, nor had anyone else in his agency. They were, if not exactly the useful fools Lenin had once spoken about, then trained attack dogs to be unleashed when needed, but never really trusted by those who semi controlled them. And they'd never really been all that efficient. About the only thing they'd really accomplished was to force airports to install metal detectors, inconveniencing travelers all over the world. Certainly they'd made life hard on the Israelis, but what, really, did that country matter on the world stage? And even then, what had happened? If you forced countries to adapt to adverse circumstances, it happened swiftly. So, now, El Al, the Israeli airline, was the safest and most secure in the world, and policemen the world over were better briefed on whom to watch and to examine closely-and if everything else failed, then the policemen had special counterterror units like those who'd settled things in Bern and Vienna. Trained by Germans to kill like Germans. Any other terrorists he sent out to do evil work would have to deal with such people. Too bad, Popov thought, turning his TV back to a cable channel while the last tape rewound. He hadn't learned much of anything from reviewing the tapes, but he was a trained intelligence officer, and therefore a thorough man. He poured himself an Absolut vodka to drink neat-he missed the superior Starka brand he would have had in Russia-and allowed his mind to churn over the information while he watched a movie on the TV screen.
"Yes, General, I know," Clark said into the phone at 1:05 the next afternoon, damning time zones as he did so.
"That comes out of my budget, too," General Wilson pointed out. First, CINC-SNAKE thought, they ask for a man, then they ask for hardware, and now, they are asking for funding, too.
"I can try to help with that through Ed Foley, sir, but the fact of the matter is that we need the asset to train with. You did send us a pretty good man," Clark added, hoping to assuage Wilson's renowned temper.
It didn't help much. "Yes, I know he's good. That's why he was working for me in the first goddamned place."
This guy's getting ecumenical in his old age, John told himself. Now he's praising a Marine-rather unusual for an Army snake eater and former commander of XVIII Airborne Corps.
"General-sir, you know we've had a couple of jobs already, and with all due modesty, my people handled them both pretty damned well. I have to fight for my people, don't I?"
And that calmed Wilson down. They were both commanders, they both had jobs to do, and people to, command and defend.
"Clark, I understand your position. I really do. But I can't train my people on assets that you've taken away."
"How about we call it time-sharing?" John offered, as a further olive branch. "It still wears out a perfectly good Night Hawk."
"It also trains up the crews for you. At the end of this, on may just have a primo helicopter crew to bring down to Bragg to work with your people-and the training expense for your operation is just about nothing, sir." And that, he thought, was a pretty good play.
At MacDill Air Force Base, Wilson told himself that this was a losing proposition. Rainbow was a bulletproof operation, and everyone knew it. This Clark guy had sold it first of all to CIA, then to the President himself-and sure enough, they'd had two deployments, and both had worked out, though the second one had been pretty dicey. But Clark, clever as he was, and good commander that he seemed to be, hadn't learned how to run a unit in the modern military world, where half the time was spent managing money like some goddamned white-socked accountant, instead of leading from the front and training with the troops. That's what really rankled Sam Wilson, young for a four-star, a professional soldier who wanted to soldier, something that high command pretty well precluded, despite his fitness and desire. Most annoying of all, this Rainbow unit promised to steal a lot of his own business. The Special Operations Command had commit menu all over the world, but the international nature of Rainbow meant that there was now somebody else in the Same line of work, whose politically neutral nature was supposed to make their use a lot more palatable to countries that might need special services. Clark might just put him out of business in a real sense, and Wilson didn't like that at all. But, really, he had no choice in the matter, did he?
"Okay, Clark, you can use the aircraft so long as the parent unit is able to part with it, and so long as its use by you does not interfere with training and readiness with that parent unit. Clear?"
"Yes, sir, that is clear," John Clark acknowledged.
"I need to come over to see your little circus," Wilson said next.
"I'd like that a lot, General."
"We'll see," Wilson grumbled, breaking the connection.
"Tough son of a bitch," John breathed.
"Quite," Stanley agreed. "We are poaching on his patch, after all."
"It's our patch now, Al."
"Yes, it is, but you mustn't expect him to like that fact."
"And he's younger and tougher than me?"
"A few years younger, and I personally would not wish to cross swords with the gentleman." Stanley smiled. "The war appears to be over, John, and you appear to have won."
Clark managed a smile and a chuckle. "Yeah, Al, but it's easier to go into the field and kill people."