Games of the Hangman (17 page)

At regular
intervals the young Italian girl checked her and the room and peered out of the
small observation holes cut in the thick curtains.
 
Maura O'Farrell paid her no heed.
 
From time to time the children moaned in
their sleep but did not wake.
 
The
makeshift sedative of brandy and aspirin mixed with sweetened warm milk had
done its work.
 
For a few hours they
could rest, oblivious of the memory of seeing their father slaughtered like a
pig.

For her part
the young Italian girl felt tired but not too unhappy with their situation.
 
They had been unlucky, but now things would
work out.
 
Those fools outside would have
to give in.
 
Killing the farmer had been
a stroke of brilliance.
 
It would cut
short futile negotiations.
 
At the agreed
time of 3:30 a.m. the phone would ring and the authorities would announce their
capitulation:
 
a helicopter at dawn to
the airport and then a requisitioned plane to
Libya
.

The Irish
government would never allow a mother and her four children to be killed.
 
Tina was looking forward to that phone call.
 
She could feel the warmth of the Libyan sun
on her face already.
 
Ireland
had the
most beautiful countryside, but the wind and the rain and the damp cold were
just too much for a hot-blooded woman.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The final
preassault briefing took place in the twelve-meter-long Special Weapons and
Equipment trailer.
 
The walls of the
mobile unit were lined with row after row of purpose-designed weaponry.
 
Ammunition, scaling ladders, bullet-resistant
clothing, and hundreds of other items of specialized combat equipment were
stored in custom-built racks and cabinets.
 
At one end of the trailer there was a giant high-resolution television
screen flanked by huge pinboards covered with maps, drawings, and photographs.
 
A long table ran for a third of the length of
the trailer.
 
On it, a scale model of the
farmhouse and vicinity had been roughly constructed, using sand and children's
building kits.

Kilmara stood
to one side of the giant screen, which was connected to the surveillance system
controlled by the separate
Mobile
Command
Center
.
 
The twelve Rangers of the assault group sat
in folding chairs facing their colonel.
 
Army and Special Investigations Branch liaison personnel swelled their
numbers to more than twenty.
 
A digital
clock flashed away the seconds.
 
Fitzduane sat discreetly in the background, thinking of how many times
before he had watched the trained, attentive faces of troops being briefed —
and afterward photographed their corpses.
 
He wondered who in the room this night was going to die.

Kilmara began
the briefing.
 
The twelve men in the
assault group listened intently.
 
"We're going in.
 
Our
objective is to release the hostages unharmed, using only such force as is
necessary to achieve that objective.
 
It
is my judgment that this will entail killing or, at the minimum, very seriously
wounding the terrorists.
 
For the last
two hours you have been practicing against a similar house a few miles away.
 
What I'm telling you now incorporates the
lessons learned during that exercise.

"There
are five hostages in all — specifically, Mrs. Maura O'Farrell and her four
children.
 
As best we can determine from
acoustic surveillance, they are being kept in the second floor master bedroom.
 
We believe that the
window
of that room are
locked and that the windows and the heavy tweed
curtains have been nailed in place.
 
Since there is a bathroom directly off the master bedroom, the terrorists
can keep the hostages quite conveniently in one place under close observation
and at the same time have freedom of movement themselves.

"The
farmhouse, as you've discovered, is a modern two-story building with one
feature of particular interest to us, the hallway.
 
That hallway is a small atrium.
 
It runs the full height of the house and is
lit from the top by a sloping skylight — which can open, incidentally, but is
kept closed and locked this time of year.
 
The hallway contains both the stairs to the second floor and the
telephone.

"Most of
the
time the two terrorists prowl the house and keep watch on
us — and the hostages —
on pretty much a random basis.
 
However, our surveillance has shown that a
pattern has developed during the negotiating sessions on the phone.
 
During these times the German, Dieter Kretz,
according to his papers, is in the hall near the front door, using the
phone.
 
He has no choice.
 
The phone is directly wired in on that spot,
and there are no other extensions in the house.
 
Of course, the hall door and adjacent hall windows are covered with
blankets nailed into place.
 
They started
to do this after O'Farrell was killed, and while they were hammering away, we
used the opportunity to insert acoustic probes into all key external areas of
the house.
 
That means that while we
cannot see the terrorists — with one notable exception that I'll talk about in
a moment — from the sounds they make we do have a precise idea where they are
at any time.
 
I'm also pleased to be able
to say that the equipment is sufficiently sensitive for us to be able to
determine not only the presence of a person in a particular location but the
identity of that
person,
provided he or she talks or
moves around.

"While
the telephoning is going on, the girl normally sits halfway up the stairs so
that she is near enough to the hostages and yet at the same time can talk with
Dieter and put her two cents worth into the negotiations.
 
Sometimes she actually descends the stairs
and listens in on the oncoming call.
 
The
crucial time is therefore during telephone contact.
 
Not only is Dieter in a predictable location
then — and Tina, too, with luck — but we can actually see him."

Kilmara spoke
quietly into a miniature microphone attached to a compact earpiece.
 
Almost immediately the picture on the screen
changed from a medium shot of the whole house to a small yellow rectangle.
 
Kilmara spoke into his microphone again, and
the yellow rectangle blurred and increased in size until it filled the whole
screen.
 
There was an adjustment of
focus, and suddenly the assembled men realized they were looking directly through
the skylight into the hall of the besieged farmhouse.
 
They saw Dieter come into camera view, pause,
look at the phone, and then walk out of sight in the direction of the front
sitting room.
 
The long-focus lens gave
the picture an unreal, ethereal quality.

Kilmara
continued.
 
"The terrorists have
said that if we attempt to approach any closer than the agreed perimeter of
about two hundred meters from the house, they will kill a hostage.
 
On the terrorists' instructions, we have
floodlit the area up to about ten meters from the house.
 
This allows the terrorists to see out without
being dazzled.
 
Now, the effect of all
this is that although it is exceedingly difficult for us to cross that floodlit
perimeter area undetected — and we have not yet been willing to take that risk
because of the hostages — at the same time our friends inside cannot see beyond
the wall of light surrounding them.
 
They
look out into the perimeter, no problem.
 
But if they look up, then they just see the glare of the wall of
floodlights."

The Ranger
colonel spoke into the microphone again, and the picture on the screen
changed.
 
It now showed a giant metal arm
with a platform on the end, the whole device being mounted on a self-propelled
chassis.

"That
picture of the hall," he said, "was taken from the top of that cherry
picker crane.
 
There is enough space on
the platform for at least three people; the range into the hall from the
platform is about two hundred and eighty meters.
 
The problem is that the skylight is
double-glazed and made out of toughened glass set at an angle to the direction
of fire.
 
It will deflect a conventional
rifle round.

"So there
are the main elements of our problem — and this is exactly what we're going to
do."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Fitzduane
watched the assault group select and check its weapons.
 
His profession made him more knowledgeable than
most about tactical firepower.
 
Of the
three Rangers in the cherry picker, two were armed with accurized M-21 assault
rifles fitted with high-magnification image-intensifier sights.
 
Early models of these sights had “whited out”
when exposed to a sudden increase in light — say a room light being switched on
— but the current version was microprocessor-controlled and could adapt without
the marksman's losing his aim.
 
The ammunition
had the lethal apple green tips of special-purpose TKD high-penetration
rounds.
 
The Teflon-coated rounds lost
stopping power as a corollary of their penetrating ability, but with the
massive tissue destruction effect of the high-velocity 7.62 mm bullets, that
problem would be a little academic.

The third
Ranger on the cherry picker team selected a semiautomatic GLX-9 grenade
launcher actually custom-built in the Ranger armory.
 
Inspired by the original single-shot M-79
launcher, this weapon held four rounds in a rotary magazine and could hurl a
stream of grenades with considerable accuracy for up to four hundred meters.

The actual
entry into the house would be made by a team of six Rangers under the command
of Lieutenant Phil Burke.
 
They took
British-made SA-80 5.56 mm assault rifles and Dutch V-40 hand grenades.
 
The rifle ammunition was a derivation of the
Glaser safety round and had the unusual characteristic of expending virtually
all its energy in the target.
 
It
inflicted the most appalling wounds on the victim and yet did not ricochet.

The task of
the third group was to provide intensive fire support from the front of the
house.
 
They took grenade launchers and
Belgian-made 5.56 mm belt-fed minimi light machine guns.

The plan
provided that the cherry picker team would take out Dieter first, and then Tina
if she was by the phone.
 
If she kept to
her normal position on the stairs, it was calculated that the combined
firepower of grenades and concentrated machine-gun fire would cut her to pieces
before she could reach the hostages in the master bedroom.
 
Meanwhile, Phil Burke's team would cross the
perimeter and enter the master bedroom using lightweight scaling ladders.
 
There three of them would pour covering fire
out through the bedroom door into the hall toward the stairs while the balance
of the team hurled the hostages down a chute to safety below.

The danger lay
with Tina.
 
If she climbed the stairs to
the hostages without being incapacitated by the volume of fire and before
Burke's team made it into the bedroom, the hostages would die in a burst of
Skorpion fire.
 
It was that simple.

In Fitzduane's
opinion it was going to be very close — or as Kilmara put it to the assault
group:
 
"If at first you don't
succeed, well, so much for skydiving."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The men on the
cherry picker team moved off first.
 
They
needed time to maneuver into the best firing position and to attach the rifle mounts
to the platform rail.
 
Their main fear
was that a gust of wind would jar the platform ever so slightly at the crucial
moment.
 
Kilmara had requested
stabilizing cables with hydraulic mounts, but the truck carrying them had
suffered a double flat tire and would not arrive in time.
 
Fortunately, the night so far had been calm.

The six men of
the Ranger entry team were hideous in blackface camouflage and night-vision
goggles.
 
They wore light mat black
helmets made of ballistic material and containing miniature radios.
 
Fitzduane was reminded of the head of a
deformed fly.

With twenty
minutes to zero, all units had completed checking in.
 
The digital clock in the command center
flashed second by second through the remaining time.