Jack Ryan 10 - Rainbow Six (85 page)

Malloy pulled on the collective, having seen at least one good hit. In seconds, the Night Hawk was at three hundred feet, and the Marine turned to the right and looked down to see a wrecked and smoking car stationary in the middle of the road.

“Down to collect him?” the copilot asked.

“Bet your sweet ass, son,” Malloy told Harrison. Then he looked for his own flight bag. His Beretta was in there. Harrison handled the landing, bringing the Sikorsky to a rest fifty feet from the car. Malloy turned the lock on his seat-belt buckle and turned to exit the aircraft. Nance jumped out first, ducking under the turning rotor as he ran to the car's right side. Malloy was two seconds behind him.

“Careful, Sergeant!” Malloy screamed, slowing his advance on the left side. The window was gone except for a few shards still in the frame, and he could see the man inside, still breathing but not doing much else behind the deployed air bag. The far window was gone as well. Nance reached into it, found the handle and pulled it open. It turned out that the driver hadn't been using his seat belt. The body came out easily. And there on the backseat, Malloy saw, was a Russian-made rifle. The Marine pulled it out and safed it, before walking to the other side of the car.

“Shit,” Nance said in no small amazement. “He's still alive!” How had he managed not to kill the bastard from twelve feet away? the sergeant wondered.

Back at the hospital, Timothy O'Neil was still in his van wondering what to do. He thought he knew what had happened to the engine. There was a three-quarter-inch hole in the window on the left-side door, and how it had managed to miss his head was something he didn't know. He saw that one of the Volvo trucks and Sean Grady's rented Jaguar were nowhere to be seen. Had Sean abandoned him and his men? It had happened too fast and totally without warning. Why hadn't Sean called to warn him of what he did? How had the plan come apart? But the answers to those questions were of less import than the fact that he was in a van, sitting in a parking lot, with enemies around him. That he had to change.

“Lieber Gott,” Weber said to himself, seeing the wounds. One Team-1 member was surely dead, having taken a round in the side of his head. Four others right here were hit, three of them in the chest. Weber knew first aid, but he didn't need to know much medicine to know that two of them needed immediate and expert attention. One of those was Alistair Stanley.

“This is Weber. We need medical help here at once!” he called over his tactical radio. “Rainbow Five is down!”

“Oh, shit,” Homer Johnston said next to him. “You're not foolin', man. Command, this is Rifle Two-One, we need medics and we need them right the fuck now!”

Price heard all that. He was now thirty yards from the van, Sergeant Hank Patterson at his side, trying to approach without being seen. To his left he could see the imposing bulk of Julio Vega, along with Tomlinson. Off to the right he could see the face of Steve Lincoln. Paddy Connolly would be right with him.

“Team-2, this is Price. We have subjects in the van. I do not know if we have any inside the building. Vega and Tomlinson, get inside and check-and be bloody careful about it!”

“Vega here. Roger that, Eddie. Moving now.”

Oso reversed directions, heading for the main entrance with Tomlinson in support, while the other four kept an eye on that damned little brown truck. The two sergeants approached the front door slowly, peering around corners to look in the windows, and seeing only a small mob of very confused people. First Sergeant Vega poked a finger into his own chest and pointed inside. Tomlinson nodded. Now Vega moved quickly, entering the main lobby and sweeping his eyes all around. Two people screamed to see another man with a gun, despite the difference in his appearance. He held up his left hand.

“Easy, folks, I'm one of the good guys. Does anybody know where the bad guys are?” The answer to this question was mainly confusion, but two people pointed to the rear of the building, in the direction of the emergency room, and that made sense. Vega advanced to the double doors leading that way and called on his radio. “Lobby is clear. Come on, George.” Then: “Command, this is Vega.”

“Vega, this is Price.”

“Hospital lobby is clear, Eddie. Got maybe twenty civilians here to get looked after, okay?”

“1 have no people to send you, Oso. We're all busy out here. Weber reports we have some serious casualties.”

“This is Franklin. I copy. I can move in now if you need me.”

“Franklin, Price, move in to the west. I repeat, move in from the west.”

“Franklin is moving in to the west,” the rifleman replied. “Moving in now.”

“His pitchin' career's over,” Nance said, loading the body into the Night Hawk.

“Sure as hell, if he's a lefty. Back to the hospital, I guess,” Malloy strapped into the chopper and took the controls. Inside a minute, they were airborne and heading east for the hospital. In the back, Nance strapped their prisoner down tight.

It was a hell of a mess. The driver was dead, Chavez saw. crushed between the large wheel and the back of his seat from when the truck had slammed into the guardrail, his eyes and mouth open, blood coming out the latter. The body tossed out of the back was dead as well, with two bullet holes in the face. That left a guy with two broken legs, and horrible scrapes on his face, whose pain was masked by his unconsciousness.

“Bear, this is Six,” Clark said.

“Bear copies.”

“Can you pick us up? We have an injured subject here,
and I want to get back and see what the hell's going on.”

“Wait one and I'll be there. Be advised we have a wounded subject aboard, too.”

“Roger that, Bear.” Clark looked west. The Night Hawk was in plain view, and he saw it alter course and come straight for his position.

Chavez and Mole pulled the body onto the roadway. It seemed horrible that his legs were at such obviously wrong angles, but he was a terrorist, and got little in the way of solicitude.

“Back into the hospital?” one of the men asked O'Neil.

“But then we're trapped!” Sam Barry objected.

“We're bloody trapped here!” Jimmy Carr pointed out. “We need to move. Now!”

O'Neil thought that made sense. “Okay, okay. I'll pull the door, and you lads run back to the entrance. Ready?” They nodded, cradling their weapons. “Now!” he rasped, pulling the sliding door open.

“Shit!” Price observed from a football field away. “Subjects running back into the hospital. I counted five.”

“Confirm five of them,” another voice agreed on the radio circuit.

Vega and Tomlinson were most of the way to the emergency room now, close enough to see the people there but not the double glass doors that led outside. They heard more screams. Vega took offhis Kevlar helmet and peeked around the corner. Oh, shit, he thought, seeing one guy with an AKMS. That one was looking around inside the building-and behind him was half the body of someone looking outward. Oso nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand came down on his shoulder. He turned. It was Franklin, without his monster rifle, holding only his Beretta pistol.

“I just heard. five bad guys there?”

“That's what the man said,” Vega confirmed. He waved Sergeant Tomlinson to the other side of the corridor. “You stick with me, Fred.”

“Roge-o, Oso. Wish you had your M-60 now?”

“Fuckin' A, man.” As good as the German MP-10 was, it felt like a toy in his hands.

Vega took another look. There was Ding's wife, standing now, looking over to where the bad guys were, pregnant as hell in her white coat. He and Chavez went back nearly ten years. He couldn't let anything happen to her. He backed off the corner and tried waving his arm at her.

Patsy Clark Chavez, M.D., saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a soldier dressed all in black. He was waving to her, and when she turned the waves beckoned her to him, which struck her as a good idea. Slowly, she started moving to her right.

“You, stop!” Jimmy Carr called angrily. Then he started moving toward her. Unseen to his left, Sergeant George Tonlinson edged his face and gun muzzle around the corner. Vega's waves merely grew more frantic, and Patsy kept moving his way. Carr stepped toward her, bringing his rifle up

-as soon as he came into view, Tomlinson took aim, and seeing the weapon aimed at Ding's wife, he depressed the trigger gently, loosing a three-round burst.

The silence of it was somehow worse than the loudest noise. Patsy turned to look at the guy with the gun when his head exploded-but there was no noise other than the brushlike sound of a properly suppressed weapon, and the wet-mess noise of his destroyed cranium. The body-the face was sprayed away, and the back of his head erupted in a cloud of red-then it just fell straight down, and the loudest sound was the clatter of the rifle hitting the floor, loosed from the dead hands.

“Come here!” Vega shouted, and she did what she was told, ducking and running toward him.

Oso grabbed her arm and swung her around like a doll, knocking her off her feet and sending her sliding across the tile floor. Sergeant Franklin scooped her up and ran down the corridor, carrying her like a toy. In the main lobby he found the hospital security guard, and left her with him, then ran back.

“Franklin to Command. Dr. Chavez is safe. We got her to the main lobby. Get some people there, will ya? Let's get these fucking civilians evacuated fast, okay?”

“Price to Team. Where is everyone? Where are the subjects?”

“Price, this is Vega, we are down to four subjects. George just dropped one. They are in the emergency room. Mrs. Clark is probably still there. We hear noises, there are civilians in there. We have their escape route closed. I have Tomlinson and Franklin here. Fred's only got a pistol. Unknown number of hostages, but as far as 1 can tell we're down to four bad guys, over.”

“I've got to get down there,” Dr. Bellow said. He was badly shaken. People had been shot within a few feet of him. Alistair Stanley was down with a chest wound, and at least one other Rainbow trooper was dead, along with three additional wounded, one of those serious-looking.

“That way.” Price pointed to the front of the hospital. A Team1 member appeared, and headed that way as well. It was Geoff Bates, one of Covington's shooters from the SAS, fully armed, though he hadn't taken so much as a single shot yet today. He and Bellow moved quickly.

Somehow Carr had died without notice. O'Neil turned and saw him there, his body like the stem for a huge red flower of blood on the dingy tile floor. It was only getting worse. He had four armed men, but he couldn't see around the corner twenty feet away, and surely there were armed SAS soldiers there, and he had no escape. He had eight other people nearby, and these he could use as hostages, perhaps, but the danger of that game was dramatically obvious. No escape, his mind told him, but his emotions said something else. He had weapons, and his enemies were nearby, and he was supposed to kill them, and if he had to die, he'd damned well die for The Cause, the idea to which he'd dedicated his life, the idea for which he'd told himself a thousand times he was willing to die. Well, here he was now, and death was close, not something to be considered in his bed, waiting for sleep to come, or drinking beer in a pub, discussing the loss of some dedicated comrades, the brave talk they all spoke when bravery wasn't needed. It all came down to this. Now danger was here, and it was time to see if his bravery was a thing of words or a thing of the belly, and his emotions wanted to show the whole bloody world that he was a man of his word and his beliefs . . . but part of him wanted to escape back to Ireland, and not die this day in an English hospital.

Sandy Clark watched him from fifteen feet away. He was a handsome man, and probably a brave one-for a criminal, her mind added. She remembered John telling her more than once that bravery was a far more common thing than cowardice, and that the reason for it was shame. People went into danger not alone, but with their friends, and you didn't want to appear weak in front of them, and so from the fear of cowardice came the most insane of acts, the successful ones later celebrated as great heroism. It had struck her as the worst sort of cynicism on John's part . . . and yet her husband was not a cynical man. Could it therefore be the truth?

In this case, it was a man in his early thirties, holding a weapon in his hands and looking as though he didn't have a friend in the world

-but the mother in her told Sandy that her daughter was probably safe now, along with her grandchild. The dead one had called after her, but now he was messily dead on the hospital floor, and so Patsy had probably gotten away. That was the best information of the day, and she closed her eyes to whisper a prayer of thanks.

“Hey, Doc,” Vega said in greeting.

“Where are they?”

Vega pointed. “Around this corner. Four of them, we think. George dropped one for the count.”

“Talk to them yet?”

Oso shook his head. “No.”

“Okay.” Bellow took a deep breath. “This is Paul,” he called loudly. “Is Timothy there?”

“Yes,” came the reply.

“Are you okay?-not wounded or anything, I mean,” the psychiatrist asked.

O'Neil wiped some blood from his face - the glass fragments in the van had made some minor cuts. “We're all fine. Who are you?”

“I'm a physician. My name is Paul Bellow. What's yours?”

“Timothy will do for now.”

“Okay, fine. Timothy, uh, you need to think about your situation, okay?”

“I know what that is,” O'Neil responded, an edge on his voice.

Outside, things were gradually becoming organized. Ambulances were on the scene, plus medical orderlies from the British Army. The wounded were being moved now, to the base hospital at Hereford where surgeons were waiting to reat them, and coming in were SAS soldiers, thirty of hem, to assist the Rainbow troopers. Colonel Malloy 's helicopter set down on the pad at the base, and the two prisoners were taken to the military hospital for treatment.

“Tim, you will not be getting away from here. I think you know that,” Bellow observed, in as gentle a voice as he could manage.