the time of highest vulnerability. But no, whoever this was, they had chosen the middle of the day, and they'd taken hostages - children, Gassman reminded himself. So, were they robbers or something else? hat sort of criminals were they? What if they were terrorists… they had taken hostages… children… Basque terrorists? Damn, what then?
But things were already leaving Gassman's hands. The senior Thompson executive was on his cell phone, talking with his corporate headquarters, a call quickly bucked up to his own chairman, caught in a sidewalk caf+й having a pleasant lunch that the call aborted instantly. This executive called the Defense Minister, and that got things rolling very rapidly indeed. The report from the Thompson manager on the scene had been concise and unequivocal. The Defense Minister called him directly and had his secretary take all the notes they needed. These were typed up and faxed to both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, and the latter called his Spanish counterpart with an urgent request for confirmation. It was already a political exercise, and in the Defense Ministry another phone call was made.
'Yes, this is John Clark,' Rainbow Six said into the phone. 'Yes, sir. Where is that exactly… I see… how many? Okay. Please send us whatever additional information you receive… No, sir, we cannot move until the host government makes the request. Thank you, Minister.' Clark changed buttons on his phone. 'Al, get in here. We have some more business coming in.' Next he made the same request of Bill Tawney, Bellow, Chavez, and Covington. The Thompson executive still in Worldpark assembled his people at a food stand and polled them. A former tank officer in the French army, he worked hard and quickly to bring order from chaos. Those employees who still had their children, he set aside. Those who did not, he counted, and determined that thirty-three children were missing, along with one or maybe two children in wheelchairs. The parents were predictably frantic, but he got and kept them under control, then called his chairman again to amplify his initial report on the situation. After that he got some paper on which to compile a list of names and ages, keeping his own emotions under control as best he could and thanking God that his own children were too old to have made this trip. With that done, he took his people away from the castle, found a park employee and asked where he might find phones and fax machines. They were all escorted through a wooden swinging door, into a well disguised service building and down into the underground, then walked to the alternate park command post, where they met Mike Dennis, still holding the folder with his welcoming speech for the Thompson group and trying to make some sense of things.
Gassman arrived just then, in time to see the fax machine transmitting a list of the known hostages to Paris. Not a minute later, the French Defense Minister called. It turned out that he knew the senior Thompson executive, Colonel Robert Gamelin, who'd headed the development team for the LeClerc battle tank's second-generation fire- control system a few years before.
'How many?'
'Thirty-three from our group, perhaps a few more, but the terrorists seem to have selected our children quite deliberately, Monsieur Minister. This is a job for the Legion,' Colonel Gamelin said forcefully, meaning the Foreign Legion's special-operations team.
'1 will see, Colonel.' The connection broke.
'I am Captain Gassman,' the guy in the strange hat said to Gamelin.
'Bloody hell, I took the family there last year,' Peter Covington said. 'You could use up a whole fucking battalion retaking the place. It's a bloody nightmare, lots of buildings, lots of space, multilevel. I think it even has an underground service area.'
'Maps, diagrams?' Clark asked Mrs. Foorgate.
'I'll see,' his secretary replied, leaving the conference room.
'What do we know?' Chavez asked.
'Not much, but the French are pretty worked up, and they're requesting that the Spanish let us in and-'
'This just arrived,' Alice Foorgate said, handing over a fax and leaving again.
'List of hostages-Jesus, they're all kids, ages four to eleven… thirty-three of them… holy shit,' Clark breathed, looking it over, then handing it to Alistair Stanley.
'Both teams, if we deploy,' the Scotsman said immediately.
'Yeah.' Clark nodded. 'Looks that way.' Then the phone beeped.
'Phone call for Mr. Tawney,' a female voice announced on the speaker.
'This is Tawney,' the intel chief said on picking up the receiver. 'Yes, Roger… yes, we know, we got a call from-oh, I see. Very well. Let me get some things done here, Roger. Thank you.' Tawney hung up. 'The Spanish government have requested through the British embassy in Madrid that we deploy at once.'
'Okay, people,' John said, standing. 'Saddle up. Christ, that was a fast call.'
Chavez and Covington ran from the room to head for their respective team buildings. Then Clark's phone rang again. 'Yeah?' He listened for several minutes. 'Okay, that works for me. Thank you, sir.'
'What was that, John?'
'MOD just requested an MC- 130 from the First Special Ops Wing. They're chopping it to us, along with Malloy's helo. Evidently, there's a military airfield about twenty clicks from where we're going, and Whitehall is trying to get us cleared into it.' And better yet, he didn't have to add, the Hercules transport could lift them right out of Hereford. 'How fast can we get moving?'
'Less than an hour,' Stanley replied after a second's consideration.
'Good, 'cuz that Herky Bird will be here in forty minutes or less. The crew's heading out to it right now.'
'Listen up people,' Chavez was saying half a klick away as he walked into the team's bay. 'We got a job. Boots and saddles, people. Shag it.'
They started moving at once for the equipment lockers before Sergeant Patterson raised the obvious objection: Ding, Team-1's the go-team. What gives?'
'Looks like they need us both for this ride, Hank. Everybody goes today.'
'Fair 'nuff.' Patterson headed off to his locker.
Their gear was already packed, always set up that way as a matter of routine. The mil-spec plastic containers were wheeled to the door even before the truck arrived to load them up.
Colonel Gamelin got the word before Captain Gassman did. The French Defense Minister called him directly to announce that a special-operations team was flying down at the request of the Spanish government, and would be there in three hours or less. He relayed this information to his people, somewhat to the chagrin of the Spanish police official, who then called his own minister in Madrid to inform him of what was happening, and it turned out that the minister was just getting the word from his own Foreign Ministry. Additional police were on the way, and their orders were to take no action beyond the establishment of a perimeter.Gassman's reaction to being whip- sawed was predictable disorientation, but he had his orders. Now with thirty of his cops on the scene or on the ay, he ordered a third of them to move inward, slowly and carefully, toward the castle on the surface, while two more did the same in the underground, with their weapons holstered or on safe, and with orders not to fire under any circumstances, an instruction more easily given than followed.
Things had come well to this point, Rene thought, and the park command center was better than anything he'd hoped for. He was learning to use the computer system to select TV cameras that seemed to cover the entire grounds, from the parking lots to the waiting areas for the various rides. The pictures were in black and white, and once a venue was selected he could zoom and pan the camera to find anything he wished. There were twenty monitors set on the walls of the office, each of them linked by a computer terminal to at least five cameras. Nobody would get close to the castle without his knowledge. Excellent.
In the secretaries' room just through the door, Andre had the children sitting on the floor in one tight little knot, except for the two in their wheelchairs, whom he'd placed against the wall. The children were uniformly wide-eyed and frightened-looking, as well they might be, and at the moment they were quiet, which suited him. He'd slung his submachine gun over his shoulder. It wasn't needed at the moment, was it?
'You will stay still,' he told them in French, then backed to the door into the command center. 'One,' he called.
'Yes, Nine,' Rene answered.
'Things are under control here. Time to make a call?'
'Yes,' One agreed. He took his seat and picked up a phone, then examined the buttons, and finding a likely one, he pressed it.
'Yes?'
'Who is this?'
