Stanley shook his head. “Radio-silent.”
Which made sense, Clark decided. Anyone good enough to get into the grounds that quickly and take down four Fallskarmsjagares would also be smart enough to go straight for the communications room.
“Nobody taking credit?” Chavez asked.
“None so far, but that won’t last long, I suspect. So far the Libyans have a lid on the press, but it’s only a matter of time, I’m afraid.”
The hodgepodge of terrorist groups in the Middle East tended to take overlapping credit for any act of significant violence, and it wasn’t always about prestige, either, but rather a deliberate attempt to muddy the intelligence waters. It was a lot like what a police homicide unit went through during big murder cases. Quick confessions and nutjob suspects were a dime a dozen, and each one had to be taken seriously, lest you miss a real tango. The same applied to terrorism.
“And no demands, I assume?” Clark added.
“Right.”
As often as not there were no demands. In the Middle East most hostage takers just wanted to grow an international audience before they started executing people, only belatedly explaining the whys and wherefores. Not that that made any difference to Clark and his team, but until some government functionary somewhere said “Go,” Rainbow was, like every other special ops outfit, at the mercy of politics. Only once the pols had satisfied themselves that unleashing the dogs of war was appropriate did Rainbow get to do what it did best.
“Now here’s the tricky part,” Stanley said.
“Politics,” Clark guessed.
“Right again. As you might imagine, our friend the Colonel wants to send in his Jamahiriyyah-he already has them staged, in fact-but the Swedish Consul General isn’t so keen on the idea, what with the Jamahiriyyah’s rules of engagement being what they are.”
The Jamahiriyyah Guard were essentially Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s own personal Special Forces unit, composed of two thousand or so men drawn from his own backyard, the Surt region of Libya. The Jamahiriyyah were good, Clark knew, and well supported with their own in-house logistics and intelligence units, but the Jamahiriyyah were not known for their discretion, nor for any deep concern for collateral damage, inanimate and animate alike. With the Jamahiriyyah making the assault, the Swedes were likely to lose a fair number of staff.
In 2003, at Qaddafi’s command, the Libyan government officially informed the United Nations it was prepared to accept responsibility for the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie some fifteen years earlier and was further prepared to compensate the victims’ families to the tune of nearly $3 billion. The gesture was immediately rewarded with not only praise from the West but also the lifting of economic sanctions and diplomatically couched “attaboys” from many European countries. And the leopard didn’t stop there, first opening up his weapons programs to international inspectors, then denouncing the 9/11 attacks.
Clark had a guess about Qaddafi’s change of heart, and it had nothing to do with the mellowing of old age but rather with plain old economics. In other words, oil prices-which had plummeted throughout the ’90s, leaving Libya poorer than it had been since camels and not black gold had been king in the desert nation, and less able to fund the Colonel’s pet terrorist projects. Of course, Clark reminded himself, Qaddafi’s nice-guy routine was probably helped along by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which he probably saw as just a preview of what could happen to his little fiefdom. In fairness, Clark conceded that it was always better to have a leopard only pretending to change its spots as long as its fangs were in fact blunted. The question was, now that oil prices were back up, would the Colonel be feeling frisky again? Would he use this incident to roar?
“Of course, the Supreme Command in Stockholm wants to call in their own blokes, but Qaddafi is having none of it,” Stanley continued. “Last I heard, Rosenbad Street was talking to Downing Street. At any rate, we’ve been put on standby. Herefordshire is putting out the call for the rest of the team. We’ve got two on leave-one medical, one on holiday-but the bulk of them should be assembled and equipped within the hour and en route to us shortly after that.” Stanley checked his watch. “Say, seventy minutes to wheels up.”
“You said ‘staged,’” Chavez said. “Staged where?” Time was critical, and even in the fastest of transports, London to Tripoli was a long hop-perhaps longer than the hostages inside that consulate had to live.
“Taranto. The Marina Militare has kindly offered to put us up until the pols sort things out. If we get the call, we’re just a skip across the water to Tripoli.”
16
LIEUTENANT OPERATIVNIK (Detective) Pavel Rosikhina pulled back the sheet-a tablecloth, really-that some kind soul had draped over the body and stared into the wide-eyed face of what he’d assumed was yet another Mafia execution. Maybe not. Despite the man’s pallor, it was clear he wasn’t Chechnyan or an ethnic Russian, which surprised him, given their location. A Caucasian Russian.
The single bullet had entered the man’s skull just above and an inch forward of his left ear and exited… Rosikhina leaned over the table, careful to touch nothing but the tablecloth, and peered at the right side of the man’s head, which lay resting on the booth’s cushioned upper edge.
“How close, you think?” he heard, and turned around.
His sometimes partner, Gennady Oleksei, stood a few feet away, cigarette dangling from his half-smiling lips and hands shoved into the pockets of his leather coat.
Over Oleksei’s shoulder Rosikhina could see that the uniformed militia officers had finished herding the restaurant’s customers out the front door, where they stood milling around, waiting to be questioned. The restaurant’s staff-four waiters, a cashier, and three cooks-were seated at the now-empty tables, giving their names to another officer.
Oleksei and Rosikhina worked in the Saint Petersburg militia’s Main Office for Combating Financial Crimes, a subdivision of the Criminal Investigations Department. Unlike most Western police agencies, Russian operativniks were not assigned permanent partners. Why this was no one had ever explained to Rosikhina, but he assumed it had something to do with funding. Everything had to do with funding, from whether they got their own cars from week to week to whether they worked alone or with partners.
“You’re assigned?” Rosikhina asked.
“Called me at home. How close?” Oleksei repeated.
“Two to six feet. Easy shot.” He noticed something lying on the seat behind the victim’s buttocks. He leaned over for a closer look. “Got a gun,” he told Oleksei. “Semiautomatic. Looks like a Makarov. He was trying, at least. A second faster on the draw and maybe…”
“Now, there’s a question for you,” Oleksei said. “Would you rather go like our friend here, knowing it was coming, or would you rather just… poof. Be gone. Nothing.”
“Good Christ, Gennady…”
