Dead or Alive (18 page)

“You forget to pay a parking ticket, Ding?” Clark asked his son-in-law.

“Not me,
mano.
I’m a straight arrow.”

Each of them gave his wife a quick kiss and a “Don’t worry,” then followed the flight attendant up the aisle to the already open door. Waiting for them in the jet bridge was a London Metropolitan Police Service officer. The black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the man’s cap told Clark he wasn’t your run-of-the-mill bobby, and the patch on his sweater told him he belonged to SCD11—intelligence—part of the Specialist Crime Directorate.

“Sorry to interrupt your jaunt home, gentlemen,” the cop said, “but your presence has been requested. If you’ll follow me, please.”

British manners—along with driving on the wrong side of the road and french fries being called “chips”—was one of the things Clark had never quite gotten used to—especially among the upper echelons of the Army. Polite was always better than rude, mind you, but there was something unnerving about being talked to oh, so civilly by a guy who had probably killed more bad guys than most people would ever see in their lifetime. Clark had met some folks here who could explain in detail how they planned to kill you with a fork, drink your blood, then skin you, all the while making it sound like an invitation to afternoon tea.

Clark and Chavez followed the cop down the jetway, through several checkpoints, then through a card reader-controlled door into Heathrow’s security center. They were led to a small conference room where they found Alistair Stanley, still officially second-in-command of Rainbow Six, standing at the diamond-shaped table under the cold glare of fluorescent lights. Stanley was SAS, or Special Air Service, Britain’s premier special warfare unit.

Though Clark was reluctant to admit it in mixed company, as far as he was concerned, when it came to efficacy and longevity, the SAS was without peer. Certainly there were outfits out there that were as good as the SAS—his alma mater, the Navy SEALs, came to mind—but the Brits had long ago set the gold standard for modern-era special ops troops, going back as far as 1941 when a Scots Guards officer named Stirling—later of Stir-ling submachine-gun fame—and his L Detachment of sixty-five men harried the German
Wehrmacht
across North Africa. From their early behind-the-lines sabotage missions in North Africa to Scud hunting in the Iraqi desert, the SAS had done it all, seen it all, and written the book on special ops along the way. And like all his brethren before him, Alistair Stanley was a top-notch troop. In fact, Clark had rarely thought of Stanley as his second but rather his co-commander, so great was his respect for the man.

Along with driving lanes and french fries, SAS organization had been another adjustment for Clark. In characteristically British fashion, the SAS’s organization was unique, divided into regiments—the 21st, the 22nd, and the 23rd—and squadrons—ranging from A through G, with a few alphabetical gaps thrown in for good measure. Still, Clark had to further admit, the Brits did everything with flair.

“Alistair,” Clark said with a solemn nod. The look on Stanley’s face told him something serious had already happened or was in the process of happening.

“Miss us already, Stan?” Ding said, shaking his hand.

“I wish that were it, mate. Feel bloody awful interrupting your trip and all. Thought you boys might like to have one more go before you go soft. Got something interesting in the works.”

“From?” Clark asked.

“The Swedes, in a roundabout fashion. Seems they’ve gone and lost their consulate in Tripoli. Bloody embarrassing for them.”

Chavez said, “By ‘lost,’ I assume you don’t mean misplaced?”

“Right, sorry. Typical British understatement. Charming but not always practical. The intelligence is still filtering in, but given the location, it doesn’t take much of a leap to venture a guess as to the culprit’s general identity.”

Clark and Chavez pulled out chairs and sat down at the table. Stanley did the same. He opened a leather portfolio containing a legal pad covered in handwritten notes.

“Let’s hear it,” Clark said, switching mental gears.

Ten minutes earlier he’d been in civilian mode—or at least as much of a civilian mode as he allowed himself—sitting with his family and getting ready to head home, but that was then and this was now. Now he was the commander of Rainbow Six again. It felt good, he had to admit.

“Best as we can tell, there are eight men in all,” Stanley said. “Bypassed the local cops quick as you please with nary a casualty. Satellite images show four Swedes—probably Fallskarmsjagares—down and out within the compound’s grounds.”

The Fallskarmsjagares were essentially Sweden’s version of airborne rangers, culled from the best of the Army. Probably members of the Särskilda Skyddsgruppen—Special Protection Group—that had been seconded to SÄPO, the Swedish Security Service, for embassy duty.

“Those are some tough boys,” Chavez said. “Somebody did their homework—and some good shooting. Anything from inside the consulate?”

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.

An interesting bastard, Qaddafi,
Clark thought. Like much of the U.S. intelligence community, Clark had his doubts about Qaddafi’s recent character transformation from bad boy of North Africa to humanitarian and denouncer of terrorism. The old phrase “a leopard can’t change its spots” might be a cliché that rang false for some, but as far as Clark was concerned, Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qaddafi, “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution,” was a leopard through and through, and would be until the day he died of natural causes or not-so-natural causes.

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.”

L
IEUTENANT 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.
Interesting.

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.
There.
An egg-sized exit hole behind the man’s right ear. The blood and brain matter splattered on the wall behind the booth fit with the bullet’s trajectory, which meant the killer would have been standing . . . here. Right in front of the kitchen door. How close would be a matter for the coroner to decide, but looking at the entry wound, Rosikhina knew it wasn’t done at close-contact range. There were no powder-burn marks on the skin around the wound, nor any stippling. The wound itself was perfectly round, which further ruled out a contact shot, which usually left behind a distinctive star-shaped rip in the skin. Rosikhina covered his nose against the fecal stink. As did many victims of sudden death, the man’s bowels and bladder had relaxed. He carefully pulled back the man’s sport coat, first the left side, then the right, patting the pockets for a wallet. There was nothing but a silver ballpoint pen, a white handkerchief, and an extra button for the man’s suit coat.

“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.