Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [54]
“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