Rainbow Six (1997) (43 page)

Two buildings away, Jean-Paul was looking out at the same scene and contemplating much the same thoughts. He’d never married and had rarely even enjoyed a proper love affair. He knew now, at forty-three, that this had created a hole in his life and his character, an abnormality that he’d tried to fill with political ideology, with his beliefs in principles and his vision of a radiant socialist future for his country and for Europe and ultimately for the whole world. But a niggling part of his character told him that his dreams were mere illusions, and that reality was before him, three floors down and a hundred meters west, in the distant faces of children waiting to board the steam train to the park, and—but, no, such thoughts were aberrations. Jean-Paul and his friends
knew
the rightness of their cause and their beliefs. They’d discussed them at the greatest length over the years and concluded that their path was the right one. They’d shared their frustration that so few understood—but someday they
would
understand, someday they
would
see the path of justice that socialism offered the entire world,
would
understand that the road to the radiant future had to be paved by the revolutionary elite who understood the meaning and force of history . . . and they wouldn’t make the mistakes the Russians had made, those backward peasants in that over-large, foolish nation. And so he was able to look down on the assembled people, as they tightened up at the platform while the steam whistle announced the coming of the train, and see . . . things. Even the children were not people, really, but political statements to be made by others, people like himself who understood how the world actually worked, or how it should work. Would work, he promised himself. Someday.

 

 

Mike Dennis always took his lunch outside, a habit he’d formed in Florida. One thing he liked about Worldpark was that you could have a drink here, in his case a nice red Spanish wine, which he sipped from a plastic cup as he watched how people circulated, and looked for goofs of one kind or another. He found no obvious ones. The walkways had been laid out after careful and thorough planning, using computer simulations.

The rides here were the things that drew people most of all, and so the walkways had been planned to lead people to the more spectacular of them. The big expensive ones
were
pretty spectacular. His own kids loved to ride them, especially the Dive Bomber, a top-hanging coaster that looked fit to make a fighter pilot lose his lunch, next to which was the Time Machine, a virtual-reality ride that accommodated ninety-six guests per seven-minute cycle—any longer and some patrons could get violently ill, tests had shown. Out of that and it was time for some ice cream or a drink, and there were concessions planted right there to answer the cravings. Farther away was Pepe’s, an excellent sit-down restaurant specializing in Catalonian cuisine—you didn’t put restaurants too close to the rides. Such attractions were not complementary, since watching the Dive Bomber didn’t exactly heighten the appetite, and for adults, neither did riding it. There was a science and an art to setting up and operating theme parks like this one, and Mike Dennis was one of the handful of people in the world who knew how it was done, which explained his enormous salary and the quiet smile that went with his sips of wine, as he watched
his
guests enjoy the place. If this was work, then it was the best job in the world. Even the astronauts who rode the space shuttle didn’t have this sort of satisfaction. He got to play with his toy every day. They were lucky to fly twice in a year.

His lunch completed, Dennis rose and walked back toward his office on Strada España, the Spanish Main Street, the central spoke on the partial wheel. It was another fine day at Worldpark, the weather clear, the temperature twenty-one Celsius, the air dry and pure. The rain in Spain did not, in his experience, stay mainly in the plain. The local climate was much like California’s, which, he reflected, went just fine with the Spanish language of the majority of his employees. On the way, he passed one of the park security people.
Andre,
the name tag said, and the language tag on the other shirt pocket said he spoke Spanish, French, and English. Good, Dennis thought. They didn’t have enough people like that.

 

 

The meeting place was prearranged. The Dive Bomber ride used as its symbol the German Ju-87 Stuka, complete to the Iron Cross insignia on the wings and fuselage, though the swastika on the tail had been thoughtfully deleted. It ought to have greatly offended Spanish sensibilities, Andre thought. Did no one remember Guernica, that first serious expression of Nazi
Grausamkeit,
when thousands of Spanish citizens had been massacred? Was historical appreciation that shallow here? Evidently it was. The children and adults in line frequently reached out to touch the half-scale model of the Nazi aircraft that had dived on both soldiers and civilians with its “Trumpet of Jericho” siren. The siren was replicated as part of the ride itself, though on the hundred-fifty-meter first hill, the screams of the riders as often as not drowned it out, followed by the compressed-air explosion and fountain of water at the bottom when the cars pulled out through simulated flak bursts for the climbing loop into the second hill after dropping a bomb on a simulated ship. Was he the only person in Europe who found the symbology here horrid and bestial?

Evidently so. People raced off the ride to rejoin the line to ride it again, except for those who bumbled off to recover their equilibrium, sometimes sweating, and twice, he’d seen, to vomit. A cleanup man with a mop and bucket stood by for that—not the choicest job in Worldpark. The medical-aid post was a few meters farther away, for those who needed it. Andre shook his head. It served the bastards right to feel ill after choosing to ride that hated symbol of fascism.

Jean-Paul, René, and Juan appeared almost together close to the entrance of the Time Machine, all sipping soft drinks. They and the five others were marked by the hats they’d bought at the entrance kiosk. Andre nodded to them, rubbing his nose as planned. René came over to him.

“Where is the men’s room?” he asked in English.

“Follow the signs,” Andre pointed. “I get off at eighteen hours. Dinner as planned?”

“Yes.”

“All are ready?”

“Entirely ready, my friend.”

“Then I will see you at dinner.” Andre nodded and walked off, continuing his patrol as he was paid to do, while his comrades walked about, some taking the time to enjoy the rides, he imagined. The park would be even busier tomorrow, he’d been told at the morning briefing session. Another nine-thousand-plus would be checking into the hotels tonight or tomorrow morning in preparation for the bank-holiday weekend in this part of Europe, for Good Friday. The park was set up for mobs of people, and his fellow security personnel had told him all manner of amusing stories about the things that happened here. Four months earlier, a woman had delivered twins in the medical post twenty minutes after riding the Dive Bomber, much to her husband’s surprise and the delight of Dr. Weiler—the children had been awarded lifetime passes to Worldpark on the spot, which had made the local TV news, part of the park’s genius for public relations. Maybe she’d named the boy Troll, Andre snorted, as he spotted one ahead. The Trolls were short-leg /massive-head costumes worn by petite females, he’d learned on coming to work. You could tell by the skinny legs that fit in to the huge feet-shoes they wore. There was even a water supply in the costume to make the monstrous lips drool . . . and over there was a Roman legionnaire dueling comically with a Germanic barbarian. One of them would alternately run from the other, usually to the applause of the people sitting down to watch the spectacle. He turned to walk over to the German
Strasse,
and was greeted by the oom-pah music of a marching band—why didn’t they play the
Horst Wessel Lied?
Andre wondered. It would have gone well with the damned green Stuka. Why not dress the band in SS black, maybe have compulsory shower baths for some of the guests—wasn’t
that
part of European history, too?
Damn this place!
Andre thought. The symbology was designed to incur the rage of anyone with the most rudimentary political awareness. But, no, the masses had no memory, no more than they had any understanding of political and economic history. He was glad they’d chosen this place to make their political statement. Maybe
this
would get the idiots to think, just a little bit, perhaps, about the shape of the world. The mis-shape, Andre corrected himself, allowing himself a very un-Worldpark frown at the sunny day and smiling crowds.

There,
he told himself.
That
was the spot. The children loved it. There was a crowd of them there even now, dragging, pulling the hands of their parents, dressed in their shorts and sneakers, many wearing hats, with helium-filled balloons tied to their little wrists. And there was a special one, a little girl in a wheelchair, wearing the Special Wish button that told every ride attendant to allow her on without the need to stand in line. A sick one, Dutch from the style of her parents’ dress, Andre thought, probably dying from cancer, sent here by some charity or other modeled on the American Make-A-Wish Foundation, which paid for the parents to bring their dying whelp here for one first and last chance to see the Trolls and other cartoon characters, their rights licensed to Worldpark for sale and other exploitation. How brightly their sick little eyes shone here, Andre saw, on their quick road to the grave, and how solicitous the staff was to them, as though
that
mattered to anyone, this bourgeois sentimentality upon which the entire park was founded. Well. They’d see about all that, wouldn’t they? If there were ever a place to make a political statement, to bring the attention of all Europe and all the world to what really mattered, this was it.

Ding finished his first pint of beer. He’d have only one more. It was a rule that no one had written down and that no one had actually enforced, but by common agreement nobody on the teams had more than two at a time while the teams were on-call, as they almost always were—and besides, two pints of Brit beer were quite a lot, really. Anyway, all the members of Team-2 were home having dinner with their families. Rainbow was an unusual outfit in that sense.
Every
soldier was married, with a wife and at least one kid. The marriages even appeared to be stable. John didn’t know if that was a mark of special-operations troopers, but these two-legged tigers who worked for him were pussycats at home, and the dichotomy was both amazing and amusing to him.

Sandy served the main course, a fine roast beef. John rose to get the carving knife so that he could do his duty. Patsy looked at the huge hunk of dead steer and thought briefly about mad-cow disease, but decided that her mother had cooked the meat thoroughly. Besides, she liked good roast beef, cholesterol and all, and her mom was the world’s champ at making gravy.

“How’s it going at the hospital?” Sandy asked her physician daughter.

“OB is pretty routine. We haven’t had a single hard one in the last couple of weeks. I’ve kinda hoped for a placenta previa, maybe even a placenta abrupta to see if we have the drill down, but—”

“Don’t wish for those, Patsy. I’ve seen them happen in the ER.
Total
panic, and the OB better have his act together, or things can go to hell in a New York minute. Dead mother
and
a dead child.”

“Ever see that happen, Mom?”

“No, but I’ve seen it come close to that twice in Williamsburg. Remember Dr. O’Connor?”

“Tall, skinny guy, right?”

“Yeah.” Sandy nodded. “Thank God he was on duty for the second one. The resident came unglued, but Jimmy came in and took over. I was sure we’d lose that one.”

“Well, if you know what you’re doing—”

“If you know what you’re doing, it’s still tense. Routine is fine with me. I’ve done ER duty too long,” Sandy Clark went on. “I love a quiet night when I can get caught up on my reading.”

“Voice of experience,” John Clark observed, serving the meat.

“Makes sense to me,” Domingo Chavez agreed, stroking his wife’s arm. “How’s the little guy?”

“Kicking up a storm right now,” Patsy replied, moving her husband’s hand to her belly. It never failed, she saw. The way his eyes changed when he felt it. Always a warm, passionate boy, Ding just about melted when he felt the movement in her womb.

“Baby,” he said quietly.

“Yeah.” She smiled.

“Well, no nasty surprises when the time comes, okay?” Chavez said next. “I want everything to go routinely. This is exciting enough. Don’t want to faint or anything.”

“Right!” Patsy laughed.
“You? Faint? My commando?”

“You never know, honey,” her father observed, taking his seat. “I’ve seen tough guys fold before.”

“Not this one, Mr. C,” Domingo noted with a raised eyebrow.

“More like a fireman,” Sandy said from her seat. “The way you guys just hang around ’til something happens.”

“That’s true,” Domingo agreed. “And if the fire never starts, it’s okay with us.”

“You really mean that?” Patsy asked.

“Yes, honey,” her husband told her. “Going out isn’t fun. We’ve been lucky so far. We haven’t lost a hostage.”

“But that’ll change,” Rainbow Six told his subordinate.

“Not if I have anything to say about it, John.”

“Ding,” Patsy said, looking up from her food. “Have you—I mean . . . I mean, have you actually—”

The look answered the question, though the words were “Let’s not talk about that.”

“We don’t carve notches in our guns, Pats,” John told his daughter. “Bad form, you see.”

“Noonan came over today,” Chavez went on. “Says he’s got a new toy to look at.”

“What’s it cost?” John asked first of all.

“Not much, he says, not much at all. Delta just started looking at it.”