Rainbow Six (1997) (45 page)

About the only thing the group didn’t have was a coterie of people leading them with flags, which was mainly a Japanese affectation, anyway. After the first day’s ceremonies, the Thompson people would wander off on their own, and enjoy their four days here as normal tourists.

Mike Dennis watched the procession on his office TV monitors while he gathered his notes. The Roman soldiers were a signature item for his theme park, and, for some reason or other, had proven to be wildly popular, enough so that he’d recently increased their number from fifty to over a hundred and established a trio of centurions to command them. You could spot them by the sideways plumes on their helmets instead of the fore-and-aft on the helms of the ordinary legionnaires. The guys in the outfit had taken to real sword practice, and it was rumored that some of the swords actually had edges, which Dennis hadn’t bothered to verify and which he’d have to put a stop to if he did. But anything that was good for employee morale was good for the park, and it was his practice to let his people run their departments with minimal interference from his command center in the castle. He used his computer mouse to zoom in on the approaching mob. They were about twenty minutes early, and that was . . . oh, yeah, it was Francisco de la Cruz leading the parade. Francisco was a retired sergeant in the Spanish army’s paratroops, and the guy just grooved to leading parades and such, didn’t he? Tough-looking old bastard, over fifty, with burly arms and so heavy a beard—Worldpark allowed mustaches but not beards for its employees—that he had to shave twice a day. The little kids found him intimidating, but Francisco had a way of scooping them up like a bearish grandfather and putting them instantly at ease—the kids especially liked playing with his red horsehair plume. Dennis made a mental note to have lunch with Francisco sometime soon. He ran his little department well, and deserved some attention from topside.

Dennis pulled the manila folder from his action tray. He had to give a welcoming speech to the Thompson guests, to be followed by music from one of the park’s roving bands and a parade of the Trolls, then dinner in the castle restaurant. He checked his watch and rose, heading for the corridor that led to a disguised passage with a “secret” door into the castle courtyard. The architects for this place had been handed a blank check, and they’d utilized the Gulf oil money well, though the castle wasn’t totally authentic. It had fire escapes, sprinklers, and structural steel, not just blocks piled up and mortared together.

“Mike?” a voice called. The park manager turned.

“Yeah, Pete?”

“Telephone, it’s the chairman calling.”

The executive turned and hustled back to his office, still clutching his prepared speech.

Francisco—Pancho to his friends—de la Cruz was not a tall man, only five-seven, but wide across the chest, and his pillarlike legs made the ground shake when he marched, stiff-legged, as an historian had told him was the custom of the legions. His iron helmet was heavy, and he could feel the flopping of the plume atop it. His left arm held the large and heavy
scutum,
the shield of the legionnaire that reached almost from neck to ankles, made of glue-laminated wood, but with a heavy iron boss in the center in the image of the Medusa, and metal edges. The Romans, he’d long since learned, had been tough soldiers to march into battle with this heavy gear—almost sixty pounds of it at full load with food and mess kit, about what he’d marched with as a soldier in the field. The park had duplicated all of it, though the quality of the metal was surely better than that which had been produced in the blacksmith shops of the Roman empire. Six young boys had formed up on him, emulating his heavy-footed march. De la Cruz liked that. His own sons were now in the Spanish army, following in their father’s footsteps, just as these French boys were now doing. For de la Cruz the world was in its proper shape.

 

 

Only a few meters away, it was getting that way as well for Jean-Paul, René, and Esteban, the last of them with a cloud of balloons affixed to his wrist, selling one even now. The others were all wearing their white Worldpark hats, all getting into position around the crowd. None of the terrorists were wearing the red Thompson shirts, though doing so would not have been all that difficult. Instead, they wore black Worldpark shirts to go with the hats, and all but Esteban and Andre were also wearing backpacks, like so many other visitors to Worldpark.

The Trolls had everyone in place a few minutes early, they all saw. The adults were joking among themselves, and the children pointing and laughing, their faces illuminated with joy that would soon change to something else, some racing around the taller adults, playing games of hide-and-seek within the crowd . . . and two were in wheelchairs—no, Esteban saw, they were not part of the Thompson group. They wore their special-access buttons, but not the red shirts.

Andre saw those guests, too. One was the little dying Dutch girl from the previous day and one other . . . English by the look of his father, pushing the wheelchair up to the castle and through the crowd. Yes, they’d want both of those. So much the better that these two weren’t French, wasn’t it?

Dennis had sat down at his desk. The call required detailed information that he’d had to call up on his computer. Yes, quarterly park revenues were 4.1 percent over projections. . . . Yes, the slow season had turned out to be somewhat less slow than they’d expected. Unusually favorable weather, Dennis explained, was the explanation, and one couldn’t count on that, but things were going smoothly, except for some computer problems on two of the rides. Yes, they had some software engineers in the back-lot area working on that right now. . . . Yes, that was warranty coverage from the manufacturer, and the manufacturer’s representatives were being entirely cooperative—well, they should, as they were bidding on two more mega-rides whose designs would make the entire world take a breathless step back, Dennis told the chairman, who hadn’t seen the proposals yet, and would on his next trip to Spain in three weeks. They’d be doing TV shows about conception and design on these two, Dennis promised the chairman, especially for the American cable-channel market, and wouldn’t it be something if they increased their draw of American patrons—stealing guests from the Disney empire, which had invented the theme park. The Saudi chairman, who’d initially invested in Worldpark because his children loved to ride things that he had trouble even looking at, was enthusiastic about the proposed new attractions, enough so that he didn’t ask about them, willing to be surprised by Dennis when the time came.

“What the hell?” Dennis said over the phone, looking up when he heard it.

Everyone jumped at the noise, the shattering staccato of Jean-Paul’s submachine gun, firing a long burst up into the air. In the castle courtyard, people turned and cringed instinctively at the same time, as they first saw the one bearded man aiming upward and swinging his weapon, which ejected a brief shower of brass cases into the air. Being untrained civilians, they did little for the first few seconds but look in shock, without even time to show real fear yet—

—and when they turned to see the shooter in their midst—those around him drawing instinctively away instead of trying to grab him—and the others withdrawing their weapons from their backpacks, at first just bringing them out without firing—waiting a beat or so—

Francisco de la Cruz was standing behind one of the others, and saw the weapon coming out even before the first one fired. His brain recognized the unfriendly yet familiar shape of an Israeli Uzi nine-millimeter submachine gun, and his eyes locked on it, reporting direction and distance, and that this was something that didn’t belong in his park. The shock of the moment lasted only that long, and then his twenty-plus years of uniformed service flashed into his consciousness, and two meters behind that bearded criminal, he started moving.

Claude’s eyes caught the movement, and he turned to see—what was this? A man wearing Roman armor and the strangest of headgear was moving toward him. He turned to face the threat and—

Mike Dennis ran to the window instead of using the TV monitors. Others were watching those, and the take from the various cameras was being recorded automatically in a bank of VCRs elsewhere in the park. His eyes saw, and though his brain didn’t believe, it was there, and impossible as it was, it had to be real. A number of people with guns were surrounding the sea of red shirts, and they herded them now, like sheepdogs, inward and toward the castle courtyard. Dennis turned:

“Security lockdown, security lockdown
now!”
he called to the man on the master control board, and with a mouse click the castle’s doors were all dead-bolted.

“Call the police!” Dennis ordered next. That was also pre-programmed. An alarm system fired off a signal to the nearest police barracks. It was the robbery-alert signal, but that would be sufficient for the moment. Dennis next lifted a desk phone and punched in the police number from the sticker on his phone. The one emergency contingency they’d planned for was a robbery of their cash room, and since that would necessarily be a major crime committed by a number of armed criminals, the park’s internal response to the signal was also pre-programmed. All park rides would be stopped at once, all attractions closed, and shortly people would be instructed to return to their hotel rooms, or to the parking lot, because the park was closing due to an unexpected emergency . . . The noise of the machine guns would have carried a long way, Dennis thought, and the park guests would understand the urgency of the moment.

 

 

This was the amusing part, Andre thought. He donned a spare white hat from one of his comrades and took the gun that Jean-Paul had packed for him. A few meters away, Esteban cut the balloons loose from his hand, and they soared into the air as he, too, took up his weapon.

The children were not as overtly frightened as their parents were, perhaps thinking that this also was one of the magic things to be expected at the park, though the noise hurt their little ears and had made them jump. But fear is contagious, and the children quickly saw that emotion in their parents’ eyes, and one by one they held tight to hands and legs, looking about at the adults who were moving quickly now, around the red-shirted crowd, holding things that looked like . . . guns, the boys recognized the shape from their own toys, which these clearly were not.

René was in command. He moved toward the castle entrance, clear of the nine others who were holding the crowd in place. Looking around, he could see others outside the perimeter of his group, looking in, many crouching down now, hiding, taking what cover there was. Many of them were taking pictures, some with television cameras, and some of those would be zooming in to catch his face, but there was nothing he could do about that.

“Two!” he called. “Select our guests!”

“Two” was Jean-Paul. He approached a knot of people roughly, and first of all grabbed the arm of a four-year-old French girl.

“No!” her mother screamed. Jean-Paul pointed his weapon at her, and she cringed but stood her ground, holding both shoulders of the child.

“Very well,” “Two” told her, lowering his aim. “I will shoot her, then.” In less than a second, the muzzle of his Uzi was against the little girl’s light-brown hair. That made the mother scream all the louder, but she pulled her hands back from her child.

“Walk over there,” Jean-Paul told the child firmly, pointing to Juan. The little girl did so, looking back with an open mouth at her stunned mother, while the armed man selected more children.

Andre was doing the same on the other side of the crowd. He went first of all to the little Dutch child. Anna, her special-access name tag read. Without a word, he pushed Anna’s father away from the wheelchair and shoved it off toward the castle.