High Flight Read online

  Colonel Philippe Marquand, chief of the service’s Anti-Terrorism Unit, had been given a literal carte blanche by the government to run them into the ground, a task which he had undertaken with zeal. Most of them were either dead or in jail now, and the last remnants of the gang—three men and one woman—had made the mistake of coming back to France and robbing the bank this afternoon at Chartres.

  The local police had responded to the silent alarm not suspecting they would run into a hornet’s nest. The first two officers on the scene were shot to death as they got out of their radio unit. Two other officers died when their radio unit took a direct hit from a LAW rocket.

  By then the firefight had moved from the downtown bank to a roadblock on the N154 north of the city. A Chartres lieutenant of police recognized at least one of the bank robbers as a Berlin Hit League gunman by the name of Bruno Mueller. The former Stasi lieutenant colonel, whose specialties were murder and sabotage, was on France’s top-ten most-wanted criminals list, his name flagged for immediate attention of the Action Service. The call had been put through to Paris as the gun battle continued up into the Rambouillet. Less than one hour earlier the bank robbers had pulled up to a stone farmhouse where apparently they were going to make their stand.

  A strong gust of wind caught the chopper broadside, slewing it sharply to the left, its landing gear tangling momentarily in the tops of some trees before it went over on its side. Gisgard pulled the collective and the cyclic, hauled the stick far right, and kicked the rudder pedal hard. The machine shuddered to an upright attitude, every weld in its frame strained to the limit, and he set it down hard, chopping all power immediately.

  “Nice landing, Pierre,” Colonel Marquand shouted from the back.

  “Yes, sir,” Gisgard replied as the rear hatch was opened and Marquand and the ten men he’d brought down with him scrambled out into the snowstorm.

  Colonel Marquand was a short, dark, dangerous-looking man who’d once been described as a Sherman tank with an attitude. Squinting his jet-black eyes against the driving snow, he could make out the stone farmhouse at the end of a narrow track that emerged from the woods and ran across a long, narrow field. A dozen radio units and Bureau of Criminal Investigation vans were deployed in a semicircle in front of the house. He’d been assured that the entire perimeter was secure. It meant that there would be some lost police officers wandering around in the storm, fingers on the triggers of their weapons.

  “I want a scope on that house and on the woods behind it right now, Rene,” he told his number two as they headed toward the communications truck parked just off the track. “Place your shooters no more than fifty meters from the front, left, and right.”

  “What about the rear?” Captain Rene Belleau asked, as he motioned for his people to move out. Both he and Marquand were part Corsican, and they commanded a lot of respect.

  “That Chartres lieutenant has got officers back there.”

  “Stationary?”

  “One would hope so,” Marquand said. “I’ll see if I can establish communications with them.”

  “And hostages?” Belleau said grimly. “It looks like a working farm, hein?”

  “Just our luck,” Marquand replied heavily, as they reached the comms truck. He banged on the rear door and hauled it open, as Belleau, dressed in white army camos, disappeared into the storm, a walkie-talkie to his lips.

  The interior of the truck was bathed in soft red light. Three young officers were seated to the left at a long radio console, and to the right a police lieutenant and a sergeant looked up from a map spread out on a wide table.

  “Lieutenant Regis?” Marquand asked, climbing up into the truck, and pulling the door closed.

  “You from Paris?” the lieutenant asked. He was about forty, and looked competent.

  “Marquand, Action Service.”

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” Regis said, holding out his hand.

  Marquand ignored it, and shouldered the sergeant aside so that he could get a better look at the map. He pulled off his gloves. On this larger-scale chart he could see that the river was within twenty meters of the rear of the farmhouse, and that there were no locks or dams between here and where it joined with the much larger River Eure. From there it would be possible to take a boat all the way to Le Havre.

  “What are you doing to protect the people you have deployed in front of the house?” he asked.

  “Protect?” Regis asked, surprised. “I have twenty-three men, all of them heavily armed …”

  “How many have you lost so far?”

  “I …”

  “Yes?”

  “Seven dead, five wounded,” the lieutenant said.

  “Sergeant, I want all of those men out of their vehicles and on the ground. Pull any of them not dressed for the weather out of there.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant snapped, and he turned to the radio operators.

  “Now, what about your people at the rear of the farmhouse? Are they on this side of the river, or the other?”

  “The far side. We have fourteen back there, and they are equipped for this weather.”

  “I’ll put four of my people with them. Radio your men and tell them what to expect.”

  The sergeant looked around. “We’re momentarily out of communication with three of our people.”

  “Why is this?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Sergeant, locate them as soon as possible,” Marquand said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is the river frozen over?”

  Régis looked surprised. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “Find out,” Marquand said.

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant answered for him.

  “Do they have any hostages in the house? Did they take any from the bank?”

  “None from the bank, colonel, but we believe there are two civilians in the farmhouse. The man and the wife.”

  “Is the house equipped with a telephone?”

  The lieutenant hesitated.

  Marquand pulled out his walkie-talkie and keyed it. “René, phone line?”

  “Oui. It has tone.”

  “Bon. Any movement in the house?”

  “A few shadows, but no clear targets. What about the rear?”

  “Looks as if there may be three friendlies without communications. We’ll do orange on my signal.”

  “Right,” Belleau radioed tersely.

  “I want a link to that phone line. Send Henri over on the double.”

  “What about the local officers?”

  “Stand by only. I didn’t spot any medical units out there.”

  “Non, neither have I,” Belleau radioed.

  “They’re on their way,” Régis said.

  “That’s good,” Marquand said. “Because in a few minutes we’re going to have some casualties.”

  “Our men are dismounting now,” the sergeant said. “But I’m sorry to say there is no luck so far in the rear.”

  “What about the river?”

  “It isn’t frozen, the current is too swift.”

  “It’s an escape route. Are any of your people within sight of the river?”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.

  “If anything moves toward the river, from whatever direction, shoot to kill.”

  “But, colonel, you understand three of my men are unaccounted for back there,” Regis protested.

  “Then let us hope they do not decide to go for a swim this evening.”

  The sergeant turned back to the radios to issue the orders.

  “Your men are to be used for containment. If anything gets past us, it will be up to you to bring it down.”

  “I thought we might go in with you,” the lieutenant said.

  “You have lost enough brave officers. No need for more,” Marquand said almost gently. “This is our fight now.”

  The back door opened. One of Marquand’s men dressed in white camos came in and went immediately to the radio
consoles. His name tag read BOUTET. “The line is isolated, and I’ve tied it to the auxiliary here,” he said, studying the panel. He flipped a couple of switches, and picked up one of the handsets. “Bon.”

  “René,” Marquand radioed.

  “In position,” Belleau came back.

  “We go in in one minute.”

  “Oui.”

  “Inform your people,” Marquand told the sergeant, and he motioned for Boutet to place the call. He remembered a half-dozen other moments similar to this one, and each time he hoped it would be the last.

  “Hallo. Bonjour. This is the police, to whom am I speaking?” Boutet began. His job was to keep the hostage-takers talking for as long as possible, which would help distract them.

  Marquand was about to raise the walkie-talkie to his lips, when Boutet shook his head.

  “Lost him.”

  Belleau came on. “There’s movement! They’re coming out!”

  “Allez-y! Allez-y!” Marquand radioed, then shoved the sergeant toward the door. “Out of here now!” he shouted. “Everybody!”

  He was out the door right behind the sergeant, nearly stumbling in the snow, Boutet on his heels. Before they got ten yards, a bright flash seemed to surround them, and the communications truck exploded in a million pieces, knocking them down like a set of ten pins.

  The bastards had targeted the truck from the moment they realized what it was being used for, Marquand thought, scrambling to his feet. It was a mistake that he should not have made.

  Another flash about thirty meters nearer to the house took a police van. The sound of small arms fire rattled from behind the house.

  “Two mecs down! We’re going in!” Belleau radioed.

  Lieutenant Regis and the three radio operators were dead, so there was no immediate way of knowing what had happened at the rear of the house.

  Boutet was helping the sergeant who’d been hit by flying debris. There was nothing else to do for the moment. The action was in the farmhouse a hundred meters away.

  The small arms fire died off within ninety seconds.

  Belleau came back. “The farmhouse is secure. Two males and one female down and dead. The hostages, one male, one female, are both dead as well.”

  “That leaves one unaccounted for,” Marquand radioed. “Watch yourself, René.”

  “Stand by.”

  “Merde,” the sergeant swore. He was looking back at what was left of the communications truck.

  “We’ve got movement back here,” Belleau radioed excitedly. “Across the river. All right, stand by.”

  Boutet was looking up at him, his eyes narrow.

  “All right, Philippe, it’s the police. They’re pulling a body out of the river about thirty or forty meters downstream.”

  “The third subject?” Marquand queried.

  “Unknown.”

  “Stay put until I can establish communications with someone on that side of the river.”

  “Will do,” Belleau responded.

  Marquand had a feeling that this was going to be a very long night.

  Edward R. Reid began to think of himself as the great pacifier in 1986 when in his financial newsletter Lamplighter he predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan as the next threat to the nation. His stated goal, and there were a lot of powerful people in and out of Washington who listened to him, was true peace through a beneficent financial domination of the world by the United States. But now at sixty-nine he felt as if he were no closer to his goal than he had been eleven years ago, and he was running out of time.

  “The tragic inevitability of war can be circumvented only if we have the will,” he’d written in his last newsletter. “Economic conditions in the U.S. continue to deteriorate on many fronts, the national debt spirals upward at an ever-increasing pace, and the new health care system is pushing record numbers of small businesses into bankruptcy, elements that will lead either to a decline into international obscurity for America and Americans, or war with Japan for the same reasons we went to war with them fifty-six years ago.”

  A war he’d missed because he was too young, he thought as he paid off his cabby at the 21st Street entrance to the State Department and shuffled across the sidewalk. He was a bulky man, with huge feet, very large, still powerful hands, a broad, almost square head with white, thinning hair, a bulbous red nose, patchwork blue and red blood vessels high on his cheeks, and brilliantly penetrating blue eyes. A Princeton class of ’50 man, he’d come to work for State after a three-year stint in the Army in West Germany. In 1961 he’d returned to Princeton for dual master’s and doctorate degrees with honors in political science and economics, and in 1967 any department or agency in Washington would have welcomed him with open arms, but he chose State because his first love was international affairs, especially those of West Germany. He felt it was there that the fight against communism would be won or lost.

  His two disappointments in life were his wife’s death in 1983 and his failure to reach the top spot, Secretary of State, rising only as far as Deputy Undersecretary for Economic Affairs.

  “Every President you’ve served under has told you that you’re more valuable where you are,” Margaret, his wife of twenty-eight years, told him when he would grumble. “You’re too smart to be a politician, you old poop, so quit your complaining.”

  He missed her, and not a day went by when he failed to wish for her counsel.

  It was a few minutes before one when he stepped through the metal detector downstairs and took the elevator up to the ninth floor. His name was on the list and he was expected. The call from Thomas Bruce, who held his old job, had come at 8:00 sharp this morning. “Secretary Carter would like to have a word with you sometime today. Would one o’clock be convenient?”

  “It would,” Reid had said, knowing full well what the meeting would be about. They were going to jump him about his last newsletter, which was fine with him because it meant they were paying attention.

  Warner MacAndrew, the State Department’s official spokesperson, was just coming out of the Secretary’s reception area as Reid stepped off the elevator. The man was tall and thin, all planes and angles. He looked serious.

  “They’re waiting for you inside, Mr. Reid,” he said, stepping back and holding the door.

  “That serious, is it,” Reid commented, entering the office.

  “I for one agree with you,” MacAndrew said softly, and Reid smiled.

  He was passed directly through by an assistant who opened the inner door and said, “He’s here, Mr. Secretary,” then stepped aside.

  Secretary of State Jonathan Stearnes Carter, seated behind his desk, did not bother to get up. At fifty-one he was one of the youngest Secretaries of State in recent times, but he came highly qualified from Colgate and Cornell as a lawyer with experience on the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, various presidential commissions including law enforcement and administration of justice, and work as special and chief counsel on three different Senate subcommittees. Seated across from him were Thomas Bruce and Dietrich Kaltenberger, the State Department’s General Counsel. They all looked unhappy.

  “Thank you for coming over on such short notice, Edward,” Secretary Carter said, motioning him to take a seat.

  “My pleasure, Mr. Secretary,” Reid replied. “I’m always at the service of my country.”

  Everyone said that Carter looked something like FDR, but there was no well-met smile on his face today.

  “We won’t keep you long. You’re a busy man.”

  “As you are, Mr. Secretary. What can I do for you?”

  “Simply put, we want you to stop your call to arms against Japan.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir, but I’m doing no such thing.”

  “We’ve read your latest,” Kaltenberger said.

  “Then you’ve not read it closely enough. If you had you would understand that I am calling for something quite different.”

  “What?” Carter asked bluntly, and
Reid turned back to him, enjoying this more than he thought he would.

  “I’m sure, Mr. Secretary, that you are aware that because of the continuing trend toward corporate downsizing, one in eleven Americans are out of work.”

  “What does that have to do with this?” Kaltenberger said, but Carter waved him off, and Reid continued.

  “Housing starts were down sharply for the fifth quarter in a row, and yet just before I left my house a half-hour ago, the Dow Jones had reached another all-time high in very heavy trading. That cannot continue, of course. Another Black Friday is just around the corner. But it’s worse. The infrastructure in this country, neglected for fifty years, is falling apart. Superhighways with potholes, bridges unsafe at any speed, mass transit systems in total shambles, factories falling apart, air pollution in some cities across this great nation so horrible that individual county health departments have begun issuing gas masks for the elderly and people with respiratory problems. But nobody cares. A malaise has infected this nation. And it’s time to stop it.”

  “By going to war with Japan?” Kaltenberger asked.

  “By avoiding war with Japan.”

  “How?”

  “It has become an unstable economic giant that needs controlling,” Reid said. “It holds a significant percentage of our debt, which, of course, it could call due at any time.”

  “Go on,” the Secretary said, tight-lipped.

  “Now that the Russians have all but shut down their military spending, and ours has been sharply cut back, the Japanese ground, air, and maritime self-defense forces, as they’re called, are the fastest growing military forces in the world. Within a few months they’ll be occupying our old base at Subic Bay in the Philippines—the first time since 1945 that their forces have been permanently deployed outside the home islands.”

  “How in the hell did you hear about that?” Kaltenberger asked, but again Carter waved him off.

  “A military force, I might add, that is almost certainly nuclear capable. They’ve got the reactors, they’ve got the fuel reprocessing plants to make enriched plutonium, and they’ve got the second-largest space center in the world on Tanegashima Island just south of Kyushu, from where they have launched satellites into space.”