Free Rainbow Six (1997) by Tom - Jack Ryan 09 Clancy Page A

“It’s always exciting,” she added with a smile.
    For me, too, Clark thought. Confident as he’d been with Ding and his men, still, looking down the barrel of a light machine gun and seeing the flashes made one’s blood turn slightly cool. And the lack of body armor wasn’t all that smart, though he justified it by telling himself he’d had to see better in order to watch for any mistakes. He’d seen nothing major, however. They were damned good.
    “Excellent,” Stanley said from his end of the dais. He pointed “You—uh—”
    “Patterson, sir,” the sergeant said. “I know, I kinda tripped coming through.” He turned to see that a fragment of the door frame had been blasted through the entrance to the shooting room, and he’d almost stumbled on it.
    “You recovered nicely, Sergeant Patterson. I see it didn’t affect your aim at all.”
    “No, sir,” Hank Patterson agreed, not quite smiling.
    The team leader walked up to Clark, safing his weapon on the way.
    “Mark us down fully mission-capable, Mr. C,” Chavez said with a confident smile. “Tell the bad guys they better watch their asses. How’d Team-1 do?”
    “Two-tenths of a second faster,” John replied, glad to see the diminutive leader of -2 deflate a little. “And thanks.”
    “What for?”
    “For not wasting your father-in-law.” John clapped him on the shoulder and walked out of the room.
    “Okay, people,” Ding said to his team, “let’s police up the brass and head back for the critique.” No fewer than six TV cameras had recorded the mission. Stanley would be going over it frame by frame. That would be followed by a few pints at the 22nd’s Regimental NCO club. The Brits, Ding had learned over the previous two weeks, took their beer seriously, and Scotty McTyler could throw darts about as well as Homer Johnston could shoot a rifle. It was something of a breach of protocol that Ding, a simulated major, hoisted pints with his men, all sergeants. He had explained that away by noting that he’d been a humble staff sergeant squad leader himself before disappearing into the maw of the Central Intelligence Agency, and he regaled them with stories of his former life in the Ninjas—stories that the others listened to with a mixture of respect and amusement. As good as the 7th Infantry Division had been, it wasn’t this good. Even Domingo would admit to that after a few pints of John Courage.
     
     
    “Okay, Al, what do you think?” John asked. The liquor cabinet in his office was open, a single-malt Scotch for Stanley, while Clark sipped at a Wild Turkey.
    “The lads?” He shrugged. “Technically very competent. Marksmanship is just about right, physical fitness is fine. They respond well to obstacles and the unexpected, and, well, they didn’t kill us with stray rounds, did they?”
    “But?” Clark asked with a quizzical look.
    “But one doesn’t know until the real thing happens. Oh, yes, they’re as good as SAS, but the best of them are former SAS. . . .”
    Old-world pessimism, John Clark thought. That was the problem with Europeans. No optimism, too often they looked for things that would go wrong instead of right.
    “Chavez?”
    “Superb lad,” Stanley admitted. “Almost as good as Peter Covington.”
    “Agreed,” Clark admitted, the slight on his son-in-law notwithstanding. But Covington had been at Hereford for seven years. Another couple of months and Ding would be there. He was pretty close already. It was already down to how many hours of sleep one or the other had had the night before, and pretty soon it would be down to what one or the other had eaten for breakfast. All in all, John told himself, he had the right people, trained to the right edge. Now all he had to do was keep them there. Training. Training. Training.
    Neither knew that it had already started.
     
     
    “So, Dmitriy,” the man said.
    “Yes?” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov replied, twirling his vodka around in the glass.
    “Where