"So tell them that if they want hard intel, they have to have somebody with a live brain and a mouth after the shooting stops." But Werner knew that that wasn't easy under the best of circumstances. Just as taking tigers alive was far harder than taking them dead, it was difficult to capture someone possessing a loaded submachine gun and the will to use it. Even the HRT shooters, who were trained to bring them in alive in order to toss them in front of a Federal District Court judge for proper sentencing and caging at Marion, Illinois, hadn't done well in that area. And Rainbow was made up of soldiers for whom the niceties of law were somewhat foreign. The Hague Convention established rules for war that were looser than anything found in the United States Constitution. You couldn't kill prisoners, but you had to capture them alive before they were prisoners, and that was something armies generally didn't emphasize.
"Does our friend Mr. Clark require any more guidance from us?" Werner asked.
"Hey, he's on our side, remember?"
"He's a good guy, yes. Hell, Dan, I met with him while they were setting Rainbow up, and I let him have one of our best troops in Timmy Noonan, and I'll grant you he's done a great job-three of them so far. But he's not one of us, Dan. He doesn't think like a cop, but if he wants better intel, that's what he has to do. Tell him that, will ya?"
"I will, Gus," Murray promised. Then they moved on to other things.
"So what are we supposed to do?" Stanley asked. "Shoot the bloody guns out of their hands? That only happens in the cinema, John."
"Weber did exactly that, remember?"
"Yes, and that was against policy, and we damned well can't encourage it," Alistair replied.
"Come on, Al, if we want better intelligence information, we have to capture some alive, don't we?"
"Fine, if possible, which it rarely will be, John. Blood rarely."
"I know," Rainbow Six conceded. "But can we at least get the boys to think about it?"
"It's possible, but to make that sort of decision on the fly is difficult at best."
"We need the intel, Al," Clark persisted.
"True, but not at the cost of death or injury to one of our men."
"All things in life are a compromise of some sort," Rainbow Six observed. "Would you like to have some hard intelligence information on these people?"
"Of course, but-"
"'But,' my ass. If we need it, let's figure a way to get it," Clark persisted.
"We're not police constables, John. That is not part of our mission."
"Then we're going to change the mission. If it becomes possible to take a subject alive, then we'll give it a try. You can always shoot'em in the head if it's not. The guy Homer took with that gut shot. We could have taken him alive, Al. He wasn't a direct threat to anyone. Okay, he deserved it, and he was standing out in the open with a weapon, and our training said kill, and sure enough, Johnston took the shot, and decided to make a statement of his own because he wanted to-but it would have been just as easy to take out his kneecap, in which case we'd have somebody to talk to now, and maybe he would have sung like most of them do, and then maybe we'd know something we'd sure as hell like to know now, wouldn't we?"
"Quite so, John," Stanley conceded. Arguing with Clark wasn't easy. He'd come to Rainbow with the reputation of a CIA knuckle dragger, but that's not what he was at all, the Brit reminded himself.
"We just don't know enough, and I don't like not knowing enough about the environment. I think Ding's right. Somebody's setting these bastards loose. If we can figure out a little about that, then maybe we can locate the guy and have the local cops put the bag on him wherever he is, and then maybe we can have a friendly little chat and maybe the ultimate result will be fewer incidents to go out and take risks on." The ultimate goal of Rainbow was an odd one, after all: to train for missions that rarely-if ever-came, to be the fire department in a town with no fires.
"Very well, John. We should talk with Peter and Domingo about it first of all, I think."
"Tomorrow morning, then." Clark stood from his desk. "How about a beer at the club?"
"Dmitriy Arkadeyevich, I haven't seen you in quite some time," the man said.
"Four years," Popov confirmed. They were in London, at a pub three blocks from the Russian Embassy. He'd taken the train here just on the off chance that one of his former colleagues might show up, and so one had, I van Petrovich Kirilenko. Ivan Petrovich had been a rising star, a few years younger than Popov, a skilled field officer who'd made full colonel at the age of thirty-eight. Now, he was probably
"You are the rezident for Station London now?"
