Outside the door, they put him in a wheelchair. It was only fifty yards to the clinical side of the installation. Two orderlies lifted Number Four into a bed, and restrained him into it with- Velcro ties. Then one of them took a blood sample. Ten minutes later, Killgore tested it' for Shiva antibodies, and the sample turned blue, as expected. Chester, Subject Number Four, had less than a week to live not as much as the six to twelve months to which his alcoholism had already limited him, but not really all that much of a reduction, was it? Killgore went back inside to start an IV into his arm, and to calm Chester down; he hung a morphine drip that soon had him unconscious and even smiling slightly. Good. Number Four would soon die, but he would do so in relative peace. Mare than anything else, Dr. Killgore wanted to keep the process orderly.
He checked his watch when he got back to his office/ viewing room. His hours were long ones. It was almost like being a real physician again. He hadn't practiced clinical medicine since his residency, but he read all the right journals and knew the techniques, and besides, his current crop of patient/victims wouldn't know the difference anyway. Tough luck, Chester, but,it's a tough world out there, Steve Nought, going back to his notes. Chester's early response to the virus had been a little unsettling-only half the time programmed-but it had been brought about by his grossly reduced liver function. It couldn't, be helped. Some people would get hit sooner than others because of differing physical vulnerabilities, So the outbreak would start unevenly. It shouldn't matter in the eventual effects, though it would alert people sooner than he hoped it would. That would cause a run on the vaccines Steve Berg and his shop were developing. "A" would be widely distributed after the rush to manufacture it. "B" would be more closely held, assuming that he and his team could indeed get it ready for use. "A" would go out to everybody, while "B" would go only to those people who were supposed to survive, people who understood what it was all about, or who would accept their survival and get on with things with the rest of the crew.
Killgore shook his head. There was a lot of stuff left to be done, and as usual, not enough time to do it.
Clark and Stanley went over the takedown immediately upon their arrival in the morning, along with Peter Covington, still sweaty from his morning workout with Team-1. Chavez and his people would just be waking up after their long day on the European mainland.
"It was a bloody awful tactical situation. And Chavez is right," Major Covington went on. "We need our own helicopter crews. Yesterday's mission cried out for that, but we didn't have what we needed: That's why he had to execute a poor plan and depend on luck to. accomplish it."
–"He could have asked their army for help;" Stanley pointed out.
"Sir, we both know that one doesn't commit to an important tactical move with a helicopter crew one doesn't know and with -whom one has not worked," Covington observed, in his best Sandhurst grammar. "We neat to look at this issue immediately."
"True," Stanley agreed, looking over at Clark.
"Not part of the TO and E, but I see the point," Rainbow Six conceded. How the hell had they overlooked this requirement? He asked himself. "Okay, first let's figure all the chopper types we're likely to see, and then find out if we can get some drivers who're current in most of them."
"Ideally, I'd love to have a Night Stalker-but we'd have to take it with us everywhere we -go, and that means-what? A C5 or a C-17 transport aircraft assigned to us at all times?" Stanley observed.
Clark nodded. The Night Stalker version of the McDonnell-Douglas AH-6 Loach had been invented for Task Force 160; now redesignated the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment-SOAR-based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. They were probably the wildest and craziest bunch of aviators in the world, who worked on the sly with brother aviators from selected other cauntries Britain and Israel were the two most often allowed into the 160 compound at Campbell. In a real sense, getting, the choppers and flight crews assigned to Rainbow would be the easy part..The hard part would be getting the fixed wing transport needed to move the chopper to where they needed it. It'd be about as hard to hide as an elephant in a schoolyard. With Night Stalker they'd have all manner of surveillance gear, a special silent rotor-and Santa on his fucking sleigh with eight tiny reindeer, Clark's mind went on. It would never happen, despite all the drag he had in Washington and London.
"Okay, I'll call Washington for authorization to get some aviators on the team. Any problem getting some aircraft here for them to play with?"
"Shouldn't be," Stanley replied.
