Rainbow Over Sunnydale Chapter 15
by Joe Black
Disclaimer: Red Storm and Tom Clancy own Rainbow and Characters. Joss Whedon owns Buffy and Characters. Anyone else belongs to me. I make no profit of the following except to have a little fun.
Spoilers: Buffy to present. Rainbow to Bear and the Dragon.
Authors note 1: I am adjusting the Buffy time line slightly, moving things back about a month.
Authors note 2: I can't seem to get Fanfic to accept any special formatting so anytime that you see '*' it means that the speaker is speaking a foreign language. If you see '[*]' it is the persons thoughts.
Catlimere: Yeah isn't it?
Hecatonchires: Thanks.
Dorothy: Yeah I always felt that the Sunnydale police force just decided to let her deal with the strangeness since she seemed to be so good at it. "I had visions of her walking up to that desk sergeant in "Dead Things," and saying 'I think I killed someone in the park,' and him reaching over patting her on the head and saying, 'Try to be more careful next time."
LMiC2001: To paraphrase Monty Python, "Of course it's a good plan, I thought of it!"
X-lander: 'fraid you might have to wait one or so chapters for that.
Marcus Rowland: Finding out who bought the guns might be a good Idea. I'm afraid that you might have to wait to find out how Gerry knows for a little while. Buffy never has been shy about telling people who she is, especially if it will get her something. Also questioning people Buffy usually takes the lead in the interrogation.
Thanks to all that reviewed. Constructive criticisms always welcomed. Flames cheerfully ignored.
Situation Room
The White House
Washington DC
26Oct2002
1220 hours
"Say again?" Jack said into the phone.
"The explosion in London was the Watchers Headquarters," Sir Basil explained. "So far there have been no survivors found. I'm surprised that Goodly didn't tell you it was Watchers HQ when he briefed you. Or haven't you briefed him in?"
"Basil I just got briefed in yesterday myself. That's why I was calling you, I had hoped that you could set up a meeting between The Watchers and myself." Jack explained.
"I don't understand. I know that President Durling didn't brief you in when you were the NSA. He felt that your plate was full enough and that you didn't need your worldview turned upside down in the middle of a crisis. But you should have been briefed in as soon as you became President." Basil said sounding a little perplexed.
"It's like this Basil," Jack began, then went on to explain the events of yesterday.
"Good lord," Basil said when he heard the story, "That's why you wanted Rainbow then."
"Yeah, I have Rainbow Six, his Team 2 leader and the The Initiative team leader that didn't bolt out in Sunnydale making contact with the locals." Jack explained.
"Who is the Initiative Team Leader?" Basil requested.
"Riley Finn," Jack replied.
"Good man," was the response.
"You know him?'' Jack was surprised.
"By reputation only," Basil said. "We had a joint operation in Tibet last June for a brief time. Our team leader had good things to say about him and his team."
Moving on Jack asked, "Do you have any idea whose bomb it was?"
"No. We know that the council has been having a covert conflict with someone. We think that the attacks have been going on for sometime. We offered to help, but Quentin Travers, the leader of the council told us that it was an internal problem and that they would deal with it themselves."
"Did a bang up job it looks like," Jack commented dryly.
"I met Quentin Travers on several occasions, he never impressed me.
"We think that the Watchers were having some kind of meeting when the explosion took place," Basil told Jack.
"Sounds like an inside job then," Jack said.
"We are working on that hypothesis ourselves." Basil replied. "Just a minute Jack, I just got an update," Basil read quietly for a minute or so, then said, "I just received word that there may be a watcher left alive after all."
"Who?" Jack asked.
"According to records we got from Heathrow, a Rupert Giles, accompanied by three young ladies was on a plane for Kennedy about three hours after the explosion."
"Giles, that's The Slayer's in Sunnydale Watcher isn't it?" Jack asked remembering the name from his briefings.
"Yes, but I seem to recall that he had an out with the council a couple of years ago," Basil replied.
"You're thinking he might be the inside man?" Jack questioned.
"He seems to be the only watcher who wasn't there," was the response.
"Did he arrive here yet?" Jack wanted to know.
"Yes he arrived at Kennedy before we realized his significance. He and his travelling companions were supposed to be booked clear through to Buenos Aries but they seem to have vanished in New York." Basil replied.
"I'll let our people know to look out for them. Do you have names for the girls traveling with him?"
Jack could hear Sir Basil going over the paper. Yes, here it is," He said, "Annabelle Green, Molly Lincoln, and Kennedy Loxley."
Jack copied down the names, "I'll get these out to law-enforcement agencies and see if we can find them."
"Her Majesty's Government thanks you,"
"No problem," Jack told him. "I don't suppose you know how a Slayer is chosen?"
"Worried about Sally and Katie?" Basil asked.
"Wouldn't you be?" Jack demanded.
"Indeed. Unfortunatly how a girl becomes a candidate for being a slayer is something that Travers wouldn't tell me. Or even how they go about finding them. But he did say that there are under 500 potential Slayers on the planet at any given time, so the odds that either of your girls are 'potential slayers' is astronomical."
"Basil," Jack said quietly, "What were the odds that I would be President? I have a rogue general trying to end the world because of those."
Sir Basil had nothing to say to that. The two men exchanged a couple of minutes of pleasantries, then said their good byes. Before he hung up Sir Basil promised to get the other Rainbow team on it's way as soon as possible.
Once Jack had hung up he debated calling Clark with the news immediately. Instead he thought there were a couple of other calls he needed to make first.
1630 Revello Dr.
Sunnydale CA
26Oct2002
0855 hours
Anya finished pulling herself back to the table. She looked across the table and saw the expression on Willows face. "Willow, I didn't mean that I thought you had summoned them," She assured the red-headed witch, "From what this says," holding up the book, "if you had summoned them, they would have cleaned out the forest of food long ago, and we would have been getting reports of missing pets, bums and small children." Willow looked only slightly relieved.
"Okay, Anya why don't you call Buffy and let her know what we think it is," Willow instructed the ex-demon.
"Okay," Anya said as she pulled out her cell phone. She dialed Buffy's number and waited for her to pick up. As Anya filled Buffy in, Willow got up and went into the kitchen. Riley and Xander got up and saying their good-byes headed out to look for something that they could use as a base.
John Clark sat back and looked into the living room and saw Andrew sitting on the couch watching TV; tape still over his mouth. Clark realized that no one had fed him yet this morning. Standing up he went into the living room and asked, "Would you like some breakfast?"
Andrew nodded. Clark reached down and pulled the tape off of his mouth, "Ouch!" Andrew said.
Anya said her good-byes to Buffy and turned to Dawn, "Buffy says not to forget that you are supposed to run this morning."
Dawn rolled her eyes, "Like I could with everyone here to remind me." Dawn got up and went into the kitchen also.
Clark head for the kitchen, "I'm getting Andrew some breakfast," he told Anya as he went by.
"Why not let the FBI guy feed him?" Anya asked.
"Because I don't know when Pat will get here, and generally speaking the better you treat your prisoners the more well behaved they are," Clark explained as he went through the door into the kitchen.
Dawn was leaning against the sink, a glass of water in her hand. "Where do you keep the lunch meat?" He asked her.
"Refrigerator, in the meat drawer, mayo and mustard is on the door," reaching around she grabbed a loaf of bread and tossed it to Clark.
Clark shook his head trying to figure out how he became chief warden to the prisoner. Clark piled up three or four pieces of ham on a slice of bread, "Mayo or Mustard, Andrew?" He called into the living room.
"Mayo please," Andrew responded.
Clark reached out and grabbed the mayo jar and tried to unscrew the lid. He couldn't budge it, "What the heck," He muttered as he tried to get it to turn.
Dawn saw him struggling and smiled, "Buffy must of forgot the last time she made a sandwich," she said as she reached into a drawer and pulled out a strap-wrench. "It used to drive us nuts before we knew that Buffy was The Slayer, mom and I could never get the lids off." She proceeded to open the lid with the wrench with an ease that spoke of a lot of practice. Tossing the wrench back into the drawer Dawn headed for the front door and called, "I'm going running I'll be back in a little bit," closing the door as she went.
Clark finished making the sandwich and took it and a handful of chips he found in a cupboard into the prisoner. He undid the ropes keeping his upper arms pinned to his body so he could eat.
Anya had come in and taken a seat in one of the chairs. "If you want to go do something I'll watch him for you," she told Clark.
"Thanks," Clark told her though he noticed that Andrew didn't look too happy with the prospect. Clark went back out into the kitchen and made himself another pot of coffee. When it was done he poured himself a mug and went out onto the back porch. He noticed that Willow was already there.
She was sitting in a chair, her feet up against the railing holding a mug of something resting her arms on her knees. She glanced his way but went back to staring at a spot about halfway across the yard. Clark searched the area with his eyes but didn't see anything unusual. Either she was deep in thought, or it was something you needed to be a witch to see. He shrugged to himself and drank his coffee in silence.
Willow just sat and stared for a minute or two then said without turning to him, "Do you feel any remorse for those men you killed?"
Clarks first thought to the question was, "[Which ones?]" But he decided that it wasn't necessary to go there yet so instead he said, "The drug dealers?"
Willow just nodded her head.
"No."
"I do," Willow said, still staring at the spot in the yard.
"You're a better person than me then Willow Rosenberg." Clark told her.
Willow snapped her head around at Clark, "How can you say that? You know what I almost did! I laid awake at night for months thinking about it. You have no Idea what it feels like to almost have the blood of the world on your hands." She returned to staring at the yard; she took a drink from her mug.
"You might be surprised how much I know about what that feels like Ms. Rosenberg," Clark said quietly.
Willow turned back and looked at him, eyes questioning.
"A couple of years ago Ding and I were assigned as Security and Protections Officers to Jack Ryan when he was the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA. We were in Israel meeting with some high-level members of the Israeli Government. The meeting was being held at an open-air café in Jerusalem. Ding and I noticed an Arab male with a bag seeming to pay an awful lot of attention to the area around the table where Jack was having his meeting. We were closest so we rousted him." Seeing Willows look of shock he went on quickly, "We didn't hurt him, Ding just bumped into him and made him spill his bag. It was filled with books, books on nuclear physics." Clark could see that Willow didn't see what this had to do with anything, so he explained, "The man was Ibrahim Ghosn." Willow still shook her head. The name rang no bells. "He was one of the primary architects of the Denver bomb," Clark finished.
Willows eyes opened in recognition. Growing up for Willow had been hard. Her parents where for most of her life were near absentee. Her mother and father always had this cause or that cause to rush off to. They never abused Willow or anything, (well unless you count the time that her mom had tried to burn her and Buffy at the stake, but that wasn't her fault she had been under a spell.) but they had never really been there either. The one day of the year that Willow could count on doing something with her mom had been Superbowl Sunday. Ira Rosenberg watched the game every year. He had two friends from high school that he would get together with and they would eat, drink and watch it. Sheila Rosenberg would spend the day with her daughter. They would go to zoo, or a museum, then get to go some place good to eat, then finish the day with video's and popcorn at home. That year Carl Willaims had gotten a hold of two tickets for the game. Bill Coon and her dad had cut cards for the other one. Ira had lost. Willow could still remember him coming into the room in the middle of 'Mary Poppins' and saying that the cable had gone out. He checked the cable on the living room set but that had been out too. He called the Cable Company; kind of mad because it had been a good game, but they told him the problem was with the satellites. Willow remembered her dad's face when it was announced that someone had set of a nuclear bomb at the Superbowl. His face had sort of crumpled and a sound that she had never heard him make before, and thankfully has never heard anyone else make again came out of him. He just sort of stood there with tears leaking down his face. Her mom had gone paled as she realized how close she had come to losing her husband. There had been a brief moment when the family had hugged each other, but that had ended all to soon. Some people if this happened to would see it as a sign that there was work left for them to do, but something died in Ira Rosenberg with his two friends, he was never the same afterward. Willow herself still could not watch 'Mary Poppins'.
"Ms. Rosenberg?" Clark asked concerned. She had gone kind of glassy eyed when he had mentioned Denver.
"Sorry General Clark," Willow said. "My father lost two close friends that day.
"I'm sorry for him," Clark said awkwardly.
" Thank you. But you can't blame yourself for what happened General! How could you have known?'' Willow said. "And not to put too fine a point on it, while all of those people dying was bad, I don't think that's quite into the end of the world league."
"The world came a lot closer to ending that night than most people appreciate Ms. Rosenberg," Clark said. "[You better have been serious about me using my judgment Jack]" Clark thought.
"I know that there was some fighting that night, but didn't the terrorists start them?" Willow asked.
"The fighting in Germany yeah," Clark confirmed, "But the stuff that happened in the Med happened because the brass in The Pentagon didn't think the Rules of Engagement through."
"Okay, that was bad but it got settled down quickly. Still not seeing any end-of-the-world stuff," She continued feeling vaguely stupid sitting here arguing about whether Clark had almost ended the world or not.
"There was a lot more going on than that Ms. Rosenberg," Clark began, but Willow held up her hand.
"My name is Willow, if we are going to discuss philosophy and stuff then I think we should be on a first name basis."
"Willow then, I'm John." Clark agreed.
"Okay then, Willow, we had an agent in Russia. He was high up in the Russian Government. He was also an ambitious bastard. He decided that Russia would be much better off if he was running it. Unfortunatly we, the US happened to like President Narmonov. So he started to alter his reports. Making it look like Narmonov was losing control, that hard-liners were maneuvering to oust Narmonov and dial the cold war back in. A couple of weeks before the attack he reported that the Russian Military were missing a couple of tactical nukes."
Willow gasped. Clark just nodded. "When the bomb detonated President Fowler lost his two main foreign policy people. Add to that the fact that if wasn't for some last minute problems he would have been at the game it sure looked like an attempt at a decapitation strike.
"President Fowler came close to losing it. Fortunately Jack had managed to put together what had happened, unfortunatly he and Fowler had fight so Fowler wasn't listening to him anymore."
"Goddess," Willow said, while she was used to stopping apocalypses that no one knew about, this was the first one that she had missed. It wasn't a pleasant feeling. "How far did it go?" She asked.
"If it had gone any farther keys would have been turned," Clark said grimly.
Willow paled noticeably, Xander had dragged her to enough of those guys pics that she knew what that meant. "Who stopped it?" She asked Clark.
"Jack Ryan knew President Narmonov," Clark began, he saw Willow's head come up with interest but he shook his head 'no', that isn't a story your getting, "He managed to get up on the hot line and convinced Narmonov to back his forces down. Which the Russians did, and it defused the situation."
"Okay, I can see where you might feel guilty but how could you have known what… Ghosn was up too? It wasn't you who did it." She finished firmly.
"But was it you?" Clark asked.
"I'm pretty sure it was me," Willow said slightly sarcastically, "I was there you know, when I tried to end the world."
"Willow I know what my head was like the first forty-eight hours or so after I found out about Pat. If I wasn't under observation in a hospital I don't know what I would have done, but I probably would not be here. You were in tremendous pain. You tried to commit suicide, but a person doesn't decide to commit suicide when they put the barrel of the gun into their mouths Willow. They decide as they are taking the slack off the trigger. You stopped."
"No," Willow corrected quietly, "Xander stopped me." Clark snorted. "Hello, I think we established that I was the one who was there," Willow said crossly.
"Willow I have to admit that my opinion of Xander Harris has skyrocketed since I was introduced to him as a person who left his fiancée at the alter, but I don't think that he could talk his way out of a parking ticket. I doubt that he would be able to convince someone who had truly decided to kill themselves, let alone someone who had decided to do it by ending the world. Don't misunderstand me, I think that he probably did reach that part of you that was you, and gave it the nudge that it needed. But in the end Willow Rosenberg stopped Willow Rosenberg."
Willow looked at him, confusion in her eyes. "Think about it anyway Willow," Clark finished. He looked into his cup and saw that it was empty, "Pat O'Day should be here soon. I need to go and get ready." He turned and went back into the house. Willow set back in her chair and began thinking about what he had told her.