Countdown to Midnight

Thirty-Nine

The moment his boots touched the tanker’s steel deck, Nick Flynn punched out of his parachute harness and yanked off his oxygen mask and cylinder. The pungent stench of raw crude oil stung his eyes and nose. These sons of bitches have been dumping their oil overboard, he realized. That odd coating he’d noticed spreading over the sea was a thick oil slick which must already be more than a mile or two across. He shouldn’t be surprised. Even deliberately causing a major environmental disaster was petty vandalism compared to the vicious act of mass murder the Russians and their Iranian partners intended to carry out against the United States.

The alarm sirens blaring across the ship suddenly cut out. In the comparative silence, he heard shouts from the six-story-high superstructure looming above him. Feet rang on metal as armed men rushed down the companionways and ladders leading to the deck. Whoever was in charge up there obviously wanted to hit the Quartet Directorate force while it was most vulnerable.

Flynn sighed. He hated it when the enemy reacted intelligently. But it figured that Iran and Russia’s mercenary Raven Syndicate would have entrusted this high-risk operation to some of their best officers and men. He tore at the zippers sealing his wingsuit and kicked out of the bunched nylon fabric as quickly as possible. Then he dropped prone and rolled into cover behind a ladder to the steel catwalk running above this section of the hull. While readying his Kel-Tec carbine, he kept an eye on the deck ahead. There, not more than a couple of hundred feet away, hunched shapes were already moving toward him, darting from cover to cover as they drew steadily closer.

“Dragon Lead in position portside, near frame thirty. Hostiles on the move,” he warned over the team’s tactical net. From his personal perspective, facing aft, he was on the Gulf Venture’s righthand side, but the relative directions of port and starboard on a ship were always set from its bow, not its stern.

“Dragon Two ready, too,” Tadeuz Kossak answered coolly from the other side of the massive vessel. “Another group is advancing up the starboard side.”

Voices crackled through Flynn’s headset as McGill, Cooke, Hynes, and the rest of his men confirmed that they were safely down on the deck and moving aft to join up. As the first two out of the Super Hercules, he and Kossak had landed the closest to the tanker’s superstructure. And that now put them directly in the path of this oncoming enemy counterattack. They would have to hold long enough for the others to make their way along several hundred feet of hull crowded with a maze of piping, machinery, and shipping containers concealing the ship’s heavy weapons.

He risked a quick glance over his left shoulder and saw the dark nose cone of the Iranian rocket just visible above a collection of the large cylindrical oil pipelines that ran the length of the ship’s upper hull. It was positioned along the ship’s centerline, about halfway toward the distant bow. Which meant anyone shooting toward him risked hitting their own highly explosive rocket by accident. Given the tangled assortment of ladders, catwalks, crossovers, pipelines, and other machinery in the way, the odds of that happening were fairly low — but it was still something for the bad guys to worry about, unless they were willing to take a chance on blowing themselves up. They would be reluctant to fire without a clear target. He and Kossak, on the other hand, had relatively clear fields of fire against the attackers. Advantage, Flynn and company, he thought calmly — sighting through the optic fitted to the short barrel of his carbine. “Lead to Two,” he radioed the Pole. “Engage when ready.”

“Copy that, Lead,” Kossak said.

Flynn saw a bearded man appear in his sights, not more than a hundred feet and fifty away. That was practically point-blank range. The Iranian attacker wore standard-issue sailor’s coveralls, but he moved like a trained soldier and carried a submachine gun held ready to fire when he jumped out from behind a mooring bollard and sprinted forward.

Flynn squeezed off two quick shots, holding the carbine’s stock tight against his shoulder as it recoiled slightly. There was no real visible muzzle flash, thanks to the suppressor threaded onto the end of the barrel. Both spent 7.62mm cases were ejected forward out through a port and rolled away.

Hit twice, the Iranian folded over and collapsed in a heap. Blood, black in the dim light, pooled across the deck. There were cries of alarm as his companions dove back into cover. A sharp, piercing crack-crack echoed from the other side of the ship as Kossak opened fire, too.

Jaw tight, Flynn shifted his aim. A quick blur of movement at his one o’clock had caught his eye. He saw another enemy crewman rearing up from behind a pump housing with a grenade in his hand. Shit. These bastards were both evilly smart and experienced. Even if a random fragment from a grenade blast somehow flew all the way to the launch pad a couple of hundred feet behind him, it would have lost so much energy on the way that it probably wouldn’t even penetrate the rocket’s relatively thin skin. Despite his ballistic helmet and body armor, Nick wasn’t likely to come off as well.

He fired three times in rapid succession. Flashes sparked off the pump casing from two near misses. But one bullet tore through the Iranian’s chest and exploded out his back in a spray of blood and shattered bone and tissue. With a muffled groan, the man fell backward. The grenade dropped out of his hand, rolled onto the deck in front of him, and went off with a blinding flash.

WHAANNGG.

Flynn buried his face against the steel deck as razor-sharp fragments sleeted past overhead, pinging and clanging off the catwalk and piping above him. He heard agonized screams from the area around the pump casing. Some of the other attackers must have been caught in the blast.

Taking advantage of the sudden chaos, he rolled out from behind the ladder to go prone again behind the corner of one of the big fake shipping containers the Iranians used to hide their gun mounts and SAM launchers. Staying in any one place too long against enemies of this caliber would be a lethal error.

He was just in time.

Submachine guns crackled, firing short bursts aimed at his first position. 9mm rounds tore at the ladder rungs and deck plating and went howling away in coruscating clouds of pulverized steel. Flynn steadied his weapon, waiting.

And sure enough, just as the flashes faded, two more bearded Iranians charged forward, shouting as they came. He squeezed the trigger several more times, holding the Kel-Tec carbine on target as it kicked back a little against his shoulder with every separate shot.

One of the attackers stumbled and went down. The other dropped to one knee, swung his submachine gun toward Flynn, and opened fire. Rounds whip-cracked low over his head, punching holes in the metal-sided container.

Sharp splinters exploded outward. Most were stopped by his armor. One tiny, burning piece of steel tore across the side of his right leg, tracing a line of white-hot fire across his skin. Teeth clenched on a hiss of pain, he shot back, firing again and again and again. Hit repeatedly, the second Iranian crumpled to the deck and lay still.

Flynn pulled back behind the container and rolled over to check his wound. It was minor, just a thin, bloody slice along the outside edge of his calf. Not even worth slapping on a bandage, he thought with relief. Then his eyes widened in shock as a new shape loomed up from around the other side of the container — the side facing the ocean. While his comrades had drawn Flynn’s fire at the price of their lives, another Iranian had somehow squeezed through the narrow gap between the container and the railing to outflank him. Desperately, Flynn whipped his carbine around, already sure that it was far too late. Adrenaline rushed through his body, slowing time until every second seemed an eternity. But all that did was give him more time to realize just how badly he’d screwed up.

Suddenly, gunfire erupted close by, shatteringly loud. The Iranian lurched away in a torrent of ripped cloth and flesh. Screaming, he pitched backward over the railing and toppled into the ocean far below.

“Sorry I cut that one a bit close, Nick,” Flynn heard a voice say through his ringing ears. He looked around and saw Tony McGill lower his own carbine. The ex — SAS sergeant had just skidded to a stop a few yards away. His bright white teeth gleamed against the backdrop of his camouflage-painted face, rather like those of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland just before it disappeared.

He breathed out. “Close was good enough, Tony,” he said gratefully. Behind McGill, Cole Hynes and Mark Stadler took up their own firing positions, going prone behind whatever cover they could find.

“Geez, sir,” Hynes called over to him, sounding aggrieved. “Couldn’t you have waited a little for the rest of us to get here?”

Flynn risked a quick look around the corner of the bullet-riddled container. Bodies littered the deck in front of him. For the moment, there was no further sign of any movement ahead. “Sorry about that,” he told Hynes wryly. “I meant to ask the bad guys to wait until you were in position, but in all the excitement, I clean forgot.”

“All hostiles are down on the starboard side,” Tadeuz Kossak reported over the radio. “Cooke, Ricard, Vucovich, and I are set to advance.”

Flynn nodded. “Same situation here on the port side, Dragon Two,” he replied. “We’ve smashed their counterattack.” He climbed back to his feet. So far all they’d accomplished was to stave off immediate defeat. The only way to win this was to break into the tanker’s massive superstructure to find and then destroy the enemy’s launch control center. And a nagging itch at the back of his mind suggested they were fast running out of time to get that done.

“Holy shit!” Hynes yelled suddenly. “Here come more sons of bitches! A whole shitload of them!”

Flynn looked ahead to see another wave of attackers erupt out of the shadows around the tanker’s superstructure. He bit down on a startled oath. There must be at least twenty charging across the deck toward his little group of four men. And unlike their predecessors, these sailors made no effort to take cover. Instead, they ran straight toward him, shouting and yelling wild battle cries, and waving fire axes, crowbars, and heavy wrenches. He stared in shock for a split-second. Holy Christ, he thought in utter astonishment, this was a human wave attack like something out of the Middle Ages — or a ship-to-ship boarding action in the Napoleonic Wars. Tools and axes against rifles? What kind of crazy bullshit was this?

Then he recovered. An axe or crowbar swung hard enough could kill you just as dead as a 7.62mm bullet. “Open fire!” he shouted, sighting on the charging mob and starting to squeeze off shots.

Hynes and the others followed suit.

Iranian sailors started dropping, knocked to the deck by the impact of rounds moving at more than twenty-five-hundred feet per second. But there were a hell of a lot of them, and they only had a couple hundred feet of relatively open deck to cover, Flynn realized. His first magazine ran dry and he quickly dropped it out and slammed in a fresh one with twenty more rounds. But by the time he had his weapon back up and ready to fire again, the mob’s survivors were on top of them.

At close quarters, everything came down to reflexes and instinct. Flynn ducked the wild swing of an axe, slammed the muzzle of his carbine against the attacker’s ribs, and pulled the trigger. Crack. Blood spattered across his face. The dying axman dropped to his knees, still feebly trying to grapple him. He kneed the Iranian hard in the face, feeling bones and teeth shatter… and then whirled away as a long wrench flashed right past his shoulder.

This was bad, he thought desperately, sidestepping to dodge another sailor charging at him, this one wielding a crowbar. Really, really bad—

Out on an open catwalk three levels above the tanker’s main deck, Viktor Skoblin took the folding-stock assault rifle offered to him by Yvgeny Kvyat. He automatically checked to make sure it was fully loaded. His eyes narrowed. The Iranians might have returned their weapons, but the fools had neglected to include their body armor — and now there was no time left to retrieve that valuable protective gear. He glared back at the Iranian petty officer who’d come to let them out of their improvised prison. “What did Heidari say?” he demanded.

“He wants you to join our counterattack,” the other man repeated. “And destroy what remains of the enemy paratroops at close range!”

Skoblin risked a glance over the edge of the catwalk. The scene below was one of unrelieved madness. Corpses by the dozen sprawled across the deck. Forward of the superstructure, on the both the port and starboard sides of the ship, he could see tiny knots of men fighting hand-to-hand. A horrific cacophony of gunshots, shrieks, and yells rose above the conflict. He looked back at the petty officer and shook his head. “I won’t waste my troops like that,” he snapped. “Your captain can shove those stupid orders up his tight ass.”

Almost unbidden, the Revolutionary Guardsman’s right hand dropped to the pistol holstered at his waist. “Are you refusing a legal command, Major Skoblin?” His tone was dangerously calm.

At once, Skoblin offered him an apologetic smile. “Naturally, I meant no disrespect,” he assured the other man. The fingers of his left hand twitched in a private signal to Dmitri Fadeyev.

The former GRU assassin nodded minutely. Then, without warning, he hacked at the Iranian’s right wrist, paralyzing the nerves there. Stunned by the sudden onslaught, the petty officer’s mouth opened wide to yell a warning that might be heard by those on the bridge above them. But before he could make a sound, Fadeyev’s clenched fist smashed into his throat, crushing his larynx. Gasping, straining for breath that would not come, the dying man sank to his knees.

Skoblin studied him dispassionately for a second and then turned to two more of his men. “See if this asshole can fly,” he ordered.

Nodding grimly, they grabbed the choking petty officer under his arms and hurled him over the edge of the catwalk to plunge fifty feet straight down onto the steel deck.

Nervously, Kvyat licked his full lips. “What do we do now?” he asked softly.

Skoblin stabbed a finger at the pudgy ex-GRU intelligence officer. “You take four men and hold this catwalk against any attack from the deck,” he said. He nodded to Fadeyev, Yuri Linnik, Kirill Zaitsev, and two more members of his Raven Syndicate security team. “The rest of us will head up two decks and guard the approaches to the Launch Control Center.” He hefted his assault rifle. “That’s the key point. If we hold that, nothing else matters.”

“Captain Heidari won’t be happy that we’ve disobeyed his orders,” Kvyat pointed out carefully.

Skoblin shrugged his massive shoulders. “I don’t give a shit, one way or the other.” He nodded toward the deck below. “If any of the enemy make it alive out of that bloody mess, we’ll stop them cold.”

“And if the Iranians win?”

Skoblin considered the possibility dispassionately. “Even if they do, there won’t be many of them left in one piece,” he said coolly. “Which will leave us with all the power aboard this damned ship. And then, once that rocket is away, we can carry out the rest of the orders Voronin gave us… and finish off that pig Heidari and all of his remaining fanatical madmen.”

His men nodded eagerly. After the indignity of so easily being taken captive by the Iranians, they were looking forward to turning the tables on their supposed allies. Then, while Kvyat and his four men settled somewhat uncertainly into firing positions along the catwalk, Fadeyev, Linnik, and the rest followed Skoblin as he loped toward the nearest accommodation ladder up to the higher reaches of the Gulf Venture’s superstructure.