Countdown to Midnight

Forty-Two

Seemingly surrounded by danger on every side, Captain Reza Heidari struggled to remain calm and centered on his primary mission. The unexpected sight of the huge Russian submarine surfacing off his port bow was only the latest shock he’d experienced. From this vantage point high above the tanker’s hull, he could see bodies carpeting the deck. His counterattacks had failed utterly. And now, from the staccato rattle of rifle shots drawing ever closer, the enemy’s commando force was steadily fighting its way up through the superstructure toward the bridge — coming closer with every passing minute. “Hold your course,” he directed the helmsman. “Maintain five knots.”

“Steady on one-five-zero degrees at five knots, aye, sir,” the helmsman said. The young sailor sounded frightened, but still determined to do his duty.

Heidari nodded encouragingly at him. “Keep up the good work, Seaman Vaziri. Soon we will strike the Americans a blow from which they can never recover.” The countdown clock now showed less than five minutes remaining before launch, so he’d brought the Gulf Venture out of its seemingly endless succession of 360-degree turns onto a straight course. They were now heading directly for the point picked out by the experts in Tehran and Moscow as the ideal set of coordinates to fire the Zuljanah rocket toward its planned detonation point high over the American Midwest.

The intercom phone connected to Launch Control buzzed. He snatched it up. “Yes? Heidari here.”

“We’re under attack down here, Reza!” Hossein Majidi blurted out. “There’s a pitched battle going on just outside the hatch! We can hear bullets striking the armor!”

Heidari bit down on an oath. “The whole ship is under attack, Doctor,” he said with forced patience. “You and your technicians are safer in there than anyone else aboard this vessel. You certainly have nothing to fear from mere small-arms fire.” He checked the digital readout. It was still counting down. “What is the status of the rocket?”

With an audible effort, Majidi pulled himself together. “We’ve almost finished fueling the third stage. Once that’s complete, we’ll run the last sequence of checks to verify the final readiness of the Zuljanah’s engines, staging systems, navigation, and the EMP warhead itself. As soon as those are done, we will be go for launch.”

“Very good,” Heidari said. He put iron in his voice. “Focus on your task, Hossein. Let nothing distract you. Everything now depends on the missile in your charge. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Reza,” the scientist assured him. “The Zuljanah will strike home and destroy America. I swear it.”

Heidari nodded. “As God wills. Bridge out.” He hung up.

From across the bridge, his second-in-command, Touraj Dabir spoke up, the tension plain in his voice. “Those boatloads of soldiers the Russian submarine is sending across have nearly reached our hull, Captain.”

“I saw them,” Heidari replied.

“Then if we can hold long enough, this battle is won,” the younger officer said hopefully. “Isn’t it?”

Heidari eyed him. “You think so?” He shrugged. “I am not so sure.”

“But the Russians are our allies!” Dabir protested.

“If so, they have a curious way of showing it,” Heidari said dryly. The petty officer he’d sent to release Skoblin and his men had never returned to the bridge. Nor had the Raven Syndicate mercenaries obeyed his orders to clear the lower deck. That, plus the realization that they’d been secretly trailed — probably for days at least — by this Russian submarine was a clear sign that Moscow was now only following its own interests, without any regard for those of its one-time ally.

Dabir looked even more worried now. “Then perhaps we should—”

Before he could finish, the sailor posted as a guard at the open hatch to the port wing shouted a sudden warning while drawing his pistol. “Look out! The enemy is—” He spun around, caught by a burst of point-blank gunfire, and went down hard. Before the dying sailor had even stopped moving, a man in unfamiliar camouflage leaped through the opening with a short, stubby rifle at the ready.

Heidari fumbled for his own sidearm, cursing himself for his slowness — furiously aware that he was already far too late.

Flynn caught the sign of movement over near a table piled high with charts and some sort of digital readout. He fired twice and saw the hawk-nosed naval officer he’d shot fold over and go down. Then, still moving to the side, he swung his carbine through a wide arc — squeezing off shots every time his sights settled on a new figure. Caught by surprise by his rapid, unrelenting attack, most of the Iranian sailors stationed on the bridge died before they could pull their own weapons and shoot back.

Only one man, a taller and heavier-set officer, was able to duck behind a console. Shouting loudly, he came back up with a pistol in his hand and opened fire.

Flynn felt a crushing impact across his chest. Pain exploded across his sternum. It knocked the breath out of him and rocked him back on his heels. He’d been hit by a 9mm pistol round. Hell, that hurt, he thought fuzzily, seeing the bridge around him go weirdly red. Reacting instinctively, he shot back — and hit the other man twice, in the stomach and in the chest. The Iranian groaned and collapsed to lie unmoving on the blood-spattered deck.

Panting, straining for air, Flynn scanned the rest of the bridge, ready to open fire again at the least sign of movement. But it was empty, populated only by the bodies of those he’d just killed. Only then did he risk looking down at himself. A blackened ring with the faint gleam of brass at its center showed where the pistol bullet had embedded itself in the middle layer of his body armor. He relaxed a little. He’d be bruised and battered as hell for days from the impact, but that was a lot better than fighting a punctured lung.

Recovering a bit, he automatically replaced his carbine’s nearly empty magazine with one that still held around ten 7.62mm rounds. If this battle went on much longer, he thought tiredly, he was going to be reduced to waging it with his own pistol and combat knife.

The digital readout over that chart table ticked down again. Now it showed T –3 minutes and 10 seconds. Oh, crap, Flynn realized. That must be the time remaining until the crew launched their rocket. This battle was just about over, after all. Ignoring the pain spreading across his chest, he kneeled down in the middle of the bridge, swung McGill’s demolitions satchel off his shoulder, unzipped it, and started quickly laying out the gear he would need.

Colonel Konstantin Danilevsky crouched near the prow of the second inflatable, watching closely as the Raven Syndicate operatives aboard the first rubber boat reached the tanker and hooked on to the metal ladder at its side. The men aboard his own boat tied up to the side of the first, with the last inflatable doing the same thing on the other side. All three small craft rocked in the low wake curling off the massive hull towering high above them. Wavelets coated with a thick scum of drifting oil sloshed over their low sides.

“Any change in orders?” the leader of the first boat asked. His eyes shone bright against the rivulets of black crude oil staining his face. Motoring through the widening slick surrounding the Gulf Venture had doused them all with splashes of the foul-smelling gunk.

Danilevsky shook his head. “None! Clear the aft deck and superstructure. Kill everyone you encounter. Then, once that missile is away, we’ll scuttle this damned tanker and shoot anyone trying to escape from belowdecks.” He nodded vigorously. “Now get moving!”

Loaded down with weapons and equipment, one by one, the first boatload of former Spetsnaz soldiers leaped for the ladder and started swarming upward. Men from the second and third inflatables crowded in behind them, ready to begin their own laborious ascent to the ship’s deck as soon as the way ahead was clear.

Tadeusz Kossak and Alain Ricard swung over the edge of the first catwalk, lowered themselves by their arms, and then let go — dropping heavily onto the deck several feet below. Jumping up, they unslung their carbines and sprinted aft along the edge of the hull toward the stern.

There in the darkness ahead, they could see a man clambering up and over the ship’s outer railing. More men crowded the ladder behind him.

The two Four agents opened fire on the move, peppering the area around the ladder with 7.62mm rounds. With a muffled cry, the first Russian aboard fell sprawling. Another, caught by a bullet just as he threw a leg over the railing, screamed shrilly, and tumbled backward into the sea. Kossak and Ricard charged on, still shooting.

Around the edge of the superstructure, Cole Hynes heard the sudden burst of firing. His head reared up and his eyes widened. The Russians were already coming aboard.

Weakly, Wade Vucovich put his hands on the combat tourniquet his friend had been frantically applying. “I got this, Cole,” he said, gripping the tourniquet rod and starting to twist it to stop the blood pulsing from his bullet-torn leg. “You go.”

Hynes nodded once. “Don’t screw this up, Wade,” he warned, scrambling to his feet and grabbing his weapon. “Make sure that sucker is tighter than an off-base loan shark.”

Vucovich tried to grin back at him. “Count on it.”

But Hynes was already gone, racing toward the sound of the gunfire.

Ricard and Kossak skidded to a stop beside the railing and leaned over to open fire. More Raven Syndicate troops fell screaming from the ladder to plunge into the ocean. They were dragged under instantly by the weight of their weapons and equipment. Instead of panicking at this sudden threat, the Russians still crowded aboard the boats started shooting back, aiming for the two dimly seen shapes high above them.

Kossak drew a line across the closest boat, firing rapid, aimed shots that knocked down two men in as many seconds. Suddenly, he heard a startled gasp from beside him. He turned his head in surprise. “Alain?”

Hit in the head and killed instantly, Ricard slumped forward and slowly crumpled to the deck.

“Damn it,” Kossak murmured. Somberly, he swung back toward the boats below, determined to pile up more dead Russians to avenge his comrade of many years. But then two hammer blows hurled him back from the railing. He spun around and slid down to his knees. Distantly, he realized that he was very badly wounded — perhaps fatally so, if help could not arrive in time. Already, the world around him seemed to be growing even darker and colder.

No, the Pole thought angrily, summoning all his willpower to push back against the darkness. Doggedly, he pawed through one of the pouches on his assault vest. He would not yield to death or unconsciousness. Not yet. He would not lose this fight. He would not make another mistake. At last, his hand closed on the cylindrical shape he’d been hunting and pulled it out. Desperately, he strained to stand back up.

And then Cole Hynes leaned over him. Almost gently, he took the grenade from Kossak’s trembling hand. “I got this, Tad,” he said quietly.

Kossak looked up with a smile. “Wyślij ich do piekła. Send them to hell,” he said in Polish, not caring that the American would not understand his words. Letting go at last, he slid gratefully into darkness.

Hynes stepped toward the railing, already twisting the grenade’s pull ring and then yanking it out to release the pin. With one smooth motion, he lobbed the AN-M14 TH3 incendiary grenade into the nearest Raven Syndicate boat and ducked back down. With a snakelike hiss, it ignited — spewing a glowing ball of blinding white flame burning at more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Instantly, it set the oil-coated sea ablaze.

Flynn finished wiring the last of the several demolition charges he’d fixed to the bridge’s steel deck. Lines of det cord now snaked across the floor in different directions, all connected to another length of flexible shock tube. Sweating, he sat back on his heels and checked the time shown on the readout over the enemy’s chart table. He now had less than two minutes left before the countdown reached zero and that rocket roared aloft on its way toward the United States. But one detail remained to make sure his hastily rigged charges would work as planned.

He grabbed a water-filled IV bag out of McGill’s satchel and duct-taped it down across the lump of plastic explosives he’d just set. Then he hurried over to the others and did the same thing. This was a field expedient pioneered by the U.S. Marine Corps to create shaped charges out of ordinary C4. The liquid in those IV bags should compress the explosions when they went off — directing much of their force downward through the deck.

The countdown clock now showed just over a minute remaining.

Unreeling the shock tube as carefully as he could while still hurrying, Flynn backed out through the hatch and onto the bridge’s port wing. He moved all the way to the far end, about thirty feet from the open hatch. This was still way too close, he knew, but he was now completely out of both time and sensible, safe options. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled over the Dragon Team’s tactical radio net as a warning to Cooke, McGill, and the others. Then he laid down with his head aimed toward the bridge to present his helmet to the oncoming blast, pressed his face hard against the deck, and yanked the igniter ring.