Countdown to Midnight

Forty-Four

Carrying Tadeusz Kossak between them, Flynn and Hynes struggled up a steeply inclined accommodation ladder and fought their way along a tilting exterior catwalk to a landing perched in the middle of the tanker superstructure’s second level. Bandages, already reddening, swathed the Pole’s chest, but he was still breathing — if only just barely. McGill and Cooke were there ahead of them, standing guard over the badly wounded Wade Vucovich.

Below this landing, a bright orange enclosed lifeboat hung down at an angle. It was perched along twin slide tracks that stretched outward from the ship — aimed toward the sea. Like all modern oil tankers, the Gulf Venture was equipped with gravity-launched, fire-resistant lifeboats.

“Let’s go!” Flynn shouted, stumbling to a stop as the ship lurched over another few degrees. Sweat glistened on his face. With the vessel listing ever faster, the fires raging across the water below were suddenly that much closer. “Cast loose and get that damned hatch open!”

McGill leaped to obey. Swiftly, the former SAS sergeant released the secondary lashing lines securing the lifeboat to the davit. Then he yanked the rear hatch wide open. Working feverishly, he and Hynes loaded first Vucovich and then Kossak aboard.

Flynn was the last one in. He banged the hatch shut and latched it tight. Emergency lights glowed faintly, revealing a fully enclosed cabin. Rows of airplane-style seats faced the steeply raised stern of the lifeboat. The others were already strapping the injured men and themselves into chairs.

Perched on a raised platform above the passenger compartment, a single seat faced forward, offering a view through narrow slit windows. This was the lifeboat’s control station. Straining, Flynn pulled himself up and dropped into the seat. He quickly snapped his safety harness closed to avoid falling face-first into the panel ahead of him. With the Gulf Venture’s rapidly increasing list, they were hanging almost straight down off the side of the massive ship.

Rapidly, he scanned the rudimentary steering, engine, and davit release controls. Fortunately, they matched those in the manuals and training videos he’d studied while preparing for this mission. Using these lifeboats had always been one of their best options for evacuating the tanker in an emergency.

Flynn glanced over the side of his seat. Kossak and Vucovich lolled unconscious in their chairs, only held upright by their harnesses. McGill and the others flashed him thumbs-up signals. “Hey, remember, ladies and gentlemen, that no smoking is allowed for the duration of this flight,” Hynes reminded them all with a twisted grin. “Which oughta be about one second.”

No one laughed.

“Gee, tough crowd tonight,” Hynes said with a shrug.

McGill grinned at him. “Comedy is hard,” he remarked thoughtfully. “Soldiering is easy. Stick to what you do best, Cole.”

“Jesus,” Flynn muttered to himself, feeling the tanker roll even farther over. Through the windows ahead of him, the oil-fed fires licked higher. All the technical mumbo-jumbo boasting about “fire-resistance” in those manuals had better be accurate, he thought. Or this would be the shortest, most lethal thrill ride in history. Swallowing hard, he turned the key to start the lifeboat’s engine. It roared into life smoothly. One hurdle down. Then he reached down and removed the pin securing the release lever. A quick twist closed the lifeboat’s bypass valve.

“Here goes,” he said loudly. “Hang on tight.” Then he pumped the lever several times in rapid succession. Outside, the two metal clamps still holding the lifeboat in place opened wide. Suddenly freed, it slid straight down the rails, picking up speed as it went, reached the end of the track, and plunged almost straight down toward the ocean.

Flynn slammed forward hard against his harness as they splashed into the sea with tremendous force — hurling a column of burning, oil-coated water high into the air. He bit down hard on his lip as the jolt sent a wave of pain flaring out from the bruised areas of his chest and ribs. The stern fell backward with another splash and they settled on an even keel. Flames roared higher on all sides, accompanied by drifting smoke that reduced visibility to only a few yards. The temperature inside the lifeboat spiked rapidly. Without waiting any longer, he shoved the engine throttle all the way forward, took hold of the wheel, and began steering the little craft away from the dying oil tanker’s side.

“See if you can raise Lariat One, Tony,” Flynn called down to McGill. Squinting against the hellish, flickering glare, he stared ahead through the smoke, trying to find the quickest path through this sea of fire. “Tell ’em that we could sure use a lift. And ASAP.”

They all knew escaping aboard this lifeboat was only a means of staving off the inevitable for a little while longer. With that Russian submarine lurking nearby, they were doomed.

Through his headset, Flynn heard the other man start calling over the radio, enunciating clearly in a calm, measured tone. “Dragon Team calling Lariat One. Dragon Team calling Lariat One. Do you read me? Over—”

“Sir! Small surface contact! Off the starboard bow! Range four thousand meters!” one of the two sailors posted as lookouts yelled.

Nakhimov looked in that direction. There, barely visible in all the drifting smoke and dazzling flame, he caught a brief glimpse of a small orange boat crossing behind the stern of the sinking Gulf Venture. One of the lifeboats from the tanker, he realized immediately. So there were a few survivors after all. He focused his binoculars on the distant craft, only to see it vanish again — hidden from view by the much larger burning, listing ship. He leaned over the intercom. “Sonar! Do you have the new contact?”

“Negative, Captain,” he heard his sonar officer say apologetically. “The breaking-up noises from that tanker are drowning out anything else in the immediate area.”

No great surprise, there, Nakhimov realized. His passive sonars were deafened by the horrific din created by huge pieces of machinery inside the Gulf Venture’s hull tearing loose and the pounding roar made by millions of gallons of seawater flooding into its ruptured compartments.

Then he shrugged. The lifeboat couldn’t get far. Not up against Podmoskovye’s greatly superior speed, even with the submarine still riding on the surface. He bent down and snapped out the necessary helm orders. They would circle around the sinking ship. Once they were on the other side, they’d have a clear line of fire and be able to get a sonar fix to guide on. And even a single torpedo ought to suffice to reduce that tiny lifeboat to a few torn shards of orange plastic floating on the sea.

A few minutes later, Nakhimov heard one of his lookouts exclaim, “There the tanker goes!”

He turned his gaze toward the Gulf Venture in time to see its two broken halves sliding fast into a boiling cauldron of froth and foam. The Zuljanah rocket, still securely clamped to its launch gantry, vanished from sight. In moments, nothing remained to be seen but a blazing ring of oil-fueled fires and drifting pieces of debris.

“Air contact dead ahead!” the other lookout suddenly screamed. “It’s crossing our bows only a few thousand meters off!”

Nakhimov whipped around in shock. There, roaring in low over the surface of the ocean, he saw a large twin-engine aircraft. The floats fixed to the ends of its high wing showed that it was amphibious, a seaplane capable of landing on and taking off from the water. It was flying straight toward the tiny lifeboat — already descending even lower as it came in to make a landing. “Sonar, this is the captain! Can you get a fix on that small surface contact yet?” he growled.

“Negative, sir,” his sonar officer admitted. “The noises made by the sinking tanker still obscure everything else.”

Nakhimov swore under his breath. Zhdanov would never forgive him, he realized, feeling an ice-cold shiver of fear run down his spine. His only chance of escaping the wreckage of the Russian president’s cherished Operation MIDNIGHT had been to ensure that no one escaped to report what Moscow and Iran had been planning. And now he’d failed, even at that.

Numbly, he watched the float plane touch down and taxi over to the wallowing lifeboat.

Laura Van Horn glanced back from the cockpit of the Viking Aircraft CL-415. Originally designed as a firefighting aircraft, the Canadian-made seaplane had a narrow aft compartment. It was crowded now with the Dragon Team’s survivors and a small cadre of qualified merchant marine officers, more of the Quartet Directorate’s part-timers. They were on this flight out from Bermuda in case Flynn and his men had been able to take the Gulf Venture intact. Her eyes widened slightly at the sight of the two severely wounded men being laid carefully across the seaplane’s deck. A former combat medic who’d signed on with Four was already hard at work on Tadeusz Kossak. “Everybody on board?”

“We’re all here,” Flynn replied. He sounded exhausted. “Alain and Mark didn’t make it.”

She nodded tightly, holding her own regret under wraps for the moment. “Then strap in,” she ordered. “This takeoff might be a little rough.”

“Compared to being shot at, hacked by axes, blown up, torpedoed, and diving head-on into a bunch of flames?” Hynes said carefully. He shrugged. “I’ll take it.”

“We were inside a lifeboat when we dove into that fire,” Flynn reminded him, with a weary grin. “So it’s not quite as bad as you’re making it sound.”

Inside, her heart beat a little faster. So Nick was still himself where it counted, she thought warmly, despite how battered, tired, and sad he looked right now. Hiding her own smile, Van Horn swung back to her controls and pushed her engine throttles forward. Slowly, the big seaplane picked up speed, bouncing across shallow waves as it roared ahead. Twin plumes of white foam and spray lengthened behind her floats. At last, she pulled back strongly on the yoke.

With a final sharp jolt, the CL-415 broke free of the ocean and climbed away — gaining altitude fast. She banked sharply back to the west and flew high over the Russian submarine, which had turned after her in vain pursuit during her takeoff run.

Hundreds of feet below the surface, the environmental sensors inside the Zuljanah rocket’s warhead obeyed Hossein Majidi’s last commands. As the torn remains of the Gulf Venture plunged into the ink-black Atlantic depths, they detected rapid changes in pressure and temperature. Milliseconds later, critical relays inside the sinking weapon closed… and the five-hundred-kiloton bomb detonated.

Several miles behind the speeding twin-engine seaplane, a huge flash as bright as the noonday sun suddenly erupted beneath the surface of the sea. Seconds later, an enormous column of water — hundreds of yards across — erupted like a volcano, soaring thousands of feet into the air before slowly collapsing back in on itself. At the same time, a massive, tsunami-like wave roared outward from the center of the blast, racing across the ocean at hundreds of miles an hour.

Caught broadside by a shockwave with pressures far beyond human comprehension, the Podmoskovye was crushed flat in the blink of an eye, along with its entire 135-man crew. And when the blast-created tsunami arrived, the submarine’s twisted wreckage was casually tossed aside like a crumpled beer can caught in the surf. Carried along for some miles, it finally sank below the surface, spiraling around and around as it plummeted into the abyss.

As it rippled outward from the detonation point, the shockwave’s power fell off rapidly, but even miles from the center, it was still strong enough to hurl the seaplane into a left-hand spin. Thrown suddenly out of control, the CL-415 corkscrewed down out of the sky.

Watching the ocean and sky whirling across her cockpit canopy with dizzying speed, Van Horn reacted instantly. One hand slammed both engine throttles back to idle. The only way out of this spin was to get her plane’s nose down and fly out it. Powering up would only make things worse, since it would tend to raise the aircraft’s nose. Next, she brought her ailerons to their neutral position, and applied right rudder to reduce the CL-415’s rolling and yawing movement as it twisted down out toward the sea.

Her final move was the most counterintuitive of all. Even though it felt as though they were falling straight out of the sky, she shoved her yoke forward — deliberately lowering the seaplane’s nose to reduce its angle of attack. For long seconds as they kept spinning, she was afraid her various measures weren’t going to work, at least not in time to stop them from crashing into the Atlantic.

But then the spin slowed and finally stopped. With her aircraft back under control, Van Horn quickly zeroed out her rudder, pulled back gently on the yoke, and carefully added power to level out the heavy twin-engine seaplane only a few feet above the white, foaming sea. Breathing heavily, she regained altitude and flew on.

At a thousand feet, she risked a glance over her shoulder into the cramped passenger cabin behind the cockpit. “Everybody okay?” she called out cheerfully.

Shaken, Flynn and the others slowly disentangled themselves from where they’d been thrown. Hynes looked at her reproachfully. “You know, ma’am, when you said that takeoff would be a little rough, I figured you were just exaggerating.”

“Mea culpa,” she said with a crooked grin. “But that little joyride wasn’t entirely my fault.” She banked the CL-415 around so that they could all see the vast seething cauldron below. “When you guys set out to sink a ship, you sure don’t screw around.”

Flynn whistled softly, staring at the foaming turmoil below. He shook his head in astonishment. “I guess not.” He looked back at her. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That we just saw that Russian warhead go off?” Van Horn said. “Uh-huh, that’s what I’m thinking.” Her expression turned serious. “And, Nick?”

“Yeah,” he said absently, still watching the ocean boil below them.

“I’m damned glad it went off out here. And not over the United States,” she said softly. “You and your guys did good today. Really good. No one died in vain.”

Having made her point, Van Horn turned back to the west and advanced her throttles to full power. The thundering roar of the two big Pratt & Whitney turboprops grew louder. She’d seen the grave look on the medic’s face while he kept working on the seriously wounded Tadeusz Kossak. The sooner she got them all back on the ground, the happier she would be. She’d lost two of her Quartet Directorate comrades that day. She wouldn’t lose any more. Not if she could possibly help it.