Nucflash

18

Carefully, moving slowly and with great precision in almost total darkness, Murdock switched on his rebreather rig, checked the gas flow, then unhooked his umbilical from the SDV’s life support. MacKenzie had the side door open. Murdock waited as Roselli squeezed through the opening and into the water outside. Sterling followed, and then it was Murdock’s turn.

After the claustrophobia of the SDV’s interior over the past five hours, the freedom of movement outside was sheer heaven. Swimming was not quite as easy out here as it might have been otherwise, for the SEALs had abandoned their usual swim fins for rubber-soled, dry-suit boots, the better to scramble about on the oil rig topside without having to worry about carrying extra footgear. They were further burdened by the waterproof gear bags, which were secured by nylon straps to their load-bearing vests.

At a depth of forty feet, the ocean’s swell was mostly well over their heads, but they could still feel the mighty surge of water moving above them. Together, the four swimmers used lines to secure the delivery vehicle to a cross beam on the submerged platform alongside, working carefully in the murky light to avoid mistakes. Once the SDV was secure, Murdock moved close to the cockpit and signaled Johnson with an upraised thumb. Johnson responded the same way, then cracked his hatch. Normally, the bus driver would wait with the bus, but there was no telling how long the SEAL team would be here. The SDV had a strictly limited battery life; in fact, the only alternative was for Johnson to turn around after dropping the other SEALs off and head back out to sea for a rendezvous with the Horizon or another tug like her somewhere out of sight of the objective.

And if the SEALs needed to extract in a hurry, he wouldn’t be there to pick them up.

Not that extraction was a particularly important aspect of this recon, Murdock thought with an uncharacteristic stab of pessimism. This one was for all the marbles, and if the SEALs or the SAS or anybody else along the way screwed up, well, it wouldn’t be a particularly bad way to go, not from ground — or rather from water — zero. A sudden, heaven-searing flash, and you’d be incinerated before your nerve endings could transmit the sensation of pain to your brain.

The nightmare would be reserved for all of those thousands of people on the fringe of the effects, the ones having to deal with radioactive rain or soot from the North Sea oil fires, for the fishermen and roughnecks and workboat crews swamped by the radioactive base surge, for the kids made sick by contaminated milk and grain and livestock ashore.

Murdock was ready to risk that blinding, instant flash for himself — if it gave him a fighting chance of avoiding that slower, more agonizing death for all of those thousands of civilians.

He just hoped to hell that his assessment of the tangos’ mentality, tossed off in a casual conversation last night in the Golden Cock, was accurate. If these people were psychopathic nut-cases instead of dedicated political terrorists, then all bets were off. Hell, even if his guess about the bastards was right, the sight of SEALs clambering around on Bouddica Bravo would make whoever was holding the firing button damned nervous.

And nervous men made mistakes.

Johnson pulled himself free of the SDV’s cockpit, and Murdock clapped him on the shoulder, giving him an OK sign of approval. The newbie had performed well, in a dangerous and difficult assignment. The entire operation could have been doomed had he missed the bearing of the oil complex by even a single degree. Murdock waited as Johnson retrieved his own waterproof bundle of weapons and gear. Then, together, the five men pushed away from the moored SDV and began swimming into the forest of struts and supports beneath Bouddica Bravo.

They’d decided to approach the complex from the smaller Bravo platform for several reasons. Perhaps most important, Alpha was supported above the waves by four massive steel-and-concrete pylons, each many meters thick and all narrower at the water than they were at their tops. Climbing those structures at all would be next to impossible; climbing them unseen would be more difficult still.

Bravo, on the other hand, was a more conventional oil-rig platform, built on a structure like the gantry crane surrounding a rocket about to be launched. The rocket, in this case, was the drilling rig itself, which extended down through the center of the platform and was completely surrounded by the supports. The underwater portions of the structure had to be serviced periodically by BGA divers; there were handholds and an access hatch to the rig’s main deck, the pylons themselves offered lots of handholds — assuming you could climb like a monkey — and a man could almost certainly make his way all the way from the water’s surface to the well deck proper without being seen from any other part of the complex.

The terrorists, most of them anyway, those who hadn’t remained on board the Noramo Pride, would be on Alpha, up in the operations center and in the east-side living quarters complex. They might be terrorists, but they weren’t fools. It was cold outside, and except for a few routine guards taking turns out in the brisk, North Sea wind, most would be inside where it was warm.

Up… up… up. Murdock could feel the water growing rougher, in powerful, mountain-sized surges. With his equipment load and no fins, the uphill swim swiftly became a small torture. His weight belt had been set for neutral buoyancy at twenty feet; halfway to the surface, it became harder to keep moving up, harder to support the drag of all of the weight he was carrying. He moved himself along up the cross struts, hand over gloved hand. All the way up, he watched for other movements within the pylon forest. Though unlikely, it was not impossible that the terrorists’ first string of defense included a pair or two of frogmen of their own.

Murdock broke the surface first, clinging with one hand to a steel cross brace as he pushed his mask back with the other. The cold of the water was so raw it hurt, biting into the skin of his exposed face like a knife. The air temperature was in the high forties; the water itself must be a whisker or two above freezing. Back in Virginia Beach they were having a heat wave on the heels of an early spring. And here he was, worrying about major exposure…

Carefully, Murdock took a long, hard look around. This, arguably, was the most dangerous moment. If the opposition was alert, if the guards were ignoring the potential threat posed by the Horizon and were watching the surface of the water close to the derrick pilings, then the SEAL recon was doomed before it had properly begun. Nothing… no sign of life anywhere. Bouddica Alpha’s lowest work deck stretched like a raftered ceiling forty or more feet overhead, while the pilings rose about him like the trunks of fantastic, otherworldly trees. Sterling’s head broke the surface with an oily ripple a few feet away… and beyond him, MacKenzie, Roselli, and Johnson.

The team’s next set of steps had all been worked out and rehearsed again and again back at Dorset. Satellite photos provided to the British government by the American Defense Intelligence Agency had shown the general layout of the platform area, and Wentworth had shared those maps with the SEALs as soon as they’d reached his desk. As Murdock bobbed in the sea beneath the platform, he used each lift provided by a passing wave to check the actual layout with what he’d memorized off the satellite maps.

Nothing, apparently, had moved in the past few hours. The tanker Noramo Pride was still moored east of the platform, about a mile off. A red-and-white-painted anchor tug outwardly identical to the Horizon was moored close beside one of the four main supports beneath Bouddica Alpha. That would be the Celtic Maiden, assigned as Bouddica’s safety boat. Not far from the Maiden was an aging fishing boat, dilapidated and rust-streaked, looking very much out of place alongside so much twenty-first-century hardware. Murdock had heard nothing about that craft’s identity, but her presence here meant trouble. Either she’d been used by the terrorists in their takeover of the original tanker, or she was an honest fishing vessel, somehow swept up in the drama unfolding over the North Sea. Either way, there were probably tangos aboard, and they would have to be neutralized.

The sheer number of large and complex targets here was daunting. Bouddicas Alpha and Bravo alone represented a small city, with thousands of niches, corners, and hidey-holes for the bad guys. Same for the Noramo Pride, an enormous vessel that could have any number of people aboard. And both the Celtic Maiden and the old fishing trawler would have to be considered too.

Clearly, the assault was far beyond the capability of SEAL Seven’s Third Platoon. Most of the op would have to be in the hands of the SAS and — Murdock had been pleased to learn just before their departure that morning — the GSG9. The Germans, evidently, had decided to pitch in to protect their North Sea interests by sending a squad of GSG9 troopers. Murdock hadn’t seen them, but he’d heard that Lieutenant Hopke was with them.

Knowing Hopke’s feelings for Inge Schmidt, feelings shared by Murdock himself, he somehow wasn’t surprised.

They would all be welcome on this one. The single disadvantage in a multi-unit op, of course, was the fact that so many elite teams could end up getting in each others’ way, literally tripping over one another, even opening fire on one another, once they’d broken into the confused tangle of a firefight inside the objective.

After verifying that the various ships were still where the satellite data had originally placed them, Murdock signaled to the others. Roselli, MacKenzie, and Johnson all began unbuckling their diving rigs and pulling their equipment off. While Jaybird Sterling and Murdock stood — or rather swam — watch, the other three shucked themselves down to combat blacks and load-bearing harnesses, with their weapons and other combat gear still sealed in black, waterproof pouches fastened to their backs. Their rebreathers and other swim gear, along with Murdock’s and Sterling’s weapons bags, were attached to a floatation bladder that Sterling inflated with a small CO₂ bottle equipped with a pull ring. The bladder’s buoyancy had been calculated to keep the bundled gear adrift just beneath the surface. Any curious eyes that glimpsed the tarp-covered bundle would assume that it was a piece of flotsam bumping against Bravo’s structural supports.

With the gear safely afloat and lashed to a piling, it was time to begin climbing the platform. Roselli was the best climber in the group. He looked at Murdock and Murdock nodded vigorously. God, it would be good to get out of this cold! Roselli groped upward for another cross support just within arm’s reach, grabbed it in one gloved hand, and chinned himself up. A moment later, his rubber-suited legs slid clear of the water, and he began his nerve-wracking climb.

Murdock ran his gloved hand over the piling beside him. Damn… that was ice! Not a solid layer, but a slickness of frozen vapor. Roselli must be part mountain goat to be pulling this off.

A surge of icy water caught Murdock from behind, raising him several feet along the piling, slamming him forward, then dropping away beneath him as he clung precariously to his slippery handhold. A moment later, the water returned, the current whirling him about and breaking his grip.

MacKenzie reached out with one strong hand and grabbed Murdock’s arm, hauling him back. “Easy, L-T,” he said, just loud enough to be heard above the surge and hiss of the waves.

Murdock spat salt water, then gulped in a lungful of cold air. “Thanks, Mac. Let’s link up.”

Each of the four men held fast to the framework with one arm, and with the other snagged hold of the load-bearing harness of the man on his left. Together, they clung to one another and the piling, as wave after ice-cold wave of seawater cascaded about them.

Blinking though the salt, Murdock stared up at Roselli, now a tiny black shape half lost among the black, crisscrossing beams and support struts of the derrick platform. Murdock knew a sharp thrill of fear. If he slipped on that ice-slicked perch now, lost his grip, and fell, he could easily break his back or neck in the fall or hit the water so hard he’d lose consciousness and drown before the others could reach him. Murdock watched the twisting, upward-inching shape, willing him to go on…

Roselli vanished forty feet overhead, a telephone pole’s height above the surging, angry water. For a breathless moment, the four SEALs clung to each other, waiting, and then something came spilling toward them from the derrick platform above, something that unraveled as it fell, then jerked to a halt, dangling free, its end swinging about in the wind.

A caving ladder. MacKenzie, closest and with the longest reach of any of the men still in the water, reached up and out and snagged the end as it swung past just overhead. Carefully, he released his hold on Murdock and the piling, letting his full weight drag down on the ladder and pull it taut. Johnson gave a final check to his gear bag, making certain the snaps and fittings were all secure, then swung up onto the caving ladder’s rungs and began swiftly climbing up out of the water.

With Roselli on the platform and Johnson on his way up, it was time for Murdock and Jaybird to pull a small reconnaissance of their own. Murdock locked eyes with the other SEAL, nodded twice, then pulled his face mask back down and settled it in place. A last look around to get his bearings, and then he ducked beneath the surface again, striking out toward the north.

Toward the moored anchor tug Celtic Maiden.

The distance was only about four hundred feet, but it was tough going nonetheless without flippers, even without the added weight of the weapon bags and ammo they’d been carrying. After hours of forced inactivity inside the bus, Murdock was already beginning to feel the effects of exhaustion and exposure.

But he particularly wanted to check out the Celtic Maiden’s strange cargo. The sat photos from Washington had not included any analysis, and Murdock doubted that the folks at the National Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington — NPIC, for short — had advanced any solid guesses yet. Murdock had studied an enlargement of the stern of the Celtic Maiden for quite a while early that morning, however, and was disturbed by what he’d seen there. Something was resting on the Maiden’s fantail, an elongated, vaguely torpedo-like shape swaddled in canvas.

If there was even the tiniest chance that the object wrapped in tarpaulins on the Maiden’s deck was the PRR A-bomb, Murdock wanted to know it. Half of the battle would be won if the SEALs could just confirm where the bomb was being kept, and if the tangos had been stupid enough to leave the thing so easily accessible to the sea, then Murdock might be able to pull the appropriate wires and end this whole crisis, right here and now.

Not that it would be that easy. Things never were, and on tricky and dangerous ops like this one, the ubiquitous Murphy of Murphy’s Law was always likely to be tagging along.

At last, the Celtic Maiden’s hull loomed overhead, vast and dark against the silver light of the surface. From beneath the water, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Taking his place at the workboat’s stern between the two massive propellers, Murdock waited while Sterling got into position a few feet away, then cautiously the two men surfaced together.

They’d been lucky in one aspect of the positioning of the various players in the drama. The Celtic Maiden was moored beneath the bridge that spanned the gap between Bouddica Alpha and Bouddica Bravo, her bow facing east. That meant she was facing the Horizon almost bow-on, and the SEALs had been counting on the distraction offered by the Horizon in order to get aboard the facility. Anyone on board the Maiden was, Murdock fervently hoped, up on the bow or in the wheelhouse up on the superstructure, keeping a wary eye on the other tug.

No one was visible from the water astern. Reaching up onto the Maiden’s transom, Murdock chinned himself smoothly out of the water… then froze. Movement!

But it was someone’s back, a man wearing what looked like commando garb, walking away from the tarp-shrouded object on the afterdeck and vanishing around the corner of the superstructure forward.

The aft end of the tug was deserted now, so far as Murdock could see. Leaning forward, he rolled out of the water and onto the waffle-ribbed steel deck. Sterling joined him a moment later.

Silently, exchanging hand signals, the two SEALs split up, circling the big package from either side, and checking beneath the cradle that supported it. If it was a bomb it was a damned big one, far larger than even the first U.S. bombs used half a century ago on Japan.

Keenly aware that someone might return at any moment or glance down on the afterdeck from the superstructure forward, Murdock and Sterling took cover behind the object. It was securely wrapped, but Sterling found a loose flap extending from beneath the steel strap that held the tarp in place, and worked open a large enough opening to see inside.

Murdock had not been expecting this. He found himself looking not at a homemade A-bomb, but at the aluminum and plastic-cowling enclosing a fair-sized propeller.

Silently, Sterling pointed to some characters impressed in part of the prop shroud. They looked Chinese, but both SEALs had learned to recognize the different types of Oriental characters that were descended from the original Chinese, even if they couldn’t read them.

Korean.

Sterling already had his camera out, a small device manufactured by TRW that recorded images digitally. He got several shots of the lettering and of as much of the propeller and shroud as he could get at. Then, still in complete silence, the two men replaced the loose corner of the tarp, pulled down their masks, and rolled into the sea off the workboat’s transom with scarcely a splash to mark their entry.

Washington, Murdock thought as the two SEALs swam the four hundred feet back to the pylons beneath Bouddica Bravo, would be interested in this one.

The other three SEALs were all gone when they returned. After finding the equipment bundle, they removed their swim gear, added it to the cache, and reset the inflation on the bladder to keep it suspended just beneath the surface. Then, Murdock in the lead, they ascended the caving ladder, which had been left in place for them.

It was a wild, dizzying climb, one made interesting by the buffeting wind and the biting cold. Murdock could feel the water freezing in his hair, where it stuck out from beneath his dry suit’s hood. He climbed with an awkward-looking frog’s posture, his knees splayed out to either side, to keep from pushing himself out too much from the ladder and losing control of the thing. Despite Sterling’s weight on the bottom end, the wind kept threatening to spin him about, or worse, to bash him against the side of the piling.

Then he was at the top, and the platform stretched above him like a vast, gray, steel ceiling. The ladder threaded its way through a narrow manhole, and he squeezed his way up and through.

Roselli was on the platform on the other side, his equipment bag on the deck, his 9mm Smith & Wesson Mark 1 Mod 0 Hush Puppy clutched in both hands.

Murdock touched him lightly and flicked a sign with his fingers. Anything?

Negative, was Roselli’s hand-sign response. You?

Later.

Mac and Johnson… that way.

Okay.

Together, the two men surveyed their surroundings, automatically positioning themselves back to back and rotating slowly to the left, covering one another and maintaining a 360-degree lookout.

From their vantage point on the oil platform’s main deck, they had a clear view of the causeway stretched across open water to Bouddica Alpha, which rose like a fantastic, far-future city on its four massive pylons a hundred meters to the north. Murdock could see the windows of the operations center, but they were blank and empty. If there were people up there — and there must be — they weren’t close to the windows and they weren’t looking this way. They too must be watching the Horizon, which was still riding the heavy swell well clear of the facility, highly visible with its bright red hull and odd, far-forward white superstructure. Even further east, moored to one of the area’s huge fueling buoys, was an oil tanker, a black and rust-red cliff topped aft by a white superstructure like the face of a four-story building.

Murdock shifted his full attention back to the twin platforms. Nowhere on all that vast and tangled structure was a human shape visible.

He grinned to himself. There were four more working decks on Bouddica Bravo above this one, and Alpha was bigger still, an incredibly complex forest of cranes and gantries, tanks and towers, in which an army of SEALs could hide out for days, if necessary, undiscovered. The SOBs would’ve needed an army of their own to adequately protect a facility this large and this complex. They’d bitten off more than they could possibly chew.

He sensed movement behind him. Sterling was there, dripping wet, clutching his Hush Puppy automatic. Swiftly, the two of them adjusted the radios attached to the insides of their hoods, pulling the pencil mikes out until they rested on their lower lips. They would be maintaining radio silence at first, for obvious reasons, but when they needed communications links, they would need them fast. Murdock had to concentrate, though, to keep his lip, which he imagined was pretty blue by now, from trembling. This shit was worse than Hell Week back in Coronado.

When all was ready, Roselli led them away from the deck opening, threading up several steel ladders and deeper into the platform, until they were climbing the weather shroud on the central drilling derrick itself. Halfway up, in a position identified from the plans of the facility back in Wentworth’s office, was a spot where a walled-in section gave way to the more traditional open latticework of girders and braces. There was a platform there, giving the roughnecks access to the drill, with plenty of heavy machinery — winches, hoists, and the pumping gear for drilling mud — which would provide the SEALs with cover, the perfect site for an observation post.

They’d code-named the spot Eyrie. The other two SEALs were already in place and in the process of setting up the rest of their gear.

The most important set of hardware was the HST-4 satcom unit, its attendant decoder, and the small satellite uplink unit that went with it. MacKenzie had already carefully aligned the folding satellite dish with an invisible point in the sky. With that gear properly set up and aimed, they’d be able to converse directly with Washington through one of the MILSTAR communications satellites if they wanted to, though that particular call was probably a bit premature just now.

More important, it would let them talk directly with Wentworth, back in Dorset, or with Captain Croft aboard the Horizon. The SEALs had a great deal of help available, if and when they needed it.

Though they had personal communication with each other as well, they didn’t use it, since the enemy might have scanner gear in operation, set to watch military channels.

The first information beamed out over the tiny satellite dish was the digital recordings stored in Sterling’s TRW camera, followed by a brief report of what they’d seen so far.

Meanwhile, Murdock and Roselli set out to reconnoiter the rest of Bouddica Bravo… and this time they found some tangos.

There were two of them, rough-looking men armed with H&K MP5 submachine guns much like those carried by the SEALs, though they were not the SD3 suppressed version with the heavy silencer barrels. They’d found a place for themselves on the east side of the facility, tucked away out of the cold and the wind behind an immense stack of barrels and drilling-shaft segments. Indeed, the SEALs could easily have missed them entirely, except that Murdock’s sharp sense of smell had first detected a whiff of cigarette smoke, fresh and sharp above the clinging stink of oil and machinery. Murdock and Roselli watched them for a time, dispassionately, until they were certain that there was no alarm, no sense of urgency or worry on the part of the enemy. Then, stealthily, moving with death-silent footfalls, the two SEALs backed away, rejoining the others.

Back in the Eyrie, MacKenzie had a pair of binoculars out and was studying the sheer white cliff-face of Bouddica Alpha. “Anything?” Murdock asked quietly.

“I’ve got two guards spotted on top of the command center,” MacKenzie replied. “And I’ve been following some movement inside. Hard to get a good count, though.”

“Two more back that way,” Murdock added. “It’s going to be a bear getting an accurate head count. Especially if they keep moving around.”

“Roger that.”

The SEALs settled down to wait.