Nucflash

21

It was still light. Sunset this day, in this part of the North Sea, had been at 2136 hours, and the sky was still suffused with a deep, royal blue light. The moon, which would be just past full tonight, had not yet risen.

Murdock, MacKenzie, and Roselli were making their way across the bridge between Bouddica Bravo and Bouddica Alpha, sticking to the shadows among the bundles of oil and gas pipelines, and avoiding the narrow, partly enclosed catwalk stretched along the top of the span. Ahead of them, the south side of Alpha’s crew habitat module rose like a white cliff before and above them; a series of railed ladders and catwalks zigzagged up the otherwise blank, white-painted wall like a fire escape. At the highest level, a full one hundred feet above the water, a lone terrorist guard paced the fifth-level walkway, his submachine gun slung over his shoulder. Forty feet below the bridge, two more guards maintained watch on the stern of the Celtic Maiden. The unloading operations taking place aboard the Rosa had been completed, at least. The trawler had maneuvered clear of the platform, and the bomb — or whatever it was — hung suspended above the water now, twisting slowly back and forth with the wind about fifty feet above the water, and in plain view of all of the guards.

It was an interesting tactical problem. The SEALs would have no trouble reaching Alpha unobserved. The tangle of pipelines and railings offered plenty of cover for their stealthy crossing. But once they started climbing that fire escape, they would be in plain view of the guard at the top, of the two on the Maiden, and of the two terrorists positioned behind them, on the east side of Bouddica Bravo. There was no way to approach the object suspended beneath the crane at all, not without getting at the crane controls on the upper deck and physically bringing the thing aboard the platform.

There were two possible approaches, once the SEALs reached Alpha. The sneaky-Pete approach would be to move around to the left, vanishing into the forest of tanks, pipelines, and processing machinery that made up the western side of Bouddica Alpha. There were stairways and ladders back there that would get them up to the fifth level and the platforms operations center.

But Murdock was favoring a more open approach.

No matter how stealthy they were, there was always the possibility that by sheer bad luck and the malign intervention of the god Murphy, someone would see them sneaky-Peting their way through the refinery area. But what if they walked up that outside ladder in full view?

The SEALs had shed their dry suits and were wearing the ordinary combat blacks they’d had on beneath the bulky neoprene garments. Over that they wore combat harnesses very similar to the load-bearing vests worn by most of the terrorists. On their heads, they wore black wool watchcaps, again much like the headgear worn by a number of the tangos. Seen in poor light, glimpsed for a second or two, any one of the SEALs would simply be one more man in black among many. Weapons might present a problem; many of the terrorists carried H&K MP5 submachine guns, while the SEALs carried MP5SD3s, the sound-suppressed version of the same weapon, with heavy, cylindrical muzzles as thick as a man’s arm.

Still, some of the tangos had been seen on the platform with other weapons, Uzis and even American-made M-16s, and in poor light, the SD3s weren’t that dissimilar from the weapons carried by the bad guys. People tended to see what they thought they ought to see, so the silenced subguns probably wouldn’t attract any attention. Anyone who caught sight of the SEALs as they walked around on the platform superstructure would assume that they were comrades. All they needed to do was walk in as though they owned the place, instead of sneaking around like commandos.

No problem. It was all part of the SEAL knack of blending into their environment.

And Murdock was about to put that knack to a brutal test.

Once they reached the upper levels of the platform, MacKenzie would take out the radar, while Murdock and Roselli tried to find an isolated tango to question. A quick-and-dirty interrogation or two was the only way Murdock could think of to verify that the object suspended from the crane was, in fact, the terrorist bomb. With luck, and the appropriate threats, they could even find out how it was fused, and whether or not there were booby traps on the thing.

Whatever they learned would have to go out over the satellite net; Johnson and Sterling would handle that… as well as keep an eye on the terrorist sentry post on Bouddica Bravo.

Then, when all the rest was complete, Murdock was determined to find Inge Schmidt, somewhere within that imposing fortress towering above him.

And they had to pull it all down by 2230 hours — forty-five, no, make that forty-four minutes from now — when the joint British, American, and German assault went down.

Movement caught Murdock’s attention, high overhead, on the fourth-floor level of the living quarters. He froze in place, raising one warning hand to stop Roselli and Mac behind him. His breath caught in his throat. Two men were walking around the corner from the west side of the building, and between them was a woman, blindfolded and handcuffed.

It was hard to tell at this distance and at this angle, but Murdock was certain from the skirt, the blouse, and the matted blond hair that it was Inge once again. The group was only in sight for a moment or two. Murdock watched in helpless fury as the men led the woman up the outside ladder from the fourth level to the fifth, then ushered her through a door off the top-level catwalk after exchanging an inaudible comment or two with the guard there.

Swiftly, Murdock plotted the movement against the mental map he carried of the complex. That brief glimpse of Inge had been a damned lucky break; three SEALs could have spent hours searching the labyrinth of rooms and passageways that was the living quarters for the platform personnel before finding her. Even now, all he knew was that she was still alive — for the moment, at least — and being held somewhere on the structure’s top deck.

The rest of the mission — verifying the position of the bomb, taking out the radar, gathering other intel and getting it to the assault force — would have to come first.

But when all of that was done…

In all that time since they’d picked her up on the street outside her Riisselsheim apartment, they’d not asked her a single question, told her they were demanding ransom, or even threatened her directly with death, and her capture was beginning to seem more and more senseless, a random, brutal, and arbitrary interruption of her normally orderly life.

After dragging her off the trawler, they’d taken her first to a large recreation area somewhere deep within the facility’s third level, tossing her in with a large number of hungry, dirty, miserable, and thoroughly frightened BGA employees. Less than an hour later, however, her captors had returned for her, leading her away to a tiny cabin on the fourth level and locking her in. Two men had come to her new prison at dinnertime, but instead of bringing food, they’d handcuffed her as they had in the van, then blindfolded her and led her step by step with rough hands gripping her arms. They’d walked a long way… down an echoing, empty passageway, turning right, then left again. For a short time, they’d been outside. Despite the blindfold, Inge could sense the difference in the light, could taste and smell the salt in the air, could feel the cold bite of the wind on her bare skin. They’d gone up a steeply climbing ladder, with her captors tightly holding her arms to keep her from falling. Up one level, and then they’d gone inside again, down another corridor, and finally into what she’d sensed was a small room.

Roughly, they’d removed her handcuffs, forced her down into a straight-backed chair, then shackled her wrists once more behind her, pinning her in the seat.

She waited for what seemed like hours, though in fact it was probably only a minute or two. Then she heard the door open to her right, heard footsteps, felt the movement of air as someone leaned over her.

“Good evening, Fräulein,” a man’s voice said, speaking German with the precise fluency of a native. From the trace of an accent, she guessed that he was from eastern Germany somewhere. “How is your head?”

She didn’t answer, but she listened with a fierce concentration to the voice, to his movements, to the sense of his presence, somewhere to her left.

“From what I’ve been told,” the voice said, “you crippled one of my men back in Rüsselsheim. And this afternoon you just missed crippling Johann. He was upset about that.”

“I wish I’d killed him,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Yes, I’m sure that’s true. That, incidentally, is the reason for the handcuffs. I would prefer that you keep those pretty hands to yourself for the time being. And if you attempt to kick me or one of my people now, we will have to tie your feet as well. I think it better if we can have a more dignified discussion, yes?”

Dignified, with her helpless and blindfolded? The irony nearly brought a wild laugh from her throat. She was, she realized with a new stab of fear, frighteningly close to the thin, ragged edge of hysteria.

“In any case, I wish to discuss with you your meetings with some Americans last week.”

“Go to hell.”

“Now, now. Dignified, Fraulein. Remember?

“You are Fraulein Inge Schmidt,” the voice went on after a moment, speaking as though reading from a file. “A civilian employee, level ten, of the Bundeskriminant. You initially began training with the GSG9, but failed your preliminary physical evaluation. You are currently assigned to the BKA’s data-processing division and work as liaison between the GSG9 and other law enforcement agencies and the computer network known as Komissar. You see, Fraulein, we know all about you. We want you to describe your contacts with the Americans.”

“If you know so much about me, you can describe them yourself.”

The man sighed. “I really would like some answers, Fraulein. You were seen in the company of American Navy SEALs. We want to know what they were doing in Wiesbaden, and we want to know precisely what you told them.”

“Fuck yourself,” Inge told him, turning her head toward the sound of that hateful voice.

“Hardly necessary, my dear,” the voice said reasonably. She felt something — fingers? — brush her cheek and flinched. “Not when you are available, eh?”

“Rather cheap melodramatics, threatening me with rape,” she said. She forced a bitter laugh but the threat shook her nonetheless. She already felt used, violated. She hoped her captors couldn’t tell from her voice what she was feeling… or sense her dread of what might happen next. She thought, from the feel of it, that her blouse, torn by that bastard in the van, must be hanging open, and wished she could close it up now.

“Rape would be only the least of it, I assure you. Fräulein Schmidt, I have thirty-nine men here on board this facility and aboard the various ships in my little fleet, and after each of them has sated himself with you, loosened you up for me, so to speak, they will bring you back to me. And then the real interrogation will begin.” And then in stark and utterly clinical detail, her interrogator began describing what he would do to her, what he had done to other women he’d had to question in the past, and what had happened to them along the way. Things involving electricity… or scalpels… or ropes slowly and relentlessly tightened with twist after twist to an iron bar. Things that would leave her helplessly broken, she knew that, knew with desperate, despairing certainty that she could never stand that kind of pain. Despite herself, she was trembling now, and beads of sweat were trickling down her face beneath the blindfold.

“And, in the end, my dear, you will tell me exactly what I want to know. You’ll beg to tell me things I haven’t even asked, just to make the hurting stop.” She could hear him smiling, and she couldn’t stop the trembling. “They always do.”

“Who was your teacher,” she snapped. “Mengele?”

But the small bravado left her feeling very small, and very empty.

“I think a demonstration,” she heard him say. Hands fumbled with the front of her blouse, then with her bra, rolling it up above her breasts. “Ah. Lovely. Johann? The electrodes, please.”

“No—” Then she clamped her mouth shut. I won’t beg, she thought with a fierce and desperate defiance. I won’t beg. She started to twist against the handcuffs, and hard hands from behind grabbed her shoulders, holding her motionless in her seat.

“Even a few volts of electricity applied to a tender part of the body can be excruciatingly painful,” the voice said casually, as if discussing the weather. “I think we’ll start… here.” And something bit her left earlobe, the sharp tiny pain in a completely unexpected place startling her so badly she jumped despite the hands holding her and nearly upset the chair. “And here.” Something clamped on her right ear. “We should remove the earrings too, I think, Johann. So we have better contact. There. That is better.”

She was shaking so hard now she could scarcely sit upright in the chair. It felt like they’d attached alligator clips to both ear lobes; she could feel the wires lying across her shoulders.

“Now, Fraulein. Would you like to tell me about your American SEAL friends?”

“Bastard! Go to hell!”

The pain exploded in her head like a thunderbolt.

Murdock heard Inge scream, faint, far-off and muffled by walls and distance… but unmistakably a scream.

Damn those fucking bastards!

But he held himself in check, forcing a cold and calculating deadliness to replace that first hot surge of fury that threatened to drown rational thought in a combat frenzy. No… take it easy. We’re going to do this right…

The SEALs were more than halfway up the zigzagging ladder on the south wall of the crew’s quarters. It had taken them nearly all of the past ten minutes to work their way invisibly across the rest of the bridge and clamber onto the catwalk running around the outside of the crews’ quarters’ first deck. The scream had been very faint, almost lost in the rush of the wind, but the sound had been enough to chill him far more than the cold bite of the North Sea.

“Easy, L-T,” MacKenzie said from just behind Murdock on the ladder. “Don’t let the bastards—”

“Don’t worry, Mac,” he said, his voice sharper and colder than the stiff breeze plucking at his combat vest. “Whatever they do to her, they’re gonna pay for it in blood.”

“Roger that.”

They kept climbing, their weapons casually slung over their backs, with no evident response from the sentry overhead or from the other platform off to the south.

Those two men on Bravo worried Murdock more than the lone guard. Murdock couldn’t see them, though he knew precisely where they were. Sterling and Johnson were keeping an eye on them while the other three SEALs penetrated Alpha, and would take them down if they seemed to notice anything amiss across the way on Alpha. The problem was that while Murdock trusted Jaybird’s and Skeeter’s judgment, the moment they took out the two sentries the clock would be running. It would be possible to explain the disappearance of one guard, if they had to take him down, as an isolated accident.

The disappearance of three, at two different locations, would tip off the enemy that they were under assault, just as soon as they realized the three were missing.

The risk — to the SEALs, the hostages, to the whole operation — was appalling, but all Murdock could do was play out the hand.

He kept climbing.

The telephone rang, a jarring, explosive sound, and Adler looked up from the shaking, whimpering girl, irritated. Now what? He’d told Karl he was not to be disturbed. Walking over to the small desk, he picked up the receiver and stabbed the internal call button with its blinking light. “What is it?”

“Sorry to interrupt you, Herr Adler,” Karl Strauss’s unpleasantly nasal voice said on the other end of the line. “But that workboat is coming back. They say, they say that the Korean woman is on board. We’ve won, Heinrich!”

“No, we haven’t,” Adler replied. “Not yet.” But it was an important first step, and Adler felt a thrill of excitement. It was happening! Just as Pak had assured him it would! “Very well,” he said. “I will be up immediately.”

Hanging up the receiver, he turned, then walked back to the girl. She was slumped in the chair now, no longer struggling, no longer whimpering. Her earlobes were fiery red where they’d been burned, the skin already blistering. When he lifted her chin with one hand and pulled off the blindfold, her eyes stared past him, glazed and unfocused. “Are you ready to tell us what we need to know yet, my dear?”

There was no answer, not even a groan. It was possible, he thought, that he’d pushed her too hard, too fast. Carefully, he pried one eyelid open wider, checking the dilation of the pupil. Then he checked the other. Was she going into shock? Both pupils were the same size.

“I must go up to Ops,” he told Johann, who was standing next to the table with the car battery and switch. He removed the alligator clips from her ears, then handed them across to the other man. “Take her back to her room and watch her. I don’t want her to hurt herself.”

Johann smiled. “What if I hurt her instead, Herr Adler? I could continue the interrogation, you know.”

Adler reached down and pressed his fingers against the woman’s throat, probing for a pulse. There it was… strong and pounding, not the weak and thready flutter of someone deep in shock. It was possible that she was faking it, trying to avoid more pain, but Adler couldn’t be sure.

Adler was drawing on years of highly specialized training with the old East German Stasi. All of his earlier statements — the threat of gang rape, the threats of slow torture with knife or flame or rope — had been made as part of a deliberate campaign to elicit an emotional response. He was looking for a handle on this woman. He needed to break her, and quickly, because he was certain that the enemy wouldn’t capitulate to the PRR’s demands without at least the attempt to board the platform.

He suspected that she knew something about the American SEALs and their interest in the PRR, and he was determined to find out what it was. Unfortunately, they were running out of time. If the enemy was going to try something, their plan, their deployment must already be in motion, and though something so obvious was unlikely, it was still distinctly possible that an assault had been timed to correspond with the arrival of the workboat bearing Major Pak’s comrade. It was for that reason that he’d given the order to go ahead and remove the bomb from the Rosa. It had been Pak’s suggestion that they suspend it high in the air above the water where no one could reach it unobserved.

“Go ahead, Johann,” he said, still probing. “Have fun. Just don’t damage her too seriously, at least not until I have a chance to get my answers.”

He was watching her eyes carefully as he said the words, watching for a reaction. Had her nostrils flared slightly? Hard to tell. Perhaps she really was in shock… or simply in a deep, psychological withdrawal. He snorted. Obviously, the girl was psychologically soft, with no tolerance for pain at all. Breaking her would not take long.

But first, he had to see to Chun’s arrival… and to make certain his men were ready, just in case this was a diversion of some sort for an assault. “Do what you want with her,” he said, reaching for the door.

Johann grinned unpleasantly. “It will be my very great pleasure, Herr Adler.”

Adler had known Johann Schneider since the two of them had worked together in the Stasi. He never had liked the man.

He enjoyed his work too much, and that could make a man get sloppy.

Clomping noisily up the last few rungs of the ladder, Murdock mounted the top catwalk and turned to face the guard. The man was leaning against the walkway railing, casually lighting a cigarette… despite the prominent NO SMOKING sign posted on the wall nearby.

Idiot. The terrorists were as likely to destroy Bouddica through stupidity or carelessness as they were by triggering their bomb.

Murdock suspected — judging from the mix of Irish Provo and German RAF terrorists so far identified — that not all of them knew one another that well. In fact, he was counting on that. As he walked toward the guard, the man flicked the glowing tip from his cigarette, glanced incuriously over his shoulder directly at Murdock and the other SEALs, then looked away again.

Silently, Murdock and MacKenzie exchanged hand signals, and then Mac turned and vanished down the catwalk around the building’s southwest corner. He would take out Bouddica’s radar facilities while Roselli and Murdock looked for intel.

Murdock stopped at the door through which they’d taken Inge a few minutes ago. He glanced in through the small, square window; the door opened into a small foyer with another door beyond, with no one visible inside. He tried the knob; it opened. Keeping a cautious eye on the guard’s back, he held the door open for Razor, who casually walked through and into the foyer beyond.

As Roselli pushed open the inner door, however, Inge — it was unmistakably Inge, and much closer now — screamed again, a raw-throated wail that could only have been wrenched from her by some terrible pain. The guard turned at the sound, and from three yards away, his hard, pale blue eyes locked with Murdock’s.

A half-smile played at the man’s lips, “Laute Tussi, ” he said. Murdock’s few words of German weren’t up to translating, but it didn’t sound pleasant.

But translation was the last thing Murdock had to worry about. Almost as he said the words, the German terrorist’s eyes narrowed suddenly, and the half-smile vanished. Murdock could read the realization in those eyes that the man standing before him was a stranger. Widening, the eyes dropped to Murdock’s load-bearing vest… the radio strapped to his left shoulder… the Kevlar pouch bulging with flash bangs on his right hip… the thousand other tiny details of equipment and manufacture that separated the SEAL from the terrorist…

… and the man was already pulling his submachine gun up to the firing position…