Nucflash

22

The tango guard was still fumbling with his slung weapon, his mouth opening to give a shout of warning, when Murdock took a half-step forward, then slammed the stiffened knuckles of his right hand squarely into the man’s Adam’s apple. With a tiny crunch, the guard’s trachea collapsed, and the shout turned into a fish-like gasping for air, the lit cigarette popping from the mouth and sailing away with the wind. Murdock’s follow-through brought his elbow snapping back into his temple. The guard sagged and Murdock caught him; a step and a shift of balance, and the terrorist went backward over the railing, falling silently one hundred feet into the dark gray water below.

“No smoking!” Murdock called softly after him. The sound of the splash was lost in the wind, but an instant later, someone yelled from far below, on the after deck of the Celtic Maiden, “Man overboard! Man overboard!”

“Achtung!” another voice cried from four levels below. “Mann über Bord!”

Murdock glanced around. No one else in sight. He ducked through the door. With a bit of luck, the guard’s fall could be attributed to an accident.

But the SEALs couldn’t ride on luck alone for long.

The two guards stationed on Bouddica Bravo had not been paying any particular attention to the three black shapes making their way up the outside of the other platform to the north. In fact, for the past hour their chief concern seemed to be simply to stay warm, so they’d been hunkered down out of the wind, sharing cigarettes and what looked like a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Smoking… on an oil platform. Watching from his hiding place among the pipes and fittings twenty feet away, Johnson had been wondering if he should suggest shooting those guys simply to keep them from blowing the facility sky high with a lit match — never mind their nuke — but the gunfire posed as much risk or more. Better to let them go…

… until, at just exactly the wrong moment, one of them stood up, stretched prodigiously, and glanced across the open gulf toward Bouddica Alpha just in time to see one black-clad figure tip another over the railing on the fifth-level catwalk.

“Hey, Georgie,” the man said with a thick, Irish lilt, reaching down and shaking his partner’s shoulder. “We got us a problem!”

Georgie was already reaching for the walkie-talkie, which rested on a coiled length of cable nearby.

Johnson locked eyes with Sterling, who was in a second hiding place a few feet to the left, and exchanged nods. Together, as though run by the same computer program, they raised their S&W Hush Puppies, Johnson drawing down on the man on the right, while Sterling aimed at the one on the left. Sterling called the time, a whispered countdown so soft it was more felt than heard. “And three and two and one…”

Both Hush Puppies spoke simultaneously, their muzzle flashes and the crack of the shots alike swallowed by the heavy muzzles of the sound suppressors. The reports were two closely paired triplets of shots, the thump of each report louder than the hiss of silenced pistols in movies, but still too soft to be heard more than a few meters away, especially above the rush of wind and waves. Johnson’s man was just picking up the radio when the first 9mm round slammed through the side of his head. He was probably dead before the second and third shots tore out his throat… or before the radio smashed loudly on the deck. Sterling’s man was just turning toward the SEALs — he might have seen something moving in the shadows — and then his face puckered with a savage impact, followed swiftly by two more.

The bodies crumpled into black piles, as spent brass clinked and bounced on the steel deck. “Two up,” Johnson said over his radio. “Two down.” With hand signals, he directed Sterling to collect the tangos’ weapons. No sense in leaving them for the enemy… or in wasting precious 9mm ammunition.

They were going to need a lot of it damned soon now.

Heinrich Adler had just stepped into the operations center, where five PRR gunmen stood watch over two of the platform’s personnel, an administrator named Dulaney and a female radio operator named Sally Kirk. The terrorists had been bringing facility personnel up two at a time for two-hour shifts, in order to run the radar and radio equipment, under close supervision, of course.

Karl Strauss met him at the door. “We’ve warned them to keep off,” he said. “Just like last time. They’re holding position two kilometers off to the east.”

Major Pak was in ops as well. “They have Chun,” the man said impassively. “I demanded to be allowed to speak with her.”

“And?”

“It’s her. She’s there, on board the Horizon.”

“Then we’d better have them bring her on over, hadn’t we?” Adler said easily. “Put out the word. Everybody keep alert. This could very easily be a trick.” A telephone buzzed, and one of the other PRR men picked it up. “I don’t want anybody to be alone, do you understand? Everybody in pairs at all times.”

“Herr Adler?” the man with the telephone called.

“What is it?”

“Trouble, sir. That was Kemper, on guard down by the minisub. One of our boys just fell overboard.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know yet. They’re still fishing him out. But they say he’s dead. Probably broke his neck in the fall.”

“I want armed parties out, checking the catwalks and exterior platforms.”

“I will tell them.”

Pak’s eyes narrowed. “I do not like this. It seems conveniently timed for an ‘accident.’ ”

Adler glanced at the Korean. “I agree. The question is, do we let that anchor tug come close? Or not? Your call. You’re the one who wants to get your friend back from the Brits.”

Pak seemed to consider the question. “We do need her. Not to arm the bomb. I can handle that. But I would feel better about the success of this operation if we had her to handle the Squid.”

“Doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference, does it?” Strauss said, his voice betraying his nervousness. “I mean, if that thing goes off, we’re all dead anyway, right? Does it really matter whether the explosion is up here on the surface or two hundred feet underwater? We’re not going to care, that’s for sure!”

“It matters insofar as whether or not we can inflict maximum damage on the enemy’s facilities,” Pak said. “An underwater burst will guarantee that the British, Germans, and Americans will never again be able to draw oil from the North Sea. The effects on their economies will be incalculable. A surface burst would not be nearly so effective.”

Adler considered this. Originally, the North Korean — inspired plan had called for using the borrowed minisub to plant and arm the bomb deep within the tangle of struts, supports, and drilling pipe somewhere beneath Bouddica Bravo, the idea being that it would be almost impossible to find and disarm down there.

But Strauss had an excellent point. “The idea,” Adler said carefully, “is for us not to have to detonate the bomb in the first place. I would much rather live. To see the PRR established as a state. And to spend some small part of six billion dollars. So far as the Americans and British are concerned, the threat to their facilities is the same, whether the bomb is above water or below. I think, given the likelihood of a ruse, we will be safer warning them to stay away.”

Pak blinked. “Perhaps you’re right. However, I would still like to bring Chun over here. If we are successful in this… enterprise, there is no telling what they might do to her.”

“They’ll release her unharmed, Major. That’s part of the agreement, part of our demands.”

“We could send the helicopter for her. It could hover, in clear view of here, while she and she alone climbed aboard. If nothing else, she might provide us with intelligence about what it is the enemy is planning. Perhaps she saw enemy troops aboard that boat.”

Adler thought about that a moment longer, then nodded sharply. “Very well. But only if we can keep that boat at least two kilometers away. See to it, Karl.”

“Ja wohl, Herr Adler. ”

The best way to frustrate any planned enemy assault was to be unpredictable, to throw changes in troop dispositions and patrol patterns and unexpected obstacles up at every possible juncture. If there were troops aboard that workboat, they’d have a damned hard time reaching Bouddica unobserved.

The change in plan might even flush their people into the open.

He would welcome that. Heinrich Adler was a patient man, but he much preferred facing an enemy in the open, one to one, without all of this sneaking and maneuvering.

And very soon now, the issue would be resolved, one way or another.

“I think we should get those clothes off of you, Fraulein, and make you more comfortable.” The man’s voice was oily with black promise. “Let me help you.”

Inge felt the man fumbling behind her back with the keys to her handcuffs, freeing her wrists. It was all she could do to keep from shaking, to keep her body as limp and as lifeless as a pile of rags. The bastard had sent that last jolt of electricity through her nipples, and the scream that it had elicited from her had destroyed any hope she’d had of convincing him that she was already unconscious or in shock. Still, she thought, if she stayed limp, if she faked a muscle spasm or twitch and seemed to have trouble standing — and at the moment she didn’t think she’d have to work very hard to fake that — then she still might find the opening she was so desperately looking for.

The man had a pistol tucked into the back waistband of his trousers. She’d seen it there, as he’d moved back and forth between her chair and the table with the battery and the switch. If she could just get her hands on it…

The handcuffs came off. Her captor grabbed her by her right upper arm and hauled her to her feet. “On the desk, I think,” he said as he steered her toward it. She took a step, stumbled in a headlong fall…

“None of that, bitch!” He yanked her arm, hard, spinning her around to face him. She took that momentum and fed it, bringing her arm up, fingers clenched above her palm, hurling all of her weight and every ounce of strength she could muster in a blow that slammed the heel of her hand squarely into her captor’s nose.

The strike jolted her clear to her shoulder; using her karate training, she’d instinctively focused the blow well behind the man’s eyes, and her follow-through snapped his head back and brought an ugly splatter of blood from his ruined nose.

Perfectly timed and delivered, such a strike could kill, driving shards of cartilage into the brain. Inge had been rushed, however, and throwing the strike at an awkward angle. Johann wasn’t killed; he didn’t even let go of her arm, but he did go down, crumpling backward onto the floor with a strangled yelp, dragging Inge down on top of him.

For a horrible moment, the two of them thrashed about in an awkward tangle of limbs until Inge was able to connect a second time, hitting him in the nose again. Blood flecked the carpet, dark droplets sprayed as Johann twisted around. He was reaching for the gun, he had the gun and was pulling it out. Inge yelled, a wail of defiance and anger and hurt as she kept hammering at the man’s battered face.

The gun clattered free, bouncing across the floor. Johann struck out, knocking Inge clear with a blow that set her head ringing, but she used the momentum, turning to fall into a roll, landing beside the gun and scooping it up.

Johann came to his knees at the same instant, rising, face bloodied, eyes staring, as Inge’s fingers closed about the automatic pistol’s butt, her thumb snapped off the safety, and her finger squeezed the trigger.

Had the terrorist not been carrying the weapon with a round already chambered — always a dangerous practice, Inge knew from her own weapons training with the BKA — she would have been dead, for her opponent was much stronger than she was and would have had no trouble at all taking the pistol away from her.

But instead there was a startling and ear-piercing bang and the pistol leaped in her clenched hands. Blood exploded from the terrorist’s left shoulder, a bright flower that staggered him as he tried to get to his feet. Inge held tight and corrected her aim. The gun barked again, and the back of Johann’s head exploded in a gory spray of pink and red. Adding injury to insult, the bullet had punched its way in through his mangled nose.

Inge rose to her feet, the pistol still trained on the sprawled corpse in front of her. She’d never killed a man before, and the shock, the sheer, numbing realization of what she’d just done was almost overwhelming.

But the gunshot would bring others, and she didn’t want to be found here. Pausing only to tug her bra and blouse back into place — the fabric burned her where it dragged across the tenderness at the tips of her breasts, but she ignored that — she hurried to the door, opened it, and peered out.

An empty passageway. Which way to go? She’d been brought here from the left, so somewhere in that direction was the doorway going outside. A plan was forming, still maddeningly hazy in its details, of hiding herself in the refinery area behind the living quarters. It would take them a while to find her there. Adler had boasted of having thirty-nine men — thirty-eight now, she amended with grim joy — and he couldn’t spare that many just to search for her. Perhaps she could find a way to signal the government forces that must have this platform surrounded by now.

But voices were sounding from the right. Men were coming this way, and at a dead run from the sound of it. Just a little way down the corridor to the right was the intersection with a cross passageway. Almost without thinking, she turned right, then stepped off to the side, out of the main corridor.

Almost immediately, two black-clad men raced by in the main corridor. “This way,” one yelled in German as they passed her hiding place. “In here!” Neither saw her.

If they found Johann’s body, however, there would be more men here almost at once, and they would search and search until they tracked her down. Coolly, she stepped back into the main passageway, glanced right to make sure no more were coming, then brought her pistol up, aiming at the backs of the two running men.

There is no fair in combat, Blake had told her a century or two ago. She opened fire just as they reached the door to the room where Johann’s body was and started to turn the knob. Two shots… three… four… five… Again and again she squeezed the trigger, the gun thundering in the narrow corridor. One of the terrorists staggered back, slamming into the wall opposite the door. The other twisted around, staring into Inge’s eyes with a horrible mix of surprise and pain, but he wasn’t going down… he was still on his feet and he had his own weapon out now, a gleaming black submachine gun that was swinging up and around to aim at Inge’s head.

Then his face was obliterated by a splash of blood, and he hit the floor on his back with a loud thump. A hand touched Inge’s shoulder; still working on instinct, she let go of her pistol with the left hand, caught the wrist, threw her hip into her assailant and sent him spilling across her leg and onto the floor. He was wearing black military-looking garb like the others. She raised her pistol, centering it on his stunned expression…

Another gloved hand reached past her from the right, dropping across the breech of her pistol just as she pulled the trigger. There was a dull snap as the gun’s hammer closed on the glove, right where the webbing between thumb and forefinger would be. Another hand closed over her mouth. Struggling, she tried to bite it but couldn’t penetrate the leather. She tried to fight, tried to throw him off, tried—

“Easy, Inge! Damn it! Easy! It’s Blake!”

Blake!…

He released her mouth and she turned, looking up into his face. It was Blake! It was!

It took a blurred moment to sort out what had just happened, so fast had things taken place. She’d shot one of the terrorists, but the bullets hadn’t penetrated the Kevlar armor the other was wearing; Blake had killed the man with a burst from his silenced submachine gun, while the other SEAL had grabbed her shoulder, probably to pull her out of the way. She’d thrown him and come that close to putting a bullet between the SEAL’s eyes.

Except that Blake had been there, just in time.

“Oh Gott! How?… ”

“Never mind. Are you all right?”

She felt like she was going to collapse right there on the floor if he let go of her arms, but jerkily she nodded. “I–I’m fine.”

“We heard you scream.”

“They… never mind. It’s okay. I’m okay, really. My God, Blake… what are you doing here?” Then realization dawned. “It’s a takedown?”

“The beginning of one. Our side needs intelligence. That’s why we’re here.”

“One of them told me he had thirty-nine people here,” Inge said. “On the platform and on what he called his fleet. With him, that’s forty.” She looked at the two bodies sprawled in the passageway. “I guess that makes thirty-seven.”

“Well done, Inge! Heinrich Adler?”

“One of them called him Herr Adler, yes.”

“Okay. Let’s get the hell out of here.” Murdock looked at the other SEAL. “Did she hurt you, Razor?”

“Lucky throw,” the SEAL muttered, but he was grinning. “I like the lady’s style, L-T.”

“Me too.”

“Razor? I nearly shot you. I’m sorry… ”

“Don’t sweat it, ma’am. I’d only’ve gotten pissed off if you’d actually shot me. Y’know, L-T? I think we oughta make her an honorary SEAL.”

“Maybe later. C’mon. Let’s move out.”

“Blake, wait!” she said. “What about the bodies? And there’s another one in that room.”

“Leave ’em,” Murdock said. “By now, everybody on this platform has heard gunfire, and a check will show those men missing. If we leave the bodies, though, they might think that all they have to contend with is one very wild escaped prisoner… not a bunch of SEALs.”

“SEALs always eat their kills,” Razor explained quietly. “We’re very neat and tidy that way.”

Quickly, they led her down a side passageway, deeper into the platform’s living quarters.

“Gunfire!” the frantic voice said over the telephone. “Gunfire on level five! Three men are down!”

“Where?” Adler snapped. But he knew what the answer would be.

“Room 512. Johann is dead—”

Shit! “The prisoner we brought over today from the Rosa. Is she still there?”

“Nein, Herr Adler. She is gone. There are just the bodies.”

“Find her. Everyone on full alert!”

He slammed the receiver down. Was it possible that Schmidt had somehow gotten Johann’s gun away from him, shot him, and then shot two more? He shook his head, rejecting the possibility. No, not her. He’d seen the weakness in her. It was much more likely that the enemy already had commandos aboard the facility.

And then his eyes widened. Perhaps even… American SEALs…