Nucflash

23

Major Pak burst through the doorway opening onto Bouddica Alpha’s upper deck, just below the helipad. Ahead, the refinery’s flare stack jutted out over the sea at a sharp angle, still capped by its wavering halo of orange flame; nearby were the twin towers, each capped by a spherical white shroud, that supported the facility’s weather and surface traffic radars.

His destination, however, was off to the left on the far side of a maze of air-conditioning ducts and blowers. The cab to the platform’s number one crane was standing empty, the arm still stretched out over the sea to the east, supporting the PRR’s Korean-made nuclear device.

As soon as he’d heard that there’d been gunfire somewhere inside the Bouddica complex, he’d known the time had come to act.

He was a man with a mission.

That mission did not necessarily match the mission parameters of Adler and his PRR.

It never had.

Operation Saebyok — the word meant “Dawn”—had been conceived by the hard-liner military clique within the Pyongyang government as a means of beginning a new day in the exercise of international power, a way of striking back at the hated Americans, a means of crippling, or at least slowing, the quickly expanding economies of the European community. Behind it all, Pak knew, was the determination of the militarists to confirm their own positions of power; when Bouddica was incinerated, their long-argued program of expanded covert warfare against the West would be proven viable, their own power base secured.

The next bomb to detonate beneath the World Trade Center towers in New York City might well not be conventional explosives.

And so, contact between the North Korean secret police and the scattered and demoralized remnants of the old RAF and other European terrorist groups had been strengthened. A seed had been planted within the RAF leadership, the idea of the state without borders, of a nation born in terrorism but rising to become the idealistic champion of the downtrodden peoples of the earth.

North Korea had provided the nuclear weapon for some much-needed hard currency and provided as well the experts to arm and place it and to advise the PRR in the seizure of the BGA oil platform. Adler and the other European fools thought the Americans and the British would capitulate to their demands, leaving the PRR with their nuclear device, a means of preserving their existence and of providing themselves with negotiating power in the future.

Pak and his superiors knew better. The world would never allow the PRR to keep its nuclear hardware, not if they had to hunt down every one of the People’s Revolution members and assassinate them one by one. Besides, Pyongyang had other plans for the PRR’s new weaponry. The threatened nuclear devastation of the North Sea, the collapse of Britain’s economy, the tottering even of the titanic American economy as it tried to stop the collapse of its friends, all much better suited North Korea’s future plans.

So the nuclear weapon was to be detonated whether the enemy capitulated to the PRR’s demands or not. Ideally, it was to be detonated during the expected enemy assault, so that it would look to the world as though the Americans and British had brought the disaster down upon themselves.

He was grinning as he broke into a run, trotting past the air conditioning machinery toward the crane’s waiting cab.

Before long, the world would know what terror really was.

MacKenzie had climbed the service ladder on the first of the two radar towers and used his diving knife to pry open the service access panel just below the spherical white weather shroud housing the unit’s rotating dish. Disabling the radar would be a simple matter of reaching in, grabbing a handful of wires, and yanking hard… but the idea was for both radars to go down at once after the tangos realized something was going down.

He’d already manufactured two small bombs, each a fist-sized lump of C-6 from the team’s small supply, a pencil-sized detonator, and a small unit that included a 9-volt battery and a digital timer. After pulling one of the devices from a pouch and checking his watch, he punched the buttons on the timer, setting the alarm, as it were, for 2230 hours. Then he reached into the access hatch and mashed the plastique in among the circuit boards and wiring.

As he pulled back to replace the access panel, movement on the roof of the platform crew’s quarters caught his eye. A lone man was jogging from a doorway opening out onto the roof just below the helipad.

He was wearing civilian clothing — a light-colored shirt and trousers — and MacKenzie’s first thought was that one of the hostages had managed to escape.

But he’d seen the same shirt earlier that day through binoculars and through the telephoto lens of the digital camera. “L-T!” he whispered into the lip mike suspended just below his mouth. “This is Mac!”

Murdock, Roselli, and Inge had taken shelter inside another room on Bouddica Alpha’s fifth level. Unlike Room 512, which had been a small office of some kind, this one was one of the apartment-cabins provided for personnel working their two-week shift on the oil platform. It was small but comfortably furnished, with a tall, narrow window that admitted the cool blue eastern light of the dying evening, carpeted decks, and even a small television in the bulkhead above the desk.

The most important amenity it possessed, however, at least so far as the SEALs were concerned, was privacy. The five levels of the towering crew’s quarters module were as complex and maze-like as a five-story hotel. Forty men could not possibly search it all in less than many hours — the main reason, Murdock thought, that the PRR tangos had waited so long to remove the bomb from the trawler. The terrorists had probably searched the structure at least cursorily after collecting all of the personnel in the main recreation area, but they didn’t have enough men to guard it, or even to patrol it on a regular basis.

Inge had just begun describing for the SEALs what little she’d seen of the layout of the Bouddica platform when Mac’s call sounded over the speakers clipped to their left ears. “L-T! This is Mac!”

If Mac was breaking radio silence, it had to be urgent. Murdock held up one finger to silence Inge, opened his transmitter, and said, “Go!”

“I’ve got Pak in sight. He’s double-timing for the crane!”

Which told Murdock immediately what he most needed to know. If the object suspended from that crane was a dummy, the PRR’s resident nuclear expert wouldn’t be that interested in it.

If he was running toward the crane controls, however—

“Inge. When you were aboard that fishing boat, there was a Korean man there too.”

She nodded. “Pak. One of the men you were investigating last week.”

“Was he interested in that device they pulled out of the ship’s hold with a crane?”

The woman thought for a moment. “I wasn’t really watching, I’m afraid, but I’d have to say yes. He was there on the deck shouting at someone in English to be careful with—”

Confirmation! “Mac! Take him down!”

“Rog.”

“Jaybird! Skeeter!”

“We’re here, L-T.” Sterling’s voice replied.

“Put the word out over the satcom. Copperhead! I say again, Copperhead!”

There was a small, shocked silence. “Affirmative. Copperhead.”

Murdock turned to Inge. “They wouldn’t let you join GSG9, huh?”

“What about it?”

“You may have just saved this platform and everyone on it.”

“Told you, L-T,” Roselli said. “She’s SEAL material.”

Still standing on the rungs that led up the radar tower to the access hatch, MacKenzie unslung his MP5 and took aim at the running figure. He estimated the range to be fifty meters — half the length of a football field.

Submachine guns are brutal, close-range weapons and not designed for sniping, but SEALs were trained to use a wide variety of weapons under every possible set of conditions. Leading Pak slightly, he squeezed the trigger, loosing a three-round burst with a fluttering hiss, but the runner kept moving. MacKenzie adjusted his aim and fired two more bursts, and the runner stumbled, then went down, vanishing behind a tangle of air-conditioning ducts.

MacKenzie would have to get close to make sure the job was done. First, however, he opened up the access panel again and reset the timer, giving himself sixty seconds.

The code word “Copperhead” Murdock had just ordered Sterling and Johnson to transmit meant that the assault would be going down now, not twenty minutes from now.

The cavalry was already on the way in, and those radars had to be taken down first.

“An atomic bomb!” Inge’s eyes were wide. “Mein Gott! That was an atomic bomb they had out there?”

Murdock reached into a pouch and extracted one of the long, curved magazines he carried for his H&K. Bullets gleamed, copper and gold, as he began thumbing them out of the mag and into his hand. Counting out ten rounds, he handed them to Inge, spilling them into her cupped hands. “You know how to reload your magazine?”

She looked up at him and nodded.

“Good. Load up… just in case. I don’t think the bad guys will bother you here. If you hear anything outside that door, though, just get down on the floor behind the bed and stay there.”

“But… ”

“Razor and I have to go. You’ll be safe here.”

Damn it, she didn’t want to be safe! But she knew from Blake’s expression, from the tone of his voice, that he would accept no argument. “Very well… ”

“Good girl. I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”

And then the two SEALs were gone.

Inge stared at the door, the bullets still in her hands. “Like hell I’m going to sit here and wait for you, Herr SEAL!” she muttered after them.

Then she reached for the empty pistol.

Pak lay flat on his belly, his pistol drawn, searching the direction from which the shots must have come.

He’d been hit. One moment he’d been running across the upper deck, and the next he’d felt twin hammer blows against his right leg, one halfway between his knee and his hip, the other just below his knee. The impact had knocked him down, and blood was pooling beneath his leg on the concrete deck. There still wasn’t any pain — not really — but he felt the dizziness and chill of impending shock. From the way his lower leg was twisted, he was sure that it was broken.

Lifting himself on his elbows and using his good leg, he pulled himself forward, the broken limb dragging behind until he could get a better view past the machinery he’d fallen behind. The radar towers. The shots must have come from the radar towers, but he couldn’t see anyone there. No! There was someone, a dark shape climbing down the tower’s side.

Fifty meters. Too far for him to have any hope at all of hitting a man with a handgun, not without an extraordinary stroke of luck.

Pak didn’t believe in luck. The crane’s cab was ten meters ahead.

He kept crawling.

“Colonel!” the pilot called, twisting around in his seat and shouting to make himself heard above the thunder of the rotors. “We just got a flash over the satellite taccom! The word is ‘Copperhead.’ ”

Wentworth’s eyes narrowed, and he jerked his head in a curt, short nod. “Okay. Pass the word to all Falcons. We’re going in!”

Copperhead. The SEALs had located the bomb, and it was aboard the Bouddica complex, vulnerable to a quick dash by the assault force.

Wentworth unholstered his Browning Hi-power and checked the action, before snapping home a loaded magazine. This time he would not be waiting out the op in a command post somewhere.

Outside, beyond the thin metal skin of the big Westland Sea King HC.Mk4, four other Sea Kings of 846 Squadron, an aerial armada configured for commando assault, stretched out in a huge V-formation nearly half a mile across, dipped their noses and accelerated as one toward the northeast. They were twenty-five miles from the objective. At a maximum low-level speed of better than two and a half miles per minute, they would be there in ten minutes.

DeWitt and the other SEALs of SEAL Team Seven had heard the Copperhead call. Six were already aboard the Noramo Pride, with the last two coming up three caving ladders dangling off the stern passageway to port, just under the towering white loom of the ship’s superstructure.

The rendezvous at sea had gone precisely as in training, though the size and strength of North Sea waves had been a lot nastier than they’d been during any training run. As the twilight had deepened, the two small rubber raiders had closed on the titanic ship riding at her moorings a few miles away, slipping along with electric motors that made scarcely more than a purr as they brought the SEALs in close.

Once under the hull, port side aft, Fernandez had tossed a grappling hook up and over a railing thirty-five feet above the water, then swarmed up the line after it, a maneuver practiced and practiced again by all of the SEALs. Moments later, three caving ladders had dropped over the side, and the SEALs of Third Platoon Gold Squad, plus Higgins and Brown from Blue, had been on their way up the side.

Copperhead! That meant the A-bomb wasn’t here, and DeWitt felt a small, almost guilty sense of relief. If there was a screwup and they all died in a nuclear flash in the next few minutes, at least it wouldn’t be his fault!

Bemused by the universal human tendency to place blame somewhere else, even in the face of disaster so absolute that who was at fault mattered not at all, DeWitt waited until the last two SEALs joined the party on the tanker’s fantail. They were almost invisible, in black wet suits, with hoods and gloves, and with faces painted so black that the whites of their eyes were startlingly luminous by comparison.

The ship was quiet, and mostly darkened save for a blaze of lights from the bridge, topside on the superstructure, and forward. Breaking out their weapons and checking them carefully, the SEALs split into two teams. Higgins, Brown, Fernandez, and Kosciuszko started down the portside gangway, moving forward. DeWitt led Holt, Nicholson, and Frazier around the stern of the ship, then forward along the starboard gangway.

They met their first tango coming aft, his M-16 slung over his shoulder, his right hand in his trouser pocket. DeWitt shot him with a sound-suppressed burst through the chest and throat, then with Nicholson’s help, tossed the body over the side.

The outside ladder leading up to the pilothouse was there.

He signaled his men to hurry.

MacKenzie dropped to the deck below the radar tower, then glanced at his watch. It would have been nice to have been able to take care of the other radar… but he had to make sure of the man he’d put down first. H&K at the ready, he scanned the labyrinth of machinery in front of him, selecting a route that would put him between the target and the crane.

A shout sounded from the left, followed by the clatter of boots on cement. Men were spilling onto the facility’s roof from the open doorway, and in one sudden twist of events, MacKenzie had gone from being the hunter to the hunted.

Could he pass himself off as one of the tangos? Another shout, followed an instant later by a burst of automatic fire, answered that question with a decisive no. Either he had no business being up here in the first place, or some sort of security plan was in operation that identified him as an enemy. Bullets shrieked off the cement nearby; others punched through the thin metal of the air conditioning ducts with the sound of hammers striking sheet tin.

MacKenzie dropped and rolled as the shots, wildly aimed, snapped over his head. He came up with his MP5 pressed stock-to-shoulder, squeezing off two three-round bursts in rapid-fire succession. One tango threw out his arms, pitched backward, and sprawled face up on the deck; a second clutched his belly and crumpled into a ball, rolling heels over head as he fell. MacKenzie found cover behind a massive blower head as four more tangos spread out to right and left, trying to flank him.

Suddenly, things weren’t looking good at all.

According to Inge, Adler, the PRR leader, had told Johann he was going up to Ops after getting a phone call. The enemy’s defense of the installation would probably be directed from there in any case, and this was a splendid opportunity to catch a number of the PRR force’s leaders in one place.

So Murdock wanted to hit Ops fast, before the SAS/GSG9 helos arrived. He knew that the installation rose like a futuristic afterthought above the rest of the quarters module and overlooked the helipad. He told Sterling what he planned to do, and then he and Roselli had raced off down the passageway toward a central, interior stairwell that led up one more level to Ops.

At the top of the stairs, a fire-door opened onto a long passageway that ran along the center’s west wall. South were storage rooms and a door leading out onto the main upper deck; north were the entrances to the helipad and to Ops.

Murdock and Roselli came through the door one after the other, Murdock rolling to the left while Roselli took the right, weapons already at their shoulders. A tango was jogging toward the door as Murdock burst into the corridor, obligingly sliding across the tops of his sights just as he clamped down on the trigger.

The sound-suppressed MP5 made a noise like flags cracking in the wind and the terrorist twisted right, slammed into a wall, then collapsed at the same moment that Roselli’s MP5 went into action at Murdock’s back. “We’re in Corridor One,” Murdock announced over the tactical net. He glanced back over his shoulder to confirm Roselli’s kill. “Two bad guys down. Moving to Ops.”

His words, transmitted over the open satellite network, would keep listeners in Dorset and in the Pentagon informed of exactly what was happening. Gunfire sounded, unsuppressed but muffled, outside the walls of the building.

They ignored it. Together, the two SEALs dashed for the door leading to the Operations Center.