Nucflash

26

Murdock had seen the bomb’s release as he raced across the rooftop toward the crane, seen it drop from the hoist and arrow fifty feet straight down, vanishing into the gray water with a splash. He reached the railing above Alpha’s southwest corner and stood there looking over the edge, hands gripping the railing so tightly his knuckles ached, holding his breath, waiting for that searing, final instant that could come any second now.

No one knew how the thing might be armed and triggered. The assumption all along had been either a remote-control device of some sort that would detonate the thing at the press of a button, or a timer, set either manually or through a remote control. The former was a nightmare possibility; the latter was deemed more likely. The PRR terrorists who set the thing would almost certainly allow some leeway for their own escape. There were terrorists who seemed suicide-minded enough to go to certain death, but that didn’t fit the usual profile of terrorist shooters drawn from the old RAF or the Provos. Politically motivated, they seemed to go for the main chance, seeking to create havoc but rarely allowing themselves to get drawn into suicide situations. They shot it out to the last bullet only when there was no other way out.

If these terrorists had been members of the Japanese Red Army now, it would have been a lot more worrisome from the start. Some of those guys deliberately sought martyrdom, like the Hezbollah crazies who’d driven an explosives-laden truck into an American compound in Lebanon.

As the minutes passed and there was no blinding flash, Murdock started to relax. Maybe the bomb hadn’t been armed after all. Perhaps it had dropped by accident.

Or… Pak was supposed to have a remote control of some sort. Turning from the rail, Murdock raced back toward the crane… then came to a dead stop. Mac was there… and, oh, God, no…

“Inge! ”

Mac was there, cradling Inge’s head. There was a lot of blood on her blouse, and some on her face as well, next to her mouth. SAS and GSG9 commandos had circled off the area, creating a perimeter around the crane. A young officer looked up as Murdock approached.

“I’m sorry, Yank,” he said. “We thought—”

“Inge!” She was unconscious. He looked up at Mac. “How is she?”

“Don’t know, L-T. She took a fifty through her back.”

He probed her shoulder, front and back. Entrance and exit wound were clean and no wider than his gloved finger, punching through her left shoulder blade from behind and emerging beneath her collarbone; a fifty-caliber round was so powerful it must have punched clear through her and scarcely slowed. Still, there was a hell of a lot of blood. Mac or someone had plugged the wound with a cloth that was already sodden through with blood.

“We’ve got a medic coming down now,” the SAS officer said.

“Where’s Pak?” Murdock demanded.

MacKenzie nodded toward the crane. “Up there. She got him, L-T. You would’ve been proud. But he pulled the damned lever anyway.”

“We’re still here,” he said. “Take care of her.”

“Right, L-T.”

He left them and started up the ladder to the crane cab.

Crackling radio calls over Murdock’s earphone followed the progress of the assault inside the quarters.

“Charlie-five, Charlie-three. I’m on Level One, Corridor Two. Two prisoners here. Moving!”

“Delta-one, this is seven. We are in the rec hall. Repeat, in the rec hall. Two terrs down. The hostages are okay. ”

“Seven, one. Keep ’em there. Medics and handlers are on the way. ”

“Echo two, Echo one. Watch yourselves. We’re coming down Corridor Seven. ”

“Roger that. ”

Elsewhere, the battle was rapidly dying out. British helicopters remained hovering off each corner of Alpha, as dozens of SAS and GSG9 troops scoured the roof, penetrated the doors, filtered down into the depths of the labyrinthine installation. Occasional scattered bursts of gunfire sounded from below, but by and large, all resistance had ceased. Several tangos had been rounded up by SAS troopers and were lying flat on the deck, hands in the smalls of their backs, as commandos cuffed and searched them.

Pak was crumpled in the corner of the cab, bleeding from a dozen wounds but still alive. Murdock thought the man was unconscious, but as he started searching him, as he found and retrieved the remote-control unit in an inside jacket pocket, the North Korean’s eyes opened.

“Too… late.”

“What do you mean, ‘too late’? What’d you do?”

Pak started coughing, vomiting blood. “Too late,” he managed to say again as his eyes drifted shut. He was dying.

Murdock glanced down at the twisted, broken leg. His hand snapped down, slamming against the broken ends. “Wake up, you bastard! What did you do?”

Pak’s eyes opened again. The pain seemed to brace him, to give him strength. “Pressure switch,” he said. “I set it for eighty… for eighty… ”

The eyes glazed over. Pak was dead.

A pressure switch! That was why the bomb had been suspended over the water. It could be jettisoned easily, possibly with the non-suicidal PRR gunmen being told it would be detonated by a simple timer after they’d had a chance to escape. Probably the idea had been to use the minisub to plant the thing if there was time. Then arming the pressure switch would be like a direct trigger, detonating the bomb as soon as the button was pushed. In either case, having the bomb detonate deep underwater would be certain to cause maximum damage to all of the bottom installations in this part of the North Sea.

He’d set it to detonate at eighty something. Eighty what? The water in this part of the North Sea averaged forty fathoms… about 240 feet. Murdock frowned. Pak was North Korean… and the Koreans measured everything in meters.

Eighty meters?

That would be 248, almost 250 feet.

Oh, God! Could it actually be that simple? Had Pak miscalculated… and armed the bomb to explode eight feet deeper than the water around the Bouddica Complex? Murdock sagged back against the crane’s support, suddenly weary. That bastard Murphy had been up to his old tricks on both sides of the battle this time.

He dropped from the cab and started walking back toward Mac and Inge. Other helicopters were approaching now, with more troops, with NEST personnel, with medics and doctors.

Roselli met him. “I just heard about Inge.”

“She’ll be all right,” he said. She’s got to be.

“Yeah, she’s tough. They’ll have her on a medevac chopper in another few minutes. What’s the word on Pak’s bomb?”

“He said there was a pressure switch, set for eighty meters.” Murdock managed a weak smile. “I think he miscalculated. The water’s not that deep here!”

Roselli laughed. “Ha! That’s a good one! All that high-tech, and the son of a bitch forgot to check his depth charts!”

The moon, just past full, was rising over the southeastern horizon, enormous and silver, its light casting cool illumination across the sea.

The moon…

And with a terrible, icy certainty, Murdock knew that he was wrong, that Pak had made no mistake, that the bomb deposited moments ago at the base of Bouddica Alpha was still very much alive and very, very dangerous.

“This is Eagle Leader!” he shouted over his mike. “I need to talk with a senior man with the complex! One of the civilians!”

There was a confused rustle of sound over the net. Then an unfamiliar voice came on. “Uh, this is John Brayson. I’m the senior facility manager. What can—”

“Mr. Brayson! How deep, exactly, is the water underneath Bouddica Alpha? Do you know?”

“Of course,” Brayson’s reply came back, sounding a trifle hurt. “Two hundred forty-seven feet. That’s the average depth, of course—”

“And what’s the variance from tides?”

“Tides? Oh, well, that depends of course—”

“Damn it! How high are the fucking tides out here?”

“Between low tide and high, they average five meters,” Brayson said. “About fifteen, sixteen feet. Of course, with a storm surge, they can be—”

Murdock cut him off, switching to the main tactical channel. If the moon was just rising, it ought to be close to low tide here. Murdock cursed himself for not checking the local tide tables before leaving on this op, but there’d been so much else to think about. If it was low tide now, the water must be somewhere in the neighborhood of 240 feet or so, maybe a little less.

Six hours after low tide, however, the moon would be high in the sky, the bulge of water raised by the moon’s once-daily passage across the heavens would pass Bouddica from east to west, and the water would be deeper.

With the water reaching a high-tide depth of perhaps 254 feet.

It was impossible to get a precise time without some fairly accurate tables at hand. High tide did not always keep lockstep with the moon, but lagged behind by as much as three hours, depending on the location. Wind and weather could raise tides higher, or knock them down. The position of the sun could amplify them into spring tides, or restrain them as neap tides.

But it was a safe guess that somewhere between two and four hours from now, the water beneath Bouddica would reach 248 feet—80 meters — and Pak’s atomic bomb would detonate.

Murdock opened a channel. “This is Eagle Leader. The bomb is armed, repeat, armed. Colonel Wentworth!”

“I’m here, Eagle Leader. Go ahead.”

“I suggest you start evacuation immediately. Get everyone off the complex and at least ten miles away.”

“Roger that.”

“I don’t know how long we have… but I’m going to find out. Somebody track down some deep-diving gear for me, fast!”

Roselli touched his shoulder. “Make that two sets, L-T.”

“This’ll be a solo dive, Razor.”

“Like fuck it will! What’s the first rule of BUD/S?”

Swim buddies. You never hit the water without a partner.

“Besides,” Roselli added, “it’s gonna be dark down there. You’ll need an extra set of eyes… and hands.”

Murdock thought about it, then nodded. There was no denying Roselli’s logic. In any case, he’d be no safer up here than he would 240 feet down.

“Okay, Razor. Looks like we’re dive buddies. Let’s get rigged out.”

Skeeter Johnson had been listening in over the tactical channel. “Hey, Skipper?” he called on the SEALs’ channel. “This is Skeeter! Wait for me! You’re gonna need a bus to get you down!”

“Negative Skeeter,” Murdock’s voice shot back. “I’d be blind in the bus, and it’d take too long to get the SDV powered up and moving. Besides, the life support won’t be compatible. I’m using some of the diving gear here on the platform. You can bring our dry suits across, though.”

Johnson scowled. He was being left out of this op, and he didn’t like that one bit. Sure, sure, everyone had a job to do, but he and Jaybird had been parked with the satellite gear, while Murdock, Mac, and Razor pulled the actual sneak-and-peek on Alpha. And it was a good thing they’d been posted here too. At one point during the battle, two tangos had come charging across the bridge. Whether they’d been fleeing the battle or coming over to secure Bravo for some other purpose was unknown; Sterling and Johnson had opened up on them from ambush, knocking both off the catwalk and into the sea. If the radio gear had been left unguarded…

But the battle was over now, with little chance of wandering tangos coming this way. Damn it, he wanted to get in on this!

He was pretty sure that the choice of personnel had been deliberate on Murdock’s part; Murdock, Mac, and Razor were all long-time members of Third Platoon’s Blue Squad, while he and Jaybird were relative newcomers. Murdock had probably arranged things so that the men who knew each other, their moves, their habits in combat would all be working together.

It was safer that way, with less likelihood of someone getting pegged by friendly fire.

But this was different. Murdock needed him.

“Do you read me, Skeeter?” Murdock’s voice came. “Send Jaybird across with our dry suits. You stay put!”

“Uh… roger that. I copy.”

He exchanged a dark glance with Sterling, who was already gathering up the SEALs’ gear, then sat down to wait.

Bouddica was almost embarrassingly well stocked with diving gear. There were suits of every possible kind — wet suits, dry suits, hot-water suits, even a few of the bulky, heavily armored “Jim suits” that looked like a cross between an old-fashioned hard-hat diving rig, medieval suits of armor, and the suits worn by astronauts on the surface of the Moon.

Murdock and Roselli, however, would wear their dry suits. They wouldn’t provide perfect protection against the bitter cold of the North Sea depths, but they wouldn’t require as much preparation and fitting out as the high-tech hot-water suits that Bouddica’s BGA deep divers normally used when they were servicing the bottom pipelines and installations.

The main reason Murdock had elected not to use his SEAL gear, which should still be floating in the tethered swim bladder beneath Alpha, was that it was rebreather gear, rated for use only to a depth of about thirty feet. Pure oxygen from a rebreather became toxic at the pressure of greater depths.

They couldn’t even rely on normal SCUBA gear at 240 feet. SCUBA used standard oxygen-nitrogen gas mix, the same as normal air, but at depths much below one hundred feet, the standard mix became dangerous as well. Nitrogen narcosis, sometimes called “rapture of the deep,” was an affliction every diver developed to one degree or another when breathing nitrogen at greater than about three atmospheres’ pressure. The best medical evidence was that at depths beyond one hundred feet, the nitrogen actually began interfering to a greater or lesser degree with the impulses passing from neuron to neuron in the brain. Concentrating on the task at hand, training, and experience could overcome nitrogen narcosis to a certain degree… but cold water and fear could increase a man’s susceptibility.

The other danger, of course, was decompression sickness. Diving on straight air meant that as the pressure went up, nitrogen in their bodies would be forced into their body tissues. If they surfaced too fast, nitrogen bubbles could form in a man’s bloodstream — fizzing up just like the carbon dioxide in a shaken soda can when the pop top was pulled. The bubbles would collect in his joints and cause an exquisite agony; some might clog vital arteries in brain or heart or lung. The condition was called “the bends,” and it was both crippling and deadly.

Murdock and Roselli would be diving on heliox, a gas mixture that substituted helium for nitrogen. Helium would completely eliminate the dangers of nitrogen narcosis. While it wasn’t impossible to get the bends on heliox — helium bubbles could form the same as nitrogen bubbles — the danger of decompression sickness was much reduced on a deep dive when the divers breathed helium, and at extreme depth breathing was easier too.

Of course, both men would sound like Donald Duck when they spoke.

Their headgear consisted of full-face masks, with built-in radios. Radio signals didn’t travel far underwater — no more than a few yards, in fact — but the mask transmitters would enable Murdock and Roselli to communicate as long as they stayed close to one another. There were also pickups on the pylons supporting Bouddica Alpha, so listeners on the surface would be able to hear them once they were within range. Helium, however, changed a diver’s voice, pitching it much higher and giving it a squeaky, cracking effect that grew worse the deeper he went. The distortion was literally known as the “Donald Duck Effect.”

More serious was the fact that helium was a far better conductor of heat than nitrogen. Breathing heliox, the divers would be far more susceptible to the intense cold.

But they would face that when they had to.

“Okay,” Murdock told the others in the room as Bouddica’s senior dive master buckled on an extra set of weights, investing him like a squire assisting a knight with his armor before a medieval tourney. “Roselli and I will go first. The rest of the SEALs get their chance as soon as you can get gear together for them, but this will be volunteers only. Don’t dive until something happens to us… or until we call you down. Everybody else, except absolutely necessary personnel — and volunteers only — get the hell out.” He glanced at his watch. “We probably still have two hours or so. But we can’t count on much more. Everybody understand?”

There were nods and muttered agreements from the others in the room. Murdock exchanged nods with Roselli, then slipped the mask down over his face. A quick radio check — all okay — and he and Roselli flip-flopped their way across to the open wall. Murdock clung to a nylon line with his right hand, a line that led back to a winch mounted on the diver bay close by the door. The shackle on the free end would let him hook onto the eye on the end of the atomic bomb; they’d be able to hoist it up from here once he signaled the hookup complete.

As long as there were no booby traps Pak hadn’t told them about, the bomb could be easily disarmed then.

All they had to do was get the rope and shackle to the bomb.

There was an elevator in the nearest pylon that should have whisked them down to the bottom, but it had never worked right. Squire Murphy, once again. Most BGA divers used a complex elevator arrangement that lowered them down the outside, but it would take too long to break that out now. Instead, they would jump from the lowest level, a drop of about forty feet, then swim for the bottom, some forty times a man’s height below. Roselli went first, stepping off the edge of the door and vanishing as he fell.

“Lieutenant!” Wentworth called. Murdock paused in the open door, a step away from the night. “Luck, Yank,” the SAS colonel called. “We’ll be waiting for you. Right here.”

Murdock gave him a thumbs-up, then stepped after Roselli into darkness.

Chun heard the first splash as something heavy landed in the sea less than twenty meters from where she was hiding. She turned in time to see a dark shape — obviously a fully suited diver — plummet out of the sky and land in the water, close by the boiling foam left the first entry.

Divers… two of them. It wasn’t hard to guess what they were after.

It was time for her to execute her plan.

She’d been hiding here behind the massive winch on the tug’s after deck, shivering, trying to stay warm, trying to stay hidden, wondering what to do. The submarine resting on the cradle nearby offered her a possible escape, but she wasn’t eager to take that route. The minisub had a top speed of only a few knots; it wouldn’t be hard to track the machine and destroy it.

Besides, she knew that Chong Yong would not have dropped the bomb without arming it, knew that he would have set the pressure switch to detonate within a few hours. It was her duty to stay behind, to make sure no attempts were made to retrieve it.

One SAS trooper stood guard by the minisub. He was standing with his back to Chun, watching the spot in the water where the two divers had vanished. Rising smoothly from her hiding place, Chun fired into the man’s back from a range of five meters, the sound-suppressed burst from her stolen H&K snapping his spine and propelling him forward into the water.

Then she was running for the sub. The tarpaulin had been removed earlier, the hatch on top open. In seconds, she’d vaulted up to the craft’s top deck, scrambled into the hip-snug conning tower, banged the circular hatch shut and dogged it, then dropped into a control room so tiny she could touch opposite bulkheads without even stretching.

The cradle was equipped with hydraulics, controlled from inside the cabin. Chun went down the line of memorized switches… power on, lights on, cabin pressure on, batteries on, diving planes to manual, blowers on, steering enabled, hydraulics on…

With a whine and the creak of shifting mass, the stern of the little sub began elevating. Chun lay on her belly at the pilot’s station, her entire world narrowed to banks of switches and controls, and a line of three small portholes giving her a view forward and slightly to either side. The water was coming up as the Squid’s nose tipped down. The stern was tipping higher… higher…

Chun hit the shackle release holding the Squid astern. Smoothly, the six-meter craft slid forward; bubbles and foam exploded about the portholes… and then were replaced by black water.

As the sub’s electric motors come up to speed, Chun hit the ballast flood controls. Water gurgled into the tanks, and as the surge of the North Sea caught her with a heavy, rolling thump, the Squid settled lower into the sea.

She started her dive.