Gideon's War/Hard Target (20 page)

The door closed with a flash of auburn hair, and Kate was gone, leaving Gideon in a whirl of emotion. He forced himself to push aside his concern for a woman he’d met only a few hours ago and realized that he remained troubled by her insistence that it was Tillman who had murdered Ambassador Stearns. Gideon was willing to accept that his memory might no longer be the most reliable way to identify his brother. But even accounting for Tillman’s altered voice and misguided ideology, he still couldn’t believe that his brother would murder an unarmed hostage, especially not with the sadistic relish this man had demonstrated. Even more troubling, Gideon still couldn’t accept that his brother wanted him dead.

But if the man claiming to be Tillman wasn’t really Tillman, then who the hell was he and what did he want? And where was Tillman? More questions for which he had no answers. The only thing he was certain of was that he would never find those answers unless he got down to D-4 and disarmed the bomb.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THREE OF TIMKEN’S BEST men were dead because of the crazy bitch.

Before, when he ordered the rig manager to change into the yellow jumpsuit, she had eyed him like an insect, taunting him with her half-naked body. Despite his urge to tear off her bra and panties and teach her a lesson for looking at him that way, he had remained stone-faced. Timken had resisted the impulse then, and now he wanted to hog-tie her and do what he should have done before. But Parker warned Timken to leave her alone until they were sure they didn’t need her any longer. She was the only one on the rig who knew about that damn clunking sound, which seemed to be happening with greater frequency—once every ten minutes or so—and with greater intensity. You could feel it through the soles of your feet. Parker promised Timken that once they were certain they didn’t need her, he could do whatever he wanted with the woman.

Parker needed to make sure the rig remained standing long enough for the storm to pass, and to carry with it the obstructing cloud cover. The success of his plan depended on the Obelisk’s destruction being recorded by the satellites and surveillance planes that were being deployed over the South China Sea. If Parker understood anything, it was the power of the image.

Kate stumbled as the jihadis pushed her into B-14. The first thing she noticed was the blood—on the ceilings, on the walls, on the bedsheets— streaks of it everywhere. Although the ambassador’s body was nowhere ain t‡to be seen, she knew where the blood must have come from.

“Dammit, Kate, why didn’t you listen to me? I told you to stay away!” In the tangle of emotion in Big Al’s voice, the anger quickly gave way to relief. “Thank God you’re all right.”

“If they hurt you . . . I couldn’t have lived with myself.” She looked forlornly around the blood-spattered cabin. “It’s my fault he killed the ambassador.”

“Bullshit.” Big Al snorted. “They killed him. You had nothing to do with it.”

“Shut up.” The jihadi named Chun spoke with an American accent, which Kate thought was strange. He pulled her arms behind her while one of the smaller jihadis secured her wrists with plastic cuffs. Chun jerked his head toward the hallway and then followed his two men silently as they exited the room.

The door closed behind him. Kate waited another minute to make sure no one was listening at the door before she whispered to Parker and Prejean. “The president is sending a Delta team to take the rig back.”

“I thought the terrorists jammed the radio,” Prejean said.

“They did.”

“Then how do you know about this Delta team?”

“Gideon Davis.”

Parker’s hound dog eyes blinked, as if he hadn’t heard her correctly. Then he spoke for the first time. “Gideon?”

“Yes. He’s on the rig.”

Keeping her eyes pinned nervously on the door, Kate explained how she had escaped from the jihadis and pulled Gideon from the sea. Prejean noticed that whenever she mentioned this man Gideon, she seemed to brighten. It was a subtle thing, but Prejean knew her well enough to pick up on it, and he allowed himself a small smile. During the nearly ten minutes it took her to get through the story, Parker listened impassively, trying not to betray his anger and concern at this unwelcome news.

“This bomb Gideon is trying to disarm . . . where is it?” Parker asked.

“There’s a storage room on D Deck adjacent to the rig’s most structurally vulnerable point. Even a small explosion there could take down the rig.”

“Makes sense,” Prejean agreed.

“And when is this Delta team coming?” Parker asked.

“The eye of the hurricane is supposed to pass over the rig before the deadline runs out. The Deltas are dropping through the eye. If Gideon can disarm the bomb before they land . . .”

“They’ll have a chance of rescuing the hostages and taking back the rig from those jihadi bastards.” Prejean smiled as he finished her thought. “We may get out of this alive, chérie. At least we have a fighting chance.”

Other than his initial surprise that Gideon had survived, Parker betrayed no emotion during her explanation. Kate assumed his measured reaction was just the way he processed stressful situations. As she was about to finish her story, the div�€†noise reverberated through the rig.

CLUNK!

“There it is again,” Parker asked innocently. “It keeps happening, and it seems to be getting worse.”

“There’s a design flaw in the rig’s passive damping system. There’s a forty-ton weight about sixty feet below sea level that’s whacking into its housing—”

“Mr. Prejean told me what it is,” Parker interrupted. “He seems to think it’s serious.”

“We had concerns about it when the waves were eleven feet. But with this hurricane coming in and the waves pushing thirty feet, we’re in uncharted territory. Without looking at the engineer’s analysis, I couldn’t tell you for sure.”

“Engineer’s analysis?” Parker repeated.

“An engineer named Cole Ransom was supposed to come out here to assess the problem and fix it if necessary. He was scheduled to be on the same chopper as you. I think Abu Nasir killed him for his passport, so he could take his place on that flight.”

Parker thought for a moment, then nodded toward Cole Ransom’s notebook computer, which was sitting on a desk on the far side of the cabin. “That’s the computer Abu Nasir was carrying. If it’s the engineer’s computer, maybe you can find out how serious the problem is.”

Prejean added. “He’s right, chérie. We need to keep this rig standing long enough for the Delta boys to land.”

The idea had only settled for a moment, when Parker coughed twice. He regarded Kate apologetically. “The damp is giving me a cold.” A moment later the door opened and Chun appeared, his AK leveled at the hostages. “Mr. Parker . . . Abu Nasir wants to talk to you.” One of the smaller jihadis lifted Parker by the arm and ushered him from the cabin. Before the door closed, Parker nodded to Kate, as if to confirm what they’d talked about.

Chun had been listening to their conversation inside the cabin with a stethoscope-like audio amplifier. Parker’s cough had been his signal to be taken out. The first thing he did when he got outside the cabin was thrust his wrists toward Chun. “Cut these damn things off.”

Gideon clutched the railing to keep from being blown off his feet as he descended the stairs to D Deck. He shifted the AK he’d slung around his shoulder into firing position as he slipped through the narrow margin of a door into a corridor. It was empty. He began working his way through the maze of passages, taking care not to make a sound.

Gideon hugged the wall around the corner from D-4 when he heard two men speaking in Malay. Gideon didn’t dare peer around the corner for fear of being seen. Among the tools he’d collected from the equipment room was a mirror with a stainless-steel stem, which demolition experts use to view the inaccessible innards of a bomb. Gideon used it now to look around the corner of the adjacent corridor. Posted outside cabin D-4 were four jihadis. And one of them was walking toward his position.

Gideon pulled back and tried hiding. He pressed his back into a shallow alcove, when the approaching jihadi appeared around the corner, busily engaged in biting the cellophane ear�€†wrapper off a pack of cigarettes. He had clearly walked down the hallway to take a smoke break. He was all the way around the corner before he noticed Gideon in the alcove. The jihadi froze, the cigarette pack dangling from his teeth by a thin thread of plastic.

Realizing that if he shot the man, it would alert the other three guards, Gideon smashed the wooden butt of his AK across the man’s jaw. The cigarette pack flew from the man’s teeth, and he dropped like a sack of bricks. Gideon hoped the howling wind outside had concealed the sound. He trained his gun at the corner and stood silently for a moment, listening.

Nothing. No sounds of alarm, no footsteps, no shooting.

He took a fresh clip from a pouch on the man’s load-bearing vest. The magazine was comfortably heavy from its thirty unfired rounds. Then a pouch on the man’s belt caught his eye. It contained a black cylindrical piece of metal. For a moment Gideon thought it might be some kind of impact weapon for close-quarters combat—a collapsible baton, maybe. But then he looked closer, saw the small black hole in the end, and realized what it was.

Gideon had been concerned about firing at the men in the hallway with the AK, afraid that the noise might alert everybody else on the rig, giving him very little time to defuse the bomb. Even the sound of a typhoon couldn’t hide an AK-47 blasting away on full auto.

Unless you had a suppressor.

And now he did.

He slid the black cylinder from the jihadi’s pouch and quietly screwed it onto the mating threads of his rifle muzzle. Five quick turns and the suppressor was firmly seated. While he was doing this, he devised a game plan. It was surgical in its efficiency. He would put a head shot into whoever was looking in his direction first, then another one into whoever was closest to him. Then he would take down the third man, who would probably be firing to cover his retreat. Three carefully aimed shots delivered in rapid sequence.

Before he could finish reviewing the mental checklist, he heard a wild shout behind him. The man on the ground had obviously regained consciousness and was warning his friends in frantic Malay.

Time to improvise.

Gideon stepped around the corner and started firing. Unfamiliar with the weapon, he hadn’t noticed that the AK was set on full auto. Which was just as well. The three men in the hallway had all swung around to see what the shouting was about. Gideon swept the AK back and forth across the hallway, once, twice, a third time, fighting to keep the muzzle down.

The fusillade of 7.62mm rounds chewed the three jihadis to pieces. It took less than two seconds to burn through the magazine.

Gideon then whirled around to deal with the jihadi he’d hit with the butt of the AK. The man was groggily clawing for his Makarov. Gideon tried to kick him in the face, but the man was quick, rolling away as he pulled the Makarov from his holster.

Gideon dove onto the man, twisting his hand around and pressing the muzzle against the man’s abdomen and squeezing the trigger. It turned out that the human abdomen is roughly as effective at quieting a closed-breech weapon as a suppressor. The Makarov made some racket—but it wasn’t nearly as loud as Gideon expected.

Loud enough tos M�€† be heard on one of the upper decks? He hoped not. The typhoon was astonishingly noisy now—the wind howled as the waves buffetted the base of the rig, and the relentless rain knifed into the steel exterior of the rig at seventy miles an hour.

Gideon threw open the door of the storage room, flipped on the light.

At the far side of the windowless room was the large steel box Kate had described seeing winched down by the crane. She had been right. This was the place.

Stacked neatly on the floor beside the box lay an array of electronic equipment—video monitors, black boxes with switches on them. A thick bundle of cables ran from the equipment to an access panel on the wall. Gideon moved closer. What he saw on the panel’s display caused him to stop breathing.

A thin LED window displayed a countdown, the seconds ticking down with frightening rapidity. It was the bomb’s timer, and it was rigged to the detonator.

08:43:07... 08:43:06...

He looked for something to prop against the door to keep anyone from entering. Other than the big metal box and the electronics, the room was bare. On the far side of the room was a door with the words EQUIPMENT LOCKER stenciled on the front. But it was secured with a heavy padlock. He’d just have to hope that nobody showed up while he was working.

Gideon studied the tools he’d brought as he set them on the floor in a neat row. During his months in the Cambodian jungle, Horst had taught him an enormous amount, but this was going to be a lot trickier than defusing some aging Soviet antitank mine. Horst had always said that the single most important tool for disarming a bomb was your eyes. Before even touching a wire, you had to study the bomb, the trigger, the mechanism—everything. There was zero margin for error.

The detonation control equipment consisted of several black metal boxes—standard nineteen-inch rack-mount boxes of the same size as home stereo equipment. The bottom box bore two large rocker switches on the front. One read POWER and the other read ARM. Both were in the on position.

The next piece of equipment also had a big red rocker switch on the front. Next to that was a knob labeled FREQ. A small antenna protruded from the side. It looked exactly like the wireless router in Gideon’s office at home. He guessed that it was some kind of relay that allowed the bomb to be triggered remotely—from the control room. Or even from a boat. Which meant, as he expected, that if the people who had seized the Obelisk were threatened—say by a Delta Force inserting from above—the bomb could be detonated remotely before the time ran down.

The next box was the timer with its red LED numbers and a numeric keypad like the kind found on cell phones. On top of this rested yet another black metal box with two rows of small LED lights running across it. The top lights were all white, and in the second row the lights were all green. Thin white wires ran out the back, snaking across the casing and disappearing into the access panel. He counted twenty-four. Twelve white LED lights, twelve green LED lights, twenty-four wires. One wire for each light. This was a good deal more complex than he had expected.