Nucflash (18 page)

By then, of course, it was too late to back out without looking like a wimp—
pussy
was the vulgarity used by the other men—and that was something Johnson refused to accept from anyone.

“So what do you think, Skeeter?” Jaybird Sterling asked him, jolting his thoughts.

“Huh? About what?”

Fernandez, standing next to Jaybird, nodded toward the C-130. “About the bus, man. We were just wondering if she was gonna be of any use over here.”

“You said you just got out of bus driver's school,” Sterling added. “We were just wondering if you'd logged any hours on that thing.”

“Not many,” Johnson admitted.

“Hell, I still don't know why they shipped the thing over here,” Brown said. “Without a mother sub, we can't go very far in that thing.” SDVs were generally carried on the deck of specially modified Navy subs. Without a big sub to piggyback a ride with, the SDV would be sharply limited in range and usefulness.

“You know the Navy.” Fernandez laughed. “Always prepared.”

“That's the Boy Scouts.”

“A bunch of amateurs. I bet
they
don't pack Mark VIII SDVs with them when they go on a hike.”

“I wish it was one of the new babies,” Johnson said. “One of the real hot deep-divers.”

Gregory Lawrence Johnson had long been fascinated by the sea and by the various means that man had employed to explore it. He'd first heard about Navy frogmen as a boy of ten or eleven when he'd read an account of the Navy Underwater Demolition Teams of World War II . . . and of how they'd pioneered SCUBA and cold-water dry-suit research in the late forties and into the fifties.

Born and raised in southern California, not far from Malibu, he'd already been an experienced swimmer and an expert with SCUBA gear when he'd joined the Navy at the age of eighteen. More than anything else, Johnson had seen the SEALs as a chance to continue his love affair with diving. It had sounded like a real adventure, for the Navy was doing things with deep-diving submersibles and underwater breathing gear still totally unknown in the civilian world.

Skeeter Johnson possessed a determined singlemindedness of purpose that his buddies often laughed about. He'd enlisted in the Navy wanting to be a diver, and his recruiter had suggested that he choose one of two possible routes . . . through EOD school—that was Explosive Ordnance Disposal—or as a SEAL. In fact, he'd originally put down EOD school as his first choice, and SEALs second. EOD divers, he'd been told, spent a lot of time practicing their trade in and under the water, and they had to learn to use some pretty exotic gear while they were about it. His interest in the SEALs stemmed mostly from the fact that his recruiter had told him that the men who drove the Navy's small submersibles were SEALs first. After Navy boot camp, he'd gone to Mineman School simply because that rating would open a direct route to advanced EOD training.

Unfortunately, the continuing military cutbacks that had begun with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War had cut sharply into the Explosive Ordnance Disposal program. Not even the problems the Navy had faced from enemy mines in both the Tanker War in the eighties and the brief but spectacular Gulf War with Iraq in 1991 had convinced a shortsighted budget oversight committee that EOD needed more ships, equipment, and personnel. Minesweeping and disposal, after all, had always been the tediously boring part of modern warfare; Harpoons and Tomahawks, Sea Wolf submarines and Stealth aircraft were all a lot more sexy, and even some of those programs were all in serious trouble. There'd been no openings at all for new EOD personnel when Johnson completed his basic mineman training.

SEAL recruits, however, were still much in demand . . . not so much because the Navy felt it needed them for war, but because there was such a high attrition rate among the SEAL candidates. The dropout rate for would-be SEALs averaged something like sixty percent; only five percent of all recruits actually finished with the class they started with, and the SEAL program aggressively sought volunteers for BUD/S training . . . fresh meat for the grinder. Though the demand rose and fell according to the vagaries of politics and the world situation, it had happened that SEAL recruits were needed when Johnson was in Mineman School, and his application had been granted.

Johnson had been disappointed but game. He knew enough about the SEALs to know they didn't like quitters, and there was always the possibility of learning those new SCUBA techniques, maybe even of becoming an SDV driver.

But he wasn't a SEAL yet, wouldn't be until he'd completed his probationary training and received the coveted Budweiser. To tell the truth, Johnson wasn't sure he wanted that gaudy, heavy gold pin since his request for additional, more advanced training with the SDVs had been turned down and he'd been assigned instead to SEAL Seven.

BUD/S training had been everything that Johnson had ever heard it was, and far, far more. It had been a grueling, muddy, exhausting nightmare that had challenged him physically and mentally like he'd never been challenged before. He'd learned just how far he could push his endurance in the water, in repeated two-mile swims across open ocean, in fifty-foot-deep tanks with hands and feet bound, in buddy exercises with a shared SCUBA tank. Hell Week had been just that, a solid week of hell when he'd been allowed just three hours of sleep total, spread out in fitful catnaps and dozes while lying neck-deep in cold ooze or stretched out on the sand or even while standing in formation.

Somehow, somewhy, he'd stuck it out.

He still wasn't sure why. SEAL trainees were no longer followed about on their evolutions by a brass bell that could be rung three times to announce a DOR—a Drop On Request—from the program, but they could still give up after a couple of counseling sessions and be transferred back to the Fleet. He'd come
that
close to bagging it all and giving up.

It had been during the fourth day of Hell Week. He'd staggered out of the mud pit where he and twenty-eight other men had been wallowing for the past several hours, declared through chattering teeth that he'd had enough, and stumbled off toward the trailer where an officer waited to hear his request.

But he'd gone back to the mud and the cold. Why? He still wasn't entirely certain. During his first counseling session, he'd been asked if he really wanted to quit, told to consider what he'd already invested in becoming a SEAL . . . but his final decision had more to do with the fear that the others would think that he was a quitter than anything else. The shame that attended that failure of nerve and strength and soul had seemed a worse fate than dying in the program, worse even than the humiliation of being assigned to a Navy minesweeper as just another ordnance man, screwing fuses in and out of mines.

He'd stuck . . .
somehow
he'd stuck out of sheer, stubborn pride, and now he was seriously wondering if he'd made a very bad mistake. More interested by far in the technical end of Navy diving, Johnson had never actually thought much about one decidedly non-technical aspect of his new career specialty, the fact that the Navy SEALs were looking for
warriors,
for men who could kill instantly, without hesitation, without remorse.

And that was what he thought separated him from the others.

It wasn't that he couldn't kill. He wouldn't have completed the program had he not satisfied his instructors that he could, if necessary, take an enemy's life. The issue had more to do with his inward focus as a SEAL; he didn't
think
of himself as a warrior, didn't feel that warrior's bond shared by his comrades, had trouble imagining himself ever fitting in. His greatest love was still diving, exploring the ocean depths, losing himself in the weightless joy, so like skydiving, of a free-dive descent into an alien, emerald world.

“C'mon, Skeeter!” Brown's voice snapped. “Wake up!”

The other SEALs were filing toward the C-130 Hercules—“Herky Bird” in military parlance—leaving Johnson behind. He jogged to catch up.

The airedales were just unloading the last piece of SEAL special equipment off the Herky Bird. It was big, a very special package, vaguely torpedo-shaped despite the bulky wrappings and tarps that enfolded it like a blanket swaddling a baby. Twenty-one feet long and four wide, it was gentled out of the C-130's cargo bay on a tractor-towed cart and wheeled off toward the hangar used to stow the SEAL Team's equipment.

The bus had arrived.

“Noramo Pride
,
Noramo Pride
, this is OPF Bouddica. Please respond, over.”

The platform's radio officer listened for a moment to the burst of static, mimicking the hiss of wind and rain outside the monster oil platform. Her brow furrowed in concentration as she tried to pick out a reply from all the noise. Nothing . . . nothing but static, punctuated by the sharper, harsher crackle of lightning somewhere close by.

The storm had come up hours ago, howling in out of the northwest just after midnight, and while the front's first burst of wild violence had swiftly passed, the black night was still being lashed by hissing rain and hail, blasting along on a thirty-five-knot wind.

Sally Kirk was worried. Earlier on her watch, just before the storm had struck, in fact, one of the hundreds of green-yellow blips smeared across the facility's radarscopes had gone off course. It was a big one too . . . one rapidly identified as an American oil tanker, the
Noramo Pride
.

The straying of one of those blips was hardly unusual. The North Sea carried an enormous amount of surface traffic, from oil tankers to freighters and container ships, from oil-field workboats and tugs to fishing boats and pleasure craft, a mob drawing its members from as many different nations as there were seafaring countries. Imposing order on that mass of shipping was, frankly, next to impossible, though neatly aligned shipping lanes that kept traffic well clear of the forest of oil-recovery platforms in the area had been drawn up and well marked by radar buoys.

“Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride
, this is OPF Bouddica. Respond, please. Over.”

Still no response, and the
Noramo Pride
was ten nautical miles off. If they didn't turn soon, there was going to be a collision. A very large, very nasty collision.

The BGA Consortium's Bouddica oil production facility consisted of two separate platforms connected by a partly enclosed bridge suspended fifty feet above the churning black waters of the North Sea. To the north was the command center, Bouddica Alpha, also called “Big B.” South was the drilling platform, Bouddica Bravo, or B-2. Each structure was enormous; together, viewed as a single complex, they were titanic, a small city rising on stilts from the depths of the North Sea. At night, illuminated by twin galaxies of white and yellow and green lights gleaming like Christmas tree lights from the dark and thickly tangled branches of both structures, and by the bright orange flare atop the burn-off stack above Alpha's processing center, the center took on the aspect of some fantastic, far-future city from some science-fiction movie, an eerie and not quite believable sight.

The facility was brand-new, five years in the making and only brought into full production last September. The British-German-American Consortium—BGA for short—had invested hundreds of millions of pounds, marks, and dollars in this facility, which rested in just under 250 feet of water squarely atop one of the most recently discovered of the dozens of large oil deposits of the central stretches of the North Sea.

Oil. It had first been discovered in the late 1960s, just after the various countries ringing the coasts of the North Sea had arrived at an agreement neatly carving up the sea and its resources for exploitation. Bouddica had been constructed just west of the dividing line sundering the British claim from the Norwegian.

Bouddica was not entirely British, however, even though most of the personnel serving aboard were British nationals and the platform itself was technically British soil. These were the 1990s, and the oil that had been so astonishingly plentiful and easy to reach in the early seventies, transforming the economies of those countries able to draw upon it, was long gone. Rigs like Bouddica had been constructed in much deeper water—the depth increasing with each advance in the technology that shaped the raising of these structures—and were correspondingly far more expensive. The BGA Consortium had been formed as a means of pooling the resources—technical, personnel, and economic—of three important oil prospecting nations: the British, who owned the claim to the area of the North Sea where Bouddica had been built; the Germans, who'd made astonishing advances in the technology of oil drilling and production; and the Americans, who were bankrolling the lion's share of the project . . . just as they would take the lion's share of the oil once it was pumped to the surface and refined.

Though most of the structure was invisible to Kirk in the darkness and the rain, she knew precisely what it looked like, having approached it by helicopter or by service ship dozens of times, in all weathers, in all lights. The eastern side of Alpha looked like a displaced apartment building, with smooth walls and neatly spaced rows of windows. Built on the leeward side of the structure where it was sheltered from the worst of the wind in a North Sea blow, it housed the living quarters for the 312 men and women who lived and worked on Bouddica for two-week stretches at a time. The structure's large heliport was perched atop the apartment complex like a graduate's mortarboard cap. To the west were the gas and oil processing facilities, a vast, roughly cubical tangle of girders and struts, towers and pipes, conduits and storage tanks, all nestled together beneath the three-hundred-foot thrust of the burn-off tower and its flaring tip of orange flame. The whole enormous, brilliantly illuminated structure was perched atop four pillars that rose like sequoias from the sea, growing thicker toward their tops to support Alpha's 615-million-ton mass.