Nucflash (26 page)

Horizon's
engine sounds were well off to the right now and starting to pass astern. That suggested that he might not have passed the oil platform yet, but it must be getting damned close.

The operation was like a colossal, high-tech game of blind-man's buff. And the stakes of this game . . .

Johnson didn't want to even think about that.

And just when he'd begun assuming that the SDV must have missed the objective, that he would have to circle around and try another pass, the gray-lit backdrop of the water ahead seemed to take on a faintly more solid feel, a tenuous something that gradually formed a spiderweb of wavering shadows against shadows that was nonetheless more substantial than the light-shaft phantoms he'd been watching earlier. Banking slightly to the left, Johnson slowed the SDV's forward motion to a crawl and steered for the apparition, which slowly solidified into a dark framework of struts and pilings, descending out of the silvery light of the surface and plunging into the black emptiness below. The bus was scant yards from the nearest of the pilings before any detail at all was visible, a dark and muddy-looking encrustation of algae, barnacles, and muck adhering to the surface of a vertical post four feet thick.

“End of the line back there,” Johnson said into his face mask mike. “We're coming up on Bravo.”

“Good naviguessing, Skeeter,” Murdock's voice said in his earphones. “Bang on the money.”

The skipper's praise warmed him.

For the first time since he'd been transferred to SEAL Seven, Johnson felt like he belonged.

Carefully, moving slowly and with great precision in almost total darkness, Murdock switched on his rebreather rig, checked the gas flow, then unhooked his umbilical from the SDV's life support. MacKenzie had the side door open. Murdock waited as Roselli squeezed through the opening and into the water outside. Sterling followed, and then it was Murdock's turn.

After the claustrophobia of the SDV's interior over the past five hours, the freedom of movement outside was sheer heaven. Swimming was not quite as easy out here as it might have been otherwise, for the SEALs had abandoned their usual swim fins for rubber-soled, dry-suit boots, the better to scramble about on the oil rig topside without having to worry about carrying extra footgear. They were further burdened by the waterproof gear bags, which were secured by nylon straps to their load-bearing vests.

At a depth of forty feet, the ocean's swell was mostly well over their heads, but they could still feel the mighty surge of water moving above them. Together, the four swimmers used lines to secure the delivery vehicle to a cross beam on the submerged platform alongside, working carefully in the murky light to avoid mistakes. Once the SDV was secure, Murdock moved close to the cockpit and signaled Johnson with an upraised thumb. Johnson responded the same way, then cracked his hatch. Normally, the bus driver would wait with the bus, but there was no telling how long the SEAL team would be here. The SDV had a strictly limited battery life; in fact, the only alternative was for Johnson to turn around after dropping the other SEALs off and head back out to sea for a rendezvous with the
Horizon
or another tug like her somewhere out of sight of the objective.

And if the SEALs needed to extract in a hurry, he wouldn't be there to pick them up.

Not that extraction was a particularly important aspect of this recon, Murdock thought with an uncharacteristic stab of pessimism. This one was for all the marbles, and if the SEALs or the SAS or anybody else along the way screwed up, well, it wouldn't be a particularly bad way to go, not from ground—or rather from water—zero. A sudden, heaven-searing flash, and you'd be incinerated before your nerve endings could transmit the sensation of pain to your brain.

The nightmare would be reserved for all of those thousands of people on the fringe of the effects, the ones having to deal with radioactive rain or soot from the North Sea oil fires, for the fishermen and roughnecks and workboat crews swamped by the radioactive base surge, for the kids made sick by contaminated milk and grain and livestock ashore.

Murdock was ready to risk that blinding, instant flash for himself—if it gave him a fighting chance of avoiding that slower, more agonizing death for all of those thousands of civilians.

He just hoped to hell that his assessment of the tangos' mentality, tossed off in a casual conversation last night in the Golden Cock, was accurate. If these people were psychopathic nut-cases instead of dedicated political terrorists, then all bets were off. Hell, even if his guess about the bastards was right, the sight of SEALs clambering around on Bouddica Bravo would make whoever was holding the firing button damned nervous.

And nervous men made mistakes.

Johnson pulled himself free of the SDV's cockpit, and Murdock clapped him on the shoulder, giving him an OK sign of approval. The newbie had performed well, in a dangerous and difficult assignment. The entire operation could have been doomed had he missed the bearing of the oil complex by even a single degree. Murdock waited as Johnson retrieved his own waterproof bundle of weapons and gear. Then, together, the five men pushed away from the moored SDV and began swimming into the forest of struts and supports beneath Bouddica Bravo.

They'd decided to approach the complex from the smaller Bravo platform for several reasons. Perhaps most important, Alpha was supported above the waves by four massive steel-and-concrete pylons, each many meters thick and all narrower at the water than they were at their tops. Climbing those structures at all would be next to impossible; climbing them unseen would be more difficult still.

Bravo, on the other hand, was a more conventional oil-rig platform, built on a structure like the gantry crane surrounding a rocket about to be launched. The rocket, in this case, was the drilling rig itself, which extended down through the center of the platform and was completely surrounded by the supports. The underwater portions of the structure had to be serviced periodically by BGA divers; there were handholds and an access hatch to the rig's main deck, the pylons themselves offered lots of handholds—assuming you could climb like a monkey—and a man could almost certainly make his way all the way from the water's surface to the well deck proper without being seen from any other part of the complex.

The terrorists, most of them anyway, those who hadn't remained on board the
Noramo Pride
, would be on Alpha, up in the operations center and in the east-side living quarters complex. They might be terrorists, but they weren't fools. It was
cold
outside, and except for a few routine guards taking turns out in the brisk, North Sea wind, most would be inside where it was warm.

Up . . . up . . . up. Murdock could feel the water growing rougher, in powerful, mountain-sized surges. With his equipment load and no fins, the uphill swim swiftly became a small torture. His weight belt had been set for neutral buoyancy at twenty feet; halfway to the surface, it became harder to keep moving up, harder to support the drag of all of the weight he was carrying. He moved himself along up the cross struts, hand over gloved hand. All the way up, he watched for other movements within the pylon forest. Though unlikely, it was not impossible that the terrorists' first string of defense included a pair or two of frogmen of their own.

Murdock broke the surface first, clinging with one hand to a steel cross brace as he pushed his mask back with the other. The cold of the water was so raw it hurt, biting into the skin of his exposed face like a knife. The air temperature was in the high forties; the water itself must be a whisker or two above freezing. Back in Virginia Beach they were having a heat wave on the heels of an early spring. And here he was, worrying about major exposure. . . .

Carefully, Murdock took a long, hard look around. This, arguably, was the most dangerous moment. If the opposition was alert, if the guards were ignoring the potential threat posed by the
Horizon
and were watching the surface of the water close to the derrick pilings, then the SEAL recon was doomed before it had properly begun. Nothing . . . no sign of life anywhere. Bouddica Alpha's lowest work deck stretched like a raftered ceiling forty or more feet overhead, while the pilings rose about him like the trunks of fantastic, otherworldly trees. Sterling's head broke the surface with an oily ripple a few feet away . . . and beyond him, MacKenzie, Roselli, and Johnson.

The team's next set of steps had all been worked out and rehearsed again and again back at Dorset. Satellite photos provided to the British government by the American Defense Intelligence Agency had shown the general layout of the platform area, and Wentworth had shared those maps with the SEALs as soon as they'd reached his desk. As Murdock bobbed in the sea beneath the platform, he used each lift provided by a passing wave to check the actual layout with what he'd memorized off the satellite maps.

Nothing, apparently, had moved in the past few hours. The tanker
Noramo Pride
was still moored east of the platform, about a mile off. A red-and-white-painted anchor tug outwardly identical to the Horizon was moored close beside one of the four main supports beneath Bouddica Alpha. That would be the
Celtic Maiden
, assigned as Bouddica's safety boat. Not far from the
Maiden
was an aging fishing boat, dilapidated and rust-streaked, looking very much out of place alongside so much twenty-first-century hardware. Murdock had heard nothing about that craft's identity, but her presence here meant trouble. Either she'd been used by the terrorists in their takeover of the original tanker, or she was an honest fishing vessel, somehow swept up in the drama unfolding over the North Sea. Either way, there were probably tangos aboard, and they would have to be neutralized.

The sheer number of large and complex targets here was daunting. Bouddicas Alpha and Bravo alone represented a small city, with thousands of niches, corners, and hidey-holes for the bad guys. Same for the
Noramo Pride
, an enormous vessel that could have any number of people aboard. And both the
Celtic Maiden
and the old fishing trawler would have to be considered too.

Clearly, the assault was far beyond the capability of SEAL Seven's Third Platoon. Most of the op would have to be in the hands of the SAS and—Murdock had been pleased to learn just before their departure that morning—the GSG9. The Germans, evidently, had decided to pitch in to protect their North Sea interests by sending a squad of GSG9 troopers. Murdock hadn't seen them, but he'd heard that Lieutenant Hopke was with them.

Knowing Hopke's feelings for Inge Schmidt, feelings shared by Murdock himself, he somehow wasn't surprised.

They would all be welcome on this one. The single disadvantage in a multi-unit op, of course, was the fact that so many elite teams could end up getting in each others' way, literally tripping over one another, even opening fire on one another, once they'd broken into the confused tangle of a firefight inside the objective.

After verifying that the various ships were still where the satellite data had originally placed them, Murdock signaled to the others. Roselli, MacKenzie, and Johnson all began unbuckling their diving rigs and pulling their equipment off. While Jaybird Sterling and Murdock stood—or rather swam—watch, the other three shucked themselves down to combat blacks and load-bearing harnesses, with their weapons and other combat gear still sealed in black, waterproof pouches fastened to their backs. Their rebreathers and other swim gear, along with Murdock's and Sterling's weapons bags, were attached to a floatation bladder that Sterling inflated with a small CO
₂
bottle equipped with a pull ring. The bladder's buoyancy had been calculated to keep the bundled gear adrift just beneath the surface. Any curious eyes that glimpsed the tarp-covered bundle would assume that it was a piece of flotsam bumping against Bravo's structural supports.

With the gear safely afloat and lashed to a piling, it was time to begin climbing the platform. Roselli was the best climber in the group. He looked at Murdock and Murdock nodded vigorously. God, it would be good to get out of this cold! Roselli groped upward for another cross support just within arm's reach, grabbed it in one gloved hand, and chinned himself up. A moment later, his rubber-suited legs slid clear of the water, and he began his nerve-wracking climb.

Murdock ran his gloved hand over the piling beside him. Damn . . . that was ice! Not a solid layer, but a slickness of frozen vapor. Roselli must be part mountain goat to be pulling this off.

A surge of icy water caught Murdock from behind, raising him several feet along the piling, slamming him forward, then dropping away beneath him as he clung precariously to his slippery handhold. A moment later, the water returned, the current whirling him about and breaking his grip.

MacKenzie reached out with one strong hand and grabbed Murdock's arm, hauling him back. “Easy, L-T,” he said, just loud enough to be heard above the surge and hiss of the waves.

Murdock spat salt water, then gulped in a lungful of cold air. “Thanks, Mac. Let's link up.”

Each of the four men held fast to the framework with one arm, and with the other snagged hold of the load-bearing harness of the man on his left. Together, they clung to one another and the piling, as wave after ice-cold wave of seawater cascaded about them.

Blinking though the salt, Murdock stared up at Roselli, now a tiny black shape half lost among the black, crisscrossing beams and support struts of the derrick platform. Murdock knew a sharp thrill of fear. If he slipped on that ice-slicked perch now, lost his grip, and fell, he could easily break his back or neck in the fall or hit the water so hard he'd lose consciousness and drown before the others could reach him. Murdock watched the twisting, upward-inching shape, willing him to go on. . . .