Nucflash (31 page)

“Careful with that!” the man shouted in English. “Don't bump it against the side!”

A bomb? It hardly mattered. She was more interested in the fact that so much attention was being focused on the trawler's cargo. Possibly . . . possibly . . . there was a chance here for her to escape. Inge knew her chances of survival for more than a few minutes in the cold water of the North Sea weren't good, but the oil-production platform offered hope. The thing was enormous, the size of a small city. The terrorists couldn't have men enough to search the whole damned thing.

If she could find a hiding place . . . and a way to communicate with the outside world . . .

Desperate hopes, clutching at straws, at fantasies. But Inge was not the sort to simply allow herself to be herded from place to place, helpless. Her captors shoved her along, away from the unloading operations, guiding her toward a metal gangway hung over the trawler's side. One of them, the one they called “Johann,” went first. The second urged her forward with the barrel of his gun.

Feigning submission, she stumbled down the ladder, then stumbled again on the smooth, hard steel of the temporary floating dock below. Johann reached out to steady her. . . .

Her snap kick caught him in the knee, dropping him to the deck and eliciting a yelp of pain. She dashed past him as he crumpled, sprinting for the long, narrow ladder leading up the side of the platform called Bouddica Alpha.

Two steps up, a powerful hand snagged her left ankle and yanked her leg out from under her. She fell heavily, bruisingly against the steps, and as she started to struggle up on trembling arms, the butt of an assault rifle cracked the back of her head.

She tumbled back to the deck, head throbbing, as Johann leaned close, his leer blotting out the sky. “You'll be sorry for that,
Fotze!”
The word he'd called her was sexually graphic, a foul vulgarity reducing her from a person to a
thing
to be used more completely than anything done to her in her captivity so far. She spat in Johann's face.

“Scheisse!” he howled.
“Dirne!”

She tensed and squeezed her eyes shut as he raised his fist. . . .

 

Murdock bit off a savage obscenity as he watched the drama come to a close on the floating temporary dock four hundred feet away. One of the gunmen, the one she'd kicked, struck Inge twice with his fist before the second man pulled him off of her. Together then, they lifted her between them and half walked, half dragged her up the steps.

God! Why had they brought her here? Presumably they'd been holding her aboard the trawler until they felt it was safe to move her across. Or maybe they were simply getting her beyond the reach of any possible naval commando attack. He followed her through the binoculars as two of the tangos forced her up that long, long, steel-rung stairway.

A few hours ago, he'd been willing to accept the judgment of some military planner in the Pentagon about whether or not to launch an assault in the middle of hostage negotiations. Now he was watching one of those hostages climb that ladder, a woman he knew.

A woman, he realized with a small, almost guilty start, whom he cared for very much. The guilt, he thought, arose from the fact that he shouldn't allow personal considerations to intrude at this point.

But intrude they did. There was no escaping them.

“We're going over there to get her, Mac,” he said quietly. “Before the show goes down.”

“Yeah, I thought you might want to do that,” MacKenzie replied. “You sure it's a good idea?”

Mac's words were level, calm, and unhurried, not questioning Murdock's reasoning so much as . . . forcing him to examine it.

“I know what's percolating through that thick skull of yours, Mac,” he said. “It's not what you think.”

“No?”

“They've been holding her aboard that trawler. With that . . . thing that looks like it could be a bomb. If we can get her to tell us what she saw down there . . .”

“She
could
help nail it down for us, L-T,” MacKenzie said, taking the binoculars back from Murdock and focusing them on the trawler's deck. The bomb—if that was what it was—was hanging out over the water now, as the crane operator slowly reeled it higher. “Well, we were going to have to talk to some people over there anyway. Wonder what they're having for dinner in the mess hall?”

Murdock rolled on his side, drawing his Hush Puppy and checking the action. “How about nine-mike-mike parabellum?” he asked.

“
Cordon
blam,” Roselli said, grinning.

“Yeah,” Johnson added. “Shot cuisine. I like it.”

They would have to move before it got fully dark.

It was still light. Sunset this day, in this part of the North Sea, had been at 2136 hours, and the sky was still suffused with a deep, royal blue light. The moon, which would be just past full tonight, had not yet risen.

Murdock, MacKenzie, and Roselli were making their way across the bridge between Bouddica Bravo and Bouddica Alpha, sticking to the shadows among the bundles of oil and gas pipelines, and avoiding the narrow, partly enclosed catwalk stretched along the top of the span. Ahead of them, the south side of Alpha's crew habitat module rose like a white cliff before and above them; a series of railed ladders and catwalks zigzagged up the otherwise blank, white-painted wall like a fire escape. At the highest level, a full one hundred feet above the water, a lone terrorist guard paced the fifth-level walkway, his submachine gun slung over his shoulder. Forty feet below the bridge, two more guards maintained watch on the stern of the
Celtic Maiden.
The unloading operations taking place aboard the
Rosa
had been completed, at least. The trawler had maneuvered clear of the platform, and the bomb—or whatever it was—hung suspended above the water now, twisting slowly back and forth with the wind about fifty feet above the water, and in plain view of all of the guards.

It was an interesting tactical problem. The SEALs would have no trouble reaching Alpha unobserved. The tangle of pipelines and railings offered plenty of cover for their stealthy crossing. But once they started climbing that fire escape, they would be in plain view of the guard at the top, of the two on the
Maiden
, and of the two terrorists positioned behind them, on the east side of Bouddica Bravo. There was no way to approach the object suspended beneath the crane at all, not without getting at the crane controls on the upper deck and physically bringing the thing aboard the platform.

There were two possible approaches, once the SEALs reached Alpha. The sneaky-Pete approach would be to move around to the left, vanishing into the forest of tanks, pipelines, and processing machinery that made up the western side of Bouddica Alpha. There were stairways and ladders back there that would get them up to the fifth level and the platforms operations center.

But Murdock was favoring a more open approach.

No matter how stealthy they were, there was always the possibility that by sheer bad luck and the malign intervention of the god Murphy, someone would see them sneaky-Peting their way through the refinery area. But what if they walked up that outside ladder in full view?

The SEALs had shed their dry suits and were wearing the ordinary combat blacks they'd had on beneath the bulky neoprene garments. Over that they wore combat harnesses very similar to the load-bearing vests worn by most of the terrorists. On their heads, they wore black wool watchcaps, again much like the headgear worn by a number of the tangos. Seen in poor light, glimpsed for a second or two, any one of the SEALs would simply be one more man in black among many. Weapons might present a problem; many of the terrorists carried H&K MP5 submachine guns, while the SEALs carried MP5SD3s, the sound-suppressed version of the same weapon, with heavy, cylindrical muzzles as thick as a man's arm.

Still, some of the tangos had been seen on the platform with other weapons, Uzis and even American-made M-16s, and in poor light, the SD3s weren't that dissimilar from the weapons carried by the bad guys. People tended to see what they thought they
ought
to see, so the silenced subguns probably wouldn't attract any attention. Anyone who caught sight of the SEALs as they walked around on the platform superstructure would assume that they were comrades. All they needed to do was walk in as though they owned the place, instead of sneaking around like commandos.

No problem. It was all part of the SEAL knack of blending into their environment.

And Murdock was about to put that knack to a brutal test.

Once they reached the upper levels of the platform, MacKenzie would take out the radar, while Murdock and Roselli tried to find an isolated tango to question. A quick-and-dirty interrogation or two was the only way Murdock could think of to verify that the object suspended from the crane was, in fact, the terrorist bomb. With luck, and the appropriate threats, they could even find out how it was fused, and whether or not there were booby traps on the thing.

Whatever they learned would have to go out over the satellite net; Johnson and Sterling would handle that . . . as well as keep an eye on the terrorist sentry post on Bouddica Bravo.

Then, when all the rest was complete, Murdock was determined to find Inge Schmidt, somewhere within that imposing fortress towering above him.

And they had to pull it all down by 2230 hours—forty-five, no, make that forty-four minutes from now—when the joint British, American, and German assault went down.

Movement caught Murdock's attention, high overhead, on the fourth-floor level of the living quarters. He froze in place, raising one warning hand to stop Roselli and Mac behind him. His breath caught in his throat. Two men were walking around the corner from the west side of the building, and between them was a woman, blindfolded and handcuffed.

It was hard to tell at this distance and at this angle, but Murdock was certain from the skirt, the blouse, and the matted blond hair that it was Inge once again. The group was only in sight for a moment or two. Murdock watched in helpless fury as the men led the woman up the outside ladder from the fourth level to the fifth, then ushered her through a door off the top-level catwalk after exchanging an inaudible comment or two with the guard there.

Swiftly, Murdock plotted the movement against the mental map he carried of the complex. That brief glimpse of Inge had been a damned lucky break; three SEALs could have spent hours searching the labyrinth of rooms and passageways that was the living quarters for the platform personnel before finding her. Even now, all he knew was that she was still alive—for the moment, at least—and being held somewhere on the structure's top deck.

The rest of the mission—verifying the position of the bomb, taking out the radar, gathering other intel and getting it to the assault force—would have to come first.

But when all of that was done . . .

 

In all that time since they'd picked her up on the street outside her Riisselsheim apartment, they'd not asked her a single question, told her they were demanding ransom, or even threatened her directly with death, and her capture was beginning to seem more and more senseless, a random, brutal, and arbitrary interruption of her normally orderly life.

After dragging her off the trawler, they'd taken her first to a large recreation area somewhere deep within the facility's third level, tossing her in with a large number of hungry, dirty, miserable, and thoroughly frightened BGA employees. Less than an hour later, however, her captors had returned for her, leading her away to a tiny cabin on the fourth level and locking her in. Two men had come to her new prison at dinnertime, but instead of bringing food, they'd handcuffed her as they had in the van, then blindfolded her and led her step by step with rough hands gripping her arms. They'd walked a long way . . . down an echoing, empty passageway, turning right, then left again. For a short time, they'd been outside. Despite the blindfold, Inge could sense the difference in the light, could taste and smell the salt in the air, could feel the cold bite of the wind on her bare skin. They'd gone up a steeply climbing ladder, with her captors tightly holding her arms to keep her from falling. Up one level, and then they'd gone inside again, down another corridor, and finally into what she'd sensed was a small room.

Roughly, they'd removed her handcuffs, forced her down into a straight-backed chair, then shackled her wrists once more behind her, pinning her in the seat.

She waited for what seemed like hours, though in fact it was probably only a minute or two. Then she heard the door open to her right, heard footsteps, felt the movement of air as someone leaned over her.

“Good evening, Fräulein,” a man's voice said, speaking German with the precise fluency of a native. From the trace of an accent, she guessed that he was from eastern Germany somewhere. “How is your head?”

She didn't answer, but she listened with a fierce concentration to the voice, to his movements, to the sense of his presence, somewhere to her left.

“From what I've been told,” the voice said, “you crippled one of my men back in Rüsselsheim. And this afternoon you just missed crippling Johann. He was upset about that.”

“I wish I'd killed him,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Yes, I'm sure that's true. That, incidentally, is the reason for the handcuffs. I would prefer that you keep those pretty hands to yourself for the time being. And if you attempt to kick me or one of my people now, we will have to tie your feet as well. I think it better if we can have a more dignified discussion, yes?”