Nucflash (35 page)

 

Still standing on the rungs that led up the radar tower to the access hatch, MacKenzie unslung his MP5 and took aim at the running figure. He estimated the range to be fifty meters—half the length of a football field.

Submachine guns are brutal, close-range weapons and not designed for sniping, but SEALs were trained to use a wide variety of weapons under every possible set of conditions. Leading Pak slightly, he squeezed the trigger, loosing a three-round burst with a fluttering hiss, but the runner kept moving. MacKenzie adjusted his aim and fired two more bursts, and the runner stumbled, then went down, vanishing behind a tangle of air-conditioning ducts.

MacKenzie would have to get close to make sure the job was done. First, however, he opened up the access panel again and reset the timer, giving himself sixty seconds.

The code word “Copperhead” Murdock had just ordered Sterling and Johnson to transmit meant that the assault would be going down
now
, not twenty minutes from now.

The cavalry was already on the way in, and those radars had to be taken down first.

 

“An atomic bomb!” Inge's eyes were wide.
“Mein
Gott! That was an atomic bomb they had out there?”

Murdock reached into a pouch and extracted one of the long, curved magazines he carried for his H&K. Bullets gleamed, copper and gold, as he began thumbing them out of the mag and into his hand. Counting out ten rounds, he handed them to Inge, spilling them into her cupped hands. “You know how to reload your magazine?”

She looked up at him and nodded.

“Good. Load up . . . just in case. I don't think the bad guys will bother you here. If you hear anything outside that door, though, just get down on the floor behind the bed and stay there.”

“But. . . ”

“Razor and I have to go. You'll be safe here.”

Damn it, she didn't
want
to be safe! But she knew from Blake's expression, from the tone of his voice, that he would accept no argument. “Very well. . . ”

“Good girl. I'll be back for you as soon as I can.”

And then the two SEALs were gone.

Inge stared at the door, the bullets still in her hands. “Like hell I'm going to sit here and wait for you, Herr SEAL!” she muttered after them.

Then she reached for the empty pistol.

 

Pak lay flat on his belly, his pistol drawn, searching the direction from which the shots must have come.

He'd been hit. One moment he'd been running across the upper deck, and the next he'd felt twin hammer blows against his right leg, one halfway between his knee and his hip, the other just below his knee. The impact had knocked him down, and blood was pooling beneath his leg on the concrete deck. There still wasn't any pain—not really—but he felt the dizziness and chill of impending shock. From the way his lower leg was twisted, he was sure that it was broken.

Lifting himself on his elbows and using his good leg, he pulled himself forward, the broken limb dragging behind until he could get a better view past the machinery he'd fallen behind. The radar towers. The shots must have come from the radar towers, but he couldn't see anyone there. No! There was someone, a dark shape climbing down the tower's side.

Fifty meters. Too far for him to have any hope at all of hitting a man with a handgun, not without an extraordinary stroke of luck.

Pak didn't believe in luck. The crane's cab was ten meters ahead.

He kept crawling.

 

“Colonel!” the pilot called, twisting around in his seat and shouting to make himself heard above the thunder of the rotors. “We just got a flash over the satellite taccom! The word is ‘Copperhead.' ”

Wentworth's eyes narrowed, and he jerked his head in a curt, short nod. “Okay. Pass the word to all Falcons. We're going in!”

Copperhead. The SEALs had located the bomb, and it was aboard the Bouddica complex, vulnerable to a quick dash by the assault force.

Wentworth unholstered his Browning Hi-power and checked the action, before snapping home a loaded magazine.
This
time he would not be waiting out the op in a command post somewhere.

Outside, beyond the thin metal skin of the big Westland Sea King HC.Mk4, four other Sea Kings of 846 Squadron, an aerial armada configured for commando assault, stretched out in a huge V-formation nearly half a mile across, dipped their noses and accelerated as one toward the northeast. They were twenty-five miles from the objective. At a maximum low-level speed of better than two and a half miles per minute, they would be there in ten minutes.

 

DeWitt and the other SEALs of SEAL Team Seven had heard the Copperhead call. Six were already aboard the
Noramo
Pride
, with the last two coming up three caving ladders dangling off the stern passageway to port, just under the towering white loom of the ship's superstructure.

The rendezvous at sea had gone precisely as in training, though the size and strength of North Sea waves had been a lot nastier than they'd been during any training run. As the twilight had deepened, the two small rubber raiders had closed on the titanic ship riding at her moorings a few miles away, slipping along with electric motors that made scarcely more than a purr as they brought the SEALs in close.

Once under the hull, port side aft, Fernandez had tossed a grappling hook up and over a railing thirty-five feet above the water, then swarmed up the line after it, a maneuver practiced and practiced again by all of the SEALs. Moments later, three caving ladders had dropped over the side, and the SEALs of Third Platoon Gold Squad, plus Higgins and Brown from Blue, had been on their way up the side.

Copperhead! That meant the A-bomb wasn't here, and DeWitt felt a small, almost guilty sense of relief. If there was a screwup and they all died in a nuclear flash in the next few minutes, at least it wouldn't be his fault!

Bemused by the universal human tendency to place blame somewhere else, even in the face of disaster so absolute that who was at fault mattered not at all, DeWitt waited until the last two SEALs joined the party on the tanker's fantail. They were almost invisible, in black wet suits, with hoods and gloves, and with faces painted so black that the whites of their eyes were startlingly luminous by comparison.

The ship was quiet, and mostly darkened save for a blaze of lights from the bridge, topside on the superstructure, and forward. Breaking out their weapons and checking them carefully, the SEALs split into two teams. Higgins, Brown, Fernandez, and Kosciuszko started down the portside gangway, moving forward. DeWitt led Holt, Nicholson, and Frazier around the stern of the ship, then forward along the starboard gangway.

They met their first tango coming aft, his M-16 slung over his shoulder, his right hand in his trouser pocket. DeWitt shot him with a sound-suppressed burst through the chest and throat, then with Nicholson's help, tossed the body over the side.

The outside ladder leading up to the pilothouse was there.

He signaled his men to hurry.

 

MacKenzie dropped to the deck below the radar tower, then glanced at his watch. It would have been nice to have been able to take care of the other radar . . . but he had to make sure of the man he'd put down first. H&K at the ready, he scanned the labyrinth of machinery in front of him, selecting a route that would put him between the target and the crane.

A shout sounded from the left, followed by the clatter of boots on cement. Men were spilling onto the facility's roof from the open doorway, and in one sudden twist of events, MacKenzie had gone from being the hunter to the hunted.

Could he pass himself off as one of the tangos? Another shout, followed an instant later by a burst of automatic fire, answered that question with a decisive no. Either he had no business being up here in the first place, or some sort of security plan was in operation that identified him as an enemy. Bullets shrieked off the cement nearby; others punched through the thin metal of the air conditioning ducts with the sound of hammers striking sheet tin.

MacKenzie dropped and rolled as the shots, wildly aimed, snapped over his head. He came up with his MP5 pressed stock-to-shoulder, squeezing off two three-round bursts in rapid-fire succession. One tango threw out his arms, pitched backward, and sprawled face up on the deck; a second clutched his belly and crumpled into a ball, rolling heels over head as he fell. MacKenzie found cover behind a massive blower head as four more tangos spread out to right and left, trying to flank him.

Suddenly, things weren't looking good at all.

 

According to Inge, Adler, the PRR leader, had told Johann he was going up to Ops after getting a phone call. The enemy's defense of the installation would probably be directed from there in any case, and this was a splendid opportunity to catch a number of the PRR force's leaders in one place.

So Murdock wanted to hit Ops fast, before the SAS/GSG9 helos arrived. He knew that the installation rose like a futuristic afterthought above the rest of the quarters module and overlooked the helipad. He told Sterling what he planned to do, and then he and Roselli had raced off down the passageway toward a central, interior stairwell that led up one more level to Ops.

At the top of the stairs, a fire-door opened onto a long passageway that ran along the center's west wall. South were storage rooms and a door leading out onto the main upper deck; north were the entrances to the helipad and to Ops.

Murdock and Roselli came through the door one after the other, Murdock rolling to the left while Roselli took the right, weapons already at their shoulders. A tango was jogging toward the door as Murdock burst into the corridor, obligingly sliding across the tops of his sights just as he clamped down on the trigger.

The sound-suppressed MP5 made a noise like flags cracking in the wind and the terrorist twisted right, slammed into a wall, then collapsed at the same moment that Roselli's MP5 went into action at Murdock's back. “We're in Corridor One,” Murdock announced over the tactical net. He glanced back over his shoulder to confirm Roselli's kill. “Two bad guys down. Moving to Ops.”

His words, transmitted over the open satellite network, would keep listeners in Dorset and in the Pentagon informed of exactly what was happening. Gunfire sounded, unsuppressed but muffled, outside the walls of the building.

They ignored it. Together, the two SEALs dashed for the door leading to the Operations Center.

MacKenzie's plastic explosive bomb detonated with a sharp bang that blasted the service access panel off and sent it fluttering off over the sea. The report took some of the heat off MacKenzie too, for the terrorists trying to flank him suddenly ducked for cover and opened fire, blazing away at the radar tower.

The distraction was enough for MacKenzie to rise from cover and open fire himself—not at the PRR terrorists who were scattered across half of the quarters module's roof—but at the large white shroud covering the second radar dish. Snapping his select-fire lever to full auto, he emptied the rest of his magazine at the target, watching bits and tatters of the plastic cover flying away under the caress of the steady stream of 9mm bullets.

His weapon clicked empty and he dropped to cover again, dropping the dry magazine and slapping home a fresh one. Rising again, he emptied another twenty rounds at the radar, until the tango gunmen started throwing shots his way once more; sometimes, the subtlety of carefully prepared and packaged explosive charges had to give way to the sheer, brute force of full-auto fire.

Sure that he'd shredded that radar dish enough to take it off the air as effectively as the first, MacKenzie dropped to his belly and started crawling. The tangos were closing on him fast now from two directions, and he wanted to reach the crane before they did.

 

Heinrich Adler looked left and right, panic gibbering like a looming black beast somewhere in the back of his mind. Pak! Where was Pak? The Korean must have dashed out, but Adler hadn't seen him go.

He didn't trust Pak, never had trusted him completely. The man was unpredictable . . . even dangerous.

The operations center had huge, slanted windows fronting on three sides of the long, east-facing room. The north windows overlooked the helipad, where the Lynx in its Royal Dutch Navy livery still rested. East there was only water, and the dark shapes, almost invisible now in the rapidly deepening twilight, of the
Noramo Pride,
the
Rosa,
and the
Horizon
.

South was a view of Bouddica Bravo and the bridge connecting it with the main platform. The yellow-painted arm of the crane extended past the window, the atomic bomb suspended in space some eighty feet below the level of the windows.

He could hear the chatter of automatic weapons fire outside and knew the enemy commandos were storming the facility. An instant ago, both radars had gone down, first one, then, seconds later, the other, and he'd known that the end was in sight.