Nucflash (27 page)

Roselli vanished forty feet overhead, a telephone pole's height above the surging, angry water. For a breathless moment, the four SEALs clung to each other, waiting, and then something came spilling toward them from the derrick platform above, something that unraveled as it fell, then jerked to a halt, dangling free, its end swinging about in the wind.

A caving ladder. MacKenzie, closest and with the longest reach of any of the men still in the water, reached up and out and snagged the end as it swung past just overhead. Carefully, he released his hold on Murdock and the piling, letting his full weight drag down on the ladder and pull it taut. Johnson gave a final check to his gear bag, making certain the snaps and fittings were all secure, then swung up onto the caving ladder's rungs and began swiftly climbing up out of the water.

With Roselli on the platform and Johnson on his way up, it was time for Murdock and Jaybird to pull a small reconnaissance of their own. Murdock locked eyes with the other SEAL, nodded twice, then pulled his face mask back down and settled it in place. A last look around to get his bearings, and then he ducked beneath the surface again, striking out toward the north.

Toward the moored anchor tug
Celtic Maiden.

The distance was only about four hundred feet, but it was tough going nonetheless without flippers, even without the added weight of the weapon bags and ammo they'd been carrying. After hours of forced inactivity inside the bus, Murdock was already beginning to feel the effects of exhaustion and exposure.

But he particularly wanted to check out the
Celtic Maiden's
strange cargo. The sat photos from Washington had not included any analysis, and Murdock doubted that the folks at the National Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington—NPIC, for short—had advanced any solid guesses yet. Murdock had studied an enlargement of the stern of the
Celtic Maiden
for quite a while early that morning, however, and was disturbed by what he'd seen there. Something was resting on the
Maiden's
fantail, an elongated, vaguely torpedo-like shape swaddled in canvas.

If there was even the tiniest chance that the object wrapped in tarpaulins on the
Maiden's
deck was the PRR A-bomb, Murdock wanted to know it. Half of the battle would be won if the SEALs could just confirm where the bomb was being kept, and if the tangos had been stupid enough to leave the thing so easily accessible to the sea, then Murdock might be able to pull the appropriate wires and end this whole crisis, right here and now.

Not that it would be that easy. Things never were, and on tricky and dangerous ops like this one, the ubiquitous Murphy of Murphy's Law was always likely to be tagging along.

At last, the
Celtic Maiden's
hull loomed overhead, vast and dark against the silver light of the surface. From beneath the water, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Taking his place at the workboat's stern between the two massive propellers, Murdock waited while Sterling got into position a few feet away, then cautiously the two men surfaced together.

They'd been lucky in one aspect of the positioning of the various players in the drama. The
Celtic Maiden
was moored beneath the bridge that spanned the gap between Bouddica Alpha and Bouddica Bravo, her bow facing east. That meant she was facing the
Horizon
almost bow-on, and the SEALs had been counting on the distraction offered by the
Horizon
in order to get aboard the facility. Anyone on board the Maiden was, Murdock fervently hoped, up on the bow or in the wheelhouse up on the superstructure, keeping a wary eye on the other tug.

No one was visible from the water astern. Reaching up onto the
Maiden's
transom, Murdock chinned himself smoothly out of the water . . . then froze. Movement!

But it was someone's back, a man wearing what looked like commando garb, walking away from the tarp-shrouded object on the afterdeck and vanishing around the corner of the superstructure forward.

The aft end of the tug was deserted now, so far as Murdock could see. Leaning forward, he rolled out of the water and onto the waffle-ribbed steel deck. Sterling joined him a moment later.

Silently, exchanging hand signals, the two SEALs split up, circling the big package from either side, and checking beneath the cradle that supported it. If it
was
a bomb it was a damned big one, far larger than even the first U.S. bombs used half a century ago on Japan.

Keenly aware that someone might return at any moment or glance down on the afterdeck from the superstructure forward, Murdock and Sterling took cover behind the object. It was securely wrapped, but Sterling found a loose flap extending from beneath the steel strap that held the tarp in place, and worked open a large enough opening to see inside.

Murdock had not been expecting this. He found himself looking not at a homemade A-bomb, but at the aluminum and plastic-cowling enclosing a fair-sized propeller.

Silently, Sterling pointed to some characters impressed in part of the prop shroud. They looked Chinese, but both SEALs had learned to recognize the different types of Oriental characters that were descended from the original Chinese, even if they couldn't read them.

Korean.

Sterling already had his camera out, a small device manufactured by TRW that recorded images digitally. He got several shots of the lettering and of as much of the propeller and shroud as he could get at. Then, still in complete silence, the two men replaced the loose corner of the tarp, pulled down their masks, and rolled into the sea off the workboat's transom with scarcely a splash to mark their entry.

Washington, Murdock thought as the two SEALs swam the four hundred feet back to the pylons beneath Bouddica Bravo, would be interested in this one.

The other three SEALs were all gone when they returned. After finding the equipment bundle, they removed their swim gear, added it to the cache, and reset the inflation on the bladder to keep it suspended just beneath the surface. Then, Murdock in the lead, they ascended the caving ladder, which had been left in place for them.

It was a wild, dizzying climb, one made interesting by the buffeting wind and the biting cold. Murdock could feel the water freezing in his hair, where it stuck out from beneath his dry suit's hood. He climbed with an awkward-looking frog's posture, his knees splayed out to either side, to keep from pushing himself out too much from the ladder and losing control of the thing. Despite Sterling's weight on the bottom end, the wind kept threatening to spin him about, or worse, to bash him against the side of the piling.

Then he was at the top, and the platform stretched above him like a vast, gray, steel ceiling. The ladder threaded its way through a narrow manhole, and he squeezed his way up and through.

Roselli was on the platform on the other side, his equipment bag on the deck, his 9mm Smith & Wesson Mark 1 Mod 0 Hush Puppy clutched in both hands.

Murdock touched him lightly and flicked a sign with his fingers.
Anything?

Negative
, was Roselli's hand-sign response. You?

Together, the two men surveyed their surroundings, automatically positioning themselves back to back and rotating slowly to the left, covering one another and maintaining a 360-degree lookout.

From their vantage point on the oil platform's main deck, they had a clear view of the causeway stretched across open water to Bouddica Alpha, which rose like a fantastic, far-future city on its four massive pylons a hundred meters to the north. Murdock could see the windows of the operations center, but they were blank and empty. If there were people up there—and there must be—they weren't close to the windows and they weren't looking this way. They too must be watching the
Horizon
, which was still riding the heavy swell well clear of the facility, highly visible with its bright red hull and odd, far-forward white superstructure. Even further east, moored to one of the area's huge fueling buoys, was an oil tanker, a black and rust-red cliff topped aft by a white superstructure like the face of a four-story building.

Murdock shifted his full attention back to the twin platforms. Nowhere on all that vast and tangled structure was a human shape visible.

He grinned to himself. There were four more working decks on Bouddica Bravo above this one, and Alpha was bigger still, an incredibly complex forest of cranes and gantries, tanks and towers, in which an army of SEALs could hide out for days, if necessary, undiscovered. The SOBs would've needed an army of their own to adequately protect a facility this large and this complex. They'd bitten off more than they could possibly chew.

He sensed movement behind him. Sterling was there, dripping wet, clutching his Hush Puppy automatic. Swiftly, the two of them adjusted the radios attached to the insides of their hoods, pulling the pencil mikes out until they rested on their lower lips. They would be maintaining radio silence at first, for obvious reasons, but when they needed communications links, they would need them fast. Murdock had to concentrate, though, to keep his lip, which he imagined was pretty blue by now, from trembling. This shit was worse than Hell Week back in Coronado.

When all was ready, Roselli led them away from the deck opening, threading up several steel ladders and deeper into the platform, until they were climbing the weather shroud on the central drilling derrick itself. Halfway up, in a position identified from the plans of the facility back in Wentworth's office, was a spot where a walled-in section gave way to the more traditional open latticework of girders and braces. There was a platform there, giving the roughnecks access to the drill, with plenty of heavy machinery—winches, hoists, and the pumping gear for drilling mud—which would provide the SEALs with cover, the perfect site for an observation post.

They'd code-named the spot Eyrie. The other two SEALs were already in place and in the process of setting up the rest of their gear.

The most important set of hardware was the HST-4 satcom unit, its attendant decoder, and the small satellite uplink unit that went with it. MacKenzie had already carefully aligned the folding satellite dish with an invisible point in the sky. With that gear properly set up and aimed, they'd be able to converse directly with Washington through one of the MILSTAR communications satellites if they wanted to, though that particular call was probably a bit premature just now.

More important, it would let them talk directly with Wentworth, back in Dorset, or with Captain Croft aboard the
Horizon
. The SEALs had a great deal of help available, if and when they needed it.

Though they had personal communication with each other as well, they didn't use it, since the enemy might have scanner gear in operation, set to watch military channels.

The first information beamed out over the tiny satellite dish was the digital recordings stored in Sterling's TRW camera, followed by a brief report of what they'd seen so far.

Meanwhile, Murdock and Roselli set out to reconnoiter the rest of Bouddica Bravo . . . and this time they found some tangos.

There were two of them, rough-looking men armed with H&K MP5 submachine guns much like those carried by the SEALs, though they were not the SD3 suppressed version with the heavy silencer barrels. They'd found a place for themselves on the east side of the facility, tucked away out of the cold and the wind behind an immense stack of barrels and drilling-shaft segments. Indeed, the SEALs could easily have missed them entirely, except that Murdock's sharp sense of smell had first detected a whiff of cigarette smoke, fresh and sharp above the clinging stink of oil and machinery. Murdock and Roselli watched them for a time, dispassionately, until they were certain that there was no alarm, no sense of urgency or worry on the part of the enemy. Then, stealthily, moving with death-silent footfalls, the two SEALs backed away, rejoining the others.

Back in the Eyrie, MacKenzie had a pair of binoculars out and was studying the sheer white cliff-face of Bouddica Alpha. “Anything?” Murdock asked quietly.

“I've got two guards spotted on top of the command center,” MacKenzie replied. “And I've been following some movement inside. Hard to get a good count, though.”

“Two more back that way,” Murdock added. “It's going to be a bear getting an accurate head count. Especially if they keep moving around.”

“Roger that.”

The SEALs settled down to wait.

0835 hours EDT
Situation Room Support Facility
Executive Office Building
Washington
,
D.C.

“Who authorized this!” the Secretary of Defense demanded, his face flushed with rage. The transcript of the report from England was spread out before him on the table. “Who let these . . . these
cowboys
loose over there?”

“The terrorists?” Caldwell asked, momentarily confused.

“No, damn it! These SEALs! Who gave them orders to board that oil platform?”

“As near as we can gather, Mr. Secretary,” Admiral Bainbridge said quietly, “the SEAL commander on the scene interpreted his orders rather, um, broadly. He wrote up what we call an UNODIR report, a report telling us precisely what he was going to do unless we told him otherwise. Unfortunately, his report did not reach levels cleared to know what was going on until too late.”

“At this point,” Marlowe, the CIA director pointed out, “we'd do a hell of a lot more damage pulling them out than we would leaving them there.”

“That's easy for you to say,” Hemminger snapped. “What if they're seen, damn it? What if that SEAL over there gets excited and launches a takedown? He could trigger the very disaster we're trying to avoid!”