Nucflash (34 page)

But voices were sounding from the right. Men were coming this way, and at a dead run from the sound of it. Just a little way down the corridor to the right was the intersection with a cross passageway. Almost without thinking, she turned right, then stepped off to the side, out of the main corridor.

Almost immediately, two black-clad men raced by in the main corridor. “This way,” one yelled in German as they passed her hiding place. “In here!” Neither saw her.

If they found Johann's body, however, there would be more men here almost at once, and they would search and search until they tracked her down. Coolly, she stepped back into the main passageway, glanced right to make sure no more were coming, then brought her pistol up, aiming at the backs of the two running men.

There is no
fair
in combat
, Blake had told her a century or two ago. She opened fire just as they reached the door to the room where Johann's body was and started to turn the knob. Two shots . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . Again and again she squeezed the trigger, the gun thundering in the narrow corridor. One of the terrorists staggered back, slamming into the wall opposite the door. The other twisted around, staring into Inge's eyes with a horrible mix of surprise and pain, but he wasn't going down . . . he was still on his feet and he had his own weapon out now, a gleaming black submachine gun that was swinging up and around to aim at Inge's head.

Then his face was obliterated by a splash of blood, and he hit the floor on his back with a loud thump. A hand touched Inge's shoulder; still working on instinct, she let go of her pistol with the left hand, caught the wrist, threw her hip into her assailant and sent him spilling across her leg and onto the floor. He was wearing black military-looking garb like the others. She raised her pistol, centering it on his stunned expression. . . .

Another gloved hand reached past her from the right, dropping across the breech of her pistol just as she pulled the trigger. There was a dull snap as the gun's hammer closed on the glove, right where the webbing between thumb and forefinger would be. Another hand closed over her mouth. Struggling, she tried to bite it but couldn't penetrate the leather. She tried to fight, tried to throw him off, tried—

“Easy, Inge! Damn it!
Easy!
It's Blake!”

Blake!
. . .

He released her mouth and she turned, looking up into his face. It was Blake! It was!

It took a blurred moment to sort out what had just happened, so fast had things taken place. She'd shot one of the terrorists, but the bullets hadn't penetrated the Kevlar armor the other was wearing; Blake had killed the man with a burst from his silenced submachine gun, while the other SEAL had grabbed her shoulder, probably to pull her out of the way. She'd thrown him and come
that
close to putting a bullet between the SEAL's eyes.

Except that Blake had been there, just in time.

“Oh Gott!
How? . . . ”

“Never mind. Are you all right?”

She felt like she was going to collapse right there on the floor if he let go of her arms, but jerkily she nodded. “I—I'm fine.”

“We heard you scream.”

“They . . . never mind. It's okay. I'm okay, really. My God, Blake . . . what are you doing here?” Then realization dawned. “It's a takedown?”

“The beginning of one. Our side needs intelligence. That's why we're here.”

“One of them told me he had thirty-nine people here,” Inge said. “On the platform and on what he called his fleet. With him, that's forty.” She looked at the two bodies sprawled in the passageway. “I guess that makes thirty-seven.”

“Well done, Inge! Heinrich Adler?”

“One of them called him Herr Adler, yes.”

“Okay. Let's get the hell out of here.” Murdock looked at the other SEAL. “Did she hurt you, Razor?”

“Lucky throw,” the SEAL muttered, but he was grinning. “I like the lady's style, L-T.”

“Me too.”

“Razor? I nearly shot you. I'm sorry. . . .”

“Don't sweat it, ma'am. I'd only've gotten pissed off if you'd actually shot me. Y'know, L-T? I think we oughta make her an honorary SEAL.”

“Maybe later. C'mon. Let's move out.”

“Blake, wait!” she said. “What about the bodies? And there's another one in that room.”

“Leave 'em,” Murdock said. “By now, everybody on this platform has heard gunfire, and a check will show those men missing. If we leave the bodies, though, they might think that all they have to contend with is one very wild escaped prisoner . . . not a bunch of SEALs.”

“SEALs always eat their kills,” Razor explained quietly. “We're very neat and tidy that way.”

Quickly, they led her down a side passageway, deeper into the platform's living quarters.

 

“Gunfire!” the frantic voice said over the telephone. “Gunfire on level five! Three men are down!”

“Where?” Adler snapped. But he knew what the answer would be.

“Room 512. Johann is dead—”

Shit!
“The prisoner we brought over today from the
Rosa.
Is she still there?”

“
Nein
, Herr Adler. She is gone. There are just the bodies.”

“Find her. Everyone on full alert!”

He slammed the receiver down. Was it possible that Schmidt had somehow gotten Johann's gun away from him, shot him, and then shot two more? He shook his head, rejecting the possibility. No, not her. He'd seen the weakness in her. It was much more likely that the enemy already had commandos aboard the facility.

And then his eyes widened. Perhaps even . . . American SEALs . . .

Major Pak burst through the doorway opening onto Bouddica Alpha's upper deck, just below the helipad. Ahead, the refinery's flare stack jutted out over the sea at a sharp angle, still capped by its wavering halo of orange flame; nearby were the twin towers, each capped by a spherical white shroud, that supported the facility's weather and surface traffic radars.

His destination, however, was off to the left on the far side of a maze of air-conditioning ducts and blowers. The cab to the platform's number one crane was standing empty, the arm still stretched out over the sea to the east, supporting the PRR's Korean-made nuclear device.

As soon as he'd heard that there'd been gunfire somewhere inside the Bouddica complex, he'd known the time had come to act.

He was a man with a mission.

That mission did not necessarily match the mission parameters of Adler and his PRR.

It never had.

Operation Saebyok—the word meant “Dawn”—had been conceived by the hard-liner military clique within the Pyongyang government as a means of beginning a new day in the exercise of international power, a way of striking back at the hated Americans, a means of crippling, or at least slowing, the quickly expanding economies of the European community. Behind it all, Pak knew, was the determination of the militarists to confirm their own positions of power; when Bouddica was incinerated, their long-argued program of expanded covert warfare against the West would be proven viable, their own power base secured.

The next bomb to detonate beneath the World Trade Center towers in New York City might well not be conventional explosives.

And so, contact between the North Korean secret police and the scattered and demoralized remnants of the old RAF and other European terrorist groups had been strengthened. A seed had been planted within the RAF leadership, the idea of the state without borders, of a nation born in terrorism but rising to become the idealistic champion of the downtrodden peoples of the earth.

North Korea had provided the nuclear weapon for some much-needed hard currency and provided as well the experts to arm and place it and to advise the PRR in the seizure of the BGA oil platform. Adler and the other European fools thought the Americans and the British would capitulate to their demands, leaving the PRR with their nuclear device, a means of preserving their existence and of providing themselves with negotiating power in the future.

Pak and his superiors knew better. The world would never allow the PRR to keep its nuclear hardware, not if they had to hunt down every one of the People's Revolution members and assassinate them one by one. Besides, Pyongyang had other plans for the PRR's new weaponry. The threatened nuclear devastation of the North Sea, the collapse of Britain's economy, the tottering even of the titanic American economy as it tried to stop the collapse of its friends, all much better suited North Korea's future plans.

So the nuclear weapon was to be detonated whether the enemy capitulated to the PRR's demands or not. Ideally, it was to be detonated during the expected enemy assault, so that it would look to the world as though the Americans and British had brought the disaster down upon themselves.

He was grinning as he broke into a run, trotting past the air conditioning machinery toward the crane's waiting cab.

Before long, the world would know what terror really was.

 

MacKenzie had climbed the service ladder on the first of the two radar towers and used his diving knife to pry open the service access panel just below the spherical white weather shroud housing the unit's rotating dish. Disabling the radar would be a simple matter of reaching in, grabbing a handful of wires, and yanking hard . . . but the idea was for both radars to go down at once after the tangos realized something was going down.

He'd already manufactured two small bombs, each a fist-sized lump of C-6 from the team's small supply, a pencil-sized detonator, and a small unit that included a 9-volt battery and a digital timer. After pulling one of the devices from a pouch and checking his watch, he punched the buttons on the timer, setting the alarm, as it were, for 2230 hours. Then he reached into the access hatch and mashed the plastique in among the circuit boards and wiring.

As he pulled back to replace the access panel, movement on the roof of the platform crew's quarters caught his eye. A lone man was jogging from a doorway opening out onto the roof just below the helipad.

He was wearing civilian clothing—a light-colored shirt and trousers—and MacKenzie's first thought was that one of the hostages had managed to escape.

But he'd seen the same shirt earlier that day through binoculars and through the telephoto lens of the digital camera. “L-T!” he whispered into the lip mike suspended just below his mouth. “This is Mac!”

 

Murdock, Roselli, and Inge had taken shelter inside another room on Bouddica Alpha's fifth level. Unlike Room 512, which had been a small office of some kind, this one was one of the apartment-cabins provided for personnel working their two-week shift on the oil platform. It was small but comfortably furnished, with a tall, narrow window that admitted the cool blue eastern light of the dying evening, carpeted decks, and even a small television in the bulkhead above the desk.

The most important amenity it possessed, however, at least so far as the SEALs were concerned, was privacy. The five levels of the towering crew's quarters module were as complex and maze-like as a five-story hotel. Forty men could not possibly search it all in less than many hours—the main reason, Murdock thought, that the PRR tangos had waited so long to remove the bomb from the trawler. The terrorists had probably searched the structure at least cursorily after collecting all of the personnel in the main recreation area, but they didn't have enough men to guard it, or even to patrol it on a regular basis.

Inge had just begun describing for the SEALs what little she'd seen of the layout of the Bouddica platform when Mac's call sounded over the speakers clipped to their left ears. “L-T! This is Mac!”

If Mac was breaking radio silence, it had to be urgent. Murdock held up one finger to silence Inge, opened his transmitter, and said, “Go!”

“I've got Pak in sight. He's double-timing for the crane!”

Which told Murdock immediately what he most needed to know. If the object suspended from that crane was a dummy, the PRR's resident nuclear expert wouldn't be that interested in it.

If he was running toward the crane controls, however—

“Inge. When you were aboard that fishing boat, there was a Korean man there too.”

She nodded. “Pak. One of the men you were investigating last week.”

“Was he interested in that device they pulled out of the ship's hold with a crane?”

The woman thought for a moment. “I wasn't really watching, I'm afraid, but I'd have to say yes. He was there on the deck shouting at someone in English to be careful with—”

Confirmation! “Mac! Take him down!”

“Rog.”

“Jaybird! Skeeter!”

“We're here, L-T.” Sterling's voice replied.

“Put the word out over the satcom.
Copperhead!
I say again,
Copperhead!”

There was a small, shocked silence. “Affirmative. Copperhead.”

Murdock turned to Inge. “They wouldn't let you join GSG9, huh?”

“What about it?”

“You may have just saved this platform and everyone on it.”

“Told you, L-T,” Roselli said. “She's SEAL material.”