“Dragon Lead in position portside, near frame thirty. Hostiles on the move,” he warned over the team’s tactical net. From his personal perspective, facing aft, he was on the Gulf Venture’s righthand side, but the relative directions of port and starboard on a ship were always set from its bow, not its stern.
“Dragon Two ready, too,” Tadeuz Kossak answered coolly from the other side of the massive vessel. “Another group is advancing up the starboard side.”
Voices crackled through Flynn’s headset as McGill, Cooke, Hynes, and the rest of his men confirmed that they were safely down on the deck and moving aft to join up. As the first two out of the Super Hercules, he and Kossak had landed the closest to the tanker’s superstructure. And that now put them directly in the path of this oncoming enemy counterattack. They would have to hold long enough for the others to make their way along several hundred feet of hull crowded with a maze of piping, machinery, and shipping containers concealing the ship’s heavy weapons.
He risked a quick glance over his left shoulder and saw the dark nose cone of the Iranian rocket just visible above a collection of the large cylindrical oil pipelines that ran the length of the ship’s upper hull. It was positioned along the ship’s centerline, about halfway toward the distant bow. Which meant anyone shooting toward him risked hitting their own highly explosive rocket by accident. Given the tangled assortment of ladders, catwalks, crossovers, pipelines, and other machinery in the way, the odds of that happening were fairly low — but it was still something for the bad guys to worry about, unless they were willing to take a chance on blowing themselves up. They would be reluctant to fire without a clear target. He and Kossak, on the other hand, had relatively clear fields of fire against the attackers. Advantage, Flynn and company, he thought calmly — sighting through the optic fitted to the short barrel of his carbine. “Lead to Two,” he radioed the Pole. “Engage when ready.”
“Copy that, Lead,” Kossak said.
Flynn saw a bearded man appear in his sights, not more than a hundred feet and fifty away. That was practically point-blank range. The Iranian attacker wore standard-issue sailor’s coveralls, but he moved like a trained soldier and carried a submachine gun held ready to fire when he jumped out from behind a mooring bollard and sprinted forward.
Flynn squeezed off two quick shots, holding the carbine’s stock tight against his shoulder as it recoiled slightly. There was no real visible muzzle flash, thanks to the suppressor threaded onto the end of the barrel. Both spent 7.62mm cases were ejected forward out through a port and rolled away.
Hit twice, the Iranian folded over and collapsed in a heap. Blood, black in the dim light, pooled across the deck. There were cries of alarm as his companions dove back into cover. A sharp, piercing crack-crack echoed from the other side of the ship as Kossak opened fire, too.
Jaw tight, Flynn shifted his aim. A quick blur of movement at his one o’clock had caught his eye. He saw another enemy crewman rearing up from behind a pump housing with a grenade in his hand. Shit. These bastards were both evilly smart and experienced. Even if a random fragment from a grenade blast somehow flew all the way to the launch pad a couple of hundred feet behind him, it would have lost so much energy on the way that it probably wouldn’t even penetrate the rocket’s relatively thin skin. Despite his ballistic helmet and body armor, Nick wasn’t likely to come off as well.
He fired three times in rapid succession. Flashes sparked off the pump casing from two near misses. But one bullet tore through the Iranian’s chest and exploded out his back in a spray of blood and shattered bone and tissue. With a muffled groan, the man fell backward. The grenade dropped out of his hand, rolled onto the deck in front of him, and went off with a blinding flash.
WHAANNGG.
Flynn buried his face against the steel deck as razor-sharp fragments sleeted past overhead, pinging and clanging off the catwalk and piping above him. He heard agonized screams from the area around the pump casing. Some of the other attackers must have been caught in the blast.
Taking advantage of the sudden chaos, he rolled out from behind the ladder to go prone again behind the corner of one of the big fake shipping containers the Iranians used to hide their gun mounts and SAM launchers. Staying in any one place too long against enemies of this caliber would be a lethal error.
He was just in time.
Submachine guns crackled, firing short bursts aimed at his first position. 9mm rounds tore at the ladder rungs and deck plating and went howling away in coruscating clouds of pulverized steel. Flynn steadied his weapon, waiting.
And sure enough, just as the flashes faded, two more bearded Iranians charged forward, shouting as they came. He squeezed the trigger several more times, holding the Kel-Tec carbine on target as it kicked back a little against his shoulder with every separate shot.
One of the attackers stumbled and went down. The other dropped to one knee, swung his submachine gun toward Flynn, and opened fire. Rounds whip-cracked low over his head, punching holes in the metal-sided container.
Sharp splinters exploded outward. Most were stopped by his armor. One tiny, burning piece of steel tore across the side of his right leg, tracing a line of white-hot fire across his skin. Teeth clenched on a hiss of pain, he shot back, firing again and again and again. Hit repeatedly, the second Iranian crumpled to the deck and lay still.
Flynn pulled back behind the container and rolled over to check his wound. It was minor, just a thin, bloody slice along the outside edge of his calf. Not even worth slapping on a bandage, he thought with relief. Then his eyes widened in shock as a new shape loomed up from around the other side of the container — the side facing the ocean. While his comrades had drawn Flynn’s fire at the price of their lives, another Iranian had somehow squeezed through the narrow gap between the container and the railing to outflank him. Desperately, Flynn whipped his carbine around, already sure that it was far too late. Adrenaline rushed through his body, slowing time until every second seemed an eternity. But all that did was give him more time to realize just how badly he’d screwed up.
Suddenly, gunfire erupted close by, shatteringly loud. The Iranian lurched away in a torrent of ripped cloth and flesh. Screaming, he pitched backward over the railing and toppled into the ocean far below.
“Sorry I cut that one a bit close, Nick,” Flynn heard a voice say through his ringing ears. He looked around and saw Tony McGill lower his own carbine. The ex — SAS sergeant had just skidded to a stop a few yards away. His bright white teeth gleamed against the backdrop of his camouflage-painted face, rather like those of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland just before it disappeared.
He breathed out. “Close was good enough, Tony,” he said gratefully. Behind McGill, Cole Hynes and Mark Stadler took up their own firing positions, going prone behind whatever cover they could find.
“Geez, sir,” Hynes called over to him, sounding aggrieved. “Couldn’t you have waited a little for the rest of us to get here?”
Flynn risked a quick look around the corner of the bullet-riddled container. Bodies littered the deck in front of him. For the moment, there was no further sign of any movement ahead. “Sorry about that,” he told Hynes wryly. “I meant to ask the bad guys to wait until you were in position, but in all the excitement, I clean forgot.”
“All hostiles are down on the starboard side,” Tadeuz Kossak reported over the radio. “Cooke, Ricard, Vucovich, and I are set to advance.”