“Very well,” Nakhimov acknowledged. He darted a finger at the two sailors in foul-weather gear clustered at the base of a ladder to a hatch on the ceiling of the control room. It opened into a chamber at the base of the sail. From there, another ladder led up to the observation platform at the top. “Lookouts to your posts!”
They swarmed upward and through the hatch. Donning his own jacket, Nakhimov followed them up. The raw, acrid smell of oil greeted him as soon as he scrambled through the final hatch and came out into the narrow navigating station at the top of Podmoskovye’s sail.
He raised his binoculars, focusing on the huge oil tanker a couple of thousand yards off the submarine’s starboard bow. Repeated flashes lit the night at different points on the ship’s aft superstructure, accompanied by the distinct pop-pop-pop of distant gunfire. He lowered his binoculars. The battle was still in progress. He swiveled around and leaned over the coaming to peer toward the stern.
Danilevsky and the other Raven Syndicate mercenaries were already out on the hull there. Bulky in their body armor and life jackets, they were busy wrestling equipment and weapons out through a large hatch. Held by lines, three inflatable, high-speed boats bobbed alongside, buffeted by low waves curling off the submarine’s glistening flank. Even as he watched, Danilevsky and his troops slithered carefully down into the three crowded boats. One by one, the three rubber-sided craft cast off and motored away toward the Gulf Venture—cutting V-shaped wakes through the thick layer of crude oil covering the sea.
Forty-One
Flynn took the metal steps two at a time, with his carbine raised and ready at his shoulder. Staying on the right half of the accommodation ladder, he swiveled from side to side, looking for the faintest hint of any movement… or even a shadow in the wrong place. Shannon Cooke followed him, a few feet behind and on his left. Tony McGill brought up the rear, guarding against any sudden ambush that might erupt from behind them. On their way up these external staircases and their adjoining catwalks, they’d already passed two solid, weathertight doors into the superstructure. Both had seemed bolted shut from the inside. For now, Flynn was content to bypass those entrances into the lower levels of this massive ship. With severely limited time and only a handful of men available, the Dragon assault force couldn’t afford to get caught up in a prolonged fight to clear a labyrinth of unimportant corridors and compartments.
Both logic and their examination of “before” and “after” photos of the Gulf Venture indicated that the mission-critical locations — the launch control center and the bridge — were on the two highest sections of the superstructure. The bridge itself was obvious, with its array of large windows and two open side wings. Flynn’s bet was that the rocket’s control center was on the level immediately below it. Before the tanker’s refit, that part of the ship had portholes like all the other inhabited areas. Those glassed-in openings were gone now, replaced by a layer of what appeared to be solid steel. That design change only made sense if you wanted to create a highly secure compartment for vital equipment and personnel — like the computers, technicians, scientists, and engineers required to launch a powerful rocket.
“Contact left high!” Cooke blurted. He fired twice in rapid succession and then kept firing as quickly as he could pull the trigger, aiming at the rectangular opening to the next catwalk up. The gunman who had popped upright there to jump them shot back just as frantically.
Without thinking, Flynn exploded into action, charging straight up the stairs, firing on the move. Caught exposed and without any possible cover, attacking into the ambush was his only option. Rounds slashed past and caromed off rungs and risers in a glittering spray of sparks and white-hot splinters. One 5.45mm bullet clipped the edge of his body armor, ripping through cloth and cracking one of his composite ceramic ballistic plates. Sudden pain flared red along his ribs.
Hit by somebody’s fire, the enemy gunman fell backward, with his hands clutching futilely at the red-rimmed holes torn through his chest. The assault rifle he’d dropped slid down the stairs and came to rest at Cooke’s feet.
Flynn reached the top of the stairs and threw himself down, rolling onto his side to keep his carbine pointed down the length of the catwalk. More corpses were sprawled there — one draped over the railing and two others curled up on the deck. He caught a glimpse of movement and saw a pudgy-faced man, pale with terror, fumbling with a Russian-made assault rifle. He’d been lying prone behind one of the dead men and was now hurriedly trying to bring his weapon on target.
Flynn shot him. The gunman slumped forward — with the top of his head blown off.
Two levels up, outside the sealed Launch Control Center, Viktor Skoblin heard the sudden burst of gunfire die away. He was crouched inside one of the small compartments that lined the narrow corridor leading directly to the center’s armored hatch. He’d left the compartment door open just far enough to let him aim down the corridor. There, at the far end, another sealed weathertight hatch barred the way out onto a wide covered platform just below the starboard bridge wing.
“Do you think Kvyat and the others have stopped the enemy?” Fadeyev hissed from his concealed position in another compartment just across the corridor.
Skoblin shook his head dismissively. “Not likely,” he growled. He shrugged. “If we’re lucky, they got one or two before dying themselves.” All along, he’d never had any illusions that Kvyat’s small force would accomplish anything more than delay the attackers fighting their way up the tanker’s superstructure. Like the ex-GRU intelligence officer, the four other Raven Syndicate operatives he’d assigned to hold the lower catwalk were more experienced at surveillance work and other nonlethal dirty tasks. He’d deliberately held back his most skilled and ruthless killers — Fadeyev, Linnik, and the rest — to hold this position.
Grimly, he sighted down the barrel of his rifle. It wouldn’t be long now.
Flynn watched Tony McGill mold tiny pieces of plastic explosive over the hinges of the latched weathertight door blocking their way into the Gulf Venture’s superstructure. During his service with the SAS, the former sergeant had mastered the art of opening locked doors by blasting them open. “Not exactly a transferrable skill to civvie street,” he’d commented wryly during their planning sessions for this mission. “Unless I went in for aiding and abetting bank heists, that is.”
With his charges in place, McGill finished off by tamping in nonelectric blasting caps attached to short sections of detonator cord, which were, in turn, tied into a length of thin, flexible shock tube with an igniter at the other end. Only a millimeter wide on the inside, the shock tube contained tiny particles of HMX/aluminum explosive powder. Once it was set off, the resulting shockwave would travel down the tube at more than 6,500 feet per second toward the sections of det cord and their connected blasting caps. “That should do it,” he told Flynn.
Unreeling the shock tube as they went, they backed away from the door and down the nearest accommodation ladder. Setting off a breaching charge without seeking good cover might look cool in movies. In real life, it was a ticket to traumatic brain injury and even death.
Cooke, who was now providing rear security for three of them, suddenly stopped dead, staring out across the catwalk’s low railing. “Jesus Christ, Nick. These bastards have a goddamned submarine with them.”