Flynn saw what he meant. There, about a mile away across the sea he could see the tall, sharklike fin and humpbacked bow of a huge submarine silently gliding along. It was keeping pace with the oil tanker.
“Bloody hell,” McGill said in awe. “That’s a Russian Delta IV—class SSBN.”
“It’s worse than that,” Flynn said abruptly, pointing at the trio of inflatable boats headed their way. They were crammed full of heavily armed soldiers. “My bet is that’s the Podmoskovye. I heard Moscow outfitted it as a special operations sub a few years back.”
Cooke stared at them. “So those boats are probably full of Spetsnaz commandos?”
Flynn nodded. “That or Raven Syndicate thugs. Which amounts to the same thing.”
“Well, heck,” the ex — Army Special Forces operator said reflectively, his southern Virginia accent thicker suddenly. “I suppose it’s too late to resign from this mission?”
Flynn grinned back at him. “Sorry, but, yeah, it is. Way too late.” He went back on their radio circuit. “Dragon Two, this is Lead.”
“Two here,” Tadeusz Kossak replied immediately. “Alain and I are moving up the accommodation ladders toward your position now, Dragon Lead. Hynes will join us as soon as he finishes putting a tourniquet on Vucovich.”
“Scratch that, Tadeusz,” Flynn said tersely. “Check the view out to portside.”
After a brief moment of stunned silence, Kossak murmured, “Święta Matko Boża. Holy Mother of God.”
“You said it,” Flynn agreed. “These guys are playing for keeps.”
“What are our orders?” Kossak asked.
Flynn thought quickly. There was only one alternative that made sense in the tactical circumstances they now faced. If those Russian reinforcements made it onto the Gulf Venture’s deck, he and his men were as good as dead. There was no way they could take on that many highly trained and well-equipped opponents and win. “Repel boarders,” he said simply. “Keep them off our backs while we finish the job up here.”
“Understood,” the Pole told him calmly. “We will stop the Russians cold. Or die trying. Dragon Two, out.”
Damn, I wish I could tell them not to push it that far, Flynn thought bleakly. He was getting very tired of seeing good friends killed and wounded following his orders. But he knew there was no choice. Tad Kossak, Alain Ricard, and Cole Hynes represented the only armed force he had left to block this enemy move. Assuming, of course, that you could really call just three men an “armed force” when they were outnumbered so heavily.
“We’d best get a move on, then,” McGill said softly, still holding the length of flexible shock tube with its attached igniter. “If we can still take out that rocket, at least all this will have mattered.”
Flynn nodded sharply. The other man was right. “Let it rip,” he ordered.
They all moved back out of the direct line of the stairs and hunkered down. “Fire in the hole!” McGill called out. He yanked the igniter ring. A puff of gray smoke eddied away.
Wha-WHUMMP.
The catwalk they were sheltering on flexed slightly, absorbing the shock wave flashing outward from the detonating plastic explosives. Barely a second later, a dense cloud of smoke and burnt fragments of paint swirled down through the opening from above.
With Flynn in the lead, they all jumped to their feet and raced back up the stairs. When they burst out of the smoke, they found that the watertight door, scorched and blackened, had been blown inward and now leaned drunkenly to the side, still partially held upright by one twisted and torn pair of hinges at the bottom. The other fastenings had all vanished. Through the smoke still curling away from the blast, they could make out a ten-yard-long hallway with doors opening to either side, and a solid-looking armored hatch at the far end. But before they could plunge through that narrow gap, the defenders hiding inside opened up with rapid three-round bursts. The warped door rattled and clanged, torn by bullets that punched through from end to end, tearing off strips of wood and steel and paint. Sparks danced around the deck-level coaming.
“Son of a bitch!” Flynn dove to the right out of the line of fire and hit the deck.
McGill did the same to the left.
Hit by ricochets that shattered his left arm, Cooke stumbled away and went down next to Flynn. “Ah, crap,” the Army veteran muttered. White-faced with pain, he grabbed the carbine he’d dropped when he fell and tried to aim the weapon toward the door one-handed. Through gritted teeth, he forced out, “Only one way anyone’s getting down that damn corridor, Nick. And alive ain’t it. Those guys have too much firepower.”
“Grenades?” Flynn wondered. Each of them carried a couple of different makes.
“Might get one or two of them, if we were lucky, and they were dumb,” Cooke allowed. Then he shook his head. “But you saw all those hidey-holes in there. Odds are they can just ride out the blasts and then blow us to hell the moment we show our faces in that doorway.”
From his own position flat against the deck, McGill nodded tightly. “And even if we could winkle those bastards out, that hatch up ahead looks like a bloody bank vault. Like something out of your Fort Knox, say. I’m not sure that I could blow it open with the limited demolitions gear we’ve got.”
Frustrated, Flynn slammed his fist into the deck and then immediately regretted the childish gesture. The Quartet Directorate had signed him on to accomplish missions, not to bitch and moan about how difficult they were. So, think, Nick, he told himself sternly. That was his job as a leader. He stared at the blown-open door. The enemy soldiers inside had stopped shooting, obviously preferring to conserve their ammunition to repel the next real attack.
His eyes narrowed in contemplation. Cooke and McGill were right. A hey-diddle-diddle, straight-up-the-middle charge would only be suicide. So what other approach did that leave? Instinctively, his eyes rose to the last remaining deck above them on the tanker’s superstructure. The navigation bridge there must be directly over whatever compartment was behind that armored hatch. And then he saw a possible answer. It was time to make this battle a three-dimensional fight. He fought down a grin. And after all, he had been a captain in the U.S. Air Force, hadn’t he? So maybe he’d been intelligence puke and not a real balls-to-the-wall fighter jock, but tactics were tactics, right?
Quickly, Flynn looked around and saw a ladder that led straight up toward the open bridge wing above them. He turned back to McGill and motioned to him. “Toss me your demolition charges, Tony.”
The other man unslung the satchel from around his neck and lobbed it across to him. “What’ve you got in mind?” he asked.
Flynn told him.
McGill smiled narrowly. “Nice,” he said appreciatively. “It might even work.”
“I sure hope so,” Flynn said simply, as he looped the satchel over his own shoulder. “Because otherwise, our only option is to shoot the hell out of that doggone rocket and hope we can blow it up on the pad — along with this whole ship and all of us with it.”
Cooke winced. “I vote for your first plan.” He swallowed hard, clearly fighting down a wave of agony shooting up his broken arm. “What do you want Tony and me to do?”
“Keep those assholes down that corridor busy,” Flynn told him. “Don’t give them a chance to wonder what else is going on out here.”
“Can do, Nick,” Cooke said. Awkwardly, he braced his carbine against his remaining good shoulder and started squeezing off rounds toward the doorway. McGill followed his example. The odds were very much against either man scoring any hits on the enemy troops forted up inside the ship’s superstructure, but pouring a volume of fire down that corridor ought to keep their heads down and persuade them their opponents were still trying to break in… instead of making an end run.