BUD/S training had been everything that Johnson had ever heard it was, and far, far more. It had been a grueling, muddy, exhausting nightmare that had challenged him physically and mentally like he’d never been challenged before. He’d learned just how far he could push his endurance in the water, in repeated two-mile swims across open ocean, in fifty-foot-deep tanks with hands and feet bound, in buddy exercises with a shared SCUBA tank. Hell Week had been just that, a solid week of hell when he’d been allowed just three hours of sleep total, spread out in fitful catnaps and dozes while lying neck-deep in cold ooze or stretched out on the sand or even while standing in formation.
Somehow, somewhy, he’d stuck it out.
He still wasn’t sure why. SEAL trainees were no longer followed about on their evolutions by a brass bell that could be rung three times to announce a DOR — a Drop On Request — from the program, but they could still give up after a couple of counseling sessions and be transferred back to the Fleet. He’d come that close to bagging it all and giving up.
It had been during the fourth day of Hell Week. He’d staggered out of the mud pit where he and twenty-eight other men had been wallowing for the past several hours, declared through chattering teeth that he’d had enough, and stumbled off toward the trailer where an officer waited to hear his request.
But he’d gone back to the mud and the cold. Why? He still wasn’t entirely certain. During his first counseling session, he’d been asked if he really wanted to quit, told to consider what he’d already invested in becoming a SEAL… but his final decision had more to do with the fear that the others would think that he was a quitter than anything else. The shame that attended that failure of nerve and strength and soul had seemed a worse fate than dying in the program, worse even than the humiliation of being assigned to a Navy minesweeper as just another ordnance man, screwing fuses in and out of mines.
He’d stuck… somehow he’d stuck out of sheer, stubborn pride, and now he was seriously wondering if he’d made a very bad mistake. More interested by far in the technical end of Navy diving, Johnson had never actually thought much about one decidedly non-technical aspect of his new career specialty, the fact that the Navy SEALs were looking for warriors, for men who could kill instantly, without hesitation, without remorse.
And that was what he thought separated him from the others.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t kill. He wouldn’t have completed the program had he not satisfied his instructors that he could, if necessary, take an enemy’s life. The issue had more to do with his inward focus as a SEAL; he didn’t think of himself as a warrior, didn’t feel that warrior’s bond shared by his comrades, had trouble imagining himself ever fitting in. His greatest love was still diving, exploring the ocean depths, losing himself in the weightless joy, so like skydiving, of a free-dive descent into an alien, emerald world.
“C’mon, Skeeter!” Brown’s voice snapped. “Wake up!”
The other SEALs were filing toward the C-130 Hercules—“Herky Bird” in military parlance — leaving Johnson behind. He jogged to catch up.
The airedales were just unloading the last piece of SEAL special equipment off the Herky Bird. It was big, a very special package, vaguely torpedo-shaped despite the bulky wrappings and tarps that enfolded it like a blanket swaddling a baby. Twenty-one feet long and four wide, it was gentled out of the C-130’s cargo bay on a tractor-towed cart and wheeled off toward the hangar used to stow the SEAL Team’s equipment.
The bus had arrived.
13
“Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride, this is OPF Bouddica. Please respond, over.”
The platform’s radio officer listened for a moment to the burst of static, mimicking the hiss of wind and rain outside the monster oil platform. Her brow furrowed in concentration as she tried to pick out a reply from all the noise. Nothing… nothing but static, punctuated by the sharper, harsher crackle of lightning somewhere close by.
The storm had come up hours ago, howling in out of the northwest just after midnight, and while the front’s first burst of wild violence had swiftly passed, the black night was still being lashed by hissing rain and hail, blasting along on a thirty-five-knot wind.
Sally Kirk was worried. Earlier on her watch, just before the storm had struck, in fact, one of the hundreds of green-yellow blips smeared across the facility’s radarscopes had gone off course. It was a big one too… one rapidly identified as an American oil tanker, the Noramo Pride.
The straying of one of those blips was hardly unusual. The North Sea carried an enormous amount of surface traffic, from oil tankers to freighters and container ships, from oil-field workboats and tugs to fishing boats and pleasure craft, a mob drawing its members from as many different nations as there were seafaring countries. Imposing order on that mass of shipping was, frankly, next to impossible, though neatly aligned shipping lanes that kept traffic well clear of the forest of oil-recovery platforms in the area had been drawn up and well marked by radar buoys.
“Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride, this is OPF Bouddica. Respond, please. Over.”
Still no response, and the Noramo Pride was ten nautical miles off. If they didn’t turn soon, there was going to be a collision. A very large, very nasty collision.
The BGA Consortium’s Bouddica oil production facility consisted of two separate platforms connected by a partly enclosed bridge suspended fifty feet above the churning black waters of the North Sea. To the north was the command center, Bouddica Alpha, also called “Big B.” South was the drilling platform, Bouddica Bravo, or B-2. Each structure was enormous; together, viewed as a single complex, they were titanic, a small city rising on stilts from the depths of the North Sea. At night, illuminated by twin galaxies of white and yellow and green lights gleaming like Christmas tree lights from the dark and thickly tangled branches of both structures, and by the bright orange flare atop the burn-off stack above Alpha’s processing center, the center took on the aspect of some fantastic, far-future city from some science-fiction movie, an eerie and not quite believable sight.
The facility was brand-new, five years in the making and only brought into full production last September. The British-German-American Consortium — BGA for short — had invested hundreds of millions of pounds, marks, and dollars in this facility, which rested in just under 250 feet of water squarely atop one of the most recently discovered of the dozens of large oil deposits of the central stretches of the North Sea.
Oil. It had first been discovered in the late 1960s, just after the various countries ringing the coasts of the North Sea had arrived at an agreement neatly carving up the sea and its resources for exploitation. Bouddica had been constructed just west of the dividing line sundering the British claim from the Norwegian.
Bouddica was not entirely British, however, even though most of the personnel serving aboard were British nationals and the platform itself was technically British soil. These were the 1990s, and the oil that had been so astonishingly plentiful and easy to reach in the early seventies, transforming the economies of those countries able to draw upon it, was long gone. Rigs like Bouddica had been constructed in much deeper water — the depth increasing with each advance in the technology that shaped the raising of these structures — and were correspondingly far more expensive. The BGA Consortium had been formed as a means of pooling the resources — technical, personnel, and economic — of three important oil prospecting nations: the British, who owned the claim to the area of the North Sea where Bouddica had been built; the Germans, who’d made astonishing advances in the technology of oil drilling and production; and the Americans, who were bankrolling the lion’s share of the project… just as they would take the lion’s share of the oil once it was pumped to the surface and refined.