“End of the line back there,” Johnson said into his face mask mike. “We’re coming up on Bravo.”
“Good naviguessing, Skeeter,” Murdock’s voice said in his earphones. “Bang on the money.”
The skipper’s praise warmed him.
For the first time since he’d been transferred to SEAL Seven, Johnson felt like he belonged.
18
Carefully, moving slowly and with great precision in almost total darkness, Murdock switched on his rebreather rig, checked the gas flow, then unhooked his umbilical from the SDV’s life support. MacKenzie had the side door open. Murdock waited as Roselli squeezed through the opening and into the water outside. Sterling followed, and then it was Murdock’s turn.
After the claustrophobia of the SDV’s interior over the past five hours, the freedom of movement outside was sheer heaven. Swimming was not quite as easy out here as it might have been otherwise, for the SEALs had abandoned their usual swim fins for rubber-soled, dry-suit boots, the better to scramble about on the oil rig topside without having to worry about carrying extra footgear. They were further burdened by the waterproof gear bags, which were secured by nylon straps to their load-bearing vests.
At a depth of forty feet, the ocean’s swell was mostly well over their heads, but they could still feel the mighty surge of water moving above them. Together, the four swimmers used lines to secure the delivery vehicle to a cross beam on the submerged platform alongside, working carefully in the murky light to avoid mistakes. Once the SDV was secure, Murdock moved close to the cockpit and signaled Johnson with an upraised thumb. Johnson responded the same way, then cracked his hatch. Normally, the bus driver would wait with the bus, but there was no telling how long the SEAL team would be here. The SDV had a strictly limited battery life; in fact, the only alternative was for Johnson to turn around after dropping the other SEALs off and head back out to sea for a rendezvous with the Horizon or another tug like her somewhere out of sight of the objective.
And if the SEALs needed to extract in a hurry, he wouldn’t be there to pick them up.
Not that extraction was a particularly important aspect of this recon, Murdock thought with an uncharacteristic stab of pessimism. This one was for all the marbles, and if the SEALs or the SAS or anybody else along the way screwed up, well, it wouldn’t be a particularly bad way to go, not from ground — or rather from water — zero. A sudden, heaven-searing flash, and you’d be incinerated before your nerve endings could transmit the sensation of pain to your brain.
The nightmare would be reserved for all of those thousands of people on the fringe of the effects, the ones having to deal with radioactive rain or soot from the North Sea oil fires, for the fishermen and roughnecks and workboat crews swamped by the radioactive base surge, for the kids made sick by contaminated milk and grain and livestock ashore.
Murdock was ready to risk that blinding, instant flash for himself — if it gave him a fighting chance of avoiding that slower, more agonizing death for all of those thousands of civilians.
He just hoped to hell that his assessment of the tangos’ mentality, tossed off in a casual conversation last night in the Golden Cock, was accurate. If these people were psychopathic nut-cases instead of dedicated political terrorists, then all bets were off. Hell, even if his guess about the bastards was right, the sight of SEALs clambering around on Bouddica Bravo would make whoever was holding the firing button damned nervous.
And nervous men made mistakes.
Johnson pulled himself free of the SDV’s cockpit, and Murdock clapped him on the shoulder, giving him an OK sign of approval. The newbie had performed well, in a dangerous and difficult assignment. The entire operation could have been doomed had he missed the bearing of the oil complex by even a single degree. Murdock waited as Johnson retrieved his own waterproof bundle of weapons and gear. Then, together, the five men pushed away from the moored SDV and began swimming into the forest of struts and supports beneath Bouddica Bravo.
They’d decided to approach the complex from the smaller Bravo platform for several reasons. Perhaps most important, Alpha was supported above the waves by four massive steel-and-concrete pylons, each many meters thick and all narrower at the water than they were at their tops. Climbing those structures at all would be next to impossible; climbing them unseen would be more difficult still.
Bravo, on the other hand, was a more conventional oil-rig platform, built on a structure like the gantry crane surrounding a rocket about to be launched. The rocket, in this case, was the drilling rig itself, which extended down through the center of the platform and was completely surrounded by the supports. The underwater portions of the structure had to be serviced periodically by BGA divers; there were handholds and an access hatch to the rig’s main deck, the pylons themselves offered lots of handholds — assuming you could climb like a monkey — and a man could almost certainly make his way all the way from the water’s surface to the well deck proper without being seen from any other part of the complex.
The terrorists, most of them anyway, those who hadn’t remained on board the Noramo Pride, would be on Alpha, up in the operations center and in the east-side living quarters complex. They might be terrorists, but they weren’t fools. It was cold outside, and except for a few routine guards taking turns out in the brisk, North Sea wind, most would be inside where it was warm.
Up… up… up. Murdock could feel the water growing rougher, in powerful, mountain-sized surges. With his equipment load and no fins, the uphill swim swiftly became a small torture. His weight belt had been set for neutral buoyancy at twenty feet; halfway to the surface, it became harder to keep moving up, harder to support the drag of all of the weight he was carrying. He moved himself along up the cross struts, hand over gloved hand. All the way up, he watched for other movements within the pylon forest. Though unlikely, it was not impossible that the terrorists’ first string of defense included a pair or two of frogmen of their own.
Murdock broke the surface first, clinging with one hand to a steel cross brace as he pushed his mask back with the other. The cold of the water was so raw it hurt, biting into the skin of his exposed face like a knife. The air temperature was in the high forties; the water itself must be a whisker or two above freezing. Back in Virginia Beach they were having a heat wave on the heels of an early spring. And here he was, worrying about major exposure…
Carefully, Murdock took a long, hard look around. This, arguably, was the most dangerous moment. If the opposition was alert, if the guards were ignoring the potential threat posed by the Horizon and were watching the surface of the water close to the derrick pilings, then the SEAL recon was doomed before it had properly begun. Nothing… no sign of life anywhere. Bouddica Alpha’s lowest work deck stretched like a raftered ceiling forty or more feet overhead, while the pilings rose about him like the trunks of fantastic, otherworldly trees. Sterling’s head broke the surface with an oily ripple a few feet away… and beyond him, MacKenzie, Roselli, and Johnson.