Washington and London had agreed on that one, at least, though DeWitt imagined there’d been some pretty acrimonious infighting over the question at first. But they needed to bring Chun in close, even let her go across to Bouddica, so the terrorists could see her and perhaps believe that the government forces had capitulated; while the exchange was taking place, at precisely 2230 hours, DeWitt’s SEALs would take down the tanker, Murdock and the four men with him would knock out the facility’s radar, and the SAS men aboard Horizon would storm the main platform. A small SBS team, DeWitt had been told, would deal with the trawler Rosa, just in case the A-bomb was hidden in her hold. The final blow would be delivered minutes later, when a flight of British helicopters, ferrying in SAS and GSG9 commandos, would come skimming in out of the west at wave-top height. If Lieutenant Murdock and his people were able to take down Bouddica Alpha’s radar, the helos ought to make it all the way in without being sighted until literally the last moment. More helos would be coming in behind the first wave, these carrying American NEST agents and Navy EOD experts, with the tools and the know-how to disarm a live nuclear warhead.
Simple.
Except that there’d been no time to rehearse this thing, no time even to be sure of the preliminary intelligence. DeWitt had at least been told that most of the intel they’d received had come courtesy of Lieutenant Murdock and the other SEALs in the recon force, which meant it could be trusted as gospel, but there were so many unknowns still. How many tangos were there aboard Bouddica, aboard the Rosa, aboard the Noramo Pride? How alert were they? Could the separate assault teams of SEALs, of British SAS and SBS, of German GSG9 troopers all work smoothly together and coordinate their separate attacks without either giving away the show by jumping the gun or confusing an already confused situation by blundering into each other’s fire zones?
And most vitally important of all, where was the PRR’s atomic bomb?
So vital was that last bit of intelligence that the entire operation had a built-in hold. Lieutenant Murdock and the others were supposed to be looking for the thing, starting at 2200 hours when the tangos would be busy watching the handover of Miss North Korea. Murdock had a satellite uplink; what he put out over the tactical net would be heard by everyone in the assault team. If Murdock could learn the whereabouts of the bomb, all of the teams involved had several alternate and fallback plans to cover various possibilities. The code phrase “snapping turtle” meant to concentrate everything on the freighter, that someone had picked up hard intel that the A-bomb was there. “King cobra” meant the tanker, Noramo Pride. “Copperhead” meant that the attack would go as planned — but immediately, whether or not everyone was in place and ready to go. “Copperhead” would be invoked if one of the OICs on the site — meaning Murdock or Croft on Bouddica, or DeWitt aboard the tanker — discovered the bomb and thought that the assault’s best chance would come from a quick rush now, rather than waiting for the 2230-hour deadline.
The reptilian code word that no one wanted to think about, however, was “crocodile,” transmitted by Murdock or one of his SEALs. Crocodile meant that the SEALs had discovered something about the bomb that made assaulting the platform too damned risky, something like a tango with a dead-man switch, or the bomb placed where it couldn’t be reached and disarmed.
Lieutenant Murdock literally had it in his power to call off this whole damned show, even after things had already started going down.
It was not the sort of responsibility that DeWitt envied in anyone.
“Say… L-T?” MacKenzie had returned to his lookout and was peering once more through his binoculars. He had them focused on the freighter, riding on her mooring several hundred yards off the platform’s east face. “Something happening here. I’m not sure, but this sure as hell could be it.”
Sliding down alongside MacKenzie, Murdock accepted the binoculars from the big Texan.
Murdock too had been thinking hard about the responsibility that had been assigned to him that afternoon. It was, he thought, a typical dodge pulled by the spineless bureaucratic types who so often screwed up a slick, simple mission with impossible add-on requirements — this “crocodile” abort code he’d been given, or worse, the code word “copperhead” that literally meant charge!
Of all the pencil-necked fucking stupidities. Giving that kind of power to a junior officer in an advance OP was begging for trouble. An inexperienced man might panic or chicken out; an overeager one, or one just burned out by combat, could ignore the danger and blunder full ahead… right into a nuclear disaster. It would have made a hell of a lot more sense if the powers-that-were had simply worked up their plan, relied on the SEAL intel to find the bomb or not and then deploy, based on what they’d learned.
Possibly, the brass in both Washington and London had decided there simply wasn’t enough time, that gathering the intel and launching the raid both had to be carried out almost simultaneously. But Murdock didn’t like it, not one small bit.
He tried to push the doubts aside as he concentrated on focusing the binoculars on what Mac was pointing out.
“They’re bringing the Rosa in close again,” he said.
“That’s sure what it looks like to me, Skipper.”
Murdock glanced back over his shoulder. Sterling and Roselli were both out cold, taking their turns at catching some sleep, stretched out on the steel deck with their rucksacks as pillows. He wouldn’t wake them yet… but this could be what they’d been waiting for. He could see tangos on the trawler’s deck, some of them holding coils of line as though they expected to tie up alongside Bouddica Alpha.
Even more significantly, someone was moving one of the cranes mounted on Alpha’s superstructure, swinging it around until its arm was out over the water.
As though they were getting ready to unload something heavy from the ship’s hold.
“What’s your guess, Mac?” Murdock said softly. He handed the binoculars back to the other SEAL.
“About what, L-T?”
“Where’s the damned bomb?”
“Well,” MacKenzie said, drawling the word with an exaggerated Texas accent. “It would have to be in the trawler, in the tanker, or it’s already on the platform somewhere, hauled in on that helicopter. I don’t see any other option. But our satellites would have spotted an unloading operation out of the trawler, for instance, even if they did it at night or under the cloud cover. Right?”
Murdock nodded. “Right so far.”
“But to get it onto the tanker, they’d have had to pull a transfer at sea. That’s a tricky maneuver, even for experienced hands, and I doubt that these guys have that kind of experience. The sea’s been rough the last couple of days, too. Seems risky, for something as heavy as an A-bomb.
“And I don’t think they’d use the helo either. They’d need all the payload for troops for their first assault. And in dirty weather like we’ve been having, well, I just can’t see them trusting an atomic bomb, maybe a one-of-a-kind and very expensive bomb, to the possibility of a crash at sea, or something going wrong when they land their troops. So if it was up to me, I’d have to guess the thing was still on the Rosa.”