If she could find a hiding place… and a way to communicate with the outside world…
Desperate hopes, clutching at straws, at fantasies. But Inge was not the sort to simply allow herself to be herded from place to place, helpless. Her captors shoved her along, away from the unloading operations, guiding her toward a metal gangway hung over the trawler’s side. One of them, the one they called “Johann,” went first. The second urged her forward with the barrel of his gun.
Feigning submission, she stumbled down the ladder, then stumbled again on the smooth, hard steel of the temporary floating dock below. Johann reached out to steady her…
Her snap kick caught him in the knee, dropping him to the deck and eliciting a yelp of pain. She dashed past him as he crumpled, sprinting for the long, narrow ladder leading up the side of the platform called Bouddica Alpha.
Two steps up, a powerful hand snagged her left ankle and yanked her leg out from under her. She fell heavily, bruisingly against the steps, and as she started to struggle up on trembling arms, the butt of an assault rifle cracked the back of her head.
She tumbled back to the deck, head throbbing, as Johann leaned close, his leer blotting out the sky. “You’ll be sorry for that, Fotze!” The word he’d called her was sexually graphic, a foul vulgarity reducing her from a person to a thing to be used more completely than anything done to her in her captivity so far. She spat in Johann’s face.
“Scheisse!” he howled. “Dirne!”
She tensed and squeezed her eyes shut as he raised his fist…
Murdock bit off a savage obscenity as he watched the drama come to a close on the floating temporary dock four hundred feet away. One of the gunmen, the one she’d kicked, struck Inge twice with his fist before the second man pulled him off of her. Together then, they lifted her between them and half walked, half dragged her up the steps.
God! Why had they brought her here? Presumably they’d been holding her aboard the trawler until they felt it was safe to move her across. Or maybe they were simply getting her beyond the reach of any possible naval commando attack. He followed her through the binoculars as two of the tangos forced her up that long, long, steel-rung stairway.
A few hours ago, he’d been willing to accept the judgment of some military planner in the Pentagon about whether or not to launch an assault in the middle of hostage negotiations. Now he was watching one of those hostages climb that ladder, a woman he knew.
A woman, he realized with a small, almost guilty start, whom he cared for very much. The guilt, he thought, arose from the fact that he shouldn’t allow personal considerations to intrude at this point.
But intrude they did. There was no escaping them.
“We’re going over there to get her, Mac,” he said quietly. “Before the show goes down.”
“Yeah, I thought you might want to do that,” MacKenzie replied. “You sure it’s a good idea?”
Mac’s words were level, calm, and unhurried, not questioning Murdock’s reasoning so much as… forcing him to examine it.
“I know what’s percolating through that thick skull of yours, Mac,” he said. “It’s not what you think.”
“No?”
“They’ve been holding her aboard that trawler. With that… thing that looks like it could be a bomb. If we can get her to tell us what she saw down there…”
“She could help nail it down for us, L-T,” MacKenzie said, taking the binoculars back from Murdock and focusing them on the trawler’s deck. The bomb — if that was what it was — was hanging out over the water now, as the crane operator slowly reeled it higher. “Well, we were going to have to talk to some people over there anyway. Wonder what they’re having for dinner in the mess hall?”
Murdock rolled on his side, drawing his Hush Puppy and checking the action. “How about nine-mike-mike parabellum?” he asked.
“Cordon blam,” Roselli said, grinning.
“Yeah,” Johnson added. “Shot cuisine. I like it.”
They would have to move before it got fully dark.
21
It was still light. Sunset this day, in this part of the North Sea, had been at 2136 hours, and the sky was still suffused with a deep, royal blue light. The moon, which would be just past full tonight, had not yet risen.
Murdock, MacKenzie, and Roselli were making their way across the bridge between Bouddica Bravo and Bouddica Alpha, sticking to the shadows among the bundles of oil and gas pipelines, and avoiding the narrow, partly enclosed catwalk stretched along the top of the span. Ahead of them, the south side of Alpha’s crew habitat module rose like a white cliff before and above them; a series of railed ladders and catwalks zigzagged up the otherwise blank, white-painted wall like a fire escape. At the highest level, a full one hundred feet above the water, a lone terrorist guard paced the fifth-level walkway, his submachine gun slung over his shoulder. Forty feet below the bridge, two more guards maintained watch on the stern of the Celtic Maiden. The unloading operations taking place aboard the Rosa had been completed, at least. The trawler had maneuvered clear of the platform, and the bomb — or whatever it was — hung suspended above the water now, twisting slowly back and forth with the wind about fifty feet above the water, and in plain view of all of the guards.
It was an interesting tactical problem. The SEALs would have no trouble reaching Alpha unobserved. The tangle of pipelines and railings offered plenty of cover for their stealthy crossing. But once they started climbing that fire escape, they would be in plain view of the guard at the top, of the two on the Maiden, and of the two terrorists positioned behind them, on the east side of Bouddica Bravo. There was no way to approach the object suspended beneath the crane at all, not without getting at the crane controls on the upper deck and physically bringing the thing aboard the platform.
There were two possible approaches, once the SEALs reached Alpha. The sneaky-Pete approach would be to move around to the left, vanishing into the forest of tanks, pipelines, and processing machinery that made up the western side of Bouddica Alpha. There were stairways and ladders back there that would get them up to the fifth level and the platforms operations center.
But Murdock was favoring a more open approach.
No matter how stealthy they were, there was always the possibility that by sheer bad luck and the malign intervention of the god Murphy, someone would see them sneaky-Peting their way through the refinery area. But what if they walked up that outside ladder in full view?
The SEALs had shed their dry suits and were wearing the ordinary combat blacks they’d had on beneath the bulky neoprene garments. Over that they wore combat harnesses very similar to the load-bearing vests worn by most of the terrorists. On their heads, they wore black wool watchcaps, again much like the headgear worn by a number of the tangos. Seen in poor light, glimpsed for a second or two, any one of the SEALs would simply be one more man in black among many. Weapons might present a problem; many of the terrorists carried H&K MP5 submachine guns, while the SEALs carried MP5SD3s, the sound-suppressed version of the same weapon, with heavy, cylindrical muzzles as thick as a man’s arm.