He suspected that she knew something about the American SEALs and their interest in the PRR, and he was determined to find out what it was. Unfortunately, they were running out of time. If the enemy was going to try something, their plan, their deployment must already be in motion, and though something so obvious was unlikely, it was still distinctly possible that an assault had been timed to correspond with the arrival of the workboat bearing Major Pak’s comrade. It was for that reason that he’d given the order to go ahead and remove the bomb from the Rosa. It had been Pak’s suggestion that they suspend it high in the air above the water where no one could reach it unobserved.
“Go ahead, Johann,” he said, still probing. “Have fun. Just don’t damage her too seriously, at least not until I have a chance to get my answers.”
He was watching her eyes carefully as he said the words, watching for a reaction. Had her nostrils flared slightly? Hard to tell. Perhaps she really was in shock… or simply in a deep, psychological withdrawal. He snorted. Obviously, the girl was psychologically soft, with no tolerance for pain at all. Breaking her would not take long.
But first, he had to see to Chun’s arrival… and to make certain his men were ready, just in case this was a diversion of some sort for an assault. “Do what you want with her,” he said, reaching for the door.
Johann grinned unpleasantly. “It will be my very great pleasure, Herr Adler.”
Adler had known Johann Schneider since the two of them had worked together in the Stasi. He never had liked the man.
He enjoyed his work too much, and that could make a man get sloppy.
Clomping noisily up the last few rungs of the ladder, Murdock mounted the top catwalk and turned to face the guard. The man was leaning against the walkway railing, casually lighting a cigarette… despite the prominent NO SMOKING sign posted on the wall nearby.
Idiot. The terrorists were as likely to destroy Bouddica through stupidity or carelessness as they were by triggering their bomb.
Murdock suspected — judging from the mix of Irish Provo and German RAF terrorists so far identified — that not all of them knew one another that well. In fact, he was counting on that. As he walked toward the guard, the man flicked the glowing tip from his cigarette, glanced incuriously over his shoulder directly at Murdock and the other SEALs, then looked away again.
Silently, Murdock and MacKenzie exchanged hand signals, and then Mac turned and vanished down the catwalk around the building’s southwest corner. He would take out Bouddica’s radar facilities while Roselli and Murdock looked for intel.
Murdock stopped at the door through which they’d taken Inge a few minutes ago. He glanced in through the small, square window; the door opened into a small foyer with another door beyond, with no one visible inside. He tried the knob; it opened. Keeping a cautious eye on the guard’s back, he held the door open for Razor, who casually walked through and into the foyer beyond.
As Roselli pushed open the inner door, however, Inge — it was unmistakably Inge, and much closer now — screamed again, a raw-throated wail that could only have been wrenched from her by some terrible pain. The guard turned at the sound, and from three yards away, his hard, pale blue eyes locked with Murdock’s.
A half-smile played at the man’s lips, “Laute Tussi, ” he said. Murdock’s few words of German weren’t up to translating, but it didn’t sound pleasant.
But translation was the last thing Murdock had to worry about. Almost as he said the words, the German terrorist’s eyes narrowed suddenly, and the half-smile vanished. Murdock could read the realization in those eyes that the man standing before him was a stranger. Widening, the eyes dropped to Murdock’s load-bearing vest… the radio strapped to his left shoulder… the Kevlar pouch bulging with flash bangs on his right hip… the thousand other tiny details of equipment and manufacture that separated the SEAL from the terrorist…
… and the man was already pulling his submachine gun up to the firing position…
22
The tango guard was still fumbling with his slung weapon, his mouth opening to give a shout of warning, when Murdock took a half-step forward, then slammed the stiffened knuckles of his right hand squarely into the man’s Adam’s apple. With a tiny crunch, the guard’s trachea collapsed, and the shout turned into a fish-like gasping for air, the lit cigarette popping from the mouth and sailing away with the wind. Murdock’s follow-through brought his elbow snapping back into his temple. The guard sagged and Murdock caught him; a step and a shift of balance, and the terrorist went backward over the railing, falling silently one hundred feet into the dark gray water below.
“No smoking!” Murdock called softly after him. The sound of the splash was lost in the wind, but an instant later, someone yelled from far below, on the after deck of the Celtic Maiden, “Man overboard! Man overboard!”
“Achtung!” another voice cried from four levels below. “Mann über Bord!”
Murdock glanced around. No one else in sight. He ducked through the door. With a bit of luck, the guard’s fall could be attributed to an accident.
But the SEALs couldn’t ride on luck alone for long.
The two guards stationed on Bouddica Bravo had not been paying any particular attention to the three black shapes making their way up the outside of the other platform to the north. In fact, for the past hour their chief concern seemed to be simply to stay warm, so they’d been hunkered down out of the wind, sharing cigarettes and what looked like a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Smoking… on an oil platform. Watching from his hiding place among the pipes and fittings twenty feet away, Johnson had been wondering if he should suggest shooting those guys simply to keep them from blowing the facility sky high with a lit match — never mind their nuke — but the gunfire posed as much risk or more. Better to let them go…
… until, at just exactly the wrong moment, one of them stood up, stretched prodigiously, and glanced across the open gulf toward Bouddica Alpha just in time to see one black-clad figure tip another over the railing on the fifth-level catwalk.
“Hey, Georgie,” the man said with a thick, Irish lilt, reaching down and shaking his partner’s shoulder. “We got us a problem!”
Georgie was already reaching for the walkie-talkie, which rested on a coiled length of cable nearby.
Johnson locked eyes with Sterling, who was in a second hiding place a few feet to the left, and exchanged nods. Together, as though run by the same computer program, they raised their S&W Hush Puppies, Johnson drawing down on the man on the right, while Sterling aimed at the one on the left. Sterling called the time, a whispered countdown so soft it was more felt than heard. “And three and two and one…”
Both Hush Puppies spoke simultaneously, their muzzle flashes and the crack of the shots alike swallowed by the heavy muzzles of the sound suppressors. The reports were two closely paired triplets of shots, the thump of each report louder than the hiss of silenced pistols in movies, but still too soft to be heard more than a few meters away, especially above the rush of wind and waves. Johnson’s man was just picking up the radio when the first 9mm round slammed through the side of his head. He was probably dead before the second and third shots tore out his throat… or before the radio smashed loudly on the deck. Sterling’s man was just turning toward the SEALs — he might have seen something moving in the shadows — and then his face puckered with a savage impact, followed swiftly by two more.