“Was he interested in that device they pulled out of the ship’s hold with a crane?”
The woman thought for a moment. “I wasn’t really watching, I’m afraid, but I’d have to say yes. He was there on the deck shouting at someone in English to be careful with—”
Confirmation! “Mac! Take him down!”
“Rog.”
“Jaybird! Skeeter!”
“We’re here, L-T.” Sterling’s voice replied.
“Put the word out over the satcom. Copperhead! I say again, Copperhead!”
There was a small, shocked silence. “Affirmative. Copperhead.”
Murdock turned to Inge. “They wouldn’t let you join GSG9, huh?”
“What about it?”
“You may have just saved this platform and everyone on it.”
“Told you, L-T,” Roselli said. “She’s SEAL material.”
Still standing on the rungs that led up the radar tower to the access hatch, MacKenzie unslung his MP5 and took aim at the running figure. He estimated the range to be fifty meters — half the length of a football field.
Submachine guns are brutal, close-range weapons and not designed for sniping, but SEALs were trained to use a wide variety of weapons under every possible set of conditions. Leading Pak slightly, he squeezed the trigger, loosing a three-round burst with a fluttering hiss, but the runner kept moving. MacKenzie adjusted his aim and fired two more bursts, and the runner stumbled, then went down, vanishing behind a tangle of air-conditioning ducts.
MacKenzie would have to get close to make sure the job was done. First, however, he opened up the access panel again and reset the timer, giving himself sixty seconds.
The code word “Copperhead” Murdock had just ordered Sterling and Johnson to transmit meant that the assault would be going down now, not twenty minutes from now.
The cavalry was already on the way in, and those radars had to be taken down first.
“An atomic bomb!” Inge’s eyes were wide. “Mein Gott! That was an atomic bomb they had out there?”
Murdock reached into a pouch and extracted one of the long, curved magazines he carried for his H&K. Bullets gleamed, copper and gold, as he began thumbing them out of the mag and into his hand. Counting out ten rounds, he handed them to Inge, spilling them into her cupped hands. “You know how to reload your magazine?”
She looked up at him and nodded.
“Good. Load up… just in case. I don’t think the bad guys will bother you here. If you hear anything outside that door, though, just get down on the floor behind the bed and stay there.”
“But… ”
“Razor and I have to go. You’ll be safe here.”
Damn it, she didn’t want to be safe! But she knew from Blake’s expression, from the tone of his voice, that he would accept no argument. “Very well… ”
“Good girl. I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”
And then the two SEALs were gone.
Inge stared at the door, the bullets still in her hands. “Like hell I’m going to sit here and wait for you, Herr SEAL!” she muttered after them.
Then she reached for the empty pistol.
Pak lay flat on his belly, his pistol drawn, searching the direction from which the shots must have come.
He’d been hit. One moment he’d been running across the upper deck, and the next he’d felt twin hammer blows against his right leg, one halfway between his knee and his hip, the other just below his knee. The impact had knocked him down, and blood was pooling beneath his leg on the concrete deck. There still wasn’t any pain — not really — but he felt the dizziness and chill of impending shock. From the way his lower leg was twisted, he was sure that it was broken.
Lifting himself on his elbows and using his good leg, he pulled himself forward, the broken limb dragging behind until he could get a better view past the machinery he’d fallen behind. The radar towers. The shots must have come from the radar towers, but he couldn’t see anyone there. No! There was someone, a dark shape climbing down the tower’s side.
Fifty meters. Too far for him to have any hope at all of hitting a man with a handgun, not without an extraordinary stroke of luck.
Pak didn’t believe in luck. The crane’s cab was ten meters ahead.
He kept crawling.
“Colonel!” the pilot called, twisting around in his seat and shouting to make himself heard above the thunder of the rotors. “We just got a flash over the satellite taccom! The word is ‘Copperhead.’ ”
Wentworth’s eyes narrowed, and he jerked his head in a curt, short nod. “Okay. Pass the word to all Falcons. We’re going in!”
Copperhead. The SEALs had located the bomb, and it was aboard the Bouddica complex, vulnerable to a quick dash by the assault force.
Wentworth unholstered his Browning Hi-power and checked the action, before snapping home a loaded magazine. This time he would not be waiting out the op in a command post somewhere.
Outside, beyond the thin metal skin of the big Westland Sea King HC.Mk4, four other Sea Kings of 846 Squadron, an aerial armada configured for commando assault, stretched out in a huge V-formation nearly half a mile across, dipped their noses and accelerated as one toward the northeast. They were twenty-five miles from the objective. At a maximum low-level speed of better than two and a half miles per minute, they would be there in ten minutes.
DeWitt and the other SEALs of SEAL Team Seven had heard the Copperhead call. Six were already aboard the Noramo Pride, with the last two coming up three caving ladders dangling off the stern passageway to port, just under the towering white loom of the ship’s superstructure.
The rendezvous at sea had gone precisely as in training, though the size and strength of North Sea waves had been a lot nastier than they’d been during any training run. As the twilight had deepened, the two small rubber raiders had closed on the titanic ship riding at her moorings a few miles away, slipping along with electric motors that made scarcely more than a purr as they brought the SEALs in close.
Once under the hull, port side aft, Fernandez had tossed a grappling hook up and over a railing thirty-five feet above the water, then swarmed up the line after it, a maneuver practiced and practiced again by all of the SEALs. Moments later, three caving ladders had dropped over the side, and the SEALs of Third Platoon Gold Squad, plus Higgins and Brown from Blue, had been on their way up the side.
Copperhead! That meant the A-bomb wasn’t here, and DeWitt felt a small, almost guilty sense of relief. If there was a screwup and they all died in a nuclear flash in the next few minutes, at least it wouldn’t be his fault!
Bemused by the universal human tendency to place blame somewhere else, even in the face of disaster so absolute that who was at fault mattered not at all, DeWitt waited until the last two SEALs joined the party on the tanker’s fantail. They were almost invisible, in black wet suits, with hoods and gloves, and with faces painted so black that the whites of their eyes were startlingly luminous by comparison.
The ship was quiet, and mostly darkened save for a blaze of lights from the bridge, topside on the superstructure, and forward. Breaking out their weapons and checking them carefully, the SEALs split into two teams. Higgins, Brown, Fernandez, and Kosciuszko started down the portside gangway, moving forward. DeWitt led Holt, Nicholson, and Frazier around the stern of the ship, then forward along the starboard gangway.