They met their first tango coming aft, his M-16 slung over his shoulder, his right hand in his trouser pocket. DeWitt shot him with a sound-suppressed burst through the chest and throat, then with Nicholson’s help, tossed the body over the side.
The outside ladder leading up to the pilothouse was there.
He signaled his men to hurry.
MacKenzie dropped to the deck below the radar tower, then glanced at his watch. It would have been nice to have been able to take care of the other radar… but he had to make sure of the man he’d put down first. H&K at the ready, he scanned the labyrinth of machinery in front of him, selecting a route that would put him between the target and the crane.
A shout sounded from the left, followed by the clatter of boots on cement. Men were spilling onto the facility’s roof from the open doorway, and in one sudden twist of events, MacKenzie had gone from being the hunter to the hunted.
Could he pass himself off as one of the tangos? Another shout, followed an instant later by a burst of automatic fire, answered that question with a decisive no. Either he had no business being up here in the first place, or some sort of security plan was in operation that identified him as an enemy. Bullets shrieked off the cement nearby; others punched through the thin metal of the air conditioning ducts with the sound of hammers striking sheet tin.
MacKenzie dropped and rolled as the shots, wildly aimed, snapped over his head. He came up with his MP5 pressed stock-to-shoulder, squeezing off two three-round bursts in rapid-fire succession. One tango threw out his arms, pitched backward, and sprawled face up on the deck; a second clutched his belly and crumpled into a ball, rolling heels over head as he fell. MacKenzie found cover behind a massive blower head as four more tangos spread out to right and left, trying to flank him.
Suddenly, things weren’t looking good at all.
According to Inge, Adler, the PRR leader, had told Johann he was going up to Ops after getting a phone call. The enemy’s defense of the installation would probably be directed from there in any case, and this was a splendid opportunity to catch a number of the PRR force’s leaders in one place.
So Murdock wanted to hit Ops fast, before the SAS/GSG9 helos arrived. He knew that the installation rose like a futuristic afterthought above the rest of the quarters module and overlooked the helipad. He told Sterling what he planned to do, and then he and Roselli had raced off down the passageway toward a central, interior stairwell that led up one more level to Ops.
At the top of the stairs, a fire-door opened onto a long passageway that ran along the center’s west wall. South were storage rooms and a door leading out onto the main upper deck; north were the entrances to the helipad and to Ops.
Murdock and Roselli came through the door one after the other, Murdock rolling to the left while Roselli took the right, weapons already at their shoulders. A tango was jogging toward the door as Murdock burst into the corridor, obligingly sliding across the tops of his sights just as he clamped down on the trigger.
The sound-suppressed MP5 made a noise like flags cracking in the wind and the terrorist twisted right, slammed into a wall, then collapsed at the same moment that Roselli’s MP5 went into action at Murdock’s back. “We’re in Corridor One,” Murdock announced over the tactical net. He glanced back over his shoulder to confirm Roselli’s kill. “Two bad guys down. Moving to Ops.”
His words, transmitted over the open satellite network, would keep listeners in Dorset and in the Pentagon informed of exactly what was happening. Gunfire sounded, unsuppressed but muffled, outside the walls of the building.
They ignored it. Together, the two SEALs dashed for the door leading to the Operations Center.
24
MacKenzie’s plastic explosive bomb detonated with a sharp bang that blasted the service access panel off and sent it fluttering off over the sea. The report took some of the heat off MacKenzie too, for the terrorists trying to flank him suddenly ducked for cover and opened fire, blazing away at the radar tower.
The distraction was enough for MacKenzie to rise from cover and open fire himself — not at the PRR terrorists who were scattered across half of the quarters module’s roof — but at the large white shroud covering the second radar dish. Snapping his select-fire lever to full auto, he emptied the rest of his magazine at the target, watching bits and tatters of the plastic cover flying away under the caress of the steady stream of 9mm bullets.
His weapon clicked empty and he dropped to cover again, dropping the dry magazine and slapping home a fresh one. Rising again, he emptied another twenty rounds at the radar, until the tango gunmen started throwing shots his way once more; sometimes, the subtlety of carefully prepared and packaged explosive charges had to give way to the sheer, brute force of full-auto fire.
Sure that he’d shredded that radar dish enough to take it off the air as effectively as the first, MacKenzie dropped to his belly and started crawling. The tangos were closing on him fast now from two directions, and he wanted to reach the crane before they did.
Heinrich Adler looked left and right, panic gibbering like a looming black beast somewhere in the back of his mind. Pak! Where was Pak? The Korean must have dashed out, but Adler hadn’t seen him go.
He didn’t trust Pak, never had trusted him completely. The man was unpredictable… even dangerous.
The operations center had huge, slanted windows fronting on three sides of the long, east-facing room. The north windows overlooked the helipad, where the Lynx in its Royal Dutch Navy livery still rested. East there was only water, and the dark shapes, almost invisible now in the rapidly deepening twilight, of the Noramo Pride, the Rosa, and the Horizon.
South was a view of Bouddica Bravo and the bridge connecting it with the main platform. The yellow-painted arm of the crane extended past the window, the atomic bomb suspended in space some eighty feet below the level of the windows.
He could hear the chatter of automatic weapons fire outside and knew the enemy commandos were storming the facility. An instant ago, both radars had gone down, first one, then, seconds later, the other, and he’d known that the end was in sight.
“Sir!” Strauss yelled, fear visible in his eyes and in his stance. “Sir, what do we do?”
Adler yanked back the slide on his Austrian-made Glock automatic pistol. What should they do? He stared for a moment at the two hostages, sitting together at the control center console, and his wild gaze and the way he was holding the weapon must have convinced them that he was about to shoot them both.
“No!” the man shouted, standing and putting himself between Adler and the young woman. “Don’t do it!”
“Ruhe!” Adler snapped, his English forgotten for the moment. “Halte die Klappe!”
Turning, he raced down the long room to the south window, where he could peer back at the elevated cab of the crane. Despite the near-darkness, he could see enough by the light off the flare stack to make out a solitary figure in civilian clothing raising himself painfully to the ladder that led up toward the open cab.