by Peter Nealen
And, as much as he hated to think of it, Hart might have kept up in Burma, but he wasn’t in the best of shape. And finning shape was different from running or rucking shape.
He let it go. It was too late to change anything, and this part should be over soon, anyway. They should only have about another five hundred meters to swim.
Jenkins was slowing, coming vertical in the water. Brannigan frowned behind his mask; maybe he was off in his own calculations, but he didn’t think they were that close yet. There wasn’t any sign of the platform’s pilings ahead of them. But Jenkins signaled that he was going to do a tac peek, to check on their position.
Brannigan just nodded, giving him an “Okay.” Jenkins was the one navigating. If he needed to get his bearings, better that he did it, rather than try to gut it out and get them lost.
Slowly, Jenkins rose toward the surface, breaking it just before Brannigan did.
Careful to keep his mask halfway submerged, Brannigan looked around, taking stock. He hadn’t been off. The stacked boxes on stilts of the Tourmaline-Delta platform loomed ahead, less than five hundred meters away. They were right on course, and right about where he’d figured they’d be. Jenkins had just second-guessed himself.
He stared briefly at the back of the other man’s head. He knew how easy it was, underwater, with few landmarks, to get disoriented. He’d just expected the SEAL, of all people, to have been a bit more on the ball.
Jenkins started back down, using the nav board as a paddle to thrust himself under the water. Brannigan followed, ducking beneath the surface to see Bianco behind him, hovering upright in the water, leaning back and holding onto the Budweiser line, pulling down to help them submerge with a minimum of surface ripples.
Jenkins looked back at him, and he just pointed. Let’s go.
The other man nodded, rolled back to the nav board, and started kicking again.
After a few more minutes, the massive steel towers, sitting atop the even more massive storage tanks that the oil platform rested on began to loom out of the water ahead of them. Visibility under the water was definitely shorter than on the surface, but it was still very clear.
The bottom was a long way below them; they weren’t going to be able to swim down and stash their gear. They’d have to either keep the rebreathers on until they could establish a foothold on the platform itself, or drop them and forget about them. Which would mean finding another way off the platform.
As always, Brannigan wasn’t counting on the people who hired them to expend much effort to extract them. He’d been proven wrong in Burma, but it was something that was always a possibility. They were hired guns for a reason.
They were deniable. And “deniable” often meant “expendable.”
After a moment’s deliberation, he decided to take a chance. As they floated near one of the pilings, slowly working their way around toward the boat deck, he unlimbered his M6 and pointed it up. They were going to take their chances surfacing on their rebreathers. He didn’t want to ditch the equipment until he knew they weren’t going to need it.
They did unclip from the Budweiser line and let it fall away, twisting down into the darker waters below them. That was just going to limit them in a way they really didn’t need in a firefight.
Slowly, their weapons held ready, Brannigan’s Blackhearts rose toward the light of the surface.
***
Brannigan, Jenkins, Hancock, and Flanagan surfaced at almost the same time, bringing their weapons up with them, pointed toward the boat deck. The deck itself was empty except for what looked like a couple of orange lifeboats.
Brannigan tilted his M6’s muzzle toward the water and carefully drew back the bolt, breaking the seal and helping the water flow out of the bore. Firing with water in the barrel wouldn’t necessarily be catastrophic, but it didn’t pay to take chances with the weapon you were depending on for your life.
Jenkins had already drained his own, and was treading water, his rifle pointed up at the platform above them, scanning. Brannigan followed suit, even as the rest surfaced, and Flanagan and Hancock dropped their regulators out of their mouths and began to grab hold of the ladder extending down from the boat deck.
***
Joe Flanagan was happy enough to be getting out of the water, even if it involved an awkward clamber under the renewed weight of his soaked gear, trying to keep his fins, which were now looped around his wrists, from getting in the way. He’d always been a competent swimmer—he could never have been a Recon Marine otherwise—but he wasn’t one of those who were always entirely comfortable in the water. He was, in his own words, a “land mammal.”
He and Hancock had picked a spot shadowed by one of the lifeboats; they hadn’t seen any bad guys yet, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. The platform’s superstructure towered eight stories above them, the stairs and framework making a maze of girders that could be hiding a platoon. They didn’t have any information that suggested the bad guys had quite that kind of strength, but at the same time, they didn’t know that they didn’t, either.
There wasn’t enough information about the opposition, period.
Crouched behind the lifeboat, his regulator hanging from its straps beneath his chin, he peered out and around the boat, scanning the gray-and-yellow-painted steel around them. Nothing.
Then a bullet skipped off the top of the lifeboat, less than a foot from his head.
“There’s somebody up there,” he said, as he ducked back and ripped his mask off. He could see better without it.
A moment later, a storm of fire smashed into the boat, bullets hitting the fiberglass with loud thumps, muffled by the saltwater-soaked earplugs he already had in. Both men dropped flat, as Bianco and Childress, who were starting to climb up onto the deck, ducked back down below the lip of the boat deck.
Hancock had shed his own mask, water dripping from his shaved head, and ducked around the lifeboat’s bow, where he cranked off a fast five shots. The incoming fire slackened, and Flanagan turned, leaning back to make sure his muzzle cleared the top of the lifeboat.
He wasn’t entirely sure where the shooter was; he needed to get a better look. He had a general idea, but hadn’t actually seen him. He scanned the superstructure above, his finger hovering near the trigger, his eye just above the small red-dot sight.
There. A figure in some kind of blue-gray camouflage was on one of the landings of the zig-zag stairwell leading up to the heli-deck. Steadying the rifle, pulling it back into his shoulder, Flanagan put the red dot on what he could see of the terrorist shooter, and fired.
Flanagan didn’t have a great deal of faith in the 5.56x45mm NATO round. He’d been in enough firefights where it simply hadn’t done the trick without five to ten rounds that he wasn’t even going to think about only shooting once. Tightly controlling the recoil, he dumped five rounds up at the semi-obscured figure as fast as he could pull the trigger.
Steam puffed from the LWRC’s barrel as the saltwater was boiled off by the shots. The figure vanished.
Flanagan didn’t move from his spot, keeping his rifle pointed and his eyes open. Maybe he’d gotten him, maybe he hadn’t.
Either way, they were definitely made.
There was a lot of splashing and grunting as the rest of the team clambered up onto the boat deck. They had to move quickly.
“I’ve got you,” Bianco said, moving up next to Flanagan and taking up his sector. The enormous, weight-lifting gamer had shed his dive rig and was now wearing just his cammies and chest rig. “Drop your stuff.”
Flanagan didn’t say anything. There was, in his mind, no need. He simply lowered his rifle, unslung it, and put it on the deck while he started to unfasten the Hollis Explorer’s straps, pulling the regulator’s straps over his head. His fins went on the deck, and the rebreather went on top of them. Then he had his rifle in his hands again.
Joe Flanagan didn’t like to talk if he didn’t have to. And the middle of a firefight was pretty much his defini
tion of “talking is unnecessary.”
But the firefight had died away, apparently. The figure he’d shot at hadn’t reappeared, and nobody else had a target. There seemed to have only been one sentry on the boat deck.
That was bound to change.
Brannigan was suddenly there next to them, having dropped his own rebreather. “All right,” he said, just loudly enough to be heard with earplugs in, “Wade and Tanaka have security on the far ladderwell. Let’s move up, finish securing the deck, and get at least a couple of guns high.”
“I’ll go up,” Flanagan said.
“With you,” Bianco answered.
Getting up from a knee, keeping his eyes and his muzzle moving, watching the hatch leading into the superstructure ahead, the ladderwell above, and the handful of portholes in the superstructure across the boat deck, Flanagan started for the base of the steps. Water squelched from his canvas shoes; he would have preferred boots, but the shoes fit the fins better, and held up out of the water better than the neoprene fin booties that he had often used in the Marine Corps.
No more shots sounded as he crossed the boat deck and pivoted, putting his back to the steel wall behind him as he aimed up the stairs. The empty landing was all he saw. He scanned around one more time before starting up the steps, Bianco a half a step behind him.
It was eerie. The bad guys were definitely there, but aside from the first few shots, they weren’t showing themselves. Why not? They’d massacred the Mexican Marines who had tried to assault the platform; what game were they playing now?
He kept climbing, his legs burning a little. It had been a while since he’d been finning, and now he was climbing eight flights of stairs after his leg muscles had had time to cool a little. But he kept his movements smooth, pivoting his muzzle to cover wherever Bianco wasn’t.
The helipad at the top was empty. The helos that the terrorists had used to get out there were long gone. And there didn’t appear to be any lookouts up there, either.
Where was everybody? He was pretty sure they hadn’t bugged out already; otherwise that sentry shouldn’t have shot at them.
And if they weren’t fighting back, what other nasty surprises were they prepping in the bowels of the platform?
Chapter 11
Wade knelt on the deck, silently cursing the diamond texturing that was digging into his knee, dripping saltwater onto the steel and blinking it out of his eyes. I was definitely not made for this amphibious shit. Still, he had to admit that it was something different.
He and Tanaka were barricaded on the corner of a part of the superstructure, watching the catwalk leading back behind it to where their imagery had said there was another stairwell, as well as the second boat deck. He knew that the squids and Marines called them “ladderwells,” but Wade had never used that kind of nautical terminology, and wasn’t about to start. He was a Ranger, not a sailor.
“Hey, Wade?” Tanaka ventured. The younger man was slightly farther out, crouched behind some gray-painted piece of equipment that Wade couldn’t identify. He had a slightly different angle. “Can you see this?”
“Since I don’t know what ‘this’ is, I guess I can’t, can I, Tanaka?” he asked, trying not to roll his eyes. Tanaka was a tough kid; tougher than some of the former special operations guys on the team. But there were times that he really needed to think a little more before he opened his mouth.
Of course, Wade would have to admit that he was an impatient son of a bitch. Something which every other Ranger who’d known him in his twenty years in the Army could attest to.
“I’ve got movement, just around the corner,” Tanaka said, sounding a little chastened. “I can’t see anything that clearly, but there might be somebody back there, by the base of the stairs.”
At least he didn’t say “ladder.”
“Well, I can’t see the stairs at all from here, so no, I can’t see it,” Wade said. Getting to his feet, once again silently cursing the rubbery feeling in his legs that seemed to come from being back on solid…well, a solid surface, if not solid ground, after being in the water for so long, he lifted his rifle to the ready, and started forward.
His move seemed to have surprised Tanaka, who stayed behind cover for a long moment before getting up to follow. He had to remind himself to give the kid some slack; he’d done all right in Burma. Wade bit back the impulse to yell at him to get moving.
He didn’t want to go around that corner by himself, especially not if there were bad guys there. Wade might live for a firefight, but he was as averse to getting his head blown off as the next guy.
He slowed as he neared the corner. He thought he could hear something by then, but couldn’t be sure, past the pulse thumping in his ears, along with the rasp of his own breathing. He almost ripped the earplugs out, but forced himself to leave them in. Surrounded by that much steel, things were gonna get loud.
Tanaka’s own muzzle came into his peripheral vision, and then he moved.
Stepping out carefully, his rifle up and ready, he eased around the corner, the red dot just below his line of sight. The skeletal, gray-painted girders of the stairwell came into view, and then he could see just what Tanaka had been talking about.
A figure moved between the girders, and a voice spoke, pitched low, the words just outside of the threshold where he could understand them, especially with the earplugs in. Lifting his rifle fractionally, he continued moving forward.
There was a yell, immediately followed by a flash and a sharp report. The bullet hit one of the girders around the stairs and ricocheted, flying out over the water with an angry whine. Wade returned fire, snapping two shots back at the muzzle flash while he dove for the nearest cover, which appeared to be the stairway itself. The shots’ concussions rang and reverberated painfully through the structure of the platform.
Tanaka was moving, dashing for the rack where a lifeboat hung above the blue water below, firing quick snap-shots at the enemy as he went. Bullets cracked through the air, reaching for him, but he got to the minimal shelter of the steel rack and threw himself behind it, dumping the rest of his magazine toward the unknown hostiles as fast as he could pull the trigger.
Wade got his feet under him and lunged out, pivoting to bring his own rifle to bear as he came around the corner of the stairs. He could see a little bit through the steel mesh of the steps and the interweaving, zig-zag pattern of the steel supports, but there was just too much crap in the way to get a clear shot.
Three men were crouched near the stairs, all dressed in what looked like Kryptek Poseidon camouflage, with matching chest rigs and gunbelts. Two of them were facing him and Tanaka, their bullpup rifles in their shoulders.
The first one saw Wade at the same time he came around, and was already aiming in. Wade snapped his rifle up, painfully aware that he was off-balance and out of a good shooting stance, and snapped a shot at him.
In that single instant, he was aware of the face of the man facing him, clean-shaven, either Hispanic or deeply tanned, wearing expensive Gator sunglasses, looking at him through a red dot almost identical to his own. The muzzle flash from the bullpup rifle wasn’t bright, not in the sunshine, but he saw just about every detail of it, anyway.
The man in the blue-gray Kryptek missed. Wade didn’t.
His bullet smacked into the man’s shoulder, throwing him to one side as it blew a chunk of meat out of his deltoid with a spatter of blood. The rifle went off-line just long enough for Wade to line up the man’s head, cursing that he’d missed it with the first shot, and blow a good portion of his brains out a quarter-sized hole in the back of his head.
The second man was already down, shaking violently and screaming as he bled out from half a dozen of Tanaka’s bullets. The third had ducked behind the fifty-five-gallon drum behind them, drawing a pistol and firing unaimed shots over the top of the barrel, cussing loudly.
And he was cursing in English. With a noticeably American accent.
What the fuck? Nobody had said anything
about these assholes being Americans. Of course, Wade remembered that nobody really knew anything about them, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. At least no more a surprise than anything else about this op. But it still pissed him off.
Of course, Wade being Wade, he wasn’t going to let it stop him from killing as many of them as he could. Because if there was one thing Wade thought was worthwhile, it was killing assholes, regardless of what kind of assholes they were.
He wasn’t especially outraged that Americans were the assholes this time. Wade had few ideological hangups. To him, there were His Guys, and Everyone Else. And any time some of Everyone Else crossed His Guys, or managed to get on his target deck, then he was fine with killing them dead, regardless of who the hell they were.
He stepped out from the stairway, even as a pistol round hissed passed his head, returning fire with a pair that smacked into the steel wall above the hiding man’s head. He didn’t have a clear shot, but the guy was shooting at him and Tanaka, and that pissed him off.
The pistoleer stopped shooting, and suddenly scrambled away, ducking through a hatch a few feet behind the barrel. Tanaka chased him with a trio of shots, but they smacked into the coaming and the hatch itself. Then the guy was gone.
“Come on, Tanaka,” Wade snapped, as he stepped over to the man he’d killed. “That was maybe a fifteen-yard shot. You should have hit him.”
“You didn’t hit him when you shot at him,” Tanaka replied, getting up and moving forward, his rifle still held at the ready.
Wade kicked the bullpup rifle away from the grasping hands of the man he’d shot in the head. “I wasn’t trying to hit him, I was just trying to get him to stop shooting so that I could move to get a clear shot,” he said. “Different animal.” He looked down at the corpse. “What do we have here?” The guy looked American, all right. And that was a Desert Tech MDR bullpup, or he wasn’t a gun nerd. And if there was one thing Wade liked above and beyond his comics collecting, it was guns.
