Enemy Unidentified (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 3)

by Peter Nealen

  “Uh, Wade?” Tanaka sounded like he was suddenly very reluctant to be anywhere near the corpses.

  “What now, Tanaka?” he asked. But as he lifted his eyes, he suddenly didn’t need to hear Tanaka’s explanation anymore. He could see it with his own two eyes.

  There were wires coming off the fifty-five-gallon drum that the three dead terrorists had been gathered around. And that looked an awful lot like an electrical initiation system on top, with shock tube going down inside the top of the drum.

  “Don’t move,” he said. Contrary to every screaming nerve in his body, he stepped forward, closer to the barrel. I’m dead anyway if this thing is set to go off. May as well make sure.

  To his relief, it didn’t look like everything was entirely set up. The initiation system was there, but there were loose wires, and the remote receiver didn’t look like it was entirely connected.

  “Cover me,” he said shortly. Tanaka moved up next to him, rifle raised and scanning the nearby hatch, up the stairs, and up toward all of the handful of hatches and portholes on the quarterdecks above them that were in view. It was a lot to cover, but Wade had business.

  Slinging his own rifle, he gingerly picked up the remote receiver and pulled the wires out. Then he carefully started dismantling the initiation system, pulling the shock tube out of the igniter and tossing the igniter toward the ocean.

  Finally, though he couldn’t be absolutely sure that he’d gotten everything, he’d torn apart every bit of the initiation system that he could find. There might be a backup down inside the drum, in which case he and Tanaka were probably screwed, but he’d done what he could.

  “Let’s go back,” he said, bringing his rifle back up. “Brannigan needs to know about this.”

  ***

  Brannigan was crouched behind a lifeboat, looking up at the surrounding superstructure. The platform was huge; clearing the entire thing was going to be a long, laborious process, and fraught with risk. Not least for the hostages. But they wouldn’t do the hostages any good by getting shot to pieces rushing it. Not for the first time, he wished he had the kind of resources that he’d had as a MEU commander.

  He briefly thought back to that last op, in East Africa. He’d taken a good chunk of the Ground Combat Element ashore, after sending his Recon teams ahead to clear the air defenses. Three companies of Marines had stormed the terrorist village, secured the hostages, and been out within minutes.

  The Blackhearts were more than competent. There was no doubt about that. And they had a certain, nearly-surgical effectiveness that the bad guys often weren’t expecting. They’d proved it on Khadarkh, and they’d proved it in Burma. But he still wanted a Battalion of Marines to do this job.

  There was a hiss, barely audible through his earplugs, and then Wade was kneeling next to him, having come around the lifeboat’s bow. The big man took a knee beside him, his pale blue eyes still scanning the platform’s superstructure around them.

  “Tanaka and I found three bad guys back by the other stairs,” Wade said without preamble. “They were setting up charges; looked like a fifty-five-gallon oil drum full of explosives. We killed two, and I tore out the initiation system, but there are probably more.”

  Brannigan grimaced. “Probably a lot more,” he agreed. “Hell.” He thought he understood, now, why they’d encountered so little resistance. The enemy must have an escape route, and be planning on drawing them deeper inside, where they could go down with the platform when it blew sky-high, coincidentally creating another disaster on the Gulf Coast. “Carlo!” he hissed. “Roger!”

  Looking a bit like Mutt and Jeff, the squat Santelli and lean, hatchet-faced Hancock hurried over. Brannigan let them wait for a second while the plan formed in his mind.

  “Tell ‘em what you told me, Wade,” he said. He needed a moment.

  Wade repeated his report. Hancock took it in, stony-faced, his dark eyes never still, flicking from danger area to danger area. They were still in a bad spot, tactically speaking, and Hancock knew it. They had a tiny foothold, but they were still holding on by their fingernails. Santelli shook his head and swore under his breath.

  “All right, here’s the plan,” Brannigan said. “Three elements; Carlo, Roger, and I will be element leaders. Carlo and Roger, you’re on bomb-hunting detail. Start on the outside as best you can, and work your way in. Find the charges and disarm them, if you can’t just kill the bomb-layers as you go. I’ll take the third element, head up top, and start looking for the hostages.” He figured that their best bet was going to be the crew quarters. That would be the largest open area on the platform, more than likely.

  “Four men per element,” he said. “Grab your guys and get moving. We don’t have a lot of time. I’ll grab Joe and Vincent.” He looked around. “Aziz!” he snapped. “You’re with me. Let’s go.”

  Aziz might have grimaced, but he couldn’t tell for sure. He also didn’t have the time to worry about it. If the man thought that he could just hunker down on the boat deck and hold security, he was in the wrong job. Without waiting for him, Brannigan got to his feet and drove toward the ladderwell leading up to the helideck.

  ***

  Flint looked up at the noise. He wasn’t entirely sure if he’d heard anything or not; a lot of the platform’s equipment was still running, despite the fact that it wasn’t going to be pumping oil anywhere, and hadn’t been for several days. And with his left ear being not quite up to snuff anymore, he couldn’t be sure. But Scrap and Inmate looked up at the same time, so he figured he probably wasn’t hearing things.

  “What was that?” Inmate asked. Inmate’s portrait could have been in the dictionary under “thug.” His flat face, smashed nose that had clearly been broken repeatedly, small eyes, and distinct lack of a neck went right together with his shaved skull. He wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked, but Flint still didn’t think much of his brains. His Eastern European accent didn’t help Flint’s impression of his mental facilities, either. He just sounded thick.

  “Unless I’m losing my mind,” Flint said, pulling his radio out, “those were gunshots.” He lifted the radio to his lips. “Crash, this is Flint.”

  There was no reply. He repeated the call. His eyes narrowed. Crash was a dumbass, a notch below Inmate, which was why he’d been put on security. Give him a sector to cover and tell him not to budge from it, and he couldn’t screw up too badly. “Crash, Crash, this is Flint.”

  Still nothing. “This is Flint. Anybody got eyes on Crash?” I bet the idiot shot himself.

  But then more shots reverberated faintly through the structure. Maybe not. Even Crash wouldn’t shoot himself a dozen times.

  “This is Gibbet,” the breathless voice over the radio said. “We’ve got boarders. Crash, Carnage, and Viper are down.”

  Flint thought fast, even as he mentally cursed Gibbet for forgetting to specify just where the boarders were. Carnage, Viper, and Gibbet were supposed to be setting charges…down by the southeast lifeboat deck. That was right.

  “Listen up,” he said over the radio. “This is Flint. We have boarders down at the lifeboat decks. Report status on all charges.”

  One by one, the demo teams started checking in. It sounded like only half the bombs were set, and none of the really big ones, the ones that were supposed to go on the wells, were even in position yet.

  Son of a bitch. “I want everybody not currently on an active bomb team to report to the main office, about thirty seconds ago,” he snapped. Snatching up his MDR, he stormed out of the crew quarters and toward the stairs leading up to what had been the platform supervisor’s office. It had become his impromptu command center since they’d taken the Tourmaline-Delta.

  Dingo, Villain, Dogmeat, and Lizard were already there when he arrived, kitted out and ready. Dogmeat, Villain, and Lizard were wearing their Kryptek balaclavas, but Dingo was open-faced. He also looked pissed.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Dingo asked. “I thought your guys were supposed to be on the ball, k
eeping a lookout? It was my team’s down time.”

  Flint almost shot him right then and there. He could have sworn his palm itched as it twitched, ever so slightly, toward his Field Pistol. “I don’t know,” he admitted through clenched teeth. “Maybe they figured we’d spot any vehicles they used to insert, so they swam all fucking night. Your guess is as good as mine. Doesn’t matter.” Chopper and Funnyman ran up the ladderwell from below, Funnyman’s plate carrier still unfastened. Flint did a quick count in his head. That was everybody who wasn’t on explosives detail or dead.

  “We’ve got to buy some time,” he said. “The sub just came to periscope depth and made contact; it’s less than an hour out. We need to contain these guys at least until we can get the rest of the bombs set and fall back to the sub. Once that’s done, they can go up with the platform.”

  “They’ve had at least ten minutes already,” Dingo said. “How the hell are we supposed to contain ‘em?”

  Flint glared at him. “They shouldn’t be too hard to find. Yeah, it’s a big platform, but they only have so many ways up. Head for the ladderwells and start pushing down. I’ll take the west, you take the east. Once you’ve made contact, either barricade and hold ‘em in place, or push ‘em back to the boat decks.” He spat on the deck. “We’ve got plenty of explosives and plenty of ammo. Use your imagination.”

  He looked around at the rest. Funnyman looked bored. Which, knowing him, meant he was really ready to play. He wasn’t called Funnyman for his jokes.

  “If there are no more stupid questions,” Flint snarled, “let’s get moving. We’ve got Mexican heroes to kill.”

  Chapter 12

  Hancock made sure to double-check the charge that Wade had disarmed. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Wade to have rendered the thing as safe as possible; it was just that they hadn’t had eyes on it for some time, and it was entirely possible that some of the bad guys might have come back around and re-rigged it.

  Roger Hancock hadn’t survived multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan by playing around with IEDs.

  Fortunately, it appeared that the barrel bomb hadn’t been touched since Wade and Tanaka had dealt with it. The two corpses were still lying on the deck, the puddles of blood underneath them getting sticky. There were drops spattered around the hatch, too.

  “See?” Tanaka said. “I didn’t miss him.”

  “He’s still breathing, isn’t he?” Wade said coldly. “So you may as well have missed him.”

  Hancock might have said something to Wade, but let it go. Tanaka was one of the big boys now. He had to have a Rhino Liner for a skin. If he couldn’t handle Wade ragging him for missing a kill shot, then he needed to reassess his position with the Blackhearts.

  Of course, in the middle of a mission was probably not quite the best time to do that…

  Gomez was as silent as ever, his M6 covering up the ladderwell. The man never seemed to have a comment about anything. He just watched, listened, and acted.

  Which was fine with Hancock, at that point. Chatter wasn’t what was needed.

  “Let’s make sure they can’t set this thing off in our rear,” Hancock said. “Tanaka, Gomez, hold security. Wade, you and I are gonna roll this drum of boom-boom into the drink.”

  Wade nodded, slinging his rifle around behind his back and cinching it down as Hancock did the same. Together, they put their gloved hands, still damp from the ocean, on the rim of the oil drum, and started to twist.

  It was heavy; there had to be a lot of explosives inside. Hancock took a deep breath, as he and Wade tipped the drum up onto the edge of its lower rim and started to wheel it toward the rail.

  Hancock wasn’t having fun. He was an adrenaline junkie, an extreme-sports guy. But explosives were where he drew the line when it came to thrills. Roger Hancock didn’t like playing with things that went boom. There were too many ways it could go wrong.

  That didn’t include things like grenades, or even breaching charges. Those were just a part of the job. But bombs that somebody else had made, usually somebody hostile? Those gave him the heebie-jeebies.

  He knew that it wasn’t likely that the barrel was going to explode. The initiation system had been ripped out, and the number of explosives in general use that detonated when shot was pretty small. Given the apparent sophistication of their enemy, he doubted that they were using anything that wasn’t already pretty well-known and relatively safe.

  That didn’t make him feel any better. Enemy bombs were enemy bombs, and never to be trusted.

  He and Wade got the drum to the nearest lifeboat and laid it down on its side. The gap in the deck below was designed to allow the lifeboat to drop into the water, and there wasn’t a whole lot of room beside the orange fiberglass craft.

  They’d have to make do.

  Wade held onto the rim and stepped around to one side, while Hancock moved to the other end. Together, they shoved, hard, and the bomb rolled forward, coming to rest against the lifeboat’s hull with a hollow clunk. They didn’t stop, but kept pushing, finning shoes slipping on the deck, straining to shove the bomb hard enough to get through the gap.

  The lifeboat didn’t seem to be moving, but the barrel slipped, then slipped again. Then it went all the way through, disappearing into the blue water below with a splash, as Hancock caught himself on the side of the lifeboat’s hull, reaching out to grab Wade before he could follow the drum into the depths.

  He pulled his rifle back around in front of him, and was about to say something when a flurry of bullets hit the side of the lifeboat.

  Tanaka was returning fire, huddled next to a big, blue-gray box of machinery. More rounds were scoring bright scars in the paint, but Tanaka didn’t even flinch. He was blasting shots back at whoever was engaging them, rapping out fast hammer pairs at someone Hancock couldn’t see. A moment later, Gomez had rolled away from the ladderwell and taken shelter behind the same blue-gray metal box.

  Hancock could have gone to join them. Instead, he headed for the lifeboat’s bow, keeping low and moving around the side instead of trying to pop over the top. Too many amateurs went over the top, where they were easier to target.

  There were at least three of them. And they weren’t exposed; they were shooting around the maze of pipes on the seaward side of the platform, underneath the gigantic tubes that returned seawater to the Gulf after it had been separated from the crude oil coming up the derricks. They were trading shots with Tanaka, but neither they nor he were going to get good hits.

  Hancock, on the other hand, was better set. He could just see enough of one of them, who was easing his rifle and one eye around the corner, to get a shot. He put his red dot on the man’s head and hammered three rounds at him, the dot bouncing ever so slightly with each shot. The head vanished, and the shooting stopped.

  Wade was next to him, cursing steadily under his breath as he searched for a shot. All three of the bad guys had disappeared.

  Wade really can’t stand not getting a share, can he? But Hancock didn’t move immediately. He could never say exactly why, but something about the setup made the hackles rise on the back of his neck. He just knew that rushing in after those three was going to be a bad idea.

  Not for the first time, he wished they had some grenades. Even just some flashbangs. They were extremely useful for this kind of clearing operation.

  “Tanaka, Gomez, move up!” he hissed, just loud enough that he hoped they heard him. The earplugs were causing some communications problems, but he still acknowledged that they had been a good idea. The thunderous echoes rolling back and forth between the steel and concrete surfaces of the platform would have been deafening without them. They were plenty loud even with the earplugs in.

  There wasn’t a lot of maneuvering room. If anything, this platform was worse than the Citadel on Khadarkh. There were only so many places they could go, and a good defender would have most of them covered.

  He just barely saw Tanaka and Gomez halt just short of the corner, Tanaka aimed in
on the corner itself, and Gomez behind him, covering his back. “Moving,” he said to Wade. As he’d expected, Wade was right with him as soon as he started advancing.

  There was another blocky container, or bit of unfathomable machinery, standing on thick steel girders about a story over their heads. The girders hemmed them in, their crisscrossing pattern neither providing a clear way through nor offering much in the way of cover. The alternative was to just boogie around the corner, though, so Hancock moved up next to the thicker, vertical girders, and took a knee.

  “Get ready to pull me back if this turns out to be stupid,” he muttered. Then he dropped down on his side, his rifle in his shoulder, and shoved himself out past the girder, along the deck.

  Sure enough, there they were. He’d apparently hit his target; one of them was a corpse, lying where he’d been dragged by his fellows. The other two were back along the side of the platform about twenty yards, aimed in at the corner.

  They hadn’t been ready for somebody to try to slide out, flat on the deck, though. Their initial fusillade of fire went high, bullets smacking into steel with ringing bangs that echoed and reverberated, showering Hancock with stinging fragments. He returned fire, hammering half a magazine at them, though it wasn’t the best-aimed. He saw one of them crumple with a scream as a bullet shattered his shin, but then Wade was hauling him out of the line of fire, even as the bullets began dropping lower, reaching for his life.

  He was about to protest; there was only one left, but then Gomez yelled an alarm and opened fire on the ladderwell.

  Wade was hauling him to his feet and rushing toward the cover of the blue-gray machinery. Hancock was barely able to get his feet under him, the barrel of his rifle glancing off the girders as he stumbled after Wade. Bullets hammered at the deck near their heads, but Gomez was putting enough fire down that the terrorists up on the ladderwell weren’t able to get a good shot, even from such a short distance away.