by Peter Nealen
He’d gotten about two steps when Childress saw movement up above.
Whipping his rifle to his shoulder, he yelled, “Contact, high!” just before his trigger broke. The LWRC bucked into his shoulder, and the movement vanished. He didn’t know if he’d hit anything.
Then all hell broke loose.
Muzzle flashes were just puffs in the midday sunlight, but bullets were pounding the deck around Santelli, who scrambled backward to get away from both the oncoming fire and the explosives. It was possible that a stray round might set the trap off, or the bad guys might have a remote. Either way, it was a bad idea to stay close to an enemy explosive device in the middle of a firefight.
Childress, Curtis, Jenkins, and Hart all opened fire at the same time, leaning out or moving back to shoot around the big, green-painted steel box they were sheltering behind. They didn’t have much to shoot at; the bad guys were well barricaded and exposing as little of themselves as possible. Between that and the play of sunlight and shadows, especially as the Blackhearts had to squint up into the bright, clear sky, they may as well be next to invisible.
Childress hunkered down behind the steel box as bullets hammered into it, ringing the steel like bells, and dropped an empty mag. This wasn’t good. He wasn’t sure just what these guys were shooting, but it seemed to be hitting harder than the 5.56 rounds in his M6.
Of course, that could just be because they were shooting at him.
They were pinned. There was no way around it. Those assholes up ahead, and above, had a lot of ammo, and they weren’t shy about spending it. If they could get inside the hatch, they might be able to break contact and get around to flank their adversaries, but that damned booby trap was in the way.
“Fuck it,” he barely heard Hart say. Then the amputee was running out onto the walkway, heading straight for the bomb.
“Hart!” Santelli yelled, leaning out and dumping half a mag at the nearest muzzle blast he thought he could see. “Get your ass back here before it gets shot off!”
But Hart wasn’t listening. He slammed up against the pipe where the bomb was affixed, fired a fast five shots toward the shooters on the catwalks up above, even though he probably couldn’t see any of them, then slung his rifle and pulled out his knife.
Childress had to force himself not to stare, and to keep shooting back at their tormentors. He’d known Hart had some issues; he was prone to binge drinking and emotional outbursts. But this was nuts. If Hart just yanked that charge off, and broke the IR laser’s beam in the process, he was going to blow himself—and quite possibly the rest of them—to bits.
But Hart wasn’t quite that crazy. Hunkered down as best as he could get behind the pipe, he started prying carefully at the box’s lid. A few bullets hitting the girders over his head didn’t even make him flinch. He was in the zone, and Childress, between shooting back at the terrorists, hoped it was the right zone.
Getting the lid open, somehow without disturbing the IR sensor attached to it, Hart reached inside with his knife. A moment later, he was pulling a block of explosives, inside a black sheath that had to contain the fragmentation, out of the box. Hugging the explosive block to his chest, he dashed back toward the shelter of the green box.
“Don’t bring that fucking thing back over here!” Curtis yelled, even as Hart ran behind him and into cover. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m not gonna keep it!” Hart yelled back, as he heaved the explosives over the railing to fall toward the Gulf waters below. “What do you think I am, crazy?”
“After that little stunt?” Curtis replied. “Yeah, I do think you’re crazy!”
“Let’s go!” Santelli snapped, leaning out beside the edge of the big metal box. “Get in that hatch! Go!” He opened fire, blasting three or four rounds at each muzzle blast he could see.
Childress took a deep breath, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. There was nothing for it. He leaned out past Santelli, fired a few rounds in the general direction of the enemy, and then ran for it, his head down and his legs pumping.
He hit the wall next to the hatch with bruising impact, and gulped for air. He really, really wished for a flashbang. Because there was no way to disguise the fact that he was about to go through that hatch.
Curtis nearly collided with him, snapped, “With you,” and then they were going through the hatch, Curtis’ rifle only a few inches off to one side of Childress’ upper arm.
The passageway was dark, and apparently empty. No gunfire met them coming in, and no movement drew their own fire. Childress honestly wasn’t sure if he wouldn’t have fired at anything that moved at that point. It was poor fire discipline, but this boarding operation was turning into an absolute nightmare.
Curtis suddenly grabbed him by the straps of his chest rig and hauled him back. Childress saw what the little man had spotted a moment later. There was another box in the hallway, barely ten feet ahead. It was just sitting there against the bulkhead, on the deck. In any other circumstances, it might have been perfectly innocuous. After what they’d just encountered, though, it was almost certainly another bomb.
“How much boom-boom did these fuckers bring?” Curtis hissed, even as Hart and Jenkins piled in through the hatch behind them. Santelli was last, barricading on the hatchway.
“What’s the holdup?” Santelli asked, breathing hard. There was a lot of power in that stubby, slightly round frame of his, but he wasn’t built for speed, and they all knew it.
“Another IED,” Childress reported.
“I’ve got it,” Hart said, pushing past him and Curtis. “Just make sure nobody pops out to shoot me.”
“Dude, when did you become a demo expert?” Childress asked. He’d known Hart by reputation in the Corps, though really only after he’d lost his leg.
“I’ve got a farm, full disability, quite a bit of money put away, and a lot of spare time,” Hart said, as he knelt by the box. “I might have spent some of that time building bombs just for the hell of it.”
Childress was about to say something, then just shrugged. He’d done the same thing, from time to time.
This time, it took Hart less time. The bomb was set up along the same lines as the last one, and he got the box open, stripped out the initiation system, and then carefully pulled out the explosive block. “What do we want to do with these?” he asked. “Because I don’t really want to go running back out there to toss it.”
“Just set it away from the box and do what you can to wreck the initiation system,” Santelli ordered. “And make it snappy; we don’t have a lot of time.”
Fortunately, the initiation system appeared to be exclusively keyed to the garage door opener. Hart stomped on the fragile electronic components with his good foot, and then unslung his rifle and pointed it down the hallway. “Set,” he said.
“Good, let’s move,” Santelli said. “And watch your fire; Roger’s element might be in here with us.”
***
“What are we gonna do with that thing?” Tanaka asked. The four of them were frozen where they were, all too conscious of the proximity of both the barrel bomb and the booby trap. “I can’t even see the explosives.”
“Maybe it’s linked to the barrel bomb,” Wade suggested.
“Maybe,” Hancock said. “Or maybe there’s a claymore just out of sight, zip-tied to the rail.”
“We don’t exactly have a lot of time to debate the matter,” Wade pointed out.
Hancock looked up and around, even as Tanaka pointed out that getting blown to smithereens was going to kind of defeat the purpose of moving quickly. There wasn’t a hatch between them and the booby trap, as he’d expected. The enemy wasn’t going to give them that easy an escape route, and even if they had, he’d be suspicious that there would be another trap inside. It was what he’d do.
“Does anyone think they can detach the sensor and keep it on the beam across to the rail?” he asked.
“Hell no,” Wade replied. “I can’t even get my garage door t
o close right without fiddling with the damned thing half a dozen times. I’d dip just far enough out of true without even knowing it that we’d probably never feel it. At least I wouldn’t.”
“What if we shot it?” Tanaka suggested.
“Supposing you’re a good enough shot, that could just break the beam and blow the charge,” Wade pointed out.
Gomez abruptly turned around, leaving his sector on the corner for a second, craned his neck out, then looked back around the corner. “Come on,” he said. “On me.”
Hancock didn’t know what was in Gomez’ head, but figured he’d probably spotted something. “With you,” he said, falling in behind the dark, quiet man.
Gomez didn’t take his eyes off his sector, but as soon as he knew that Hancock was behind him, he was moving, pushing back around the corner toward the ladderwell. A head appeared, two landings up, and Gomez’ rifle snapped up and barked. The head jerked and disappeared.
Then he was flowing into the hatch just outside of the ladderwell, Hancock right behind him and to his left, both muzzles entering the passageway at almost the same time.
The passageway was dark and empty. There also didn’t appear to be any booby traps in it. Hancock started to understand Gomez’ thinking, though he figured it was probably still pretty likely that the enemy had defensive devices scattered all around the big bombs.
Then he remembered that the bomb that had been set up on the boat deck hadn’t been so defended. So, maybe they had a chance. Of course, the terrorists hadn’t had a chance to finish arming that one; it might have been one of the last charges set. If that was the case, they were in trouble.
Gomez stopped dead, peering into the dim interior, that seemed even darker after the glare of sunshine on the water outside. He held up a hand to halt, motioned for the rest to stay where they were, then crept forward soundlessly.
Hancock was impressed at Gomez’ stealth. The man could give both of the team’s designated woodsmen, Flanagan and Childress, a run for their money. His shoes rolled soundlessly on the deck, making hardly a sound.
Gomez moved about fifty feet ahead, keeping his rifle up and scanning every opening he passed, no matter how small. Hancock was about ready to go after him, before he got ambushed, when he stopped again and knelt. He studied something in front of him for a second, then crossed himself and bent down.
He fiddled with something in the shadows for a minute, then rose and ran back toward them. “Way’s clear,” he announced. “It needed a power supply.” He tossed a battery pack out the hatch.
“That was risky,” Hancock said.
Gomez just shrugged. “We had to get through. Either it worked, or it didn’t.”
“You’ve got more faith than I do, brother man,” Hancock said. “Let’s go.”
***
Flanagan all but leapt over Aziz’ and Brannigan’s fallen bodies. He definitely stepped on Brannigan’s leg, but pushed off as he swiveled to bring his rifle to bear, acutely aware that he was about to die. There was a beaten zone of fire through the hatch, and he was running right into the middle of it. But they were committed, had been committed as soon as Aziz had crossed the threshold, and to hesitate at that point meant to die. So he attacked instead.
A bullet burned past his ear with a painful crack, even as he opened fire, stitching five rounds from the blue-gray camouflaged figure’s upper chest into his head. Or at least, that was what he intended to do. He was moving fast enough, and unsteadily enough, thanks to stepping on Brannigan’s leg, that only the first two bullets hit; the other three went high and smacked into the overhead.
Then Bianco was through behind him, blasting a second man off his feet with a flurry of shots that were so fast they sounded like Bianco was shooting one of his beloved machineguns, rather than a semi-auto rifle.
Flanagan was already committed to his lunge, and couldn’t quite stop himself. He dropped on his side on the deck, keeping his rifle up, and pumped three more bullets into the man he’d already shot. The guy had staggered, but was still on his feet, his bullpup rifle tracking toward Flanagan’s head. The weapon fell from nerveless hands as Flanagan and Bianco both put bullets through his skull, the rounds crisscrossing through his brainstem to blow bloody chunks out of the back of his head. He fell to the deck like a puppet with its strings cut.
Those two had been the only ones in the room, which otherwise looked like a bunkroom, fitted out for four people. Two stacks of bunks, a small sink, and an even smaller head took up a good deal of the space.
Aching from his impact with the deck, Flanagan levered himself back up, still keeping his rifle trained on the two fallen terrorists. But Bianco moved quickly to check the one he’d shot first. The man was dead, one eye staring sightlessly at the overhead, blood running from his ruined throat and a hole just beneath his other eye, which was bulged out and staring at the bulkhead.
“On the door,” Flanagan rasped. Bianco didn’t need to hear it twice, but barricaded himself on the hatch, covering down the passageway. Flanagan slung his rifle and started hauling the two fallen Blackhearts inside.
Brannigan was still breathing. That was a relief. He was unconscious, and bleeding freely from a head wound, but a brief examination showed Flanagan that it hadn’t gone through; it had been a glancing hit that had just knocked him out.
The bloody holes in his leg and chest were another matter.
Getting Brannigan’s bulk inside the hatch, he looked over at Aziz. Their former interpreter and designated pain-in-the-ass was still alive, but it didn’t look like he would be for much longer. He was shaking, bloody froth at his mouth, and he was audibly choking on his own blood. He’d been hit at least three times through the vitals; it was a miracle one of the bullets hadn’t blown his heart out of his back.
Flanagan might not like Aziz, but he wasn’t going to leave a teammate to die in a hatchway, not if he could help it. He left Brannigan on the deck and moved to Aziz.
He’d just grabbed the other man’s vest and started to pull when it happened. Aziz shuddered, then went very, very still. Flanagan thought he felt a sudden chill in the air, even though it was sweltering on the Gulf Coast.
Aziz was gone.
He hauled the body back inside anyway, then turned to Brannigan.
The hole in the Colonel’s leg wasn’t spurting blood, so it probably wasn’t an arterial bleed, but he ripped a tourniquet out of Brannigan’s kit and threw it around the leg anyway. As soon as it was cinched down, he pulled Brannigan’s chest rig over his head, tore open his camouflage blouse, and looked for the bullet hole in his chest.
It was low down, and off to one side, and the exit wound was, thankfully, not far away. It might not have gone through his guts. It was high enough, though, between navel and clavicle, that he ripped a pair of chest seals out of the Colonel’s first aid kit and slapped the adhesive dressings over both holes. Only then did he take the time to carefully wind some gauze and an ACE wrap around the bleeding head wound.
There was no way they were diving out now, not with Brannigan a casualty. And with just him and Bianco still in the fight, their element wasn’t going anywhere.
The fate of the platform, and the hostages, was going to have to depend on the other two elements. And neither one was necessarily looking for hostages; they were looking for bombs.
They hadn’t used the radios much, so far. They didn’t have headsets for the little black Motorolas, for one thing, and none of them had been sure how far they’d reach through the structure. But Flanagan pulled his out of its waterproof pouch, stuffed into his chest rig.
“Surfer, this is Woodsrunner,” he called. “Kodiak and Professor are down. Kodiak is alive, but Professor’s dead. Nerd and I are strongpointed just below the helipad. Need support.”
He let off the push-to-talk button, staying on a knee next to Brannigan, his rifle pointed toward the hatch, one hand on the pistol grip. He glanced down at their big commander. He was still out, but still breathing, and didn’t seem
to be choking on his tongue. He was just bleeding a whole lot.
Flanagan was starting to wonder if any of them were going to get off the Tourmaline-Delta platform alive.
Chapter 14
Hancock couldn’t hear Flanagan’s radio call. There was too much steel on the platform for the radios to reach very far. So he, Wade, Tanaka, and Gomez continued to push deeper into the structure, hunting terrorists and bombs.
The deeper they got into the bowels of the platform, the fewer traps they found. There were more barrel bombs, though, all of them placed near machinery or electronics. The entire platform appeared to be wired to blow. However they had initially boarded the platform, the terrorists had brought a lot with them.
They moved carefully, systematically, even as haste gnawed at them. Maybe not at Gomez, Hancock thought, even as he glanced at the dark man’s impassive face. Gomez was the model of taciturn focus, alert and ready to kill, efficiently and emotionlessly.
Wade paused at another hatch, waiting just a moment as Tanaka moved up behind him and Gomez covered down the passage they were following. Hancock took up the rear.
True dynamic entries had become impossible. There had been too many booby traps. To simply flow into a room was asking to trip an improvised claymore and get them all shredded by flying ball bearings.
So, Wade paused longer than usual at the hatch, scanning the coaming for tripwires, pressure plates, or more of the glorified garage door openers. So far, the IR lasers and sensors had been the only initiation systems they’d found, which made disarming the traps a bit more difficult. You could always cut a tripwire.
The hatch appeared clear, so Wade stepped through, pivoting through the opening to cover the near corner with his weapon, while Tanaka followed half a step behind. Hancock turned as he felt them move, and flowed in behind them, tapping Gomez with an elbow as he went.
