Enemy Unidentified (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 3)

by Peter Nealen

  They were in a large engine room, lined with diesels, most of them idling. The power was still on, but the well machinery wasn’t operating, so the engine room wasn’t at full capacity. Hancock suddenly wondered just what sort of imminent catastrophe was in the offing, just from failing to maintain the equipment for the last few days.

  They hadn’t seen any of the crew so far, or the hostages. Which didn’t bode well for either group.

  A quick scan confirmed the worst. There were more bombs set up near each engine. They’d turn the engine room into a nightmare of fire and flying metal in a heartbeat.

  “Where the hell did all this crap come from?” Tanaka hissed.

  “I’m betting that most of the drums are full of crude,” Wade replied. “With just enough PETN or whatever dropped in to make it go boom.” He looked at Tanaka with an icy smile. “It’s what I’d do. Why pack in more explosives, when there should be plenty of raw materials on-site?”

  “Let’s get to it,” Hancock said. “Hopefully before some asshole pushes a button somewhere and we all go boom.”

  With Tanaka and Gomez providing security, Hancock and Wade started at the nearest engine. They were getting it down to a science. Yank the shock tube out of the black plastic box that had to be the timer/detonator, then pull it out of the barrel, making sure to separate it from the blasting caps. It was careful, nerve-wracking work. None of them were Explosives Ordnance Disposal techs, and Hancock could almost hear his EOD friends losing their minds over the slapdash, ham-fisted way they were disarming the bombs. By all rights, they should all have been blown to pieces already.

  He glanced down inside the hole in the top of the drum as he pulled gingerly on the shock tube. It looked like Wade had been right; two blocks of explosive were floating in what looked like a slurry of crude oil and something else. Possibly something they’d dumped in to act as a plasticizer.

  Hancock’s mind was working, even as he focused on trying not to explode. So far, the bombs had been set to sow a lot of fire and destruction, but nothing truly catastrophic. They’d been apparently placed to cause maximum casualties among an attacking force, but these were placed to put the rig out of action. Which led him to wonder just what else they were going to find, deeper in.

  He came to the last bomb on the last diesel. He looked up at Wade as he finished up, hoping that they weren’t just wasting their time, that the terrorists hadn’t wired the bombs with backup initiation systems inside the barrels that would detonate them anyway.

  “We’ve got to think,” he said. All three of the other Blackhearts were close enough to hear; they’d been moving together along the engine room as he and Wade had worked. There was still no sign of anyone else around. No opposition, no crew, no hostages. “If they’re setting up to destroy the rig, this isn’t going to be the big one. They’d do a lot of damage by destroying this room, but I doubt it would necessarily destroy the whole platform.”

  Wade shook his head. “It might, once the fire took hold. But I think you’re right. The wells themselves are going to be the prime targets.”

  Gomez was nodding, without taking his eyes or his muzzle off the nearest hatch. “That’s how the big ones usually start,” he said. “Like the Deepwater Horizon.”

  “So, we make for the wells?” Tanaka asked. He sounded a little nervous at the idea of driving straight toward the center of the platform, bypassing the spaces in between. There were a lot of ambush sites in a structure that size. Charging through and bypassing adjacent spaces was a good way to get shot in the back.

  “I don’t think we’ve got any choice,” Hancock said. He wasn’t any more thrilled with it than Tanaka; he might be a bit of an adrenaline junkie, but that didn’t mean he had no sense of self-preservation. “If we can head off the main threat, then we can start clearing more methodically, without worrying about getting turned in to pink mist.”

  “Except by the booby traps,” Wade pointed out.

  “Yes, thank you for the reminder, Wade,” Hancock said sarcastically. “I’m sure we all needed it.” He looked around the room, then glanced out at the passageway. “Where the hell are all the bad guys?”

  “Maybe we killed enough of them that they only have enough left to guard the hostages,” Tanaka suggested.

  “Maybe,” Hancock mused, unconvinced. “Well, guns up and heads on a swivel. Let’s go.”

  With Gomez in the lead, the four of them rolled out of the engine room and turned inward, toward the center of the platform and the massive oil derricks that dominated it.

  ***

  Santelli was getting pissed. They’d encountered three more of the improvised claymores affixed to the bulkheads on their way inside, and it was giving him flashbacks to the roads in Iraq. He was pretty sure these assholes weren’t Islamic terrorists; they were too sophisticated, and hadn’t made any of the usual pronouncements. But they’d certainly learned from them. And that pissed him off even more.

  The truth was that terror is terror, and a lot of the tools and techniques have never been unique to Islamists. Santelli even knew that. But he was a simple man, and when he got mad, the nearest parallels sufficed to his way of thinking. These murdering bastards were using the same techniques as the jihadi terrorists who had tried to kill him and his boys in Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore they had to have gotten the same ideas from the same jihadi assholes.

  He and his element had made it to the far side of the tower of living and control spaces just short of the twin oil derricks that formed the basis of the Tourmaline-Delta platform, and had just gone up another level. Most of the lower spaces had been devoted to machinery and storage; this level seemed to be the same.

  Childress and Curtis were on point; positions in their little formation were constantly changing and shifting as they worked their way through the structure. None of them were particularly married to a spot in the stack; they all had enough training that they could move around from task to task seamlessly. Granted, they hadn’t trained all that much together, but there was enough commonality of experience and training to make up for that shortfall.

  Childress moved quickly to a corner, paused, and then popped around it as Curtis moved up next to him. A moment later, he reared back as a long burst of automatic fire hammered the bulkhead past him.

  “Barricade,” he announced, barely audible over the thunder of the gunfire and bullet impacts in the confined space. “Looks like a bunch of barrels set up with a shooter behind them, firing through a loophole.”

  Santelli had to hand it to Childress; he’d gotten a pretty good look and cataloged it in his head in the split-second he’d been exposed. The kid could seem like a bit of a yokel, the kind of simple-minded trigger-puller often found in the infantry, but he had a good head on his shoulders and a keen eye.

  He looked around at their surroundings. They were at a T-intersection of sorts; there was another hatch, that might be partially open, across from them, and then there was the passage around the corner where the barricade was set up.

  “I can run the rabbit, maybe get in that hatch,” Jenkins suggested. “Then somebody nail him when he tries to shoot me.”

  “The rabbit gets shot trying that, more often than not,” Hart said.

  “I don’t see another option,” Jenkins replied defensively, looking back at the big, bearded amputee. Hart’s bushy brown beard was still dripping, partially from seawater, partially from sweat.

  “Of course there’s another option,” Curtis said. “We go up a level and come down behind these shitheads.”

  Jenkins looked nonplused for a moment; he apparently hadn’t thought of that. Santelli kept his own pugnacious face impassive; he hadn’t either.

  “All right, back to the ladderwell,” he said. “And let’s make it snappy, before these punks figure out what we’re doing.”

  With Hart taking the lead, since he’d been covering their six, they started retracing their steps. Hart popped out onto the landing first, his rifle trained upward, whi
le Santelli followed, covering the lower landing, just in case the terrorists had circled around.

  Both ways were clear. Hart started up, while Santelli held his place, letting the rest of the stack flow past him to climb to the next level. Only when Childress murmured, “Last man,” did Santelli abandon his post and fall in behind.

  Hart got to the next landing up and pointed his muzzle at the hatch. Jenkins was about to open the hatch when it swung inward on its own.

  Two men in blue-gray camouflage, wearing skull balaclavas and carrying bullpup rifles, were right in the hatchway.

  Hart didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger as soon as the first silhouette registered in his mind. The M6 barked, muzzle blast almost close enough to punch a ragged hole in the terrorist’s magazine pouches.

  But Hart’s reflexes weren’t quite what they had been. And they were definitely slower than the terrorists’. Both rifles hammered at each other from a couple of feet away, seemingly right at the same time. But the terrorist was slightly faster.

  Hart staggered backward, blood spouting from his shoulder, even as the terrorist staggered. Then Jenkins put a hammer pair into each terrorists’ head from less than three feet, his own muzzle blast scorching and tearing even as the bullets tracked through their skulls, punching bloody holes out through their balaclavas. He kept shooting even as they tumbled to the deck, tracking them all the way down and putting two more bullets apiece into their ruined heads.

  Curtis had shouldered in front of Hart and shoved the hatch the rest of the way open, driving inside the passageway over the pair of corpses. Santelli took a hand off his rifle to grab Hart, and propelled the wounded man inside with him. They had to get out of the fatal funnel of that hatchway, not to mention the exposed landing, with its gridded steel mesh in the place of solid decking. Once they had hardpointed, he could see about treating Hart’s wounds.

  Provided he survived. At that range, it seemed impossible that the terrorist could have missed putting a bullet through the man’s vitals.

  Jenkins and Curtis were driving ahead, Childress taking up the rear as Santelli moved Hart along. The big man hadn’t said anything, and seemed to be in some shock. His arm was awash in blood, but that was all Santelli could tell right at the moment.

  Curtis drove to the nearest hatch, holding on it until Jenkins was right behind him, ready to go in. Driving the hatch open, they plunged inside. Santelli, his rifle up, followed with Hart in tow. It was less than ideal to go through a door with a casualty, but he didn’t want to hang out in the deathtrap of a passageway, either. The room was potentially safer, anyway.

  He almost forgot about Hart as he cleared the threshold and entered the room.

  There were no terrorists inside. Jenkins and Curtis had nothing to shoot. Which was why nobody objected to the fact that Jenkins had his rifle dangling by its sling as he puked his guts out on the deck.

  The room was a big one; it had once been a rec room or meeting room. The walls had been white, with beige leather couches, a TV, a row of phones, and several vending machines.

  The walls were spattered with dried blood, and the couches were black with it. Where they weren’t covered by rapidly decomposing corpses.

  It was hard to pick out individual bodies; the dead had been piled together in the middle of the room after they’d been gunned down. Some were wearing the orange coveralls and hard hats of oil rig workers. Others were in suits or business casual. Or what was left of it.

  From the stench, and the state of several of the bodies he could see, it was pretty clear to Santelli that this mass murder had happened several days ago.

  Possibly even before the Mexican Marines had first tried to assault the platform.

  Feeling his own gorge rise, Santelli tried to hold his breath. “Everybody out,” he gasped. He wasn’t going to try to treat Hart in there. Hopefully they could find a different strongpoint before the man bled to death. Hell, he’d take his chances in the passageway.

  They didn’t so much flow out as stagger out of the hatch and into the hall. Only long-ingrained discipline drove them toward the next hatch, weapons ready, hoping they weren’t about to stumble into a similar charnel house as the one they’d just left.

  The clinical part of Santelli’s mind was pretty sure they wouldn’t. He hadn’t had time to make a count, but he was pretty sure that all the people they were there to rescue were lying dead and rotting in that break room.

  Childress stacked on the next door, Curtis joined him, and they went in. The rest followed, still choking, still smelling the sick stink of death in their nostrils, even though the next room was the dining hall, apparently untouched by the violence across the hall.

  That stench wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. Santelli knew he’d wake up smelling it for weeks hence. Maybe even years.

  He had already compartmentalized the horror, putting it aside as he turned to Hart, who was looking pale and shaky. He quickly moved the man to a table, pulling out his knife and cutting away his cammies around the wound in his shoulder.

  It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, either. The bullet had just missed the clavicle and torn through most of the deltoid, punching out the far side. Hart’s chest cavity seemed to be intact, and his artery hadn’t been touched. There was just a lot of blood, and a good-sized chunk of meat missing.

  He quickly checked Hart over for any other holes or bleeds, pulling his chest rig clear and getting under his camouflage blouse. “You’re a lucky bastard, Hart,” he said. “Your arm’s gonna be fucked up for a while, but you don’t seem to have any fatal holes in you.” The terrorist must have just mashed the trigger as soon as he’d seen Hart, while his rifle was still off-line.

  Of course, he’d seen enough to know that Hart had done the same. It had taken him a bit longer to register that there was an enemy in front of him. He’d just gotten lucky, in that his rifle had been on target when he’d done it.

  That was going to have to be addressed. Tanaka and Hancock hadn’t mentioned finding Hart falling-down drunk, but Santelli had seen enough when they’d shown up to suspect it. If the booze was slowing the big man down too much, he was going to have to get cut away.

  Provided they survived and got off the platform.

  He had a moment to take stock, even as he packed the entry and exit wounds with gauze and wrapped a bandage tightly around Hart’s shoulder. The man was still ambulatory, and could even still shoot. His support hand would be stiff, with the bandage in place, and it would hurt, but he could fight. At least, Santelli hoped that he could. He peered into Hart’s eyes, bleary and glazed with pain and shock.

  “Hart,” he said, lightly clapping the man on the cheek. “You with me? You good? I need you all here, buddy.”

  Hart blinked, flexed his shoulder, winced, and picked up his rifle. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yeah, I’m good.”

  Santelli was skeptical. But they couldn’t afford to take him out of the fight, not in the situation they were in. He looked around at the rest. Jenkins, Curtis, and Childress were all posted up on the doorways, holding security on the passageway beyond.

  “All right, plan’s changed,” he said. “Clearly, this is no longer a rescue mission. The hostages are dead, and apparently have been since before we boarded this thing. So, it is now a retribution mission. I want these miserable, murdering fucks dead, and I want ‘em all dead.”

  “How the hell are we going to hunt them all down?” Childress asked. “There are only a few of us, and it’s a big platform.”

  “We head up top, see if we can link up with Brannigan, and start to clear it from top to bottom, one compartment at a time,” Santelli bit out. “Unless they’ve got a boat down below, which I didn’t see, they’ve got no way off this thing. It’s us or the sharks.”

  He hauled Hart to his feet. “Tac reload if you have to. Time to move.”

  ***

  Flanagan checked Brannigan’s tourniquet and bandages for what felt like the fifteenth
time in the last few minutes. Bianco was still on the door, but hadn’t seen anything. They had heard the distant thunder of gunfire reverberating through the structure, but there had been no other sign of either the terrorists or any of the other Blackhearts.

  “Surfer, this is Woodsrunner,” he tried again.

  “I don’t think they can hear us, man,” Bianco said.

  Before Flanagan could answer, Brannigan groaned. Bianco’s head twitched to look over at him, but he corrected himself and stayed trained on the doorway.

  “Don’t try to move, Boss,” Flanagan said. “You got hit pretty bad.”

  Brannigan opened his eyes, but they were glazed and not quite focusing. “Where am I?” he asked thickly.

  “You’re in a room just inside the top level of the Tourmaline-Delta platform,” Flanagan answered. “Do you remember how we got here?”

  Brannigan, despite Flanagan’s warning, shoved himself up on an elbow, then groaned again, his face going gray with pain. “Yeah,” he whispered, his eyes shut tight. “I remember everything up to getting a bat to the head.”

  “You were lucky,” Flanagan told him. “It creased your scalp, but it doesn’t look like it cracked your skull. You’ve got a through-and-through just below your ribs, though; I don’t know how bad it is.”

  Brannigan slowly opened his eyes again and squinted down at his leg and the tourniquet cinched down just below his pelvis. Then he sagged back against the deck. “Guess I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.” He looked over at the still form lying just inside the hatch. “What about Aziz?”

  “He’s gone, Boss,” Bianco said quietly.

  “I was afraid of that,” Brannigan said, closing his eyes again. He just breathed slowly for a long moment. “What’s our status?”

  “I can’t get either of the other elements on the radio,” Flanagan answered. “But we’re pretty much stuck here.”