The bus was a Swimmer Delivery Vehicle, an SDV in military-speak. Standard equipment for the Navy SEAL teams, it was nonetheless an awkward compromise between politics and practicality — a compromise that more often than not was practicality ignored for political considerations.
The submarine navy had lobbied long and hard — and with complete success — to keep the Navy SEALs from appropriating money for submarines of any kind. Yet the SEAL Teams needed a vehicle that could travel underwater and undetected to its target, carrying the commandos and all their gear. They needed a vehicle that could travel hundreds of miles, so that the process of getting the thing launched wasn’t under observation by the enemy, and they needed one small enough that it could be transported by air anywhere in the world at virtually a moment’s notice. SEALs were trained to insert into an enemy area in many ways — by HAHO and HALO parachute drops, by helicopter, by the ubiquitous SEAL IBS. But SDV insertions theoretically gave the SEALs a covert insertion shared by none of the other services, one that they should have been able to use to supreme advantage.
And would have, had it not been for the infighting over the proper definition of a submarine, and over who got to use them.
As a result of the infighting, the SEALs were not allowed to acquire any dry submarines at all, meaning enclosed boats sealed against the sea that would allow their passengers to travel in relative safety and comfort for the hundreds of miles usually necessary in this sort of a deployment.
SEALs had to ride in boats that, while enclosed for streamlining purposes, were filled with seawater, their passengers and drivers breathing off life-support tanks stowed behind the bulkheads. Every minute in the water — especially in cold water — sapped a man’s strength and endurance, even when he was wearing a supposedly cold-proof dry suit, which meant that the time spent traveling to the objective had to be counted against his overall dive endurance time.
It was, Johnson reflected, a perfect example of the ancient adage learned by every recruit in boot camp: There were just three ways of doing anything in the Navy — the right way, the wrong way, and the Navy way.
As Johnson steered the SDV left, angling out of the Horizon’s wake, the little vessel lurched hard, rolling momentarily to starboard.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” Johnson said into his face mask mike, “and thank you for flying with SDV airways. We will be traveling today at an altitude of minus forty feet, so please make sure your cigarettes are extinguished, your seat belts are fastened, and your seat backs are in their full upright position… ”
“Just watch those barrel rolls over the runway,” Murdock’s voice came back. “Listen, Skeeter. How’s it look up at your end? You think you can find the thing without going active?”
“Hey, just sit back and relax,” Johnson quipped, shifting metaphors by mimicking an old bus commercial, “and leave the driving to us.”
His heart was hammering, his hands inside the gloves covering them were sweating. He’d never been this keyed up in his life, and he wasn’t sure whether the emotion was from excitement or stark terror.
Navigation — naviguessing, as Murdock had called it before they’d embarked — was an almost mystical blend of sixthsense awareness and pure luck. Since it was assumed that terrorists sophisticated enough to own an atomic bomb would also be sophisticated enough to rig some sort of simple hydrophone arrangement so that they could listen for the ping of an approaching sonar, the SEALs would be restricted to passive sonar for their approach.
Active sonar, using bursts of sound, “pinging,” like underwater radar to pinpoint objects such as ships or oil-rig platforms, was far better for undersea navigation, but it carried the risk of being detected by the target and alerting the enemy that a submarine was in the area. Passive sonar was strictly listening and therefore safely covert; hydrophones aboard the SDV could pick up the sounds other vessels in the water made. The problem was there was a lot of traffic in the North Sea, and the surrounding water was filled with eerie clanks, thumps, whirrs, and the churning throb of engines and screws.
In particular, the nearby screw sounds made by the Horizon just ahead drowned out nearly every other sound in the area, and Johnson had to listen hard over his headset to try to pick out the more distant noises. A small screen on the console in front of Johnson’s face gave a graphic representation of those sounds, what submariners referred to as the “waterfall” because of its appearance, like falling sheets of colored water. Most of the display was the jagged pulse of the Horizon’s powerful twin screws… but there was another element beyond the screw noise, a rhythmic clanking, that probably was coming either from the Bouddica complex or from the tanker moored nearby.
The current flowed southwest to northeast, coming up out of the English Channel at about three knots, and Johnson welcomed the added boost it gave him from astern, just like a tail wind for an aircraft.
At five knots, however, even adding in the assist from the following current, it would take the SEAL SDV well over half an hour to traverse five miles — longer when you added in the extra time required for maneuvering.
It gave Johnson a lot of time to think about what could go wrong.
All things considered, he thought, it was miraculous how fast things had come together when the plan depended on the cooperation of the men on the front lines instead of the REMFs who normally made the decisions. The way Johnson had heard it, the British SAS colonel had cleared the whole thing with his superiors, right down to arranging for the tow from the oil-field supply tug. The plan called for him to take the SDV up close to the pilings supporting Bouddica Bravo and park it there. While Horizon—with a hidden contingent of SAS commandos — moved in close and opened negotiations with the terrorists, the SEALs would climb the pilings, taking advantage of the distraction offered by the Horizon to make their move without being seen. Normally, such an operation would have been carried out under the cover of darkness, but Murdock had made the decision to go in during the daytime for two important reasons.
First and foremost was the time… or the lack of it. According to their intelligence briefing, the bad guys had set a deadline of 1200 hours Saturday for the last of their demands to be met. The sooner the SEALs could get aboard and find a convenient perch for an OP, the better. Horizon’s presence was important too, if for no other reason than that the tug was needed to tow the SDV close enough to the objective to make this operation possible. Having the tug approach at night, however, would definitely make the opposition twitchy, and more alert to the possibility of approaching combat swimmers.
And finally there was the simple and quite practical matter of finding the place. Right now, at a depth of forty feet, there was just barely enough light to see out to a range of perhaps ten or twenty meters. The Bouddica complex was enormous, almost a thousand feet long from one end to the other, counting both platforms and the bridge between them… but the sea transformed even the largest oil platform into a speck lost in emptiness. At night, the speck became harder still to find, especially if the SDV couldn’t use lights for fear of being spotted from the surface. Since they didn’t dare go active with their sonar to spot the thing, while passive sonar was notoriously imprecise, it was possible that they could spend hours aimlessly circling about, passing within a few yards of the objective and unable to see it in the darkness.
Not that it was a piece of cake pulling this stunt off in daylight. The murk ahead played tricks on the eyes, with the wavering shafts of sunlight from the surface creating the illusion of large and solid structures. As Johnson increased the angle of separation between the SDV and the Horizon, he began trying to pick up that rhythmic clanking he’d heard earlier. He was also keeping his eye glued to the compass bubble on his console. The Horizon had been lined up perfectly with Bouddica before the sub’s release. By watching his compass heading, his clock, and his speed, he could hold a mental image of the platform’s direction as the SDV changed course. Bouddica was — should be—that way.
He hoped. He glanced at his console clock. Though the exact timing was the subject of considerable guesswork — their speed through the water couldn’t take into account the speed of the water itself, and that could vary quite a bit with depth or position — it had been almost fifty minutes since their release from the Horizon… enough time, perhaps, to have missed the objective entirely.
He continued to listen for that intermittent clanking sound that had been, if not a certain guide, then at least a reassuring confirmation. It still seemed to be coming from more or less dead ahead. There were other sounds to contend with as well: the whirr and chug of some sort of equipment, probably a generator; the sharp, sudden, and unrepeated bursts of sound known to sonar operators as transients… caused by such unpredictable events as someone jumping off a ladder onto a steel deck, or dropping a heavy tool; and finally, the welcome throb of Horizon’s engines, backed down now to a gentle purr and interspersed with occasional blasts that sounded like steam hissing from a vent. That meant that the tug had come as close to Bouddica as the tangos allowed; her engines were running, and the sharp hisses were bursts from her fore- and aftmaneuvering thrusters. She was station-keeping and, in the process, providing a rough beacon for the SDV while SAS Captain Croft negotiated with the tangos.
Horizon’s engine sounds were well off to the right now and starting to pass astern. That suggested that he might not have passed the oil platform yet, but it must be getting damned close.
The operation was like a colossal, high-tech game of blind-man’s buff. And the stakes of this game…
Johnson didn’t want to even think about that.
And just when he’d begun assuming that the SDV must have missed the objective, that he would have to circle around and try another pass, the gray-lit backdrop of the water ahead seemed to take on a faintly more solid feel, a tenuous something that gradually formed a spiderweb of wavering shadows against shadows that was nonetheless more substantial than the light-shaft phantoms he’d been watching earlier. Banking slightly to the left, Johnson slowed the SDV’s forward motion to a crawl and steered for the apparition, which slowly solidified into a dark framework of struts and pilings, descending out of the silvery light of the surface and plunging into the black emptiness below. The bus was scant yards from the nearest of the pilings before any detail at all was visible, a dark and muddy-looking encrustation of algae, barnacles, and muck adhering to the surface of a vertical post four feet thick.
“End of the line back there,” Johnson said into his face mask mike. “We’re coming up on Bravo.”
“Good naviguessing, Skeeter,” Murdock’s voice said in his earphones. “Bang on the money.”
The skipper’s praise warmed him.
For the first time since he’d been transferred to SEAL Seven, Johnson felt like he belonged.
18
Thursday, May 3
1755 hours
The North Sea
Bouddica Bravo
Carefully, moving slowly and with great precision in almost total darkness, Murdock switched on his rebreather rig, checked the gas flow, then unhooked his umbilical from the SDV’s life support. MacKenzie had the side door open. Murdock waited as Roselli squeezed through the opening and into the water outside. Sterling followed, and then it was Murdock’s turn.
After the claustrophobia of the SDV’s interior over the past five hours, the freedom of movement outside was sheer heaven. Swimming was not quite as easy out here as it might have been otherwise, for the SEALs had abandoned their usual swim fins for rubber-soled, dry-suit boots, the better to scramble about on the oil rig topside without having to worry about carrying extra footgear. They were further burdened by the waterproof gear bags, which were secured by nylon straps to their load-bearing vests.
At a depth of forty feet, the ocean’s swell was mostly well over their heads, but they could still feel the mighty surge of water moving above them. Together, the four swimmers used lines to secure the delivery vehicle to a cross beam on the submerged platform alongside, working carefully in the murky light to avoid mistakes. Once the SDV was secure, Murdock moved close to the cockpit and signaled Johnson with an upraised thumb. Johnson responded the same way, then cracked his hatch. Normally, the bus driver would wait with the bus, but there was no telling how long the SEAL team would be here. The SDV had a strictly limited battery life; in fact, the only alternative was for Johnson to turn around after dropping the other SEALs off and head back out to sea for a rendezvous with the Horizon or another tug like her somewhere out of sight of the objective.
And if the SEALs needed to extract in a hurry, he wouldn’t be there to pick them up.
Not that extraction was a particularly important aspect of this recon, Murdock thought with an uncharacteristic stab of pessimism. This one was for all the marbles, and if the SEALs or the SAS or anybody else along the way screwed up, well, it wouldn’t be a particularly bad way to go, not from ground — or rather from water — zero. A sudden, heaven-searing flash, and you’d be incinerated before your nerve endings could transmit the sensation of pain to your brain.
The nightmare would be reserved for all of those thousands of people on the fringe of the effects, the ones having to deal with radioactive rain or soot from the North Sea oil fires, for the fishermen and roughnecks and workboat crews swamped by the radioactive base surge, for the kids made sick by contaminated milk and grain and livestock ashore.
Murdock was ready to risk that blinding, instant flash for himself — if it gave him a fighting chance of avoiding that slower, more agonizing death for all of those thousands of civilians.
He just hoped to hell that his assessment of the tangos’ mentality, tossed off in a casual conversation last night in the Golden Cock, was accurate. If these people were psychopathic nut-cases instead of dedicated political terrorists, then all bets were off. Hell, even if his guess about the bastards was right, the sight of SEALs clambering around on Bouddica Bravo would make whoever was holding the firing button damned nervous.
And nervous men made mistakes.
Johnson pulled himself free of the SDV’s cockpit, and Murdock clapped him on the shoulder, giving him an OK sign of approval. The newbie had performed well, in a dangerous and difficult assignment. The entire operation could have been doomed had he missed the bearing of the oil complex by even a single degree. Murdock waited as Johnson retrieved his own waterproof bundle of weapons and gear. Then, together, the five men pushed away from the moored SDV and began swimming into the forest of struts and supports beneath Bouddica Bravo.
They’d decided to approach the complex from the smaller Bravo platform for several reasons. Perhaps most important, Alpha was supported above the waves by four massive steel-and-concrete pylons, each many meters thick and all narrower at the water than they were at their tops. Climbing those structures at all would be next to impossible; climbing them unseen would be more difficult still.
Bravo, on the other hand, was a more conventional oil-rig platform, built on a structure like the gantry crane surrounding a rocket about to be launched. The rocket, in this case, was the drilling rig itself, which extended down through the center of the platform and was completely surrounded by the supports. The underwater portions of the structure had to be serviced periodically by BGA divers; there were handholds and an access hatch to the rig’s main deck, the pylons themselves offered lots of handholds — assuming you could climb like a monkey — and a man could almost certainly make his way all the way from the water’s surface to the well deck proper without being seen from any other part of the complex.
The terrorists, most of them anyway, those who hadn’t remained on board the Noramo Pride, would be on Alpha, up in the operations center and in the east-side living quarters complex. They might be terrorists, but they weren’t fools. It was cold outside, and except for a few routine guards taking turns out in the brisk, North Sea wind, most would be inside where it was warm.
Up… up… up. Murdock could feel the water gro
wing rougher, in powerful, mountain-sized surges. With his equipment load and no fins, the uphill swim swiftly became a small torture. His weight belt had been set for neutral buoyancy at twenty feet; halfway to the surface, it became harder to keep moving up, harder to support the drag of all of the weight he was carrying. He moved himself along up the cross struts, hand over gloved hand. All the way up, he watched for other movements within the pylon forest. Though unlikely, it was not impossible that the terrorists’ first string of defense included a pair or two of frogmen of their own.
Murdock broke the surface first, clinging with one hand to a steel cross brace as he pushed his mask back with the other. The cold of the water was so raw it hurt, biting into the skin of his exposed face like a knife. The air temperature was in the high forties; the water itself must be a whisker or two above freezing. Back in Virginia Beach they were having a heat wave on the heels of an early spring. And here he was, worrying about major exposure…
Carefully, Murdock took a long, hard look around. This, arguably, was the most dangerous moment. If the opposition was alert, if the guards were ignoring the potential threat posed by the Horizon and were watching the surface of the water close to the derrick pilings, then the SEAL recon was doomed before it had properly begun. Nothing… no sign of life anywhere. Bouddica Alpha’s lowest work deck stretched like a raftered ceiling forty or more feet overhead, while the pilings rose about him like the trunks of fantastic, otherworldly trees. Sterling’s head broke the surface with an oily ripple a few feet away… and beyond him, MacKenzie, Roselli, and Johnson.
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