“Yes!” Roselli said, clenching his fist and jerking his arm back. “All right!”
“Are we gonna hit them?” Johnson wanted to know.
“Let’s keep a sock on it, people,” MacKenzie said, lowering his binoculars and turning to face the others. But he was grinning. “What’s the story, Jaybird?”
“Okay. They’re gonna want to talk to the L-T to finalize shit.” He looked at his watch, peeling back the Velcro cover. “Thirty-five minutes. Fourteen-hundred hours, our time. But an assault is go. They’re bringing in the rest of Third Platoon to hit the tanker out there, and more SAS to take down Bouddica Alpha. We’re to stay put, but act in support from the Eyrie. And…”
“What?” Murdock asked as Sterling hesitated.
“The station’s radar. They want both of them taken out, just before the show goes down.”
“We don’t have much with us in the way of bang-clay,” MacKenzie said. “What… three kilos?”
“That would be enough to take both radars down,” Murdock decided. Bouddica had two radar towers, visible above the main platform as a pair of slender towers capped by what looked like large, white golf balls — the weather shrouds housing the radar dishes.
“There’s more,” Sterling added.
“What?”
“Any preliminary data we can acquire about the location and nature of the, quote, possible nuclear device, unquote, as well as any information on the location of the hostages and the disposition of tango security elements on any of the targets, including the fishing trawler Rosa… ” Sterling stopped, and drew a deep breath, before proceeding. “Would all be greatly appreciated!”
“Tall order,” Murdock said. He was already considering possible approaches to the main personnel habitat over on Alpha. If they could just slip across the bridge unobserved, at night… “We’ll have to see what we can do about that. When it’s going down?”
“Tonight. Time’s not set yet, but tonight. The British government has been in radio communication with the terrorists. I gather they’ve agreed, at least in principle, to all of the tangos’ demands, though they’re claiming some problems.”
“Delaying tactics,” MacKenzie suggested.
“Sounds like it,” Sterling agreed. “Things like, the UN can’t make an official vote on admitting the PRR until a full session of the General Assembly can be arranged Monday.”
“They bought that?” Roselli asked. “The tangos, I mean?”
“They’re probably more interested in the money transfer,” Murdock suggested. An earlier burst-transmission picked up from MILSTAR had brought the SEALs up to speed on the terrorist demands.
“Probably.”
“What about the prisoner release?” MacKenzie wanted to know.
“The British have promised to release the prisoners,” Sterling said. “One of them, the Korean woman, will be sent out to Bouddica tonight. The terrorists were demanding that she be flown out to the platform by helicopter, but the Brits are pleading that bad weather in the area might pose a danger. So they’re sending her out on the Horizon.”
“Which lets Wentworth get his boys in close when they come in to hand her over,” Murdock said, nodding. “Slick.”
“If they can manage it, the tug will move in close and provide a diversion while SEALs and SBS take down the tanker and the trawler. We’ll hit the facility’s radar so that the main assault force can come in by helo.”
“What about the minisub?” Johnson asked.
“The SAS’ll hit that off the Horizon.”
“Sounds like it’s all covered then,” Roselli said.
“Yeah,” Murdock said. “Except for one little thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Where the hell’s the A-bomb? Sounds like Washington is expecting us to find that out for them.”
Sterling nodded. “I guess they’re working out a set of code words now, Skipper. They’ll discuss that with you when you talk to them later. So we can tell them where the thing is, or even call the whole thing off.”
Roselli laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Which makes it our fault if the thing goes down bad.”
“Shit, Razor,” Murdock said, grinning. “Isn’t that the way it always is?”
“Scars and stars, L-T,” Roselli said, shrugging. An old SEAL saying held that others got the stars — meaning promotion to admiral — while the SEALs faced the actual combat. “It’s always scars and stars… ”
20
Friday, May 4
1920 hours GMT
The North Sea
Eight miles south of the Bouddica Complex
DeWitt released his equipment pack, which fell to the end of its tether with a sharp jerk, then dangled there five meters beneath his feet. Looking up, he checked the canopy of his ram-air chute, making certain that it was fully deployed and hadn’t twisted into a deadly Mae West. Doc Ellsworth, he remembered, had been the victim of a faulty chute deployment over the Balkans; he’d been able to work with his reserve okay, but he’d ended up coming in off course and slammed into a tree.
Incidents like that always tended to make everyone a little more careful afterward.
The wind was blowing from the east at a fairly gentle five knots, which meant that DeWitt and the other jumpers had to quarter slightly into the wind to compensate for drift to the east. This op had been pretty restrictive in what was available for insertion. There weren’t enough minisubs available for eight men, and if they were to reach their objective by IBS, they would have to come from the south or the west to keep from fighting the current… and an approach from the west would take them right under the noses of the tangos on Bouddica.
The current mission plan then, as were so many of them, was a series of compromises forced by available equipment and the lay of the land. The objective was at least in sight now… the long, low, black and white smudge of the tanker Noramo Pride, lying on the horizon just to the right of the tangled gray tower that marked Bouddica.
To DeWitt’s right, just visible as a blue-on-blue patch against the sky, was another chute, he couldn’t tell whose. Seven other SEALs were in the sky all around him, but DeWitt couldn’t see any of them, a fact that was oddly reassuring. If he couldn’t see them at a range of a mile or so, the terrorists on Bouddica and aboard the tanker wouldn’t see them either.
The plan was simple — the best kind when it came to combat. There were fewer things to go wrong, or to screw up, that way. The SEALs had leaped from an Air Force C-130 moments before at an altitude of thirty thousand feet, which put the aircraft easily beyond the range at which it could be seen or heard from the platform. The SEALs, wearing heavy coveralls and jackets against the cold, with oxygen bottles strapped to their sides and connected to the full-helmet masks they wore, had fallen to ten thousand feet before opening their chutes.
It was, in fact, a mix of HAHO and HALO techniques. High Altitude, High Opening approach would have had them pulling the ripcord above 25,000 feet, then literally flying to their target for as much as fifty miles across the open sea. They could damn near have jumped over the east coast of England and flown all the way to Bouddica on the power of the wind alone.
High Altitude, Low Opening gave the jumpers no distance but let them fall almost on top of the target, literally yanking their rip cords at the last possible moment, scant hundreds of feet above the surface.
The compromise, however, had them fall a long way in order to stay off the enemy’s radar. Bouddica had a decent radar setup, both to monitor the ever-changing weather and to watch the steady flow of surface traffic moving through this part of the North Sea. A skilled operator might detect the blips that were approaching parachutists, and while it seemed unlikely that terrorists would have radar experts within their ranks, SEALs only reached old age when they planned for all possibilities and were very, very careful in how they dealt with them.
They would splash into the sea five miles south of Bouddica, where they would home in on a Chemlite stick held by Bro
wn, who’d jumped a few moments before the rest of them in order to serve as pathfinder. Once everyone was down, they would inflate two SEAL IBSs — one of them was part of the heavy bundle dangling beneath DeWitt’s feet — climb aboard, and begin motoring toward the Noramo Pride.
They would deliberately hang back out of sight, however, until 2200 hours, almost half an hour past sunset, when it would be dark enough to approach on the surface of the sea without being easily spotted.
Once they reached the tanker, of course, everything was easy. Just climb the damn thing, neutralize every terrorist aboard, and wait for further orders. Meanwhile, all hell would be breaking loose around them. The anchor tug Horizon would be returning to the area at just about 2200 hours, with the North Korean woman on board. There would be some final negotiations, and then Chun would be handed over to the tangos, just as they’d demanded.
Washington and London had agreed on that one, at least, though DeWitt imagined there’d been some pretty acrimonious infighting over the question at first. But they needed to bring Chun in close, even let her go across to Bouddica, so the terrorists could see her and perhaps believe that the government forces had capitulated; while the exchange was taking place, at precisely 2230 hours, DeWitt’s SEALs would take down the tanker, Murdock and the four men with him would knock out the facility’s radar, and the SAS men aboard Horizon would storm the main platform. A small SBS team, DeWitt had been told, would deal with the trawler Rosa, just in case the A-bomb was hidden in her hold. The final blow would be delivered minutes later, when a flight of British helicopters, ferrying in SAS and GSG9 commandos, would come skimming in out of the west at wave-top height. If Lieutenant Murdock and his people were able to take down Bouddica Alpha’s radar, the helos ought to make it all the way in without being sighted until literally the last moment. More helos would be coming in behind the first wave, these carrying American NEST agents and Navy EOD experts, with the tools and the know-how to disarm a live nuclear warhead.
Simple.
Except that there’d been no time to rehearse this thing, no time even to be sure of the preliminary intelligence. DeWitt had at least been told that most of the intel they’d received had come courtesy of Lieutenant Murdock and the other SEALs in the recon force, which meant it could be trusted as gospel, but there were so many unknowns still. How many tangos were there aboard Bouddica, aboard the Rosa, aboard the Noramo Pride? How alert were they? Could the separate assault teams of SEALs, of British SAS and SBS, of German GSG9 troopers all work smoothly together and coordinate their separate attacks without either giving away the show by jumping the gun or confusing an already confused situation by blundering into each other’s fire zones?
And most vitally important of all, where was the PRR’s atomic bomb?
So vital was that last bit of intelligence that the entire operation had a built-in hold. Lieutenant Murdock and the others were supposed to be looking for the thing, starting at 2200 hours when the tangos would be busy watching the handover of Miss North Korea. Murdock had a satellite uplink; what he put out over the tactical net would be heard by everyone in the assault team. If Murdock could learn the whereabouts of the bomb, all of the teams involved had several alternate and fallback plans to cover various possibilities. The code phrase “snapping turtle” meant to concentrate everything on the freighter, that someone had picked up hard intel that the A-bomb was there. “King cobra” meant the tanker, Noramo Pride. “Copperhead” meant that the attack would go as planned — but immediately, whether or not everyone was in place and ready to go. “Copperhead” would be invoked if one of the OICs on the site — meaning Murdock or Croft on Bouddica, or DeWitt aboard the tanker — discovered the bomb and thought that the assault’s best chance would come from a quick rush now, rather than waiting for the 2230-hour deadline.
The reptilian code word that no one wanted to think about, however, was “crocodile,” transmitted by Murdock or one of his SEALs. Crocodile meant that the SEALs had discovered something about the bomb that made assaulting the platform too damned risky, something like a tango with a dead-man switch, or the bomb placed where it couldn’t be reached and disarmed.
Lieutenant Murdock literally had it in his power to call off this whole damned show, even after things had already started going down.
It was not the sort of responsibility that DeWitt envied in anyone.
1930 hours GMT
OP Eyrie
Bouddica Bravo
“Say… L-T?” MacKenzie had returned to his lookout and was peering once more through his binoculars. He had them focused on the freighter, riding on her mooring several hundred yards off the platform’s east face. “Something happening here. I’m not sure, but this sure as hell could be it.”
Sliding down alongside MacKenzie, Murdock accepted the binoculars from the big Texan.
Murdock too had been thinking hard about the responsibility that had been assigned to him that afternoon. It was, he thought, a typical dodge pulled by the spineless bureaucratic types who so often screwed up a slick, simple mission with impossible add-on requirements — this “crocodile” abort code he’d been given, or worse, the code word “copperhead” that literally meant charge!
Of all the pencil-necked fucking stupidities. Giving that kind of power to a junior officer in an advance OP was begging for trouble. An inexperienced man might panic or chicken out; an overeager one, or one just burned out by combat, could ignore the danger and blunder full ahead… right into a nuclear disaster. It would have made a hell of a lot more sense if the powers-that-were had simply worked up their plan, relied on the SEAL intel to find the bomb or not and then deploy, based on what they’d learned.
Possibly, the brass in both Washington and London had decided there simply wasn’t enough time, that gathering the intel and launching the raid both had to be carried out almost simultaneously. But Murdock didn’t like it, not one small bit.
He tried to push the doubts aside as he concentrated on focusing the binoculars on what Mac was pointing out.
“They’re bringing the Rosa in close again,” he said.
“That’s sure what it looks like to me, Skipper.”
Murdock glanced back over his shoulder. Sterling and Roselli were both out cold, taking their turns at catching some sleep, stretched out on the steel deck with their rucksacks as pillows. He wouldn’t wake them yet… but this could be what they’d been waiting for. He could see tangos on the trawler’s deck, some of them holding coils of line as though they expected to tie up alongside Bouddica Alpha.
Even more significantly, someone was moving one of the cranes mounted on Alpha’s superstructure, swinging it around until its arm was out over the water.
As though they were getting ready to unload something heavy from the ship’s hold.
“What’s your guess, Mac?” Murdock said softly. He handed the binoculars back to the other SEAL.
“About what, L-T?”
“Where’s the damned bomb?”
“Well,” MacKenzie said, drawling the word with an exaggerated Texas accent. “It would have to be in the trawler, in the tanker, or it’s already on the platform somewhere, hauled in on that helicopter. I don’t see any other option. But our satellites would have spotted an unloading operation out of the trawler, for instance, even if they did it at night or under the cloud cover. Right?”
Murdock nodded. “Right so far.”
“But to get it onto the tanker, they’d have had to pull a transfer at sea. That’s a tricky maneuver, even for experienced hands, and I doubt that these guys have that kind of experience. The sea’s been rough the last couple of days, too. Seems risky, for something as heavy as an A-bomb.
“And I don’t think they’d use the helo either. They’d need all the payload for troops for their first assault. And in dirty weather like we’ve been having, well, I just can’t see them trusting an atomic bomb, maybe a one-of-a-kind and very expensive bomb, to the possibility of a crash at sea, or something going wrong w
hen they land their troops. So if it was up to me, I’d have to guess the thing was still on the Rosa.”
“Right. Just what I was thinking. Only now they’re moving the trawler in close to the platform again, and it looks to me like they’re readying the crane. What do you want to bet they’re making the transfer now?”
“Why’d they wait so long? They’ve been here two days.”
Murdock shook his head. “Hard to say.” Then he reconsidered. “No… maybe it’s not so hard to read after all. By now, they’ve gotten word that the Horizon is coming back with the Korean woman on board. These people aren’t stupid. They have to assume at least the possibility that we’re going to try something when the Horizon gets here.”
MacKenzie grinned. “We are.”
“Sure, but they don’t know one way or the other. If they suspect the Special Boat Service people are out, hell, if they know the SEALs are in town, they’re going to be worried about combat swimmers hitting the ships. Up until now, it was safer to keep us guessing about the bomb, maybe keep it squirreled away on the Rosa, out of sight belowdecks. Now they figure it’ll be safer on the platform, easier to defend, at least from frogmen.”
“Sounds logical. What can we do about it?”
“Depends on what they do with the bomb. I’m still wondering about that Korean submarine. If they mean to use it to plant the bomb, they might put it down right alongside, on the Celtic Maiden.”
“That would be a little too easy, don’t you think?” MacKenzie said.
Murdock smiled. “Hey, we can dream, can’t we?”
“Only if we pull a reality check once in a while. Why would they move the thing out of the trawler, which they think is vulnerable to SEALie types, only to plant it on the afterdeck of a tug three feet from the water?”
“Okay, okay, so they’ve got something else in mind. What?”
“Damfino, L-T. But if we watch, maybe we’ll find out.”
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