Some of the women techs screamed, but Eve stood her ground — her mouth open, her eyes wide.
Defloria shoved Mitchell away and bolted, but before he got five feet Wyner raised his weapon and fired two silenced shots, blowing the back of the InterOil manager’s skull apart and sending him to the deck.
“All right!” DeCamp shouted. “Calm down! No one else needs to be hurt.”
“You mean to kill us all,” Eve said when her people finally quieted down.
“Not necessary,” DeCamp said, and he motioned toward the open pipe locker. “If you will be so kind as to step inside, we’ll lock you away for a bit, and you’ll be out of the way and absolutely safe.”
SIXTY-TWO
Gail reached the shadows behind one of the massive impeller cable tripods just as Eve and her postdocs and techs were herded into one of the pipe lockers about fifty feet away and the doors secured with a pry bar.
She’d been gone not much more than five minutes from the time she’d heard the incoming helicopter and slipped away from the party until now, and Defloria and Don Price both were lying dead on the deck, obviously shot in the head with powerful weapons. Silenced weapons, because up in the delivery control room where she’d gone to send the Mayday, she hadn’t heard a thing. All she’d been concentrating on at that moment were the facts that Lapides and one of his crew were dead and the radios destroyed.
Mac had been right again, just as he had been right about an imminent attack. They’d apparently taken on one or more ringers from Biloxi. And when DeCamp’s signal came they’d swept through the rig killing people. Maybe even Mac.
The slightly built man giving orders was DeCamp, the same man she’d seen in the second-floor corridor at Hutchinson Island. Although she couldn’t hear his voice or see his eyes this time, she could tell he was the same man from the way he held himself, his self-assured manner, his apparent indifference. Nor could she clearly hear what he was saying, but she knew that he was issuing orders.
Watching them she felt more alone than she had ever felt, except the night she’d learned that her father had been shot to death. She had to assume the worst-case scenario now, that Mac was down and she was on her own. There were six of them, including DeCamp and possibly an additional one or more somewhere aboard, killing the rest of the construction and delivery crew, including Herb Stefanato who’d been at the party with Defloria.
She didn’t think it was likely for her to take all of them out or even save the rig from destruction, but she figured they would be elsewhere engaged setting their explosives so that she would have a shot at getting Eve Larsen and her people out of the storage locker and into one of the automatic lifeboats and launch them into the sea.
DeCamp said something to his operators, two of whom immediately headed over to the outside stairs that led up to the helipad, while the others went with him to the main corridor hatch that led in one direction to the science control room and in the other across to the living quarters.
All that was left were the two bodies, the party table, the constant noise of the boat whistles and horns, and the pipe locker. Since her father’s death and especially since what she considered were her failures at Hutchinson Island, Gail had come out here with the selfish motive of proving herself to Mac. It was important because the only other man she’d ever loved had been shot to death in downtown Minneapolis by a street bum, and she didn’t want to lose Mac or disappoint him.
She waited a full two minutes after DeCamp and his operators were gone, then cocked the hammer of her SIG and stepped out of the shadows, hesitated just a moment longer to make sure no one had been left behind, then hurried across to the pipe locker. She could hear murmurs from inside, like pigeons in a hutch, and she leaned in close.
“Dr. Larsen, it’s me.”
The murmurs stopped and Eve was right there on the other side of the door. “Can you get us out of here?”
The broad muzzle of a suppressor tube touched the side of Gail’s face and she started to bring her pistol up.
“No need to die here, Ms. Newby,” Kabatov said. “Not now, not like this.”
She was seething with anger. She’d let this happen. She’d walked right into it as if she’d been wearing a blindfold. Again she hadn’t trusted her instincts that had been singing the tune loud and clear: DeCamp was a professional who hardly ever made mistakes. Price had been a traitor, so he would have informed DeCamp about Mac and about her. And setting the trap, which she’d walked into, had been child’s play.
“Decock your weapon and raise it over your shoulder, handle first.”
She’d been trained to suddenly move her head a couple of inches to the right, bat the muzzle of Kabatov’s weapon to the left while firing her pistol over her shoulder into the man’s face. But he was a pro and she didn’t know if she had the luck.
So she did as she was told, her disappointment in herself raging as deeply and strongly as the grindingly heavy chip she’d been carrying on her shoulder for as long as she could remember.
“Bastard,” she said.
Kabatov laughed and stepped back. “Pull the pry bar out and step inside, I’m sure you’ll have plenty to talk about.”
Gail turned to look at him, his face flat, his lips thick, a five o’clock shadow darkening his already swarthy features. He was a pit bull ready and willing to tear her throat out with the slightest provocation, and she shuddered inwardly.
She pulled the pry bar out of the latch, a momentary urge to hit him in the face with it, instead she handed it to him, opened the door, and stepped inside.
Eve and the others had backed away, and for just a moment seeing who it was they lit up, but then they spotted Kabatov and the door was closed, plunging them into near-total darkness, the only light coming through the seams at the corners.
“Where’s McGarvey?” Eve demanded.
Gail was certain that Kabatov was still listening. “I think he’s dead,” she said for his benefit.
“Christ,” Eve said.
And in that one word Gail found that she had genuine pity for the woman because she knew for certain that Eve was in love with Mac. Probably head over heels, judging by her despair. An even if they got out of this, both of them would end up disappointed.
They heard something rattle into the latch, and Gail knew that it wasn’t the pry bar. It was a padlock. She put her ear to the door in time to hear footfalls moving away, and then nothing except the boat horns and the normal machinery sounds of the platform’s various systems.
“Anyone got a flashlight?” she asked.
“On my key ring,” someone said.
“Won’t he see it through the cracks?” Eve asked.
“He’s gone,” Gail said.
A thin beam of light suddenly came on, enough so they at least could see each other. Eve and her techs and postdocs were frightened half out of their skulls.
“Is it true that Kirk is dead?” Eve asked. “Or did you just tell us that for his benefit in case he was listening?”
“I don’t know,” Gail said. “At least I hope he isn’t. But in the meantime we’re on our own. Everyone look around see if we can find something to use to get us out of here, and maybe a weapon of some sort.”
“What good will that do?” one of the techs asked. “Someone on the bridge must have sent a Mayday by now.”
“That’s where I went when I heard the helicopter. But they’re all dead and the radio gear has been destroyed.”
“I say we don’t antagonize them,” the same young man said. “My God, look what they did to Don and Mr. Defloria. Let them do what they came to do, and when they’re gone we’ll take to the lifeboats. We can always come up with another oil platform.”
“They’re not going to let us out of here,” Gail told them.
“But they said they’re going to blow up the rig or something.”
“Yes, and we’ll ride it to the bottom of the Gulf,” Eve said. “They have to make sure no one aboard survives.”
“There’s no reason,” someone else said.
“They can’t let us live, we saw their faces,” Eve said. She turned and looked at the others. “Where’s Lisa?”
SIXTY-THREE
McGarvey’s hands had been tied until this moment. Lying in the darkness on the platform that had once accommodated the workspace for the base of the exploration drilling rig about thirty feet above the main deck, he was in a position to see everything that had gone on below, plus the helipad one hundred feet to the left and ten feet above him.
His pistol and Franchi shotgun were all but useless at those distances, so he couldn’t have risked trying to take his shot.
DeCamp and his people were all gone, two up to the helicopter where they’d retrieved two satchels and disappeared belowdecks, and the others into the main lateral corridor below and to McGarvey’s right that ran the width of the platform with access not only to the living and recreation decks, but in one direction to the science control room and the other to the delivery bridge.
The contractor who’d locked Gail and the others inside the pipe locker had walked away and McGarvey was about to go down to the main deck when the man came back, obviously taking pains to conceal his return, and McGarvey eased back into the shadows.
But now the main deck was deserted, and so far as McGarvey could tell no sentries had been posted, though he was fairly sure that at least one or two of DeCamp’s people were looking for him, while the two who’d carried the satchels from the helicopter were setting the explosives to sink the rig. Which made them priority one.
McGarvey crawled to the edge of the platform and took the ladder down to the main deck, where keeping to the deeper shadows as much as possible he made his way to the pipe locker that was secured with a heavy-duty padlock.
“Gail,” he called softly.
“My God, Kirk, I didn’t know what happened to you,” Gail said. “Can you get us out of here?”
“Not without making a lot of noise. Is everyone okay?”
“No one’s been hurt,” Gail said. “Lapides and one of his people are dead up in the control room and the radios destroyed. I think they’re going to try to sink us.”
“That’s exactly what they’re going to do,” McGarvey said. “They brought two satchels down from the helicopter, almost certainly explosives. They’re going to take out two of the legs and capsize the rig. I’m going to take them out.”
“What if you don’t make it?” Eve asked. “We’ll be stuck in here.”
“It won’t happen,” Gail said, trying to override her.
“Goddamnit, there’s six of them, all heavily armed, and it looked like they knew what they were doing.”
“She’s right,” McGarvey said, taking one of the pencil fuses from his pocket. It just fit through the gap between the two halves of the door. “Here.”
“Got it,” Gail said.
He tore a lump about the size of book of matches from one of the blocks of Semtex and molded it around the body of the combination lock, making sure it was secure enough so that when Gail inserted the fuse through the gap it wouldn’t get dislodged.
“Stay put until you hear the helicopter take off,” he told them. “If I’m not back by then, blow the lock and get to the lifeboats.”
“I’m sorry, Kirk,” Gail said.
“You had lousy odds,” McGarvey said. “Don’t do anything to attract their attention. I don’t want them to come back for some reason and spot the Semtex.”
“I don’t want to die,” one of the young women cried softly.
“You’re not going to die,” Gail told her.
“Keep them quiet,” McGarvey said, and he turned and headed for the hatch to the main corridor.
SIXTY-FOUR
In the delivery control room DeCamp was monitoring the VHF noncommercial channels sixty-eight and sixty-nine that the flotilla had used to communicate with one another to make sure that no one had noticed the activity aboard the oil platform. But the chatter was normal, mostly small talk heavily laced with religious mumbojumbo, the same as it had been all the way across from Biloxi.
To this point the operation was going according to plan with the exception of Gurov and his walkie-talkie now in McGarvey’s hands, which made issuing orders to his people problematic. But not impossible. The odds were still definitely in their favor.
“He just went through the hatch into the main corridor,” Wyner said from one of windows looking down on the deck.
Like clockwork, DeCamp thought, suppressing a slight smile. The trouble with professionals was their professionalism. By the training manual. Thinking out of the box was generally frowned on, especially by some of the unimaginative bastards who wrote those manuals. It was the same in just about every army or security service in the world. The good field officers remained in the field, while the failures were often the ones who made up rules. Hidebound government bureaucrats who couldn’t see beyond their cubicles. Certainly in America no one had wanted to believe in a scenario in which al-Quaeda could mount such a devastating attack as 9/11. Most of them had been looking in the wrong direction — were still looking in the wrong direction — which made his work all the more easier.
DeCamp keyed his walkie-talkie. “Shall we make it one hundred thousand euros?” he said, effectively alerting his people that McGarvey was on the way.
The trap had been almost too easy. Locking Dr. Larsen and her scientists in the container and deserting the main deck had simply been too tempting a target for either McGarvey himself or the woman he’d brought with him — who turned out to be Gail Newby, the security officer from Hutchinson Island. He’d been only slightly disappointed that it had been Ms. Newby and not McGarvey but that didn’t matter, because now he held the high ground. McGarvey was a dead man marching.
Wyner had been studying the pipe locker through a set of binoculars. “Looks like plastique around the lock,” he said.
“About what I suspected,” DeCamp said. “No doubt he managed to pass a fuse through to Ms. Newby.”
“There’s enough room for it between the doors.”
“What’s he carrying?”
“I’m sure he has a pistol, but he’s got what looks like a Franchi slung over his shoulder,” Wyner said.
It was a nasty weapon. DeCamp had seen firsthand what it was capable of doing in a confined space when he’d sent six of his men into the home of an Angolan army general outside Luanda, the capital city. All six had been cut down, but in the heat of battle the general had used all of his ammunition in one short firefight, leaving himself defenseless. In the end DeCamp had fired his American-made Colt Commando six times into the general’s face — one round for each of his Buffalo Battalion troop — destroying the man’s skull.
“Bring the two women up here,” DeCamp said. “It’s time we provided a little distraction for McGarvey. Perhaps give him pause.”
SIXTY-FIVE
McGarvey held up at the corner before the mess hall one level down from his and Gail’s rooms. The bodies of two construction crewmen lay sprawled on the deck, their blood smeared on the bulkhead. A third man lay in an open doorway, blood still pooling beneath his body. This had happened within the last few minutes.
“Goddamnit,” he said under his breath. It was senseless. Had the Coast Guard been sent out to escort Vanessa to Florida where security might have been tediously long, none of this would have happened. Some good people had died here, and more would probably lose their lives before it was over. And he was a part of it.
But he’d seen this same kind of shit before; over and over again in his career. Timid bureaucrats, unwilling to stick their necks out. In this case because of someone with a vested interest in oil; someone whose back was against the wall, someone who could not allow an experiment like this to succeed.
Follow the money, he’d told Otto.
Someone shouted something farther down the corridor, and McGarvey heard what sounded li
ke rounds richochetting off a steel bulkhead.
He had counted five operators in addition to DeCamp. Two had fetched the satchels from the helicopter and were somewhere below setting the charges. Which left two, possibly three, men working their way through the rig trying to find him and killing everyone they came across. No one was to be left alive, shot to death or locked away someplace to drown when the platform went to the bottom.
They were professionals. Almost certainly ex-military special services who for one reason or another became independent mercenaries, rather than go to work for a contracting service. It meant that by their very nature they were men who did not take orders very well.
They were in the business purely for the money. Their loyalty went to whoever had the biggest bank account, and only for however long they could see a clear escape route. These were not Islamic extremists willing to die for the cause. It was a weakness.
He keyed the walkie-talkie. “You’ve forgotten the helicopter, Colonel DeCamp,” he said, as he started down the corridor toward the sounds of the gunfire. “I have something you may need.”
Turning the receive volume way down so that he had to bring the handheld to his ear to hear if DeCamp answered, he hurried down the corridor, holding up at the open door to the galley. But the mess hall appeared to be deserted.
At the far corner he held up again, and keyed his walkie-talkie, but didn’t speak.
From somewhere down the corridor, very close, he heard the distinct click of a handheld receiving his signal, and raising his shotgun he peered around the corner, when DeCamp’s voice came over his walkie-talkie.
“Don’t kill him yet.”
Someone in one of the rooms a few feet farther down the corridor reached around the door frame with a silenced MAC-10 and fired a short burst. McGarvey snapped off three shots and ducked back, directly into the warm muzzle of a suppressor.
“You killed a friend of ours,” Burt said, his British accent heavy.
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