Predator

by Wilbur Smith

  “OK, keep me posted if there are any developments. I’ve got to get this mission under way.” Cross left the command post, walked into the briefing room, saw that everyone was there and got straight down to business. He tasked the various members of his team to deal with the helipad, the production area, the residential and administrative block and the canteen where the bulk of the platform’s staff were being held hostage. Then he described how he hoped to get into the canteen and take out the terrorists who controlled it while limiting the danger to the hostages. It took less than five minutes—enough for another hostage to lose their life, as he was painfully aware—but by the end of it everyone knew exactly what was required of them. He wrapped it up with an order to the boat crews to get their boats in the water faster than they’d ever done before, and weather conditions be damned.

  “I don’t care if there’s a storm out there. There are people dying on that platform and we are the only hope of saving them. So get that boat in the water, pronto, or I’ll kick you in myself and you can swim all the way to the rig!”

  Té-Bo was enjoying himself. Exactly as Commander Matemba and Monsieur Tumbo had predicted, the entire Magna Grande installation was helpless. No one had come to its rescue, and the only signs of resistance had come from a few of the oil workers who had tried to use hammers and wrenches against men armed with AK-47s. That resistance had not lasted long. Some of the shots had sparked small fires, but the rig’s automatic sprinkler systems had dealt with them. That was good. The rig would be destroyed, but not while Té-Bo and his men were still on it.

  His phone started ringing. It was one of his men, Yaya Bokassa, who’d been sent to the control room to monitor what was happening on the platform. “The screens have all gone dead!” he told Té-Bo. “I can’t see what is happening anywhere.”

  “Sabotage!” announced Té-Bo dramatically. “Someone must have cut a wire, or smashed the cameras.”

  “Impossible! We have accounted for all the personnel on the rig. And how could they kill all the cameras at once? There must be a malfunction in the system.”

  “Then make it work again!”

  “I don’t know how. I need help.”

  Té-Bo gave a disgusted “Pah!”; he stopped the call and turned to face the hostages. “Écoutez! Listen to me!” he called out. “I require any man who knows how works the control room to announce himself now. If you do not, I will kill two of you, right now. You have ten seconds, or I commence to shoot.”

  Té-Bo began counting down. He had reached “two” when a man called out, “I’m the control room manager. I’ll tell you what you need to know. Just, please, don’t shoot.”

  “Très bien,” Té-Bo said as the man stepped forward, hands above his head. He spat out a series of quickfire orders in French to one of the terrorists and then asked the man in front of him, “What is your name?”

  “Herschel Van Dijk,” he replied in a strong Afrikaaner accent.

  “So, you say you can operate the control room. Very good. It does not function correctly. So you will make it function. If you do not do this, you will die.”

  Té-Bo issued more orders to his man and Herschel was led away toward the control room.

  It was a minor setback, but overall Té-Bo was still perfectly content. Everything was going according to plan. He looked at the stopwatch function on his phone. It showed four minutes and fifteen seconds. Time to find another hostage to kill.

  Cross took the two patrol boats on a course upwind of the platform, pushing the boats right to the very edge of the lightpool, allowing just enough leeway that they’d still be hard to spot if the pilot of the airborne helicopter happened to be looking in their direction. Every member of the team was armed with a long-barreled Ruger. Many had pouches carrying additional, specialist gear. Two of the SBS men, swimming in the same group as Nastiya, were going in as a pair, one of whom had an additional line attached to his waist, next to his buddy line. The far end of the line was clipped to a canister about a meter long. The last thing Cross did before he went in was to tell him, “Whatever you do, look after that thing. If it doesn’t get on to the rig in one piece, we might as well just jump back into the water and swim home.”

  “Don’t worry, boss, you’ll have it.”

  “Good. Right, Donnie, time we went in for our evening dip.”

  On the Glenallen Cross had talked about swimming to the platform. Once he was actually in the water it was more a matter of frantically trying to produce something remotely close to a freestyle stroke as the waves picked him up, swept him forward and then plunged him into a churning, foaming vortex. Time after time he struggled back up to the surface, gasped for breath and then started thrashing his arms and legs again, feeling the tug of the line that linked him to the much faster, more experienced McGrain.

  To make matters worse, the drysuit, sealed at his wrists and ankles and specifically designed to keep moisture coming in or out, was turning into his own private sauna, trapping all the heat generated by his exertions. Not a drop of seawater had penetrated the suit and yet Cross was soaking wet in his own sweat as his temperature rose. Now he understood something all SBS and SEALs had long known: that heatstroke is as great a danger to a combat swimmer as the sea itself. Cross and all his people were in a race against time to get on to the platform before their body heat got to them.

  All the while, the gargantuan bulk of the Magna Grande platform loomed ever more imposingly above them and Cross felt smaller and smaller as the sheer scale of what he had to master became ever more apparent. The massive legs with their side supports looked like an immobile, unyielding quartet of steel cliffs, waiting with cruel indifference for the sea to dash the raggle-taggle band of feeble, struggling humans against them. The waves crashing against the legs were forming eddies and rip currents between them and the ocean was propelling Cross directly into the maelstrom so that he faced a choice between being flattened against a leg like a bug on a windscreen, or being drowned as he was sucked down into the hungry sea.

  He thanked heavens for McGrain up ahead of him. “Och, it’s no’ so bad, sir,” the Scotsman had said as the leading patrol boat had manoeuvred into position. “Compared to a bad night on the North Sea this is a bloody millpond.”

  Now they were close enough that even with the rain and spray battering his eyes, Cross could make out the rusty ladder running down one of the legs that McGrain was aiming for. He saw the SBS veteran turn his head back toward him, though his eyes were focused on something beyond them both. Cross turned, too, to check what McGrain was looking at, and then his blood, so recently close to boiling, seemed to chill to ice in his veins.

  A wave was coming toward them. It was higher by far than any they had yet encountered. It was a black wall of water, glinting with the reflected lights from the rig and it seemed as solid as the platform itself; it rose above Cross like a great jackboot, ready to stamp down upon him.

  On and on it came, encircling and enfolding Cross. He seemed to be in a long tunnel, whose sides were all water. Then the sides of the tunnel began to collapse as the wave broke and all Cross could do was take one last breath, and pray.

  Oohhh, shit!” Donnie McGrain had seen plenty of waves, but never one like this. Where the hell had it come from? It was as if every other wave had been a Transit van and this one was a Chieftain tank. He put his head down, thrust his arms forward in a racing freestyle stroke and kicked hard, ignoring his heaving lungs and aching muscles as he dragged one last burst of speed out of his body. He did not have to look; he could sense the weight of the water arcing over him as he raced the wave to the rig.

  The ladder was just a few meters in front of him now. It seemed to be taunting his pleading fingers as he stretched out his right arm and fell just short.

  Now he could feel the undertow dragging at him as the wave drew itself up to break with all its might against the human structure that had the impudence to resist its journey across the ocean.

  McGrain’s left arm wheele
d over his body, reached for the ladder . . . and though his fingertips brushed the metal he could not make them stick.

  He kicked again as the crest of the wave hit the leg high above him, made one last, desperate lunge and felt his fist clench around a rung as the water flung him against the ladder, knocking the breath from his lungs. Sensing rather than seeing Cross being hurled at the face of the leg, just a couple of meters away from him, McGrain gasped for air and then the weight of the seven seas seemed to fall on him as the wave plunged down, tore him from the ladder and sucked him deep into its grasp.

  It wasn’t just his own descent that was the problem. McGrain had Cross’s weight dragging him down too and he knew that a first-timer, even one as proficient in so many other military disciplines, was bound to feel disoriented when he was plunged under water at night. If Cross started swimming deeper rather than heading for the surface he would drown them both.

  But then McGrain felt the line go slack beneath him. For an instant he wondered if Cross had cut the line, not wanting to drag them both down. He was the kind of man who’d do something that insanely self-sacrificial. But then McGrain saw a patch of even deeper, more Stygian black against the gloom of the water, thought: The pontoon! and smashed into raw steel for a second time. He tugged on the line and felt an answering tug back. So Cross was conscious. McGrain yanked the line again, this time pulling upward. He prayed that Cross had got the hint, steadied himself against the pontoon, squatted and then thrust upward. Cross came with him and McGrain started kicking for the surface.

  He was out of breath and they were still at least ten, probably more like twenty meters below the surface. McGrain ignored the pain in his lungs and fought the screaming voices in his head tempting him to breathe out, expel all the stale gas from his body and suck clean, fresh air back in.

  But there was no air, just water. To breathe in was to drown and die. He had to make do with what he had . . . but he so, so wanted to breathe out.

  McGrain kicked again and sensed Cross doing the same thing as the line slackened once again. McGrain could feel his oxygen-deprived brain start fizzing like an untuned TV screen. Blissful, painless unconsciousness was just a moment away. Now it was not his swimming training that he drew upon, but the brutal lessons he had been taught about resisting the pain of torture, blanking out the agony, ignoring all your deepest instincts.

  He kicked again, and again, and again, lost in a black, sunless universe in which there was nothing but hurt, and water, and kicking . . . and suddenly his head burst out of the water into the open air and now he could open his mouth and drag the salty air deep down into his starving lungs. He trod water, looked around and saw Cross, behind him, doing the same thing, and beyond him was the ladder, just stuck there imperturbably on the side of the leg as if saying, “Well, where the hell have you been?”

  The sea seemed a little calmer now and McGrain had little difficulty grabbing hold of it, climbing a few rungs and helping Cross up after him. “Right,” he said, “let’s get to the top of this bastard rig.”

  There was no sign of any hostiles on the spider deck, or any evidence that they had been there. The platform was rectangular in shape and at each end of the long sides there were metal stairways, enclosed in protective steel mesh but otherwise open to the elements, that zig-zagged up the outer sides of the platform. They rose past three lower decks to the main deck itself. The accommodation and administration block stood at one end of the main deck, with the helideck perched on its roof. The various processing functions of the production block were at the other end of the deck, as far away from the living quarters as possible, with the derrick towering up above the platform in-between. Once he was out of the water, Cross had put in his earpiece and was now receiving information from Dave Imbiss once again.

  “We’ve lost another two hostages,” Imbiss told him. “Hostiles are still distributed as before: most in the canteen and accommodation areas, some by the derrick—I think they’re down near the turntable, right by the drill-string, though the signal’s still breaking up. Doesn’t look like anyone’s expecting company. The hostile by the helipad is the only lookout but he’s not the outdoors type—he’s spent most of the time trying to get out of the weather. I suggest taking him out first, just in case he starts doing his job.”

  “Copy that,” said Cross. “What about the crews of the Hinds—can they see anything?”

  “Doubt it. The ones on the pad won’t have a line of sight from their cockpit to anything happening beneath them. As for the bird in the air, if anyone’s hanging out the side door, looking down, they could see people moving on open decks, maybe. But the visibility’s lousy, so it would be really hard to distinguish us from their buddies and unless these guys are trained air-sea rescue personnel, which I seriously doubt, I don’t see them wanting to stick their heads outside the cabin in a storm like this.”

  “Understood. Any indication of anyone placing IEDs?”

  “Not that I can see, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

  On one level Cross was pleased by the apparent carelessness of the men who had seized the platform. Their failure to take any of the obvious steps required to hurt anyone mounting a counter-attack had made it much easier for Cross to get his people aboard. But this was very clearly a well-planned and ruthlessly executed operation. So why make such an obvious mistake? And what were the helicopters doing, hanging around when—as he had every intention of demonstrating—they could easily be destroyed? It was plain that whoever had planned this attack had never had any intention of letting it play out for very long. In fact, it had every appearance of being a suicide mission. But to what purpose? Was it just a case of killing as many oil workers as possible and making a mess of the platform? Or was there something else?

  That was a question for later. Cross had to focus all his attention on the here and now. O’Quinn and Thompson had been tasked with securing the helideck. One swift movement of Cross’s hand was all the signal they needed to get on their way.

  Now the other teams took up their positions at the bottom of their respective stairwells. McGrain was on the far side of the spider deck, ready to lead his team up toward the derrick to take out the hostiles there. Cross and his three men were heading for the accommodation block, with the aim of clearing a route to the canteen. Once there, Cross had to achieve the safe rescue of the hostages and destruction of the hostiles who were holding them. All the men were under orders to minimize the use of ammunition by shooting to kill at extreme close range, with minimum risk to the hostages or the safety of the platform itself. But in order to fulfil those orders, they had to get into the canteen, prevent the hostiles opening fire and simply gunning all their captives down and find a way to get close enough to men armed with AK-47 assault rifles to be able to kill them at point-blank range.

  No sane commander would ever sanction such a wildly improbable set of objectives unless he had absolutely no alternative. That was, however, the situation in which Cross found himself. He had one very slender chance of making his plan work. And for that, he was counting on Nastiya.

  Paddy O’Quinn was standing behind the stern of an orange lifeboat that was positioned at the top of a slide from which it could be launched into the sea. Dave Imbiss had guided him to that vantage point, barely thirty feet from the foot of the ladder that led up to the helideck. The sentry was huddled beneath the overhang of the deck itself. He didn’t look like much of a hostile, more like a scrawny kid who’d got the job no one else wanted and was now as miserable as countless sentries through the ages who’ve been sent outside to keep watch on wet and windy nights. The lookout was such a pathetic sight that O’Quinn felt genuinely sorry for him, but that did not alter the fact that he represented a potential danger to the mission. And so, resting the long brushed-steel barrel of his Ruger against the hull of the lifeboat, O’Quinn fired twice, secure in the knowledge that there was no way anyone in the helicopter that stood on the helideck with its engine idling could pos
sibly have heard the shots even if the Ruger had not possessed its inbuilt suppressor. O’Quinn had aimed for the kid’s heart. Both rounds hit him in the center of the chest and as his body crumpled to the ground, Thompson dashed from his own position, even closer to the helideck, picked the corpse up and pulled it deeper into the shadows.

  Making sure to remain under cover, O’Quinn made his way to where Thompson was standing. They were now just a few feet from the bottom of the ladder. Soon they would both be dashing up it, but not yet.

  O’Quinn switched on his comms. “Hostile down. Repeat, hostile down. The way is clear. Over.”

  “Message received and I’ll pass it on. Good work,” Imbiss replied.

  A second later Cross was informed that O’Quinn had dealt with the lookout. Now the other three teams could start making their ways up through the platform and the rescue mission could begin.

  There were countless danger spots aboard the Magna Grande rig, but high on the list was the wellhead where the oil being pumped up from hundreds of meters beneath the seabed finally came aboard. So that was one of the key targets for any anti-terrorist mission and McGrain, being the man in the team with the most experience on offshore platforms, was given the job of securing that area, and the drillers’ cabin, from which the entire drilling operation was controlled. His team of three other men included Terry Flowers, a Royal Marines veteran who’d qualified as a Class One Ammunition Technician and was thus trained, among many other things, to disable any booby traps or explosive devices that the insurgents might have left along the way. The quartet walked slowly toward their target area, looking like a group of World War I soldiers who’d been blinded by gas. McGrain was in front, with his head down, sweeping a torch from side to side, with Flowers walking behind him, his eyes focused on the beam from the torch. Flowers had one hand on McGrain’s shoulder, ready to squeeze hard if the torch lit up anything that might be a trip wire or pressure-plates that could trigger a blast. The other two shuffled along behind, but their attention was concentrated on what was going on around them as they looked for any sign of the terrorists themselves.