by Wilbur Smith
Té-Bo looked at his timer and saw that five minutes were nearly up. Time for another execution and another body to add to the blood-drenched pile that was building up in one corner of the room. A couple of the victims had soiled themselves in fear and the stench of their excrement was adding to the general smell of sweaty bodies crammed into a confined space. Not that Té-Bo was bothered. The slums he had grown up in had stunk far worse and it wouldn’t be long now before they’d be on their way. Once the bomb was set beneath the derrick, he would order his men to fire at will into the hostages, killing them all, and then it would just be a matter of getting on to the helicopters and heading back to base.
“Alors, it is time!” he called out and then ordered two of his men to seize another victim from the crowd.
By now any thought of resistance seemed to have left the hostages. Té-Bo could see that they were all thinking of nothing other than saving their own skins, somehow staying alive long enough for someone to come to their rescue: But that someone will never come.
His men grabbed a white man with very pale skin and thinning red hair. He put up a feeble struggle as he tried to wriggle free of their grasp, but a gun-butt to his kidneys soon knocked the fight out of him. They were dragging the man back to the execution site, where Té-Bo was checking that his gun was still in perfect working order, when a man’s voice rang out from the back of the room.
“Take me!” he said. “I know that man: he has a wife and children. I don’t. I’ve got no one depending on me. Take me!”
Té-Bo laughed. “You are in luck, m’sieur,” he said to the redheaded man, who had just been shoved down on to his knees and was moaning, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die . . .” again and again.
“Take him away,” Té-Bo commanded and the man was pulled back on to his feet. Again he resisted, unaware that his life was being saved until he saw the other man walking at a calm, steady pace through the crowd toward their captors. Now the condemned man realized that this newcomer was taking his place and he cried out, “Thank you, thank you! God bless you,” before he was shoved back into the crowd.
Come on, Cross, get your bloody arse in gear! Sharman thought as he walked through the disbelieving crowd of hostages to the terrorists waiting to kill him. Their leader had a big grin on his face, clearly loving the idea that anyone would be so stupid as to volunteer for their own execution. His mates were poking each other with their elbows, grinning all over their faces, enjoying the show—all except for one, who was filming the whole episode, adding extra entertainment to the live snuff movie being uploaded for the whole world to see.
But dying was not part of Sharman’s plan. He had positioned himself beneath one of the air-conditioning vents and heard the noise of someone moving in the duct above him, followed by the faint hissing of gas and the sweet smell that Imbiss had warned him to expect. He’d also found himself feeling a little lightheaded, even spacey. But his mind was still working clearly enough to know what he was doing. He was taking his time as he approached the small group of armed men, looking around him, spotting the first yawn here, a woman shaking her head as if trying to clear it over there. But there was no sign of anything happening to the terrorists just yet. They still looked full of beans. No . . . wait. One of them had just rubbed a hand across his face and another was blinking with slow, heavy eyelids. But the hands that now took hold of him were full of energy and strength and the terrorist leader with his big Beats headphones was bright-eyed as he shouted at the camera: “Are you watching, Monsieur le Président? Do you doubt the will of the Cabindan people? Do you think we are cowards or old women who collapse at the sight of blood? No, we are not! We are men and we will kill and kill again. The five minutes have passed and so another . . .” He gave a stifled yawn. “. . . another one must die.”
Sharman saw his own killer come toward him with a gun in his hand. He saw the gun being raised. He prayed that he had actually seen a tremor of the barrel as it was raised to his head . . . And then his world went black and he was plunged into absolute nothingness.
Go! Go! Go!” Imbiss shouted into the comms system.
On the ladder just below the lip of the helideck O’Quinn and Thompson unholstered and loaded their Rugers. Then O’Quinn mouthed a single word: “Now!”
The two men sprang up on to the deck and started blazing away at the crew inside the glazed cockpit of the Hind that was sitting there, its rotors idling.
The Hind was armed with a devastating 12.7-mm Yakushev Borzov Gatling gun, with a 1,470-round magazine capable of destroying entire units of infantry. But the magazine was empty, for the very Air Force officers who had accepted bribes to let the two helicopters be taken for the night had refused to sanction the loading of any ammo or rockets, for fear that they might be double-crossed and find the Hinds’ weapons being turned on them. So now the crew had no means of firing back.
This need not have mattered. The helicopter’s armor was famously tough and well able to withstand small-arms fire. But the windows around the cockpit were made of toughened glass and it takes strong nerves for men to remain calm and immobile while bullets are cracking against windows right by their heads. The pilot did what Cross and O’Quinn had expected he would and powered up his rotors for the speediest possible take-off. He heaved the Hind up into the air, not noticing that his enemy had actually ceased firing, and turned the helicopter away from the platform and out to sea. The pilot of the second Hind, still circling above, saw what his comrade was doing, assumed—with considerable relief—that they were abandoning their passengers to their fate and followed his leader.
They’d cleared the platform by no more than 100 meters when O’Quinn said, “Patrol boat one, fire at will,” into his mike.
Two missiles burst out of the darkness beyond the platform where the patrol boats were lurking, screamed across the sky and hit the Hinds beside their exhaust outlets. The helicopters exploded and burning wreckage fell through the rain to the foaming waters of the Atlantic.
O’Quinn spoke again: “Both birds down. The hostiles are now trapped on the platform. I say again, the hostiles are trapped.” Then he turned to Thompson and said, “Right, let’s see if Cross needs a helping hand.”
McGrain had sent two of his men up toward the drillers’ room. Any hostiles looking through its glass-fronted façade would have a clear line of sight, and thus of fire, down on to the area beneath the derrick where the hostiles had almost finished arming their bomb. So they had to be dealt with.
The second they heard the go-signal the men kicked in the door of the drillers’ room and threw in a flash-bang, praying that its blast would be contained within the room’s steel walls. Then they charged in, found two dazed, disoriented hostiles and killed them the old-fashioned way, with wire garrottes that sliced through their windpipes and the carotid arteries and left them bleeding and suffocating to death.
McGrain had intended to do the same to the men by the turntable, but they saw him and Flowers coming, picked their rifles off the floor beside them and turned to shoot. McGrain had no option but to open fire himself: a few well-aimed rounds from a .22 pistol had far less potential to cause fire or explosion than two magazine-loads of automatic fire from an AK-47 sprayed at a moving target.
The two hostiles went down. Flowers had run straight to the IED. “So, can you disable it?” McGrain asked.
Flowers grinned. “Piece of piss, mate. Absolute piece of piss.”
Nastiya turned off the tap on one tank of the sevoflurane anaesthetic that Dr. Rob Noble had supplied to Cross before the team left London and then scrambled along the duct to turn the other one off too. She rolled it away from the vent, kicked the vent open and dropped through it on to one of the canteen dining tables. As she landed, she saw Halsey and Moran burst through the door to the galley, race through the area behind the serving counter and enter the canteen itself.
Then she looked around through her mask and there, at the far end of the room was Cross.
There are times when stun grenades simply won’t do the job. They work very well on a few closely grouped people in a confined space, but are much less effective against multiple targets spread around a wider area, such as a large works canteen. One alternative is knockout gas, but that has a less-than-noble history as a means of rescuing hostages. In October 2002, the Russians used the ventilation of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow to distribute a chemical agent—its identity a secret ever since—that incapacitated around forty armed Chechen rebels and the 850 audience members that they had taken hostage. All the rebels were killed, but 130 hostages also died from adverse reactions to the gas. The Russians had never seen any need to apologize for their actions: better that than have all the hostages killed by the grenades, mines and improvised explosives hanging from their captors’ bodies.
Cross accepted that logic, but if he ever used gas, as he feared he might have to on either the platform or the FPSO, he did not want to have to explain why his actions had killed any innocent people at all, let alone a hundred or more.
He’d put his requirements to Rob Noble: “I need a gas and a means of delivering it that will make the bad guys unable to fight without actually taking out any of their victims.”
“You do realize that one requirement virtually cancels out the other, don’t you?” Noble had replied. “I mean, if you really want to put someone out cold, the thing I’d choose is M99, otherwise known as etorphine. It’s an opiate vets use to incapacitate large animals. Where humans are concerned it’s a Class A drug, largely because it doesn’t just knock people out, it’s liable to kill them too. There is an antidote, but it has to be injected, and if you’ve ever got tens, or even hundreds, of people to worry about, that’s a non-starter.”
“So what do you suggest?” Cross had asked.
“Sevoflurane. It’s an effective anaesthetic, frequently used in surgery, and it’s perfectly safe if properly administered. Now, you’re hardly going to have a platoon of trained anaesthetists caring for all the people you want to knock out, but you should be all right if you deliver it in modest concentrations and get it out of the air as fast as possible afterward.”
“That’s a bit tricky. Most ship’s portholes and oil-platform windows are sealed shut.”
“Well, blow the buggers open, then,” said Noble. “I’ve never known you to be shy of a good, big bang.”
So now Cross was charging into the canteen, which looked like the aftermath of a drunken, drugged-up night of debauchery as people sprawled across chairs and tables, or staggered around in slow, befuddled confusion. Ahead of him Cross saw the terrorists’ leader, the one he’d labelled Beats Boy, trying to point his gun at Sharman’s head. But the weapon seemed to be getting heavier and heavier in the young terrorist’s hand and when Sharman slumped to the floor, it was the gas not a bullet that was responsible.
Cross hit Beats Boy with a double-tap. Looking around he saw other hostiles going down, dying in slow motion as the Cross Bow team took them out with cold, practiced precision. He picked up an AK-47 dropped by one of the terrorists and aimed it at a window. This was a far more powerful firearm than his lightweight pistol and it was time to let some air in.
The men who had stormed the rig had all been dealt with. Now the main priority was getting all the hostages out of the canteen before they suffered any side-effects from the sevoflurane, other than feeling very, very sleepy. Cross had gratefully peeled the gas mask from his face and was just telling Paddy O’Quinn to organize a body count of the hostages, rescuers and terrorists when Dave Imbiss came over the comms. “I’ve got some people here would really like to express their thanks for what you all just did, so I’m putting this out to everyone: go ahead, sir . . .”
“Hi, Hector, this is John Bigelow, I just want to say on behalf of everyone here at Bannock Oil and, I’m sure, of all the loved ones of the folks you and your people rescued today: you did a great job. I always had faith that you would rise to the challenges of working in this offshore environment, but I never dreamed that you would be called upon so soon, to face such a terrible situation.”
“Thank you, John, that means a lot to all of us . . .” Cross replied, thinking, Really? You didn’t dream? Not even when I told you, in plain English, exactly what might happen?
“We’re just sorry we couldn’t save everyone,” Cross added. “But we did all we could and we certainly made sure that the people who attacked this rig paid a very heavy price for their crime.”
“We’re very glad you did,” Bigelow replied. “It sends out a message to anyone who’s thinking of assaulting an oil installation that they can expect immediate retribution. Now I’d just like to hand over to someone else who’d like to say a few words.”
“This is Vice Admiral Scholz from the Fleet Forces Command of the U.S. Navy. We spoke earlier, if you recall, Mr. Cross.”
“Yes, sir, you gave us a very clear picture of our situation,” Cross replied.
Scholz laughed uncomfortably. “Which wasn’t too good, as I recall.”
“No, sir.”
“Well, that only underlines the scale of your achievement. What you and your people achieved tonight, recapturing an offshore rig in the most testing weather conditions, with virtually no time to plan your mission . . . I’d say that constitutes a military miracle. If you were a U.S. serviceman, they’d be pinning quite a medal on your chest, and on all the personnel who supported you so valiantly.”
“Thank you, sir. We were just doing our jobs to the best of our ability.”
“And you should all be very proud of yourselves.”
The line from the U.S. went dead, to be replaced by the sound of a dozen ex-soldiers making sarcastic remarks about the sudden stench of corporate and military horse manure.
“I could use some fresh air myself,” said Cross and headed out on to the main deck to get it.
Hey, Johnny,” said Chico Torres on the bridge of the Mother Goose, “you wanna do a countdown? Cause our baby’s about to blow—just a few minutes to go now.”
Congo laughed. “Yeah, let’s be Mission Control, take it right on down to blast-off. So, which way do I look to see the big show?”
“Dead astern. Tell you what, why don’t we go down to the bar, fix ourselves a good drink, you know, raise a glass to a job well done.”
“Hell, we don’t know it was well done,” Congo objected.
“Believe me, Johnny. I was there, and it was done just fine. So, like I say, we get a drink, we go out on to the aft deck . . . you don’t mind a bit of wind and rain, right? That’s where we’ll get the best view.”
“I gotta tell you, Chico, I don’t hold with getting wet, as a rule. But on this particular occasion, I might just make an exception. C’mon, let’s go see what they got behind that bar.”
The storm had abated and there was only a gentle drizzle falling over the Magna Grande field. Cross and O’Quinn were standing on the main deck of the rig, leaning on a guardrail and looking out over the ocean, straight toward the Bannock A, a mile away across the water.
“So, Donovan was the only man we lost,” Cross said.
“Yeah, no one else was even wounded.”
“He was a good man. Had a wife and a young kid, didn’t he? Make sure they’re looked after . . . Still, one man in fourteen: I’d have taken those odds an hour ago. How about rig crew?”
“Twenty-nine dead, more than forty wounded, but most of those are no more than bumps and bruises. There are also about a dozen missing, but it looks like a lot of people found places to hide, so it could be a while before they all come out of the woodwork.”
“How about the ones with serious injuries?”
“There’s seven of them and we’re working out the best way of getting them treatment, either on the Glenallen or the Bannock A. There’s a sick bay here, of course, but the medic was one of the hostages who got shot. He was number five.”
Cross sighed and shook his head. “We lost too many crew, but I can’t think of any way w
e could have got here sooner, or done a cleaner job.”
“Don’t even go there, Heck. You heard that admiral fella, you pulled off a military miracle.”
“No, if it had been a miracle, I’d have walked on the water to get here.”
O’Quinn laughed, but then said, “Seriously, he’s right . . . We had no help from anyone, no air support, no proper training on the rig . . .”
“I’ll bloody well have words with Bigelow about that. He can count his lucky stars his precious platform didn’t go up in smoke.”
“Exactly . . . Look, we saved three-quarters of all the people on this rig, and you were the man in charge. Suppose someone had saved three-quarters of all the people in the Twin Towers. Would you bollock him for not getting the other quarter out?”
“Of course not . . .” Cross grimaced. “But you know as well as I do, Paddy, that it only takes one smart-arse journalist or ambulance-chasing lawyer to say we could have done better and suddenly everyone’s saying it was a disaster.”
“Ach, screw them, what the hell do they know?”
“About the things we have to do?” Cross asked. “Nothing. They couldn’t even imagine. And you’re right, we did a good job tonight, a bloody good job.”
On the Mother Goose, Torres and Congo were looking to the east, swigging from bottles of Bud and Cristal respectively. Torres was keeping an eye on the timer displayed on his mobile phone. “OK, baby, here we go,” he said. “Ten . . .”
Congo joined in as they both intoned, “Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . .”
The submersible sled that Torres had towed behind the mini-subs was anchored to a spot directly beneath the stationary hull of the Bannock A. On it were approximately 4000 pounds of high explosive, with a sealed, waterproof detonator linked to a timer that was itself co-ordinated precisely with the one on Chico Torres’s phone.