Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “I’m coming with you,” MacGarvey said.

  She laughed nervously. “Do you actually think someone will try to stop me?” she asked. “Try to sabotage the rig? The same people who hit Hutchinson Island?”

  “I thought it was a possibility. Now I’m sure of it.”

  “Because of the grant offer?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  Her eyes were round. She looked a little overwhelmed, as if she’d been given a problem that had no solution or set of solutions that made any sense. “I can’t accept it.”

  “We’ve already gone over their reasons, and nothing has changed. You represent a serious threat to a lot of people.”

  “Explain this to the Coast Guard, or the CIA, you have the connections.”

  “Won’t help. The government will not get involved, unless an actual attack takes place.”

  “By then it would be too late.”

  “It’s why I’ll be aboard the platform, and I don’t want you telling anybody who I am. As far as your people are concerned, I’ll just be a part of the delivery crew.”

  “Don will know.”

  “Ask him to keep it quiet, your lives might depend on it,” McGarvey said.

  She wanted to argue, he could see it in the set of her jaw, in her eyes. “One man against however many they — whoever the hell they are — send against us?”

  “I’ll bring one other person with me.”

  “And you’ll be armed. You’ll have weapons.”

  “Yes.”

  Again she was nearly overwhelmed by what he was telling her. “What if they just drop a bomb on the rig, or fire a missile at us?”

  “I think it’d take more than that to destroy something that large,” McGarvey said.

  “Okay, so they plant bombs,” Eve argued, her voice rising.

  “I’m going to fly down to the rig and take a look, see how I would do it if I wanted to stop you.”

  “All right, what about a suicide bomber?”

  “They’ll be professionals, which means they’ll want to get away. It’s their one weakness.”

  She laughed humorlessly. “Some weakness. And I suppose I can’t refuse your help. I don’t want to put my people in harm’s way, most of them are just kids. But, goddamnit I’m not going to let the bastards beat me. This experiment is too important.”

  “I agree.”

  “But what about afterwards? I mean if my experiment is a success, and we begin delivering power to the SSP and L connection with the grid, what then? Armed guards forever?”

  “Maybe, at first,” McGarvey said. “Until you go to the next phase and anchor your impellers to the ocean floor. And sooner or later, if I understand what you’re trying to do, there’ll be hundreds of them.”

  “Tens of thousands,” Eve said absently.

  “By then the project will be far too large to sabotage.”

  She focused on him. “I just have to survive long enough for that to happen,” she said, and smiled wanly. “Welcome to the team.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Brian DeCamp, dressed in desert camos, lay in a hollow, studying the fantastic-looking structure nearly the size of a soccer field that a squad of Libyan Army engineers had knocked together over the past thirty days. It was the middle of the night in the deep desert more than six hundred kilometers southeast of Tripoli, the only time the construction crews worked, and the only time DeCamp and his three operators came out of their tents, or moved from under the camouflage netting that covered just about everything.

  One of the engineers came to the rail of the partial mock-up of Vanessa Explorer, and pissed over the side. It was an insult to the four nonbelievers he knew were preparing for another assault exercise. But an insult that meant absolutely nothing to DeCamp and his team.

  “Lead, team two set,” Nikolai Kabatov radioed in DeCamp’s earpiece. A former KGB senior lieutenant who’d killed a pair of prostitutes in Lengingrad, and had resigned his commission for the good of the agency, lay in the sand fifty meters to the east, with his teammate Boris Gurov, a former Spetsnaz captain who’d been kicked out of the service for driving a squad of men to such depths of exhaustion during a winter exercise above the Arctic Circle that four men had died.

  “Go in thirty,” DeCamp replied.

  “Copy.”

  The two men in addition to DeCamp’s teammate, Joseph Wyner, who’d been a helicopter pilot with the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, were all that he figured would be needed for the initial stage aboard the rig, which would be manned only by the scientists and technicians, plus the delivery crew. A total of thirty people, none of them with any combat experience.

  Finding the three operators had been a simple matter of logging on to the Web site of Contractor Services Unlimited, which like the old Soldier of Fortune magazine was practically an employment agency for contractors and military officers and enlisted personnel, who for one reason or another had either resigned or been forced to resign, and were looking for work. Actually, as Gurov had explained, when DeCamp had interviewed him in London, guys like him wanted to get back into the game, wanted the thrill of combat, wanted to blow up something, kill someone.

  “The bigger the bang the better,” he’d said. “And I don’t give a pizdec’s asshole who the target is.”

  Out of nearly one hundred résumés online, DeCamp had picked three men to meet face-to-face, and he’d hired all of them, because they were perfect: they were well trained, they had combat experience — Chechnya for Gurov and Kabatov, and Afghanistan for Wyner — they were hungry, and they were expendable.

  He’d arrived in Tripoli two months ago, where he met with his Libyan military contact, the assistant chief of staff, Lt. Col. Salaam Thaqib, set up a financial presence with the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank in the amount of two million euros, one hundred thousand of which was transferred into Thaqib’s Swiss bank account, and rented four adjoining suites in the Corinthia Bab Africa, the country’s leading hotel.

  Three days later blueprints of the reworked oil platform had been delivered by a messenger from the Czech Republic embassy on behalf of the ABN Commerce Bank in Prague where DeCamp maintained an account. The drawings had originated from his contact aboard the rig via InterOil and spreading them out on a conference table he’d ordered be brought up, it had taken him less than ten minutes to find the rig’s weakness and devise a number of plans to send it to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Included with the blueprints was a list of everyone who would be aboard, all of whom would go down with the platform. There would be no survivors.

  That afternoon he’d had two copies made of the blueprints, sending them by courier over to the colonel’s office, one to be used to construct the mock-up in the desert and the second to build a scale model of the rig that had been brought over to the hotel and set up in his suite ten days later, making at least one of his plans perfectly clear. In some ways, he’d thought, toppling the platform would be easier than the assault on Hutchinson Island had been.

  During his off hours in those weeks, DeCamp kept in shape by running five miles each day, swimming in the Med, and working out for hours at a time in the hotel’s spa. His meals were nearly all protein, and he drank no alcohol, a regimen he’d learned in the Buffalo squadron before any tough field assignment. The protein built lean muscle mass, and the lack of carbohydrates toned him down, sending him into a form of ketosis, almost like a diabetic whose hypoglycemic index was altered, only in this case giving him a lot of extra energy. Almost like floating an inch off the ground after the first week. Almost like being on uppers.

  Thirty seconds later Wyner raised his left fist and pumped it once and DeCamp nodded.

  “Now,” DeCamp said into his comms unit, and he and Wyner headed up out of the hollow, crawling on their hands and knees toward the plywood and canvas full-scale mock-up of one of Vanessa Explorer’s four semisubmersible legs.

  Waiting for his three operators to show up at the Corinthia, DeCamp had worked out two poss
ible scenarios; one of which was dropping two scuba-equipped teams from different directions one mile out from the rig. The insertion boat would be a low-slung cigarette, showing no lights, capable of speeds in excess of sixty knots, and perfectly capable of crossing the Gulf to reach the platform.

  They would set explosive charges well beneath the waterline on two of the legs, then swim back to the boat. When the charges went off, the two legs would rapidly fill with water, and the unstable rig would suddenly list sharply to one side, so suddenly that nothing aboard could be done to stop a capsize.

  Twenty feet away from the leg, DeCamp could see why it would not work, and he stood up. “Abort,” he said softly into his comms unit.

  Wyner saw it, too. “Shit,” he said, and he got to his feet. “Unless the seas are flat calm we won’t get anywhere near the leg. Too much movement. Barnacles would cut us to shreds.”

  “I didn’t see it from the blueprints or the model,” DeCamp said without rancor. Mistakes in the field could get you killed. Mistakes in a training mission were usually only embarrassing. He’d learned a part of that lesson the hard way from Colonel Frazer on the streets in Durban, and the rest of it in the field with the Buffalo Battalion when he helped carry casualties out of the hot zone; the blokes who made the mistakes, the ones who’d not paid enough attention in the training missions, were the ones who returned to base in body bags.

  Wyner was tall and slender, like a greyhound, and he stood relaxed, most of his weight on one foot. He’d taken ballet lessons as a teenager, not because he’d wanted to go on stage, but because he wanted to develop his agility so that he could become a better fencer. He was deadly in a knife fight, which was all about footwork; DeCamp had never seen a better man with a blade.

  “We could use magnetic attachers,” he suggested. “With whisker poles we wouldn’t have to get all that close.”

  “No,” DeCamp said.

  Kabatov and Gurov came out of the darkness from the east side of the rig, both of them short, sturdy men with broad Slavic features and sometimes sly smiles that made it impossible to guess what they were thinking. They looked like oil roustabouts, roughnecks who’d done manual labor all of their lives; they looked like men who’d grown up on the wharves of busy seaports, or in coal or uranium mines in Siberia, on the high seas aboard container ships — the men who would be sent forward in a storm to replace the chains on a stack of containers about to topple overboard, because they were just so much cannon fodder in the minds of the captains and the owners. And it was exactly the reason DeCamp had hired them, because they fit perfectly, especially for the only option left open. Something he’d thought might be difficult but not impossible for the right men.

  The three of them had filtered separately into Tripoli over a five-day period, Wyner first, Gurov, with his rough humor, three days later, and Kabatov the day after that. They were put on DeCamp’s regimen without grousing because they’d been promised one million euros each; the catch, making the payday a big one, was that the chances one or all of them might end up dead was better than fifty-fifty.

  “I’m the paymaster, which makes me the squad leader,” DeCamp told them when they were all together in his suite. “You guys are good, which means I want to hear what you have to say. My door is open twenty-four/seven to any idea, any complaint, any suggestion, any comment, starting now right through the end of the op.”

  They’d nodded, but said nothing.

  “Refuse a direct order, hesitate for one second, drink alcohol, smoke, or try to communicate with anyone in the real world other than the four of us in this room, and I will kill you,” DeCamp said. “Questions?”

  “No, sir,” Wyner said. “What’s the mission and how do we get there?”

  DeCamp removed the bedsheet covering the oil rig model. “Vanessa Explorer,” he said. “She’s an out of commission oil exploration platform anchored right now in the Gulf of Mexico a few miles off the Mississippi coast. Sometime in the next thirty days her anchors will be pulled up, and an oceangoing tug will tow her out into the Gulf and around the tip of Florida where she’s to be positioned on the Atlantic coast north of Miami. We’re going to sink her with all hands before she gets there.”

  The three operators gathered closer to the model, none of them showing any signs that they were surprised or skeptical. Missions with million euro paydays were always interesting, but never easy.

  “What about the crew?” Gurov asked.

  “Fourteen scientists and technicians from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, plus seventeen delivery crew and deckhands, give or take, including electricians, pipe fitters, and welders who’ll be doing work on the rig while en route.”

  “I didn’t know oil exploration was going on in that part of the Atlantic,” Wyner said.

  “It’s a scientific experiment, but that part is irrelevant. I was hired to send the rig to the bottom.”

  “That’s thirty-one people versus the four of us,” Gurov said. “Any of them with security or military backgrounds?”

  “To this point no, and we will have the help of one person aboard who’ll provide us with real-time intel.”

  “Military background or not, the crew will not simply jump overboard when we show up. Some of them will resist,” Kabatov said. “What equipment will we have to use?”

  “That will depend on which option we go with,” DeCamp told them. “At this point there are two, and I’ll want your input.”

  “It’ll take a hell of a lot of explosives to do any real damage to something that large,” Wyner said. “I did a year of contract security work aboard one of them in the Persian Gulf, during the first American war. The Saudis were a little nervous with all the ordnance flying around, and the money was good.”

  “I didn’t see that in your résumé,” DeCamp said, vexed.

  Wyner shrugged. “I didn’t put down every job I’d ever had.”

  “Anyone else with oil rig experience?”

  The Russians said no.

  Patience was another of the virtues that the colonel had taught him in Durban. “The angry man is the out-of-control soldier, usually the first to die in battle. Remember it.”

  “The delivery crew and deckhands have shore leave days on a rotating schedule. Option one is to arrange for an accident that would take out four of them, and then apply for jobs aboard the rig.”

  “Doesn’t wash,” Wyner said. “Why would they hire the four of us and not someone else?”

  “InterOil does the hiring, and we have help there. But you’re right, might be a bit of a stretch. The alternative would be for us to take out only two.”

  “Assuming it would be two of us, and not you, how would you and whoever else get aboard?”

  “They’ll have a media event, which I would attend, for starts, to legitimize myself. And then when the rig is well offshore, we’d return aboard a helicopter with four more operators and take over. If we go with that option it would be your job to disable whatever communications gear you could get to, including sat phones.”

  “And number two,” Wyner asked.

  “We scuba to the rig, and plant explosives in a pair of the legs.”

  Gurov suddenly grinned, seeing everything. “Only one problem with that scenario. The rig will capsize and sink, but there will be survivors. The only way we’re going to get rid of them all is to kill them first and lock their bodies in one of the compartments, so there’d be no floaters.”

  “Why kill them?” Kabatov asked. “Just herd them into the crew’s mess and lock the door.”

  DeCamp had wanted to try the scuba approach first, mainly because it had been drummed into his head to plan for every possibility and to train for each one and find the unknown variables, the overlooked problem that could ruin everything. Like this tonight.

  “So, what’s the problem?” Gurov asked.

  “Won’t work this way,” Wyner said, and he explained.

  From the moment DeCamp had realized the scuba approach wa
sn’t going to work, he’d decided on the other simpler plan, more elegant, less chance of failure. He would make a call to his contact aboard the oil platform to arrange for two of the least skilled men on the construction crew, roustabouts, to be fired for whatever reason he could find, and replace them with Kabatov and Gurov. The contact’s name had been supplied by Wolfhardt, who’d apparently had something on the man. Money, DeCamp had suspected, which was one of the great motivators, and he didn’t expect any difficulties. And it would give them additional inside information, the only danger if either Kabatov or Gurov — especially Gurov — got into it with one of the legitimate crewmen or scientists aboard the rig. They would have to keep their mouths shut, and do their work until the attack. Perhaps one week, or a little less.

  “We’re flying back to Tripoli tonight,” he told them. “We’re done here.”

  “What’s next?” Wyner asked.

  “Nikolai and Boris are going to make their way to Biloxi, Mississippi, where they’ll be hired as replacements for a pair of deckhands aboard the rig.”

  Gurov brightened. “How will we know which guys you want us to take down?”

  “Won’t be necessary. Just show up at the union hall and you’ll get the jobs.”

  “Too bad.”

  “You’ll have plenty of chance to spill blood,” DeCamp said. “A lot of blood.”

  “What about me?” Wyner asked.

  “You’re coming to London with me to hire four more operators, familiarize them with the rig, and from there move the ops to New Orleans, where we’ll pick up our equipment.”

  “How will we communicate?” Kabatov asked. “In case something changes or goes wrong.”

  “I have a Nokia encrypted sat phone for you.”

  “How do we get out of there when it’s over?”

  “By helicopter out to a ship heading to the Panama Canal.”

  “A lot could go wrong,” Wyner commented.