Silent Running

by Don Pendleton

  “Come,” the first gunman snapped.

  “No problem,” Spellman said as he stepped out of his makeshift cell. When the gunman motioned for him to walk down the passageway, he moved out between the two.

  Spellman was shocked when the lead gunman said something to his partner and split off up one of the ladders, evening the odds.

  The physician looked back over his shoulder past the gunman and mugged surprise. “¡Hola!” he said loudly.

  When the gunman turned to see who was behind them, Spellman brought his fists together and hammered them on the back of the gunman’s neck. He heard an audible crack and the man slumped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

  Being a doctor, he couldn’t stop himself from automatically kneeling to check for a pulse, but there was none. From the way the man’s head lolled on his neck, it was obvious that he had broken it. He was surprised how easy it had been, but the man’d had his back turned.

  Grabbing the body by the feet, Spellman dragged it back into the laundry closet and closed the door behind them. The first thing he needed was a change of clothing. The cook’s whites he’d worn since the night of the hijacking had outlived their usefulness. The gunman was a little larger man than he was, but that was better than his being smaller.

  He stripped the corpse of its pants and black fatigue jacket, but kept his own shoes. After belting the gunman’s black leather belt and holster over the jacket, he took the pistol from the holster and looked it over. The safety switch on the left side of the receiver had two positions: one marked with a green dot and one with red. Since the lettering on the side of the slide wasn’t in English, he couldn’t count on the U.S. tradition of green meaning go and red meaning stop working here. Red could also mean danger, ready to fire.

  Spellman wasn’t very familiar with firearms. He knew enough from the movies that he thought he could change the magazines if it came to that, but he didn’t know how to test the safety switch. Taking a couple of pillows from the shelf, he flicked the pistol’s safety to the red position. Pressing the muzzle tight against a pile of sheets, he held the pillows over it and pulled the trigger. He smiled as the pistol bucked in his hand; he had guessed right the first time. The report had been well muffled, and no one could have heard it from the passageway.

  He had a gun now, but how he was going to find Mary was still a problem. Without speaking Spanish, there was no way that he would be able to pass for one of the terrorists. But he was hoping that dressed in black, anyone seeing him from a distance would take him for one of the gunmen and not raise the alarm.

  He opened the door a crack and, finding the passageway empty, stepped out. Until he got this ship figured out, he decided to go down to the machinery decks to look for a better place to hide until nightfall.

  NOW THAT THE Sandshark had caught up with the Carib Princess, Captain Rawlings had no trouble maintaining station a few miles behind her. Trailing his satcom array, he sent an hourly position report to CinClant. He received nothing in reply, so figured that his earlier orders from the CNO were still in force.

  “If he keeps on this course,” the officer of the deck stated, “he’s heading for one of the oil platforms.”

  “Aw, shit!” Brognola muttered.

  Garcia and an oil rig could mean only one thing, and he didn’t need an environmental disaster added to an already overly complicated situation. There was nothing like a little environmental hysteria to really screw up an operation.

  “You can use the radio if you need to.” Rawlings nodded toward the commo room.

  “I know he’s got the information already,” Brognola said, “but I want to bounce something off of him.”

  “Good luck.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  As the submarine stalked the Carib Princess on her way to the oil rig, Brognola prowled the control room muttering under his breath. Being forced to sit and wait was killing him. Thanks to the sub’s corpsman, at least he had something to take to keep his stomach in place. Even though Captain Rawlings was making hourly reports to his superiors, he, too, was keeping the White House Chief of Staff updated. Each time he called, though, he was told that the President was still in conference on the matter and had made no decision. If this kept up much longer, antacid tabs or not, he wasn’t going to have any stomach lining left. The pots of coffee he was washing the tabs down with would make sure of that.

  “She’s reducing turns, sir,” the sonar man called from the other side of the room.

  The sub had been cruising at periscope depth, and Rawlings sent the scope up again for a quick look. “He’s hull down,” he announced, “and coming to a stop.”

  When the Carib Princess went dead in the water fifteen miles from the oil platform, Rawlings ordered the Sandshark into a protective position between it and the oil rig and sent up the scope to look at what the Cuban was doing. Whatever he had in mind, it wouldn’t be good. This time Rawlings also deployed the Mk-18 scope, which had video imaging capability, and piped the images it captured to a monitor at one of the attack stations so Brognola and Striker could watch.

  TO KEEP FROM ATTRACTING undue attention, when the Carib Princess arrived in the vicinity of the oil platform, Garcia stopped the ship well below the horizon. He wasn’t unaware that the ship was being tracked by the Yankees’ recon satellites and by their high-flying spy planes. As long as he had the passengers, though, he didn’t care if his position was known to them. He did, however, want to catch the crew of the oil rig by surprise.

  The rigs had large crews, sometimes up to a hundred men, and, while his assault teams were well armed, they were relatively small. But with the oil workers reportedly not being armed, his fighters shouldn’t have much trouble with them.

  The Matador air operations leader walked onto the bridge. “The men and the canisters are ready to launch, Comrade,” he reported.

  “Well done, Comrade.” Garcia smiled. “Tell them to take off.”

  The first Mi-8 Hip lifted off with twenty-two Matador fighters inside for the ten-minute flight to the oil rig. As soon as the platform was pacified, the second aircraft with the canisters would join it. An hour after that, America would start paying for her crimes against the people.

  THE VIDEO from the Sandshark’s periscope showed movement on the rear deck of the cruise ship as one of the helicopters was readied for takeoff.

  “I’ve got rotary-wing contact Romeo Six, Sir,” the radar man announced when it launched. “It’s bearing directly for the platform.”

  Rawlings turned the scope to catch the chopper when it flew past.

  “My guess is that he’s sending an assault force to the platform,” Bolan said.

  “I can take that chopper out, Sir,” the weapons officer suggested.

  “Weapons on hold, Guns,” Rawlings snapped.

  “Aye, Sir, weapons on hold.”

  “Can you contact the rig and warn them?” Brognola asked the captain.

  “I doubt if they’re armed,” Bolan interjected. “And it might be better if they don’t try to resist armed gunmen. We don’t know what he’s planing to do yet.”

  Bolan had a bad habit of pointing out the obvious, so Brognola backed off. It was a bitch having to wait for the enemy to make his move. It was worse having to ask Washington to do what needed to be done.

  IF YOU WERE TO ASK HIM, Bud Miller probably wouldn’t call himself a patriot. That was too fancy a word and he would have shied away from it. Sure he loved his country, but like most Americans, he bitched about everything from taxes to scumbag fat cats and politicians, and he didn’t think a real “patriot” would do that. He also wasn’t much for what was touted as American family values. He’d never known his dad, his mom was a royal pain in the ass and he was currently between ex-wife number three and whoever was in the running to become number four. Working on oil rigs wasn’t conducive to marital bliss, but he’d never had any trouble getting hitched. The women liked the fat paychecks, but the extended tours on the rig were
another matter.

  Miller was, though, a man who was fiercely loyal to his friends, and the crew of Sonoco Delta 39 were as close to a family as he’d ever really had. On shore, his door was always open and his couch available for any roughneck who needed to sober up or who had just been thrown out of his trailer by a pissed-off, soon-to-be ex-wife. He was also known as a soft touch for a small loan until payday, a never-ending point of contention with his ex-wives all of whom thought that their alimony payments should always come first.

  So, when the unmarked chopper touched down on the rig’s landing pad unannounced and started disgorging black-clad gunmen, Miller became angry.

  One of the reasons Miller was never short of feminine companionship and was so well respected among his peers was that he was a big man. Not big as in John Belushi, but as in Arnold Schwarzenegger. Being six-six and two hundred and forty pounds made him a man to be reckoned with in almost any situation. Even so, he was an easygoing kind of guy as if to compensate for his bulk. That’s the thing that drew women to him like flies to a ham sandwich at a Fourth of July picnic and accounted for his string of serial marriages.

  He was laid-back and hard to ruffle, but when he was angry, everyone sat up and took notice. When that happened, and it was only rarely, those who could, evacuated the premises. Those who couldn’t, quickly said “Yes, sir.”

  “Hey, Bud!” Rick Fraser, company man and shift supervisor, stuck his head out of the office. “Who the hell are those guys in that chopper?”

  “Fucked if I know,” Miller said. “But they sure as hell don’t look friendly to me. Those are AKs they’re packin’ not M-16s.”

  “I’d better go down there.”

  “I wouldn’t do it, Rick. You got the key to the gun rack?”

  There wasn’t much need for guns on an oil rig, but if someone went overboard, a rifle would keep the sharks away until they could get the boat to him. Plus, in the wake of 9/11, some guy in Washington had woken up to the fact that oil rigs could be hijacked and had made surplus military rifles available if the oil companies wanted to arm their rigs.

  Miller’s bosses had taken a dozen of the offered rifles and pistols and a small supply of ammunition, but kept them under lock and key in the main office.

  “Let me go down and talk to them,” Fraser said. “I’m sure there’s some reason they’re here.”

  Miller wasn’t one of those die-hard union guys who thought that every company man was a moron. Granted a lot of them couldn’t pour piss out of a boot unless the instructions were printed on the bottom of the heel, but he’d also known some damned good men in the higher ranks of the company. Unfortunately, Fraser wasn’t one of them.

  Miller turned back and walked over to a tool locker. Taking out a three-foot titanium pry bar, he headed for the main office on the next deck up.

  Jim Simmons, the shift crew boss, was parked behind his desk, as he usually was, drinking a cup of coffee. “Who the hell’s in that chopper?” he asked. “We aren’t scheduled for any resupply today.”

  “They’re packing guns.” Miller headed for the arms locker. “AKs, I think.”

  “You’re shitting me!”

  “Nope.” Miller fitted the end of the pry bar to the lock hasp and applied pressure. “And Fraser’s gone down there to talk to them.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Simmons frowned.

  “I’m buying the company a new lock,” Miller replied as he popped the hasp free. “Put it on my tab.”

  Simmons was a good man who had come up through the company the hard way, but he could be a bit slow on the uptake at times. Worrying too much about a fat pension he’d be getting at the end of the year could do that to a man.

  Miller reached in, pulled out an AR-15, the civilian, semiauto version of the M-16, and cracked the bolt. “We’re gonna need these when your boy gets his ass blown away.”

  As if on command, the rattle of an AK on full-auto sounded. Grabbing a handful of loaded magazines, Miller headed for the door.

  Simmons stared after him, his jaw slack, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth.

  THE CREW at the drill head heard the firing over the cacophony of the working drill. An oil rig wasn’t the place for quiet solitude, but gunfire, particularly full-auto fire, was a first. Without being told, the driller started to pull the bit out of the hole to shut down.

  “Yo, Jack!” Miller leaned over the railing of the upper desk and shouted to the drill head foreman, “Get your guys up to the office and get some guns.”

  “What’s going on?” Jack Dawson asked.

  “I don’t know,” Miller shouted. “But those guys from that chopper have AKs, and I think they’re trying to take over the rig.”

  “The hell they are!” Dawson waved to the rest of his crew. “Let’s go, guys!”

  As Dawson and his men ran for the office, Miller worked his way around, searching for a covered position to try his luck. The superstructure of the platform got in the way of his line of sight to the landing pad, so he ended up in the open on one of the catwalks above the water. It wasn’t the best place in the world for a would-be sniper, but it was all he could find.

  He’d never fired an AR-15, and the straight-line stock and sight placement were a little strange to him. But he got a sight picture on a guy about seventy-five yards away who looked to be in charge and squeezed off a round.

  The guy didn’t go down, and Miller lined up on him again. He was squeezing when a blow to his left arm spun him and he slipped off his perch. The rifle slipped from his hands as he fell toward the waves below.

  JACK DAWSON, the drill head foreman, made it to the office with only three of his eight-man crew left. The rest had fallen back along the way. Thanks to someone’s artistic use of a pry bar, the arms locker was open. The four men snatched AR-15s from the rack and stuffed their pockets with loaded magazines.

  “How do you use this damned thing?” one of the younger men asked, frowning.

  “Here.” An older man stuck out his hand. “Gimme that fuckin’ thing.”

  Flipping the rifle upside down, he took a magazine and stuffed it into the well. “That’s how you load it. To drop the empty mag, you just hit this button.”

  Rolling the rifle right side up again, he pulled on the charging handle and let it fly forward. “That puts a round in the chamber. The safety’s simple enough for even a dumb shit like you.”

  “Thanks, old-timer.” The kid grinned.

  “If you’d been in the Army, you’d know simple shit like that.”

  “Okay, boys,” Dawson said. “Let’s go.”

  RAWLINGS HAD MANEUVERED the Sandshark to within five hundred yards of the Delta 39 for a better look at what was going on. With his optical scope up to full power, he could see the figures on the platform and the firefight that was taking place. It looked to be pretty much one-sided, but it showed that the roughnecks had access to weapons.

  Brognola and Bolan were also watching on the video relay as the scene played out. “If he can sabotage the drill head,” Brognola said, “he can put that well out of action for quite some time.”

  “But that would just be temporary,” Bolan said. “Even if it catches fire, it can be put out and restored fairly quickly.”

  “What if he opens the valves on the holding tanks and releases the oil?”

  “Then we’d have a problem,” Bolan admitted. “But that, too, can be contained.”

  “So what the hell’s he doing?”

  Bolan shrugged.

  BUD MILLER surfaced above the waves under the platform and spit out a mouthful of water. His arm was throbbing, but when he looked at the wound, he saw that the bullet had just torn a furrow through the muscle. He could move it okay. It didn’t hurt much yet, but he knew that was only temporary. If he was going to save himself, he needed to do it now while he still could.

  The platform’s three massive sea legs were hollow steel tubes with ladders inside for the convenience of the maintenance crew. Six feet above th
e waterline, there was a hatch that could be opened from the outside. The thought was that if someone fell into the water, he could swim to one of the legs, climb up the rescue rungs welded on the outside, open the hatch and make his way inside. From there, the maintenance ladder would take him up to the main deck. As far as Miller knew, this rescue system had yet to be used, but he was glad it was there and would save him.

  Keeping as low in the water as he could, he paddled to the closest leg. The rescue rungs were on the inside curve of the leg, so he would be hidden in case anyone looked down to see if he had survived. Favoring his wounded arm, Miller went up the rungs one-handed. The dog on the hatch was properly greased, but stiff, and it took a moment for him to get it open.

  Inside the leg, he left the hatch open a bit to give him some light as he took a look at his wound. The salt water had washed it clean, but it was still bleeding. Taking off his T-shirt, he used his teeth to tear a strip off of the bottom. The makeshift bandage would slow the bleeding, which he figured would clot sooner or later. Right now, though, he had other things to worry about.

  He started up the maintenance ladder, knowing that the first exit hatch he came to would open onto the lowest of the rig decks: the loading dock below the main deck. He thought it might be a better idea to exit there to take a look at what was going on before he went further up. Cracking the hatch, he peered out and found that the deck was empty.

  Miller stepped out and had started for the ladder that led to the main deck when he heard boot heels coming down the metal steps. He ducked behind the platform leg for cover and waited. When he heard the footsteps stop, he risked a peek. The gunman was a Latino, who didn’t seem to be very comfortable about the prospect of walking around on open-mesh deck plates. It took a while before a guy got comfortable with seeing the waves below his feet.

  When the gunman headed in the direction of Miller’s pillar, he ducked back behind it. But knowing the guy was concentrating on where he put his feet gave him an idea. He listened to the hesitant steps and waited until it sounded as though the man was right on top of him.