Stepping out from behind the pillar, Miller clotheslined the gunman, smashing his forearm into his Adam’s apple and crushing his larynx. The gunman gagged and his hands clawed at his throat as if he were trying to open his smashed airway. No such luck. He went unconscious in seconds, slumping to the deck. A few more seconds and he was dead.
Being a man who never liked to see garbage littering his oil rig, Miller grabbed the corpse by the ankles, dragged it over to the side and tossed it into the sea. The body sank beneath the waves.
After snatching up the fallen assault rifle, Miller took cover behind the pillar again to examine his prize. He wasn’t a dedicated gun nut like some of his buddies, but he wasn’t a complete firearms novice, either. He knew what an AK looked like and roughly how it worked; he’d just never had a chance to fire one. But if these bastards were able to use them, he figured he could do it, as well.
Taking out the magazine, he cracked the bolt to empty the chamber and let it go forward. Pulling the trigger, he found that the weapon was on safe. Seeing the big flat lever on the left side of the receiver, he flicked it up one notch and pulled the trigger again. This time, the hammer fell with a click. That was the fire position.
Resetting the magazine, he chambered a round. Rather than put the weapon back on safety and having to fumble around if he needed it, he left it hot and kept his finger outside the trigger guard. Now that he was armed, he realized that he should have stripped the gunman’s body of his extra magazines, but it was too late now.
Instead of taking the ladder the gunman had used, Miller went to the other side of the deck and took the other ladder up to the main deck. He had work to do.
“WE HAVE A SECOND rotary wing contact Romeo Seven bearing for the platform, Sir,” the radar man announced.
Rawlings turned the scopes to pick up the second machine, and both Brognola and Bolan watched it on the video monitor. “Probably carrying explosives,” Bolan commented. “Better give the Coast Guard a heads up so they can start notifying the company to get their fire-fighting crews going.”
“Do it,” Rawlings told his radioman.
“Aye, Sir.”
WHEN MILLER GOT up to the main deck, he saw that he wasn’t the only roughneck who had struck back. More than one black-clad body lay in a pool of blood. Several drillers had been killed, as well, but the firing had completely died down. If that made him the Lone Ranger still defending the rig, so be it. This time, though, he was going to find a better place to do it from. Getting shot hurt.
He’d found a great place: the cage holding the welding gas bottles. The sides were quarter-inch plate, which he figured would give him a little protection. Before he got started, though, he needed to know how much ammunition he had so he snapped the magazine out of the AK. To his disappointment, he counted only four rounds, which wasn’t much. With one in the chamber, though, he should be able to cause some damage if he took careful shots.
He was replacing the magazine when he heard the rotor sounds of a second chopper. The riggers had more gunmen than they could deal with right now and didn’t need any more. Poking only his head and the rifle above his makeshift armor, Miller took a deep breath and sighted in on the approaching chopper.
Not knowing that in a chopper the pilot sat on the opposite side than a fixed-wing aircraft pilot, Miller sighted the man in the right-hand seat. He took up the slack on the trigger and fired slow aimed shots until his magazine went empty.
By the second shot, the chopper seemed to wobble in the air. The Mi-8 rolled a few degrees, her left gear wheel dropping low enough to hit the edge of the main deck. The chopper slammed onto the deck hard, snapping off her tail boom. The spinning rotor slammed against the steel deck, shattering the blades and sending them flying.
As soon as the fuselage came to a halt, several men staggered out of the wreckage and took off running. Miller didn’t see any flames, but knew that fuel might be leaking. His AK was empty now, but he was pleased with the job he had done with it. Now he had to find a place to hide.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Diego Garcia was in the captain’s cabin off the bridge when the Matador Air Ops officers rushed in. “The helicopter carrying the material crashed on the platform,” he reported. “There was firing right as it was landing. The copilot was killed outright, and the pilot lost control of his machine and crashed.”
“And the material it was carrying, Comrade?” the Matador leader asked.
“Some of it was lost in the sea, but a few of the canisters were damaged on impact and the material leaked onto the platform.”
A flash of pain hit Garcia behind the eyes and he blinked. This wasn’t the time for him to show weakness, so he bit down. He could still make the plan work, but he would have to move quickly.
“Leave the material there,” he said. “Don’t try to salvage it. Recover our fighters immediately in the other machine and we’ll move on to the second target.”
Garcia hit the intercom to the bridge. “Helmsman, as soon as the helicopter is recovered, make a course for Bravo 108,” he ordered.
“As you command, Comrade.”
“And—” he turned back to his air officer “—when we hit it, I want twice as many men to make the assault and I want them to completely eliminate the workers. Launch both of the helicopters together and when the site is secure, one of the machines will fly back here to pick up the material.”
“Yes, Comrade.”
As soon as the man left, Garcia took two of his dwindling supplies of pain pills. No man in the history of socialism had been tested as he was being tested. But no matter what obstacles were put in his way, he wouldn’t quit.
WHEN THE CUBANS reacted to the crash of the chopper by loading back into the remaining helicopter and evacuating the platform, Bolan’s suspicion that the Cubans had planned to destroy it were confirmed.
“But with what?” Hal Brognola thought out loud.
“My hunch is that whatever it was, it got lost when that second chopper crashed.”
“You think they’re going back for more?”
“Not when they pulled their fighters out,” Bolan said. “I’d say they’re leaving.”
“She’s making turns to get under way, Sir,” the sonar man reported.
Captain Rawlings turned to Brognola. “What now?”
“Just keep tailing her,” Brognola replied wearily, “and I’ll try once more to get some definitive guidance out of the Puzzle Palace. Someone up there’s got to know what the Man wants us to do.”
A HALF HOUR LATER Brognola walked into Rawlings’s cabin, poured himself a cup of coffee and took his place at the table.
“The Man was in a meeting I couldn’t break into again,” he said, “so I patched into the Farm and ran this incident past them. They were following it by satellite, and it’s worse than we thought. Those weren’t explosives that were being transferred to that oil platform. It was nuclear waste of some kind, probably from nuclear power plants. When that chopper crashed, the nuclear detection satellites picked up what it was carrying and it’s real hot. Hunt thinks that they were going to try to contaminate the wells by pumping it down into the oil bearing strata.”
“Would that work?” Rawlings frowned.
“Apparently only too well,” Brognola replied. “While the underground pools of oil beneath the wells are more or less separate, there’s still a slight connection between the different pockets. If he can contaminate half a dozen wells with the stuff, it’ll spread from one strata to the others and poison the oil in the entire Caribbean region. Hunt says that if he can pull this off, no one will be able to use the oil for a thousand years or more.”
“There goes the President’s plan to become self-sufficient in oil by 2010,” Rawlings commented dryly.
“I think Garcia’s trying to strike at the heart of our national economy,” Brognola said. “First the hordes of illegals storming across the fence and now this. And if Cuba is working in conjunction with the OPEC nations on thi
s, I think we can expect a repeat of the ’73 oil embargo on top of it. But this time, it might work.”
“Our radar plot,” Rawlings said, “indicates that he’s steaming toward one of the other oil rigs in the vicinity. ETA a couple of hours.”
“How about launching the SEALs,” Bolan asked Rawlings, “at least to cripple the ship?”
“If you can get your boss to sign off on it,” the captain said. “I’m sure they’d be glad to swim over and put a charge on her rudder to put her out of commission so he can’t try this again. But to do that, and no offense meant, I’ll have to get clearance from someone in the chain of command whose name I’ve heard before.”
“No offense taken,” Brognola said. “I’ll see if I can get through to him again.”
Gulping down the rest of his coffee, he left for the commo room again.
BROGNOLA DIDN’T LOOK quite so grim-faced this time when he returned to the makeshift war room in Rawlings’s cabin. “I didn’t get everything I wanted,” he said, “but even a slice is better than no pie at all.”
He handed a faxed hard copy to Rawlings. “Here’s your firing orders,” he said. “If Garcia launches those choppers again, you have the National Command Authority’s permission to engage and blow them out of the sky. A copy’s been sent to CinClant to cover your ass with them.”
“’Bout fucking time.” The Skipper grinned broadly. As a fighting man, it rankled that he wasn’t able to do anything about the Americans being held hostage on that ship. But he could sure as hell blast those choppers out of the air before they did any more damage to oil rigs.
“How about the SEALs?” Bolan asked.
Brognola sat at the small table and reached into his pocket for an antacid tab. “The SEALs aren’t officially authorized,” he said. “He’s still having trouble with the Europeans, particularly since the nuke alert satellites are going off like a string of cheap Christmas tree lights. Everyone’s screaming and waving their hands like a bunch of old women, and they’ve convened an emergency session of the UN Security Council to discuss this ‘new’ emergency.”
In another circumstance, the Stony Man action teams would be all over this, both for the sake of the hostages and to take care of the nuclear material before it got out of hand. But as it was, both of the Farm’s teams were engaged half a world away and Bolan was the only Stony Man operative in a position to act right now.
“The good news, if you want to call it that,” Brognola told Bolan, “is that when I asked, he didn’t outright forbid you to go in and take care of business. He didn’t authorize it, but then he didn’t make any of his usual threats if you go, either. He’s leaving it completely up to you.”
That was the way Bolan liked to operate anyway.
“I’ll opt in.”
Rawlings couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re trying to tell me that you don’t have specific authorization from the President to take action on this, but that he still wants it done?”
Brognola mugged his best innocent look. “Like I tried to explain before, that’s how it usually works.”
The sub captain shook his head. “Man, this has gone from James Bond all the way to Alice in Wonderland, and it hasn’t gotten any better as it’s gone along.”
He held up a hand to keep Brognola from going into his rap about the nature of his “job,” if it could be called that, again. He had no way to confirm any of this and it was making his head ache. He also knew that if he called CinClant for clarification, though, it’d be like putting a gun to his own head.
“Look, Captain,” Bolan said, turning to Rawlings, “you’re the boss here. We both know the law of the sea, and I know how it works. So before this goes too much further and everyone gets wrapped around the axle, how about coming up to the surface alongside the Princess just long enough to let me off this boat. You and Hal can then go on your way and argue about who’s going to do what to whom and when.”
“You’ve got to be out of your mind, mister,” Rawlings growled. “It’s still blowing up there, and you wouldn’t last five minutes in that water.”
“That’s kind of my concern, isn’t it?” Bolan locked eyes with him. “And if I remember, Captain, your original orders were to pick me up and take me where I said I wanted to go, right? Well, this is where the bus stops for me. I’m getting off as close to that ship as you can get me.”
“Striker,” Brognola jumped in, “you can’t help those people if you drown.”
“Someone has to help them,” he replied, “and I seem to be the guy who has the best chance right about now. We don’t know what Garcia’s ultimate plans are, but I’m not willing to risk all those people’s lives in the hopes that he turns them loose sometime in the future.”
He leaned closer to his old friend. “You know how these things work, Hal. This isn’t the first time we’ve come up against this scenario and if we don’t take this guy out, he’ll start killing those people, and you know it. Regardless of what the Man’s going through with the Europeans and the UN, the ball’s in our court and I’m the only one in place who can make a play.
“Plus—” he glanced up at the clock on the wall “—time isn’t on our side. This storm impeded him as much as it has us, but it’s dying down. Once it’s blown past, we have no idea what he’s going to do next. What if he has a nuke weapon on board, as well as that waste material and he decides to sail it into a major harbor? With the hostages on board, we won’t be able to stop him.”
“Okay, you two,” Rawlings said in capitulation. “I’ve got to be out of my mind, but I’ll go along with this. You know, I’ve had a great career so far in this man’s Navy. I’ve gotten my ticket punched all the way through, I’ve made a few above-the-zone promotions and had some choice assignments where I did quite well, thank you, and got my required brownie points. I’d really like to be the CNO someday because I think that I could do a lot for the fleet.
“But…” Rawlings added, a strange look on his face, “I’m not sure that I want to wear the gold braid if it’s covered with American blood. So, since you two crazies seem to be determined to trash your careers, as well as risk your lives, the very least I can do is help you do it. Promise me, though, that if you survive, you’ll come and see me when I’m permanently beached in the old sailors’ home.”
Brognola laughed. “If I remember, it’s right down the street from the old disgraced federal bureaucrats home, so we’ll be neighbors.”
“I take it that you know how to use underwater gear?” Rawlings asked the man he knew as Cooper.
Bolan nodded.
“Okay, I’ll go along with this dog-and-pony show, but there’s one problem. Even in good weather, you can’t swim fast enough to catch up with him when he’s under way. You get suited up and the next time he stops, I’ll release you as close to the ship on the lee side as I can. I can’t get too close, ’cause I can’t risk a collision in winds like this. If we take any hull damage, we’ll go under. But I can put you within a couple hundred yards of her.”
“That should do it.”
“And while you’re getting suited up,” Brognola said, “I’ll get hold of the Farm to see if the Bear can come up with a blueprint for that thing. I’m sure that the builder kept something for the archives.”
“If your man can’t find anything in the builder’s records,” Rawlings offered, “tell him to try the Coast Guard. They’re likely have a deck plan in their data banks because they use them for their contraband searches.”
“Good tip.”
THE SEALS HAD THEIR own small compartment by the torpedo room in the forward end of the sub. In times of underwater war, they would assist the ordnance men in keeping the tubes fed with Mk-48 ship killers and tube-launched cruise missiles. At other times, they provided security for the sub in foreign ports or were available to undertake their signature ops on land.
Rawlings led Bolan into the SEALs’ berth and walked up to an older man with a buzz cut and master chief petty officer’s ch
evrons pinned on the collars of his Marine-style OD combat fatigues.
“Master Chief Duffy,” Rawlings said, “this is Colonel Cooper. I need you to help him get suited up with some of your spare gear. We’re going to be dropping him off soon.”
The SEAL didn’t comment on the absurdity of launching a swimmer in this kind of weather, particularly someone who wasn’t a fin. But he’d heard the scuttlebutt that they had a pair of high-level spooks on board, so he kept his thoughts to himself. He just extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Sir,” he said.
Bolan shook his hand. “Master Chief.”
“The chief’ll take care of what you need,” Rawlings said. “When you’re ready, let me know.”
Duffy led Bolan over to the SEALs’ lockers and started to break out a full set of underwater gear. Bolan stripped to his shorts and donned the wet suit as soon as it was laid out.
“You’ve worn this gear before, Sir,” the chief said as he watched Bolan suit up.
“On occasion, Chief,” Bolan admitted, “but it’s been a while. So, how about running me through all the checks to make sure I don’t miss anything.”
The SEAL watched closely as Bolan made the connections for the scuba gear and adjusted the wet suit. “Is it true, Sir, that there’s a bunch of terrorists holding Americans hostage on that ship?”
“That’s classified information, Chief,” Bolan said. “And if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
The SEAL started to bristle before he realized that Bolan was playing the old Spec Ops game with him. He couldn’t reveal classified information outright, but from one professional to another, he could give him the pieces and let him put them together himself.
“There are Americans on the ship, Chief,” Bolan admitted, “and right now we’re not too sure about the status of the regular crew.”
That was all the SEAL needed to hear. He was an expert at the game and could read everything he needed to know into that one innocent statement.
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