Oceans of Fire

by Don Pendleton

  “Oh, shit!” Hawkins threw himself behind the stairwell as the car hurtled down toward the dock. It hit bottom like a train wreck. The car was little more than a metal cage, and sections of it scythed across the dock in all directions. Several large size pieces slammed into the stairwell and rang it like a gong. Hawkins rose from cover and surveyed the mangled metal cage, then glanced back at the burning sub. He may have missed his landing, but he was doing a fine job of making mayhem from the ground up. Hawkins looked up at the mass of the platform overhead. He wasn’t looking forward to walking up sixty-five feet of stairs, but if the enemy decided to bolt, they were going to have to come through him.

  He put an exhausted foot on the first step and began his ascent.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Platform

  “Clear!” Lyons moved out of the dispensary and down the narrow corridor. They had cleared the barracks and the generator room and were working their way down. The Stony Man warriors had left a trail of death and destruction behind them, but by now the enemy knew they were just two men and had ceased their fighting retreat. Lyons and Bolan had broken two ambushes, mostly with the help of the Panzerfaust. Now they were fresh out of rockets.

  Lyons stopped and held up a fist. Bolan crouched ten yards behind, covering the corridor with his rifle. At the end of the corridor a door was hanging open very suspiciously. “How many more do you figure?”

  “Hard to say. Enough to keep us honest.”

  Lyons nodded. There was no way to go except forward.

  The serrated lump of a fragmentation grenade sailed out the door and clattered across the floor. “Grenade!” Lyons shoved his arm out to full extension. The 12-gauge Jungle Gun roared, and the soft lead buckshot slammed into the iron casing of the grenade and sent it spinning back the way it had come. He fired a second and third time, and the grenade rolled back through the door and a man screamed as it detonated. Lyons crept forward. He took a quick peek through the door and nearly had his head taken off by gunfire.

  The interior was a hangar. Massive steel frame racks stood empty where they would hold ADS suits and submersibles. A huge steel hatch had been cut into the floor and winches and cranes ringed it to lower divers and subs into the sea. Benches, compressors and equipment for servicing the deep diving gear was everywhere. Plenty of good solid cover for the bad guys.

  Laurentius Deyn’s voice rang out. “I would be very careful about throwing grenades into this room. You might hurt someone you care about. Isn’t that right, Mr. Tokaido?”

  The young hacker groaned with sudden pain.

  “Carl!” Bolan shouted.

  Lyons had burst into the hangar. Pistols and automatic rifles reverberated in the space. The Able Team leader rolled behind a massive winch and emptied his shotgun over the top.

  Bolan ran forward, hurling his last flash-stun grenade in front of him. It detonated in harmless thunder in the middle of the hangar, but the sound and light allowed him to leap behind a compressor large enough to pump up a submarine. The echoes of the grenade reverberated away.

  “Foolish,” Deyn declared. “Throw down your weapons.”

  Lyons shoved fresh shells into his shotgun. Ammo was running low. He shot a glance over to Bolan. The Executioner had set down his rifle and filled his hands with a .50-caliber Desert Eagle in one hand and a Beretta 93-R machine pistol in the other. It would have been a Butch and Sundance situation except for the nuclear devices and a hostaged friend.

  “Throw down your weapons,” Deyn reiterated.

  “Not gonna happen!” Lyons snarled.

  “How can I convince you?” Deyn mockingly queried. A woman screamed. Johan Mahke rose up from behind an overturned steel worktable and bodily flung Franka Marx into the middle of the hangar. He quickly dropped his bulk behind cover again. Lyons’s eyes narrowed. The German woman was a bloody mess and her clothes were torn, but it looked to be little more than a beating so far.

  “Throw down your weapons!”

  The knuckles of Lyons’s good hand went white around the grips of his shotgun.

  “Very well…Lars!”

  A man popped up from cover in the corner of the hanger. His MP-5 submachine gun barked off a single shot.

  Franka Marx screamed as the bullet blasted into the back of her leg and burst out the front.

  “No!” Tokaido screamed.

  “Carl!” Bolan shouted.

  Lyons didn’t need the admonition. He knew all about the sniper’s draw. They would keep wounding Franka Marx until he and Bolan were forced to attack, and when they did they would have to rush across the open hangar into a cross fire, and Deyn still had Akira as his ace in the hole.

  “Throw down your weapons!”

  Marx lay on the giant steel door clutching her leg and weeping helplessly.

  “Lars!” Deyn shouted.

  Lyons swung his shotgun around, but it wasn’t Lars who popped up. Mahke snaked his pistol out from cover and fired.

  Marx screamed in agony as his bullet smashed through her shoulder.

  Bolan looked over at Lyons and mouthed two words.

  Your call.

  Lyons nodded.

  Hawkins’s voice roared from the back of the hangar. “Go! Go! Go!”

  A pair of flash-stuns went off, filling the hangar with thunder, lighting and dancing pyrotechnic fireflies. Lyons and Bolan rose. The Executioner’s Barrett boomed on rapid semiauto, and his armor-piercing bullets punched holes in Mahke’s steel cover. The big man reared up bleeding and bellowing. He and Bolan exchanged fire. The soldier’s ceramic armor took the 9 mm rounds. Johan Mahke’s massive frame had to take the .50-caliber bullets as they tore through his Kevlar and ripped out his back, and the big man toppled like an oak.

  Lars rose up, but Marx was no longer his target. Lyons’s Jungle Gun roared like the King of the Beasts it was and buckshot hammered Lars’s head into red ruin. Marx screamed again, not with the agony of another bullet but the panicked scream of a trapped animal.

  Somewhere across the hangar Tokaido was screaming. “Franka! Franka!”

  Mahke had thrown her onto the submersible deployment doors. Whoever had the controls had pressed Open. She tried to get away, but her gunshot wounds reduced her movement to a crippled crawl. The clamshell door opened beneath her and Franka Marx slid down the smooth steel, screaming as she fell into empty air.

  Mack Bolan didn’t hesitate. He tossed away has pistols and took a running leap. He did a jackknife over the doors and arrowed straight down into the dark after her. Lyons kept moving forward. Two of Deyn’s men charged forward in full raid armor. The Ironman cut their knees out from under them, then mercilessly shot open their face shields at point-blank range.

  Lyons crouched behind a rolling tool bin as everything went quiet. “Deyn!”

  “He’s in the corner!” Hawkins called.

  “How many men?”

  “One!”

  Lyons had been expecting a lot more. Hawkins had to have taken care of some things down below. “Give it up, Deyn! Don’t make me come get you!”

  “You will surrender,” Deyn replied, “or I will activate the devices. Then I will begin shooting your friend Akira apart a piece at a time.”

  “Kill his ass!” Tokaido shouted. “Just kill his—” The young man’s call was cut off.

  Lyons stalked forward like biblical retribution. He saw Hawkins moving forward along the far wall and gave him a single nod. The man nodded back. Lyons’s directive was clear.

  If you see the shot, take it.

  “That is far enough,” Deyn declared.

  The German stood in front of a diving cage. Inside was a pallet holding the thermonuclear demolition charges. In front of the cage a pair of aluminum suitcases lay open to expose sophisticated communications equipment. Tokaido stood handcuffed in front of Deyn. Lyons’s eyes went arctic. The kid looked like death warmed over. There wasn’t an inch of exposed flesh that wasn’t pulped. It was his eyes that were the worst. The young man sta
red out of the sea of broken blood vessels. He saw Lyons but from some terrible middle distance. Deyn’s right arm was snaked under his hostage’s arm, the muzzle of a Walther P-5 pressed firmly under his chin. Deyn held a black detonator box in his left hand. His smile was beatific. It was clear that he was absolutely insane.

  It was a lose-lose situation. Everyone was going to die.

  Lyons smiled back. If Deyn had had anything left of his tiny little mind, the smile would have sent him running to hide under the bed. “You’re going to do it anyway.”

  “Drop the shotgun.”

  Lyons dropped the Mossberg.

  Tokaido sagged in Deyn’s grip. “Jesus, Carl, just—” He grimaced as the pistol jammed up against his jaw and shut it.

  Deyn lifted a bemused eyebrow at the silenced SOCOM strapped to Lyons’s thigh. “The pistol, with two fingers.”

  Lyons fumbled the snaps with his broken right hand. He pulled out the heavy pistol and dropped it to the floor. Tokaido’s eyes rolled with utter despair. He was getting more of his friends killed.

  “Tell your man to drop his rifle and pull back.”

  “T.J., drop the rifle. Pull back.”

  “Carl!” Hawkins was appalled. “We—”

  “Do it!” Lyons snarled. A rifle clattered to the floor back by the far wall. Lyons lost the berserker smile. “Let him go.”

  Deyn’s eyes flew wide with sadistic delight. “Let him go?” Deyn waved the detonator box like a magic wand. “Why—”

  Lyons moved. He wasn’t the best shot at Stony Man Farm or the most accurate, but perhaps second only to Bolan, Lyons never hesitated. He was beyond fast. Lyons was sudden. He was facing Deyn, and the German couldn’t see the Colt Python where it rested in a small-of-the-back holster. Lyons was right-handed but he had spent hour after hour at the BUD firing range and then more at the Farm during the mission lull practicing his weak hand draw and emptying the Colt into a target at ten feet. His body detonated into the movement he had burned into his muscle memory.

  The Big Snake struck in a blur of stainless steel.

  The first .357 Magnum hollowpoint round burst apart Deyn’s left hand and the detonator box it held. The German’s eyes went blank with shock as he regarded the remaining shreds of his hand. Lyons had no time for Deyn’s discomfort.

  Lyons shot Tokaido through the left thigh.

  The young man gasped and buckled. Deyn’s right arm had to take the young man’s body weight. Deyn’s pistol scraped out from underneath Akira’s jaw and fired into empty air. He struggled to bring the weapon up, but his embrace around Akira’s handcuffed body encumbered him. He stared down the barrel of the Python, his pupils dialing down to pinholes of insane, thwarted rage.

  “No—!”

  The 125-grain jacketed hollowpoint round punched through the bridge of Deyn’s nose and blew out the back of his head.

  He and Tokaido fell to a tangle on the floor.

  “T.J.! Medic kit! ASAP!”

  Hawkins charged forward as Lyons pulled Tokaido free and applied pressure to his wounded leg. A .357 round made an ugly wound. The computer wizard already looked to have gone through hell, and he was slipping straight into shock. Hawkins skidded to a stop and ripped field dressings out of his web gear. His jaw dropped as he looked at Tokaido. “Jesus…”

  Lyons took the bandages and eyed Hawkins. The former Delta Force commando’s eyes looked out from textbook raccoon bruising. His nose was clearly broken. “You all right?”

  “I think I have a concussion.”

  “Mmm.” Lyons nodded. “That’s got to be the radio jammer. Cut it and get on the horn.”

  “Carl…”

  Lyons turned his head toward the cage. The casings were making a slight whirring noise. They all simultaneously made a sharp click, and their exposed dials all rotated a notch. Lyons stared at Laurentius Deyn’s shattered skull.

  Deadman’s switch.

  Tokaido bled through the first field dressing and Lyons applied another. “Can you see the timer?”

  Hawkins strained his arm through the bars. “I can’t reach the access panel!”

  Lyons applied a third dressing. “How the hell were they going to get out of here in twenty minutes?”

  “Oh.” Hawkins yawned and shook his head. “They have a sub.”

  “A sub?”

  “Yeah, but…I fragged it.”

  “You fragged it.” Lyons took a long hard look at the man. He didn’t look too good. “That would’ve been our only way out.”

  Hawkins blinked. “I ate a pylon. I have a concussion.”

  “See if you can cut the jammer.”

  Hawkins knelt by the communications gear and began flipping switches. “Jamming is off. We have tactical.”

  Lyons thumbed his mike. “Control, this is Ironman.”

  Barbara Price’s voice came back instantly. “Sitrep, Ironman.”

  “Akira secured. Deyn dead. Striker and Franka Marx MIA.”

  Bolan’s voice came back over the sound of the howling wind. “I have Marx.”

  “What is the status of the devices, Ironman?”

  “They are active and on a countdown.”

  “How long?”

  “We don’t know. I am out of explosives and the devices are tamper-proofed and secured in a cage. I can neither access nor defuse. I have wounded. Can you extract us?”

  “Negative, Ironman. Not in time. Helicopter resources are extracting the dive team. The hardsuits have to be extracted by sling and they took a prisoner as well as the crews of two submersibles. Extraction resources are at their limit.” Price was clearly trying to control her emotions. “They secured the ridge. Primary mission is a success.”

  “Well, that’s good news.” Lyons let out a long sigh. Tokaido had slipped into unconsciousness. It would be a blessing to leave him that way. “Call in the strike, Control.”

  “Carl…”

  “Call in the strike. With any luck it’ll be a ten-kiloton blast or less rather than a hundred.”

  “Stand by, Ironman.”

  Bolan’s voice came across the link. “Carl, I’m coming up.”

  “You’re clear, Mack. Come ahead.”

  The wind moaned up through the open deployment doors while they waited. Bolan came up out the stairwell soaked with a bloody and bandaged Franka Marx unconscious in his arms. He placed her next to Akira. Bolan smiled with genuine warmth and stuck out his hand. “Nice knowing you guys.”

  Hawkins grinned. “It’s been a privilege.”

  Lyons rare smile crept onto his face. “Hell of a ride.”

  Price’s voice came back across the line. She and Bolan had been intimate and her voice was breaking. “The Virginia is about to fire. You could try…swimming, or—”

  “You can’t outswim one hundred kilotons, Barbara. Much less a hundred.”

  Lyons gazed down at Tokaido. “I told the Bear I’d stick with Akira no matter what.”

  Hawkins sighed. “I have a headache.”

  “We’re just going to stay here, Barb. Tell everyone else…well, tell them, and tell Calvin good job.”

  Lyons cocked his head. “Tell the sub to belay the missile strike.”

  The line was silent for several shocked moments. “Carl…”

  Bolan had seen that look on Lyons’s face before. Many of the operators were meticulous planners. Others flew by the seat of their pants. The Ironman often operated on what could only be described as divine madness.

  Price was flabbergasted. “Carl, I don’t have the authority to—”

  “Barb, can you put the sub’s captain on the line?”

  “Stand by.”

  Moments went by and then the line clicked. “Ironman, this is Captain Laswell. How may I be of assistance?”

  “Can you sink the platform?”

  “Sink it?”

  “Yeah, rather than blowing it up with missiles and detonating the weapons on the surface, how about you sink it with torpedoes?”

  “Ironman
, the water will absorb the heat and radiation, but you’ll still be blasted sky-high when the weapons go off.”

  “Yeah,” Lyons admitted. “But like you said, the ocean will absorb the heat and radiation. It will be just like a one-hundred-kiloton depth charge. Except for some high water, Cape Hatteras won’t take the hit.”

  The line went silent.

  “Carl?”

  “Yeah, Mack?”

  “You’re amazing.”

  Lyons glanced at his watch and thumbed his mike. “Barb?”

  “Stand by.”

  Moments passed as Kurtzman, the Joint Chiefs and the President of the United States were consulted.

  Captain Laswell of the USS Virginia came on the line. “Fish in the water, Ironman. ETA two minutes.”

  “Affirmative, Virginia.”

  Bolan rose. “Let’s go up top.”

  Hawkins sighed wearily where he sat against the wall. “Why?”

  Bolan picked up Marx. “In here we drown. Up top we float until the blast. It’ll be quicker.”

  Lyons pushed himself to his feet and gathered up Tokaido. “Roger that.”

  The three of them made their way up to the platform. The wind and rain lashed against them. Hawkins dug life jackets out of the barracks lockers. Lyons checked his watch as they lashed themselves together with the slings from their weapons. “Ten seconds—”

  The entire platform shuddered as if an earthquake had struck. The steel superstructure moaned like a wounded beast with a sound that vibrated their bones. The four Mark 48 Advanced Capability torpedoes were at the limit of their range. They had cut their guide wires tens of thousands of feet back and gone into search mode. The massive support pylons of the platform were the only game in town. Their warheads were large enough to sink a Russian cruiser. The platform’s support pylons were massive steel girders encased in concrete. The torpedoes didn’t have the power to blow the platform’s legs off, but the entire structure shuddered as it was knee-capped.

  Lyons took hold of Tokaido in a death grip. “Here we go!”

  Stomachs dropped and everything unsecured slid as the entire platform tilted. The team went with the lean, taking short running steps until the wall of the command shack was beneath their boots and was no longer a wall but a floor. Pallets tumbled and broke open. The fuselage of the crippled helicopter tumbled across the deck, and the broken crane boom scraped by showering sparks once more. The metal girders ceased their moaning and screamed as they tore and snapped. The platform was no longer leaning. It was falling. It went dark as the platform lights went out.