by Bob Mayer
"Then we will do this another way. Either way, it will be done." The man's voice was irritated. "Take your clothes off."
"No," she said in a low voice.
"To this you have no choice," he said. "You will either take them off and live or I will kill you with them on. Do as I say and you will not be hurt."
Kirsten believed him, at least that he would kill her if she didn't strip. She stared at the blade, trying to see if there was blood on it, Tommy's blood, but it seemed to be clean, the blade clearly reflecting a sliver of moonlight.
The man took one step forward. "Now."
She hesitated and the blade flashed in front of her and she gasped as a line of fire ran down the left side of her face. She reached a hand up and pulled it away. It was covered in blood.
"Nothing major," the man said. "It will heal. Do as I say and we won't have to do that again."
Kirsten pulled her sweater off. She watched her own fingers unbuttoning her blouse, surprised in a distant sort of way how steady they were. Why weren't they shaking? she wondered. She could feel dampness on her cheek but no pain.
She was wearing a black bra, a decision she had made knowing that Tommy and her would be coming up here and how much he liked it and also how he could handle unhooking it in the front. Tommy had gotten very frustrated and embarrassed when he couldn't unhook one of her other ones, and his resulting anger, trying to cover for his real feelings, had ruined the evening. So she'd worn this one so the evening wouldn't be ruined.
She unhooked it. The cloth fell away, exposing her small, pointy breasts. The man had not moved again once she started undressing and there was no sign that he took any interest in her nakedness as she pulled her jeans down. She unbuckled her belt and unzipped her jeans, then pushed them down before pausing. She'd forgotten to take her sneakers off and her jeans were bunched at her feet.
"Go to the window," the man said.
She bent over to pull her sneakers off, but the man repeated his order.
"Go the window. Now!"
She shuffled over, arms crossed on her chest, until she was facing the window. She could feel goose bumps on her naked skin. She could see the entire courtyard now and she saw a dark lump on the ground about thirty feet away. Tommy! He wasn't moving.
"Put your hands on the windowsill."
She could tell from the voice that he was right behind her. She put her palms on the grimy wood.
She flinched as she felt the point of the knife touch the outside of her left hip.
"Back with your feet."
She shuffled her feet back until the knifepoint on her left buttock stopped her. Now she couldn't move, half bent over, her weight caught between her feet and her hands on the sill. She didn't know it, but it was the way police and counterterrorism experts were taught to search a suspect, putting them in a position where if they removed either hand from their forward support, they would fall over.
She heard some noises behind her. She knew she was going to be raped. Beyond that, her mind refused to go. She focused on Tommy's body lying on the stones. Was he dead?
Something looped over her head and she gasped. The man tightened her blouse down over her mouth. She felt the cloth with her tongue as he tied a knot on the back of her head. She panicked, sucking air in through her nose.
Then she felt a hand on her rear, holding her steady. She closed her eyes. Tommy and she had used this position before and she knew what to expect
Or so she thought. She gasped with pain as the man's cock rammed up against her anus. Tears flowed as he vigorously pushed in. Tommy had never done this and she felt as if she'd been skewered. Through her pain, one thought flashed: Did this man have AIDS?
She opened her eyes and blinked out the tears. Her heart jumped. She saw Tommy move. An arm stretching out then the body twitching and shaking.
The man behind her was slamming against her and she had to hold on with all her strength to avoid going down to her knees. She could feel the flat steel of his knife slapping against her right side with every stroke. The pain of his thrusts was terrible but also distant in a strange way.
Tommy was on his knees now, shaking his head. She could see darkness on his face. Blood. Tommy stood and peered about, getting his bearings. Kirsten tried to scream, but the sound was caught in her blouse and all that came forth was a mewling noise.
Tommy froze, his eyes locked into the window. Kirsten met his gaze and she knew he saw her. Saw what was happening to her and the blood on her own face. Tommy looked about, then picked up a piece of two-by-four and came striding forward.
Kirsten wanted to look over her shoulder and see if the man had spotted Tommy, but she dared not. There was no sign that he had, as his rhythm was getting faster, his breathing rough.
Tommy was ten feet away now. Five feet. She could see his face, the anger on it. The blood running down one side.
Then Tommy's head exploded, blood and brain bursting forth, splattering Kirsten with gore. Half of the head was gone as the body tumbled forward lifeless to lie right below her, outside the windowsill.
The man had begun coming as Tommy's body fell. The man slammed against Kirsten, pinning her against the windowsill, grunting in pleasure. She hardly noticed; what sanity she had left was focused entirely on Tommy's body. There had been no sound of a shot, but there was no doubt in her mind that that was what had happened. She looked up, across the courtyard, but could see nothing. It was like a movie, unreal. Tommy had fallen in slow motion. Even the pain in her rear was so far away now.
A voice—a man's voice—echoed in the courtyard, coming from the other side, calling out to the man behind her in a strange tongue, one she had never heard before.
She barely felt his hand reaching around her, his body pressed even more tightly against her back. The hand had the vial in it and the lid was off. He pressed it against her nostrils. With her mouth gagged, her next breath in sucked up the contents.
She felt the man step back from her, the cool evening air against her naked back. Then a spear of pain pierced her from the base of her skull to the small of her back. Her body snapped upright so quickly, bones cracked. She struggled for air, but her lungs wouldn't work. Her eyes bulged forward, blood seeping out around the edges. Her fingers grabbed at the dirty windowsill so hard her nails broke, leaving bloody streaks on the wood.
Kirsten's body convulsed forward, slamming her neck down onto the broken glass still in the window, her neck severed. She slumped forward, hanging over the sill. A small— unnaturally small—trickle of blood came out of the severed carotid artery, dripping down onto Tommy's body, the last thing her bulging eyes saw being the splintered bone and scrambled brains that had been part of her boyfriend's head.
The man had watched all this while zipping his pants up and putting his knife back in the sheath. He looked at the vial in his hand and carefully screwed the top on. Then he placed the vial back in his pocket. He removed the gloves and tossed them away. Reaching up, he pulled a set of filters out of his nostrils, placing them back in a case.
Using the jeans wadded between her legs, the man lifted Kirsten's legs and pushed her over the sill, her body falling onto Tommy's. He walked out the door.
He looked up into the shadows of the inner castle wall as the voice called out to him in the same foreign tongue. "It worked?"
The man pulled the zipper on his jacket tight against his throat, shivering from the chill German evening and the damp air. "Yes."
The owner of the voice appeared, a tall man, broad in the shoulders, a rifle in his hands, as he walked down the stone steps from the inside rampart. He twisted a screw just forward of the magazine well on the weapon and the barrel was released. He slipped the barrel inside his jacket, hanging it on a hook sewn into the material. The stock went on the other side.
He looked at the two bodies. "Not much blood," he noted.
"It acted quickly," the man with the rings said. "I think she was dead before she hit the glass."
"You'
re certain it worked?" the other man sounded irritated.
"It worked."
"You couldn't have just—" the other began, but the smaller man cut him off.
"It worked."
"All right." The second man glanced at an expensive watch. "The meet is scheduled in forty-five minutes. You cut it close."
"The meet," the first man spit. "I am tired of doing his dirty work. Why must we do his bidding?"
"Because he tells us to."
"One of these days . . ." The first man let the sentence trail off, incomplete.
The second man extracted a pistol from inside his large coat. He pulled the slide back, chambering a round, then handed it to the other.
"Why do I need this?"
"Because we are dealing with dangerous men now, not children." The man looked about. "I feel something." His eyes searched the dark ramparts. "Someone."
"Let us go, then."
Chapter Two
The Gulf breeze carried the faint scent of salt water and the distant thud of helicopter blades. The sound had been there for the past four hours, coming from all sides of the oil rig, although no aircraft could be sighted. Mike Thorpe, dressed in black combat fatigues and armed with an AK-74 automatic rifle, turned to Colonel Giles.
"What do you think, sir?"
The sir wasn't necessary as Giles had retired from the U.S. Army years previously; however, it wasn't from military formality that Thorpe used it, but rather personal respect. Giles was dressed the same, his stick-thin figure wrapped in a combat vest on top of the black fatigues.
"They'll hit soon. They have to."
"Why?" The third person on the platform was dressed in worn khaki and carried a small camcorder. Lisa Parker was in her mid-thirties, five and a half feet tall and slender. She had long brown hair that she wore tied up in a bun. Her face had high cheekbones and was creased with worry lines around the edge of her mouth and eyes.
Giles turned toward her. "They'd rather wait until dark, but we didn't give them that option with our demands. We've been photographed by satellite for the last couple of hours and they have a good idea what they're up against. Or so they think. Swimmers from SEAL Team Six are probably below us right now.''
Parker looked over the edge of the metal platform they stood on, two hundred feet to the water below. The surface was calm and she could see nothing.
Thorpe shook his head. "You won't see them until they want you to." He pointed to the horizon. "The choppers are just over the horizon and their only job is to make noise. To cover up the sound the assault helicopters are going to make when Delta Force comes swooping in to take the oil rig back from us."
"You'll see them coming," Parker said. "What good does covering the noise do?"
"Yeah, we should see them," Thorpe agreed, "but covering up the sound gives them a few extra seconds before they're spotted, and seconds count. Deep down, they hope they'll catch us napping."
Thorpe, Giles and the other four men in their cell had been here for six hours. They'd come in broad daylight aboard the daily resupply helicopter that they'd taken over at the Louisiana airfield that was the rig's home base. A gun to the pilot's head had ensured a smooth flight to the rig and a perfect landing. And complete surprise.
The rig towered over three hundred feet above the smooth water of the Gulf of Mexico. The rig's crew of twenty-four men were now locked in a tool shed under the main deck, which was forty feet below where Thorpe and Giles stood. The main deck held a landing platform on which the Huey helicopter was parked, a barracks area, a control room and space for the various pipes and fittings that were required for the job the rig did. In the center, a tall derrick held the pipe that descended through the deck, through the water and into the bedrock four hundred feet under the surface of the water.
Giles had radioed their demands to the appropriate authorities less than an hour after they'd seized the rig. That was when the clock had started. A police negotiator from the town that held the rig's land headquarters had tried his best to keep them on the radio and talk. That was his job. Talk and win concessions and wear away at the minds of the terrorists. Distract them.
Giles had simply repeated his demands and told the cop that he had only one word left in his vocabulary that he could use: yes, to all the demands. If the man said one other word, a prisoner would be executed. The only exception had been allowing a news chopper to fly Parker out to the rig. The radio had been silent for the last two hours. Thorpe imagined that the negotiator was not a very happy man at the present moment.
The problem for Giles, Thorpe and the rest of the team was that the yes to their demands hadn't come yet and there wasn't much time left before they would have to carry out their threats.
Of course, Thorpe knew, they—whoever they specifically were in this case—wouldn't give in to the demands. And because the rig was not just offshore but also outside the twelve-mile limit, it was a federal case and that meant that some very specialized people were coming to deal with this.
At the very least, Thorpe expected the navy's SEAL Team Six under the water and the army's Delta Force through the sky. Thorpe craned his neck and looked up, past the towering derrick into the clear Gulf sky, half expecting to see parachutes from a HALO (high altitude, low opening) parachute team floating down.
Giles's team hadn't spent the intervening four hours simply waiting. They had been busy placing charges all over the rig. If they blew the rig, the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico would take at least ten years to recover. The Exxon Valdez disaster would look like a fender bender compared to the head-on collision they were preparing here.
Which was the point of the demands. Publicizing the destruction of the Gulf's ecosystem that was already occurring because of the offshore drilling and the immense potential for an accident that would destroy the ecosystem. That was demand number one. Number two was eight million dollars.
Neither the publicity—other than having Parker film all this—nor the money had been forthcoming and the deadline would arrive in one hour.
Thorpe stretched his shoulders. He was a tall man, standing six-foot-two. He carried one hundred and eighty pounds tautly on his frame. The years carrying a gun for a profession had not been kind. His face was weathered deep brown. The skin already carried the deep lines and crevices that signaled middle age. He had deep blue eyes and dark hair, liberally sprinkled with gray. There were dark etchings under his eyes, and the skin over his cheekbones was stretched a little too tight.
"Maybe we ought to retire," Giles said, scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars.
"We did," Thorpe said.
"No, from all of it," Giles said.
"You already retired once and I thought I had," Thorpe said. "Don't throw salt on the wound. Those dumb shits in the army . . ." He didn't want to go into that right now.
"Radar?" Giles called out.
One of the members of his team had a laptop computer resting on a plastic case. A wire ran from it to the rig's radar dish.
"Horizon is clear," the man reported.
"Let me give them one more jerk of the chain," Giles said. He flipped open his cellular phone. He dialed, then began speaking as soon as the other end was answered, not giving the negotiator a chance to start his own spiel.
"This is Colonel Lazarus of the Earth Army, First Battalion. I have not received a response to my demands. I am assuring you we will destroy this monstrosity of technology if we do not get the answer we want. There is no compromise. The earth demands no compromise."
The negotiator finally got a word in. "We're working on your demands, but it takes time to—"
"Time!" Giles yelled. "You've had time. You've had generations. You took the time to build this monstrosity. You can take it apart quicker. One hour. That is it. The people will know that this is your fault when they see what this reporter is taping. We want to end this peacefully. It is obvious you don't. Any blood will be on your hands."
Giles snapped the phone shut.
; " 'The earth demands no compromise'?" Thorpe repeated.
"Hey, I'm making it up as I go," Giles said, which Thorpe knew to be far from the truth. Everything they had done today had been planned out to the tiniest detail.
"Do you think they'll give in?" Parker asked.
Giles didn't even have to think about it. "No. I'm going to check the west side."
As Giles wandered away, Parker had her first chance alone with Thorpe. "How have you been, Mike?"
Thorpe's eyes remained focused on the horizon. "Living."
"I heard—" Parker began, but she didn't get a chance to finish the statement as the radar man called out.
"Contacts, all directions."
Thorpe caught a glint of something on the horizon. "I've got a chopper low on the water," he called out, bringing Giles running.
Giles looked that way, then did a three-sixty. "Choppers on all horizons. Coming in. Game time." He put the glasses into a case. "Let's roll."
Parker swung her camera in that direction and zoomed in on one of the helicopters.
Giles and Thorpe started climbing down from the work platform to the deck. Parker hurriedly turned off the camcorder and followed. Giles was issuing orders as they descended. By the time they got to the main deck, the Huey's blades were turning, one of their men holding a gun on a less-than-happy pilot. The other men were pushing the crew out of the room they had been locked in, taping a toy gun in alternating hands of each pair. The other hands were handcuffed together. Soon they had twelve pairs of prisoners, with toy guns securely taped into their free hands.
"Forty seconds!" Giles called out, watching the approaching helicopters.
A man ran to each corner of the rig, dropped a timed satchel charge off and then sprinted back. Thorpe opened the cover on a remote detonator. He quickly punched in numbers.
"Set," Thorpe said.
"Another contact!" the radar man yelled. "Something real fast! From the east! Ten seconds out!"
"What the hell is that?" Giles was pointing to something low and fast to the east, heading toward the rig at tremendous velocity.