Simultaneously, he brushed the air frantically with his left hand. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he croaked, waving us away. “Drive on. Drive on.”
Have I told you how I’ve learned to take “yes” for an answer lately?
Well, Wonder knows how, too—especially when I’m back handing him on the shoulder hard enough to leave knuckle-hair prints. He put the car in gear and hauled my profusely perspiring betzim outta there.
We rolled slow and easy, allowing the semi a long, long leash. It meandered back up the access road, crossed the main post road three hundred yards south of the main gate, stopped at the traffic light that regulated traffic moving across the main MacDill runway, and turned north, creeping parallel to the perimeter fence on an overgrown, obviously underused security path.
There is no vehicle gate at the northwest corner of MacDill. There is, however, a railroad siding. Actually, there are two railroad sidings. One runs north/south, the other, east/west. Access to both is through a pair of huge, sliding steel gates, each topped with barbed wire, that sit roughly seventy-five yards apart, twenty yards south of Chisholm Avenue—which runs parallel to MacDill’s northern border.
We worked our way parallel to the semi about three hundred yards south of it and stopped. I climbed out of the Chevy and perused the sidings and gates through my binoculars.
In case you wanted to know, railroad gates are security sieves. Red Cell used the railroad gates at Groton, Connecticut, to infiltrate the Navy’s allegedly secure nuclear sub base there—walked right through carrying big duffel bags, and no one ever stopped us. (Things were so lax that three of my better sneak-and-peekers actually sauntered aboard one of the Los Angeles-class attack subs moored on the Thames River and cached a load of Improvised Explosive Devices right next to her nuclear reactor without being challenged. If the IEDs had been for real, they would have caused an atomic explosion big enough to vaporize greater metropolitan Groton.)
Anyhow, alongside these sidings (say that three times fast) were a series of three-story warehouses, in which were stored such essential but nontactical supplies as fifty-five-gallon drums of axle grease and other lubricants, huge tubs of floor cleaner for the hangars’ concrete slab floors, bales of barbed wire, huge rolls of chain-link fencing—all the janitorial and mechanical odds and ends that are needed to support the physical well-being of the installation.
There was something else sitting on the east/west railroad siding, too. It was an industrial-size crane—the sort that is used to transfer semi-trailers on and off railroad flatcars. Which is exactly what took place in front of our eyes right now.
The semi pulled up parallel to the siding, directly under the five-story crane. The tractor disengaged its fifth wheel, and the driver unhooked the hydraulic, brake, and electric lines. Then he and his assistant attached four hawser-size cables to the trailer, and it was lifted gently up, and onto a convenient flatbed railroad car. I would have panicked, except I saw that it was the only railroad car on the siding. That told me it would have to be attached to a train if it was heading anywhere—and we’d get to it well before then.
I rousted Doc’s car on the radio. He and the others had followed the station wagon which, he reported, had parked down at the end of something called A Road, right on the Port Tampa dock—one of the city’s commercial shipping harbors—which I knew to be roughly two or two-and-a-half miles away, as the pelican flies.
As I spoke to Doc, a small switcher engine began moving backward from the north/south siding. It eased up to the loaded flatbed. I saw the platform car shift as the buffers retracted and the coupling devices engaged. I pressed the TRANSMIT button on my radio. “Anything interesting moored over where you are?”
“Well, since you asked, there are a half dozen old shrimpers—you should be able to smell ’em from there— and two nice trawlers—sixty, seventy foot. And there’s one beautiful Hatteras moored just off the dock. I can give it away for a quarter mil, cash,”
Doc began to chortle. I told him to quit—he’s not the chortling kind. So he got serious. “And, as a matter of fact, there is also one of those dumbass supply ships—the ones we used for oil-rig boarding exercises when you and I were a lot younger and actually got some pussy every now and then.”
Pussy, shmussy. I was about to call “bingo” because I had a full card. “Is it one of those supply ships that they use to carry platform modules?”
“Hold on a sec—” Doc paused long enough to take a careful look. While he does, let me explain to you the significance of my question to him. See, oil rig platforms these days are designed in modular fashion. In English, that means that prefab sections—often about the size of a semi-trailer—are shipped out to the rig, lifted aboard, and bolted into position. That allows the configuration of the platform to change. A drilling platform, for example, will have two or three living quarter modules aboard, because you need more folks when you’re drilling than when you’re pumping. The pumping modules will house more computerized equipment than humans because once the well is drilled, and operational, it can be run by a skeleton crew and a computer.
“Yo, muta khallef?” Doc came back on-line, calling me a dumbshit in Arabic. “That is an affirmative.”
There are few times in life, my friends, when one and one does, in fact, actually equal two. I had a gut feeling that this was going to be one of them.
I watched until the switcher and its flatbed moved north through the unguarded railroad gate. Then we hauled our butts, too, so we could monitor its progress as it made its way to the Port Tampa docks, where it traversed the cold sheds and transit sheds, slid under the container-loading bridge, and was gently laid across the foredeck of an anonymous-looking supply vessel. Just as Doc had reported, it was the precise kind of vessel used to supply oil rigs. But there was more. The name of the ship, Helen G. Kelley, was written in foot-high block letters across her wide, flat stern. Below the name, the single word GALVESTON was centered. Galveston, as we all know, is an oil-processing center. But there was more, too: on the Helen G. Kelley’s single gray stack was painted a stylized, medieval sheaf of straw on whose binding was emblazoned the words PAJAR PETROLEUM. The fucking thing belonged to LC Straw-house.
So, the weapons were being shipped to an oil rig, from which they’d probably be dispensed or sold. That made perfect sense to me. What? You say you’re confused? Okay, let me explain my thinking.
Oil rigs are isolated. Sure, they’re hard to reach. But they’re also more difficult to stake out than some warehouse in the middle of a big city. Moreover, you can mix and match your weapons. Steal ’em from Michigan, Iowa, California—and sell ’em to tangos from Florida (or anywhere else). That kind of miscellany makes them harder to trace—at least initially.
We had to follow the Helen G. Kelley. So, it was time to work the phones. While Wonder attached his modem to my cellular unit and routed the call through Rogue Manor so he could monitor the Intelink without being traced, I dialed Mugs’s number with the other phone and waited for his welcome growl, so I could remind him that he’d offered to introduce us to a Frog with a boat.
SINCE WE’RE ABOUT TO EMBARK ON OUR WAY TO AN OIL-drilling rig out in the Gulf of Mexico, maybe I should tell you something about them. Okay—there are three types of oil-rig platforms commonly found in the Gulf. In relatively shallow waters, there are semisubmersibles, which float atop huge, tire-shaped pontoons and are secured with the aid of immense, winch-and-cable-operated sea anchors. There are jack-up platforms, smaller, skeletal steel structures whose height from the water surface can be controlled by a complicated raising and lowering procedure known—you guessed it—as “jacking.” In deeper water, or where the currents are dangerous, there are fixed drill-rig or pumping platforms—huge towers of steel and concrete that ascend more than a hundred feet above the surface of the water from depths of three hundred feet.
The specific features, layout, accommodations, and creature comforts of each company’s platforms may be some
what distinct, but their structures, their dynamics, and what’s on them are always more or less the same. The skeleton of the offshore rig—this is a fixed platform I’m talking about here, because it is really the most commonly seen rig—is made of steel pipes and girders set into concrete and steel pylons. The frame supports a series of grid tiers, on which sit the drilling, pumping, and storage equipment. Some rigs are drill rigs—they are actively searching for oil by running long probes into the ocean floor. Others are pumpers—drawing oil from below the surface and transferring it first to onboard storage tanks, then to seagoing tankers.
Normally, platforms have but two main decks, although there are a maze of passageways, catwalks, and ladders that connect them, as well as various terraced structures that protrude from the primary framework. There are also a plethora of miscellaneous tanks, vats, reservoirs, and steel Conex boxes, as well as various levels on the drilling or pumping platform, which is known as the derrick. These caches, stashes, hiding places, and mazed passageways make the takedown of a platform rig—this is a top secret U.S. Navy SEAL technical term I’m going to use here—a total potential clusterfuck.
See, roughly sixty feet above water level sits the first level. It consists of a series of interconnected catwalks and grates, on which sit the pumps, the separator tanks, and the bulk-storage containers. Also stored there are the piles of twelve-inch pipes that carry the oil from the ocean bottom. Twenty feet above and connected by a series of ladders and ramps lies the main deck.
There, you find a central work station, which includes the draw works, or “doghouse,” where the oil-pumping equipment itself is housed. There is a control module, which houses the offices, the cellular phones and ship-to-shore radios and the weather equipment. There is a crew-bunking module, which includes a mess area and rec room, and there is a monitoring module, where the computers that oversee the operations are kept.
Along the perimeter of the main deck are a series of cranes, which are used to bring supplies aboard, boat-mooring stations, a helipad, and the long flare pipe from whose nozzle is burned off the natural gas that is separated from the oil by the oil/gas separating module that sits on the main deck.
Some rigs are larger than others. Some have huge, multistory drilling derricks that also house drill-string motion compensators—the hydraulic-pneumatic devices that move the derrick up-and-down, up-and-down, in rhythm with the sea to keep the pipe stationary in the drill hole while everything else moves. The semisubmersibles have enormous, doughnut-shaped pontoons fifty to sixty feet in diameter, which lie thirty feet below the surface and support the weight of the platform.
The tactics used to board platform rigs take up thirty pages of the current NAV-OPS manual. But since that document is classified, I can give you the gist by defining the strategy simply as SC/FD. That means you either Swim and Climb, or you Fly and Drop—or you perform a combination Of both.
If you take the SC option, you can, for example, come off a ship safely over the horizon and transfer into smaller boats—Zodiacs or Boston Whalers—and then drop into the ocean eight hundred to a thousand meters from the target and swim the last leg. Once you reach the platform, your lead climber shinnies up the vertical brace until he reaches a secure position. Then he attaches and drops a caving ladder, and the rest of your shooters clamber aboard.
What I have just described is much more difficult than it sounds. As Desi used to say to Lucy, “Lemme ’splain you how come.”
First, getting to the rig in a small boat can be a problem. Most of the time you will do the approach at night so that you won’t be seen. In calm seas, no prob. But the Gulf is not known for its calm seas. Moreover, the wave and current patterns in the Gulf are different from those found in the Atlantic or Pacific. Sure, an Atlantic Ocean storm, with its twenty-foot seas, can be rough on the kidneys—I still remember all the fun we had (I am using that F-word in a literary application known as irony here, people) when SEAL Team Six practiced boarding exercises in February, thirty miles off the Virginia coast. And the Pacific’s huge, thirty-foot swells make chasing down ships almost impossible. You will recall that in Red Cell, both our C-130 and our rubber ducky almost ran out of gas before we were able to chase down and board Grant Griffith’s rogue tanker with its cargo of bad guys and stolen nuclear Tomahawk missiles. You don’t recall? Then go out and buy the fucking book right now, it’s still in print.
Okay—now, back to our story. I was talking about current events. Well, the swirling currents you find in the Gulf of Mexico resemble the kinds of riptides you see close to shore in other waters. So you are not only slapped in/out, but also right/left. This semicircular sweeping action can cause you to lose your sense of direction, especially if you are out beyond the sight of land—and believe me, many of the platforms are more than one hundred miles from shore.
Second, getting that first man up the platform can be tough. The braces are slippery. The currents are treacherous. The waves slap you up against the steel and you can break arms, legs—even back or neck—in the attempt to climb. Even once you have made the ascent and are in position, you have to deal with the caving ladder—the rolled-up steel-and-cable boarding device you’ve carried with you to make things easier for everyone else—which is a slippery, narrow son of a bitch, and as you put boon-docker to rung, your sole slips, your soul flips, and you tumble ass over teakettle back down into the water. If, that is, it is indeed water you hit—and not concrete pylon.
Believe me—I have climbed a hundred or so of these nasty things, and each one is worse than the last. Of course, the good news was that we were in the Gulf of Mexico and not the North Sea, where the fucking platforms are coated with ice seven months of the year, and you can remove the skin from your hands trying to scale them.
So much for SC. For FD, you have two options. You can fast-rope from a chopper, which sneaks up on the platform at sea level and then rises, flares, and drops you off quickly. Or, you can HAHO—High Altitude High Opening—from a plane, jumping from twenty-five thousand feet and riding a flat chute down, forming up at about a thousand meters above the target and corkscrewing the rest of the way down onto the platform in formation.
The fast rope is good—but it makes you vulnerable during the approach, when the bad guys have about thirty seconds to see you coming and do something about it. Still, a chopper, which can deliver ten shooters in less than five seconds, is an effective insertion platform. Moreover, if you have an additional chopper—a Hughes 500 with a sniper team aboard—you can sit above the rig and pick off the bad guys while the main force fast-ropes.
The HAHO option, while the most picturesque in the Hollywood sense of things, is the most dangerous to the shooters. Landing on one of these motherfuckers in a crosswind can be lethal, because of the huge number of steel cranes, masts, wires, cables, and other goodies that can snag, snare, impale, entrap, and hook your vitals as you descend out of the sky at seventeen feet per second, which computes out to roughly twelve miles an hour. Moreover, a drop is hard to coordinate. There are too many uncontrolled variables—wind shear, descent rates, and unexpected thermals are three that come to mind right now—which can make the split-second timing that is absolutely crucial for these sorts of operations go awry.
When I commanded SEAL Team Six, we developed a coordinated swimmer/chopper approach that was particularly effective against tango-occupied oil rigs. First, we’d put a snoop contingent onto an adjacent rig. (Normally, you see, offshore oil platforms are built in clusters. That way they are easier to supply, repair, and maintain.) Once our “eyes” had established themselves and reported on the tangos’ activities and schedule, we’d make our final assault plans.
Generally, we’d launch our swim team at night—darkness is great cover at sea. Once it had reached the target, made its ascent, and hunkered in position just underneath the rig deck, we’d launch the airborne element. Only when the swimmers were locked, loaded, and ready to go, would the choppers head in. We would track their progress on th
e radio. The swimmers could also hear as the choppers passed through the three-minute perimeter, then two minutes, and finally one minute. Just before the aircraft hit, the swim team would go over the rail and head for the nearest tangos—identified by our snoopers who had night-vision equipment trained on the platform.
Bang—we’d swarm the rig and surprise the bad guys. And just as the tangos were being hit, the airborne team would arrive, fast-roping onto the rig’s helipad. Our timing was always great. In fact, even when Mr. Murphy was at his worst—when the visibility sucked, or the crosswinds screwed up the chopper’s approach, or the seas dinged the hell out of my swimmers—this combined assault technique always worked. I mean, it worked. I vass dere, Cholly.
I know, I know—you’re sitting there asking why the hell I am providing you with all of this techno-thriller sort of detail. The answer, gentle reader, is because I was convinced that I was, quite soon, going to need to use all the various skills we had developed to board oil rig platforms—and when you are boarding an oil rig platform, you don’t have a lot of time to talk about it or explain how. You just gotta do it.
Moreover, I want you to understand just how elaborate, complicated, tricky, and potentially disastrous such assaults can be under the very best of circumstances, because we were about to enter the Doom on Dicky Zone. We would operate sans equipment—no caving ladders, no swim gear, and no Zodiacs or Boston Whalers to bring us within striking distance. There would be no tactical intelligence to assist us. There would be no backup to haul our butts out of the fire if we screwed up—no choppers to drop a platoon of shooters; no Hughes 500 and sniper team to protect our six.
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