McGarvey crawled to the edge of the platform and took the ladder down to the main deck, where keeping to the deeper shadows as much as possible he made his way to the pipe locker that was secured with a heavy-duty padlock.
“Gail,” he called softly.
“My God, Kirk, I didn’t know what happened to you,” Gail said. “Can you get us out of here?”
“Not without making a lot of noise. Is everyone okay?”
“No one’s been hurt,” Gail said. “Lapides and one of his people are dead up in the control room and the radios destroyed. I think they’re going to try to sink us.”
“That’s exactly what they’re going to do,” McGarvey said. “They brought two satchels down from the helicopter, almost certainly explosives. They’re going to take out two of the legs and capsize the rig. I’m going to take them out.”
“What if you don’t make it?” Eve asked. “We’ll be stuck in here.”
“It won’t happen,” Gail said, trying to override her.
“Goddamnit, there’s six of them, all heavily armed, and it looked like they knew what they were doing.”
“She’s right,” McGarvey said, taking one of the pencil fuses from his pocket. It just fit through the gap between the two halves of the door. “Here.”
“Got it,” Gail said.
He tore a lump about the size of book of matches from one of the blocks of Semtex and molded it around the body of the combination lock, making sure it was secure enough so that when Gail inserted the fuse through the gap it wouldn’t get dislodged.
“Stay put until you hear the helicopter take off,” he told them. “If I’m not back by then, blow the lock and get to the lifeboats.”
“I’m sorry, Kirk,” Gail said.
“You had lousy odds,” McGarvey said. “Don’t do anything to attract their attention. I don’t want them to come back for some reason and spot the Semtex.”
“I don’t want to die,” one of the young women cried softly.
“You’re not going to die,” Gail told her.
“Keep them quiet,” McGarvey said, and he turned and headed for the hatch to the main corridor.
SIXTY-FOUR
In the delivery control room DeCamp was monitoring the VHF noncommercial channels sixty-eight and sixty-nine that the flotilla had used to communicate with one another to make sure that no one had noticed the activity aboard the oil platform. But the chatter was normal, mostly small talk heavily laced with religious mumbojumbo, the same as it had been all the way across from Biloxi.
To this point the operation was going according to plan with the exception of Gurov and his walkie-talkie now in McGarvey’s hands, which made issuing orders to his people problematic. But not impossible. The odds were still definitely in their favor.
“He just went through the hatch into the main corridor,” Wyner said from one of windows looking down on the deck.
Like clockwork, DeCamp thought, suppressing a slight smile. The trouble with professionals was their professionalism. By the training manual. Thinking out of the box was generally frowned on, especially by some of the unimaginative bastards who wrote those manuals. It was the same in just about every army or security service in the world. The good field officers remained in the field, while the failures were often the ones who made up rules. Hidebound government bureaucrats who couldn’t see beyond their cubicles. Certainly in America no one had wanted to believe in a scenario in which al-Quaeda could mount such a devastating attack as 9/11. Most of them had been looking in the wrong direction — were still looking in the wrong direction — which made his work all the more easier.
DeCamp keyed his walkie-talkie. “Shall we make it one hundred thousand euros?” he said, effectively alerting his people that McGarvey was on the way.
The trap had been almost too easy. Locking Dr. Larsen and her scientists in the container and deserting the main deck had simply been too tempting a target for either McGarvey himself or the woman he’d brought with him — who turned out to be Gail Newby, the security officer from Hutchinson Island. He’d been only slightly disappointed that it had been Ms. Newby and not McGarvey but that didn’t matter, because now he held the high ground. McGarvey was a dead man marching.
Wyner had been studying the pipe locker through a set of binoculars. “Looks like plastique around the lock,” he said.
“About what I suspected,” DeCamp said. “No doubt he managed to pass a fuse through to Ms. Newby.”
“There’s enough room for it between the doors.”
“What’s he carrying?”
“I’m sure he has a pistol, but he’s got what looks like a Franchi slung over his shoulder,” Wyner said.
It was a nasty weapon. DeCamp had seen firsthand what it was capable of doing in a confined space when he’d sent six of his men into the home of an Angolan army general outside Luanda, the capital city. All six had been cut down, but in the heat of battle the general had used all of his ammunition in one short firefight, leaving himself defenseless. In the end DeCamp had fired his American-made Colt Commando six times into the general’s face — one round for each of his Buffalo Battalion troop — destroying the man’s skull.
“Bring the two women up here,” DeCamp said. “It’s time we provided a little distraction for McGarvey. Perhaps give him pause.”
SIXTY-FIVE
McGarvey held up at the corner before the mess hall one level down from his and Gail’s rooms. The bodies of two construction crewmen lay sprawled on the deck, their blood smeared on the bulkhead. A third man lay in an open doorway, blood still pooling beneath his body. This had happened within the last few minutes.
“Goddamnit,” he said under his breath. It was senseless. Had the Coast Guard been sent out to escort Vanessa to Florida where security might have been tediously long, none of this would have happened. Some good people had died here, and more would probably lose their lives before it was over. And he was a part of it.
But he’d seen this same kind of shit before; over and over again in his career. Timid bureaucrats, unwilling to stick their necks out. In this case because of someone with a vested interest in oil; someone whose back was against the wall, someone who could not allow an experiment like this to succeed.
Follow the money, he’d told Otto.
Someone shouted something farther down the corridor, and McGarvey heard what sounded like rounds richochetting off a steel bulkhead.
He had counted five operators in addition to DeCamp. Two had fetched the satchels from the helicopter and were somewhere below setting the charges. Which left two, possibly three, men working their way through the rig trying to find him and killing everyone they came across. No one was to be left alive, shot to death or locked away someplace to drown when the platform went to the bottom.
They were professionals. Almost certainly ex-military special services who for one reason or another became independent mercenaries, rather than go to work for a contracting service. It meant that by their very nature they were men who did not take orders very well.
They were in the business purely for the money. Their loyalty went to whoever had the biggest bank account, and only for however long they could see a clear escape route. These were not Islamic extremists willing to die for the cause. It was a weakness.
He keyed the walkie-talkie. “You’ve forgotten the helicopter, Colonel DeCamp,” he said, as he started down the corridor toward the sounds of the gunfire. “I have something you may need.”
