Abyss

meant absolutely nothing to DeCamp and his team.

“Lead, team two set,” Nikolai Kabatov radioed in DeCamp’s earpiece. A former KGB senior lieutenant who’d killed a pair of prostitutes in Lengingrad, and had resigned his commission for the good of the agency, lay in the sand fifty meters to the east, with his teammate Boris Gurov, a former Spetsnaz captain who’d been kicked out of the service for driving a squad of men to such depths of exhaustion during a winter exercise above the Arctic Circle that four men had died.

“Go in thirty,” DeCamp replied.

“Copy.”

The two men in addition to DeCamp’s teammate, Joseph Wyner, who’d been a helicopter pilot with the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, were all that he figured would be needed for the initial stage aboard the rig, which would be manned only by the scientists and technicians, plus the delivery crew. A total of thirty people, none of them with any combat experience.

Finding the three operators had been a simple matter of logging on to the Web site of Contractor Services Unlimited, which like the old Soldier of Fortune magazine was practically an employment agency for contractors and military officers and enlisted personnel, who for one reason or another had either resigned or been forced to resign, and were looking for work. Actually, as Gurov had explained, when DeCamp had interviewed him in London, guys like him wanted to get back into the game, wanted the thrill of combat, wanted to blow up something, kill someone.

“The bigger the bang the better,” he’d said. “And I don’t give a pizdec’s asshole who the target is.”

Out of nearly one hundred resumes online, DeCamp had picked three men to meet face-to-face, and he’d hired all of them, because they were perfect: they were well trained, they had combat experience — Chechnya for Gurov and Kabatov, and Afghanistan for Wyner — they were hungry, and they were expendable.

He’d arrived in Tripoli two months ago, where he met with his Libyan military contact, the assistant chief of staff, Lt. Col. Salaam Thaqib, set up a financial presence with the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank in the amount of two million euros, one hundred thousand of which was transferred into Thaqib’s Swiss bank account, and rented four adjoining suites in the Corinthia Bab Africa, the country’s leading hotel.

Three days later blueprints of the reworked oil platform had been delivered by a messenger from the Czech Republic embassy on behalf of the ABN Commerce Bank in Prague where DeCamp maintained an account. The drawings had originated from his contact aboard the rig via InterOil and spreading them out on a conference table he’d ordered be brought up, it had taken him less than ten minutes to find the rig’s weakness and devise a number of plans to send it to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Included with the blueprints was a list of everyone who would be aboard, all of whom would go down with the platform. There would be no survivors.

That afternoon he’d had two copies made of the blueprints, sending them by courier over to the colonel’s office, one to be used to construct the mock-up in the desert and the second to build a scale model of the rig that had been brought over to the hotel and set up in his suite ten days later, making at least one of his plans perfectly clear. In some ways, he’d thought, toppling the platform would be easier than the assault on Hutchinson Island had been.

During his off hours in those weeks, DeCamp kept in shape by running five miles each day, swimming in the Med, and working out for hours at a time in the hotel’s spa. His meals were nearly all protein, and he drank no alcohol, a regimen he’d learned in the Buffalo squadron before any tough field assignment. The protein built lean muscle mass, and the lack of carbohydrates toned him down, sending him into a form of ketosis, almost like a diabetic whose hypoglycemic index was altered, only in this case giving him a lot of extra energy. Almost like floating an inch off the ground after the first week. Almost like being on uppers.

Thirty seconds later Wyner raised his left fist and pumped it once and DeCamp nodded.

“Now,” DeCamp said into his comms unit, and he and Wyner headed up out of the hollow, crawling on their hands and knees toward the plywood and canvas full-scale mock-up of one of Vanessa Explorer’s four semisubmersible legs.

Waiting for his three operators to show up at the Corinthia, DeCamp had worked out two possible scenarios; one of which was dropping two scuba-equipped teams from different directions one mile out from the rig. The insertion boat would be a low-slung cigarette, showing no lights, capable of speeds in excess of sixty knots, and perfectly capable of crossing the Gulf to reach the platform.

They would set explosive charges well beneath the waterline on two of the legs, then swim back to the boat. When the charges went off, the two legs would rapidly fill with water, and the unstable rig would suddenly list sharply to one side, so suddenly that nothing aboard could be done to stop a capsize.

Twenty feet away from the leg, DeCamp could see why it would not work, and he stood up. “Abort,” he said softly into his comms unit.

Wyner saw it, too. “Shit,” he said, and he got to his feet. “Unless the seas are flat calm we won’t get anywhere near the leg. Too much movement. Barnacles would cut us to shreds.”

“I didn’t see it from the blueprints or the model,” DeCamp said without rancor. Mistakes in the field could get you killed. Mistakes in a training mission were usually only embarrassing. He’d learned a part of that lesson the hard way from Colonel Frazer on the streets in Durban, and the rest of it in the field with the Buffalo Battalion when he helped carry casualties out of the hot zone; the blokes who made the mistakes, the ones who’d not paid enough attention in the training missions, were the ones who returned to base in body bags.

Wyner was tall and slender, like a greyhound, and he stood relaxed, most of his weight on one foot. He’d taken ballet lessons as a teenager, not because he’d wanted to go on stage, but because he wanted to develop his agility so that he could become a better fencer. He was deadly in a knife fight, which was all about footwork; DeCamp had never seen a better man with a blade.

“We could use magnetic attachers,” he suggested. “With whisker poles we wouldn’t have to get all that close.”

“No,” DeCamp said.

Kabatov and Gurov came out of the darkness from the east side of the rig, both of them short, sturdy men with broad Slavic features and sometimes sly smiles that made it impossible to guess what they were thinking. They looked like oil roustabouts, roughnecks who’d done manual labor all of their lives; they looked like men who’d grown up on the wharves of busy seaports, or in coal or uranium mines in Siberia, on the high seas aboard container ships — the men who would be sent forward in a storm to replace the chains on a stack of containers about to topple overboard, because they were just so much cannon fodder in the minds of the captains and the owners. And it was exactly the reason DeCamp had hired them, because they fit perfectly, especially for the only option left open. Something he’d thought might be difficult but not impossible for the right men.

The three of them had filtered separately into Tripoli over a five-day period, Wyner first, Gurov, with his rough humor, three days later, and Kabatov the day after that. They were put on DeCamp’s regimen without grousing because they’d been promised one million euros each; the catch, making the payday a big one, was that the chances one or all of them might end up dead was better than fifty-fifty.

“I’m the paymaster, which makes me the squad leader,” DeCamp told them when they were all together in his suite. “You guys are good, which means I want to hear what you have to say. My door is open twenty- four/seven to any idea, any complaint, any suggestion, any comment, starting now right through the end of the op.”

They’d nodded, but said nothing.

“Refuse a direct order, hesitate for one second, drink alcohol, smoke, or try to communicate with anyone in the real world other than the four of us in this room, and I will kill you,” DeCamp said. “Questions?”

“No, sir,” Wyner said. “What’s the mission and how do we get there?”

DeCamp removed the bedsheet covering the oil rig model. “Vanessa Explorer,” he said. “She’s an out of commission oil exploration platform anchored right now in the Gulf of Mexico a few miles off the Mississippi coast. Sometime in the next thirty days her anchors will be pulled up, and an oceangoing tug will tow her out into the Gulf and around the tip of Florida where she’s to be positioned on the Atlantic coast north of Miami. We’re going to sink her with all hands before she gets there.”

The three operators gathered closer to the model, none of them showing any signs that they were surprised or skeptical. Missions with million euro paydays were always interesting, but never easy.

“What about the crew?” Gurov asked.