Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Gideon's War and Hard Target

There was no reply. The line was dead. Gideon wondered how...

He tried dialing again, but all he got was a strange busy signal.

He picked up the last two pictures and looked at them. There weren’t more than twelve months separating the grinning kid on the car from the busted-up veteran in the final photo. Which one of those people was the real man? Had their father’s heroic action in Vietnam twisted that sweet, grinning young man into a monster? Or had the dead-eyed killer been hiding beneath a bogus smile for the first eighteen years of his life?

Gideon closed was±€†the case, put the case back in the small box, put the small box back in the big box, and put the big box back in the closet.

Then he lay down on his bed and stared at the shadows moving on the ceiling until the sun came up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHUN WAS LOOKING FOR the woman, patrolling the stairs adjacent to the bridge, when he saw something out of the corner of his eye, a flash of motion near the base of the bridge over on the BLP side. At least he thought he saw something. When he looked over, he saw nothing but the rain being blown nearly sideways by the wind. Not that he could see much of anything in this weather. It was probably just rain swirling near one of the lights mounted underneath the rig.

Chun reached C Deck and found one of his men, Muammar, struggling with the handle of a huge steel valve at the edge of the bridge. They’d managed to close one of the feeder valves, but this one was stuck.

“The valve’s stuck, sir,” Muammar shouted, the wind whipping at his clothes.

Chun pushed the smaller man aside, gave the wheel a yank. It grabbed for a second, then broke free and turned easily. He spun the wheel hard. The flame in the middle of the bridge died to nothing, then winked out.

“Go!” Chun shouted. “Find the woman.” Following his men across the bridge, Chun scanned for the woman in the yellow jumpsuit.

They’d made it only halfway across the bridge when Gideon heard the hissing jet of flame die out above them. He expected the jihadis would be crossing soon, but not this quickly. His heart thumped as he felt the vibration of their boots clattering across the bridge above them. He knew they couldn’t see or hear him. But still, they were only heart-stopping inches away from him and from Kate, who continued to slither through the network of wet steel toward the far side of the bridge.

The steel was cold and slick with water, and the wind shook the bridge with every gust as they inched their way across. The trusses were about a foot and a half from top to bottom, with X-shaped rods connecting the top and bottom members. There was barely enough room for Gideon’s broad shoulders to slip through the gaps. Because Kate was slimmer and more flexible than he was, she slid through without much trouble, the distance between them increasing by the minute.

Below them, the foam-capped mountains of water rose and fell. One slip and they’d be dead. Gideon knew he’d been lucky to make it up to the Obelisk after his boat was shot to pieces. If he fell now, he wouldn’t get a second chance. Even if he survived the fall into the ocean, the current would drag him off in a heartbeat, leaving the waves to drown him at their leisure.

“Hurry!” Kate hissed. “Once they realize we’re not over on the Bridge Linked Platform, somebody will figure out where we are.”

Gideon eyed the far side of the bridge grimly. He still had a good sixty yards to go. His hands were already aching, and his shoulders were bruised from squeezing through the tight gaps in the bracing.

A white-flecked mountain of water reared up slowly from below him, threatening for a moment to overwhelm them. Like other surges so far, it finally em"p>

CLUNK.

A strange vibration ran through the entire rig.

“What’s that?” he hissed.

“I’ll explain later, just keep moving,” she said. She was watching him intently now, as though she was concerned he wasn’t going to make it.

Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty.

Gideon’s pace was agonizingly slow. And the wind was blowing appreciably harder by the minute. The only good thing about the bad weather was that it gave them cover. Even if the jihadis looked in the right place, Kate and Gideon would be hard to see.

Gideon’s arms were burning and his knees were sore. Each time he pushed through the gap between the braces, a wave of pain ran through his shoulders.

Kate was only five yards from the railing of the drilling platform, and he wasn’t far behind.

Which was when Kate slipped. One moment she was there, crossing the gap from one truss to another . . . and the next she was dangling from one of the braces by the fingers of one hand.

She let out a visceral cry. Her shout was spontaneous. And loud.

Gideon was sure somebody must have heard it—even over the thunder of the waves and the howling of the wind.

She was clawing wildly with her other hand, but she was having to fight the wind. The muscles in her arm burned. As physically fit as she was, there was no way her grip would hold more than a few seconds.

Kate’s face was taut with terror. In the last day she’d had several brushes with death. But only in this moment did she realize that hers wasn’t as much a fear of dying as it was a fear of not having lived. The thought of missing her own life made her suddenly sad and angry and gave her a surge of strength, and she reached with her dangling hand, gripping the wet steel.

Gideon saw this—and also saw that the wind was blowing so hard that her grip would soon fail. He wasn’t going to make it to her in time by slithering through another set of braces. In desperation he dropped his feet so that he, too, was hanging from the strutwork, holding on with both his hands. Then, like a kid on the monkey bars, he swung from rung to rung across three sets of struts, closing the five-yard gap between them faster than he would have thought possible.

Her knuckles were white as she squeezed the metal. He was close enough now that he could see her fingers starting to slide. He swung forward just as her grip gave way, catching her fall by circling her body with his legs, clamping them shut around her bare waist with the force of a bear trap. She gasped.

“Hold on,” he repeated through gritted teeth. Her body felt surprisingly warm against his, but the extra weight of her body tested his grip. Gideon did a hundred pull-ups every day. On a dry bar in a dry windless gym, he could have hung there for a fair amount of time. But the bar was wet, and the wind was gusting faster by the minute.

He levered his legs upward, as though he were lamÁ€†doing a hanging abdominal crunch.

“Grab it,” he said.

Kate’s fingers stretched toward the bar above them. Closer and closer, until only fractions of an inch separated her fingertips from the bar. But there they stopped. He couldn’t raise his legs any higher, and her arms couldn’t reach any farther. Waves of fire shot through his stomach muscles. Finally he had to let her back down.

“Try again,” she said.

“It’s not going to work,” he said. “You’ll have to climb.”

“Climb?” Her face was only a foot below his. She looked up at him with an expression like he’d just told her to grow wings and fly.

“Listen to me,” he said with a conviction that calmed her rising panic. “Grab my shoulders. Put your arms around my neck. Then I’ll let go of you with my legs. Just climb me like a tree. I’ll put my legs around you again, this time below your hips, and lever you up until you’re close enough to grab on.”

She swallowed. It meant that for a moment she would be hanging there suspended with nothing to grip on to but his wet skin.

“Hurry,” Gideon said. “I see somebody on the BLP.”

“Do they see us?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But they will soon if you don’t go.”

She grabbed around his neck. He let go with his legs and she pulled herself up until finally she could circle his entire neck with her arms.

Kate’s hair whipped at Gideon’s face, stinging his skin as he wrapped his legs around her a second time—but this time just below her hips in stead of around her waist. He pulled her up again until she was able to grab the bar. Within seconds, she had swung herself up, catching a strut with her right heel and then pulling herself onto the bridge.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

Gideon followed suit, and both of them lay gasping, their...

Their eyes met briefly before Kate squirmed out from under him. She pushed through the gap in the final set of braces, then glanced back at him, all the levity burned out of her face. There was one last thing to do. In order to get back onto the drilling platform, they would have to hang from the bridge and swing their feet over to the railing on the D Deck walkway, a good six feet below them. One slip and she’d be gone.

“Here goes nothing,” she said. She rubbed her hands together, clenched her fists several times, then grabbed the last strut and dropped down, feet hanging over the terrible waves. Gideon felt his heart in his throat.

Kate swung her feet, caught the edge of the railing with her toes, and let go of the bridge.

That was when the bullets began thunking into the steel wall around her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHUN SPOTTED THE WOMAN from his vantage point on the top deck of the BLP. She was hanging fromin D‡ the bottom of the bridge, feet flailing as she swung toward the railing.

Son of a bitch, he thought. That was it. That was the flash of motion he’d seen earlier. The rig manager had stripped off her yellow jumpsuit so Chun and his men wouldn’t see her when she crossed beneath the bridge. Whatever else you could say about her, the woman was clever. It would almost be a shame to kill her. Almost.

“There!” he shouted as he raised his AK-47, took a bead on her, and squeezed the trigger. He was a good eighty, ninety yards away. An easy shot on the range. But she was moving, and the wind was blowing so hard that he couldn’t hold the weapon steady. His first shot went wide. His second went high.

A couple of his men were firing now. They were blasting away on full auto, which was fine for fire suppression or popping somebody from across a small room, but if you wanted to hit anything farther than fifty yards, you were wasting your time. The first shot was all you got. After that, all you had was a bunch of noise and muzzle climb.

“Selective fire! Selective fire!” Chun shouted as he squeezed off another round.

But the rig manager was already diving through the gap between the ceiling and the top of the railing and disappeared somewhere onto D Deck on the drilling platform.

Finally his men stopped wasting ammo.

“Find her,” he shouted. “Now.”

As Kate spun in the wind and then fell away onto D Deck, Gideon weighed his options. Right now the bad guys didn’t know he was still alive. From the angle they were firing, they couldn’t see him. If he tried to join Kate now, they’d see him for sure. And they might even hit him. Kate had come only inches from missing the deck entirely. He realized it was pure luck that she’d gotten to the deck safely.

So he decided to wait for them to move.

He didn’t have to wait long. Boots thudded back over the bridge above him toward the drilling platform.

He lowered his head below the beam that protected him from their probing eyes, waited for the sound above him to die away, then scanned the platform for jihadis. No sign of movement.

Don’t look down, he thought as he dropped his legs from the struts and hung over the water. Without thinking, he looked down. The wind was coming so hard now that the faces of the waves were almost solid sheets of white foam. It was surely the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen in his life—and yet it had a magnetic attraction. He forced himself to look toward the deck where he would be jumping. Then he swung once, swung again. And let go.

Wham. He slammed into the deck, legs buckling, rolled once, came to his feet.

Gideon found himself at the juncture of a short passage leading into the heart of the platform. He saw Kate waiting for him at the far end of the L-shaped passageway. When he reached her, he asked, “So where are we going?”

She put her index finger over her lips, then pointed to her left and held up two fingers, indicating that there were two jihadis patrolling above them. Gideon could hear the shouting of the men who were pursuing her from the BLP. “I ran up the stairs, theem"Ñ€†n doubled back down on the other stairs,” she whispered, her face so close to his that he could feel her breath in his ear. “The guys from the BLP think I’m up on C Deck.”

Gideon gave her a tight smile.

“Room D-4, the storage room, is down that way,” she whispered. “I checked it out before you jumped. They have two guards on the door.”

“I’ll need tools to disarm the bomb,” Gideon said. “Wire cutters, strippers, screwdrivers, maybe a voltmeter and some—”

Before he could finish explaining what he needed, he heard a flash-bang grenade and saw the signature flash of light in the stairwell.

“Follow me,” Kate said, yanking open a door at the end of a short hallway. Gideon followed her into the room and strained to see into the darkness. The room was no more than eight feet square, lined with shelves full of cleaning products. A mop and some brooms leaned against the wall. He shut the door. Now it wasn’t semidarkness. It was absolute pitch-black.

He felt around for a light switch, flipped it up and down, but the bulb must have been dead because the room remained dark. Gideon fumbled at the door, trying to find a lock. But there was no lock, no bolt, nothing to keep the jihadis out if they started searching D Deck room by room.

“We’re trapped,” Gideon said.

“No, we’re not,” Kate said. “There’s a mechanical shaft that goes from C Deck up to the top of the rig. This room is right underneath it. We can get to it by crawling up through the air-conditioning duct. Our electrician’s got a workroom on A Deck. You’ll find all the tools you’ll need. And while we’re on A Deck . . .”

“They’ll search D Deck, find out you’re not there, and head back up,” he said, finishing her thought.

“Exactly. Then we’ll come back down so you can defuse the bomb.” She liked that they were on the same page.

“Hold on to this,” he whispered, placing her hands on the rickety steel shelf. Her skin was ice cold. “I’m going to climb up and see if I can find the air duct that will lead into the mechanical shaft.”

“Got it,” she whispered. He could feel the muscles moving under her skin as she braced herself against the shelf. Outside the room another flashbang went off, followed by more shouting. “Hurry!” she hissed.

Gideon knew the jihadis would be checking each room, sweeping methodically through the maze of passages as they cleared each deck. The platform was only about the size of a very small office building. It wouldn’t take them long.

Gideon climbed gingerly up onto the shelf. Despite his attempt to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the sheet metal flexed under him. Obviously this thing was not made for holding a two-hundred-pound man. He began feeling around on the ceiling. His fingers found several small pipes or conduits, then the boxlike metal structure of a ventilation duct. Threaded thumb studs held the cover on.

He twisted the thumb studs and within a few seconds he could feel one side of the panel come free. Then the other. Dust sifted down>GiÑ€† into his eyes as he removed it.

He clawed at his stinging eyes, nearly dropping the panel.

As he pushed his head into the duct, Kate climbed up behind him. The shelf swayed and groaned. But it didn’t fall. He could feel her pressed against him now, one arm encircling his hips. It had been a long time since he’d been this close to a woman. The urgency of the situation made theirs a strange intimacy.

He heard a crash behind him, followed by a muffled curse. “You okay?”

“The shelf fell,” she said. He grabbed her wrist and yanked, bracing his feet against the sides of the duct.

After a moment her hips cleared the sides of the access panel and she shot forward, landing on top of him between his legs. They were so tightly wedged that Gideon could barely move. But they froze completely when a weak light suddenly burst up from the access panel.

They could hear someone moving around in the storage room below, kicking things and spitting out words in Malay that sounded like expletives. It was obvious the jihadis were as frustrated by the darkness as Gideon and Kate had been.

Gideon felt Kate’s shallow breathing against his chest. Her entire wet body was trembling—whether from cold or fear he wasn’t sure—as the jihadi continued to slam around in the room below them. Then the light disappeared, and the door thudded shut.

Slowly Kate’s body relaxed. Her head dropped into the crook of his neck. He felt her warm breath against his shoulder, and her hair fell over his face. She smelled like soap. For a moment she molded her body around his, an impulsive gesture that kindled a warmth inside Gideon he hadn’t felt in a long time. As much as he wanted to surrender to it, he knew he couldn’t. Not now.

“We need to move,” he said.

She stiffened, pushed herself away from him. “Yeah. Definitely. We better go.”

Gideon crawled forward, pushed open the panel on the far end of the duct, and found himself at the bottom of a long shaft about four feet square and seventy-five feet high. A steel ladder ran up the side all the way to the top. Every ten feet or so there was a small access door, each one with a large letter stenciled on it to show which deck it led to. A fine mist fell on Gideon’s face as he looked up, rain driven by the wind through a vent at the top of the shaft.

CLUNK.

The entire rig shook as the ominous sound echoed through the shaft.

“What is that noise?” he said. She hadn’t answered his question the last time he’d asked her about it.

“The damping system which is supposed to keep the rig from swaying too much in heavy seas is defective. Long term, it could mess up this rig pretty seriously. But right now we’ve got bigger worries.”

Kate began to climb past him. Gideon followed. The shaft echoed with the deep howling of the wind blowing over the top. By the time they reached the hatch for A Deck, the noise of the wind was deafening.

They climbed into the hallway and shut the hatch, walking as swiftly and silently as they could until theyep Ñ€† reached a door at the end of the empty corridor. Gideon followed Kate inside.

“Wow,” Gideon said, surveying the back wall, stacked with conduit, electrical boxes, breakers, switches. A pegboard hung from the side wall, containing every kind of tool he could think of—and a lot he’d never seen before. “You guys don’t fool around.”

She gave him a wry look as she slipped into a pair of grease-stained coveralls with the Trojan Energy logo on the sleeve. “When you’re a hundred miles from shore on a rig with operating costs running fifty grand a day, you can’t afford to shut down the rig and make a run to Home Depot just because you haven’t got the right wrench. Take whatever you need.”

As Gideon selected tools from the pegboard and shoved them into a canvas bag, Kate said, “So you still haven’t told me—where does a guy like you learn how to defuse bombs.”

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“We have a couple of minutes,” Kate said. “They’re still searching for me on D Deck, so we can’t go back there just yet.”

It was true: there was nothing they could do but hunker down while the jihadis scoured D Deck, looking for Kate. He might as well tell her the story while they waited. It would be something to help them both pass the time.

“You ever heard of the Tampuan?” he said.

“The what?”

“It’s actually a who. . .”

The day after he ended his relationship with Miriam, Gideon flew to Cambodia to negotiate an end to one of those civil wars that remain unknown to most people outside the conflict zone and never make the front page of any newspapers.

Gideon explained to Kate that if you looked at a map of Southeast Asia, you’d see Cambodia in the middle of a semicircle of nations including Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos. Each of those countries has its own predominant ethnic group—the Khmer in Cambodia, the Laotians in Laos, the Thais in Thailand. But hunched in the middle of Southeast Asia lay a range of high, formidable mountains. And in those mountains were a host of obscure ethnic groups totally unrelated to the dominant ethnicities of each country. Cham, Kuy, Rhade, Jarai, Hmong– the list was long. Cambodia alone had nearly ten ethnic minorities. And in Ratanakiri Province was one of the smallest and most isolated of these groups, the Tampuan.

There were only 25,000 in all of Southeast Asia, most of them in Cambodia.

During the hellish Pol Pot regime, the Tampuan formed a resistance movement. Once Pol Pot and his cronies got pushed out, the Tampuan Liberation Front continued to fight against the central government, dominated by Khmer out of Phnom Penh. It was what the UN termed a “low-level” conflict, which was nothing but bureaucrat-speak for a war where the people who got killed didn’t own television stations or newspapers.

Eventually the Tampuan and the Cambodian government incurred enough casualties and economic damage to reach the same conclusion: their little war was not worth continuing. Under the best of circumstances, winding down a civil war is a tricky business, but the vested interests between these warring parties had cby Ñ€†reated a Gordian knot that most people in the State Department thought would be impossible to untangle. That none of the representatives on either side had the authority to make any real decisions made it even more challenging.

Gideon quickly discovered that patience is a diplomat’s greatest virtue. He would alternately listen and talk and then listen some more, for hours and hours, until the hours became days, and the negotiating parties went back to their superiors to redraw their respective bottom lines. During these breaks, Gideon would sometimes play soccer with the children in the village where the negotiations were taking place.

A significant factor in the negotiations was that Pol Pot had fought the Tampuan by planting mines on every road and trail and water buffalo path in Tampuan territory. As a result, northeastern Cambodia contained more mines per square mile than any place in the world. Twenty years after Pol Pot’s death, the Tampuan were still being blown up almost daily. And most of the victims were children.

Children chase balls into the jungle. They go off the beaten path. They lack the caution of adults. And they paid the price, sometimes losing their limbs or their eyes or, most often, their lives.

As part of the emerging agreement he was negotiating, Gideon convinced the international community to send in teams of bomb specialists to defuse the mines. There were police from the Finnish national bomb squad, retired SAS ordnance specialists, even veterans of the many East Bloc state security forces, which were then in tatters.

A bomb disposal expert named Horst soon arrived in the village. A large ex-Spetsnaz sergeant, he turned out to be a very good bomb guy, except for the regular and substantial doses of medicinal vodka he required to steady his nerves. But the occasional by-product of his alcohol abuse were hands that trembled as if he had Parkinson’s disease. Which was something of a liability in the bomb-disarming business.

One day as Gideon was waiting to hear back from Phnom Penh about some minor point of protocol, a boy ran into the village, sobbing uncontrollably. Several of the children Gideon played soccer with had chased a ball into the jungle. Normally they might not have, but this was a brand-new ball, which Gideon had given them.

Searching for the ball, the boy’s younger sister had stepped on a mine. As Gideon had learned, some antipersonnel mines explode not when you step on them, but when you step off them. That particular kind of mine is called a Bouncing Betty, which is designed to pop up into the air, then detonate at head height in order to kill more people.

The little girl had heard the click of the trigger and realized that if she moved, the Bouncing Betty would blow her head off. So she froze. And now, between breathless sobs, her brother was explaining what had happened. Unless somebody could defuse the mine while she was standing on it, the girl was dead. Gideon went to get Horst, but the bomb expert’s face had gone ashen, his hands were trembling like leaves. For a moment, no one spoke. Then Horst stood and said, “Gideon, you need to be my hands.”

A dozen villagers followed them into the jungle, where they found the little girl standing in a clearing, remarkably composed even as her mother wailed and cried. Her khaki-colored eyes followed Gideon’s movement with absolute trust as he followed Horst’s instructions. Gideon lay on the ground and carefully brushed away the dusty earth surrounding the mine, so he coul goÑ€†d describe the trigger mechanism. Horst confirmed it was an M2A4 bounding mine, then proceeded to talk Gideon through the process until he’d disarmed the trigger. The girl’s mother swept her up into her arms and wept, thanking Gideon through her tears.

It took another three months to finalize the agreement and end the long civil war between the Tampuan and the Cambodian government. During those months, whenever Gideon wasn’t at the negotiating table, he went with Horst on de-mining missions, learning everything he could from the German about mines and munitions—from pressure plates and percussion caps to arming plugs and fuse retainer springs.

Kate listened to his story, rapt.

“So bottom line is, yeah, I think I can disarm the bomb.” He looked at his watch. “We’ve been here ten minutes. Let’s get back down to D Deck and see if the coast is clear.”

Gideon slung the tool-laden canvas bag over his shoulder, then he cracked the door open and looked both ways. The corridor outside the electrician’s supply room was empty. Kate suggested he follow her, since she knew the rig best, so they started moving toward the mechanical shaft hatch. Gideon heard a toilet flushing behind a door he was approaching. Kate turned at the sound, meeting Gideon’s eyes, but she’d already gone past the door, which now started to open outward. As it eclipsed their view of each other, Gideon mouthed the word Run, but before Kate could get very far, the door banged open. Whoever was coming out would spot her immediately. Sure enough, Gideon heard the crackle of a radio and a voice on the other side of the door, shouting in a heavy Malay accent, “A Deck! She’s on A Deck!”

Gideon kicked the door out of the way and tackled the man in front of him, spearing him to the floor, when he realized he’d made a mistake. The man wore a lemon yellow jumpsuit and had his wrists shackled behind him with flex cuffs, while a jihadi stood several feet in front of them, his radio raised to his mouth. Only then did Gideon realize what had happened: the jihadi had taken the hostage to relieve himself.

“What are you doing, you moron?” The hostage was a sandy-haired guy with the physique of a college wrestler, and small resentful eyes. The jihadi dropped his walkie-talkie and swung his AK toward them, but Gideon managed to grab the rifle and deflect its barrel as it spit out a volley of automatic gunfire.

Gideon drove back the jihadi—an average Mohanese weighing a good sixty pounds less than Gideon—and propelled him backward until they smashed against the exit door, which opened under their combined weight.

The rain was nearly horizontal in the hurricane wind, and Gideon’s feet went out from under him on the rain-slick decking. He landed hard on his back and lay for a moment, stunned, while the panic-stricken jihadi tried desperately to free his weapon from the larger man’s grasp. Gideon planted his feet on the man’s hips and yanked him forward, driving his feet into the air, launching the jihadi upward, causing his hands to tear free from the rifle.

A horrible scream briefly pierced through the howling wind, then abruptly died away.

Gideon found himself alone on the walkway.

It took him a moment to understand that he had not only propelled the jihadi over his head but had also flung the man clear over the railing. Fightian&Ñ€†ng the wind, Gideon stood and looked over the railing into the water. Sheets of foam sluiced down the face of the massive waves.

The jihadi was gone.

Gideon yanked open the door and was about to reenter the hallway to retrieve the hostage, when he froze. The hostage was lying dead in his own pooling blood. A jihadi holding a Makarov pistol was standing over him and now fired a second shot into the dead man’s head. Then he shouted toward yet another jihadi, who was approaching from the far end of the corridor. Gideon peered around the corner. What he saw triggered a response in his nervous system that caused him to feel as if he were running a high fever. The second jihadi was shoving Kate toward the first, who now raised his Makarov to the back of her head.

They were going to execute her, too.

Only then did Gideon remember that he was holding the AK-47 of the jihadi he’d thrown over the railing. He had never shot an AK before, had never even held one. But it felt familiar and easy. His fingers knew this thing, knew what to do with it before his mind could even begin to process what his body was doing. He pressed the stock to his shoulder and sighted the target.