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.