The Huey flared and then landed, the skids slamming into the metal grating. Four Coast Guardsmen with stretchers approached. Giles and his men leapt off and their superior firepower and training made short work of the four men. The door to one of the vans opened and two Delta Force commandos jumped out firing. The battle was pitched for a few seconds.
Thorpe fired carefully with his AK-74. The familiar sound of gunfire rang in his ears, muffled somewhat by the earplugs he had put in during the flight. After eighteen years of this, he knew he had to take care of his hearing.
He zeroed in on one of the Delta men and fired. The man's expression told him he had scored a hit. For good measure, Thorpe fired twice more, earning him a curse from the commando as the hard plastic rounds smacked him in the chest. The rounds, designed to be used in training scenarios such as this, still hurt when they hit at over five hundred feet per second.
The other man was down and Giles ordered his men forward. They ran across the deck. While Giles took one van, Thorpe took the other. He kicked open the door and edged in, muzzle leading. He paused as he saw a burly figure seated at a radio console. The man held a pistol to his own head.
"Take another step and I kill the hostage."
Thorpe laughed, lowering his gun. "Long time no see, Dan."
Sergeant Major Dan Dublowski lowered his gun. "Damn, who'd have thought the bad guys would hit our C & C?" He pointed at the radio. "You should hear the shit going on at the rig. You got some pissed-off workers who got hit by plastic bullets from the rescuers after being hit by the flash-bangs. Then the SEALs are screaming about the simulators you dropped in the water. They got two guys with busted eardrums."
"They'd be dead if we'd dropped full charges," Thorpe noted.
"Hey, I know that, you know that and now they know that," Dublowski said. "That's the purpose."
"What the hell was that missile?" Thorpe asked.
"Latest thing in special ops." Dublowski pointed at a console that had several TV screens mounted on it. "It's what you might call a pocket cruise missile. The technical dinks nicknamed it the Hummingbird. Not only can it carry a small payload, it also had cameras mounted, giving us a real time close shot of the target just before we hit it."
"Not real time enough."
"True, but that was due more to a screwed up plan than the equipment," Dublowski admitted. "The missile is retrievable. There's a chopper out there now tracking down its homing device somewhere to the west of the rig."
He walked to the door and stepped out, Thorpe following. Colonel Giles came walking out of the other van, a very upset navy captain with him, Parker filming it all. The captain had the distinctive gold insignia of the SEALs on his chest: an eagle clutching a trident with a muzzle-loader pistol and anchor superimposed; nicknamed a Budweiser, as it resembled that company's emblem.
"Goddamn it!" The captain's voice was loud. "This ship was outside the limits of the play of the problem. We thought we had real casualties being flown in here."
" 'Play of the problem'?" Giles repeated, giving a half-smile toward Parker and her lens.
"I knew you shitheads were going to do something like this," Dublowski said in a low voice as Giles and the captain continued their loud and angry discussion. At least angry on one side. To Giles this was a job, and he didn't get upset about a job.
"How'd you know?" Thorpe asked.
"When you insisted that no one, even those on this ship, have live ammo. At first I thought you were just being extra safe, but then I figured there was a purpose to your concern."
"How come you didn't tell him?" Thorpe asked, pointing at the irate navy officer.
"Because he's a jerk," Dublowski said. "We've been training with these SEALs for two weeks and they act like they shit ice cream. Since this operation was on water, he insisted that his people plan the mission. Our colonel didn't like the plan, but he had to bow to the CINC who agreed with dickhead there and gave OPCON to the navy. Plus," Dublowski added, "I don't like SEALs. Not after McKenzie and Omega Missile."
Thorpe knew the entire exercise had been set up three months previously to test Delta-Seal Team Six on joint operations. Obviously there was a lot of work to be done. But that was the purpose. Giles's civilian security consulting company had received the contract to play the terrorist force seizing the oil rig. They'd been given quite a bit of latitude to formulate their course of action, which was actually unusual, given the military's tendency to want to make every exercise into a dog and pony show, especially when the congressional SOCOM — Special Operations Command — counter terrorist liaison, Lieutenant Colonel Lisa Parker, was allowed to be part of the play of the problem to see firsthand how it went — and report back to the Select Committee on Terrorism.
"What was the plan?" Thorpe asked.
Dublowski snorted. "Plan? Hit the rig with everything all at once and use the Hummingbird dropping flash-bangs to shock you at the last second. That was the best he could come up with. You didn't give us much choice with your time limit. The SEALs were pissed because their real plan for an oil rig is to cut into one of the legs and come up the hollow inside and hit them by surprise. Except the oil company who supplied the rig and time for this didn't exactly want them to do that to their equipment. Plus two hours wasn't enough time to cut through. So they had to climb up the outside. They knew they'd get waxed, but they hoped the Hummingbird and Delta coming in from all directions with choppers would give them a chance."
"We were the bad guys. We weren't supposed to give you much choice or a chance," Thorpe said.
"Yeah." Dublowski sighed. "Well, we'll be hashing this one out for a while."
Thorpe looked at his old friend. He hadn't seen Dublowski in a couple of years — since the Omega Missile escapade in Louisiana. The two of them went back a long way. Long before that episode they'd served together in Desert Storm on a SCUD-buster team that had gone all over western Iraq searching for the elusive rocket launchers. Last Thorpe had heard, Dublowski had been overseas in Germany and everyone involved in Omega Missile had been scattered to the four corners. He hadn't known Dublowski had "gone behind the fence," working for Delta again, but Thorpe also knew that Delta tended to drag people with Dublowski's experience back in for more tours whether they wanted to or not. Once in the Force, always in. At least for everyone but himself, Thorpe conceded. He was the exception to the rule.
Dublowski looked older than his forty-seven years. There was a slight nervous tic under the skin near the sergeant major's left eye that Thorpe didn't remember seeing before; a certain lack of focus to the older man's eyes that Thorpe found strangely familiar.
"How have things been?" Thorpe asked.
"They've sucked."
"What's the matter?"
"Terri's gone."
Thorpe blinked. Terri was Dublowski's daughter. The last time Thorpe had seen her, she'd been fourteen years old with pigtails and dressed in coveralls, running around the backyard at the Dublowski's house in Fayetteville, outside Fort Bragg. But almost four years had passed since then.
"What do you mean, gone?"
Dublowski walked over to the ship's railing. His eyes were focused on the sea. "After Louisiana, I was stationed with Special Operations Command Europe, in Stuttgart. Staff puke work while I recovered from some knee surgery and, as you know, getting me as far away from the States as they could. She was a senior at the high school there. One Friday night two months ago she went out with some friends and she never came back."
Thorpe didn't know what to say, so he remained silent, waiting for the rest of the story.
"Her friends said the last they saw her — as best they can remember, since most of them had been pretty drunk — was she said she was leaving, going home. They'd all been out in one of the preserves in the Black Forest, drinking and partying.