Gideon's War / Hard Target

“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 sca

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.