Alpha, Delta (4 page)

A loud bang had him startled from his relaxed
I know my way
vibe. Then a rumble and a shake that could only have meant that lightning had hit Forseti.
Thank fuck we landed earlier.
Niall sent a quick wish that the helicopter had landed safely back in Grane and carried on. He rounded the last corner and another explosion rocked the path he was taking. He stopped and steadied himself against the wall. That didn’t sound like lightening…

Cautiously he stepped forward to the corner and came face to face with one of the security guards from the ride over. He didn’t know who was more startled. The security guard was armed, pointing a gun upward, not at Niall. Then the guard reacted, pointed the gun at Niall, and his demeanour screamed to Niall that he should run.

In the split second it took for all that to take place another explosion rocked the walkway they were on and both men knocked heavily into the wall. The guard flailed and fell back, a bullet embedding itself in the wall next to Niall’s head. With years of experience on walkways that weren’t stable Niall regained his footing. Without hesitating he turned and ran. Time didn’t slow down; it was a frantic terrifying stumble to the next door in the corridor, and a desperate heave through the space, kicking the heavy metal door shut and turning the exterior lock. A bullet hit the door, and the guard, red-faced and determined, was at the handle trying the lock.

Niall stumbled backward, hitting the wall and sliding to the side, falling to his knees and facing the other corridor. Jeff was there. Sprawled on the cold floor, his sightless eyes wide open, a bullet hole in the center of his forehead, and blood pooling around his head.

Terror gripped Niall and shock drove him to stand and back away even more. What was happening? He could see the armed man through the tiny glass porthole in the door and for a split second Niall froze, looking into the dark eyes of the man who had shot at him. Then he turned and ran again. Left, right, along, down—the schematics of the accommodation block changed from one platform to another, but once he was into the bowels of Forseti he’d be able to stop and breathe.

His breathing was tight but his thoughts were suddenly clear as he jumped the last flight of stairs into the drilling deck. He had to grab his glasses as he realised he was losing them and he removed them and shoved them under his sweater. He’d be blind without them.

This is a terrorist threat. This is a hostage situation.
He stopped at the base of the stairs and forced himself to focus. Whatever the fuck was going on he had to follow protocol. Information and communication. He bent at the waist and supported his arms on his knees, his breathing easing. He was fit but he wasn’t a freaking marathon runner. His long hair flopped in his eyes and, irritated, he swept it back as he stood.

Communication meant one thing. The drilling deck, where the brains of Forseti was, or the media room, where the workers contacted families.

Media room is compromised,
he told himself.
What would Finn do?

Decision made, he jogged through the maze of the drilling deck and stopped only at the main door out into the open air. The rain hadn’t let up; he wasn’t going to make it to the other side of the deck without being soaked through. He could go down two levels and come back up in the comms room but that would add time to this.

What if the comms room is compromised as well?

He stepped back away from the window and pulled out his cell phone. It was just a normal iPhone and there was no way there would be anything in the way of a connection. If he couldn’t get to the main deck to connect to NorsDev then he had to find a satellite phone and hope to hell the weather let up enough.

What if all four security guys on the Puma were in on this? What if they were working with the crew here? What if they have guns trained on the upper production deck? What do they want?
Who wanted to take over an oilrig in the middle of the damn ocean that didn’t even form part of the active pipeline for oil? It didn’t make any sense.

Time outweighed the worries and Niall pushed open the door onto the deck, the rain finding and drenching him in seconds. He carefully shut the door behind him and edged his way around the large half-football-field sized area, crossing in and among steel and plastic, thanking God he hadn’t switched out his boots for his work shoes, and wishing to hell he’d taken a coat to the briefing.

Why would you have even done that, idiot?

A sound over the noise of the rain had him stopping with fright clogging his throat, but it was just a loose plastic cover snapping under the weight of rain. If this was a working platform it would be dealt with but the deterioration of care was the first thing that happened on decommissioning. The sharp edges of it tugged at his sweater and he yanked away before, in a motion of desperation, he yanked at the plastic itself and tore of a thick swathe of it. Stiff and uncompliant, it was the only weapon he could think to find. What he wouldn’t give for a steel pipe, or hell, a gun.

He reached the comms area and crouched by the window. In there was a way to contact NorsDev, to contact Finn, anyone. He couldn’t see movement but that didn’t mean a thing. Then, just as he made to move, he caught sight of a man pacing the comms room with a wicked-looking automatic weapon in his hands. He’d been behind a pillar and out of view but now he was plainly there to see. Niall ducked down. Great. There went comms, which only left the satellite phones. Where would they be?
In the comms room. Idiot.

 But wait.
IT maintenance…

Working his way back around the main deck, he approached the comms room from another direction, straight to the maintenance room, and after a considered look in through a cracked window, he cautiously moved in. When he shut the door behind him he stopped absolutely still, gauging if anything was there. No signs of movement, no sounds, just an empty room full of storage boxes and a couple smashed PC screens. He opened the nearest box, nothing but ID card holders. Another box held paper, yet another wrappers of energy bars, but no actual bars. His stomach rolled, reminding him he hadn’t even got breakfast and it must be way past lunch now.

Finally, maybe six boxes later he found what he was looking for and pulled out three satellite phones and a couple of chargers. Pushing them back in, he lifted the box and glanced at the piles of remaining boxes. There could be more but could he chance it?

In the end, the need to get out of the situation alive trumped everything and he was out of the security room, and scrambling down open stairs. Icy rain stung his eyes and skin as he moved to the lower production deck and into one of the main storage rooms. There he finally stopped long enough to realise he was shaking with cold and he couldn’t feel his fingers. When the door was closed against the elements it didn’t make him feel any better physically but on the safety level he felt like he could give himself a few minutes to breathe. He pulled off the sweater, which dripped with water. Then, ignoring his wet pants, laid everything inside the box on the table in the darkened corner. Using his cell flashlight, he lit the area, hoping no one was checking the random abandoned rooms on this deck. He’d deliberately chosen a room with three exits and it was enough so he could focus if he knew he had at least two alternative ways out.

Two of the satellite phones were broken, the backs off and the electrics loose, and only one charger had a light glowing to say it worked when he plugged it in.

“Fuck.”

He blew on his fingers, trying to get some warmth into them, but his whole body was so cold it was impossible. Wires slid through his hold, the delicate connections a mess that he couldn’t at first make sense of.

Frustrated, he stopped. He needed to warm up before he could concentrate. Walking from side to side in the room, over and around crates, he finally felt like he was warming. All he could do was be thankful he didn’t appear to be teetering on the edge of hypothermia.

The wiring was easy after that. The box contained satellite phones for maintenance and he was able to cobble together enough to get one phone that might work. Finally, with the handset on charge, he hid everything under crates and crawled into a space he made, dragging his sweater with him and huddling against the interior wall, which was warmer to touch than the cold floor.

All he could do now was wait.

The call came in just past fourteen hundred hours, Erik beating him to ops by about two seconds, both men pulling on vests and arranging holsters.

Finn had been reading, spending the quiet down time before dinner trying to get his head around some of the shit that had gone down today. Time at the Urskar training facility was hard work but it wasn’t hard physical work that was bugging Finn. He knew exactly what it was.

Niall.

They’d talked this morning; he was working on the Forseti platform in the Heidrun oilfield for the next few weeks. They wouldn’t be seeing each other for a while, and that was fine. Finn was good with that. Of course, he didn’t like the fact Finn was flying in this weather. The storm passing through near the Forseti platform was a big one. And yes, he had to admit to himself he’d checked. And that was the problem. He’d checked the storm, he’d worried about the flight, and he was already missing the feisty, nerdy, sexy engineer enough to have it consuming his thoughts. All the what-ifs and the whens, and mostly the whys. He didn’t usually do serious, but Niall could make him change his mind. One guy with a soft voice and a wicked mouth comes along and suddenly Finn was losing control of his
touch but don’t keep
policy.

Then, this morning he’d fucked up. Big time.

He hadn’t been paying attention and he’d seriously blown things in training. He’d let his guard down and got a helmet full of pink dye with a spot-on head shot from a crowing Erik. It wasn’t so much the kill shot, it was why Finn had been distracted. He’d been thinking about Niall, and not in the
I want to fuck that sideways
kind of way, but in an
I hope he’s okay and I’ll miss him
kind of way.

Then Erik had to go and manage to kill him. It was the first time Erik had ever gotten the drop on Finn in training. It had taken three hair washes and vigorous scrubbing to get the pink out of his hair and off his left temple.

Fucker.

When they reached the briefing room Erik grinned at him, that shit-eating grin that told Finn he wouldn’t be living it down that Erik’s team had taken first blood in the mini war game they were taking part in. The grin didn’t last long, subsiding as soon as Cap walked in. After all, it didn’t matter what had happened this morning; now they were all about whatever had caused them to be alerted.

“About thirty minutes ago four bodies were found at the Grane oil terminal, identified as security assigned to the NorsDev Forseti Platform.”

Cap stared straight at Finn and for a brief moment Finn wasn’t really understanding the words. Then one thing hit him square in the chest. Forseti. That was where Niall was.

Rising to his feet he didn’t know what to say as fear gripped him. “Four?”

“We have reason to believe these four men were replaced so that a team of hijackers could get onto Forseti.”

“That’s being decom’d.” Erik sounded puzzled. “What kind of collateral does an empty oil platform have?”

“Only four?” Finn interjected. “What about the engineers? Niall Faulkner and his brother Ewan?”

Erik looked up at him and Finn could see the moment the information made sense in his head.

“Fuck. Niall is on Forseti?”

“Both of them… Niall and Ewan. Did they go? Does someone know if he…?” The rest of the team all stared at him, Cap included, and Finn realised he was coming off as a mad man. He subsided. No one could get information out if Finn was raving like a fucking lovesick moron.

“The pilots are back, they took one engineer and four security replacements. So, souls on the platform are one engineer, six skeleton crew, and the four security replacements. Eleven souls in all.”

The bottom fell out of Finn and dread stole his breath. Was it Niall or Ewan on Forseti? With who? Terrorists?

“Intel is showing no communications, or demands, but chatter has it that this is an isolated cell connected to the Hofstad Network out of Denmark.” Cap slid his finger on the laptop and the screen changed behind him to show four faces. Three fair-haired, one dark, all in fatigues with long addendums at the bottom of the photo. Ex-Marine, one former SAS. The names a blur. Except for one.

Svein Roberg.

“He’s dead,” Erik said in disbelief, echoing Finn’s thoughts exactly. Roberg had a long history of fighting the good fight for whichever side paid him most. Ex-Special Forces, he had finally been taken down by the ERU two years before, just after Finn joined the team. In fact, it had been Finn who faced him down after tracking him to a small holding in Alta. They’d chased him to the Alta Dam, where the murdering fucker had died.

The bastard had tried extortion in the name of environmental concern and had killed three oil workers in an explosion at one of the dry land containment depots. Finn would never forget Svein’s face. He didn’t even fight when Erik and Finn had him cornered, simply dropped his weapon and raised his hands.

In the best traditions of all grandstanding bad guys he laughed then said, “I live to fight another day,” repeating this over and over as he fell to his knees. There had been madness in his words, and cunning in his silver eyes. Only when Finn had stepped forward did the madness manifest in a blur of motion, the two men grappling for the weapon and a bullet leaving Finn’s gun and carving into Svein’s neck, blood spurting. Time had slowed and Finn had watched in horror and a curious fascination as the terrorist leaped in a grotesque twist of muscles over the dam wall and down into the churning water below.

“They never found his body,” Finn said softly. But Finn hadn’t cared then. The fucker had a bullet in his neck and had fallen over six hundred feet. He had to have been dead.