Murdock tossed off the last of his gin and nodded. Another roar of approval sounded in unison from the two groups of men—SEALs and SAS troopers—who’d taken over the pub a few hours before by the simple expedient of being louder and more obnoxious than anyone else in the establishment.

“They make noise together all right, Colonel,” Murdock said.

Chucking everybody else in the place out was a strange way to preserve operational security, he thought, but it was just as well that most of the civilians had long since taken their business elsewhere. None of the men were in uniform, but even in civvies, the British and American elite troops stood out alike in their hard-muscled fitness and swaggering banter. They looked military, and Murdock was more aware than ever that that could mean trouble.

When he’d first taken command of SEAL Team Seven, Murdock had made a point of making the men adhere to the Navy dress codes . . . and more. No mustaches that could break the seal on a face mask. Short hair. Discipline, and the uniformity of appearance that helped build good unit morale.

Over the past few months he’d changed his mind, though. As a vital part of the U.S. military’s intelligence gathering network, Navy SEALs had to be able to blend in with the population at large. There’d been a particularly nasty terrorist incident in the early eighties, when three Navy divers on a hijacked passenger plane had been singled out by their terrorist captors despite their civilian clothes, beaten, and finally murdered. The word was they’d been picked out from the other passengers by their athletic builds, clean-cut looks, and whitewalls—the close-shorn hair that left them nearly bald on the sides of their heads.

That, Murdock had declared, was not going to happen to his boys, and as the men liked to say among themselves, the Old Man had loosened up considerably since taking command of SEAL Seven’s Third Platoon. Roselli and Fernandez both sported black mustaches now, and all of the men had hair a bit longer than Navy regs normally allowed.

Besides, as he watched the men, it was clear they didn’t lack for unit morale.

Someone stumbled against a table and there was a sharp report of shattering glass.

“Go easy on the crockery, eh?” The bartender growled at Murdock’s back.

Murdock sighed. Reaching into his hip pocket, he pulled out his wallet, then unfolded a five-pound note, which he slipped across the counter. “Sorry.”

“No problem, mate,” the bartender said, making the money disappear. “Long as we settle up when I call time, right?”

“Right.”

The bartender, Murdock reflected, didn’t seem too upset at the fact that so many of his customers had been driven away tonight. With all the heavy-drinking SEALs and their new SASmen buddies, he was probably doing three times his normal business.

While Murdock retained enough of his officer’s training formality to keep him from joining in the fun—even a SEAL officer was expected to maintain a certain amount of decorum in front of his men, after all—he’d come along to unwind with his men . . . and maybe to look after them as well.

Though details of any upcoming mission were still vague, everyone knew, with that undeniable and insistent sixth sense that the shooters in any elite team always possess, that something was going down. By way of preparation and possibly of initiation, the SASmen had invited their SEAL compatriots to a pub in Dorset’s strip district as soon as they’d stood down from the last of their training exercises that afternoon, and the party promised to get even more raucous as the evening wore on.

With the pub named The Golden Cock, the SEALs could hardly have refused, even if they hadn’t felt the need to uphold their international reputations as hard drinkers. There’d already been a great deal of ribald bantering between the Brits and the Americans over that noun, which, though not exactly common in refined company in England, was still a perfectly legitimate term either for a rooster or for nonsense. Somewhere in the shared linguistic past of the two countries, the term “cock and bull story” had been broken in two, with the English taking the cock while the Americans got the bull. Polite Americans, it was noted, didn’t like using the word “cock” under any circumstances, and the SASmen delighted in ribbing the SEALs about getting drunk on “rooster-tails” before dinner, or about going off half-roostered.

MacKenzie and DeWitt had stayed back at the Dorset base, continuing to go over the platoon’s gear and filling out the paperwork for the munchkins back in CONUS, but the rest of the men had joined up with First Troop and descended on the objective with the enthusiasm of Sherman’s visit to Georgia.

“Good to let the boys have one over the eight,” Wentworth said. He signaled the bartender for two more.

Murdock looked at him and blinked. “Beg pardon?”

“Get sloshed.”

“Pissed?”

“Don’t think they’ve quite reached that point yet, Leftenant.”

“Let’s have another round, gents!” an SAS trooper called out.

The crowd began clamoring at the bar. Murdock and Wentworth grabbed their drinks and a half-empty bottle and moved off to a table, safely out of the way. The men jostled one another happily and noisily, and it was impossible—unless you knew their faces—to separate the British SAS from the SEALs.

“So what do you think, then?” Wentworth asked him as they took their seats.

“About what. The men?”

“The situation, actually. About being on alert and not knowing when the curtain’s going up. Or even if it’s going up.” He toasted the men at the bar with an upraised glass. “Them I know about!”

“Not a lot to go on, is there?”

The standby orders had been routed through to the SEALs late that afternoon, but with precious little explanation. According to the background faxed through to SAS headquarters from Norfolk, terrorists had taken over both an oil-production platform and an American tanker and were threatening to touch off a nuke if anyone so much as came close. The British had a bit more information available, thanks largely to the BBC broadcast at noon that day. The group responsible was the PRF . . . the same group that had been involved in the Middlebrough takedown.

That strongly suggested that this was the big operation hinted at by the German BKA.

The Third Platoon’s orders directed them to be “made ready for possible immediate operations against hostiles in connection with the current situation on the Bouddica oil production facility.”

Yeah, right. The bad guys had a fucking nuke in there, and the SEALs were to be “made ready.”

The orders passed down to the First Troop of the 23rd SAS were a bit more explicit. A reconnaissance operation was being contemplated for the following afternoon—sometime after noon on Thursday. Wentworth had been in on some of the early planning missions, and was scheduled for another at 0800 hours the next morning. Initial planning had concentrated on the use of a BGA service boat out of Middlebrough to deploy an SAS assault force, possibly backed up by SBS commandos.

“No, not a lot to go on,” Murdock finally said. “SOP, really. Not enough intelligence and we’re operating in the dark.”

“I’ve been wondering about why you SEALs were put on alert,” Wentworth said. “Not really your bailiwick, is it?”

“Well, the way I see it, Colonel, the brass’ll probably make it a political decision. You Brits will take on the oil rig, since that’s British property, while we hit the tanker.”

“If the brass ever gets off its collective arse,” Wentworth said, “and decides to do anything. If you ask me, I think they’re afraid to move.”

“Well I suppose a one-hundred-kiloton nuke could have that effect on someone,” Murdock said. “But damn it, we have to do something.”

“Of course.” Wentworth downed a slug from his glass. “We will await further orders. Or do you Yanks do things differently?”

Murdock turned his gaze on the men gathered at the bar. “I wonder.”

Wentworth’s eyebrows arched up. “You’re worrying me, Yank. I can hear the gears clicking away from here.”

“Yeah. I was just wondering about a quiet little exercise.”

“Exercise?” Wentworth took a deep breath, then poured himself another couple of fingers from the bottle. “I suppose you mean a reconnaissance exercise.”

“Full gear. Full simulation. Open ocean.”

“Possibly with a ‘simulated’ target?”

“I had in mind one of those North Sea oil rigs. A big one.”

“I was afraid of that.” Wentworth took a deep breath. “You know, Yank. I should say no right now. What you’re suggesting, going in without orders? They could bloody hang you from the yardarm.”

“Actually, I think I have the orders end of things pretty well covered. UNODIR.”

“What’s that?”

“‘Unless otherwise directed.’ The Special Warfare warrior’s friend. They just want me to stay where they can reach me . . . and that means keeping them informed at all times of where I am.” He patted the beeper in his jacket pocket. “Like this. So, I write out a set of orders. ‘Unless otherwise directed, SEAL Seven Third Platoon shall under the command of Lieutenant Murdock, et cetera, et cetera, conduct an independent reconnaissance in preparation for possible operations against hostiles in connection with the current situation on the Bouddica oil-production facility.’ I transmit that to Norfolk a few hours before we get wet. By the time someone back in Norfolk reads it and starts getting nervous, we’ve gone in, done it, and gotten out again.”

“You’re mad. There’s a procedure to these things. They’d never accept that.”

“I don’t know about you Brits,” Murdock said, considering his glass. “In my neck of the woods, the main consideration is always, always CYA.”

“CYA?”

“Cover your ass. Or arse, as you Brits might say. As long as the people reading the document as it makes its way up the ladder can truthfully say, ‘This looked as though it was done according to proper procedure, and I handled it according to proper procedure,’ they never have to actually think about the damned thing. Somewhere up the line, someone will have enough weight to really read the thing and say, ‘Hub?’ By then, though, they’ll have to go along with it. What are they going to do, call up the bad guys and say, ‘Uh, excuse me but have you seen our SEAL Team?’ ”

Wentworth laughed.“ ‘Won’t you please send them home?’ ”

“‘They’ve been very bad boys. I’m sorry if they bothered you.’ ”

“Assuming your own people don’t shoot you,” Wentworth said after a moment, “we do still have a problem. Have you thought through the implications of what might happen if we fail?”

Murdock looked up sharply. “ ‘We’? I don’t remember inviting you.”

“Be reasonable, Leftenant. You’re going to need help to deploy, right? A boat. Or a helicopter. And you’ll need backup. Extraction cover and transport. Maybe special weapons and ammo. Reinforcements. Radio net coverage. Am I right?”

“Well . . .”

“Besides, we need that intel too, and if the Defense Ministry makes up its mind to launch an assault, it would be nice to have our team already in place. So First Troop is in too. Now, answer my question. What if we fail? Can we risk failure?”

“You’re asking whether we can afford the possibility of the bad guys setting off their bomb.” Wentworth nodded, and Murdock pressed ahead. He began ticking off points on his fingers. “Okay. First, we don’t know they have a bomb. That has got to be the number-one question Washington and London are both asking right now, and we can answer it for them.”

“Maybe. If we get close enough.”

“Two. Assume they do have a bomb.”

“We have to, damn it. If nothing else, there’s the radioactivity on that Korean woman’s clothing.”

“Agreed. And they’re not going to touch the thing off at the first sight of combat swimmers.”

“You seem awfully sure of yourself about that.”

“Stands to reason. Push the button and . . .” Murdock shaped a mushroom cloud with his hands. “Boom. And that leads to some very serious consequences.”

Wentworth laughed, a dry, forced bark. “No! Now pull my other one.”

“No, I mean it. Serious consequences for them, for their cause. Remember how Saddam’s eco-terrorism backfired on him?”

“Yes.” Wentworth hesitated, then his eyes widened. “Yes! You think this PRR is going to be concerned about world opinion.”

“Hell, they have to. Saddam threatened to blow up all the oil wells in Kuwait if the forces leaning on him didn’t back off. He also threatened to set loose an enormous oil slick in the Persian Gulf. When Desert Storm kept storming, he did both. All he managed to do was convince the rest of the world that he was as crazy, as vicious crazy, as we’d been saying all along.”

“That was war, of course.”

“And terrorism isn’t? In fact, my impression always was that the terrorism of the seventies and eighties was designed to convince nice, soft, comfortable people in the West that they were now in a war zone, potential targets. Americans . . . hey. Wars between Arabs and Israelis, that didn’t bother them, right? Didn’t strike home. But when an airliner blows up and some of the passengers are from your home state, when suddenly it takes a couple of hours longer to check aboard your flight because of the security precautions, when laws are being passed that take away some of the freedoms you’d taken for granted up until then . . . when suddenly you’re fucking inconvenienced, you’ve become part of the war. And that’s exactly what those groups were after.

“Well, after a while, most of the terror groups learned that they were sending the wrong message. Westerners started thinking of all Arabs as barbarians or worse, as crazed fanatics. Elite units that fought terrorists—the SAS, the SEALs, Delta Force—well, they were the heroes. It hurt the tangos’ cause, drove a damned stake through it. After a while, terror groups like the PLO that needed legitimacy started talking about diplomacy and peace instead of car bombs. The only ones left tossing bombs around are the ones who really do think they’re at war with the West, or who do it for revenge.”

“Or for the thrill of seeing the write-up in the London Times.”

“Maybe. Better example . . . when the Provos started getting bloody in the seventies, the IRA’s funding in the States started drying up. A lot of their money originally came from Irish-Americans, especially in Boston and New York, but Americans wouldn’t bankroll terrorists.”

“Most Americans, anyway. But I take your point. Setting off a nuclear device in the North Sea, ruining the economics of the five or six countries that depend on North Sea oil and fishing productivity, causing massive unemployment, spreading radioactive fallout across a quarter of the continent and blackening the beaches with radioactive sludge . . . bad show, really. And a very bad press.”

“I think it was Mao who said a guerrilla has to swim with all the other fish in the sea. He can’t alienate the people he’s trying to liberate. And that nuke, believe me, would alienate a lot of people.”

“You don’t think the general population will respond to this idea of a nation without boundaries? If it means membership in the nuclear club?”

“Look at the hits in world opinion that the U.S. has taken for being the only nation in history to use atomic bombs in war. These people know that if they touch off a nuke, they’re going to be remembered the same way.”

“Some of those people out there,” Wentworth said. He stopped, then shook his head. “They might like the publicity.”

“Not these people. They’re looking for political power. And they won’t rock the boat, won’t want to rock the boat, I mean, with the North Koreans bankrolling them and providing them with noisy toys. My guess is that they’ll be damned careful about setting off their device, if only because they need Pyongyang to supply them with more bombs, and the North Koreans don’t need to find themselves at the receiving end of an antinuke crusade any more than the tangos do.”

“So, what’s your point? That the terrorists won’t set off the bomb? Assuming they have one, of course.”

“No. That they’re not going to be so itchy-twitchy to set it off that they’ll push the button the moment they catch sight of one of us. My guess is they won’t push the button until they have absolutely no other choice. As long as the bomb hasn’t gone off yet, they still have a hold on us, a way to manipulate us. If they set it off, they’ve got to know that the whole world is going to brand them as monsters, as outcasts, and at least a dozen governments aren’t going to rest until every last one of them is hunted down. Where’s their political power then?”

“You know,” Wentworth said with a faraway look in his eyes. “That actually makes a crazy kind of sense.”

“There’s one more reason nothing will happen,” Murdock said.

“And what is that, then?”

“The crazy sons of bitches aren’t going to see us, that’s why. In and out, sneak and peek. SEALs are good.”

“Not to mention modest.”

“And truthful. At least while operating UNODIR.”

“Okay. Let’s say I buy into all this. What’s your idea?”

Murdock had been thinking about such an operation for some time now, ever since the communication had arrived from Washington. He began sketching the outline for Wentworth, and the SAS colonel, listening carefully, began to smile.

“I have access to the blueprints for Bouddica,” the SAS colonel said after several minutes of listening. “I can download them through my fax back at headquarters. We’ll have to talk with someone higher up about the notion of a prisoner release . . . or an exchange, and that will give us the excuse we need to get a boat in close. The powers that be might go for that in any case, just to be able to talk with the opposition.”

“That’s what I thought. Sounds like the people on Bouddica are especially eager to get that Korean woman, Chun, back.”

“Yes. Yes, they are. Getting M15 and the people at HQ to go along with the idea, though . . .”

“We can try. What have we got to lose?”

“Our commissions, for one thing. But I think you’ve got a decent plan there. I’ll get on it with my staff people right away.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Just one thing, Leftenant.”

“Colonel?”

“Why do you insist that you be along as one of the scouts? Wouldn’t things be better served if you coordinated from the rear?”

“That’s not the way SEALs do it, Colonel.”

He didn’t look convinced. “Maybe. But I was wondering if you had . . . personal considerations in this.”

Murdock didn’t answer immediately. Of course he had personal considerations . . . and Wentworth damn well knew it. He’d been worrying about Inge Schmidt ever since Monday, when he’d heard the People’s Revolution had kidnapped her.

Where was she? There were, essentially, two possibilities as he saw things. They might be holding her in a safe house ashore, probably somewhere in Germany. If that was the case, there was almost nothing he could do about it . . . nothing, that is, except carry out the raid against the tangos on the Bouddica platform. It was just possible that a prisoner taken there, or a document, or some other piece of intelligence picked up in either the preliminary reconnaissance or in a full-blown takedown later would yield some clue as to where they were holding her. The moment such a clue surfaced, Murdock would see to it personally that Lieutenant Hopke of GSG9 had it too . . . and then God help the terrorists who were holding Inge captive!

The second possibility was more intriguing. The bad guys must have kidnapped Inge to find out more about the Americans who’d been seen with her. If they knew Murdock and MacKenzie were SEALs, they’d be questioning Inge about how much the American SEALs knew, about why they were in Europe, about how they might react to the Bouddica takeover. Depending on how the tango command structure worked, it was distinctly possible that they would take Inge out to Bouddica and hold her there. It would be more secure than any safe house ashore; the terrorists must be afraid that intelligence picked up by the SAS in Middlebrough would compromise their operation all over the continent. They might see Bouddica as the safest place to hold their hostages.

Either way, Murdock was determined to be on that recon team.

“I’m going, Colonel,” he said quietly. “Let’s leave it at that, shall we?” He shoved his glass back across the table and stood up. “Perhaps it’s time I got my boys out of the pub, off the streets, and away to someplace where they’ll do no harm.”

“That lot?” Wentworth asked. He laughed. “No chance there. Your lads, like mine, were born to do harm, and heaven help the poor soul who gets in their way.”