Читать книгу Code Name: Dove - Judith Leon - Страница 11

Valdez, Alaska, 1:00 a.m.

Sunday, May 15

The fishing trawler Polaris sliced through heavy drizzle and a calm sea at the mouth of Port Valdez Bay. From the aft deck a man in black peered through the Arctic darkness toward the shore, a tight knot of excitement like a clenched fist in his chest. Along the shore the pipeline terminal lights stood out like diamonds against black velvet.

His face drooped on the right side, its nerves severed by an old wound. He stroked the damp, corpselike cheek and sucked another lungful from his cigarette. In ten minutes they would launch the Zodiacs. He snuffed the cigarette on the heel of his boot, jammed the butt into one of his flack vest pockets and entered the cabin.

Nine pairs of eyes fixed on him. These were The Founder’s elite— Earth’s Warriors. Every man here had trained in the special forces of various armies before their dedication to The Founder, but still two faces showed fear: the Nigerian, Kariango, and the Frenchman, “Slow Jack” Soustelle.

“You two look ready to piss your pants,” he said in English. “It’s time to fix that.” He strode to the forward bulkhead, fished out the key on the chain around his neck and opened the locked compartment. He removed a small, gray box that captured the men’s attention as though it were a priceless jewel. The Founder’s enforcer laid the box on the narrow central table, tilted the lid back and gently plucked the pencil-thin, pale yellow glass ampoule from its foam cushion.

He held it up so the men could see it. “Speed. Strength. Fearlessness. One smell of this and you’ll be ten times the men you are now.”

He scanned all their faces. “Ready?”

Dark-painted faces nodded. The men gave him grunts of eagerness. Slow Jack said, “Damn right! Bring on the coffee!”

The Founder’s enforcer snapped the ampoule’s slender neck. There was a slight click, and then the smell of burned coffee quickly diffused through the cabin. He sucked in a deep breath of the drug and felt immediately the flutter of an accelerating pulse. The others followed his example. The drug was altering their bodies, their fight response heightening in a way that made them—short of death itself—invincible. A test bar of steel, half an inch thick, lay on the table. He picked it up and, bare-handed, bent it in two. The men murmured. He gestured toward the door. “Get the boats into the water.”

Thirteen minutes later he huddled with his men on stony ground fifty feet up from the shoreline, hidden under starlit darkness and four camouflage thermal blankets. The security system set up by the Alyeska pipeline oil partnership was ridiculously inadequate. A single fence, half a dozen cameras and only a token force of armed security guards. No motion detectors, no dead man’s entrance, no slalom barriers. Only a few feet away lay a dead-end cul-de-sac in the road near Loading Berth Five.

The drizzle thickened into cold, pelting sleet. Finally the red security truck appeared. He nudged Wyczek. The two of them shimmied free of the blanket, hugged the ground as they moved apart till they reached the pavement on opposite sides of the cul-de-sac. The truck entered the turnaround and circled. Wyczek rose. The dummkopf driver’s mouth dropped open in amazement. The man hit the brakes, fumbled at his holstered gun.

The enforcer bolted across the asphalt and, with his bare fist, shattered the window. He grabbed the door, ripped the thing off its hinges and tossed it aside, then pulled his combat knife. The driver turned. The enforcer slid across the seat and rammed his blade under the ribs, up into the man’s heart. “Terra eterna,” he whispered.

He holstered the knife and then grabbed the driver’s twitching body with both fists, yanked it from the truck and threw it like a rag doll to the side of the road. With his men, he piled into the truck bed.

Wyczek leaped into the truck cab and drove them back toward the terminal entrance. They turned right onto an access road to the upper levels, cruised past the Operations complex. The enforcer scanned for signs of danger.

“Still no alarm,” Slow Jack muttered.

Wyczek braked to a halt. With Slow Jack, Wyczek and two other soldiers, the enforcer hit the ground running. His Uzi chugging, Wyczek chewed up the Ops Center door. Another Earth Warrior lobbed in a satchel charge packed with C-4 explosive and shrapnel, and the enforcer tossed a matching satchel through a window.

A brief pause, then two quick blasts.

The windows blew outward, the door exploded. The pipeline personnel knew they were here now.

Yellow and red light washed upward into the night. Kariango and Soustelle had blown the microwave antennae linking the Ops Center to the twelve pumping stations. They had cut off the snake’s head. No way now could Valdez shut down the flow of oil or alert the outlying stations.

A brief vision of oil spilling across open tundra flashed into his head. Can’t be helped. He further reassured himself by softly uttering one of The Founder’s sayings, “If we must inflict some pain to the body to save it, so be it.”

It took only eight more minutes to lay the plastique and the white phosphorus grenades in the walls of the containment dikes. The Alyeska security force finally came to life and under a storm of gunfire, he and his men dashed for the truck. Kariango took a hit in the leg.

Wyczek raced the truck toward the beach. Under fire, all of them piled into the Zodiacs. Two more men took hits before they could get out of firing range. When they were, the enforcer yelled, “Throttle back!” Wyczek slowed to near halt and the enforcer hit the electronic detonator. A roar bounded across the water. Then another.

The sound was impressive, but the sight— Christ! Hundred-foot-high flames gouged like hungry tongues through the rain, licking the blackness. He clenched his fists. “Fantastish!” he whispered. His whole body vibrated. He sat transfixed.

Operation Viper had been executed flawlessly. Within the week he would report to The Founder in triumph. He shook himself and gave Wyczek the signal to get them out of here. As always, in a few hours he and the other men would hit “the pit” when the drug wore off, but the week-long depression was a small price to pay for this kind of thrill.

The Zodiacs streaked into the darkness.