Divide and conquer - Tom Clancy [59]
"How?"
"His throat was cut with his own knife," she said.
"But Battat was ill-"
"I know," said the deputy ambassador.
"And either Battat was delirious or afraid. After he stopped the killer, he left the hospital by the window. The police are out looking for him now. So far, all they've found was the rifle used to kill Mr.
Moore. Metal detectors picked it up in a pond."
"I see," Friday said. The assassin did not speak English. Even if Battat were lucid, he could not have learned anything from the killer.
But Fenwick and the Harpooner would be furious if Battat were still alive.
"I'd better go out and join the search," Friday said.
"No," Williamson said.
"I need you here at the embassy. Someone has to liaise between the Baku police and Washington. I've got to deal with the political ramifications."
"What political ramifications?" Friday asked innocently. This was going to be sweet. It was going to be very sweet.
"The police found the rifle they think was" used in the attack on Moore," she said.
"I don't want to talk about this on an open line. I'll tell you more when you get here." That was good news, at least. The deputy ambassador had concluded that the killings were political and not random.
"I'm on my way," Friday said.
"Watch yourself," Williamson said.
"I always do," he replied. Friday hung up, turned around, and left the apartment.
"I always do."
Baku, Azerbaijan Tuesday, 6:16 a.m.
The Harpooner and his team reached the oil rig just before dawn. The boat cut its engines one thousand feet from the nearest of the four columns. Then the Harpooner and four members of his Iranian team slipped into the water. They were all wearing wet suits and compressed air cylinders. Slipping beneath the dark surface of the sea, the men swam toward the rig. Two of them carried waterproof pouches containing water gel high-energy explosives. The Harpooner had carefully injected the blue sticks with heat-sensitive pentanitroaniline. As the sun rose, the heat would cause the foil packet to warm. The sunlight itself would detonate the explosion. Two other men carried an inflatable raft. This would allow them some stability underneath the platform. Many rigs had sensors on the columns and motion detectors along the sea line. Avoiding the columns and going under the motion detectors was the safest way to get inside the perimeter. Once the explosives were placed, it would be virtually impossible for the crew of the rig to get to them in time. The Harpooner carried a spear gun and night-vision glasses. He would use the gun to fire the water gel packets around the support struts beneath the platform. The Harpooner had brought along only a dozen of the seven eighths-inch sticks of explosive. He had learned long ago that the trick to destroying something big is not necessarily to hit it with something big. In hand-to-hand combat, a foe could be driven back with a powerful roundhouse punch. He can be debilitated faster, more efficiently, and with more control, with a finger pressed against his throat, just below the larynx and above the clavicle. Hooking the top of a foot behind the knee and then stepping down with the side of the foot will drop someone faster than hitting them with a baseball bat.
Besides, all it takes to neutralize a bat attack is to move in close to the attacker. The Iranian oil rigs in the Caspian Sea are mostly semi submersible platforms. They rest on four thick legs with massive pontoons that sink below the waterline. There is a platform on top of the legs. The riser system-the underwater component, which includes the drill-descends from the derrick, which is mounted on the platform.
The key to destroying a platform like that is not to take out the columns but to weaken the center of the platform. Once that has happened, the weight of the structures on top will do the rest. The Harpooner's team had been able to get copies of the oil rig blueprints.
He knew just where to place the water gel The men reached the underbelly of the rig without incident. Though it was dark in the water, the higher