"That's from this morning," Gannet said.

"s.h.i.t," Tex said. "Pardon my French."

"That would be 'merde,' Tex," Annja said.

"I knew that."

As Gannet zoomed in on the image the tadpole grew into an unmistakable helicopter. "That looks just like the helicopter that we saw in Italy," Annja exclaimed. She stopped herself just short of blurting "attacked." They had not told the Black Bart crew any details of just what they were doing, and they had not pressed. For all the air of make-believe about the radio pirates, they really were outlaws of a sort. They knew the value of discretion.

The coverall-clad airfield girl stuck her head in the door. Without the ball cap, she had blond hair tied in pigtails and a wide face full of freckles. She didn't really look like Jadzia, but her appearance still gave Annja a brief twinge.

"Your golf gear's here, Mr. Tex!" she chirped.

"Thanks a bundle, Maggie," Tex said.

"Golf gear?" Annja said, a beat out of sync with Gannet.

Tex shrugged. "Hey, you never know when I might fancy a round, as you Brits would say. Addiction's like that."

The youth gave him a dubious look. He transferred it to Annja, who shrugged.

"I doubt it's the same chopper you saw in Italy," Tex said. "Be a long, slow trip."

Gannet clicked again. The chopper grew to fill the screen. Annja studied it.

"I'm pretty sure it's the same model, though," she said. "Same paint scheme, too. Blue with white trim."

"Which might mean it belongs to the same people." Tex shrugged. "Or it may not. Pretty common color scheme."

"Agusta Westland A109," said Gannet. "Fairly common design, that. But what we can do is read the registration number off the tail boom." He typed some more. "And here we see the machine is registered to EP Great Britain, operating out of their Edinburgh facility."

"Which pretty much confirms what we know already, doesn't it?" Annja asked.

"Suggests EP still owns the rig, anyway," Tex said.

She frowned. "What would an oil company want with a tapped-out drilling platform?"

"Well," Gannet said, sitting back and lacing his fingers behind his head, "I can't speak for them, but we find ours right handy for illicit activities."

"Storm's coming in fast," Annja said from the doorway. "Poor Jadzia." The two sentences weren't exactly related. Poor Jadzia was based on the imminent expiration of the kidnappers' deadline. Then again, it was looking more and more likely the storm would hit Claidheamh Mor B before they did. Each second it delayed them made the captive girl's survival less likely. And if the terrible North Sea swallowed them in its fury...

The multiple metallic clack from behind her in the airfield's little maintenance shop made the hairs on Annja's nape rise. Not because it was unfamiliar, or for that matter that she was afraid of it. She knew perfectly well what made a sound like that. Nothing else on Earth did. The unexpectedness of hearing it here here was what shocked her. was what shocked her.

"You know how to use one of these?" Tex sat on a plastic crate with his hat pushed way back on his head. He was holding up a black shotgun with a rear pistol grip. "Benelli M4 semiauto combat shotgun, 12-gauge. The very latest thing in social work auto regulating, gas operated, with two stainless-steel self-cleaning pistons. The Marines use 'em, but they're good weapons in spite of that."

"I've used a shotgun a few times, yes," Annja said guardedly. "Never a Benelli before."

"Nothing to it. Loads here. Ghost-ring sight, just the thing for rapid target acquisition." He cycled the charging handle. "Point and shoot. I'd recommend something a little lighter on the recoil truth to tell, 12-gauge is a bit much for most men to use efficiently. But all your work with that sword of yours gives you a little bit of an edge when it comes to strength, don't you think?"

He looked up and saw her expression. "What?"

Annja glanced around. Tex had cheerfully chased everyone out of the shop before opening up his long, heavy "golf bags." Leo had headed back to the mainland by motorboat-taxi to spend the night. Gannet and crew were out admiring their handiwork repainting the ultralight.

"One question," she said. "Aren't the Orkney Islands still part of the United Kingdom?"

"Last I checked," Tex said, laying the shotgun on a bench beside him and fishing out a pair of black autopistols.

"Don't they have gun control here?"

"Sure do. Along with a skyrocketing rate of violent home invasions. No connection, I'm sure. Why?"

She looked at him.

"Oh. These?" He laughed and laid them down on a cloth spread on the tabletop, being careful, she observed, not to point them at her.

"As for these, well they're legal. As to how legal it is for us to have them " he shrugged " don't ask, don't tell, as the saying goes."

He grinned at her persistently dubious look. "I told you I had contacts."

She laughed a bit feebly. "Whatever you say." It occurred to her she didn't really need to know the whole truth. And, thinking about it, she didn't really want to.

He tossed her a cardboard box of fifty 9 mm cartridges and poured a cloth bag of empty black magazines onto the table. "We've got an hour or so before our flight leaves for Claymore B. Hope your thumb's up for a workout."

Chapter 14.

"Dang," Tex said. He didn't say it loud. Annja was surprised she could hear it over the reverberations of that last thunder crack. Her ears literally rang.

"What? What 'dang'? 'Dang' does not sound good."

"Depends on your definition of 'not good.'"

"Try me."

"Just lost GPS."

"The lightning bolt did that? I didn't know lightning could knock it out."

He shrugged despite the sheer physical effort of keeping the little airplane under control in the brutal winds. Annja suddenly realized just how difficult that must have been with no power a.s.sist on a plane that size. "Might just be the storm blocks the signal. One way or another we're flying by dead reckoning now."

"It never occurred to me until now," Annja said, "just how ominous that phrase is. Can you really find the platform without it?"

The rig, which had seemed so huge and intimidating when she and Tex had worked out their tactics for infiltrating it, shrank in her mind to the dimensions of a Matchbox model in this vast and hateful sea.

"Well," Tex said, drawing it way out, "I can give it the old college try."

"What if we miss it in the storm? This rain is like lead curtains at times."

"Lemme put it this way got a hankerin' to see the Arctic up close and personal?"

"We can make it all the way to the ice pack?"

"Oh, shoot, no. I'm just funnin' you, ma'am. We'll run out of fuel and ditch in the sea long before that. The good news is, it's a short-enough hop from Papa Westray to the platform. We don't see it in the next five minutes, we've got plenty of leeway to double back and try a quartering search."

"What if we still can't find it?"

"Then we'll be well and truly lost. As opposed to just lost."

"I love a man who knows how to show a girl a good time."

"We aim to please, ma'am."

The big man sat in a chair, oblivious to the spray the wind lashed against the window of the commissary. A generator-run s.p.a.ce heater blasted away, turning a far corner of the room into a localized furnace. He was out of its baleful radiance, but cushioned by layers of clothing, fat and a genuine indifference to his own comfort, he ignored the chill that inevitably seeped in from the storm outside.

Sulin stood by the window, as far as possible from his coleader, with his hands clasped behind the back of his high-collared jacket, gazing out into the storm.

For some reason, both turned and looked at Jadzia. The girl sat eating a bar of jerky, tearing at the tough strip with sharp white teeth. She had been semicovertly admiring Sulin. She almost regretted that Annja Creed would inevitably kill him.

Something in her manner seemed to irk Marshall. "Time is running out for you, girl," he rumbled.

Sulin stiffened slightly. "It's true that the ultimatum has expired," he said. "But we are to wait for further orders from above before we take any action, my friend."

"I'm not your friend, pretty boy," Marshall said without looking at him. His small gray eyes gazed intently at Jadzia, who ostentatiously crossed her long bare legs.

"Your little gal pal must not really care about you," he told her. "She's gone to ground to protect her own precious hide. But we'll find her and dig her out. And we'll get the scrolls."

"Don't hector her," Sulin said. "It's doubtful she knows anything of real use, to us or our superiors."

"What about what they've read from the scrolls so far?"

"Presumably all the truly sensational revelations they have come across are contained in what they posted on the Net," Sulin said. "If they found more, it died with the rest of the dig team."

He glanced over his shoulder at Marshall. A flash of lightning lit his beautifully sculpted face in harsh purple-white radiance. "Beware of asking questions that might have dangerous answers," he said with contempt ringing through his voice. "If she did happen to know something more, something...controversial would it be healthy for you or for me to hear it? This whole operation is about keeping these things secret."

"You threatening me?" Marshall laughed.

Sulin's violet eyes narrowed. "Do not delude yourself," he said in a voice of oiled silk. "We are tools, purchased by our employers. Will they think twice about discarding us if they deem our usefulness has come to an end?"

Marshall stretched and sighed. "s.h.i.t, Lucy," he said. "You figure anybody leaves this world alive?"

"Louis," Sulin hissed.

Jadzia rose. Her mood had shifted. She didn't take Marshall's menace particularly seriously. He was a s.a.d.i.s.tic thing, certainly. But Jadzia was the star of this adventure.

She was the heroine of this saga, she decided. And the heroine never dies.

Without a word she walked from the room.

Glancing out the port side of the wraparound canopy, Annja saw a great gray monster of a wave crest above the level of their tiny aircraft. She understood intellectually the need to fly so low so that the ocean's surface effect would hide them from the radar rig Gannet's satellite imaging had clearly shown rotating high up in Claidheamh Mor B's superstructure.

But the sight of those menacing waves filled her with terror. The North Sea was not known for its mercies.

It took all her will to control the fear. But she did. She held on to self. self. To focus. To focus.

She formed a picture in her mind a young, pretty face, framed by blond pigtails. Jadzia. The innocent whose destiny she had cradled in her own two hands. And dropped. She would not let herself fail Jadzia again. If she died trying well, she would die trying her very d.a.m.ned best.

To distract herself from the crashing menace of the storm, she let loose a question that had been bubbling around in her subconscious for days.

"Why are you helping me, Tex?"

"Huh?" he shouted back over his shoulder. She saw his face ran with sweat, although it was cool in the aircraft despite the efforts of its tiny heater. His shoulders hunched and bunched with effort, he grunted with the strain of fighting the yoke. His brow was folded with concentration, yet his eyes and mouth smiled as if he were having the time of his life.

"Why are you helping me?"

He actually paused. In their brief acquaintance she had seldom seen him do that. He was thoughtful, a.n.a.lytical even, during the downtimes, as she had seen again that afternoon planning their quixotic two-person aerial a.s.sault on the oil platform. But in the crunch, when called upon he never seemed to hesitate to speak or act as the situation demanded.

"I can't resist a pretty face?" he called back at length.

Fury surged up inside her. "Don't try to blow me off! Not now. This is important."

At once she felt remorseful, and also stupid. He is risking terrible danger for you and Jadzia, she thought. But Tex answered with regret audible in his words, if scarcely above the booming of the wind and the constant cannonade of thunder near and far.

"You're right," he said, shouting to be heard with his face turned forward again toward their unseen goal. "You deserve a straight answer. When I was a kid I did some things. They may or may not have been illegal. You might say I had official status to do them, in fact. I told myself they couldn't be wrong if duly const.i.tuted authority told me to do them. And that they were for the greater good, you know?"

He shook his head. "Later on I found what we'd been told was mostly lies. I watched my buddies die, for lies. And you know, my real reason for it all was that I was a stupid, self-centered kid who thought he'd live forever no matter what. And doing what they told me to gave a dirty, dangerous thrill like nothing else."

"That's why you're doing this? For the thrill?" Again she regretted that the unbearable seethe of emotion inside her, no less tempestuous than the sky and sea outside, had propelled the first thought to pop in her mind straight out her mouth.

"Maybe," he yelled back. "I been chasin' thrills ever since, even though they're all pretty feeble imitations of of what I used to do. But I feel I've got something to make up for. And I'm grateful for a chance to do something real something I know is good. Shoot, Annja. It's a little girl little girl out there." out there."

Her right arm shot forward past his shoulder. "Look!" she cried.

A single light glowed in the darkness like a white eye. It was just a few points away from dead ahead.

"Now comes the fun part," Tex said, all business again. He climbed a few scant yards to give them clearance from the thousand avid mouths of the sea, for the plane would lose lift in a turn. He flew level a moment longer, to regain speed. Then he banked the ultralight left.

Out into the open sea.