He grabbed it, clamping hold.

She was tempted to yell encouragement, but she didn’t want to alert the jihadis as to what she was doing. Besides, Gideon Davis didn’t seem to need encouragement. As soon as he reached the ring, he pulled it over his head and under his arms. The water spun him around.

Her momentary rush of pleasure at saving the man from being swept away was replaced by concern. She was a fit woman. But lifting a couple hundred pounds of dead weight through fifty feet of air? There was no way.

She pulled with all her strength. Then her feet slipped on the wet decking and she fell, hanging halfway off ton ‘€†he hatch. The rope, with all the man’s weight on it, began to slip, pulling her inexorably toward open air.

No good deed goes unpunished, she thought. Here she was, trying to save this guy’s life, and now she was going to get dragged into the ocean right along with him. At the last moment, though, her feet regained purchase, and she was able to stop.

If only she had something mechanical to haul him up with. Then it struck her. There was a hydraulic winch over on the other side of the platform. All she had to do was attach the rope and winch the man right up out of the water.

She snaked the rope over a piece of pipe, then ran over to the winch and made three quick loops around the drive shaft. It was going to be painfully slow, but it should work.

She thumbed the large green button next to the winch, then hit the lever again. The shaft began to turn, slowly taking up the rope.

Through the steel mesh under her feet, she could see Gideon starting to rise into the air. He swung in a slow arc through the air, his body the weight on the end of a pendulum.

His progress upward was painfully slow. Each revolution of the shaft only pulled the rope a few inches.

Luckily the wind was pushing Gideon Davis toward the pier, so that he was not visible to the jihadis on the other platform. The darkness and driving rain, too, were working in their favor, obscuring the vision of everyone on the rig.

As he got closer to the hatch, it became impossible for her to see him anymore. She grew worried as he started getting closer to the hatch. If she pulled him too far, the inexorable power of the hydraulic winch could wedge him against the hatch frame. In which case the rope would cut him in half.

“Yell when you get to the top,” she called, hoping the sound of the wind and waves would drown her voice and keep her from being heard by the jihadis.

There was a brief silence. Then she heard his voice. “Five more feet,” he shouted. “Three . . . two . . . okay, stop!”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

She pulled back on the hydraulic lever, and the rope...

She couldn’t tell if he was in the line of fire from the other part of the rig, so she grabbed him and propelled him to shelter behind the bulkhead at the center of the deck.

Gideon Davis wiped the blood and seawater from his face. “Thank you,” he gasped. “You must be Kate Murphy.”

“And you must be the cavalry,” she said.

Gideon squinted at her, unsure whether she was being facetious. “I’m afraid so,” he said wearily.

“Well, I sure hope you brought a gun.” She regarded him soberly. “Because that’s the only way any of us are getting off this rig alive.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

GIDEON RECOGNIZED THE WOMAN who rescued him as the hostage he had seen on CNN. Even under these circumstances, Kate Murphy looked more beautiful in person than she had on television. But he had to focus. She was asking him what efforts were being made to rescue her crew. Gideon explained the president’s plan to insert a Delta team through the eye of the hurricane eleven hours from now.

She looked at her watch. “That’s cutting it close to Abu Nasir’s deadline,” she said, adding, “and it assumes that the eye of the hurricane passes directly overhead. Meanwhile, there’s a bomb on my rig.”

“I know.” Gideon stood slowly on his rubbery legs. “Which is why I need to get to Abu Nasir.”

“For what possible reason?”

“So I can talk some sense into him. He’s my brother,” Gideon said in a voice that contained equal parts shame and defiance.

“I know.” She described everything that had happened until now, how she had been on the chopper deck with Abu Nasir when he targeted Gideon’s approaching boat, and how the incident had distracted the jihadis long enough for her to escape.

“I’m still having a hard time believing my brother is doing this. I know him.”

“Maybe not as well as you think you do. I heard him give the order to blow you out of the water!” Her voice rose to a shout. “I’m sorry, your brother told his men to kill you. I can’t say it any plainer than that.” The rig manager was one of those women whose beauty was only accentuated by anger. Her high cheekbones were flushed, and her green eyes flashed.

Gideon still couldn’t reconcile the man who had just ordered him killed with the big brother who had always been his protector. Even when they’d fought, Tillman had always stood between Gideon and anyone who would harm him. But as much as he wanted to deny or rationalize what he’d been told, the evidence against Tillman was overwhelming. The pain of that acknowledgment was almost physical. He felt something seizing up in his chest, like a fist tightening around his heart.

As much as Gideon wanted to confront Tillman face-to-face, to at least try to figure out what was going through his mind, what tortured thinking had brought him to this terrible place, Kate Murphy was right— now was not the time for talking. As long as Tillman had the bomb, he was in control. Gideon’s immediate goal was clear. Whatever it took, he had to stop his brother before any more innocent people died.

“All right then,” Gideon said. “We’ve got to disarm that bomb.” Gideon asked her, point-blank, “Do you know where they planted it?”

Kate frowned. “Even if we manage to find this bomb, would you know how to defuse it?”

“I’ve cleared a few land mines and IEDs over the years,” Gideon said, not wanting to waste another moment talking about his experience. Kate nodded uncertainly as Gideon asked again, “So do you have any idea where this bomb might be?”

?omb.&;When your brother took over the rig, he ordered his men to wheel this big metal case off the chopper.”

“You think the bomb was in that case?”

“At the time I couldn’t figure out what it was. But when they forced me to read their demands, I made the connection. I saw them using the crane to winch it down the drill shaft.”

“Then you didn’t actually see where they took it.”

“Somewhere on D Deck . . .” Kate trailed off and shook her head ruefully.

“You know this rig better than anyone, where it’s most vulnerable structurally.” Something about Gideon’s voice calmed her mind, made her feel safe. “If you wanted to take down this rig with a bomb, where would you plant it?”

Kate thought for a moment, then said, “Let me show you something.” He followed her to a peculiar object cantilevered off the side of the deck. It looked like an elongated egg made of Day-Glo orange plastic, about twenty feet long and eight feet in diameter.

“What is this?” he asked.

“An escape pod. It’s got a weighted keel, so it’ll float in the roughest waters. The egg shape makes it ungodly tough. There’s a transponder, a signal beacon, a radio, and five days’ worth of food and water for fifteen people. There’s also a schematic of the rig.”

Attached to the wall was a schematic of the Obelisk marked with red and green arrows to show fire drill and escape plans. Kate traced one section with a slender finger. “This is the D Deck, the lowest above-water section on the rig. The struts that support the rig are made of reinforced concrete. They terminate here at D Deck, and the superstructure of the rig is held on top with a set of very large bolts. If a bomb took out those bolts, you wouldn’t have to blow up the whole rig. The superstructure would shear off the struts under the pressure of the waves.”