“Dad won the Medal of Honor,” Gideon said. “Tillman?”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

There was no reply. The line was dead. Gideon wondered how...

He tried dialing again, but all he got was a strange busy signal.

He picked up the last two pictures and looked at them. There weren’t more than twelve months separating the grinning kid on the car from the busted-up veteran in the final photo. Which one of those people was the real man? Had their father’s heroic action in Vietnam twisted that sweet, grinning young man into a monster? Or had the dead-eyed killer been hiding beneath a bogus smile for the first eighteen years of his life?

Gideon closed was±€†the case, put the case back in the small box, put the small box back in the big box, and put the big box back in the closet.

Then he lay down on his bed and stared at the shadows moving on the ceiling until the sun came up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHUN WAS LOOKING FOR the woman, patrolling the stairs adjacent to the bridge, when he saw something out of the corner of his eye, a flash of motion near the base of the bridge over on the BLP side. At least he thought he saw something. When he looked over, he saw nothing but the rain being blown nearly sideways by the wind. Not that he could see much of anything in this weather. It was probably just rain swirling near one of the lights mounted underneath the rig.

Chun reached C Deck and found one of his men, Muammar, struggling with the handle of a huge steel valve at the edge of the bridge. They’d managed to close one of the feeder valves, but this one was stuck.

“The valve’s stuck, sir,” Muammar shouted, the wind whipping at his clothes.

Chun pushed the smaller man aside, gave the wheel a yank. It grabbed for a second, then broke free and turned easily. He spun the wheel hard. The flame in the middle of the bridge died to nothing, then winked out.

“Go!” Chun shouted. “Find the woman.” Following his men across the bridge, Chun scanned for the woman in the yellow jumpsuit.

They’d made it only halfway across the bridge when Gideon heard the hissing jet of flame die out above them. He expected the jihadis would be crossing soon, but not this quickly. His heart thumped as he felt the vibration of their boots clattering across the bridge above them. He knew they couldn’t see or hear him. But still, they were only heart-stopping inches away from him and from Kate, who continued to slither through the network of wet steel toward the far side of the bridge.

The steel was cold and slick with water, and the wind shook the bridge with every gust as they inched their way across. The trusses were about a foot and a half from top to bottom, with X-shaped rods connecting the top and bottom members. There was barely enough room for Gideon’s broad shoulders to slip through the gaps. Because Kate was slimmer and more flexible than he was, she slid through without much trouble, the distance between them increasing by the minute.

Below them, the foam-capped mountains of water rose and fell. One slip and they’d be dead. Gideon knew he’d been lucky to make it up to the Obelisk after his boat was shot to pieces. If he fell now, he wouldn’t get a second chance. Even if he survived the fall into the ocean, the current would drag him off in a heartbeat, leaving the waves to drown him at their leisure.

“Hurry!” Kate hissed. “Once they realize we’re not over on the Bridge Linked Platform, somebody will figure out where we are.”

Gideon eyed the far side of the bridge grimly. He still had a good sixty yards to go. His hands were already aching, and his shoulders were bruised from squeezing through the tight gaps in the bracing.

A white-flecked mountain of water reared up slowly from below him, threatening for a moment to overwhelm them. Like other surges so far, it finally em"p>

CLUNK.

A strange vibration ran through the entire rig.

“What’s that?” he hissed.

“I’ll explain later, just keep moving,” she said. She was watching him intently now, as though she was concerned he wasn’t going to make it.

Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty.

Gideon’s pace was agonizingly slow. And the wind was blowing appreciably harder by the minute. The only good thing about the bad weather was that it gave them cover. Even if the jihadis looked in the right place, Kate and Gideon would be hard to see.

Gideon’s arms were burning and his knees were sore. Each time he pushed through the gap between the braces, a wave of pain ran through his shoulders.

Kate was only five yards from the railing of the drilling platform, and he wasn’t far behind.

Which was when Kate slipped. One moment she was there, crossing the gap from one truss to another . . . and the next she was dangling from one of the braces by the fingers of one hand.

She let out a visceral cry. Her shout was spontaneous. And loud.

Gideon was sure somebody must have heard it—even over the thunder of the waves and the howling of the wind.

She was clawing wildly with her other hand, but she was having to fight the wind. The muscles in her arm burned. As physically fit as she was, there was no way her grip would hold more than a few seconds.

Kate’s face was taut with terror. In the last day she’d had several brushes with death. But only in this moment did she realize that hers wasn’t as much a fear of dying as it was a fear of not having lived. The thought of missing her own life made her suddenly sad and angry and gave her a surge of strength, and she reached with her dangling hand, gripping the wet steel.

Gideon saw this—and also saw that the wind was blowing so hard that her grip would soon fail. He wasn’t going to make it to her in time by slithering through another set of braces. In desperation he dropped his feet so that he, too, was hanging from the strutwork, holding on with both his hands. Then, like a kid on the monkey bars, he swung from rung to rung across three sets of struts, closing the five-yard gap between them faster than he would have thought possible.

Her knuckles were white as she squeezed the metal. He was close enough now that he could see her fingers starting to slide. He swung forward just as her grip gave way, catching her fall by circling her body with his legs, clamping them shut around her bare waist with the force of a bear trap. She gasped.

“Hold on,” he repeated through gritted teeth. Her body felt surprisingly warm against his, but the extra weight of her body tested his grip. Gideon did a hundred pull-ups every day. On a dry bar in a dry windless gym, he could have hung there for a fair amount of time. But the bar was wet, and the wind was gusting faster by the minute.

He levered his legs upward, as though he were lamÁ€†doing a hanging abdominal crunch.

“Grab it,” he said.

Kate’s fingers stretched toward the bar above them. Closer and closer, until only fractions of an inch separated her fingertips from the bar. But there they stopped. He couldn’t raise his legs any higher, and her arms couldn’t reach any farther. Waves of fire shot through his stomach muscles. Finally he had to let her back down.

“Try again,” she said.

“It’s not going to work,” he said. “You’ll have to climb.”

“Climb?” Her face was only a foot below his. She looked up at him with an expression like he’d just told her to grow wings and fly.

“Listen to me,” he said with a conviction that calmed her rising panic. “Grab my shoulders. Put your arms around my neck. Then I’ll let go of you with my legs. Just climb me like a tree. I’ll put my legs around you again, this time below your hips, and lever you up until you’re close enough to grab on.”

She swallowed. It meant that for a moment she would be hanging there suspended with nothing to grip on to but his wet skin.

“Hurry,” Gideon said. “I see somebody on the BLP.”