Stratton suddenly thought of Smithy and as he rose up to the crest of the next wave he turned around in search of him. Rowena appeared to be doing the same. Neither of them could see the scientist and they forcibly removed him from their thoughts. There was too much to do to keep themselves alive.
Stratton removed his mouthpiece and slung the strap of the grapnel launcher over his head. He finned hard to keep his chin above the water. ‘Where’s the snag line?’ he shouted.
Jason removed his mouthpiece and held up the thin, neatly coiled nylon cord that had a collection of karabiners attached to it.
Stratton took the line and hooked one of the karabiners to Jason’s harness. He held another, connected by a metre-long line to Jason’s, and looked for Binning who was drifting away from the group, staring up at the oil platform as if mesmerised by it.
‘Binning!’ Stratton shouted.
The man came out of his reverie, took out his mouthpiece and finned hard to rejoin them.
Stratton attached the karabiner to his harness. ‘You two swim that way. Stretch the line tight between us. Move it.’
Jason detected anxiousness in the operative’s voice but a glance at the rig revealed why. They were closing on it with surprising speed. It was getting bigger by the second. The four of them dropped down the side of a steep trough as if sliding down the side of a hill.
Jason and Binning began to fin as hard as they could away from the others.
Stratton unceremoniously grabbed Rowena, snapped the remaining karabiners to her harness and his own and swam away on his back, yanking her along. Her head went under for a moment and she surfaced coughing and spluttering. She fought to control her reaction to the swallowed water and finned hard to keep up with Stratton. The thought of being a liability to the SBS man horrified her almost as much as the possibility of drowning did.
The pairs quickly moved apart as they closed on the Morpheus’s four huge black-steel piles.
Stratton singled out the leg he wanted to snag, gauging their approach. That was the tricky part, or the latest in a series of them. As the powerful tide pulled them towards the leg it became obvious to them all that if they got it wrong and missed, or even bounced off and were unable to get a pair either side, then they would sail on into the black ocean beyond. They would fail.
The current took the team in a wide curve rather than a straight line. Stratton calculated that they were too far to one side. ‘Fin!’ he shouted and Rowena responded. They lay on their backs and climbed the side of another huge swell and finned as hard as they could. The line went tight as the pair went over the peak. Stratton followed it to where it disappeared into the next wall of water. He hoped that Jason and Binning had made the same calculation. Suddenly the line went slack, indicating that they had. ‘More!’ shouted Stratton and they gave it another hard effort. They stopped to reassess their track and Rowena spat out salt water, her face cold but her body warm inside the rubber suit.
They were back on target and as they reached the peak of a swell Stratton took a second to study the levels of the platform still a couple of hundred metres away. He could see a haze of lights and not much else. If there were people outside, he couldn’t see them. Yet he had the same advantage. Even an alert enemy couldn’t see him. For now.
He had another advantage: the hijackers had no idea when they were coming. The enemy could watch the water constantly for any sign of a swimmer but it would be difficult to spot one. With such a large area to observe, at night in particular, it would be almost impossible to find a black-suited target in the rolling water. Night-vision goggles would reveal little unless they were trained directly on the swimmer. The same went for a thermal imager - the team’s cold faces gave off hardly any heat and the rubber dry-suits masked their body warmth. A watcher on the exposed lower levels would struggle to make them out in these conditions.
But they needed to be lucky. If the watcher was there and did somehow see them he could pick them off with relative ease from one of the lower