Tonight was no exception.

Jack ran through the schematics of the oil rig platform in his mind again, particularly the control room and machine shop—his two targets. Gavin Biery’s webmaster magic had come through again. If it weren’t for him they’d be going in totally blind.

Gavin’s intel brief confirmed four hostages and six Green Army Faction eco-terrorists, armed and trained. But intel on a hostage-rescue operation like this was always sketchy. John Clark’s warning echoed in his head. “Stay frosty out there. You don’t know what you don’t know.”

True that.

“It’s time,” Ding whispered in everyone’s comms.

“Roger that,” Midas confirmed.

Jack watched Ding’s boat veer off at a sharp angle, its bulletproof Armorflate rubber skin shredding water into the turn. The small drilling platform had two access ladders. Jack’s boat would take the front; Ding and Dom would scramble up the back. On training runs with the Norwegian MJK (Marinejegerkommandoen) this past week, the weather had been cold but calm and they’d been able to get the timing down perfectly. But out here tonight on a raging North Sea, everything was up for grabs.

The mission had two goals: save the hostages and kill or capture the tangos. The Green Army Faction threatened not only to kill the captured oil workers but also to blow the rig, causing another catastrophic oil-spill disaster like Deepwater Horizon if their ransom demands weren’t met. American policy had always been to ignore ransom demands from terrorists. Meeting them inevitably led to more terror. Any student of history knew that. But some governments and corporations apparently didn’t read history.

Those were the people Green Army Faction targeted. Profitably.

But in this case, intel from an informant indicated that the group on the rig had no intention of surrendering after the money transfer. In their sick minds, they planned on “saving the earth” by poisoning the sea in order to fuel more public outrage at the oil industry. Killing the oil rig workers was a sacred bonus, like ISIS butchering captive infidels.

The decommissioned oil rig stood in an abandoned field dead center in the North Sea and in international waters. The Texas wildcatting team was developing new fracking-style technology to revive dead underwater wells. The GAF got wind of it and struck.

When it became clear that the hostages would be killed, the company’s desperate security chief called his friend John Clark, hoping Clark could mobilize some of his old Rainbow Six connections. But with only a four-hour window remaining, there weren’t any options.

Except one.