Seal Team Seven

Sunday, 22 May

2220 hours (Zulu +3)

U.S.S. Santa Fe

North of the Seychelles islands

For nearly eight hours after the SEALs had been plucked from the water off the coast of Somalia, the Los Angeles attack sub Santa Fe had been running south at her maximum speed of better than thirty-five knots. Her goal was a place on the charts, a featureless spot in the ocean where, if Yuduki Maru continued on her steady, northward course, submarine and freighter would meet.

The SEALs spent most of that time in the Santa Fe's torpedo room, which had been vacated by the regular crew. The space was cramped to the point of claustrophobia, and the passage was monotonous. Santa Fe's crew seemed to draw apart from the visitors, recognizing them as fellow professionals but unwilling to cross the wall of reserve that separated one group from the other. Submarine crews, like SEALS, were well known for their silence around people not their own.

For the last several hours of the passage, Murdock and DeWitt were guests of the Captain in the control room. Commander George Halleck was a lean, taciturn man, all creases and sharp edges. It was well past sunset on Sunday, though the only indication of day or night beyond the sub's steel bulkheads was the fact that the compartment was red-lit, a measure that preserved the officers' night vision against the need to use the periscopes or to surface.

"We have sonar contact with your target, gentlemen," Halleck said. The three of them, plus Lieutenant Commander Ed Bagley, the boat's Executive Officer, were leaning over the control room's plot table, where a back-lit chart of the area rested under transparent plastic. The Santa Fe's skipper tapped the end of a south-to-north line with his grease pencil. "About here. Course unchanged, still zero-one-two. Speed eighteen knots."

"They're making it easy for us," the boat's XO said with a grin. He was taller than the Captain, and heavier, with thick eyeglasses that gave him an owlishly unmartial appearance.

"How far?" Murdock asked.

"Approximately thirty miles," Halleck replied. "Exact range can't be determined by passive sonar, of course, but my best people have their ears on, and they're pretty sure of the number."

Passive sonar — listening for the engine noise of the target — was preferable to the more accurate and informative active sonar, because it didn't give away the sub's presence.

"Has anybody else tried approaching them?" DeWitt wanted to know.

"About the time we were fishing you boys out of the water," Bagley said, "they skirted within thirty nautical miles of the Seychelles Islands. Half the Seychellan navy turned out — three patrol boats, actually — but they didn't come closer than a couple of miles and no shots were fired. It was more like an escort than an attempt to stop them."

"There's also this," the Captain said, handing Murdock a black-and-white photograph. "That was transmitted to us by satellite an hour ago. The time stamp says it happened about an hour before that."

"Still after sunset," Murdock observed.

"Affirmative."

The "photograph" had actually been taken in radar, so details like hull numbers and slender masts were not visible and the water, daylight-bright, had the look of wrinkled metal. Still, the shot showed a remarkably detailed image of a ship, smaller than Yuduki Maru and riding lower in the water. Something like a white bed sheet had been stretched above her deck. "That's Hormuz," Murdock said.

"So the Iranians rendezvoused with them?" DeWitt added.

"Actually, we don't know that for sure. If they did rendezvous, it was at a point where we had no satellite coverage, and our AWACS radar simply didn't have the resolution to be certain. They at least came very close, certainly within a mile or two. Hormuz is now five miles off Yuduki Maru's starboard beam, traveling parallel to her course but quickly falling behind. She can only make nine or ten knots, top speed."

"I guess that confirms the Iranian connection, though, doesn't it, Lieutenant?" DeWitt said.

"I damn well guess it does." Murdock tapped the sheet in the photograph. "What's this? A tarp?"

"Probably," Halleck said, rubbing his chin. "A tarp or canvas rigged as an awning. Whatever they're doing, they don't want our satellites or recon planes to get a good look."

"The question, then, is whether they used that hole in our satellite coverage to transfer part of Yuduki Maru's cargo to the Hormuz."

"Or if they moved soldiers from the Hormuz to the Yuduki Maru," DeWitt pointed out.

"We'll have to assume both," Murdock decided. "It'll be Plan Alfa." In their planning sessions, they'd allowed for the possibility that Hormuz might rendezvous with the plutonium freighter before the SEALs could deploy. Plan Bravo would have sent Blue Squad aboard the Yuduki Maru, with Gold Squad waiting in their CRRCs as a backup. Alfa called for Blue to take the Japanese ship while Gold Squad boarded the Iranian Hormuz. It meant there would be no immediate backup for either team once they boarded the ships. The Fourth Platoon was now deploying to Masirah, just in case something went wrong in Third Platoon's assault.

Murdock suppressed the thought, and the surge of adrenaline that accompanied it. If something went wrong, the mission would be in the hands of Lieutenant Mancuso and Fourth Platoon.

It also meant that, in all likelihood, he and his teammates would be dead.

"We have one other joker in the deck," Halleck said. "Sonar has picked up another contact pacing the Yuduki Maru. It may be submerged."

"The Iranian Kilo."

"Looks that way. The sonar profile looks like a conventional sub. Stealthy, no reactor coolant pump noise or anything like that. She may be trailing the plutonium ship by another four or five miles."

"Have they heard us?"

"Not so far as we can tell. There's been no change in her course or speed since we picked her up."

"How big a problem is she for you, Captain?"

Halleck grimaced, then shrugged. "For us, not much. The big danger is whether she's there as escort, or as insurance."

"What do you mean, Captain?" DeWitt asked.

"He means that if we board the Yuduki Maru and take down the tangos before she reaches port, the Iranians might decide to put a fish into her."

"That's about the size of it," Bagley said. "Washington would have the devil of a time proving the ship hadn't been blown up by us, on purpose or by accident."

"And we get blamed for contaminating half the African coast," DeWitt said. "Cute."

"Will you be able to take her out?" Murdock asked.

"We won't, no," Halleck replied. "Not without letting those people aboard the freighter know we're out here. But the Newport News is already getting into position. They'll take care of the Kilo when you go aboard."

"Good." Murdock nodded. "How much longer to drop-off?"

Halleck consulted the large clock mounted on the bulkhead at the forward end of the control room. "I'd say another twenty minutes to get into position. We'll keep running ahead of them then, and you can leave any time after that."

"Can't be too much longer, or the separation between Hormuz and the Yuduki Maru will become too great. We'd better get ready to swim then. If you'll excuse us, Captain?"

"Of course."

The platoon had been preparing for their swim for the past several hours, going over their rebreather apparatus, weapons, and other gear with the loving care and attention that had long been the hallmark of the SEALS. Each man was wearing a black wet suit and SCUBA gear, and his face had been completely blackened with waterproof paint. Weapons had been sealed, and explosive charges and detonators were stored in waterproof pouches. While they didn't want to sink either of the target ships, the theory was that if they couldn't capture them, the SEALs might at least slow them by damaging some critical piece of machinery.

That, at least, was the idea. The gap between theory and practice, however, was often turned into a yawning abyss by Murphy's Law. All the SEALs could do was try to be prepared for anything that might go wrong... and stay flexible enough to meet the problems they simply could not anticipate.

There are several ways to egress a submarine. Simplest would have been for Halleck to bring the Santa Fe up until just the top of her sail was above water, with the SEALs going out through the sail cockpit. Yuduki Maru had radar, however, and it was possible that even so small a target as that would be picked up at a range of less than ten miles, so the platoon egressed, as planned, through the after lockout compartment.

Because of the positioning of their water intakes, modern submarines cannot rest on the bottom as their World War II predecessors could. Besides, the ocean here was deep; they were over the Somali Basin, which plunged to better than five thousand meters — over three miles straight down. The Santa Fe, now traveling north some eight miles ahead of the Yuduki Maru and about ten miles ahead of the Hormuz, slowed to a crawl, maintaining just speed enough to maintain way, her conning tower scraping along just beneath the surface.

Two by two, because the chamber was too small for more, the men of SEAL Seven, Third Platoon, began locking out of the escape trunk. Murdock was last out, giving each man's gear a final check before he climbed the ladder into the narrow cylinder that was a floodable extension of the sub's pressure hull. He went out with MacKenzie, squeezing into the chamber opposite the big Texan and using the intercom, called a 31-MC, to alert the sub's crew that they were ready to go. Turning a valve flooded the chamber; when the water was above the side door, they pushed it open, emerging in a recess in the Santa Fe's afterdeck. The other twelve men had already broken out the gear that had been stored there after their paradrop; four Combat Rubber Raiding Craft from the C-130's pallet canister had been rolled up, lashed together, and stowed in the deck compartment between the sub's outer and pressure hulls, along with the boat's engines and other necessary gear.

They worked swiftly and surely, in an almost total, inky darkness penetrated only incompletely by the small lights the men carried. Both the Santa Fe and the SEALs were still moving slowly forward, and the water pressure as the current boiled aft past the sail was like a stiff wind. Air bubbles tinkled and burbled in the darkness as they rose from SCUBA regulators. SCUBA gear was being used for this mission rather than rebreathers because the final approach would be on the surface, rather than underwater, and there would be no danger of the bubbles giving away the divers' positions.

In moments, the CRRCs were freed and inflated from pressure bottles, rising to the surface accompanied by their retinue of frogmen. Their lights were extinguished as they rode the rubber rafts toward the surface. In minutes, the four rafts were bobbing on a gentle swell on the surface. Stars peeped from among scattered clouds overhead. The horizon, visible only where the stars ended, was empty.

The SEALs rolled aboard their CRRCs and began unshipping the engines and securing their gear. SCUBA tanks, masks, and flippers were removed and stowed. Flak jackets and combat harnesses went on over wet-suit tops; radio headsets were slipped into place and plugged into belt Motorola units. They wore the SEALs' usual mix of headgear: floppy boonie hats, woolen balaclavas, or a dark green scarf folded into a triangle and worn over the head like a bandana. Under their swim fins, they wore thick-soled, rubber-cleated boots, specially designed footwear for climbing slippery steel. No words were spoken during the entire process, and radio silence was strictly observed save for the brief clicks of the necessary radio checks; each movement, each act had been practiced countless times by every man in the team. A hand signal, barely visible in the night, a thumbs-up, and the two sets of rafts began drawing apart, propelled by silenced engines that gave off little noise above a soft purr. The plan called for them to split into two groups of two, Murdock's group heading due South to intercept the Yuduki Maru, DeWitt's squad bearing to the southeast to close with the more distant Hormuz.

The Blue Squad rafts traveled side by side at twelve knots, meeting and breasting each swell. Murdock cradled a hand-held radar unit, intermittently sending out a pulse to check on the Yuduki Maru's position. The signal, deliberately tailored to mimic that put out by aircraft search radars, would probably not be picked up at all by the freighter; if it was, it would be dismissed as another of the aircraft that had been prowling the skies around the hijacked plutonium ship for the past several days.

For the next fifteen minutes, Yuduki Maru remained steadily on course. Soon, the SEALs could actually see her, bow-on, her bridge brilliantly illuminated and with running lights to port and starboard, at her prow and at her masthead. Evidently, the hijackers were doing nothing to hide her presence. It was almost as though they were daring the SEALs to attack.

The lights provided the SEALs with one tremendous advantage, however. Guards on her deck would ruin their night vision every time they looked inboard; the SEALS, black-faced, in black garb, aboard black CRRCs, were all but invisible on the black water. The chances that shipboard guards would notice the approach of the SEAL boats were sharply reduced.

Three hundred yards from the Yuduki Maru's bow, the two CRRCs began to separate. MacKenzie, Garcia, and Higgins in one boat steered for the freighter's starboard side. Murdock, Roselli, Brown, and Ellsworth made for the port. Stretched between the two rafts was a two-football-field length of light-weight, slender, but very strong wire rope; the CRRCs drew apart until they were two hundred yards apart and the cable was stretched taut between them. The range to the plutonium ship closed, more gradually now as the cable's drag slowed the CRRCs. The swell was growing worse, sending the rubber boats up each gentle but irresistibly passing mound of water, then sending them sliding man-deep into the trough that followed.

The Yuduki Maru loomed out of the night, her bow wake a ghostly white mustache shining in the darkness, her hull a black cliff towering over the rafts, her superstructure a bulky white castle riding the sky above the aft third of the ship. The freighter passed squarely between the two CRRCs, the throb of its engines booming out of the silence of the night.

Murdock killed the CRRC's engine as the wire rope snagged against the huge ship's bow. With a jerk, the rubber boat's course was reversed; the SEALs clung to handholds set into the gunwales as the Yuduki Maru began dragging them relentlessly forward at eighteen knots, a sleigh ride that carried them up and down the ocean swell with enough velocity to send a cascade of spray over the CRRC's bow. Inexorably, the raft was swung toward the freighter's side. The SEALs were ready as the rubber side thumped heavily against the ship's massive steel cliff, fending off the big ship with gloved hands. Brown secured the raft in place with a limpet magnet and a length of strong line. Wake and ocean swell combined to send the CRRC bobbing up and down at the Yuduki Maru's side. Swiftly, Ellsworth dropped a hydrophone cable over the side; Roselli was already extending a long, telescoping aluminum pole with a hook on the end.

Fully extended, the climbing pole reached thirty feet, high enough that Roselli, supported upright by the others in the boat, was able to snag a deck stanchion with the rubberized tip.

"Solid," Roselli said, giving the pole a hard, downward tug. The rise and fall of the raft at the ship's side threatened to knock both SEAL and extension pole into the sea, but he hung on, riding the motion with practiced skill. The Yuduki Maru's stern was only twenty yards astern, and the turning of her twin screws filled the air with a deep-throated throbbing.

Murdock nodded, then reached for the trigger for the hydrophone. This was a compact, battery-powered device designed to transmit data via a burst of high-frequency sound. Swiftly, he punched in a code group, three numbers that, transmitted through the water to the submerged Santa Fe, indicated that the SEALs had made contact with the Yuduki Maru and were going aboard.

On the other side of the freighter, MacKenzie and his people ought to be going through the same motions, but Murdock and the SEALs in his CRRC would operate as though they were alone. With the message transmitted and their gear ready, Murdock slapped Roselli twice on the shoulder and jabbed his thumb skyward. The chief nodded, then set one rubber-cleated sole against the Yuduki Maru's hull, took a boost as the CRRC rose sharply beneath him with the next wave, and started walking up the ship's side, pulling his way along the climbing pole as though it were a rope and the sheer, steel-plated side of the freighter were simply a glossy black wall of rock.

As Murdock watched Roselli climb, he unslung his H&K subgun, then strapped it into position on the front of his combat web gear. He pulled the mud plug from the muzzle and breach, then racked back the charging lever to chamber the first round. One way or another, the issue was about to be settled.

2311 hours (Zulu +3)

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Step by step, Roselli ascended the side of the Yuduki Maru, a human fly walking the sheer black cliff of the Japanese freighter.

His position was precarious, for the freighter's side bulged out over the raft, and as Roselli climbed the rigid extension pole, he was actually slightly head-down for part of the trip. Water slapped and boiled along the ship's side beneath him, and the first few feet were treacherously slick with a layer of slime. Once he was onto the part of the hull high enough above the water to be more or less dry, he still had to watch each step, for the steel plates were studded with rivets and made dizzyingly uncertain by the rise and fall of the vessel itself. Fortunately, the huge ship's motion in the water was far less than that of the raft at its side. Had the sea been much rougher, however, they would have been forced to come in by helicopter, as he had suggested back at Little Creek. An assault from the sea would have been out of the question.

All in all, however, Roselli had made more difficult climbs during training, scrambling hand-over-hand up dangling lines as instructors and other trainees played blasts of water from fire-hoses at him. Reaching the freighter's afterdeck, he paused to snap a hook attached to his web-gear harness to the stanchion rising just above his head. Then, swinging freely at the vessel's scuppers, he was able to use his hands to grab the edge and chin himself up.

As the new lieutenant had feared, there was a guard on the freighter's fantail... no, two guards. They carried AKM assault rifles, and leaning against the superstructure but within easy reach was the long, twin-handled tube of an RPG rocket launcher. There was light enough from the superstructure at their backs to illuminate both men. They were swarthy, one with a bushy, black beard, the other with at least a week's stubble showing on his face. They were wearing uniforms of some sort, nondescript brown or olive-drab clothing that could have belonged to almost any army in the world. One thing was clear. These two were not Japanese, which could only mean they had arrived off the Hormuz.

One, evidently, had just reached the fantail. Unslinging his AKM, he set it against the bench on which the other man was sitting. "Salaam," the first man said. He reached for his left breast pocket. "Segar mayl dareed?"

"Teshakor meekonam," the seated man replied. He accepted a cigarette from the other. "Kebreet dareed?"

"Baleh. Eenjaw."

Roselli felt a small, inner chill. If they'd made their approach by helicopter, the bad guys would have been waiting for them. A single RPG round would have blown a helo right out of the sky as easily, as efficiently, as an American Stinger surface-to-air missile.

Not for the first time, Roselli wished he spoke Arabic... no, not Arabic. These men were Iranians and would be speaking Farsi. Whatever they were saying, it sounded like small talk. They appeared relaxed and slightly bored as they smoked and chatted, though both from time to time cast glances out beyond the railing and stanchions that circled the fantail. Once the seated man seemed to stare straight at Roselli, but the SEAL's blackened face and black balaclava, his eyes narrowed to slits to hide the whites and his motionlessness as he clung to the harness strap, all served to cloak him in invisibility.

He was careful not to meet the Iranian's eyes, however, even through narrowed eyes. The phenomenon had never been accepted by science, but Roselli, a combat veteran, was well aware that people could often feel, with what could only be described as a sixth sense, when another person was staring at them. Roselli had no idea whether or not this represented some kind of awareness beyond the usual five senses, or was simply a stress-induced heightening of hearing or smell to a near-magical degree, but he'd experienced it more than once himself. After his first quick appraisal, he kept his eyes lowered, staring at the deck close to the Iranians' feet rather than at the soldiers themselves.

He was not seen. The night-blind Iranians continued their conversation, puffing away at cigarettes that stank as powerfully as the mingled bilge-water stench and diesel fumes rising from the Yuduki Maru's vents.

With one hand still clinging to the belaying strap, he used the other to unholster his sound-suppressed Hush Puppy pistol. Bracing the long barrel on the edge of the deck, he aimed carefully at the standing man first, then squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession.

The chuff-chuff-chuff of the weapon, barely audible above the rumble of the engines, stuttered as sharply as a burst of full-auto fire, and the triplet of 9mm slugs caught the Iranian with a closely grouped volley that tore open his throat and crushed his skull, pitching him back and to the side as a startling pinwheel of scarlet arced from his head. Without pausing to confirm the first kill, Roselli shifted aim to the other man, who remained seated, the lit cigarette dangling from half-open lips, his expression still blank and uncomprehending. The SEAL fired three more rounds, and these were mingled with a trio of silenced shots from the Yuduki Maru's starboard side.

The Iranian, pinned between volleys from opposite directions, lurched up high on his toes, groped with one clawed hand for the face that had vanished in a raw mask of blood, then crumpled to the deck a scant second after the first. An AKM clattered beside the bodies, then skidded to a halt. For a long second, there was neither movement nor sound beyond the throb of the freighter's engines.

Holstering his Hush Puppy, Roselli unsnapped a pouch at his belt, extracting a three-pronged grappling hook attached to a tightly rolled caving ladder. Securing the hook to another stanchion, he let the caving ladder unroll into the darkness below.

In a moment, he sensed the tug of someone climbing the ladder and knew the others in the CRRC were on their way up to join him.

2315 hours (1515 hours Zulu -5)

Joint Special Operations Command Center

The Pentagon

In Washington it was mid-afternoon, but the overhead lights in JSOCCOMCENT had been turned off, giving the windowless room the feel of night. The only illumination came from the green-glowing phosphorescence of a large television monitor.

Congressman Charles Fitzhugh Murdock leaned forward, studying the monitor with keen interest. The image on the screen, an oblique view of the Japanese freighter Yuduki Maru glowing in pale, green-white light, was real-time, an infrared image transmitted from a satellite passing south over the Indian Ocean. The camera angle slowly changed as he watched.

"What is it?" he asked. Ten other men were in the room, civilians and high-ranking officers of several military services, clustered with him about the monitor. "What did I just see?"

A slender civilian first introduced to Murdock only as "Mr. Carter" pointed at ghost figures now slipping over the Yuduki Maru's taffrail. "Those tiny flashes of light were gunshots, Mr. Congressman," he said. He was holding a telephone receiver in his hand and had been whispering into the mouthpiece at intervals ever since the drama had begun unfolding.

"Two terrs are down," a Navy captain, Paul Mason, said. "The rest of our people are climbing on board now."

Murdock suppressed the churn of acid fear in his belly those words raised. It was a lot worse standing in this room ten thousand miles away, watching the action unfold on a television screen like the make-believe gunplay of some computer game.

General Bradley, the big, bluff Air Force officer who appeared to be in charge of this room, pointed at the screen. "Damn," he said, chewing on the end of an unlit cigar. "Can't we get a better view on this thing?"

Carter spoke quietly into a telephone, and Congressman Murdock realized he must be in direct communication with whoever was controlling the spy satellite. A moment later, the image of the ship expanded, the view zeroing in on the aft third of the ship. The glowing ghost figures of nine men, two of them prone on the deck, were barely distinguishable against the heat-glow of the ship itself. The imagery remained clear, but the satellite's motion was more apparent. The view kept slipping to the right, forcing the unseen controller to shift the camera angle left in compensation.

It had, Murdock reflected, taken all but an act of Congress to get him here, into this shielded, buried room within the Pentagon labyrinth, impregnable behind four separate security checkpoints. Captain Granger had been his passport into this underground shadow-world, and he'd had to do a fair amount of arm-twisting to pull it off. "Look," he'd told Granger the day before. "The SEALs need a friend on the HMAC, someone who's willing to slug it out with Farnum and his kill-the-military cronies, and I'm it! But damn it, you've got to give me some cooperation on this. Let me see what it is I'm supposed to be defending."

Even yet, Murdock wasn't certain what strings Granger had had to pull to get him into this room. The very existence of this type of high-detail, real-time satellite imagery was still, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a jealously guarded secret, one that most members of Congress were not privy to. The pictures were like magic, the freighter a ghost ship of green and white light, illuminated by her own heat. Moments before, he'd watched the approach of two tiny rafts to their far larger target, the heat from their laboring engines shining in the infrared image like tiny stars.

My son's down there, he thought, feeling as though he were watching from the satellite's vantage point hundreds of miles overhead. My son's in one of those rafts, and I can't do a damned thing about it.

He wasn't even certain that his son was leading this raid. Admiral Bainbridge had refused point-blank to disclose the names of the men assigned to the raid, and the source of his information, a mid-level staffer on NAVSPECWARGRU-Two's planning staff, had been unable to provide confirmation. When he'd confronted Blake, two days ago at the SEAL base in Little Creek, he'd been bluffing, hoping to get his son to admit to things the congressman had heard but been unable to verify.

But somehow, it was easier for him to assume that Blake was aboard one of those rafts. It was the uncertainty, the not knowing, that made the waiting hell.

He turned to Captain Granger, stiff and starched in his Navy dress whites. "I just want you to know, Ben, that whatever happens now, I'm grateful."

Granger glanced at him but said nothing, and Murdock sensed the resentment the former SEAL must still feel at the strong-arm tactics the congressman had employed to gain entrance to this inner sanctum. Granger, no doubt, had been forced to spend some political capital of his own to win this privilege for a mere congressional VIP. I really called in all my markers on this one, Murdock thought. I just hope I can provide value for value next week when it comes time for the HMAC's vote.

An electronic peep sounded from a speaker somewhere in the room's ceiling, startling in its intensity. "Foreman, Hammer Alfa," a voice whispered, and Murdock had his confirmation. Even through the hiss of static, he recognized his son's voice. "Sierra-Charlie. Moving."

"They're all aboard," Mason said, probably for Murdock's benefit since everyone else in the room apparently knew what was going on. "We're Foreman. Hammer Alfa is the Yuduki Maru strike team. Sierra-Charlie is the code phrase meaning everything's on sched."

"How much longer we got on this bird?" Bradley asked.

"Three minutes, General," Carter replied. "It's going to be damned tight."

"KH-twelve-slash-nine will be over the horizon in fourteen minutes," a technician added. "There'll only be an eleven-minute hole in the coverage."

"Maybe so," Mason said. "But a hell of a lot can happen in eleven minutes."

"We'll still have voice communications, through our AWACS Sentry," Admiral Bainbridge said. He cast a hard glance at Murdock, then looked away. "Being able to see wouldn't help that much anyway."

He resents me, too, Murdock thought. The hell with him. The hell with all of them. I just want my son to come out of this alive. He turned his full attention to the video-game action unfolding on the screen.

2316 hours (Zulu +3)

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Lieutenant Blake Murdock unhooked his harness, then chinned himself gently over the edge of the deck. Shadows moved on the starboard side of the fantail, forty feet away. MacKenzie materialized like a shadow out of darkness, an H&K MP5 clenched in black-gloved hands. Murdock signaled with a thumbs up, then unharnessed his own subgun. He could hear voices in the distance coming from somewhere forward, and a harsh bark of laughter. From elsewhere, higher up, came the metallic rattle of booted feet descending a ship's ladder, then the clump of a fast walk across a steel deck. "Hajibaba! Kojaw meetavawnam jak paydaw konam?"

Still, no excitement in the other voices, no sign that the SEALs had been spotted yet.

The two bodies and their weapons went over the stern, the splashes lost in the churning of the freighter's wake. Blood streaked the deck, but in the near-darkness it looked black, like grease or spilled coffee.

Murdock crouched alongside the superstructure, his H&K aiming up the covered port-side walkway that led past the bridge superstructure and toward the forward deck. More shadows slipped onto the deck alongside; Magic, Doc, and Roselli. MacKenzie, the Professor, and Boomer were all aboard to starboard.

Lightly, Murdock touched Roselli's shoulder and gestured toward the ship's bow. Weapon at the ready, Roselli nodded, then started forward along the walkway.

2317 hours (Zulu +3)

Oiler Hormuz

Jaybird rose above the sentry, a K-bar knife gleaming scarlet-black in the half-light, the guard lying on the deck with a six-inch gash through throat and windpipe, jugular and carotid. There was a very great deal of blood, but no one could have heard the man's muffled gurglings as Jaybird had lowered him to the deck.

The SEAL felt the first tremors of reaction and viciously suppressed them. With all his training, with all his mental preparation, the Iranian lying at his feet was the first man he'd ever killed, and for a trembling moment, the shock threatened to overwhelm him.

Then training reasserted itself. The man was an enemy who would have sounded the alarm if he'd heard Jaybird's stealthy approach from behind. Now he was a dead enemy; Jaybird's long hours of hand-to-hand had made the stealthy approach, the snatch, reach, and slash, almost instinctive. The SEAL wiped his K-bar on the man's pants leg and sheathed it. Behind him, Kosciuszko and Nicholson slithered over the ship's gunwales and onto her rusty deck.

The first thing Jaybird noticed about the ship was her stench. The Hormuz stank, a repulsive mix of diesel oil, dead fish vomit, and unwashed bodies. Next he noticed the peculiar twist to her motion underfoot. Jaybird wondered if the ancient vessel's owners had really spent much effort making her seaworthy. The old, low-slung tanker wallowed in the worsening seas, and each swell threatened to break over the exposed quarterdeck and swamp her.

Gold Squad had approached Hormuz according to plan, with a length of lightweight wire rope snagging the vessel's prow and drawing the two CRRCs together roughly amidships. Now they were aboard, facing an unknown number of Iranian troops, possibly army, possibly navshurawn, as their marines were called. "Hammer Bravo," Lieutenant DeWitt's voice whispered over his radio headset. "Go!"

That was the signal for the Hormuz assault team to move out. Holding his H&K shoulder-high and probing the darkness to his front, Jaybird moved with cautious, toe-first steps, flowing like a shadow against the rust streaks and flaking paint of the tanker's superstructure. Thirty steps forward took him to a safety-roped monkey-walk and the top of a ladder. Below was the Hormuz's well deck, picturesquely called no-man's-land aboard a merchantman because its low freeboard shipped water in heavy weather. The area was cluttered with carelessly piled hills of hempen rope, rusty cable, a sloppily stowed derrick, and cargo pallets and crates. Hatches in the deck were propped open, revealing shafts of oily light from below; to his right, the railed walkway ran across the front of the ship's superstructure. A soldier in fatigues and a helmet leaned against the railing, staring across the well deck, his AKM slung muzzle-down across his back.

"Hammer Bravo-six, this is Bravo-three," he whispered into his lip mike, drawing back behind the corner of the superstructure. "One tango, 0-1 deck forward."

"Take him down," came the answer.

"Rog."

Bracing the H&K high, Jaybird took a deep breath, then swung sharply around the corner of the superstructure, drawing down on the target's center of mass and squeezing the trigger simultaneously.

He'd deliberately set the weapon for semi-automatic fire; the sound-suppressed weapon hissed and spat with each tug of the trigger, slamming round after round into the Iranian, who staggered back a step, reached for his assault rifle, then collapsed onto the deck. His helmet hit the superstructure with a metallic clunk. Jaybird held his position, scanning left and right, watching for some reaction to the sudden sound.

Nothing. "Three," he snapped, identifying himself. "Clear. Moving."

A door in the superstructure four feet from the body opened onto a companionway with ladders leading up and down. Jaybird took the steps leading up, treading softly to the next deck... then continued beyond to the deck above that. The squad's meticulous studies of Hormuz's deck plans back in Little Creek were paying off. Jaybird knew precisely where this companionway led, and what lay beyond it. At his back, Nicholson followed him up, covering his advance up the ladder.

At the 0-3 deck, three levels above the main deck, the ladder ended at a passageway and a door leading forward. Jaybird was still halfway up the companionway when the door opened and a bearded man stepped through.

He was not wearing an army uniform, but a blue jacket over a striped T-shirt. He took two steps into the passageway and then saw Jaybird.

The SEAL's appearance — black-clad, with a dark bandana tight over his head and his face a horror of cold eyes staring from mingled green and black paint — bought Jaybird a full second of gape-mouthed silence. The Iranian's eyes widened, his mouth hung open...

And then Jaybird shot him, the reflex automatic, unthinking. Two coughs from his H&K drilled twin holes in the surprised Iranian's head, one above his left eye, the other through the bridge of his nose. The SEAL sprinted the last five steps, reaching the body scant seconds after it collapsed to the deck.

"Awn cheest?" a voice asked from beyond the half-closed door.

"Namedawnam," someone answered, and the door swung open. Another ship's officer took one step through...

Jaybird was on him in an instant, left hand grasping the man's naval jacket with his forearm rammed against the windpipe, right hand wielding the H&K, the long, heavy muzzle roughly jammed against the Iranian's forehead.

"Tasleem shaveed!" Jaybird barked. Those SEALs who didn't speak Farsi had memorized useful key phrases before the mission. "Surrender!"

The man's eyes bulged in terror. "Nazaneed! Nazaneed!"

Jaybird shoved the man back into the compartment from which he'd just emerged. It was the ship's bridge, a wide area beneath a low overhead cluttered with pipes and conduits. Two other officers were there, one at the wheel, the other leaning above the bridge radar scope. Jaybird pushed his prisoner to the deck, then gestured with black-faced menace with his submachine gun.

"Dahstahraw boland koneed!" he ordered. The bridge officers complied, raising their hands over their heads. Nicholson came in at Jaybird's back, checking the radio shack and the captain's day-room, both empty.

"This is Nickle," Nicholson said over his radio, returning to Jaybird's side. "Bridge secure. Three prisoners."

Jaybird moved to the opposite side of the bridge, keeping the prisoners covered as the other SEAL snapped several fast questions at the Iranian on the deck. That man was the oldest of the three and had the most gold braid on his cap and jacket — almost certainly Hormuz's captain. After a brief exchange, Nicholson looked across at Jaybird.

"He says there's a crew of fourteen aboard," Nicholson said. "Claims the ship's a merchantman in international waters, that they're carrying a shipment of copra, timber, and kapok from Madagascar to Bandar Abbas, and that we're pirates."

With deliberate slowness, Jaybird raised his subgun until it was aiming directly at the merchant captain's face, then gradually tracked the muzzle down the length of the man's body until it was aiming at his groin. He allowed himself a smile, bared teeth startlingly white behind the grease paint. With a dramatic flourish, he flexed his forefinger over the trigger. "Na! Na!" the captain cried, eyes wild and staring, sweat glistening on his forehead and in his beard. "Nazaneed! Kahesh meekonam! I speak! I speak!" Haltingly, in mingled bursts of Farsi and thickly accented English, the ship's captain admitted that there were ten soldiers aboard, members of a naval infantry brigade belonging to the Pasdaran, Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard. He knew of the Japanese plutonium ship, but insisted that none of the cargo had been transferred to the Hormuz. "Just soldier! Just soldier!" he insisted, looking from Jaybird to Nickle and back again. "We send soldier, other ship!"

"Chand ast sarbawz?" Nickle demanded. "How many soldiers?"

"Chehe!"

Nicholson blinked, then looked across at Jaybird. "Shit. He says forty."

"What, they put forty troops aboard the Yuduki Maru?" Jaybird licked his lips. "We thought they might have reinforced the terrorists over there," Nicholson said. "But forty soldiers is a fucking army!"

"Yeah," Jaybird said. "And our guys are walking into a trap!"

2318 hours (Zulu +3)

Freighter Yuduki Maru

They'd been aboard the Japanese ship for less than seven minutes, splitting up and padding with cat's-stealth silence along the vessel's alleys and walkways. One by one, the Iranian guards they encountered were eliminated, silently and efficiently. So far, there'd been no sign of either Japanese terrorists or the Yuduki Maru's original crew, but the ship seemed to be crawling with armed Iranian soldiers. The brown-fatigued soldiers were everywhere, lounging in small groups, standing lone watch in passageways, manning a pair of machine guns that had been mounted high up above the deck on the wings of the bridge. Crouching in the shadows on the ship's starboard side, MacKenzie and Higgins studied the forward deck from beneath a white-painted deck ladder. By the light spilling from the bridge some thirty feet above his head, MacKenzie could make out at least a dozen armed men lounging on the ship's long forward deck.

"Hammer Alfa-six," he whispered over his mike, using Murdock's op call sign. "This is Alfa-one. I'm starboard side, aft of the main deck. I've got twelve tangos in sight, and I can hear more of 'em moving around above me. What the hell's going down?"

"Wait one."

"Rog." Murdock sounded tense. He must have just encountered another Iranian guard.

Damn, how many troops had boarded the plutonium ship off the Hormuz? Half, at least, must be asleep below decks, probably in the new quarters constructed for Yuduki Maru's security contingent. Others were on watch throughout the vessel's interior. And there were still the original Japanese terrorists to consider. MacKenzie added up the likely numbers and arrived at a figure of between forty and fifty bad guys... not very good odds.

Still, the SEAL squad had the advantage of surprise, and they'd already whittled down the enemy strength somewhat. In Vietnam, he knew, it had been commonly claimed that five or ten SEALs could take on as many as two hundred enemy troops and expect to win, thanks to surprise, superior training, and superior technology.

He didn't savor challenging those kinds of odds here, however. Vietnam had been a different kind of war, with room for the SEAL teams to pick and choose their ambush sites, their battles, and their targets. Here, the SEALs were at a distinct disadvantage, hemmed in by the narrow confines of the ship.

And in Vietnam, they hadn't been worried about two tons of plutonium stored below decks either.

He glanced up, as though he could see through the overhead to the bridge wing thirty feet above his head. If someone could get to those machine guns, they might be able to command the deck below.

"Mac, Six. Looks like we've stepped into a nest of them." Murdock's voice in his headset was so low Mac had to strain to catch the words. There was a pause, and MacKenzie could almost hear the new lieutenant measuring the odds. "Okay, guys. This thing's too big not to give it a damned good try. Mac, you and your people get below to the engine room. Rest of you with me."

"Roger that. Moving." MacKenzie gestured to Higgins and started aft.

A sound, footsteps on steel, made him look up. An Iranian soldier was on the ladder eight feet above him, clattering carelessly down the steps. The man wore a helmet and carried an AKM slung over his shoulder. He was watching his own feet, but before he'd taken another step, he glanced up and his eyes locked with MacKenzie's.

The Texan was already in motion, bringing up his H&K, triggering a single, sound-suppressed shot that punched brutally into the Iranian's jaw and up through his brain. The man's boots flew out from beneath him and he pitched back against the ladder, his helmet hitting a step with the clang of something heavy and metallic striking steel.

2319 hours (Zulu +3)

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Tetsuo Kurebayashi stood atop one of the low deckhouses on Yuduki Maru's weather deck, striving to regain the peace he'd felt with the universe in the days before the Iranians had come aboard. The stars were the same, including the Milky Way, though their full glory was masked by a layer of broken clouds slowly moving in from the east. Still, he felt uneasy, about the mission, about the Eikyuni Shinananai Tori's new allies, even knowing that this reinforcement by the Iranian troops had been planned a full year ago, as Operation Yoake had first begun to take shape in Tehran and in the training camps in Syria.

The Iranians were barbarians, all of them, stinking with sweat and filth and the sharp spices in their food, distracted constantly by the demands of their religion, careless in their manners and courtesy. Their leader, a colonel in their Pasdaran outfit named Sayyed Hamid, was a member of one of Iran's most powerful families, and he was no better than the rest, a great pig of a man who cared nothing for the Ohtori or its goals, who treated Kurebayashi and his brothers as hirelings, as mercenaries, useful now so long as they stayed out of the way.

He didn't like the Iranians, and he wondered why Isamu Takeda, the Ohtori leader who'd conceived and engineered Yoake-Go from the group's base in Syria, had deigned to work with them at all. Other nations in that same part of the world would have paid any price for the cargo riding beneath the Yuduki Maru's deck.

Kurebayashi heard a sound, a loud, metallic clang. Curious, he turned, staring aft across the freighter's tanker-like foredeck and the Iranians lying asleep or squatting in small groups. He couldn't see any — No! There! On a ladder on the ship's starboard side, close against the superstructure, one shadow grabbed another and dragged it down. For a shock-frozen instant, Kurebayashi wasn't sure of exactly what had happened, but as he played it back in his head, he was pretty sure he'd seen an Iranian soldier sprawling back against the ladder, and another figure dressed in black grabbing him. Commandos! It could be nothing else.

"Abunai!" he screamed in warning. Then he realized that not one in twenty of the Iranians aboard spoke a word of Japanese, so he snatched up his AKM, aimed it across the deck at the shadows moving next to the superstructure, and clamped down on the trigger.

Gunfire, urgent, insistent, and painfully loud, shattered the serenity of the night.

2319 hours (Zulu +3)

Weather deck

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Bullets sparked and shrieked off the steel plating of the ship's superstructure as MacKenzie, Garcia, and Higgins dropped to their bellies. Mac could see the flicker of the muzzle flash against the darkness blanketing the ship's forward deck, could hear the characteristic flat crack of an AK on full-auto. On the well deck between MacKenzie and the gunman, Iranian troops were stirring, a hornet's nest awakened by the sudden, savage volley. "Hammer Six!" Mac called. "This is One! It's going down!"

"Rog. I copy. Charlie Mike."

Charlie Mike: continue mission. Another burst of automatic gunfire screamed off the ladder four feet above MacKenzie's head. Levering himself up over the Iranian soldier's corpse, he aimed at the wink of the muzzle flash and triggered three quick bursts. The range was long for a subgun, even for an H&K. The hostile fire ceased, however, though there was no way to tell whether the enemy gunman had been hit or simply driven to cover.

"Let's move out," he snapped. Higgins and Garcia backed away from the ladder, then vanished through an open door into the superstructure.

Gunfire barked from the freighter's forward deck, as Iranians yelled at one another in urgent Farsi. MacKenzie switched to full-auto and loosed a long, sweeping burst, a pointed invitation to the hostiles to keep their heads down. Then he followed the others.

Inside the door, a companionway led down and aft, toward the Yuduki Maru's engine room.

2320 hours (Zulu +3)

Bridge access

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Murdock was already on an interior ladder leading from the 0-2 deck to the 0-3 deck, with Yuduki Maru's bridge just ahead. The chatter and crackle of automatic weapons fire was muffled inside the ship's superstructure, but still audible. Murdock signaled to Ellsworth, Brown, and Roselli. Follow me!

The door leading to the bridge was closed and unguarded. With no information on what was going on inside, Murdock silently signaled the others, having them take up positions on either side of the entryway. Reaching into one of his combat vest pouches, he extracted a flash-bang, grasped the arming pin, and nodded to Roselli.

The SEAL chief tried the lever on the door, which swung inward easily at his touch. Murdock yanked the flash-bang's cotter pin, flipped off the arming lever, and tossed the grenade through the opening.

An intense pulse of light, a rattling string of eight thunderclap detonations assaulted the senses as the flash-bang went off on the bridge. Roselli was through the door while the bulkheads were still ringing from the final blast, entering left to right with his H&K at the ready.

Murdock was immediately behind him, entering right to left. Smoke from the expended flash-bang wreathed the compartment. A shadow against the smoke resolved itself into an Iranian soldier leaning against a line of printers, his hands over his eyes, blood running from one ear. Murdock fired, a single round fired from chest-high that snapped through the man's throat, then punched a neat hole through the glass of the large bridge window at his back. Murdock fired again as the soldier collapsed, then swung to the right, weapon all the way up to his shoulder now. A second Iranian, rising from one of the track-mounted, sliding bridge chairs, staggered as a triplet of rounds from Roselli's H&K slammed him out of the chair and into the bridge console, arms flailing before he slumped to the deck in a spreading pool of blood. A Japanese seaman was kneeling behind the ship's wheel at the main control console, head turned to look back over his shoulder, his nose bloodied and his dark eyes wide with terror. Murdock had just dismissed the man as unarmed — a probable hostage — when another Japanese merchant sailor leaped behind the seaman, crouched, threw an arm around the man's throat, and held the muzzle of a SIG-Sauer P-220 automatic pistol against the man's skull.

"Tomare! Atoe sare!"

There was no time for negotiations. Clearly, the Japanese terrorist was unacquainted with SEAL marksmanship, a skill practiced constantly with a variety of weapons and from every position imaginable. More than enough of the terrorist's head was visible as he sheltered behind the hostage's body; Murdock shifted the aim of his H&K slightly and squeezed the trigger. The side of the tango's head exploded in a fine spray of blood and bone; the P-220 dropped from nerveless fingers and the terrorist slumped to the deck. The hostage let out a piercing scream and covered his eyes.

Movement behind the glass of the door leading to the starboard bridge wing caught Murdock's attention. Firing above the kneeling helmsman's head, he put three rounds through the glass and was rewarded by the sight of an Iranian twisting away, then falling against the outside of the door, leaving a smear of scarlet as he slumped below the bullet-holed window. Murdock heard the hard-voiced snap of sound-suppressed shots at his back. Ellsworth had just fired through the port wing door from his position at the entrance to the bridge, taking out the Iranian posted there.

Brown, coming in behind Roselli, had reached the bridge entrance to the communications shack. "Clear!" he yelled.

"Clear!" Roselli barked, standing astride the second dead Iranian.

"Clear!" Ellsworth called from the open door.

Murdock nudged the body of the first man he'd shot. The eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the overhead. "Clear! Roselli! Brown! Take the wings!"

Glass shattered in the forward bridge windows, and bullets whined and thudded among the overhead piping and wire conduits. Iranians on the forward deck could see the SEALs on the well-lit bridge easily and were firing at them as they rushed aft.

Then the machine gun mounted on the starboard wing of the bridge opened up, a long, raucous yammer shockingly loud after the harsh whisperings of the sound-suppressed H&Ks. Brown was wielding the weapon, a Type 62 GPMG on a pintel mount, sweeping the muzzle back and forth in broad arcs that lashed the forward deck with screaming lead. An instant later, Roselli opened up with the port machine gun, and the Iranians on the deck found themselves in a devastating, plunging cross fire. The wild shooting from the deck ceased, as a dozen Iranian soldiers scrambled for cover behind piles of wood, coiled cable, and any other cover they could find.

Murdock knelt beside the terrified Japanese helmsman. "You speak English?"

The man blinked at him, uncomprehending. "Utsu na! Utsu na!"

"Great," Murdock told him. "You're going to be all right, fella. Stay down."

The merchant sailor might not have understood the words, but he seemed to understand Murdock's tone and gestures. He lay flat on the deck. Murdock stepped behind him and, stooping down, dropped his knee into the small of the man's back, then grabbed his wrists. From the deck, the helmsman barked something, surprise mingled with hurt and anger in his voice, but Murdock swiftly secured the hostage's hands behind his back with a strip of white plastic that could be removed only with scissors or a knife. Each SEAL carried twenty-four of the disposable handcuffs in a vest pouch; standard operating procedure required them to cuff every non-SEAL they didn't kill. The helmsman was almost certainly a legitimate crew member of the Yuduki Maru, forced to steer the ship by his captors, but the short and sharp encounter with the tango holding a pistol to the guy's head could have been a charade, a way of planting one terrorist at least among the SEALS. Besides, with his hands tied, the guy was less likely to jump up at an inopportune moment and run into someone's line of fire.

"Sorry, fella," Murdock said gently, patting the hostage's shoulder and rising. "Until we can check your driver's license, we can't risk having you run loose."

Gunfire banged from the deck, was answered by a full-auto salvo from the starboard bridge wing.

"I don't know, Lieutenant," Ellsworth said. "Seems to me we weren't supposed to run into a fucking army on this tub." Another burst of gunfire from the deck punctuated his comment. Four more holes appeared in one of the slanted bridge windows, centered in small halos of crazed glass.

"You know what they say about Naval Intelligence, Doc. Contradiction in terms." He switched to the Pentagon's frequency. "Foreman, Foreman, this is Hammer Alfa."

Outside the bridge, gunfire flared and cracked in the night.

2321 hours (1521 hours Zulu -5)

Joint Special Operations Command Center

The Pentagon

"What is it?" Congressman Murdock said. "What's going on?"

None of the others with him in the room replied immediately. The atmosphere was charged with tension, and to make matters worse, the magic camera-in-the-sky pictures were gone now, the images lost when the satellite transmitting them had slipped below the horizon three minutes earlier. Murdock had only a hazy idea of how such things worked, but a staffer had patiently explained to him that morning that, while satellites could to a certain extent be repositioned in their orbits, those orbits were nonetheless dictated by certain laws of physics that not even Congress could rewrite. Once the KH-12 satellite transmitting those scenes had passed over the horizon at 3:18 P.m. Washington time, there would be an eleven-minute gap until 3:29 — when the only information coming to the Pentagon from the events unfolding aboard the Yuduki Maru would be the voice channels, monitored by an AWACS E-3A Sentry aircraft circling well to the north and relayed by communication satellite to Washington.

"Damn it," Congressman Murdock said again. "Someone tell me what's happening!"

General Bradley looked at him, and the corner of his mouth pulled back in a hard, quick, and humorless half smile. "Apparently, Hormuz was able to rendezvous with the Yuduki Maru sometime earlier today."

"Worst-case scenario," Mason added. "There are Iranian troops aboard that freighter. According to Hammer Bravo, it might be as many as forty men."

"Oh, God. Are we going to have to abort?"

"We'd rather not, Congressman," Admiral Bainbridge said, his voice cold. "We've gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to get our people onto those ships. Let's give them a chance, shall we?"

Though the air in the climate-controlled room was cool, almost chilly, Murdock found that he was sweating.

2323 hours (Zulu +3)

Bridge

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Bending over low to stay out of the line of fire, Murdock moved to the main bridge console, studying the array of computer terminals, instruments, and consoles.

The bridge arrangement of modern merchant ships had become more and more complex over the past decade, until they resembled something out of a science-fiction movie, but Murdock had been carefully briefed on the control systems layout of Yuduki Maru's main console. At the extreme right of the main panel, next to a machinery monitoring station, was a terminal and display screen, the freighter's cargo-monitoring console. He checked to see that the display was on, entered some memorized commands on the keyboard, then studied the glowing display of characters and graphics that filled the screen.

The characters were Japanese ideographs, but he'd been shown what to look for on the graphics, and what he saw was immensely reassuring. Yuduki Maru's cargo, stored in holds one and two, was still secure. Radiation levels in the hold were normal, there was no indication that the automated wash-down foam had been triggered, and all of the cargo hold seals were listed as intact. Apparently, no one had even tried to enter the cargo holds, and that lifted an enormous weight from Murdock's shoulders. One of several worst-case scenarios discussed back at Little Creek was the possibility that the terrorists had mined or booby-trapped the cargo.

If they hadn't been into the cargo hold, they couldn't have tampered with the plutonium.

But Murdock was taking no chances. Still working by rote, he entered another string of keyboard commands, and watched as the characters on the screen shifted from Kanji characters to English. With the United States insisting on a say in the security of the plutonium, the freighter's computer security had been programmed with both Japanese and English access, and the SEALs had been given the appropriate codes before the mission. He waited as a new screen came up, then began typing in a series of memorized commands.

After another pause, the results of his work flashed onto the screen and he nodded his satisfaction. The plutonium holds were now under an emergency lock-down. Only a password that Murdock had just typed into the security system — Jaybird — would allow access. If the SEAL squad was wiped out in the next few moments and the Iranians regained control of the bridge, they would be unable to get past the security overrides. Eventually, they might be able to break the code, bypass the security lock-down, or cut their way in through the weather deck and rifle the cargo by brute force, but all of those attempts would take both time and special equipment not available out here in the middle of the Indian Ocean. "Lieutenant?" Ellsworth said. He was crouched by the door at the back of the bridge through which the SEALs had burst moments before. "I think we're about to have company."

"On my way." He switched off the computer monitor, then hurried across the deck to where Doc was waiting.

Now everything was up to MacKenzie down in the engineering room.

2324 hours (Zulu +3)

Engine room access

Freighter Yuduki Maru

MacKenzie had led Garcia and Higgins down two levels, to what on a Navy vessel would have been called the third deck, somewhere close to the freighter's waterline. The passageway led fore and aft; forward, according to the deck plans and model the SEALs had studied, lay the cargo holds that — please God! — should be locked and secured. That, however, was the Lieutenant's responsibility. Three men could not secure Yuduki Maru's cargo, but Murdock ought to be able to check it and lock it down from the bridge.

Instead, Mac led the way aft, toward the freighter's engine room. Somewhere ahead, a steel door clanged open. A moment later, a Japanese merchant sailor appeared, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, running blindly down the passageway. An instant later he caught sight of the SEALS, of their black faces, menacing garb, and weapons, and he nearly collided with a bulkhead trying to stop.

"Tomare!" Higgins called. "Halt!" Several of the SEALs were fluent in more than one other language, but he was the only one in the platoon who spoke Japanese. The seaman took a step back.

"Chikayore!" Higgins snapped. "Come forward." Reluctantly, the man complied.

In seconds, they had the seaman on his face, his wrists cuffed with plastic ties behind his back, his ankles tied together. Higgins spoke to him, his voice coaxing. The hostage answered back, gesturing back down the passageway with his head and with rolling eyes. "What's he say, Prof?"

"Okay, he says he's just a member of the crew," Higgins replied. "Says there's always a couple of Iranians on guard in the engine room. He also says something's got 'em pretty well stirred up right now. He decided to git while the gittin' was good."

MacKenzie nodded curtly. "Let's put 'em down then."

Leaving the seaman lying in the passageway, the SEALs headed for the engine room. The door was closed but unlocked, opening to Garcia's push.

Inside, a railed platform overlooked the engine room, a claustrophobic compartment filled with monstrous shapes: reduction gears, condensers, generators, and massive steam turbines like green-painted prehistoric monsters embedded in the ribbed, gleaming steel decks.

An Iranian soldier shouted warning as MacKenzie burst through the open door. The SEAL chief triggered a short burst from his H&K and the man went down, his AKM clattering off one of the engine housings and onto the deck. Another soldier lunged for cover, shouting something in Farsi. Garcia leaned into the railing and fired once... twice. The Iranian clawed at his back, then dropped to the deck. For a long moment, MacKenzie held his position, swinging his H&K's muzzle left and right, searching for further movement. Nothing.

"Secure the door," MacKenzie told Garcia. "Prof, you're with me."

A steep metal ladder led from the platform down to the main engineering deck. MacKenzie, his H&K strapped to his combat harness, grabbed the railings and rode them twelve feet to the steel grating below. The engine room throbbed with the pulse of confined power, and in the distance aft, connecting with the turbines, he could see the ponderous revolutions of the reduction gears turning Yuduki Maru's paired propeller shafts.

Mac and Prof carried out a lightning inspection of the engineering deck, checking the bodies and searching for tangos missed during their entry. They found no more terrorists, but they did discover four terrified Japanese crewmen hiding behind a massive generator mounting. MacKenzie covered them while Higgins tied their wrists, led them to the forward end of the compartment, where he tied their ankles as well, and then began questioning them.

"Shit, Mac," Higgins said, joining him again after a few moments. "These people all say there's forty or fifty bad guys on board! Some Japanese tangos, plus a shitload of Iranians!"

"I was beginning to get that idea." MacKenzie looked forward, past the humming hulks of the freighter's turbines. There were three doors in the forward bulkhead, two high up and to either side, and a third in the middle and on the same level as the engineering deck, leading forward to the boiler room. Garcia was still on the starboard side platform, guarding the door and watching over the engine room. The four civilians, tied hand and foot, lay on the deck next to the boiler room door.

Tactically, the SEALs simply could not now continue the mission as originally planned. Though SEALs liked to boast of a ten-to-one or better kill ratio in combat, there was no way, realistically, that the seven of them could face an unknown but very large force of heavily armed Iranians — now thoroughly aroused and hostile Iranians — and win. Despite the popular fictional image of SEALs as Rainboesque commandos who routinely took on impossible odds, the Teams were not suicide squads and they did not attempt hopeless missions. Their training, their experience, and their hard-won skills were too valuable to throw away in empty, heroic gestures. "Hammer Six," he called. "This is One."

"One, Six. Copy."

"Echo Romeo secure. But Skipper, it's not gonna be secure for long. I've got some locals here who tell me we've just stepped smack in the cow patty big time."

"Roger that." There was a moment's hesitation, and MacKenzie could almost hear the wheels turning as Murdock considered his next order.

"Okay, Chief," Murdock's voice said. "Set for Kneecap, but do not initiate. Do you copy?"

"Roger. Set Kneecap, do not initiate."

"Keep me posted."

"Rog."

Kneecap was the code word for one of the SEAL team's contingency plans, a last-ditch, we've-got-to-get-out-of-Dodge measure to keep Yuduki Maru's cargo out of Iranian hands. Two satchel charges, one apiece for each of the freighter's propeller shafts, would be enough to disable the Yuduki Maru, leaving her dead in the water. A second assault would then be mounted, as soon as additional SEAL or Marine forces could be mustered.

A final, more drastic option remained if Kneecap didn't work. If worst came to worst, the team could execute Headshot, blowing precisely placed holes in the freighter's sides and sending her to the bottom. In theory, specialized submarine recovery vehicles would be able to salvage the freighter's cargo before seawater corroded the cylinders containing the plutonium, contaminating the local waters with radioactivity.

That was definitely a last-ditch option, however. No one wanted to risk breaching or scattering the containment cylinders, for the scenario describing the spread of radioactive contamination through ocean currents from the Seychelles to Cape Town was too dreadful to easily contemplate.

"Prof!" he called. "It's Kneecap! You take the port shaft. I'll take the starboard."

Yuduki Maru's two propeller shafts ran from the reduction gears connecting them with the turbines, vanishing through watertight seals and bearings into the shaft alleys in the aft hull. An explosive charge positioned over the shaft bearings would break or bend the propeller shafts, rendering them useless, irreparable anywhere short of a major dry-dock overhaul.

MacKenzie reached into one of his waterproof satchels, pulling out a cable-cutting charge, a U-shaped pouch containing a half kilo of C-6 plastic explosive, multiple detonators, and an electronic firing trigger with a keypad for entering any time, in seconds, from one to 9,999.

He was halfway to the shaft bearing when the Iranians burst through the engine room's port-side entryway.

"Cover!" Garcia shouted from his perch on the starboard side. His H&K spat flame, striking sparks and shrill pings from the open door, then slashing into the first Iranian soldier in line and toppling him over the platform railing and onto a generator housing below. The next Iranian got off one brief, wild burst from his AK before Garcia's enfilade fire sent him tumbling in a bloody heap down the steel ladder. A confused babble of Farsi, shouted orders and queries, sounded from the passageway beyond.

MacKenzie dove for cover, crouching behind a massive reduction gear housing alongside one of the throbbing turbines. "Six, this is One! It's going down now. Hard!"

"Copy, One. What's your sit?"

MacKenzie could hear the hammer of a heavy weapon in the background as Murdock spoke. "Not good! Not good!" MacKenzie shouted over the tactical channel. "We need backup, and we need it fast!" Another burst of AK fire sang through the engine room. Sooner or later, overwhelming Iranian forces would root them out of here, with gunfire, grenades, or gas.

And then it would be all over.

MacKenzie dropped an empty magazine, then slapped home a fresh one. A single burst of AK fire snapped from the door, wild again, the rounds shrieking off steel. He guessed, judging by the yells and shouting voices outside, that the Iranians must be getting ready to try a rush.

The original plan to blow Yuduki Maru's propeller shafts was out now. It would take minutes to plant the charges... and the SEALs now had only seconds. What the hell was going on up on the bridge?

2326 hours (Zulu +3)

Bridge

Freighter Yuduki Maru

"I hear 'em on the ladder," Ellsworth said. "They're coming up the companionway."

"Flash-bangs," Murdock said, reaching for his combat vest as Ellsworth nodded and did the same. The metallic thumpings on the stairway behind the bridge were louder now, punctuated by shrill voices. The two SEALs yanked the pins on their stun grenades, paused, then tossed them in perfect arcs through the bridge door and into the square pit of the companionway outside.

Seconds later, the darkened corridors lit with pulsing flashes of dazzling light reflected from white-painted bulkheads, and the ear-hammering blasts of multiple concussions. When his ears stopped ringing, Murdock could hear the low groans and cries of stunned, wounded men.

"Together," he told Doc, and together they broke from cover, racing to the companionway and thrusting their H&Ks over the railing. Two decks down, and scattered halfway up the steps, a tangle of khaki-clad bodies was writhing in the uncertain illumination of a fallen emergency lantern, Iranian troops, the blood streaming from noses, mouths, and ears looking garishly black in the yellow light. Murdock flicked his selector switch to semi-auto and began triggering round after aimed round into the helpless targets. Doc joined in the slaughter until, seconds later, there was no more movement.

"Stay here," he told Ellsworth. "Yell if any more come."

"Will do, Skipper."

Murdock ducked back onto the bridge, ducking again as more bullets slammed through the shattered bridge windows, tunneling into the overhead soundproofing, spilling more shards of glass across the deck of the bridge. He crouched in the shelter of the console, as the Type 62 machine guns thundered from both wings.

Clearly, Operation Sun Hammer had gone badly sour. The four Americans on the bridge had stopped the Iranian thrust through the superstructure, and they had the Iranians on the forward deck pinned down for the moment, but others would be on their way soon, and there simply weren't enough SEALs aboard to neutralize the entire enemy force.

He switched channels on his tactical radio. "Foreman, Foreman, this is Hammer One. Do you copy?"

Somewhere to the north, the orbiting E-3A Sentry aircraft picked up his words, passing them along to the anxiously waiting men in the bowels of the Pentagon.

"Hammer One, Foreman copies," came the reply a moment later.

"Sheet metal," Murdock said, using the code phrase meaning that Hammer had just tried driving a nail into steel instead of soft wood.

For a long moment, Murdock heard only static. Outside, the gunfire had died down, but he could still hear the Iranians calling to one another in the darkness.

He had just told the mission directors back in the Pentagon that the mission, as originally planned, could not be completed, and what he was waiting to hear now was the code phrase "Alfa Bravo," the order to abort.

But what, he wondered, should he do if he heard Charlie Mike, ordering him to continue? Long before sunup, he and his men would all be dead or prisoners, and beyond executing Kneecap, they wouldn't be able to accomplish a damned thing.

Shit. If they ordered the SEALs to stay, there was a damned good possibility that he was going to develop serious communications problems. He was supposed to have operational control on site, not the REMFs in Washington, but that wouldn't count for much if he ended up disobeying a direct order. Come on! Come on!

2328 hours (1528 hours Zulu -5)

Joint Special Operations Command Center

The Pentagon

"Damn it," General Bradley said, chewing at his cigar. "They can't just jump ship! We'll have video back in another minute. They can't pull out now!"

To Congressman Murdock, it sounded as though Bradley were more concerned about not being able to see what was going on... almost like a child told that he couldn't watch his favorite cartoon.

"Doesn't sound like we have much choice, General," Captain Mason replied. He gestured at the main viewing screen, which showed a test pattern at the moment. "Murdock is our man on the scene. He has to make the call, one way or the other. And we have to back him."

There, it had been said. His son was in charge of Sun Hammer. Congressman Murdock closed his eyes, riding out a tremor of fear that rippled up his spine. "In any case," Bainbridge said, "we have to give them our answer. Now."

Captain Granger laughed. "You gentlemen realize that there's not a lot we can do to enforce whatever order we give them? It really is their call."

"Tell them Alfa Bravo," Bainbridge said. His eyes glittered like ice in the phosphor light from the test pattern on the screen.

Mason picked up a telephone and began speaking into it rapidly.

As he was talking, another telephone on a console near the screen buzzed, and Carter picked it up. "Yeah... uh-huh." There was a pause. "Okay. We're ready." He kept the receiver in his hand, as he had before. "KH-twelve-five is coming over the horizon now," he told the others. "They're putting the feed through from NPIC now." Carter pronounced the acronym "en-pick," a word that stood for the National Photographic Interpretation Center, a joint CIA-NSA department located in Washington, D.C., that carried the responsibility for receiving and distributing all military satellite imagery.

The test pattern flickered out and was replaced by a slow-moving emptiness of rugged, black ripple patterns. It took Congressman Murdock a moment to recognize what he was looking at as the surface of the ocean. Under the control of unseen hands at some distant control center, the view slewed abruptly to one side, focusing once again on the Yuduki Maru. The angle was different this time, flatter, and from farther off. It was moving more quickly too, which meant, Murdock had been told, that the satellite shooting this was traveling in a lower, faster orbit.

Again, the Yuduki Maru was illuminated in soft-glowing greens and whites, an oblique view that picked out the flashes of gunfire on her long, forward deck in sharp pinpricks of light. It seemed strange to see the shots flickering in absolute silence.

"That's it," Bradley said, pointing. "A firefight. God, how are they going to get out of that?"

"What about the other group?" Murdock asked. "The ones on the Hormuz?"

"Normally," Mason said, "they would have been the backup to the strike on the plutonium ship. But they have their hands full with their own prisoners. The helos are still inbound. Another thirty minutes before they arrive at least." He shook his head. "I don't see that Hammer One has a choice. They have to get out."

"If," Bainbridge said quietly, "the Iranians let them."

2329 hours (Zulu +3)

Bridge

Freighter Yuduki Maru

"Hammer One, Foreman. Alfa Bravo. Repeat, Alfa Bravo. Confirm."

"Foreman, Hammer One confirms Alfa Bravo, Alfa Bravo. Out." Murdock cut the channel. "That's it, people!" he yelled to the others on the bridge. "We're outa here!" Switching to the tactical frequency, he patched through to MacKenzie again. "Hammer One-one, this is Six. One-one, Six! Get out of there, Mac! We've got an abort and we're going over the side!"

2329 hours (Zulu +3)

Engine room

Freighter Yuduki Maru

"Roger that, Six. One copies." MacKenzie signaled Higgins and Garcia with a vigorous pumping of his fist. "Right, boys and girls! Time to get out of Dodge!"

Damn. With the Iranians pressing them, they'd not had time or opportunity to plant the charges that would cripple the Japanese freighter. Still, he might manage to salvage a portion of Kneecap at least. Murdock hadn't given any orders about that one way or the other, or even asked how far along they were planting their charges.

That left things pretty much up to MacKenzie. Rising from cover behind a reduction gear housing, he loosed a long, full-auto burst at the open door, forcing the Iranian troops at the port-side doorway to duck for cover. Higgins took the opportunity afforded by MacKenzie's covering fire to bolt for the starboard-side ladder and scramble up the rungs to where Garcia was crouched astride the watertight door's combing.

"Cover me!" MacKenzie shouted.

From his perch on the railed, overhead platform, Higgins responded with a three-round burst that sparked and sang off the doorway opposite his position. MacKenzie pulled out the timer on his satchel charge, stabbed the numeral nine twice, punched the start button, then tucked the canvas bag into the pistoning motion of a starboard reduction gear housing. He now had about a minute and a half.

"Moving!" he yelled, and with the word he was racing down a narrow passage between the hulking mountains of painted steel.

At the base of the ladder, he paused long enough to stoop next to the four Japanese enginemen who were still lying facedown on the deck next to the aft bulkhead. Swiftly, he used his diver's knife to slice through the plastic restraints on their wrists. Pointing fiercely at the center door, he shouted one of his few words of Japanese: "Isoge! Hurry!"

The crewmen needed no further encouragement. Scrambling to their feet, they dove for the passageway leading to Yuduki Maru's boiler room. Lying flat on the deck, they probably would have been safe from the detonation of half a kilo of plastic explosives, but bits of metal and broken machinery would make a devastating shrapnel. Worse, MacKenzie had no idea what the Iranians might do to their hostages when they found them tied up and abandoned by the Navy SEALS, but a distinct possibility would be a mindless venting of their anger on helpless, trussed-up civilians. This way, at least, they would have a chance.

"God damn it, Mac," Garcia yelled from overhead. "Move your ass!"

MacKenzie swarmed up the engine-room ladder, joining the other two SEALS. By his watch, only seconds remained of the minute and a half on the timer.

"Go!" he snapped. "Go! Go!"

After dogging the watertight door shut, they raced down the passageway outside, retracing their steps. They were ten feet from the door when a loud crack echoed off steel bulkheads behind them, accompanied by the metallic clang of hurtling fragments. Instantly he felt a strange new sensation, an uncomfortable, uneven shudder transmitted through the deck plating.

"Feels like you rigged up the works real good, Mac," Garcia said.

"Yeah, but we only knocked out one screw." They stopped in the passageway next to the Japanese crewman they'd caught and tied earlier. As Garcia and MacKenzie watched the corridor approaches, Higgins cut the man free, speaking quietly to him in Japanese.

MacKenzie opened his tactical channel. "Hammer Six, Hammer Six! This is One."

"Six. Go ahead."

"Okay, Lieutenant. The bad guys are back in Echo Romeo, in force. We managed half a Kneecap before we split."

"Copy that, Mac. How badly is she hurt?"

"Can't say for sure, Lieutenant. But my guess is her port shaft is bent to hell."

"Rog. I can feel the cavitation up here. Okay, Mac. Good work. Make your way topside for E&E. Hold the boarding zone for three minutes. If we're not there by then, you're on your own."

E&E — Escape and Evasion. MacKenzie scowled at that sour thought. The mission had gone bad, a real clusterfuck. They would have to run...

"Yessir. Copy that." He glanced back at Higgins, who was helping the Japanese crewman to his feet. "Uh, Lieutenant? We have one of the hostages here."

"Good," Murdock's voice replied. "Bring him along if you can."

"That's what I was thinking." Questioning the Japanese crewman could reveal useful details about Yuduki Maru's hijackers and might, possibly, give them a second shot at the freighter.

"Let's get the hell out of here," he growled at the others. Together, they started up another ladder toward the main deck.

2331 hours (Zulu +3)

Bridge

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Murdock looked at the terrified Japanese crewman still lying on the deck, hands bound behind him and his back dusted with broken glass. Blood streaked his forehead where he'd been cut by a flying shard. Murdock didn't want the SEAL force burdened by rescued hostages, but he also doubted that the terrorists or Iranians aboard would be lenient with anyone who had helped the U.S. intruders. Mac had one hostage already. Good enough. He would bring another.

"Doc!" he snapped. "You help this guy. We're taking him with us."

Ellsworth snicked a fresh magazine into his H&K. "Aye, Skipper."

Roselli and Brown joined them a moment later. "Port MG is spiked, Skipper," Roselli told him. "I yanked the operating rod and the bolt and chucked 'em over the side."

"Same on the starboard wing," Magic added.

"Okay, gentlemen." Murdock took a last look around the glass-littered, blood-splattered bridge. Was he forgetting anything? "Let's get the hell out of here."

2332 hours (Zulu +3)

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Tetsuo Kurebayashi poked his head above the deck hatch, staring aft toward the ship's superstructure. It was difficult to see much; it was dark and most of the superstructure lights had been smashed, including the lights on the bridge.

In fact, the bridge looked empty, the large, out-slanting windows eye-socket-empty and lifeless. The machine guns to either side, on the wings, were silent as well. Had the American commandos been killed?

Kurebayashi was too much the professional to assume that. More likely, the attackers had withdrawn.

But what had they come here to accomplish in the first place? Kurebayashi had assumed their intent was to recapture the Yuduki Maru, but they'd seized the bridge and, according to the wild reports brought to him by the Iranians, other parts of the ship as well, then simply abandoned them.

Where had they gone... and why?

Cautiously, Kurebayashi rose, half expecting a sniper's shot from some darkened section of the bridge to slam him down, but no shot came. "Tsuite koi!" he called to the men crouched in the darkness around him. "Follow me!" When no one responded, he shifted to one of his fragments of badly accented Farsi. "Akabeh man biaweed!"

He started forward, his AKM thrusting ahead as he moved. Often, he'd been taught at the training camps in Syria and Libya, heroism in battle consisted of nothing more than keeping your wits about you when it counted and in acting when others about you were reacting. At first, none of the Pasdaran hiding in the shadows moved, but as he continued his lone march toward the Yuduki Maru's superstructure, others, first singly, then in small groups, began following. "Isoge!" he snapped, lapsing back into Japanese as he broke into a run. "Hurry!"

2333 hours (Zulu +3)

Port-side catwalk

Freighter Yuduki Maru

The rescued hostage was less than eager to maintain the SEALs' rapid pace, and twice Murdock had to tell Ellsworth to snap it up, to make the man hurry. He'd sent Magic Brown on ahead to flush any would-be ambushers, and ordered Roselli to bring up the rear, protecting their flanks from the Iranian and terrorist gunmen sure to be close on their heels. He stayed with Doc and the prisoner, pushing aft along the open walkway between Yuduki Maru's superstructure and the side of the ship.

When Brown reached the fantail, Murdock gestured Doc and the hostage on, then doubled back to join Roselli. "Anything?" he asked the lanky SEAL.

"They're on our tail, Lieutenant," Roselli replied. "At least ten of 'em."

"Let's discourage them until the others get away."

"A pleasure." Crouched against the superstructure, Roselli raised his H&K, aiming into the darkness forward. Murdock stood behind, aiming over the other SEAL's head. Shadows moved against the darkness.

"Now!" Murdock rasped, and he squeezed the trigger, loosing a hissing, full-auto burst at the half-glimpsed attackers. A shrill cry wailed from the forward deck. Gunfire barked and flashed in reply, and a bullet howled off steel a foot above Murdock's head.

"Shit, we're gonna get murdered here!" Roselli said.

"Just so they don't murder our guys in the water. Keep firing!"

He spent the last of his magazine, dropped the empty, and slapped in a new one, his last full mag. Thirty rounds... and then he'd be down to pistol and knife. He threw the selector switch to semi-auto.

A scream echoed from astern. Looking back over his shoulder, Murdock glimpsed one of the Japanese hostages flying through the air and into the phosphorescent glow of the ship's wake. Apparently, Doc had been forced to convince the guy to abandon ship; a black shadow followed the crewman — Doc — in a perfect dive twenty feet into the sea below.

"Skipper!" Brown's voice sounded in his earphone. "We're in!"

"Our side's wet too," MacKenzie added. "You guys want to stay aboard and play with your new friends by yourselves?"

"Cast off!" Murdock replied. "Razor and me're right behind you!

He snapped off several quick shots against targets felt more than seen. Murdock could almost feel the irresistible tug of the sea. From the beginning, SEAL training emphasizes that the sea is the SEAL's home, his advantage, his place of refuge, the place to go where the enemy cannot follow. "Okay, Razor," he called. "Over the side!"

"Right, Skipper! I'm — shit!" The deck lurched beneath their feet before Razor could finish the reply, and a dull, two-part ba-BOOM thundered in the night astern of the Yuduki Maru. Turning and staring aft, Murdock could just make out something like a vast wall of white spray, a geyser made dimly luminous by the faint luminosity of the sea itself, rising against the night.

"What in Jesus' name was that?" Roselli asked, his voice betraying his awe.

"Offhand," Murdock said, "I'd say it's that Iranian Kilo."

A second explosion thundered out of the darkness, accompanying a second towering geyser.

"Mat'll hold our playmates' attention for a bit," Murdock said. "Let's go!"

Together, they took three swift, running steps across the deck, catapulted over the railing, and dove head-first into the sea.