Seal Team Seven

Wednesday, 25 May

1610 hours (Zulu +3)

Motor yacht Beluga

Indian Ocean, 380 miles southeast of Socotra

They'd crossed the equator in the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday, some thirty-six hours earlier. As they kept motoring north, sails furled, Jean had continued to hammer at Paul about what was happening, but neither Paul nor their hosts seemed to have any idea about what was really going on.

"It must be terrorists," Karl had said time after time. "It must be terrorists." But beyond the mute and tragic testimony of those bodies adrift in the oil slick a week before, there'd been no announcement, no official word of any kind except for continuing stories over the news networks about Yuduki Maru's mysterious change of course. Other news bulletins, from Madagascar and the Seychelles, had reassured Beluga's crew that it was indeed the plutonium ship they were still tracking on their radar, but the only solid reporting had been what they themselves had called in.

And Jean knew just how thin that information really was. For several days now, Paul, Rudi, and Karl had been arguing among themselves about whether or not to take Beluga in close to the Japanese freighter in order to give her a visual inspection and, possibly, hail her crew. Paul and Karl were afraid that if the ship had been hijacked, they would be putting Beluga and all aboard at risk. One burst of machine-gun fire, and the yacht would be transformed into a sinking wreck, with everyone aboard her dead. Rudi continued to argue that terrorists wanted nothing more than a forum where they could air their political grievances and who better to provide such a forum than Rudi Kohler? Although Rudi was Beluga's master, however, he'd held back from simply deciding to take them in. Jean thought that, despite his reporter's zeal, he too was frightened of what they'd stumbled into.

The women, for the most part, kept out of it, though they speculated among themselves endlessly. The sunbathing sessions continued, though for short periods only and never in the middle of the day. In late May, the sun this close to the equator could be ferocious.

Terrorists. Jean wanted nothing to do with terrorists. She was still certain that she'd heard gunfire on Monday night, and the memory haunted her. Rudi insisted that she couldn't possibly have heard anything across thirty miles of open ocean. She'd heard something, though, just before midnight, a low, dull, double boom out of the north that might have been thunder... except that the sky had been perfectly clear.

The final decision had been to get closer, but not too close. According to the latest news reports — overflights by aircraft bearing the world's top news personalities were now daily, almost constant events — Yuduki Maru had suffered some kind of damage to her engines and was limping along now at about ten knots. During the night, Beluga had easily closed some of the distance between the two vessels, and the Yuduki Maru was now periodically visible as a dark speck on the northern horizon. According to Viktor, they were less than ten miles away.

"Jean!" Helga waved to her from the beach blanket she was sharing with Gertrude on Beluga's sun deck. "Jean, come join us!"

Waving back, she climbed the short ladder to the sun deck. She was wearing bikini briefs and nothing else; somehow, during these past few days, she'd lost the shyness that had tormented her through the first couple of weeks of the cruise.

Was it the vague sense of danger focused on the plutonium ship that had changed her? Or had the uncertainty simply let her grow closer to the others, until they were more like family than acquaintances? Dropping cross-legged onto the towel, she accepted a bottle of sun block from Gertrude and began lathering it on.

"So what's the word?" Helga wanted to know. "Anything?"

Jean had just come from Beluga's tiny radio shack, their sole link to the outside world via the sat-comm antenna atop the mainmast.

"CNN just broke a story that American commandos tried to board the plutonium ship the other day and failed," Jean replied. "The Pentagon is denying it."

"What about... them?" Gertrude asked, jerking a thumb forward toward the distant freighter. By now, everyone aboard Beluga was assuming that the Yuduki Maru had been hijacked by terrorists, but no one was quite willing to speak of that possibility openly. The faceless hijackers, whoever they were, remained "them" or "those people."

"Nothing," Jean said. "Though there was one interesting related tidbit. It seems Iran is accusing the United States of hijacking one of its navy ships. An oiler named Hormuz."

"Ach," Helga said, disgusted. "Who is terrorizing who?"

"The White House and the Pentagon have both denied the incident."

"Of course." Gertrude made a face. "Militarists!" She gave the word, which meant the same in German as in English, the full, throaty force of its German pronunciation, turning it into a swear word. "When is your country going to learn that the Cold War is over, that militarism is a thing of the past?"

Jean nodded toward the distant freighter. "Maybe when those people learn it doesn't pay to use terror as a political weapon."

"But what could be the point of capturing an Iranian ship?" Helga wondered. "Did they get the wrong target, perhaps?"

Jean shook her head. "I wish I knew. None of it makes much sense." She was staring thoughtfully toward the north, where something was moving against the ultramarine surface of the sea.

"Jean?" Helga asked. "What is it?"

It was a ship... no... it was too small and much too fast to be a ship. It was bow-on, driving the white mustache of a sweeping wake before it as it slap-slapped across the waves toward the Beluga at high speed. In moments, however, it grew from a toy to a sleek, shark-lean craft at least twenty feet longer than the Beluga, with the huge, white sphere of a radar housing perched atop its deckhouse, and with a single turret on the foredeck sporting a long and wicked-looking cannon. A flag with three horizontal bars, green, white, and red from top to bottom, fluttered at the masthead — the flag of revolutionary Iran.

The women stared at the patrol boat, stunned by the suddenness of its appearance. The men remained motionless as well, all but Viktor, who dashed for the companionway going down to Beluga's lower decks. By the time he reappeared, moments later, a bolt-action rifle in his hands, the Iranian craft had circled about and was drawing close to Beluga's starboard side.

Soldiers, heavily armed and wearing khaki uniforms, lined the patrol boat's rail. When Viktor stepped onto the afterdeck with the rifle, a sharp burst of machine gun fire rattled from the craft's bridge, a warning volley that knocked splinters from Beluga's mainmast and boom.

"Her auf damn!" an amplified voice barked from the Iranian craft. "Drop the weapon!"

Reluctantly, Viktor let the rifle clatter to the afterdeck. Iranian soldiers were already vaulting the rail, boarding the Beluga both aft and forward in a rush of shouting, gun-waving men.

Jean screamed as a soldier grabbed her shoulder and shoved her roughly toward the well deck aft. "Get your hands off me!"

She was answered with a stinging slap across her back. "Akab behraveed!"

She didn't understand, but the meaning was clear. She allowed herself to be dragged along. The yacht's entire crew was herded aft. Resistance, even verbal protest, was met with savage blows from fists or rifle butts. Helga struggled in the grip of two soldiers, one of whom was clutching at her naked breasts, and Karl lurched toward his wife and her attackers, fists clenched. "Bastard! Nicht doch!"

A single gunshot barked, propelling Karl forward. Blood splattered the white paint of Beluga's deckhouse as he crumpled to the deck. "Karl! Nein!" Helga tried to reach her husband, but her captors forced her into line with the others. Karl scrabbled weakly on the deck for a few more moments, clutching the wound in his chest, then lay still.

Jean and the other civilians all were in shock, uncomprehending, automatons shoved this way and that by the soldiers. Several of the boarders gathered around the women, leering at them and making jokes among themselves. Viktor tried to fight back when someone shoved him, and was clubbed to the deck with a blow from a rifle butt.

The man who'd shot Karl was tall and muscular, sporting a thick black mustache that hid his mouth. He gestured at all of them with the automatic handgun in his fist. "Kneel! All of you!" he snapped in English. "Here, in row! Hands on heads!"

Terrified, the prisoners obeyed as the soldiers prodded them into line on the deck. Jean found herself kneeling between a weeping, desperate Helga and one of Beluga's crewmen as the black-mustached man, obviously the Iranians' leader, strode down the line, inspecting each of them in turn. With him, startlingly, was a Japanese man wearing olive-drab shorts and a short-sleeved floral-print shirt, and carrying an assault rifle as though he knew how to use it. A Japanese... one of the plutonium freighter's crew? What in God's name was going on here?

The Iranian commander stopped in front of Gertrude. "American?" he asked.

"Nein," she said. "kh bin ein Deutscher." She stopped, licked her lips, then tried again in English. "I am... German. My passport is in..."

The dark man cut her off with a sharp gesture, then continued down the line. He stopped again at Helga, who was still crying uncontrollably, but said nothing. Instead, he looked her up and down, then turned and stared at Jean. She began trembling violently as she felt his eyes on her, and her legs grew so weak she could hardly hold her position. When he smiled at her, there was no humor in his eyes. "You," he said, moving in front of her. "You are certainly American."

How does he know? she wondered. Jerkily, she nodded.

Reaching out, he lightly brushed her bare, lotion-slick left breast with the backs of his fingers. She jerked back from the repulsive touch and nearly fell. Several of the watching soldiers chuckled unpleasantly.

"You Western woman really should learn modesty," the commander said thoughtfully. His English was excellent, though it carried a heavy accent. "By exposing your bodies in this shameful manner, you disgrace yourselves and your male relatives. You also present a considerable temptation for my men, who tend to regard such displays of female flesh as an indication of your moral character. Or lack of it."

The Japanese civilian whispered something to the commander, who nodded. Turning suddenly, the Iranian barked an order in Farsi. The soldiers advanced then, laughing, grabbing the women from the line, herding them forward toward the yacht's cabins. Rough hands groped and fondled Jean as she was propelled down the steps, grabbing at her breasts, buttocks, and thighs, tugging at the knots in the strings of her bikini bottom, then ripping the scrap of cloth away entirely. Gertrude screamed as a laughing Iranian soldier pranced about the galley, waving her briefs as trophy. Helga's bikini bottom had no ties, and they pinned her to the deck while one of them peeled the bottom off her thrashing legs.

Oh, Christ, they're going to rape us! she thought, but then the three naked women were shoved into a cabin and the door was slammed and locked behind them. The soldiers had already been here, rifling dresser drawers and smashing bottles of whiskey and gin discovered in the room's tiny bar.

Outside, she heard them shouting in Farsi and laughing as they went through the Beluga, smashing open every locked door in a joyful quest for loot. The Iranian officer was haranguing the male members of the crew, but she couldn't catch the words. Oh, God, what was he saying? What was he going to do to Paul?

Gertrude lay on the deck, trembling, trying to cover herself with her arms as she sank into shock. Helga, after a long moment, began stumbling about the cramped room, no longer crying but with a glazed expression fixed on her face as she began picking up torn and discarded articles of clothing and bits of broken glass. The room, Jean realized, had been the one occupied by Helga and her husband. "Karl," she mumbled half-aloud, "Karl doesn't like the mess. Poor Karl..."

Numb with terror, battling the shock that threatened to engulf her, Jean Brandeis sat on the bunk, her eyes fixed on the locked door. She had no illusions that any of them would be released, not after an incident that was nothing less than piracy on the high seas. There would be no phone call to the American embassy, no news report to the West save, possibly, a curt announcement to the effect that Beluga and her crew had been lost at sea.

She wondered how much longer they would be permitted to live, and what humiliation they would be forced to endure in whatever time was left.

1635 hours (Zulu +3)

Motor yacht Beluga

Indian Ocean, 380 miles southeast of Socotra

Tetsuo Kurebayashi listened impassively as Pasdaran Colonel Ruholia Aghasi continued shouting at the men kneeling before him on the deck. Kurebayashi spoke English — that language was how he communicated with the Iranians who spoke no Nihongo — but the colonel's words were too rapid for him to follow more than a word or two, and Aghasi kept alternating between English and German, of which Kurebayashi spoke not a word.

Unlike Sayyed Hamid, however, that fat pig of a Pasdaran colonel in charge of the Iranians aboard the Yuduki Maru, Aghasi was clearly a man of keen intelligence, who knew what he was doing and how best to achieve results. Though he couldn't understand the speech, he knew what Aghasi was saying, because Kurebayashi had come up with the idea and convinced the Iranian leader to try it just hours ago. Aghasi was the commander of a contingent of troops just arrived with the Iranian naval squadron; Kurebayashi had approached him, rather than the unimaginative Hamid, with his idea of seizing the Greenpeace schooner that had been dogging Yuduki Maru's wake for the past three weeks.

The speech was having the desired effect. Aghasi, the Ohtori leader noted, was playing the game well, waving the confiscated scraps of the women's bathing suits in front of the male prisoners with evident relish, gesturing frequently toward the cabin where the women had been taken, and at those of his men who were lounging about the well deck now with weapons very much in evidence. Through threats and bullying, the colonel had already gotten two of the prisoners to admit that two of the women were their wives; the dead man, apparently, had been husband to the third. A pity that he had been the one chosen by Heaven to serve as an example to the others... Still, those two would be enough.

Kurebayashi was a longtime student of American tactics. The Yankees had already tried a covert operation, slipping a small squad of commandos aboard the Yuduki Maru in an attempt to surprise her captors. That attempt had failed... though eighteen of the forty Iranian troops aboard had been killed or seriously wounded, and poor Shigeru Ota, one of Kurebayashi's Ohtori, had vanished in the fight. Their next move, he was certain, would be either another attempt to negotiate or an overwhelming show of force. Iranian sources had already reported the gathering of a sizable American naval task force south of the Arabian peninsula, between the Yuduki Maru and her destination; his guess was that they would try a frontal assault next, possibly behind the screen of a professional negotiator.

The Iranians, with their entire pathetic little navy, could not possibly hope to match the Americans ship for ship and gun for gun. The little Beluga and her activist passengers were the best weapon they could have to meet the Yankees' challenge, to force them to back down. All that was needed was some cooperation from the prisoners.

That part would be easy. Kurebayashi had studied in America, two years at UCLA. He knew Western men, and he knew something of their illogical ways of thinking, especially about women and sex. Kohler and Brandeis, he was sure, would do anything, anything to keep their wives from being gang-raped and tortured one by one before their eyes. Since it was Kohler's help they needed most, they would start with the dead German's wife, then move on to the American, saving Kohler's wife for last. The only real problem was that the process would take time, and Kurebayashi very much doubted that they had more than a few hours before the Americans struck.

But then, it was possible that the threat alone would be enough. He studied the prisoners through narrowed eyes. Yes... Aghasi's little speech was definitely having the desired effect. The American, Brandeis, was pale and sweating, on the verge of passing out right there on the deck. Kohler's eyes were squeezed shut, and he was moaning something to himself over and over in German. These men were already broken, Kurebayashi thought, clay to be molded in any way their captors saw fit.

Aghasi barked a question at the American. Slowly, a little jerkily, the man nodded, his hands still clasped on top of his head. Excellent. They had one ally, even if he was an unwilling one. Then Kohler agreed too, nodding his head enthusiastically as tears rolled down his cheeks.

Success...