Seal Team Seven

Prologue

0945 hours

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Cherbourg Harbor, France

A blast from the freighter's horn sounded across the water, momentarily drowning the shrill calls of circling sea gulls as the 7,600-ton freighter began her ponderous acceleration toward the open sea. Echoes bounced back from Cherbourg's waterfront, mingled with the thunder of noise from an angry crowd.

Ashore, beyond the chain-link fence separating Cherbourg's military port facilities from the civilian docks, a thin line of troopers drawn from the French Gendarmerie Nationale faced a sea of protestors, who answered the ship's horn with a wild, drawn-out wail of noise. Placards danced above shouting, angry faces; fists punched the sky in time to chanted slogans.

Near the military base's main gate, a scuffle broke out between police and the mob.

Tetsuo Kurebayashi leaned against the railing on Yuduki Maru's starboard side, a ghost of a smile tugging at his normally impassive face. International Greenpeace had made Yuduki Maru and her sister ships the focus of a whirlwind of controversy. The publicity of her departure from France would ensure plenty of attention from a watching world later, once Yoake-Go, Operation Dawn, was fully under way.

Kurebayashi was fourth officer of the Yuduki Maru, but his first loyalty was not to the ship, nor to the company that owned and operated her, nor even to Captain Koga. As he turned from the railing, he caught the eye of Shigeru Yoshitomi, a deck division cargo handler, and he gave the man a slight nod, an exchange unnoticed by their shipmates nearby. Though of mutually alien social classes, both men were Ohtori, and brothers in blood.

In the harbor, less than one hundred meters off the Yuduki Maru's starboard beam, a two-masted sailing ketch, a gleaming, white-hulled, rich man's toy, matched the freighter's slow pace. A banner had been unfurled on the yacht's port side, bearing legends in French, English, and Japanese: BAN THE SHIPMENTs and GREENPEACE. Yuduki Maru's escort, the sleek cutter Shikishima, was already moving up to position herself between the freighter and the Greenpeace yacht. According to the news stories Kurebayashi had heard while he was in France, the yacht, a forty-meter motor sailer named Beluga, was to be Yuduki Maru's watchdog for the entire length of her voyage from Cherbourg to Japan, following in her wake and making certain the freighter did not break the international agreements that had shaped her planned course.

Kurebayashi smiled again at the thought. Only a handful of men aboard the Japanese freighter knew it, of course, but the Yuduki Maru would not be completing her voyage to the home islands.

Excitement quickened within. All of his training, all of his dedication to the Cause, all of his long-bottled desire to strike back at the hated American imperialists, would soon find outlet in action, and in purpose.

Soon, the Ohtori commando thought. Only three more weeks...