Seal Team Seven

Wednesday, 18 May

1145 hours (Zulu +3)

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Indian Ocean, south of Mauritius

The sun glared with brassy heat from the flat swells of the Indian Ocean, as two ships, the Yuduki Maru and her escort, Shikishima, plowed steadily eastward at eighteen knots. Twenty days out of the French military port at Cherbourg, she had another four weeks' voyage ahead of her. Her course lay due east across the Indian Ocean, south of Australia and New Zealand, then turning northwest, passing through Micronesia and the empty waters of the western Pacific until she entered her home port of Tokai, ninety miles northeast of Tokyo.

Yuduki Maru's long-way-around voyage had been dictated by the volatile rumblings of international politics. Like some twentieth-century Flying Dutchman, she was pledged to remain always at least two hundred nautical miles from land. Forbidden outright to enter the waters of South Africa, Indonesia, Chile, or Malaysia she had a sharply limited choice of courses. The Straits of Mulacca, twenty-three miles wide at their narrowest, and the South China Sea, a den of modern-day pirates, both had been closed to her.

In the interests of secrecy, her final course had been set only days before she'd left Cherbourg. Not that secrecy remained absolute. The Greenpeace vessel Beluga had dogged the tiny flotilla since their sailing, remaining just over the horizon, making certain that the Japanese ships did not break their international quarantine.

Captain Chuichi Koga, Yuduki Maru's master, was unconcerned with the Beluga, as he was with the quarantine and with the crowds of protestors who'd mobbed the fences at the naval base perimeter at Cherbourg. The total voyage, Cherbourg to Tokai, should take seven weeks. Koga, a professional, confident, and supremely competent officer of the merchant marine who demanded absolute punctuality of himself and of his crew, had no doubts whatsoever that they would arrive in port on schedule.

Yuduki Maru was small for so long a voyage, with a length overall of 119 meters, a beam of less than eighteen meters, and a full-load draft of just over six meters. She had a displacement of 7,600 tons.

Nevertheless, she was an impressive vessel. Like her sister ship, the Akatsuki Maru, she had been an American cargo ship — sailing under the name Atlantic Crane — before her conversion to her new and highly specialized task. She'd been refined in a Belfast shipyard, her hatches strengthened, her huge, forward deck crane removed, and her electronics suite upgraded and modernized. Large sections of her cargo hold had been sealed off and converted to carry extra reserves of diesel fuel so she could manage her forty-thousand-kilometer voyage without refueling. Some of her cargo space had also been converted into accommodations. Besides her usual crew of forty-five, the Yuduki Maru carried thirty armed guards.

And, of course, there was the comforting presence of the Shikishima a kilometer to port. Captain Koga, like most of his superiors, would have been far happier if a couple of Japanese Navy destroyers could have escorted Yuduki Maru on her long passage. Unfortunately, Japan's postwar constitution specifically prohibited any of her 125-odd military vessels from being deployed outside Japanese waters. For that reason, escort duties had been assumed by the Kaijo Hoancho, an organization analogous to the U.S. Coast Guard. Shikishima had been specially built for this task at a cost of twenty billion yen, a 6,500-ton cutter armed with machine guns and one of the American Phalanx close-in point-defense systems. She also carried a Kawasaki-Bell 212 helicopter on her fantail landing platform.

The Americans had been involved with planning for the security of these voyages from the beginning. They were, naturally enough, keenly interested in the security of Yuduki Maru's precious and deadly cargo.

Two tons of plutonium, after all, was prize enough to attract the eye of dozens of governments, political factions, terrorist groups, environmental activists, and outright criminals all over the world.

It was enough to provoke a war, and more than enough to finish one. It was also a symbol of Japan's national honor.

Japan's interest in plutonium was strictly peaceful and economic. Ever since the 1960s, the country had been committed to achieving energy self-sufficiency through an aggressive and high-tech atomic power program. In particular they'd sought the promise of fast-breeder nuclear reactors.

There were already forty-one conventional nuclear power plants fueled by uranium in the Japanese home islands. For years, the spent nuclear fuel from these reactors had been shipped to reprocessing plants in Europe, notably the French company Cogema, in Cap de la Hague, Normandy, and a British plant in Sellafield, Cumbria. There, high-grade plutonium was extracted from the radioactive ash left over from the conventional nuclear plants; a special type of power plant, the so-called fast breeder, generated power from plutonium and, in a process that seemed to defy the normal laws concerning something from nothing, actually generated more nuclear fuel as an end product. Ultimately, Japan could be completely self-sufficient, generating all of its own power needs, even exporting power to other nations.

It was a worthwhile goal, given that Japan was currently almost entirely dependent on outside sources for energy, and she had some grand and energy-intensive plans for future technological growth. Unfortunately, there were some serious drawbacks as well.

First and foremost, plutonium is without question the deadliest substance known. Quite apart from its high levels of radioactivity, it is so toxic that a microscopic amount can kill a man, while a gram or two in a water reservoir can wipe out an entire city. And, of course, there is the nuclear genie; the hardest part of building an atomic bomb is processing the uranium in the first place, or getting hold of enough plutonium to provide the fissionable material. Just eight kilograms of plutonium is enough for the manufacture of a quick-and-dirty nuclear device as powerful as the one that burned the heart out of Nagasaki.

Too, there were the political problems that buzzed around the stuff like flies over garbage. A sizable percentage of Japan's home population resisted any manifestation of nuclear power, for obvious reasons, and the outcry from environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists around the world had been startling. Transporting so much plutonium was perceived as an unacceptable risk, one threatening thousands, even millions of people, should something go wrong.

Nor was breeder technology proven. Monju, a prototype breeder reactor, was still a year away from producing electricity. America, France, Great Britain, and the other major industrial powers had long ago abandoned the breeder concept as too risky for commercial use.

The creation of so much plutonium had proven to be a public relations nightmare for Tokyo, but there was no other way for the country to achieve its goals. Suggestions from the international community that Japan use plutonium extracted from the post-Cold War world's nuclear stockpiles instead of shipping it halfway around the world was no solution at all, since something still had to be done about all that plutonium piling up in Europe. Besides, the Japanese public insisted, understandably if somewhat irrationally, that only plutonium that had never been used in nuclear weapons was acceptable as a power source at home.

Fears of what would happen if Japan's plutonium stockpiles at home or abroad fell into the wrong hands dogged the nation like a shadow. Anti-nuclear groups were swift to point out that while a serious malfunction in a conventional reactor could lead to meltdown and the release of radiation, a disaster in a breeder plant could result in a very large bang indeed.

Since the United States had sold the original nuclear fuel to Japan, Washington, under the provisions of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, maintained a say over what happened to it and how it was handled. Unfortunately, the U.S. government was far more sensitive to pressure from the environmentalists Japan than Japan was. A 1989 plan to fly the plutonium back to had been vetoed outright by the U.S., which dreaded the political, ecological, and literal fallout of a plane crash.

The ideal, of course, would have been to process the original spent fuel cores at home, in Japan, but the first such reprocessing plant, now being constructed at Rokkasho, in northern Japan, was not due to begin operation until 1997, and would only have an output of five tons of plutonium a year. Besides, Britain and France had already served notice that they would not store Japan's accumulating stores of plutonium indefinitely. The stuff was difficult to keep, took up a lot of space, and provided a dazzling target for terrorists and activists of any of several political persuasions.

And so, the only alternative for Japan, hedged in by a bewildering array of political threats, treaty and constitutional obligations, and public relations problems, had been to transport the stuff back to the home islands by sea. Tokyo had consulted with Washington on the operation and accepted the American directives regarding security. These had included the structural upgrades to the freighters, the addition of an onboard security force, and the building of the Shikishima herself, since Japanese naval vessels were not allowed to leave their home waters.

The first shipment of 1.7 tons had left Cherbourg early in October of 1992, arriving without incident in Tokai fifty-eight days later. Several shipments had made the passage since, the start of the biggest sea lift of plutonium in history. The timetable ultimately called for a total of some ninety tons of plutonium to be shipped from Europe to Japan by the year 2010. Koga wondered if his government was tempted by so much plutonium to abandon its stance of nearly fifty years and become a nuclear power. The idea didn't bother Koga as it did many of his countrymen; he didn't remember Hiroshima, and as Japan became increasingly isolated in a hostile world, it would have to learn to protect itself, without relying on the vacillations of a fragmented and unreliable West.

In the meantime, it was enough to carry out his duty, which was to deliver two tons of plutonium safely to port in Tokai.

Raising his binoculars to his eyes, he scanned an empty horizon for a moment, then turned them on the lean, white hull of Shikishima, still maintaining station to the north. The Kaijo Hoancho emblem, a triple blue stripe on the hull forward, like a squared-off Roman letter S lying on its back reaching from scupper to waterline, was clearly visible, as were the sailors lounging in the gun tub on the forward deck. They seemed unconcerned about the proximity of Yuduki Maru's cargo.

And in fact, there was little to worry about. The cargo was safely stowed in hundreds of individual lead pigs in the freighter's holds, divided into carefully measured and separated quantities to avoid critical mass and a chain reaction. So far as any external threat was concerned, Yuduki Maru and Shikishima were alone on that wide, empty ocean. The nearest land at the moment was the southern tip of Madagascar, one thousand kilometers to the north, and the weather, a serious concern during the initial planning, was exceptionally and spectacularly calm.

Koga turned his attention to the Yuduki Maru's deck below the bridge. The freighter was designed along the lines of a tanker or bulk carrier, with the blocky, white superstructure far aft, and hold access through deck hatches in the long forward deck. A number of men were visible at the moment, mostly off-duty crewmen basking in the sun. One man, a galley worker, was perched bare-legged on one of the hatch covers, dutifully slicing up vegetables, which he removed one by one from a large sack at his side, and dropping the pieces in a bowl in his lap.

Also visible were five of the ship's security people, wearing brown uniforms and carrying Beretta submachine guns. Yuduki Maru's security force had been drawn from one of Tokyo's Police Special Action Units, again to avoid the restrictions of Japan's postwar constitution. They were the best there was, however, tough, disciplined men who had trained extensively with the British SAS, Germany's GSG-9, and Israeli paratroopers.

There was simply no way any enemy could get at the plutonium in Yuduki Maru's hold. Koga allowed a rare smile to crease his lips. It promised to be an extraordinarily boring voyage.

"Captain!" the helmsman shouted, pointing to port. "Look!"

Koga looked, and had trouble absorbing what he was seeing. A column of water hung suspended at Shikishima's side, descending across her deck like a blanketing mist. In the next instant, the escort vessel seemed to arch from the water like a stretching cat; the thunder of the detonation reached Yuduki Maru a second later, a piercing roar that assaulted the ears and rattled the glass in the bridge windows. Shikishima dropped with nightmare slowness back into the sea, her back snapping as she struck, mingled black smoke and orange flame mushrooming into the sky above her deck.

Koga watched, transfixed, horrified. What was happening? Contradictory thoughts chased one another through his head. The Shikishima's boilers had blown up. She had struck an old mine adrift since some long-ago war. She had been torpedoed. Torpedoed! A second blast tore through Shikishima's stern quarter, hurling fragments — boat davits, life rafts, stanchions, men — hundreds of meters through the air. The Safety Agency's escort could not possibly have struck two mines. Somewhere in that empty sea, a submarine was firing torpedoes at the flotilla!

"Captain!" the helmsman wailed. "What should we do?"

Do? If they stopped to pick up survivors, the next torpedo might well slam into Yuduki Maru's hull, with disastrous results. Indeed, a torpedo might already be on the way, streaking unseen toward the freighter beneath the ocean waves.

"Speed... more speed!" Koga said. He reached for the intercom microphone hanging on its hook beneath the forward bridge window, and froze, hand extended, as he saw the drama unfolding on the forward deck.

The five security men down there had raced as one to Yuduki Maru's port railing, staring at the stricken Shikishima, pointing and calling excitedly to one another. At their backs, unnoticed, the lone galley hand had reached into the burlap bag of vegetables and was extracting the gleaming black length of an AKM assault rifle.

Before Koga could react, before he could think of shouting warning, the crewman opened fire on full automatic from a range of less than five meters. Security personnel jerked and twisted. One lurched forward and fell over the side, as the others groped for slung weapons, dropped twitching to the deck, and died.

The intercom forgotten, Koga reached instead for the ship's alarm button. He slapped it, and the raucous blast of the emergency alarm blared from the bridge speakers and throughout the ship. The security officer stationed on the bridge unholstered his pistol and took a step forward. "Captain," he said, and then one of the doors leading onto the bridge from aft burst open, and two wild-eyed men exploded from the passageway behind it. One held an Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun, the other an AKM. The one with the Uzi triggered the weapon, and 9mm slugs tore half the security officer's skull away, pitching him against the bridge window in a spray of blood and shattering glass. The other ignored the rest of the bridge crew, but hurried to the door leading to the ship's communications center.

"Come out! Come out!" he shouted, but the communications officer and those standing watch with him must not have moved quickly enough to suit him, for almost immediately the AK opened fire, a hammering fusillade that was deafening in the confines of the bridge. There was a long, drawn-out scream, a second burst of automatic fire, and then only the rasp of the ship's emergency alarm.

"Kill that noise," the man with the Uzi growled, and he held the weapon's muzzle a few centimeters from Koga's head.

Koga complied instantly. He had no doubt that these madmen would kill everyone on the bridge if they showed the slightest resistance.

It dawned on Koga, belatedly, that the man with the Uzi was his own fourth officer, Tetsuo Kurebayashi. The gunman emerging with a sadist's grin from the communications center was Shigeru Yoshitomi, a lowly cargo handler.

"Chikusho!" Koga said as the alarm strangled into silence. "Damn you!" It seemed inconceivable, impossible. Terrorists on his ship, members of his own crew! "What is it you want?"

"Silence!" Kurebayashi snapped. His face was twisted with mingled joy and battle-lust, and looking into those eyes, Koga was terrified. "Hands up! And the rest of you! Get down on your knees! Hands over your heads! Now!"

Koga dropped to his knees with the rest of the bridge personnel. From where he kneeled on the deck, he could just glimpse Shikishima's final death throes above the bridge window sill. Fire boiled from the sea, and only the bow and part of the helicopter pad on the fantail were visible, jutting at sharp angles from the sea and separated by a sea of burning oil. Black smoke stained the cloudless sky.

In the distance, somewhere below decks, he could hear the muffled pounding of automatic gunfire. God, how many terrorists were there? How had they infiltrated his crew? Koga was filled with a sudden, sad foreboding.

Despite all of his care and professionalism, Yuduki Maru and her deadly cargo were not going to make her scheduled port of call.

1520 hours (Zulu +3)

Motor yacht Beluga

Indian Ocean, south of Mauritius

Though she desperately wanted to acquire the casual international sophistication of her German friends Gertrude and Helga, Jean Brandeis still felt uncomfortable going topless in front of the men aboard the Beluga, even if one of them was her husband. Her modesty, she'd decided, was a last, conservative vestige of her Midwestern American upbringing, one she'd not been able to shake after years of living both in Los Angeles and in France. Throughout Beluga's long cruise from Cherbourg down the Atlantic coast of Europe, she'd compromised each time Gertie and Helga stripped down for sunbathing by lying face down on a towel spread out on the deck, and always with her bikini top within easy reach.

By the time Beluga had entered African waters at the end of the first week of the cruise, she was so badly sunburned that she'd had a decent excuse to cover up. Then, during the passage around the Cape of Good Hope, there'd been a stiff, cold wind, with weather and temperatures appropriate to November in northern latitudes.

Eventually, though, about the time Beluga again crossed the thirtieth parallel somewhere south of Madagascar, Jean's burn had darkened to a delicious California-girl tan, and the days had warmed enough that Helga and Gertrude had begun their daily regimen of nude or half-nude sunbathing again. Afraid of seeming prudish or provincially unsophisticated, and encouraged by her husband, she'd joined them. She wanted so much to make a good impression on their new friends.

Jean Brandeis had considered herself to be a liberal activist ever since she'd married her husband, Paul, five years earlier. Paul Brandeis, a Hollywood producer who'd won international acclaim with his films on a variety of ecological and animal-rights causes, had swept her into a whole new world of celebrities, parties, and popular activism. Encouraged by a well-known French producer, both of them had joined Greenpeace International two years earlier.

That was when they'd met Karl and Helga Schmidt and Rudi and Gertrude Kohler, all long-time members of both Greenpeace and Europe's International Green Party. Karl had had a hand in organizing the huge protest in Cherbourg; the yacht Beluga was Rudi's, though he'd registered it as belonging to Greenpeace. Jean had been thrilled by the urbane sophistication of Paul's new friends and excited by the Prospect of activist work, a cause she could fight for. Somehow, though, she'd never expected that work to carry her across ten thousand miles of open ocean, dogging the heels of a Japanese freighter. Focusing world media attention on the threat presented by the Yuduki Maru and her cargo was a worthwhile cause certainly, but the voyage had rapidly degenerated into an unending tedium dragging on for day after day after sun-baked day. Quarters aboard were cramped; Beluga was a forty-meter, two-masted schooner, a millionaire's yacht, but after three weeks with ten people aboard — the six of them plus a four-man crew — her dimensions had somehow shrunk to those of a twenty-foot day sailer. Helga and Gertrude, who three weeks ago had seemed so witty and smart and vivacious, were revealed as shallow gossips who talked of little but sex, celebrities, and themselves.

To make matters worse, lately Karl had started hitting on her, his casual and friendly flirtations becoming more insistent, more open. It seemed to Jean that when he bumped into her in Beluga's narrow passageways, the contact was deliberate, and more lingering than was strictly necessary to get by.

And Paul wasn't making it any easier on her either, damn him, with his fiercely whispered admonitions that she should be nice to their hosts. She knew he saw Karl and Rudi both as contacts who could open some important doors in the European entertainment industry, but she wondered if he had any idea what Karl's idea of nice might be.

She wished this cruise were over. More than that, she wished something would happen. It was so boring, plodding along in the wake of that damned, unseen Japanese ship, day following day, each day the same.

A cry from the bow snapped her from the warm lassitude of her thoughts. Karl and two of the crewmen were running forward, and she could feel the pitch of Beluga's diesel engine change in the ever-present throb transmitted through her deck. Something was happening... something that had the yacht's crew excited.

Karl ran aft again, heading toward Beluga's wheel. "Karl!" she called as he passed. "What is it?"

"I'm not sure, honey," he said. "Viktor thinks it could be a shipwreck."

A shipwreck, hundreds of miles from the nearest land? That made no sense. Forgetting her partial nudity, she scrambled to her feet and hurried forward. A small crowd was gathering at the starboard railing near the foremast, chattering to each other in German and gesturing at the water. Viktor, the Beluga's mate, was studying the water ahead through binoculars.

"What is happening?" Helga asked, coming up behind her. "What do they see?"

Peering past Viktor's shoulder, Jean could see a darkening on the sea a hundred yards off. An oil slick, probably. She knew about oil slicks... but there was lots of floating debris as well.

Helga screamed, pointing.

The man was floating face-up twenty feet off Beluga's starboard side. Despite the burns on his face, he was clearly Oriental. He was also clearly dead.

Paul was beside her, a Geiger counter in his hand, a grim expression on his face as he swept the instrument back and forth in the air.

"Is it... was it..."

"No radiation," Paul Brandeis replied curtly. "I don't know if it was the Yuduki Maru or not. It could have been her escort." He turned to Viktor. "We'd better call this in."

"Ja, Herr Brandeis." Jean folded her arms across her breasts and shivered. Her wish — that something would happen — had been granted.

Somehow, though, this wasn't quite what she'd had in mind.