Seal Team Seven (26 page)

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.

“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.

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.

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 Ramboesque 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.