Seal Team Seven (40 page)

“All night at least,” Higgins said.

“That was the idea,” Murdock said.

“What the hell is the new password, anyway?” Roselli wanted to know.

Murdock grinned. “ ‘Jaybird.' It was the only thing I could think of at the time.”

“Ha! Well, they sure won't hit on that by trial and error. It must be giving them fits!”

“I just hope they don't think the Japanese crewmen are giving them the wrong information,” Sterling said. “Things could go a bit hard on them.”

“Shit, Jaybird, you want we should go in and give them the keys to the stuff?” Roselli asked.

“I didn't say that.”

“Anyway, they know we were up there on the bridge long enough to change the codes. They're probably just mad as hell they didn't get one of us to tell them what it was!”

Murdock leaned over, studying the armed men arrayed along
Yuduki Maru
's side. More soldiers were on the pier alongside, where workers were preparing to sway several bulky propane tanks up to the ship's deck in a cargo net. “What would you guys say . . . twelve armed guards on board?”

“About that,” Roselli agreed. “Twelve in sight anyway. And another fifteen or twenty on the dock. Ramazani probably has every Pasdaran soldier he feels he can trust in this burg sitting on top of his prize.”

“And they're positioning that hammerhead crane over there to offload the stuff,” Sterling added. “If we're gonna do something, we'd better do it damned fast.”

Higgins glanced at his watch. “Patience, son. The SDVs ought to be here in another hour.”

“If they stuck to sched,” Roselli added. “Hey, Sterling?”

“Yeah?”

“How
did
you get the name Jaybird?”

The SEAL trainee groaned and the other SEALs laughed. With her engine set just one notch above idle, the Boghammer cruised slowly and ever deeper into the Iranian harbor.

Tetsuo Kurebayashi had been unable to sleep. Despite the years of self-discipline and self-denial, despite the rigors of his Ohtori commando training, the excitement, the overwhelming sense of fulfillment of a mission accomplished blended with the heady anticipation of another mission about to begin, left him wide awake.

Besides, it was noisy within the steel confines of the hijacked freighter. A small army had come aboard as soon as they'd been safely tied up to the dock, and the Iranian construction personnel were now hard at work, attempting to cut through the reinforced steel containment walls that surrounded
Yuduki Maru
's precious cargo.

Dressing, he'd gone up to the vessel's bridge. Iranian soldiers had finished removing the machine guns ruined by the American commandos but had not replaced them. Instead, grim-looking Iranian Pasdaran stood guard with automatic weapons. The compartment still showed the signs of battle—the soundproofing tiles overhead shredded by hundreds of bullet holes, the teletype printers and several consoles smoke-stained and pocked by stray rounds, most of the glass in the large, slanted bridge windows missing. A brown stain on the tile deck marked where an Iranian soldier had died.

Glancing around once, Kurebayashi stepped through the door and onto the open starboard wing of the bridge.

Isamu Takeda was already there, leaning against the railing.

“
A, Isamusama,
” Kurebayashi said, startled. “
Sumimasen!
”

“Please, Tetsuosan,” the Ohtori leader replied, also speaking Japanese to maintain a sense of privacy from the nearby Iranian troops. “Join me.”

“
Hai, Isamusama!
” Kurebayashi gave the requisite, respectful bow, raising his eyes no higher than the collar of Takeda's military-style blouse. “You honor me.”

“We have come a long way from the streets of Sasebo,
neh
?”

Clearly, Takeda was in a reflective mood. Kurebayashi grunted an assent, joining his leader against the wing railing. It had been a long time, almost fifteen years, since they'd met one another in the rock-throwing riots staged to protest the American military presence in the home islands. That had been at the very beginning, when Ohtori was first being born from the fallen ideals and promise of the Japanese Red Army.

It had taken that long to find a weapon suitable for bringing the American imperialists to their knees.

“The general tells me it will take a little time yet to reach our goal,” Takeda said. He nodded toward the activity on
Yuduki Maru
's deck. The flare of cutting torches cast monstrous, flickering shadows across the steel.

“After waiting this long,” Kurebayashi said, “I suppose we can wait a few hours more. The arrangements are made for our share?”

“Yes. It will be flown to Bangkok tomorrow night, then placed aboard a ship to be smuggled into Yokohama.” He smiled easily. “It will be most poetic, don't you think? The Western devils brought down by the demon they first unleashed upon our people seven sevens of years ago.”

“
Hai, Isamusama!
It is justice, and partial payment as well.”

“I know how you feel about working with the Iranians, Tetsuosan,” Takeda went on. “But it is proper
naniwabushi, neh
?”

In Japan, the practice called
naniwabushi
, meaning to get on such close personal terms with someone that he was obligated to generosity, was basic to any good businessman's repertoire. Terrorism too was a business, sometimes even a profitable one, certainly one to be pursued with the dedication and attention to detail of any corporate endeavor. By planning the capture of the
Yuduki Maru
, by penetrating the security measures put in place by the freighter's owners and actually executing the takeover, Ohtori had placed a tremendous obligation upon Ramazani and the other plotters within Iran's military. As payment, Ramazani had promised Ohtori two hundred kilos of plutonium—one tenth of the cargo locked away in the freighter's hold. This mission, Operation Yoake, had yet one final act to unfold, one that would find consummation at Yokosuka some three months hence.

Yokosuka, just twenty-eight miles south across Tokyo Bay from the Japanese capital, once one of Imperial Japan's first naval bases, had for five decades been the largest U.S. Navy shore facility in the Far East, covering five hundred acres and including the headquarters for COMFLEACT, the Commander of Fleet Activities, which oversaw the logistics and maintenance for all U.S. Navy forces in the western Pacific. Just a few kilos of highly radioactive plutonium, dispersed by a remotely detonated car bomb, would be more than enough to render the entire area uninhabitable for the next several centuries. And that would be only the beginning. Two hundred kilos would provide blast-scattered death enough for
many
car bombs, many places around the world. The blast that had shaken the World Trade Center in New York City over a year ago would be utterly forgotten, a mere shadow of the horror, blood, and lingering death that was to follow.

It would be . . . what was the American term? Payback. Yes, it would be payback indeed for the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To drive that particular point home, the attack was planned for the sixth of August, some sixty-eight days hence.

Kurebayashi looked away from the dazzle of the torches and work lights, staring instead at the black water slowly rising and falling along
Yuduki Maru
's starboard side. Turning and leaning over the railing to peer into the darkness aft, he saw one of the sleek Iranian patrol boats motor slowly past the freighter's stern, at the very edge of the illumination spread by the work lights ashore.

All was quiet, but Kurebayashi was ill at ease. He'd been thinking a lot lately of the black-garbed commandos who'd risen from the sea and so nearly overturned Yoake. He was fairly sure that they'd been American SEALs—though both the U.S. Marines and the Army Special Forces used UBA equipment when necessary. The SEALs had a well-deserved reputation throughout the world's freedom-fighter underground as ruthless, efficient, and implacably deadly foes.

He didn't believe for a moment that the Americans were going to let Ohtori and the Iranians walk away with two tons of plutonium. If they were going to try again to stop the theft, it would have to be now, before
Yuduki Maru
's steel-lined vaults were breached, before the plutonium could be scattered to waiting terrorist cells around the world.

Kurebayashi felt a small chill down his spine at the thought.

“If you agree, I will inspect our sentries,” he told Takeda.

“Of course, Tetsuosan.”

He bowed again, then left the Ohtori leader on the bridge wing. According to the schedule, Hotsumi and Masahiko were on duty on the fantail, while Seito stood guard over
Yuduki Maru
's crew, locked away now in the aft crew's quarters. Throughout the voyage north to Bandar-é Abbas, the Ohtori gunmen had maintained their own watch independently of the Iranians. These Pasdaran were too lax, too ill-disciplined to maintain a proper military watch.

And there was a very great deal at stake.

Roselli had guided the Boghammer across the harbor, approaching at last a deserted pier in a remote and poorly lit part of the waterfront. There, they'd shut down the engine and tied the patrol boat to a ramshackle bollard. One by one then, with the others standing watch, they'd donned their black gear and UBAs, tested them, and checked once more their weapons and equipment. At 0015 hours precisely, they'd rolled over the side of the Boghammer, moving stealthily in the shadows beneath the rickety pier, donned fins and face masks, and slipped beneath the ink-black surface of the water with scarcely a ripple to mark their passing.

It was a two-hundred-meter swim from the pier where they'd left the Boghammer to the dockside construction area where
Yuduki Maru
had been moored. They navigated by compass and by counting the strokes of their swim fins.

Halfway across, Murdock could hear sounds transmitted through the water from the target, the clank of steel on steel, the thump of something heavy being dropped. Sound propagates through water much more efficiently than it does in air, and far faster. It felt as though they must be nearly on top of their target.

They continued swimming. As the noises grew louder, Murdock cautiously moved to the surface until the upper half of his head broke the water, rising just enough to give him a frog's-eye view of the target.
Yuduki Maru
's stern rose like a black wall against the glare of lights on the dock side. The dazzling flare of a cutting torch shone like a brilliant star.

Submerging again, Murdock had waited until the other three SEALs moved close enough that he could signal by touch. They were dead on course, and only about thirty meters short of their target.

Moments later, they'd swum up against the slime-slick bottom of the
Yuduki Maru
, where she rode at her moorings in twenty-one feet of water. Reaching into a pocket of his loadout vest, Murdock extracted a small metallic case the size of a pack of cigarettes, nudged the transmit switch with his gloved thumb, then positioned the device against the freighter's hull.

The homer was part of the specialized VBSS loadout, originally brought along against the possibility that they would need to mark the
Beluga
for a second boarding attempt. He heard nothing when he turned it on, of course; the high-frequency chirps emitted by the device were well above the human auditory range.

But someone equipped with the right equipment would be able to pick up the signals, and home on them. Murdock and the other SEALs allowed themselves to sink to the muck of the ill-defined harbor bottom, and waited.

SEALs were very, very good at waiting.

With a dwindling whine of its electric motor, the lead Mark VIII SDV settled gently to the muddy bottom, closely followed by the other two. Moving carefully in the cramped darkness, MacKenzie switched on his own rebreather, then disconnected the life-support line that had been feeding him off the bus's bottled air.

The long three-hour run north from the drop-off point had been routine. There'd been a few tense moments as they cruised past the island of Larak, a few miles east of Qeshm. The SDV's pilot had reported over the plug-in intercom that sonar had detected a rotary-wing aircraft hovering overhead, and moments later, they'd heard the telltale throb of approaching propellers. An Iranian patrol boat was passing overhead.

There was no telling what the helicopter had seen—or even if it had seen anything at all in the darkness. All three SDVs had powered down until they were only barely making way, traveling in near-perfect silence; the patrol boat had passed close overhead, circled a time or two, then headed off toward the west.

With sonar reporting the area clear again, the three SEAL minisubs had continued on their way. The Mark VIII featured a sophisticated Doppler Navigation System, or DNS, that allowed pinpoint navigation even in waters as foul and choked with mud as those of the Gulf. It also mounted an OAS, or Obstacle-Avoidance Sonar subsystem, allowing the subs to keep track of one another and to avoid obstacles—sunken hulks, coral heads, or the structural pylons of Gulf drilling rigs—even when the water was almost completely opaque.

At 0041 hours, the SDV's pilot had alerted the passengers over the intercom: A high-frequency sonar signal had been picked up on the predicted bearing. MacKenzie had allowed himself to relax a little at the news. Murdock and the others were okay. They'd penetrated the harbor, located the
Yuduki Maru
, and planted the sonar homer.