"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.
Thursday, 19 May
1512 hours (Zulu -5)
NAVSPECWARGRU-Two Briefing Room
Little Creek, Virginia
Captain Paul Mason strode into the briefing room, back straight and almost pain-free. It had been several years now since he'd needed a cane to walk, and he continued to skirmish with the Navy doctors who'd originally predicted that he'd be driving a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Someday, Mason knew, he would not only walk, but he would jump out of airplanes again as well, don the heavy tanks of a SCUBA apparatus, and even pull a five-miles-plus endurance swim with fins. He was a SEAL.
Waiting in the room were several of the important ops-level people in the Norfolk SEAL Community; the skippers of SEAL Teams Two, Four, Seven, and Eight; Captain Kenneth Friedman, commanding Helicopter Attack Squadron Light Four, the Red Wolves; and several staff, logistics, and support officers. Rear Admiral Bainbridge, CONAVSPECWARGRU-Two, was there as well, chewing on the stem of an unlit pipe and looking distinctly unhappy as he reviewed a sheaf of computer printouts just handed to him by his meteorological officer. Also present was Rear Admiral Kerrigan of MIDEASTFOR. The Middle East Force, under the operational umbrella of the Sixth Fleet in the Med, was headquartered in Bahrain, but Kerrigan served as staff liaison to the various naval commands based in Norfolk, including NAVSPECWARGRU-Two.