Seal Team Seven (17 page)

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

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 sunbaked 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 though 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.”

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.

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, CO-NAVSPECWARGRU-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.

And at the end of the table, isolated by his civilian clothes, was the suit from Langley. Brian Hadley didn't
look
like a spook—small, rumpled, and nearsighted, with the frizzy white hair of a university professor—but he was supposed to be one of the best analysts in the CIA's Intelligence Directorate, head of the Office of Global Issues.

Hadley had arrived, Mason knew, only moments ago from the Executive Office Building, where the National Security Council staff had been meeting round the clock since this current crisis had broken loose.

Mason walked to the end of the long mahogany table, taking his place behind the podium there. The other men in the room, most of whom he knew well, watched him attentively.

“Very well, gentlemen,” Mason said, gripping the sides of the podium. “You've all been following the situation, and you know why we're here. For the past twenty-four hours, the Japanese plutonium ship
Yuduki Maru,
with two tons of weapons-grade plutonium aboard, has been off course. She is out of radio contact and, until we can determine otherwise, we are assuming that this is a terrorist incident and are classifying it as a Broken Arrow.”

The men around the table shifted uncomfortably. Broken Arrow was the code phrase for any accident with nuclear weapons—specifically with U.S. weapons accidentally launched or jettisoned, such as had happened back in the sixties with the crash of a U.S. aircraft carrying nuclear weapons off the coast of Spain.

The provisions for calling a Broken Arrow alert, however, included the theft or loss of any nuclear weapon or radiological component, or any situation where there was a real or implied public hazard from that component. The fine points had been debated in both the Pentagon and the White House already; the plutonium aboard the
Yuduki Maru
belonged to Japan and was not the direct responsibility of the U.S. government. Still, the United States had assumed an indirect responsibility for the plutonium. American firms had sold the original uranium to Japan in the first place, and perhaps more to the point, two tons of radioactive plutonium represented a terrific danger, both to American interests and to America's allies. If terrorists had indeed hijacked the
Yuduki Maru
, they were not likely to be sympathetic to U.S. interests.

Reinforcing this, Mason went on to discuss the evidence that this was the act of terrorists. “The
Shikishima,”
he said, “the freighter's Maritime Safety Agency escort, has been confirmed sunk. At about 1530 hours yesterday local time, the Greenpeace yacht
Beluga
encountered the oil slick and some floating bodies.
Beluga
and other vessels in the area have been alerted to keep an eye out for survivors, but at this point we are not hopeful.

“We were able to pinpoint
Yuduki Maru
immediately and confirm that she is now cruising almost due north at eighteen knots. As of 1300 hours our time today, she was two hundred miles off Pointe Itaperina—that's the southeastern corner of Madagascar. Our intelligence on the situation so far is limited. There has been no communication from her crew, and attempts to contact her have been ignored. We have no idea who is in command now, what group, faction, or government is responsible, or what the freighter's new destination might be.”

“How the hell was the escort sunk?” Captain Whittier, of SEAL Two, wanted to know. “Sabotage?”

“Possibly, though security was extraordinarily tight on both vessels before they left Yokohama. At the moment, we're operating on another, rather disturbing possibility.” Mason opened his briefcase and removed a folder stamped Top Secret. Inside were two eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs, which he passed around to the other men at the table.

“As you can see from the inscription,” Mason continued, “both photographs are of the Iranian naval facility at Bandar Abbas, right on the Straight of Hormuz. The first one was taken on 4 May. Note the two submarines in the upper left.”

“Kilos,” Captain Harrison, the CO of SEAL Eight, said. “The Iranian Kilos.”

In 1992, amid considerable international controversy, Russia had delivered to the Republic of Iran two conventional attack submarines of the type known in the West as Kilo. Displacing 2,900 tons submerged, with a top underwater speed of twenty knots, they'd been designed by the old Soviet Union primarily as a commodity for export. Algeria, Poland, Romania, and India all had Kilos in their fleets, and possibly Cuba and Libya as well. Each was armed with twelve 533mm torpedoes.

“The second photograph was taken by a KH-12 satellite two days later, on 6 May. One of the submarines, note, is gone. We have identified the missing boat as the
Enghelab-e Eslami.
That's Farsi for the
Islamic Revolution.”

“Let me get this straight, Captain,” Admiral Bainbridge said. “You're saying that the goddamn
Iranians
could be behind this?”

Mason faced him squarely. “There is no hard evidence to that effect, Admiral. At least not yet. But one possibility we must consider is that an Iranian submarine torpedoed the
Shikishima,
and that at the same time, a terrorist component aboard the plutonium freighter seized the ship. The
Yuduki Maru's
new course is consistent with a port in Iran.”

“And this Iranian boat has been missing all this time?” Bainbridge asked, “Almost two weeks?”

“You know it's never as easy as it looks in the movies, Tom,” Admiral Kerrigan told him.

Bainbridge scowled. “I thought we had subs in the Gulf watching the sons of bitches?”

“We did,” Kerrigan said. “We've had an attack boat stationed in Bahrain ever since the Iranians took delivery of those boats, a blanket warning to them not to get cute with shipping in the Gulf. But tracking a submarine in the open ocean's tough, especially a conventional boat. They're quieter than nukes. No cooling pumps for the reactors. Our sub, the Sturgeon-class attack boat
Cavalla,
headed out after the
Revolution
as soon as we realized the Iranian boat was gone. We also have other attack subs converging on that area, but, well, it's a big ocean. Remember the flap a few years back, when that North Korean freighter carrying missile parts to the Gulf just disappeared? And that was with subs searching for her, satellites, the whole nine yards.”