Seal Team Seven (23 page)

Two by two, because the chamber was too small for more, the men of SEAL Seven, Third Platoon, began locking out of the escape trunk. Murdock was last out, giving each man's gear a final check before he climbed the ladder into the narrow cylinder that was a floodable extension of the sub's pressure hull. He went out with MacKenzie, squeezing into the chamber opposite the big Texan and using the intercom, called a 31-MC, to alert the sub's crew that they were ready to go. Turning a valve flooded the chamber; when the water was above the side door, they pushed it open, emerging in a recess in the
Santa Fe
's afterdeck. The other twelve men had already broken out the gear that had been stored there after their paradrop; four Combat Rubber Raiding Craft from the C-130's pallet canister had been rolled up, lashed together, and stowed in the deck compartment between the sub's outer and pressure hulls, along with the boat's engines and other necessary gear.

They worked swiftly and surely, in an almost total, inky darkness penetrated only incompletely by the small lights the men carried. Both the
Santa Fe
and the SEALs were still moving slowly forward, and the water pressure as the current boiled aft past the sail was like a stiff wind. Air bubbles tinkled and burbled in the darkness as they rose from SCUBA regulators. SCUBA gear was being used for this mission rather than rebreathers because the final approach would be on the surface, rather than underwater, and there would be no danger of the bubbles giving away the divers' positions.

In moments, the CRRCs were freed and inflated from pressure bottles, rising to the surface accompanied by their retinue of frogmen. Their lights were extinguished as they rode the rubber rafts toward the surface. In minutes, the four rafts were bobbing on a gentle swell on the surface. Stars peeped from among scattered clouds overhead. The horizon, visible only where the stars ended, was empty.

The SEALs rolled aboard their CRRCs and began unshipping the engines and securing their gear. SCUBA tanks, masks, and flippers were removed and stowed. Flak jackets and combat harnesses went on over wet-suit tops; radio headsets were slipped into place and plugged into belt Motorola units. They wore the SEALs' usual mix of headgear: floppy boonie hats, woolen balaclavas, or a dark green scarf folded into a triangle and worn over the head like a bandana. Under their swim fins, they wore thick-soled, rubber-cleated boots, specially designed footwear for climbing slippery steel. No words were spoken during the entire process, and radio silence was strictly observed save for the brief clicks of the necessary radio checks; each movement, each act had been practiced countless times by every man in the team. A hand signal, barely visible in the night, a thumbs-up, and the two sets of rafts began drawing apart, propelled by silenced engines that gave off little noise above a soft purr. The plan called for them to split into two groups of two, Murdock's group heading due south to intercept the
Yuduki Maru,
DeWitt's squad bearing to the southeast to close with the more distant
Hormuz
.

The Blue Squad rafts traveled side by side at twelve knots, meeting and breasting each swell. Murdock cradled a hand-held radar unit, intermittently sending out a pulse to check on the
Yuduki Maru's
position. The signal, deliberately tailored to mimic that put out by aircraft search radars, would probably not be picked up at all by the freighter; if it was, it would be dismissed as another of the aircraft that had been prowling the skies around the hijacked plutonium ship for the past several days.

For the next fifteen minutes,
Yuduki Maru
remained steadily on course. Soon, the SEALs could actually see her, bow-on, her bridge brilliantly illuminated and with running lights to port and starboard, at her prow and at her masthead. Evidently, the hijackers were doing nothing to hide her presence. It was almost as though they were daring the SEALs to attack.

The lights provided the SEALs with one tremendous advantage, however. Guards on her deck would ruin their night vision every time they looked inboard; the SEALs, black-faced, in black garb, aboard black CRRCs, were all but invisible on the black water. The chances that shipboard guards would notice the approach of the SEAL boats were sharply reduced.

Three hundred yards from the
Yuduki Maru's
bow, the two CRRCs began to separate. MacKenzie, Garcia, and Higgins in one boat steered for the freighter's starboard side. Murdock, Roselli, Brown, and Ellsworth made for the port. Stretched between the two rafts was a two-football-field length of lightweight, slender, but very strong wire rope; the CRRCs drew apart until they were two hundred yards apart and the cable was stretched taut between them. The range to the plutonium ship closed, more gradually now as the cable's drag slowed the CRRCs. The swell was growing worse, sending the rubber boats up each gentle but irresistibly passing mound of water, then sending them sliding man-deep into the trough that followed.

The
Yuduki Maru
loomed out of the night, her bow wake a ghostly white mustache shining in the darkness, her hull a black cliff towering over the rafts, her superstructure a bulky white castle riding the sky above the aft third of the ship. The freighter passed squarely between the two CRRCs, the throb of its engines booming out of the silence of the night.

Murdock killed the CRRC's engine as the wire rope snagged against the huge ship's bow. With a jerk, the rubber boat's course was reversed; the SEALs clung to handholds set into the gunwales as the
Yuduki Maru
began dragging them relentlessly forward at eighteen knots, a sleigh ride that carried them up and down the ocean swell with enough velocity to send a cascade of spray over the CRRC's bow. Inexorably, the raft was swung toward the freighter's side. The SEALs were ready as the rubber side thumped heavily against the ship's massive steel cliff, fending off the big ship with gloved hands. Brown secured the raft in place with a limpet magnet and a length of strong line. Wake and ocean swell combined to send the CRRC bobbing up and down at the
Yuduki Maru's
side. Swiftly, Ellsworth dropped a hydrophone cable over the side; Roselli was already extending a long, telescoping aluminum pole with a hook on the end.

Fully extended, the climbing pole reached thirty feet, high enough that Roselli, supported upright by the others in the boat, was able to snag a deck stanchion with the rubberized tip.

“Solid,” Roselli said, giving the pole a hard, downward tug. The rise and fall of the raft at the ship's side threatened to knock both SEAL and extension pole into the sea, but he hung on, riding the motion with practiced skill. The
Yuduki Maru's
stern was only twenty yards astern, and the turning of her twin screws filled the air with a deep-throated throbbing.

Murdock nodded, then reached for the trigger for the hydrophone. This was a compact, battery-powered device designed to transmit data via a burst of high-frequency sound. Swiftly, he punched in a code group, three numbers that, transmitted through the water to the submerged
Santa Fe,
indicated that the SEALs had made contact with the
Yuduki Maru
and were going aboard.

On the other side of the freighter, MacKenzie and his people ought to be going through the same motions, but Murdock and the SEALs in his CRRC would operate as though they were alone. With the message transmitted and their gear ready, Murdock slapped Roselli twice on the shoulder and jabbed his thumb skyward. The chief nodded, then set one rubber-cleated sole against the
Yuduki Maru's
hull, took a boost as the CRRC rose sharply beneath him with the next wave, and started walking up the ship's side, pulling his way along the climbing pole as though it were a rope and the sheer, steel-plated side of the freighter were simply a glossy black wall of rock.

As Murdock watched Roselli climb, he unslung his H&K subgun, then strapped it into position on the front of his combat web gear. He pulled the mud plug from the muzzle and breach, then racked back the charging lever to chamber the first round.

One way or another, the issue was about to be settled.

Step by step, Roselli ascended the side of the
Yuduki Maru,
a human fly walking the sheer black cliff of the Japanese freighter.

His position was precarious, for the freighter's side bulged out over the raft, and as Roselli climbed the rigid extension pole, he was actually slightly head-down for part of the trip. Water slapped and boiled along the ship's side beneath him, and the first few feet were treacherously slick with a layer of slime. Once he was onto the part of the hull high enough above the water to be more or less dry, he still had to watch each step, for the steel plates were studded with rivets and made dizzy-ingly uncertain by the rise and fall of the vessel itself. Fortunately, the huge ship's motion in the water was far less than that of the raft at its side. Had the sea been much rougher, however, they would have been forced to come in by helicopter, as he had suggested back at Little Creek. An assault from the sea would have been out of the question.

All in all, however, Roselli had made more difficult climbs during training, scrambling hand-over-hand up dangling lines as instructors and other trainees played blasts of water from firehoses at him. Reaching the freighter's afterdeck, he paused to snap a hook attached to his web-gear harness to the stanchion rising just above his head. Then, swinging freely at the vessel's scuppers, he was able to use his hands to grab the edge and chin himself up.

As the new lieutenant had feared, there was a guard on the freighter's fantail . . . no,
two
guards. They carried AKM assault rifles, and leaning against the superstructure but within easy reach was the long, twin-handled tube of an RPG rocket launcher. There was light enough from the superstructure at their backs to illuminate both men. They were swarthy, one with a bushy, black beard, the other with at least a week's stubble showing on his face. They were wearing uniforms of some sort, nondescript brown or olive-drab clothing that could have belonged to almost any army in the world. One thing was clear. These two were not Japanese, which could only mean they had arrived off the
Hormuz
.

One, evidently, had just reached the fantail. Unslinging his AKM, he set it against the bench on which the other man was sitting.
“Salaam,
” the first man said. He reached for his left breast pocket.
“Segar mayl dareed?”

“Teshakor meekonam,”
the seated man replied. He accepted a cigarette from the other.
“Kebreet dareed?”

Roselli felt a small, inner chill. If they'd made their approach by helicopter, the bad guys would have been waiting for them. A single RPG round would have blown a helo right out of the sky as easily, as efficiently, as an American Stinger surface-to-air missile.

Not for the first time, Roselli wished he spoke Arabic . . . no, not Arabic. These men were Iranians and would be speaking Farsi. Whatever they were saying, it sounded like small talk. They appeared relaxed and slightly bored as they smoked and chatted, though both from time to time cast glances out beyond the railing and stanchions that circled the fantail. Once the seated man seemed to stare straight at Roselli, but the SEAL's blackened face and black balaclava, his eyes narrowed to slits to hide the whites and his motionlessness as he clung to the harness strap, all served to cloak him in invisibility.

He was careful not to meet the Iranian's eyes, however, even through narrowed eyes. The phenomenon had never been accepted by science, but Roselli, a combat veteran, was well aware that people could often
feel
, with what could only be described as a sixth sense, when another person was staring at them. Roselli had no idea whether or not this represented some kind of awareness beyond the usual five senses, or was simply a stress-induced heightening of hearing or smell to a near-magical degree, but he'd experienced it more than once himself. After his first quick appraisal, he kept his eyes lowered, staring at the deck close to the Iranians' feet rather than at the soldiers themselves.

He was not seen. The night-blind Iranians continued their conversation, puffing away at cigarettes that stank as powerfully as the mingled bilge-water stench and diesel fumes rising from the
Yuduki Maru'
s vents.

With one hand still clinging to the belaying strap, he used the other to unholster his sound-suppressed Hush Puppy pistol. Bracing the long barrel on the edge of the deck, he aimed carefully at the standing man first, then squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession.

The
chuff-chuff-chuff
of the weapon, barely audible above the rumble of the engines, stuttered as sharply as a burst of full-auto fire, and the triplet of 9mm slugs caught the Iranian with a closely grouped volley that tore open his throat and crushed his skull, pitching him back and to the side as a startling pinwheel of scarlet arced from his head. Without pausing to confirm the first kill, Roselli shifted aim to the other man, who remained seated, the lit cigarette dangling from half-open lips, his expression still blank and uncomprehending. The SEAL fired three more rounds, and these were mingled with a trio of silenced shots from the
Yuduki Maru's
starboard side.

The Iranian, pinned between volleys from opposite directions, lurched up high on his toes, groped with one clawed hand for the face that had vanished in a raw mask of blood, then crumpled to the deck a scant second after the first. An AKM clattered beside the bodies, then skidded to a halt. For a long second, there was neither movement nor sound beyond the throb of the freighter's engines.

Holstering his Hush Puppy, Roselli unsnapped a pouch at his belt, extracting a three-pronged grappling hook attached to a tightly rolled caving ladder. Securing the hook to another stanchion, he let the caving ladder unroll into the darkness below.