The CIA man took Kerrigan's place at the podium. "Thank you, Admiral. I have little to add at this point, except for an interesting development that was telexed back to Langley from intelligence officers aboard the U.S.S. Nassau.
"It turns out that one of the Japanese crewmen retrieved by Lieutenant Murdock's people is, in fact, one of the original terrorists who seized the Yuduki Maru."
A stir ran through the listeners in the room. This was new, and unexpected.
"The man Murdock rescued from the freighter's bridge is who he claims to be, Jiro Kurosawa, a merchant marine employee of the company running the Yuduki Maru.
"The other man, however, who was intercepted near the freighter's engine room by, um, Chief MacKenzie, has been positively identified by Kurosawa as one of the new merchant seamen who produced concealed weapons last Wednesday and seized the ship.
"While the prisoner has not yet talked, his fingerprints were faxed to Langley, where they were matched with those of Shigeru Ota, a low-ranking member, a soldier really, of the Japanese Ohtori."
"Ohtori?" Kerrigan asked, interrupting. "What the hell's that?"
"A new and radical offshoot of the old Japanese Red Army. 'Ohtori' corresponds roughly to the West's 'phoenix."'
"The fabulous bird reborn from its own ashes," Mason said. He spoke softly, more to himself than to anyone else in the room, but Hadley heard him and nodded. "Exactly. The JRA was one of the more extremist terrorist groups of the seventies. They were behind a number of terrorist incidents but are probably best remembered for the Lod Airport Massacre in Israel in 1972, where they killed twenty-six people. In the early eighties their leader renounced violence as a political weapon, but they reportedly are still based in the Middle East. Ohtori may be a pro-violence splinter group with their own agenda."
"One working with the Iranians?" Admiral Bainbridge asked.
"Either with the Iranians, or with an Iranian faction," Hadley replied. "The JRA has reportedly been based in the Middle East ever since the early seventies, with training camps in Libya and Syria. Though they've been more closely associated with the PFLP and other Palestinian groups, it is possible that they've taken up the cause of the international Shiite revolution sponsored by Iran." Hadley ran one hand through his untidy fringe of white hair. "Whatever their goals, we can be certain that they are inimical to Western interests. They are anti-Israel, anti-American, and in favor of overthrowing the established order by armed revolution. It could be that they've decided to provide some additional arms to the revolution in the guise of the two tons of plutonium on that ship."
"What about the Greenpeace schooner," Admiral Bainbridge asked him. "What's her name? Beluga."
"We've not been devoting satellite time to them, of course," Hadley told him. "But our AWACS radar surveillance pinpoints them still on Yuduki Maru's tail, about twenty to thirty miles astern."
"Someone should warn them off," Captain Coburn pointed out. "I'd hate to see more civilians mixed up in this."
"Actually, they've been quite useful so far," Hadley said. "They called in the original report after Shikishima was sunk, and they've been filing position reports daily ever since."
"Sure, but we have satellites to tell us where the freighter is. And these people are going to draw a lot of unwanted publicity onto our operation."
"Actually," Hadley said, "while there was some legitimate concern over media publicity during Operation Sun Hammer, the Security Council has decided that Beluga's presence in the area can become an asset."
"Christ," Mason said. "How?"
"First off," Hadley replied, "the negative publicity if we move in and order Beluga out of there could generate adverse world opinion. Beluga is registered to Greenpeace, but her owner of record is a German millionaire named Rudi Kohler. He's one of the top eight or ten people in the Green Party movement, a prominent anti-nuclear activist and he's a big name in the European news media. Owns half a dozen major papers and news magazines in Germany, France, and Italy. We barge in and order him out of there, and I guarantee that we're going to be accused of censorship, police-state tactics, and probably wife-beating as well.
"On the other hand, if Kohler is present when the U.S. Marines seize the Yuduki Maru and prevent an eco-disaster, our role in this affair will be seen in a positive light."
"And what happens," Admiral Bainbridge said slowly, "if something goes wrong in front of these people? If the terrorists blow up the freighter, for example, and end up contaminating half of the East African coast?"
Hadley gave him a humorless smile. "In that event, Admiral, I'm afraid all of the public relations in the world won't help. And we'll have more to worry about than Rudi Kohler's newspaper syndicate.
"That's all that I have at the moment, if there are no further questions. I will, of course, pass on further developments as they become available." He stepped back from the podium. "Admiral Kerrigan?"
"Thank you, Brian." Kerrigan again changed places with the Agency man. "Okay, gentlemen. I'm sure you're all eager to know just what part the Navy Special Warfare community is going to play in Operation Deadly Weapon."
Here it comes, Mason thought. He had the distinct feeling that Kerrigan was setting up the SEALs as part of his own power play. The way he'd phrased it, "is going to play," suggested that NAVSPECWAR was now, at last, right where he wanted it.
"Since SEAL Seven's Third Platoon is already aboard the Nassau, they will be temporarily assigned to II MEF, under the command of General Vonnegut. They'll be pretty busy for the next few days as they undergo their mission debriefs. I will pass the word to Admiral Winston and General Vonnegut that they will be available for Deadly Weapon, if the site commanders deem their participation advisable. Yes, Admiral?"
"Ah, Admiral Kerrigan," Bainbridge said. "Wouldn't it be advisable to deploy additional Special Warfare groups to the region? Captain Coburn could have the rest of SEAL Seven in place by-"
"No, Admiral, it would not," Kerrigan said. "The Marines have their own special recon units, of course, and I very much doubt that your people could add much to the overall force picture. My staff will advise you of further developments. That is all."
With a gesture of his head, he gathered in his retinue of aides and staffers and vanished from the room. For several moments, a low buzz of conversation rumbled among the SEAL personnel who remained.
Kerrigan, it was clear, had just scored the victory over the Special Warfare community that he'd been searching for for years; SEAL Seven's failure aboard the Yuduki Maru had given him the leverage he needed to all but exclude the SEALs from Deadly Weapon.
Mason thought about the hearings on the U.S. Navy SEALs still going on up in Washington and wondered how much weight Kerrigan's faction now carried on Capitol Hill.
The entire future of the SEALs might have just been settled once and for all, and settled with all of the finality of a door slamming shut.
2310 hours (Zulu +3) U.S.S. Nassau Off Ras Asir, Somalia
"Hey, Skipper?"
"Hello, Mac. Whatcha got?"
Murdock was standing on Nassau's port-side elevator, which had been lowered to the hangar deck position. At his back, through the cavernous maw opened in Nassau's sheer, vertical side, lights glared from the overhead over a tangle of helicopters and AV-8 Harrier jump-jets. The aircraft were packed so closely that their order could have made sense only to the ship's "Mangler," the officer in charge of moving aircraft about the interior of the huge amphibious assault ship and up the elevators to the flight deck above. The sense of chaos was heightened by the men serving the machines, and by the dozens of low-slung "mules," vehicles that served as shipboard jeeps and tow trucks, skittering among the shadows.
It was more peaceful out here, Murdock thought, leaning against the elevator platform's safety railings beyond the spill of light from the glaring cavern of Nassau's interior. Twenty feet above the dimly seen froth of the LHA's wake, he could hear the hiss of the water against the assault ship's hull, the powerful
throb of her screws astern.
"I don't mean to disturb you, Lieutenant," MacKenzie said. He sounded hesitant.
"No problem, Chief. Come on out and enjoy the view."
The view was spectacular, and one Murdock never tired of. Though the ship itself cut off half of the sky, the other half, visible to port, was a glory of stars undimmed by city smog or street lights. Aft, half a mile astern in Nassau's wake, the running lights of LPD 4, the U.S.S. Austin, added red, green, and white exclamation marks to the Milky Way's glowing message.
"Thanks, Lieutenant," MacKenzie said, walking up and delivering a salute that Murdock returned. He was wearing a chief's khaki uniform and flat black-billed cap with a CPO's anchor-and-USN insignia, both acquired at the ship's store just that afternoon. "I got the guys bedded down. Weapons stripped and cleaned, gear stowed. The ship's store was able to provide dungarees or khakis for everyone."
"That's good." Murdock plucked at his own new khakis, distinguished by the railroad ties on the collar, and by the officer's eagle, shield, and crossed-anchor insignia on the cap. "I was beginning to think we were going to be running around in our wet suits for the rest of the cruise."
Mac looked off into the darkness astern. "Hey, maybe you can tell me. Scuttlebutt says one of those slants we scooped up was a tango. Know anything about that?"
"Sorry, Chief. They haven't told me a damned thing."
It was true. Murdock had heard the same stories, spreading now among the enlisted men and junior officers aboard the Nassau, but no one had been able to confirm them, and when he'd asked the intelligence officers they'd simply smiled and politely told him that their investigations were continuing, and that he would be informed if there was anything about the rescued men he should know.
"I get the impression we've been sent to Coventry, Sir."
"It's possible, Chief. I wouldn't worry about it, though. You and the men all did everything that was expected of you, and more." He grinned, though he didn't know whether MacKenzie could see his expression in the poor light. "If anyone gets the axe for the Sun Hammer screw-up, it'll be me."
"Screw-up, Sir?"
"Hell, yeah, screw-up. We didn't get the freighter, did we?"
"We locked up the Jap computer and we fucked up their starboard propeller shaft. That counts for something, Sir, don't it? And we brought back those two slants. Even if neither one's a tango, that's bound to give G-2 some pretty solid intel on what's happening on that ship."
"Maybe. But we failed to carry out our orders, Chief. That's something CO-NAVSPECWARGRU-Two and CO-MIDEASTFOR don't like to hear. Especially with so much riding on it."
He'd spent most of the past twenty minutes watching the stars and the ship's wake and wondering how this was all going to shake out. His father, conceivably, could use the episode as additional ammunition to force him out of the SEALS, if only because a congressman's son couldn't be permitted to embarrass his father; hell, Captain Coburn might be under pressure from half a dozen different directions right now, all urging him to dump Blake Murdock. Unless G-2 had more questions for him and the team tomorrow, he expected they'd all be heading back to CONUS by sometime tomorrow afternoon. From what he'd heard from the Marine officers aboard the Nassau, II MEF would be handling things from here on out.
"Well, if you ask me, Lieutenant," MacKenzie said, "you did a hell of a job out there. The guys think so too, all of 'em. I just thought you should know that." He saluted again, turned on his heel, and strode back onto Nassau's hangar deck, leaving a stunned Murdock saluting empty air.
MacKenzie's respect, and the respect of the other SEALs of the platoon, meant more to him right now than an official commendation and "well done" from Admiral Bainbridge himself.
It was time, he decided, to stop thinking about his own future and make sure his men knew his feelings about them.
Turning away from the night, he followed MacKenzie back into Nassau's brightly lit belly.
Wednesday, 25 May
1610 hours (Zulu +3) Motor yacht Beluga Indian Ocean, 380 miles southeast of Socotra
They'd crossed the equator in the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday, some thirty-six hours earlier. As they kept motoring north, sails furled, Jean had continued to hammer at Paul about what was happening, but neither Paul nor their hosts seemed to have any idea about what was really going on.
"It must be terrorists," Karl had said time after time. "It Must be terrorists." But beyond the mute and tragic testimony of those bodies adrift in the oil slick a week before, there'd been no announcement, no official word of any kind except for continuing stories over the news networks about Yuduki Maru's mysterious change of course. Other news bulletins, from Madagascar and the Seychelles, had reassured Beluga's crew that it was indeed the plutonium ship they were still tracking on their radar, but the only solid reporting had been what they themselves had called in.
And Jean knew just how thin that information really was. For several days now, Paul, Rudi, and Karl had been arguing among themselves about whether or not to take Beluga in close to the Japanese freighter in order to give her a visual inspection and, possibly, hail her crew. Paul and Karl were afraid that if the ship had been hijacked, they would be putting Beluga and all aboard at risk. One burst of machine-gun fire, and the yacht would be transformed into a sinking wreck, with everyone aboard her dead. Rudi continued to argue that terrorists wanted nothing more than a forum where they could air their political grievances and who better to provide such a forum than Rudi Kohler? Although Rudi was Beluga's master, however, he'd held back from simply deciding to take them in. Jean thought that, despite his reporter's zeal, he too was frightened of what they'd stumbled into.
The women, for the most part, kept out of it, though they speculated among themselves endlessly. The sunbathing sessions continued, though for short periods only and never in the middle of the day. In late May, the sun this close to the equator could be ferocious.
Terrorists. Jean wanted nothing to do with terrorists. She was still certain that she'd heard gunfire on Monday night, and the memory haunted her. Rudi insisted that she couldn't possibly have heard anything across thirty miles of open ocean. She'd heard something, though, just before midnight, a low, dull, double boom out of the north that might have been thunder ... except that the sky had been perfectly clear.
The final decision had been to get closer, but not too close. According to the latest news reports--overflights by aircraft bearing the world's top news personalities were now daily, almost constant events--Yuduki Maru had suffered some kind of damage to her engines and was limping along now at about ten knots. During the night, Beluga had easily closed some of the distance between the two vessels, and the Yuduki Maru was now periodically visible as a dark speck on the northern horizon. According to Viktor, they were less than ten miles away.
"Jean!" Helga waved to her from the beach blanket she was sharing with Gertrude on Beluga's sun deck. "Jean, come join us!"
Waving back, she climbed the short ladder to the sun deck. She was wearing bikini briefs and nothing else; somehow, during these past few days, she'd lost the shyness that had tormented her through the first couple of weeks of the cruise.
Was it the vague sense of danger focused on the plutonium ship that had changed her? Or had the uncertainty simply let her grow closer to the others, until they were more like family than acquaintances? Dropping cross-legged onto the towel, she accepted a bottle of sun block from Gertrude and began lathering it on.
"So what's the word?" Helga wanted to know. "Anything?"
Jean had just come from Beluga's tiny radio shack, their sole link to the outside world via the sat-comm antenna atop the mainmast.
"CNN just broke a story that American commandos tried to board the plutonium ship the other day and failed," Jean replied. "The Pentagon is denying it."
"What about ... them?" Gertrude asked, jerking a thumb forward toward the distant freighter. By now, everyone aboard Beluga was assuming that the Yuduki Maru had been
hijacked by terrorists, but no one was quite willing to speak of that possibility openly. The faceless hijackers, whoever they were, remained "them" or "those people."
"Nothing," Jean said. "Though there was one interesting related tidbit. It seems Iran is accusing the United States of hijacking one of its navy ships. An oiler named Hormuz."
"Ach," Helga said, disgusted. "Who is terrorizing who?"
"The White House and the Pentagon have both denied the incident."
"Of course." Gertrude made a face. "Militarists!" She gave the word, which meant the same in German as in English, the full, throaty force of its German pronunciation, turning it into a swear word. "When is your country going to learn that the Cold War is over, that militarism is a thing of the past?"
Jean nodded toward the distant freighter. "Maybe when those people learn it doesn't pay to use terror as a political weapon."
"But what could be the point of capturing an Iranian ship?" Helga wondered. "Did they get the wrong target, perhaps?"
Jean shook her head. "I wish I knew. None of it makes much sense. She was staring thoughtfully toward the north, where something was moving against the ultramarine surface of the sea.
"Jean?" Helga asked. "What is it?"
It was a ship ... no ... it was too small and much too fast to be a ship. It was bow-on, driving the white mustache of a sweeping wake before it as it slap-slapped across the waves toward the Beluga at high speed. In moments, however, it grew from a toy to a sleek, shark-lean craft at least twenty feet longer than the Beluga, with the huge, white sphere of a radar housing perched atop its deckhouse, and with a single turret on the foredeck sporting a long and wicked-looking cannon. A flag with three horizontal bars, green, white, and red from top to bottom, fluttered at the masthead--the flag of revolutionary Iran.
The women stared at the patrol boat, stunned by the suddenness of its appearance. The men remained motionless as well, all but Viktor, who dashed for the companionway going down to Beluga's lower decks. By the time he reappeared, moments later, a bolt-action rifle in his hands, the Iranian craft had circled about and was drawing close to Beluga's starboard side.
Seal Team Seven 01 - Seal Team Seven Page 21