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 limey-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 SCUBA 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 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.
0040 hours (Zulu +3) Bandar Abbas shipyard
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 SCUBAs, 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 highfrequency 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 t
he ill-defined harbor bottom, and waited. SEALs were very, very good at waiting.
0052 hours (Zulu +3) SDV 1 Outside the Bandar Abbas shipyard
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. Now it was up to the rest of Third Platoon.
MacKenzie dragged the passenger compartment hatch back, then carefully extricated himself from the grounded bus. He had to operate almost entirely by feel; it was past midnight, and even at high noon, the visibility in the silty waters of the Gulf was never more than a few feet. A shimmering glow suffused from the surface overhead, creating a kind of ceiling to the watery world. There were floodlights up there, MacKenzie decided, illuminating the surface of the water at the harbor entrance. By that glow he could just make out the vague shadow of a net hanging vertically in the water above him.
The luminous dial of his depth gauge showed a depth of forty feet, well within the safe working range for Mark XV SCUBA gear. Carefully, he moved aft along the side of the SDV and opened the hatch to the cargo compartment. Other divers appeared in the water around him. Together, they broke out a small sled, a raft stretched across two small pontoons, to which their equipment and heavy weapons had been lashed. It took a moment to valve air from the sled's ballast tanks until it assumed neutral buoyancy. Then Holt and Frazier assumed positions to either side of it and began guiding it with gentle, flippered kicks toward the net. The other SEALs followed.
MacKenzie marked the net with two red-glowing chemical lights, their glow too dim to reach the surface but bright enough here to let the SEALs see what they were doing. Brown, Kosciuszko, and Fernandez produced cable cutters, and together they went to work on the submarine net.
In moments, they'd cut a six-foot gap through the net, marking the opening with the chemical lights. Leaving the three SDVs parked by the net, the twelve SEALs one by one slipped through the opening and into the inner harbor.
MacKenzie checked the luminous dial of his watch. It was 0058 hours. They were behind sched and would have to hurry. He wondered how Coburn was holding up, but when he caught sight of the Old Man sliding through the opening in the net, he looked okay. MacKenzie assigning himself as the captain's dive buddy, touched Coburn in query and received a jaunty OK hand signal in reply. So far, so good.
Kosciuszko was holding a black device the size of a paperback book before him as he swam, studying the LED readout on a tiny screen. Sensitive to the frequencies used by Murdock's homer, the hand-held sonar would guide the SEALs to their target.
With firm, thrusting kicks that felt good after three hours of immobility in the SDV, MacKenzie and the others began swimming through the jet-black murk. He thought he could already hear the water-transmitted clangs and bumps of construction work somewhere ahead.
0112 hours (Zulu +3) Beneath the freighter Yuduki Maru Bandar Abbas shipyard
In Vietnam SEALs had learned the art of patience, deliberately assuming uncomfortable positions in order to stay awake and alert for hour after dragging hour while waiting at the side of a jungle trail for the appearance of an enemy column.
Such extreme measures weren't necessary here, waiting in the black murk beneath the Yuduki Maru, though each of the four men was alert to the signs of drowsiness in himself and in the others. Drowsiness here, twenty feet beneath the surface, could be a Symptom Of CO2 poisoning, due to malfunction, chemical exhaustion in their Drager LAR V rebreather rigs, or simply from working too hard.
Each move they made was slow and deliberate; the bottom, obscured in drifting silt, was a tangled, potential deathtrap of concrete blocks, discarded truck tires, broken glass, empty packing crates, and slime-covered railroad ties, jumbled together in a kind of chaotic obstacle course. They'd taken up a bottom watch position, the four of them within touching distance, resting back-to-back so that they could see in all directions. There was little to see. They were underneath the wooden pier, close to one of the massive, algae-shaggy pilings that descended from the dim glow at the surface into the tarry muck of the bottom, and visibility was effectively zero.
In fact, while swaddled in his wet suit and dive gear, the only sense Murdock still had was hearing, and he was focusing all of his attention on the sounds echoing through the black water around him. The heavy-equipment noises from the Yuduki Maru's deck had ceased, but loud thumps and bumps continued to transmit themselves through the water at irregular intervals, and occasionally he could hear the creak and pop of wood shifting as men moved on the pier directly above his head.
And then he heard another sound ... one that made him reach back and urgently tap the other SEALS. It was a metallic, tinkling noise, a bubbling that came in short bursts of noise, followed by silence.
The SEALs' rebreathers were silent, giving off no air bubbles. What they were hearing was almost certainly a SCUBA rig ... no, two rigs, judging from the one-two, pause, one-two rhythm of the noise. Iranian divers ... and they were coming toward the SEALS.
0115 hours (Zulu +3) inside the Bandar Abbas shipyard harbor
Coburn didn't realize that he was in trouble until the thought struck him, with all of the impact of religious revelation, that he'd somehow forgotten what the mission was.
He'd been swimming steadily ahead through the silt-laden water, checking his wrist compass occasionally to maintain the assigned heading of three-two-zero degrees, but mostly relying on the dimly sensed shadows of the other SEALs around him. He was working harder than he'd expected. His muscles were still up to the task the SEALs had set for themselves, but Coburn found he was having to fight for air as he swam harder and harder, trying to keep up. The effort was much like that of Hell Week, a demanding test of stamina and willpower as the recruit's reserves were drained completely, then challenged by yet another seemingly impossible task.
He was thinking about Hell Week when he realized that he'd lost sight of the other divers. That in itself was not surprising, the silt in the water had been growing steadily thicker as the team moved deeper into the harbor, until the water was so murky that his dive buddy could have been six feet away and remained invisible. The shock came when he stopped to think about what to do next and realized that he didn't know why he was here. A training mission? Yes, that must be it ... though he had the nagging feeling that this operation was far more important then the usual SEAL
qualification dive. He shook his head, trying to clear it. How could he forget what he was doing in the middle of an exercise? There was a reason for that, but he couldn't remember what it was.
His head hurt, the pain throbbing with his accelerated heartbeat, and he was having trouble clearing his ears. The full mask squeezed uncomfortably against the borders of his face. His thinking felt ... muddy, somehow. And God! He was feeling so tired, so sleepy.
0115 hours (Zulu +3) Beneath the freighter Yuduki Maru Bandar Abbas shipyard
Murdock strained to catch the tinkling gurgle of the enemy's SCUBA rigs. Had the SEALs been discovered already? There was no way to tell. Possibly the Iranians had picked up the telltale pings of the sonar homer, though the high-frequency device had been designed to avoid the usual sound channels used by conventional sonar ears. More likely, it was a routine patrol, checking the Yuduki Maru's bottom for mines or listening devices, or sweeping the area for any signs of enemy frogman activity. The bad guys had to be a bit nervous after that first attempt to take the freighter back by seaborne assault.
Silently, Murdock spoke to the others with touch and shadow-shrouded gesture Roselli and Higgins, go that way ... Jaybird, come with me. Splitting into two teams of two, the SEALs circled left and right. It was always difficult to tell the source of underwater sounds, but the SCUBA bubble noise was sharp enough that the SEALs could localize it to the general direction of the shore. Most likely, the enemy divers had gone in near Yuduki Maru's bow and were approaching now along her bottom. Murdock drew his Mark II Navy knife and sensed Jaybird doing the same.
The sounds were closer now and sharper. That way. Moving out from under the pier, Murdock scraped along inches beneath the steel ceiling of the freighter's keel, trying to localize what he was now certain were the noises from two SCUBA regulators. They needed to be careful in their identification, since it was quite possible that the two SEAL teams could blunder into one another by mistake. Shadows moved a few feet in front of him, materializing out of the drifting silt.
Seal Team Seven 01 - Seal Team Seven Page 29