There was simply no way any enemy could get at the plutonium in Yuduki Maru's hold. Koga allowed a rare smile to crease his lips. It promised to be an extraordinarily boring voyage.
"Captain!" the helmsman shouted, pointing to port. "Look!"
Koga looked, and had trouble absorbing what he was seeing. A column of water hung suspended at Shikishima's side, descending across her deck like a blanketing mist. In the next instant, the escort vessel seemed to arch from the water like a stretching cat; the thunder of the detonation reached Yuduki Maru a second later, a piercing roar that assaulted the ears and rattled the glass in the bridge windows. Shikishima dropped with nightmare slowness back into the sea, her back snapping as she struck, mingled black smoke and orange flame mushrooming into the sky above her deck.
Koga watched, transfixed, horrified. What was happening? Contradictory thoughts chased one another through his head. The Shikishima's boilers had blown up. She had struck an old mine adrift since some long-ago war. She had been torpedoed. Torpedoed! A second blast tore through Shikishima's stern quarter, hurling fragments — boat davits, life rafts, stanchions, men — hundreds of meters through the air. The Safety Agency's escort could not possibly have struck two mines. Somewhere in that empty sea, a submarine was firing torpedoes at the flotilla!
"Captain!" the helmsman wailed. "What should we do?"
Do? If they stopped to pick up survivors, the next torpedo might well slam into Yuduki Maru's hull, with disastrous results. Indeed, a torpedo might already be on the way, streaking unseen toward the freighter beneath the ocean waves.
"Speed... more speed!" Koga said. He reached for the intercom microphone hanging on its hook beneath the forward bridge window, and froze, hand extended, as he saw the drama unfolding on the forward deck.
The five security men down there had raced as one to Yuduki Maru's port railing, staring at the stricken Shikishima, pointing and calling excitedly to one another. At their backs, unnoticed, the lone galley hand had reached into the burlap bag of vegetables and was extracting the gleaming black length of an AKM assault rifle.
Before Koga could react, before he could think of shouting warning, the crewman opened fire on full automatic from a range of less than five meters. Security personnel jerked and twisted. One lurched forward and fell over the side, as the others groped for slung weapons, dropped twitching to the deck, and died.
The intercom forgotten, Koga reached instead for the ship's alarm button. He slapped it, and the raucous blast of the emergency alarm blared from the bridge speakers and throughout the ship. The security officer stationed on the bridge unholstered his pistol and took a step forward. "Captain," he said, and then one of the doors leading onto the bridge from aft burst open, and two wild-eyed men exploded from the passageway behind it. One held an Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun, the other an AKM. The one with the Uzi triggered the weapon, and 9mm slugs tore half the security officer's skull away, pitching him against the bridge window in a spray of blood and shattering glass. The other ignored the rest of the bridge crew, but hurried to the door leading to the ship's communications center.
"Come out! Come out!" he shouted, but the communications officer and those standing watch with him must not have moved quickly enough to suit him, for almost immediately the AK opened fire, a hammering fusillade that was deafening in the confines of the bridge. There was a long, drawn-out scream, a second burst of automatic fire, and then only the rasp of the ship's emergency alarm.
"Kill that noise," the man with the Uzi growled, and he held the weapon's muzzle a few centimeters from Koga's head.
Koga complied instantly. He had no doubt that these madmen would kill everyone on the bridge if they showed the slightest resistance.
It dawned on Koga, belatedly, that the man with the Uzi was his own fourth officer, Tetsuo Kurebayashi. The gunman emerging with a sadist's grin from the communications center was Shigeru Yoshitomi, a lowly cargo handler.
"Chikusho!" Koga said as the alarm strangled into silence. "Damn you!" It seemed inconceivable, impossible. Terrorists on his ship, members of his own crew! "What is it you want?"
"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.