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 through 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."

"Ja, Herr Brandeis." 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.

Thursday, 19 May

1512 hours (Zulu -5)

NAVSPECWARGRU-Two Briefing Room

Little Creek, Virginia

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, CONAVSPECWARGRU-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.