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?"

"Baleh. Eenjaw."

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.

In a moment, he sensed the tug of someone climbing the ladder and knew the others in the CRRC were on their way up to join him.

2315 hours (1515 hours Zulu -5)

Joint Special Operations Command Center

The Pentagon

In Washington it was mid-afternoon, but the overhead lights in JSOCCOMCENT had been turned off, giving the windowless room the feel of night. The only illumination came from the green-glowing phosphorescence of a large television monitor.

Congressman Charles Fitzhugh Murdock leaned forward, studying the monitor with keen interest. The image on the screen, an oblique view of the Japanese freighter Yuduki Maru glowing in pale, green-white light, was real-time, an infrared image transmitted from a satellite passing south over the Indian Ocean. The camera angle slowly changed as he watched.

"What is it?" he asked. Ten other men were in the room, civilians and high-ranking officers of several military services, clustered with him about the monitor. "What did I just see?"

A slender civilian first introduced to Murdock only as "Mr. Carter" pointed at ghost figures now slipping over the Yuduki Maru's taffrail. "Those tiny flashes of light were gunshots, Mr. Congressman," he said. He was holding a telephone receiver in his hand and had been whispering into the mouthpiece at intervals ever since the drama had begun unfolding.

"Two terrs are down," a Navy captain, Paul Mason, said. "The rest of our people are climbing on board now."

Murdock suppressed the churn of acid fear in his belly those words raised. It was a lot worse standing in this room ten thousand miles away, watching the action unfold on a television screen like the make-believe gunplay of some computer game.

General Bradley, the big, bluff Air Force officer who appeared to be in charge of this room, pointed at the screen. "Damn," he said, chewing on the end of an unlit cigar. "Can't we get a better view on this thing?"

Carter spoke quietly into a telephone, and Congressman Murdock realized he must be in direct communication with whoever was controlling the spy satellite. A moment later, the image of the ship expanded, the view zeroing in on the aft third of the ship. The glowing ghost figures of nine men, two of them prone on the deck, were barely distinguishable against the heat-glow of the ship itself. The imagery remained clear, but the satellite's motion was more apparent. The view kept slipping to the right, forcing the unseen controller to shift the camera angle left in compensation.

It had, Murdock reflected, taken all but an act of Congress to get him here, into this shielded, buried room within the Pentagon labyrinth, impregnable behind four separate security checkpoints. Captain Granger had been his passport into this underground shadow-world, and he'd had to do a fair amount of arm-twisting to pull it off. "Look," he'd told Granger the day before. "The SEALs need a friend on the HMAC, someone who's willing to slug it out with Farnum and his kill-the-military cronies, and I'm it! But damn it, you've got to give me some cooperation on this. Let me see what it is I'm supposed to be defending."

Even yet, Murdock wasn't certain what strings Granger had had to pull to get him into this room. The very existence of this type of high-detail, real-time satellite imagery was still, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a jealously guarded secret, one that most members of Congress were not privy to. The pictures were like magic, the freighter a ghost ship of green and white light, illuminated by her own heat. Moments before, he'd watched the approach of two tiny rafts to their far larger target, the heat from their laboring engines shining in the infrared image like tiny stars.