A sound, footsteps on steel, made him look up. An Iranian soldier was on the ladder eight feet above him, clattering carelessly down the steps. The man wore a helmet and carried an AKM slung over his shoulder. He was watching his own feet, but before he'd taken another step, he glanced up and his eyes locked with MacKenzie's.

The Texan was already in motion, bringing up his H&K, triggering a single, sound-suppressed shot that punched brutally into the Iranian's jaw and up through his brain. The man's boots flew out from beneath him and he pitched back against the ladder, his helmet hitting a step with the clang of something heavy and metallic striking steel.

2319 hours (Zulu +3)

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Tetsuo Kurebayashi stood atop one of the low deckhouses on Yuduki Maru's weather deck, striving to regain the peace he'd felt with the universe in the days before the Iranians had come aboard. The stars were the same, including the Milky Way, though their full glory was masked by a layer of broken clouds slowly moving in from the east. Still, he felt uneasy, about the mission, about the Eikyuni Shinananai Tori's new allies, even knowing that this reinforcement by the Iranian troops had been planned a full year ago, as Operation Yoake had first begun to take shape in Tehran and in the training camps in Syria.

The Iranians were barbarians, all of them, stinking with sweat and filth and the sharp spices in their food, distracted constantly by the demands of their religion, careless in their manners and courtesy. Their leader, a colonel in their Pasdaran outfit named Sayyed Hamid, was a member of one of Iran's most powerful families, and he was no better than the rest, a great pig of a man who cared nothing for the Ohtori or its goals, who treated Kurebayashi and his brothers as hirelings, as mercenaries, useful now so long as they stayed out of the way.

He didn't like the Iranians, and he wondered why Isamu Takeda, the Ohtori leader who'd conceived and engineered Yoake-Go from the group's base in Syria, had deigned to work with them at all. Other nations in that same part of the world would have paid any price for the cargo riding beneath the Yuduki Maru's deck.

Kurebayashi heard a sound, a loud, metallic clang. Curious, he turned, staring aft across the freighter's tanker-like foredeck and the Iranians lying asleep or squatting in small groups. He couldn't see any — No! There! On a ladder on the ship's starboard side, close against the superstructure, one shadow grabbed another and dragged it down. For a shock-frozen instant, Kurebayashi wasn't sure of exactly what had happened, but as he played it back in his head, he was pretty sure he'd seen an Iranian soldier sprawling back against the ladder, and another figure dressed in black grabbing him. Commandos! It could be nothing else.

"Abunai!" he screamed in warning. Then he realized that not one in twenty of the Iranians aboard spoke a word of Japanese, so he snatched up his AKM, aimed it across the deck at the shadows moving next to the superstructure, and clamped down on the trigger.

Gunfire, urgent, insistent, and painfully loud, shattered the serenity of the night.

2319 hours (Zulu +3)

Weather deck

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Bullets sparked and shrieked off the steel plating of the ship's superstructure as MacKenzie, Garcia, and Higgins dropped to their bellies. Mac could see the flicker of the muzzle flash against the darkness blanketing the ship's forward deck, could hear the characteristic flat crack of an AK on full-auto. On the well deck between MacKenzie and the gunman, Iranian troops were stirring, a hornet's nest awakened by the sudden, savage volley. "Hammer Six!" Mac called. "This is One! It's going down!"

"Rog. I copy. Charlie Mike."

Charlie Mike: continue mission. Another burst of automatic gunfire screamed off the ladder four feet above MacKenzie's head. Levering himself up over the Iranian soldier's corpse, he aimed at the wink of the muzzle flash and triggered three quick bursts. The range was long for a subgun, even for an H&K. The hostile fire ceased, however, though there was no way to tell whether the enemy gunman had been hit or simply driven to cover.

"Let's move out," he snapped. Higgins and Garcia backed away from the ladder, then vanished through an open door into the superstructure.

Gunfire barked from the freighter's forward deck, as Iranians yelled at one another in urgent Farsi. MacKenzie switched to full-auto and loosed a long, sweeping burst, a pointed invitation to the hostiles to keep their heads down. Then he followed the others.

Inside the door, a companionway led down and aft, toward the Yuduki Maru's engine room.

2320 hours (Zulu +3)

Bridge access

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Murdock was already on an interior ladder leading from the 0-2 deck to the 0-3 deck, with Yuduki Maru's bridge just ahead. The chatter and crackle of automatic weapons fire was muffled inside the ship's superstructure, but still audible. Murdock signaled to Ellsworth, Brown, and Roselli. Follow me!

The door leading to the bridge was closed and unguarded. With no information on what was going on inside, Murdock silently signaled the others, having them take up positions on either side of the entryway. Reaching into one of his combat vest pouches, he extracted a flash-bang, grasped the arming pin, and nodded to Roselli.

The SEAL chief tried the lever on the door, which swung inward easily at his touch. Murdock yanked the flash-bang's cotter pin, flipped off the arming lever, and tossed the grenade through the opening.

An intense pulse of light, a rattling string of eight thunderclap detonations assaulted the senses as the flash-bang went off on the bridge. Roselli was through the door while the bulkheads were still ringing from the final blast, entering left to right with his H&K at the ready.

Murdock was immediately behind him, entering right to left. Smoke from the expended flash-bang wreathed the compartment. A shadow against the smoke resolved itself into an Iranian soldier leaning against a line of printers, his hands over his eyes, blood running from one ear. Murdock fired, a single round fired from chest-high that snapped through the man's throat, then punched a neat hole through the glass of the large bridge window at his back. Murdock fired again as the soldier collapsed, then swung to the right, weapon all the way up to his shoulder now. A second Iranian, rising from one of the track-mounted, sliding bridge chairs, staggered as a triplet of rounds from Roselli's H&K slammed him out of the chair and into the bridge console, arms flailing before he slumped to the deck in a spreading pool of blood. A Japanese seaman was kneeling behind the ship's wheel at the main control console, head turned to look back over his shoulder, his nose bloodied and his dark eyes wide with terror. Murdock had just dismissed the man as unarmed — a probable hostage — when another Japanese merchant sailor leaped behind the seaman, crouched, threw an arm around the man's throat, and held the muzzle of a SIG-Sauer P-220 automatic pistol against the man's skull.

"Tomare! Atoe sare!"

There was no time for negotiations. Clearly, the Japanese terrorist was unacquainted with SEAL marksmanship, a skill practiced constantly with a variety of weapons and from every position imaginable. More than enough of the terrorist's head was visible as he sheltered behind the hostage's body; Murdock shifted the aim of his H&K slightly and squeezed the trigger. The side of the tango's head exploded in a fine spray of blood and bone; the P-220 dropped from nerveless fingers and the terrorist slumped to the deck. The hostage let out a piercing scream and covered his eyes.