Movement behind the glass of the door leading to the starboard bridge wing caught Murdock's attention. Firing above the kneeling helmsman's head, he put three rounds through the glass and was rewarded by the sight of an Iranian twisting away, then falling against the outside of the door, leaving a smear of scarlet as he slumped below the bullet-holed window. Murdock heard the hard-voiced snap of sound-suppressed shots at his back. Ellsworth had just fired through the port wing door from his position at the entrance to the bridge, taking out the Iranian posted there.

Brown, coming in behind Roselli, had reached the bridge entrance to the communications shack. "Clear!" he yelled.

"Clear!" Roselli barked, standing astride the second dead Iranian.

"Clear!" Ellsworth called from the open door.

Murdock nudged the body of the first man he'd shot. The eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the overhead. "Clear! Roselli! Brown! Take the wings!"

Glass shattered in the forward bridge windows, and bullets whined and thudded among the overhead piping and wire conduits. Iranians on the forward deck could see the SEALs on the well-lit bridge easily and were firing at them as they rushed aft.

Then the machine gun mounted on the starboard wing of the bridge opened up, a long, raucous yammer shockingly loud after the harsh whisperings of the sound-suppressed H&Ks. Brown was wielding the weapon, a Type 62 GPMG on a pintel mount, sweeping the muzzle back and forth in broad arcs that lashed the forward deck with screaming lead. An instant later, Roselli opened up with the port machine gun, and the Iranians on the deck found themselves in a devastating, plunging cross fire. The wild shooting from the deck ceased, as a dozen Iranian soldiers scrambled for cover behind piles of wood, coiled cable, and any other cover they could find.

Murdock knelt beside the terrified Japanese helmsman. "You speak English?"

The man blinked at him, uncomprehending. "Utsu na! Utsu na!"

"Great," Murdock told him. "You're going to be all right, fella. Stay down."

The merchant sailor might not have understood the words, but he seemed to understand Murdock's tone and gestures. He lay flat on the deck. Murdock stepped behind him and, stooping down, dropped his knee into the small of the man's back, then grabbed his wrists. From the deck, the helmsman barked something, surprise mingled with hurt and anger in his voice, but Murdock swiftly secured the hostage's hands behind his back with a strip of white plastic that could be removed only with scissors or a knife. Each SEAL carried twenty-four of the disposable handcuffs in a vest pouch; standard operating procedure required them to cuff every non-SEAL they didn't kill. The helmsman was almost certainly a legitimate crew member of the Yuduki Maru, forced to steer the ship by his captors, but the short and sharp encounter with the tango holding a pistol to the guy's head could have been a charade, a way of planting one terrorist at least among the SEALS. Besides, with his hands tied, the guy was less likely to jump up at an inopportune moment and run into someone's line of fire.

"Sorry, fella," Murdock said gently, patting the hostage's shoulder and rising. "Until we can check your driver's license, we can't risk having you run loose."

Gunfire banged from the deck, was answered by a full-auto salvo from the starboard bridge wing.

"I don't know, Lieutenant," Ellsworth said. "Seems to me we weren't supposed to run into a fucking army on this tub." Another burst of gunfire from the deck punctuated his comment. Four more holes appeared in one of the slanted bridge windows, centered in small halos of crazed glass.

"You know what they say about Naval Intelligence, Doc. Contradiction in terms." He switched to the Pentagon's frequency. "Foreman, Foreman, this is Hammer Alfa."

Outside the bridge, gunfire flared and cracked in the night.

2321 hours (1521 hours Zulu -5)

Joint Special Operations Command Center

The Pentagon

"What is it?" Congressman Murdock said. "What's going on?"

None of the others with him in the room replied immediately. The atmosphere was charged with tension, and to make matters worse, the magic camera-in-the-sky pictures were gone now, the images lost when the satellite transmitting them had slipped below the horizon three minutes earlier. Murdock had only a hazy idea of how such things worked, but a staffer had patiently explained to him that morning that, while satellites could to a certain extent be repositioned in their orbits, those orbits were nonetheless dictated by certain laws of physics that not even Congress could rewrite. Once the KH-12 satellite transmitting those scenes had passed over the horizon at 3:18 P.m. Washington time, there would be an eleven-minute gap until 3:29 — when the only information coming to the Pentagon from the events unfolding aboard the Yuduki Maru would be the voice channels, monitored by an AWACS E-3A Sentry aircraft circling well to the north and relayed by communication satellite to Washington.

"Damn it," Congressman Murdock said again. "Someone tell me what's happening!"

General Bradley looked at him, and the corner of his mouth pulled back in a hard, quick, and humorless half smile. "Apparently, Hormuz was able to rendezvous with the Yuduki Maru sometime earlier today."

"Worst-case scenario," Mason added. "There are Iranian troops aboard that freighter. According to Hammer Bravo, it might be as many as forty men."

"Oh, God. Are we going to have to abort?"

"We'd rather not, Congressman," Admiral Bainbridge said, his voice cold. "We've gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to get our people onto those ships. Let's give them a chance, shall we?"

Though the air in the climate-controlled room was cool, almost chilly, Murdock found that he was sweating.

2323 hours (Zulu +3)

Bridge

Freighter Yuduki Maru

Bending over low to stay out of the line of fire, Murdock moved to the main bridge console, studying the array of computer terminals, instruments, and consoles.

The bridge arrangement of modern merchant ships had become more and more complex over the past decade, until they resembled something out of a science-fiction movie, but Murdock had been carefully briefed on the control systems layout of Yuduki Maru's main console. At the extreme right of the main panel, next to a machinery monitoring station, was a terminal and display screen, the freighter's cargo-monitoring console. He checked to see that the display was on, entered some memorized commands on the keyboard, then studied the glowing display of characters and graphics that filled the screen.

The characters were Japanese ideographs, but he'd been shown what to look for on the graphics, and what he saw was immensely reassuring. Yuduki Maru's cargo, stored in holds one and two, was still secure. Radiation levels in the hold were normal, there was no indication that the automated wash-down foam had been triggered, and all of the cargo hold seals were listed as intact. Apparently, no one had even tried to enter the cargo holds, and that lifted an enormous weight from Murdock's shoulders. One of several worst-case scenarios discussed back at Little Creek was the possibility that the terrorists had mined or booby-trapped the cargo.

If they hadn't been into the cargo hold, they couldn't have tampered with the plutonium.

But Murdock was taking no chances. Still working by rote, he entered another string of keyboard commands, and watched as the characters on the screen shifted from Kanji characters to English. With the United States insisting on a say in the security of the plutonium, the freighter's computer security had been programmed with both Japanese and English access, and the SEALs had been given the appropriate codes before the mission. He waited as a new screen came up, then began typing in a series of memorized commands.