Jean and the other civilians all were in shock, uncomprehending, automatons shoved this way and that by the soldiers. Several of the boarders gathered around the women, leering at them and making jokes among themselves. Viktor tried to fight back when someone shoved him, and was clubbed to the deck with a blow from a rifle butt.

The man who'd shot Karl was tall and muscular, sporting a thick black mustache that hid his mouth. He gestured at all of them with the automatic handgun in his fist. "Kneel! All of you!" he snapped in English. "Here, in row! Hands on heads!"

Terrified, the prisoners obeyed as the soldiers prodded them into line on the deck. Jean found herself kneeling between a weeping, desperate Helga and one of Beluga's crewmen as the black-mustached man, obviously the Iranians' leader, strode down the line, inspecting each of them in turn. With him, startlingly, was a Japanese man wearing olive-drab shorts and a short-sleeved floral-print shirt, and carrying an assault rifle as though he knew how to use it. A Japanese... one of the plutonium freighter's crew? What in God's name was going on here?

The Iranian commander stopped in front of Gertrude. "American?" he asked.

"Nein," she said. "kh bin ein Deutscher." She stopped, licked her lips, then tried again in English. "I am... German. My passport is in..."

The dark man cut her off with a sharp gesture, then continued down the line. He stopped again at Helga, who was still crying uncontrollably, but said nothing. Instead, he looked her up and down, then turned and stared at Jean. She began trembling violently as she felt his eyes on her, and her legs grew so weak she could hardly hold her position. When he smiled at her, there was no humor in his eyes. "You," he said, moving in front of her. "You are certainly American."

How does he know? she wondered. Jerkily, she nodded.

Reaching out, he lightly brushed her bare, lotion-slick left breast with the backs of his fingers. She jerked back from the repulsive touch and nearly fell. Several of the watching soldiers chuckled unpleasantly.

"You Western woman really should learn modesty," the commander said thoughtfully. His English was excellent, though it carried a heavy accent. "By exposing your bodies in this shameful manner, you disgrace yourselves and your male relatives. You also present a considerable temptation for my men, who tend to regard such displays of female flesh as an indication of your moral character. Or lack of it."

The Japanese civilian whispered something to the commander, who nodded. Turning suddenly, the Iranian barked an order in Farsi. The soldiers advanced then, laughing, grabbing the women from the line, herding them forward toward the yacht's cabins. Rough hands groped and fondled Jean as she was propelled down the steps, grabbing at her breasts, buttocks, and thighs, tugging at the knots in the strings of her bikini bottom, then ripping the scrap of cloth away entirely. Gertrude screamed as a laughing Iranian soldier pranced about the galley, waving her briefs as trophy. Helga's bikini bottom had no ties, and they pinned her to the deck while one of them peeled the bottom off her thrashing legs.

Oh, Christ, they're going to rape us! she thought, but then the three naked women were shoved into a cabin and the door was slammed and locked behind them. The soldiers had already been here, rifling dresser drawers and smashing bottles of whiskey and gin discovered in the room's tiny bar.

Outside, she heard them shouting in Farsi and laughing as they went through the Beluga, smashing open every locked door in a joyful quest for loot. The Iranian officer was haranguing the male members of the crew, but she couldn't catch the words. Oh, God, what was he saying? What was he going to do to Paul?

Gertrude lay on the deck, trembling, trying to cover herself with her arms as she sank into shock. Helga, after a long moment, began stumbling about the cramped room, no longer crying but with a glazed expression fixed on her face as she began picking up torn and discarded articles of clothing and bits of broken glass. The room, Jean realized, had been the one occupied by Helga and her husband. "Karl," she mumbled half-aloud, "Karl doesn't like the mess. Poor Karl..."

Numb with terror, battling the shock that threatened to engulf her, Jean Brandeis sat on the bunk, her eyes fixed on the locked door. She had no illusions that any of them would be released, not after an incident that was nothing less than piracy on the high seas. There would be no phone call to the American embassy, no news report to the West save, possibly, a curt announcement to the effect that Beluga and her crew had been lost at sea.

She wondered how much longer they would be permitted to live, and what humiliation they would be forced to endure in whatever time was left.

1635 hours (Zulu +3)

Motor yacht Beluga

Indian Ocean, 380 miles southeast of Socotra

Tetsuo Kurebayashi listened impassively as Pasdaran Colonel Ruholia Aghasi continued shouting at the men kneeling before him on the deck. Kurebayashi spoke English — that language was how he communicated with the Iranians who spoke no Nihongo — but the colonel's words were too rapid for him to follow more than a word or two, and Aghasi kept alternating between English and German, of which Kurebayashi spoke not a word.

Unlike Sayyed Hamid, however, that fat pig of a Pasdaran colonel in charge of the Iranians aboard the Yuduki Maru, Aghasi was clearly a man of keen intelligence, who knew what he was doing and how best to achieve results. Though he couldn't understand the speech, he knew what Aghasi was saying, because Kurebayashi had come up with the idea and convinced the Iranian leader to try it just hours ago. Aghasi was the commander of a contingent of troops just arrived with the Iranian naval squadron; Kurebayashi had approached him, rather than the unimaginative Hamid, with his idea of seizing the Greenpeace schooner that had been dogging Yuduki Maru's wake for the past three weeks.

The speech was having the desired effect. Aghasi, the Ohtori leader noted, was playing the game well, waving the confiscated scraps of the women's bathing suits in front of the male prisoners with evident relish, gesturing frequently toward the cabin where the women had been taken, and at those of his men who were lounging about the well deck now with weapons very much in evidence. Through threats and bullying, the colonel had already gotten two of the prisoners to admit that two of the women were their wives; the dead man, apparently, had been husband to the third. A pity that he had been the one chosen by Heaven to serve as an example to the others... Still, those two would be enough.

Kurebayashi was a longtime student of American tactics. The Yankees had already tried a covert operation, slipping a small squad of commandos aboard the Yuduki Maru in an attempt to surprise her captors. That attempt had failed... though eighteen of the forty Iranian troops aboard had been killed or seriously wounded, and poor Shigeru Ota, one of Kurebayashi's Ohtori, had vanished in the fight. Their next move, he was certain, would be either another attempt to negotiate or an overwhelming show of force. Iranian sources had already reported the gathering of a sizable American naval task force south of the Arabian peninsula, between the Yuduki Maru and her destination; his guess was that they would try a frontal assault next, possibly behind the screen of a professional negotiator.

The Iranians, with their entire pathetic little navy, could not possibly hope to match the Americans ship for ship and gun for gun. The little Beluga and her activist passengers were the best weapon they could have to meet the Yankees' challenge, to force them to back down. All that was needed was some cooperation from the prisoners.