"Rolling Prairie, Pickax One," Dilmore replied. "Hold fire, roger." He dropped the helo into a shallow bank to starboard.

"What do you think, Skipper?" Mobely asked. "Was that message for real?"

"Hell, it sounded like he was reading from a prepared statement. I think the poor bastard had a gun to his head."

"Yeah. Who's this Kohler guy anyway?"

"I don't..."

"Ninety-nine aircraft, ninety-nine aircraft" sounded over the radio, interrupting.

"Uh-oh," Mobely said. The call sign "ninety-nine aircraft" was military shorthand for all aircraft aloft, and a general order to all of them probably meant an abort. "That was a little too fast for my liking."

"Quiet," Dilmore said. "I want to hear."

"Ninety-nine aircraft, scrub Prairie Fire. Repeat, scrub Prairie Fire and RTB."

RTB — Return to Base. The brass was calling off the attack before a single shot had been fired.

"Aw, shit!" Mobely said. "They're letting the bastards get away with fucking murder!"

"Maybe they know something about it we don't," Dilmore said. "Cominright to three-five-oh. Oops. What's that?"

"What's what?"

"Sailboat trailing the Iranians, six, maybe eight miles back."

"Hell, that's probably the Greenpeacers."

"Rog. Let's have a closer look, okay?"

"Fine. You explain digressing from the flight plan to the CO when we get back."

"No problems. Hang onto your lunch."

The Marine SuperCobra dropped until its skids were practically skimming the waves, angling south toward the two-masted schooner motoring northward with its sails furled. Several men in civilian clothes stood on the aft deck, one of them at the wheel. As the helicopter circled at a distance, the men waved.

"That's the Greenpeace bunch?" Mobely asked.

"That's them. Beluga."

"They look okay."

"Yeah. They could also have a guy with a machine gun pointed at 'em, hiding in that hatchway in the deck, telling 'em to smile and wave."

"Whatcha want to do?"

"Shit. We can't land. We can't attack a boat full of hostages, if that's what they are. I guess we wave back."

Circling once more, the SuperCobra then peeled off toward the west, following the other helos of Pickax back toward the U.S.S. Nassau.

Prairie Fire was, Dilmore thought, a total bust. The Iranians had just pulled a bit of legal chicanery that might let them get their hands on the plutonium, the operation had the blessing of some guy from Greenpeace, and Uncle Sam was going to come out of this with egg on his face... again.

Damn. Why couldn't those SEALs have done the job right when they'd had the chance?

1215 hours (Zulu -5)

NAVSPECWARGRU-Two Briefing Room

Little Creek, Virginia

"Is the President aware that it will be a hundred times harder getting at the Yuduki Maru once it's in a hostile naval base?" Admiral Bainbridge asked. "It won't be a simple boarding operation at sea anymore. It'll mean a full-scale invasion."

They were gathered once again in the SEAL base briefing room. Captain Phillip Christopher, a staff aide for Admiral Kerrigan, had just brought the Special Warfare Command the news that Prairie Fire had been aborted. After Christopher had said his piece, Brian Hadley had informed them of the decision made by the President and the National Security Council to allow the Iranian squadron to pass the American ships now gathered south of Masirah unmolested.

"I'm sure the President has been advised of that fact by the Joint Chiefs," Hadley replied, but the CIA liaison officer didn't look happy. His once-neat gray suit was rumpled, and looking at the bags under his eyes, Paul Mason doubted that the man had had more than an hour or two of sleep in the past forty-eight. "For the moment, the military community is being asked to narrow its focus, to concentrate on the Greenpeace vessel Beluga, rather than on the Japanese freighter."

"Just what does Greenpeace have to say about all of this, Mr. Hadley?" Mason asked.

"They've not released an official statement yet," Hadley replied. "Privately, though, people at their European headquarters in Brussels have been discussing the situation with our ambassador there. They feel that there's a strong possibility that their people are being held hostage, that Kohler was being forced to make those statements against his will. They do not believe the story that Iran freed a hijacked ship any more than we do, and they certainly oppose having that plutonium diverted to Bandar Abbas." Hadley gave a grim smile. "Half of Europe is already panicking over what might happen if the Iranians decide to use the plutonium against their neighbors in the Gulf. They wouldn't have to build a bomb, you know. Plutonium is the most deadly poison known to man. Dispersing a few pounds of the stuff as dust in the air or sea could render vast stretches of the Arabian Gulf coast uninhabitable, poison over half of Saudi Arabia's fresh-water supply, even contaminate the region's oil fields for centuries. Iran won't need to build an atomic bomb to become the power in the region. What we haven't been able to determine yet is whether this thing is being orchestrated from Tehran, or whether it's the work of a military cabal, a handful of military officers seeking a power base to overthrow the mullahs."

"Hell, their four largest warships were protecting the Yuduki Maru this morning," Admiral Bainbridge pointed out. "If it's a cabal, it's a damned big one, one including their whole navy."

"We can't rule that possibility out," Hadley admitted.

"Haven't we learned anything from questioning the people aboard Hormuz?" Captain Coburn asked.

"Nothing definite," Hadley said. "Frankly, the officers and men aboard the Hormuz simply don't know that much. Their orders came from the Iranian Gulf Fleet Headquarters at Bandar Abbas."

"Who issued the orders?" Bainbridge asked.

"An Admiral Seperh Paydarfar," Hadley replied. "The Agency's still digging for information on Paydarfar, but he appears to be a fairly loyal senior fleet naval officer with good political connections in Tehran. No evidence yet that he might be involved in an anti-government plot.

"In any case, we think our best chance for detailed intelligence is going to come from the Beluga."

"That's a switch," Coburn said. Several of the other officers in the room laughed.

There was a long, history of, if not outright animosity, then at least hostile wariness between Greenpeace International and the U.S. Navy. Greenpeace had publicly attacked the Navy on more than one occasion — for deploying nuclear weapons aboard its ships, for routinely dumping jet fuel at sea during carrier landing operations, even — and this one went back quite a few years — for purportedly training dolphins to plant explosives against the hulls of enemy ships. For its part, the Navy tried to maintain a good public relations profile by remaining aloof, despite what often appeared to be a leftist-organized campaign against the Navy's programs. It never admitted either way, for instance, whether or not nuclear weapons were stored aboard any given ship, and used simple "no comment" statements to avoid verbal engagements with anti-nuke protestors.

Leftist or not, Greenpeace was clearly now being used by the Iranians for reasons of their own, a situation that could not make the organization very happy. Greenpeace had taken the lead in the international battle against Japan's plutonium shipments, and now it seemed that the organization was actually giving its blessings to the diversion of two tons of stolen plutonium to a nation that was not exactly a trustworthy member of the international arena.

"I imagine the people at Greenpeace aren't exactly happy about this," Hadley said. "They stand to lose a very great deal of prestige and credibility if the Iranians decide to use that plutonium. Even if Tehran just uses the stuff to blackmail its neighbors, it will be remembered that one of Greenpeace's European spokesmen claimed the Iranians were just helping out."