Now Murdock emerged from below deck into the baking heat of the Gulf sun and walked back to the helm. There was a somewhat lonely emptiness to the sky; American helicopters had continued to dog the Iranian squadron day and night until an hour earlier, when the freighter had officially entered Iranian territorial waters. Now the four SEALs were alone. "Looks like we're getting pretty close," he told Jaybird.

"For sure, Skipper. Maybe we should get shined up and squared away for inspection, huh?"

"Shit, Jaybird," Roselli called from the top of the deckhouse. "You look just fine to me!"

"You both need haircuts," Murdock replied, and the others laughed. None of the SEALs looked very military at the moment. All of them had removed their black gear and wet suits and were wearing pieces of uniforms scrounged from the Iranian dead before they'd been put over the side Saturday morning. Jaybird had stripped to the waist; just since yesterday, his California-boy tan had darkened to the point where his skin was as swarthy as that of any Iranian. To aid the disguise, he kept his pale, sun-bleached blond hair covered by a black Navy watch-cap. Roselli and Higgins both wore Iranian tunics that, unbuttoned and with the shirt-tails dangling, gave them the unkempt appearance of a pair of modern-day pirates... or a Pasdaran boarding party. Murdock had relieved Aghasi of his peaked officer's cap and tunic, complete with colonel's insignia, and aviator's sun glasses before packing the Iranian off aboard the helo. He hadn't had time to grow the colonel's bushy mustache as well, but to complete the deception he'd smeared his upper lip with a finger laden with camo paint. The disguise wouldn't fool anyone up close, of course, but through binoculars at a range of twenty meters or more, it ought to get by. The SEALs were banking on that peculiar aspect of human psychology that allowed people to see what they expected to see, rather than what was actually there.

Raising his own binoculars to his eyes, he carefully swept the horizon from west to east.

They were well into the northern portion of the Strait of Hormuz now. That wrinkled-looking mass of bold gray mountain rising to the north was Iran. Almost due west was the rocky, mountainous island of Qeshm, largest island in the Gulf, with its odd, cone-shaped rain reservoirs and impoverished-looking, ramshackle coastal villages. Through his binoculars, Murdock could pick out the anachronistic intrusion of radar dishes and blockhouses marking an Iranian Silkworm missile battery mounted on the erosion-streaked side of a barren hill. Camouflage tarps had been stretched between poles, shielding SAM sites and vehicle parks from the blazing sun... and from the probing eyes of American satellites.

Dead ahead, some fifteen miles across the sun-dazzled water, the port of Bandar Abbas — known simply as Bandar to the locals — rose between sea and mountains in blocks and tiers of white stone. A beneficiary of the wars, both trade and military, of the 1980s, Bandar was a large and modern city with a population of just over 200,000. Though the typically squalid tent cities and slums of most Middle Eastern cities cluttered Bandar's fringes, Murdock could make out the gleaming facades of several modern buildings above the noisome tenement hovels of the low-rent districts. Every building seemed in need of paint, however, and the dhows, fishing boats, and motor craft lining the waterfront were uniformly battered, sun-baked, and coated with ancient layers of filth and grime.

Farther west, Bandar Abbas's airport buildings were visible as gray and white blurs shimmering in the desert heat. Murdock could just barely pick out the shapes of several military aircraft there — F-4 Phantoms and F-5E Tiger IIs, for the most part, sold to Iran before the revolution — as well as the larger bulk of an Iran Air 727.

Returning his attention to the city's waterfront, Murdock examined several port facilities. One fronting the downtown area was clearly a commercial port and ferry dock; others were marinas occupied by high-sterned, lateen-rigged dhows and fishing smacks. Most of the military facilities appeared to be northwest of the city, tucked in behind the lee of Qeshm Island and the hook of the headland on which the city was built.

And that, clearly, was where Damavand was taking the Japanese freighter. Through the binoculars, Murdock identified a small shipyard between Bandar Abbas and the port of Dogerdan to the west, with dry-dock facilities, the looming skeletons of hammerhead cranes, the squat cylinders of POL storage tanks, and the long, low tent-roofed shapes of warehouses and machine shops. Numerous yard and service craft lay alongside sun-bleached wharfs; larger ships, a destroyer and a pair of frigates, were tied up alongside a fueling pier. Patrol boats and landing craft were everywhere, almost too numerous to count.

Shifting the aim of his binoculars again, he studied the stern of the Yuduki Maru. A large number of Iranian soldiers were visible on her upper deck, and the sounds of gunfire, single shots and full-auto, carried faintly across the open water. Many of the soldiers were firing off whole magazines into the sky, celebrating their victory over the Great Satan and his minions. It was unlikely that they'd been told anything about the politics of their mission, other than that it would be a blow against the hated Americans.

"Better get your celebrating done now, you sons of bitches," Murdock said softly. "You might not have the chance later."

"Hey, Skipper," Roselli called from his perch atop the deckhouse. "What do the rules of war say about you wearing a Pasdaran colonel's uniform?"

"Oh, not a whole lot, Chief. The usual hearts-and-violins stuff about piracy, hanging from the neck until dead, drawing and quartering."

"Yar!" Roselli growled. "We be pirates!"

"Aye," Higgins added, clambering up out of the companionway. "Break out the skull and crossbones!"

"You guys're pirates, all right," Murdock replied, continuing to study the Yuduki Maru through his binoculars. It looked like a deck crew forward was casting off the tow from Damavand, though from this angle it was a little hard to be sure. No doubt they'd decided that it made better propaganda for the freighter to be taken into her berth under her own steam, even if she did have to limp along on one screw.

Higgins joined him on the well deck. "Skipper?"

"Yeah, Prof. What's up?"

"I'm not sure," the slightly built SEAL replied, "but I think it involves us." Higgins had been manning the yacht's communications shack almost continuously since they'd taken Beluga, not only transmitting intelligence, but also eavesdropping on the Iranians. The radio-silence orders had applied to all of the ships in the squadron, but there'd been plenty of traffic coming out of Bandar Abbas, and from other warships in the area.

"Okay, you know I don't have much Farsi," Higgins said. "Just Arabic. But I could follow enough to know that they've been trying to raise us for the past five minutes or so. If I had to take a guess, I'd say they started out by telling us where to go, then started telling us to heave to."

"Okay, Prof, thanks. It's nothing we weren't expecting."

"Stick with the radio silence then?"

"Absolutely. Damned thing's bust, right?"

"Can't hear a thing, Skipper."

"Good. Hang tight a sec." Pulling a notebook from his pocket, Murdock began writing quickly, filling three pages with his observations of the port approaches, the military aircraft on the runway, the ships and patrol boats in the harbor, the Silkworm and SAM batteries on Qeshm. Tearing off the pages at last, he handed them to Higgins. "You read all that?"

"Sure. No sweat."

"Transmit that ASAP, coded burst through MILSTAR. Repeat it until you get an acknowledgment."

"Aye, aye, Skipper."