Murdock glanced up. Jaybird had killed his man as well, slitting the man's throat like an expert.

Turning the bodies over, the SEALs closed the regulator valves shut, stopping the flow of air from the tanks. Men on the pier following the divers' progress by their tell-tale bubbles on the surface might wonder at having lost the bubbles... but they would wonder a lot more if the rhythmic bubble patterns turned to two steady streams that no longer moved. The SEALs had just purchased a little more time while the people on the surface assumed that their divers had moved beneath the ship... ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps. After that...

Damn, where were the guys off the SDVs?

0116 hours (Zulu +3)

Inside the Bandar Abbas shipyard harbor

Coburn's breaths were coming in short, panting rasps now. The pain in his head was almost unendurable, and he had to stifle an urge to yawn inside his mask.

Damn this Hell Week shit. Push a guy until he's so damned tired he doesn't know whether he's coming or going, until he's about to fall asleep on his feet. Maybe it's time to ring the fucking bell, to get out now while the getting's still good.

Compass heading... what was his heading? Holding the wrist compass up before his mask, he tried to focus on the numbers. Two-three-zero... he needed a heading of two-three-zero. Damn! He was way off course! The next marker in the exercise was that way! How much time had he lost?

He had to keep moving, keep working. He wasn't going to quit, wasn't going to ring the damned bell. But God, he was so sleepy!..

A hand descended on his arm, yanking him to one side. Angrily, Coburn turned to fend off this unexpected attack from behind. The other diver was much bigger than he, and stronger. Coburn reached for his knife...

...and the move was expertly blocked. The other SEAL positioned himself so that his face mask was six inches from Coburn's. The SEAL captain found himself looking into MacKenzie's worried eyes.

MacKenzie. What was he doing here? He was supposed to be in the Persian Gulf, going after that Japanese freighter.

Then Coburn remembered where he was, and the realization was at once terrifying and embarrassing. He floated there in MacKenzie's grip, almost limp, as the SEAL master chief reached out and snagged another diver out of the gloom.

Ellsworth, the platoon's corpsman. Coburn watched as MacKenzie signaled to Ellsworth with his free hand, forming a "C", an "O," then holding up two fingers.

CO2. Coburn's symptoms of the past few minutes began to make some kind of sense. He'd been breathing awfully hard since they'd left the SDVs, partly because the long night swim was hard work, partly because — he made himself admit the fact now — he'd been excited. Maybe too excited. He'd started breathing so hard that he hadn't been ventilating his lungs properly... or possibly he'd simply not been giving his rebreather's CO absorbent time to purge all of the carbon dioxide from his gas mix.

He wanted to kick himself.

MacKenzie pointed toward the surface and Doc nodded. The only treatment for carbon-dioxide poisoning was to abort the dive at once. Coburn felt MacKenzie handing him off to Ellsworth. Together, they started for the surface.

0118 hours (Zulu +3)

Beneath the freighter Yuduki Maru

Bandar Abbas shipyard

Murdock and the other three SEALs had dragged the bodies of the two Iranians to the bottom and wedged them securely among the broken concrete blocks and discarded rubber tires beneath the pier, then returned to their back-to-back watch position. How long before the bad guys topside decided to come looking for their missing frogmen?

If the SDV team didn't show up damned quick, he would have to start thinking about what the four of them could do on their own.

Not that they'd be able to do a hell of a lot. A four-man Rambo-type assault was a possibility, but not a good one. SEALs got results by working as a team according to a carefully worked-out plan, not by going in with guns blazing in some kind of wild, death-or-glory banzai charge. Besides, though they were armed, they had no grenades, no explosives, and once on board they would be outnumbered at least ten to one. Getting themselves shot would accomplish exactly nothing. The smart move would probably be to return to the Boghammer and try to raise Prairie Rome on the sat comm. Presumably, the air assault portion of Deadly Weapon was still under way, even if the SDV attack had been aborted.

Or was it? It wouldn't be the first time that a nervous Pentagon or an indecisive Administration had gotten cold feet and called off a major attack at the last possible second. Maybe the SDV SEALs and the airborne assault had both been called off, but nobody had bothered to inform the four SEALs already in the harbor.

It was a lonely thought.

Then as if on cue, other divers materialized silently out of the inky water, familiar shadow-shapes in SEAL black gear vests and Mark XV SCUBAs. It was too dark to recognize features behind those full-face masks, but MacKenzie's big-boned lankiness was a welcome sight indeed.

Murdock counted them as they gathered around, and realized with a small stirring of alarm that there were only ten men in the group. The last sat-comm transmission from Prairie Home had said that there would be twelve. Who was missing?

There was no time to find out. With swift, silent efficiency, the SEALs parceled off into two groups. As in the first assault against the freighter, they would go aboard in two groups, both of them on the starboard side this time, to avoid being seen from the pier.

Unpacking their gear from the cargo sled, the SDV SEALs extended their hooked painter's poles and unshipped their weapons. In moments, the first two SEALs were on their way up the Yuduki Maru's side.

0121 hours (Zulu +3)

Inside the Bandar Abbas shipyard harbor

Doc Ellsworth broke surface close beneath a wood-and-concrete pier extending west from a massive stone jetty. Coburn surfaced a moment later, and Doc guided him to the algae-caked bulk of one of the pier's bollards.

This appeared to be a fueling pier. A Combattante II-class patrol boat was tied up alongside, and the sailors aboard were passing fuel lines across from the jetty.

The Combattante II was a French-made boat, about 155 feet long, weighing 249 tons, and carrying a complement of about thirty men. Originally equipped with harpoon missiles, the Iranian Combattantes were now armed only with one rapid-fire 76mm cannon in a turret forward and a 40mm antiaircraft gun aft. Doc was less worried about the patrol boat's armament than he was about the men working on her afterdeck.

But Doc's first thought was for his patient. As Coburn clung gasping to the bollard, Ellsworth pulled off the SEAL's mask, then examined his face closely in the dim light. There was a lot of bloody mucus hanging in clots from Coburn's nose... probably from a ruptured sinus. No froth at the nose or mouth, which was damned good because then Ellsworth would have to consider the possibilities of embolism or lung squeeze. Chances were, Coburn had been breathing so hard he'd popped a sinus.

Hard breathing almost certainly meant CO2 poisoning. The symptoms were subtle, but included drowsiness and loss of concentration, confused thinking, and sometimes the headache that might be associated with the dilation of the arteries in the victim's brain.

"How do you feel?" he whispered in Coburn's ear, just loud enough to be heard above the lapping of the water at the pier and the voices of the working party nearby. "Head?"

"Head hurt like a bastard for a while there," Coburn said. "It's better now."