"Hammer Alfa-six," he whispered over his mike, using Murdock's op call sign. "This is Alfa-one. I'm starboard side, aft of the main deck. I've got twelve tangos in sight, and I can hear more of 'em moving around above me. What the hell's going down?"
"Wait one."
"Rog." Murdock sounded tense. He must have just encountered another Iranian guard.
Damn, how many troops had boarded the plutonium ship off the Hormuz? Half, at least, must be asleep below decks, probably in the new quarters constructed for Yuduki Maru's security contingent. Others were on watch throughout the vessel's interior. And there were still the original Japanese terrorists to consider. MacKenzie added up the likely numbers and arrived at a figure of between forty and fifty bad guys... not very good odds.
Still, the SEAL squad had the advantage of surprise, and they'd already whittled down the enemy strength somewhat. In Vietnam, he knew, it had been commonly claimed that five or ten SEALs could take on as many as two hundred enemy troops and expect to win, thanks to surprise, superior training, and superior technology.
He didn't savor challenging those kinds of odds here, however. Vietnam had been a different kind of war, with room for the SEAL teams to pick and choose their ambush sites, their battles, and their targets. Here, the SEALs were at a distinct disadvantage, hemmed in by the narrow confines of the ship.
And in Vietnam, they hadn't been worried about two tons of plutonium stored below decks either.
He glanced up, as though he could see through the overhead to the bridge wing thirty feet above his head. If someone could get to those machine guns, they might be able to command the deck below.
"Mac, Six. Looks like we've stepped into a nest of them." Murdock's voice in his headset was so low Mac had to strain to catch the words. There was a pause, and MacKenzie could almost hear the new lieutenant measuring the odds. "Okay, guys. This thing's too big not to give it a damned good try. Mac, you and your people get below to the engine room. Rest of you with me."
"Roger that. Moving." MacKenzie gestured to Higgins and started aft.
A sound, footsteps on steel, made him look up. An Iranian soldier was on the ladder eight feet above him, clattering carelessly down the steps. The man wore a helmet and carried an AKM slung over his shoulder. He was watching his own feet, but before he'd taken another step, he glanced up and his eyes locked with MacKenzie's.
The Texan was already in motion, bringing up his H&K, triggering a single, sound-suppressed shot that punched brutally into the Iranian's jaw and up through his brain. The man's boots flew out from beneath him and he pitched back against the ladder, his helmet hitting a step with the clang of something heavy and metallic striking steel.
2319 hours (Zulu +3)
Freighter Yuduki Maru
Tetsuo Kurebayashi stood atop one of the low deckhouses on Yuduki Maru's weather deck, striving to regain the peace he'd felt with the universe in the days before the Iranians had come aboard. The stars were the same, including the Milky Way, though their full glory was masked by a layer of broken clouds slowly moving in from the east. Still, he felt uneasy, about the mission, about the Eikyuni Shinananai Tori's new allies, even knowing that this reinforcement by the Iranian troops had been planned a full year ago, as Operation Yoake had first begun to take shape in Tehran and in the training camps in Syria.
The Iranians were barbarians, all of them, stinking with sweat and filth and the sharp spices in their food, distracted constantly by the demands of their religion, careless in their manners and courtesy. Their leader, a colonel in their Pasdaran outfit named Sayyed Hamid, was a member of one of Iran's most powerful families, and he was no better than the rest, a great pig of a man who cared nothing for the Ohtori or its goals, who treated Kurebayashi and his brothers as hirelings, as mercenaries, useful now so long as they stayed out of the way.
He didn't like the Iranians, and he wondered why Isamu Takeda, the Ohtori leader who'd conceived and engineered Yoake-Go from the group's base in Syria, had deigned to work with them at all. Other nations in that same part of the world would have paid any price for the cargo riding beneath the Yuduki Maru's deck.
Kurebayashi heard a sound, a loud, metallic clang. Curious, he turned, staring aft across the freighter's tanker-like foredeck and the Iranians lying asleep or squatting in small groups. He couldn't see any No! There! On a ladder on the ship's starboard side, close against the superstructure, one shadow grabbed another and dragged it down. For a shock-frozen instant, Kurebayashi wasn't sure of exactly what had happened, but as he played it back in his head, he was pretty sure he'd seen an Iranian soldier sprawling back against the ladder, and another figure dressed in black grabbing him. Commandos! It could be nothing else.
"Abunai!" he screamed in warning. Then he realized that not one in twenty of the Iranians aboard spoke a word of Japanese, so he snatched up his AKM, aimed it across the deck at the shadows moving next to the superstructure, and clamped down on the trigger.
Gunfire, urgent, insistent, and painfully loud, shattered the serenity of the night.
2319 hours (Zulu +3)
Weather deck
Freighter Yuduki Maru
Bullets sparked and shrieked off the steel plating of the ship's superstructure as MacKenzie, Garcia, and Higgins dropped to their bellies. Mac could see the flicker of the muzzle flash against the darkness blanketing the ship's forward deck, could hear the characteristic flat crack of an AK on full-auto. On the well deck between MacKenzie and the gunman, Iranian troops were stirring, a hornet's nest awakened by the sudden, savage volley. "Hammer Six!" Mac called. "This is One! It's going down!"
"Rog. I copy. Charlie Mike."
Charlie Mike: continue mission. Another burst of automatic gunfire screamed off the ladder four feet above MacKenzie's head. Levering himself up over the Iranian soldier's corpse, he aimed at the wink of the muzzle flash and triggered three quick bursts. The range was long for a subgun, even for an H&K. The hostile fire ceased, however, though there was no way to tell whether the enemy gunman had been hit or simply driven to cover.
"Let's move out," he snapped. Higgins and Garcia backed away from the ladder, then vanished through an open door into the superstructure.
Gunfire barked from the freighter's forward deck, as Iranians yelled at one another in urgent Farsi. MacKenzie switched to full-auto and loosed a long, sweeping burst, a pointed invitation to the hostiles to keep their heads down. Then he followed the others.
Inside the door, a companionway led down and aft, toward the Yuduki Maru's engine room.
2320 hours (Zulu +3)
Bridge access
Freighter Yuduki Maru
Murdock was already on an interior ladder leading from the 0-2 deck to the 0-3 deck, with Yuduki Maru's bridge just ahead. The chatter and crackle of automatic weapons fire was muffled inside the ship's superstructure, but still audible. Murdock signaled to Ellsworth, Brown, and Roselli. Follow me!
The door leading to the bridge was closed and unguarded. With no information on what was going on inside, Murdock silently signaled the others, having them take up positions on either side of the entryway. Reaching into one of his combat vest pouches, he extracted a flash-bang, grasped the arming pin, and nodded to Roselli.
The SEAL chief tried the lever on the door, which swung inward easily at his touch. Murdock yanked the flash-bang's cotter pin, flipped off the arming lever, and tossed the grenade through the opening.
An intense pulse of light, a rattling string of eight thunderclap detonations assaulted the senses as the flash-bang went off on the bridge. Roselli was through the door while the bulkheads were still ringing from the final blast, entering left to right with his H&K at the ready.