Murdock was immediately behind him, entering right to left. Smoke from the expended flash-bang wreathed the compartment. A shadow against the smoke resolved itself into an Iranian soldier leaning against a line of printers, his hands over his eyes, blood running from one ear. Murdock fired, a single round fired from chest-high that snapped through the man's throat, then punched a neat hole through the glass of the large bridge window at his back. Murdock fired again as the soldier collapsed, then swung to the right, weapon all the way up to his shoulder now. A second Iranian, rising from one of the track-mounted, sliding bridge chairs, staggered as a triplet of rounds from Roselli's H&K slammed him out of the chair and into the bridge console, arms flailing before he slumped to the deck in a spreading pool of blood. A Japanese seaman was kneeling behind the ship's wheel at the main control console, head turned to look back over his shoulder, his nose bloodied and his dark eyes wide with terror. Murdock had just dismissed the man as unarmed a probable hostage when another Japanese merchant sailor leaped behind the seaman, crouched, threw an arm around the man's throat, and held the muzzle of a SIG-Sauer P-220 automatic pistol against the man's skull.
"Tomare! Atoe sare!"
There was no time for negotiations. Clearly, the Japanese terrorist was unacquainted with SEAL marksmanship, a skill practiced constantly with a variety of weapons and from every position imaginable. More than enough of the terrorist's head was visible as he sheltered behind the hostage's body; Murdock shifted the aim of his H&K slightly and squeezed the trigger. The side of the tango's head exploded in a fine spray of blood and bone; the P-220 dropped from nerveless fingers and the terrorist slumped to the deck. The hostage let out a piercing scream and covered his eyes.
Movement behind the glass of the door leading to the starboard bridge wing caught Murdock's attention. Firing above the kneeling helmsman's head, he put three rounds through the glass and was rewarded by the sight of an Iranian twisting away, then falling against the outside of the door, leaving a smear of scarlet as he slumped below the bullet-holed window. Murdock heard the hard-voiced snap of sound-suppressed shots at his back. Ellsworth had just fired through the port wing door from his position at the entrance to the bridge, taking out the Iranian posted there.
Brown, coming in behind Roselli, had reached the bridge entrance to the communications shack. "Clear!" he yelled.
"Clear!" Roselli barked, standing astride the second dead Iranian.
"Clear!" Ellsworth called from the open door.
Murdock nudged the body of the first man he'd shot. The eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the overhead. "Clear! Roselli! Brown! Take the wings!"
Glass shattered in the forward bridge windows, and bullets whined and thudded among the overhead piping and wire conduits. Iranians on the forward deck could see the SEALs on the well-lit bridge easily and were firing at them as they rushed aft.
Then the machine gun mounted on the starboard wing of the bridge opened up, a long, raucous yammer shockingly loud after the harsh whisperings of the sound-suppressed H&Ks. Brown was wielding the weapon, a Type 62 GPMG on a pintel mount, sweeping the muzzle back and forth in broad arcs that lashed the forward deck with screaming lead. An instant later, Roselli opened up with the port machine gun, and the Iranians on the deck found themselves in a devastating, plunging cross fire. The wild shooting from the deck ceased, as a dozen Iranian soldiers scrambled for cover behind piles of wood, coiled cable, and any other cover they could find.
Murdock knelt beside the terrified Japanese helmsman. "You speak English?"
The man blinked at him, uncomprehending. "Utsu na! Utsu na!"
"Great," Murdock told him. "You're going to be all right, fella. Stay down."
The merchant sailor might not have understood the words, but he seemed to understand Murdock's tone and gestures. He lay flat on the deck. Murdock stepped behind him and, stooping down, dropped his knee into the small of the man's back, then grabbed his wrists. From the deck, the helmsman barked something, surprise mingled with hurt and anger in his voice, but Murdock swiftly secured the hostage's hands behind his back with a strip of white plastic that could be removed only with scissors or a knife. Each SEAL carried twenty-four of the disposable handcuffs in a vest pouch; standard operating procedure required them to cuff every non-SEAL they didn't kill. The helmsman was almost certainly a legitimate crew member of the Yuduki Maru, forced to steer the ship by his captors, but the short and sharp encounter with the tango holding a pistol to the guy's head could have been a charade, a way of planting one terrorist at least among the SEALS. Besides, with his hands tied, the guy was less likely to jump up at an inopportune moment and run into someone's line of fire.
"Sorry, fella," Murdock said gently, patting the hostage's shoulder and rising. "Until we can check your driver's license, we can't risk having you run loose."
Gunfire banged from the deck, was answered by a full-auto salvo from the starboard bridge wing.
"I don't know, Lieutenant," Ellsworth said. "Seems to me we weren't supposed to run into a fucking army on this tub." Another burst of gunfire from the deck punctuated his comment. Four more holes appeared in one of the slanted bridge windows, centered in small halos of crazed glass.
"You know what they say about Naval Intelligence, Doc. Contradiction in terms." He switched to the Pentagon's frequency. "Foreman, Foreman, this is Hammer Alfa."
Outside the bridge, gunfire flared and cracked in the night.
2321 hours (1521 hours Zulu -5)
Joint Special Operations Command Center
The Pentagon
"What is it?" Congressman Murdock said. "What's going on?"
None of the others with him in the room replied immediately. The atmosphere was charged with tension, and to make matters worse, the magic camera-in-the-sky pictures were gone now, the images lost when the satellite transmitting them had slipped below the horizon three minutes earlier. Murdock had only a hazy idea of how such things worked, but a staffer had patiently explained to him that morning that, while satellites could to a certain extent be repositioned in their orbits, those orbits were nonetheless dictated by certain laws of physics that not even Congress could rewrite. Once the KH-12 satellite transmitting those scenes had passed over the horizon at 3:18 P.m. Washington time, there would be an eleven-minute gap until 3:29 when the only information coming to the Pentagon from the events unfolding aboard the Yuduki Maru would be the voice channels, monitored by an AWACS E-3A Sentry aircraft circling well to the north and relayed by communication satellite to Washington.
"Damn it," Congressman Murdock said again. "Someone tell me what's happening!"
General Bradley looked at him, and the corner of his mouth pulled back in a hard, quick, and humorless half smile. "Apparently, Hormuz was able to rendezvous with the Yuduki Maru sometime earlier today."
"Worst-case scenario," Mason added. "There are Iranian troops aboard that freighter. According to Hammer Bravo, it might be as many as forty men."
"Oh, God. Are we going to have to abort?"
"We'd rather not, Congressman," Admiral Bainbridge said, his voice cold. "We've gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to get our people onto those ships. Let's give them a chance, shall we?"
Though the air in the climate-controlled room was cool, almost chilly, Murdock found that he was sweating.
2323 hours (Zulu +3)
Bridge
Freighter Yuduki Maru
Bending over low to stay out of the line of fire, Murdock moved to the main bridge console, studying the array of computer terminals, instruments, and consoles.