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."
"Tingling in your hands? Nausea? Chest pains?"
Coburn shook his head. "Negative."
His speech was taut and coherent. MacKenzie had spotted Coburn's trouble in time. The insidious thing about CO2 poisoning was the way it crept up on you, robbing you of your concentration and mental clarity, while making you breathe harder... which in turn made the condition worse. A two percent excess of C02 in the gas mix was enough to trigger harder breathing. Ten percent caused unconsciousness, while fifteen brought on spasms and rigidity. Death was usually from drowning.
One thing was sure. They didn't dare risk letting Coburn dive again. Doc gestured toward the shore, where rocks and mud rose from the water at the point where the pier met the land. They could take shelter there, without having to worry about clinging to the bollard. They would also be able to unstrap their H&Ks and have them ready, just in case. "Let's get comfortable."
Together, they started moving toward the shore, keeping to the shadows beneath the pier.
0121 hours (Zulu +3)
Freighter Yuduki Maru
Bandar Abbas shipyard
MacKenzie was first up the freighter's side, hauling himself from the water hand over hand along the painter's pole. The last time he'd done this had been at sea, safely shrouded by the anonymity of night. This time it was night... but the glare of lights from the shipyard facilities ashore and from the work area on Yuduki Maru's forward deck was bright enough that he could imagine himself etched clearly against the ship's side.