Keith Douglass - Seal Team Seven

Instead, Mac led the way aft, toward the freighter's engine room. Somewhere ahead, a steel door clanged open. A moment later, a Japanese merchant sailor appeared, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, running blindly down the passageway. An instant later he caught sight of the SEALS, of their black faces, menacing garb, and weapons, and he nearly collided with a bulkhead trying to stop.

"Tomare!" Higgins called. "Halt!" Several of the SEALs were fluent in more than one other language, but he was the only one in the platoon who spoke Japanese. The seaman took a step back.

"Chikayore!" Higgins snapped. "Come forward." Reluctantly, the man complied.

In seconds, they had the seaman on his face, his wrists cuffed with plastic ties behind his back, his ankles tied together. Higgins spoke to him, his voice coaxing. The hostage answered back, gesturing back down the passageway with his head and with rolling eyes. "What's he say, Prof?"

"Okay, he says he's just a member of the crew," Higgins replied. "Says there's always a couple of Iranians on guard in the engine room. He also says something's got 'em pretty well stirred up right now. He decided to git while the gittin' was good."

MacKenzie nodded curtly. "Let's put 'em down then."

Leaving the seaman lying in the passageway, the SEALs headed for the engine room. The door was closed but unlocked, opening to Garcia's push.

Inside, a railed platform overlooked the engine room, a claustrophobic compartment filled with monstrous shapes: reduction gears, condensers, generators, and massive steam turbines like green-painted prehistoric monsters embedded in the ribbed, gleaming steel decks.

An Iranian soldier shouted warning as MacKenzie burst through the open door. The SEAL chief triggered a short burst from his H&K and the man went down, his AKM clattering off one of the engine housings and onto the deck. Another soldier lunged for cover, shouting something in Farsi. Garcia leaned into the railing and fired once... twice. The Iranian clawed at his back, then dropped to the deck. For a long moment, MacKenzie held his position, swinging his H&K's muzzle left and right, searching for further movement. Nothing.

"Secure the door," MacKenzie told Garcia. "Prof, you're with me."

A steep metal ladder led from the platform down to the main engineering deck. MacKenzie, his H&K strapped to his combat harness, grabbed the railings and rode them twelve feet to the steel grating below. The engine room throbbed with the pulse of confined power, and in the distance aft, connecting with the turbines, he could see the ponderous revolutions of the reduction gears turning Yuduki Maru's paired propeller shafts.

Mac and Prof carried out a lightning inspection of the engineering deck, checking the bodies and searching for tangos missed during their entry. They found no more terrorists, but they did discover four terrified Japanese crewmen hiding behind a massive generator mounting. MacKenzie covered them while Higgins tied their wrists, led them to the forward end of the compartment, where he tied their ankles as well, and then began questioning them.

"Shit, Mac," Higgins said, joining him again after a few moments. "These people all say there's forty or fifty bad guys on board! Some Japanese tangos, plus a shitload of Iranians!"

"I was beginning to get that idea." MacKenzie looked forward, past the humming hulks of the freighter's turbines. There were three doors in the forward bulkhead, two high up and to either side, and a third in the middle and on the same level as the engineering deck, leading forward to the boiler room. Garcia was still on the starboard side platform, guarding the door and watching over the engine room. The four civilians, tied hand and foot, lay on the deck next to the boiler room door.

Tactically, the SEALs simply could not now continue the mission as originally planned. Though SEALs liked to boast of a ten-to-one or better kill ratio in combat, there was no way, realistically, that the seven of them could face an unknown but very large force of heavily armed Iranians — now thoroughly aroused and hostile Iranians — and win. Despite the popular fictional image of SEALs as Rainboesque commandos who routinely took on impossible odds, the Teams were not suicide squads and they did not attempt hopeless missions. Their training, their experience, and their hard-won skills were too valuable to throw away in empty, heroic gestures. "Hammer Six," he called. "This is One."

"One, Six. Copy."

"Echo Romeo secure. But Skipper, it's not gonna be secure for long. I've got some locals here who tell me we've just stepped smack in the cow patty big time."

"Roger that." There was a moment's hesitation, and MacKenzie could almost hear the wheels turning as Murdock considered his next order.

"Okay, Chief," Murdock's voice said. "Set for Kneecap, but do not initiate. Do you copy?"

"Roger. Set Kneecap, do not initiate."

"Keep me posted."

"Rog."

Kneecap was the code word for one of the SEAL team's contingency plans, a last-ditch, we've-got-to-get-out-of-Dodge measure to keep Yuduki Maru's cargo out of Iranian hands. Two satchel charges, one apiece for each of the freighter's propeller shafts, would be enough to disable the Yuduki Maru, leaving her dead in the water. A second assault would then be mounted, as soon as additional SEAL or Marine forces could be mustered.

A final, more drastic option remained if Kneecap didn't work. If worst came to worst, the team could execute Headshot, blowing precisely placed holes in the freighter's sides and sending her to the bottom. In theory, specialized submarine recovery vehicles would be able to salvage the freighter's cargo before seawater corroded the cylinders containing the plutonium, contaminating the local waters with radioactivity.

That was definitely a last-ditch option, however. No one wanted to risk breaching or scattering the containment cylinders, for the scenario describing the spread of radioactive contamination through ocean currents from the Seychelles to Cape Town was too dreadful to easily contemplate.

"Prof!" he called. "It's Kneecap! You take the port shaft. I'll take the starboard."

Yuduki Maru's two propeller shafts ran from the reduction gears connecting them with the turbines, vanishing through watertight seals and bearings into the shaft alleys in the aft hull. An explosive charge positioned over the shaft bearings would break or bend the propeller shafts, rendering them useless, irreparable anywhere short of a major dry-dock overhaul.

MacKenzie reached into one of his waterproof satchels, pulling out a cable-cutting charge, a U-shaped pouch containing a half kilo of C-6 plastic explosive, multiple detonators, and an electronic firing trigger with a keypad for entering any time, in seconds, from one to 9,999.

He was halfway to the shaft bearing when the Iranians burst through the engine room's port-side entryway.

"Cover!" Garcia shouted from his perch on the starboard side. His H&K spat flame, striking sparks and shrill pings from the open door, then slashing into the first Iranian soldier in line and toppling him over the platform railing and onto a generator housing below. The next Iranian got off one brief, wild burst from his AK before Garcia's enfilade fire sent him tumbling in a bloody heap down the steel ladder. A confused babble of Farsi, shouted orders and queries, sounded from the passageway beyond.

MacKenzie dove for cover, crouching behind a massive reduction gear housing alongside one of the throbbing turbines. "Six, this is One! It's going down now. Hard!"

"Copy, One. What's your sit?"

MacKenzie could hear the hammer of a heavy weapon in the background as Murdock spoke. "Not good! Not good!" MacKenzie shouted over the tactical channel. "We need backup, and we need it fast!" Another burst of AK fire sang through the engine room. Sooner or later, overwhelming Iranian forces would root them out of here, with gunfire, grenades, or gas.