Keith Douglass - Seal Team Seven

The Japanese civilian whispered something to the commander, who nodded. Turning suddenly, the Iranian barked an order in Farsi. The soldiers advanced then, laughing, grabbing the women from the line, herding them forward toward the yacht's cabins. Rough hands groped and fondled Jean as she was propelled down the steps, grabbing at her breasts, buttocks, and thighs, tugging at the knots in the strings of her bikini bottom, then ripping the scrap of cloth away entirely. Gertrude screamed as a laughing Iranian soldier pranced about the galley, waving her briefs as trophy. Helga's bikini bottom had no ties, and they pinned her to the deck while one of them peeled the bottom off her thrashing legs.

Oh, Christ, they're going to rape us! she thought, but then the three naked women were shoved into a cabin and the door was slammed and locked behind them. The soldiers had already been here, rifling dresser drawers and smashing bottles of whiskey and gin discovered in the room's tiny bar.

Outside, she heard them shouting in Farsi and laughing as they went through the Beluga, smashing open every locked door in a joyful quest for loot. The Iranian officer was haranguing the male members of the crew, but she couldn't catch the words. Oh, God, what was he saying? What was he going to do to Paul?

Gertrude lay on the deck, trembling, trying to cover herself with her arms as she sank into shock. Helga, after a long moment, began stumbling about the cramped room, no longer crying but with a glazed expression fixed on her face as she began picking up torn and discarded articles of clothing and bits of broken glass. The room, Jean realized, had been the one occupied by Helga and her husband. "Karl," she mumbled half-aloud, "Karl doesn't like the mess. Poor Karl..."

Numb with terror, battling the shock that threatened to engulf her, Jean Brandeis sat on the bunk, her eyes fixed on the locked door. She had no illusions that any of them would be released, not after an incident that was nothing less than piracy on the high seas. There would be no phone call to the American embassy, no news report to the West save, possibly, a curt announcement to the effect that Beluga and her crew had been lost at sea.

She wondered how much longer they would be permitted to live, and what humiliation they would be forced to endure in whatever time was left.

1635 hours (Zulu +3)

Motor yacht Beluga

Indian Ocean, 380 miles southeast of Socotra

Tetsuo Kurebayashi listened impassively as Pasdaran Colonel Ruholia Aghasi continued shouting at the men kneeling before him on the deck. Kurebayashi spoke English — that language was how he communicated with the Iranians who spoke no Nihongo — but the colonel's words were too rapid for him to follow more than a word or two, and Aghasi kept alternating between English and German, of which Kurebayashi spoke not a word.

Unlike Sayyed Hamid, however, that fat pig of a Pasdaran colonel in charge of the Iranians aboard the Yuduki Maru, Aghasi was clearly a man of keen intelligence, who knew what he was doing and how best to achieve results. Though he couldn't understand the speech, he knew what Aghasi was saying, because Kurebayashi had come up with the idea and convinced the Iranian leader to try it just hours ago. Aghasi was the commander of a contingent of troops just arrived with the Iranian naval squadron; Kurebayashi had approached him, rather than the unimaginative Hamid, with his idea of seizing the Greenpeace schooner that had been dogging Yuduki Maru's wake for the past three weeks.

The speech was having the desired effect. Aghasi, the Ohtori leader noted, was playing the game well, waving the confiscated scraps of the women's bathing suits in front of the male prisoners with evident relish, gesturing frequently toward the cabin where the women had been taken, and at those of his men who were lounging about the well deck now with weapons very much in evidence. Through threats and bullying, the colonel had already gotten two of the prisoners to admit that two of the women were their wives; the dead man, apparently, had been husband to the third. A pity that he had been the one chosen by Heaven to serve as an example to the others... Still, those two would be enough.

Kurebayashi was a longtime student of American tactics. The Yankees had already tried a covert operation, slipping a small squad of commandos aboard the Yuduki Maru in an attempt to surprise her captors. That attempt had failed... though eighteen of the forty Iranian troops aboard had been killed or seriously wounded, and poor Shigeru Ota, one of Kurebayashi's Ohtori, had vanished in the fight. Their next move, he was certain, would be either another attempt to negotiate or an overwhelming show of force. Iranian sources had already reported the gathering of a sizable American naval task force south of the Arabian peninsula, between the Yuduki Maru and her destination; his guess was that they would try a frontal assault next, possibly behind the screen of a professional negotiator.

The Iranians, with their entire pathetic little navy, could not possibly hope to match the Americans ship for ship and gun for gun. The little Beluga and her activist passengers were the best weapon they could have to meet the Yankees' challenge, to force them to back down. All that was needed was some cooperation from the prisoners.

That part would be easy. Kurebayashi had studied in America, two years at UCLA. He knew Western men, and he knew something of their illogical ways of thinking, especially about women and sex. Kohler and Brandeis, he was sure, would do anything, anything to keep their wives from being gang-raped and tortured one by one before their eyes. Since it was Kohler's help they needed most, they would start with the dead German's wife, then move on to the American, saving Kohler's wife for last. The only real problem was that the process would take time, and Kurebayashi very much doubted that they had more than a few hours before the Americans struck.

But then, it was possible that the threat alone would be enough. He studied the prisoners through narrowed eyes. Yes... Aghasi's little speech was definitely having the desired effect. The American, Brandeis, was pale and sweating, on the verge of passing out right there on the deck. Kohler's eyes were squeezed shut, and he was moaning something to himself over and over in German. These men were already broken, Kurebayashi thought, clay to be molded in any way their captors saw fit.

Aghasi barked a question at the American. Slowly, a little jerkily, the man nodded, his hands still clasped on top of his head. Excellent. They had one ally, even if he was an unwilling one. Then Kohler agreed too, nodding his head enthusiastically as tears rolled down his cheeks.

Success...

1945 hours (Zulu +3)

Indian Ocean, seventy miles east of Socotra

It was evening, but the sun was still well above the western horizon when the first flight of four Marine SuperCobra gunships clattered in toward the Yuduki Maru. They came in low, skimming the waves, approaching out of the west so that the enemy's gunners — and their heat-seeking anti-air weapons, if they had any — would be blinded by the sun. Half a mile behind the gunships, three big CH-53 Super Stallions of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing came in at higher altitude, each carrying a full load of fifty-five Marine combat troops.

Captain Ron Dilmore was strapped into the rear seat of Pickax One-three, one of the SuperCobras sliding into attack position west of the Iranian squadron. His gunner/copilot, in the front seat, was a skinny, blond kid from Kansas, Lieutenant Charles Mobely.

"So what's it gonna be," Mobely was saying over the ICS, the Cobra's intercom system. "Peace or war?"