Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (2 page)

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Seal Talk: Military Glossary

Pacific Ocean

1,475 miles west of Honolulu

Barry Stillman watched with a cautious and practiced eye as the last of the one hundred lead tanks protected in sturdy plank boxes eased toward hold number three. The crates were extremely heavy for their size and were his only cargo. Captain Grafton had watched part of the loading, then became bored and went to his cabin, where he probably had screened another western movie on his video player. Stillman leaned tanned arms against the rail as the semitropical breeze ruffled his dark hair. His sun-weathered face held blue eyes, a nose that had been broken and not quite set straight, and a square jaw that had taken its share of pounding by bare knuckles. He was thirty-eight and had been in the Merchant Marine all of his adult life. Now he was second in command of the
Willowwind
, a three-hundred-foot-long freighter with a double hull and the latest in electronic navigation. She was small by today’s standards and one of the new breed—fast, dependable, and completely computer operated.

Stillman watched as the last lead tank moved into the hold. The crates were made of heavy wooden planks, and the containers inside were cast from solid lead three inches thick, with a small opening in the top that was stoppered with a melted-in eight-inch plug of lead. Nothing could possibly get in or out of the lead coffins.

Nothing better. Inside those one hundred tanks was enough weapons-grade plutonium to make nuclear weapons
that could blast all of the major capitals of the earth into radioactive dust. Shipper: the United States Government. Maybe the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but Stillman wasn’t sure. He heard the cost would be five billion dollars by the time the project was finished. This little no-name island was an atoll, with killer coral heads creating a calm blue lagoon. There were only four acres of actual land. The highest point on the atoll was thirty-two feet above the restless Pacific Ocean. There was no food or freshwater source on the atoll.

The speck of land was thirty miles east of Kure Island, the last of the Hawaiian Islands to the west. That atoll of sand and coral was a little over fifteen hundred miles west of the big Island of Hawaii. The Hawaiian chain lay in a crescent and contained a hundred and twenty-four separate islands. They were the tops of a string of volcanic mountains that barely reached the surface. There had been no people on this atoll when the U.S. government moved in six months ago with bulldozers, carpenters, plumbers, engineers, and specialists in one particular field. Their job was to build a plant that would be used to remove the plutonium from hundreds of nuclear warheads, nose cones, and bombs, and package it for transport.

Russia had agreed to do the same thing, but backed down when they found out the cost would seriously damage its fragile economy. The U.S. plunged forward with the task of removing fifty tons of weapons-grade plutonium from decommissioned nuclear devices.

This was the second shipment of ten tons. Stillman had been on this same ship for the first transfer. It went off without a hitch. Eight easy days to San Diego, where the secret cargo was handled with care, unloaded at night, and moved through darkness by unmarked trucks, inland across two states to a highly restricted desert location that nobody would talk about. There, another newly constructed plant put the plutonium through immobilization. The plutonium was mixed with highly radioactive waste,
which made the resulting product useless for fueling nuclear weapons.

As the last crate was lowered into the hold, a cable slipped and the heavy box swung dangerously close to a bulkhead. Stillman grabbed the rail, his heat pounding. If that crate shattered and the lead tank fell and ruptured … He wiped sudden sweat off his forehead. There was enough of the deadly radioactive plutonium in each of those crates to fry everyone on the ship and the island into crispy critters in seconds. The alert crane operator caught the problem, adjusted for the swing of the crate, and stopped it before it crashed into the bulkhead. Then the operator lowered the dangling box the rest of the way into its place in the hold.

Stillman let his breath out and wiped more sweat off his forehead. The plutonium was over-crated, so the chances of it breaking open were slim. Still he worried. Every man on board worried about it. It was like hauling a jug of nitroglycerine over a bumpy road on a cart with no springs. He vowed that this would be the last trip he made hauling plutonium. He and all the officers and crew were pulling down double pay for the run. The word was out that the next load would be ready in two months and would bring triple regular pay for all hands. Stillman wasn’t going to do it again. On this one he’d had five good sailors quit when they found out their hazardous cargo was plutonium. They demanded to be flown back to Honolulu. They were union men, so he had to comply. That put him in a bind since he had to find five replacements who would take the job and get them out here from Honolulu before time to sail.

The union rep in Honolulu said he wasn’t happy with the men he had to send, but the bottom of the barrel had been scraped a dozen times lately. The company had flown in the five men. He talked to each of them, and wasn’t impressed. Their seamanship experience was far below what he had wanted. Two were from the South Pacific—Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands. One was a Filipino, and the other two were brown-skinned and had
papers from California, maybe Mexicans. All had the usual U.S. seaman’s papers and union cards. A strange lot. But the rep said it was the best he could do. He had four men turn him down when he told them they would be hauling a hazardous cargo. So Stillman was stuck with these guys. Now the crew members had their adjusted assignments for the trip and had settled down. They would be sailing in two hours. In eight days he’d get this devil’s brew into San Diego and off loaded, then he was moving to another company.

Something on the horizon caught Stillman’s attention and he looked up. A freighter twice as big as the
Willowwind.
What was she doing out here? She was well off the usual shipping lanes. Images of South Pacific pirates flooded his brain and he shook his head. Pirates would be crazy to try to take this cargo. It would take a large ship and they did have a gun locker on board. He’d never seen it opened. He shook his head. Pirates worked the South Pacific, not way up here in the middle. Forget the pirates.

Jeffers, an able bodied seaman and one of the twenty-four men on the ship, came up to the rail.

“Mr. Stillman. Cap’n wants to see you, sir.”

“Thanks, Jeffers. We should be buttoning up and getting ready to cast off. Check out the hold covers.”

“Aye, aye.”

Stillman did not like the captain. He was gruff, sloppy, and drank too much. Some day that could cost him his captain’s ticket. Eugene Grafton was from the old school—get by with as little trouble, and as little work as was absolutely required. If past performances were holding true, the captain would be in his cups an hour before they set sail. The term “set sail” always troubled Stillman. On the old three masters they actually did spread out their sails and set them in place when they were ready to leave, so the wind would catch in them and power them out of port. Now the meaning had become lost in valves and drive shafts and computerized navigation.

He knocked on the captain’s cabin hatch, then opened it and looked in.

“You called for me, Captain Grafton?”

“Aye, I did. Come in and relax. I hear the last of them blasted lead tanks is safely on board and secured below.”

“Yes, sir. Last one just went down. Will we still be sailing at eighteen hundred?”

“Aye, just before dusk, get us out of here. Then eight more days of nightmares and we’ll be free again.”

Stillman nodded. “Captain, I hear they turned down our request for a military guard to sail with us.”

“They did. No cause—waste of manpower, etcetera, etcetera, they said. I asked them for a squad of Marines.”

“I keep thinking about those seagoing South Pacific pirates.”

“Worry wart,” Captain Grafton said. He downed the last of the liquid in his glass. He had four videocassettes in his lap. The Captain was fifty-eight and said he would retire in a year and go back to Oregon. Grafton stood only five feet six, and had put on fifty pounds over the years to add to his beefy frame.

“Stillman, did I tell you I picked out the farm I want to buy in Oregon? Just five miles upcoast from Tillamook. Eighty acres of good bottomland ideal for pasturing my milk cows. I’m going to start with a herd of forty.”

“That will keep you busy, Captain.”

“Oh, I’ll have help.” He paused, burped, and shook his head. “Well, Mr. Stillman, you better get this craft underway. Stand by to set sail there, Chief Mate. Look alive now.”

Stillman saluted and hurried out of the room. Another quarter of the bottle and two John Wayne westerns and the captain would be blotto for the rest of the afternoon and all night.

Four minutes before 1800 they cast off the last lines and the three-hundred-foot freighter eased away from the newly constructed floating pier that allowed the
Willowwind
to come close enough to the atoll to onload the cargo. Chief Mate Stillman watched closely as the big ship edged away from the fragile wooden dock. Then they
were clear. He checked the computerized navigation settings, confirmed that they would be making the required southeasterly course, and turned control of the big vessel over to Wayne Ludlow, the second mate from San Mateo, California.

“Last trip for me, too, man,” Ludlow said. “Just thinking what’s in them crates makes me want to heave. You realize how many nuke bombs some wild-eyed country like Iraq could make with this load?”

“Yeah, true. But the fucking Iraqi navy hasn’t been reported in the Pacific yet, so I think we’re safe. See you in the morning.”

Stillman smiled as he went to his cabin. Ludlow had a wild imagination, but he was a good sailor. He had control of the big ship until the morning watch came on at 0600. Stillman had been looking forward all day to a new movie he had had sent in from Honolulu. He’d ordered six cassettes and got all of them. All war movies and action flicks. He’d ration himself to two a day, then start repeating his favorites.

By 2300 he was dozing through parts of
First Blood.
He turned off the tape and considered taking a shower. No, tomorrow. He’d make one courtesy call to the bridge to chat with Ludlow, then turn in. It had been a long and draining day.

Stillman had just passed the captain’s cabin hatch when he heard a loud sound. A shot? He hesitated, then knocked on the hatch and, as usual, opened it a foot and looked inside.

“Captain?”

A second later a face loomed in front of the chief mate. Stillman recognized him as Jomo Shigahara, an able-bodied.

“Yes, Chief Mate Stillman, I was just about to come looking for you. Come in, come in, the captain asked me to call you.”

Stillman frowned, opened the door farther, and could see into the second half of the cabin and the captain’s bed.

“Shigahara, I don’t understand. What are you doing in the captain’s cabin? Did I hear a gunshot?”

“A gunshot? I didn’t hear one. The Cap asked me to bring him up some rum from the kitchen.”

“Rum? Didn’t know the captain drank rum.”

“You know the Cap, he drinks anything. You better talk to him.” Shigahara motioned toward the bed.

“Yes.” Stillman stepped into the cabin and walked over to the bed, where the captain lay on his back. It wasn’t until the last moment that he saw the small hole in the near side of the captain’s head and the spray of blood and skull fragments on the pillow and the bulkhead on the other side. Too late Stillman cried out and started to turn. He sensed movement behind him, then something hit him hard on his head and he dropped to his knees. The second blow sent him sprawling on his stomach toward the captain’s bed, and the dark furies closed in around him and finally covered him. He could see nothing more.

Jomo Shigahara grunted as the chief mate fell. Usually one whack with his .45 pistol was enough to knock out a man. He must be slipping. He nodded at a man on the far side of the room. “Tie his hands and feet together and make sure he can’t get free. Then we follow our plan. You five guys from Honolulu really set us up. Next we get the crew quarters and then the bridge.”

The other man nodded. His name was Matsuma, one of the Polynesian men in the group of five flown in as replacements. “The one guy on the bridge we’ve got to watch for is the lookout. The guy on tonight usually wanders around the ship.”

“Yeah, he’s Pokey. No trouble from him. This time of night the rest of the crewmen should be in their bunks. The other officers might be a worry. We got the captain and chief mate. That leaves the second mate, Ludlow, the engineering officer, and the radio officer. We’ll get them last.”

“Jomo, looks like this might work. When you told me to get four reliable men with papers in Honolulu, I wondered
if we could pull it off. Damn, looks like we gonna do it.”

“We are. I don’t plan nothing this much and not get the job done. So we take down the crew quarters next. Could be ten hostile crewmen. Two will be on the bridge. We’ll see if any of them want to make some extra money. Some huge extra money.”

“Let’s do it.”

They left the captain’s cabin and moved down to the weather deck and forward to the crew quarters. Down one deck they came to the crew cabins. The first hatch was open a foot. Shigahara rammed it open and jolted inside with the .45 pistol pointing into the room. Three men lay on bunks, two reading and one with earphones on.

“What the hell?” the first seaman said, looking up.

“Just hold your hands out and don’t ask questions,” Shigahara snapped. Matsuma went behind the gun, leaned in, and strapped plastic riot cuffs around the man’s wrists. “What the fuck is going on?” the man with the earphones asked, pulling off the headset. Shigahara slapped the side of the heavy .45 down across the man’s head, slamming him back into his bunk. The sailor shook his head.