Seal Team Seven (35 page)

Garcia and the Professor were both equipped as assault breachers, with shotguns instead of H&Ks. Standing to the sides of their respective doors, they took aim, then fired, the twin booms of the shotguns ear-splitting in the confined space below decks. The cabin doors were lightweight, hollow-core barriers designed for privacy and nothing more. One-ounce slugs smashed locking mechanisms and plywood, then punched through carpeting and fiberglass decks as the doors disintegrated into splinters and whirling sheets of wooden paneling.

On the starboard side, Roselli lunged through the door a blink behind the shotgun blast, his Smith & Wesson gripped in both hands, the aiming laser sweeping across the darkened room like a jewel-bright rapier. On the far bulkhead, a porthole had been opened; an Iranian stood there, a G-3 assault rifle aimed at the door.

The shotgun blast and the spray of splinters and wood chips had forced him to turn his head, and he was a split second late in firing—fortunately for Roselli, since the SEAL otherwise would have been dead as soon as he burst through the opening. Roselli tracked his pistol, the laser painting an unsteady line across the Iranian's chest. In the same, confused instant, one of the two other figures in the cabin, a big, lanky man in a lightweight safari jacket suddenly bolted toward the door.

Roselli held his fire as the hostage lurched between him and the soldier. The soldier fired an instant later, triggering a full-auto burst toward the door; the volley had been aimed at Roselli, but the bullets slammed into the bulkhead, the overhead, and the hostage's back. Roselli triggered three quick shots as the stricken hostage crumpled to the deck, slamming the Iranian back against the porthole.

On the other side of the passageway, Doc plunged into the stateroom through the storm of splinters loosed by Higgins's shotgun blast. A single Iranian soldier stood there, hiding behind a tall, attractive blond woman in a T-shirt and blue slacks. He had his left arm tight across his throat, gripping her so tightly that her scream was a silent, desperate gape as her hands clawed at his forearm; his right hand pressed the muzzle of a Colt .45 pistol against the side of her head.

“
Aslehetawnra beeandawzeed!
” he screamed, and the panic was evident in the harsh raggedness of his words. “
Goosh koneed va elaw meezanam!
”

Ellsworth wasn't sure what the man had said. He didn't speak Farsi, and the few phrases he'd memorized for this op were brief and strictly utilitarian. He suspected, though, that the Iranian had just rattled off a couple of those memorized phrases, things like “Drop your weapons,” and “obey or I'll shoot.” Strictly Wild West gunslinger stuff.

“Take it easy, fella,” he said, his eyes glancing about the tiny compartment. Two more women were clinging to each other on the cabin's single bed. “Nobody's gonna hurt you!
Azyatee beh shomaw nameerasad!
”

The expression on the visible part of the Iranian's face went from desperation to blank puzzlement. The pistol in his hand didn't waver, but a fraction more of his head was visible now behind the woman's blond mane. Doc was holding his Smith & Wesson at waist level, a deliberately nonthreatening stance, but the laser was painting the wild straggle of the Iranian's hair. He dipped the muzzle a fraction of a degree, and the red dot of the laser aim-point slid onto the guy's face. The Iranian flinched, probably from the dazzle of the laser, and pulled farther behind the woman. Doc let the laser dot drift onto her hair, which sparkled under the beam's caress. “
Tasleem shaveed!
” Doc told him. “Surrender!”

“Eh?”

Doc squeezed the trigger. His pistol
chuffed,
punching the round effortlessly through the woman's hair and into the Iranian's left eye. The soldier spun backward and fell across the bed alongside the other two women. The blonde stood motionless on the deck, eyes squeezed shut, screaming now as loud as she was able.

“Shit,” Doc said. “I didn't think my accent was that bad!”

The blonde stopped screaming, opened her eyes, then screamed again as soon as she'd had a good look at her rescuer.

“It's okay,” he said, raising his voice. “It's okay! We're Americans!”

“Americans!” One of the women on the bed sprang forward, grabbing his arm. “Thank you, God! Americans!”

The other two women followed an instant later, and Ellsworth found himself surrounded. “Port cabin clear,” he reported over his radio as the women crowded closer. “One tango down.”

“One tango down, starboard cabin,” Roselli added on the same channel. “And one hostage down too. Doc? We need you over here!”

“On my way, Razor.” He had to roughly disentangle himself from the women to get out of the compartment. “Okay! Okay! Take it easy, ladies! We'll have you out of here soon.”

He could hear the thunder of the Huey outside edging closer to the yacht.

“Prairie Home, Bedsheet,” Murdock called. Leaving the prisoner under guard, he'd emerged onto
Beluga
's well deck and was standing again in the night, speaking via satellite link with the command center aboard
Nassau
. “Prairie Home, Bedsheet. Come in, Prairie Home.”

He waited out the silence, listening to static. The Huey circled through the night, keeping watch against the appearance of Iranian patrol boats or other unpleasant surprises. Close by, Jaybird, who'd once professed to Murdock his experience with sailing vessels, had taken over the helm, while MacKenzie, Higgins, Roselli, and Fernandez mounted guard on
Beluga
's upper deck.

Except for the muffled clatter of the helo, the night was quiet now. The nearest Iranian vessels, some three miles ahead now, seemed oblivious to the activity aboard the Greenpeace yacht. The continual flybys and perimeter intrusions throughout the past hours had paid off; the Huey was certainly registering on the Iranian warships' radar, but they'd apparently chosen to ignore it.

They would, no doubt, continue to ignore it, at least until
Beluga
showed some sign of trouble, an abrupt change of course, for example, or a rendezvous with an American ship.

“Bedsheet, this is Prairie Home,” a voice crackled at last in his earplug speaker. “Authenticate Hotel, Alfa, one-niner-one.”

“Prairie Home, roger. I authenticate: Victor, India, one-one-three.”

“Roger, Bedsheet. Go ahead.”

“Prairie Home, objective secured, repeat, objective secured. We have fourteen tangos down, that's one-four tangos down, one tango captured, all accounted for. We have one hostage dead during the takedown, one missing.”

Murdock tried to dismiss the sour, dark burning inside he'd felt since he'd learned of Paul Brandeis's death minutes before, but it wouldn't go. The SEAL assault had gone down with stunning ferocity, speed, and precision. Forty seconds after Murdock had first opened fire on the
Beluga
's helmsman, all but one of the Iranians had been dead, with no casualties among the SEALs. Of the hostages aboard, all three women, Rudi Kohler, and four of Kohler's employees found locked in the crew's cubby below decks were safe.

The single, wrenching tragedy in the takedown had been the death of Paul Brandeis, the American hostage who'd blundered into Roselli's line of fire and taken the full-auto burst meant for the SEAL. Doc hadn't been able to help the American, who'd probably been dead before he hit the deck. Murdock could still hear the wrenching sobs of Brandeis's widow, even out here on
Beluga
's deck.

“Bedsheet, Prairie Home. That's a major well done! Now pack up and get the hell out of there!”

“Copy, Prairie Home,” Murdock said. “We have some loose ends to tidy up first. This is Bedsheet, out.”

Well done, right
, he thought bitterly.
The hell of it is, the mission was well done! But damn it all! We came so close to pulling it off one hundred percent!

There was always a terrible risk in hostage rescues, the near certainty that one or more of the civilians involved would get hurt or killed. Put one or more desperate, armed men in the company of a number of untrained and panicky civilians, then throw a SEAL assault team into the middle of it. No matter how well trained the attackers, no matter how expert their marksmanship, no matter how many hours logged in the fun house back at Little Creek or how advanced the technology of their weapons, the chances were still better than ever that someone—SEAL or terrorist, it didn't really matter—would deliberately or by accident cut down some kid or wife or husband. In the 1990s, the supreme example of how a hostage rescue ought to work remained the stunning Israeli raid on Entebbe in 1976. The Israeli paras performed brilliantly, but even there, two of the over one hundred hostages were killed and seven wounded during the fierce firefight in the air terminal building between Israeli troops and the PFLP terrorists.

Knowing the odds didn't help. Paul Brandeis had panicked and gotten in the way during the firefight; another hostage, Karl Schmidt, was missing—almost certainly dead, though Murdock hadn't had time yet to question the rescued civilians about that.

Yes, there definitely were several loose ends to wrap up here. Turning sharply, he strode across the deck and took the steps down the companionway two at a time.

Murdock sat behind a polished formica table across from the Iranian prisoner, who'd been propped up on one of the sofas that circled the lounge bulkheads. Doc was next to the prisoner, wrapping a bandage around his broken wrist. The man claimed to be Pasdaran Colonel Ruholla Aghasi and insisted that he was ready to cooperate in any way that he could.

Studying the man, Murdock was inclined to believe him, though training and common sense both urged caution. Senior officers did not change sides at a whim, nor were they as likely to be cowed by pain or threat as lower-ranking men who simply did what they were told.

None of the SEALs was feeling particularly friendly toward Aghasi at the moment. In choked, broken words, Gertrude Kohler had described the hijacking, Karl Schmidt's murder, and the threatened rape and torture of the women. Doc's hostility was clearest of all, a dark simmering behind his eyes as he tended to Aghasi's wound. Garcia was sitting quietly on the other side of the lounge, mounting guard with a sullen intensity that was disturbing. The rest were either forward with ex-hostages or up on deck.

Casually, Murdock gestured with the muzzle-heavy blackness of the Smith & Wesson in his hand. “Colonel, you say that you're willing to help us,” he said quietly. “I don't see why I should believe you.”

“Hell,
I
don't think you should trust him, Skipper,” Doc said. He continued wrapping the roll of gauze bandage around Aghasi's wrist as he spoke, the action strangely at odds with the steel-hard anger in the SEAL's voice. “These sons-a-bitches gunned down two innocent people!”

“Take it easy, Doc. Let's hear him out.”

“I . . . regret those deaths,” the Iranian said. “I didn't want civilians to be hurt. This operation has not gone entirely to plan.”

“Suppose you tell us about it, Colonel. Who killed Karl Schmidt? The Ohtori?”

That jolted the colonel. He reacted to the name Ohtori as though he'd been slapped. “N-no,” he said. “One of my men shot him when he, when he attacked the soldier holding his wife. I did not order it. How . . . do you know of Ohtori?”

“Never mind, Colonel. It's my turn to ask the questions. How long have you been working with the Japanese?”

Aghasi swallowed. “Not long. To be truthful, this operation has been a mistake from the start. That is why I wish to cooperate.”

Ellsworth tied off the bandage, then slipped the Iranian's hand into a gauze sling. “Maybe he'd like to cooperate from the bottom of the sea, Skipper. Should be safe enough. Even the sharks wouldn't want him. What d'you say?”

“Why don't you go check on Mrs. Brandeis, Doc?”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Aghasi looked pale, and he was sweating heavily. His uniform gave off the acrid bite of ammonia, a mingled stench of sweat and urine. “Your men are . . . frightening, Lieutenant.”

“Frightening? Hell, you don't know what frightening really is. Right now, they just dislike you. You'd better pray you never get them
really
mad!” He gestured with the pistol again. “So. Why don't you like the Ohtori? Who decided to start working with them?”

The Iranian took a deep breath. “Do you know an Admiral Sahman? Or General Ramazani?”

“No. Should I?”

“Perhaps not. Sahman is second-in-command of the Iranian naval facilities at Bandar Abbas. Ramazani is one of our senior Pasdaran officers, a hero of the Iraqi War.”

The “Iraqi War,” Murdock knew, referred to the bloody struggle between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988, a conflict that had claimed over a million dead on both sides.

“It happens that both Ramazani and Sahman oppose the mullahs in Tehran. Since the Shah was overthrown fifteen years ago, Iran has been held back, paralyzed. They believe, as I do, that an Islamic state can also be a
modern
state.

“In any case, they've kept their opposition secret while they built their own power bases and allied with other revolutionary groups. By now, they have connections with groups throughout the Gulf region, including the NLA.”

The NLA, the National Liberation Army, was a brigade-sized band of Iranian rebels and defectors, perhaps 4,500 men in all, armed with captured or stolen equipment and operating out of southern Iraq. Murdock had seen the background and pre-mission intelligence on the NLA when he'd taken command of Third Platoon; the SEALs who'd gone in on Operation Blue Sky—the hostage rescue at the Basra airport—had been briefed on the possibility that they might encounter NLA elements in the Iraqi swamps.