Warlord: An Alex Hawke Novel

by Ted Bell

  As he ran, Tabu Babar felt a lifetime of boyhood hopes and dreams slowly falling away from him, running like dirty water, sloshing along the filthy gutter and disappearing down the drain.

  Tabu ran out into the thick of the screaming mobs, dodging this way and that. In his emotional fever, he ran for the station blindly, hoping for a bullet or a blade to end his agony. He was without hope, now. He wanted to leave this world. He’d lost everything; and now he felt he might be losing his mind as well.

  Strangely, this was a kind of comfort. Hope had been lost and replaced by a kind of hot lust.

  A fervent dream of revenge now settled into his brain and, with it, an odd sense of peace in all the madness around him. He would survive. And he would make them pay.

  The streets were a nightmare, but the great black fortress called the New Delhi train terminal was a raving madhouse. He stood gasping at the scene before him. Every Moslem in the city it now seemed wanted to escape to their new homeland of Pakistan. Somehow, Tabu made it to the platform for the Lahore-bound train just as the big station clock bonged twelve. The train was still there, thanks be to Allah, huffing and puffing, billowing clouds of steam rising from beneath its great iron wheels.

  This was always an obscenely noisy place. But now, the cacophony threatened to overwhelm him. The cavernous black hall, with its maze of iron girders above, was overflowing with clamor and shouting, almost drowning out the cries of the countless water and sweetmeat vendors, the useless barks of policemen, the shrill cries of women snatching up baskets and herding their children and husbands forward on the mobbed platforms.

  The throngs were clambering over one another to board third-class railcars already full to overflowing. Women and children were simply flung aside by bigger, stronger refugees. Fights were breaking out and the few police stood idly by, laughing as they finally gave up and turned a blind eye to the inter-Moslem violence before them.

  Tabu looked at his bag chockablock with his cherished books and knew he had no choice but to leave it behind. He flung it onto the glimmering tracks beneath the wheels, and in a sudden flash of rage, ripped off his little English schoolboy cap and hurled it onto the tracks as well. Books be damned. Mayo be damned. England be damned!

  THE TRAIN CARS WERE PACKED, jammed with desperate people hanging out the windows just to breathe in the stifling night air.

  He raced back to the rear of the train and clambered up the metal ladder to the roof of the very last car. There were many others already there, and a smiling family made room for him. Somehow they’d managed to get a pair of family goats up top with them and the animals were bleating in fear.

  The patriarch of the family, the ancient grandfather, looked at Tabu’s rumpled school uniform and said, “English school?”

  Tabu nodded.

  “You like English, boy? You like this Mountbatten? This noble lord who deserts us in the middle of the night? After swearing to keep our poor country whole and at peace? Who now treats us like so many swatted flies?”

  Even Tabu was surprised by the violence of his own response. He slammed his fist down on the roof of the train hard enough to dent it and screamed in anguish.

  “Mountbatten is a false god, a bloody liar! A betrayer! Devil! They are all devils, these English! Let Almighty Allah take these English far, far away! May they never even smell paradise!”

  The family moved away slightly, thinking him surely mad. And perhaps, he realized for the first time, he truly had gone mad.

  Far ahead, a plaintive locomotive whistle blew and the old train lurched and creaked forward, slowly at first, gradually gaining momentum. There was the familiar deep chugging noise, a rattling of the couplings, and the squeak of the iron wheels, but Tabu heard a strange sound echoing off the iron roof of the great station.

  A loud staccato noise.

  He looked behind him at the throngs of swarming people left stranded on the platform, and understood the noise. Mobs in red turbans, a vicious Hindu sect, were firing machine guns into the helpless crowd of Moslem men, women, and children left behind. Screaming, they jumped down onto the tracks and ran for safety, but many, many died.

  Bitter tears coursed down Tabu’s cheeks as he looked at the sprawling dead and dying he was leaving behind. With them died his lifelong dreams, his hopes of making a fine life for himself on that cherished green island called England; the one precious ideal he had held so strongly in his young heart was now seeping into the ground with the blood of his slaughtered brothers.

  The journey to Lahore was almost more than Tabu could bear. Beside the tracks, along roads twisting through the most fertile part of what was once India, the Punjab, he saw what must be millions of Moslems, most walking, the elderly or infirm in ox-drawn carts, women with babies in their arms, furniture piled high upon their backs, all bound for the newly partitioned Moslem nation of Pakistan.

  Tabu learned that countless tens of thousands of these Moslem immigrants had been slaughtered by violent sects of Hindus and Sikhs waiting in ambush along the great trek north. This was the legacy that his great hero, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had left behind. And then he was home… .

  The Babar ancestral home, Putrajaya, was one of the great landmarks of the city of Lahore. The monumental palace was set inside a vast parkland of exquisite gardens, fountains, and beautiful flower-choked lagoons, all protected by a high wall surrounding the entire property. For some reason, no guards were on station and the entrance gate was not closed. It was flung wide open, and intuition made Tabu enter with caution.

  As he started to move slowly along the drive toward the house, and then crossing open ground, everything suddenly began to make horrible sense.

  He saw two men, dressed in the familiar garb of the Mahadi sect, dragging his young sister of sixteen down the white marble steps of the entrance. She was screaming and trying to twist away, but the men were huge and overpowering. Tabu, knowing any attempt at rescue would only result in the death of both him and his sister, retreated quickly into the trees before he could be seen. Three more Mahadi appeared, and they had his mother and father. Both were bruised and bleeding. And now smoke was pouring from the countless windows on the upper floors. His boyhood home was afire, his boyhood was afire.

  Tabu fled, his home a funeral pyre, and ran for the main gate of Putrajaya, praying a Mahadi would put a rifle bullet in his back before he reached the road. For days afterward he would aimlessly wander the streets of Lahore, scrounging for food, trying to make sense of what had become of his once charmed life. He went to the homes of relatives and found them charred ruins, found sticklike corpses inside. Nowhere left to turn, hungry and afraid, he lived the hand-to-mouth life of a street urchin.

  One day, a withered old crone took pity on him. The streets were too dangerous for a boy so young and pretty, she said. She would take him to a wonderful orphanage. A place of safety, a refuge where poor boys would find hot food and shelter. When Tabu saw the man who ran the orphanage put five filthy rupees into the hand of the old woman, Tabu knew he’d just been sold into a life of slavery.

  They took you in, all right, and put food in your belly and a roof over your head. After a while, though, when they thought you were ready, they’d come in the night, steal you sleeping from your bed, and ferret you down to the cellar. There, under harsh lights, they would bind you to a blood-soaked butcher’s block. Then, as you stared up in horror, they would do one of two things, sometimes both if you had been a trouble.

  They would either lop off one of your hands with a filthy cleaver, and then plunge your bloody stump into hot pitch. Or someone would carefully pour a tablespoon full of boiling acid into one of your eyes. He would then scoop the jelly out of the socket with the same hot spoon as you screamed until you were hoarse.

  It was, of course, simply a matter of good business. Out in the streets, the one-handed, or the one-eyed, beggar boy was far more productive, these savages, these saviors, these “defenders of the poor” had learned. They had studied the cha
ritable habits of the influx of European grandees and grand dames to a fare-thee-well. And they knew what worked.

  And these roaming saints of the streets, always in search of hopeless orphans, were nothing if not good businessmen. They had soon realized there was money to make off the downtrodden. You just needed to keep trodding them down at a steady clip, and clip one wing. So simple.

  A one-eyed Tabu would now join the swarming floodtide of thousands of India’s half-blinded children surging through the narrow confines of every city, holding out his or her remaining hand for a rupee, please, sir, one rupee, sir, only one, sir. Please.

  How terribly swift had been his fall from grace, from a life of knowledge, privilege, and comfort.

  It had taken less than a month.

  Tabu Babar, only yesterday a brilliant boy who’d foreseen a brilliant future for himself, perhaps as a successful banker in the “City” of London, or a famous barrister, now occupied life’s lowest rung.

  Untouchable.

  Until, that is, in a squalid back street of Lahore, he’d managed to catch the attention of, and been touched lovingly by, an enormously wealthy Englishwoman named Lady Braeburn Thorne.

  He was no longer untouchable. Oh, no.

  He was touched again and again and again…

  HE MUST HAVE DOZED OFF for he awoke with a start. Sir David Trulove was squeezing his upper arm tightly enough to hurt. He cracked an eye, saw Sir David leaning in toward him with a crooked grin on his deeply lined face. “Have a look,” C said.

  “What on earth?”

  “Down there. At your feet.”

  He looked down and saw one of the young terrorists crumpled on his back, a great red gash in his neck still pumping great gouts of dark blood.

  “How did—?”

  Sir David held up a long blade he must have hidden somewhere upon his person. It was dripping blood. He casually swiped it across his trousers and stuck it back in a sheath round his ankle. Old bugger had no end of tricks up his trousers.

  “He fell asleep right in front of me. Drugs must have worn off,” C whispered. “These guards are all buzzing with methamphetamines, but not a few are bloody dozing off as time goes by. Except for our esteemed colonel over there. Look at him, drugged to the gills, having a go at one of the young belles of the ball. Probably promised her the earth and moon by the looks of things.”

  Zazi was positioned squarely behind a naked blonde, the girl bent forward over the cushioned back of a chair with her broad and gleaming white rump high in the air. All you could see was the colonel’s muscular back, glistening with sweat even in the murky light as he labored over her, thrusting himself ever more rapidly into this gullible girl whose voice could be heard, moaning her appreciation for her captor’s deepest expressions of affection.

  Trulove reached down and snatched the AK from the dead terrorist on the floor and stood up in a single, athletic motion. He aimed at the jihadi colonel’s back, his finger tightening on the trigger—suddenly a hand pressing down on his forearm and—

  “No! Don’t!”

  “What?” C said, oblivious, opening fire, his lethal burst cutting Zazi nearly in half at this range, before he swung his head around to confront this bloody naysayer.

  Trulove, astonished, was looking into the ugly snout of the Markov 9mm pistol, not two feet away, as it spat two rounds into his chest, his blood spattering the face of his assailant before he went down.

  “OH, MY GOD,” CHARLES SAID, looking across the room at his old and trusted friend, now revealed as a traitor and a madman. A monster, now revealed for what he was, standing in a haze of gun smoke, a ghostly blue figure beneath the misty bulbs above. The Prince of Wales had just watched one of his oldest friends murder the director of MI6 in cold blood. So had the boys. It defied all belief. But he’d seen it. Everyone had.

  Montague Thorne, gun in hand, walked slowly toward the Prince of Wales, weaving his way through the maze of furniture and terrified hostages, his free hand swiping the blood spatter from his eyes until he stood before the Prince of Wales flanked by his two sons, standing there silently, with his aristocratic nose and his vulgar heart.

  “Monty. Oh my God, Monty, why? Who are you? What are you?”

  Montague Thorne smiled, red blood on his white teeth as he spoke.

  “I am what I have always been, Charles. You’ve seen my signature. A pawn. Just a little black pawn in the game. The Great Game as you people call it. The human chess game you and your family have played for years in my part of the world. Our blood is on your hands, just as yours is on mine. I’ve been playing my own little game all these years, you see, devoted my whole life to it. Moves and countermoves on the great board. The time draws nigh for the pawn’s final move.”

  “What in God’s name do you intend, Monty?”

  “Pawn takes Queen, Charles. However else did you think this game could end?”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  THE GOOD NEWS, STOKE THOUGHT, WAS they’d gotten very lucky with the weather: a storm had rolled in. Heavy fog with intermittent rain. That meant it would be a lot harder for any enemy shooters on the ground to hit them once they’d deployed their chutes. There was also a lot of booming thunder around them that would mask the thwump-thwump of the rotor blades when they descended from their current altitude.

  The bad news, Stoke realized, was with the heavy ground fog at night, it might be a hell of a lot harder to spot the LZ, or, if you missed the landing zone, find another good spot to land on the rooftops of Balmoral Castle without breaking your damn leg or worse. Stoke had never seen so many damn chimneys on one house in his whole damn life.

  “How are you feeling, big man?” Hawke, who was seated next to him, asked, just loud enough to be heard over the noise of the twin rotors.

  “My pucker factor is rising a little.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “What you said to me back there in the hangar at Stornoway.”

  “Which part, Stoke?”

  “The part where you said, and I quote, ‘This is the big one, Stoke, the counterterrorist Lifetime Achievement Award, so get ready. It won’t look good on either of our résumés if we come back from this mission with a dead Queen.’”

  “Oh, right. I did say that, didn’t I? Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Damn straight it’s true. That’s why my pucker factor is so elevated.”

  Hawke said, “And another thing, Stokely. Don’t shoot my best friend Ambrose Congreve if you can possibly avoid it, all right?”

  “I thought I was your best friend.”

  “You are.”

  “How’s that work again?”

  “It’s a tie, all right? A dead heat.”

  “Don’t say dead anything, okay?”

  “Look. We can do this, Stoke. These SAS Special Projects troops are the best-trained counterterrorist outfit in the world. You’ve never worked with anybody remotely as good as these guys at this kind of thing. Seriously, Stoke. They wrote the book.”

  “Hell I haven’t. I’m telling you, man, the U.S. Navy SEALs are as good as anybody in the whole damn world. Maybe these guys wrote the book, but the SEALs? They made the movie and the movie is better.”

  “You’re right. It’s a tie, okay?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  At the stroke of midnight, Hawke’s chosen mode of transportation, a matte-black Royal Air Force Chinook HC2 helicopter with no RAF insignia, had arrived on station at its insertion point, five thousand feet directly above Balmoral Castle. The tandem-rotor Chinook carries up to fifty-five troops and, because this might be a casualty evacuation, twenty-four stretchers. There were two RAF medical officers aboard, too, with full trauma emergency capabilities.

  Early on in the planning at RAF Stornoway, Hawke had decided this had to be a nighttime operation. The Chinook’s cockpit had full nighttime capability when operated with night-vision goggles. The helo was armed, too, with two M134 six-barreled miniguns, one in each front side window, and an M60D heavy ma
chine gun on the ramp. It was the perfect aircraft to conduct a low-level night operation in a hostile environment.

  At this moment, the Chinook, flying IFR, on instruments, with no visible lights, was hovering, an invisible black-bellied monster hiding in the soup.

  In the belly of the beast, in addition to the mission commander, Alex Hawke, and his colleague, Stokely Jones, there were two fourteen-man squads of SAS counterterrorist commandos known as SP teams. They specialized in assault and hostage rescue missions. They were all checking and rechecking their gear and weapons, sitting directly across from each other on the canvas cargo sling seats that ran up and down the interior fuselage of the Chinook.

  All were wearing one-piece assault suits made of flame-retardant Nomex 3, bulletproof armored waistcoats, ceramic armor plates covering the front, back, and groin, and an armored helmet capable of stopping a 9mm round at close range.

  The weapons they carried included the HK MP5 submachine gun, the SIG Sauer P226 pistol, and Remington shotguns loaded with “hattan” rounds designed to shoot off door hinges without putting hostages at risk. From their utility belts hung stun grenades, flash-bang grenades, and smokers.

  The SAS had two ways of going into a hostage situation: quiet or noisy. Hawke had insisted they go in quiet; thus, their weapons were all carrying noise suppressors. And he’d added two of the SAS’s very best snipers to the team.

  One lucky troop would jump with a very cumbersome “Harvey Wallbanger” in his arms. This wall-breaching device fired a water-filled plastic projectile at high velocity, causing a breach. The projectile immediately lost all kinetic energy once the breach was made. Much safer, and quieter, than explosives.