by Ted Bell
Der Wolf.
The man climbed down the steps to the tarmac with a good deal of athleticism, Hawke noticed. He held a heavy leather suitcase in his hand, but he handled it as if it were a spy novel he’d been reading on the flight. He was a big, bald man, with masses of bunched muscle around his neck and shoulders. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing powerful forearms. The whole gristly package came with a right bullet of a head, too, gleaming with sweat.
Hawke zoomed in on the face, on the hooded dark and bushy-browed eyes of the arriving passenger.
He took a good long look at the fellow and then handed the glasses to his old friend, an ex–Navy SEAL and former New York Jet, a human mountain from West 129th Street in Harlem known by the name of Stokely Jones Jr. A much-decorated counterterrorist for hire, he was oft described by Alex Hawke as “about the size of your average armoire.”
“It’s him, Stoke,” Hawke said. “Ivanov.”
Stokely Jones took a quick peek and confirmed Hawke’s opinion. There was no doubt. The man they’d come to Cuba to kill had arrived right on schedule.
That night it turned cold in the mountains. From his vantage point in the jungle peaks of the Sierra Maestra, Commander Hawke could see the misty lights of Cabo Cruz, a small fishing village on the northeastern coast of Cuba, on the coastline far below. To the east, a few more such villages were visible from his vantage point. Dim clusters of light scattered along the black coastline, as if tiny gold coins had been flung out by some giant hand.
These were the only signs of civilization visible in the darkness from the mountainside campsite.
Hawke pulled his collar up as he looked seaward. The wind was up, heralding a cold front moving north. He knew from CIA ops briefings in Miami that a tropical storm was brewing up to the south of Cuba. It was headed this way, a cold wind out of Jamaica, drawn northward by warmer Caribbean waters. Hawke swore softly under his breath. Sometimes inclement weather worked in your favor; and sometimes it decidedly did not.
Among the five men living at the makeshift campsite, the mood around the deliberately low-burning campfire was one of quiet, confident expectation. The tiny village of Cabo Cruz, just below them, was their target tonight. In that village was the man the commando squad been tracking for the last forty-eight hours, ever since the Ilyushin 12 had touched down at the secret airstrip.
His name was General Sergey Ivanovich Ivanov.
He was a high-ranking Russian officer on a mission from Moscow, a much-feared veteran of the Spetsnaz brigade who’d written their names in blood on the killing fields of Chechnya. Special forces, the crème de la crème of Putin’s much vaunted advance combat brigades.
Earlier that afternoon, the general, along with two civilian aides cum bodyguards and his plainclothes entourage of advisors, had checked into a seaside hotel called Illuminata de los Reyes, Light of the Kings. They’d taken the entire top floor of the pale-pink-washed building. The general’s quarters were on the third floor, a capacious suite with a balcony overlooking the sea. That night before, Sergey had left the French doors open to the wind and waves; at around midnight, he’d ventured out onto the balcony for a last Montecristo cigar and vintage brandy.
Hawke’s four-man stick was a British MI6-initiated counterterrorist team, operating in tandem with the CIA. The Englishman’s mission, under the direction of Sir David Trulove, chief of MI6, was straightforward enough: travel to Miami, then Cuba, and gather intelligence about Russian operations on the island. And then take out der Wolf.
A forward espionage base in North America was long rumored to be under consideration by Vladimir Putin’s top generals as a KGB spy outpost. Human intel reports out of CIA Miami indicated scouting had already begun for a prime location on a small island off the northeastern coast of Cuba.
Hawke’s joint force of CIA and MI6 commandos had a clear-cut objective: kill the man sent by Moscow to supervise the design and construction of a major Russian military facility on the Isla de Pinos. In 1953, Fidel had been imprisoned at a notorious facility there, a house of horrors built by Batista. And his brother Raúl had recommended the small island to the Kremlin as the ideal location for a major spy base.
Now, the Castro brothers, despite increasingly friendly diplomatic overtures from Washington, had revealed their true colors: despite any rhyme or reason, the Cuban sympathies still lay with Moscow. Sir David Trulove, Hawke’s superior at MI6, had once joked to Hawke that los hermanos must have missed the memo: “Communism is dead.”
Los hermanos, Spanish for “the brothers,” was Sir David’s pet sobriquet for that notorious pair of tenacious banana republic dictators.
It had been estimated by British-run undercover operatives in Havana that the general’s imminent demise would set back top secret Russian espionage initiatives by at least eighteen months to two years. Time sorely needed by the Western powers to get their act together on the new realities shaping the Latin America geopolitical arena.
The CIA/MI6 hit team consisted of four warriors: Commander Hawke himself, ex–Royal Navy; the former Navy SEAL Stokely Jones Jr.; a young ex-Marine sniper named Captain Alton Irby; and a freelance Aussie SAS demolition expert, Major Sean Fitzgerald.
They had picked up a fifth member, a local guide, shortly after they’d arrived. He was a good-looking young kid named Rico Alonso. He was moody and hot-tempered, but Hawke put up with him. Rico exuded complete confidence, something he’d gained through prior dealings with British and American commandos traveling in harm’s way. He’d done it all before, apparently with much success. And he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the jungle regions of the central Cuba’s mountains that Hawke was in desperate need of.
The stick had been put ashore on the northeastern coast by an American submarine, Hammerhead, out of Guantanamo Bay; the insertion location was a small port city called Mayacamas. That had been two days earlier, the night before they’d scouted the airstrip. Since then they’d been tracking the movements of the target, using Rico to gather intel from the village locals about the Russian general’s movements, weapons, and sleep habits.
Tonight, Hammerhead had returned to the Mayacamas LZ on the coast. The attack submarine was loitering offshore even now, scheduled for a rendezvous with Hawke at 0400 hours this morning. It was a full moon, and the brightness presented its own set of dangers.
Six hours gave the four-man stick and Rico plenty of time to make their way down to the village, suppress resistance, if any, in and around the hotel, and gain access to the top-floor room where the Russian target was now presumably sleeping. The team would assassinate him and then make their way back along the coast to the exfiltration point as quickly as possible.
It all sounded straightforward enough, and in reality, it was. But war, as Alex Hawke had learned long ago, had its own reality. If things could go wrong, they would. Even if things could not possibly go wrong, things could always find a way. And, sometimes, incredibly, things would go right at the very moment when you’d lost all hope. That was just the way it was in the fog of war.
Behind the keening note of the freshening wind, the sea boomed softly at the bottom of the cliffs. Alex Hawke got to his feet, kicked dirt onto the smoldering embers, and began a final check of his automatic weapon and ammunition. He carried a machine pistol and an FN SCAR assault rifle with a grenade launcher mounted on the lower rail. Grenades hung like grape clusters from his utility belt.
“Let’s move out,” Hawke said softly, putting a match to the Marlboro jammed in the corner of his mouth.
“Time,” Stoke said to the other men. “You heard the man.”
Stoke, like the others, was surreptitiously watching their leader, his old friend Alex Hawke. Hawke, especially in his muddy jungle camo, was hardly the picture of a typical British lord in his midthirties. To be sure, there was nothing typical about the man. He was, as one of his former Etonian classmates once put it,
“a masterpiece of contradictions.” He was a British intelligence officer and former Royal Navy combat pilot about whom it had oft been said: the naturally elegant Lord Hawke is also quite naturally good at war.
Now, on the eve of battle, the man grew ever more calm and at peace with himself. He was unmoving, quietly smoking in the flickering firelight, the smoke a visible curl, rising into the cool night air. Stoke alone knew that behind Hawke’s wry smile and placid exterior was, after all, a creature of radiant violence.
This man, whom Stokely had befriended twenty years earlier, was a natural leader; equal parts self-containment, fierce determination, and cocksure animal magnetism. Women and men alike seemed drawn to him like water to the moon.
Even in repose Hawke was noticeable, for he possessed the palpable gravity of a man who had been there and back. A pure and elemental warrior, necessarily violent, riveting, nature itself. Well north of six feet, incredibly fit for someone his age, this was a man who swam six miles in open ocean every day of his life.
He possessed a full head of unruly black hair, had a chiseled profile, and sported a deepwater tan from weeks at sea. And then there were those “arctic blue” eyes. A prominent London gossip columnist once declared in Tatler that his eyes looked like “pools of frozen rain.” She had thus further embellished his reputation as one of London’s most sought-after bachelors. Hawke’s two vices, Bermudian rum and American cigarettes, were the only two left to him since he’d given up on women.
“Awright, let’s hit the road,” Captain Irby, said, kicking enough damp earth onto the fire to extinguish it. And the five heavily armed men began to make their way down the seaward face, hacking their way through rugged terrain covered by dense vegetation. Rico first, then Irby, Fitzgerald, Stoke, and, finally, Hawke, covering the rear.
It was slow going.
The trail was switchbacked, snaking down the mountain, hairpin turns giving on sheer drops. Almost immediately, Hawke began to second-guess the wisdom of taking Rico’s advice. For one thing, the trail was very steep and soon began to grow narrow in places. The commandos were forced to use their machetes simply to keep hacking their way forward. Rico offered constant assurances, saying more than once that it would widen out soon. It didn’t. Now, it was barely wide enough for passage.
And then it got worse.
Walls of green now pressed in on them from either side, slowing them down even more. Thick, loopy vines and exposed ficus roots underfoot grabbed at their boots. Hawke, having seen Irby suddenly trip and pitch forward, didn’t like it one bit. Not that it mattered much now. Retracing their steps and coming down the open face was not an option at this late stage in the mission.
So there was nothing for it. Hawke grimly kept his mouth shut and told the chattering Rico to do the same . . .
Thirty minutes into the descent, the jungle closed in, then narrowed to a complete standstill. They stumbled into an apparent dead end. A tiny space inside a cathedral of hundred-foot-high palms, the fronds chattering loudly high overhead in the stiff winds, the air in the green hollows cool and damp. Rico was slashing at the solid green walls that remained before them, cursing loudly as he flailed away with his ivory-handled machete.
“Look, Commandante!” the young Cuban kid cried out over his shoulder. “All clear ahead now!”
Hawke looked. Rico had disappeared through the now invisible opening he had slashed between two trees in the wall of palms. The squad pressed forward in an attempt to follow his lead.
“Shut that damn kid up, Stoke,” Hawke said, using his assault knife to whack at the dangling morass of thick green vines as he, too, tried to follow Rico’s path forward. Captain Irby was now in the lead, and he was pulling back elephant leaves and palm fronds, seeking a way forward.
“I don’t like this, boss,” Stoke said, watching Irby struggle. “Something is not—”
“Down! Everybody get fucking down!” Captain Irby croaked, turning to face them, his face stricken. Stoke took one look at the man’s clouding eyes and knew they were in deep trouble.
“Hey, Captain, you okay, man?” Stoke said to him, reaching out to help. There was so much blood. The man had something stuck in his . . . oh, Jesus, it looked like Rico’s ivory-handled machete. It was buried up to the hilt, near the top of Irby’s chest, just above his Nomex body armor. Irby’s fixed and glazed eyes stared out at nothing, and he fell facedown at Major Fitzgerald’s feet.
“Oh, God, I didn’t think he would—” the Aussie said, dropping to his knees to see what he could do for his dead or dying comrade.
And that’s when the thick jungle surrounding the natural cathedral erupted in a storm of sizzling lead. Heavy machine-gun fire came from all directions, muzzle flashes visible everywhere they looked, rounds shredding the foliage over their heads and all around the trapped commandos. Masses of shrieking green parrots, macaws, and other tropical birds loudly rose up into the moonlit skies in terror as the incoming fire increased in ferocity.
“Get down now! Take cover!” Hawke shouted. He dove left, but not before he heard the young Aussie scream, “I’m hit! I’m hit!” And then he was silent.
“Damn it to hell!” Hawke cried, getting back on his feet to go to the wounded man’s aid.
“Forget him, boss! He’s gone,” Stoke cried out.
Hawke felt a visceral torque in his gut. In a rage, he opened up with both his assault rifle and his machine pistol, firing both weapons on full auto until he’d exhausted his ammo and reached for more. Stoke had his back, the two of them stood there back-to-back, leaning against each other as they spun in unison, unleashing a 360-degree hail of lead with overlapping fields of fire. The thumping roar of Stoke’s heavy M-60 machine gun seemed to be having an impact on the enemy hidden in the jungle.
“Gotta be getting the hell out of here, boss!” Stoke said, grabbing Hawke’s shoulder and spinning him around. “Back up the mountain! It’s the only way . . .”
“Go, go!” Hawke said. He heaved two frag grenades over his shoulder while turning to follow his friend’s upward retreat. He’d taken two steps forward when a high-caliber round slammed him in the lower back, spun him around, and dropped him to his knees.
“Boss!” Stoke cried, seeing Hawke trying vainly to get to his feet and firing his weapon blindly.
“Keep bloody moving, damn it!” Hawke shouted. “I’ll take care of these bastards. Leave me be.”
“Not today,” Stoke said.
Stoke whirled around and bent down, firing his weapon with his left hand and scooping Hawke up with his right. He flung Hawke over his broad shoulders and started running flat out straight up the mountain. The giant with his wounded friend tore through the dense foliage as if it didn’t exist.
They got maybe a few hundred yards before all hope of salvation vanished. A broad rope net, weighted with stones, was released by three Cuban soldiers perched on branches high in the canopy. The net fell, entrapping the two enemy combatants, driving them to the ground, and ending for good any hope they still harbored of escape.
When Hawke came to, he was gazing into the sweat-streaked face of the Russian general he’d come to Cuba to kill.
Ivanov was bent over from the waist, smiling into his prisoner’s unseeing eyes. His thick lips were moving, his Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down, but he wasn’t making any sounds Hawke could understand as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Alex blinked rapidly, trying to focus. He saw Stoke out of the corner of his eye.
His friend was bound by his ankles with rough cordage and suspended upside down from a heavy wooden rafter. He appeared to be naked. And there was a lot of blood pooled on the floor beneath his head for some reason. Had he been shot, too, and hung to bleed out? Hawke’s own wound was radiating fire throughout his body. He fought to stay awake . . . heard a familiar laugh and looked across the room.
The kid, Rico, was there, too, sitting at a batte
red wooden table, smoking a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of rum with some other Cuban guards. He seemed to be talking to Stokely out of the side of his mouth. Every now and then he’d get up, walk over to the suspended black man, scream epithets into his bleeding ears, and then backhand him viciously across the mouth with his pistol. A few white teeth shone in the puddle of blood under Stoke’s head.
Stoke, perhaps the toughest man Hawke had ever met, was a stoic of the first order. Hawke had never once heard his friend cry out in pain.
Hawke felt a white-hot flare of anger. Bloody hell. He had to do something! He tried to rise from the chair but felt himself slipping away again. He could not seem to keep his eyes open. How long had he been awake? They never let him sleep. No food. Some poisonous water out of a rusty coffee can now and then. It was cold sleeping on the dirt floor of the dank cement building after the sun dropped . . .
They’d both been stripped naked the first night. Allowed to keep nothing but their heavy combat boots with no laces. The bullet was still in Alex’s back, and the wound had turned into one hot mess, all right, but he fought to ignore the searing pain and keep his wits about him. He shook his head and tried to remember where he was despite the spiking fever that made straight thinking so difficult.
It was a compound built in a clearing in the middle of the jungle. Palm tree fronds brushed the ground. High wire fences. Dogs. Every evening the Russians came, including General Ivanov. They drank vodka and played rummy with the Cubans. The general and Rico interrogated the two prisoners until they got bored with torture and retreated deeper and deeper into drink.
The worst brutality the two prisoners had endured was called the “Wishing Well.” Every morning at dawn, two burly guards would march them naked through the jungle to a spot away from the compound. There, two fifty-gallon drums had been stacked one on top of the other and buried in the soil. Hawke and Jones were made to lie down in the dirt beside the well. One guy would bind each of their ankles to a stout bamboo pole while the other one kept his MAC-10 machine pistol trained on both of them.