by Ted Bell
“What time is it, Daisy?” June said a few minutes later, her eyes fixed on the empty two-lane road ahead. She was doing eighty.
“ ’Bout nine-thirty.”
“I mean exactly.”
“Nine thirty-two. Exactly.”
Daisy mashed the accelerator to the floor. “If we hurry, we can still make the FedEx machine in time for the last pick-up at ten.”
53
KEY WEST
H awke stripped off all of his clothes on his way to the head in the aft owner’s stateroom. He caught a mirrored glimpse of his naked body stepping into the green glass shower. Six months in the jungle on starvation rations were not an especially good way for a man to lose weight. When he’d been admitted to Lister Hospital, he’d weighed only 143 pounds and his body had been wracked with malaria and other exotic bugs.
Now, two months later, he’d reached his fighting weight of 180 pounds, give or take the odd ounce or two. God knew he was trying. Eating right, lowering his alcohol intake, and maintaining the strict daily exercise regimen in the ship’s small gym had started to yield dividends. He was rapidly gaining in upper body strength and increased muscle mass. The salt air and sunshine had been working wonders on him, body and, perhaps, his battered soul.
He leaned toward the glass and rubbed the stubble on his chin. He hardly recognized himself in the mirror anymore. His black hair was cut short in a military brush cut and he was clean-shaven. Save the stark white band around his middle, the tropical sun had deepened his skin color to a dark and healthy tan.
Physically, at least, he was definitely on the mend. The septicemia and malarial symptoms had diminished considerably, as well as the insomnia. He was sleeping better and the nightmares had ceased altogether. To his surprise and delight, the prior evening he’d successfully completed a six-mile night swim in heavy surf off a deserted Key West beach. He was trying to run at least five miles a day on the sandy beaches. Running in sand got you in shape in a hurry.
For all that, he was not yet nearly as fit as he liked to be before going into the field.
But this assignment wouldn’t wait. He wouldn’t even have time to wish Conch a proper farewell. He’d gotten a message that she’d called earlier. He hadn’t called back. He didn’t want to say good-bye over the telephone. An image came to him, unbidden, Conch, her lustrous auburn hair splayed out upon his pillow.
Hawke suddenly realized that he desperately needed a shower.
A cold shower, to be brutally honest, to purge all the thoughts of overwhelming desire that featured so prominently in his recent dreams now that he’d recovered. He was uncomfortably aware that a woman had elbowed the nightmare jungle demons aside, fighting for his nightly attentions. The beauteous and brilliant Consuelo had appeared. The scent of her, the touch of her hand sometimes lingered upon waking.
Instead of cold, he reached for the chromium handle marked HOT.
There was a circular rain-head fixture above his head; a hundred or so tiny apertures created the hot needlelike streams he craved whenever he bathed. The temperature was exactly as advertised and he closed his eyes and let the rain-head hammer the tension out of him. Steaming hot water streamed down on his head and shoulders and he stood under the downpour willing his mind and body to unwind.
Relax, he told himself, leaning his head back against the glass wall and controlling his breathing. There was no time for women in his life. Affairs of state beckoned, far more urgent and demanding than mere affairs of the heart. When it was over, if he were able, he would tend to the latter.
He squirted some of the sharp-smelling L’Orange Verte body shampoo into his hands, lathering his hair, face, chest and shoulders. Yes, relax, old sport. Focus on the mission. Prepare for battle. Take up the sword. Why was he so bloody distracted tonight of all nights? Two reasons, obviously. The second reason was a very special boat just delivered for the high-speed run down to Brazil.
The first reason?
He didn’t even want to think about the first reason now.
But the boat, yes, he could think about her all right. He’d ordered her especially for this assignment and she was a wonder. She was one hundred and eighteen feet long with a beam of only thirty feet and could accommodate a crew of twenty. She drew only four and a half feet of water, a draught that should suit his purposes perfectly. He was planning a speedy trip up the Amazon, with a quick stop at Manaus to reprovision and pick up some equipment he’d need in the interior of the rain forest.
An Italian design group with the wildly improbable name of ‘Wally’ had created the sleek Italian offshore powerboat to his unique specifications, adding armor and weaponry to what was more typically used as a high-speed Côte d’Azur cruiser.
The most avant-garde design team in the world had created a vessel built of advanced composites that could cruise offshore comfortably at sixty knots. Three 5,600-horsepower gas turbine engines drove the boat. People had described the new Wally design as “psycho origami.”
To Hawke’s naval eye, she was a staggeringly beautiful vessel. Her knifelike hull and fiercely aggressive superstructure resembled nothing so much as a wildly experimental stratospheric airship. Lazzarini-Pickering, the principal naval architects at Wally, had designed a boat all rake and flat planes and sharp angles from stem to stern. Stealth, Hawke thought, had long become a design cliché. But this new boat left any such tired ideas in her wake. Even sitting alongside an old Navy pier in Key West, she seemed to be doing fifty knots.
With his newly appointed crew present on the dock, he had just christened her Stiletto, smashing a bottle of Pol Roger Winston Churchill against her razor-edged bow. The crew had cheered wildly, eager to be off next morning. Already a crewman was carefully stenciling the newly christened yacht’s name in blood red on her dark flanks. She was completely finished in a very deep gunmetal gray , vaguely metallic in direct moonlight.
Her magnificent bow, with a deeply inset teak deck, swept aft to a prominent knife-edged pilothouse built of carbon fiber and laminated composite glass. The three large rectangular windows of thick, bulletproof Lexan, sharply angled aft, were tinted a shade of dark charcoal. The massive air intakes for her gas turbine engines, mounted amidships on either side of the hull, owed much to intensive wind tunnel testing the Wally design team had done in Italy at the Ferrari racing facility at Maranello.
HAWKE PUT his head back and let the stinging water strike his face.
If it was possible for a man to love a machine, he thought, then this was love. Tomorrow morning, he would light out for the Equator and points south. He and his sleek new girl would go racing across the blue sea at speeds approaching one hundred knots. He would take her far up the Amazon, deep into the jungle, and show her where life and death lived together in such uneasy coexistence. He would find the devil standing at the crossroads and he would kill him.
“Need any help?”
With the noise of the shower, he hadn’t heard her come into his bathroom. Now there were two more hands washing him. And her naked body was up against his, moving against his leg, her head nuzzling in the curve of his neck and shoulder. Her mouth was at him too.
Hawke said nothing. What was there to say? No? Yes? Maybe? He simply stood there in the green glass box with his head and shoulders against the wall, feeling her hands moving on his upper body now as she set about scrubbing his face and hair and shoulders.
“I was afraid you’d start without me,” she said.
“If you get soap into my eyes, you’ll be sorry,” Hawke said.
“I’ll try to be careful.”
Her hands moved down the length of his arms and over his chest to his belly where they paused.
“You’ll have to do the rest, I’m afraid,” she said, blinking the streaming water from her eyes as she looked up at him, smiling.
“I will not. And be thorough about it, will you?”
“I’ve never washed a man before.”
“Really? Then something tells me you are a woman
with abundant natural talents.”
She bent to her task.
“Hard work.”
“Yes, isn’t it.”
I am drowning, he thought.
And then the woman was in his arms, the two of them were standing in the steamy mist and drenching downpour, both of their bodies slick with soap and heat and desire. He felt the soft weight of her lovely breasts pressed against his chest. He kissed her mouth for the very first time and was surprised at the violence of that kiss, at the need of it, how hard he kissed her and how hard she kissed back, the fierce tenderness of it all, and how wonderful she tasted on his lips.
Somehow, he managed to turn the shower off. He lifted her in his arms and carried her through into the bedroom where he gently laid her upon his bed. She was smiling up at him through half-closed lashes as he reached for the light.
It had been a long time since he had been with a woman and he took her with a gentle brutality, the sweetness of which surprised them both. When the moment came, she dug her fingernails into his hips to take him with her and then she cried out, blessing or cursing his name, perhaps both, and he drove himself into her harder and faster until at last he buried his face in her hair and urgently whispered her name.
Afterward, he lay still on his back, gazing up into the semi-darkness of his cabin and listening to the sound of their tandem breathing. Eventually, her breath slowed and became rhythmic and quiet. Moonlight was pouring through the half-opened shades on either side of his paneled cabin. He closed his eyes, sleep tugging at him, pulling him down.
At some point, he, too, must have drifted off, for he awoke with a start. There were still puddles of moonlight on the floor at the foot of the bed. He sat up, coming awake instantly. It was three o’clock in the morning. The bedside phone was ringing. The green light was blinking, meaning it was his private line.
He reached across her for it, but she’d already taken it off the hook and was sleepily saying, “Hello? Who’s this, please? Yes, he’s right here. Hold on a tick.”
She rolled over and offered him the phone.
“Who is it?” he whispered, his cold eyes flashing with anger at her impertinence.
“It’s your friend,” she said, stifling a yawn as she handed him the phone.
“Which friend is that?” he said, covering the mouthpiece and instinctively dreading her reply.
“The American Secretary of State, Consuelo de los Reyes.”
“Conch?” Hawke mouthed the word.
“Mmm.”
“Bloody hell, Pippa!” he whispered fiercely.
54
H awke put the phone to his ear. The girl in his bed turned her back to him and yanked the bedcovers up over her head like a small child desirous of a private tantrum. Was she actually pouting? Bloody hell, he’d just have to ignore her.
“Good evening, Conch,” Hawke said, with a good deal more bravado than he’d intended.
It was a full two minutes before Alex Hawke was allowed to insert a single word edgewise.
“Sorry,” he finally managed to wedge in.
“He says he’s bloody sorry!” he heard the girl under the covers cry, thankful the exclamation was somewhat muffled.
Pippa rose from the bed without another word, swaddled in trailing bedclothes, and padded silently across the hardwood floor to the head. She pulled the door firmly closed behind her. Thirty seconds later, she emerged once more in one of the white terry robes that hung in all the guest staterooms. Her hair looked different, and Hawke realized she must have used his silver military brushes. The robe, which was obviously what she’d worn when she’d crept below to his stateroom, was belted tightly about her waist.
She crossed his cabin without even a backward glance and, on her way out, banged his stateroom door shut just hard enough to avoid splintering it.
“Conch, this is not at all what it seems,” Hawke said, wincing at the sound of the slamming door, easily loud enough to be heard over the phone, “Can we just move on?”
“Alex, relax. Your personal life long ago ceased to have any fascination for me. And I would happily let you go back to whoever you were doing except for one thing. I’ve just gotten off the phone with the president. He is in full crisis mode. And, he specifically asked me to call you.”
“Conch,” Hawke said, sitting up in bed, coming full awake. He was vastly relieved to be talking business. “How can I help?”
“In the last six hours, all hell has broken loose along the Mexican border. It’s not exactly war, but it’s close enough. We’ve had reports of multiple incursions by Mexican Army units in three different states. Border Patrol agents are being openly attacked, shot at without provocation by illegals with AK-47s. A few small border towns in Texas and New Mexico are under siege by rampaging drug gangs on motorcycles. There has been widespread burning and looting of remote farms and ranches. A few small border towns have reported fires raging out of control. Arson.”
“God.”
“Now, we’re getting reports of American vigilantes raiding Mexican border towns in reprisal. Anti-American demonstrations in Mexico City and the countryside are turning violent. This thing is spiraling out of control, Alex. It’s insane. The administration is all caught up in planning for the Inauguration and we’re on the verge of a full-fledged border war.”
“An invasion,” Hawke said, “That’s just how the American people will see this. That the bloody Mexicans have invaded their country.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake, how else could they see it? It’s what’s been happening, Alex. You know the numbers. Ten thousand a day coming across. Twelve to twenty million illegals already over. And now, just what we need, Mexican Army units crossing the border.”
“You have any proof of that?”
“No. Unfortunately, we don’t.”
“Uniformed troops takes this to a new level. Has anyone spoken directly to the president of Mexico about this?”
“Of course. That was the first call the president made. Mexican President Fox disclaims any knowledge of his army moving north across our border. Only he could give that order. He says he has not. But, he also says, if these vigilante reprisals against innocent Mexican civilians continue, he will declare Mexico in a state of war with the United States and move four divisions north. He will also immediately stop all oil flow to the U.S. through Mexico.”
“What’s the president’s response?” “He’s going to pull every single National Guard Unit from the interior of the country and disperse them along that two thousand-mile-long border.”
“That sounds a lot like war. How long will that take?”
“To organize and mobilize something like that? A week. Less.”
“That may not be enough time.”
“To do what, Alex?”
“Conch, the whole time I was in hospital I was thinking about Top. I ordered a new boat to navigate the Amazon and its tributaries. I can have a crew ready to go in less than twelve hours. For reasons I’m not sure you’ll understand, I’m going back.”
“I understand all right, Alex. It’s commonly called revenge.”
“THERE’S A powerful political angle to this, Alex. Border state governors and local law enforcement are besieging the president to do something immediately. In the meantime, the Minutemen are raising public funds to erect a border wall and money is flooding in. You saw the demonstration in L.A. last year. People waving Mexican flags, chanting, ‘Viva la Reconquista!’ The Mexicans are taking back the southwest without a shot being fired.”
“With the help of the jihadistas I saw in the jungle.”
“You think the Mexicans are innocent?”
“Hell, no. Ambrose and I interrogated a German diplomat named Zimmermann. Formerly the liaison between the Mexican government and the Brazilian terror army. He’s dead now. I think the Mexicans are in this at some level. Maybe not all the way to the President, but someone.”
“Alex, look. The president was just narrowly re-elected, primarily becaus
e those southwestern states supported him. Believed he was going to stand up for this country and that our borders still meant something. If he doesn’t put a stop to this borderline wildfire and fast, he’s going to be country fried chicken right out of the box.”
“Pulling the Guard away from all those major cities is a bad idea right now, Conch. A very dangerous idea.”
“Right. We see thousands of internet threats every day. We must have missed this one.”
“I saw this threat with my own eyes, Conch.”
“What do you want me to do? Invade Brazil? Argentina? We’re stretched so goddamn thin right now—caught between Iraq and a hard place, isn’t that what you said? Send what few troops we do have, and they’ll only be concentrated and vulnerable along a broken border.”
“That’s only half of it. Send the balance of the Guard to the border and you leave major cities wide open.”
“I know.”
“Conch, the president doesn’t really think the root of this problem is Mexico, does he? That’s his dilemma. He can’t say what he really believes publicly. He thinks I might be right. Tell me the truth.”
“He’s not sure, Alex. Nobody in Washington can figure out what the hell the Mexicans are up to, much less the rest of the Latan leaders. But, every day, there are more attacks on our border agents. Six were shot in the last week. You’ve got el Presidente down there, somewhat believably disavowing any knowledge of armed troop incursions.”
“And that may prove true.”
“Privately, he has assured us he means us no harm. But he encourages an invasion of our country by millions of his citizens. And then says he’s very pissed off at American reprisals against his people.”
“Resulting in the current confusion at the White House and up on the Hill,” Hawke said.
“With the Mexicans rubbing our faces in it on CNN. I’m just waiting for the mainstream backlash.”