by Ted Bell
“So the Russians had to find another buyer. Who on earth other than the Arabs or the Chinese has got that kind of money?”
“Good question. Cap finally put me on to our two dinner guests. His information indicates they’ve located a new buyer. She has been purchased. Being delivered now. Our job is to find out who the proud new owner is. We need to ensure that the delivery does not happen. The U.S. Navy has deciphered certain radio codes that might enable us to intercept it at sea.”
“Who, exactly, is ‘we’?”
“‘We,’ in this case, is Washington, the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and me. They’re footing the bill for our little Caribbean cruise, actually. Jolly generous, I’d say.”
“Who in Washington? Anybody I know?”
“High.”
“Your friend POTUS?”
“Yes. And the brand-new American secretary of state.”
“Your old friend Conch.”
“Indeed. She called me in early January just as I was about to shoot myself out of sheer boredom.”
“Ah. I thought you had successfully extinguished that long-flickering flame.”
“Her motives are hardly romantic, Constable. She has hired me to find out who bought that damn submarine and why. Most importantly, where the hell she’s located. They like to keep track of these things, you know.”
“Hmm. One suspects Madame Secretary’s motives are always romantic where you’re concerned. Speaking of suspects, who’s on the list of potential buyers?”
“Oh, the usual madmen and megalomaniacs, naturally. All the rogue states. North Korea. Iran. Some kind of pan-Islamic movement. The one who scares me most is Muammar Useef, the erstwhile Saudi playboy.”
“Long-range ballistic missiles bearing germs. That’s how Muammar would go. And he’s got the money and the motive.”
“And the track record, of course. Not to mention the opportunity. No question. That’s why the Yanks are taking this one so seriously,” Hawke said.
“Funny,” Congreve said. “The world seemed a much safer place when all we had to deal with was a bunch of drunken Russians stumbling around the Kremlin knocking over the samovars.”
“Yes. Praying they didn’t all wake up with hangovers and bang their bloody bums up against the wrong button,” Hawke said. He paused a moment, looking at his friend thoughtfully before he spoke.
“Actually, there’s another matter I’m pursuing down here, Ambrose. I mentioned it to you on the docks this afternoon. At the risk of being dramatic, I’m going to show you something I’ve never shown another living being. Or even a dead being for that matter.”
“Nothing too personal, one would only hope.”
“Please, Ambrose. This is quite serious.”
“Hawke!”
Sniper had squawked a warning, and Hawke knew Quick must be approaching the banquette where they were sitting. It was one of the oldest pirate tricks in the books, but it still worked. Over the years, Hawke had been working on Sniper’s vocabulary, and the bird had a surprising range of expressions.
Tommy Quick was carrying a small metal box with an electronic keypad embedded in the top. He placed it gently on the table in front of them.
“Put Sniper back in his cage, will you, Tom?” Hawke said, waving his hand before his nose. “I don’t think this Brie agrees with him. Upset stomach.” Quick held out his forearm, and the bird immediately flew from its owner’s shoulder to the steward’s outstretched arm.
Ambrose leaned forward to touch the silver box, and Hawke grabbed his hand in mid-air. “Don’t touch the box, Ambrose. It’s alarmed and will respond to my fingerprints only. Sorry.”
“A lovely box.”
“Isn’t it? Polished titanium,” Hawke said, punching in his code. The lid of the box snapped open with a hiss, then started rising slowly. Peering over the edge, Congreve saw a small scrap of blue paper, now yellowed with age. There was some kind of crude drawing and quite a bit of scribbling below the picture. Hawke punched another key, and the interior of the box was illuminated. Then a thick piece of glass lowered from the raised lid to cover the opening. It was, Congreve saw, optical glass designed to magnify the contents.
“It’s the map, Ambrose. The one I spoke of. Early eighteenth century. My grandfather gave it to me.”
“A map of what, exactly?”
“Oh, buried treasure, and all that sort of thing. My grandfather loved to tell stories of cutthroat buccaneers and bloodthirsty swashbucklers and buried booty. This map you see here belonged to one of my more infamous ancestors.”
“They were all infamous, as far as I can tell. Right down to the present day.”
“Every family has a few black sheep, I suppose. Only in my family, it was a black hawk.”
“Blackhawke, the pirate. Yes. Your great ancestral role model. I’ve always been curious about that bloody chapter in the Hawke family history. So, tell me the story for God’s sake. The barbarous Russians won’t be here for another half hour!”
“Well, if you’re really interested.”
“Hawke, you really do try my patience at times.”
“All right, all right. I’ll tell you the tale.”
11
“The pirate stared at the skulking black rat,” Alex Hawke began, and he was off.
“Last meal, Rat!” the ragged old man shouted hoarsely at the creature. “Here’s the totality of me bleeding generosity at last, down your bleeding gullet, I’m afraid.” The pirate eyed a lively morsel of weevil-infested bread and lobbed it at the oily-looking creature. The rat had backed into its favorite dank corner of the prison cell, all eyes and haunches. Man and rodent had grown quite companionable these last few months, and the proffered tidbit was quickly consumed.
The rat’s black eyes glittered as it turned away from its benefactor with nary a trace of gratitude for past favors. There then came a sound from the pirate’s throat that could have passed for a sigh, had it not been so mournful, and he collapsed back upon his pitiful rack. Wrapping a threadbare blanket around his shoulders, he lifted his gaze. One patch of sky was visible in the moldy wall opposite, and he could see the light was fading. With it went the pirate’s chances for a long and happy life.
Unlike his friend Rat, the ailing buccaneer would not be enjoying the hospitality of Newgate Prison when the sun rose next morning. The prisoner coughed and smiled grimly in spite of himself. Six months prior to his arrest and this miserable circumstance, he’d been out on the open seas of the Caribbee, his ship bursting to the gunwales with captured booty he’d relieved from a Spaniard, on a hard reach, flying up the Gulf Stream, finally to home and family after long years afloat.
They’d be coming for him shortly, he knew, for what would be his last journey. King’s men, horses, and soldiers. Coming to load him into a cart, him and a few of his miserable shipmates, and haul them all away, down Holborn Street, through the laughing, taunting crowds. This trip was known poetically as “heading west.” But every lost soul rolling out Newgate’s gilded archway for the last time knew he was eastbound. East, for the muddy banks of the Thames and Executioner’s Dock. Where waited a length of stout rope and the hangman.
“It’s old Blackhawke himself that’s cornered now, ain’t it, Rat?” he said, watching the animal scurry to the corner opposite. The man dipped his quill once more into the inkwell and returned to his unfinished letter. He coughed and shivered in the chill, damp air.
His recent trip across the icy North Atlantic, chained like a dog in the brig, and subsequent few months in this notorious pesthole of a prison had left the famous pirate captain much diminished. Once the mere sight of his flagship masthead appearing on the horizon had struck fear into every man afloat. Now Blackhawke was a figure of mockery and derision, wrongly consigned to the hangman’s noose by high-placed friends now turned lower than dogs, treacherous enemies who had betrayed him to save their own hides.
Blackhawke straightened and turned once more to his letter. Such thoughts of doom weren’t befitting a
man of his stature and fame. And, besides, there was still the chance of the king’s pardon, wasn’t there? He dipped his quill, put it to the blue paper, and made a few scratches, trying to sketch in the outline of the island’s coastline. He wasn’t much used to drawing maps and figures, and it taxed him sorely.
“Now, where was that bloody rock?” he said to Rat, scratching his raggedy beard. “I remember a spiky rock standing just above the cave, looked like a ship under sail it did, but where? Here, I think,” he said, and drew it on the map.
He’d been trying to finish the letter to his wife all week, but his mind was clouded with fear, anger, and rum. The rum was courtesy of the Newgate Prison parson, who’d been smuggling it into his cell in ever more copious quantities as his days dwindled.
“See? All smugglers in some ways, ain’t we, Parson?” he’d said between sips of rum to the clergyman that very morning. Both knew it was possibly the pirate’s last drink. “Piracy! There’s a laugh! Who ain’t a pirate? It’s the way of the world they’re hanging me for! And me not even guilty! Why, I had me that letter of marque from his majesty and two French passes for all them East India ships I took, didn’t I?”
He and the parson both knew that wasn’t exactly true. The famous pirate captain had been sentenced to death for the murder of a Mr. Cookson, a former bosun on his ship. The captain, strolling his quarterdeck, had overheard an unflattering remark from the bosun and banged the man smartly on the head with a wooden bucket. Unfortunately, the poor fellow expired two days later.
At his trial for both murder and piracy, Blackhawke had claimed it was manslaughter, a crime of passion. Suppression of mutiny, he’d argued in the dock. But the jury had decided otherwise. In words that tolled like solemn bells in the gloom of the Old Bailey, each prisoner learned his fate that evening.
“You shall be taken from the Place where you are, and be carried to the Place from whence you came, and from thence to the Place of Execution, and there be severally hang’d by your necks until you be dead.
“And may the Lord have mercy on your souls.”
The pirate scratched some more on the scraps of blue paper that Parson had given him. His fever had parched his memory. He was having trouble remembering the outline of the rocky coast on the nor’west side of the island. This was information vitally important to his purposes. It was his last chance to provide sustenance for his soon to be grieving widow and children. As he drew, he tried to call up the night he’d buried the last of his ill-gotten treasure.
On a chilled, moonless night, he and two mates had left the moored English Third-Rater and rowed the skiff toward the island’s rocky coast. Though Blackhawke had paid careful attention as the shoreline hove into view, the exact geography of the place had long receded now from his mind’s eye.
Well, he’d just do the best he could and hope his dear wife would find the location. Surely she’d recognize the twisting river that he roughed in there on that jagged coast jutting into the sea? And the coconut trees here, and the big rock above the cave? His drawings looked something like cocoa trees, didn’t they?
He put a bold black X where he thought the treasure should be. Yes. That was it. Just about that far west of the river.
The captain and two shipmates had done their digging inside the cave right there, two leagues west of the mouth of the river. Boca de Chavon, the Spaniards called it, whatever that meant. And exactly one hundred paces from that big rock jutting into the sea, the one that nearly chewed the bottom out of that skiff all right.
Three men had rowed ashore. There was a hidden cave, the mouth of which was completely underwater all the time save dead low tide. At the very back of that cave was where they did their digging, hacking deep through coral and wet sand.
But after the bags of gold were safely concealed in a deep hole in the deepest part of the cave, only one man had returned to the sloop that night. Blackhawke himself. The two mates remained behind to “guard” the treasure, although they were in a most unhealthy condition. As they held their lanterns, leaning over, peering down into that black hole full of gold, both had their skulls stove in by a mighty swipe of Blackhawke’s spade.
Under the crude illustration, Blackhawke wrote to his wife in his crabbed hand:
Gold! Aye, there’s gold in that cave on the Dog’s Island, dearest wife, verily some hundred odd bags of it that we lifted from the good ship Santa Clara, being the barge of the Spanish corsair Andrés Manso de Herreras, which we took as a prize off the Isle of Dogs.
This Manso de Herreras, he was the most bloodthirsty of cutthroats and we lost many a man in a pitched battle on his decks once we’d boarded the Santa Clara. He almost got the better of your beloved husband, advancing on me from behind, but my faithful parrot Bones sung out in time and I sent the cur to his maker and his gold to my hold from whence I stashed it in the cave. I pray you, care for old Bones, since the wily old bird will live a long life and twas mine he saved.
But also in that cave you’ll find two unfortunate souls who I had to dispatch so as to keep my secrets. Prepare yourself for them skeletons before you lift your spade, my Darling. And do your digging as I do mine, on nights when the moon has fled the sky or the clouds abet your endeavours.
A caution, dear Wife! There’s grave danger for a body wanting to go ashore on that rocky coast. Cave Canem! Its teeth are sharp enough to bite you into bits. Many have died trying. But, once past those cruel teeth, I warrant that my poor family’s salvation lies beneath my mark on the old Dog himself.
At least I go to my maker knowing I’ve provided for you and our dear children. I’ve got some fancy this letter will prove my farewell, although the king may spare me yet. I only hope my good name will not be forever sullied by this treacherous betrayal—
There was a sharp rap at his cell door, and Blackhawke looked up. Surely they’d not come for him so early as this? Blackhawke hurriedly reached beneath his threadbare bedcovers and withdrew a battered brass spyglass. He removed the eyepiece and set it aside. Taking up his quill, he scrawled under the map and letter “With undying affection, your husband Richard” at the bottom of his letter.
He then rolled up this document and inserted it into the body of the spyglass. As good a hidey-hole as any and his only one at that!
Another rap at his door and he called out, “Away with you, whoever you may be! Captain Blackhawke is not presently receiving!”
He was screwing the eyepiece back into place when the heavy cell door swung open. It was only Parson, carrying another jug of prison grog.
“Good Parson!” Blackhawke said. “Have you happy word from my beloved monarch?” Blackhawke was at the window, the spyglass to his eye, peering through the bars at the dark and lowering clouds. Good, he thought, the letter was not visible inside the shaft of the glass. He’d get the thing to his wife somehow, with the parson’s help.
The parson came forward and handed the jug of grog to Black-hawke, who immediately took a deep swig. “Come, what news? I beg you.”
“The king’s men are in the courtyard,” Parson said. “The carts are being harnessed as we speak. Only one of your crew was pardoned. A Mr. Mainwaring, who finally produced convincing evidence of his innocence, Captain.”
The old pirate collapsed back upon his cot and uttered one word, “Lost.”
12
“Splendid yarn!” Congreve exclaimed just as the heavily armed steward came to stand beside Hawke. “For God’s sakes, man, don’t stop now!”
“Sorry for the interruption, sir,” Tom Quick said. “But the stern watch just rang up to say the launch has left the dock and your guests are on their way.”
“Thank you, Tommy.”
Ambrose slapped his knee in delight. “Astounding. Really quite remarkable!”
“What do you mean?” Hawke asked.
“Well, I mean to say it gave me goose pimples. The ‘skulls stove in with spades.’ All that blood and thunder sort of thing.”
Hawke smiled at his friend. He had
to admit he had gotten rather caught up in the telling of the tale.
“So what happened next, old chap?” Ambrose asked. “You’ve certainly captured my imagination!”
“Well, I’ll continue it later, if you insist. I’m not much of a storyteller, but I must have made Grandfather tell it a hundred times. I’ve been anxious to tell you the story, and show you the map, ever since we got down here to the tropics. Get your old brain working on the thing. I’ve been chewing at that map all my life and made a little progress, of course, but I’ve only gotten so far.”
“It’s fascinating. Once I’ve examined the document more closely, I’ll compare it to some of the older maps in the ship’s library. First thing tomorrow and—heavens—look at the time! I’d better get hopping. I’ve got a few very nervous crustaceans awaiting me in the kitchen and I think it’s time to get them into a nice hot bath.” Congreve got to his feet.
“It’s called a galley, Constable. How many times must I remind you? On a boat, the kitchen is the galley.”
“In my view, a kitchen by any other name is still a kitchen.”
“I give up,” Hawke said, raising his glass. “Show those lobsters no mercy.”
“Yes, once the lobsters have been murdered in cold blood, I’ll rejoin you and your new comrades in arms,” Congreve said. He wandered off, cocktail in hand, pipe between clenched teeth.
Hawke noticed Quick coming up the steps with a bottle of Chateau Montrachet on ice.
“Love a splash of that, Tom,” he said.
“Pleasure,” Tom said, and poured him a glass.
“These two men coming for dinner,” Hawke said. “Russians, as you know. Arms dealers, in fact. Highly untrustworthy. Has Sutherland alerted the crew and staff remaining on board tonight?”
“Yes, sir.”