by Ted Bell
“Means it’s okay to land,” Alex heard Stoke say in his headphones, and he eased the little seaplane in over the treetops and dropped in for a three-point landing.
Ten minutes later, Alex and Stokely were in the back of one of the two Jeeps, bouncing along a dirt road that snaked upwards through the jungle. It was good Stoke had asked for two Jeeps. His SEAL toys filled up most of the second one.
“Wait till you see this joint,” Stoke said. “It is something else.”
Alex had been enjoying the riot of color everywhere he looked. It was like racing through a tunnel of botanical wizardry. Orchids, bougainvillea, and frangipani. Banyans and banana trees. Red, green, and yellow birds that darted and swooped overhead. Shafts of sunlight picked out waterfalls splashing into small pools and spilling across the road.
He was finding the humid heat of Martinique deliciously lush after the dry, sparse vegetation of the Exumas and Bahamas.
“It’s an old fort,” Stoke said. “Place was falling down years ago, when the boys first came down here and bought it. But the troops spent all their spare time fixing it up real good. Look up there, see it?”
The Jeep came over a rise, and Alex saw the small fortress sitting atop one of the many green hills that paraded down to the sea. It looked to be late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, most probably English, Hawke thought, judging by the design of the crenellated battlements and guard towers at the four corners.
Colonized by France in 1635, Martinique had remained a French possession, save three brief periods of foreign occupation by Britain. The old fort was incredibly sited and gleaming white in the morning sunlight. Stoke had not overstated the facts, Alex saw as they drew near, the fortress was indeed something else.
“See all them shiny cannons poking out all around the top?” Stoke asked.
“Yes,” Hawke said. “Magnificent.”
“Well, guess what,” Stoke said. “They all work. Only fire ’em on special occasions, birthdays and Bastille Days and shit like that. But you should hear those mofos roar. Man, you talk about thunder and lightning!”
“What do they call the fort, Stoke?”
“Well, it had some fancy French name when they first bought it, but the boys renamed it. It’s officially called Fort Whupass now.”
Hawke laughed. “Fort Whupass,” he said, loving the sound of it.
The fellow driving their Jeep, a Martiniquais, who had forearms like lodgepoles sticking out of his olive-green T-shirt, turned around and smiled at him. “Oui, c’est ça! Bienvenue à Fort Whupass, mes amis,” he said in his Creole patois.
“Merci bien,” Hawke replied, looking up into the trees. “Il fait tres beau ici.”
“Oui, merveilleux.”
“Vous êtais ici, maintenant?”
“Non, pour la journée seulement.”
“Ah, oui, alors—”
The Jeep finally emerged from the dense jungle, and Hawke could see the sandy road ahead, climbing up to the wall of the fortress. He was astounded to see a large rectangular platform being lowered as the Jeep drew near.
“A drawbridge?” Hawke asked, incredulous.
“Damn right, a drawbridge,” Stoke said. “Ain’t regulation without one. And a moat, too, full of big-ass alligators. You going to have a fort you got to do it right! Besides, these boys don’t want nobody sneaking up on they ass.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Stoke looked at him for a beat and then said, “Well, maybe about the alligators. There is a moat, though. Big-ass moat.”
“A moat, Stoke? In Martinique?”
“Well, no, ain’t really no moat either. But they always talkin’ ’bout puttin’ one in. Can’t ever have enough security when every terrorist organization on earth hates your ass. Boys done moved three times in the last fifteen years.”
They were just passing under a tree and Hawke glanced up to see a man in jungle camo perched on a high branch. He was cradling a high-powered rifle with a scope. The sniper saw Hawke staring and waved.
The two Jeeps barreled across the lowered platform, which Hawke saw actually did cover a deep ravine, and screeched to a halt inside the open stone-paved courtyard. There was conspicuous lack of activity inside the fort, just a few dogs sleeping in the shade of a four-story structure of whitewashed stone.
The hot morning sun and the humidity were enough to make anyone, man or beast, seek shade.
“Where is everybody?” Hawke asked, surprised at the sense of total desolation that pervaded the old fort.
“Sleepin’, most likely,” Stoke said. “Catching Z’s. Boys had a twenty-mile jungle run last night. They all sacked out in the barracks, which is the ground floor. Second floor is the armory. Third floor is communications and computers and shit. Top floor is where we’ll find our guys waiting. They call it the poop deck.”
“Stoke, you seem to know an awful lot about this place. Why’s that?” Hawke asked, following his natural curiosity around the building to take a look.
“Well,” Stoke said, right behind him and looking sheepish, “I did do a little freelance work down here from time to time. When I was NYPD, you know, I’d take all my vacation time in Martinique.”
“That’s how you’d spend your vacation?”
“Shit, boss, counterterrorism is the most fun you can have with your clothes on!”
“My God, what in the world is that?” Hawke said as they rounded the back of the white stone building.
There was an amazing structure just inside the wall at the rear of the courtyard. It looked like a giant cube of green glass, which is just what it was. Constructed of thick, clear green glass building blocks, dazzling in the morning sunlight, the building had to be thirty feet high by thirty feet wide. A perfect square, no windows, no door that Hawke could see.
“Somethin’ else, ain’t it, boss? I knew you’d get a kick out of it!”
“What is it? Looks like an emerald as big as the Ritz.”
“I call it the Emerald City. But it’s really a museum.”
“Museum?”
“The ‘spoils of war’ museum. Where they store all the things they pick up around the world after the shooting dies down. Whatever the enemy leaves on the ground. You wouldn’t believe what’s inside that place.”
“I’d certainly love to see it. How do you get inside?”
“Through a tunnel from the basement of the main building. If there’s time, they’d be happy to show you.”
“Right, Stoke, let’s get going.”
They entered the main building and climbed a narrow set of stone steps carved into the wall. Four flights up, they arrived in a dark corridor that led to a vaulted chamber. Beside a massive wooden door, in a chair leaned back against the wall, a man wearing a white kepi on his head sat reading a book. The novel Citadelle, by Saint-Exupéry, Alex noticed. Required reading for all Legionnaires.
But he was wearing an old navy and gold SEAL T-shirt and khaki shorts, the traditional SEAL daytime uniform. His head was shaved and he had a black beard that hadn’t been trimmed in years. He had a MAC 10 submachine gun slung over the back of the chair and a burning Gauloise hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked up, saw Stoke approaching, and a huge grin lit up his deeply tanned face.
“Zut alors! Skippair!” the man exclaimed in a heavy French accent. “Incroyable! I heard you were coming down!” He rocked his chair forward and leaped up to embrace Stokely. They pounded each other’s backs sufficiently hard to fracture a normal man’s spine.
“Froggy! Yeah, the Frogman his own self! Shit! I’ve missed your sorry pencil-dick numbnuts ass,” Stoke said, holding him by the shoulders and looking down at him. The man was barely five feet tall and almost that wide. “You still smoking them damn lung darts? What’d I tell you ’bout that?”
“I take it you two know each other,” Hawke said, a little impatiently. The clock, after all, was ticking.
“Stokely Jones is ze meanest woman I ever served under, monsieur,” Fro
ggy said, sticking out his hand to Hawke. “Comment ça va, monsieur? I am ze famous Froggy.”
“Alex Hawke, Froggy,” Hawke said, shaking his hand. “Pleasure.”
“Frogman was in the C.R.A.P. division,” Stoke said. “French Foreign Legion. One of the few French units to serve in the Gulf War.”
“Crap?” Hawke asked, waiting impatiently for the joke.
“Oui, monsieur! Commandos de Recherché et d’Action en Profondeur! Ze best!” Froggy said, puffing out his chest and saluting.
“Splendid,” Hawke said, looking at his watch. “I think we’re expected.”
“Oui-oui, c’est vrai,” Froggy said, opening the door. “It’s true. Let me tell zem you are arrived.” He stuck a silver bosun’s whistle in his mouth and piped them aboard as they entered the room.
50
Two men rose from a large wooden table where they’d been sitting. Sunlight streamed into the room through open windows on all sides. To the east, Alex could see the dark blue Atlantic rolling to the horizon. To the south and west, the pale blue of the Caribbean Sea. The room was devoid of furniture save the plain wooden rectangle of the table and twelve simple wooden chairs.
There was a sign on one wall, hand lettered in flowery calligraphy. It was the SEAL creed:
The More You Sweat In Training
The Less You Bleed In Combat
There were maps and navigational charts scattered everywhere. Hawke was gratified to see that it was a map of Cuba they’d been poring over. Clearly, they hadn’t been wasting any time since Stoke’s phone call little more than two hours earlier.
Stoke went to each man and embraced him in turn. There was little back-pounding now, just emotion. For a second, Hawke thought they were all going to get leaky on him.
“Boss, say hello to Thunder, this good-lookin’ Injun on the left, and Lightnin’, this ugly-ass Irishman on the right. Boys, give a big warm welcome to Alex Hawke, the guy I’ve told you so much about.”
“Good morning,” Hawke said, striding across the sunlit room, smiling at both of them. “And thanks for agreeing to meet on such short notice. It’s deeply appreciated. Flying down, I heard no end of lies about you two.”
“Congenital liar, Stokely is,” Lightning said, earning himself a look from Stoke. He was a big strapping Irish chap, ruddy-complexioned, and weather-burned, with short red-gold hair that also lightly covered his bulging forearms, and crinkling blue eyes. He had the stub of an unlit cigarette jammed in the left side of his mouth.
“You must be FitzHugh McCoy,” Hawke said, giving the man a stiff salute. McCoy, Hawke knew, was a Medal of Honor winner. In the U.S. military, such a man is entitled to a salute from anyone of any rank.
“Welcome aboard, Commander Hawke,” the man said in a thick Irish brogue, returning the salute. “FitzHugh McCoy is indeed the name, but call me Fitz. My accomplice here is Chief Charlie Rainwater. If he likes you, he’ll let you call him Boomer.”
“Pleasure,” Hawke said to the copper-skinned man, offering his hand.
The keen-eyed fellow studied Hawke for some time, seeming to decide whether or not to shake his hand. He was tall and bristling with muscle, with blazing black eyes and a long narrow nose sharp as an arrow above somewhat cruel lips. His shoulder-length black hair fell about his shoulders and he was wearing buckskin trousers.
He was, Hawke had learned on the short flight down, a full-blooded Comanche Indian. A true plains warrior, he was also the best underwater demolition man in the long history of UDT and the SEALs.
He and Fitz had earned their reputations in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam as part of SEAL Team Two’s riverine operations. They specialized in making life miserable for Mr. Charlie on a daily basis. Thunder, because he always scouted barefoot, saved countless lives in the jungle, finding tripwires no one else could see, hearing VC footsteps no one else could hear, smelling a VC ambush a mile away.
Boomer had earned three bronze stars in Vietnam, and one silver star. Fitz had had the Congressional Medal of Honor pinned on his chest in the White House Rose Garden by President Lyndon Baines Johnson himself.
Thunder finally extended his copper-skinned hand to Hawke.
“Boomer,” he said.
“Hawke,” Alex said, and shook his hand.
“Good name,” Boomer said.
“I inherited it,” Hawke said, smiling at the man.
“I hear you earned it, too,” Boomer said, and settled back into his chair, putting his bare feet up on the table and crossing his arms across his broad chest.
“Skipper here tells me we have a critical time element,” Fitz said, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. “So maybe we should all get to be arsehole buddies later and get down to business right now.”
“Brilliant,” Hawke said, taking a chair at the table. “I think we just became asshole buddies, Fitz.”
Stokely, pulling out a chair, burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny, Skipper?” the lanky Irishman asked Stokely.
“First time in my entire life I have ever, I mean ever, heard Alex Hawke say the word asshole,” Stoke said, still laughing.
“That’s because I only call you one after you’ve left the room,” Alex said, to Stoke’s evident chagrin and the obvious amusement of Fitz and Boomer.
“Commander Hawke,” Fitz McCoy said, moving over to a large blowup of Cuba on the wall, “let’s get started. All I know is based on a troubling conversation with Stokely this morning. Trust me, this outfit can do anything. But I didn’t like one thing I heard.”
“Fitz, I’ll be honest,” Alex said. “I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest if you just said, ‘No, thank you,’ and sent us packing. Any sane man would. I mean it.”
Stoke coughed into his fist, stifling a snort. Alex was unbelievable. Man just automatically knew exactly where people’s buttons were located. Man had just located Fitz’s number one button and mashed it hard.
Fitz stared at Alex for a long moment, and Alex saw him come to the decision.
“Okay, it’s a hostage snatch,” Fitz said, stubbing out his cigarette and jamming another one in his mouth. “How many are we pulling out?”
Hawke pulled an eight-by-ten photograph out of an envelope. “Our primary objective is this woman. An extremely close friend of mine. Her name is Victoria Sweet. This is a picture of her taken just last week. And this is a transcript of a cassette she recorded after her capture, clearly under duress. I have the cassette as well.”
“Thanks, we’ll listen to it. Meanwhile, how about a quick sitrep? Summarize the situation for us? We are aware, of course, that there’s been a military coup d’état in Cuba.”
“Cuba’s new military regime wants two things. One. Immediate lifting of the U.S. embargo. Two. Immediate withdrawal of all personnel from Guantánamo NAS within eighteen hours and twenty-seven minutes from right now.”
“These guys are in no position to make such ridiculous demands!” Fitz said. “What is this, the mouse that roared?”
“This mouse has two substantial assets,” Hawke said. “A fully operational Soviet stealth submarine carrying forty warheads. And a biological or nuclear weapon hidden inside the Guantánamo naval base set to detonate at 0600 hours tomorrow.”
“Holy shit,” Fitz said. “These guys are crazy. After bin Laden, and all of Al Qaeda’s and Saddam’s subsequent bullshit, America’s tolerance for this kind of crap is zero. These Cuban dipshit generals would obviously rather have a parking lot than a country. Where the hell is Castro when you need him?”
“Disappeared, Fitz,” Hawke said. “He’s either dead or a hostage they didn’t get around to yet.”
“I’d guess dead.”
“Probably right,” Hawke said. “At any rate, the Gitmo CO is preparing an order of evacuation. First step, get all the women and children safely aboard the JFK and other Navy vessels. Once they’re steaming out of Gitmo harbor with half the Atlantic Fleet giving them cover, squadrons and cruise missiles from the Fleet are goin
g to carpet-bomb the place.”
“Including the hostage site, I assume,” Fitz said.
“Yes. It’s called Telaraña. The Spider’s Web,” Hawke said. “Just here, in Golfo de Guacanayabo, is a small island just off the coast of the town of Manzanillo. The military installation there is the Navy’s number one target. That’s where the rebel leaders are holding the hostages and that’s where the Soviet sub is parked. And that’s why we’ve got a time crunch.”
“I have to be honest with you lads,” Fitz said, looking from Stoke to Hawke. “This mission looks like a real goatfuck. One. Who knows when the Navy F-14s will show up? We’ll be just as dead as the Cubanos.”
“Good question,” Hawke said. “I have no idea.”
“Conch wouldn’t tell you?” Stoke asked Hawke.
“I’d never put her in the position of having to say no, Stoke.”
“Two. We’ve got an island with an area of at least three square miles, uncharted. With no SIGINT, no TECHINT, I’m not seeing a lot of ways to pull this off. And, there’s not even bloody time for basic recon. How about HUMINT?”
“The CIA does have men on the ground, inside the target zone,” Hawke said, pleased that Conch had just taught him the meaning of HUMINT. “They created a lot of the material I’m going to show you now. Plus a satellite and a dedicated bird in the air twenty-four hours a day. Predator.”
He put a heavy leather satchel on the table and withdrew a thick black three-ring binder. A scarlet X on the cover identified it as top secret.
“Have a look,” Hawke said.
Both men eagerly flipped through the pages, their excitement growing.
“Where the hell did this come from, Commander?”
“A U.S. Navy briefing I attended on the JFK this morning. I’m sure I’m breaking every rule in the book by showing it to you, but what the hell.”
“Fitz,” Boomer said, tabbing through the book. “Look. A whole section of thermals.”