by Ted Bell
China Moon was up on the bow with the coiled bowline to hand in a matter of seconds. As Hawke slowed the Wally and let the wind and tide gradually push her portside up against the wooden pilings of the dock, China tossed the line to the dockmaster perfectly. He caught it in midair and quickly secured the tender to the dock.
Hawke scanned the skies above, hoping to see his aircraft nearby. He wasn’t disappointed. A large dark blue aircraft suddenly dropped through the thin cloud layer and banked sharply to starboard, lining up on final approach to the airport at Nassau.
“That’s my new airplane on final. Rather good-looking, don’t you think? The latest Gulfstream.”
“Oh, please, spare me. Men and their toys. Don’t be a bore, Alex. I don’t get impressed anymore. So, that’s what brings you to the Bahamas. The mysterious disappearance of Prince Henry. I actually had dinner a few times with the prince before he disappeared. Charming boy. We had fun.”
Now she had Hawke’s complete attention. “How much fun, exactly, China?”
“Mind your manners, Mr. Hawke. My private life is none of your affair.”
“Everything regarding Prince Henry is my affair. Now, how much do you know about the prince’s vanishing without a trace?”
“Nothing at all. Here’s what I can tell you. One minute he was everywhere. The next minute he was nowhere.”
“Oh, he’s somewhere, China. And I’m going to find him and take him home, wherever he is. Bet on it.”
* * *
—
Later, waiting out on the tarmac for Stoke to disembark from the dark blue Gulfstream, he remembered her words regarding the missing prince: One minute he was everywhere. The next minute he was nowhere.
As good a place the start as any, Hawke supposed. And here came his pal Stokely, with a big white smile on his face as wide as a mile. They embraced, pounding each other on the back and laughing happily at the idea of being in the game again, with the one person they could each rely on to bring the fight to the enemy and then some.
CHAPTER 28
The English Channel
January 1942
The big bomber was an ungainly thing now, wallowing about in the sloppy seas like a wounded duck missing one wing. Hawke pushed his copilot through the opening ahead of him, into the darkened fuselage. It was dank and reeked of spilled petrol and oil. The sea was relentless, now beginning to flood the cockpit. The first thing Hawke saw upon emerging from the flight deck was three of his crewmen, all perhaps injured to one extent or another, down on the deck amidships, attending to the apparently seriously injured wireless operator. A jocular, freckled young lad from Cornwall, Airman Campbell.
The midships exit over the remaining wing was swung wide open to the air and water. It had already started to flow inside the fuselage. They were standing in about six inches of water even now. Swiftly, and without saying a word, Hawke placed his big hands on his copilot’s broad shoulders and shoved him out into the sea. Stauffenberg hit the water with a splash, whirled around, and gave his skipper a big thumbs-up. He was okay. And he had understood that Commander Hawke had no time for argument right now. . . .
“What is it, lads?” Hawke said, rushing to the boys gathered around the injured crew member.
“It’s Campbell, sir. The aft bulwark folded on impact and came down on his right leg just above the ankle. We can’t pull him free, sir! Can’t budge him an inch.”
“Just go. Get out of here,” the trapped boy croaked through his feverish pain. “Leave me to it, please, I beg you.”
Another crewman spoke up. “We’re not leaving him like this, sir. We can’t!”
“Get out of the way, and let me see him for God’s sake!” Hawke shouted. They parted and Hawke leaned in. He got a good look at the boy’s perilous situation.
Hawke acted instinctively.
There was a medical cupboard here amidships full of emergency surgical supplies, including morphine, thank God, and equipment in the event of a crash. There was an item in there that might save the young aviator. Hawke pulled open the cabinet door and dragged the bulky leather bag off the shelf. Then he dropped to his knees next to the badly injured boy. He looked the three crewmen in the eye before he spoke, giving them a look that said he would brook no disagreement with his orders. They all saw the hacksaw in his hand and knew what was coming next.
Airman Campbell was about to lose his left foot to a surgeon who’d never performed surgery in his life.
“Gentlemen, I’m assuming you’re all wearing your Sten guns and your sidearms attached to a webbed bandolier under your tunics. Is that correct?”
“Aye!” they said, checking. Each man had the standard issue for Royal Navy pilots. The Sten gun, a British submachine gun chambered in 9X19mm. And a snub-nosed Smith &Wesson .38 Spec. revolver.
“Ensure that all weapons are securely attached to your torso and free of any encumbrance when the time comes to first show our weapons in a hurry.”
“We’re good, sir!” one of the young crewmen assured him.
“I order you to abandon ship, gentlemen,” Hawke shouted. “Now!”
“Aye-aye, sir!” they shouted. “Good luck, Campbell!” And one and all raced to the midships open port. Stauffenberg, the copilot, was bobbing about twenty feet from the doomed bomber, waiting for them and urging them to hurry before she went down.
Hawke, now on his knees beside the fallen airman, rolled up a fresh white surgical towel. “Open your mouth,” he told the boy before placing the towel between his teeth.
“Please help me, sir! I don’t want to die. . . .”
“You’re not going to, sonny boy. But there’s going to be some pain involved. I want you to bite down on that towel as hard as you possibly can when I tell you to. Understood?”
“Aye, sir.” Campbell shivered, already in horrible pain. The sloshing water inside was now almost ten inches deep and rising fast. Hawke did what he had to do.
“Bite down, son! Now!”
Hawke steadied the boy’s leg with his left hand and began to saw relentlessly at his shinbone with his right hand. The tibia, Hawke knew from training, was the strongest bone in the leg. And the hardest to sever.
Suddenly, the bomber’s nose dropped precipitously. She was going down, and so were the two remaining crewmen.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” the boy screamed as the jagged teeth of the saw edge began to cut away at his leg, going through both flesh and bone.
Hawke, trying to pretend he wasn’t affected by the smells and sounds of his saw grinding through bone, said, “You’re going to be all right, Campbell. Just hold that thought! Bear with me. It’ll be over in a few seconds.”
The young man was having none of it, pain blinding him to everything else. “Somebody, help me! Please! I can’t take it! I can’t take it!”
Hawke, sawing with as much strength and speed as he could muster, went at the task now with a vengeance. The boy passed out, which helped. Even though it was an eternity, two minutes later, the deed was done. The foot was finally separated from the tibia, or shank bone. Hawke took the towel from the boy’s mouth and bound it tightly around the stump of the grievously wounded leg. He knew it wouldn’t help much, but it was all he had, and it was better than nothing.
As he got to his feet, something—he was not sure what—made him pick up the bloody severed foot and, with reverence, place it inside his flight jacket. It seemed an obscenity for this German ship to go down with even a part of this brave young English warrior still aboard.
Water had now risen so that the boy’s head was completely submerged. He was unconsciously swallowing gulps of seawater. Seconds counted now. They had to get out or go down . . . get out or go down . . . get out or go down.
He bent down and grabbed Campbell’s wrists and pulled and yanked at his torso for all he was worth. A minute later, the boy was finally freed from t
he crushed bulkhead. He got an arm underneath him and got him upright. He headed toward the opening in the fuselage, sloshing through water now up to his knees. The water was icy cold, and he knew, if he’d miscalculated, and help was not soon on its way, they’d all be dead of hypothermia in less than half an hour. They’d live just long enough to die.
Moments later, they were all in the bitterly cold water, life jackets inflated. About two hundred yards away, his bomber (amazing that he thought of the German airship that way) was in her death throes. All the air in her remaining wing and fuselage was gone, replaced by the unrelenting surge of seawater.
As the crew all watched, the tail of the Heinkel, emblazoned with a large red swastika, suddenly rose up from the sea and into the sky, just like the bow of Titanic had done, and she silently slipped beneath the waves, headed for her final resting place on the bottom. Operation Skyhook was now in full swing. No deaths and only one casualty.
And now for the hard part, Hawke thought to himself.
CHAPTER 29
Sevenoaks Plantation, Virginia
January 1942
The Chinese ambassador downed the balance of the amber whiskey in his crystal tumbler and then, suddenly and inexplicably rising to his feet, heaved it as hard as he could into the fireplace in frustration. Flints of gleaming crystal sprayed everywhere, but the fire screen helped him avoid getting sliced to ribbons.
It was cold as hell in this goddamn house.
He’d had a fire going in practically every room downstairs all day long, and still the house was cold as a crypt. He sighed and padded over to the wide-open hearth. Choosing the largest pine log he could find, he heaved it onto the conflagration. Then another for good measure.
“Damn it to hell,” he shouted into the empty library. It had been pissing rain or sleeting or snowing all bloody weekend. He had been like a caged Tiger, padding about his gargantuan lair like a wounded animal who’d just lost his mate. And in a way, that was exactly what had happened.
If he was not quite in love, he was certainly in lust, and he had it bad. If that weren’t bad enough, it was a love tainted with another, much-less-desirable emotion.
Guilt.
His girl had called early that morning from the comfort of her warm bed at her parents’ house not a mile away from Sevenoaks. She was hungry, she said, hungry for his touch, for the smell of him, for the taste of him. She would go insane if she couldn’t share his bed on this, what promised to be the coldest night in years. Her parents were driving her mad, all of them cooped up in the big farmhouse on the lake because of the fucking weather. How long could she pretend interest in the jigsaw puzzle, pieces of which were scattered all over the kitchen table? A picture of the goddamn Champs-Élysées? I mean, really, who bloody cared? Someone at Farmington had told her a good one, though. “Question: Why did the French plant trees all along both sides of the Champs-Élysées? Answer: So the conquering Nazis could walk in the shade.”
It was just a street, for God’s sake. Seen it once, you’ve seen it a million times. Anyway, back to her miserable parents. It was her mother, really, who was driving her up the walls. Daddy was much more sanguine about her behavior. Mummy kept telling her nothing good could come of her well-publicized affair with the Chinese ambassador. Insisting that she must break it off. Stay away from him. “He’s a climber, darling. What Daddy and I used to refer to as a ‘social alpinist.’ He’s just using you as a girl on the side for as long as he can until his best friend and—may I remind you, your bloody fiancé—returns home from England.”
“Oh, get off your high horse, Mummy dearest. We both know why you really want me to save myself for Hawke.”
“We do? I don’t. Pray tell, darling.”
“Because, and I dare you to deny this, because he’s got that fancy bloody title, that’s why. Because his name is Lord Blackie Hawke! Yes! And because nothing, oh, nothing on this big green planet would elevate you into that rarefied air that you so fervently seek to breathe more than having an oh-so-grand daughter named Lady Winfield Hawke!”
“How dare you! How dare you accuse me of such base behavior? I ought to slap your face, young woman.”
“Go ahead. No? Well, let me tell you something else, Mumsie, old girl. You also lie awake nights dreaming about a grandson or a gran-daughter with a fucking English title! Look at you! You’re blushing because you know it’s all true! Every word! Christ in a barrel, I’m sure you’ve already got Lord and Lady Mountebatten on the guest list for the wedding at the Chevy Chase Club!”
“How you despise me! Go! Get out of my sight, damn you!”
“With pleasure. I’m going out tonight. Don’t wait up.” So saying, she dashed out of the kitchen and bounded up the staircase to her room on the third floor. She couldn’t last another second without hearing his voice. Or with hearing another word out of her mother.
* * *
—
The ambassador wandered over to the drinks table, looking for something, anything, to ease his troubled mind. It wasn’t just this girl driving him mad with desire. Hell, he knew that. Oh, no. That wasn’t the real problem. It was the guilt. What had Hawke said to him that last day standing at the bar at the Cosmos Club?
“Look after her while I’m gone, will you, buddy? She can get a little crazy sometimes, as you know. I don’t want her getting into any trouble while I’m gone. . . . Besides, we secretly got engaged last weekend up in Kennebunkport.”
Or maybe it was Hyannis Port. Something Republican like that.
Hawke hadn’t been gone long when she’d first shown up unannounced at his doorstep at midnight one snowy night. A Friday or a Saturday when he was home alone out in the country.
At the deep tolling of the door chimes down in the front hall, he raced down the stairs and yanked open his front door. He narrowly avoided fainting. She was wearing a full-length mink, a rich dark brown affair with a cowl collar pulled up and framing her face and her honeyed curls. Her plump cheeks had been tinted pink by the frigid air, the perfect face amid a swirl of whirling snowflakes, her bright eyes beaming up at him, daring him to refuse her entry on this frigid night.
“I was in the neighborhood, kind sir,” she said in her best Scarlett O’Hara drawl as she brushed by him and into the center of the black-and-white-checkered entrance hall.
“Your timing is perfect, darling. I was just about to commit suicide.”
“Don’t be silly! Aren’t you going to take a girl’s coat, Mr. Ambassador? I do declare I believe you’ve forgotten your manners, Captain Butler.”
He laughed and moved toward her.
“Let me help you,” she said. She stepped out of her shoes and, shrugging her shoulders and kicking at her L.L.Beans, let the long mink coat fall to puddle around her pretty little white feet.
He took a breath and paused in midstride, staring at her.
She was carrying an open bottle of Pol Roger in her right hand and wearing nothing but a smile. She looked down at her magnificent bosom and said, “Is it chilly in here, or is it just you, Mr. Ambassador? My goodness, everybody’s all puckered up!”
And so it had begun.
And so it continued.
And so one day it would end.
* * *
—
The following week, on the Friday, they’d had their first row. It wasn’t his fault really.
“I need you, baby. I need you real bad,” she said that afternoon on the phone, her voice a smoky blend of passion, cigarettes, and strong spirits. She was drinking again, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it.
“Six o’clock tonight,” he told her, his own voice suddenly husky and freighted with lust. His love was sodden with the want of her. He was besotted by the touch of her hand, the hot press of her lips. He went directly upstairs and took a steaming-hot shower, dressed in his best silk pajamas and his maroon paisley
robe from Charvet in Paris.
They’d mutually agreed it would be ill-advised for them to be seen together in Washington society. They would limit their weekly trysts to his house in the country, where they could come and go under the radar. It was his new habit to entertain her in his pj’s. It made him more relaxed and added to the style he wished to employ at his new country home. He thought of it as “relaxed elegance yet still elegant.”
Around five that evening, keen with anticipation of her imminent arrival, he’d gone down to the kitchen to check on dinner with the cook and make sure there was fresh ice in the silver bucket on the drinks table in the library. He fixed himself a Rob Roy and collapsed into his favorite wine red leather club chair beside the roaring fire.
He was sipping his delicious concoction when, five minutes later, Hamish, his English butler, floated in on a cloud of unflappable serenity. Hamish, of the stiff upper lip and the crisp white collars and the formidable brain power.
Now Hamish was telling him that there was a call for him in his study.
“Who is it, Hamish? Miss Woolworth?”
“Indeed not, sir. It is, in fact, your father who’s asking for you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. My father is half a world away in China. It’s the middle of the night there. Or . . . day, or something!”
“I beg to disagree, Mr. Ambassador. He is calling from town. He’s down at the railroad station.”
“Good Lord. How extraordinary. All right, please tell him I’ll be right there. . . .”
“As you wish, sir.” Hamish withdrew.
“Hullo?” Tiger said, half expecting it to be Winnie pulling some kind of a prank or just calling about something or other.
It wasn’t.
It really was his father calling from the local train station.
“Hello, son. Surprise, surprise!”