Pirate ah-3

by Ted Bell

  “Let’s hope. Even if she goes south and around the island the long way, we’ll have to make this quick. Assuming she patrols at an average of five knots, she can circumnavigate Masara in less than an hour. We need to do this recon and be back aboard Cacique and under way before that or we’ve got a new set of problems.”

  “Let’s go,” Brock said and submerged. Hawke followed immediately and saw the little clouds of phosporescence trailing behind Brock’s flippers. He swam easily up alongside the American and gave him a thumbs-up. If he’d been worried about Brock earlier, he now saw those fears as perhaps unfounded. In fact, the man was doing fine. He was, Hawke reminded himself, a tough, thorough, hard-bitten professional field agent who’d survived capture and torture at the hands of the most vicious secret police on the planet.

  He’d been hand-picked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to go into China alone.

  Who knew what else was on his resume? In the great Kingdom of Spookdom, Brick Kelly had assured him, Harry Brock was a crown prince. Harry had walked the walk, Hawke knew. He just hadn’t swum the swim.

  Five minutes later, Hawke held up his hand, signaling Brock to stop. They were hanging twenty feet below the surface, a few hundred yards from the docks, and the sound of the patrol boat’s twin screws was rapidly growing louder. She was headed straight for them.

  The underwater sound was, for Hawke, a most unpleasant reminder of the incident aboard the USS Lincoln. The two men hung in the water and watched the patrol boat approach and slide overhead. The underside of the fifty-foot hull was clearly visible as it passed above. Both watched intently, instinctively holding their breath despite the re-breathers. If she made a left turn north toward Point Arras, they had serious problems.

  Captain Ali and Ahmed would be caught completely unawares. They were both clever and resourceful men, but what plausible and speedy explanation could be offered for Cacique’s presence in the little cove so near the fort? And if they were suddenly boarded by armed French sailors, would one of them have the presence of mind to quickly duck below and hide or remove any incriminating evidence of documents and equipment? It wasn’t likely that there would be time.

  The two men in the water breathed a sigh of relief. The patrol boat had turned right and away from Cacique. She was steaming south along the coast. Still, they had less than an hour to complete their mission and get back to the boat. They swam for the fort.

  “Shit,” Brock whispered under his breath as they broke the surface simultaneously.

  “Now what?”

  They had surfaced as planned under the steel dock. No one had seen or shot at them. But the water was thick with jellyfish. Hawke himself could feel a few stinging welts rising across his cheek and the back of his neck. Portuguese man-of-wars. A few more of these electrifying stings could send a man into a state of shock. He decided not to tell Brock about that part.

  “One of them get to you, Harry?” Hawke asked.

  “Yeah. Damn it.”

  “When you get back to the boat, rub some of your own piss on the welts. It’ll take the sting away.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me. I think the opening is just below me. I can feel it with my flipper.”

  “Yeah, I feel it, too.”

  “Go. I’ll mark the spot and catch up inside.”

  “Kick ass. Loot and shoot.”

  “Kick ass? No, Harry, we—”

  Brock had disappeared below the surface. Hawke took out his assault knife and carved three horizontal slashes in the barnacles on the piling. The entrance below was now clearly marked but out of sight on the inside of the piling. He checked his stainless-steel watch. This was mean high tide. At dead low, a few hours from now, the opening in the rock would be large enough to accommodate a lighter full of men and ammo. Or an outbound vessel loaded with rescued hostages.

  Then, as the tide came back in, the opening would disappear. The timing on this operation was going to very interesting.

  Hawke dove down, used his knife again to mark the entrance with three slashes just above the arch, and swam inside.

  He and Brock were not heavily armed. Hawke himself carried only a compass, a plumb line, and a depth gauge in addition to his knife. They weren’t here to kick ass, Hawke was thinking as he swam toward the phosphorescence that marked Brock’s rapid progress inside the tunnel. No. They were here to run away and fight another day.

  Namely, tomorrow. That’s when Stokely would arrive. Along with his deadly friends from Martinique, the antiterrorist team known as Thunder and Lightning. Tonight’s objective was solely to reconnoiter the powder magazine and find a safe way inside the fortress. To figure out precisely how to kick ass when they came back. And get the women and children out safely.

  Loot and shoot? That’s what Harry had said.

  Hawke swam faster.

  A loose cannon was one thing. But a loose cannon without a cannon was another matter entirely. Hawke made another mental note: Keep an eye on Harry.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Die Unterwelt

  THE TUNNEL WAS DANK AND CLAUSTROPHOBIC. THE STONE walls were cold to the touch, wet. The ground beneath Stoke’s boots felt like loose shale, pockmarked with puddles. Jet led the way with a small halogen light from the SLR’s emergency roadside kit. Blondi ran ahead, sniffing the ground. Every fifty feet or so there was an alcove with an exit door. All the doors were painted the same faded luminous green. These exits to nowhere still glowed faintly in the dark, a century after they had been installed.

  There were exposed pipes and pneumatic tubes running overhead. Strange egg-shaped lanterns were mounted on rusted steel frames attached to the walls, every twenty feet or so. Now and then you’d see hand-cranked ventilators beneath the egg lamps. Stoke stopped a second and tried one. It made a creaking sound, but it turned and he could feel a slight suction from the grate. Still operable, Jet said. They’d been installed in World War I. Their purpose was to thwart any lethal gases an enemy might unleash in the tunnels.

  There was, Stoke learned, an extensive network of bunkers and abandoned tunnels beneath the Tempelhof airfield. All were laid with small-gauge railroad track. Smaller tunnels like this one led off to a vast system of bunkers beneath the city of Berlin. And connected with even larger tunnels that could actually accomodate automobile traffic.

  “During the war,” Jet said, her words bouncing off the dripping stone walls, “Goering used his big Mercedes staff car to commute out here in secret. Every day, he was driven out from his Luftwaffe headquarters on Wilhelm Strasse in Berlin. This tunnel is seven kilometers long.”

  “Yeah? What about these smaller tunnels?” Stoke asked.

  “They loop around the entire field. During the war, electric trams ferried ammunition and supplies out to the squadrons. Luftwaffe Junkers and Messerschmitt crews used trams to get out to their aircraft. The idea was to keep as much human activity as possible below ground and away from the eyes of Allied bombardiers.”

  “These tracks look new.”

  “They are. There’s a tram station about five hundred yards ahead. New high-speed trams. That’s how I get out to my car.”

  “Where’s the third rail? For the electric trams, I mean.”

  “They’re not electric now. Levitation. Antigravity propulsion.”

  “Get out of town.”

  “You’ll see for yourself if we have time. When the Allied bombers came, these tunnels and bunkers were used as bomb shelters by millions of Berliners. I imagine you could barely feel the tremors down here.”

  “Must have been great,” Stoke said.

  After they’d been walking along the tracks for about five minutes, Jet paused at one of the unmarked green doors. “This is it,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Trust me. Where’s Blondi? Kommen Sie hier! Schnell!”

  She pushed the green door open and they went inside, Blondi trailing happily behind.

  The walls of the large room were lined with
triple-bunk beds. In the center of the room, what looked like an operating table. In a corner stood an old toilet. More hand-cranked ventilators. Over the door, in chipped and peeling paint, was the word Wehenzimmer. Stoke paused to look at the sign.

  “This was one of the labor rooms for pregnant women,” Jet said. “There were shops, hospitals, breweries, everything you’d need down here in the Unterwelt. Come on, we’re almost there.”

  “Where?”

  “This route is Schatzi’s escape hatch. He showed me once. It leads indirectly to his private office. He can get out in a hurry if he has to.”

  “Why does he need an escape hatch?”

  “If I were your girlfriend, wouldn’t you want an escape hatch?”

  “Good point.”

  At the end of the narrow hall, another room. A Weinstube, looked like, with a dark oak bar and a modern glassed-in wine cellar. Schatzi’s after-hours hangout. Behind the bar, there was a nondescript wooden door with a modern elevator hidden behind it. Jet placed her hand on a biometric print scanner set into the wall and the doors parted, disappearing back into the walls. They rode in silence all the way to the top.

  Once they came to a stop, Jet pressed a numerical keypad and the door slid open on another world. White walls, gleaming marble floors, high ceilings, and lots of glass. Even at night, the space was full of light.

  “Überwelt,” Stoke said.

  Jet laughed. “Good one,” she said, “You know more German than you let on. Come on. His office is just down this way.”

  They walked along the gently curving white hallway. There was magnificent art, massive canvases, and heroic sculpture lining both walls, but Stoke didn’t take time to admire it. He knew he was getting close to something. Whatever her reasons, and he still had his private suspicions, Jet was taking him to it. Her shifting loyalties were troublesome. Alex Hawke had gone along with his idea of bringing her to Germany. So far, that had been the right decision. He wouldn’t be here without her.

  The white hall dead-ended in a glass-walled atrium that soared five or six stories high. It was some kind of reception room with an oval desk and a few leather sofas and chairs. On the opposite wall was a pair of stainless-steel doors flanked by a sculpted pair of golden eagles standing about thirty feet high.

  “Schatzi’s got a thing for eagles,” Stoke said, crossing the atrium to the massive doors. To his left, visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall, the moonlit airfield was spread out before him. The margins of the criss-crossing runways were lit with faintly glowing blue lights set low to the ground. It was beautiful, and mercifully free of command cars and half-tracks full of guys in black with machine guns.

  “Caesar had a thing for eagles. So did Napoleon. So does Schatzi.” Jet leaned into what looked like a fish-eye lens set behind black glass in the wall.

  “What’s that?” Stoke said.

  “Facial thermography. Identifies the characteristic heat patterns of the face. Over sixty-five thousand different temperature points, believe it or not.”

  “I’d believe pretty much anything at this point.”

  “Far greater accuracy than fingerprints. Can’t trick it with facial hair or even cosmetic surgery. Only way you can beat a thermograph is with alcohol.”

  “You been drinking? Looks like you beat it.”

  The doors parted, disappearing back into the walls. “No. He just forgot to lock my face out. Probably figured he’d never see it again.”

  Beyond the doors, Stoke saw another stark white room, smaller, but with equally spectacular views of the field. Schatzi’s office was filled with moonlight and more grandiose art. The white marble floor was covered with a large Oriental rug. Very cozy. The entire wall behind the German tycoon’s desk was a Mercator projection map of the world painted on glass. On the desk itself, a gleaming model of a flying saucer.

  “Guess he didn’t change the locks,” Stoke said as he walked over to the ornate carved desk. He picked up the model saucer and turned it over.

  “No, he’s not that stupid. He changed them. But that keypad in the elevator allows you to enter a code to override all the locks in this part of the building. He forgot to change that code. And to delete my print from the print scanner.”

  “Forgot he showed his girlfriend the escape hatch, too. Hey, Jet, is Schatzi building flying saucers here?”

  “That’s the new disc prototype. The Messerschmitt ME-1. The Germans were working on antigravity flying discs in 1944, so it’s not exactly new technology. The idea is that an electrogravitational field can be created by a fast-rotating superconductive disc. Schatzi’s just picking up where they left off. So is Boeing, by the way, but they don’t talk about it.”

  “No shit? Who’s the fat guy in the painting?”

  “Hermann Goering. Founder of the Luftwaffe. This was his old office.” Jet hit a button that illuminated the wall-sized map.

  Every square mile of Europe, Asia, and Africa was the same color blue. GERMANIA was splashed across the map in bright red foot-high letters. An old vision of a new world. A vision that died hard. And took an unthinkable number of people with it. Standing in this room, you got a definite feeling of bad déjà vu.

  “Deutschland über alles,” Stoke said.

  “That was the general idea.”

  “Jet,” Stoke said, looking at her carefully. “You didn’t bring me all this way to look at Nazi maps and flying saucers.”

  “No, I did not. Listen to me. Almost everything you and Hawke need to know right now is in this room. Three years’ worth of Leviathan correspondence, detailed project design drawings, financial records, everything. This keycard opens the desk. It also opens all those file cabinets along the wall.”

  “Leviathan? Harry Brock mentioned that. What is it?”

  “The sea beast.” Jet opened the center drawer of the desk and took out a black leather folder embossed with a gold crown. “Start with this file. Good luck.”

  “Good luck?” Stoke said, peeking inside the file. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going home, Stoke. I thought about it the whole time we were flying. I’ve had all the betrayal and treachery I can stomach for a while. I’ve done what I could to help you and your friend Alex Hawke. You’re on your own now, I’m leaving.” She called to Blondi and headed for the door. “I’m going to sleep for a few days. Don’t forget to lock up.”

  “Wait a damn minute, Jet. How do I know what to take? Half this stuff is in Chinese. You just can’t walk out now and say—good luck!”

  “I can’t?”

  She and Blondi were halfway across the atrium when he caught her.

  “Jet, hold up. You said, almost everything I need is here. What else is there?”

  “I have no idea. I’m just a cop, remember? But I can promise you this, that if my father, Luca Bonaparte, and von Draxis have a hand in it, it’s something very, very bad. Whatever it is, you’ll figure it out, Stoke. You’re a smart guy. If you want to talk at some point, call this number in Hong Kong. Maybe I’ll feel different about helping you then.”

  She started to say something else, then stopped herself. She handed him a card with her name engraved on it and beneath that a handwritten number. “A friend of mine will answer. She’ll tell you how to find me. Good-bye, Stoke.”

  She went up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Thanks, Stoke,” she said. “For saving my ass.”

  Stoke watched Jet and Blondi disappear around the curving wall and then walked over to the glass overlooking the field. There was a faint red line glimmering on the eastern horizon. He figured it would take an hour to sort through everything in the office. Take whatever looked interesting. He’d love to take a look at the plans for Valkyrie. See what was up with that missing keel. With any luck, he and Arnold could be airborne before dawn.

  Then he’d go find Alex Hawke down in Oman.

  A few minutes later, he was still at the window, thinking about Jet’s kiss. Was it a “see you lat
er” kiss? Or a “good-bye, dumbass” kiss? He couldn’t help thinking about what a perfect trap she could have led him into. Man shot dead while stealing secret documents on private property. Hell, it was true.

  A moment later, he heard a muffled roar out on the runway. It was the black SLR. She had her night-vision goggles on all right, had the lights out, nearly invisible, a fast-moving blur streaking along the blue-lit runway at more than two hundred miles an hour. She was headed for the main gate. If they had any brains, the VDI guards would just put the damn gate up and to hell with it. One thing he knew for sure about Jet now. She sure as hell wasn’t going to stop for anything.

  Or, anybody.

  Had to get moving now, and be quick about it. He’d just seen an urgent text message on his PDA from Alex Hawke. He was in Oman and he needed help bad and he needed it now. He turned from the window.

  Time to loot. And maybe, shoot.

  Chapter Forty-six

  New York City

  AMBROSE CONGREVE WAS A LIGHT SLEEPER. THE SOUND OF sirens and garbage trucks on the streets of old New York nudged him awake at 5:00 A.M. He dozed fitfully for an hour or two, then, through sheer force of will, woke himself up. He slipped out of his warm bed and into his leather slippers and robe. He stretched and yawned and briefly considered jumping right back in bed. No, he was hungry. Ravenous. Small wonder. It was nearly tea back in London.

  He fumbled for the bedside phone and rang room service. Yes, two eggs over easy, toast, a pot of black coffee and some fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. Thirty minutes? Thanks very much.

  He gently replaced the receiver in its cradle. Turned on the bedside lamp. Ouch. It was bright. A sensation one might describe as severe pain bloomed somewhere behind his eyeballs. What on earth was the matter? He was a vigorous chap long accustomed to rising at the crack of nine. Ah, yes. Jet lag. Two days in New York and he was still suffering mightily. True, he and Captain Mariucci had stopped off for a nightcap, but—ouch. His head was banging.

  Jet lag and—well, truth be told, he was a bit hung over. A wee touch of the Irish flu, to be perfectly honest about the thing. He had only a vague memory of going to bed in the first place.