by Ted Bell
“Thanks,” Hawke said to Brock.
“Don’t mention it,” Brock replied, and then both men looked up to see the most extraordinary sight.
Tsing Ping, now writhing in anger, had been lifted a good three feet off the deck. Both hands were above his head, pinioned in the one-handed grip of a giant black man. This man, who was now standing in the doorway looking at him from head to toe with intense curiosity, seemed immovable; as solid and still as a black marble statue.
“Hey! Listen up!” the black man said to Tsing Ping. “What you got against soap and water, boy?”
“Stokely!” Hawke said, barely able to contain his joy at the sight of the man. He hadn’t seen his old friend in more than a year. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“Saving your ass again, looks like to me. Speaking of which, we got to go. I got a couple of mines going off in about a New York minute.”
“What mines?” Hawke asked.
“Limpet mines, you know, that somehow got attached to the hull. This old tub’s going down, boss. What shall I do with this little guy? Hey, you! Stop that!”
Tsing Ping was making horrible guttural sounds and scissoring his legs viciously at Stokely’s groin. Stoke put an end to that with a short, jabbing motion of his arm. He slammed the Chinaman bodily against the bulkhead twice and then dropped him like a sack of broken sticks to the deck. He didn’t move after that.
“Ugly little critter, ain’t he?” Stoke said, looking down at Ping. “What is he?”
“Dead, I hope,” the American said, looking pleadingly at Hawke. “He ought to be if he’s not. Sweet Jesus. Somebody shoot him.”
Hawke holstered his pistol. He may have had pirate blood in him, but cold-blooded murder had never held any appeal.
“Be dead soon anyway,” Stoke said, looking at Alex with understanding in his brown eyes. Stoke didn’t want to murder the man either.
“What do you mean?” Brock said.
“I mean when this old piece of scrap iron goes to the bottom in, say, oh…let’s call it three minutes now,” Stoke said, looking at his dive watch. “When he wakes up, he’ll be dead enough.”
“Let’s go,” Hawke said, and he and Stokely helped the American move quickly aft down the companionway.
“Nice of you to show up,” said Hawke.
“Not much else to do on shipboard,” Stokely said. “Not since I gave up duplicate bridge.”
“How’d you come to be aboard Blackhawke anyway?”
“Got picked up in Corsica. Taking care of some business there and saw her in the harbor. Tom Quick said he was making a run over here to pick you up. I didn’t see a good reason to turn down the invitation.”
“And tonight?”
“He said you needed backup.”
“Damn it, why does no one listen to me?”
“’Cause you the boss, boss.”
The stern was deserted. A thick fog had rolled in, making the decks slippery and the rail wet to the touch. Hawke leaned over the rail and saw the large black Zodiac, the outboards idling, hovering in position. It was a twenty-foot drop to the oily black water.
“I’ll go first,” Hawke said to the American, climbing up on the rail. “Then you, then him. Watch where I land and do the same. Stoke, you get him up on the rail. I’ll help him into the boat. Oh, and Brock?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to land on your butt. It’ll hurt your ankles a lot less.”
Hawke dove and surfaced three feet from the Zodiac. Tom Quick left the helm of the center console and helped him aboard. Having been nervous about this whole operation, Quick had decided not to entrust this pickup to anyone else. And he’d invited Stokely to come with him. He knew the skipper would later say this was overkill and decided to keep his mouth shut for the time being.
“Now!” Hawke shouted up to the two men waiting at the stern rail. “Go!”
Stokely helped the American over the rail. He jumped, awkwardly but effectively, splashing bottom first and coming up easily within Hawke’s grasp. At that moment, lead started thumping the water very nearby in a neat circular pattern fired from above. Looking up, Hawke saw a single man with an AK standing on the upper deck directly above Stokely’s head.
It was Tsing Ping.
Hawke instantly saw the thing unfolding: Stoke in the act of looking up to see who the hell was still shooting at them and the muzzle of Tsing’s automatic weapon coming down to greet him with a lethal burst of fire. In a half second, Stoke’s head would explode into a fine red mist. Zero chance of survival at this range. In a nanosecond less than the allotted time, Hawke whipped the Walther from his hip holster and put three quick rounds through the Chinaman’s heart.
Tsing managed a harmless spurt before he pitched forward over the rail. He plunged, dead weight, into the black water.
Stoke, never one for lengthy mourning, shouted a hearty “Yo!” and saluted snappily. He then turned his back to the rail and executed a perfect Navy SEAL backflip, entering the water with an astoundingly minimal splash considering his size.
Hawke, mentally calculating the time it had taken to draw his weapon and fire, smiled inwardly. Slipping, perhaps, yet gaining a bit of traction.
A minute later, they were all three safely in the stern of the Zodiac, and Tom Quick shoved the throttles forward. The twin 300-HP Yamahas roared. The big inflatable went instantly on plane and two seconds later they disappeared into the fog. There was sporadic fire from the bow of the Star; Hawke could see the faint wink of harmless muzzle flashes from her direction disappearing into the fog. In ten minutes, he’d have the hostage safely back aboard Blackhawke.
“Tommy, get on the radio,” Hawke said. “Tell them the hostage is out and alive. Dehydrated, malnourished, with possible fractures of the wrists. No other casualties. Have sickbay standing by to receive him. And someone get on the horn to Langley. Tell them we have Harry Brock alive.”
Hawke pulled a nylon blanket from the stern locker and got the American wrapped in it, then held Brock’s head while he sipped from an emergency water ration Hawke had found in the locker. Two seconds after that, he heard the muffled underwater explosions of the limpet mines Stokely had affixed to the Star’s hull.
“Any particular reason you decided to sink that boat, Stoke?” Hawke asked, as secondary explosions rocked the old steamer and licks of fire and thick black smoke from the midships hold climbed into the murky sky.
“Cargo she was carrying. I didn’t like the looks of it. Some kind of super-sized gun barrel. And nuclear reactor shit headed from France for North Korea. Damn French. Why the hell they selling this stuff to those people for, got at least four nukes already? The world ain’t dangerous enough for they ass?”
“That was you? Operating the crane?” Hawke asked, deciding to hold his questions about the cargo for later. DNI’s intel about the Renault auto assemblies was clearly inaccurate.
“Hell, yeah, it was me. I ain’t too good operating heavy machinery, as maybe you noticed. I saw you up there all alone in that wheel-house. Situation looked a little iffy up there, all those shadows moving around and gunfire and shit, so I started throwing my weight around, tried to distract everybody.”
Hawke laughed out loud.
“Skipper?”
The tone of Quick’s voice brought Hawke scrambling to the console. “What is it, Tommy?”
“That,” Quick said, putting the tip of his right index finger on a tiny greenish blip moving across the radar screen.
The large color Navstar display showed their position relative to the mother ship. The GPS indicated they were a quarter of a mile outside the harbor mouth waypoints, a half mile from where Black-hawke lay at anchor. And there was another vessel bearing down on them at high speed. Suddenly, phosphorescent tracers were sizzling overhead, glowing in the fog.
A second later, a round caught Quick in the right shoulder, spun him around and slammed him backward into the console. He collapsed to the deck. Hawke grabbed the helm wi
th one hand, knelt on the deck, and placed the other hand on Tom Quick’s bleeding wound. Using two fingers, he probed deeply for an exit wound, and found it, all the while keeping his eyes glued to the bright screen.
“Make a fist and press it here,” Hawke told Quick, guiding his hand to the blood-soaked depression. “There. Harder. That should hold you till we get you to sickbay.”
“I’m all right, sir. Just a sting. You got the helm okay?”
“Yeah, hold on. I’m going to lose these bastards in that fog bank.” Hawke firewalled the twin throttles and swung the boat hard starboard, catching the backside of a cresting wave and getting the big RIB momentarily airborne. “Stoke, you have that man battened down?”
“I got him, boss,” Stoke shouted above the roaring engines. “You go on ahead and open her up!”
“Good God,” Hawke said a moment later, his eye tracking the narrowing gap between the two moving vessels on the vivid color display. “What the hell is this, Tommy? A launch from the Star?”
“I don’t think so, Skipper,” Quick said, struggling to his feet. “Way too big. She’s got to be some kind of—holy shit!”
“What?”
“Whoever they are, she’s painted us! We’re all lit up!”
“Who the hell—”
Hawke put the helm hard over and the inflatable curved a tight radius cut to port. Immediately, he veered hard starboard, initiating a violent zigzag course in a desperate effort to elude more incoming enemy fire. A steady warning tone now came from the Zodiac’s on-board systems and a half dozen panel lights began flashing rapidly.
Hawke thumbed the radio mike.
“Blackhawke, Blackhawke, Chopstick’s under attack…repeat…under…attack…we are taking evasive measures…copy?”
“Skipper!” Blackhawke’s fire-control officer replied, “we’re not believing this, sir. I think they—yeah, they are launching! Get out of there!”
“She just launched,” Hawke said, disbelief palpable in his voice. They were off the coast of France, for God’s sake. He yanked the wheel once more hard to starboard. “A surface missile! Are they all bloody insane around here?”
“Can you lose it, sir?” Quick asked, eyeing the screen in utter disbelief. He clenched his shoulder and staggered every time they went off a wave and exploded through a wall of water. The big props dug in once more and they shot forward.
“I don’t know—depends—if it’s heat- or radar-guided and—you know what, to hell with this…Blackhawke! Talk to me!”
“Roger that, Skipper,” came the cool voice of the crewman manning the ship’s fire-control and commo operations center. “Missile has no active radar…it is heat-seeking…we, uh, we have lock-on with the attacking vessel…they, uh, the attacking vessel not responding to repeated verbal warnings, sir.”
“Who the hell are they?” Hawke demanded, curving an impossibly tight right turn.
“Refuses to identify herself, over. Visual ident impossible in this thick stuff, sir.”
“Are these outboards hot enough to pull that missile in?”
“Maybe not…it’s going to be close—hard left now!”
Hawke looked back at Stokely and the rescued American holding on for dear life in the stern of the Zodiac. He needed to get Harry Brock to safety. He’d do what he had to do. He put the damn thing halfway up on its side the turn was so tight.
The missile passed harmlessly not ten feet aft of his stern.
“Blackhawke, sink the attacking vessel. Fire when ready.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper. We confirm that. Blackhawke is launching—”
“I cannot believe this shit!” Stokely shouted. “Man, we—nobody shoots a damn missile at a little rubber boat!”
The Zodiac was lifted upward on a roiling mound of water by the massive explosion aboard the attacking boat. The soupy grey fog surrounding them instantly became an incandescent orange and the shockwave nearly ripped the four men from the small inflatable.
Whoever had had the nerve to shoot at him no longer existed.
The sea-skimming Boeing Harpoon AGM 84-E missile fired at Hawke’s command by Blackhawke was carrying nearly five hundred pounds of Destex high explosive in its warhead. The Harpoon unerringly found its target. Seven of the attacking vessel’s crewmen were killed in the initial explosion, two drowned, and one died from severe burns some hours later in a Cannes hospital. The ship burned for twenty minutes before she rolled and went to the bottom.
If you even glanced at the papers next morning, although it hardly seemed possible given the events of the first few years of the twenty-first century, the world seemed to have slipped its moorings yet again.
Somehow, a French vessel had been sunk off Cannes. Hawke would later learn she was L’Audacieuse, No. 491, a type P40 attack cutter on patrol for the French navy. L’Audacieuse, it was claimed in an appearance by the French Foreign Trade minister, Luca Bonaparte, was on routine patrol off the port of Cannes, when, without provocation, she was deliberately and viciously fired upon and sunk with all hands by a British vessel believed to be in private hands.
If you paid much attention to the screaming headlines in French newspapers or the endless state-run France Inter Radio or France 2 television reports, you would believe that France and England were on the brink of war over the incident.
At the center of this new international storm, a certain captain of British industry named Alexander Hawke.
Chapter Ten
London
AMBROSE STOOD IN THE COLD RAIN ON THE GLISTENING pavement. Traffic on Lambeth Palace Road, just outside the south entrance to St. Thomas’s Hospital, was heavy. He was waiting for Inspector Ross Sutherland to appear. The man was a good ten minutes late and Congreve, who had spent the last four hours sitting by the comatose Mrs. Purvis’s bedside in a dreary wing of St. Thomas’s Hospital, was not in the sunniest of moods. He was about to step from the curb and hail a taxicab when the dark-green Mini Cooper appeared, careening around the corner at a high rate of speed and skidding to a stop one foot from the curb.
Sutherland club-raced the thing weekends out at Goodwood and Aintree and the car still had a large number 8 stuck to the side of the door. Ambrose had never in his life imagined owning a car, but he thought of buying one at that very moment. A dark blue Bentley Saloon, prewar, with walnut picnic trays that folded down in the rear. Yes. It would look lovely parked in the gravel drive at Heart’s Ease. He could motor out to Sunningdale for his Saturday foursome or to Henley on Sundays, pack a basket, a chilled bottle of good—
The numbered passenger door flew open and Congreve bent himself down and over, contorting his comfortably large corpus so that it miraculously folded inside the rolling deathtrap. His umbrella was another matter. It refused to collapse without a Herculean effort and snapped shut only after a pinched thumb and a few well-chosen words from its owner. Only then did Ambrose pull the door shut, find what comfort he could by adjusting the rake of the barebones racing seat, and acknowledge Ross Sutherland’s presence behind the wheel.
“He stoops to conquer,” Ambrose said with a wry smile, strapping himself in. He’d learned long ago that complaining to Sutherland about his beloved Mini was air he could save for more fruitful use elsewhere. Ross murmured something vaguely apologetic, noisily engaged first gear, and accelerated at an astounding rate of speed until he was able to insert the damnable machine into an invisible hole in the stream of traffic humming along Lambeth Road. Congreve ran his fingers through his damp thatch of chestnut hair, heaved a sigh of relief at getting out of the rain, and pulled his briar pipe from an inside pocket of his sodden tweeds.
“Sorry I’m late, sir,” Sutherland said, eyeing his superior out of the corner of his eye. “A holy fuss at the Yard and I couldn’t duck out until quarter past.”
“Late? Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Congreve was packing his bowl with Peterson’s Irish. His voice was flat. “I assumed I was early.”
“Well,” Sutherland said, shifting gears, his
bright tone suggesting a change of mood and subject as well, “how is dear Mrs. Purvis getting along, sir?”
“Expected to recover fully, thank God.”
“What are the doctors saying, sir?”
“The bullet nicked her heart.”
“Good lord.”
“Left ventricle. She was extremely lucky. A centimeter northeast and she’d be bound for glory.”
“I’m so—sorry, Chief. I know how fond of her you are. Whoever did this—”
“Bastards.”
“Plural?”
“I may be wrong.”
Sutherland knew better than to even chance a reply to that one. Congreve was seldom wrong, but never in doubt. After ten minutes in heavy South East London traffic, they were making quite good time motoring south along the Albert Embankment. The clouds had lifted, forming a clearly defined purplish grey line beneath which lay a band of orange sky. The sun had dipped below the visible horizon and the Thames was bathed in a red glow, a long black barge chugging slowly downstream toward Greenwich. Eventually Congreve said, “Next turning. That’s it, right here. Moreton Street. It’s a shortcut.”
A few minutes later they pulled to a stop in front of Henry Bulling’s former home at Number 12, Milk Street. Large puddles of standing water dotted the street and the downpour had eased, replaced by a vaporous rain, cold and invasive. The house itself was a halfheartedly mock Tudor wedged between an ugly rash of modern bungalows and two-story boxes of variegated flesh-toned brick. Ambrose had been subconsciously hoping the Bulling residence would surprise him with a cheery, pleasant facade. It did not.
He still felt a twinge of guilt at his good fortune in the matter of Aunt Augusta’s will.
“Do you have the key?” Ambrose asked as they mounted the wooden steps. A few soggy copies of the Times and the Daily Mirror lay against the entrance. Congreve noted that the most recent edition was five days prior. Who had canceled service?
“Aye, here you are, sir,” Sutherland said, putting his murder bag down on the peeling floorboards and fishing the marked evidence envelope containing the key out of his pocket. Sutherland, sans the pleasant Highland burr, was a dead spit for an American. A former Royal Navy aviator, Hawke’s wingman during the first Gulf War in fact, Ross had the fresh crew-cut looks and brisk bonhomie one generally associates with England’s cousins across the sea. He’d turned into a fine copper, however, and the two men had notched a few successes together. Most recently, they had succeeded in identifying the murderer of Alex Hawke’s bride, the late Victoria Sweet. That foul murder, a grotesque act of vengeance, had occurred on the steps of the chapel as the beautiful bride had emerged into the sunlight. It still rankled, it still hurt.