by Ted Bell
“Two squad members completed a thorough search of the premises, sir. They are reporting a recent forced entry of Brock’s residence and a burglary. However, electronics, TVs, computers, et cetera, were left behind. So far, we can find no trace of the two bottles of German vodka, Commander. Is Agent Brock with you?”
“He is.”
“May I speak with him?”
“Certainly. Harry, here, take the phone.”
Harry took the phone.
“Hello? The vodka? Yeah, right, it’s there all right. Two bottles of German vodka. Has a red-and-black label with the German word Feuerwasser. I left them both on the stainless-steel counter next to the fridge in the kitchen. Just stuck them in among all the other hooch bottles, sir. What? Really?”
Harry handed the cell phone back to Hawke.
“He says they can’t find the vodka. Seriously? Why the hell would someone knock my door down to steal a couple of bottles of vodka?”
Hawke was about to reply. He looked around at the officers and crew now on the bridge. This was his yacht, and every last soul aboard it had been vetted and revetted with MI6 background checks that went back to birth certificates, and prior generations. For some reason, at that particular moment, all that just wasn’t enough.
He turned to Stokely and Brock and motioned to them to come closer. He said, “You two gents ever seen my ship’s library? No? Six thousand volumes. Knowing what a big reader you are, Harry, I should think you’d find it fascinating. Couple of Danielle Steels down there I think you’d enjoy.”
“Is that a slam? I am a reader. Huge fan of Danielle’s. Ever read her? Phenomenal. I’ve read every one of her books. Twice.”
Hawke just stared at him in disbelief. Nothing about the man could amaze him anymore.
“Inspector Walker, will you take my son down to the galley? The pastry chef promised to teach him how to make brownies today.”
ON A LOWER DECK, HAWKE, Stoke, and Harry found big red leather chairs standing before the large, lozenge-shaped portholes in the library bulkheads. Hawke plucked a cigarette from the lacquered black holder on the coffee table and then offered one to Brock. A steward came by to see if he could get them anything and Hawke ordered coffee.
“So, Harry,” he said, lighting up a Morland’s and expelling a thick blue cloud, “this may surprise you, but I think I know who stole your hooch.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I don’t kid. How big a presence would you say the KGB have in South Florida today, Harry?”
“Hard to say. The Russian mob, as we all know, are huge in Miami these last few years. Megayacht millionaires, boy billionaires, you name it, buying up mansions everywhere. Mob’s wholly infiltrated with KGB officers, you can bet on it. You remember that Russkie birthday party we blew up in South Beach? The night we met Stoke’s friend ‘Urine Yurin’? That whole group was the tip of the iceberg. I’d say at any given moment we’ve got eight or nine senior KGB operatives under surveillance down here. Why do you ask?”
“When we’re done here, I want you to get your chief of station in Miami over here to the boat. Sheffield, that’s his name. He and I need to have a serious discussion about your robbery this morning, Harry.”
“What’s up, boss?” Stoke said, hooking his columnar left leg over the arm of the chair.
“It’s a long story, but I’ll make it short. Putin’s developed a powerful new explosive. Looks and tastes like vodka.”
“The Russians blew the FP&L station, am I right, boss? Cubans or Russians or both. Maybe using this untraceable vodka stuff to do it?”
“Yeah. Firewater,” Hawke said. “The name fits, all right.
“Okay,” he went on, getting to his feet and pacing back and forth in front of the small fireplace. “Putin demonstrated this new stuff to me. He wanted me to see Feuerwasser in action for a reason. He wanted me to see the full reach of his global power now. Why would he do that?”
Stoke said, “Because Congreve was right. Putin was setting you up in France, man! Hell, yes, he was! He’s got something major up his sleeve. He is getting ready to roll the planetary dice big-time and he sure doesn’t want the Americans getting all up in his face about it. That’s why. Florida Power was nothing but a threat. What he did here in Miami, he must be able to do anywhere in the world, what he’s saying. He’s probably already shipped out a few million cases by now. Pretty good threat.”
“A don’t-fuck-with-me message,” Brock said, getting into it now. “Of course! That’s exactly why Putin blew the power station. But this little pissant Miami explosion? Shit, ole Vladimir’s just getting warmed up! My bet is he’s getting ready to make his big moves in Europe. Probably moving troops across the bridge into Estonia or Poland or somewhere as we speak. Hell, he’s out to rule the world, we know that. Man like that? He needs distractions to cover his actions. He’s got to take the Pentagon and the White House’s eyes off the damn ball before he rolls tanks and heavy artillery across sovereign borders in Eastern Europe.”
Stoke said, “Yeah, blowing up Miami, London, or Los Angeles would be a pretty good distraction.”
Hawke nodded and got to his feet. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go back up to the bridge and have a word with the captain.”
“What’s up, boss?”
“I’m changing our travel plans, boys. All you buccaneers aboard this pirate ship just got a brand-new destination.”
“Cuba,” Harry said, giving a wolf whistle. “Setting sail for Spy Island! Hot diggity dog damn!”
Stoke said, “Calm down, Harry. We need you to get your CIA station chief’s ass over to this damn boat, right now. Boss is heading into dangerous waters here. I don’t want us getting in over our heads before we know what the hell we’re doing. Or informing CIA of our various theories and what the hell we plan to do about it.”
“Hooahhhh!” Brock shouted.
“Calm down, Harry,” Hawke said.
“Are you kidding? I love this shit,” Harry said. He was actually jumping up and down in his chair. “I mean I really love it!”
Hawke and Stoke just sat there looking at this wild man. Stoke said, “You’re something else, Harry. You’re like some caffeinated kid at a Midwest carny.”
Harry paused midjump, his arms supporting his weight.
“Really? Excuse me all to hell, Sir Stokely. You mean like all us plainspoken grassroots types unlike you who haven’t yet been knighted by the Queen?”
Stoke looked at Hawke and then back at Harry.
“Grassroots? That what you said, Harry? Yeah, the grass of ten thousand country clubs maybe.”
Hawke laughed.
“Too bad you didn’t get to drink that German hooch, Harry. You’d really have gotten a lot of bang for your buck there, soldier.”
CHAPTER 52
The Chinese Borderlands
Waking after a restless night, Colonel Brett Beauregard rose from his cot and ventured outside the tent and into the clearing. There, he added some wood to the still-glowing embers of the campfire that had probably saved his life the night before. Not until he bent to pick up the first piece of fallen timber did he see he still had his assault knife clenched in his hand. He’d realized his MP5 would be useless if the beasts got inside his tent while he was asleep. That knife would be his only chance at survival. Or so he had reassured himself, drifting off at some unholy hour.
The damp, deep forest air outside the tent was deeply cold. He was stiff as a board, having barely slept a wink all night. The goddamn howling in the wee small hours! The wolves, he imagined, had been teasing him, playing with him by making noises close by one minute, retreating deeper into the forest the next.
He swung his long legs over a fallen timber, sat down, and looked at his watch, a relic from his days of glory. A Rolex Daytona he’d bought in Lucerne. Those were the days. Fat Rolodexes and fat Rolexes and a seat at the table with the Big Dogs.
It was nearly 0600.
No time to dillydally thinking
about what used to be.
After three cups of piping black coffee and two hard biscuits, he went about the surprisingly emotional business of digging Corporal Tolstoy’s grave. He had a good U.S. Army camp shovel and he made short work of the roots and stones and the ice-hard soil. Before going to sleep, he had gathered up what remained of the young soldier. He carefully wrapped his remains in a dark green tarp. Now, he placed the boy at the bottom of the fresh grave. Saying a prayer over the corpse, he began to shovel the dirt.
A quarter of an hour later, he’d packed up camp. His jeep was following the muddy, deeply rutted timber road shown on his map. A winding river that had no name snaked through woods and meadows toward his rendezvous with Captain Koczak. They were to meet at 0800 in the foothills of a mountain range located a good fifty miles to the south. Fifty miles on the wrong side of the Chinese borderlands. The Chinese side.
The seldom used unpaved road was rough and jarring, and Beauregard had to mind the twisty trail lest he put the jeep on the wrong side of the riverbank. He was going far too fast for conditions, he knew, but he’d overslept and he had a reputation for never being late for a military rendezvous, and this was no time to start.
He careened over an old covered wooden bridge and crossed into China. Then he drove exactly fifty-three miles deeper into the blasted wasteland that was northern China. A few minutes later, his overheated jeep crested a stony hilltop. He saw his team spread out down below. They were already pitching camp and establishing a defensive perimeter to keep out Chinese raiders looking for Russians to kill.
In the center of the concertina fence line was his command-and-control vehicle. God only knows how the boys had extracted it from the runoff ditch. But they had, and he accelerated down the hill toward them, happy to be back among his men, his fighters, once more. He saw the Russian captain huddled with a few of his men outside the newly pitched field operations tent. Koczak huddled over the map table, studying their escape route once the mission was accomplished.
“Welcome, Colonel!” he said, not looking up. “We got your e-mail about poor Tolstoy. We are only thankful that you survived the vicious wolf attack.”
“Captain Koczak, good morning! How long until the Avenger radar is operational?”
The captain whipped his head around and said, “Avenger Team SAM is saying we need three hours, Colonel.” The two men had an uneasy peace. The seasoned Russian Army officer resented having to report to an American mercenary.
“Look at your watch, Captain. Inform them they’ve got two.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We have system power up? Are the Avenger generators online?”
“Soon.”
“Now.”
“But of course, Colonel. I will order them to double their efforts.”
Beau looked up at the broad expanse of clear morning sky, noting the position of the sun. And then at his watch. They would be ready, all right, come what may. He knew there were roving bands of heavily armed Chinese peasant militias carrying bazookas and mortars. Like the Huns, they preyed on the weak and lost. Russian peasants who unwittingly crossed the border into China and made camp for a few nights had zero chance of survival should they fall prey to the vicious marauders from the mountains.
The colonel had surrounded the Avenger launch site with a steel cordon of heavily armed soldiers with orders to shoot on sight anyone coming within a thousand yards of his operation. Two people had been shot and killed a little after daybreak, after straying inside the colonel’s no-man’s-land, the captain had informed him. They turned out to be two starving women who had been scrounging the barren land in search of food.
He ordered that the corpses be removed from where they had fallen and given a proper burial.
AND LESS THAN AN HOUR later, they informed the colonel that all generators were online, all offensive combat systems were powered up and running. Team Avenger, along with their Russian Spetsnaz “advisors,” were ready to execute the mission. Spetsnaz had long been the umbrella term for all Russian special purposes forces. These were elite units operating under the command of the GRU, or Main Intelligence Directorate, Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency. The two Spetsnaz technicians, who had designed, maintained, and prepared to unleash the American Avenger system weapons control were seated in the tracking cockpit of the tracked SAM carrier. The Dark Rider had demanded in a recent memo that one of the Spetsnaz officers must pull the trigger once the target had been acquired.
Avenger had been developed at Vulcan’s Port Arthur, Texas, weapons lab; it was a highly modified version of the truck-mounted Buk Russian missile system. The design and implementation and the combined Russian and American mercenary warfare training teams had been led by the colonel himself.
The target aircraft, Beauregard knew, would be traveling at roughly 965 kph, or 600 miles per hour. It was now flying at a mandated altitude of 33,000 feet at a heading of 180 degrees, SE.
The old Russian SA-11 Buk surface-to-air system, and likewise the newer Avenger, were find-and-follow systems. The colonel’s new launcher, though, was a vastly more sophisticated variant of the much older design. It was designed to track a target with radar long before interception, and then throughout the flight of the missile until it detonated.
Once launched, the target’s radar data were transmitted continuously to the missile, guiding it toward the target. Avenger could find and follow targets at altitudes up to 70,000 feet. But it was not without its drawbacks. For instance, it couldn’t distinguish between a military transport plane and a large passenger aircraft, or even a heavy bomber. The team Beauregard had put together knew only the coordinates of the target and the approximate time the airplane would be within range.
The eighteen-foot Avenger air defense missile carried a high-explosive warhead that would detonate, not upon impact, but within a preset distance from the moving target. A blast field of bolt-sized shrapnel would perforate the engine nacelles, the cockpit, the entire fuselage, causing the aircraft and anyone aboard to simply disintegrate in midair. However successful the Avenger was, the results on the ground were not going to be very pretty. Death rarely was.
The colonel looked up at the towering blue skies and donned his headset. He and the rest of the men scanning the heavens through powerful telescopes did not have long to wait.
Six silent minutes had ticked off the countdown timer display when a voice cracked the stillness.
“Target heat signature acquired, sir,” the Spetsnaz commander said in his headphones. “Radar tracking initiated . . . and, uh . . . yes . . . we now have radar lock, sir.”
“Radar lock. Roger that,” Beauregard said. He could see the crew inside the plexi-bubble cockpit high atop the tracked carrier, both giving him a thumbs-up. The entire bubble and its occupants were now swiveling in a clockwise direction as they tracked the invisible target high above.
He heard a scratchy noise in his headphones, and then this: “Target flying at 37,000, range is 90.5 nautical miles uprange and closing. All missile launch and radar component systems are a go. And . . . we are now approaching optimum launch parameters, sir.”
The colonel replied, “Thirty-seven thousand altitude at 40.5 miles and tracking, roger.”
“Avenger missile is armed . . .”
Beauregard raised his binoculars even though there was nothing visible at that altitude and said, “Missile armed, roger.”
He suddenly heard the launch commander say, “And . . . on my mark . . . and . . . Mark. Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . ONE! Launch sequence initiated . . . and . . . Launch! Avenger is away . . . onboard missile systems now tracking target . . . and . . . okay, we are approaching optimum detonation parameters . . . looking . . . uh . . . looking good . . . climbing through 10,000 . . . 15,000 . . . our airspeed is maxed at Mach 4.6 . . . missile climbing through 20,000 feet . . . 25,000 . . . 30,000 feet now . . . we, uh . . . we have critical . . .”
A brilliant flash of white light exploded in the sk
ies almost directly above the colonel’s head. He looked up at the sound of an enormous c-r-a-a-a-ck from on high.
Then he heard Captain Koczak screaming. Debris from the target was thudding into the rocky desert just shy of the mountains surrounding them.
ALMIGHTY GOD, THE COLONEL THOUGHT, what have I done?
He ran ahead a thousand yards toward the spot where a giant piece of engine nacelle had just impacted the ground. Captain Koczak was right on his heels. Within minutes the two men were standing just outside a vast and growing debris field. But what they saw next shook Beauregard to the core. It was raining people. Bodies, and pieces of bodies, were plummeting from the sky . . . even severed heads thudding to earth all around him. Bodies fell, still trapped inside their seats. Luggage, clothing, newspapers, a Raggedy Ann doll . . . it was hailing death.
Captain Koczak looked away, grey and stricken, as two small corpses, children, landed within a hundred feet of his position. By some miracle, they were still holding hands. The Russian officer clearly had no idea what was happening now. Or even how to assimilate this civilian human carnage into what they had all been told was to be a strictly military mission.
The captain and all his men had been led to believe they were taking down a military transport plane. And the colonel as well had been led down that same fabricated road himself.
“Good God, Colonel!” Koczak cried out. “There’s been a terrible mistake! It’s a fucking passenger plane, Colonel! We’ve just shot down a civilian airliner!”
Beauregard remained silent. He watched the still-flaming engines and torn wings full of jet fuel as they slammed into the mountains a half mile away, burning every tree and bush in sight, scorching the earth black.
“Colonel, you need to see this,” a young soldier said.
One of the troops had approached the colonel. He had a charred piece of the disintegrated A-320’s fuselage in his hand. It was pockmarked with jagged holes that Beauregard recognized as damage inflicted by high-energy particles. In other words, shrapnel from the warhead of the Avenger missile.