by Ted Bell
He slept, God knows how long.
And then the lights came on.
Literally.
He found himself the target of a shaft of pure white light. He looked up to his left and saw its source. A searchlight mounted high on the superstructure of a massive aircraft carrier. Then another, and another, both lower and near the deck, picked him out. And then, to his right, he became aware of the deep bass thumping of helicopter rotor blades. A spotlight from the chopper picked him up, and he saw a diver appear in the opening in the side of the fuselage.
Could this possibly be a friendly? The odds were certainly against it, given China’s recent military posturing in this little corner of the world. The diver splashed down about six feet away and hopes for a miracle vanished when he told Hawke to remain calm in Mandarin. Then he went about securing the lifting harness to Hawke’s body.
Hawke had spent a lot of time in mainland China with his friend and companion, the great Scotland Yard criminalist Ambrose Congreve. In addition to being a brilliant detective, Ambrose had studied languages at Cambridge. While doing a six-month stint in a Beijing prison for “subversive activities” that had never been proven, Congreve had given Hawke a rudimentary, but substantial, working knowledge of Chinese.
“In the nick of time,” Hawke said to the diver in his native tongue.
“What?”
“You arrived just in time. I was slowly freezing to death.”
“Silence. No conversation.”
“Have it your way. Just trying to be friendly.”
Hawke and his rescuer were winched up and into the belly of the Chinese Ahkoi helo. Nobody aboard would talk to him. He was sure they knew an unidentified aircraft had entered their airspace and had been shot down (they imagined) by one of their missiles. So they were sensibly predisposed not to be chatty. Hell with them—he was still alive, wasn’t he? He’d gotten out of tougher scrapes than this one over the years.
The initial interrogation aboard the Chinese carrier was short but brutal. Still, he’d gotten out of it with little more real damage than three broken fingers and a mild concussion. They’d told him he’d never leave this ship alive, then locked him up inside a stinking crew cabin in the bowels of the bilge with room for little more than a crappy bunk bed. He now lay on the top berth thinking very seriously about how the hell to escape.
Two military policemen with automatic weapons had delivered him to this lovely boudoir. He was fairly certain the same two would come for him when it was time for the more labor-intensive interrogation. They were thugs, those two, viciously abusive but stupid. Just the way he liked them. He’d feigned a far worse concussion than he’d actually suffered, forcing them to half carry him down many flights of stairs, something that they did not appear to enjoy.
He was consciously unconscious when they slammed into the tiny space and pulled him down from the upper berth. As he expected, they yanked him to his feet and wrapped his arms around their shoulders in order to keep him moving. He kept his head down, mumbling incoherently. When the MP on his left paused to kick open the half-closed door, he used the moment to grab a fistful of hair on each man’s head and violently slam their skulls together hard enough to cause them to sink to the floor. He checked. They were out for the long count.
He quickly stripped the uniform from the taller of the two. It fit him badly, but it was good enough to get him up eight flights of metal steps to the carrier’s deck level without incident. Hawke had jet-black hair, which helped, and he kept the cap brim pulled down and his face lowered. He also had the advantage of carrying an automatic rifle in case things got spicy.
He saw a sailor open a hatch in the bulkhead and felt the cold blast of icy wind howl in from the flight deck. He waited sixty seconds and then stepped through to the outside himself. He had no earthly idea how he was going to execute the plan he’d devised, but that was of little concern. You had to be able to make this stuff up as you went along. He heard a sizable group of men laughing as they approached his position and stepped back into the shadows.
Pilots.
There were eight of them, all in flight suits and some wearing their helmets, some holding them loosely in their hands, kidding around, walking with that cocky jet-jock walk. They were obviously en route across the expanse of darkened deck to their covey of Sukhoi 33 carrier aircraft being readied for immediate launch. He remained hidden between two huge storage lockers behind the bulwark until just after they had passed. Then he fell in behind them, quickening his pace until he caught up with the lone straggler at the rear. Fortunately, he was by far the tallest of the lot.
He approached his target from directly behind, shot out both hands, and used his thumbs on the carotid artery, to paralyze the poor fellow and still keep him on his feet. He gave the main group of pilots time to continue on, then pulled the unconscious one back into the shadows of the storage lockers. It was the work of a moment to zip himself inside the pilot’s jumpsuit and don his boots and helmet and flip the visor down. He strode quickly, but not too quickly, across the deck and caught up with the jocular pilots just as they were climbing into their respective Sukhois.
He made a beeline straight for the sole unoccupied fighter, then saluted the two attending crewmen who stood aside for him to mount the cockpit ladder.
“Lovely night for flying, boys,” he muttered in guttural Chinese, sliding himself down into the seat. After strapping himself in, he reached forward and flipped the switch that lowered the canopy. Then he studied the instrument array and illuminated controls, quickly deciding exactly what did what. The Chinese had stolen so much aeronautical technology from the West that getting the hang of things was embarrassingly easy.
He gave a hand signal to the crewmen below, lit the candle, and taxied into position behind the last jet in line for the center catapult. The blast shield had already risen from the deck behind the first jet in the squadron, and Hawke watched as the fighter was flung out over the ocean, afterburner glowing white hot.
He must have been daydreaming because he suddenly heard the air boss screaming at him in his headphones, telling him to get his ass moving. The aircraft in front of him had advanced into position and he’d not followed immediately. Now he added a touch of power and tucked in where he belonged. There remained only three planes ahead of him.
“So sorry, Boss,” he muttered in the time-honored traditional communicative style of fighter pilots all over the world. On a carrier, the air boss is God himself.
“Don’t let it happen again, Passionflower, or I’ll kick your ass all the way back to Shanghai.”
“Roger that, sir,” Hawke said, advancing once more.
“You forget something in your preflight, Passionflower?”
“No, sir,” Hawke said.
“Yeah? Check your fucking nav lights switch for me, just humor me.”
Shit. He hadn’t turned them on. Dumb mistake and he couldn’t afford to be dumb at this point, not in the slightest.
“You awake down there, son? I’m inclined to pull your ass out of line.”
“Sir, no sir. I’m good to go.”
“Yeah, well, you damn well better be. I’ve got my eye on you now, honey. You screw up even a little bit on this mission this morning and your ass is mine. You believe me?”
“Sir, I always believe you. But I’ll come back clean, I swear it.”
“Damn right you will. Now get the hell off my boat, Passionflower. I got more important things than little pissants like you to worry about. You’re up.”
Hawke moved forward and engaged the catapult hook inside its buried track. He heard the blast shield rumble up into position behind him and looked to his left, nodding, a signal to the launch chief that he was poised and ready. The man raised his right arm and dropped it, meaning any second now. Hawke’s right hand automatically went to the “oh-shit bar” on the right-hand side of the canopy.
Adrenaline flooded Hawke’s veins as he gripped the bar with his right hand. Being launched violently into space by a modern carrier catapult was as close as any human being can come to the experience of being in a catastrophic fatal car crash and surviving. It was that intense.
Early on, after a lot of expensive hardware had gone into the drink, some aeronautical genius had figured out that most pilots instinctively grabbed the aircraft’s controls too quickly after launch. It’s scary to feel out of control when your wheels separate from the mother ship. Now every fighter had a handhold forward and to the right inside the canopy. You grabbed it just before they pulled the trigger. Thus its name, the oh-shit bar.
During a “cat shot,” the time it took you to remove your hand from that bar and take hold of the controls was precisely, to the nanosecond, the right amount of time needed to elapse before you seized control after leaving the leading edge of the deck.
He was airborne.
He looked back down at the deck lights of the Varyag, the carrier growing rapidly smaller as he gained altitude. He suppressed any feelings of joy over escaping an agonizing death at the hands of the most sophisticated torturers on the planet. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, he told himself, as he climbed upward to join “his” squadron’s flight. Their heading was a northerly course that would take them over the Paracel Islands. Exactly the wrong direction. He needed to be headed south-southeast and he needed to get moving or he’d miss his rapidly diminishing window: the one chance he had to try to defuse a crisis with global implications.
The rim of the earth was edged in violent pink as he slipped into his designated slot at the rear of the tight formation. There was a minimum of radio chat for which he was thankful. There was normally a lot of banter at this stage and he didn’t want to hear any questions or inside wisecracks over the radio that he couldn’t respond to without sacrificing his cover. He needed precious time to remain anonymous until he could figure out how the hell to peel off and head for his mission destination without arousing the slightest suspicion.
He knew what he had to do now, although he didn’t much like it.
Land on the island airstrip on Xiachuan Island. Meet with this Chinese Admiral Tsang and fulfill C’s back-channel charge as best he could. Find a strategic way to avert the imminent showdown and eliminate another global flash point. He didn’t much like the fact that a high-tech SAM had been launched at him streaking across some dinky little atoll in the middle of nowhere. And that a Chinese carrier just happened to be sailing the sea-lane where he went down? No. He simply couldn’t shake the distinct impression that this might all be an elaborate setup. That the wily Chinese were going to use his violation of their airspace as proof positive that the West was being deliberately provocative.
They’d trot out his blackened corpse and twisted pieces of his American fighter jet on global TV. Use him to justify an even more aggressive posture in the South China Sea. Take retaliatory measures against Taiwan, Japan, or Vietnam. Next step, war. That’s how he saw it, anyway. C might disagree. But C wasn’t sitting in the hot seat with his ass on the line.
He now had little choice. He flew on with the formation, heading north toward the Pacific. He looked at his watch, calculated time and distance to his target. A long way to go and a short time to get there. And suddenly it came to him.
He thumbed the transmit button on his radio.
“Flight leader, flight leader, this is, uh, Passionflower, over.”
“Roger, Passionflower, this is Red Flight Leader. Go ahead, over.”
“Experiencing mechanical difficulties. System malfunctions, over.”
“What’s your situation?”
“I’m flying hot, sir. Engine overheat. It’s getting worse. Running override system checks now. Doesn’t look good.”
“Are you declaring an emergency?”
“Negative, negative. I think I can throttle back and make it home to mother. Request permission to abort and return, over.”
“Permission granted, over.”
“Roger that, Red Flight Leader. Passionflower returning to the Varyag, over.”
Hawke peeled away from the formation and went into a steep diving turn away from his flight. The sun was up now, just a sliver above the horizon, streaks of red light streaming across the sea below. When Red Flight was out of radar range, he corrected course and went to full throttle. By his latest calculations, he’d touch down just in time. He sat back and allowed himself his first smile in hours.
If he didn’t get blown out of the sky, it promised to be another beautiful day in Paradise.
Keep reading for an excerpt from
Ted Bell’s upcoming novel
Phantom
on sale March 2012
Prologue
The house at the seaward end of Captain’s Neck Lane in Bar Harbor is a three-story Victorian painted a lovely shade of pale yellow with white trim. The home has all the prerequisite nineteenth-century decorative gingerbread geegaws and doodads, but they are not overwhelming. There is a certain peace about the house that you can feel, just standing on the sidewalk at the front gate on a quiet summer evening.
Peace, yes, and should you step inside, abiding love.
There was red, white, and blue bunting hung from the portico surrounding the front door. A very large American flag was draped from the roof and obscured the two large windows on the third floor. A banner was affixed to the exterior wall just below the flag. It read:
A HERO’S WELCOME, U.S. MARINE SGT. CHRIS MARLEY!
Tonight, all the windows of 72 Captain’s Neck Lane are aglow, though it is well nigh the witching hour. Even lit is the tiny window at the top of the tower jutting out from the western front corner of the house. In that small round room, a little girl is sitting on her bedroom floor being read to by her father. The child’s name is Aurora, age six. The father is Christopher, age thirty-two, a warrior at heart. Still. He is missing part of his right leg, from the knee down. It is the result of an IED the Taliban had left waiting for him beside the road to Kabul. He’d been promised a prosthetic, but there was a very long line of amputees ahead of him.
He thought little of the wound. He had seen countless horrors far worse. He was one of the lucky ones. He was alive. He had come home safely to his family. He had done his duty. He was a proud man, proud of his service and what he’d done for his country, though he would never, ever, let you know it. His father had never talked about his war. Neither would he.
“I like my cane,” the Marine told people. “It has many other uses, you know. You can scare cats with it, stuff like that.”
Aurora, unable to sleep because of an impending adventure, has had her father reading to her for hours. She hasn’t yawned once, Christopher thought, pulling another book from her shelves. Not once! With her flouncy red curls and cornflower-blue eyes, she was a picture-perfect child.
Christopher Marley once told his wife, Marjorie, that when the great gardener finally clipped all the inferior roses in the great garden, he came up with one perfect bud and he named it “Aurora.” It was the kind of thing he said from time to time, the kind of thing that endeared him to his wife of ten years. Not to mention his legions of loyal readers.
Christopher, a famous writer of children’s books before duty and country had called, turned the page of the picture book.
“Ooh, Daddy, what a lovely palace! Who lives there? Can I live there someday? Become a real princess?”
“Well, most likely not. You’ll see it for yourself when we get to Orlando tomorrow, but I can tell you now even though it’s a great secret. That palace is the home of Cinderella and—”
“Cinderella? She’s so beautiful.”
“Indeed. As I say, it’s her palace, but she has many guests living there as well. Including a certain mouse, your favorite mouse in the whole wide world.”
“Re
my? In Ratatouille?”
“Remy was a rat, darling, not a mouse. Otherwise they would have called the movie Mouseatouille. Which they didn’t.”
Aurora laughed and pursed her lips, thinking this over.
“Not Mickey?”
“Yup. Mickey Mouse himself.”
“Mickey Mouse. The real Mickey Mouse. Lives in that very palace with Cinderella? Inside.”
“Correct.”
“And we’re going there. To that exact palace. Tomorrow.”
“We are.”
“Oh, Daddy, I want to hug you. I’m so excited . . . can we meet Mickey? Go to his house? See his room and everything?”
“I should think so. He does live there, after all.”
“Well. We’ll just walk up to his door and knock on it, won’t we, Daddy?”
“Or maybe he’ll be out playing and we’ll go say hello. I hear he is just about the most popular mouse in Orlando and—”
At dinner the night before he shipped out, he had made a solemn promise to his family. When he got home he was taking them all to Disney World for a grand holiday. Three whole days. In bed later that night, he’d asked his wife to honor his promise in his absence. No matter what. And there were times, lying in a rocky roadside ditch, bleeding out, when Sgt. Chris Marley, USMC, had believed he’d never set foot (he still had one, anyway) inside Disney World. He still remembered Aubrey, his son, who had pumped his fist and shouted, “Disney World? Space Mountain, bring it on!”
“Daddy! Wake up! You fell asleep reading!”
Aurora, her eyes gleaming, looked up at him and said one word freighted with reverence.
“Mickey.”
At that moment the door swung inward and a small, familiar-looking boy of eleven (he was Aurora’s older brother) stood there holding a very beat-up red duffel bag with a big black L above a pair of crossed lacrosse sticks. It was the one his dad had used at Lawrenceville. The boy’s name was Aubrey. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great handsome eyes that he would grow into with the passing of time.