by Ted Bell
They had to be in the club car. He was not at all surprised. KGB officers always ran true to form and he’d rather expected to find them there.
Before he pushed the button that opened the automatic pneumatic sliding doors to the final car, he peered through the frosty windows. The two Russians could be seen on a rounded banquette at the very rear of the car, opposite each other, drinking, smoking, and playing cards. Otherwise, the car appeared to be completely empty, just as you would expect at this hour.
After affixing a short silencer to the SIG’s muzzle, he returned the gun to its holster beneath his left shoulder. Hawke spent many long hours at the Six shooting range practicing his quick draw. He could draw his weapon and fire accurately in less than two-hundredths of a second, about as fast as the blink of an eye. He could also shoot a playing card in half—right through the edge of it—at twenty yards with the first shot, but that was just a killing machine showing off.
He pushed the metal button and the doors whooshed open. It was sleeting fiercely now, and the white flashes of ice in the dark whipped past the speeding train at warp speed.
He stepped inside the smoky club car, walked smiling toward the two men. Three packs of cards were scattered over the table. The air was blue with cigar smoke, and an ashtray had toppled over, leaving some butts on the floor.
His face and posture a mask of composure, whatever lurked inside him well battened down, Hawke said, “Good evening, gentlemen. I do hope I’m not disturbing you.”
The Russians looked up in surprise and grunted something incomprehensible.
He was ready to draw if either made a move for his weapon, but neither did. Instead, they smiled and motioned him toward them as they might an old comrade. The effect that vodka had on one’s ego and the false sense of security it created had never failed to amaze Hawke. But he’d been counting on that effect at this late hour and he was not disappointed. The KGB had a well-known history with vodka and it was one that, over the years, frequently tipped in an MI6 operative’s favor.
“Sit down, sit down,” the one to Hawke’s right said, sliding over. It was the smaller one, not the one who’d tried to touch Alexei.
“Thanks so much, but I can’t stay long. I’ll take a drink though. Can’t sleep. Damnedest thing, insomnia. I’m Alex Hawke, by the way. Didn’t get a chance to introduce myself properly in the dining car, I’m afraid.”
The hefty cretin whose wrist he’d nearly fractured in the dining car poured him a glass of vodka, sloshing some over the side. Hawke stepped nearer to the table, took the drink with his left hand, downing a bit while keeping his eyes moving rapidly side to side, looking for any hint of aggression, and then spoke directly to the large Russian, his low voice dripping with menace.
“You seemed inordinately interested in my dinner companion earlier this evening. As I told you, I’m his bodyguard. You then made a threatening remark. Something about a long journey, perhaps we’d meet again. Well, here we are. We meet again. I don’t usually socialize with drunken thugs and paid assassins, but in your particular case I’m making an exception. I’m armed, of course, so don’t even think of doing anything foolish.”
He caught simultaneous movement, both to his right and left. Hands going for guns on both sides of the round table.
In a single fluid motion he brought his right foot up, viciously ripping the wooden card table from its base, pitching bottles, glasses, cards, ashtrays up into the faces of the two men. At the same time he whipped out his SIG .45 and drew down on the two men before they could get to their weapons.
“Hands in the air. Now. Good. Now, one at a time, slowly remove your guns and throw them toward me. Not at me, on the bloody floor! Mind your manners, boys; I warn you, I’m pretty handy with this peashooter. I make nice tight patterns in foreheads when I shoot.”
The guns clattered to the floor, and the men looked at him, ashen-faced, waiting to be executed.
“I suggest we step out onto the platform. I’ve got a couple of very expensive Cuban cigars, Monte Cristo number 8. I thought you two cretins might enjoy a good smoke at the end of a long day.”
He pulled a single cigar from his breast pocket and passed it beneath his nose, inhaling the pungent aroma.
“Delicious. On your feet. We’ll step out onto the platform behind you. Get a little fresh air and enjoy a good smoke. You first, Ivan, then your comrade. Outside. Now.”
At the rear of the club car was a door opening onto a small half-oval platform with a railing. It was where one could smoke cigars, take the air, or wave farewell to friends at the station.
The Russian pulled the sliding door open. Sleet, snow, and freezing night air came rushing into the club car as first one, then the other, stepped outside.
Hawke remained in the doorway and withdrew the sword from the scabbard at his side.
“I could shoot you now, but I’ve a better idea. My terrible swift sword. I’m descended from a ruthless English pirate, you see. Chap called ‘Blackhawke’ and a right bastard he was too. When he wanted to dispose of someone, he’d make them walk the plank and sleep with the fishes. If they were reluctant, he’d give them encouragement with the tip of his blade. Turn around and face the rear, hands in the air.”
They did so, resigned to their fate now.
“Ivan, up on the rail. Do it now or you’ll get a very long knife in the back and a punctured lung. Your chances of survival are slim in any case, but probably marginally better if you jump. I’m waiting. You may have noticed I’m not a patient man.”
The train was racing through the night at speeds well over one hundred miles an hour, the trackless forests to either side receding in a white blur. The killer climbed clumsily up onto the rail, keeping his balance with one hand desperately clutching the ice-coated overhanging roof.
“Jump, damn you!” Hawke said, prodding the man repeatedly with his new sword. And the man, screaming, jumped to his death, hurling his body into the black night.
“You’re up, old sport. Time to fly.”
The second man turned toward Hawke, pleading for his life in a rush of garbled Russian.
“I’m sure your pleas for mercy are poignant and convincing, but they’re falling on deaf ears. Up on the rail with you, you sniveling bastard. Die like a man, at least.”
As the man struggled up on the rail, Hawke said, “When your employers in Moscow find your frozen carcasses, if they ever do, it will perhaps give them pause before any more such clumsy assassination attempts. I won’t tolerate threats to my son. Now, jump, you miserable shit.”
Hawke pressed the tip of the sword into the man’s fat buttock, “I said jump!”
Wailing in fear, he did just that.
Hawke wiped the blood from the tip of his sword and returned it to the scabbard. It had performed most satisfactorily. Captain Blackhawke would have been proud of his progeny. Then he turned to survey the scene of the crime. He bent to pick up the glass he’d used to drink the vodka. No sense leaving incriminating evidence about, he thought, and he heaved the glass over the rail. Then he closed the door. Messy enough. It looked like there’d been a drunken fight. Anything could have happened. Two passengers would be determined to be missing sometime tomorrow. In this godforsaken tundra, their bodies would not be found for days or weeks, if ever.
A mystery, perhaps not worthy of Dame Agatha Christie, but still a mystery sufficient to suit Hawke’s purposes.
Alexei, his face pink and angelic upon his pillow, looked precisely the way he had when his father had left him. Hawke, feeling relaxed for the first time since boarding the train, took down his false-bottomed travel case and returned his weapon to its compartment. Then he removed the sat phone, poured himself a small whiskey, and returned to the dreaded chair in the sitting parlor.
“Sir David,” Hawke said when his superior at MI6 picked up.
“Hawke?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where the devil have you been? There are no end of rumors, and the least you could have done is to give me some kind of heads-up before you disappeared. Everyone thinks you’re dead.”
“I’m terribly sorry, sir. It just wasn’t possible. It was a personal matter. I’ll explain it all when I see you.”
“And when might that happy event occur?”
“Tomorrow evening, with any luck. I’ll need a bit of help getting out of here.”
“Where the hell is here?”
“A train. Arriving at the Saint Petersburg rail station around noon tomorrow. The Red Arrow. First-class car just aft of the locomotive. I’ve booked the first two compartments at the forward end of the car. Double-oh-one is the car number. I’m anticipating a decidedly unfriendly reception committee upon arrival on the platform. KGB. I’m going to need armed cover before leaving the train, and the more the better. I’m bringing a hostage out. Very fragile. He’ll require special assistance.”
“Hurt? Wounded?”
“No. Small.”
“Small?”
“Affirmative. He’ll need milk.”
“Milk?”
Hawke heard a voice in the background and then C turning from the phone’s mouthpiece and saying to someone, “Hawke’s coming out. With a hostage. Needs milk, apparently. What? Hell if I know what he’s up to, barmy, if you ask me!”
Then he was back on the phone.
“You’ll have it, Alex. Next steps?”
“My thought was quick armed surface transport to an unmarked helo standing by on the roof of our Saint Petersburg consulate. A quick buzz across the Baltic Sea to Tallinn, and a plane of some sort waiting there in Estonia to bring us in.”
“Consider it done. Are you quite all right, Alex? You sound odd, I must say.”
“Under the circumstances, I’m perhaps the happiest man on earth, sir.”
“I do think you’ve gone a bit mad, Alex, but I’ll take care of these arrangements. At least you’re not dead.”
“At the very least, sir. Thank you for noticing.”
Click.
Nine
Seminole, Florida
It was hot. Always hot out here in the damn swamp, Stokely Jones Jr. thought, emerging from the cool dark shade of the old Baptist church into the searing, wind-inflamed morning. You wouldn’t think they had churches in Hades, but they did. The big man paused at the top of the weathered steps, loosened his tie, mopped his brow, and looked out across the churchyard. Three people were sitting on a shaded bench that wrapped around a tree: Alex Hawke; his son, Alexei; and the pretty young woman who looked after his child.
Miss Spooner is what Hawke called the young woman. Nell Spooner had a small wicker basket of toys on her lap, things to keep little Alexei from getting bored out here in the boonies. She had big almond-shaped blue eyes, honey-blond hair, and a young Princess Diana vibe going on. Sweet innocence, kind that made you automatically warm up to somebody you didn’t know from Adam.
Stoke smiled, seeing the look on Alex Hawke’s face. All the pain that man had been through lately? Replaced with joy. Plain and simple happiness. Stoke swiped his handkerchief across his brow. He just stood there watching the three of them for a few minutes. You live long enough, he was thinking, you get to see that, sometimes, the good really does come with the bad.
And God knows Hawke had had his share of bad lately. Came back from Russia without the woman he loved. But not empty-handed, no sir. Now he had a son. And how he did love that boy, Lord only knows how much. Father and son. But something else, deeper. Like they were twins or something.
The circular wooden bench surrounded a gnarled live oak tree. Standing tall out in the scruffy churchyard. Last hurricane that roared up from Key West took its toll around here. But, like the old rugged cross, that tree had stood its ground.
In the silence he could hear the hum of traffic. Two long miles full of scrub palm, sand fleas, snakes, and gators from here, old U.S. 41, or Alligator Alley, made its way over to Tampa.
Earlier, he and Hawke had passed the Injun Tradin’ Post, the tourist trap where Stoke’s former fellow inmate at the Glades Correctional Institution, a Seminole Indian and local former prizefighter named Chief Johnny Two Guns, had shopped. He was reputed to have bought the fake Seminole tomahawk there that he had murdered his own mother with.
Turns out Two Guns’s late mom was a God-fearing soul, the choirmaster here for nearly fifty years. Small world, right? Full of some really good people and a whole lot of flaming assholes.
Not much of a church, he considered, looking back at it. It was a white frame structure of two stories. Some of the windows had fixed wooden louvers, and some had shutters that folded back. There were also a few stained-glass windows with lots of panes missing. The roof was galvanized sheet iron, corrugated.
Paint was peeling off the steeple, too, he noticed, and then a skeet bit him right on the back of his neck. Damn! He slapped at it, got the sucker, and saw the smear of his own blood in the palm of his hand. Memories. “Heat ’n’ Skeet,” that’s what the U.S. Navy SEALs used to call this backcountry.
Stoke, a former NFL linebacker built like two, had done some secret training not twenty miles from here. Blown up a lot of shit, including more than a few ten-foot gators with grenades dropped from hovering choppers right down their gaping gullets. Messy, but more entertaining than The Price Is Right or whatever that crap was they had on TV. Besides, gators ate dogs. And sometimes babies.
Scattered around here and there on the church grounds, somebody had placed big tin buckets of smoldering woody husks that gave off white smoke—homemade mosquito bombs. Stoke murdered another stinging dive-bomber and descended the creaking steps, trying to stand in the white smoke. But the stuff kept shifting away from him in a fluke of nature that made him smile. Sometimes nature was on your side, but mostly not.
Well, all he had to say to that right now was “Hallelujah.”
It was Stokely Jones’s wedding day.
He should be happy, he thought, sweat stinging his eyes. God knows he loved Fancha with all his heart; it was marriage he wasn’t so sure about. His one serious relationship with a woman before this was with a podiatrist from Tenafly, New Jersey. Big old gal, mostly bosom, had half the men in Jersey at her feet, he used to joke. She’d wanted to marry him, too. Morning of the wedding? He’d skipped.
Now, here he was again. Just being inside that church had made him nervous as a damn long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. He hadn’t even meant to propose! One night, out at her palazzo on Key Biscayne, looking at her beautiful face in the moonlight, he’d said, “You know what, baby? I worship the ground you will walk on in a future lifetime.”
Bam. Look at him. Here he was, at a specific church, on a specific date. Getting . . . he almost choked . . . getting married.
Grace Baptist Church was located in the town of Seminole, Florida, population 867, most of them black folks and members of the congregation. You had farmers, fishermen, and caneworkers mostly out here. It was the bride’s hometown.
Fancha’s family had emigrated to the States from the Cape Verde islands back in the 1980s. Settled out here in the sawgrass and muck for some unknowable reason. Maybe somebody in the family was a professional alligator wrestler, who knows. Compared to Harlem, where he grew up, this place bit the big one, all he had to say about it.
Grace Baptist was the church Fancha had grown up in, singing in the choir. Not exactly St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Or even the Abyssinian Baptist Church at 132 West 138th Street. Now those were churches. You walk in there and you can feel the good Lord saying, “This right here, this is the house of the Lord, sinner, and don’t you forget it.”
“Damn, it’s hot!” Stokely Jones said, dropping down on the bench next to his best man, Lord Alexander Hawke. Man flew all the
way in from England with his little boy to be here. Cutest little kid you ever saw, dressed in his blue-and-white seersucker suit, short pants, white knee socks, and black patent leather shoes with straps to hold them on. He had his father’s jet-black hair and blazing blue eyes.
Didn’t miss a trick either. Nell Spooner had given him a mayonnaise jar with holes punched in the top and an insect inside to keep him entertained after he’d been through all the toys.
“What’s that in there?” Stoke asked the child. “A cricket?”
“No, sir,” Alexei said, peering into the jar at his new pet. “A grasshopper! Spooner says grasshoppers fly and crickets don’t.”
“Is that right? I didn’t have that information,” Stoke said, ruffling his hair and smiling at the boy’s proud papa.
Hawke, for some unknown reason, looked cool as a damn cucumber just plucked out of the Frigidaire. Had on a pure white linen three-piece suit, not a wrinkle in it, a beautiful blue silk tie, and, despite all the heat and humidity and mosquitoes on this late May morning, he had a big smile on his face.
“What are you so damn chipper about?” Stoke asked him. He’d gotten that word, chipper, from Hawke long ago and used it ever since. Liked the sound of it.
“Listen to that choir,” Hawke said.
“What about it?”
“It’s beautiful, that’s what. I’ve never heard music like that. Have you, Miss Spooner?”
“No, sir, I’ve not,” she said. “It is divine, isn’t it?”
Stoke said, “It’s divine, all right; that’s old-time religion you’re listening to now. Gospel music. Angel music. Sacred. Folks are just rehearsing in there now. Choir’s just getting their pipes warmed up. You wait. Whole building’ll be shaking, hands clapping, feet stomping, folks praising the Lord to the rafters when they cut loose, feels like the roof is going to fly off and sail away, I’m telling you.”