Overkill

by Ted Bell

  “Now? In the middle of the night? In a fucking typhoon?”

  “Yes. It’s a poor skipper who doesn’t test his mettle in a blow. Used to say that in the Royal Navy. It’s true. You’ve got three minutes. Hurry up.”

  Hawke turned and walked over to the heavy armchair nestled against the hearth; the fire was almost out, but the coals were glowing. He sat facing the bathroom door and pulled his Walther PPK from the holster hanging beneath his left arm. If Hugo bolted, he planned to shoot him in both legs.

  “Leave the door open, Hugo,” he said.

  “For fuck’s sake, a man has a right to a little privacy, Alex.”

  “When a man puts on a lady’s nightie, he forsakes a whole lot of rights. And one of them is privacy. One minute.”

  The cold rain blew sideways. Hawke and Hugo walked down the length of the broad main dock, the wind howling around them, blowing great walls of seawater up over the boards, the water sometimes rising to their knees as they struggled forward. Fishing boats to either side strained at their moorings, bucking like Texas broncos in their stalls. They kept walking, heads down against the driving rain.

  “Where the hell are we going, Alex?”

  Hawke kept the man close, the muzzle of the lethal little Walther pressed deep into his ribs.

  “Right here, mon amie,” Stokely said, standing at the helm of the speedboat. He cranked the engines.

  “Too Elusive? Why?”

  “I need privacy too, Hugo. You and I are going to have a lengthy conversation. It might turn unpleasant. For you, I mean. At any rate, I don’t want an audience. Now get in your damn boat, Hugo.”

  Hawke helped the fat man get safely aboard and seated at the starboard-side fishing chair. Then he went about loosening the fore and aft mooring lines on the dock, so taut and strained in the high winds. Then, gun still in hand, he boarded the speedboat and went to the helm to have a word with Stoke.

  “Take her straight out, Stoke,” he said, “Fifteen, twenty miles offshore.”

  That done, he went over to Hugo and pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the Frenchman’s forehead.

  “Be still. If you move, if you even cross your legs, you’re a dead man. Do you understand me?”

  “Jesus, of course. I don’t want to die.”

  “That’s a healthy attitude, Hugo. We’ll put that to the test out there on the open seas. It could lead to a productive conversation.”

  “Put it to the test?”

  “Are you secure? This little boat of yours is going to get thrown around out there tonight. I’d buckle up and enjoy the ride if I were you.”

  “Boat of mine? It doesn’t belong to me!”

  “It does according to our mutual chum Ivar Solo. We had a little chat with him earlier.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Exactly.”

  Hawke took the seat beside Stoke and said, “Hit it, Stoke. Hit the throttle hard.”

  “Aye aye, Skipper. Hold on to your hat,” Stoke said and firewalled the twin throttles. The stern went down and the bow went up at an alarming angle. Too Elusive shot forward, powering through the waves at tremendous speed, headed directly for the harbor mouth . . .

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Conditions were moderately insane just outside the breakwater entrance to the harbor at Juan-les-Pins. The wind had increased since Hawke’s earlier outing in Too Elusive. Stoke was now wrestling with the wheel, having a hell of a time keeping his bow up and right into the wind. This, so she wouldn’t be broadsided by a rogue wave and capsized. Or take a really big one over her stern, which, depending on the size of these walls of water, could simply overwhelm and sink them.

  Looking back at the shoreline, Hawke could just make out lights winking on the Croisette, the boulevard that circled the beaches at Cannes, lights strung out in the distance like a glistening diamond necklace, floating in the dark skies above the stormy seas.

  Half an hour later, the winds had lessened considerably. Hawke looked at his GPS and saw that he was approximately fifteen miles from the harbor at Juan-les-Pins. And due to weather, there was little chance he’d be interrupted by another vessel.

  “Throttle back, Stoke,” Hawke said. “It’s time for the little powwow with our guest of honor here. Bring her up into the wind and engage the autopilot. I’m going to need your help with this.”

  “What are you going to do?” Hugo Jadot said, looking a little green about the gills.

  “Feeling all right? Seasick?” Hawke asked him. “Sorry, I’m afraid we’re fresh out of Dramamine, Hugo, old sport.”

  Hawke had secured the man in the big chrome fishing chair at the stern, with a line tied around his chest and his wrists and ankles secured with dental floss, a little trick Stoke had learned from the Viet Cong when he was back in the shit. Ouch.

  “What can I do, boss?” Stoke said, coming aft to help.

  “Hold on a second.” Hawke was opening hatch covers in the wide transom. “Here’s what I’m looking for,” he said, hauling out two white nylon lines, each about forty feet long.

  “You going to tie his ass up?” Stoke said.

  “Not exactly. Going to teach him a little trick I learned in the Royal Navy. How the splendid captains and commanders of yore used to deal with a recalcitrant midshipman or two. Get the lying little shit out of that chair, would you, Stoke?”

  Stoke freed the little fellow and said, “What next, bossman?”

  “Cut his hands loose. And his ankles.”

  “Loose?” Stoke said. “Why would we do that?”

  “We’re going to take him forward to the bow. And he’s going to need his hands when we get there.”

  “Alex,” Hugo said, “I beg you. As one of my oldest friends—you don’t intend to torture me, do you?”

  “Good heavens, no, old sport,” Hawke said. “That would be politically incorrect now, wouldn’t it? No, no. Just a little enhanced interrogation is what we have planned for you.”

  “I have rights! I’m a citizen of France!”

  “Right, but then you put on that cute little pink nightie and—”

  “No! You can’t do this! I insist you—”

  “Shut the F up, Hugo,” Stoke said. “When the man wants you to talk, he’ll let you know.”

  “Merde,” Hugo muttered. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “I got an idea,” Stoke said. “Let’s just cut this little butterball up into bite-size Shark McNuggets and feed him to the fishies.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Hawke said, tying one of the lines around Hugo’s waist and knotting it securely.

  “Oh, wait,” Stoke said, “I know where you’re going with this. That old Royal Navy trick you taught me off of Miami one day.”

  “Correct,” Hawke said. “Hold on. One more thing.” Hawke opened another locker in the transom, this one full of scuba-diving gear. “Here we go,” Hawke said, handing Stoke the heavy lead-weighted diver’s belt.

  “Oh, yeah,” Stoke said, smiling, and hitched the belt good and tight around the hotelier’s considerable waistline. “Now we’re talking. That’s not too tight, is it, Hugo?”

  But M. Jadot, literally paralyzed with fear, wasn’t in the mood for idle chitchat.

  “Okay,” Hawke said, “now, the second line also goes around his waist. Loop it a couple of times. Two lines with him in the middle, with about twenty feet on either side.”

  “I remember this!” Stoke said. “Hugo, you’re going to love this shit.”

  Hawke, tugging Hugo along, had grabbed one end of the line and was carefully making his way toward the bow. Stoke had the other end and brought up the rear. Jadot, in the middle, was giving every evidence that he was about to be sick to his stomach.

  “Okay, Hugo,” Hawke said, flipping a switch that turned on all the bow lights. Then as they reached the bow pulpit, he said, “Time for your helicopter ride . . . Stoke, will you do the honors?”

  “You got it, boss,” the giant warrior said. He then grabbed Jadot by the n
eck, and stepping out onto the stainless-steel pulpit projecting from the bow, he held the man out over the heaving black sea.

  “No!” Jadot squeaked. “Please!”

  But Stoke had let some line out. He was already swinging the man round and round his head, executing the dreaded “helicopter,” before heaving him into the black sea. Jadot landed with a splash, disappeared, and surfaced finally, floundering and slapping at the water in an effort to stay afloat.

  “Ready?” Stoke asked Hawke.

  “Yeah. I’ll ease my end of the line and you walk him aft to the port side of the wheelhouse. Keep him afloat with your end until I get in position to starboard.”

  Hawke eased his line some more and moved from the port side of the bow to the starboard side. As he slowly fed Stoke more slack, the line disappeared beneath the keel, now pulling in on his line.

  “Take a deep breath, Hugo,” Stoke shouted down at the bobbing man. “You’re going to swim with the fishies. We’re ’bout to keelhaul your sorry ass.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Hawke tied his end of the line to the starboard rail and went aft to join Stoke to port with Hugo. He leaned way out over the portside rail and saw Hugo bobbing there on the surface a few feet below, kept afloat by Stoke’s end of the line. They switched places, with Stoke going forward to take Hawke’s end of the line.

  “Hugo, I’m going to ask you some very serious questions. Every time I don’t like your answers, you’re going down under the boat for a while, understood? I can’t hear you . . .”

  “Yes, but please—”

  “Shut up! First question, where the bloody hell is my son? I swear to god, I’ll kill you, Hugo. And you know me well enough to know I mean that, don’t you?”

  “I swear, Alex, I don’t know—”

  “Wrong answer, you little shit. Next. Do you know a Russian named Ivanov?”

  “No.”

  “Never met him?”

  “No.”

  “Liar. You didn’t ferry him and his KGB thugs out to Tsar? Aboard this very boat? You have ten seconds.”

  “No.”

  “Captain Solo says otherwise. I choose to believe him. One more time, Hugo. Where is my son? Tell me!”

  “I don’t—”

  Hawke craned his head around and yelled to Stoke.

  “Keelhaul!” Hawke shouted, and Stoke began pulling on his line, submerging Jadot and bouncing him against the hull, pulling him under until he was centered directly beneath the keel.

  After a two-minute submersion, Hawke said, “Okay, let’s bring him up.”

  The bald head appeared above the surface.

  “We can play this game all night, Hugo. But the water temperature’s below fifty. Do you know the meaning of the word hypothermia? No? It means that after twenty minutes in that water, your body will begin to shut down. Question: Do you know a man named Joe? Another Russian, acquaintance of General Ivanov’s?”

  “Yes! Yes, I do! Please! Just pull me back aboard, Alex. I’ll tell you everything I know. Okay? Please!”

  “Where did they take my son?”

  “I don’t know! I swear! I’d tell you if—”

  “Sink him,” Hawke said. “Drop him like a bloody stone, Stoke.”

  Another minute or two passed before Hawke and Stokely brought M. Jadot to the surface.

  “No more!” he sputtered, flailing about wildly. “I can’t take anymore!”

  Hawke looked at the man for a few moments and made a decision. Some men just weren’t comfortable out in the open seas at night while wearing a life jacket made of lead. His wide-eyed former friend was plainly terrified of drowning in the black depths.

  He was ready to talk.

  Maybe.

  “Ready, Stoke?” Hawke cried, just in case Hugo needed a wee bit more convincing.

  “What now?”

  “There are only two ways to keelhaul someone. The bad way. And then the really bad way.”

  “Talk to me, boss.”

  “Right, I’m going to pull him all the way under the boat’s keel with my end of his line. Slowly, very slowly. I want you to feed me just enough slack so that he clears the underside of the hull . . .”

  “And the really bad way?”

  “You don’t cut him any slack this time. That way, when I pull, he gets his ass bounced and scraped along twenty feet or so of hull, of really nasty, razor-sharp barnacles.”

  “Sounds unpleasant.”

  “It is, believe me. We do this enough times, Hugo won’t have much skin left. Ready? First time, give him slack. We’ll see what happens . . .”

  Stoke pulled on his end. The terrified Frenchman went down and disappeared under the boat on Hawke’s side, Alex feeding Stoke line. Stoke, watching the sweep of the second hand on his watch, slowly stared reeling the man in. He counted off the last few seconds, waiting to see the little bastard reappear in the water just below him.

  “Bring him up, Stoke. Now!”

  Hugo surfaced, sputtering and cursing.

  Hawke came over to the port rail where Hugo was spitting up seawater and twisting at the end of the line. He asked Stoke to put his light on the man’s face and bent down to speak to him.

  “I’m going to wait until you’re through throwing up all that seawater, Hugo, and then I’m going to ask you about another name. By the way, I don’t wish to alarm you, but all that splashing about you’re doing has a very seductive appeal for any sharks in this neck of the woods . . . Ready?”

  Hugo nodded his head.

  “One more name for you, Hugo. Putin. Where is Putin hiding?”

  “No idea, I swear to you! He’s not someone who you can—”

  His head disappeared beneath the waves before he got it all out. Stoke counted to thirty before bringing him up again. Hawke bent over the rail and barked, “Who the hell is this ‘Joe’ that Ivanov was arguing with? Screaming about whose operation it was. And what is the operation?”

  “Joe is just some guy who works for Putin. I don’t know . . . heard his name, never met him.”

  “Not Uncle Joe, is he? I know Putin surfaced long enough to make a call. One call, and it was to Los Angeles. Home of Uncle Joe.”

  “I heard him called that sometimes, Uncle Joe, yes, that’s right.”

  “And the operation? What’s that all about?”

  “No idea, but—”

  “You really want to go back down?”

  “No! Please. I can give you the name of the operation! I overheard them speaking of it a couple of times while they were aboard . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “Overkill, that’s the name. Operation Overkill.”

  “Helpful. And where did these bastards take my boy?”

  “Alex, you’ve got to believe me! You think that under these conditions, I wouldn’t tell you if I knew? I don’t know what to—”

  “Asshole . . . Haul him up where I can get my hands on the little shit, Stoke.”

  Stoke hauled him up to the port rail and kept him swinging there as Hawke reached out over the rail.

  “Where is my son, damn you? Tell me what happened! I want the truth this time. Last chance,” Hawke said, and grabbed the man by the throat with his big right hand. He squeezed with crushing force. Hugo began screaming and dancing like a puppet on a string, knowing he was about to die—

  Jadot looked up at his tormentor in a pop-eyed way and said, “Please!” he begged. “I’ll talk! For Jesus’s sake, don’t kill me, Alex!”

  Hawke let go. “I’m listening,” he said.

  Hugo’s voice was strained and raspy to the point of being almost unintelligible. “Okay, okay, hold on.” He coughed, rubbing his ruined throat with his hands. “You’re right. This Uncle Joe and some Russian guys came and got the boy, middle of the night the day before you got here . . .”

  “Did you tell them I was coming to your hotel? You were the only one who knew that information, Hugo. So tell me the truth. Lie and you die.”

  “Yes, I’
m sorry, I couldn’t stop myself. They would have killed me.”

  “Pity. Missed opportunity. Did you take Uncle Joe out to Putin’s yacht aboard Too Elusive?”

  “No. Had his own borrowed tender. A launch from one of the other mega-yachts in the harbor. Clearly he was a guest aboard that yacht, using their tender. The yacht hauled anchor and departed the harbor an hour after Joe left Tsar with your son.”

  “Which one?”

  “Which one what?”

  “Which effing yacht, goddamn you!”

  “Troika.”

  “Good. Owner?”

  “Don’t know. Some Russian oligarch billionaire. Vasily somebody or other . . .”

  “Where the hell were they taking my son? Goddamn you! Talk!”

  “If I knew that, I’d tell you, Alex. But, I don’t. I swear I’d tell if—”

  “Haul him again, Stoke. Take him under. No slack at all this time.”

  “Fast or slow, boss?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Slow.”

  Stoke hauled on the line, bouncing Hugo along under the boat and singing all the while his version of an old sailor’s ditty:

  “It’s only me, from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor,

  I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree.

  In every port, a gal waits for me,

  So good-bye, Toots, I’ll see you when you see me!”

  Chapter Fifty

  “Another croissant, m’lord?” Ambrose Congreve asked Alex on the morning following the long night of enhanced interrogation featuring the repeated submerging of the hotel’s owner, M. Hugo Jadot, beneath the icy seas.

  Hawke had awakened filled with renewed vigor for the task at hand. Knowing the extent of Putin’s paranoia and what he was surely capable of, he was determined to speed things up. Every extra second that his son was in the hands of the Russian was a second too many. Thus his sense of renewed urgency.

  He looked at Congreve thoughtfully and said, “You’re always talking about the importance of a time line in an investigation, Constable. Well, this one is certainly heating up, isn’t it, coming to a boil. I want a new timeline, if you don’t mind. One where everything we now know is known, and one that can determine that our high-value actions between this morning and the day we bring Alexei safely home are done on a rapid-fire basis. Yes?”