Pirate (8 page)

HAWKE RACED DOWN THE DESERTED COMPANIONWAY, A
grim corridor lit only by a few naked bulbs suspended from loose wires dangling from the overhead. Doors hung open on either side, small flyspecked cabins with double- or triple-tiered bunks, empty. At the far end, a large door in the bulkhead opened into the galley. He stepped inside. The stink of cabbage and rancid grease was overpowering. He was about to turn and retrace his steps when his eye caught a thin edge of yellow light between two tall cabinets loaded with rusty canned goods, stocks that appeared to be long past their best-by date.

He ripped at the shelving and dodged heavy falling cans of undoubtedly exquisite Chinese delicacies. The cabinet swung open easily, revealing a tiny broom closet of a room, no bigger than six by four. There was a metal rack upon which lay a man, pale and gaunt, who looked as if he’d neither eaten nor slept during his days in enemy hands. A tin plate with what appeared to be dried vomit rested on his chest, just below his chin. A foul slops bucket stood under his bed. At the sight of Hawke, he made to sit up, and the thin scrap of blanket fell away, revealing his legs. They were severely bruised and made fast to the frame with strips of heavy canvas.

The man smiled weakly up at Hawke as he entered.

“What part of China you from, mister?” he said, slurring his words.

“I look Chinese to you?” Alex said, and he had the knife in his hand, cutting the canvas from the frame, starting with the left leg.

“Can’t see too well. Where are you from then?”

“Place called Greybeard Island. Little rock out in the English Channel.”

“English, yeah. Thought so. A limey. I’m Harry Brock. From L.A.”

“La-la land. Never been there. Have they been torturing you, Harry Brock?” Hawke asked, inspecting his horribly swollen feet and ankles.

“Nothing Dr. Scholl can’t fix,” he said, laughing weakly. “I don’t know. Been on the run. Can’t remember much of the last few days.”

“Drugs, Mr. Brock. Chlorides. Pentothal. Anything broken? Can you walk?”

“I think so. Any chance at all of us getting out of here?” the man said. The fear that this might not be so was writ large in his dilated blue eyes.

“That’s the general idea,” Hawke replied, cutting the last of the bonds. “On your feet, Mr. Brock. Let’s get off this tub before it sinks.”

“Sounds good,” the American said, and, with Hawke’s help, he swung his legs painfully off the frame and got his feet under him. He swayed and Hawke put one arm around him.

“I won’t be much good to you in a fight. I think the bastards have broken my wrists. One of ’em, anyway.”

“We’re going to make straightaway for the stern. As fast as you’re able. Over the rail. I’ve got a man waiting below in a Zodiac. He’s expecting us. Now. Can you make it?”

As he said this last, Hawke heard a now familiar high-pitched voice behind him. He whirled, and his right hand came up in a blinding motion, the Assassin’s Fist already on its deadly way. Tsing Ping appeared to move his head less than an inch to the left and Hawke’s blade twanged into the wooden shelving, the knife handle vibrating just by Tsing Ping’s ear.

“You are knife fighter?” the man said in his disturbingly childlike voice. “Good. I, too.”

An ugly serpentine dagger appeared from the folds of Ping’s black pajamas, and he flicked it playfully before his face. Hawke, who still had his left arm supporting the American, was going for the Walther on his right hip when he heard certain death whizzing his way. The point of the Chinaman’s blade was perhaps an inch from piercing Alex’s heart when it struck something solid. There was a metal thud and Hawke glanced down to see the dented tin plate that had saved his life still in Harry Brock’s hand and the assassin’s dagger falling harmlessly to the deck.

“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 with 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.