Warriors (7 page)

KATHLEEN CHASE HAD SPENT THE
last eleven months of her five-year imprisonment in a space reserved for the lowest of the low. An underground prison within the prison. Her stinking windowless room with no table, no chair, no toilet. This was her “punishment” for refusing to admit to her crimes against the state. Admit that she was an American spy. An agent for the CIA come to sow discredit on the government and engineer revolution against the Dear Leader.

The underground prisons were built to blindfold the prying eyes of American satellites. But not hers. She’d kept her eyes open just in case she ever managed to escape. She memorized the guards who tormented her, their names, their faces, their habits.

She’d learned that for all the prisoners publicly executed in these prisons each year, thousands more were simply tortured to death or secretly murdered by guards in the underground facility where she lived. Rape was a given at any time of day or night. Most prisoners were simply worked to death. Mining coal, farming, sewing military uniforms, or making cement. All the while subsisting on a near-starvation diet of watery corn soup, sour cabbage, and salt.

Issued a set of clothes once a year, prisoners worked and slept in filthy rags. There was no soap in her cell, no socks, no gloves, underclothes, or even toilet paper. Twelve- to fifteen-hour days were mandatory until death.

Over time, if they live long enough, prisoners lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken. All this by the age of forty, and none had a life expectancy beyond the age of fifty.

In December, she would turn forty-five . . .

She felt the rough hands all over her body. The guards getting in one last good feel, squeezing her breasts painfully. Then she was alone at the stake. She heard their boots clomping away from her. She heard the low keening noise of the crowd beginning to reach a fevered pitch.

She took a deep breath, knowing it was her last. Finally at peace, she waited for an eternity or more for the lead slugs to pierce her flesh and find her heart.

She heard the guard captain scream the order to fire.

Fire!

Fire!

Fire!

The crowd saw her head pitch forward, her chin on her chest. A roar went up. Deafening.

But there had been no blood, no twitching corpse riddled with bullets. They’d all fired above her head. She’d heard the rounds whistle above her. She had simply fainted.

This was not the first mock execution the joyous crowd of prisoners had witnessed. They’d seen hundreds. And so they knew the appropriate response. They laughed. Wildly and insanely, letting the guards know they were in on the joke, that they appreciated the entertainment.

“WRITE THE LETTER!” HER TORMENTOR
screamed at her. She was back in the basement in a private room on the lowest level of hell. Kang was in rare form today, practically frothing at the mouth. He was the only one who spoke enough English to be trusted with interrogation of such a prize as the valuable American woman Kathleen Chase.

“You write! Tell your husband what happened this morning. About our Dear Leader’s beneficence in sparing your life. His mercy. Tell him about your good health. About how well you are being treated here, you and your children. Hot food, good beds. If not—”

“Show me my children, damn you! Show them to me!”

“Your children are alive, we keep telling you. But they will die if you do not obey. They will watch you die before we decapitate them. They will suffer before—tell him. You write the letter now!”

“You write it, Kang. Sign it, too. And then go fuck yourself.”

“Bitch!” he screamed. The he raised his fist and slammed it down, the ballpoint pen in his grip piercing her hand, nailing it to the wooden table.

She howled in pain, unable to stop it, but her cries were no longer enough for him. He started slapping her viciously across the face, whipping her head around until she thought she’d pass out again . . .

She no longer believed her two children were alive. She had not seen them in so very long . . .

She had only one hope now.

That next time, the bullets would not miss.

C
H A P T E R
  9

H
awke didn’t have to wait long.

One second all was calm, the next he felt the rippled pressure of sudden underwater movement.

He waited for what always came next.

A soft nudge in the small of his back. No pain, just the tentative probing of some large fish. Exactly just what kind of fish it might be was not a question he preferred to speculate about. But the words just wouldn’t go away.

The bad one was
snout
. That’s what the nudge had felt like.

Then, a minute later, there was the really bad one.

Shark.

No mistaking it.

Minutes later, another punishing blow.

Christ. A jarring slam to the rib cage on his right side. A second later, he saw the shark’s dorsal fin knifing toward him maybe two seconds before it hit him. Sharp pain now, it hurt like a bastard. Broken ribs in there for sure. He turned slowly in the water, minimizing his movements.

Even in the pitch-black darkness, he could see the dorsal fins circling lazily around him. What did they say about curiosity? Oh, yeah, curiosity killed the pilot. Right now, they weren’t in dining mode. Right now they were only curious about this new object in the neighborhood. He took a deep breath, winced at the resulting pain, and let it all out slowly.

This could go either way.

They could get bored with him and just disappear.

Or, the other way, they could shred him into several bite-sized chunks, ripping away his limbs first before fighting over his torso. Staying positive in adverse conditions was one of his main strengths, so that’s what he did right now.

The fact that more dorsals were appearing and encircling him, and the fact that his body was suspended, hanging there helplessly in the frigid water, well, that made it tough to stay cheery.

But Alex Hawke, it had to be said, was nothing if not one tough customer.

He closed his eyes and immobilized his body, forcing himself to concentrate on all the good things in his life. His cherished son, named Alexei by his Russian mother, now just four years old. He saw him now, running through the patches of dappled sunlight on the green meadow in Hyde Park. The child’s guardian, Nell, was chasing him, laughing. Nell was more than a nanny. She was Hawke’s much-loved woman. Something of a legend at Scotland Yard, and in truth, Alexei’s bodyguard, Nell had saved the child’s life on more than one occasion. Because of Hawke’s recent activities in Russia, his son had been targeted by the KGB.

One of his deepest fears was creeping around the edges of his conscious thought. The fear that this night he was leaving his son without a father. Or even a mother. It had happened to him at age seven . . . no other pain can compare.

An hour passed. A very long hour.

For whatever reason, the roll of the dice, God’s infinite mercy perhaps, the toothy beasts had left him alone, at least for the moment. Cold had begun to claw its way inside his protective armor. He was shaking now, and his teeth were chattering away, much ado about bloody nothing. It crossed his mind that freezing to death was a far, far better way to go than serving himself up as a midnight snack for the finny denizens of the deep.

He slept, God only knew 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 ship of some kind. Then another light snapped on, and another and another. Each one picking him out from a different angle.

This must be what it feels like to be some kind of star,
he thought, and, cheered that he still had a shred of his sense of humor left, he smiled to himself.

And then he became aware of the deep bass thumping of helicopter rotor blades, above and to the right. He saw the hovering black shadow come closer until it was right above him. An LED spotlight in the chopper’s bay winked on and picked him out.

A diver appeared, standing in the bay and looking down at him.

Could this possibly be a friendly? The odds were certainly against it, given China’s recent military posturing in this cozy little corner of the world. But, still, if this had to be bad, he’d take China over North Korea in a heartbeat. The NK troops were merciless automatons who brutalized and killed anything that moved.

The diver stepped out into the air and dropped.

He splashed down about ten feet away, surfaced, and started speaking to Hawke in Mandarin Chinese. His hopes for a miracle vanished, but still, it was better than the other option. Hawke spoke enough Mandarin to know he was being told to remain calm and he did. The swimmer approached and began securing the lifting harness to Hawke’s semifrozen body.

Hawke had spent a lot of time in China with his friend and companion Ambrose Congreve, the famous Scotland Yard criminalist. In addition to being a brilliant detective, Ambrose had studied languages at Cambridge. While doing a six-month stint in a Shanghai hoosegow for “subversive activities” that had never been proven, Congreve had given Hawke a basic, working knowledge of Chinese.

“In the nick of time,” Hawke said to his savior in his native tongue.

“What?”

“You arrived just in time. I was slowly freezing to death.”

“Silence. No conversation, please.”

“Have it your way. Just trying to be friendly.”

Hawke and the rescuer were winched up and into the belly of the Chinese Changhe Z-8. He lay on his back, shivering. No one aboard would talk to him. He was quite sure they knew about the unidentified aircraft that had entered their airspace and been “shot down” by one of their SAMs. So they were sensibly predisposed not to be chatty. Hell with them—he was still alive, wasn’t he? He’d managed to avoid being eaten alive, had he not? Truth was, he’d gotten out of tougher scrapes than this one over the years.

Once the chopper was airborne, he got another surprise. The mammoth floating Good Samaritan, the ship that had stumbled across the downed pilot by the sheerest of luck? It was a bloody carrier! When the chopper set down on the aft deck, he saw, to his utter amazement, an advanced Chinese fighter jet, which was the spitting image of one he’d seen in a meeting at the Pentagon just two years earlier. Code-named “Critter” because of all its spindly appendages, it never went into full production because of government “cost cutting” as the White House chose to describe it.

And now there was a whole flock of the damn things out here in the South China Sea under cover of darkness.

Whatever lay ahead, the spy knew he’d hit the espionage equivalent of the jackpot.

C
H A P T E R
  1 0

T
he initial interrogation aboard the Chinese aircraft carrier was short but brutal. Hawke gave up nothing, and he had gotten out of it with little more than a severely wounded left knee, a few broken ribs, a black eye, three broken fingers, and a concussion. The leg was the worst. Two gorillas had tried to break it by pulling it backward. The attempt failed, but they’d managed to snap a tendon or two. He could walk, but not far.

When they got bored with him, they told him he’d never leave the 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 before these bastards came for him again. Tortured and killed him.

Two military policemen with automatic weapons had delivered him to this charming boudoir. He was fairly certain the same two would come for him when it was time for the more labor-intensive interrogation. They were merely 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 steel stairs, something they bitched about all the way down.

At one point they threw him to the deck and took turns kicking at his already damaged rib cage with their steel-toed boots. He’d passed out from the pain.

He was consciously unconscious when they returned. They slammed into the tiny space and manhandled him down from the upper bunk. As he expected, they yanked him to his feet and wrapped his arms around each of their shoulders in order to keep him moving.

He kept his head down, chin bouncing on his chest, mumbling incoherently. When the goon on the left paused to kick open the half-closed door, Hawke took advantage of the moment. His powerful arms reached out with all the speed and precision of two striking cobras as he swept the two men’s heads together with sickening force. The collision of the two skulls was sufficiently forceful to cause the two men to drop like sacks of stones to the floor.

He dropped to one knee and checked.

They were dead.

“Hit them too hard,” he whispered to himself.

He fished the keys to his handcuffs from one of their pockets and freed his wrists. Then he quickly stripped the uniform from the taller of the two. It fit him badly, but it might be good enough to get him safely up eight flights of metal steps to the carrier’s flight deck without hindrance.

Hawke had jet-black hair, which helped, and he kept the military police cap brim pulled down over his eyes, and his face lowered. He also had the advantage of having a fully automatic rifle slung over his shoulder in case things suddenly got spicy.

He raced up as fast as he could without calling undue attention to himself.

A sailor opened a hatch in the bulkhead just as he mounted the last set of steps. He felt a cold blast of icy wind howl in from the flight deck. He waited a full sixty seconds before stepping through the hatch and out onto the flight deck.

He had no earthly idea how he was going to execute the plan he’d devised lying in his bunk, waiting to be tortured again and probably killed. The fact that he didn’t know was of little concern. You had to be able to make this stuff up as you went along. He heard laughter and saw a sizable group of men approaching his position.