Hawke: A Novel (39 page)

“I couldn’t see it. You did.”

“You saw it, Alex. Your mind just wasn’t ready for it yet.”

“Yes. I’ve had some kind of a—breakthrough. I’ve never felt better. Hard to describe the feeling. Clarity, perhaps.”

Alex put his hands on both of Ambrose’s shoulders and squeezed. Congreve saw tears threatening, but Alex blinked them back and smiled.

“Ambrose, time is short and I’ve some incredible news to tell you. But first, how are you? Ross said you were hit?”

“Oh, good Lord, I’m fine. Just a wee bruise over my heart is all. Ouch, yes, right there. I’d be dead, certainly, had not Stokely made me wear his perfectly hideous vest. Most unattractive.”

Hawke laughed, and said, “Ambrose, Vicky is alive.”

“What!” Ambrose exploded. “You can’t mean it! I mean to say, how on earth—”

“Don’t ask me how, I don’t know. Nor have I time to speculate. All I know is that she’s alive and being held hostage by the Cubans. By General Manso de Herreras.”

“The brother of Admiral Carlos de Herreras, the man I arrested.”

“Exactly,” Alex said. Taking his friend by the arm, Hawke said, “Come for a quick stroll around the decks, and I’ll tell you my immediate plans. God willing, I’m off again within the hour.”

Alex recounted the whole thing: his meeting aboard the
JFK,
his conversation with the secretary of state, Vicky’s cassette, and his most recent chat with Stokely. They reached the stern, and both settled into the comfortable banquette.

“Thunder and Lightning?” Ambrose said, relighting his pipe. “I certainly like the sound of that.”

“Let’s hope they live up to their celestial billing, old boy.”

“Yes,” Ambrose said. “We should drink a toast.” Picking up the nearest phone, he said, “Congreve here, sorry to trouble you. I’d like two very spicy Bloody Marys, please? Fine. That will be all, thank you.”

“I’d love to join you,” Alex said, “but Stokely and I are taking off for Martinique as soon as
Kittyhawke
’s tanks are topped off and we’ve loaded all of Stoke’s SEAL equipment.”

“I’m very glad for you, Alex,” Ambrose said. “You’ve made a great leap forward, you know, coming to grips with the past. And, of course, it’s splendid news about Vicky. If anyone can save her, you two can.”

“We’ll get her out,” Hawke said, his jaw set. “I’m going to make a copy of the treasure map in case I need a bargaining chip for
Señor
de Herreras.”

“I must say, Alex, I’ve never in my life seen you happier.”

“I admit I’ve never felt quite this way before. I always imagined I was a fairly happy-go-lucky sort of fellow. But now—look, here comes Sniper!”

The steward had arrived with Ambrose’s cocktail order, and the parrot was perched on the man’s shoulder. Upon seeing Alex, the big bird immediately flew to its owner’s outstretched forearm.

“Good fellow. Look at you, Sniper, you’ve grown fat. What have they been feeding you?”

“I saw him eat an entire tin of Beluga last evening,” Ambrose said.

“Well, he deserves it. Don’t you, Sniper? Speaking of which, I think you deserve something as well, Constable.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“You’ve had enough excitement for one voyage. While Stokely and I are gone, I want you and Sutherland to go somewhere and relax. Perhaps play a little golf. I know how you love it and I feel guilty keeping you cooped up on the boat for so long.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Alex,” Ambrose said. “I’ve enjoyed every second of it! Bloody marvelous expedition. One of our best!”

“I insist, old thing. There must be someplace here in these islands with a golf course worthy of your mighty swing and delicate touch around the greens.”

“Well, in that case, there is one course that Sutherland and I have been looking into. On the odd chance that we might have a little free time, of course.”

“Well, there you have it. Pack up your bags and sticks and go enjoy yourselves. It will do you a world of good. Send me the bill.”

“Very generous, Alex, I must say.”

“Nonsense. What’s the name of the course, by the way? The Lyford Cay Club in Nassau, I imagine.”

“No, no. A lovely old course down in the Dominican Republic, actually. Blessed with a rather poetic name. It’s called
Dientes de Perro.”

“Translation?” Alex asked, getting up and stretching his legs.

“I’ll send you a postcard.”

“Well, keep your head down, old boy. Godspeed.”

Ambrose watched his friend saunter away, the parrot bobbing on his shoulder. The tune Hawke was whistling floated back to Ambrose. It had to be thirty years old, but he recognized the lovely melody instantly.

It was the famous theme song from Lady Catherine Hawke’s last film,
Southern Belle,
the marvelous story of Abigail Lee, a beautiful woman who is killed defending her Low Country South Carolina plantation against a marauding Union army. Coming back from the dead as a ghost, she bedevils and haunts the rapacious Union general who now occupies her beloved ancestral Barnwell Island home.

In a most surprising way, Ambrose thought, sipping his Bloody Mary, Alex Hawke seemed to be coming back from the dead, too. For the first time since he’d met the boy, long ago on Greybeard Island, he could actually say that Alexander Hawke was on the road to peace.

Alex banked hard left, and
Kittyhawke
slipped down through vast canyons of sunlit clouds.

“Is that it, Stoke?” he asked.

There was a narrow slash in the undulating green canopy of trees below. A couple of hundred yards wide and about half a mile long, this gash in the jungle was definitely not on the chart of Martinique spread across Hawke’s knees.

Stoke cocked his head toward the window and said, “That’s it, all right, Bossman. Home of Thunder and Lightning itself. That hangar down there, covered with vines and shit, is where they keep the C-130. Big black mother.”

Alex came around and lined up on the end of the jungle runway, lowered his flaps and got his retractable wheels down. No tower, no air boss scrutinizing his approach and the runway wasn’t even bobbing up and down. Easy peas, as they used to say during his Dartmouth days.

Only when a couple of Jeeps emerged from the trees and raced down the runway to an apron at the far end did he see any signs of life. Once there, both Jeeps turned so that they were facing the incoming airplane and turned their headlights on.

“Means it’s okay to land,” Alex heard Stoke say in his headphones, and he eased the little seaplane in over the treetops and dropped in for a three-point landing.

Ten minutes later, Alex and Stokely were in the back of one of the two Jeeps, bouncing along a dirt road that snaked upwards through the jungle. It was good Stoke had asked for two Jeeps. His SEAL toys filled up most of the second one.

“Wait till you see this joint,” Stoke said. “It is something else.”

Alex had been enjoying the riot of color everywhere he looked. It was like racing through a tunnel of botanical wizardry. Orchids, bougainvillea, and frangipani. Banyans and banana trees. Red, green, and yellow birds that darted and swooped overhead. Shafts of sunlight picked out waterfalls splashing into small pools and spilling across the road.

He was finding the humid heat of Martinique deliciously lush after the dry, sparse vegetation of the Exumas and Bahamas.

“It’s an old fort,” Stoke said. “Place was falling down years ago, when the boys first came down here and bought it. But the troops spent all their spare time fixing it up real good. Look up there, see it?”

The Jeep came over a rise, and Alex saw the small fortress sitting atop one of the many green hills that paraded down to the sea. It looked to be late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, most probably English, Hawke thought, judging by the design of the crenellated battlements and guard towers at the four corners.

Colonized by France in 1635, Martinique had remained a French possession, save three brief periods of foreign occupation by Britain. The old fort was incredibly sited and gleaming white in the morning sunlight. Stoke had not overstated the facts, Alex saw as they drew near, the fortress was indeed something else.

“See all them shiny cannons poking out all around the top?” Stoke asked.

“Yes,” Hawke said. “Magnificent.”

“Well, guess what,” Stoke said. “They all work. Only fire ’em on special occasions, birthdays and Bastille Days and shit like that. But you should hear those mofos roar. Man, you talk about thunder and lightning!”

“What do they call the fort, Stoke?”

“Well, it had some fancy French name when they first bought it, but the boys renamed it. It’s officially called Fort Whupass now.”

Hawke laughed. “Fort Whupass,” he said, loving the sound of it.

The fellow driving their Jeep, a Martiniquais, who had forearms like lodgepoles sticking out of his olive-green T-shirt, turned around and smiled at him.
“Oui, c’est ça! Bienvenue à
Fort Whupass,
mes amis,”
he said in his Creole patois.

“Merci bien,”
Hawke replied, looking up into the trees.
“Il fait tres beau ici.”

“Oui, merveilleux.”

“Vous êtais ici, maintenant?”

“Non, pour la journée seulement.”

“Ah, oui, alors—”

The Jeep finally emerged from the dense jungle, and Hawke could see the sandy road ahead, climbing up to the wall of the fortress. He was astounded to see a large rectangular platform being lowered as the Jeep drew near.

“A drawbridge?” Hawke asked, incredulous.

“Damn right, a drawbridge,” Stoke said. “Ain’t regulation without one. And a moat, too, full of big-ass alligators. You going to have a fort you got to do it right! Besides, these boys don’t want nobody sneaking up on they ass.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Stoke looked at him for a beat and then said, “Well, maybe about the alligators. There is a moat, though. Big-ass moat.”

“A moat, Stoke? In Martinique?”

“Well, no, ain’t really no moat either. But they always talkin’ ’bout puttin’ one in. Can’t ever have enough security when every terrorist organization on earth hates your ass. Boys done moved three times in the last fifteen years.”

They were just passing under a tree and Hawke glanced up to see a man in jungle camo perched on a high branch. He was cradling a high-powered rifle with a scope. The sniper saw Hawke staring and waved.

The two Jeeps barreled across the lowered platform, which Hawke saw actually did cover a deep ravine, and screeched to a halt inside the open stone-paved courtyard. There was conspicuous lack of activity inside the fort, just a few dogs sleeping in the shade of a four-story structure of whitewashed stone.

The hot morning sun and the humidity were enough to make anyone, man or beast, seek shade.

“Where is everybody?” Hawke asked, surprised at the sense of total desolation that pervaded the old fort.

“Sleepin’, most likely,” Stoke said. “Catching Z’s. Boys had a twenty-mile jungle run last night. They all sacked out in the barracks, which is the ground floor. Second floor is the armory. Third floor is communications and computers and shit. Top floor is where we’ll find our guys waiting. They call it the poop deck.”

“Stoke, you seem to know an awful lot about this place. Why’s that?” Hawke asked, following his natural curiosity around the building to take a look.

“Well,” Stoke said, right behind him and looking sheepish, “I did do a little freelance work down here from time to time. When I was NYPD, you know, I’d take all my vacation time in Martinique.”

“That’s how you’d spend your
vacation?”

“Shit, boss, counterterrorism is the most fun you can have with your clothes on!”

“My God, what in the world is that?” Hawke said as they rounded the back of the white stone building.

There was an amazing structure just inside the wall at the rear of the courtyard. It looked like a giant cube of green glass, which is just what it was. Constructed of thick, clear green glass building blocks, dazzling in the morning sunlight, the building had to be thirty feet high by thirty feet wide. A perfect square, no windows, no door that Hawke could see.

“Somethin’ else, ain’t it, boss? I knew you’d get a kick out of it!”

“What is it? Looks like an emerald as big as the Ritz.”

“I call it the Emerald City. But it’s really a museum.”

“Museum?”

“The ‘spoils of war’ museum. Where they store all the things they pick up around the world after the shooting dies down. Whatever the enemy leaves on the ground. You wouldn’t believe what’s inside that place.”

“I’d certainly love to see it. How do you get inside?”

“Through a tunnel from the basement of the main building. If there’s time, they’d be happy to show you.”

“Right, Stoke, let’s get going.”

They entered the main building and climbed a narrow set of stone steps carved into the wall. Four flights up, they arrived in a dark corridor that led to a vaulted chamber. Beside a massive wooden door, in a chair leaned back against the wall, a man wearing a white kepi on his head sat reading a book. The novel
Citadelle,
by Saint-Exupéry, Alex noticed. Required reading for all Legionnaires.

But he was wearing an old navy and gold SEAL T-shirt and khaki shorts, the traditional SEAL daytime uniform. His head was shaved and he had a black beard that hadn’t been trimmed in years. He had a MAC 10 submachine gun slung over the back of the chair and a burning Gauloise hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked up, saw Stoke approaching, and a huge grin lit up his deeply tanned face.

“Zut alors! Skippair!”
the man exclaimed in a heavy French accent.
“Incroyable!
I heard you were coming down!” He rocked his chair forward and leaped up to embrace Stokely. They pounded each other’s backs sufficiently hard to fracture a normal man’s spine.

“Froggy! Yeah, the Frogman his own self! Shit! I’ve missed your sorry pencil-dick numbnuts ass,” Stoke said, holding him by the shoulders and looking down at him. The man was barely five feet tall and almost that wide. “You still smoking them damn lung darts? What’d I tell you ’bout that?”

“I take it you two know each other,” Hawke said, a little impatiently. The clock, after all, was ticking.

“Stokely Jones is ze meanest woman I ever served under,
monsieur,”
Froggy said, sticking out his hand to Hawke.
“Comment ça va, monsieur?
I am ze famous Froggy.”

“Alex Hawke, Froggy,” Hawke said, shaking his hand. “Pleasure.”

“Frogman was in the C.R.A.P. division,” Stoke said. “French Foreign Legion. One of the few French units to serve in the Gulf War.”

“Crap?” Hawke asked, waiting impatiently for the joke.

“Oui, monsieur! Commandos de Recherché et d’Action en Profondeur!
Ze best!” Froggy said, puffing out his chest and saluting.

“Splendid,” Hawke said, looking at his watch. “I think we’re expected.”

“Oui-oui, c’est vrai,”
Froggy said, opening the door. “It’s true. Let me tell zem you are arrived.” He stuck a silver bosun’s whistle in his mouth and piped them aboard as they entered the room.