What Comes Around: An Alex Hawke Novella (Alex Hawke Novels) (11 page)

C
HAPTER 9

South China Sea

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.

H
E 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
HAPTER 10

T
HE I
NITIAL 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.

He retreated and quickly stepped inside the nearest open hatchway. And suddenly found himself inside a large hangar amidships on the flight deck. Unusual, to say the least. Hangars on carriers were always belowdecks. He moved back deeper into the shadows.

A huge shrouded object loomed up in the dim overhead lights.

What the hell?

There was just enough light to see. He’d already formed a pretty good idea of what lay beneath the cover before he began tugging the tarp away.

The thing took his breath away.

It was the Spectre!

Either the supersecret American drone itself, or a perfect facsimile of it. Spectre was a massive, bat-winged, unmanned drone. Half again as large as his F-35C Lightning, and clearly equipped not only for surveillance, but for offensive aerial combat. Slung beneath the sleek, swept-back wings, six very lethal-looking missiles, three to a side.

And, under the fuselage, a bomb the size of which he’d never seen before. A huge bunker-buster? God forbid, a nuke?

A carrier-based drone of this size would be capable of delivering massive devastation from extremely high altitudes from anywhere on the planet. It immediately occurred to him that his entire perception of the world playing field had just altered. If he could e-mail a photo of this thing back home, it would lift Langley off its foundations.

China had somehow managed to leapfrog ahead of the West in terms of military technology and hardware. He knew the U.S. Navy was contemplating a future that included carrier-based drones for combat and delivering nuclear warheads, but China was already there!

How? How in God’s name had they managed it?

He heard laughter outside on the deck and rushed back to the open hatchway. He paused, calmed his racing heart, and peered out onto the deck.

Pilots.

There were eight of them, all in flight suits. Some had already donned their red-starred helmets, some were carrying them in their hands. All were kidding around, walking with that unmistakable and cocky jet-jock walk.

Their destination was obvious, Hawke thought. They were crossing the wide expanse of darkened deck, en route to the covey of eight highly advanced fighter jets parked near the starboard bow catapult. Fighters like the one Hawke had seen when the rescue chopper landed on the deck the night before. The pilots would have to pass directly in front of his position.

They represented his only hope of survival.

Hawke remained hidden in the shadows of a massive drone hangar directly beneath the carrier’s bridge looming above him. As the pilots approached, their banter continuing, Hawke stood stock-still and held his breath until the last Chinese fighter pilot was safely past his position.

Hawke then stepped out of the shadows and fell in behind the lone straggler at the rear. Fortunately for him, this pilot was by far the tallest of the lot. He approached his target directly from behind, matching him stride for stride. When he was perhaps a foot behind the pilot, he shot out both hands, and used pressure from both thumbs on the carotid artery to paralyze the poor chap and yet still keep him on his feet.

Giving the main body of hotshots sufficient time to move on, he then quickly withdrew, walking the unconscious man back into the shadows of an AA battery. It was the work of a moment to zip himself inside the pilot’s flight suit, don his boots and helmet, and, finally, flip the dark visor down. He then strode quickly, but not too quickly, across the deck, rapidly catching up with the jocular pilots just as they were climbing up into their respective fighters.

He made a beeline straight for the sole unoccupied fighter jet, saluting the two attending deck crewmen who stood aside for him to mount the cockpit ladder.

“Lovely night for flying, boys,” he muttered in his guttural Chinese, sliding down into the seat and adjusting his safety harness. After strapping himself in, he reached forward and flipped the switch that lowered the canopy. He then took a long moment to study the instrument array and myriad illuminated controls, quickly deciding exactly what did what.

Looking at the array of aircraft instruments, Hawke was astonished for the second time since arriving up on the carrier’s flight deck.

Most of the cockpit controls on the fighter looked oddly familiar. Why? Because they were almost identical to those in the prototype of the top-secret new American fighter jet he had flown, the J-2. He was amused (in one way) to see that the Chinese had stolen so much advanced aeronautical technology from the West that getting the hang of basic things here in the cockpit was embarrassingly easy.

But he had flown the first-generation F-35C Lightning off the USN’s
George Washington
’s flight deck courtesy of Captain Garry White and the US Navy. And this Chinese airplane? It was vastly more sophisticated in terms of avionics, communications, and, most important, offensive and defensive weapons systems. Holy God, compared to the current F-35C, this thing was like something from another goddamn planet.

Take the cookies when they’re passed,
he thought, smiling.

Due to unforeseeable circumstances, a top British intelligence officer was about to take one of what had to be, up until this moment, China’s most closely guarded military secrets for a little airborne test drive!