What Comes Around: An Alex Hawke Novella (Alex Hawke Novels) (9 page)

“One hundred million pounds sterling. Cash. In a lockbox you’ll carry in the cockpit with you.”

Hawke whistled and said, “That’s all?”

“If you succeed, it’s worth every shilling. Now, let’s order some lunch and talk of more pleasant things. I understand our mutual friend, Ambrose Congreve, is to be wed next Christmas. I assume you’re to be best man?”

“Well . . . to be honest, I don’t really know. I would assume so. But I haven’t heard from him on the subject.”

“Didn’t mean to step into that one.”

“Not at all. Perhaps they’ve called the whole thing off and he simply hasn’t the heart to tell me.”

Sir David picked up his menu and began to study it intently.

“Well. You will find an obsessively complete dossier on Operation Pacifist waiting for you when you get home to Hawkesmoor. Motorcycle courier just dropping it off with Pelham now. Memorize it and burn it. Now, then, Alex, what will you be having for lunch?”

“Not sure, sir. What looks expensive?”

C
HAPTER 5

The White House

P
RESIDENT
T
OM
M
C
C
LOSKEY
stared at the live feed from the East China Sea. He was, he knew in some secret part of him, in a state of shock. Hell, all of them were in shock—McCloskey himself; his close friend since Annapolis, Vice President David Rosow; his beautiful new and wildly popular secretary of state, Kim Oakley Case; the always reliable secretary of defense, Anson Beard; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Charlie Moore.

And all the rest of the crisis team; every one of them had been staring at the Situation Room screens for over an hour.

What they were seeing up there was real-time terror. Innocent American lives were being threatened half a world away, and there was not one damn thing he or anybody else in the White House or over at State, CIA, or the Pentagon could do about it. Not one damn thing.

“Shit,” he whispered under his breath. “Shit.”

China and her increasingly bellicose surrogate, North Korea, as of forty-eight hours ago, were staging joint naval war games in the East China Sea. North Korea had made a big show of it for the press, trotting out their latest warships. According to his most recent CIA naval intelligence briefing, and some help from British intelligence, it was clear that China had long been planning to use the North Korean navy as a pawn in this little game of their own. Test American resolve.

But how?

Nobody at CIA, State, the Pentagon, or any other intelligence agency had prepared him for this. This was a goddamn nightmare, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. The whole country was coming unglued over a few inadvertent remarks he’d made at the G 7 summit in Prague the week before. Jesus Christ. The media, no friends of his in the run-up to the damn election, were all over him for a couple of misstatements he’d made to Putin about China.

The joint press event was over and done with and he’d assumed the mikes were dead. Reasonable assumption.

They weren’t.

What he’d said was innocent enough. The once-powerful Putin, now increasingly in danger of becoming China’s bitch, was playing hardball with the United States over China’s currency manipulations. And McCloskey hadn’t come this far to be backed into a corner by the Russian’s trumped-up tough-guy act, and he was planning to draw a line in the sand and call the Russian’s bluff. But he wasn’t going to tell Putin that, no sir. He was going to sow a few seeds of disinformation and let the Kremlin show its cards. His own wife had told him what a shrewd idea it was, f’crissakes.

So what he said to the Russian was, “Prime Minister, just give me a little wiggle room here. Just enough to get through the All-Asia Conference next month. After that, I can show a lot more flexibility. Trust me.”

And for that, a few offhand comments taken completely out of context, he was paying a steep price. Using up a lot of political capital to hold his fragile coalition together. Had the Senate whip and the Speaker of the House breathing down his neck, wanting him to issue a clarifying statement.

Hell, he had Tom Friedman and the
New York Times
questioning his fitness for office. The
Washington Post
! The
Post
ran a goddamn editorial in the most recent Sunday edition headlined “Is He Losing It?” Well, so be it. Politics at this level was a game for those who could take the heat, stay in the kitchen, and keep their heads in the fucking oven.

And now this!

At 0441 hours GMT, a North Korean fast-attack warship had deliberately rammed and disabled a small and lightly armed U.S. Navy surveillance vessel now taking on water in the disputed international region of the East China Sea. It was a moonless night, there was fog, but there was no conceivable excuse for the USN captain’s behavior.

In a state of relatively minor duress, he had folded his cards and surrendered his vessel to the North Koreans, for God’s sake. Was the U.S. skipper insane?

The U.S. boat was CIA, of course, but the captain of the North Korean vessel didn’t know that. All he knew was that his claim of territorial incursion and his demand to board (backed up by overwhelming firepower) had been granted by the U.S. skipper.

Now, the president of the United States and his team watched as four young able-bodied American seamen, bound and blindfolded, were kneeling side by side with their backs against a steel bulkhead on the foredeck of their vessel.

The American skipper and his crew were being held at gunpoint up on the bridge. God knew what was going up there, McCloskey thought, feeling a sense of impotent rage come close to overwhelming him.

An oddly tall and lean Korean officer was screaming at the four captives, bending down, getting right up into their faces.

“What’s that bastard saying?” McCloskey said to the State Department translator.

He told him.

“Son of a bitch,” the president muttered.

“He’s got a gun!” someone at the table said.

The NK navy officer stepped in front of one of the Americans and stuck a large black automatic pistol up under his chin. The officer was red-faced and screaming at the sailor now, venting all his pent-up hatred and anger on the helpless sailor.

Everyone in the room saw the blindfolded youth working his mouth and knew instantly what would happen next.

“Don’t do it, boy!” General Charles Moore, chairman of the Joint Chiefs said to the screen. “Don’t give that bastard any excuse, son! None, no way, never.”

“Oh, Christ,” McCloskey said, “no, no, no.”

The sailor spat, catching the hysterical officer square in the face.

The Korean officer recoiled in anger, using the sleeve of his uniform to wipe away the saliva.

He suddenly raised his arm and drove the pistol into the sailor’s face, smashing his nose into a red pulp.

“Sonofabitch!” the president said, leaning forward, his face twisted in anger.

Further enraged by the sight of blood, the North Korean officer put the barrel of his automatic between the young American’s eyes . . . and pulled the trigger.

The dead sailor slumped forward, facedown on the cold wet deck.

“Tell me I’m not seeing this,” the president said, unable to tear his eyes away from the screen.

“He’s going to execute all four,” General Moore said in a steady voice that sounded oddly detached.

And, as they all watched in abject horror, that is exactly what he did. Head shots, at close range.

A pin could drop.

“Turn that damn thing off,” the president said.

“Off, Mr. President?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

An ashen-faced aide made a throat-cutting motion, and the monitors all went black at once.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” McCloskey said, propping his polished cowboy boots on an empty chair and firing up a Marlboro.

No one said a word.

“It’s a bitch, ain’t it?” the president said to no one in particular. “Four of our boys dead. The goddam NKs in possession of one of our CIA shit-buckets chock-full of classified information. Damn it to hell. Somebody give me a good reason not to turn North Korea into a goddamn NK-Mart parking lot. China, too, if they dick around with our navy anymore. I’m serious. I’ll tell you all one thing. I’d like to know what Admiral Wainwright has to say about all this. Tony? What the hell am I going to do now?”

A palpable pall of shocked silence hung over the room.

“Tony?” the president repeated, swiveling around, searching all the faces in the room.

Finally, someone had the guts to speak up. Secretary of State Kim Case, which surprised no one.

“Mr. President?” the slim, attractive blonde said.

“Yeah, Kim, what is it?”

“Admiral Wainwright is dead, sir. He died in the terrorist attack on the
Dreadnought
in Tripoli last May.”

The president was very quiet for a long time before he looked up, staring at the secretary, his face a stone mask.

“I know that, Kim. What I said was, I’d like to know what he thought. And I would like to know that, I really would. But he’s dead. Isn’t he?”

“Yes, Mr. President. He is.”

A stunned silence descended.

No one said a word. What more was there to say?

Emily Young, the president’s lovely young personal secretary, could be heard sobbing quietly in dark corner of the room. Emily didn’t think she could take much more of this. She loved the old cowboy. Actually was in love with him. It killed her to see the boss like this, a wounded stag. And all of them, the press, with their goddamn knives out . . . and, like a mule in a hailstorm, he just had to stand there and take it.

She heard the president say, “Emily, for crissakes, will you stop bawling? What the hell is wrong with everybody?”

There was no answer.

The president stood, looked around at all the upturned faces, and said, “Well, thank you everyone. We’ll reconvene in one hour.”

After they filed out, he sat back down again, gazing absently into the middle distance, smoking his Marlboro down to a bright orange coal. He’d never felt so lost and alone in his life.

T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE
sous-chef looked beat.

It was almost midnight on a Friday night and, for Chef Tommy Chow, it had already been a very long week. First thing Monday morning, Matt Lauer and the whole damn
Today
show crew had shown up early for a live broadcast and wanted breakfast. Then the lavish state dinner for the prime minister of England, the Rose Garden luncheon the First Lady held annually for the Daughters of the American Revolution, and on and on, no rest for the weary.

And now he’d gotten a last-minute call from the ranking West Wing staffer saying the president had invited a few of his closest cabinet members for an impromptu breakfast in the morning. Talk about China and North Korea, Tommy imagined. Hell, that’s all they ever talked about lately.

“Go home, Tommy,” one of his guys said. “You look exhausted. We can finish the prep by ourselves.”

“No. I insist. You guys head out. I promised the boss man I’d take care of this breakfast thing and I’m going to do it. Seriously, get the hell out of here and go home to your families, okay? I got no family. Not here in Washington anyway. Leave the graveyard shift to me. Okay?”

“You got it, boss. Have it your way,” the pastry chef said, and they all bolted for the exits.

Chow waited until the last one had left before he began prepping tomorrow’s cabinet breakfast. Huevos rancheros, the presidential favorite, home fries, frijoles refritos with melted Monterey Jack, rashers of bacon and jalapeño-flavored sausage patties, honey biscuits, and hot sauce. Tex-Mex, they called it. Hardly his idea of haute cuisine, but they didn’t care for that much upstairs anymore.

A rueful smile flitted across Chow’s face as he stirred what he privately referred to as his “secret sauce” into the president’s eggs.

The graveyard shift,
he mouthed silently.

Truer words would never be spoken.

Not in this White House, anyway.

C
HAP
TER 6

South China Sea

A
LOUD, KEENING
wail suddenly filled the Lightning’s cockpit. Holy mother of God, Hawke thought, he’d just been painted by enemy radar!

He whipped his head around and saw the Chinese SAM missile’s fiery flame signature streaking up toward his Lightning, dead on his six, homing in on the afterburner. By the speed of the incoming, he guessed it to be one of the newer Hong Qi 61s. Where the hell had it come from? Some kind of new Chinese radar-proof shore battery on a nearby atoll? None of his so-called sophisticated gadgetry had even picked the damn thing up!

He hauled back on the stick and instantly initiated a vertical climb, standing the Lightning on its tail and rocketing skyward like something launched from Canaveral in the good old days. He deployed chaff aft and switched on all the jamming devices located in the airplane’s tail section. He was almost instantly at forty thousand feet and climbing, his eyes locked on the missile track displayed on his radar and thermal imaging screens. Its unverified speed, Hawke knew, was Mach 3.

It was closing fast.

The deadly little bastard blew right through his chaff field without a single degree of deviation. The Chinese weapon was not behaving in accordance with MI6 and CIA assessments of their military capability. With every passing second, his appointment with imminent death went from possible to probable. He’d have to depend on the Lightning’s jamming devices and his own evasive maneuvers if he was going to survive this attack.

He nosed the F-35C over and put it into a screaming vertical dive. He was now gaining precious seconds. The Hong Qi would now have to recalculate the target, alter course, and get on his six again. He’d known from the instant the SAM missile appeared on his screen that there was only one maneuver that stood any chance at all of saving him.

A crash dive.

Straight down into the sea.

Hairy, but sometimes effective, Hawke knew from long experience. To succeed, he had to allow the deadly missile to get extraordinarily close to impacting and destroying his aircraft. So close that when he pulled out of the dive at the last possible instant, the nose of his airplane would be so near the water’s surface that the missile would have zero time to correct before it hit the water at Mach 3, vaporizing on impact.

“You’ve got to dip your nose in the water, son,” an old flight instructor had told him once about the maneuver. “That’s the only way.”

The missile had now nosed over in a perfect simulation of Hawke’s maneuver and homed in on the diving jet. He watched it closing at a ridiculous rate of speed.

His instruments and screeching alarms were all telling him he was clearly out of his bloody mind. The deeply ingrained human instinct to run, to change course and evade, clawed around the edges of his conscious mind. But Hawke had the warrior’s ability to erect a firewall around it, one that was impenetrable in times like this.

It was those few precious white-hot moments precisely like this one that Alex Hawke lived for. At his squalling birth, his father had declared him “a boy born with a heart for any fate.” And, like his father and grandfather before him, he was all warrior, right down to the quick, and he was bloody good at it. His focus at this critical moment, fueled by adrenaline, was borderline supernatural . . . his altimeter display screen was a jarring blur, but he didn’t see it; the collision-avoidance alarms were howling in his headphones, but he didn’t hear them. His grip on the stick was feather light, his breathing calm and measured, his hands bone dry and surgeon steady.

His mind was now quietly calculating the differential between the seconds remaining until the missile impacted the Lightning and the seconds until the aircraft impacted the sea. Ignoring everything, the wail of the screeching sirens and the flashing electronic warnings, the pilot began his final mental countdown.

The surface of the sea raced up at him at a dizzying rate . . .

Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

NOW!

He hauled back on the stick.

The nose literally splashed coming up, and he saw beads of seawater racing across the exterior of his canopy. He’d caught the crest of a wave pulling out of the dive . . . He felt the G forces building . . .

You got to dip your nose in the water, son.

Made it.

He barely registered the impact of the missile hitting the water over the roar of his afterburners. But he heard it, all right. He was in the clear and initiating a climb out as he visualized it: the SAM vaporizing upon contact with the concrete hard surface of the sea at such speed . . .

The G forces were fierce. He began his quick climb back to his former below-the-radar altitude.

And that’s when his starboard wingtip caught a huge cresting wave that sent his aircraft spinning out of control. Where the hell had that come from . . . He was suddenly skimming over the sea like a winged Frisbee. He felt a series of severe jolts as the fuselage made contact, and he instinctively understood that the aircraft was seconds away from disintegrating right out from under his doomed arse . . .

He reached down to his right and grabbed the red handle, yanked it, and the canopy exploded upward into the airstream and disappeared. The set of rocket motors beneath his seat instantly propelled him up and out of the spinning cockpit and straight into the black night sky.

Seconds later, his primary chute deployed and he had a bird’s-eye view of his airplane as it metamorphosed into varying sizes and shapes of scrap metal and disappeared beneath the waves.

Along with the five hundred million in the lockbox,
he thought. Not only had his mission just gone straight to hell, it was a very bloody expensive failure.

He yanked the cord that disengaged him from his seat and watched it fall away as he floated down. Moments later his boots hit the water. It was cold as hell, but he started shedding gear as quickly as he could. He was unhurt, or it seemed that way, and he started treading water while his life jacket inflated.
So far, so good,
he thought, managing to keep his spirits aloft surprisingly well for a downed airman all alone in this dark world.

Normally, there’d be an EPIRB attached to his shoulder harness. Upon contact with the water, it would immediately begin broadcasting his GPS coordinates to a passing friendly satellite. Normally, he could just hang out for a while here in the South China Sea and wait for one of Her Majesty’s Navy rescue choppers to come pluck him from the soup and winch him aboard. Normally. But, of course, this was a secret transit and he had no distress radio beacon, no EPIRB. He had exactly nothing.

He knew the water temperature was cold enough to kill him eventually. The thermal body suit he wore would stave off hypothermia long enough for him to have a slim shot at survival.

He spun his suspended body through 360 degrees. Nothing of note popped out of the darkness. No lights on the horizon, no silver planes in the sky. Nada, zip, zero. Nothing but the vastness of black stretching away in all directions . . . no EPIRB equals NO hope of immediate rescue. He was some fifty miles off the southern coast of mainland China.

If he was lucky, and he usually was, he was in a shipping channel. If not, sayonara. He looked at his dive watch, whistling a chirrupy tune about sunshine and lollypops. Five hours minimum to sunrise.

He began to whistle a song his father had taught him for use at times like this.

Nothing to do but hang here in frozen limbo and wait to see what happens next.

And maybe pray a little.