Operation Norfolk

by Randy Wayne White

  He didn’t relish the idea of fighting his way through the surf to the other side of the reef, so he decided to try running inside the atoll. The worst thing that could happen was that he’d knock the propeller off on a coral head—and he carried an extra propeller. Besides, the roar of the surf would help cover the noise of his engine.

  Hawker ran through the darkness, gauging his position by the white surf line and the dark coast. He ran until he saw the lights of what he knew from the aerial photographs marked Cwong’s big wharf. The vigilante ran still another half mile until the lights began to sharpen, then found an opening in the jungle. He swung the inflatable in, pulled it up, hid it, strapped the scuba tank to his back, carried mask fins and explosives back into the shallow water, and began walking toward the lights.

  He had stopped farther away than he had to. Indeed, Hawker found himself walking for nearly half an hour before coming to the fencing and the bright vapor lights that separated Cwong’s compound from the jungle. He could see the big wharf clearly, with its huge loading crane and two forty-foot plus diesel cargo craft moored there.

  If Cwong’s men were going to make a big drug delivery tomorrow night, they would certainly use those two boats.

  Hawker’s whole plan to damage Tongo and Mokii at the same time he was hitting Cwong hinged on that assumption.

  He hoped to hell he was right.

  He checked the time on his Seiko Submariner: 9:27 P.M. Then he took out two magnetic thermite clock-activated bombs and carefully set the detonators for 9:30 P.M. the next day.

  According to his intelligence, the boats were to make their deliveries at 9 P.M. Half an hour would allow for late starts.

  Carrying a diving light and the explosives in a canvas pack, Hawker waded backward into the water. The only other weapon he carried was his large stainless-steel Randall attack knife, the one made for him by Bo Randall in Orlando, Florida. He had that strapped to his calf.

  The water covered him, green sparks erupting around his hands every time he moved them. These were bioluminescent microscopic creatures, tracing his path.

  That wasn’t good. Hawker decided he would have to swim the half mile to the reef, letting the rough water cover his trail.

  When he got to the shallow inside edge of the reef, he poked his head up. He had roughly another quarter mile to go to get to the boats. Hawker took a bearing with the wrist compass, then dove back into the water.

  It seemed to take forever to get there, traveling through the blackness. He kept expecting a shark to nail him at any moment. Finally, though, there were huge weird shapes ahead of him: the cement pilings of the wharf.

  Hawker was in deeper water now, traveling along the bottom, his eyes locked on the green glow of the compass. When he saw the pilings, he relaxed a little.

  When he began to ascend slowly, he spotted the bowl shapes of the boat hulls above him in the glimmer of moonlight.

  He slid the canvas bag, the one with the explosives, off his shoulder.

  twelve

  Hawker reached up and touched the bottom of one of the boats with his hand, feeling the thin coating of slime and the occasional barnacle.

  They had both been hauled recently, scraped and painted. Not a good sign. It might mean that Cwong took good care of his equipment, that he was a stickler for details. Perhaps he ran a tight camp. Hawker didn’t like having neatness freaks as adversaries. They were dangerous people, because they usually prepared for everything. It was damn hard to catch them out.

  Hawker followed the hull of the second boat until he came to the twin drive shafts that angled out through the stuffing box, ending in two giant brass props. There he rested for a moment, breathing easily through the single hose regulator. He could hear the chain-rattle clink of the boats above, washing against the quay. He could hear the woodwind grunts of fish, the pop and crackle of pistol shrimp. The silent undersea world wasn’t really so silent after all.

  After the vigilante had rested, he pulled open the plastic zipper on the canvas bag. Careful that his air tank didn’t clank against the steel hull of the boat as he worked, Hawker removed one of the four magnetic bombs. He used the tiny underwater light on his wrist to check the timer once more. The twenty-four-hour dials were set for 2130 hours, 9:30 P.M. the next day.

  If things worked as he hoped, the boats would each go to their respective docks on Tongo and Mokii. Then, while they were being unloaded, the bombs would disable each vessel, maybe taking some of Cwong’s elite guards up with them. Cutting off their return to Kira-Kira would give Hawker more time to concentrate on destroying the complex there.

  Hawker placed the first bomb just astern of midship, under where the engine and fuel tank would probably be. Swimming to the second vessel, he clamped the round platter magnet in approximately the same area.

  The bombs were filled with three thousand grams of thermite, a composition that would explode, then burn, for about four minutes at more than 3,600 degrees. At that temperature, even underwater, it would burn through two solid inches of armor plating.

  If the explosion didn’t set the boats on fire, the thermite hitting the fuel tanks certainly would.

  Hawker swam into the eerie dark maze of cement pilings beneath the wharf. He swam slowly, taking his time, careful not to brush against the barnacles. When he felt something heavy hit against him, a great weight sliding by, Hawker whirled around.

  He forced himself not to panic in the darkness. Sticking his left hand out to fend off any attacker, he drew his big Randall knife in his right.

  And nothing happened.

  Not a sound.

  Hawker took a chance: He twisted the lens of the dive light and shone it around quickly.

  He didn’t see a thing.

  But something had come past him, all right. There was no doubt about that. Something big; something that knew he was there.

  It could only be one thing. One of the big open-ocean sharks had to be cruising the shallows. It had probably sensed his vibrations and brushed past to see if he was edible. Hawker hoped to hell the fish had not liked what it felt.

  He switched off the light, pressed his back against one of the pilings, and waited awhile longer. He expected to be hit at any moment, to feel the deadly crush of an angry shark’s jaws.

  Hawker waited and waited, until he realized it was useless to wait anymore. If the shark wanted him, the shark would get him. There was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  Hawker pushed away from the piling, worked his way carefully to the area he guessed would put him beneath the big cargo derrick, then surfaced.

  He had come up short. He was still beneath the front side of the quay. Above him he could hear voices—indistinct voices. They were probably speaking in Vietnamese; he didn’t understand a word of that.

  Hawker decided to stay on the surface. The big Rocket fins pushed him to the great cement base of the derrick. There he placed both of the remaining thermite bombs, setting the timers for 10 P.M. the following night. 2200 hours.

  If luck was with them, he and Sha could get across the volcanic mountain and into Cwong’s camp by then. Hit them from both sides, that was Hawker’s plan. And the explosions would make them think the attack was coming from the direction of the sea.

  The voices above him were louder now, more emotional.

  He wondered what was going on.

  No way was he going to stick around and try to find out. He pulled his mask down, submerged … and that’s when something hit him from the side, something big.

  He thought it was a shark.…

  All the little sensory nodes searched frantically, his brain checking every limb, expecting to find his legs gone, his chest ripped open.

  But there wasn’t much pain. Just that sense of being held, of being wrestled downward toward the bottom.

  As the vigilante tried to pull his arms free, he was aware of a tube of light swinging crazily back and forth, swinging from the dark object that held him.

  It was t
hen that he finally realized he was being held by a man, another diver who had a flashlight attached to his wrist. It only took a microsecond for Hawker to realize that the diver had probably been on an underwater patrol and had spotted Hawker’s light. Undoubtedly he had taken advantage of the overhead dock lights to hit Hawker from below, zeroing in on the silhouette the vigilante must have thrown.

  Damn! Cwong’s men were good.

  The first thing the diver had done was rip the regulator away from Hawker’s mouth; the vigilante suddenly realized that, in his fear, he had been holding his breath, not even noticing that he no longer had a source of oxygen. Fear can do that to a man.

  But now Hawker had to do something. And the truth was that he was actually relieved he had been attacked by a man, not the shark that had nudged him earlier.

  Now all he had to do was break the man’s grip before he drowned.

  The diver had both of Hawker’s arms pinned against his sides, driving him sideways, deeper and deeper. Hawker had been struggling, but now he forced himself to go limp, staging a total lack of resistance. The assailant reacted just as Hawker hoped he would, loosening his grip to readjust his position. The vigilante used that small opening to rip his right arm free, find the diver’s face, and yank the man’s face mask and regulator away.

  Now Hawker was loose, swimming wildly toward the surface and finally finding his own regulator. Hawker jammed it into his mouth and found just enough residual air in his lungs to blow the exhaust ports clear.

  The vigilante was taking a few small draughts of the bottled air, looking at the glimmer of lights above, when he was caught from behind again.

  Except for the wild swinging beam of the flashlight, it was like fighting a barely visible dark blob. Hawker got his arm locked around what he knew must be the diver’s head. He tried feverishly to find the Randall knife in the calf scabbard, but missed when the diver got his hand around Hawker’s throat … and then he felt a stinging pain along his cheek.

  The diver had a knife of his own. He had it out and was trying to use it.

  Hawker used both feet to fend the man off, kicking away. He saw the beam of light come up and hold on him, temporarily blinding him. The diver could see him, but all the vigilante could see was the powerful light coming closer and closer. The man couldn’t miss again with his knife. After all, he now had the advantage of being able to see.

  But then, in the narrow bloom of light, the vigilante saw something else appear, something he never thought he would be relieved to see: a huge black shape coming out of the gloom. Hawker saw the wide missile-shaped head, tiny eyes, and jagged wide grin of a shark.

  The shark came sailing into the light, head wagging back and forth. It disappeared for a moment, but then all Hawker saw was the gray belly-blur as the great fish rolled toward the diver who had attacked him.

  The beam of light strapped to the diver’s wrist made wild, crazy circles, spinning as he spun. It stabilized for a moment, showing both of the diver’s hands clawing furiously at the shark’s head. It was an unsettling sight, especially since by this time the shark had taken the diver’s whole chest into its mouth. Hawker shuddered as the shark swam away with the man, the horrible picture getting smaller and smaller as the fish sped away. Dark smoke, like dust, boiled out of the fish’s mouth. The vigilante knew it was blood.

  Hawker swam instinctively to one of the big pilings, clinging to it for cover. The crazy fear that there might be two sharks around, not just one, entered his mind.

  Finally, when his brain began to work again, he knew he had to get away. The men on the wharf might have seen the lights, heard the commotion. They might be expecting their patrol diver to surface at any moment.

  He had to get away from the pier, shark or no shark.

  Hawker took a big breath through the regulator, steeling himself. Then he swam back toward the dark water, back toward the reef where the big fish congregated. He swam until his watch told him he’d gone far enough, then headed into shallow water.

  When he was finally back in knee-deep water, wading toward the inflatable boat he had hidden in the jungle, a nausea came over him that he could not possibly ignore. Turning his head away, he vomited salt water and bile and something else, something ripe and musky from deep down inside his gut.

  It was the taste of fear.

  Hawker knew the taste; he had tasted it before. But somehow he couldn’t remember it ever having been as horrible as this.

  thirteen

  Sha came onto the beach as he pulled the inflatable toward the jungle. She was digging her fist at her eyes and yawning, her lean, longhaired figure looking dazzling in the moonlight. The only clothes she wore were a T-shirt and shorts.

  Still, Hawker hardly paid any attention. He hadn’t felt so tired since the first three days of Coronado.

  “Where you been?” she asked. “I been worried about you. Why take so long?”

  “Went out for a boat ride. Just restless. Go on back to sleep, Sha.”

  “You not do nothing dumb, no? You not try go around island. Many guns there. Many men. Boom-boom, shoot you, no kidding.”

  “I didn’t go around the island, Sha. There’s nothing to worry about. You look sleepy. Go on back and get some rest.”

  “They got machine up there. Things go around and around, tell them when big boats get too close. See pictures on screen. Very dangerous you go out alone like that. I worry, could hardly sleep.”

  Hawker had the Randall out and was cutting more tree limbs in the moonlight, hiding the boat. He stopped long enough to look up at the woman. “Are you sure you haven’t already been to America? You sound more and more like half the women I knew back in Chicago.”

  Sha put her hands on her lean hips. “What that mean? I should feel bad ’cause you go out, make it so I can no sleep—” She stopped in midsentence, her mouth open. “What happen to your face? You bleeding!” Immediately Sha was at Hawker’s side, one hand on his shoulder, the other inspecting the slash on his cheek.

  “Ouch.” Hawker pulled away. “Damn it, Sha, that hurts. Get your fingers off it.”

  She backed away. “You did go around island, didn’t you? Had big fight, I bet. Now Cwong know we here. He be looking for us. I think—”

  Hawker snapped at her: “Do me a favor—don’t think, okay, Sha? I’ll do the thinking. You’re getting paid to do just one thing. Remember, that was your rule, not mine.”

  Sha stuck her lower lip out, pouting. “Need bandage on face. Cut bad. Very bad. I promise ask no more questions, but let me fix face. You ugly ’nough, don’t need no more scars to make you more uglier.”

  Hawker stopped working for a moment, looked at her again, and almost laughed. “Okay,” he said finally. “You fix my cut. If that makes you happy, go ahead and get the first-aid kit. I’ll finish up here.”

  The woman came trotting back with bandages and a Coleman lantern. After sitting the vigilante down on the Avon, she lit the lantern. The Coleman made its steady hiss, throwing a warm circle of light into the jungle around them.

  Moths and insects found the light almost immediately, battering themselves against it. Hawker watched the insects, wondering why they were unfailingly attracted to the very thing that was the source of their destruction. The insects made him wonder about the woman. She could have played it safe. Could have stayed away. Yet she had returned to the island where her father had been killed. Where she had almost been destroyed as a little girl. And she did it on her own. She had even refused money, still not knowing he had made the deposit in her account.

  She worked on his face with obvious skill—cleaning it, putting on sulfur powder, cutting butterfly bandages to fit. She drew the skin together and pressed gauze and tape into place.

  “You’ve done this before,” Hawker said. “I’m not surprised. Working at The Saigon, you probably got a lot of practice in first aid, huh? Probably a fight every time an American walked in there.”

  The woman smiled at him ruefully. “You very
funny, you know? Always say funny things. Tell me one thing. Why you think I dumb?”

  “Dumb? I don’t think you’re dumb.”

  “You tell me not think no more. Very angry. Treat me like I too dumb to think. Make me know my place. I like you in restaurant ’cause you let me think. Say you trust my judgment. Now, all sudden you just like all men at restaurant. Very bossy. Make me feel too dumb to help.”

  “Oh, boy,” said Hawker, but feeling guilty anyway. “All I meant was—”

  She was standing, packing the first-aid stuff away. “What you mean was, Sha no talk. No think. Stay in my place. You say I only get paid to do one thing. That what you really want?”

  “Not at all,” Hawker said. As he said it, he wondered why nature seemed to give women an inborn ability to reduce men—any man—to apologetic boobs within a matter of seconds, regardless of who was right or who was wrong. “I want you to think,” he said.

  “I think you’re very bright and appreciate any advice you can give me. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

  “You really mean it? You really think me smart?”

  “Sure do. Yep. You’re a very bright lady.”

  “You really like me give advice? You want me to be like partner? Equal partner?”

  “Partner?” said Hawker. “Sure. Sure, and I want you to give advice too. Honest.”

  “Then here my advice,” Sha said.

  “I thought we’d get to this.” He smiled.

  “My advice is stay away from other side of island till I show you only good way get there! Don’t be such big dummy! I no like big dummy for partner!” Sha whirled away, stomping off toward the jungle hammocks.

  Hawker released a heavy sigh. Twisting the gas knob on the Coleman, he watched the light fade. “Christ,” he said wearily.

  They left for Cwong’s military complex in the morning.

  Hawker awoke later than normal. The sun was just over the palm trees that arched in a line away from the beach. He could hear the sounds of birds squawking and monkeys chattering through the jungle.