Phantom ah-7

by Ted Bell

  Christopher Marley shouted at his wife and suddenly detoured toward the scene where the flying cars had landed on top of the waiting crowd, leaping over the fallen bodies of his fellow citizens. He did the best he could, balancing on his one good leg, using his crutch to pull as many of the injured from the tangled wreckage as he could before EMS and park security forces arrived en masse.

  Hugging his daughter to his chest, running toward his wife and son, he had a terrible premonition.

  This is no accident.

  One

  Hawke had been in the bloody thick of it all his life. When not engaged in fighting for his life, he dreamed about it. But this hellish nightmare was all too real to be any dream. Surely near death. It felt so very close now, the cold hovering all around him; some vast, grinning blackness, a protruding bony finger beckoning, urging him to surrender. How much longer could he run? He was spent. He could hear his wild heart screaming, begging his body to stop. Grievously wounded, he was shedding blood from countless gaping rips in his flesh, suffered when first trapped by the wild ones of the forest.

  Somehow, he’d lost his bearskin coat in that last fray. Nearly naked in this freezing, bone-chilling cold, his clothes mere scraps of rags. He looked down at his feet, shocked at the stinging pain of each step in the crusted snow. He’d lost his boots, too, both feet shredded and weeping blood. He heard something, low and wolfish, rapidly gaining ground on him. He looked over his shoulder, shocked at the bright red path he’d made through the woods. How could he lose these beasts when his own feet were leaving a bloody trail in the snow! Still, he crashed through the forest, the sound of thundering hooves behind him. A hideously grinning cavalry, gaining on him, swords flashing as they ran him to ground.

  Wild Cossacks on horseback, fierce, bloodthirsty creatures who wanted only to slice the flesh from his bones; why, they’d skin and eat him alive they’d said, dragging him toward their fire. Why had he even entered this wood? He’d known certain death was lurking in the forest, but he’d stupidly ignored that certainty, leaving the vast whiteness of the endless tundra and venturing into the dark wood.

  They were closer! He could hear their howls of impending victory, the hoofbeats of their black, red-eyed steeds nearer now, great snorts of frozen breath steaming from their flared nostrils, the riders calling to him, laughing at this helpless victim who could run no longer. His legs had turned to stone and every step in the deep snow felt like his last.

  They were upon him then, stallions wheeling, rearing up, encircling him. He heard the whisper of steel slicing through air, felt the tip of a Cossack sword nick his throat, another burn his ear. They were all around him, dismantling his body bit by bit, but he knew if he could just keep his head, just keep his head away from the whispering blades, just keep away long enough to Hawke gasped for air as he came fully awake, sitting bolt upright in his lice-infested berth, his face drenched in cold sweat, the fear still real, even as reality swept the lingering remnants of terror from his brain. Another nightmare! Gazing out the train’s window at the white tundra and the solid black forests beyond, he knew why he’d had the dream, of course… because it was no dream.

  He was riding, eyes wide open, straight into a death trap, deliberately embarking upon a doomed journey into the blackest black heart of darkness. And there was a very distinct possibility he’d never get out of Russia alive.

  T he sun rose over Siberia, ascending into the blue heavens like a shimmering ball of blood. Lord Alexander Hawke, lost in thoughts of his impending death, leaned forward and peered through the grimy, ice-caked windows of his tiny compartment. The old Soviet-era train lurched and creaked, traveling at the speed of a horse and wagon as it approached yet another desolate station where no one would be waiting. Unthinking, he dabbed mentholated gel under each nostril.

  It had become a constant habit.

  His grubby kube compartment shared a wall with the foul lavatory right next door. In other words, he’d grimly decided soon after boarding, he had shit for neighbors.

  Hawke had taken what he could get, a third-class car, dimly lit, overheated, humid, and, after numerous early stops in the countryside, overflowing with drunken farm workers who smelled like a concoction of damp earth, sour garlic, and grain alcohol. The incessant singing, shouting, and fighting were well nigh unbearable. He had fled immediately to his boxlike refuge, locked his door, only coming out when he developed severe cabin fever or was “in extremis.” The noxious lavatory boasted a commode commodious enough to accommodate a circus elephant, sitting, but the toilet seat wouldn’t stay up.

  The train was hell on wheels, all right. All he could hold fast to was the memory of Teakettle Cottage, the beauty and tranquility of his secluded little “hideaway” house on Bermuda’s north shore. Situated atop a high bluff, it looked down over a small banana plantation, a fringe of pink sand, and the glittering turquoise sea. How he longed now for that quiet and languid life. The soothing balm that was solitude.

  He supposed his friend Ambrose Congreve was right when he’d accused Hawke of having a “violent addiction to being left undisturbed.” If so, so be it.

  The British Intelligence officer’s normally strong blue eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, his cheeks charred with black stubble, the thickly bunched muscles of his shoulders and upper arms stiff, aching from long confinement in his tiny quarters. He stretched his long legs out before him as best he could. He wasn’t one to complain, but the plain fact was he was bloody miserable. He lit a cigarette and turned his face toward the filthy cracked window.

  Behind him, a pair of polished steel rails stretched west across a frozen expanse of Russian tundra. The tracks angled upward and traversed the Ural Mountains and led to the main rail station at the ancient city of St. Petersburg, where Hawke had begun his journey. He had made this long railway trek from the city once before. Memorable. And everything looked just as he’d remembered it: it had not changed for the better.

  The Rodina.

  The Motherland.

  The bareness of the outline of the countryside like a Japanese watercolor, the mountain ranges, snowcapped, and the stark trees etched black against the sky, scant evidence of humanity, much less civilization. Just… white… nothingness.

  Hawke sat back, closed his eyes, and slowed his breathing. He was, understandably, a bit on edge. Not the dull edge of nagging anxiety, but the razor-sharp knife edge of fear. Alex Hawke had a very reasonable expectation of being shot dead in a few short hours. He’d visualized it many times: The train screeches to a halt at the tiny station. He peers out the window. He steps down onto the icy platform. The grey men are there, waiting. The Dark Men. Guns drawn, huddled just beyond the pool of lamplight. The Englishman had murdered their Tsar. Now it was his turn to die in a volley of gunfire.

  Or not.

  This nameless dread of the unknowable was directly contrary to Alex Hawke’s staunch militaristic nature. He possessed a rigid backbone of considerable renown, both as a combat-hardened flyboy in the Royal Navy and now in the SIS, or Secret Service. He’d always had an appetite for war when it was necessary. One of his World War II great heroes, the outspoken American U.S. Army general George S. Patton, had said all there was to be said on the subject of the proper state of a man’s mind heading into battle. “The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.”

  Hawke lit another cigarette, summoning the belligerent ghost of Patton and his pearl-handled pistols to his side, puffing furiously, working up a head of steam for whatever might lie ahead. He could scarcely believe the treacherous ease and facility with which he had set himself up: perfectly framed for calamity, or devastating heartbreak. Or, if he got very, very lucky, indescribable bliss.

  Because there was, of course, an alternative scenario. A possibility, admittedly an extraordinarily slim possibility, existed that Hawke might soon be reunited with the one woman he loved. A reunion he would have deemed an absolute impossibility just a short t
ime ago. Was she really alive? He’d witnessed her death with his own eyes, had he not? Far more likely, he’d fallen prey to a cunning lie. It was, after all, the way his enemies traditionally worked. Bait. Switch. And kill.

  Yes. A well-baited trap laid for him by the Kremlin’s spymasters at the KGB. He was sure of only one thing: a fool’s death sentence should it prove he’d been stupid enough to take the Russians’ bait. Naive enough to let his much-vaunted common sense take a backseat to his grievously broken heart. He allowed himself a thin smile. Hell, it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. And he was still kicking.

  He inhaled deeply, the sharpness of cheap Russian tobacco taking its bite, telling himself this whole thing was just another hostage rescue, for God’s sake. Hardly out of the ordinary for one of MI6’s most reliable warriors. God knows, he had countless search-and-rescue operations successfully under his belt. Including a dicey affair involving Her Majesty the Queen the year prior. He had a few scars, like anyone in his line of work. More than a few. But, by God, he thought, taking another drag, he wasn’t dead yet. Still. Look at his hands shaking. Like an old woman who’s just seen a fleeting shadow on her bedroom wall.

  This time the rescue attempt was intensely personal. It had been three long years ago that he had flung himself into love like a suicide to the pavement.

  Her name was Anastasia. Closing his eyes, he could see her even now, see his beloved Asia standing on the platform of the tiny Russian rail station at Tvas, waiting for him, her cheeks aglow in the frosted air, golden ringlets peeking from beneath the white mink cowl that framed her lovely face, her wide-set green eyes gleaming in anticipation of his appearance. Dear God! How desperately he’d longed for that moment when he’d enfold her within the protection of his arms and never let go.

  But he had let her go, hadn’t he?

  No, not let her go.

  Under extenuating circumstances, granted, but the cold, hard fact remained:

  He had murdered his own true love in cold blood.

  Disconsolate, lost, Hawke pulled a torn and well-worn photograph from inside his leather jacket. A fading black-and-white snapshot of Anastasia Korsakova, radiantly alive, on the snowy steps of the Bolshoi ballet theatre. Asia stared back at him, her profound beauty still a knife deep to the heart after these years. How this pain created a longing for his fleeting youth, that halcyon time before he had ever prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Never again, he told himself constantly. Alex Hawke had learned a hard lesson the hard way:

  A man must never place himself in a position to lose. He must search out and find only those things he cannot lose. He must develop a heart as hard as flint.

  And, after all his bloody pain and suffering, now this truly bizarre twist of fate. His beloved Anastasia, if you believed the Kremlin rumors anyway, was still alive. After narrowly escaping a death sentence for treasonous acts against her father, the late Tsar, she was rumored to have spent two years or more imprisoned in Moscow’s notoriously cruel Lubyanka Prison. Now, so he’d heard from his Russian friend the great Stefan Halter, she was held prisoner at a high-security Siberian KGB facility, Jasna Polana, the former winter palace of her father. British spooks even had a nickname for it, stolen from a spy tale by the American author Nelson DeMille: the Charm School.

  But.

  “It could all be a ruse.” He still heard Stefan Halter’s sonorous voice echo in his mind. “After all, you and I are the only two eyewitnesses to General Kuragin’s treason against the late Tsar. If Kuragin is ever to feel completely secure within the walls of the Kremlin, his only option is to eliminate us. To lure you back to Russia in search of Anastasia by encouraging false hopes would be a standard KGB ruse. As you well know, my dear friend.”

  C, his superior at Six, had been told only that Hawke was “headed up into the Swiss Alps for a bit of thinking and hiking, perhaps an assault on the Eiger.” Had Alex told his colleagues in the SIS the truth, Sir David Trulove would never have allowed this bizarre misadventure. Hawke was entirely too valuable, far too weighty a capital investment, to have himself shot out of a cannon on some wild-goose chase, indeed, chasing a woman who, by all accounts, was in all likelihood long dead.

  The beckoning trap, in fairness, had been exquisitely set. Not only had Anastasia survived, he had been told, but she’d borne him a son in prison. A son! So here he was, the forlorn fool driven onward by hope alone. But. If, by some miracle, Anastasia and his son truly were alive, he was determined to find some way, any way, to smuggle them out of Russia to safety. Precisely how he would achieve this, he had no bloody idea. All he knew was that he was bound and determined to rescue his little family in the unlikely event that they were still alive. Or simply die trying.

  Two

  T he wretched conveyance was slowing, steel wheels creaking and brakes squealing as it approached the tiny rail station. Tvas was a bleak Siberian outpost, a small village situated literally in the middle of frozen nowhere. Picture perfect for his appointment in Samarra. After the long hours of worry, waiting, and trying to distract himself by reading, Alex Hawke finally turned the last page of his well-thumbed book, a volume

  by Balzac, and reread the final passage for the umpteenth time.

  THE TRADE OF A SPY IS A VERY FINE ONE, WHEN THE SPY IS WORKING ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT. I S IT NOT IN FACT ENJOYING THE EXCITEMENTS OF A THIEF, WHILE RETAINING THE CHARACTER OF AN HONEST CITIZEN? B UT A MAN WHO UNDERTAKES THIS TRADE MUST MAKE UP HIS MIND TO SIMMER WITH WRATH, TO FRET WITH IMPATIENCE, TO STAND ABOUT IN THE MUD WITH HIS FEET FREEZING, TO BE CHILLED OR TO BE SCORCHED, AND TO BE DECEIVED BY FALSE HOPES. (O H YES, YES, THERE WAS ALWAYS THAT LITTLE POSSIBILITY!) H E MUST BE READY, ON THE FAITH OF A MERE INDICATION, TO WORK UP TO AN UNKNOWN GOAL; HE MUST BEAR THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF FAILING IN HIS AIM; HE MUST BE PREPARED TO RUN, TO BE MOTIONLESS, TO REMAIN FOR LONG HOURS WATCHING A WINDOW; TO INVENT A THOUSAND THEORIES OF ACTION… T HE ONLY EXCITEMENT WHICH CAN COMPARE WITH IT IS THE LIFE OF A GAMBLER.

  Monsieur Honore de Balzac. A century and a half ago, he had nailed this bloody business to a fare-thee-well. Hawke closed the book, stood, and stretched his weary body, reaching with both hands toward the smoke and grease-stained green ceiling overhead. He rose up on his toes, flexing his taut quad and calf muscles, and his fingertips easily brushed the grimy ceiling. Hawke was tall, well over six feet, trim, but powerfully built.

  And afraid of no one.

  He possessed a martial spirit; his strong heart beat with the grim, stubborn, earnest energy, the might and main that had won at Waterloo and Trafalgar. At his naval college, Dartmouth, he’d once asked his boxing trainer what it took to become a fighter truly worthy of the name. He never forgot the man’s response. “The ideal fighter has heart, Alex, skill, movement, intelligence, but also creativity. You can have everything, but if you can’t make it up while you’re in the ring, you can’t be great. A lot of chaps have the mechanics and no heart; lots of guys have heart, no mechanics; the thing that puts it all together, it’s mysterious, it’s like making a work of art, you bring everything to it, you make it up while you’re doing it.”

  He’d recently turned thirty-three, a fine age for a man, but old by his accounting methods. Still, a daily regimen of rigorous Royal Navy training and conditioning kept him fitter than most men ten years younger. Hawke cut an imposing figure. He had a heroic head of rather unruly thick black hair and a fine Roman nose, straight and imperial; his glacial blue eyes were startling above the high and finely molded planes of his cheeks and strong chin. His mouth could be a bit cruel at the corners but one always sensed a smile lurking there, a smile that was at once dangerous and sympathetic.

  “Quite a simple man, actually,” his friend Ambrose Congreve, the famous Scotland Yard criminalist, had once explained about Hawke. “Men want to be him, women want to bed him. And when he puts his mind to it, he’s an immovable object.”

  Hawke, to put it quite simply, went through life with the supremely confident outlook of a man w
ith nothing left to prove. He had a dark and magnificent aspect about him, proud and fiery. Women, as Congreve had said, seemed taken by him. He was both funny and sad, that irresistible combination that is one of the secrets of charm. For one thing, he had no idea that he was especially charming or even remotely good-looking. Or the faintest notion that the affection he gave and inspired so freely among others was anything but natural, at least among normal, healthy people.

  What he possessed was the real thing, and he adulterated it with nothing else. If one, and many were prone to do so, went looking for his faults, it could easily be said of him that he was not given to deep introspection. His heart and mind were always simply too busy. Elsewhere. His focus was outside, not inside. And if it was a shortcoming, so be it. He didn’t have time to worry about it.

  He reached up and took his grandfather’s battered Gladstone portmanteau down from the overhead rack and placed it on the seat. Underneath his clothing were twin false bottoms. Unfastening the straps, he reached inside the hidden compartments and removed a handheld GPS, a miniature sat phone, and his only weapon, a SIG. 45-calibre handgun. He popped the mag and ensured that the hollow-point parabellum rounds were properly loaded, leaving one in the chamber. Feeling the heft of the pistol, he almost laughed out loud at the puny state of his armament.

  He slipped the gun into a quick-draw nylon holster suspended inside his worn black leather jacket. Underarm protection you just can’t find at the corner druggist. He took his ridiculous-looking and heavy bearskin coat down from the hook on the door and shouldered into the damn thing. Donning the black sable trapper’s hat that Anastasia had given him years ago, he stepped out into the narrow corridor and made his way, carefully lurching toward the exit at the rear of the car.