White Death: An Alex Hawke Novella

by Ted Bell

  Then they’d lift them up off the ground by turns and dunk them headfirst down into the foul, slop-filled hole. Sometimes for a few seconds, other times for a couple of minutes. Or longer. Neither man knew how long his head would be submerged. Each would come up sputtering. The hole was brimming with a fetid stew of urine and feces.

  What the Wishing Well actually was, Hawke and Stokely soon realized, was the Cuban soldiers’ latrine.

  “I can’t take much more of this, Stoke,” Hawke said at dawn one morning, before the guards came for them. “I’m deadly serious, man. This will break me. I thought Iraq was bad. But, this? Hell, I’ll just start talking, man.”

  “We are just not ever going to do that, boss.”

  “I know.”

  So that morning was different. The two guards arrived and marched the naked and manacled prisoners outside the fenced perimeter and single file into the jungle. The Cubanos laughing and shouting to each other out of habit. Another hot day, another hilarious game of dunk the prisoners headfirst into the latrine.

  One guard was in front, Hawke right behind him. Then Stoke, then the other guard at the rear with his gun aimed at the back of Stoke’s head. No talking allowed for the two captives. Hawke obeyed that rule until they got within sight of the Wishing Well. That’s when he said the one word Stoke was waiting to hear:

  “NOW!”

  In that instant, Hawke got his manacled wrists over the guard’s head and cinched tight around the stocky Cuban’s throat. Hawke yanked him backward off his feet, got him on the ground, and began pummeling his face with his two bound fists, using the steel manacles as a weapon. Stoke, meanwhile, planted one foot and whirled, whipping his bound hands in a great sweeping arc, slamming his enjoined fists against the side of the other guard’s head and knocking him off his feet.

  Hawke had little memory of the ensuing skirmish. Both Cubans acquitted themselves rather nicely, knowing full well they were fighting for their lives. Hawke was fairly sure he’d bit both ears off his guy and done terrible things to his eyes and teeth. And, ultimately, to the vertebrae in his cervical spine. C3, C4, and C5, damaged beyond repair.

  Meanwhile, Stoke used his enormous size and weight to his advantage. He sat atop the guy long enough to break the index finger of the thrashing right hand by removing his gun while his finger was still inside the trigger guard. Then he bounced up and down on his chest a couple of times until all his ribs fractured pretty much at once. Until something sharp and splintery pierced his heart and lungs.

  For three days they fought to survive in the wild. Naked, hungry, no food, no water, no map. They followed the sun during the day. Kept well clear of the occasional dirt roads. Survived on snakes, bugs, and bark. Made a little shelter with palm fronds every night to keep the cold rain off their hides. And so it went.

  On the fourth night, they heard booming surf in the distance. That’s when they came upon a high wire fence. They had little strength left to go around it. Hawke was in far worse shape than Stokely; he’d lost a lot of blood and still battled a raging fever. Somehow, they both found enough strength to scale the fence and drop to the ground on the other side.

  Hawke woke up in sick bay the next morning with no memory of how he’d come to be there.

  “Good morning, handsome,” a pretty red-haired American nurse said to him, holding the straw in his orange juice next to his parched lips. “There’s someone here to see you.”

  Hawke smiled.

  “Who is it?”

  “I’ll go get him, honey,” the nurse said.

  Now a strange man appeared at his bedside. American military. Brass, obviously. A U.S. naval officer, who was also smiling down at him in a friendly way. Where the bloody hell was he? On a U.S. destroyer?

  “Good morning, Admiral,” Hawke managed, very happy to see a familiar uniform and a friendly face.

  “Good morning,” the old man said, pulling a chair up to his bedside. “Son, I don’t know who the hell you are or where the hell you came from, but I will tell you one goddamn thing. You ruined my golf game, sailor.”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “You heard me. I came up the seventh fairway this morning half expecting to find my ball in a sand trap. Instead, I found you. Bare assed, except for your goddamn shoes. Damnedest thing I ever saw. And no tracks in the sand anywhere around you. Like you’d dropped out of the blue.”

  “From the top of the fence, Admiral.”

  “But how the hell did you—Never mind.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Oh, hell, don’t apologize. I hit my sand wedge out of there and sank it for a birdie! Almost had to take your foot off to get my club face on the ball. Never had a human hazard before! Welcome to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base Golf and Country Club, son! We’re glad to have you and your Navy SEAL friend Mr. Jones here as our guests.”

  Then the admiral laughed and handed him a fat Montecristo cigar. He helped Hawke get it lit and then said, “Tell me, what can I do for you, son? You look to me like a man who could use a helping hand right about now.”

  Hawke smiled and said, “There is one thing you could do for me, sir.”

  “Name it.”

  “Got any drones?” Hawke said, taking another puff and feeling instantly much improved. The fog seemed to be lifting. He saw a small green bird alight on his sunny windowsill, and it seemed to him a harbinger of happy days to come.

  “Hell, yeah, I got drones, son. Shitload of them. What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “Well, Admiral, you see, there’s this little pink hotel over on the northeast coast of Cuba. Place called the Illuminata de los Reyes. One of the guests there, a Russian chap of my acquaintance, was exceptionally rude to my friend Stokely Jones and me recently. Killed a couple of my chaps in an ambush. And I thought, well, perhaps you could teach him a lesson in old-fashioned Anglo-American manners.”

  “Done and done!” The admiral laughed. “I’ll have my guys get a couple of birds in the air before lunchtime. That little hotel you mentioned, that’s the pretty pink one over in Cabo Cruz, am I right?”

  “That’s the one all right, Admiral.”

  “I’m on it.”

  And damn if it wasn’t done that very day.

  Done, and done, as they say.

  CHAPTER ONE

  You see, the whole damn business started with the USS Cole.

  The Cole is a serious U.S. Navy warship, mind you. Think billion-dollar baby. She’s a 505-foot-long Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer. She carries a vast array of advanced radar equipment, not to mention her torpedoes, machine guns, Tomahawk missiles, and, well—you get the picture. Bad mammajamma.

  Big, badass damn boat. Kept afloat by a crew of young navy seamen. And you won’t find as nice a gang of fine young men and women as you will in the U.S. Navy. “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” kids, all of them. Manners, remember those? Good haircuts? Pants actually held up with belts? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

  Along about August 2000—remember, this was about a year before the attack on the Twin Towers—USS Cole sailed from NAS Norfolk to join the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Arabian Gulf. A few months later she called at the seaport of Aden, situated by the eastern approach to the Red Sea. A city, weird as it might seem, built in the crater of a dormant volcano. What were they thinking? Anyway, the day it all went down, the Big Wake-Up Call, I like to call it, the Cole was under a security posture known as Threatcon Bravo. We’re talking the third of five alert levels used by the U.S. Navy to label impending terrorist threats.

  Sunny day. Hot as Hades. Most of the crew was busy with daily shipboard routine, but a bunch of guys had their shirts off, sunning on the foredeck, playing cards, shooting the breeze, or, more accurately, the shit, as they say in the navy.

  One of the guys, out of the corner of his eye, notices a small fiberglass fishing boat making its way
through the busy harbor. Kinda boat local fishermen used to ply their trade around the harbor. Nothing fancy and certainly nothing scary.

  The boat seemed to be headed right for the ship’s port side, or, so thought Seaman Foster Riggs anyway. Now, on a normal day, you understand, most of the harbor’s waterborne inhabitants sensibly gave the Cole a wide berth. Which is why Seaman Riggs got up and went to the port rail to have a closer look at the approaching vessel. Something odd about it, he was thinking.

  It was going pretty fast for conditions, number one. Two locals stood side by side at the helm station. Young guys, bearded, T-shirts and faded shorts. Had the throttle cranked, the boat up on plane. Out for a cruise, a couple of amigos just having a good time, was what it looked like.

  Nothing looked all that out of the ordinary to Riggs, even as the fishing boat drew ever nearer to the Cole. Big smiles on the local yokels’ faces as they pulled along the destroyer’s port side.

  As the boat settled, they were raising their hands up in the air, waving hello at the friendly young sailor staring down at them. Friendlies themselves, Riggs was thinking. But then they did something funny, something that should have sounded crazy loud alarm bells banging big-time inside that young seaman’s head.

  The two men looked up at the skinny sailor on the foredeck, snapped to attention, and then saluted smartly. Riggs noticed something really strange then: the smiles were gone from their faces.

  A second later, those two boys were vaporized. They had just exploded a whole boatload of C-4 plastic explosive. At the moment of the explosion, the little skiff was about five feet from the warship’s hull. And that much C-4 at close range? Hell, that is the equivalent of seven hundred pounds of TNT blowing up in your face.

  The blast shattered windows and shook the buildings along the waterfront. It also opened a forty-foot-by-forty-foot gash in the destroyer’s reinforced steel hull. And turned the inside of that ship into an abattoir. Seventeen of our young warriors were killed instantly or mortally wounded. Thirty-nine more were seriously injured. It was bad. It was real bad, brother.

  The Cole incident, that was the single worst attack on an American target since the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

  That attack was bad enough.

  And then it got worse.

  The blast in the Gulf of Aden sent shock-wave repercussions rolling down the corridors of the Pentagon.

  The navy brass had finally gotten the wake-up call heard round the world. Decades of the USN’s woefully outdated policies and training procedures had finally come back to bite the navy’s ass, big-time. The much disputed Rules of Engagement, well, that’s exactly what had put the Cole in the crosshairs of two young terrorists hell-bent on killing American sailors.

  And the Cole? Hell, she had been a sitting duck. Never had a chance.

  Crew members started reporting that the sentries’ Rules of Engagement, set up by the ship’s captain according to navy guidelines, “would have prevented them from defending the ship even if they’d detected a threat.” The crew would not have been permitted to fire without being fired upon first! You’re beginning to see the problem. But, wait, there’s more.

  A petty officer manning a .50 cal. at the stern of the Cole moments after the explosion that fateful day saw a second boat approaching and was ordered to turn his weapon away unless and until he was actively shot at. “We’re trained to hesitate,” the young sailor told the board of inquiry. “If somebody had seen something that looked or even smelled wrong and fired his weapon, sir? That man would have been court-martialed.”

  The commander of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet concluded: “Even had the Cole implemented Threatcon Bravo measures flawlessly, there is total unity among the flag officers that the ship would not and could not have prevented or even deterred this attack.”

  Hello?

  Now you got yourself a Class A shitstorm brewing in the Pentagon. Now you got the commander of the Fifth Fleet—which patrols five million square miles, mind you, including the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and parts of the Indian Ocean—saying, hold on, a U.S. Navy destroyer versus a crappy little fishing boat? And the fishing boat wins?

  That’s when the call for help went out. And that’s where I come in.

  My outfit, a little ole Texas company at that time, called Vulcan Inc., was just one of many providers contacted by the U.S. Navy and the Department of Defense. They wanted to see just how quickly people like me could respond to their “urgent and compelling” need for the immediate training of twenty thousand sailors in force protection over the next six months. The navy was basically saying to all of us, Look, we have to train X number of sailors at X types of ranges and we need to do it now. Can you handle that?

  My name is Colonel Brett “Beau” Beauregard. I’m the founder and CEO of Vulcan Inc. And I knew this was my shot. Mine was the only company that checked every box on the navy’s list. At the time, I had only twenty full-time employees. At Vulcan’s original training facility on the Gulf of Mexico south of Port Arthur, Texas, hell, we hadn’t even trained a measly three thousand people.

  That was the total ever since opening our doors three years earlier. But Beau? Nothing if not aggressive. First in my class at West Point, decorated U.S. Army Ranger, strong as a team of oxen, captain of the Army gridiron team that beat Navy to win the Thanksgiving Army-Navy game my senior year.

  Go, Army! And as I always say, “It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.”

  That navy contract? It was worth over seven million dollars. I was worth about seven cents. And I had only thirty days to get my guys ready. I got myself started bright and early next morning, you better believe I did.

  I began construction on a little idea I’d cooked up called a “ship-in-a-box.” It was a floating superstructure made of forty-foot steel tractor-trailer containers. It was painted battleship grey and fitted with watertight doors and railings. Imagine an elaborate ship’s bridge on a movie set, but one designed to withstand live ammunition in real-life firefights. Stone cool.

  For one month, no one around here slept much. But the old colonel’s magical training boat-in-a-box was ready for the navy when day 30 rolled around. To my great surprise, and delight, Vulcan won that damn navy contract. Over the next six months down at Port Arthur, Vulcan personnel trained nearly a thousand new sailors a week! We taught them to identify threats, engage enemies, and defeat terrorist attacks while aboard ships either in port or at sea.

  Almost immediately, I identified one of the navy’s biggest problems. This was the original gang that couldn’t shoot straight! It had been maybe years since a whole lot of these guys had even held guns in their hands. U.S. Navy sailors who had never even used a firearm since boot camp!

  Hundreds of sailors started flowing through the facility every week. The ATFP approach developed by my team, Anti-Terrorism Force Protection, was the very finest available on the planet at that time. We ramped up the manning, training, and equipping of naval forces to better realize a war fighter’s physical security at sea. ATFP became the U.S. Navy’s primary focus of every mission, activity, and event. This mind-set was instilled in every one of the sailors who went through the program.

  Vulcan was so successful that in 2003, Vulcan would train roughly seventy thousand sailors at our rapidly growing Port Arthur, Texas, facility.

  One night I told my brand-new wife, Margaret Anne, I felt like that scrappy little dog who finally caught that school bus he’d been chasing. We expanded the Port Arthur operation again and again—up to over seven thousand acres, more than twelve square miles, including considerable conservation areas to preserve wetlands and restore wildlife habitat. I made sure we reseeded hundreds of acres with native oak and swamp cypress.

  And I made one other important addition to the facility.

  I’d shot me a massive black bear over in Red River
County east of Dallas. Took that bad boy with a black powder rifle. Old Blackie now stood on his hind legs in the lobby of the main Lodge, a 598-pound symbol of Vulcan’s trademark tenacity—jaws frozen open, right paw raised high, ready to strike. It became the corporate logo, on every piece of paper my company generated in the years that followed. I’ve still got the T-shirt.

  In a few short years, Vulcan achieved worldwide fame. We were providing private military assistance to any country that could afford our services. And here’s the thing: we did not play favorites, and politics never entered into the equation. I was a soldier of fortune, after all, and this soldier was looking to make his fortune. I was soon working with the military and military intelligence agencies of countries around the world. And not once did I show a trace of favoritism toward any client or any government; that’s what kept me in the game.

  I got pretty good at building impenetrable firewalls between our clients. The degree of security afforded each major account was so highly regarded that the Americans, the Russians, and even the Chinese were all equally comfortable that their most closely held secrets were safe with us. Hell, at one point early on, Vulcan could claim both Israel and the Iranians as clients at one and the same time!

  My own journey to the pinnacle of power had begun; and neither America nor, later, the world, had a clue what they were in for. I made it to the very top, and I clung to my position tenaciously. But the center would not hold. Events, politics, politicians, and most devastating of all, the media, overtook me in the end. The whole world would turn on me, viciously, and bring me down.

  Because in the end, me and my guys, the former heroes of Vulcan, we who had taken bullets for the Americans and everyone else, would become objects of scorn and ridicule in the press and everywhere else. And many believed it was all through no fault of our own. Hell, I believe it to this day! Did some innocent people get shot? Yeah, it’s called war. Did we shoot first? My opinion? No, we did not. I’ve seen the evidence. I stand by my troops to this day.