Dragonfire

by Ted Bell

  “Do you play squash, Doc?” Hawke asked before crossing the slushy street.

  “Actually, my title is ‘Ambassador.’ What’s this ‘Doc’ business?”

  “You nabbed a doctorate at Oxford, I read somewhere. In American political thought of all things . . .”

  “What of it?”

  “It was a joke for Crissakes, Doc,” Hawke said. “So, do you play squash, or don’t you? Yes-or-no question.”

  “Some might claim I do. Not well, but I do play, Commander. Let’s have a go sometime.”

  “Splendid. I’ll book a court at my club,” Hawke replied, “the Fauquier Club over in Virginia.”

  They eyed each other, mentally circling like boxers, looking for an opening, each warily deciding if they could be friends with the other. Time would tell. But judging by first impressions on both sides, there was a high probability they would get along. Two tall, good-looking, and athletic chaps like these had a habit of getting extremely competitive at the drop of a hat. Whether it was women or skeet shooting, poker or polo.

  The recently minted Chinese ambassador to America paused briefly before crossing the slushy avenue. He wanted to look back at the lovely facade of the White House with a mantel of snow. A huge colorfully lit Christmas tree stood before the South Portico, with Christmas candles flickering in every window, the white palace all but shimmering in the powdery swirling snowfall. Ever since his boyhood, he’d admired depictions of the White House’s neoclassical architecture. It did not disappoint tonight.

  At the pretty little church across the street, a choir standing outside in the snow started singing “O Holy Night.” With the lovely song floating on the night air, all looked so peaceful, stately, and serene . . . but tonight at the White House, it was all just beautiful facade. Inside, the president, his staff, and the occupants of 1600 were very much on edge. They suddenly had a world war to win.

  And it didn’t look good for the home team.

  In fact, Tiger mused, it could not possibly have looked worse. He gazed at his gold wristwatch. Almost three in the A.M. Oh, well. One and done, as they used to say in college. Yeah, right, mate. The phrase inevitably ending up as a joke.

  As they entered the Hay-Adams lobby, Commander Hawke squeezed his right shoulder and said, “Mr. Ambassador, brace yourself. You are now about to enter Washington’s ‘best spot to be seen and not heard.’ Noisy as hell. No worries about discretion down there. No one can hear a word you say, so go have fun!”

  “I’m all for that, Alex Black!” the ambassador said, giving Hawke a nickname that would not stick. The two men, now united in an unspoken common purpose, quickly descended the stairs.

  Hawke added, “If you can’t get lucky down there, you might as well jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and get it over with. Put yourself out of your misery, old man!”

  No understatement there. It was indeed a mad scene down in the bar: a raucous crowd, high on high-test fuel provided by the drunker-than-lords bartenders, red-faced chaps who’d long ago in the evening given up on measuring out drinks and accepting payments. Not to mention the gorilla in the room: America’s endless nightmare of waves of zealously suicidal Japanese Zero pilots who had, earlier that very day, killed three thousand and reduced America’s Pacific Navy to a sinking, stinking, smoking rubble at Pearl.

  Hawke looked around, somewhat dizzily, at the mob of patrons gathered six deep round the bar. Small wonder. Atop the bar, an alluring young woman in a low-cut red satin gown was giving the word “shimmy” a brand-new meaning. Perhaps she’d indulged in a glass too many. Make that definitely too many. But who was counting? On that particular December night in 1941, on that unholiest of nights, many of the celebrants had the very strong feeling that this might well be America’s last hurrah. . . . Another round, please?

  “What do you think, Mr. Ambassador?” the smiling Englishman said. “Have I overstated the case?”

  “Sheer bedlam. I want in, m’lord!” Tiger Tang replied with a wide smile. “I feel like I’m swimming in secretaries! Come on, cover my six. I’m diving in!” And then he did, indeed, wade in. Commander Hawke followed in his wake, along with the potbellied little Yang-Tsing, Tiger’s relentless minder. In a matter of mere seconds, the holy trio was separated, giving themselves over to the mad frenzy of the amorphous crowd, and soon subsumed deep into the writhing mass.

  Commander Hawke managed to find a spot at the horseshoe bar and ordered a Guinness. Immediately, two boisterous redheads to his right tried to chat him up. “Not me.” He smiled. “I’m getting married in the morning. But that handsome gentleman over there in the corner is desperately lonely.” He smiled as the two damsels appeared to glide over to the table of his new friend Tiger.

  Two carrot-topped moths to the flame.

  CHAPTER 3

  Bermuda

  Present Day

  He saw the cottage now, yellow lights blazing in the windows, standing out to sea on a rocky promontory. He’d made it, by God. Now, nearing his quaint pale pink bungalow, Hawke would need to silence his approach and quickly, or he’d telegraph his position to precisely the wrong ears.

  He throttled all the way back on the black Norton and let gravity and momentum coast him in silence, save the hissing tires, all the long way down to the bottom of Royal Guardsmen’s Hill. At last, arriving at his hidden drive, he braked hard, shut the bike down, and jumped off. A thicket of banana trees concealed the sandy road from all but the most prying of eyes, and he hid the black Norton deep among the thick mangroves and elephant ears.

  Wiping the rainwater from his eyes, he then whipped his mobile from the pocket of the old Barbour shooting jacket Ambrose had lent him. He speed-dialed Edward VII Hospital’s emergency number, said he needed an ambulance immediately, gave his name and address, and said, “Please, hurry! It’s life or death!” before ringing off.

  And then he ran like hell up the twisting sandy lane that was his drive, wet leaves slapping at his face, looping vines threatening to catch a foot and bring him down . . . very dark out here in the garden . . . but he knew every inch of it.

  There was a great deal of rattling thunder and hissing lightning now, as the tropical storm moved farther ashore. A loud and sizzling strike nearby suddenly lit up a strange three-wheeled electric vehicle he didn’t recognize as his own. Parked under a palm tree near the entrance, it looked like a little silver spaceship. A Twyzy, they called them, the latest tourist toy to grace the island’s ways and byways. Our Mr. Smith had certainly arrived in style.

  Hawke moved swiftly to his left, avoiding the front lawns of the house entirely, staying just inside the green jungle cover of the banana trees until he could surveil the enemy target, locate his position inside, and come up with a plan that would somehow enable him to— What? He’d learned from Chang Hu, his ancient kung fu master, long ago that no fight has to last more than five seconds, and in that short span of time, the man who lands the first two sharp blows inevitably wins, if he’s not bound to conventions of sportsmanship, or to the effete nonsense of any given technique.

  He paused beneath a banyan tree. Closing his eyes, he touched his palms together, the thumbs beneath his chin, the forefingers pressed against his lips. He exhaled completely and breathed very shallowly, using only the bottom of his lungs, sharply reducing his intake of oxygen. Holding the image of the still pool that was now his mind, he brought his face ever closer to the pool’s surface until he was almost under and—

  A scream in the night from within the house.

  A long, plaintive howl that sounded like a grievously wounded animal . . . Pelham. Hawke sprinted seaward to the rain-swept waterfront side of the house and leapt over the wall that enclosed the broad terrace. He was running for the rear door, ready to crash through the glass if that was necessary, get in there, and kill the crazy bastard who had hurt his Pelham.

  That’s when the house went dark, every room, at
the same instant. Another cry of pain . . .

  “Pelham! Pelham!” Hawke stood stock-still and cried out. His gun now in his hand, the trusty old American .45—five cartridges in and the hammer down on the empty. The bulky blue steel revolver felt heavy and cold in his hand as he quickly snapped out the cylinder and checked the load. The slugs were scooped out and a deep cross had been cut into the head of each. No range. No accuracy to speak of. The bullet would begin to tumble five yards from the barrel. But when it hit, it would splat as wide and thin as a piece of tinfoil. A nick in the forearm would slam the victim down as though he’d been struck by a freight train. Good professional job of dumdumming. Reassuring.

  He ran with the gun out in front of him now, barreling straight ahead, and smashed right through the wide locked cedar door, splintering wood and glass and hurtling inward as he powered into the darkness within. He stopped, got his bearings, peering into the inky darkness and listening. . . .

  “Pelham?” he whispered. He heard a stir from behind the bar.

  “Alex . . . over . . . here . . . ,” he heard Pelham choke out.

  “Where?”

  “I’m just behind the bar, m’lord . . . ,” the gravely wounded old gentleman croaked.

  Hawke leapt up onto the wide rattan bar, his eyes moving everywhere, his .45 revolver still clutched firmly in his right hand. With his left, he flicked the flint on his old Zippo and had a look. Two startlingly blue eyes gleamed back up at him from the blackness. Pelham was lying on his back, and he—Good Lord—he was lying on the floor atop a bed of broken glasses and bottles, holding up his bloody right hand with his left, his shirtfront blood soaked.

  Hawke got to his knees, reached down, and managed to get a grasp on both of the poor fellow’s wrists. He paused and said, “Ready?” and his old friend managed a thin smile. The injury to his right hand was severe, and the pain of being lifted from all that jagged glass was no doubt rather hellish.

  As Hawke began to lift him higher, the trembling Pelham winced and cried out in pain. Hawke carefully hauled him up and over the edge of the wide bamboo bar, stretching him out horizontally on the bar top as carefully and as painlessly as he could.

  “Talk to me, Pelham. Where is he?” he whispered.

  Pelham gathered up amazing strength, considering the blood he must have lost, and pulled Hawke’s face down toward him, clearly wanting to whisper something in Alex’s ear.

  “What is it, old fellow? Hurry now,” he said. He could sense a nearing presence but saw nothing in the all-enveloping blackness.

  “He’s here. . . . He’s hiding, sir . . . front of the house . . . just inside the ladies’ loo by the front door . . . waiting. . . . He will have heard you come in. . . .”

  Despite the dire situation, Hawke had to smile. Heard the resounding crash of glass and splintered wood, had he? Despite the awful condition of the old fellow, despite all he’d just gone through, all the pain and all the blood he’d already lost . . . he managed to draw on those great depths of English understatement with “He will have heard you come in. . . .”

  It was at that very instant that he felt hot breath on the back of his neck and heard a whiskery voice a few inches behind his right ear say, “Howdy, dead man. It’s your old compadre, Shit. Come to pay my last respects. . . .”

  Hawke’s gut instinct was to whip his head straight back without warning. Use his skull to deal a sharp blow to the tip of Shit’s nose. One that would have disabled him, possibly killed him if a bone splinter was driven into his brain. Failing that, he’d at least have had Shit Smith by the larynx, the life of the murderous bastard between his thumb and forefinger, a hostage. . . .

  “Ah, my old friend Mr. Smith,” Hawke said, feigning a coolness he did not feel. “Forgot the first name. Sorry, old chap, something to do with excrement, no? Potty talk, what? Pee-pee? Wait! I remember! Shit, that’s it! Hello, Shit. Welcome to Bermuda, old fellow. . . . And, please say hello to my old friend Persifor Fraser, III. He’s always looking for new members here at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, don’t you know.”

  He expected some kind of reflexive trash talk in return.

  Instead, there came cruel paroxysms of razor-sharp steel on Hawke’s vulnerable flesh, Shit’s big Bowie knife, slicing through his belly and girdle of muscle with the swift ease of a hot wire through cheese. The pain was pyrotechnic as everything within him began to give way and burst.

  Now Alex Hawke himself screamed, more in excruciating pain than in fear for his life.

  He fell forward, his very guts threatening to spill out or already spilling, the upper part of his torso crushing Pelham to the bar top, smothering him. He summoned the strength to slide his right hand beneath his belly and somehow seize up the wound. Dear God, this was it. Hold on. Just hold the heavy green-grey folds of . . . of . . . Damn it to hell, his own bloody intestines . . . inside his yawning belly long enough for him to get Pelham’s bleeding under—

  Smith had bent down and grabbed a handful of Hawke’s unruly black hair, yanking his head back so the two of them were nose to nose.

  “How you doin’, Lordship? Ouch. I bet that hurts. Everything copacetic? You okeydokey?”

  “I will be,” Hawke spat out.

  “Ya think so, podnuh?”

  “If it’s the last thing I do. And then I will hunt you down, and I will bloody erase you, you miserable piece of shit. . . .”

  Shit put the blade of the Bowie under Hawke’s chin and started sawing the blade back and forth slowly, with a light touch, smiling at him while he did it, producing another warm spill of blood over his hand.

  “I—I’ll come for you. . . .”

  “Well, hell, boss. Good luck with that,” Shit said in a lighthearted way as he pricked Hawke’s nose with the tip of the Bowie knife. “I reckon I best be runnin’ along now. But you notice I ain’t taking your pretty head along with me, right? Hell, no, I ain’t! Even though the Big Boss offered me double for it if I delivered it to him on a platter. But, y’know, I just couldn’t see it. I said—I told him right up front—I said, ‘Hell, Vladimir, save yer money! I just don’t want to deal with getting it back to Moscow! Lug that bloody noggin of his around with me in a bowling ball bag for a week or so? I can’t check it with my luggage, and I don’t believe I could get past them TSA machines. Naw, fuck that shit, man. Airport security, railway stations? No way, José.’ He tole me to think on it. How much fresh pussy I could get with ten or twenty mil in the bank.”

  He dropped Hawke’s head and stood straight up, wiping the Englishman’s blood and guts from his knife on his shirttail before holstering the bloody Bowie.

  “So, I guess I’ll bid you two happy campers a fond adieu. Skedaddle on back to where I come from . . . Git while the gittin’ is good, as the man said. One step ahead of the sheriff, as per usual.”

  “Safe travels,” Hawke said with all the strength he had left in him. “Just make sure you keep your eyes open. I’ll be coming for you, you bloody arsehole.”

  Shit laughed out loud at that one.

  “Oh, hell yeah! Yes, indeedy, I certainly will do that. Don’t you worry none. Now, say good night and go away . . . yer done.”

  And the cowboy faded to black, leaving his two victims to their fate. Tonight was almost certain to be, Hawke considered, a fatal rendezvous with his longtime sidekick, sometimes known as the Pale Rider. Hawke’s pain was vast. But, at least, he reflected sadly, it was finite. This couldn’t go on much longer. Sharp-edged waves of agony climaxed in intensity until his body convulsed and his mind was awash. And then, just before the madness took over, the crests broke and surmounted the limits of his consciousness, and promised an escape, if only briefly, into oblivion.

  Hawke had no idea how long they lay there like that, the two of them, two mortally wounded men, inseparable in life and now together in death’s embrace. Half an hour? Six hours? Half his life? His existence see
med equally divided into two parts, one containing thirty or so active, colorful years; the other, the second half, some unknown span of pain. And now it was the second half that really mattered.

  A spasm in his bowels awakened him. He felt warm fluid running down his leg. It wasn’t blood. . . . It was . . . oh, God . . . dear God . . . release me . . . the stench emanating from his exposed bowels was intolerable.

  Slowly, the numbing of his overloaded nerves came into balance with each new level of agony and neutralized it. He knew that more exquisite levels of pain might still come. But pain was no longer an animate enemy he might get by the throat and crush and crush! His pain and his life had finally welded into one.

  The two would always be together now. These few remaining moments would be his epitaph, his final memories. . . . He called an old and happy image to his mind. He and his beloved son, Alexei, standing on a windswept mountain in the Highlands of Scotland. They’d been stalking a great stag all morning when they chanced upon him off a ledge twenty feet below, and now his son was filled with wonder at the sight of such a magnificent animal . . . and the beauty of the heather in full bloom.

  When there was no longer pain, after all, there would no longer be life.

  Alex Hawke, he of the purported lionlike courage and strong heart for any fate, suddenly felt very cold and alone.

  And very sad.

  CHAPTER 4

  Washington, D.C.

  December 8, 1941

  For his part, Tiger Tang, trying to conserve his resources, found a deserted corner table and retired there and summoned a waiter, determined to fly solo and nurse a small pitcher of white wine until Yang-Tsing intervened and said otherwise.

  “Belay that order,” Yang-Tsing told the waiter. “He’ll have soda water. . . .”

  But then . . .

  But then, of course, events intervened.

  And here they were, magically appearing at Tiger’s refuge table. Yes, yes, those gymnastic Topsy Twins, as well put together a pair of statuesque redheads as one could imagine. Both working up on Capitol Hill, rowdy secretaries simply dripping in Mr. Woolworth’s jewelry and faux-fox-fur wraps, known, apparently, as Agnes and Flora. Two lovelies whom he found himself charming over nightcaps.