Dragonfire

by Ted Bell

  “Perhaps I can arrange a complimentary evening for you? Over at the Castle?”

  “Castle? I haven’t seen any castles.”

  “You won’t, not unless you know where to look. It’s well hidden in the jungles high in the hills. This castle, the exact one that Charlemagne had built in 802 AD, was located in Italy on the border of Tuscany and Umbria. Completely disassembled on the site, stone by stone, and shipped here to Dragonfire. Completely rebuilt with modern plumbing and electrics. And including a ninth-century dungeon.”

  Hawke smiled. “Any self-respecting castle has to have a dungeon.”

  “There’s an unmarked sandy lane that leads up to the Castle’s moat. Only a privileged few ever get invited inside: an American president or two, a South American dictator, an international movie star or two. . . . You get the idea.”

  “Oh, yes. Indeed, I do. What kind of entertainments does this castle provide?”

  “I’ll leave that to your imagination. But all the islands are replete with rare amusements and gorgeous hostesses catering to every whim, every taste. One of the favorites is our dungeon, of course.”

  “‘Of course’? Why of course?”

  “The human mind has many dark passages, Lord Hawke, and many of them lead straight to the dungeon. All right, here we are at the marina. We just need to walk out to the end of this pier. Are you excited?”

  “By your dungeon? Good Lord, no!”

  “No, no! By your surprise? The one your partner, Big Al, told you about. I hope he gave you my message.”

  “My partner? Is that what you said? Really?”

  “Oh, gosh, I don’t know. I assumed as much.”

  “You assumed as much? You assumed I was gay? That’s a first. Whatever makes you think that, pray tell?”

  “Well, for starters, a man like you? Filthy rich, war hero, impossibly attractive, with that veddy, veddy posh title and British accent of yours? And not yet married? You’re far too pretty to be taken seriously as straight, darling. Trust me on that one.”

  “This Big Al you spoke to. What did he sound like?”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know. Your sister, maybe?”

  Hawke laughed. “Tell me about my surprise. How about that? Yes, I’m terribly excited. If it floats, flies, or . . . well, whatever, I’m keen! But I thought the Black Shadow was my surprise.”

  “No, that was just a little gift. You’re real surprise is moored right out there at the end of the pier. Have a look!”

  Hawke raced ahead, really rather anxious to see what kind of marine equipment he’d have at his disposal, should the two brothers prove to be inhospitable at some point. He foresaw a time when he just might need to leave Dragonfire Bay in rather a dire hurry. He needn’t have worried.

  The surprise (which really wasn’t one) was moored at the very end of the dock. It was a Wallytender 48, built in Forlì, Italy, forty-eight feet in length, just like the two aboard his own Blackhawke, but done up from stem to stern in an aggressive matte black finish, very stealthy, indeed, and perfect for his needs.

  At her stern, two powerful Volvo Penta IPS 650HP engines, totaling thirteen hundred horsepower. She was capable of speeds nearing sixty miles per hour and could get him into, and out of, trouble without much bother.

  “May I take her out for a little shakedown cruise?” he asked Miss Tang, whom he now thought of as perfect in the role of the despotic Mistress of Darkness down in her Dungeon of Despair.

  “By all means, Alex,” she said. “Go anywhere you wish, of course. The petrol tanks are all topped off. There’s beer and frozen vodka and tomato juice in the galley as well as finger sandwiches for your midmorning snack.”

  “Jolly good!” Hawke said, picturing a big fat Bloody Mary as soon as he’d moored somewhere to get his bearings and catch a few golden rays to cover up what he called his fish-belly white “hospital tan.”

  “A brief cautionary note, sir,” the woman said, bending down to tend to the fore and aft dock lines as well as to be better heard, not to mention giving him visual access to her voluminous womanly charms and somehow managing to simultaneously look like a very incautious woman indeed.

  She said, “There are some areas throughout the islands clearly marked ‘restricted.’ Take them seriously, please. Those waters you may not enter, of course. Otherwise, you’re free to fly. Have fun! Perhaps I’ll see you later? I’m having a few friends over at my house for cocktails and supper this evening. Over on Snow Egret Bay. Locals. Perhaps you’d like to come?”

  “I should be honored, madam. Delighted to come.”

  “It’s a date. Cocktails at seven, dinner at eight.” She turned to leave.

  “Madam Zhang?” Hawke said “One question, dear girl. The name on the door to my suite in Chinese. Jin. What does it mean, that symbol?”

  “Gold. He who owns the gold owns the world, Lord Hawke. That’s my brother’s motto.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” Hawke said, and stepped nimbly aboard, planted himself at the helm, checked the fuel and batteries, turned the key, fired the matching outsized outboards, and waved good-bye to Miss Tang. Then he grinned boyishly and sped away from the docks and out into open water at full throttle. He put the wheel over, banked hard astarboard, and headed toward the other, and far more sinister, more interesting side of the central island, Black Dragon Bay.

  * * *

  —

  He looked at his dive watch and felt a twinge. It had been a gift from Sigrid on their first Christmas together in Switzerland. A Rolex, a Sea-Dweller, of course, but one hell of a Rolex. He’d done the research. It had been created for saturation divers working at great depths, reliable and robust, but mainly to withstand incredible levels of water pressure. Earlier models, when used at extreme depths, had had shortcomings. After a number of deep dives at extreme depths for prolonged periods of time, the crystal of the Submariner was prone to pop out in the decompression chamber.

  To remedy this, the Sea-Dweller had had a helium escape valve developed on the side of the case. Hawke’s Double Red Sea-Dweller had been made for COMEX (Compagnie Maritime D’Expertises), a professional diving company based in Marseilles.

  It was going on eleven thirty. Stokely was arriving at the airstrip at two. So the MI6 officer had just enough time to begin his initial foray into what he’d now come to suspect just might well be an enemy Chinese military installation right in America’s backyard.

  Hawke was racing flat out about two miles offshore, the throttles firewalled, bow angled up sharply, the Wally boat on plane, throwing off huge bow waves to either side. He saw passengers aboard oncoming sailing yachts gather at the rail to watch his approach. While Wally boats were quite the thing in the Med, they’d not yet reached significant numbers here in the Bahamas. He now had the hillside jungle with the bizarre white concrete structure in sight. He slowed way down and was altering course to intercept it when he noticed one of the big missile frigate patrol boats following in his wake and closing fast. No sirens or flashing blue and white lights, not yet anyway.

  When they got within a thousand yards, sirens commenced to wail, horns started blaring, and flashing blue-and-white lights atop the bridge deck roof started flashing.

  So sorry, chaps. Was I speeding?

  He put the hammer down and soon the Chinese patrol boat was just a distant memory way back there at the end of his frothing, hissing wake. He wasn’t ready to go public or cause any trouble at this juncture, not quite. He needed a helluva lot more information before doing that. He made a course correction that was a beeline to the mouth of the main harbor over at Nassau Town.

  The big frigate would be tracking him on radar all the way over the horizon, figuring him for some rich tourist day-tripper over from Nassau, having a good look round Dragon Bay. Since he was headed to Paradise Island, anyway, he thought, why not tie up at Atlantis and have a little fun at the roulet
te tables or try his hand at a bit of vignt-et-un, his favorite form of gambling?

  At around one, he’d take his winnings or his lumps, jump back into the Wally, and race over to Pindling Airport to pick up pilot, copilot, and his old pal Stokely Jones Jr. Harry Brock was supposed to be aboard as well but events in Miami had delayed his departure. Hawke was not disappointed. He had always found the man exasperating and once had asked Stokely why that was.

  Stoke had looked at him and said, “Ain’t that difficult to understand, boss,” he’d said. “Fact is, you just can’t trust a man who was brought up inside a gated community in Orange County, California.” Hawke, having no idea what he was talking about, had opted to take the sagacity of the advice at face value.

  “Just think about it, boss. Give the man a little rope, is all I’m sayin,” Stoke had said.

  “Enough to hang himself with? Sound thinking.” Hawke had smiled.

  “You got to see the true inner cat before you go making up your mind. All that cocky attitude? Shit. Based on good old-fashioned insecurity. That’s always been Milk’s problem.”

  “‘Milk’s problem’? You’ve lost me now, Stoke.”

  “Milk’s his nickname. Had it since he was in grade school. . . .”

  “Dare I ask how he came by it?”

  “He was in the third grade at the Newport Beach Middle School, got a score of two percent on his math exam. One of the kids started calling him ‘Milk.’ You know, like two percent milk. It stuck with him. All the way through college.”

  “That’s actually funny. Milk. I like it. Mr. Two Percent. When do you suppose he’ll show up?”

  “Week or so, I suppose.”

  Hawke had booked rooms for all the men at the hotel. Good chance for some crew R & R and for his team to get down to the business at hand. He’d not seen Stoke in an age. Not since Switzerland, where they’d rescued the kidnapped Alexei from the clutches of that rapidly deteriorating ex-friend of his, one Vladimir Putin by name.

  Stoke lived the life of a Miami Beach pasha on his wife, Fancha’s, island estate, Casa Que Canta, over on Key Biscayne. Since the tragic death of Stoke’s sole employee—the little, one-armed Cuban sport-fishing guide, the man so nice they named him twice, Sharkey Rodrigues-Rodrigues, to a shark attack down in the Florida Keys—Stoke had been hanging out in the company of Hawke’s old nemesis, an American CIA field officer at the Miami station named Harry Brock. Hawke was interested to see whether or not any of Brock’s inestimable number of bad habits had worn off on Stokely. His four-letter vocabulary, his fondness for marijuana, his skirt-chasing, his cocky attitude. . . .

  Hawke shifted the chrome throttles back to idle speed, let the vessel settle into the seas, and stood at the helm to throw a coiled bowline to the eager young dockmaster at the Atlantis docks, then raced aft and shut down the twin Volvo Pentas while drifting in toward the dock with the current. Looking up at that amazing pink Atlantis architecture, he was beginning to get that old tingling sensation deep in his belly.

  The one he got when he knew Lady Luck would be standing shoulder to shoulder beside him when he rolled those bones out across the green baize of the tables at the much overwrought and over-gilded Atlantis Casino!

  Luck be a lady tonight!

  CHAPTER 25

  The English Channel

  January 1942

  Day dawned with streaks red and gold racing one another out of the east trooping in formation across the wave tops of the English Channel. Burnished rays of the rising sun washed over the white cliffs of Dover and the emerald green downs in the south of England.

  Commander Hawke, on this day of days, had risen hours earlier than the sun. He was a man determined to leave no nit unpicked, no dangling detail regarding today’s mission left unreconsidered for perhaps the twentieth time. Exhausted by his efforts well into the wee small hours, he’d finally collapsed, fully clothed, atop his narrow iron bed.

  The unit would be wheels up shortly and would tuck in behind the wake of a German air-raid heavy bomber squadron, en route home from attacks over the industrial north of England. For the German crews who’d survived the vicious battles in the skies to fight another day, it was all bombs away and homeward bound across the Channel to Berlin.

  Once out over the Channel, Commander Hawke, when he’d at last located a Nazi minesweeper of sufficient size to have the coveted 3-rotor decoder, would peel away from the rear of the homeward bound German bomber formation. Then, once he’d fully committed to the minesweeper in question, he’d waggle his wings to ensure he had the German skipper’s attention, cut his engines, and ditch the aircraft into the water in full view of every man aboard the big Nazi warship. And thus it was his most fervent hope to fake a convincing and believable emergency crash dive into the drink.

  This would be his critical moment. The absolute time when perfection in every aspect of a decade of flying warplanes would be the difference between life and death for the pilot and his crew. There would be no retakes, no second chances. He’d stick the crash landing at the perfect angle of attack . . . or he would not.

  In the dark of the predawn hours, Hawke, who’d be flying the German bomber on this mission, had calculated and recalculated the airship’s precise angle of attack at the moment of impact with the surface of the water. This would be no gentle splashdown. It had to be at a very steep angle and look utterly realistic. He’d also gone over the figures for the precise amount of fuel to be left remaining in the wing tanks at the appointed moment of splashdown. The air-filled wing tanks would directly affect the floatation duration once his ship was down.

  Lieutenant Stauffenberg, copilot and navigator, who’d be manning the cockpit’s right-hand seat this morning, was at his side in the staff room in those predawn hours as the skipper and his five-man crew pored over every phase of the flight plans, studied printouts of mid-Channel weather systems, high-level aerial photos of all German naval activity in the area of engagement in the last five days, and pages upon pages of other critical details as the clock wound down to zero hour.

  Stauffenberg, the young lieutenant born in Bavaria to an English mother and a German captain in the Luftwaffe, was a critical component of Hawke’s crew. German was the boy’s first language, and he was word-perfect in that language. He would be the team’s leader once they’d been safely plucked from the wreckage and delivered on board the minesweeper.

  Stauffenberg checked and double-checked everything the skipper asked him to look at and wasn’t surprised to find that Commander Hawke was every bit as thorough about the details as he himself was. Hawke took charge of everyone and everything. He commanded a loyal team of battle-hardened commandos.

  Even in the smallest moment, to see Hawke in control was inspiring. He was the living epitome of the commanding officer you would willingly die for; he conveyed the kind of courage that convinced you that he would unhesitatingly give his life for you, too. He was one of the few men you would put your trust in absolutely.

  And that is why his crew of volunteers was so upbeat and positive that morning, some of them whistling and jostling one another as the hour drew nigh. Even when it had been made painfully clear to them that the odds of surviving the initial crash that day were not even slightly in their favor.

  But the crash was critical to the mission success of Hawke and the entire team. And on that fateful day, their unalloyed allegiance was to the man who would lead them into battle and, they believed, to the ultimate victory. He’d make admiral one day soon, the lieutenant was sure of it.

  * * *

  —

  Today was just two short weeks to the day after Hawke had arrived at RAF Archbury and taken that very first flight out over the Channel in the purloined Luftwaffe bomber. Now Hawke and his elite crew would take to the skies once more. And this time, it was no practice run. He’d sent an encrypted telex to Winston at Bletchley Park. Operation Skyhook has officiall
y commenced, the missive read. The stakes could not have been higher certainly. But Hawke was pleased to see that the morale of his crew, and their determination to succeed, was far higher by a factor of ten. Hawke had seen to maintaining that level every waking moment since his arrival here at RAF HQ.

  “Time to go flying, Skipper,” Ballantine, the tail gunner, said, getting to his feet and slipping into his leather flight jacket.

  The air was clear but bitterly cold. “Weather?” Hawke asked him.

  “Iffy here, sir. Limited visibility and ground fog out on the field. But it looks good out over the target area, sir. A bit of high cirrus scattered here and there at around fifteen thousand but no visibility problems at all. RAF camera footage from yesterday shows two German minelayers and one very large minesweeper patrolling mission target perimeters until late afternoon. The lads say we can expect those vessels back on station later on this morning.”

  “Good, good, Lieutenant,” Hawke said, taking Stauffenberg aside and speaking in low tones. “Now, listen. I assume that you’ve spoken to the lads about me being last out the door once we hit the water? No matter what?”

  “Yes, sir. They’re not very happy about it, sir.”

  “Too bloody bad. This is going to be a very close thing today, no matter how much sugar and sunshine you and the crew manage to pour on it. And believe me when I tell you that I am not abandoning that bloody ship until every last one of our lads is safely outside the damn plane. Look here, if you don’t think you can convince them to—”

  Stauffenberg was immutable. He said, “Sir, I beg you to reconsider. The lads and I just don’t think we can afford to lose our team leader when we get hauled aboard that Nazi minesweeper and—”

  He was decisively interrupted by Hawke. “Listen carefully, Lieutenant. I’m safe in saying that I am the only one here at RAF HQ who is a charter member of Churchill’s ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’! Not you and your poor sods who had the nasty luck to get yourselves caught up in this little web of intrigue created by Uncle Winston and me. This is my own bloody idea and I’ll damn well sink or swim with it. All by myself! Do I make myself perfectly clear, Lieutenant Stauffenberg?”