Dragonfire

by Ted Bell

  “I guess so, baby,” Hawke said, playfully punching Stoke in his right shoulder. He might as well have punched a two-foot-thick wall of concrete.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty minutes later, Hawke shoved the twin throttles forward, firewalling them. They sped across the small inland bay, where Hawke had first spotted the strange structure, and ran the bow up onto the soft white sand. After off-loading all the scuba equipment, weapons, and gear, they tied a line to the bow. Then, thanks to the powerful Mr. Jones, they managed to pull the tender up inside the heavy thicket of mangroves growing down from the mountainside and spreading out along the beach to the sea.

  The merest suggestion of a crescent moon, hiding behind the high cloud cover, along with a careless scattering of pinpoint stars crowding out the black velvet skies vaulting above painted a soft bluish light on the bunches of palms and the white sandy beach. They were not able to get the Wally completely hidden inside the mangroves. Still, only a small portion of the aft hull remained visible, and Hawke thought she was safe enough in Brock’s care until the break of dawn. He hoped they’d get in and out of the facility much sooner than that.

  The two warriors stood on the beach, donning their gear and checking their ammo and weapons. Each man took an M4A1 assault rifle. Hawke had made the decision that the heavy M-60 machine gun was not really portable enough for a lengthy underwater swim, and Stoke stowed it in the Wally. They each took a SIG Sauer P226 sidearm and a KA-BAR assault knife. As had been agreed earlier, Brock would remain with the boat in case they had any unexpected guests on the beach.

  “All right,” Hawke said, putting a round into the chamber of his P226, “the target is that way. Let’s go up the side of the mountain a bit and keep to the jungle until we get within five hundred yards of the target. Then we get wet, swim out until we’re facing the seaward side of that monstrosity. Stay submerged all the way in, surface inside. Good?”

  “Good for me.”

  “Break a leg, gentlemen,” Brock said, chambering a round in his weapon as they walked away.

  “See that big leafy plant over there? Stay well away from it, Stoke. They’ve got it growing all over the place, especially in places where they don’t want us going.”

  “What the heck is it?”

  “Bahamians call it gympie-gympie. Also known as the moonlighter and the mulberry-leaved stinger. It’s a nettle. But it’s the most painful stinging nettle in the entire world. If those tiny silica hairs on the leaves come in contact with your skin, it’s only a matter of seconds before you experience a level of pain you wouldn’t believe possible.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, only worse. You get the sort of pain that stabs at every inch of your body with a series of electric jolts that can drive your body into anaphylactic shock in a heartbeat. I heard from a training instructor at a jungle-warfare seminar the story of a serviceman who had unwittingly used a handful of gympie-gympie leaves as toilet paper during a training exercise. Thirty minutes later? Unable to bear any more, he shot himself dead.”

  “That’s some bad shit, man. Glad you pointed that out.”

  “Yeah. So, God only knows what we’ll find inside that thing. But I can tell you one thing: They definitely don’t want anyone nosing around the premises or, God forbid, getting inside. My assumption is that Prince Henry ran afoul of the Tang twins, not because of his Randy Andy sexual behavior with the resort staff, although I’m sure that was part of it.”

  “Bad move on his part.”

  “I think he was just as curious about this installation as I am. And that he got caught nosing around out here.”

  “You think they took him out to keep him quiet?”

  “Maybe, yeah. But what I really think is that the prince represented an extremely valuable piece of property to the Tangs. Either as political leverage in a pinch or asking a queen’s ransom for his safe return at some point in time. Or worst case, he’s sleeping with the fishes.”

  “Makes sense. You think, if he’s still alive, he’s maybe still on this island?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s a good place to start looking, once we find out what this place is really all about. Okay, let’s climb up through that little break in the mangroves until we’re in sight of that big bunker or whatever the hell it is. . . . There are two watchtowers, one at each corner of the structure on the landward side. Searchlights, guards with machine guns, you know the drill. So, stay low and stay alive. . . .

  “There it is,” Hawke said, though you really couldn’t miss the damn thing, massive as it was.

  Fifteen minutes later, they had emerged into a small clearing on a promontory elevated about fifty feet above the white beach. Stoke followed Hawke out to the edge to have a look at the monstrosity. They were well above the structure and even the two twenty-foot watchtowers, so they could take their own sweet time figuring out the best route down through the jungle to the sandy white crescent beach.

  “Lordy, I see what you mean. I don’t know what the hell it is, but I can tell you one damn thing: Some serious shit going on down there, whatever it is. And they clearly want nobody but nobody finding out what.”

  Hawke looked at his steel dive watch.

  “Let’s go find out, then, Stokely,” Hawke said, and started down the angled cliff face to the sand and sea.

  Stoke was a step or two behind him. When they got to the water’s edge, they both kept walking, and moments later, they disappeared from sight. Nor was there a trail of bubbles from the two divers below the surface. Stoke had chosen the new Russian rebreather equipment. The latest thing for swimmers conducting combat operations in a heavily guarded war zone situation.

  No bubbles, no troubles, was what the man had said.

  In the end, it would not quite work out that way.

  CHAPTER 37

  Devil’s Island, the Bahamas

  Present Day

  The two men, both exceptionally strong swimmers, had been in the water for nearly half an hour. They were swimming at a depth of roughly ten meters when they became aware of a faint greenish glow in the water beneath them. It seemed to emanate directly from the mysterious white structure. Hawke had judged its size to be approximately three hundred meters in width, by maybe four hundred meters in length. By his calculations, they must have been getting very close to the target.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Stokely gesticulating with very apparent excitement and pointing below them at the bottom of the sea. Hawke looked down and saw what all the excitement was about.

  Three rows of small green lights dotted the sandy bottom! All fanned out in three separate lines from the seaward portion of the complex. In the middle, one straight line protruding out across the seabed at least five hundred yards, and two other identical lines of green lights, one to the left, the other to the right of center. To Hawke, they resembled nothing so much as the runway lights you’d see coming from an aerial view of an airfield at night.

  What the hell?

  Some kind of guidance system perhaps, he thought, swimming hard to catch up with Stokely, who had been increasing his speed the closer they got to finally solving this mystery. Within a couple of minutes, both swimmers saw a massive white structure looming up ahead. It was maybe fifty meters from top to bottom and about twenty meters above the bottom of the bay. The green “runway lights” all disappeared inside the massive opening, spanning the whole width of the structure, right in the middle.

  They both paused, treading water about fifty feet away from what they could only believe had to be the entrance to the damn thing. That is, if it even had an entrance! Behind his dive mask, Stoke was all smiles. He shrugged his big muscular shoulders as if to say, “What the hell, partner? Let’s go see what gives here. See exactly what kind of mischief these boys are up to.”

  The green glow was far stronger here, coming from somewher
e deep inside, it seemed.

  What the hell, indeed? Hawke thought, and the two of them swam side by side and disappeared into the glow inside.

  It was eerie, all right, as if they had suddenly found themselves swimming underwater in some massive swimming pool of the gods lit up by unseen underwater illumination. Hawke motioned for Stoke to stay at this depth, while he went up to the surface to recon the place for the strong possibility of armed guards up there. Or one of the missile frigates cruising offshore.

  * * *

  —

  Hawke kicked his swim fins hard three times and shot to the surface.

  He broached with only his mask visible above the surface. Using his hands and his fins, and rotating his body through 360 degrees, and seeing no sign of guards or personnel, he rose higher out of the water and was greeted with a sight that told him his instincts upon sighting this thing had been right all along.

  His instincts had not lied. It was a bloody nuclear submarine pen, one hundred eighty miles from America’s shores! A Chinese sub pen, no less!

  Hawke dove back down and motioned to Stoke to come up and see what he’d seen.

  “Holy shit,” Stoke said as he and Hawke each pushed their masks back to the tops of their heads and swiveled 360 degrees, getting their bearings. “I mean, seriously? Are you kidding me? Are those what I think they are?”

  “If you think those are advanced Chinese Navy Shine-class nuclear submarines, you’d be correct, Stoke,” Hawke said. “Five hundred seventy-five feet on the waterline, seventy-six-foot beam, and she draws about forty feet and is equipped with nuclear-powered torpedoes. Shine-class subs are powered by two fifty-thousand-horsepower steam turbines and four thirty-two-hundred-kilowatt turbogenerators. Speed is highly classified, but at MI-Six we book her in about twenty-two-point-twenty-two knots on the surface, and twenty-seven knots submerged.”

  Stoke said, “One of those babies could slip out of this pen on a moonless night, dive deep, and be patrolling deep down beneath Biscayne Bay in Miami in less than five hours. Shit, man. This is crazy-pants time!”

  “It is indeed, crazy pants, Stoke. No idea how they’ve managed to maintain the secrecy of this operation. But mystery of the underwater runway lights solved. Some kind of guidance coming and going for the big subs on patrol arriving or departing during typhoon, or even combat, conditions here in this little corner of the Bahamas. Now I know why they have those watchtowers. And the two missile frigates patrolling out here day and night. I need to communicate this with my friend Brick Kelly at CIA and fast.”

  Hawke lifted a Nikon WP-1, a waterproof camera that was hung on a strap round his neck, and began rapidly snapping pictures of everything in sight, capturing the vast interior spaces of the sub pen, the one empty pen, and the two Shine-class subs that were currently moored there. He dove down to grab a few shots of the lower hull and the propulsion system.

  Surfacing, he got what he could of the pen’s vast interior. Above, there were various steel gantries and thick tubing snaking around, which indicated a sophisticated fresh-air-circulation system. At the very rear of the structure, he could barely make out a soft reddish glow that appeared from what looked to be the thick glass of the control room operation.

  Hawke and Stoke clearly hadn’t been spotted yet. If they had been, the whole place would have instantly lit up like the Vegas Strip.

  Hawke checked his dive watch. They would have to get a move on. By his calculation, the two missile frigates were crisscrossing each other right now on the opposite side of the island. Two ships passing in the night and en route to the sub pen.

  Views of a secret Chinese naval base the chief of staff at the Pentagon had never laid eyes on were now priority one. The Shine class of nuke subs was, Hawke knew, the most advanced of China’s fleet of six nuclear subs, with more under construction, plus another fifty assorted diesel-electrics, now deployed in the Indian Ocean, off Australia and Cambodia, and other hot spots around the globe. It would take China a while to have a sub fleet as extensive as the Americans’, but they were building these subs as fast as they could . . . a total of sixty now, but they were on track to vastly exceed the U.S. fleet by 2029. . . .

  The fact that the Chinese Navy had been able to operate out of sight in these waters for so long was both surprising and disturbing. Somebody, somewhere, had dropped a very large ball. Heads would no doubt roll. The American president, the secretary of state, the Pentagon, and the CIA were all going to pitch a fit when Hawke brought this to their mutual attention. And the Tang brothers were going to have to account for their complicity at some point.

  And the Dragonfire Club? It was a powder keg primed to explode.

  Suddenly, Hawke knew that the secret of the prince’s disappearance, while deeply troubling to both Hawke and the Queen, was only the tip of the iceberg here at Dragonfire Club. The fact that China Moon was here, too, sniffing around on behalf of the Chinese Secret Police was becoming more understandable. The Chinese military, not to mention the notorious Tangs, had a great deal at stake down here. A whole lot to hide. And a whole lot to lose.

  “Seen enough, boss?” Stoke said.

  “More than enough. Let’s get the hell out of here before those two missile frigates arrive back on the scene up top.”

  They managed to return to the hotel without incident. Hawke wondered how long their luck would hold. He and Stoke were no doubt pushing their luck; that much was for sure.

  * * *

  —

  Hawke took the elevator up and used the key card to gain admittance to his penthouse suite a little after 4 A.M. The night had turned cold and rainy when he and Stokely had left the marina and ridden back to the hotel after shedding their combat gear and uniforms, stowing them in the forward anchor locker. His ivory white silk shirt and linen trousers were soaked through by the time he shut down the big bike.

  As soon as he stepped inside the darkened penthouse foyer, he knew that something was amiss. He could smell it. There was a faint scent of French perfume and spilled champagne and Gauloises cigarettes in the air. The scent of a woman. And from his bedroom, empty when he’d left it, the sound of someone softly snoring. It was a woman.

  He went to the bar to get a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge. Snapping on the light, he saw that there was an empty bottle of Krug Champagne upside down in an ice bucket and two glasses with lipstick smudges around the rim. What the devil? And then there was the crystal ashtray, once empty, now filled with stubbed-out cigarettes, also bearing the traces of two shades of lipstick.

  Correction. There were two women in his bed?

  He entered the darkened room and turned on a table lamp beside the door. Somewhat to his relief, or chagrin, as the case might have been, there was only one woman in his bed. She was sleeping on her back, her lustrous black hair arrayed back on the pillows. She was naked. Her large breasts rose and fell. Her lips parted, to a soft, almost inaudible whistle, and she stirred, pulling up the bedcovers.

  As always, something resembling heat inside him stirred as well. China Moon had always had that effect on him. Not trusting his ability to resist her charms, he decided not to climb into bed beside her. Instead, he padded out into the living room, lit the gas fire, stripped naked, and wrapped himself in the pale blue cashmere throw that was on the sofa. Then he plopped himself down in the overstuffed club chair, lit a cigarette, and stared into the make-believe fire.

  A lot to think about tonight. A lot on the line. And the sooner he downloaded the chip in the Nikon WP-1 and forwarded all those encrypted images to Brick Kelly at the CIA, Langley, Virginia, the better.

  Behind him, a voice said, “We waited up a long time for you, darling.”

  He didn’t turn around. Just took a drag on his Morland cigarette and expelled a long blue plume.

  It was China all right.

  “Whatever do you mean, we waited up?”


  “I mean, me and Zhang. You won’t believe what happened after we left you. We ran into each other again at the Disco Inferno and ended up burying the hatchet over drinks at the Zodiac Club. A few too many drinks, as it happens. She had the idea to surprise you here in your penthouse when you got back from whatever mysterious secret mission you and Mr. Jones were on.”

  “How did you get in here?” Hawke asked. “And please tell me you didn’t go through my sock drawer.”

  “Zhang used her master key card to get us in. She found the bottle of Krug in the refrigerator, and we decided, what the hell? Drank it and fell into your bed and went to sleep. She gave up on you around two and went home. I, rather obviously, did not.”

  “It occurs to me, my darling, that you are drunk.”

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning! Everybody’s drunk!”

  Hawke sighed and, against his better judgment, felt himself succumbing yet again to her considerable charms. “Come over here. Right now. Stand in front of me, hands behind your back.”

  “Yes, sir, m’lord. Anything you say, sir.”

  She complied with his demands. She was one of those supremely strong and confident women who sometimes liked being told exactly what to do. Let someone else be boss, be in control for a while, giving the orders. That was something, Hawke had long ago discovered, that powerful women needed in order not to burn themselves out; everyone needed a brief hiatus now and then. Just like alpha males needed to let strong women take control of them sometimes.

  China had put his maroon paisley silk Charvet robe on, but left it untied, allowing the nipple of her right breast to play peekaboo with the English spy.

  Hawke said, “Still all about games, aren’t you, China? Well, guess what. We’re in one now. I can see it in your eyes. You want someone to boss you around? Okay, I’m your boss. And this time, the boss wants every scrap of information about events leading up to Prince Henry’s disappearance. Not much scares me. But I saw something on this island tonight that made me afraid. Very afraid. I know you’re hiding something, and I want it now.”