Dragonfire

by Ted Bell

  CHAPTER 45

  Dragonfire Club, the Bahamas

  Present Day

  Stoke and Hawke were up early and went for a five-mile run on the beach. Two-and-a-half miles out, same thing back. On soft sand, mind you. It was the first time since the night at Teakettle Cottage when he and Pelham had been mutilated by Shit Smith that he’d really felt worth a good goddamn. He had energy again, maxed out his nitric oxide, energy to spare, and he wanted to continue on the arc of healing and restoring his body to its prior fitness.

  The run was not entirely about sweat and fitness. Hawke had been looking at pictures of the Tang residence perched atop the highest hill on the island. It was certainly big enough, built on about six different levels, meandering around and down the hillside to where the jungle encroached. The postmodern structure looked to have been built on a clearing at the very top of the hill. It was totally surrounded by dense jungle and warnings like PRIVATE. NO TRESPASSING! And orders to KEEP OUT! GUARD DOGS!

  His curiousity piqued, Hawke said, “Let’s go take a look at this damn thing, Stoke. It’s two and a half miles away, at the southern tip of the island. The beach runs along directly below it. It’s jungle all the way, but we’ve got your machete.”

  “You gonna carry, boss? Just in case,” Stoke said.

  “Yeah. I’ll stick the Walther in the waistband of my swimsuit. You?”

  “Around this place? Always. Listen, before I forget, I saw something on my way down here from Miami I meant to tell you about soon as I got off the G-plane.”

  “Now’s as good a time as any, man.”

  “Well, it was at the end of the flight. We were coming out of five thousand feet, descending and on final approach. I happened to be looking out the window, expecting to see blue water. But what I saw was green. It was a giant mangrove swamp, stretching out as far as I could see. And suddenly we’re over water again. Right in the center of the swamp was a large bay, totally surrounded on all sides by the dense mangroves.”

  “Tell me this is going to be good, Stoke,” Hawke said, wondering where this was going.

  “Gonna be good enough, I’m tellin’ ya. So, anyway, right smack-dab in the middle of this big bay? A goddamn island! Pretty big island. Completely overgrown with jungle and mangroves, just a narrow band of sand all the way around the perimeter. No sign of life whatsoever. But—and here’s the thing—we were descending rapidly now, and I was amazed to see these big signs posted everywhere, on stilts out in the water, all around the whole damn island.”

  “Could you read them?”

  “Yeah. And I did, just before we cleared the swamp about ten minutes before we touched down at Nassau. They all said the same thing: ‘Private property! Intruders will be shot!’ and ‘Warning! Armed guards!’”

  “What the hell?” Hawke said.

  “My thought exactly. What the hell? Remember that time in the Amazon? That entire city that Papa Top had created under the jungle canopy where no satellites could ever see it? Houses built up in the trees and connected by wooden bridges. . . .”

  “Yes, I certainly do remember. We barely got out of there. So, you’re saying you think there might be something on that island? Some kind of compound hidden deep beneath the trees and the mangroves?”

  “Exactly. Just what I was thinking. You think we should go take a look this afternoon, assuming we don’t get eaten alive by no damn guard dogs?”

  “Absolutely. Lots of secrets down here. I want to get to the bottom of every one of them. And I want to find my godson, Henry, damn it.”

  “We’ll find him, boss. Don’t you worry yourself about that! You think he’s still here in the Bahamas, somewhere or other?”

  “Yes. The Queen of England’s grandson is a very big fish for them to have landed. I think the brothers would want to keep him close. Somewhere they could keep an eye on him, twenty-four seven. So someone like us doesn’t come along and snatch him.”

  “Think you’re right about that, brother,” Stoke said, mopping the sweat from his face with the back of his hand.

  “I suppose we’ll see about that,” Hawke said.

  And, indeed, he would.

  It just didn’t turn out exactly as he had anticipated.

  CHAPTER 46

  Devil’s Island, the Bahamas

  Present Day

  Acold front had crept ashore on cat’s-paws during the night. Day had dawned on a thick, heavy layer of fog, a real pea-souper, as Hawke called it back home in dear old Blighty. He pulled the glass slider open, and he and Stokely walked out onto the broad terrace. You could hardly even see your hand in front of your face.

  “Okay, Stoke. Let’s do this.”

  “In this crap? Do what? We can’t even see. Hell, I couldn’t even button up my fly or tie my damn shoes.”

  “I know the route to the marina in my sleep. We’ll be fine. Man up, Stoke!”

  “Whatever.”

  “And don’t say ‘whatever.’ Makes you sound like a pompous dickhead.”

  “Hey, hold up. Did somebody get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? I think so. . . .”

  Hawke just stared at him for a few seconds and stepped back inside the living room.

  So, he and Stoke took the elevator down to the underground garage and climbed back aboard his trusty motorcycle, the amazing Vincent Black Shadow that Zhang, God bless her crazy little heart, had found for him at some old garage over in Nassau.

  Even though Hawke knew the route in his sleep, he drove very slowly through the thick stuff. He wanted to fire up the Wally, shove off, and be out of the harbor before the fog lifted. He and Stoke were clearly en route to someplace they definitely should not have been going to, and the fewer people who had eyes on him leaving the harbor this morning, the better.

  They were headed to, for want of a better name, No-Name Island, the place where, according to strategically located signs posted everywhere, they could well expect to find themselves torn limb from limb by vicious man-eating guard dogs. No picnic on the beach was this very mysterious destination. And apparently, the island was home to some secret or other nasty business that the Tang brothers and, quite possibly, the Chinese Secret Police would very much have liked to keep all to themselves.

  It had occurred to Hawke more than once that the terrible twins might even have been Chinese government intelligence agents, working all over the world in the shadows for Beijing. He’d have to ask his CIA pal Brickhouse Kelly, about that question sometime. If they were involved at the highest levels in Beijing, it would explain a lot of the very odd things that Hawke had witnessed around here since his arrival more than a week earlier.

  Hawke’s grandfather, Blackie, who had retired as Admiral Lord Hawke, had been a great unsung hero of the war with Hitler, someone who had spent a great deal of time in Washington during the war, posted as a naval attaché. He’d apparently struck up a great friendship with the newly arrived Chinese ambassador to America in the war years, an ever-deepening friendship that had lasted until the ends of both their lives. This very handsome and charming Chinese gentleman had once visited at his grandfather’s home—a castle, really—in the Channel Islands, and Hawke could still remember him as a tall, kindly man, one who had shared a deep friendship with his grandfather, something that felt akin to love itself.

  Hawke had never forgotten the man’s name.

  It was Tang. Tiger Tang. Same name.

  Hawke had found a place where he could stow the Vincent Black Shadow bike whenever he took the boat out, someplace where no one would really think to look. Behind a deserted building that appeared to have once been a prosperous bait-and-tackle shop, there was a dense thicket of cabbage palms. Once he’d left the bike in the thick of it, about thirty or forty feet inside, it was all but invisible to the naked eye.

  Despite the fog, they made it to the marina without incident. Once he’d stow
ed the bike, they were out on the water and slowly making their way beyond the harbor mouth at dead-slow speed. This was to keep the engine sound down to a minimum. The fog, if anything, was even thicker out here in open water. It was a cold, wet fog, and Stoke had gone below and fetched their bright orange Henri Lloyd foul weather jackets. He’d also brewed a pot of hot black coffee, which Hawke gulped down to stave off the chill.

  Hawke was at the helm, with Stoke standing beside him. Stoke had studied the marine charts of New Providence, Nassau, and the surrounding islands. Back-timing from Air Hawke’s landing at Nassau, he was able to approximate the location of No-Name Island and marked it with an X on the chart and put the coordinates info into the GPS mounted above the helm station. Hawke had also fired up the radar, and given the early hour and the lack of marine traffic, he thought it was safe to open up the throttles out here and get there in somewhat of a hurry.

  Half an hour later, the fog had finally dissipated. He was now able to firewall the throttles of the big Volvo Penta 650 HP outboards on the transom, coming out of the hole in the blink of an eye and getting the boat instantly up on plane, trimmed for speed.

  Still, it took nearly an hour before they entered the vast reaches of the mangrove swamp. It was exactly like the ones down in the Keys, where they had once run down a murderer. Also, Stoke had done his Navy SEALs training there. So, they both knew pretty well how to get a boat in and out of these things.

  At first, Hawke had to throttle back and slow the boat to idle speed to make it through the swamp to the bay that Stoke had described. It was, he’d said, almost in the very center of the sprawling mangroves, hundreds, perhaps thousands of acres in size. Off the beaten path, but plainly visible from the air. Mangroves are a very tough species of marine plant indeed, replicating themselves faster than weeds.

  But the way forward, the way they managed their progress once inside the stranglehold of the mangroves, was simple and straightforward, just the way Stoke had been trained to do as a SEAL.

  Stoke stood, legs wide apart, on the wide, flat bow with his trusty machete in one hand and his assault knife in the other. He would either push aside the vegetation to allow their passage or, worst case, hack his way through with his machete, creating not only a way in, but, more important, a way out. As he told Hawke, he had reason to suspect they might well need to make a very hurried exit from the isle of secrets. Hawke told him that he, too, had come to that conclusion.

  If he and Stoke had to run for it, it would be because they were running for all the marbles—indeed, for their very lives.

  CHAPTER 47

  Devil’s Island, the Bahamas

  Present Day

  The previous evening, Stoke had stowed all their ammo and the heavy artillery in the storage lockers located in the transom at the rear of the Wally’s spacious cockpit. He’d included an M32 grenade launcher, because it would be his one chance of chasing away, or sinking, any threatening vessel that got too close for comfort. Put a grenade down the throat of a pesky patrol boat with a .50 cal mounted on the bow and watch ’em scatter—that had been his combat experience with the M32 both in training and in country.

  After they’d been inside the suffocating green jungle for a good twenty minutes, Hawke shouted at Stoke on the bow, “Hey, give me a rough estimate of how far we are from the bay, Jonesie!” It was his new nickname for his partner, and Hawke knew just how crazy it drove him.

  Jonesie? Gimme a damn break, man. Hawkie. How you like that? he thought but didn’t say.

  “Yeah, boss, I’m starting to see little pieces of daylight up ahead. I’d say another ten minutes. Maybe less. Just keep doin’ what you’re doin’, boss man! We’re making some damn progress now . . . almost out. . . . Here we go!”

  The Wally tender, gliding forward now at idle speed, emerged into another world. Gone was the infernal tangle of mangrove bushes that had made Stoke so claustrophobic. In their place, a spacious, tranquil world of blue skies, clear blue water and bright sunshine. A placid bay hidden away from the rest of the world.

  And, of course, dead ahead, the No-Name Island.

  As on the day Stoke had first seen it from Hawke’s Gulfstream, there were no signs of human life anywhere, with the possible exception of all the warning signs everywhere. Then the strangest thing. There did seem to be hundreds, if not thousands, of flocks of snow-white birds nesting on the island. Everywhere you looked, nesting in the trees all along the shoreline of the island. To Stoke’s eye, it literally made this tropical coast look like there’d been a heavy snowfall the night before. “Look at this place, boss. Like a damn Bahamian Christmas card or something,” he said to Hawke.

  Countless more of the birds came and went, swooped in and out, whole flocks of them, by the hundreds, suddenly rising up en masse into the blue sky from somewhere in the interior of the island. They made no noise at all, no squawking like flying rats, which was what Stokely called the infernal seagulls down in the Florida Keys.

  Stoke turned around and called back to Hawke, “Where we going to beach this thing, boss?”

  “Does it matter?” Hawke said reasonably enough. There was not, as far as he could see, a dime’s worth of difference where they beached the Wally.

  “I guess not. All the same shit around here, far as I can see.”

  “I’m going in dead ahead. Unless you see some reason why I shouldn’t. . . .”

  “You mean, like, uh, like a mine? Something like that? Nothing would surprise me around here. They probably booby-trapped the beaches and shit.”

  “Yeah,” Hawke said, throttling back and gliding into shore and powering the bow up onto the soft white sand. “Probably got Komodo dragons running loose all over the place. Although I haven’t seen any yet, it’s how this place got its name.”

  “Dragonfire?” Stoke said.

  “Bingo. The original indigenous tribes in these islands passed down lurid tales of giant fire-breathing dragons that only came out of hiding in their caves at night. . . .”

  “Hell is a Komodo dragon, anyway? They ain’t fire-breathers, are they?”

  “Much worse. Like something out of your worst nightmare. You don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah, I do. Specially if I’m ’bout to come face-to-face with one of these bad mamajamas.”

  “I had to deal with Komodos once. A private island in Indonesia. The man I’d gone there to kill had two of them chained by his front door. And a lot more around the estate. Huge, ugly animals. Imagine a two-hundred-pound lizard that was over ten feet long. Incredibly fast animals, enormous powerful jaws. Capable of covering ground about as fast as a bloody cheetah. Venomous bite that secretes an anticoagulant, so one bite and you’re done for. I had one chase me up to the top of a tree. It was about to take my leg off when I put a round between its eyes.”

  “Damn!”

  “This Indonesian guy? He kept about seven or eight of these brutes penned up on his property. He caught any trespassers? Like me, for instance? Got themselves thrown in the Komodo pen at feeding time. Bad way to go.”

  “You trying to scare me, you are succeeding. You don’t really believe they’ve got those damn things running around loose down here, do you?”

  Hawke laughed. “C’mon, Stoke. Lighten up. I was just kidding you a little. Okay. Sorry, not sorry. I’m running this thing up onto the sand. You tie off a line to the bow cleat and run it up to the tree line and secure us to one of the big palms.”

  “You got it,” Stoke said, and did it. “Let’s move out, boss.”

  And then they were in dense jungle once more. Stoke couldn’t believe how fast the jungle swallowed them up. Not mangroves, thank God. Just good old-fashioned palm trees and looping vines and huge banana plants and wildly colored tropical vegetation. Each man was carrying a machine gun, a sidearm, and an assault knife. They’d worn heavy khaki trousers and long-sleeve shirts to protect themselves against
insect bites, mosquitoes, whatever might come their way.

  Hawke held a finger to his lips, and they continued forward in silence, taking care not to step on fallen and desiccated palm fronds or anything that made a sound. A moment later, he pointed to the trunk of a tree, and Stoke saw a thick cable running up into the tree, ending at a fan-shaped microphone. The entire jungle had been wired for sound!

  Hawke knew that whoever these people were, and whatever the hell they were up to around here, it was nothing good. This godforsaken hump of sand was not home to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the British Red Cross, or the Little Sisters of the Poor. Oh, no!

  It was the devil’s work they did here; he was pretty damn sure of that.

  Hawke smiled. He’d finally thought of a perfectly appropriate moniker for this bloody tropical paradise.

  Devil’s Island.

  And he knew he’d come to the right address.

  CHAPTER 48

  Dundee Rail Junction, Scotland

  February 1942

  Shortly after all the lads had arrived on station in the little village of Dundee in the north of Scotland, and established a garrison in the decidely dilapidated Hotel Royal Highlander across the road from the Dundee Railway Station, Ian Fleming, always rightly concerned about troop morale, took it upon himself to fashion something of a pub in the drafty ground-floor lobby. He’d called it the Red Indian Pub, in honor of the hardened warfighters who made up Fleming’s 30AU, his assault unit.

  To say that it was almost instantly a popular destination every evening would not have done it justice. Dundee was not a vast metropolis with a myriad of entertainments for young soldiers. No stompin’ at the Savoy here. No cancan dancers flashing their knickers onstage at the Moulin Rouge. No, the tiny village of Dundee was famous for only two things: the River Dee, one of the world’s most famous salmon fishing rivers, and for Dundee Orange Marmalade.

  In something less than two weeks, Fleming’s Red Indians and Hawke’s Headbangers had been forged by their two extraordinarily charismatic leaders into a single twenty-man fighting unit. And deploying into Germany soon at full strength. They spent their waking hours fanned out all over the Dundee rail yard, familiarizing themselves with the equipment, primarily the locomotives, the logistics of how a rail yard operation functioned, the basic mechanics of the steam engines, and the use of the controls, especially brakes, throttles, and engine-starting procedures.