Dragonfire

by Ted Bell

  The two warriors bolted simultaneously, Hawke going left and Stoke right. Three fast strides into the mouth of the raised weapons, and then they both dove forward, going in low, their shoulders catching the enemies hard at their kneecaps and shoving them violently backward. Two of them were down, howling in pain with severely disjointed knees.

  Hawke’s and Stoke’s tremendous forward momentum had carried them well beyond the bugger in the middle. Indeed, it had carried them into the heavy green vegetation and tumbling down a small hill into the undergrowth.

  Suddenly, there was movement in the dense foliage above them. And staccato rounds of incoming machine-gun fire kicked up little clods of damp soil all around them as the gunner found his range. It was clear there were two guns right now; one of the injured guys was back in the fray.

  “Boss!” Stoke cried, yanking Hawke’s arm hard enough to dislocate his shoulder. “Get inside those trees!”

  “One second,” Hawke said, his sidearm suddenly in his hand. “I’ve got this guy!”

  He pulled the trigger three times, and one of machine guns went silent. Rounds from the other were still whistling round his head as he followed Stoke’s mad dash into the thick cover of the trees.

  “Gimme some cover fire, boss man. I’m going upstairs.”

  Instantly, the big man was racing upward, grabbing branches of the nearest tree as fast as he could climb.

  A moment later, a single shot rang out from the top of the tree. A scream from the thick green stuff above pierced the jungle, and then it stopped.

  Stoke, hanging from the lowest branch, said, “Boss, we got to exfil and pronto. Sure they heard this little fracas down below at the camp. We got to get to the beach before they send the cavalry up here!”

  Stoke and Hawke dashed back into the dense jungle on the run, headed back to the crescent of sandy white beach where they’d hidden the speedboat.

  They were breathing hard by the time they got to the Wally.

  Hawke reached inside the cockpit and lifted the lid of the storage locker in the transom, feeling around for something.

  Stoke said, “What are you lookin’ for?”

  “I need that canvas tarp you wrapped the weapons in.”

  “Just a sec,” Stoke said, and climbed into the cockpit. He bent over and looked in the locker. “This it?” he said.

  Hawke said, “Yeah, thanks. I need you to drape the tarp over the transom and use the aft cleat to secure it to the boat somehow so that the wind won’t blow it off.”

  “Okay, but why?”

  “Because, Stoke, if we get one of those Chinese patrol boats on our tail, I don’t want them getting a look at the name on the transom. Chop-Chop is the name of Jackie Tang’s three-hundred-foot yacht, you know, and this tender carries its name, TT/Chop-Chop, back here on the transom. After what just happened? Anybody sees us leaving this island and heading back to Dragonfire Club?”

  “Got it. We’re F-ing toast. Let’s get the F outta here, brother man! Shall we? As you would put it, boss.”

  “Indeed, we shall, young Jones! Tallyho!”

  “Like the man said,” Stokely opined.

  He’d never understood what the word “Tallyho” meant, and he wasn’t about to figure it out now!

  CHAPTER 51

  Devil’s Island, the Bahamas

  Present Day

  The day after the “this close” call with death they’d had on Devil’s Island, Hawke and Stoke decided to take a day off. After a long, lazy breakfast by the rooftop pool, they retired to a pair of chaises next to the high-dive board to catch rays. Hawke, who had been something of a diver back in the day, had not seen a board in at least a decade and he decided to put on a little show of his skills for Stoke. He wanted to see how much he still remembered.

  Not much, as it turned out. The first attempted dive, a reverse dive from the tuck position, was not thrilling by any standard. The second, front tuck, got a faint clatter of applause from Stoke and nearby sunbathers. The third, and mercifully the last, was an attempt at a twisting dive from the reverse with one-and-a-half somersaults. He hit the water feetfirst and climbed out, then toweled his hair dry all the way back to his chaise.

  “What did you do that for?” Stoke said.

  “Because I can, that’s why,” Hawke said, irritated with himself for being such an obvious show-off.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Leave it alone, Stoke,” Hawke said, and picked up his book. He was reading a favorite, Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare, and he buried his head in the soggy paperback.

  On the other hand, he and Stoke were certainly enjoying the poolside scenery.

  Thanks to a hot tip from Zhang he’d heard playing back his phone messages earlier that morning, Hawke learned that every Saturday the hotel pool relaxed its very strict policy of not allowing topless bathing. But only for one hour, from eleven o’clock to high noon.

  And that a goodly number of female guests, as well as the “hostesses,” who plied their trade in the Zodiac nightclub up at the Castle, took the opportunity to work on their tans. A few that he and Stoke had happened to meet stopped by to say hello and maybe flirt a little. Not with Hawke, but with the incredibly ripped man giant, Mr. Stokely Jones Jr.

  Shortly after the twelve o’clock hour, the hostesses magically disappeared and, with them, the majority of the male guests poolside. It was hot as hell up here, Hawke thought, but now at least he could tell Stoke about his early-morning call from his friend Brick Kelly in Washington.

  Hawke leaned over to whisper in Stoke’s ear. “Keep your voice way down, okay. I’ve got news for you, and I shouldn’t be shocked to learn that there are hidden mikes all over up here. Got it?”

  “Oh, yeah. I think you could bet on it, boss.”

  Hawke lay back in his chaise, slipped his Ray-Ban Aviators on, closed his eyes against the bright overhead sun, and said: “I got a nice call from my old pal in Washington this morning.”

  “Really?” Stoke said. “The Brickman. How’s that old coot doing?”

  “Well, let’s just say he wants us to ease up on the sightseeing and log more time at the pool or in the fitness center.”

  “How come?”

  “Said he already had received enough e-mail postcards from us highlighting all the sights down here. He got all the ones from Devil’s Island yesterday. He’s all over that with the prez and the SecDef, but he’s been watching the weather, and he worries it’s going to get too hot for us very soon, us being out in the sun all the time. And that this tropical heat wave from the Far East could come at any time now.”

  “We’re sitting on a powder keg with a short fuse. I can dig that.”

  “Yeah. He wants to know how we plan to get out of here if it really heats up in a hurry. Says it would be very bad for him and all his friends if we suddenly got stuck down here and couldn’t get out. He said that his pal Rawhide over at Casa Blanca thinks we could easily become some kind of international celebrities. In a bad way. And he does not—I repeat, does not—want to see us on the cover of People magazine or the Washington Post.”

  “We might cause some kinda international incident, is what you’re saying,” Stoke said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I could see that happening. You remember that time they had that damn incident over in Cuba a few years ago. Folks still talkin’ ’bout that little CIA dustup. Or CIA goatfuck, as Harry Brock calls it.”

  “He mentioned that event, oddly enough. Said take that Cuban incident to the tenth power. Or higher. Depending on how our friends in Chinatown decide to play it when we blow the lid off this thing.”

  “Right about that, boss. Some serious shit would go down.”

  “What comes after World War Two?”

  “Three?”

  “Good guess. He also asked me how my English friend—‘th
at prince of a fellow,’ as he calls him—is doing. I had to be honest, so I told him I hadn’t even gotten around to contacting him since we got down here.”

  “What did he say to that? Pissed?”

  “He said I was terribly rude and that I should give him a ring sometime in the next few days or forget about it, get the hell out of here, and come home. He also said he’d told a friend of his down in Miami all about Dragonfire Bay. His friend said he could use a few days in the sun and was coming down soon to join us.”

  “Boss, I can tell by the look on your face you ain’t happy ’bout this.”

  “Oh, I’m not, believe me. It’s Harry Brock, isn’t it?”

  “Yep, he’s on a flight from Miami to Nassau right now. Gets in at two.”

  “Staying here?”

  “Yes. Somebody pulled somebody else’s strings apparently and got him invited.”

  “I sent him home, remember? After that outrageous stunt he pulled over at the Ocean Club. He got us all thrown out of there! Now, he’s back? What the hell, Stoke? You tell him to come back?”

  “Wouldn’t never do that, boss. You know that.”

  “Then, who did?”

  “Friend of yours. Worried about your ass.”

  “Both my parents are dead. No one left to be worried about me.”

  “It was Brick Kelly did it. Thinks we’re understaffed down here. Thinks Harry’s a helluva an asset in a firefight.”

  “Well, Harry’s coming. Lucky, lucky, me,” Hawke said with a sigh and an air of resignation.

  CHAPTER 52

  In the skies over Germany

  February 1942

  On the Saturday, Blackie Hawke and Ian Fleming found themselves seated upon jump seats in the cockpit, Fleming directly behind the pilot and Hawke behind the copilot. The big bomber lumbering along high above the English Channel was an Avro Lancaster four-engine heavy bomber. It could deliver payloads (bombs) of fourteen thousand pounds. It was also the only bomber capable of holding the RAF’s Grand Slam bombs, weighing in at twenty-two tons. At eighteen thousand feet, the altitude allowed the bomb to attain a near supersonic concrete-penetrating terminal velocity. This old bird was known as The Night Raider, and Godfrey had insisted it was the only aircraft he would accept for a successful Operation Phantom Locomotive.

  Tonight, however, no aerial bombardment. Fleming and the pilot had worked out a flight plan that would take them north out over the North Sea and then south over the German coastline, flying at extremely high altitude over the large industrial city of Hamburg. In addition to the twenty-man commando team, now officially called the Phantom Bombers, there were the two pilots, a navigator, a flight engineer, a bomb aimer, and a midgunner in the turret on top of the fuselage and a rear gunner in the tail turret.

  “Dry feet,” the pilot said when they left the North Sea and crossed over the shoreline at Nordstrand, Germany, and proceeded toward Berlin.

  Ian was busy studying his maps, calculating the country roads that would get his men to their appointed targets in the least amount of time. Hawke, who knew he would get little to no sleep in the next twenty-four hours, was trying to grab a little bit of shut-eye before they hit the silk over the small village of Bad Honnef, Germany.

  Captain George Frederic Beurling, nicknamed Buzz and Screwball, was Canadian, but he had been denied entry to the Royal Canadian Air Force, and he hadn’t been allowed by his parents to join the Finnish Air Force, and finally, after three trips to England to plead his case, he had been accepted into the Royal Air Force at the age of eighteen in 1940. He would retire as one of the top ten fighter aces of World War Two. He had Fleming up front because they were old chums, and he’d flown the man behind enemy lines many times. He found it was helpful to have Fleming with his charts, coordinating courses and corrections with the bomber’s navigator.

  Suddenly, Buzz’s voice was in Hawke’s headphones. “Commander Hawke, I anticipate, assuming that no German Messerschmitts are foolish enough to rise up to engage us over Hamburg, that we will arrive over the drop zone at approximately twenty-one hundred hours. You lads should go suit up and do your final equipment checks. Please inform the squad in the back of the bus that they have one half hour before the jumpmaster is going to throw their sorry asses out of this aircraft into the middle of the back of bloody beyond.”

  Forty-five minutes later, every single man was safely on the ground and accounted for. The wind had carried them even closer to the big red barn than they’d anticipated. One parachutist narrowly avoided landing on the roof. The parachute bearing what they’d come to call “the package” floated down to earth beneath three chutes a few minutes later. Fleming had calculated the maximum speed at which the package could hit the ground without triggering the impact detonators. Not an i undotted, not a t uncrossed, as Ian liked to say.

  * * *

  —

  Commander Fleming and Hawke were on the brink of becoming fast friends. And their partnership, engineered by Churchill and Admiral Godfrey, was already yielding huge dividends in the death struggle with the Third Reich.

  The first thing Hawke noticed upon entering the decrepit structure of the barn was the delightful smell of hot coffee and damp hay blended with high-octane petrol provided by the arriving Norton Courier motorcycles. He’d counted ten already inside with ten more arriving every few minutes. These men were carefully transporting the explosive devices inside and placing them inside the Norton’s black leather saddlebags.

  There was, too, a long table with food for the Phantom Bombers and the newly arriving Germans in their Deutschesbund Courier uniforms.

  These were Fleming’s German Resistance fighters, men who risked their lives every second of every day. And that death, if and when it finally came, would have been the most agonizing exit the Nazis could have devised. Garroted with wire and filmed for the entertainment of der Führer at Eagle’s Nest, near Berchtesgaden. One by one, these brave men went to Ian’s side and either shook his hand or, with great emotion, embraced their esteemed British leader. Hawke looked at his beat-up Rolex diver’s watch. It was half past 10 P.M.

  At the same time, the Phantom Bombers were studying their maps, checking their sidearms, and switching out their RAF flight suits for the German courier uniforms Fleming had ordered up. Donning the leather helmets and goggles, Hawke, donning his own uniform, saw that these men could now easily pass muster for the real thing. Very reassuring, he thought.

  Across the room, Fleming pulled his goggles down over his eyes, climbed aboard the nearest Norton, fired it up, and looked at Hawke. He smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

  Time to go.

  Fleming and Hawke had assigned themselves the idyllic little riverside town of Meissen, located just twenty-five kilometers north of Dresden on the banks of the River Elbe. They had chosen it because it was easily the farthest target away from the LZ, meaning the risk there was the highest.

  A thick, cold fog had rolled in from the sea. Its long grey tendrils gave the night a chilling aspect, and it would certainly impact the timing of travel to and from Meissen.

  On narrow roads, snaking through the countryside, the hazard factor rose considerably. You could misjudge a corner, turn into it too fast, and lose the bike. But, Fleming thought, he’d faced far worse obstacles operating behind German lines!

  The roads on the twisting backcountry lanes were devoid of any signs of life, save the glow of lighted windows that shone through the fog in the cottages lining the many small villages. They were fastidious about maintaining the local speed limits and not doing anything that would draw the attention of the rural polizei.

  Fleming had estimated that it would take them the better part of an hour to reach Meissen. In actual fact, the trip required an hour and a half. Still, they arrived at the rail station with more than enough time to do what had to be done.

  The station house, enwreathed in sw
irling mists of fog, was dark, as was the rail yard, where they were prepared to encounter railway detectives with or without dogs. But all was quiet. Clearly, the threat of any kind of foul play, vandalism, or criminal activity was not a priority concern for the town fathers in this romantic little haven that, for more than a thousand years, had been far more famous for its beautiful porcelain than for anything else.

  Hawke reckoned that the high explosives in their saddlebags were probably sufficient to level the pretty little town, which so far had been spared by British and American bombers.

  Fleming slowed his bike down and stopped as they left the darkened and deserted station house car park and entered the rail yard proper. For a town the size of Meissen, the yard was extensive. Freight trains and passenger cars abounded everywhere he looked.

  Fleming and Hawke both dismounted, and Hawke retrieved a sheaf of aerial photographs of the yard from his saddlebag.

  He took out his penlight and showed Ian the narrow service road that separated the yard. They quickly agreed that, to save precious time, they would bifurcate the yard for the search, with Fleming taking the northern half of the yard and Hawke the southern. Their criteria were very straightforward. They were looking for an isolated locomotive in a remote section of the yard waiting on a siding to be hooked up for the morning run to Berlin. Whoever first found the locomotive that best served their purposes would come find the other.

  They remounted their bikes and roared away in different directions.

  Hawke’s nerves, on the search, were thrumming with excitement. This was one of those amazing moments when a man at war saw the flicker of an idea that was his coming into fruition and realizing that, no matter what might come, he was doing his duty and his very best for King and Country. He was reminded how he had felt when he’d arrived at RAF Archbury and come around a corner of the officers’ club and seen that lovely German bomber that was all his.

  And then he saw it.