Pirate: A Thriller

by Ted Bell

  And, he was second in command of the Te-Wu. Tough outfit, to put it mildly. Harry couldn’t even imagine what a badass the number-one guy must be.

  The gentleman now getting ready to kill him was also the officer who had commanded the Thirty-eighth Home Brigade, responsible for the slaughter of thousands of demonstrating students in Tiananmen Square in 1986.

  Busy boy.

  Moon’s mission was to suppress dissidents on mainland China. Which Brock figured was about as tough as being on the California Raisin Board like his step-dad had been before he retired to a sun-kissed casita in Santa Rosa. There just aren’t that many bad raisins, Pop. And there just weren’t that many fucking dissidents period, end of report, in Red China, either. They’d all learned to keep their mouths shut at Tiananmen. It didn’t hurt to cover your eyes and plug your ears, either.

  Moon’s sidekick, a nasty little horror-show featuring a bald head ringed with greasy black locks, leaned casually against the sweaty bulkhead, whistling a pretty ditty. This bullyboy was semifamous, too, an assassin from the sewers of Hong Kong named Hu Xu. Couldn’t forget that name. When Brock had repeated the name on hearing it in a Foggy Bottom briefing room, he had tried a number of different inflections but it had always come out sounding like a question Abbott might ask Costello. Who’s who?

  The four-stars and the Pentagon suits just looked at him and said, “It’s not funny, Agent Brock.”

  It isn’t?

  Hu Xu was, according to his resume, the assistant consultant of interrogations, and looked like an Oriental Peter Lorre starring in a bad sideshow gig with the Ringling Brothers. This was the little chipmunk who’d just broken Harry’s wrist. Both of these Commie agitators had ugly snub-nosed Sansei .45 automatics aimed at his gut. Brock knew at that precise moment that he was dicked, double-dicked, and redicked. Made him slightly sick to his stomach.

  “We’ve been waiting patiently for your arrival, Mr. Brock,” General Moon said in clipped Oxbridge English. He lit a cigarette and stuck it between his thin lips. He kept talking, just letting it burn down without taking a puff. It was kind of cool, actually. “This is my associate, Hu Xu. He will help me find out what I need to know from you. He is a doctor of sorts. A semiretired mortician, actually, who works on both the living and the dead. You seem uninterested, Mr. Brock. Bored. Distracted. Are you?”

  “I’m pretty busy figuring out how to kill you two shitheads and get off this fucking boat. That tune your little pal is whistling. Catchy. What is it?”

  “Beethoven.”

  “I like it.”

  Moon laughed. “I’m curious about you, Mr. Brock. You’ve been difficult to arrest and you have caused my Te-Wu officers some embarrassment in Beijing. Let’s talk for a moment before Hu Xu dissects you, shall we? Have you learned very many of our secrets? You’ll tell me everything under Hu Xu’s injections and expert scalpel anyway. What exactly do you know, Mr. Brock?”

  “Enough.”

  “Tempelhof?”

  “What about Tempelhof?”

  “The Happy Dragon?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Leviathan?”

  “Leviathan? What Leviathan?” Brock said. Moon just looked at him, reading his eyes for a minute. You could tell he’d spent most of his career doing this stuff and was really, really good at it.

  “Given China’s explosive growth, you can hardly blame us for our current political actions, Agent Brock. China is the second-largest consumer of petroleum on earth. You know that. The CIA tracks our consumption numbers on a daily basis.”

  “You’re hooked on oil, pal. Welcome to the club.”

  “China has only an eighteen-day strategic petroleum reserve. Whereas you Americans have 180 days. We find this inequity unacceptable. You have the Saudis. You have Iraq. And, soon, you’ll occupy Iran, or Sudan, and our new oil contracts with those countries will be null and void.”

  “Life sucks when you’re a junkie, doesn’t it, Comrade?”

  “China intends, as you have no doubt learned during your recent travels, to redress this gross injustice in the Gulf.”

  “May I sit on the bed with the deceased?”

  “Please. It’s your deathbed, too, Harry Brock.”

  “Thanks. Hey, here’s one for you. What is the significance of the numerical sequence one-seven-eight-nine? I keep seeing that in the middle of a code break. That one has got me stumped.”

  Moon ignored him. Time for a new tactic. Brock sat on the edge of the bunk and let his hands fall between his legs, a man who knew he’d been bested. After a few long seconds, he looked up at Moon with tired, bloodshot eyes.

  “America will never allow you into the Gulf, General,” he said. “Never. Trust me on that one.”

  “Really? Are you quite sure of that, Mr. Brock?”

  In reality, Harry knew, China was already headed to the Gulf to get her fix. Yeah, China had the oil monkey on her back now, big time. Harry had recently glommed on to the fact that the Reds had moved more than half a million troops into the Sudan. More were arriving every day. This “secret army,” disguised as “guest” workers, millions of them, was slipping into Africa serving as cheap labor. Here was the thing about the Sudan: It was just three hundred miles across the water from the Saudi oilfields.

  But Brock didn’t want to go there. He had to concentrate on more important stuff, like survival. Somehow, he had to live long enough to bring home the bacon. The Chinese weren’t stupid. They knew an American spy satellite couldn’t distinguish between a soldier and a Sudanese migrant worker. The bastards had it all figured out. Only Harry could spoil this Chinese tea party. But first he had to disembark with his head intact.

  Right now, the only thing standing between the world’s shaky status quo and a total collapse of the global economy was the Saudi royal family. If the Chinese rolled from Sudan and into Saudi Arabia—or into any Gulf state—well, you don’t want to even think about that. Where Brock came from, counting on the Saudis was what was called leaning on a slender reed.

  Harry thought about all the things he could say at this point, and then he decided on, “Forget the Gulf, General. How about Mother Russia? Or Sister Canada? They’ve got a lot of sweet crude.”

  Moon had chuckled at “Sister Canada.” He had a sense of humor, you had to give him that. A lot of these Commie four-stars did not.

  Moon said, “We know that America will never allow China into the Gulf. But they will allow our ally to do it, Mr. Brock.”

  “Really? What ally is that? You don’t mean France?”

  Okay, this was the part that really pissed him off. The French. Their behavior toward America in the last decade or so had been despicable. First, their UN votes were bought and paid for by Saddam’s billions. Then, during the early going of the Iraq war, French diplomats were selling details of meetings with U.S. diplomats to the Iraqis! American boys were dying because of French duplicity. It made his blood boil. And he wasn’t the only one in Washington who was hot and bothered.

  General Moon laughed again. “That cowboy in the White House is capable of many things, Mr. Brock. But nuking Paris is not one of them.”

  He had a point. Wolf Blitzer broadcasting CNN images of the Eiffel Tower leaning at a severe angle would not be well received back home.

  Brock said, “Don’t be so sure about that, General. The prez is kind of pissed off at your little French pals right now. That whole ‘oil for food’ scandal, you know. Bugs some people in Washington. How many billions did it cost Saddam to buy French votes at the UN?”

  “Enough, Brock.”

  “I’ll say enough. The ‘City of Light’ could take on a whole new meaning, Mon General.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, General Moon, that if you and your little French pals don’t watch your step, that town could light up like the Fourth of July.”

  Harry saw the thermonuclear light bulb go off in Moon’s mind. “You’re not serious.”

  “
I’m not? Just try us, General. Keep pushing.”

  Moon never saw the knife. Never saw a human being move as fast as the American spy. All the general felt was the searing pain in his thigh as the blade sliced down to the bone. Then Brock had his gun and he fired at Hu Xu, who was a blur moving sideways away from Moon and toward the door, trying to get a shot at the American without endangering the life of the second-most-powerful man in China. The little cretin fell back against the bulkhead, gouts of blood erupting from the side of his neck.

  Brock smashed him to the floor going out the door. A second later Moon heard a splash. He ran out to the rail and looked down at the surface of the water. He fired Hu Xu’s pistol into Brock’s rippling point of entry until it was empty.

  Moon smiled, pressing his knotted handkerchief against the wound in his thigh. He went back to Hu Xu and tightly wound the blood-soaked cloth around his neck wound. He would live. This American was good fun. Te-Wu reported that he was working alone. He was on the run. He would be caught again before he could escape China, and he would be killed before he could tell anyone what he knew. Even now there was an impenetrable ring around the city of Tianjin. He whipped out his cell phone and speed-dialed the port security commanding officer. The noose started to tighten even while Harry Brock was swimming through two miles of floating garbage.

  But Harry was a resourceful guy. He had slipped through the general’s noose. And he had slipped through another one at the Mongolian border crossing into Kazakhstan when a guard ran out of the guardhouse with a faxed picture of his handsome mug. The AK-47s opened up and Harry dove into the back of a covered truck they’d just opened the gate for. The guy behind the wheel apparently decided the Red Guards were shooting at him, zigzagged, and floored it. So that worked out pretty good. They’d entered Kazakhstan on two wheels.

  After a little adventure on the stormy Caspian Sea, and a few other high and low points, Harry had finally made it to Morocco. And there he was, daydreaming of home under a date palm tree, when a waiter in a wine-red fez bent over to pour him a cup of tea and instead slammed a hypo into his neck. Boom, like that, Harry Brock had found himself back on a slow boat to China.

  Chapter One

  Le Côte d’Azur

  AN ILL WIND LAY SIEGE TO THE PORT. HARD OFF THE SEA IT blew, steady and relentless. For days the strange weather had spooked the ancient harbor town of Cannes, driving everyone indoors. You could hear the icy wind whistling up the narrow cobbled streets and round the old houses and shops that clung to the hills overlooking the bay; you could feel it stealing down chimneypots, seeping under window sashes, rattling doors and the inhabitants sealed behind them.

  All along this southern coast, dust devils and dried leaves, desiccated by the unseasonably cold wind, swirled around the grande dames standing shoulder to shoulder as they faced the sea. Le Majestic, Le Martinez, and the legendary Hotel Carlton. The nor’westerly worried, rattled, and shook acres of expensive hotel glass, the seaward windows of perhaps the most glamorous stretch of real estate in the world, the Côte d’Azur.

  Le mistral, the locals called this foul sea wind, wrinkling their noses in a Gallic gesture of disgust. There was no stench, not really, but still it seemed a frigid plague upon the land, and the man in the street, if you could find one about, kept his collar up and his head down. This wind carried the kind of relentless chill that worked its way deep into the marrow.

  Some seventy kilometers to the west of this meteorological malaise, however, the warm Mediterranean sun was smiling down upon a singularly happy Englishman.

  The cheerful fellow behind the wheel of the old green roadster was Alexander Hawke. Lord Hawke, to be completely accurate, though you’d best not be caught using that title. Only Pelham, an ancient family retainer, was allowed use of “m’lord” in Hawke’s presence. And that was only because once, long ago, he’d threatened to resign over the matter.

  Hawke was a good-looking enough sort, something over six feet, trim and extraordinarily fit. He was still fairly young, in his early thirties, with a square, slightly cleft jaw, unruly black hair, and rather startling arctic-blue eyes. His overall appearance was one of determination and resolution. It was his smile that belied the tough exterior. It could be cruel when he was crossed or took offense, but it could also betray a casual amusement at what life threw his way, both the good and the bad.

  Women seemed attracted to, rather than put off by, Alex Hawke’s rather bemused and detached views on romance, the war between the sexes, and life in general. Because he was quite wealthy, his liaisons with the fair sex were varied and well documented in the British tabloids. He had ventured down the matrimonial aisle just once. That had ended in horror and sorrow when his wife was murdered at the very outset of the marriage.

  A goodly number of men seemed to find him reasonably companionable as well. He was athletic enough to compete seriously when he cared to, and he enjoyed strong drink and a good story. However, most of the truly interesting Hawke stories were known only to a few. He never spoke of his childhood. Unspeakable tragedy had struck the boy at age seven. It didn’t kill, or even cripple him. It made him strong.

  All in all, the sorrows of his past notwithstanding, Alexander Hawke remained an improbably cheery fellow.

  If you were to ask Hawke to describe what he did for a living, he’d be hard-pressed for an honest answer. He was the titular head of a large family business—a sizable conglomeration of banking and industrial entities—but that job required only a light hand on the tiller. He had carefully chosen able commanders to helm his various enterprises and he wisely let them command.

  As for himself, Hawke did the occasional deeply private favor for HM Government. When his particular skill set was required, he also did odd jobs for the United States government. Among his fellow Royal Navy aviators, it was said of him that he was good at war.

  There was never anything on paper. No buccaneer’s letter of marque. He was simply called in whenever they needed someone who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. And someone who could keep his mouth shut afterward. He was, in fact, rather like one of those seafaring eighteenth-century scoundrels from whom he was directly descended, adventurers who plundered ship and shore in the name of the king. Hawke was, in short, nothing more nor less than a twenty-first-century privateer.

  Gunning his Jaguar eastward along the French coast toward the old city of Cannes, Hawke felt like a schoolboy sprung for Christmas. It was, after all, just another unexceptionally beautiful spring day on the Côte d’Azur. The wide-open road that hugged the shoreline, curving high above the blue Mediterranean, beckoned, and Hawke hungrily ate it up, one hundred miles of it every hour or so. Gibraltar had long since receded in his rearview mirror. And good riddance, too, he thought, to that monkey-infested rock.

  And, while he was at it, good riddance to the stuffed-shirt navy as well.

  Hawke was the kind of man to prefer bread, water, and solitary confinement to just about any kind of organized meeting. He had just suffered through two solid days of DNI briefings at British Naval Headquarters on the Rock. CIA Director Patrick Brickhouse Kelly, the guest of honor, had given a sobering presentation on the final day. He had identified another serious crisis brewing in the Gulf. The nub of it was, Red Chinese warships were headed into the Indian Ocean for a rendezvous with the French navy.

  China and France? An unlikely alliance on the surface. But one with grave implications for stability in the Gulf region. And thus, the world.

  No one in Washington was exactly sure when, or even if, this much-ballyhooed naval exercise would occur. But all of the blue-suit Royal Navy boys at Gibraltar were quite exercised about it. The very concept stirred their blood. Not a few of them were fantasizing a replay of Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar, Hawke thought. And Blinker Godfrey had provided more than enough charts, facts, figures, sat photos, and mind-numbing reports to whet their brass whistles. Endless stuff.

  Why? Hawke had wondered, squirming in his chair. It was no
t a difficult concept to comprehend: France and Red China, sailing jointly into the Indian Ocean. You can actually express that notion in one sentence. Maybe ten words. Most situations Commander Hawke dealt with were like that. Straightforward and not irreducible. In Royal Navy parlance, however, that one sentence had translated into forty-eight hours of squirming around in a smoke-filled room trying to find comfort on a hard wooden chair.

  British Naval Intelligence, Gibraltar Station, had an especially nasty habit of providing far too much unnecessary detail. This tendency was personified in one Admiral Sir Alan “Blinker” Godfrey, a pompous chap who never should have been let anywhere near a PowerPoint computer presentation. Even back in the day, when the old walrus had his antiquated overhead slides to present, he simply didn’t know how to sit down and shut up. More than once he’d caught Hawke at the back of the briefing room fingering his Black-Berry and made unpleasant remarks about it.

  So, overbriefed and underslept, Hawke finally escaped. He cleared the Spanish border checkpoint at the Rock and headed out along the sad and condo-ruined coast of Spain. As he wound up the C Type’s rev counter, he found himself turning over the salient points of the prior evening’s brief in his mind.

  The bloody French were at the heart of the matter. Their Foreign Trade minister, a corrupt and virulent anti-American somehow related to Bonaparte, was a constant worry. No surprises there; the man had been making relations with France increasingly difficult for some time. No, the truly worrisome mystery at this point was French involvement with the Red Chinese. Eyebrows were raised when Brick Kelly called them that; but “Red” was an adjective CIA Director Kelly had never stopped using, since, as he said in the briefing, “If that group of Mandarins in Beijing ain’t red, then I don’t know who the hell is.”

  Kelly then put up a chart: in the preceding year, Red China had quadrupled her military budget to eighty billion U.S. dollars. She was buying carriers and subs from the Russians and building her own nuclear missile submarines as fast as she could. In the preceding months, Kelly said, hard American and British intelligence had shown France and China engaging in secret joint naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait on seven different occasions.