Phantom

by Ted Bell

  Stoke tilted the chair forward so that the man was looking straight down at the parking lot twenty-two stories below. Stoke had to shout to be heard above the sounds of the howling wind and the traffic below.

  “Only thing holding you to this chair are the plasticuffs. One on your wrists and two on your ankles. Darryl’s got his knife out again. Snip-snip, nosedive into space, Viktor. What’s it going to be? You going to call off the dogs, partner? Or are you going down to the lobby level the hard way?”

  He was gagging and choking on his own blood.

  “Mummmpfh . . .”

  “I don’t know that word. Darryl, cut his hands loose.”

  Harry’s knife sliced through the plastic. Gurov instantly pitched forward, his head making a dull thud as his face slammed into the hotel’s exterior wall. His head and torso were now hanging completely outside the building, his arms swinging wildly, only the thin strip of plastic around each ankle holding him to the chair.

  “You prepared to wax this guy, Stoke?” Harry asked. “Take it that far?”

  “You damn right I am. In a heartbeat.”

  “Okay, good to know.”

  Stoke stuck his head out the window and called down to him. “Viktor, time’s up. You’re about to end up on the cutting-room floor. If you want to die, don’t do anything, I’ll understand. If you want to live, and agree to do exactly what I tell you to do, put your hands together like you’re praying.

  The Russian instantly clasped his hands together, interlocking his fingers, finding his voice and crying out, “Stop! I’ll do what you say! Pull me up!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Please! I beg you . . .”

  “Let’s haul him in, Darryl,” Stoke said and they did, setting his chair upright on the floor by the window. Stoke leaned down and put both hands on the man’s violently shaking shoulders, staring into his terrified eyes.

  “Look at me,” he said. “Look at my face. Look at my black face. My eyes. Hear my voice. Never forget me. Because I will not forget you. And if I have to, I will come back for you. I will come back here and I will make you sorry your mama ever met your papa. I will not just kill you. I will drive my fist inside your chest and I will rip your black heart out and feed it to you. And that, Viktor Gurov, is the solemn promise I make to you. Are we clear on that?”

  Viktor nodded his bloody head violently.

  “Good boy. And you tell the goon squad back at the clubhouse to back the hell off Alex Hawke. They don’t, they’re going to find themselves under a pile of rubble. Will you do that for me, Viktor?”

  “Da!”

  Harry said, “Sheldon, question.”

  “Shoot, Darryl.”

  “What do we do with this sack of shit now?”

  “Oh, you’re going to love this. You know that hot English screenwriter we met at the bar near Red Square yesterday?”

  “Yeah, guy who wrote Gorky Park III?”

  “That’s him. Well, he wrote a killer new ending for Viktor’s character. Killer. Matter of fact, he just texted his notes to me. He’s waiting for us now at the location.”

  Brock stood up, smiling at everyone.

  “That’s a wrap,” Harry said. “Next location, people.”

  The next morning, members of the Tsarist Society who arrived for an early breakfast got a bit of a shock. Instead of the triumphal and historic flag that normally hung from the shining brass flagpole projecting high above the street, there was a naked fat man hanging by his heels.

  Absolutely appalling.

  At first everyone thought he was dead. He must have been unconscious, for he abruptly started yelling to be cut down and someone had to call the fire department for a truck and ladder that was tall enough to reach him.

  The firemen lowered him to the street.

  The president of the Tsarist Society, former KGB general Vladimir Kutov, who happened upon the scene at that very moment, hurried over to the great white whale of a man floundering on the asphalt, shivering arms wrapped around his knees, violently rocking back and forth, muttering some unintelligible word. He had lost a lot of blood and was clearly in shock. And his mouth was full of broken teeth, which made his mad ravings even more incoherent.

  “What is it, Viktor?” Kutov said to him. “What the devil are you trying to say?”

  The man managed to utter a single word before he lost consciousness and collapsed in the street, his wild eyes staring up at the sky.

  “Hollywood.”

  Thirty-five

  Istanbul

  Hawke’s naval architect said, “I am launching our tour of the new Blackhawke on the bridge, Lord Hawke, if that suits you. We had a rather dramatic event last night, recorded by the ship’s video surveillance, and I think you should see it first.”

  Hawke didn’t like the “our tour” bit, but he bit his tongue. It wasn’t our boat, it was his damn boat. He and the architect had certainly had their moments during the design and construction of his boat. Architects sometimes had difficulty remembering who would actually inhabit the house, or cross the North Atlantic in a boat. Pure ego, which he could understand, but the best ones knew when to concede to the man who wrote the checks.

  “By all means, sir,” Hawke said. “Lead on, lead on.”

  “Follow me, please, gentlemen.” Abdullah Badie, a reed-thin and somewhat imperious Turkish yacht designer, stepped aboard the monstrous vessel’s boarding platform, easily handling the tricky move from the gunwale of the high-speed tender, bobbing in a mild chop. He turned to offer Hawke a helping hand, which was declined. Hawke had been hopping on and off boats his entire life.

  Once aboard, waiting for Stokely and Harry, Hawke gazed aloft with a mixture of pride and wonder. The bridge deck, which nearly spanned the ship’s fifty-foot beam, towered six decks above him. The foremast soared into the heavens, nearly twenty stories; the press had gushed that the sheer size of this thing he had poured his heart into helping to design and build was magnificent, was stunning, was a dream. A technological masterwork. The final result provided him with much needed satisfaction, solace, and a refuge from the world.

  “This way, gentlemen,” Badie said, his white teeth startling beneath a full black moustache.

  Abdullah, an athletic Turk, tall and bronzed in a crisp white linen suit, turned and sprinted for the nearest staircase. He was quite the dandy, Alex thought, with his scarlet cap and black canvas espadrilles. Hawke, Stokely, and Brock were right behind him, saluting the ship’s sixteen-member crew standing at attention in dress uniforms of black as they passed by. Hawke saw a lot of familiar faces; most of the group had been crew aboard the previous Blackhawke.

  They reached the bridge wing and paused a moment to look down, taking in the grandeur of the clipper yacht’s foredeck in the sunshine—brass, stainless-steel fixtures, the varnished cap rail, teak decks—everything scrubbed, polished, and gleaming to a fare-thee-well. Brock stared, openmouthed in wonder since he first laid eyes on the megayacht lying at anchor. He looked over at Hawke and said, “So, Lord Hawke, a boat like this will set you back, what—a couple of—”

  “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it,” Hawke said, quoting a fine old sport-fishing boat-builder from Florida he’d known, an old salt named Rybovich.

  “Boss,” Stoke said, eyeing the colorful signal pennants running from bow to stern up and across the tops of the three giant carbon fiber masts. Each flag was an international letter, understood only by mariners. “You know, older I get, more my maritime alphabet gets a little rusty. I know you got an important message spelled out up there in the rigging—what do the flags say, anyway?”

  Hawke looked at Stoke and smiled. “You would ask that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, I know you never miss an opportunity to mess with folks’ heads, that’s all. ’Specially when it comes to putting out special flag messages on your
boat, knowing most people can’t read ’em.”

  Hawke said, “Those particular flags read: ‘Rarely does one have the privilege to witness vulgar ostentation displayed on such an epic scale.’ ”

  Brock and Stoke both laughed out loud. It was vintage Alex Hawke and reminded them that the man in charge always believed you could still have fun, even when the mission was deadly serious. It actually increased your chances of survival and success. Both men had witnessed it many times.

  Istanbul’s Barbaros Yacht shipyard, where Blackhawke had been built and was now riding at anchor, was located just east of the city on the left bank of the Bosporus. The size of Hawke’s new yacht was completely and utterly out of scale with anything nearby. The flotilla of handmade, hand-painted fishing boats, the large tourist ferries traveling back and forth across the Bosporus, even Hawke’s palatial hotel standing on the shoreline, all were dwarfed by its presence.

  Blackhawke had kept hundreds of Turkish workers employed for more than a million man-hours over four years. This had made the British owner something of a celebrity in Istanbul, a fact he had learned only when he checked into the hotel and found that he’d been upgraded to the presidential suite. His choice of the Barbaros yard had brought Turkey’s shipbuilders long-sought international visibility. In the local papers he was portrayed as something of a hero, his vessel a symbol of Turkish pride.

  From the ship’s bridge, the vessel had a commanding view of the strait separating Europe from Asia. The $200 million yacht, its three-hundred-twenty-foot hull a gleaming jet black, was anchored within sight of the Ciragan Imperial Palace, now a five-star hotel that reeked of marbled opulence, flower petals in every fountain and in every warm bath run by the staff for tired guests.

  Arriving a day later than expected, Hawke had taken rooms there to be near his new vessel. When he saw his suite, he felt like Suleiman the Magnificent, gazing through the opened French doors at his magnificent Blackhawke, lit up against the purple night sky with halogen lights from stem to stern.

  Stoke and Harry arrived at the Palace, jet-weary and fresh from the hellish Hotel Metropol in Moscow. Upon seeing their splendorous rooms overlooking the sea, they felt like they’d died and gone to heaven. Upon arrival, they’d decided to find out the true meaning of a “Turkish bath” and had met Hawke in the bar for cocktails afterward with smiles on their faces. Hawke didn’t ask.

  Once the men were inside the bridge, which boasted a forty-foot curved control panel that looked somewhat more sophisticated than the space shuttle, Badie asked the new owner to have a seat in the captain’s command chair, a lushly padded black leather throne on a stout chromed column that raised and lowered hydraulically.

  “Looks like Captain Kirk in that chair,” Stoke said, and Brock stifled a laugh. Harry was literally awestruck by the vessel. He dreamed of cruising the world’s oceans, circumnavigating the globe, sailing to Antarctica and rounding Cape Horn. All in a cocoon of mahogany and oceans of wine he couldn’t begin to name much less afford.

  “This is a lot of boat,” he said to Hawke, who smiled and replied, “As Hillary Clinton once said, Harry: It takes a village.”

  Abdullah Badie cleared his throat and gained their attention.

  “With respect, I’d like to show you gentlemen some video footage that was recorded by Blackhawke’s underwater surveillance cameras just moments after midnight last night. There are four oscillating cameras mounted on the hull below the waterline: one at the bow, one at the stern, and two amidships—one to port, the other to starboard. The screens above you will show the feeds from all four cameras, equipped with IR lenses for nighttime visibility. Roll tape, please.”

  The screens flickered, but remained black.

  “Please be patient a few seconds. While we wait I will remind you gentlemen that you were all supposed to arrive yesterday morning and be sleeping aboard Blackhawke last night, no?”

  Hawke said, “Yes, but I was informed by your staff that the air-conditioning was not working and that none of the French bed linens nor any of the silver or china had arrived. Held up in Customs at the airport. So I elected to check into the Palace.”

  “I certainly understand. We’re working with Customs officials now, Lord Hawke. We intend to remedy this unfortunate situation shortly. I assure you, you will all be sleeping aboard this evening. It will be—how do you say—shipshape.”

  Suddenly a loud, keening alarm sounded on the speakers. On the screens, a wavering blue-white orb appeared, moving closer at about eight knots.

  “Hell is that?” Stoke said.

  “You will see momentarily, when it makes a sharp turn to port,” Badari said. “Now—you see it—the profile?”

  “I see it, but what the hell is it?”

  “A two-man submarine. European-built, four tons, called a Comsub. Look, here come two more, one to either side. That alarm you heard was the ship’s underwater sonar array registering three intruders breaching our half-mile security perimeter.”

  Hawke and his two men stared at the three oncoming wafers of light, eerie in the blackness of the sea.

  The lead sub turned hard left. You could make out its rounded shape, a long torpedo-like cigar, with a raised and windowed cockpit. But suspended underneath it hung another object, also torpedo shaped. The flanking subs turned to port as well, continued for a few hundred yards, and then all three turned to starboard, now heading directly toward the cameras.

  “Torpedoes?” Hawke said quietly. The tense atmosphere on the bridge was suddenly palpable.

  “Yes, sir. Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAMs, antiship weapons.”

  Hawke watched, mesmerized.

  “Watch carefully,” Abdullah said. “Now, they launch the JDAMs!”

  All three were launched simultaneously, streaking forward toward Hawke’s yacht. They instantly separated, one appearing to head for the bow, one for the stern, and one directly amidships.

  “Holy shit,” Brock said. “What the—”

  At the bottom of the screen, three smaller torpedoes could be seen streaking toward the incoming JDAMs.

  “Our ATT system in action,” Abdullah said, “Anti-torpedo torpedoes. Only seven inches in diameter and one-oh-five inches long but they pack an enormous punch and their acoustic sensors cannot be evaded by electronic countermeasures. The ATT’s microprocessors rapidly calculate all acoustic information and make timely maneuvers to intercept the incoming threat.”

  A second later, three huge underwater explosions roughly a quarter of a mile from Blackhawke. The three two-man subs instantly turned tail to run, their propellers churning furiously.

  Now, three more torpedoes could be seen streaking after the fleeing subs.

  “Those are offensive weapons,” Badie said, “called VLTs, or very lightweight torpedoes. They are all that is necessary in this case. We also have ship-killer JDAMs in the Blackhawke arsenal.”

  Three more explosions, less violent, but just as deadly. There was nothing left of the three submarines or their crews that was distinguishable in the water.

  “My God,” Hawke said. He knew about the vessel’s armament and defense systems, but he’d no idea they’d be tested before he even took her to sea.

  “They were meant for you, sir. That is my belief. Whoever staged this attack was aware of your plans and believed you would be sleeping aboard the vessel last night and not at the hotel.”

  Hawke looked at Stoke and Brock, the two men in a state of semishock. After the havoc they’d wreaked in Moscow, another attack in such short order was disturbing to say the least.

  Hawke smiled and said, “Well, they keep setting them up and we keep knocking them down. I guess all we can do is be the last ones standing who get tired of this goddamn game.”

  “You think that was the Russians?” Brock said.

  “Who else, Harry?”

  “Maybe that fucking ph
antom machine? Whatever the hell it is. This superintelligent cyberwar Singularity machine you’ve all been talking about.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I think this attack was a bit prosaic for technology that advanced.”

  “Shall we continue the tour, sir?” the Turk asked Hawke. He was proud of the video. And he didn’t feel he’d gotten the appreciation that was his due.

  “No, we shall weigh anchor and spread sail. Every bloody yard she carries. Right now. Inform the captain that I want to be under way immediately, if not sooner. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “No buts. I said now.”

  “We’re going sailing,” Stoke said.

  “You’re damn right we are,” Hawke said, his cold blue eyes ablaze with anger and grim determination.

  Thirty-six

  London

  Alex Hawke smiled as he hung up the dressing room telephone and went back to his packing. He and Sir David Trulove had just concluded that a strong warning had been delivered to the Tsarists. Hawke’s crack Red Banner counterterrorist team in Moscow—Ian Concasseur, Stokely Jones, and Harry Brock—had successfully conveyed an unmistakable message. And now C was going to provide Hawke’s son with heavily armed security round the clock. Hawke and Congreve were leaving for California today to question Dr. Waldo Cohen’s widow about her late husband’s suicide.

  Three MI6 plainclothes security officers had already arrived at Hawke’s large house on Belgrave Square. Two were to be posted near the main street entrance, the third inside the home, posted on the fourth floor near the boy and his recuperating guardian, Nell Spooner.

  But neither Hawke nor Trulove had any illusions that the young son of Alex Hawke was safely out of danger. Nor was Hawke himself exactly out of the woods. Still, Alex was comforted by the notion that, at minimum, he’d bought himself some time. He intended to find a way to ensure Alexei’s safety himself.

  Hawke threw his shaving kit, matching silver hairbrushes, and a couple of P. G. Wodehouse novels into the open leather seabag on the table. He’d read all the Jeeves and Wooster novels many times, but never tired of them. They were the only things that could make him laugh when he least felt like it.