Ted Bell
Crash Dive
Midnight. No moon, no stars, the sea a flat black void a few feet beneath his wingtips. For a man streaking through the night over hostile foreign waters at nearly the speed of sound, at an altitude no sane man would dare consider, Alex Hawke was remarkably comfortable. He was piloting an F-16 Viper. The matte-black American-built fighter jet was one of many purchased and heavily modified by Britain’s Royal Navy for under-the-radar special operations just like this one.
Lord Alexander Hawke, a former Royal Navy pilot and combat veteran of the Gulf War, now a seasoned British intelligence officer with MI6, had to smile.
Like the Syrian hospital bed he’d only recently escaped, the sleek F-16’s single seat reclined at an angle of exactly thirty degrees, transforming the deadly Viper, Hawke thought, into something along the lines of a supersonic Barcalounger. Leave it to the Americans to worry about fighter pilot comfort.
His eyes flicked over the dimly lit instrument array and found nothing remotely exciting. Even the hazy reddish glow inside the cockpit somehow reassured him that all was well. He was less than six hundred nautical miles from the tiny island of Xiachuan, his destination, and closing fast. Every mile he put behind him lessened the chance of a Chinese Sukhoi 33 jet interceptor or a surface-to-air missile blasting him out of the sky. Although equipped with the very latest antimissile defense systems, the Viper was no stealth fighter.
He was vulnerable and he knew it. Should he be forced to eject and was captured by the Red Chinese, he’d be tortured mercilessly before he was killed. A British intelligence officer flying an unmarked American fighter jet had no business entering Chinese airspace. But he did have business, very serious business, and his success might well avert impending hostilities that could lead to global war.
That was his mission. And he’d gladly chosen to accept it.
In London one week earlier, “C,” as the chief of MI6 was traditionally called, had summoned Hawke to join him for lunch at his men’s club, Boodle’s. Lord Hawke had thought it was a purely social invitation. Usually the old man conducted serious SIS business only within the sanctum sanctorum of his office at 85 Albert Embankment. So it was a very relaxed Alex Hawke who presented himself promptly at the appointed hour of noon.
“Well, here you are at last, Alex,” C said, amiably enough. Sir David Trulove, a gruff old party thirty years Hawke’s senior, had his customary corner table at the third-floor Men’s Grill. Shafts of dusty sunlight pouring down from the tall leaded windows set the table crystal and silver afire, all sparkle and gleam. Above the table, ragged tendrils of tobacco smoke hung in wreaths and coils, turning and twisting slowly in the sunlit room.
The dining room at Boodle’s was, by any standard, one of the poshest man-caves in London.
C took a spartan sip of his gin and bitters, looked his subordinate up and down in a cursory fashion, and said, “I must say, a bit of convalescence becomes you. You’re looking rather fit again, Alex. ‘Steel true, blade straight,’ as Conan Doyle would have it. Sit, sit.”
Hawke, favoring his injured right leg, sat. He paid scant attention to such “on the job” injuries. They simply went with the territory. The nasty business in a Syrian prison hospital was already receding from memory.
“Most kind of you, sir. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”
“Let’s see if you still feel that way at the conclusion. What are you drinking? My club, my treat,” Trulove said, catching a waiter’s eye.
“Gosling’s, please. The Black Seal, neat. So. Trouble, I take it,” Hawke said after C had ordered his rum.
“No end of it, sadly. The bloody Chinese again.”
“Something new? I thought I was fairly well up to speed.”
“Well, Alex, you know those inscrutable Mandarins in Beijing as well as I do. Always some new wrinkle up their red silk sleeves. It’s that abominable South China Sea situation, I’m afraid.”
“Heating up?”
“Boiling over.”
Hawke’s rum arrived. He took a sip and said, “What now, sir? Don’t tell me they’ve blockaded one of the world’s busiest trade routes.”
“No, no, not yet anyway. Still, simply outrageous behavior. They unilaterally extended their territorial claims in the South China Sea hundreds of miles south and east from their most southerly province of Hainan. All done with zero regard for international maritime law. They now claim a huge U-shaped area of the sea, a claim that overlaps areas that Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Brunei say belong to them.”
“Good Lord. With what possible justification?”
“Beijing says its right to the area comes from two thousand years of history, when the Paracel and Spratly island chains were regarded as integral parts of the Chinese nation. Vietnam says, rightly, that both island chains lie entirely within its territory. That it has actively ruled over both chains since the seventeenth century and has the documents to prove it.”
“Bastards have created a flash point as dangerous as the Iranians and the Strait of Hormuz. Clearly global implications.”
“Yes. And now they’ve begun making intolerable demands. They’re demanding that every vessel transiting these formerly wide-open routes must first ask permission of the Chinese government. We will not, bloody hell, ask them permission for any such thing! Nor will anyone else.”
“Of course not. And the Western countermove?”
“The United States is dramatically increasing its naval presence in the region, of course. And, as you well know, they’ve deployed U.S. Marines to Darwin in Australia. Meanwhile, the PM, in a weak moment, actually had an extraordinary idea. The allies are going to assemble a massive convoy, Alex. Warships from the Royal Navy, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Yanks with an entire carrier battle group, and seven or eight other countries. Full steam ahead under their bloody noses and see what they do about it.”
“Well, for starters, they might take out a U.S. carrier with one of their killer satellites.”
“Hmm. Good to see the Syrians didn’t break your brain as well as your leg. That is a consideration, Alex. A few pantywaists in the U.S. Congress are thus far unwilling to go along with the scheme for fear of losing one of their billion-dollar babies. So, our convoy scheme is paralyzed at the moment. But, look, we’re not going to sit around on our arses and let this stand. Not for one blasted moment.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
“You mean what are
“No free lunch, as they say.”
“Never.”
“How can I help, sir? I’ve been deemed fit for active service as of yesterday morning.”
C looked around to establish if anyone was within earshot and then said, “We at Six have established a back-channel communication with a high-ranking Chinese naval officer. Someone with a working brain in his head who doesn’t want to go to war over his government’s deliberate and insane maritime provocation any more than we do.”
“This sounds good.”
“It is. Very.”
Hawke leaned forward and quietly said, “The Chinese are well aware that they cannot possibly afford to go to war with the West now. In a decade, perhaps, but certainly not now.”
“Of course not. It’s an obvious political ploy, albeit an extremely dangerous one. They wish to divert attention from their burgeoning internal domestic turmoil, particularly Tibet, with a bellicose show of force. Show the peasant population and the increasingly restive middle class just how powerful they now are.”
“Sheer insanity.”
“But you’re going to put a stop to it, Lord Hawke. I’ve arranged a secret rendezvous for you with Admiral Tiao Tsang on a small island in a remote quadrant of the South China Sea. It was formerly a Japanese air force base,
