The machete flashed in the wildly swinging candlelight.
Hawke stopped the deadly descent of the blade inches from the general’s neck.
And emerged from his waking dream.
“No,” he finally whispered, looking down at the man kneeling before him. He bent down then and pressed his lips near his ear. “Listen to me, you disgusting piece of human rubbish. You killed my parents the day after my seventh birthday. For the rest of my life, I’m going to visit you on the anniversary of that date. Watch you rot in your prison hole. That will be my birthday present to myself each year, watching you disappear.”
He put his boot against the man’s back and shoved him forward. The general came to a rest with his face mere inches away from his own severed hand. His dull eyes stared at the hand, unblinking.
“This belongs to my father,” Alex said, and ripped the blue envelope from the dead hand.
The general spoke, a soft guttural moan. Hawke bent to hear his words.
“I didn’t hear that,” Alex said.
“I had your mother twice, you know,” Manso croaked.
“What did you say?” Alex said, bending closer toward him.
“Twice! Yes!” Manso said, in a guttural whisper. “Two times I had your whore of a mother. Once before and once after. And you know what, amigo?”
Alex raised the blade, his face contorted with rage.
“She was better the second time. After she was dead.”
The blade came down with such fury that it clanged furiously on the marble floor as it severed Manso’s head. Alex watched the head skittering across the floor, then looked at the bloody blade in his hand in wonder.
“Guards! Guards!” Juan de Herreras shouted. He charged across the room to where Hawke was kneeling beside his headless brother. In a blind rage, he roared and bellowed and flung himself through the air. Alex saw him coming, tried to roll away and ward him off with the upraised machete, but the man’s eyes were full of a dark red mist and he did not see the blade until it was too late.
Juanito screamed, driving himself forward, further impaling himself on Alex’s machete. The blade soon had pierced his abdomen, gone completely through the man, its point visibly emerging from his broad back. Alex rolled away from under the dead weight and got to his knees.
“Behind the desk! Now!” Stoke shouted. Alex saw him rolling across the floor toward the desk as the Chinese guards burst through the door. Alex heard the staccato sound of the Tsao-6 machine guns and saw splinters and fragments from the heavy oval desk flying even as he rolled behind it.
“Christ!” Hawke said to Stoke. “I thought there were only six of them! It’s the whole bloody Red Army!”
Guards continued to stream into the glass walled structure and direct fire into the general’s desk. Huge chunks were flying off now. It would not take long for the thing to disintegrate.
Stoke saw Juanito’s .357 was lying some five feet beyond the desk. If he could reach it—a guard saw his arm stretch out for the gun and there was a loud thwap as bullets kicked the pistol beyond any possibility of getting his hands on it.
In a matter of seconds the guards would realize that the two men taking cover behind the desk were completely unarmed.
“Got any ideas?” Alex asked Stoke as they huddled under the withering fire.
“Yeah, I guess it’s too late to change the beneficiary on my life insurance,” Stoke said. “Everything’s going to my ex-wife.”
“Well, we could always just shake hands and say—”
Suddenly, there was a huge muffled explosion that shook the glass structure and everything in it.
57
The marble floor heaved up and felt as if it might buckle. The automatic weapons fire stopped as the guards dove to the floor. It felt like an earthquake but sounded like thousands of pounds of TNT. The giant chandelier swung crazily from the top of the dome, creating bizarre patterns of light within the curved glass walls.
There was an ominous crack from above, and Alex looked up.
Emanating from the fixture that secured the chandelier, a spider-web of fissures started to spread in every direction across the glass ceiling above them.
Thin sprays of water started erupting everywhere. You could almost hear the tiny creakings of each little fissure zigzagging across the dome.
“What the devil—” Alex said, looking at Stoke.
“Your new friend Boomer,” Stoke said. “His diversionary tactic, remember? Get everybody safely off the beach? Boomer must have just blown the satchel charges of C-4 and limpet mines that Bravo attached beneath the submarine’s hull. The main shock wave from that explosion should reach upriver to this grotto in about, oh, three seconds—One!”
Hawke and Stokely sprinted around opposite ends of the desk, smashing through the dazed guards just getting to their feet, headed towards the open door. They saw the massive chandelier hurtling to the floor and dodged it by inches.
“Two!” Stoke screamed, as they dove through the door.
A few of the guards were raising their weapons to fire.
“Three!” They were through!
Behind them the unbearable screeching sound of all that glass finally giving way put paid to any notion of the guards bringing down the two men. Alex, in desperation, tried to slam the wooden door shut behind them, but it was too late. A wall of water was already pouring through the doorway, threatening to overwhelm them. They flew down the narrow stone steps, slipping and sliding all the way to the bottom.
The onrushing tide of water now flooded down the stairwell and into the little foyer with the pretty Picasso. There were pillows, documents, all manner of flotsam and jetsam surrounding him. Alex was totally disoriented. How did we get here? Elevator? Right. He noticed that water had already risen above his knees.
“Ain’t no time to wait for that little Chinaman,” Stoke said. “Look, here’s a door!” The door was invisible, save a thin seam that outlined it. Miraculously, Stoke had seen it, and they slammed into it, splintering it open.
Another stairway, seemingly for service staff, led down into darkness.
Again they descended, the flood of water on their heels, and found another door at the bottom. “Ready?” Stoke said, and they put their shoulders to the wood, breaching it.
This was good. The red-carpeted hallway that led to the main stairway. Which way? Left, Alex decided suddenly. “This way!” he shouted, and Stokely followed. “This is it!” Alex cried. “Hurry!”
They were climbing now, up the great curving staircase they’d descended earlier with the late General Juan de Herreras.
“Good thing about water,” Stoke said. “Don’t climb steps too good.”
They gained the main hallway where they’d first met the recently deceased Juanito and his guards. It was wholly deserted. Both men wished they had grabbed weapons from the guards as they’d left the collapsing room. Alex still had his dive knife at least. Stoke had nothing.
They both knew there had to be tangos gathering outside, perhaps hundreds of them.
With extreme caution, they peered around the massive doors of the entrance. The moon was out now, and the whole compound was bathed in its blue-gold glow. A breeze swayed the palms in a lazy dance.
There was no one inside the perimeter wall that they could see. No one in either guardhouse. Beyond, only the dark wall of jungle. They could see the moonlit sea off to their left. Something was burning out there, sending great tendrils of fire and black smoke licking high into the air.
Nighthawke?
Hawke pushed the thought out of his mind as he and Stoke gingerly made their way down the broad stone steps of the entrance. Unarmed, they had no choice now but to simply make a run for the sea and hope to God somebody was out there waiting in an IBS.
They hadn’t taken three steps when the wall of jungle beyond erupted with automatic weapons fire. Hundreds of winking muzzles in the blackness. The air was instantly full of lead, ringing off the iron-work of the gates and fence, kicking up sand at their feet. They dropped to the ground and scrambled back up the steps and
