Coffee.
He rang for a steward who, since this was Officers’ Country, appeared instantly.
“Yes, sir?” the boy said as Alex, yawning, opened the door, still trying to rub the sleep from his eyes.
“May I please have a pot of hot coffee?”
“Certainly,” the cherubic young ensign replied. “How would you like it, sir?”
“Black. No cream, no sugar.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The steward nodded and was gone.
Bloody hell, he thought. What a night. There was the single malt before dinner. Make that the double single malts. Then there was, of course, the claret, all the fine claret, with the perfectly cooked rack of lamb. Then there was the port wine. Ah, yes, the port.
An old Royal Navy expression his grandfather had used popped into his brain. He seemed to recall repeating it countless times last evening, to the evident amusement of the Americans.
“The port stands by you, sir,” he’d said.
Which translated: “Don’t hog the bottle, mister, I’m thirsty.”
He had a dim memory of endless oceans of Black Bush whiskey and port wine, pounding against breakwaters he’d spent a hellish lifetime erecting in his mind. Elaborately constructed seawalls had been smashed to bits and ancient feelings had come pouring through. Along with them, he now remembered, came the long-buried memories.
God in Heaven, he thought, rolling his long legs over the side of the bunk and dropping to the floor. He’d had some kind of a breakthrough. The ghosts had come, yes, but it seemed he’d got the best of them.
The evening’s events were all slowly coming back. What else? Ah. Something about challenging that noxious prick Tate to a duel. But the cove never showed. Hardly surprising.
Alex had found a perch on the fantail and waited, watching the billowing clouds drift past the moon, feeling the slow soothing roll of the deck. Feeling everything inside him shift, rearrange, and shift again.
Then Balfour had appeared. An American fighter pilot who’d become one of his closest friends during the Gulf War. During the course of their recuperation in a Kuwait hospital, he and Balfour had formed a close friendship. Then Balfour had taken a turn for the worse, and one day he wasn’t there.
Sitting there on the Kennedy’s fantail in the moonlight, Hawke had found himself doing something he’d never in his life done before. Opening his heart to another man.
God knows how long they sat there. He unleashed a flood of happy memories of his parents and those wondrous early years on Greybeard Island when the world was still a magical place. He spoke of Ambrose, and how his dear friend had tried to help him. And Vicky, of course, how he’d loved her and how he’d lost her.
Finally, exhausted, and miraculously unburdened, he stopped talking and just gazed at the stars, taking the peace and serenity they offered.
It was then that he realized he’d completely forgotten why he’d been sitting there on deck in the first place. Oh, yes, waiting for that insufferable man to come topside and have it out. He must have finally given up, said good night to David Balfour, and somehow made his way back down to his cabin. At least, that seemed to be the case, because it was morning and here he was!
Now, he straightened and touched his toes twenty times. Ouch. He dropped to the deck and did thirty very slow push-ups. His muscles were screaming, and his head was pounding. It had been a very long time since he’d experienced a hangover of this magnitude. Definitely Force Ten.
He stepped inside the tiny head and stood bracing himself, both hands on either side of the little stainless basin. He’d gotten himself bloody well drunk, he had. First time in recent memory. Not tipsy. Tanked. Snockered. He felt goddamn awful. He looked at his bleary, watery eyes in the mirror and was flabbergasted to see a faint smile there, lurking under the two-day beard he’d been meaning to shave off.
A real smile.
Actually, he didn’t feel as bloody awful as by rights he ought to feel. Eventually, the sorrow over Vicky’s loss would somehow be locked up in the strongbox of his heart. He’d locked up sorrow before, and, somehow, he would again. But this new feeling welling up inside had caught him entirely by surprise.
Strange, he thought, looking in the mirror again. He felt, what was the word? Light. He felt light. Exquisitely light.
No, a little better than that. Buoyant.
Alex knew himself well enough to know he was hardly the deep, introspective type. In his world, just as there was right and there was wrong, there were two distinct types of humanity. Those who float and those who dive deep. Alex, all his life, had happily tended to float. Diving was dangerous. And so this seeming sea change he sensed inside himself was all the more surprising and perplexing.
Shaving, he pondered the new experience of diving deep. What had happened? Vicky’s death had affected him profoundly. But that wasn’t the catalyst for these entirely new feelings.
No, it was seeing the face of the spider. That huge face up there on the screen in the wardroom; that’s what had triggered it. He’d been painfully aware that every man in the wardroom was staring at him, but he didn’t give a good goddamn. Some vague excuse, some innocuous justification, and he could have moved on. He could not do it.
He’d finally come face-to-face with the one unendurable truth that had ruled his entire life. It was so simple.
His father was never coming back.
He’d been waiting—
three knocks three knocks three knocks
—waiting for his father to return all his life. But his father was never coming back to save him. His father was dead. His mother was dead. He’d watched them die. Heard them die. At the hands of the deadly faceless spider who had haunted his dreams.
Only now, he’d seen the face of the spider.
He had locked on to those cold, dead eyes, and he knew. No more hiding, no more running away from the spider. Now, the spider would be running from him. The spider wasn’t all-powerful after all. The terrified little boy locked in the dreadful closet was now a wrathful man bent upon a singular and terrible vengeance.
A man who could cry havoc, let loose his dogs of war, and conquer the spider. Find the spider and kill it, as slowly and as mercilessly as—
He splashed some cold water on his face and looked at his watch. Bloody hell, it was six-fifteen. The flight ops guys were going to be merciless up on the flight deck. They’d probably all turn out, just to see the little Kittyhawke attempt a takeoff. After the humiliation of two failed landings, he was determined to resurrect his once-sterling reputation.
He figured if he ran her up to full power and popped the brake, he could be wheels up in less than fifty feet. That would give the bastards a shock.
Just thinking about climbing into the cockpit of his little plane brought a huge smile to his face. He pulled on his faded green jumpsuit, zipped it up, grabbed his duffel, and ran all the way up five flights to the deck. When he swung open the heavy steel door and stepped out onto the sunlit flight deck, he felt as if he were stepping through the gates of Heaven itself.
The sky was pure and gold and blue. The ocean heaved gently, rolling the vast deck maybe five feet side to side. He noticed a destroyer had pulled up about a thousand yards off their port beam. Then, off the Kennedy’s stern he saw many, many more, destroyers, battleships, light cruisers, and in the far distance, the hulking black silhouette of yet another carrier and her battle group. Huge Sea King helicopters were circling overhead.
The massive wake of the Kennedy showed she was executing a hard tack westward, as were all the other ships of the Atlantic Fleet. West toward Cuba, no doubt.
He wound his way through the covey of F-14s to where his own plane was parked. Seeing the LSO on the fantail, in his yellow and black bumblebee costume, Alex waved a friendly hello and got one back.
There was a young purple-coated “deckie” just climbing down from Kittyhawke’s portside wing. The boy stepped down off the pontoon, smiling, as Hawke approached.
“All fueled and ready, sir,” he said brightly. He was a red-haired, freckle-faced kid, not even twenty, Hawke
