that Alexander Hawke was on the road to peace.
49
Alex banked hard left, and Kittyhawke slipped down through vast canyons of sunlit clouds.
“Is that it, Stoke?” he asked.
There was a narrow slash in the undulating green canopy of trees below. A couple of hundred yards wide and about half a mile long, this gash in the jungle was definitely not on the chart of Martinique spread across Hawke’s knees.
Stoke cocked his head toward the window and said, “That’s it, all right, Bossman. Home of Thunder and Lightning itself. That hangar down there, covered with vines and shit, is where they keep the C-130. Big black mother.”
Alex came around and lined up on the end of the jungle runway, lowered his flaps and got his retractable wheels down. No tower, no air boss scrutinizing his approach and the runway wasn’t even bobbing up and down. Easy peas, as they used to say during his Dartmouth days.
Only when a couple of Jeeps emerged from the trees and raced down the runway to an apron at the far end did he see any signs of life. Once there, both Jeeps turned so that they were facing the incoming airplane and turned their headlights on.
“Means it’s okay to land,” Alex heard Stoke say in his headphones, and he eased the little seaplane in over the treetops and dropped in for a three-point landing.
Ten minutes later, Alex and Stokely were in the back of one of the two Jeeps, bouncing along a dirt road that snaked upwards through the jungle. It was good Stoke had asked for two Jeeps. His SEAL toys filled up most of the second one.
“Wait till you see this joint,” Stoke said. “It is something else.”
Alex had been enjoying the riot of color everywhere he looked. It was like racing through a tunnel of botanical wizardry. Orchids, bougainvillea, and frangipani. Banyans and banana trees. Red, green, and yellow birds that darted and swooped overhead. Shafts of sunlight picked out waterfalls splashing into small pools and spilling across the road.
He was finding the humid heat of Martinique deliciously lush after the dry, sparse vegetation of the Exumas and Bahamas.
“It’s an old fort,” Stoke said. “Place was falling down years ago, when the boys first came down here and bought it. But the troops spent all their spare time fixing it up real good. Look up there, see it?”
The Jeep came over a rise, and Alex saw the small fortress sitting atop one of the many green hills that paraded down to the sea. It looked to be late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, most probably English, Hawke thought, judging by the design of the crenellated battlements and guard towers at the four corners.
Colonized by France in 1635, Martinique had remained a French possession, save three brief periods of foreign occupation by Britain. The old fort was incredibly sited and gleaming white in the morning sunlight. Stoke had not overstated the facts, Alex saw as they drew near, the fortress was indeed something else.
“See all them shiny cannons poking out all around the top?” Stoke asked.
“Yes,” Hawke said. “Magnificent.”
“Well, guess what,” Stoke said. “They all work. Only fire ’em on special occasions, birthdays and Bastille Days and shit like that. But you should hear those mofos roar. Man, you talk about thunder and lightning!”
“What do they call the fort, Stoke?”
“Well, it had some fancy French name when they first bought it, but the boys renamed it. It’s officially called Fort Whupass now.”
Hawke laughed. “Fort Whupass,” he said, loving the sound of it.
The fellow driving their Jeep, a Martiniquais, who had forearms like lodgepoles sticking out of his olive-green T-shirt, turned around and smiled at him. “Oui, c’est ca! Bienvenue a Fort Whupass, mes amis,” he said in his Creole patois.
“Merci bien,” Hawke replied, looking up into the trees. “Il fait tres beau ici.”
“Oui, merveilleux.”
“Vous etais ici, maintenant?”
“Non, pour la journee seulement.”
“Ah, oui, alors—”
The Jeep finally emerged from the dense jungle, and Hawke could see the sandy road ahead, climbing up to the wall of the fortress. He was astounded to see a large rectangular platform being lowered as the Jeep drew near.
“A drawbridge?” Hawke asked, incredulous.
“Damn right, a drawbridge,” Stoke said. “Ain’t regulation without one. And a moat, too, full of big-ass alligators. You going to have a fort you got to do it right! Besides, these boys don’t want nobody sneaking up on they ass.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Stoke looked at him for a beat and then said, “Well, maybe about the alligators. There is a moat, though. Big-ass moat.”
“A moat, Stoke? In Martinique?”
“Well, no, ain’t really no moat either. But they always talkin’ ’bout puttin’ one in. Can’t ever have enough security when every terrorist organization on earth hates your ass. Boys done moved three times in the last fifteen years.”
They were just passing under a tree and Hawke glanced up to see a man in jungle camo perched on a high branch. He was cradling a high-powered rifle with a scope. The sniper saw Hawke staring and waved.
The two Jeeps barreled across the lowered platform, which Hawke saw actually did cover a deep ravine, and screeched to a halt inside the open stone-paved courtyard. There was conspicuous lack of activity inside the fort, just a few dogs sleeping in the shade of a four-story structure of whitewashed stone.
The hot morning sun and the humidity were enough to make anyone, man or beast, seek shade.
“Where is everybody?” Hawke asked, surprised at the sense of total desolation that pervaded the old fort.
“Sleepin’, most likely,” Stoke said. “Catching Z’s. Boys had a twenty-mile jungle run last night. They all sacked out in the barracks, which is the ground floor. Second floor is the armory. Third floor is communications and computers and shit. Top floor is where we’ll find our guys waiting. They call it the poop deck.”
“Stoke, you seem to know an awful lot about this place. Why’s that?” Hawke asked, following his natural curiosity around the building to take a look.
“Well,” Stoke said, right behind him and looking sheepish, “I did do a little freelance work down here from time to time. When I was NYPD, you know, I’d take all my vacation time in Martinique.”
“That’s how you’d spend your vacation?”
“Shit, boss, counterterrorism is the most fun you can have with your clothes on!”
“My God, what in the world is that?” Hawke said as they rounded the back of the white stone building.
There was an amazing structure just inside the wall at the rear of the courtyard. It looked like a giant cube of green glass, which is just what it was. Constructed of thick, clear green glass building blocks, dazzling in the morning sunlight, the building had to be thirty feet high by thirty feet wide. A perfect square, no windows, no door that Hawke could see.
“Somethin’ else, ain’t it, boss? I knew you’d get a kick out of it!”
“What is it? Looks like an emerald as big as the Ritz.”
“I call it the Emerald City. But it’s really a museum.”
“Museum?”
“The ‘spoils of war’ museum. Where they store all the things they pick up around the world after the shooting dies down. Whatever the enemy leaves on the ground. You wouldn’t believe what’s inside that place.”
“I’d certainly love to see it. How do you get inside?”
“Through a tunnel from the basement of the main building. If there’s time, they’d be happy to show
