you.”
“Right, Stoke, let’s get going.”
They entered the main building and climbed a narrow set of stone steps carved into the wall. Four flights up, they arrived in a dark corridor that led to a vaulted chamber. Beside a massive wooden door, in a chair leaned back against the wall, a man wearing a white kepi on his head sat reading a book. The novel Citadelle, by Saint-Exupery, Alex noticed. Required reading for all Legionnaires.
But he was wearing an old navy and gold SEAL T-shirt and khaki shorts, the traditional SEAL daytime uniform. His head was shaved and he had a black beard that hadn’t been trimmed in years. He had a MAC 10 submachine gun slung over the back of the chair and a burning Gauloise hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked up, saw Stoke approaching, and a huge grin lit up his deeply tanned face.
“Zut alors! Skippair!” the man exclaimed in a heavy French accent. “Incroyable! I heard you were coming down!” He rocked his chair forward and leaped up to embrace Stokely. They pounded each other’s backs sufficiently hard to fracture a normal man’s spine.
“Froggy! Yeah, the Frogman his own self! Shit! I’ve missed your sorry pencil-dick numbnuts ass,” Stoke said, holding him by the shoulders and looking down at him. The man was barely five feet tall and almost that wide. “You still smoking them damn lung darts? What’d I tell you ’bout that?”
“I take it you two know each other,” Hawke said, a little impatiently. The clock, after all, was ticking.
“Stokely Jones is ze meanest woman I ever served under, monsieur,” Froggy said, sticking out his hand to Hawke. “Comment ca va, monsieur? I am ze famous Froggy.”
“Alex Hawke, Froggy,” Hawke said, shaking his hand. “Pleasure.”
“Frogman was in the C.R.A.P. division,” Stoke said. “French Foreign Legion. One of the few French units to serve in the Gulf War.”
“Crap?” Hawke asked, waiting impatiently for the joke.
“Oui, monsieur! Commandos de Recherche et d’Action en Profondeur! Ze best!” Froggy said, puffing out his chest and saluting.
“Splendid,” Hawke said, looking at his watch. “I think we’re expected.”
“Oui-oui, c’est vrai,” Froggy said, opening the door. “It’s true. Let me tell zem you are arrived.” He stuck a silver bosun’s whistle in his mouth and piped them aboard as they entered the room.
50
Two men rose from a large wooden table where they’d been sitting. Sunlight streamed into the room through open windows on all sides. To the east, Alex could see the dark blue Atlantic rolling to the horizon. To the south and west, the pale blue of the Caribbean Sea. The room was devoid of furniture save the plain wooden rectangle of the table and twelve simple wooden chairs.
There was a sign on one wall, hand lettered in flowery calligraphy. It was the SEAL creed:
The More You Sweat In Training
The Less You Bleed In Combat
There were maps and navigational charts scattered everywhere. Hawke was gratified to see that it was a map of Cuba they’d been poring over. Clearly, they hadn’t been wasting any time since Stoke’s phone call little more than two hours earlier.
Stoke went to each man and embraced him in turn. There was little back-pounding now, just emotion. For a second, Hawke thought they were all going to get leaky on him.
“Boss, say hello to Thunder, this good-lookin’ Injun on the left, and Lightnin’, this ugly-ass Irishman on the right. Boys, give a big warm welcome to Alex Hawke, the guy I’ve told you so much about.”
“Good morning,” Hawke said, striding across the sunlit room, smiling at both of them. “And thanks for agreeing to meet on such short notice. It’s deeply appreciated. Flying down, I heard no end of lies about you two.”
“Congenital liar, Stokely is,” Lightning said, earning himself a look from Stoke. He was a big strapping Irish chap, ruddy-complexioned, and weather-burned, with short red-gold hair that also lightly covered his bulging forearms, and crinkling blue eyes. He had the stub of an unlit cigarette jammed in the left side of his mouth.
“You must be FitzHugh McCoy,” Hawke said, giving the man a stiff salute. McCoy, Hawke knew, was a Medal of Honor winner. In the U.S. military, such a man is entitled to a salute from anyone of any rank.
“Welcome aboard, Commander Hawke,” the man said in a thick Irish brogue, returning the salute. “FitzHugh McCoy is indeed the name, but call me Fitz. My accomplice here is Chief Charlie Rainwater. If he likes you, he’ll let you call him Boomer.”
“Pleasure,” Hawke said to the copper-skinned man, offering his hand.
The keen-eyed fellow studied Hawke for some time, seeming to decide whether or not to shake his hand. He was tall and bristling with muscle, with blazing black eyes and a long narrow nose sharp as an arrow above somewhat cruel lips. His shoulder-length black hair fell about his shoulders and he was wearing buckskin trousers.
He was, Hawke had learned on the short flight down, a full-blooded Comanche Indian. A true plains warrior, he was also the best underwater demolition man in the long history of UDT and the SEALs.
He and Fitz had earned their reputations in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam as part of SEAL Team Two’s riverine operations. They specialized in making life miserable for Mr. Charlie on a daily basis. Thunder, because he always scouted barefoot, saved countless lives in the jungle, finding tripwires no one else could see, hearing VC footsteps no one else could hear, smelling a VC ambush a mile away.
Boomer had earned three bronze stars in Vietnam, and one silver star. Fitz had had the Congressional Medal of Honor pinned on his chest in the White House Rose Garden by President Lyndon Baines Johnson himself.
Thunder finally extended his copper-skinned hand to Hawke.
“Boomer,” he said.
“Hawke,” Alex said, and shook his hand.
“Good name,” Boomer said.
“I inherited it,” Hawke said, smiling at the man.
“I hear you earned it, too,” Boomer said, and settled back into his chair, putting his bare feet up on the table and crossing his arms across his broad chest.
“Skipper here tells me we have a critical time element,” Fitz said, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. “So maybe we should all get to be arsehole buddies later and get down to business right now.”
“Brilliant,” Hawke said, taking a chair at the table. “I think we just became asshole buddies, Fitz.”
Stokely, pulling out a chair, burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny, Skipper?” the lanky Irishman asked Stokely.
“First time in my entire life I have ever, I mean ever, heard Alex Hawke say the word asshole,” Stoke said, still laughing.
“That’s because I only call you one after you’ve left the room,” Alex said, to Stoke’s evident chagrin and the obvious amusement of Fitz and Boomer.
“Commander Hawke,” Fitz McCoy said, moving over to a large blowup of Cuba on the wall, “let’s get started. All I know is based on a troubling conversation with Stokely this morning. Trust me, this outfit can do anything. But I didn’t like one thing I heard.”
“Fitz, I’ll be honest,” Alex said. “I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest if you just said, ‘No, thank you,’ and sent us packing. Any sane man would. I mean it.”
Stoke coughed into his fist, stifling a snort. Alex was unbelievable. Man just automatically knew exactly where people’s buttons were located. Man had just located Fitz’s number one button and mashed it hard.
Fitz stared at Alex for a long moment, and Alex saw him come to the decision.
“Okay, it’s a hostage snatch,” Fitz said, stubbing out his cigarette and jamming another one in his mouth. “How many are we pulling out?”
Hawke pulled an eight-by-ten photograph out of an envelope. “Our primary objective is this woman. An
