into the water.
“Kerim!” Alex shouted, scrambling over the transom and onto the swim platform. “Go! Go!” He twisted the electric motor’s throttle and the Hinckley moved off. It was painfully slow.
The shadowy figure of the boy appeared. He climbed up out of the hold, rolled across the deck, and got unsteadily to his feet.
“Jump!” Hawke said. “Get away as fast as you can!”
“I don’t—the belt! The weight. I don’t know if I can swim.”
“Yes you can. Use your arms. You’ve got to go, now.” Hawke turned away to get his bearings. He heard a splash and saw Kerim’s head bobbing above the surface a few feet away. He was paddling frantically, coughing and swallowing water. He wasn’t going anywhere, but he was afloat.
Alex Hawke knew he now had perhaps three minutes, maybe less. He pushed the electric motor’s tiller hard over and twisted the throttle, angling his bow away from Blackhawke. Every searchlight was trained on him now and sirens were wailing from stem to stern. Crewmen lined the rails on every deck, all of them with automatic weapons trained on the suddenly suspicious vessel. Battle stations.
Twelve feet above the waterline on the yacht’s port side, individual hatch covers slid open simultaneously and a long row of gleaming surface-to-air and short-range missiles protruded, the vessel presenting a very modern version of an English man-’o-war.
But no shots were fired, and no missiles were launched.
Someone had recognized him on Tide’s aft swim platform, and told the crew to held their fire. He could only guess what Tommy Quick must be thinking.
Complete insanity.
He’d opened up almost three hundred yards of choppy water between himself and Blackhawke now. Eyes glued to the sweep secondhand, he could see there wasn’t nearly enough time. He needed at least a thousand yards distance between the two vessels. And an additional thirty seconds swimming to have any hope of not getting killed by the concussion—he looked for Kerim and didn’t see him. He’d either gotten safely away, or he’d gone down with the weight of his heavy belt.
The second hand on his watch was relentlessly spinning towards oblivion. In desperation, he twisted the throttle grip harder, trying to get even a fraction more out of the ridiculously underpowered electric motor. He felt a click and realized the throttle was now locked wide open. Nice time to discover this handy feature, he thought; and then he arched backwards, executing a back-flip off the platform and into the cold sea.
Hawke swam desperately towards Blackhawke, ticking off the remaining seconds in his head. He looked back. Running Tide was maybe a thousand yards away now, maybe just enough, still moving off at about three knots. But, she’d begun a hard turn to starboard! Without his hand on the tiller to counteract the natural torque of the motor, she was automatically veering around. And now, she was once more on a course directly towards Blackhawke.
Christ. He was out of options. He could hardly swim into Tide’s path, hope to reboard her and correct her heading. No time. Nor could he continue to tread water where he was and allow the boat to get close enough to take him out when she blew.
He strained his eyes, looking for any sight of Kerim on the surface. Nothing. Suddenly, his eyes were fixed on the Hinckley. He’d seen movement at the edge of his vision. Something moving at the stern. At this distance it was hard to make out quite what—there! A black figure rising on the platform, climbing up out of the sea. Kerim. What was he doing! It was only a matter of seconds until—wait.
He saw the bow of Tide swing to port, beginning a turn away from him and the big yacht behind him. Kerim had realized what was happening and was manning the electric motor. Yes, that was it. He had her back on a course for open water!
Hawke cupped his hands round his mouth and screamed. “Kerim! Jump! Now!” But the boy either did not hear or did not respond and Alex had no choice but to start clawing the water, swimming furiously away from certain death.
A second later, the massive, blinding explosion of TNT rent the fabric of the air, cratered the ocean, and lit up the night sky. A fountain of fiery debris and burning fuel shot up hundreds of feet into the heavens. Hawke opened his mouth wide in anticipation of the concussion. It was the only way his lungs would survive it.
The outer perimeter of the shock wave hit him hard, blowing him backwards through the water and taking his breath away; burning sections of wood and fiberglass were raining down all around him and a sea of flaming fuel was racing rapidly across the surface. He could feel the intense temperatures of the fireball on his face, feel his eyebrows starting to singe, the surfaces of his eyeballs aching with the heat.
He spun around and took one long look at Blackhawke. He was deeply relieved to see she’d already got three launches lowered away, started her massive engines, and was even now underway, steaming rapidly away from the explosion and the spread of flaming fuel.
He gulped air and dove deep, angling down and away from the burning gas and flaming debris. Two minutes later, he broke the surface and saw the figure of Tommy Quick, illuminated a brilliant orange in the light of the flames, standing in the bow of the first launch, heaving a life-saving ring in his direction. Hawke cast a final glance over his shoulder at what had once been the handsome yacht Running Tide.
She was gone.
Along with Kerim, the reluctant martyr. Blown to Paradise.
A bloody good cop after all.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Miami
THE BLACK LINCOLN TURNED OUT OF THE INEXORABLE RIVER of heavy evening traffic along Collins Avenue and into the long sweeping drive of the fifties-era Miami Beach hotel. Colored landscape lights hidden amidst the flowering shrubbery on the Fountainbleau Hotel grounds and at the tops of the royal palms along the tree-lined drive, cast a greenish underwater glow on a line of bumper-to-bumper limos snaking towards the entrance.
To Stoke, the neon-lit scene had all the boyhood glitz of a Technicolor Frank Sinatra movie. Those were the days. Frankie and his Rat Pack were lucky enough to live in a time when even the baddest of the bad didn’t murder brides in wedding dresses on the steps of no church. That, at least, is what Stoke was thinking as he and Ross climbed out of the back of the Lincoln. Heat hit him like a wall.
He rapped the driver’s side window, and Trevor lowered it, expelling a blast of icy air. Outside, the air was thick, heavy, hot. Just the right conditions for an explosive storm. The electric charge in the air made the hair on his forearms stand up.
“Okay, Preacher, listen up. Here’s the program. Me and Ross, we going inside the Grand Ballroom for a coupla hours and rub elbows with the rich and semifamous. Eat us some gourmet rubber chicken. Maybe even find us a murder suspect doing the cha-cha-cha out on the dance floor, who knows? Can you wait somewhere ’round here?”
“I be right here, don’t you worry,” Trevor said. “De head doorman, Cholo, he is from my hometown of Port Antonio. Member to my congregation. He already knows about you, Tiki-mon. I told him we were coming.”
“Listen. You got to stop calling me that,” Stoke said, bending down to look Trevor in the eye. “Tiki, okay, he’s good, I’ll grant you that, but he plays for the Giants. Candy-ass. Stoke was a Jet, awright? Bad-ass. Get this shit straight, now, you want to stay on the A-team.”
“Yes, mon, no more Tiki.”
“Good. Listen, I don’t think this is going to happen. But you tell your homeboy, Cholo, he sees me and Ross come out that main entrance behind some guy with his hands in the air? That tells Cholo something. Tells him to call your cell, get you up to the front door in hurry. We collar one of these fat cats, there’s likely to be some pissed off people around. Need to cut and run.”
The very idea caused Trevor to slam his fist against the steering wheel in excitement.
“Yes, mon! I love it! You ever see True Lies? Bad Boys Two? CSI Miami on the TV? Same ting as dis, mon!
