and maps projected on three monitors placed around the room. Hawke nodded at Tex and pulled an envelope containing two CD-ROM discs from his inside pocket, handing it to a junior man at the near end of the table. The discs represented everything Alex, Congreve, Tex, and the worldwide DSS team assembled at Hawkesmoor had learned in the last ten days.
The young man inserted the first disc into a slot on the laptop and began scrolling through aerial images of a mountain stronghold, adjusting color and contrast.
Conch came around from her seat opposite the door and shook hands warmly with Congreve, then, very professionally, with Hawke. She held his eyes a moment too long and Alex squeezed her hand gently before releasing it.
“Hello, heartbreaker,” she whispered.
“Hey, good-looking,” Hawke said under his breath.
“You have everything you need? Tough audience.”
“Yes, one hopes, thank you.”
After the secretary had made the more formal introductions, Alex and Ambrose took two empty chairs to her left. The seat opposite the fireplace was always, Alex knew, reserved for the PM. The chair beside that was being held for the American president.
“Let’s get started,” Conch said, remaining on her feet. “My boss will be here in a few minutes, but he told me to go ahead. He already knows what I’m going to say. Slide, please.”
On all three screens was a picture of an object very closely resembling an American-style football.
There were a few stifled chuckles and some not so sotto voce murmuring up and down the length of the table. Hawke heard his name mentioned. Something about his having handed over the wrong slides.
“Looks like a goddamn football to me,” said a four-star general with a heavy Texas drawl, and there was some snickering from the American contingent.
“Doesn’t it, though?” Conch said, “It’s not. It’s a linear implosion nuclear device containing a single critical mass of plutonium, or, U-233, at maximum density under normal conditions. It weighs only 10.5 kilograms and is 10.1 centimeters across. Fusion boosted, it is capable of destroying a city roughly the size of, oh, let’s just say for argument’s sake, General, Fort Worth, Texas.”
“Still looks like a football,” the general muttered.
“Dr. Bissinger?” Conch said, nodding at a rumpled old gentleman seated across the table who had his nose buried in a book.
“Sorry?”
“Linear implosion?” Conch said, smiling at him and nodding at the football on the screens. “Could you enlighten us?”
“Ah, yes-s-s-s,” the rumpled man said, getting slowly to his feet. With a quick underhand toss, he flipped a silver mock-up of the Pigskin to the startled general. “Good catch! This is the design approach known as ‘linear implosion.’ ”
Dr. H. Gerard Bissinger, the American Undersecretary for Nuclear Affairs, was a gangly bespectacled former Harvard professor. Known in Washington circles as the “Bomb Babysitter,” he was charged with knowing the precise whereabouts of every nuke on the planet.
“Slide?” Bissinger said. “In laymen’s terms, the weapon the general is holding, shown here in cross-section, is capable of being fielded with a ‘neutron bomb’ or enhanced radiation option. Simply put, the ‘linear implosion’ concept is that an elongated, or ‘football-shaped’ lower density subcritical mass of material can be compressed and deformed into a higher density spherical configuration by embedding it in a cylinder of explosives which are initiated at each end, thus squeezing the fissle mass to the center into a super-critical shape.”
“Say what?” the American general said.
“Beg pardon?” Bissinger said.
“Excuse me all to hell, Doc,” the American general said, “but if that’s layman talk, I guess I ain’t a layman. Does anybody in this room know what the hell this man said?”
Alex couldn’t help himself. With a slight cough, he took the floor and all eyes were on him.
“In a vernacular you might well understand, General,” Hawke said evenly, “Dr. Bissinger has just informed you that it’s very late in the fourth quarter and the opposing team has the ability to throw the long bomb.”
“The long bomb?” the general asked, turning the silver football in his hands.
“Precisely,” Alex Hawke said. “The ultimate ‘Hail Mary,’ as it were, General.”
Chapter Forty
Stiltsville
STOKELY JONES LOOKED DOWN AT THE GLOWERING JEFE AND shrugged his shoulders. What the hell were you going to do? Man is on a mission. Tell the man, fucking loud and fucking clear, his mission is a suicide mission. Little shit doesn’t want to hear about it. He’s in for the kill, baby, means to bring home the bacon. Problem with acting all badass, like Lieutenant Alvarez was acting, was that you got to actually be badass if you were going to live long enough to pull it off.
“Ross, I dunno, what do you think?” Stoke said finally, sick of all the punk Cuban’s gangbanger attitude, the little guy sitting there staring eye-daggers at him. Ross was feeling better. Sitting up now, running a big hand through his strawberry blond crewcut, the drugs having kicked in. His leg probably still hurt like hell, but he was back on the case. That was good because it doubled the number of people on this boat with half a brain to two.
“I think you let the little bugger go,” Ross said, wincing as he stretched his bad leg.
“Into a trap.”
“Aye, maybe so. Not from his point of view, however. Christ, Stoke. Rodrigo’s got to be the most wanted man in Cuba. Somebody delivers his head to Fidel on a platter? The lieutenant here sees this whole thing as a once-in-a- lifetime career opportunity.”
“Got that part right.”
“Let him go, Stoke.”
Stoke nodded, yeah, that’s what he was thinking, too.
“Okay. One last time, jefe, listen up. This is as close as we going to get to that damn sea-going ghost town,” he told him, “Now, you and your compadres, you want to swim over there, I can’t stop you. I can, but I won’t. So, what I’m saying, go do what you got to do and vaya con dios, muchachos. Okay?”
Guy didn’t even say, hey, thanks a million.
“You get in trouble, jefe, you know who not to call.”
“Vaya en agua!” Pepe shouted to the young four commandos seated on the stern. Kids didn’t need a lot of encouragement. Each one executed a frogman backflip into the black water. Pepe stood up, not sure how he was supposed to go over the side and still be looking cool about it.
“You want your knife back, Lieutenant? Bad idea, you swim into the man’s trap empty-handed.”
“The knife, si. And the gun,” Pepe demanded, hand out like he was some kind of authority figure. Stoke shook his head.
“The gun? Shit. You are crazy. You the one with the death wish, not me. I give you your Glock back, first one you shoot is me.”
The man took the knife, hocked a looey into the water. “Fucking gringo coward,” he spit out, and then he did a kind of half-dive, half-jump over the side and started swimming fast towards Stiltsville before Stoke had a chance to jump in on top of him and rip his pea-brained head off.
“Yeah!” Stoke called after him, “That’s right! I’m the chickenshit. Not you! Go get ’em, el tigre! Balls to the walls! Hoo-ah!”
The black silhouettes of the seven ramshackle houses stood maybe a thousand yards away. The hard rain had stopped. Rain-heavy clouds still covered most of the stars, but there was a sliver of orange on the eastern horizon. Dawn was maybe an hour away. The Cubano contingent would or would not be around for it, depending.
