twenty-foot drop to the oily black water.
“I’ll go first,” Hawke said to the American, climbing up on the rail. “Then you, then him. Watch where I land and do the same. Stoke, you get him up on the rail. I’ll help him into the boat. Oh, and Brock?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to land on your butt. It’ll hurt your ankles a lot less.”
Hawke dove and surfaced three feet from the Zodiac. Tom Quick left the helm of the center console and helped him aboard. Having been nervous about this whole operation, Quick had decided not to entrust this pickup to anyone else. And he’d invited Stokely to come with him. He knew the skipper would later say this was overkill and decided to keep his mouth shut for the time being.
“Now!” Hawke shouted up to the two men waiting at the stern rail. “Go!”
Stokely helped the American over the rail. He jumped, awkwardly but effectively, splashing bottom first and coming up easily within Hawke’s grasp. At that moment, lead started thumping the water very nearby in a neat circular pattern fired from above. Looking up, Hawke saw a single man with an AK standing on the upper deck directly above Stokely’s head.
It was Tsing Ping.
Hawke instantly saw the thing unfolding: Stoke in the act of looking up to see who the hell was still shooting at them and the muzzle of Tsing’s automatic weapon coming down to greet him with a lethal burst of fire. In a half second, Stoke’s head would explode into a fine red mist. Zero chance of survival at this range. In a nanosecond less than the allotted time, Hawke whipped the Walther from his hip holster and put three quick rounds through the Chinaman’s heart.
Tsing managed a harmless spurt before he pitched forward over the rail. He plunged, dead weight, into the black water.
Stoke, never one for lengthy mourning, shouted a hearty “Yo!” and saluted snappily. He then turned his back to the rail and executed a perfect Navy SEAL backflip, entering the water with an astoundingly minimal splash considering his size.
Hawke, mentally calculating the time it had taken to draw his weapon and fire, smiled inwardly. Slipping, perhaps, yet gaining a bit of traction.
A minute later, they were all three safely in the stern of the Zodiac, and Tom Quick shoved the throttles forward. The twin 300-HP Yamahas roared. The big inflatable went instantly on plane and two seconds later they disappeared into the fog. There was sporadic fire from the bow of the Star; Hawke could see the faint wink of harmless muzzle flashes from her direction disappearing into the fog. In ten minutes, he’d have the hostage safely back aboard Blackhawke.
“Tommy, get on the radio,” Hawke said. “Tell them the hostage is out and alive. Dehydrated, malnourished, with possible fractures of the wrists. No other casualties. Have sickbay standing by to receive him. And someone get on the horn to Langley. Tell them we have Harry Brock alive.”
Hawke pulled a nylon blanket from the stern locker and got the American wrapped in it, then held Brock’s head while he sipped from an emergency water ration Hawke had found in the locker. Two seconds after that, he heard the muffled underwater explosions of the limpet mines Stokely had affixed to the Star’s hull.
“Any particular reason you decided to sink that boat, Stoke?” Hawke asked, as secondary explosions rocked the old steamer and licks of fire and thick black smoke from the midships hold climbed into the murky sky.
“Cargo she was carrying. I didn’t like the looks of it. Some kind of super-sized gun barrel. And nuclear reactor shit headed from France for North Korea. Damn French. Why the hell they selling this stuff to those people for, got at least four nukes already? The world ain’t dangerous enough for they ass?”
“That was you? Operating the crane?” Hawke asked, deciding to hold his questions about the cargo for later. DNI’s intel about the Renault auto assemblies was clearly inaccurate.
“Hell, yeah, it was me. I ain’t too good operating heavy machinery, as maybe you noticed. I saw you up there all alone in that wheel-house. Situation looked a little iffy up there, all those shadows moving around and gunfire and shit, so I started throwing my weight around, tried to distract everybody.”
Hawke laughed out loud.
“Skipper?”
The tone of Quick’s voice brought Hawke scrambling to the console. “What is it, Tommy?”
“That,” Quick said, putting the tip of his right index finger on a tiny greenish blip moving across the radar screen.
The large color Navstar display showed their position relative to the mother ship. The GPS indicated they were a quarter of a mile outside the harbor mouth waypoints, a half mile from where Black-hawke lay at anchor. And there was another vessel bearing down on them at high speed. Suddenly, phosphorescent tracers were sizzling overhead, glowing in the fog.
A second later, a round caught Quick in the right shoulder, spun him around and slammed him backward into the console. He collapsed to the deck. Hawke grabbed the helm with one hand, knelt on the deck, and placed the other hand on Tom Quick’s bleeding wound. Using two fingers, he probed deeply for an exit wound, and found it, all the while keeping his eyes glued to the bright screen.
“Make a fist and press it here,” Hawke told Quick, guiding his hand to the blood-soaked depression. “There. Harder. That should hold you till we get you to sickbay.”
“I’m all right, sir. Just a sting. You got the helm okay?”
“Yeah, hold on. I’m going to lose these bastards in that fog bank.” Hawke firewalled the twin throttles and swung the boat hard starboard, catching the backside of a cresting wave and getting the big RIB momentarily airborne. “Stoke, you have that man battened down?”
“I got him, boss,” Stoke shouted above the roaring engines. “You go on ahead and open her up!”
“Good God,” Hawke said a moment later, his eye tracking the narrowing gap between the two moving vessels on the vivid color display. “What the hell is this, Tommy? A launch from the Star?”
“I don’t think so, Skipper,” Quick said, struggling to his feet. “Way too big. She’s got to be some kind of—holy shit!”
“What?”
“Whoever they are, she’s painted us! We’re all lit up!”
“Who the hell—”
Hawke put the helm hard over and the inflatable curved a tight radius cut to port. Immediately, he veered hard starboard, initiating a violent zigzag course in a desperate effort to elude more incoming enemy fire. A steady warning tone now came from the Zodiac’s on-board systems and a half dozen panel lights began flashing rapidly.
Hawke thumbed the radio mike.
“Blackhawke, Blackhawke, Chopstick’s under attack…repeat…under…attack…we are taking evasive measures…copy?”
“Skipper!” Blackhawke’s fire-control officer replied, “we’re not believing this, sir. I think they—yeah, they are launching! Get out of there!”
“She just launched,” Hawke said, disbelief palpable in his voice. They were off the coast of France, for God’s sake. He yanked the wheel once more hard to starboard. “A surface missile! Are they all bloody insane around here?”
“Can you lose it, sir?” Quick asked, eyeing the screen in utter disbelief. He clenched his shoulder and staggered every time they went off a wave and exploded through a wall of water. The big props dug in once more and they shot forward.
“I don’t know—depends—if it’s heat- or radar-guided and—you know what, to hell with this…Blackhawke! Talk to me!”
“Roger that, Skipper,” came the cool voice of the crewman manning the ship’s fire-control and commo operations center. “Missile has no active radar…it is heat-seeking…we, uh, we have lock-on with the attacking vessel…they, uh, the attacking vessel not responding to repeated verbal warnings, sir.”
“Who the hell are they?” Hawke demanded, curving an impossibly tight right turn.
“Refuses to identify herself, over. Visual ident impossible in this thick stuff, sir.”
“Are these outboards hot enough to pull that missile in?”
“Maybe not…it’s going to be close—hard left now!”
