“I seen him, sir,” Graham Pordage suddenly said. “I seen Mr. Oakshott. Just this very morning.”
“You did?” Ambrose said, turning to the boy.
“What’s that?” his grandfather said, his face reddening with anger. “You never said a word, boy.”
“I didn’t, Grand, and I am most truly sorry now that—that—that we found that body.”
“Why didn’t you tell your grandfather you had seen Oakshott, Graham?” Diana Mars asked, looking at the boy evenly. “You certainly knew the police were looking all over Gloucestershire for him, didn’t you, child?”
“ ’Cause I wasn’t at all sure it was him, ma’am, is the reason. And he was always kind to me, he was, Oakshott. When he was in service, I mean. Before he became a murderer.”
Ambrose said to the boy, “What makes you now think Oakshott’s a murderer?”
“I think it was Mr. Oakshott killed that dead man right there, sir.”
“I see. This is a very serious charge. You’re accusing a man of murder, Graham. There’s nothing to be afraid of, but you must tell me precisely what happened. Starting with exactly what you saw this morning.”
“Well, that’s the thing, sir. I didn’t see him, to be honest.”
“You did not see him?”
“No, sir. And that is—I mean, which is why I was afraid to say that—I had seen him. I didn’t. I heard him, is what happened, sir.”
“You heard him. Where? How?”
“I was havin’ me morning tea as usual, I was, sir. Under Cobble Bridge, the old footbridge is where I like to have it. About a mile upstream from here. A half mile beyond Spring Cottage. Beans on toast, sir, and my cuppa. Isn’t that right, Grand?”
“Aye, he does. That’s the truth.”
“Go on,” Ambrose said.
“I guess I drifted off a bit, sir. The sun was barely up and I hadn’t quite awoked. That’s when I heard ’em. Footsteps over me head. And two men shoutin’. One was shoutin’. The other, not so much.”
“What were they shouting about?”
“Couldn’t rightly say, sir, could I? The one, I thought I recognized his voice as that of the gentleman formerly in service, Mr. Oakshott, he was telling this other bloke, whose voice I did not recognize, that it was all his fault. That he ought to kill him for what he done. That he ought to blow his brains out. The other one, I could tell he was sore afraid. Then—”
“Then, what?”
“They was fightin’ right above me head, sir. Terrible struggle, wasn’t it? Both of ’em not sayin’ anythin’, just grunting and hitting. I put me hand over me mouth so they wouldn’t hear my breathin’ so hard, sir, I was so afraid. Then one a’them, he must have thrown something in the river. There was a splash, right about in the middle where the current is strongest. That’s when the one ran off, sir. I heard him crashing into the woods. T’other one, Mr. Oakshott, he chased after him and I ran off the other way, sir.”
“Was it a gun? That went in the river?” Congreve asked.
“I couldn’t rightly say, sir.”
“And you kept this all to yourself all day long?” Ambrose asked.
“Aye. I didn’t want Mr. Oakshott to come to any trouble on my account. And I was afraid I’d seen something bad, sir.”
“You did, Graham,” Ambrose said. “And the Yard will be grateful if you can—”
“Oh,” Diana cried.
There was an awful noise as something shifted inside the corpse and a large bubble of thin grey gruel appeared on Henry Bulling’s lips, popped, and trickled from the side of his mouth.
Diana clung to Ambrose and he put his arm around her shoulders. She was trembling.
“There, there, Diana,” he said, patting her upper arm.
This time when he touched Diana Mars he didn’t feel any electric shocks or a frightening frisson.
He felt only softness and warmth.
Chapter Thirty
Aboard the USS Lincoln
“HELL OF AN AIRPLANE,” THE NEW AND IMPROVED CIA MAN Harry Brock said, squinting his brown eyes in the midafternoon sun. The wind was out of the northeast and ripping whitecaps from the crests. Large ocean swells of clear turquoise water were heaving the broad steel deck fore and aft. Brock and Alex Hawke were standing on the USS Lincoln’s flight deck along with a group of sailors, fellow admirers who’d come up on deck to take a look at the future.
The experimental stealth fighter had drawn a crowd as soon as Hawke touched down six hours earlier. The F-35 Strike Fighter would soon complement or replace all the U.S. Navy F/A18 Super Hornets it now shared the carrier deck with. And, pending further development and the rigorous assessment of many more former U.K. combat aviators like Hawke, the Royal Navy would shortly be flying F-35s instead of the Sea Harriers.
The plane Hawke had landed on the Abraham Lincoln’s flight deck early that morning was simply the most advanced piece of flying machinery on earth. Capable of speeds approaching Mach 3, the single-seat supersonic fighter could also stop in midair. Literally, as Hawke had learned to his delight on his flight out from RAF Uxbridge. Fighter jocks liked this feature. It meant that when you hit the brakes in a dogfight, your pursuer rocketed past you to become your prey in a nanosecond. Confused the living hell out of them before they died.
The supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) was the flag-ship of the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group currently on station in the Indian Ocean. At 660,000 tons, with four and a half acres of flight deck, and in excess of six thousand men and women on board, it took two nuclear reactors generating a half-million horsepower to move her at battle speeds through the water. The good news was, once her reactors were topped off she was good for fifteen to twenty years without stopping for gas.
On orders from the navy’s Seventh Fleet, the Lincoln was now proceeding from a port visit in Hong Kong, steaming due west at flank speed some two hundred miles southwest of Sri Lanka. Neither Hawke nor Brock had been made privy to her ultimate destination; of course, they were only aboard for the emergency powwow recently hosted by the Lincoln’s new skipper, Admiral George Blaine Howell, and CIA director Brick Kelly. It had been a long meeting, full of bad news and frightening scenarios.
Hawke had been asked a question by Howell toward the end. “Commander Hawke,” the admiral said, “you’ve been very quiet during this briefing. You’ve seen all the projections, all the war-gaming, all the scenarios. The buildup of Chinese troops in the Gulf. I’d like to know what you think the navy’s strategy for dealing with this god- damn Chinese situation ought to be.”
“I think there’s only one long-term strategy for dealing with the Chinese Communist Party, Admiral Howell.”
“And what might that be, Commander?”
“We win, they lose.”
Howell had looked at him for a second and then a smile broke across his face.
“I think Commander Hawke has pretty well summed up my feelings as well, gentlemen. Any further comments? No? Thank you, everyone. Dismissed.”
Another bloody meeting, blessedly, over. Afterward, as the smoke cleared, Brock had ambled over to the corner where Hawke and Director Brickhouse Kelly were huddled in serious conversation. Brock waited at a discreet distance until the talk was over, then approached Hawke. He asked if he minded if Harry followed him down to Flight Ops. There were a number of things they needed to discuss, he said.
Brock wanted to see the plane, and he wanted to thank Hawke personally for snatching him from the Chinese. And the director had told Brock the night before he would be working with the Brit on an extremely sensitive mission in the Gulf. First, Hawke was to test the new no-fly zone the Americans had in place over Omani airspace: Operation Deny Flight. Then he was to link up with Brock on the ground.
This was an operation authorized by Hawke’s old flame Conch. Consuelo de los Reyes was the American secretary of state. She and Alex had a complicated past. It involved an on-again-off-again romance that just
