to murder Sultan Aji Abbas and his family.
Some bright boy in Beijing PRC headquarters had finally figured out that the sultan’s services were no longer required. It was the thing Hawke and Kelly had most feared during the run-up to this operation. Now it was happening.
Now that Sultan Abbas had publicly invited French troops into Oman, his continued existence was pointless. Even, as the Chinese had now figured out, dangerous. China had to assume the United States was looking for the sultan. If the United States succeeded and could actually locate him, the jig was up. The Americans would put him in front of a camera. He would proceed to denounce the French invasion and expose China’s role in the operation. The ensuing flap would demolish any chance of covert success.
As if the mission Hawke and his men faced wasn’t fraught with enough danger, the clock was now ticking. It was absolutely essential that they got to the sultan before the Chinese assassins did.
Below deck, five bearded and haggard men were seated around a battered wooden table in the dark, cramped space that passed for the main saloon. Even at this hour, with an ancient electric fan whirring away from its perch on a shelf, it was stifling below. Sweat stinks. So do Gauloise cigarettes. Two of the men were smoking heavily, all were drinking cold coffee out of tin cups, trying to stay awake. Maps, charts, diagrams, sat recon photos, and ashtrays littered the table.
All five were staring through bleary eyes at a crude handmade diagram Harry Brock had drawn of the underwater entrance and tunnels leading off from the powder magazine inside Fort Mahoud.
They’d been hard at it, formulating and rejecting and reformulating strategies, for a day and a half. A cherished hour here and there for sleep. It had been forty-eight very long hours since Hawke and Brock returned from the successful reconnaissance mission inside the fort. In that brief span of time, the world had changed.
The French navy was on the move. The Charles de Gaulle and Foch carrier battle groups had been repositioned to the Arabian Sea. Troopships were also en route, believed to be carrying an amphibious landing force of some forty thousand French infantry. It was rumored that, before the impending invasion of Oman, France’s much-vaunted Mirage and Dassault Rafale fighters would once more challenge the Anglo-American no-fly zone currently being enforced in the northern skies over the Strait of Hormuz.
If it happened, this would be the first such challenge since a Mirage F1 had gone down during an encounter with an unknown British pilot during the early days of the crisis. The American no-fly zone had stirred the media pot even before the French plane went down. Now the mainstream media in the United States were having a field day, showing hourly updates on this “Second Front.” Since no grisly murder trials or celebrity pedophiles were currently available, this unfolding drama in a place few in the world had ever even heard of would have to feed the beast with a billion eyes.
The downing of the Mirage over Oman had elicited a fierce hue and cry from the French press and diplomatic corps, demanding the as-yet-unnamed pilot be turned over to French authorities. That unnamed British pilot, now drinking cold coffee, didn’t even know a French lynch mob wanted his head. Had he known, he would have been too busy to care.
Alex Hawke was one of the five men seated around the table in Obaidallah’s smoky and stifling saloon. The ship’s radio, tuned to the BBC, was muttering in plummy tones on a shelf above the table. The news was uniformly bad. But no one was really listening anymore. There was too goddamn much to be done.
The gist of the thing, according to the BBC man now droning on, was this: China’s foreign minister, Nien Chang, had just announced the commencement of joint naval exercises with the French. The two fleets would be conducting operations just outside the territorial waters of Taiwan. Through diplomatic channels, Washington and London had expressed their stern disapproval of such provocative actions. All this at a time of heightened anxieties over peace in the region. Taiwan, threatened, was a key pressure point in U.S.-China relations.
If there was to be a nuclear confrontation between the two super-powers, it would start on that island republic. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, without an American response, would simply destroy U.S. credibility throughout the world. It was a classic Catch-22. Act, and you risked global war. Do nothing, and you risked total impotence.
The U.S. ambassador to China, the Honorable Barron Collier, had expressed the American concerns to the Chinese foreign minister in Beijing. So far, Ambassador Collier had received no reply.
“Turn that goddamn thing off,” Harry Brock said, and someone did.
To say that the hopes of many in Washington and London were now riding on the shoulders of the five men here assembled was no exaggeration. It was hoped that, even at this late hour, an appearance by the sultan of Oman denouncing the French invasion of his sovereign territory might prevent a disastrous incursion. It was not just tiny Oman and the sovereignty of the Gulf States that was at stake. It was the very shaky planet itself.
Once the French were in and seized control of the oilfields, ports, refineries, platforms, and pipelines, they would be extremely difficult to remove. And once China had had her first taste of pure Omani crude, private reserve, it would be damn near impossible to wean her off it. Wargamers in the Pentagon and at NSA were still shaking their heads over this one.
A French invasion of Oman? Coupled with a simultaneous Chinese threat to Taiwan? Even the most prescient inside the Pentagon had not seen this little scenario coming. The allies were scrambling. Already, the United States and Britain were rapidly moving air and naval assets up from the rear. In Hawaii, shore leaves had been canceled. The Pacific Fleet had been called out on an emergency basis.
On point in this new theater of war, the good ship Obaidallah. A battered old barge that had no business being on top of the water. By all rights, she should have gone to the bottom decades ago.
Seated to Hawke’s right in the saloon was Stokely Jones, recently arrived from a most successful mission in Germany. Even now, the documents he had obtained in Berlin were being examined at both Langley and NSA. CIA analysts were especially interested in the Chinese connection to the German megacorporation, Von Draxis Industries. Next to Jones, another American, Harry Brock.
To Hawke’s left, two more recent arrivals: FitzHugh McCoy, a strapping Irishman, and Charlie Rainwater, a full-blooded Comanche Indian. McCoy and Rainwater, known affectionately in the worldwide antiterrorist community as Thunder and Lightning, headed up a loosely organized group of mercenaries. All were ex-Legionnaires, Ghurkas, Rangers, and battle-hardened soldiers of fortune.
It was safe to say that Rainwater and McCoy, whose motley band of eight warriors were now sleeping in Cacique’s crew quarters, constituted the best freelance hostage rescue team in the world.
Harry Brock and FitzHugh McCoy had taken an instant dislike to each other, Hawke noticed. Brock must have seen Hawke salute the little man on the dock. Which told Harry that Fitz was probably a Medal of Honor winner, since they were automatically entitled to salutes from anyone of any rank. Brock chose not to salute. Odd. But then Brock’s behavior had been odd ever since they’d linked up in Oman. At night, running down his list of worries, Hawke kept thinking about Brick’s Manchurian Candidate comment just after Harry Brock’s rescue.
“What’s your story?” Brock had said when Fitz first stepped aboard.
Fitz smiled and walked right up to the much bigger man. “Quick on the turn, fast and hard into battle. What’s yours?”
Brock wisely didn’t respond. But Hawke decided to watch him even more closely from now on.
“All right then,” Fitz said, his thick brogue raw with fatigue and tobacco, “I know everybody’s bloody hot and tired. But the more we sweat now, the less we bleed later. Let’s take it from the top. One more time, boys. Then we all go get some bloody sleep. Stokely? You’re up.”
Stoke tilted his chair away from the table until it was perched on two back legs that threatened to give way any second. He looked at his old pal McCoy, old Five-By-Five, and smiled. Fitz grinned back. There was a bond between the two men that went back decades. It had been forged in the Delta swamplands.
“You want me to go through it all again, Five-By?”
“I do.”
Fitz had earned his stripes in the Mekong: He was roughly five feet tall and approximately five feet wide. His heart was slightly bigger than those dimensions: He’d earned himself his Congressional Medal of Honor for single- handedly taking out a heavily entrenched mortar nest and saving his platoon. He’d carried two wounded to safety under heavy VC fire. He’d been missing a good portion of his stomach at the time.
In that other lifetime, Stoke had been Fitz’s squad leader, SEAL Team 3. Also in that legendary squad, Charlie Rainwater, now wearing his trademark shoulder-length ponytail, buckskins, and a faded navy and gold SEAL T-shirt. Chief, as he was known, had been the squad’s UDT demolitions expert. Chief, and the man sitting next to him, a
