Ambrose climbed out of the back of the Rolls and shook the man’s hand.
“I’m Jack, call me Jock, Barker,” the big chap said with a smile. “Welcome to Stonefield.”
“Ambrose Congreve. Pleasure to be here. What a splendid car you have there, Jock.”
“Why, thanks. It’s brand-new. My wife, Susan, hates it.”
“Really? Why?”
“She says a car like this makes me look like I want people to think I’m rich.”
“What does she want you to drive?”
“According to Susan, the truly rich all drive beat-up Volvo station wagons.”
“But then you’d look truly rich.”
Barker laughed and turned to Diana. “I think Ambrose and I are going to get along just fine. Come on inside and say hello to everyone. We’re just having lunch served down by the beach. Then we’re going for a swim.”
“Swim?” Ambrose said, a tremor in his voice. “In the sea?”
“Or not,” Diana said.
“What’s that?” Jock asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Diana said. “Ambrose doesn’t care for swimming. He’s allergic to water.”
Later, from the beach, where the sand was still warm even though the sun was long gone, the house looked as if it was afire. It stood bathed in a blaze of lights, white floodlights picking out the seaward windows and many- gabled rooftops, colored lights dancing above the pool complex, and millions of tiny white lights winking gaily in all the trees that marched down to the water.
Four massive commercial searchlights, positioned straight up at the four corners of the lawn, created columns of pure white light and a space for the chorus of voices that rose up from the lawn, bits and snippets that existed and then twinkled out like stars looking down from above. This heady cocktail buzz, the familiar Hamptons’ comic opera of summer small talk and instantly forgotten introductions, was fueled by champagne. The Bob Hardwick orchestra flown in for the occasion accompanied it.
The only competition for all this grandeur was the moon, rosy-gold with a haze around.
“I see him,” the waiter said, pushing his black glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “She’s gone inside.”
The tall, white-jacketed waiter, who’d dyed his curly blond hair jet black for the party, stood in the lee of a sand dune smoking a cigarette. The thin line of a smile appeared. He’d been waiting a long time for this night. A very long time indeed.
“Anyway, I think they’re coming,” he told the woman standing beside him in the shadows.
“Why?”
“Why? Why, because I fucking said so, didn’t I? That’s why. I heard him tell her to get her wrap. That they were going for a little stroll on the beach. I made it my job to keep track of them, didn’t I? Without being recognized, I might add.”
“I can’t stand out here all fucking night,” the woman said. She was wearing a thin black raincoat. Her jaws were clenched to keep her teeth from chattering. Even in summer, the rolling ocean cooled the night breezes blowing onshore.
“You want some of this?” the waiter hissed, raising the back of his hand and giving her face a near miss.
“No. I’m done with all that.”
“Don’t lie to me. Look. Here they come,” the waiter said. He threw down his cigarette butt and crushed it into the sand with his heel.
“That’s them?”
“That’s them all right. Good hunting.”
The waiter made his loping way across the dunes and back to the party, careful to avoid the happy couple strolling hand-in-hand through the sand toward the low-hanging moon.
Chapter Fifty
Masara Island, Oman
HEAVEN, AT LEAST FOR THE TIME BEING, WAS ON HAWKE’S side. The inverted bowl of sky above was an ideal shade for his purpose: black. There was no moon to speak of and only a silver sprinkling of stars across the northern sky. Since the winds were calm, so were the seas. Not that you would dare say it aloud: perfect spec-ops conditions. Fifteen feet below the surface, Hawke’s thirty-foot-long vehicle, dubbed Bruce, was sliding silently forward. Given the conditions, the sub was, Hawke hoped, invisible to the tower guards manning the heavy machine guns.
“All stop,” Hawke said, looking over at his navigator.
“All stop,” Stoke said.
The two men were adjacent to each other, each tucked into a separate flooded compartment in the nose of the SDV. Both were hooked into the vessel’s internal communication and auxiliary life support systems. They could speak and breathe easily. Easing the throttles back in sync to the neutral position, they felt the sub slow and stop. There was no sound.
Buoyancy systems kept them hovering at the desired depth in the black water. Visibility was near zero. Only a hooded four-color GPS screen in front of Hawke allowed him to see precisely where he was in relation to the island dead ahead. They’d made good time from the mother ship, arriving off Point Arras right on schedule.
The minisub’s all-electric propulsion system was powered by rechargeable silver-zinc batteries and designed for silent running. Only the most sophisticated underwater auditory monitors could pick it up. At idle, and three hundred yards offshore, Hawke felt the chance of audible detection was very slight indeed.
“You have the helm,” he said, removing his hand from the control stick.
“I have the helm,” Stokely replied, taking it.
Hawke completed his preparations to disembark from the portside pilot station. It had been previously agreed that he would now leave the vehicle, alone, and swim the three hundred yards remaining to the entrance to the docks. He disengaged from the onboard underwater breathing apparatus, called a “hookah” because of its uncanny resemblance to a water pipe. He now switched over to his Draeger LAR-V underwater breathing apparatus.
Opening the small hatch cover, he levered himself out of the cockpit and kicked away from the vehicle. Moving his fins with slow, scissorlike movements, he remained in Stokely’s view just long enough to make a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Stokely gave the return thumbs-up and Hawke swam away. Hawke would make sure there were no unpleasant surprises at the dock before Stoke brought the sub in close.
Once he had the all-clear signal, Stoke would pilot the SDV directly to the tunnel entrance. On the panel before him was an array of sophisticated instruments including Doppler navigation sonar displaying speed, distance, heading, and other piloting functions. A ballast and trim system controlled his buoyancy and pitch attitude. A manual control stick was linked to Bruce’s rudder, elevator, and bow planes. Pure functionality, no frills, just the way Stoke liked his war machines.
But the beast also had sharp teeth. A shark’s toothsome grin was depicted on the nose, hand-painted on the bow by some boys at the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, Virginia. Boys, Stoke said, who clearly had too much free time on their hands. Still, he had to admit the grinning shark’s teeth did give Bruce a very intimidating appearance.
It sort of screamed Don’t mess with me. I bite.
Hawke covered the remaining three hundred yards swiftly and without incident. He surfaced under the dock, swinging the Beretta nine in his right hand through a tight arc. There was a round prejacked into the chamber.
All quiet. No beeping, screeching alarms, no whispered shouts and frantic running feet on the network of steel docks above his head. Only the soft lapping of the water against the pilings. He flipped down the NVG goggles atop his helmet and quickly located the three marks he’d slashed into the barnacle crust on one of the pilings.
He studied the water’s swift flow against the piling. The tide was running, well into the ebb. If they could manage to stick to their mission schedule, the entrance would be fully exposed when they exfiltrated at high
