smiled back. Nice smile. People spend their whole life on the big blue ocean, it gives them something you just can’t find on solid ground. Peace, maybe.
There was a tiny island with nothing on it but thick mangroves and sea grapes. Just a spit sticking up out of the water, maybe a couple of hundred yards long and maybe fifty feet across. Some debris had floated up inside a small cove, a pool of emerald green water washing up on the white sand. Stuff had gotten hung up in the roots inside the cove. It looked recent. Kind of thing you might see after a plane went down. Stoke thought he saw movement over in the mangroves out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked he didn’t see anything.
Probably a big heron or an osprey doing a little fishing. Could even have been a cloud of skeets moving around back in there. He’d go check out the debris after he’d seen the plane. See what had washed up.
“I got to saddle up, amigo,” Stoke said.
Sharkey grabbed one tank and handed it to Stoke, then picked up a second one.
“Where you think you’re going?” Stoke said, looking at the one-armed man.
“Down to the plane,” Sharkey said, “You don’t think I’d let you go down there alone, do you? The plane is sitting in a very precarious position. Edge of a shoal. You get inside and she shifts a foot or two, you kiss your ass good-bye.”
“You want to come, you come on. But don’t worry your ass about me, Luis. I was born alone. I’ll go out the same way.”
STOKE FELT the cold inrush of sea into two layers of wet suit and started down, the twelve pounds of weight on his belt and his tank helping him descend through all the bubbles. The world suddenly turned off-blue and dark. The visibility was okay, though, good enough to see what he saw. Below the thermocline, down around forty feet, it would get a lot colder and a lot darker.
But they’d gotten lucky.
The plane, one wing sheared off, was hung up on a narrow shelf of limestone in about thirty feet of water. The whole shelf was only a few yards wider than the fuselage. One hundred yards farther east and she would have slipped down into a deep trench.
Stoke gave Sharkey the OK signal and saw him return it. He checked his dive watch and then continued his descent toward the airplane, looking back now and then at Sharkey. It was interesting to see how you went about swimming down here with only one arm. Sharkey seemed to do just fine, considering.
It was a DC-3, all right, intact except that the port wing was completely gone and the whole nose and cockpit were pretty smashed up, meaning it had come in at a very steep angle. It was a very old airplane, unpainted, and there were no exterior markings at all. Just some blackened aluminum on the fuselage where the engine must have caught fire.
Stoke checked up and hung in the water a few seconds, just looking down it, surveying it from nose to tail. He hoped Sharkey was right about this thing because to him the damn airplane looked about as narco as you can get.
He motioned for Sharkey to follow and swam down directly to the nose. The windows were all blown out and a school of angelfish was just swimming out of the pilot’s portside window. He saw Sharkey pointing at that window, nodding his head. Stoke flipped his fins and swam right up to peek inside.
Boo!
The dead pilot’s lolling head floated up right into his damn mask when he peered inside the cockpit. Stoke pulled away instinctively. The guy’s gray face was pretty messed up. Things like his nose were gone. You could see where the fishies had been having a picnic, pecking at him for a couple of days. Stoke pushed the head away from the window and stuck his own inside for a better look-see.
Something big had taken a chunk out of the pilot’s right thigh, looked like. And his right hand was pretty much gone. Sharks, barracuda, maybe.
But none of that was the real interesting part.
What got Stoke’s complete attention was the fact that the dead guy was wearing a military uniform. You had to wonder what a uniformed officer was doing flying around in an unmarked relic like this. Looked like Sharkey had been right about this damn thing, Stoke was beginning to think.
This was definitely not shaping up like any kind of drug lift. Of course, it could just be a rogue air force guy with a freelance weekend gig or—no. This didn’t feel like drugs anymore.
He swung around and found Sharkey hovering about six feet behind him. Gave him a big thumbs up. He could see the Cuban nodding his head in excitement, see his eyes smiling inside his mask.
Stoke, checking the shark-bit flyboy out, could just barely see military insignia, maybe a piece of a patch on the guy’s far shoulder. Could only see a little bit of it but if he could move the guy in his seat, he might be able to twist him around enough to find out where this dead cat called home. He reached inside across the guy’s chest, carefully because there was broken glass and jagged metal, and grabbed the corpse by the upper right shoulder. He pulled the man’s shoulder toward him but the guy didn’t move. Still strapped in too tight.
He’d have to swim inside and check out the cockpit anyway.
Stoke turned around to look for an entry point and saw Sharkey’s bright orange swim fins disappear inside a ragged opening in the fuselage aft of the former port wing. His diving buddy was one step ahead of him. There was also a big ugly mako hanging around, circling just above the fuselage opening and the big fella had that mean and hungry look. Maybe he was the one who’d enjoyed the cockpit entree earlier and was just dropping by for dessert.
Sharkey had probably seen that big mother too, that’s why he’d ducked inside. You could hardly blame him.
Once bitten, as the man says.
Something else beside the shark was bothering Stoke.
All these planes flew with a crew of two.
So. Where the hell was the damn copilot?
12
LONDON
A lex Hawke was half an hour early for his appointment with C at 85 Vauxhall Cross. He parked his fastback R-Type Continental in the underground parking. The old Locomotive, as he called it, had just turned fifty. Battered but unbeaten he thought, and, keying the lock, he stood back to gaze lovingly at her gorgeous flanks. He drove her hard and got sensual pleasure doing so. He even loved the hideous paint job, a color he referred to as elephant’s breath gray.
He’d grabbed his umbrella for a short stroll along the Thames. He went via the riverside walk, which, mercifully, was open. It was bitter cold and still spitting rain, but the air off the river was bracing and, besides, he needed a good chilling to clear the juniper cobwebs from his brain. Damned rum. He’d better steer clear of it.
Twilight was Hawke’s cherished time of day on the river, the hour when the plodding river traffic and headlamps streaming across the bridges acquired that misty glow. It was a scene he’d long associated with the watercolor artist he most admired, Mr. J.M.W. Turner. He walked the Embankment for ten minutes, trying to imagine why on earth C had summoned him. A pretty dark-haired passerby asked the time and he told her, realizing he’d have to hurry back.
Having satisfied himself that his city, despite all it had weathered recently, was still the most beautiful place he knew, he mounted the broad steps and strode through the main entrance at #85 Albert Embankment, Vauxhall Cross. Crossing the gleaming lobby to the bank of lifts, one could not help but notice the architecture. The current MI-6 Headquarters was a five story, exceedingly modern affair, and was variously known in the intelligence community as Babylon-on-Thames or Legoland. It had been home to C and his several thousand colleagues since 1995.
Hawke, no fan of most modern architecture, found that he liked the place despite his predisposition not to. He was especially looking forward to seeing the chief’s private and much ballyhooed lair.
