Alvand ’s hull open like a tin can.
The enemy vessel came to a dead stop. Her decks were awash. Her propellers blown off.
And then the most amazing sight anyone on board Blackhawke had ever seen.
She literally started sinking before their eyes. She was just going down, not at the stern or the bow. The whole damn boat was sinking at the same rate.
“What the hell?” Laddie said. “Amazing.”
“Yeah,” Hawke said. “We sliced her bloody keel off. All that lead just plunged to the bottom. There’s no more boat beneath the waterline. She’s wide open from stem to stern.”
Laddie just looked at him, his lower jaw threatening his collarbone.
“This is one for the books, sir.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Loose lips sink ships?”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Hawke replied.
Alvand sank without a trace within seconds.
The Strait of Hormuz now lay wide open before them.
They were going home.
Home, Hawke thought.
England.
My beloved son.
Hawke, in the following moments, was silent, still as a photograph. There was no jubilation, no exultation of triumph or evincing the thrill of victory. He was simply paying tribute to his dear father and all the wisdom that great good man had imparted to his son before his parents were brutally murdered.
The much-decorated naval hero had said it best: War is never about what’s in front of you, Alex. It’s always about what’s behind you.
And it was the truth.
Epilogue
Bermuda
It had been cold the previous night, unseasonably cold. The chill wind howled around Alex Hawke’s tiny Teakettle Cottage on Bermuda’s southern coast, whistling down the chimneys and round the window sashes, clawing at the rattling shutters, insistent and noisy as an angry mob of banshees seeking revenge.
Hawke recognized it as that cold sea air, filled with the bottomless chill that lies at the cloistered heart of ghost stories.
Alexei had come running into his father’s bedroom to say good night just as Hawke was slipping his loaded. 45 into the drawer of his bedside table. He always slept with it nearby now, even though the boy’s bodyguard, Nell Spooner, was just down the hall, sleeping in the child’s room.
Hawke felt the boy was safer in Bermuda than anywhere else, but still, he was taking no chances.
At that precise moment came a deafening boom of thunder, one that rattled the seaward windows and was quickly followed by a blinding flash of lightning that lit up the room brighter than the brightest day.
Little Alexei’s eyes widened with delight and the three-year-old leaped onto his father’s bed.
“Oh, Papa, this is a real storm. I love storms!”
“His father’s son, isn’t he?” Nell Spooner said, entering the room to collect her charge. “Now I know two very odd men who much prefer bad weather to good.”
Hawke smiled at her and then his son, who now had his thin little arms clasped around his father’s neck and was hugging him as hard as ever he could.
“Good night, Alexei,” Hawke said, kissing the boy’s forehead. “Promise me you’ll get a good night’s sleep because Daddy’s taking you out sailing tomorrow.”
“Sailing! On Stormy Petrel, Papa?”
“Of course we’re taking Petrel. Now, you go with Nell and don’t forget to say your prayers.”
Petrel, unlike Hawke’s massive megayacht, Blackhawke, was a simple forty-foot Bermuda ketch. But she was lovely, built of mahogany over oak planking, teak decks, sitka spruce spars, and a gleaming varnished cabin house. Her hull was painted jet black with golden cove stripes along her sides.
“I never forget God, Papa. He watches over me, just like Nell does.”
“I know he does. I love you, boy.”
“I love you even more, Papa.”
Nell swept Alexei up into her arms and carried him away. Hawke watched the two of them disappear down the dimly lit hall, aware of that overwhelming sensation of gratitude for his little family. It was as powerful as anything he’d ever felt.
And he remembered what his late father had said about the true meaning of war.
This, he knew, this was what lay behind him when he went off to battle.
A fter a lullaby or two, Alexei fell fast asleep in his bed. Nell Spooner reentered Hawke’s tiny bedroom, arms wrapped around herself, shivering. She spied the fire Pelham had laid in the brick fireplace.
“Please light the fire, Alex. I’m so cold. To the bone.”
Hawke put down his book and looked up.
“You know what Ambrose Congreve told me once?”
“No, darling.”
“He said, ‘Great love affairs are born in heaven. But so, too, are thunder and lightning.’ ”
Nell laughed her soft laugh. She was now wearing his old Irish fisherman’s sweater and nothing else. Her long legs were tanned a deep bronze by the Bermuda sun, pale white at the top where the beloved golden thatch nestled between her thighs.
“I like that,” she said.
“My darling girl. Of course I’ll light the fire. Come here first and give us a kiss.”
He lifted the covers and she crawled inside, reaching for him and finding him already rock hard.
It started with a kiss.
Half an hour later he slipped from her body, then silently from the bed and lit the fire. He sat there, cross- legged on the floor before the hearth, watching until he was sure it had caught. Nell came over, knelt beside him, and placed the silk coverlet around his shoulders.
“That was lovely,” she said, gazing at his profile lit by the flickering orange flames. “My man, my beautiful man.”
“Looking forward to your first sea voyage tomorrow, landlubber?” Hawke asked, still staring into the fire, lost in his own thoughts.
“I look forward to everything, Alex Hawke. Every single day.”
A t sea the following day, Nell emerged from the varnished mahogany cabin house and into the pale gold of the late afternoon sunlight. Hawke’s lovely old ketch, Stormy Petrel, was heeled hard over, slashing through crystalline blue water that roiled and foamed along either side of her bow.
“Did he finally fall asleep?” Hawke asked.
“Yes. He’s all tucked into your bed-excuse me, berth. Clutching his teddy and fast asleep. I think he was just exhausted. He loved it when you let him steer. He’s had an exciting day, hasn’t he?”
“I guessed he would love the water, the wind and sails. Hawke blood runs thick with sea salt. Has done since my ill-mannered pirate ancestors plundered and terrorized the Spanish Main.”
Nell sat down in the cockpit right next to Hawke, who was standing at the wheel, gazing upward at his billowing white mainsail, looking for a luff, and trimming or easing the mainsheet a bit when he saw a crinkle or pocket in the canvas.
“Alex. I had no idea Bermuda could be so exquisite. Small wonder you and Pelham spend so much time at Teakettle Cottage.”
“One of those places that make me happiest. But do you think Alexei is safe here? Safer than in England, at
