Hawke: A Novel (40 page)

Two men rose from a large wooden table where they’d been sitting. Sunlight streamed into the room through open windows on all sides. To the east, Alex could see the dark blue Atlantic rolling to the horizon. To the south and west, the pale blue of the Caribbean Sea. The room was devoid of furniture save the plain wooden rectangle of the table and twelve simple wooden chairs.

There was a sign on one wall, hand lettered in flowery calligraphy. It was the SEAL creed:

There were maps and navigational charts scattered everywhere. Hawke was gratified to see that it was a map of Cuba they’d been poring over. Clearly, they hadn’t been wasting any time since Stoke’s phone call little more than two hours earlier.

Stoke went to each man and embraced him in turn. There was little back-pounding now, just emotion. For a second, Hawke thought they were all going to get leaky on him.

“Boss, say hello to Thunder, this good-lookin’ Injun on the left, and Lightnin’, this ugly-ass Irishman on the right. Boys, give a big warm welcome to Alex Hawke, the guy I’ve told you so much about.”

“Good morning,” Hawke said, striding across the sunlit room, smiling at both of them. “And thanks for agreeing to meet on such short notice. It’s deeply appreciated. Flying down, I heard no end of lies about you two.”

“Congenital liar, Stokely is,” Lightning said, earning himself a look from Stoke. He was a big strapping Irish chap, ruddy-complexioned, and weather-burned, with short red-gold hair that also lightly covered his bulging forearms, and crinkling blue eyes. He had the stub of an unlit cigarette jammed in the left side of his mouth.

“You must be FitzHugh McCoy,” Hawke said, giving the man a stiff salute. McCoy, Hawke knew, was a Medal of Honor winner. In the U.S. military, such a man is entitled to a salute from anyone of any rank.

“Welcome aboard, Commander Hawke,” the man said in a thick Irish brogue, returning the salute. “FitzHugh McCoy is indeed the name, but call me Fitz. My accomplice here is Chief Charlie Rainwater. If he likes you, he’ll let you call him Boomer.”

“Pleasure,” Hawke said to the copper-skinned man, offering his hand.

The keen-eyed fellow studied Hawke for some time, seeming to decide whether or not to shake his hand. He was tall and bristling with muscle, with blazing black eyes and a long narrow nose sharp as an arrow above somewhat cruel lips. His shoulder-length black hair fell about his shoulders and he was wearing buckskin trousers.

He was, Hawke had learned on the short flight down, a full-blooded Comanche Indian. A true plains warrior, he was also the best underwater demolition man in the long history of UDT and the SEALs.

He and Fitz had earned their reputations in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam as part of SEAL Team Two’s riverine operations. They specialized in making life miserable for Mr. Charlie on a daily basis. Thunder, because he always scouted barefoot, saved countless lives in the jungle, finding tripwires no one else could see, hearing VC footsteps no one else could hear, smelling a VC ambush a mile away.

Boomer had earned three bronze stars in Vietnam, and one silver star. Fitz had had the Congressional Medal of Honor pinned on his chest in the White House Rose Garden by President Lyndon Baines Johnson himself.

Thunder finally extended his copper-skinned hand to Hawke.

“Boomer,” he said.

“Hawke,” Alex said, and shook his hand.

“Good name,” Boomer said.

“I inherited it,” Hawke said, smiling at the man.

“I hear you earned it, too,” Boomer said, and settled back into his chair, putting his bare feet up on the table and crossing his arms across his broad chest.

“Skipper here tells me we have a critical time element,” Fitz said, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. “So maybe we should all get to be arsehole buddies later and get down to business right now.”

“Brilliant,” Hawke said, taking a chair at the table. “I think we just became asshole buddies, Fitz.”

Stokely, pulling out a chair, burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny, Skipper?” the lanky Irishman asked Stokely.

“First time in my entire life I have ever, I mean
ever,
heard Alex Hawke say the word
asshole,”
Stoke said, still laughing.

“That’s because I only call you one after you’ve left the room,” Alex said, to Stoke’s evident chagrin and the obvious amusement of Fitz and Boomer.

“Commander Hawke,” Fitz McCoy said, moving over to a large blowup of Cuba on the wall, “let’s get started. All I know is based on a troubling conversation with Stokely this morning. Trust me, this outfit can do anything. But I didn’t like one thing I heard.”

“Fitz, I’ll be honest,” Alex said. “I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest if you just said, ‘No, thank you,’ and sent us packing. Any sane man would. I mean it.”

Stoke coughed into his fist, stifling a snort. Alex was unbelievable. Man just automatically knew exactly where people’s buttons were located. Man had just located Fitz’s number one button and mashed it hard.

Fitz stared at Alex for a long moment, and Alex saw him come to the decision.

“Okay, it’s a hostage snatch,” Fitz said, stubbing out his cigarette and jamming another one in his mouth. “How many are we pulling out?”

Hawke pulled an eight-by-ten photograph out of an envelope. “Our primary objective is this woman. An extremely close friend of mine. Her name is Victoria Sweet. This is a picture of her taken just last week. And this is a transcript of a cassette she recorded after her capture, clearly under duress. I have the cassette as well.”

“Thanks, we’ll listen to it. Meanwhile, how about a quick sitrep? Summarize the situation for us? We are aware, of course, that there’s been a military coup d’état in Cuba.”

“Cuba’s new military regime wants two things. One. Immediate lifting of the U.S. embargo. Two. Immediate withdrawal of all personnel from Guantánamo NAS within eighteen hours and twenty-seven minutes from right now.”

“These guys are in no position to make such ridiculous demands!” Fitz said. “What is this, the mouse that roared?”

“This mouse has two substantial assets,” Hawke said. “A fully operational Soviet stealth submarine carrying forty warheads. And a biological or nuclear weapon hidden inside the Guantánamo naval base set to detonate at 0600 hours tomorrow.”

“Holy shit,” Fitz said. “These guys are crazy. After bin Laden, and all of Al Qaeda’s and Saddam’s subsequent bullshit, America’s tolerance for this kind of crap is zero. These Cuban dipshit generals would obviously rather have a parking lot than a country. Where the hell is Castro when you need him?”

“Disappeared, Fitz,” Hawke said. “He’s either dead or a hostage they didn’t get around to yet.”

“I’d guess dead.”

“Probably right,” Hawke said. “At any rate, the Gitmo CO is preparing an order of evacuation. First step, get all the women and children safely aboard the
JFK
and other Navy vessels. Once they’re steaming out of Gitmo harbor with half the Atlantic Fleet giving them cover, squadrons and cruise missiles from the Fleet are going to carpet-bomb the place.”

“Including the hostage site, I assume,” Fitz said.

“Yes. It’s called
Telaraña.
The Spider’s Web,” Hawke said. “Just here, in Golfo de Guacanayabo, is a small island just off the coast of the town of Manzanillo. The military installation there is the Navy’s number one target. That’s where the rebel leaders are holding the hostages and that’s where the Soviet sub is parked. And that’s why we’ve got a time crunch.”

“I have to be honest with you lads,” Fitz said, looking from Stoke to Hawke. “This mission looks like a real goatfuck. One. Who knows when the Navy F-14s will show up? We’ll be just as dead as the Cubanos.”

“Good question,” Hawke said. “I have no idea.”

“Conch wouldn’t tell you?” Stoke asked Hawke.

“I’d never put her in the position of having to say no, Stoke.”

“Two. We’ve got an island with an area of at least three square miles, uncharted. With no SIGINT, no TECHINT, I’m not seeing a lot of ways to pull this off. And, there’s not even bloody time for basic recon. How about HUMINT?”

“The CIA does have men on the ground, inside the target zone,” Hawke said, pleased that Conch had just taught him the meaning of HUMINT. “They created a lot of the material I’m going to show you now. Plus a satellite and a dedicated bird in the air twenty-four hours a day. Predator.”

He put a heavy leather satchel on the table and withdrew a thick black three-ring binder. A scarlet X on the cover identified it as top secret.

“Have a look,” Hawke said.

Both men eagerly flipped through the pages, their excitement growing.

“Where the hell did this come from, Commander?”

“A U.S. Navy briefing I attended on the
JFK
this morning. I’m sure I’m breaking every rule in the book by showing it to you, but what the hell.”

“Fitz,” Boomer said, tabbing through the book. “Look. A whole section of thermals.”

“You’ll find a fairly complete set of construction and elevation plans for most of the buildings,” Hawke added. “Courtesy of the CIA construction crew.”

“Bloody good!” Fitz said. “And here are satellite photos of the whole installation, some taken as recently as yesterday. We can feed these into the ModelMaker downstairs and have a Styrofoam 3-D mock-up of the entire compound in half an hour.”

The look of hope in the Irishman’s eyes did not go unnoticed. “You’re sounding somewhat encouraged, Mr. McCoy,” Hawke said.

“Aye. We’ve moved beyond the hopeless stage, yes,” Fitz said. “We still don’t know where your hostage is. The way we operate, we clear the room. Four through the door, instantly separate the bad guys from the good guys and eliminate them. We can hardly go building to building, clearing rooms till we find the right one.”

“One second,” Boomer said. He’d been studying the thermals. Thermal imaging picked up any source of heat, men, or machinery, and turned it into recognizable shapes and forms.

“Okay,” Boomer said. “Watch. We overlay these thermal transparencies on this series of sat photos. Now. See this large rectangular building? About two clicks from the sub pen? Watch this. Every twelve hours, a large vehicle, that’s it right there, pulls up outside. Looks like maybe twenty guys climb out, enter the building, and then another twenty guys come outside and climb in the back.”

“Looks like a guard change to me,” Stoke said. “Where there’s guards, there’s hostages.”

“Definite guard change,” Fitz agreed. “Gotta be where the hostages are held.”

“Okay. That’s a start. Now, these are all barracks,” Boomer said, pointing to neat rows of buildings in a compound about half a mile from the hostage site. “Soldiers there will definitely come running when they hear the fire and grenades as we enter the target building. We have a serious need for speed.”

“Yeah,” Stoke said. “Hop and Pop.”

“Fitz’s specialty,” Boomer said. “Here’s the primary radar dome, and look at all these cute little sammy and scud site missile launchers.”

“The sub pen looks like it’s still under construction,” Fitz said. “See all the crap still on the ground? Bulldozers? Steel beams and rods. Tell me about the sub, Commander. Building looks big enough to accommodate three fooking subs.”

Hawke did. When he described the Borzoi sub with its delta-wing design, retractable conning tower, and forty missile silos, both men’s eyes widened with excitement. The idea that this might be more than just another hostage extraction clearly got their attention.

“Can we take out that sub?” Fitz asked.

“Well, it is destroying private property,” Hawke said. “But then again, the world would be a hell of a lot safer place without it. And, since the Atlantic Fleet is at this very moment preparing to neutralize or destroy it, the Americans might just look the other way. Let’s take it out.”

“Good lad. We’ll see what we can do. I’m wondering about this large structure here,” Fitz said. “The one nearest the beach. It’s clearly much older than anything else. Looks like a small
finca
that’s had a lot of wings added over the years.”

“It belongs to General Manso de Herreras,” Hawke said. “American intelligence has him as the guy who took Castro down. You can hear his voice on the tape. I’ve got video footage of him as well.”

“How and why did he abduct the hostage?” Fitz asked, looking at the photo of Vicky.

“How, I don’t know,” Hawke replied. “Why is easy. An attempt to get me to use my influence in Washington. Affect U.S. policy toward his new government. Ridiculous, but true. I’m going to kill him, by the way. When I find him.”

“Sorry?” Fitz said.

“Thirty years ago, Manso de Herreras and his two brothers murdered my parents. Stokely captured one of the brothers just yesterday and had the bastard arrested for murder. Head of the Cuban Navy, as it happens.”

“That’ll tend to piss the other two off,” Fitz said.

“So,” Boomer said, eyeing Hawke carefully. “It’s not just a simple hostage snatch, is it?”