Tsar (2 page)
He could guess the rest. It would be his job, he imagined, to find out what the hell the post was all about and then destroy it. Getting out alive would not be mentioned in his brief. But that would be the tricky bit, all right, always was.
Sod it all. He wasn’t dead yet, and he still had a few hours left until his pickup. The Monarch, a great red stag, was out there somewhere on the moors or the cliff below. The single bullet in Hawke’s pocket had its name engraved on it. He began a careful descent of the cliff face. It was bitterly cold. A fog was rolling in from the sea. Visibility: not good.
Suddenly, amid the cries of gulls and terns, an odd sound made him look up. Bloody hell, it sounded like the crack of a high-powered rifle!
Another stalker tracking the Monarch of Shalloch? Impossible. This miserable island was inhabited only by sheep, crofters, and farmers. They would hardly be out stalking on a god-awful day like—
Christ! The bastard fired again. And this time, there was no mistaking his target. Hawke ducked behind a rocky outcropping and waited, forcing his heart rate to slow to normal. Another round whistled just above his head. And another.
He caught a glint of sunlight up above, probably reflected off the shooter’s binoculars. The man was climbing. Hawke’s own position was dangerously exposed. He looked around frantically for cover. Should the man climb even a few feet higher, he’d be completely unprotected. That thicket of trees on the ledge below now looked very good.
Hawke bolted from the now worthless protection of rock and leaped into space. He landed on the ledge on his feet, went into a tuck, and rolled inside the trees. A hundred feet below, the cold and fogbound sea crashed against ageless rocks.
Five more shots rang out, rounds ripping into the thicket of birch above his head, shredding leaves and branches, debris raining down. Firing blindly now, the shooter knew he was the one exposed for the moment.
Hawke removed the single red-tipped cartridge from his pocket, inserted it into the breech, and shot the bolt.
He took a deep breath and held it, slowing his mind and body down. He was a trained sniper. He knew how to do this. He knew the distance to the target, about 190 yards, the angle of incidence, approximately 37 degrees, humidity 100 percent, wind three to six miles per hour from his left at 45 degrees. One bullet, one shot. You got the kill, or you did not.
Stags, of course, could not shoot back if you missed.
Hawke tucked the stock deep into his shoulder and welded his cheek to it. He put his eye to the scope and set his aim, bisecting the target’s form with the crosshairs. His finger closed, adding precisely a pound and a half’s worth of pressure to the trigger, not an ounce more. Keep it light…deep breath now…release it halfway…wait for it.
The crosshairs bisected the target’s face. That’s precisely where he aimed to shoot him. Right in the face. Into his eyes. Shoot him in a part of the skull that would cause irrevocable, instantaneous death.
He fired.
The round cooked off; his single bullet found its mark.
H
IS STALKER LAY
facedown, a pool of dark blood forming under what remained of his head. He was dressed for the hunt, in a well-used oiled coat and twills. Hawke looked at his boots and saw they were identical to his own, custom-made at Lobb’s of St. James. An Englishman? He fished inside the dead chap’s trouser pockets. A few quid, an American Zippo lighter, a book of matches from the Savoy Grill with a London phone number scrawled inside in a feminine hand.
Inside the old Barbour jacket pockets was nothing but ammunition and a tourist map of the Outer Hebrides, recently purchased. He pulled off the boots and used his hunting knife to pry off the heels. Inside the left boot heel, a hollowed out space had been created professionally.
After opening the small oilskin packet stuffed inside, Hawke found a thin leather billfold bearing the familiar sword-and-shield pin of the KGB. He knew its meaning well enough: the shield to defend the glorious Revolution, the sword to smite its foes. Inside the wallet were papers in Cyrillic, clearly issued by the Committee for State Security, popularly known as the KGB.
Also inside the wallet, a not unflattering photograph of Hawke himself taken recently at an outdoor café in Paris. The woman at the table with him was a pretty American actress from Louisiana. His beloved Kitty. Moments after this picture had been taken, he’d asked her to marry him.
Was this just an isolated assassination attempt, based on his past sins? Or had the KGB penetrated Operation Redstick? If the latter, the mission was clearly compromised. The Russians on that frozen Arctic island would be waiting for him. Losing the cherished element of surprise always made things a bit spicier.
He stood there, looking at the dead Russian, an idea forming in his head. Whitehall could immediately put out a coded signal, on a channel the Russians regularly monitored.
“
SSN HMS Dreadnought
arrived on station 0600 for pickup,” the false signal would read. “Two corpses found at site: British field agent and KGB assassin both apparently killed during struggle. Mission compromised, operation aborted per Naval Command Whitehall.”
Worth a shot, at any rate.
There was a collapsible spade inside the stalking pack on his back. Hawke slipped out of the canvas shoulder straps, removed the shovel from the pack, and, his spirits lightened considerably, found himself whistling his favorite tune, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” as he plunged his spade again and again into the icy ground.
Sometimes a man just had to bury his past and bloody well get on with it.
B
LUE
D
AYS
B
ERMUDA, PRESENT DAY
W
ar and peace. In Alexander Hawke’s experience, life usually boiled down to one or the other. Like his namesake late father, a hero much decorated for his daring Cold War exploits against the Soviets, Hawke greatly favored peace but was notoriously adept at war. Whenever and wherever in the world his rather exotic skill set was required, Alex Hawke gladly sallied forth. Cloak donned, dagger to hand, he would jubilantly enter and reenter the eternal fray.
He was thirty-three years old. A good age, by his accounts, not too young and not too old. A fine balance of youth and experience, if one could be so bold.
Alex Hawke, let it first be said, was a creature of radiant violence. Attack came naturally to him; the man was all fire. Shortly after his squalling birth, his very English father had declared to Kitty, his equally American mother, “He seems to me a boy born with a heart ready for any fate. I only wonder what ballast will balance all that bloody sail.”
He was normally a cool, rather detached character, but Alex Hawke’s simmering blood could roil to a rapid boil at very short notice. Oddly enough, his true nature was not readily apparent to the casual observer. Someone who chanced to meet him, say, on an evening’s stroll through Berkeley Square would find him an amiable, even jolly chap. He might even be whistling a chirrupy tune about nightingales or some such. There was an easy grace about the man, a cheery nonchalance, a faint look of amusement uncorrupted by self-satisfaction about the eyes.
But it was Hawke’s “What the hell” grin, a look so freighted with charm that no woman, and even few men, could resist, that made him who he was.
Hawke was noticeable. A big man with a heroic head, he stood well north of six feet and worked hard at a strict exercise regimen to keep himself extremely fit. His face was finely modeled, its character deeply etched by the myriad wonders and doubts of his inner experience.
His glacial blue eyes were brilliant, and the play of his expression had a flashing range, from the merriment and charm with which he charged his daily conversation to a profound earnestness. His demeanor quickly could assume a tragic and powerful look, which could make even a trivial topic suddenly assume new and enlightening importance.
He had a full head of rather untamable jet-black hair, a high, clear brow, and a straight, imperious nose. Below it was a strong chin and a well-sculpted mouth with just a hint of come-hither cruelty at the corners.
Picture a hale fellow well met whom men wanted to stand a drink and whom women much preferred horizontal.
H
E’D BEEN DOZING
on a pristine Bermuda beach for the better part of an hour. It was a hot day, a day that was shot blue all through. The fluttering eyelids and the thin smile on Hawke’s salt-parched lips belied the rather exotic dream he was having. Suddenly, some noise from above, perhaps the dolphinlike clicking of a long-tailed petrel, startled him from his reverie. He cracked one eye, then the other, smiling at the fleeting memory of sexual bliss still imprinted on the back of his mind.
Erotic images, fleshy nymphs of pink and creamy white, fled quickly as he raised his head and peered alertly at the brightness of the real world through two fiercely narrowed blue eyes. Just inside the reef line, a white sail shivered and flipped to leeward. As he watched the graceful little Bermuda sloop, the sail turned to windward again, and from across the water he distinctly heard a sound he loved, the ruffle and snap of canvas.
No question about this time and place in his life, he thought, gazing at the gently lapping surf:
my blue heaven.
Here on this sunlit mid-Atlantic isle, peace abounded. These, finally, were the “blue days” he had longed for. His most recent “red” period, a rather dodgy affair involving a madman named Papa Top and armies of Hezbollah
jihadistas
deep in the Amazon, was mercifully fading from memory. Every new blue day pushed those fearful memories deeper into the depths of his consciousness, and for that he was truly grateful.
He rolled over easily onto his back. The sugary sand, like pinkish talc, was warm beneath his bare skin. He must have drifted off after his most recent swim.
Hmm.
He linked his hands behind his still damp head and breathed deeply, the fresh salt air filling his lungs.
The sun was still high in the azure Bermuda sky.
He lifted his arm to gaze lazily at his dive watch. It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon. A smile flitted across his lips as he contemplated the remainder of the day’s schedule. He had nothing on this evening save a quiet dinner with his closest friend, Ambrose Congreve, and Congreve’s fiancée, Diana Mars, at eight. He licked the dried salt from his lips, closed his eyes, and let the sun take his naked body.
His refuge was a small cove of crystalline turquoise water. Wavelets slid up and over dappled pinkish sand before retreating to regroup and charge once more. This tiny bay, perhaps a hundred yards across at its mouth, was invisible from the coast road. The South Road, as it was called, had been carved into the jagged coral and limestone centuries earlier and extended all the way along the coast to Somerset and the Royal Naval Dockyard.
Fringed with flourishing green mangrove and sea-grape, Hawke’s little crescent of paradise was indistinguishable from countless coves just like it stretching east and west along the southern coast of Bermuda. The only access was from the sea. After months of visiting the cove undisturbed, he’d begun to think of the spot as his own. He’d even nicknamed it “Bloody Bay” because he was usually so bloody exhausted when he arrived there after a 3-mile swim.
Hawke had chosen Bermuda carefully. He saw it as an ideal spot to nurse his wounds and heal his battered psyche. Situated in the mid-Atlantic, roughly equidistant between his twin capitals of London and Washington, Bermuda was quaintly civilized, featured balmy weather and a happy-go-lucky population, and it was somewhere few of his acquaintances, friend or foe, would ever think to look for him.
In the year before, his bout of nasty scrapes in the Amazon jungles had included skirmishes with various tropical fevers that had nearly taken his life. But after six idyllic months of marinating in this tropic sea and air, he concluded that he’d never felt better in his life. Even with a modest daily intake of Mr. Gosling’s elixir, called by the natives black rum, he had somehow gotten his six-foot-plus frame down to his fighting weight of 180. He now had a deep tan and a flat belly, and he felt just fine. In his early thirties, he felt twenty if a day.
Hawke had taken refuge in a small, somewhat dilapidated beach cottage. The old house, originally a sugar mill, was perched, some might say precariously, above the sea a few miles west of his current location. He had gotten into the very healthy habit of swimming to this isolated beach every day. Three miles twice daily was not excessive and not a bad addition to his normal workout routine, which included a few hundred situps and pullups, not to mention serious weight training.
His privacy thus ensured, his habit at his private beach was to shed his swimsuit once he’d arrived. He’d made a ritual of stripping it off and hanging it on a nearby mangrove branch. Then a few hours sunning
au naturel,
as our French cousins would have it. He was normally a modest man, but the luxuriant feeling of cool air and sunlight on parts not normally exposed was too delightful to be denied. He’d gotten so accustomed to this new regime that the merest idea of wearing trunks here would seem superfluous, ridiculous even. And—what?
He stared with disbelieving eyes.
What the bloody hell was
that?