Assassin

Chapter Twenty-Six

Nantucket Island

ALEX HAWKE AND CHIEF JACK PATTERSON STOOD IN THE sunshine on the bow of Blackhawke, some thirty feet above the choppy waters of Nantucket Harbor. It was just before seven o’clock on a fine, clear Saturday morning, little more than twenty-four hours after the barely averted attack on the yacht. There were few signs of life aboard the many craft moored along the docks and out at the buoys. Summer sailors traditionally liked to party on Friday nights, and most of them were sleeping in this morning, having closed down the Straight Wharf, the Summer House, or even the notoriously rowdy Chicken Box in the wee small hours.

The air was full of snapping ensigns and diving seagulls and terns. The brisk wind and sharp iodine bite of the sea air made Hawke keenly aware of all his senses. He could feel it. He could feel everything. He was coming back. The recent episode on board Running Tide had cleared out a lot of cobwebs; more importantly, it had revealed a number of serious chinks in his well-worn armor.

Numb with grief and anger, his defenses down both literally and figuratively, Hawke had managed to stumble into one very nasty trap. Despite warnings from the man he’d entrusted with his security, he had underestimated the level of terrorist threat by a stupidly wide margin. As it happened, the incident was providential. He’d prevented a disaster that could have cost the lives of many of his friends and crew. Had the Arab simply locked down all the hatches leading to the deck, trapping Hawke below, the terrorist attack might have succeeded. But cheap luck like that ran out quickly.

After a year of bliss that had ended in tragedy, Alex Hawke was once again in the thick of it. Congreve had announced over after-dinner coffee that it was officially cloak and dagger time again.

DSS Chief Patterson had arrived from Maine via Coast Guard chopper just at twilight. Alex had watched the approach of the big red-and-white helicopter from Blackhawke’s launch. The helicopter flared up for a landing on the waters just beyond the breakwater. Alex leaned on the twin stainless steel throttles and the launch sped out to the chopper, bobbing on its pontoons, where the head of the State Department’s security forces stood waiting with a small duffel bag. On the short trip back to the yacht, he’d brought Patterson up to speed on the latest events. The near-disastrous flight he and Ambrose had experienced returning to the island from Maine. And the narrowly averted terrorist attack on Blackhawke itself.

“Father and son act,” Hawke said. “They almost pulled it off.”

“Yup. Babysitter’s father and her brother the rookie cop,” Patterson said, in his slow Texas drawl. “Makes sense. Father’d been a mechanic over at the airport since he’d moved his charming little sleeper cell family up from New York City. This kid Kerim. You say he tagged the Dog?”

“Yeah. It’s the Dog, all right. But some guy called the Emir is apparently pulling everybody’s strings. Has been for a long time, too. Ever heard of him?”

“I got emirs and sheiks coming out the wazoo, Hawkeye. You gotta do a lot better than that.”

“I plan to. At any rate, no doubt you, too, are on this particular Emir’s hit list.”

“Hell, Alex, ain’t a shit list or hit list I ain’t on—for so long I can’t hardly remember when I wasn’t. Sometimes I feel like the entire radical Islamic world’s got a fatwa on my head. But you, now that’s a different story. Why in hell would they go after you? You poke your stick in any hives lately?”

“Let’s just say I don’t have a lot of close friends in the worldwide terrorist community,” Alex said.

“Show me your boat and we’ll talk all about it.”

Hawke, listening intently to the latest intel from the DSS team as they walked, had already shown Patterson far more than most visitors ever got to see. He’d seen things inconceivable on anything less than one of the U.S. Navy’s own Spruance class destroyers. Blackhawke featured a balanced combat systems suite with towed array and active sonars, medium-range surface-to-air missile systems mounted inside the ship’s hull on both the port and starboard sides, and two long-range 7.6mm guns, also concealed, mounted both fore and aft. This integrated combat system centered on the Aegis weapon system, now up and running again, and the SPY-1 multi-function, phased array radar. All located on the very lowest deck in what was known as the War Room.

“Hell, Hawkeye,” Patterson said, looking around the massive bridge deck, “This ain’t no yacht. It’s a goddamn battleship disguised as a yacht.”

Alex smiled. “I wouldn’t go quite that far, Tex,” he said, “light destroyer, perhaps, but not battleship.”

Tommy Quick now approached the two men quietly talking at the bow. He stopped a respectful distance away and caught Alex’s eye by saluting.

“Morning, Skipper,” Quick said, “Sorry to disturb you.”

“Not at all, Sarge,” Alex replied. “Mr. Patterson and I are just standing up here trying to figure out how to save the goddamn world.”

“Yes, sir,” Quick said. “Call for you, Skipper. Mr. Congreve down in the War Room. He says it’s important. Some kinda press conference being televised in about five minutes.”

Hawke said, “Tell him we’re on our way.”

“Christ, what time is it?” Patterson asked. “Alex, I clean forgot about this.”

“Exactly six-fifty-five Eastern, Chief.”

“Which makes it almost noon in Paris,” Jack Patterson said, as he and Alex entered an elevator. “Unfortunately, I think I know exactly what this is about, Alex. Our ambassador in Paris has gone completely off the doggone rails.”

“After what happened up in Dark Harbor, I should be surprised if all of your ambassadors weren’t all a little shaky, Tex.”

“Yeah, you bet.”

They rode down six decks in silence, emerged and turned left into a long corridor lit with red domed lights every four feet or so. Hawke paused at a massive steel door and punched a seven-digit pass code into a small black box mounted on the wall. A cover in the center of the door slid back, and behind it was a fingerprint identification pad. Hawke pressed his thumb to it and the thick door slid silently into the bulkhead, revealing the War Room.

It was surprisingly small, packed with computer screens, radar screens, and TV monitors. Two young crewmen wearing earphones sat before a bewildering array of switches and controls, monitoring the integrated search, track, and weapons systems. The information displayed above them was an electronic visualization of the world out to some one hundred miles or more from the ship. The blue lighting inside the War Room was designed to enhance the video displays. At the far end of a conference table, a seated figure was wreathed in smoke.

“Some setup, Hawkeye,” Tex said, whistling softly.

“Thanks. We like it.”

“Who the heck is that in the velvet jacket?”

“That? That would be Chief Constable Ambrose Congreve, WMD.”

“WMD?”

“Weapon of Mass Deduction.”