Black Sun

CHAPTER 16

Hawker stood on the bow of a harbor tug, beneath a spitting rain and an overcast sky. He wore a heavy wool coat, boots, and a black cap pulled down over his ears. He looked like a longshoreman or a sailor, just one of the crew watching as the tug pushed its cargo southward.

The barges ahead of them were heavy with coal, destined for an outlying power plant. With this legitimate cargo in play, the tug would make a slow pass right in front of the Tower Pinnacle. As it did Hawker would go over the side and swim underwater to the base of the tower and the remnants of the old British fort.

He and Ivan had discussed several options for rescuing their respective citizens. Ivan’s preference was to get them while being moved. He believed with certainty that Kang would not keep them in the old brig forever. There would be a chance to take them when they were in transit somewhere, a weak link in the chain.

That plan presented several problems. To begin with, it required intelligence as to when and where the prisoners were being transported, but more important, it was standard attack doctrine; prisoners were always considered more likely to escape during a transit and were often guarded more heavily as a result. Beyond that, the plan required waiting, something Hawker was not well adapted to, and something that would only increase whatever suffering was going on behind the heavy stone walls.

After looking at the schematics of the two structures, they’d determined that the old fort used an ingenious sanitation system built by its original inhabitants. Latrines led to a waste holding area, which had separate tunnels connected to the river. When the tide rose, the British soldiers would open wooden doors and the river’s current would divert water through the tunnels, flushing out the system and washing the waste downstream.

“Enter through the sewers?” Ivan had asked. “Like some kind of rat?”

It seemed like a perfect solution, until a surveillance run had shown that the old wooden doors had been replaced by plugs of concrete. That left only one real option and now was the time to make it happen.

Hawker looked up into the sky. Evening was coming and the rain and the darkness would help hide him. He walked back into the pilothouse of the tug, shook Ivan’s hand, and grabbed his gear.

“Have the helicopter ready,” he said. “We’ll only get one chance at this.”

In a minute, Hawker was slipping into the water on the far side of the tug, wearing a black wet suit and carrying a rebreather. It was almost dark.

Descending under the surface, Hawker waited for the tug to pass and began swimming toward the rocks. He moved slowly, kicking in a rhythmic motion fifteen feet beneath the surface.

His air came from a device known as a CCR, a closed-circuit rebreather. This type of diving gear had several advantages over scuba tanks. First, it was lighter and easier to maneuver than standard scuba gear, and second, it reprocessed the exhaled gases, filtering them out and reclaiming the oxygen, which could be recirculated back to the diver.

“Rebreathing” the air meant there would be no trail of bubbles to appear on the surface and mark the diver’s location.

Hawker honestly doubted that anyone would be looking for such a threat, but Kang was known to be a paranoid man. If he did have people watching, Hawker wasn’t giving them anything to see.

After several minutes of swimming, Hawker had made his way across the channel and bumped into the rising ground near the edge of the harbor. The murky water was so dark that he didn’t see anything until it was inches from his face. He followed the sloped embankment up. After several feet, the muddy silt gave way to rugged black rock.

Two feet from the surface, he stopped his ascent and rolled over onto his back, gazing upward. There was still some illumination coming in through the water, but it wasn’t from the fading December sun. It came from the city lights now, especially the white floodlights of the Tower Pinnacle.

Hawker guessed it wouldn’t get any darker, but as he checked his watch he found himself ahead of schedule, so he waited, resting on the rocks and watching the water’s surface above him.

The ripples from the rain formed a hypnotic pattern. A cascade of minor rings hit and spread into one another in unpredictable order. He watched the pattern grow stronger, the light drizzle giving way to a steady rain. Hawker smiled at his luck.

He had many reasons to love the rain. In this case, the precipitation would degrade the visibility, making surveillance feeds blurry while keeping foot patrols short and sweet.

It probably didn’t matter much anyway. If Hawker was right, he’d be in before anyone knew what had happened. And on his way out he’d go in the one direction they’d never expect.

Cautiously, he surfaced.

The rocks ahead of him rose up in a jagged, sloped pattern. Higher up, set back an additional eighty feet from the water’s edge, was the base of the monstrous tower. A hundred and eleven stories clad in Italian granite. Garish white lights shone upward onto the sides of the tower to blinding effect, making it almost impossible for anyone to see a man in black crawling across the dark rocks beneath it.

Hawker sank back down, pulled off his flippers, and released the CCR. He reemerged, pulled off his mask, and climbed onto the dark stone, moving up and across it like a crab.

He found the gap in the rocks that he was looking for and ducked into it. Ten feet in, he scaled a minor chasm and pressed himself against what had once been the wall of the fort. Foot-thick stone had been cut and laid precisely, but over the years the mortar had eroded and the structure was now held together as much by its sheer weight as by anything else. Three stories above, what had once been the roof of the fort now held a manicured yard, a flower bed, and a walkway that led back to the doors of Kang’s tower.

Hawker hugged the wall until he came to an indentation through which a thin vertical slit had been cut. A foot high and no more than six inches wide, this slit had been a gunport for the old fortress, not for cannon but for musket shot. The indentation design was necessary to allow the British soldiers to aim their muskets across a wide field of fire, but it created a thin spot in the wall, a weakness that Hawker would use the explosives to breach. Designed to repel invaders, the gunport would be Hawker’s way in. But first he had to make sure he was in the right place.

He pulled off his backpack and set it down. From inside the pack he pulled what appeared to be a small box made of clear plastic. Visible through the plastic, like the innards of some transparent fish, were a small battery pack, a transformer, a microphone, a camera, and an antenna.

The NRI-built device was called a spider. Moore had sent it to Hawker along with several other pieces of high-tech equipment. At the press of a button, eight mechanical legs with articulated joints extended from the machine. The thin legs gave the spider the ability to move over incredibly varied terrain. It could even hop up a full flight of stairs, though if the plans Saravich had shown him were accurate, this particular spider would only have to go down.

Hawker retracted the legs, took a quick look in through the gunport, and dropped the device inside. He heard it bounce once and then stop.

Crouching down, he pressed his back into the recessed section of the wall. Sheltered for the most part from the falling rain, he pulled the control unit from his pack and slipped a headset over his ear. It included a speaker, so he could hear what the microphone picked up. A tiny LCD screen covered his right eye, to let him see what the camera saw.

He powered the device up and focused on the eyepiece. Ahead he saw the interior of a sixteenth-century brig, filthy and cramped, with a low ceiling and rusting metal here and there.

It looked medieval except for the support pylon in the far corner, a ten-foot-thick column of steel-reinforced concrete that plunged through the brig itself and into the bedrock below. It was a foundation piece of Kang’s tower; next to it was an elevator shaft.

Hawker pressed the button that extended the spider’s legs again and the camera view shook from side to side. A moment later the spider was off and hunting.