Warriors

CHAPTER 9

Hawke didn’t have to wait long.

One second all was calm, the next he felt the rippled pressure of sudden underwater movement.

He waited for what always came next.

A soft nudge in the small of his back. No pain, just the tentative probing of some large fish. Exactly just what kind of fish it might be was not a question he preferred to speculate about. But the words just wouldn’t go away.

The bad one was snout. That’s what the nudge had felt like.

Then, a minute later, there was the really bad one.

Shark.

No mistaking it.

Minutes later, another punishing blow.

Christ. A jarring slam to the rib cage on his right side. A second later, he saw the shark’s dorsal fin knifing toward him maybe two seconds before it hit him. Sharp pain now, it hurt like a bastard. Broken ribs in there for sure. He turned slowly in the water, minimizing his movements.

Even in the pitch-black darkness, he could see the dorsal fins circling lazily around him. What did they say about curiosity? Oh, yeah, curiosity killed the pilot. Right now, they weren’t in dining mode. Right now they were only curious about this new object in the neighborhood. He took a deep breath, winced at the resulting pain, and let it all out slowly.

This could go either way.

They could get bored with him and just disappear.

Or, the other way, they could shred him into several bite-sized chunks, ripping away his limbs first before fighting over his torso. Staying positive in adverse conditions was one of his main strengths, so that’s what he did right now.

The fact that more dorsals were appearing and encircling him, and the fact that his body was suspended, hanging there helplessly in the frigid water, well, that made it tough to stay cheery.

But Alex Hawke, it had to be said, was nothing if not one tough customer.

He closed his eyes and immobilized his body, forcing himself to concentrate on all the good things in his life. His cherished son, named Alexei by his Russian mother, now just four years old. He saw him now, running through the patches of dappled sunlight on the green meadow in Hyde Park. The child’s guardian, Nell, was chasing him, laughing. Nell was more than a nanny. She was Hawke’s much-loved woman. Something of a legend at Scotland Yard, and in truth, Alexei’s bodyguard, Nell had saved the child’s life on more than one occasion. Because of Hawke’s recent activities in Russia, his son had been targeted by the KGB.

One of his deepest fears was creeping around the edges of his conscious thought. The fear that this night he was leaving his son without a father. Or even a mother. It had happened to him at age seven… no other pain can compare.

An hour passed. A very long hour.

For whatever reason, the roll of the dice, God’s infinite mercy perhaps, the toothy beasts had left him alone, at least for the moment. Cold had begun to claw its way inside his protective armor. He was shaking now, and his teeth were chattering away, much ado about bloody nothing. It crossed his mind that freezing to death was a far, far better way to go than serving himself up as a midnight snack for the finny denizens of the deep.

He slept, God only knew how long.

And then the lights came on.

Literally.

He found himself the target of a shaft of pure white light. He looked up to his left and saw its source. A searchlight mounted high on the superstructure of a massive ship of some kind. Then another light snapped on, and another and another. Each one picking him out from a different angle.

This must be what it feels like to be some kind of star, he thought, and, cheered that he still had a shred of his sense of humor left, he smiled to himself.

And then he became aware of the deep bass thumping of helicopter rotor blades, above and to the right. He saw the hovering black shadow come closer until it was right above him. An LED spotlight in the chopper’s bay winked on and picked him out.

A diver appeared, standing in the bay and looking down at him.

Could this possibly be a friendly? The odds were certainly against it, given China’s recent military posturing in this cozy little corner of the world. But, still, if this had to be bad, he’d take China over North Korea in a heartbeat. The NK troops were merciless automatons who brutalized and killed anything that moved.

The diver stepped out into the air and dropped.

He splashed down about ten feet away, surfaced, and started speaking to Hawke in Mandarin Chinese. His hopes for a miracle vanished, but still, it was better than the other option. Hawke spoke enough Mandarin to know he was being told to remain calm and he did. The swimmer approached and began securing the lifting harness to Hawke’s semifrozen body.

Hawke had spent a lot of time in China with his friend and companion Ambrose Congreve, the famous Scotland Yard criminalist. In addition to being a brilliant detective, Ambrose had studied languages at Cambridge. While doing a six-month stint in a Shanghai hoosegow for “subversive activities” that had never been proven, Congreve had given Hawke a basic, working knowledge of Chinese.

“In the nick of time,” Hawke said to his savior in his native tongue.

“What?”

“You arrived just in time. I was slowly freezing to death.”

“Silence. No conversation, please.”

“Have it your way. Just trying to be friendly.”

Hawke and the rescuer were winched up and into the belly of the Chinese Changhe Z-8. He lay on his back, shivering. No one aboard would talk to him. He was quite sure they knew about the unidentified aircraft that had entered their airspace and been “shot down” by one of their SAMs. So they were sensibly predisposed not to be chatty. Hell with them — he was still alive, wasn’t he? He’d managed to avoid being eaten alive, had he not? Truth was, he’d gotten out of tougher scrapes than this one over the years.

Once the chopper was airborne, he got another surprise. The mammoth floating Good Samaritan, the ship that had stumbled across the downed pilot by the sheerest of luck? It was a bloody carrier! When the chopper set down on the aft deck, he saw, to his utter amazement, an advanced Chinese fighter jet, which was the spitting image of one he’d seen in a meeting at the Pentagon just two years earlier. Code-named “Critter” because of all its spindly appendages, it never went into full production because of government “cost cutting” as the White House chose to describe it.

And now there was a whole flock of the damn things out here in the South China Sea under cover of darkness.

Whatever lay ahead, the spy knew he’d hit the espionage equivalent of the jackpot.