Warriors

CHAPTER 54

A sun-blasted dock, encrusted with broken crab shells and spattered with white guano, emerged from the dark thicket of mangrove and protruded like a beckoning finger into the bright and shining bay. Gulls, in flocks like low white clouds, screamed and rippled over the heaps of small waves, looking for garbage that was dumped, often in no particular area. “Mine, mine, mine,” they shrieked, wheeling and diving as if their very lives depended on it.

Stoke put the helm hard over, hooked a tight right, and Miss Maria sped over the silvered riffle toward the beckoning dock across the bay.

When first he saw that familiar dock, Stoke smiled. This was it. He knew he’d finally arrived at the true back door to the back of beyond. The island with no name.

The home of Fort Whupass.

Hawke was more than deeply struck by the familiar sight of the island. It was not green, as he’d remembered it; somewhat miraculously, it was snow white. Huge clouds of white herons had descended upon the swampy key. More birds alighted into mangrove thickets, already so thickly covered with them that the whole island seemed magically coated with a heavy layer of animated snowfall.

He had no idea how Stoke had ever found this place.

This small island was set so deeply back among countless thousands of tiny islands scattered about the dank, humid swamp, that if you didn’t know that this little sunlit bay and something called No Name Island existed, you’d not find them by chance in ten million years.

Both men saw a shortish nut-brown man emerge from the shadows and run out to the end of the dock. He was pumping his legs and waving his arms, drawn by the sound of the rapidly approaching sportfishing boat. He had a coiled line in one hand ready to heave. The small tank of a fellow was as wide as he was tall. Even from a distance, he was all muscle, his bulging forearms like lodgepoles.

Stoke throttled back for his approach to the dock, maintaining the lowest speed that would keep her on plane, white wake hissing behind her. A minute later, he lugged down as Miss Maria’s hull settled into the brackish brown water. He saluted and gave a smile of recognition to the man on the dock. It was him, all right. Short but wide, the man had the approximate proportions of a municipal Dumpster. It was the infamous Frogman, an ex-Legionnaire better known in certain circles as “Froggy.”

His head was clean shaven, gleaming with perspiration and frosted with sunblock. His faintly piratical and long black beard looked like it hadn’t been trimmed since the last century. He even had a French Foreign Legionnaire’s white kepi on his bald head, an exotic machine gun slung over his shoulder, and his trademark smoldering Gauloise cigarette jammed in one corner of his parched mouth.

It was Froggy, all right, and he was wearing his standard faded grey T-shirt with the bloodred T&L logo and the famous legend:

“Ahoy, Frogman!” Stoke shouted over the triple-threat burbling V-6 four-stroke offshore engines burbling at his stern. He put the helm dead ahead and eased up to the dock, using only an occasional burst of reverse to swing her stern against the swirling currents and nestle against the pilings.

“Bienvenue, mes amis, au paradis!” Froggy said, heaving the line and smiling at Stoke with a deep bow. “Welcome to Paradise, Skippair! Is that my old friend Hawke aboard with you? Eh bien, Monsieur Hawke, it is you?”

“Froggy,” Hawke said, smiling broadly as he lightly stepped up onto the bow to secure the ex-Legionnaire’s bow line. “Comment ça va, mon ami? Been too long a time.”

“Way too long; it’s good to see you, old friend. Ça va bien!”

Froggy looked down at the very aggressive-looking black-hulled Miss Maria and whistled.

“Sonofabeetch, eet’s one sweet ride, mais non? Fifty cal on the bow? You must cause quite a stir when you dock her at the Pier 66 up in Lauderdale.”

Hawke laughed.

“When was our last encounter, Frogman?” Hawke said, climbing the ladder up to the dock. Stoke was busy shutting the engines down and locking up the boat. Harry was still down below, gathering gear, weapons, and tactical equipment.

“You don’t remember? You don’t remember that fooking day in Green Hell, Hawke? Eet was zat murderous gig in the Amazon River jungle, mon ami. Merde! The day the jungle skies rained fire and lead! How could anyone forget zat day? We snagged that Scotland Yard inspector friend of yours from the top of a hundred-foot-high rain tree cell block about twenty seconds before they killed him! What was his name?”

“Ambrose Congreve,” Hawke said, reaching down and giving Brock a hand up the ladder, his arms full. “My oldest friend. Only your team could have saved him, Froggy. All of you. So here’s the deal. That’s exactly why we’re back here today. We need you.”

“Merci, m’lord.”

“You’re quite welcome. Now,” Hawke said, smiling at Harry Brock emerging from below. “You remember this big ugly character, Froggy?”

Harry stuck his free hand out.

Froggy said, “Of course I remember this big ugly character! D’accord! C’est le tres fameux Monsieur Ned Scrotum, d’accord?”

“Scrotum?” Harry said, withdrawing his hand and looking at Hawke for confirmation. “Is that what he called me?”

Harry frowned. He’d slept through a whole lot of high school Frog classes, but he knew just enough to be pretty damn sure what this Frenchman had called him.

“Frogman, did you just call Harry a scrotum?” Stoke laughed.

“C’est une blague! A joke, Monsieur Harry Block! But of course I remember you. The baddest of the bad! How are you, Harry?” He stuck out his meaty hand, and Harry, much relieved, shook it warmly.

“Frog, you old bastard. It’s good to see you, too, man.”

“And you as well. We shall go ourselves and kick some more ass, eh? Thunder and Lightning to the rescue, eh? Hop and pop, snatch and shoot, boom and doom? Death from above, death from below, and sometimes death from sideways?”

“Damn right we will. My trigger finger’s so itchy I dab Preparation H on it every damn day.”

Froggy laughed.

“Then you have arrived at the right place, my friend. And, believe me, you will find us in far better fighting shape than you last saw us, old warrior. No less an authority than Soldier of Fortune magazine has declared it. FitzHugh McCoy and Chief Rainwater? All of us here at Fort Whupass, we are now ranked the number one counterterrorist and hostage rescue mercenary force in the world.”

“Holy shit,” Brock said, genuinely impressed. “Congratulations, Froggy.”

“Yes,” Stoke said, finally making it up the ladder and scrambling up onto the dock, “but what the Frogman here does not tell you is that he and the editor in chief of that particular magazine were in North Africa together under rather difficult circumstances. And that those two dudes are therefore tighter than two ticks in heat. Right, Frog? Two bugs in a rug, you two guys?”

“He is shitting you,” Froggy said. “We’re not that close. He is now married to my younger sister from Marseilles, that’s all. Now. May I help you with your… luggage? I have zee Jeep”—he called it “Jip”—“and an ATV wagon for the weapons and tactical equipment waiting right at the other end of this dock.”

“You know what I always wondered about you, Frogman?” Harry Brock said. “No offense.”

“It is beyond my imagination.”

“That fuckin’ cigarette. Always lit and always stuck in your piehole but you never smoke it. What is up with that, man?”

“Ah. Zee Gauloise! An old trick of the trade, n’est-ce pas, Harry? The cigarette I keep it lit and keep it handy, that’s all.”

“What kind of a trick?”

“Lighting bomb fuses, of course; it is what I do for zee living, you know?”

Stoke sat up front jawboning, swapping old lies and old war stories with the Frogman. Hawke and Brock sat right behind them on a hard bench seat, holding on as Froggy’s battered “Jip” tore along the deeply rutted sand road through the scrub and jungly undergrowth at a helter-skelter pace.

Hawke’s face, turned up to the sun, was a picture of bliss. He’d just done one of his favorite things: arrive on an island by boat. The whole day was shot through with blue. He was breathing hot, humid air, tinged with the sharp tang of salt on a tropical breeze. The brilliant sunshine of the Ragged Keys was glorious.

He could feel a huge surge of energy within him. It meant the game, his special game, was afoot once more.

And he was ready.

He’d always remembered an old black-and-white backstage interview with Frank Sinatra he’d seen on the BBC late one night. The famous singer sipped whiskey, smoked endless cigarettes, talked about why he loved what he did. He said, “When I walk out onto that stage, man, in front of all those thousands of people, you see, for once, I’m all alone. The spotlight is on me. No security, no voice coaches, no agents, composers, or arrangers, no nobody, see? It’s just me. And you people waiting out there. And that… that’s when I get to sing.”

The Jeep suddenly broke free of the dense mangroves and emerged into the broad light and Hawke could see the road narrow to a sandy lane traversing the island’s coastline. As the open Jeep ping-ponged along beside the turquoise waters lapping at the white sand, Hawke could make out a strange moundlike structure off to his left. He reached forward and tapped Stoke’s shoulder.

“What the hell is that thing over there?” he said, pointing. “All covered with vines and vegetation. Looks like a bloody Mayan ruin.”

Stoke turned his head, cupped his mouth, and shouted, “That’s the hangar. Where the boys keep the chief’s C-130 airplane. Big black mother they call Dumbo. Fly that thing all over the world. It’s how they cut down on airfare for business travel. Got a five-thousand-foot airstrip just over there, cut right into the mangroves.”

A minute later, the Jeep was just passing under a huge gumbo-limbo tree when Hawke heard a sound above. He looked up to see two men hanging in the branches, in full jungle camo and greasepaint faces, smiling down at him over the barrels of their MP6 submachine guns. Hawke waved, impressed with the improved security.

In the old Martinique days, those two boys would have been snoozing at the base of the gumbo-limbo.

A moment later, the caravan entered a sizable clearing of soft white sand. In the middle stood an amazing four- or five-story structure that looked remarkably familiar.

It was, Hawke saw, a perfect emerald cube, perhaps forty by forty and gleaming in the sunlight. From where he stood, the solid glass building made entirely of clear green glass building blocks seemed to be lit by a green fire glowing deep from within.

“I remember this building,” Hawke said. “Back in Martinique, at the old fort, they called it the Emerald City, right, Stoke?”

“Right. It was built as a museum for the spoils of war back then, a place to display all the things the boys would pick up off the ground after the shooting died down. It was half this size then.”

Froggy waved an arm, encompassing the entire bizarre structure.

“Is much better, now, no? We had the old one shipped over block by block. Then, we make it even bigger, adding new blocks. This is the new HQ for Fort Whupass! Zo beautiful, no? An architectural jewel, FitzHugh McCoy calls it. He and Chief Charlie Rainwater are waiting for you inside. Allons-nous, mes amis! Let’s go, let’s go!”

Harry Brock, sweat soaked and with his arms full of weapons, looked askance at the green cube glinting in the sun and said, “Okay, somebody tell me this crazy-ass glass sweatbox is air-conditioned, okay? Seriously. I was born at night, but not last night.”

“It’s air-conditioned,” Stoke said.

“Not,” Frog said.

“Wait,” Brock said, “you mean it’s not? No AC?”

“Harry!” Stoke said.

“What?”

“Shut it.”