“So. You can fight,” Manso said.
“You noticed that,” Hawke replied, spinning like a dancer with a razor-sharp blade for a prop.
Manso stood his ground and laid on three resounding blows in quick succession. Hawke parried all three, but the tip of Manso’s machete somehow caught his cheek, opening a wide gash beneath his eye.
“Ah, English blood,” Manso said. “I developed a taste for it at an early age, you will remember.” Then he danced backwards and actually licked the blood off the tip of his blade.
“Delicious! I’ll cut your heart out and eat it for breakfast!”
“I think not,” Hawke said. He was circling the man now, changing directions, looking for his opening, when suddenly Manso charged directly at him, bellowing like a wounded animal, swinging his blade wildly.
Manso was in his element now, a true machetero from the cane fields. His silver blade came flashing down, Hawke raised his in defense but the blow never came. The general stopped short, pivoted on one heel, then whirled around, bringing his bloody machete up from below.
There was a ferocious clang and Hawke’s blade, brutally ripped from his hand, went flying, clattering across the floor.
The general’s face was suffused with murderous glee as he advanced to finish his victim and claim his rightful prize.
Hawke leapt once more to the top of the desk. The general slashed again, and this time Hawke was not so lucky. He tried to jump away, but the blade sliced through his thick camo trousers and he felt a searing pain in his right thigh.
The little blue envelope fluttered to the floor. The general had sliced open not only his leg, but his pocket.
Two things happened at once. The general stooped to pick up the envelope, and Stokely shouted something at Hawke.
Hawke looked in Stoke’s direction and saw that the man had somehow retrieved his machete and it was now spinning through the air directly toward him.
There was hardly time to finesse snatching it by the handle. He just reached out and seized the machete by the blade, slicing his fingers and palm in the doing. The blood made the handle sticky but at least he now had some ghost of a chance against the crazed machetero.
“General! Up here!” Hawke cried. The general had the little blue envelope clutched triumphantly in his upraised hand.
The general looked up only to see the massive chandelier, with Hawke dangling from it, come swooping through the air toward him. In Hawke’s free hand, the blade was poised.
There came then a sound, an awful sound, of steel on flesh and bone. Of steel through flesh and bone.
An enormous howl of pain exploded from deep in the general’s throat as he looked in horror at his bloody stump of an arm. On the floor at his feet, fingers twitching, lay his bloody hand still clutching the blue envelope.
There was an explosion then, and Hawke, still hanging by one hand from the chandelier, felt and heard a round from Juanito’s .357 whistle past his ear. He turned to see Stokely on his feet, bringing his hand down with tremendous force on the Cuban’s extended forearm. There was another crack from the muzzle of the gun and then the crack of Juanito’s breaking bones.
Hawke released his grip on the swinging chandelier and dropped to the floor.
He saw that Juanito’s gun had gone flying and turned his attention back to the general. He had sunk to his knees, holding his bloody stump against his chest, taking thin, shallow breaths. Deathly pale, head down, the man was clearly in shock.
Alex lifted the thick black ponytail. Then he laid the razor-sharp edge of his heavy blade across the tendons of the man’s exposed neck. Then he raised it and—
“Boss, no!” he heard Stoke shouting from somewhere. He’d lost track of time and place. He knew he had some unfinished business here, something to do with the sword in his hand. Oh, yes. He knew what he had to do.
The machete flashed in the wildly swinging candlelight.
Hawke stopped the deadly descent of the blade inches from the general’s neck.
And emerged from his waking dream.
“No,” he finally whispered, looking down at the man kneeling before him. He bent down then and pressed his lips near his ear. “Listen to me, you disgusting piece of human rubbish. You killed my parents the day after my seventh birthday. For the rest of my life, I’m going to visit you on the anniversary of that date. Watch you rot in your prison hole. That will be my birthday present to myself each year, watching you disappear.”
He put his boot against the man’s back and shoved him forward. The general came to a rest with his face mere inches away from his own severed hand. His dull eyes stared at the hand, unblinking.
“This belongs to my father,” Alex said, and ripped the blue envelope from the dead hand.
The general spoke, a soft guttural moan. Hawke bent to hear his words.
“I didn’t hear that,” Alex said.
“I had your mother twice, you know,” Manso croaked.
“What did you say?” Alex said, bending closer toward him.
“Twice! Yes!” Manso said, in a guttural whisper. “Two times I had your whore of a mother. Once before and once after. And you know what, amigo?”
Alex raised the blade, his face contorted with rage.
“She was better the second time. After she was dead.”
The blade came down with such fury that it clanged furiously on the marble floor as it severed Manso’s head. Alex watched the head skittering across the floor, then looked at the bloody blade in his hand in wonder.
“Guards! Guards!” Juan de Herreras shouted. He charged across the room to where Hawke was kneeling beside his headless brother. In a blind rage, he roared and bellowed and flung himself through the air. Alex saw him coming, tried to roll away and ward him off with the upraised machete, but the man’s eyes were full of a dark red mist and he did not see the blade until it was too late.
Juanito screamed, driving himself forward, further impaling himself on Alex’s machete. The blade soon had pierced his abdomen, gone completely through the man, its point visibly emerging from his broad back. Alex rolled away from under the dead weight and got to his knees.
“Behind the desk! Now!” Stoke shouted. Alex saw him rolling across the floor toward the desk as the Chinese guards burst through the door. Alex heard the staccato sound of the Tsao-6 machine guns and saw splinters and fragments from the heavy oval desk flying even as he rolled behind it.
“Christ!” Hawke said to Stoke. “I thought there were only six of them! It’s the whole bloody Red Army!”
Guards continued to stream into the glass walled structure and direct fire into the general’s desk. Huge chunks were flying off now. It would not take long for the thing to disintegrate.
Stoke saw Juanito’s .357 was lying some five feet beyond the desk. If he could reach it—a guard saw his arm stretch out for the gun and there was a loud thwap as bullets kicked the pistol beyond any possibility of getting his hands on it.
In a matter of seconds the guards would realize that the two men taking cover behind the desk were completely unarmed.
“Got any ideas?” Alex asked Stoke as they huddled under the withering fire.
“Yeah, I guess it’s too late to change the beneficiary on my life insurance,” Stoke said. “Everything’s going to my ex-wife.”
“Well, we could always just shake hands and say—”
Suddenly, there was a huge muffled explosion that shook the glass structure and everything in it.
57
The marble floor heaved up and felt as if it might buckle. The automatic weapons fire stopped as the guards dove to the floor. It felt like an earthquake but sounded like thousands of pounds of TNT. The giant chandelier swung crazily from the top of the dome, creating bizarre patterns of light within the curved glass walls.