“Tommy, get on the radio,” Hawke said. “Tell them the hostage is out and alive. Dehydrated, malnourished, with possible fractures of the wrists. No other casualties. Have sickbay standing by to receive him. And someone get on the horn to Langley. Tell them we have Harry Brock alive.”
Hawke pulled a nylon blanket from the stern locker and got the American wrapped in it, then held Brock’s head while he sipped from an emergency water ration Hawke had found in the locker. Two seconds after that, he heard the muffled underwater explosions of the limpet mines Stokely had affixed to the Star’s hull.
“Any particular reason you decided to sink that boat, Stoke?” Hawke asked, as secondary explosions rocked the old steamer and licks of fire and thick black smoke from the midships hold climbed into the murky sky.
“Cargo she was carrying. I didn’t like the looks of it. Some kind of super-sized gun barrel. And nuclear reactor shit headed from France for North Korea. Damn French. Why the hell they selling this stuff to those people for, got at least four nukes already? The world ain’t dangerous enough for they ass?”
“That was you? Operating the crane?” Hawke asked, deciding to hold his questions about the cargo for later. DNI’s intel about the Renault auto assemblies was clearly inaccurate.
“Hell, yeah, it was me. I ain’t too good operating heavy machinery, as maybe you noticed. I saw you up there all alone in that wheel-house. Situation looked a little iffy up there, all those shadows moving around and gunfire and shit, so I started throwing my weight around, tried to distract everybody.”
Hawke laughed out loud.
“Skipper?”
The tone of Quick’s voice brought Hawke scrambling to the console. “What is it, Tommy?”
“That,” Quick said, putting the tip of his right index finger on a tiny greenish blip moving across the radar screen.
The large color Navstar display showed their position relative to the mother ship. The GPS indicated they were a quarter of a mile outside the harbor mouth waypoints, a half mile from where Black-hawke lay at anchor. And there was another vessel bearing down on them at high speed. Suddenly, phosphorescent tracers were sizzling overhead, glowing in the fog.
A second later, a round caught Quick in the right shoulder, spun him around and slammed him backward into the console. He collapsed to the deck. Hawke grabbed the helm with one hand, knelt on the deck, and placed the other hand on Tom Quick’s bleeding wound. Using two fingers, he probed deeply for an exit wound, and found it, all the while keeping his eyes glued to the bright screen.
“Make a fist and press it here,” Hawke told Quick, guiding his hand to the blood-soaked depression. “There. Harder. That should hold you till we get you to sickbay.”
“I’m all right, sir. Just a sting. You got the helm okay?”
“Yeah, hold on. I’m going to lose these bastards in that fog bank.” Hawke firewalled the twin throttles and swung the boat hard starboard, catching the backside of a cresting wave and getting the big RIB momentarily airborne. “Stoke, you have that man battened down?”
“I got him, boss,” Stoke shouted above the roaring engines. “You go on ahead and open her up!”
“Good God,” Hawke said a moment later, his eye tracking the narrowing gap between the two moving vessels on the vivid color display. “What the hell is this, Tommy? A launch from the Star?”
“I don’t think so, Skipper,” Quick said, struggling to his feet. “Way too big. She’s got to be some kind of—holy shit!”
“What?”
“Whoever they are, she’s painted us! We’re all lit up!”
“Who the hell—”
Hawke put the helm hard over and the inflatable curved a tight radius cut to port. Immediately, he veered hard starboard, initiating a violent zigzag course in a desperate effort to elude more incoming enemy fire. A steady warning tone now came from the Zodiac’s on-board systems and a half dozen panel lights began flashing rapidly.
Hawke thumbed the radio mike.
“Blackhawke, Blackhawke, Chopstick’s under attack…repeat…under…attack…we are taking evasive measures…copy?”
“Skipper!” Blackhawke’s fire-control officer replied, “we’re not believing this, sir. I think they—yeah, they are launching! Get out of there!”
“She just launched,” Hawke said, disbelief palpable in his voice. They were off the coast of France, for God’s sake. He yanked the wheel once more hard to starboard. “A surface missile! Are they all bloody insane around here?”
“Can you lose it, sir?” Quick asked, eyeing the screen in utter disbelief. He clenched his shoulder and staggered every time they went off a wave and exploded through a wall of water. The big props dug in once more and they shot forward.
“I don’t know—depends—if it’s heat- or radar-guided and—you know what, to hell with this…Blackhawke! Talk to me!”
“Roger that, Skipper,” came the cool voice of the crewman manning the ship’s fire-control and commo operations center. “Missile has no active radar…it is heat-seeking…we, uh, we have lock-on with the attacking vessel…they, uh, the attacking vessel not responding to repeated verbal warnings, sir.”
“Who the hell are they?” Hawke demanded, curving an impossibly tight right turn.
“Refuses to identify herself, over. Visual ident impossible in this thick stuff, sir.”
“Are these outboards hot enough to pull that missile in?”
“Maybe not…it’s going to be close—hard left now!”
Hawke looked back at Stokely and the rescued American holding on for dear life in the stern of the Zodiac. He needed to get Harry Brock to safety. He’d do what he had to do. He put the damn thing halfway up on its side the turn was so tight.
The missile passed harmlessly not ten feet aft of his stern.
“Blackhawke, sink the attacking vessel. Fire when ready.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper. We confirm that. Blackhawke is launching—”
“I cannot believe this shit!” Stokely shouted. “Man, we—nobody shoots a damn missile at a little rubber boat!”
The Zodiac was lifted upward on a roiling mound of water by the massive explosion aboard the attacking boat. The soupy grey fog surrounding them instantly became an incandescent orange and the shockwave nearly ripped the four men from the small inflatable.
Whoever had had the nerve to shoot at him no longer existed.
The sea-skimming Boeing Harpoon AGM 84-E missile fired at Hawke’s command by Blackhawke was carrying nearly five hundred pounds of Destex high explosive in its warhead. The Harpoon unerringly found its target. Seven of the attacking vessel’s crewmen were killed in the initial explosion, two drowned, and one died from severe burns some hours later in a Cannes hospital. The ship burned for twenty minutes before she rolled and went to the bottom.
If you even glanced at the papers next morning, although it hardly seemed possible given the events of the first few years of the twenty-first century, the world seemed to have slipped its moorings yet again.
Somehow, a French vessel had been sunk off Cannes. Hawke would later learn she was L’Audacieuse, No. 491, a type P40 attack cutter on patrol for the French navy. L’Audacieuse, it was claimed in an appearance by the French Foreign Trade minister, Luca Bonaparte, was on routine patrol off the port of Cannes, when, without provocation, she was deliberately and viciously fired upon and sunk with all hands by a British vessel believed to be in private hands.
If you paid much attention to the screaming headlines in French newspapers or the endless state-run France Inter Radio or France 2 television reports, you would believe that France and England were on the brink of war over the incident.
At the center of this new international storm, a certain captain of British industry named Alexander Hawke.