THE SMELL OF SMOKE. SOMEONE WAS IN THE HALL WITH
him. Stoke froze, stopped breathing. Where? Somebody smoking cigarettes. Maybe ten, fifteen yards ahead. Stoke had the big leather satchel full of purloined documents in one hand and the Schmeisser machine pistol in the other. He raised the gun and listened. Just around the bend in the hallway, two men, guards most probably. He could hear them talking now, smell the smoke drifting back from their cigarettes. They must have just entered the hallway from one of the other elevator banks he’d passed on his way to Schatzi’s office.
Clearly no hidden alarms had been sounded. The two Germans were laughing at something one of them had said. At least they were headed in the right direction, namely, away from him. He put the satchel down carefully and walked rapidly toward them on the balls of his feet, making no sound at all. There were two of them, all right, miniature versions of the Arnolds, wearing black uniforms identical to the one Stokely wore. Machine guns slung on their backs.
“Halt!”
Stoke barked loudly when he was just ten feet behind them.
“Nicht rauchen!”
The two guards stopped dead in their tracks.
“Nicht rauchen?”
one of them said with a grin in his voice, apparently finding it funny. He started to turn around.
“Yeah, you heard me,” Stoke said in English, jamming the muzzle of the Schmeisser between the guy’s shoulder blades. “No smoking. New rule.”
While they were thinking about that, he slung the machine pistol on his back, reached out with both hands, and slammed the two guards together, head-first. There was a sickening thud and the two men dropped to the floor, arms and legs akimbo, out cold.
“See what I’m saying?” Stoke said to the two unconscious guards at his feet. “Smoking is very bad for your ass.”
He took their weapons, H&K MP 5 machine guns, and added them to the collection slung on his back. Then he went back and got the satchel. On the way, he saw the elevator he and Jet had used to come up from the
Unterwelt.
Clearly, Tempelhof was coming to life. It was time to get while the getting was good.
He took the elevator to the bottom level and passed quickly through the dismal rooms of the bunker. A minute or two later he was back in the tunnel. Left was the underground parking garage. Right had to be the trams. He turned right. The tunnel went from dark and dingy to bright and white up ahead. The tram station. He crept forward and took a peek.
There was a three-car train in the station. The cars were open, round and shiny white, and seemed to hover about a foot above the tracks. The station itself was all white tile, shiny and new. Two guards, helmeted and wearing full body armor, stood on the platform talking. Behind them, two sets of escalator stairs rose through the ceiling. Just like the A train, only much cleaner and without all that old-fashioned gravity shit to worry about.
“Morning, boys, how’s it hanging?” Stoke said, striding right up to the platform, the Schmeisser flat down at his side.
“Was ist das
?” the nearest one said, swinging around with his H&K coming up. When he saw Stoke’s SDI uniform, he hesitated a beat too long, just like Stoke figured he would.
“Das ist
the new guy,” Stoke said, and squeezed the trigger.
He blew the guy off his feet with an accurate burst from the Schmeisser. The other guard must have said something very negative about Stoke into his headset because all of a sudden all the lights were flashing and alarms were sounding, including an electronic oogah horn that sounded like something from a U-boat during a crash dive.
Yeah, and here comes the cavalry to the rescue. They’d reversed the up escalator so all stairs were coming down. Guards on both sides, plus a bunch sliding down the wide stainless-steel middle part on their butts, firing in his general direction like kindergarten kids gone crazy. What saved him was, he was up against the platform edge now, only his bobbing head and shoulders visible from above. And he was moving. He was ducking and sprinting toward the train, pausing and firing a quick burst every few feet.
He’d strapped the satchel to his back. He had the Alpenkorps machine pistol in his right hand and an H&K in his left. He fired a second Schmeisser burst at the guard who’d sounded the alarm, putting him on the ground in a puddle of bright blood. With his left hand, he got off a long staccato riff, spraying the guys just coming off the escalator. It seemed to diminish their sense of urgency. Then he heard a new and disturbing noise above all the shooting and the shouting and alarms: the piercing sound of howling, growling Dobermans. Crazy animals, unlike Schatzi’s storm troopers, who didn’t flinch in the face of a little unfriendly machine-gun fire.
Shit.
Rounds were ripping up the tile around his head. Sharp chunks of ceramic stung his face. The dogs were bounding down the escalators behind the guards, even knocking some to the floor in their mad dash to chew Stokely into tiny pieces. He ducked completely below the platform edge and hauled ass for the lead car of the little Buck Rogers train. He hoped Buck had left the keys in the ignition.
Christ. Okay, that really hurt.
One dog had raced ahead of his brethren and was nipping at Stoke’s heels. Got a piece of him, too. He stopped, pivoted, and swung the butt of the H&K at the salivating dog. He got lucky. A glancing blow to the head distracted the animal just long enough for him to haul himself up and into the lead car.
“You bite my ass again, I’m going to use the other end of this gun,
verstehen Sie,
Fido?”
He knew just enough German to know which was the “Go” button, a green one on the dash. He pushed it. There was an odd noise and a humming vibration as if a disc just beneath his feet was spooling up and spinning incredibly fast. Dogs were on either side of the car now, lunging and trying to get at him. He kicked out in both directions and sent two dogs flying back into the howling packs.
He felt a slug of hot lead whistle past his ear.
Distracted by the frenzied hounds, he’d let the storm troopers get too close. Rounds were sizzling over and around him. Ten or fifteen guys in black had leaped off the platform and were headed down the track toward him, filling the tunnel with lead. Funny thing was, bullets didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the shiny white train cars. They just ricocheted off! What the hell was this thing made of?
The closest bad guy was maybe fifteen yards from the rear car. Stoke took him out with the Schmeisser and heard the most dreaded sound in close combat, the dry fire. Empty. He raised both of the H&Ks, firing at his pursuers, putting one boot up on the bench seat and leaning back against the instrument panel to brace himself. He must have hit reverse, because suddenly he was moving backward in the direction of his onrushing attackers!
Damn! He twisted around and looked to see what he’d hit. A simple lever. He’d pushed it down farther. This might work! The train accelerated supernaturally fast. But there was no sensation of speed in the cab. No g-forces slamming him backward. Weird. He watched the SDI uniforms panic and scatter wildly. He hit a couple and that was enough. Those who didn’t take off back in the direction of the station flattened themselves against the walls or dove for either side of the track.
Now he pulled the lever up a bit and the A train seamlessly reversed directions. He pushed the lever forward and the train accelerated into the tunnel, whizzing by the men still flattened to the walls. He firewalled the throttle and the thing just flew. Hyperdrive, like that scene in
Star Wars.
Oddly enough, he still felt no jolt of speed.
Only explanation he could think of: If the machine created its own gravity field, then the normal rules of gravity didn’t apply. Whoa.
Goddamn Germans were onto something here, he thought, gliding on air, leaving all the howling hounds and shell-shocked storm troopers in his dust.
Swoosh.
Man who had the brains and the money to put these things under New York City could be looking at some seriously positive cash flow.
He proceeded out in a great gentle loop, a white blur of station platforms to his right every few seconds, until he felt the tunnel begin to bend toward the left. Calculating speed and distance, and what he recalled of the above-ground geography, he figured he was getting to the far end of the field. That hangar where they’d stowed the helo had to be coming up. He slowed the train by backing down the lever a few notches. It instantly reached a speed where he could read the platform signs flashing by.
Udet, Voss, Richtofen…Lowenhardt…
and, here it comes
…Steinhoffer.
Oh, yeah. He slowed to a crawl and stopped.
Home again, home again.
The platforms out here were much smaller. Maybe ten feet long, max. Only one car could access the platform at a time. But well-lit, and the white tile was brand-new. No escalator, just a simple iron stairway leading up to a closed door. Stoke took his bulging satchel and stepped off. He’d felt something familiar on his cheek, up his nose. A stale wind. Sweeping up from the dark tunnel ahead. Definitely funky. The kind of air forced ahead of a moving train.
He took one last look at his ride, the air-cushioned electra-glide Buck Rogers Special. Some damn train all right. Man. He took the stairs going up three at a time. A trainload of VDI troopers was on its way.
“What up, Arnold?” he asked the duct-taped prisoner inside
Steinhoffer
’s tool room. He located a small saw blade and went to work on Arnold’s feet first.
“Mmmpf.”
“Yeah, well, it took a little longer than I thought it would. Had us a big ass-kicking conference down in the Underworld subway station. I won, you’ll be glad to know. How much fuel left in the helo?”
“Mmmpf!”
“That much, huh? Is that enough to get to Zurich, you think? Or not?”
“Mmmpf-mmmpf!”
“Chill your ass out, Arnold, be cool. What’s your problem? You got control issues? I’m dancing as fast as I can here. Damn, you neo-Nazis are some seriously bossy individuals.”
AN HOUR BEFORE DAYBREAK, TWO DAYS AFTER HAWKE AND
Brock had gone for their swim. The decks were varnished with rain. There were patches of fog appearing and disappearing on the gently rolling surface of the pearl-grey sea. The old supply vessel,
Obaidallah,
was anchored in fifty feet of water just off a small village on the coast of Oman. To the northwest lay the old port city of Ghalat. To the east, slouching like a slumbering cat on the horizon, lay Masara Island. The good ship
Obaidallah,
loaded to the gunwales for this run, would make her weekly supply trip to Masara tonight.
Stoke had arrived from Berlin two days earlier. He’d met up with Fitz McCoy and Charlie Rainwater at Muscat airport, along with their team of mercenaries just flown in from Martinique. The supplies that had been loaded for this particular run were all of the non-potable, nonedible variety. The stores now stacked in the hold were the exploding kind: satchel charges, limpet mines, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and nine-millimeter ammunition. The transfer of supplies from one boat to another was taking place in the dark and in secret.
At midnight, the trawler
Cacique
slipped up along
Obaidallah
’s port side and offloaded the weapons, ammunition, and other sundry equipment Brock and Ahmed had been accumulating in Muscat during the past week. The most prized item:
Bruce,
a minisubmarine developed by the U.S. Navy for the SEALs.
It resembled nothing so much as a huge squared-off torpedo with a wide shark’s smile painted on its nose. Now, the thirty-foot-long vessel remained on deck, covered with a heavy canvas tarp and lashed to the stern. This latest battery-powered vehicle was equipped with propulsion, navigation, communication, and auxiliary life support systems.
It was capable of delivering a squad of fully equipped combat swimmers and their cargo in fully flooded compartments to a mission site, loitering, and then retiring from the area while remaining completely submerged.
The
Obaidallah,
their new home at sea, had a brand-new captain and crew. The old team had been paid a month’s wages and sent home grinning like cats to their families. Ali al-Houri, captain of
Cacique,
had temporarily relieved the
Obaidallah
’s regular captain, a darkly handsome young man named Abu. He had agreed to stay on. He would serve as first mate for this run since he was well known to the French out on the island.
Ali was down in the engine room with his first mate working on the diesel now. There’d been some problem with the fuel pumps. Ali and Abu told Fitz they were pretty sure they could fix it. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. They had to go, and go tonight, one way or another.
Now, the sun was coming. And with it, the heat of day. Beneath the rolling purple ceiling of a low-hanging cloud bank, yellow light was leaking over the rim of the world. Hawke watched dawn’s arrival through the open porthole, blinking back tears of fatigue. Ah yes, Hawke said to himself. Here it comes. It’s morning again in Oman. Another crappy day just this side of paradise.
Hawke knew something his team did not.
Langley personnel on the ground in China had intercepted a red cell transmission out of Hong Kong. A communiqué from General Moon. The gist of it was, Kelly told Hawke, that the sultan was a dead man. If not already deceased, then soon. A courier had been dispatched from Hong Kong twelve hours ago with secret orders to murder Sultan Aji Abbas and his family.
Some bright boy in Beijing PRC headquarters had finally figured out that the sultan’s services were no longer required. It was the thing Hawke and Kelly had most feared during the run-up to this operation. Now it was happening.
Now that Sultan Abbas had publicly invited French troops into Oman, his continued existence was pointless. Even, as the Chinese had now figured out, dangerous. China had to assume the United States was looking for the sultan. If the United States succeeded and could actually locate him, the jig was up. The Americans would put him in front of a camera. He would proceed to denounce the French invasion and expose China’s role in the operation. The ensuing flap would demolish any chance of covert success.
As if the mission Hawke and his men faced wasn’t fraught with enough danger, the clock was now ticking. It was absolutely essential that they got to the sultan before the Chinese assassins did.
Below deck, five bearded and haggard men were seated around a battered wooden table in the dark, cramped space that passed for the main saloon. Even at this hour, with an ancient electric fan whirring away from its perch on a shelf, it was stifling below. Sweat stinks. So do Gauloise cigarettes. Two of the men were smoking heavily, all were drinking cold coffee out of tin cups, trying to stay awake. Maps, charts, diagrams, sat recon photos, and ashtrays littered the table.
All five were staring through bleary eyes at a crude handmade diagram Harry Brock had drawn of the underwater entrance and tunnels leading off from the powder magazine inside Fort Mahoud.
They’d been hard at it, formulating and rejecting and reformulating strategies, for a day and a half. A cherished hour here and there for sleep. It had been forty-eight very long hours since Hawke and Brock returned from the successful reconnaissance mission inside the fort. In that brief span of time, the world had changed.
The French navy was on the move. The
Charles de Gaulle
and
Foch
carrier battle groups had been repositioned to the Arabian Sea. Troopships were also en route, believed to be carrying an amphibious landing force of some forty thousand French infantry. It was rumored that, before the impending invasion of Oman, France’s much-vaunted Mirage and Dassault Rafale fighters would once more challenge the Anglo-American no-fly zone currently being enforced in the northern skies over the Strait of Hormuz.
If it happened, this would be the first such challenge since a Mirage F1 had gone down during an encounter with an unknown British pilot during the early days of the crisis. The American no-fly zone had stirred the media pot even before the French plane went down. Now the mainstream media in the United States were having a field day, showing hourly updates on this “Second Front.” Since no grisly murder trials or celebrity pedophiles were currently available, this unfolding drama in a place few in the world had ever even heard of would have to feed the beast with a billion eyes.
The downing of the Mirage over Oman had elicited a fierce hue and cry from the French press and diplomatic corps, demanding the as-yet-unnamed pilot be turned over to French authorities. That unnamed British pilot, now drinking cold coffee, didn’t even know a French lynch mob wanted his head. Had he known, he would have been too busy to care.
Alex Hawke was one of the five men seated around the table in
Obaidallah
’s smoky and stifling saloon. The ship’s radio, tuned to the BBC, was muttering in plummy tones on a shelf above the table. The news was uniformly bad. But no one was really listening anymore. There was too goddamn much to be done.
The gist of the thing, according to the BBC man now droning on, was this: China’s foreign minister, Nien Chang, had just announced the commencement of joint naval exercises with the French. The two fleets would be conducting operations just outside the territorial waters of Taiwan. Through diplomatic channels, Washington and London had expressed their stern disapproval of such provocative actions. All this at a time of heightened anxieties over peace in the region. Taiwan, threatened, was a key pressure point in U.S.-China relations.
If there was to be a nuclear confrontation between the two super-powers, it would start on that island republic. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, without an American response, would simply destroy U.S. credibility throughout the world. It was a classic Catch-22. Act, and you risked global war. Do nothing, and you risked total impotence.
The U.S. ambassador to China, the Honorable Barron Collier, had expressed the American concerns to the Chinese foreign minister in Beijing. So far, Ambassador Collier had received no reply.
“Turn that goddamn thing off,” Harry Brock said, and someone did.
To say that the hopes of many in Washington and London were now riding on the shoulders of the five men here assembled was no exaggeration. It was hoped that, even at this late hour, an appearance by the sultan of Oman denouncing the French invasion of his sovereign territory might prevent a disastrous incursion. It was not just tiny Oman and the sovereignty of the Gulf States that was at stake. It was the very shaky planet itself.
Once the French were in and seized control of the oilfields, ports, refineries, platforms, and pipelines, they would be extremely difficult to remove. And once China had had her first taste of pure Omani crude, private reserve, it would be damn near impossible to wean her off it. Wargamers in the Pentagon and at NSA were still shaking their heads over this one.
A French invasion of Oman? Coupled with a simultaneous Chinese threat to Taiwan? Even the most prescient inside the Pentagon had not seen this little scenario coming. The allies were scrambling. Already, the United States and Britain were rapidly moving air and naval assets up from the rear. In Hawaii, shore leaves had been canceled. The Pacific Fleet had been called out on an emergency basis.
On point in this new theater of war, the good ship
Obaidallah.
A battered old barge that had no business being on top of the water. By all rights, she should have gone to the bottom decades ago.
Seated to Hawke’s right in the saloon was Stokely Jones, recently arrived from a most successful mission in Germany. Even now, the documents he had obtained in Berlin were being examined at both Langley and NSA. CIA analysts were especially interested in the Chinese connection to the German megacorporation, Von Draxis Industries. Next to Jones, another American, Harry Brock.
To Hawke’s left, two more recent arrivals: FitzHugh McCoy, a strapping Irishman, and Charlie Rainwater, a full-blooded Comanche Indian. McCoy and Rainwater, known affectionately in the worldwide antiterrorist community as Thunder and Lightning, headed up a loosely organized group of mercenaries. All were ex-Legionnaires, Ghurkas, Rangers, and battle-hardened soldiers of fortune.
It was safe to say that Rainwater and McCoy, whose motley band of eight warriors were now sleeping in
Cacique
’s crew quarters, constituted the best freelance hostage rescue team in the world.
Harry Brock and FitzHugh McCoy had taken an instant dislike to each other, Hawke noticed. Brock must have seen Hawke salute the little man on the dock. Which told Harry that Fitz was probably a Medal of Honor winner, since they were automatically entitled to salutes from anyone of any rank. Brock chose not to salute. Odd. But then Brock’s behavior had been odd ever since they’d linked up in Oman. At night, running down his list of worries, Hawke kept thinking about Brick’s
Manchurian Candidate
comment just after Harry Brock’s rescue.
“What’s your story?” Brock had said when Fitz first stepped aboard.
Fitz smiled and walked right up to the much bigger man. “Quick on the turn, fast and hard into battle. What’s yours?”
Brock wisely didn’t respond. But Hawke decided to watch him even more closely from now on.
“All right then,” Fitz said, his thick brogue raw with fatigue and tobacco, “I know everybody’s bloody hot and tired. But the more we sweat now, the less we bleed later. Let’s take it from the top. One more time, boys. Then we all go get some bloody sleep. Stokely? You’re up.”
Stoke tilted his chair away from the table until it was perched on two back legs that threatened to give way any second. He looked at his old pal McCoy, old Five-By-Five, and smiled. Fitz grinned back. There was a bond between the two men that went back decades. It had been forged in the Delta swamplands.
“You want me to go through it all again, Five-By?”
“I do.”
Fitz had earned his stripes in the Mekong: He was roughly five feet tall and approximately five feet wide. His heart was slightly bigger than those dimensions: He’d earned himself his Congressional Medal of Honor for single-handedly taking out a heavily entrenched mortar nest and saving his platoon. He’d carried two wounded to safety under heavy VC fire. He’d been missing a good portion of his stomach at the time.
In that other lifetime, Stoke had been Fitz’s squad leader, SEAL Team 3. Also in that legendary squad, Charlie Rainwater, now wearing his trademark shoulder-length ponytail, buckskins, and a faded navy and gold SEAL T-shirt. Chief, as he was known, had been the squad’s UDT demolitions expert. Chief, and the man sitting next to him, a tough little nut called the Frogman, were the best in the business. They were going to need both men tonight.
Stokely Jones, having now seen Fort Mahoud up close and personal, was glad as hell Hawke had had the wisdom and foresight to fly all of Stoke’s old badass buddies from Martinique in for the party.
“Okay, here goes,” Stoke said. “Me and Alex in the submersible SDV. We splash in the cove off Point Arras at 0200 hours. Descend to fifteen feet and maintain that depth. We proceed north around the point and then southwest to the powder magazine entrance. Arriving at approximately 0215, we reverse direction and enter the magazine tunnel stern-first. We make our way, backing full slow inside the tunnel to Point R-2 on the diagram. We disembark and remove the five RIBS stowed aboard. We inflate the boats, securing them in a daisy-chain aft of the SDV. We secure the vehicle. We rig satchel charges with detonators and fuse igniters on both doors leading to the tunnel and use the right-hand door to enter the magazine itself. Time: 0230 hours.”