White Death: An Alex Hawke Novella (11 page)

E
PILOGUE

Der Hohenzollern

“M
ore champagne, darling?”

“Just a splash, Alex. No-no, stop!” Sigrid cried.

Ambrose Congreve sat back and smiled at the two of them. He could not remember seeing his old friend so happy. At least not in a very long time. All three of them had dressed to the nines for their Christmas Eve dinner. Hawke and Ambrose resplendent in black tie, Sigrid radiant in a plunging sequined gown of bright Christmas red.

Tomorrow morning, Ambrose and Alex would board Hawke’s Gulfstream for the short flight back to London. But tonight the three friends celebrated where it had all begun.

Der Hohenzollern.

All the festive arrangements had been made in secret; Sigrid collaborated with her old co-conspirator in the planning. The two had reserved the small private dining room on the second floor. The hand-hewn wooden room was a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Austrian carpentry. It had a stone fireplace and lead-paned windows with a view of the bustling town square below and the light snow falling softly on this happy Christmas Eve.

Best of all, a glorious Christmas tree stood in the corner. The top branches of dark green fir brushed the vaulted ceiling; all were decorated with red wooden ornaments, and lighted candles gave the place a golden glow. There were two gifts beneath the tree, one each for Ambrose and Alex.

Laughter was mixed with tying up a few loose ends from the week. Wolfie had been arrested by the
Stadtspolizei
, based on hard evidence supplied by an anonymous source. The case had exploded, reverberating across front pages on both sides of the Atlantic. MI6 and CIA were jointly looking into von Stuka’s criminal networks in both Moscow and Beijing, originating in the former and routed through the latter. Hawke and Congreve were assisting with the ongoing investigations.

The source was, of course, Dr. Steinhauser. Hawke had insisted that his friend remain hidden deep inside his Bat Cave, his secret work far too valuable to be revealed to the world at large.

Near the end of the dinner, Ambrose asked about Hawke’s decision not to continue on to the summit of Der Nadel, Alex’s quest to complete the sad search for his grandfather’s bones.

“Two things,” he’d replied.

“I know you weren’t afraid, darling, so why stop?” Sigrid said.

“On the contrary, I was bloody terrified. I think I was in a state of shock going up that Murder Wall. I have no recollection at all of how I bloody did it. Some mysterious part of me took control of my mind and body and got me to the top. It was only laying there on that snowy ledge that I even realized I was safe.”

“Why didn’t you continue?” Congreve said, “Why didn’t you go on?”

“I’m not like my grandfather, climbing at age seventy. I’m too old even now. You might be glad to know I’ll never climb another mountain alone.”

“I’ll drink to that!” Sigrid laughed, raising her glass in a toast.

They clinked glasses and Hawke continued.

“That brave old man is going nowhere now. And I have a hell of a lot of living to do. I have my son to take care of, after all. And a certain woman of my acquaintance who badly needs all the help she can get.”

Sigrid laughed to the point where she almost sprayed them both with champagne. “You said there were two reasons, you sexist pig. What’s the other one?”

“Tonight,” Alex said. “That was the real reason. I was determined up there that nothing would prevent me from spending Christmas Eve here in this room, with two people I care so deeply about.”

“Well said,” Ambrose replied with glistening eyes.

Sigrid clinked her glass with her spoon and got to her feet. Hawke thought she had never looked lovelier than she did at that moment, standing in the warm glow of the Christmas tree candles.

“Well, we’ve been busy down here, too, your lordship. Haven’t we, Chief Inspector?”

“Oh, right, I haven’t mentioned that yet, have I? Well, Alex, it seems I have a new employee. Someone who has demonstrated great courage and a keen interest in the work of the criminalist.”

“Really?” Hawke interrupted, beaming at her.

“Really. Sigrid has resigned her position with Credit Suisse. She is moving from Zurich to London, where she will live in the old gardener’s cottage at Brixden House in the Cotswolds. There, she will assist me in every aspect of my work during the daylight hours. At night, she will be enrolled at the University of Glouscestershire, having received early acceptance to study criminal law. It is her intention upon graduation to seek employment at New Scotland Yard.”

Hawke reached across the table and took her hand.

“How perfectly wonderful,” he said, “How wonderful that is.”

“I was hoping you’d say that, Alex. I so hoped you wouldn’t feel it was somehow presumptuous of me.”

“Are you joking, girl? You’ll be right down the road. We can go on picnics by the Thames! You’ll meet Alexei, too. I’m sure you two will become fast friends . . . it is the very happiest news, darling. What a truly wonderful Christmas gift. I’m so sorry I don’t have anything for you and—”

“There is one thing,” Congreve said, smiling at them both. “My new assistant and I have a lot of work to do tomorrow. I was wondering if you might find room to find a seat for her on Hawke Air in the morning?”

“You’re moving to London now?”

“Lady Mars says the cottage is all ready. The shippers will arrive with my things on Saturday, so—”

“So, we’ll all celebrate Christmas together, Alex.”

Hawke laughed and said, “I always got to open one present on Christmas Eve. Is one of those boxes under the tree for me?”

“Open it and find out,” Sigrid said.

It was.

A messenger had arrived that day with a framed photograph from Dr. Steinhauser. A grainy black-and-white picture he’d found in one of his scrapbooks.

A photograph of Alex and his grandfather, their arms around each other, smiling happily in the sunlight. It was taken early on the morning as they began their ascent of Der Nadel
.

“Merry Christmas, darling!” Sigrid said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Keep reading for an excerpt from

Ted Bell’s upcoming novel

P
ATRIOT

On sale in hardcover September 2015

A
N EXCERPT FROM
P
ATRIOT

May 2012

T
he sixth-richest man in England ducked his head.

Pure instinct, it was. A tight formation of four Russian MiG-35s suddenly came screaming out of the blinding sun, thundering directly over Lord Alexander Hawke’s Royal Navy watch cap. Silver wings flashing, thrusters howling, the fighter jets quickly shed altitude and skimmed over his position, their squat air brakes down for landing.

“
What the hell?
” Alex Hawke muttered to himself. The British intelligence officer was looking straight up as four fighter jets thundered not a hundred feet over his head! MiG-35s in bloody
Cuba
? He’d have to alert his superiors at MI6 London straightaway.

These MiG fighters were the most radical thing aloft these days; their mere presence here on the island of Cuba confirmed one of Hawke’s worst suspicions about his mission: the Russians were no longer fooling around playing, the unconvincing role of “advisors” to the aging Castro brothers. Despite Cuba’s impending and highly problematic “detente” with America, the Muscovites had clearly returned to this island paradise to stay. And they meant business.

The plain and simple fact was that his imminent mission, if successful, would soon bring about a head-on political collision between Britain, America, and Russia. The true facts about Cuba’s double-dealing would soon flare into stark relief, both in the espionage community and on front pages of newspapers around the world. Welcome to sunny Cuba! Welcome to Planet Tinderbox.

And welcome to realpolitik 2012,
Hawke thought to himself.

His four-man stick, or assassination team, and their Cuban guide were crouched in the heavy tangle of verdant jungle encroaching on the airfield. His current position was a scant hundred yards or so from the wide white airstrip. In the recent past, he’d noted on his mental pad, all the cracks in the cheap concrete had been patched, crisscrossed with slapdash splashes of black tar, and the uneven surface mostly cleared of choking weeds and overgrowth.

This very long tactical runway had been chopped into the top of the mountain by the Soviets more than a half century earlier, and it certainly looked its age. One famous legacy the Russians had left behind on the island, seriously crappy concrete.

One after another, the fighter planes scorched the far end of the runway. Puffs of bluish-white smoke spurted from the blistered tyres as, with jets howling, the four aircraft landed in sequence. They then taxied in single file to the far boundary of the field. Maneuvering adroitly, the Russian fighter pilots nested wing to wing in the shadows of a few rusty Quonset hangars overarched with climbing vines. An antiquated control tower, also built by the bloody Sovs during a brief warm spell in the Cold War, provided little in the way of shade.

Commander Hawke motioned to his squad as he rose to his feet, squinting against the high hard dazzle of the sky. “Move out,” the Englishman said softly, and he and his men melted back into the protective cover of the dense jungle canopy encroaching on the field. He wanted to get closer to that tower. The MiGs were interesting, but they were not what he’d come all the way from Britain to see.

Ten minutes and a few hundred yards later the commandos had relocated; they were now nearly in spitting distance of yet another Russian airplane, albeit one vastly less sophisticated than the four gleaming MiGs. The first new arrival, having landed a scant few minutes ahead of its fighter escort, was now parked on the tarmac, broiling under the intense Caribbean sun.

The nearby control tower, almost completely enwreathed in cascading flowering vines, loomed above the airplane but provided no shade at all. The fact that all the tower windows were either shattered or completely missing and that there were no controllers present up there seemed to be of little concern to the five Russian pilots recently arrived.

Hawke raised the Zeiss binoculars to his eyes and studied this aviation relic from another century. Unlike the four silver MiG 35s, this was a very old number indeed. It was a dilapidated twin-engine Ilyushin 12 transport, at once a venerable and veritable blast from the past. Hawke caught a sudden glimpse of garish color out of the corner of his eye and quickly shifted his focus left.

A vintage Cadillac limo, painted a ripe old shade of lavender, now rolled to a stop a few feet from the starboard wingtip of the IL 12. A small aluminum ladder was hung down from the opened cabin door aft of the wing. One of the uniformed crew, looking very much like a yachtsman in white trousers and a blue blazer, appeared at the aircraft hatchway.

This chap, clearly DGI, the Cuban secret service unit under the control of the KGB, was shielding his eyes from the fierce sunshine and carrying a serious submachine gun. He climbed down the ladder, circled the faded and rusting limo, and bent to examine the driver’s paperwork. Apparently finding everything in order, the armed steward called up to another man still aboard the airplane. A big chap in full jungle camo was now standing in the opening in the fuselage. Hawke smiled. He knew the Russian army officer by the nickname given him by his German father. But he had made his real reputation fighting rebels in Chechnya: a savage butcher.

Der Wolf.

The man climbed down the steps to the tarmac with a good deal of athleticism, Hawke noticed. He held a heavy leather suitcase in his hand, but he handled it as if it were a spy novel he’d been reading on the flight. He was a big, bald man, with masses of bunched muscle around his neck and shoulders. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing powerful forearms. The whole gristly package came with a right bullet of a head, too, gleaming with sweat.

Hawke zoomed in on the face, on the hooded dark and bushy-browed eyes of the arriving passenger.

He took a good long look at the fellow and then handed the glasses to his old friend, an ex–Navy SEAL and former New York Jet, a human mountain from West 129th Street in Harlem known by the name of Stokely Jones Jr. A much-decorated counterterrorist for hire, he was oft described by Alex Hawke as “about the size of your average armoire.”

“It’s him, Stoke,” Hawke said. “Ivanov.”

Stokely Jones took a quick peek and confirmed Hawke’s opinion. There was no doubt. The man they’d come to Cuba to kill had arrived right on schedule.

T
hat night it turned cold
in the mountains
.
From his vantage point in the jungle peaks of the Sierra Maestra, Commander Hawke could see the misty lights of Cabo Cruz, a small fishing village on the northeastern coast of Cuba, on the coastline far below. To the east, a few more such villages were visible from his vantage point. Dim clusters of light scattered along the black coastline, as if tiny gold coins had been flung out by some giant hand.

These were the only signs of civilization visible in the darkness from the mountainside campsite.

Hawke pulled his collar up as he looked seaward. The wind was up, heralding a cold front moving north. He knew from CIA ops briefings in Miami that a tropical storm was brewing up to the south of Cuba. It was headed this way, a cold wind out of Jamaica, drawn northward by warmer Caribbean waters. Hawke swore softly under his breath. Sometimes inclement weather worked in your favor; and sometimes it decidedly did not.

Among the five men living at the makeshift campsite, the mood around the deliberately low-burning campfire was one of quiet, confident expectation. The tiny village of Cabo Cruz, just below them, was their target tonight. In that village was the man the commando squad been tracking for the last forty-eight hours, ever since the Ilyushin 12 had touched down at the secret airstrip.

His name was General Sergey Ivanovich Ivanov.

He was a high-ranking Russian officer on a mission from Moscow, a much-feared veteran of the Spetsnaz brigade who’d written their names in blood on the killing fields of Chechnya. Special forces, the crème de la crème of Putin’s much vaunted advance combat brigades.

Earlier that afternoon, the general, along with two civilian aides cum bodyguards and his plainclothes entourage of advisors, had checked into a seaside hotel called Illuminata de los Reyes, Light of the Kings. They’d taken the entire top floor of the pale-pink-washed building. The general’s quarters were on the third floor, a capacious suite with a balcony overlooking the sea. That night before, Sergey had left the French doors open to the wind and waves; at around midnight, he’d ventured out onto the balcony for a last Montecristo cigar and vintage brandy.

Hawke’s four-man stick was a British MI6-initiated counterterrorist team, operating in tandem with the CIA. The Englishman’s mission, under the direction of Sir David Trulove, chief of MI6, was straightforward enough: travel to Miami, then Cuba, and gather intelligence about Russian operations on the island. And then take out
der Wolf
.

A forward espionage base in North America was long rumored to be under consideration by Vladimir Putin’s top generals as a KGB spy outpost. Human intel reports out of CIA Miami indicated scouting had already begun for a prime location on a small island off the northeastern coast of Cuba.

Hawke’s joint force of CIA and MI6 commandos had a clear-cut objective: kill the man sent by Moscow to supervise the design and construction of a major Russian military facility on the Isla de Pinos. In 1953, Fidel had been imprisoned at a notorious facility there, a house of horrors built by Batista. And his brother Raúl had recommended the small island to the Kremlin as the ideal location for a major spy base.

Now, the Castro brothers, despite increasingly friendly diplomatic overtures from Washington, had revealed their true colors: despite any rhyme or reason, the Cuban sympathies still lay with Moscow. Sir David Trulove, Hawke’s superior at MI6, had once joked to Hawke that
los hermanos
must have missed the memo: “Communism is dead.”

Los hermanos,
Spanish for “the brothers,” was Sir David’s pet sobriquet for that notorious pair of tenacious banana republic dictators.

It had been estimated by British-run undercover operatives in Havana that the general’s imminent demise would set back top secret Russian espionage initiatives by at least eighteen months to two years. Time sorely needed by the Western powers to get their act together on the new realities shaping the Latin America geopolitical arena.

The CIA/MI6 hit team consisted of four warriors: Commander Hawke himself, ex–Royal Navy; the former Navy SEAL Stokely Jones Jr.; a young ex-Marine sniper named Captain Alton Irby; and a freelance Aussie SAS demolition expert, Major Sean Fitzgerald.

They had picked up a fifth member, a local guide, shortly after they’d arrived. He was a good-looking young kid named Rico Alonso. He was moody and hot-tempered, but Hawke put up with him. Rico exuded complete confidence, something he’d gained through prior dealings with British and American commandos traveling in harm’s way. He’d done it all before, apparently with much success. And he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the jungle regions of the central Cuba’s mountains that Hawke was in desperate need of.

The stick had been put ashore on the northeastern coast by an American submarine,
Hammerhead,
out of Guantanamo Bay; the insertion location was a small port city called Mayacamas. That had been two days earlier, the night before they’d scouted the airstrip. Since then they’d been tracking the movements of the target, using Rico to gather intel from the village locals about the Russian general’s movements, weapons, and sleep habits.

Tonight,
Hammerhead
had returned to the Mayacamas LZ on the coast. The attack submarine was loitering offshore even now, scheduled for a rendezvous with Hawke at 0400 hours this morning. It was a full moon, and the brightness presented its own set of dangers.

Six hours gave the four-man stick and Rico plenty of time to make their way down to the village, suppress resistance, if any, in and around the hotel, and gain access to the top-floor room where the Russian target was now presumably sleeping. The team would assassinate him and then make their way back along the coast to the exfiltration point as quickly as possible.

It all sounded straightforward enough, and in reality, it was. But war, as Alex Hawke had learned long ago, had its own reality. If things could go wrong, they would. Even if things could not possibly go wrong, things could always find a way. And, sometimes, incredibly, things would go
right
at the very moment when you’d lost all hope. That was just the way it was in the fog of war.

B
ehind the keening note of the freshening wind, the sea boomed softly at the bottom of the cliffs. Alex Hawke got to his feet, kicked dirt onto the smoldering embers, and began a final check of his automatic weapon and ammunition. He carried a machine pistol and an FN SCAR assault rifle with a grenade launcher mounted on the lower rail. Grenades hung like grape clusters from his utility belt.

“Let’s move out,” Hawke said softly, putting a match to the Marlboro jammed in the corner of his mouth.

“Time,” Stoke said to the other men. “You heard the man.”

Stoke, like the others, was surreptitiously watching their leader, his old friend Alex Hawke. Hawke, especially in his muddy jungle camo, was hardly the picture of a typical British lord in his midthirties. To be sure, there was nothing typical about the man. He was, as one of his former Etonian classmates once put it, “a masterpiece of contradictions.” He was a British intelligence officer and former Royal Navy combat pilot about whom it had oft been said: the naturally elegant Lord Hawke is also quite naturally good at war.

Now, on the eve of battle, the man grew ever more calm and at peace with himself. He was unmoving, quietly smoking in the flickering firelight, the smoke a visible curl, rising into the cool night air. Stoke alone knew that behind Hawke’s wry smile and placid exterior was, after all, a creature of radiant violence.