White Death: An Alex Hawke Novella (12 page)

This man, whom Stokely had befriended twenty years earlier, was a natural leader; equal parts self-containment, fierce determination, and cocksure animal magnetism. Women and men alike seemed drawn to him like water to the moon.

Even in repose Hawke was noticeable, for he possessed the palpable gravity of a man who had been there and back. A pure and elemental warrior, necessarily violent, riveting, nature itself. Well north of six feet, incredibly fit for someone his age, this was a man who swam six miles in open ocean every day of his life.

He possessed a full head of unruly black hair, had a chiseled profile, and sported a deepwater tan from weeks at sea. And then there were those “arctic blue” eyes. A prominent London gossip columnist once declared in
Tatler
that his eyes looked like “pools of frozen rain.” She had thus further embellished his reputation as one of London’s most sought-after bachelors. Hawke’s two vices, Bermudian rum and American cigarettes, were the only two left to him since he’d given up on women.

“Awright, let’s hit the road,” Captain Irby, said, kicking enough damp earth onto the fire to extinguish it. And the five heavily armed men began to make their way down the seaward face, hacking their way through rugged terrain covered by dense vegetation. Rico first, then Irby, Fitzgerald, Stoke, and, finally, Hawke, covering the rear.

It was slow going.

The trail was switchbacked, snaking down the mountain, hairpin turns giving on sheer drops. Almost immediately, Hawke began to second-guess the wisdom of taking Rico’s advice. For one thing, the trail was very steep and soon began to grow narrow in places. The commandos were forced to use their machetes simply to keep hacking their way forward. Rico offered constant assurances, saying more than once that it would widen out soon. It didn’t. Now, it was barely wide enough for passage.

And then it got worse.

Walls of green now pressed in on them from either side, slowing them down even more. Thick, loopy vines and exposed ficus roots underfoot grabbed at their boots. Hawke, having seen Irby suddenly trip and pitch forward, didn’t like it one bit. Not that it mattered much now. Retracing their steps and coming down the open face was not an option at this late stage in the mission.

So there was nothing for it. Hawke grimly kept his mouth shut and told the chattering Rico to do the same . . .

Thirty minutes into the descent, the jungle closed in, then narrowed to a complete standstill. They stumbled into an apparent dead end. A tiny space inside a cathedral of hundred-foot-high palms, the fronds chattering loudly high overhead in the stiff winds, the air in the green hollows cool and damp. Rico was slashing at the solid green walls that remained before them, cursing loudly as he flailed away with his ivory-handled machete.

“Look, Commandante!” the young Cuban kid cried out over his shoulder. “All clear ahead now!”

Hawke looked. Rico had disappeared through the now invisible opening he had slashed between two trees in the wall of palms. The squad pressed forward in an attempt to follow his lead.

“Shut that damn kid up, Stoke,” Hawke said, using his assault knife to whack at the dangling morass of thick green vines as he, too, tried to follow Rico’s path forward. Captain Irby was now in the lead, and he was pulling back elephant leaves and palm fronds, seeking a way forward.

“I don’t like this, boss,” Stoke said, watching Irby struggle. “Something is not—”

“
Down!
Everybody get fucking
down
!” Captain Irby croaked, turning to face them, his face stricken. Stoke took one look at the man’s clouding eyes and knew they were in deep trouble.

“Hey, Captain, you okay, man?” Stoke said to him, reaching out to help. There was so much blood. The man had something stuck in his . . . oh, Jesus, it looked like Rico’s ivory-handled machete. It was buried up to the hilt, near the top of Irby’s chest, just above his Nomex body armor. Irby’s fixed and glazed eyes stared out at nothing, and he fell facedown at Major Fitzgerald’s feet.

“Oh, God, I didn’t think he would—” the Aussie said, dropping to his knees to see what he could do for his dead or dying comrade.

And that’s when the thick jungle surrounding the natural cathedral erupted in a storm of sizzling lead. Heavy machine-gun fire came from all directions, muzzle flashes visible everywhere they looked, rounds shredding the foliage over their heads and all around the trapped commandos. Masses of shrieking green parrots, macaws, and other tropical birds loudly rose up into the moonlit skies in terror as the incoming fire increased in ferocity.

“Get down now! Take cover!” Hawke shouted. He dove left, but not before he heard the young Aussie scream, “I’m hit! I’m hit!” And then he was silent.

“Damn it to hell!” Hawke cried, getting back on his feet to go to the wounded man’s aid.

“Forget him, boss! He’s gone,” Stoke cried out.

Hawke felt a visceral torque in his gut. In a rage, he opened up with both his assault rifle and his machine pistol, firing both weapons on full auto until he’d exhausted his ammo and reached for more. Stoke had his back, the two of them stood there back-to-back, leaning against each other as they spun in unison, unleashing a 360-degree hail of lead with overlapping fields of fire. The thumping roar of Stoke’s heavy M-60 machine gun seemed to be having an impact on the enemy hidden in the jungle.

“Gotta be getting the hell out of here, boss!” Stoke said, grabbing Hawke’s shoulder and spinning him around. “Back up the mountain! It’s the only way . . .”

“Go, go!” Hawke said. He heaved two frag grenades over his shoulder while turning to follow his friend’s upward retreat. He’d taken two steps forward when a high-caliber round slammed him in the lower back, spun him around, and dropped him to his knees.

“Boss!” Stoke cried, seeing Hawke trying vainly to get to his feet and firing his weapon blindly.

“Keep bloody moving, damn it!” Hawke shouted. “I’ll take care of these bastards. Leave me be.”

“Not today,” Stoke said.

Stoke whirled around and bent down, firing his weapon with his left hand and scooping Hawke up with his right. He flung Hawke over his broad shoulders and started running flat out straight up the mountain. The giant with his wounded friend tore through the dense foliage as if it didn’t exist.

They got maybe a few hundred yards before all hope of salvation vanished. A broad rope net, weighted with stones, was released by three Cuban soldiers perched on branches high in the canopy. The net fell, entrapping the two enemy combatants, driving them to the ground, and ending for good any hope they still harbored of escape.

W
hen Hawke came to, he was gazing into the sweat-streaked face of the Russian general he’d come to Cuba to kill.

Ivanov was bent over from the waist, smiling into his prisoner’s unseeing eyes. His thick lips were moving, his Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down, but he wasn’t making any sounds Hawke could understand as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Alex blinked rapidly, trying to focus. He saw Stoke out of the corner of his eye.

His friend was bound by his ankles with rough cordage and suspended upside down from a heavy wooden rafter. He appeared to be naked. And there was a lot of blood pooled on the floor beneath his head for some reason. Had he been shot, too, and hung to bleed out? Hawke’s own wound was radiating fire throughout his body. He fought to stay awake . . . heard a familiar laugh and looked across the room.

The kid, Rico, was there, too, sitting at a battered wooden table, smoking a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of rum with some other Cuban guards. He seemed to be talking to Stokely out of the side of his mouth. Every now and then he’d get up, walk over to the suspended black man, scream epithets into his bleeding ears, and then backhand him viciously across the mouth with his pistol. A few white teeth shone in the puddle of blood under Stoke’s head.

Stoke, perhaps the toughest man Hawke had ever met, was a stoic of the first order. Hawke had never once heard his friend cry out in pain.

Hawke felt a white-hot flare of anger. Bloody hell. He had to do something! He tried to rise from the chair but felt himself slipping away again. He could not seem to keep his eyes open. How long had he been awake? They never let him sleep. No food. Some poisonous water out of a rusty coffee can now and then. It was cold sleeping on the dirt floor of the dank cement building after the sun dropped . . .

They’d both been stripped naked the first night. Allowed to keep nothing but their heavy combat boots with no laces. The bullet was still in Alex’s back, and the wound had turned into one hot mess, all right, but he fought to ignore the searing pain and keep his wits about him. He shook his head and tried to remember where he was despite the spiking fever that made straight thinking so difficult.

It was a compound built in a clearing in the middle of the jungle. Palm tree fronds brushed the ground. High wire fences. Dogs. Every evening the Russians came, including General Ivanov. They drank vodka and played rummy with the Cubans. The general and Rico interrogated the two prisoners until they got bored with torture and retreated deeper and deeper into drink.

The worst brutality the two prisoners had endured was called the “Wishing Well.” Every morning at dawn, two burly guards would march them naked through the jungle to a spot away from the compound. There, two fifty-gallon drums had been stacked one on top of the other and buried in the soil. Hawke and Jones were made to lie down in the dirt beside the well. One guy would bind each of their ankles to a stout bamboo pole while the other one kept his MAC-10 machine pistol trained on both of them.

Then they’d lift them up off the ground by turns and dunk them headfirst down into the foul, slop-filled hole. Sometimes for a few seconds, other times for a couple of minutes. Or longer. Neither man knew how long his head would be submerged. Each would come up sputtering. The hole was brimming with a fetid stew of urine and feces.

What the Wishing Well actually was, Hawke and Stokely soon realized, was the Cuban soldiers’ latrine.

“I can’t take much more of this, Stoke,” Hawke said at dawn one morning, before the guards came for them. “I’m deadly serious, man. This will break me. I thought Iraq was bad. But, this? Hell, I’ll just start talking, man.”

“We are just not ever going to do that, boss.”

“I know.”

S
o that morning was different. The two guards arrived and marched the naked and manacled prisoners outside the fenced perimeter and single file into the jungle. The Cubanos laughing and shouting to each other out of habit. Another hot day, another hilarious game of dunk the prisoners headfirst into the latrine.

One guard was in front, Hawke right behind him. Then Stoke, then the other guard at the rear with his gun aimed at the back of Stoke’s head. No talking allowed for the two captives. Hawke obeyed that rule until they got within sight of the Wishing Well. That’s when he said the one word Stoke was waiting to hear:

“NOW!”

In that instant, Hawke got his manacled wrists over the guard’s head and cinched tight around the stocky Cuban’s throat. Hawke yanked him backward off his feet, got him on the ground, and began pummeling his face with his two bound fists, using the steel manacles as a weapon. Stoke, meanwhile, planted one foot and whirled, whipping his bound hands in a great sweeping arc, slamming his enjoined fists against the side of the other guard’s head and knocking him off his feet.

Hawke had little memory of the ensuing skirmish. Both Cubans acquitted themselves rather nicely, knowing full well they were fighting for their lives. Hawke was fairly sure he’d bit both ears off his guy and done terrible things to his eyes and teeth. And, ultimately, to the vertebrae in his cervical spine. C3, C4, and C5, damaged beyond repair.

Meanwhile, Stoke used his enormous size and weight to his advantage. He sat atop the guy long enough to break the index finger of the thrashing right hand by removing his gun while his finger was still inside the trigger guard. Then he bounced up and down on his chest a couple of times until all his ribs fractured pretty much at once. Until something sharp and splintery pierced his heart and lungs.

F
or three days they fought
to survive in the wild. Naked, hungry, no food, no water, no map. They followed the sun during the day. Kept well clear of the occasional dirt roads. Survived on snakes, bugs, and bark. Made a little shelter with palm fronds every night to keep the cold rain off their hides. And so it went.

On the fourth night, they heard booming surf in the distance. That’s when they came upon a high wire fence. They had little strength left to go around it. Hawke was in far worse shape than Stokely; he’d lost a lot of blood and still battled a raging fever. Somehow, they both found enough strength to scale the fence and drop to the ground on the other side.

H
awke woke up in sick bay the next morning with no memory of how he’d come to be there.

“Good morning, handsome,” a pretty red-haired American nurse said to him, holding the straw in his orange juice next to his parched lips. “There’s someone here to see you.”

Hawke smiled.

“Who is it?”

“I’ll go get him, honey,” the nurse said.

Now a strange man appeared at his bedside. American military. Brass, obviously. A U.S. naval officer, who was also smiling down at him in a friendly way. Where the bloody hell was he? On a U.S. destroyer?

“Good morning, Admiral,” Hawke managed, very happy to see a familiar uniform and a friendly face.

“Good morning,” the old man said, pulling a chair up to his bedside. “Son, I don’t know who the hell you are or where the hell you came from, but I will tell you one goddamn thing. You ruined my golf game, sailor.”

“Sorry, sir?”

“You heard me. I came up the seventh fairway this morning half expecting to find my ball in a sand trap. Instead, I found you. Bare assed, except for your goddamn shoes. Damnedest thing I ever saw. And no tracks in the sand anywhere around you. Like you’d dropped out of the blue.”

“From the top of the fence, Admiral.”