Hawke

He sucked one last draught of sweet air into his lungs and then—stepped off into forever.

The next morning they hung Blackhawke’s corpse from a post on the riverbank, in plain view of the passing river traffic. It rotted there for some months, sloughing off flesh, blacker and smaller with every sunrise, a stern and daily reminder of the fate awaiting those foolhardy enough to consider the pirate’s adventuresome ways.

In the end, there was little left of Blackhawke but legend. That, and his sun-bleached bones, tinkling gaily in the wind off the river.

Hawke was silent a moment, having finished his tale. He drained his port, then he stood and raised the empty glass to his friend.

“Hear me then, Death, and lay on!” Hawke said, and flung his glass far out into the nighttime sky.

“Hear! Hear!” Ambrose said, and, getting to his feet, he flung his glass over the rail as well. “Now we’ve sent Captain Blackhawke off to his reward, I’m for bed myself. Good night, Alex. Sleep well.”

“Good night, Ambrose,” Alex said. “Thanks to you, old soul, I’ll no doubt be dreaming of pirates tonight.”

But of course he dreamt of them every night.

18

At six the next morning, a crewman on the bridge initiated a program that caused the entire stern section of Blackhawke to rise upward on massive hydraulic pistons. It revealed a yawning, cavernous hangar, where Hawke garaged a few of his “toys,” as he called them.

The deck and bulkheads of the hangar were brilliantly polished stainless steel and contained only a tiny portion of Hawke’s permanent collection. Among them were the 1932 British Racing Green Bentley, supercharged. A C-type Jaguar, wi

Then there was the seventy-foot-long Nighthawke, an offshore powerboat capable of speeds in excess of one hundred miles an hour. Hawke had made many a narrow escape thanks to Nighthawke’s powerful turbocharged engines.

One of Hawke’s favorite toys, however, was the shining silver seaplane now being positioned at the top of the ramp. Its lovely streamlined appearance looked like something Raymond Loewy himself might have designed in the early thirties. At a signal, the plane was lowered to the foot of a ramp that stretched directly into the sea. In seconds, the small plane was bobbing merrily on the mirrored surface of the blue water.

The name Kittyhawke was painted in script just below the cockpit window. And, under that, a painting of a very pretty young bathing beauty. Sutherland and Quick stood at the foot of the ramp, each holding a mooring line attached to the plane’s pontoons.

Hawke and Congreve stood watching the operation. Hawke was wearing his old Royal Navy flight suit. It was his standard wardrobe whenever he flew the seaplane. He was literally rubbing his hands together in keen anticipation of the flight to Nassau.

“Fine morning for the wild blue yonder,” Hawke exclaimed, taking in a deep breath of salt air.

“Lovely,” Congreve replied, expelling a plume of tobacco smoke the color of old milkglass.

“Now, listen, old boy. I want you to have a bit of fun while I’m gone. Do some more snorkeling. Get some sun. You look like an absolute fish.”

“About that treasure map. I do hope—”

“The box is open on the library desk. If you have to lift it out, there are tweezers in the drawer.”

“I’d like to include Sutherland in my research. He might prove extremely useful.”

“Smashing. Spent some time heading up your cartography section, didn’t he? Best of luck. Who couldn’t use an extra few hundred million in gold?”

“Should be good fun.”

Hawke zipped up his flying suit and put a hand on Congreve’s shoulder.

“I’ve left you all the notes I’ve made over the years. A lot to plow through. All those rainy afternoons at the British Museum digging up contemporaneous maps and manuscripts and what-not.”

“Really? I always imagined you whiling away those hours in a pub somewhere, huddled in a dark corner with a beautiful married woman.”

“Indeed? Well. Some excellent volumes of eighteenth-century history and cartography in the library, as you know. I’ve made a fair bit of progress, but, of course, I don’t read Spanish as well as you do.”

“I was wondering—” Congreve said, and then looked away.

“Yes?”

“I wonder—well, you said you’d been in these islands before,” he said, still not looking Hawke in the eye.

“Yes?”

“Well, I was thinking perhaps that voyage you took might itself have been some kind of treasure-hunting expedition. If the map has been in your family for generations, it might be that—”

“I really have no idea,” Hawke said, his face clouding up. He stepped onto the plane’s pontoon. “I told you. I was so young. I don’t remember anything.”

“Of course. You said that. Sorry.”

“I’m off, then.”

“Please give Victoria my best.”

“Oh, I will indeed,” Hawke said, merry blue eyes and a smile returning to his face. “And mine as well, I should hope.”

“Safe journey,” Congreve said. Hawke patted the rosy cheek of the painted bathing beauty for luck and climbed up into the cockpit. He pulled the door closed after him. The window on Hawke’s side slid open, and his curly black head appeared.

“Back in a few days, I should think,” Hawke shouted. “I’ll ring you right after my meeting at the State Department. Have some fun, will you? Play some golf!”

“Golf!” Congreve exclaimed. “There’s not a golf course within a hundred miles of this bloody place!”

Hawke smiled and pulled the window closed. He looked at the preflight check he’d strapped to his knee. God, he loved this airplane! Just the smell of the thing was enough to make him feel sharply alive. Since arriving in the Exumas, he’d made good use of the little plane, taking her up for early-morning explorations of the surrounding islands.

There were a few loud reports as Kittyhawke’s Packard-built Merlin 266 engine fired, and a short blast of flame erupted from the manifold. The engine was a custom version of the one that had powered the Supermarine Spitfires that had won the Battle of Britain.

As the polished steel propeller slowly started to spin, Congreve turned to Ross, who was now standing beside him, holding the plane’s mooring line.

“What’s the weather like between here and Nassau?” he asked his Scotland Yard colleague. “I saw a nasty front moving toward the Bahamas on the weather sat this morning.”

“Should be ideal, then,” Ross said, smiling with evident fondness for Hawke. “You know the skipper. Even as my squadron commander, when we were flying sorties in Tomcats, he was always frustrated he never got to be one of those hurricane hunter chaps. He does love the eye of the storm.”

“No,” Ambrose said with a puff of smoke, “the eye of the storm is far too quiet for Alex Hawke. He loves the storm.”

Ross quickly checked the plane’s exterior controls over, then gave Hawke the thumbs-up. He tossed the last mooring line out toward the pontoon where it was automatically spooled aboard.

The engine noise increased as Hawke ran up the motor. Testing his flaps, ailerons, and rudder, he turned the plane’s nose into the wind. With a sudden roar, the plane surged forward. Congreve, who hated flying contraptions, had to admit the silver plane looked splendid, catching the sun’s early rays on its wings as it darted across the glassy blue water.