Hawke

The hot morning sun and the humidity were enough to make anyone, man or beast, seek shade.

“Where is everybody?” Hawke asked, surprised at the sense of total desolation that pervaded the old fort.

“Sleepin’, most likely,” Stoke said. “Catching Z’s. Boys had a twenty-mile jungle run last night. They all sacked out in the barracks, which is the ground floor. Second floor is the armory. Third floor is communications and computers and shit. Top floor is where we’ll find our guys waiting. They call it the poop deck.”

“Stoke, you seem to know an awful lot about this place. Why’s that?” Hawke asked, following his natural curiosity around the building to take a look.

“Well,” Stoke said, right behind him and looking sheepish, “I did do a little freelance work down here from time to time. When I was NYPD, you know, I’d take all my vacation time in Martinique.”

“That’s how you’d spend your vacation?”

“Shit, boss, counterterrorism is the most fun you can have with your clothes on!”

“My God, what in the world is that?” Hawke said as they rounded the back of the white stone building.

There was an amazing structure just inside the wall at the rear of the courtyard. It looked like a giant cube of green glass, which is just what it was. Constructed of thick, clear green glass building blocks, dazzling in the morning sunlight, the building had to be thirty feet high by thirty feet wide. A perfect square, no windows, no door that Hawke could see.

“Somethin’ else, ain’t it, boss? I knew you’d get a kick out of it!”

“What is it? Looks like an emerald as big as the Ritz.”

“I call it the Emerald City. But it’s really a museum.”

“Museum?”

“The ‘spoils of war’ museum. Where they store all the things they pick up around the world after the shooting dies down. Whatever the enemy leaves on the ground. You wouldn’t believe what’s inside that place.”

“I’d certainly love to see it. How do you get inside?”

“Through a tu

“Right, Stoke, let’s get going.”

They entered the main building and climbed a narrow set of stone steps carved into the wall. Four flights up, they arrived in a dark corridor that led to a vaulted chamber. Beside a massive wooden door, in a chair leaned back against the wall, a man wearing a white kepi on his head sat reading a book. The novel Citadelle, by Saint-Exupйry, Alex noticed. Required reading for all Legio

But he was wearing an old navy and gold SEAL T-shirt and khaki shorts, the traditional SEAL daytime uniform. His head was shaved and he had a black beard that hadn’t been trimmed in years. He had a MAC 10 submachine gun slung over the back of the chair and a burning Gauloise hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked up, saw Stoke approaching, and a huge grin lit up his deeply ta

“Zut alors! Skippair!” the man exclaimed in a heavy French accent. “Incroyable! I heard you were coming down!” He rocked his chair forward and leaped up to embrace Stokely. They pounded each other’s backs sufficiently hard to fracture a normal man’s spine.

“Froggy! Yeah, the Frogman his own self! Shit! I’ve missed your sorry pencil-dick numbnuts ass,” Stoke said, holding him by the shoulders and looking down at him. The man was barely five feet tall and almost that wide. “You still smoking them damn lung darts? What’d I tell you ’bout that?”

“I take it you two know each other,” Hawke said, a little impatiently. The clock, after all, was ticking.

“Stokely Jones is ze meanest woman I ever served under, monsieur,” Froggy said, sticking out his hand to Hawke. “Comment зa va, monsieur? I am ze famous Froggy.”

“Alex Hawke, Froggy,” Hawke said, shaking his hand. “Pleasure.”

“Frogman was in the C.R.A.P. division,” Stoke said. “French Foreign Legion. One of the few French units to serve in the Gulf War.”

“Crap?” Hawke asked, waiting impatiently for the joke.

“Oui,monsieur! Commandos de Recherchй et d’Action en Profondeur! Ze best!” Froggy said, puffing out his chest and saluting.

“Splendid,” Hawke said, looking at his watch. “I think we’re expected.”

“Oui-oui, c’est vrai,” Froggy said, opening the door. “It’s true. Let me tell zem you are arrived.” He stuck a silver bosun’s whistle in his mouth and piped them aboard as they entered the room.

50

Two men rose from a large wooden table where they’d been sitting. Sunlight streamed into the room through open windows on all sides. To the east, Alex could see the dark blue Atlantic rolling to the horizon. To the south and west, the pale blue of the Caribbean Sea. The room was devoid of furniture save the plain wooden rectangle of the table and twelve simple wooden chairs.

There was a sign on one wall, hand lettered in flowery calligraphy. It was the SEAL creed:

The More You Sweat In Training

The Less You Bleed In Combat

There were maps and navigational charts scattered everywhere. Hawke was gratified to see that it was a map of Cuba they’d been poring over. Clearly, they hadn’t been wasting any time since Stoke’s phone call little more than two hours earlier.

Stoke went to each man and embraced him in turn. There was little back-pounding now, just emotion. For a second, Hawke thought they were all going to get leaky on him.

“Boss, say hello to Thunder, this good-lookin’ Injun on the left, and Lightnin’, this ugly-ass Irishman on the right. Boys, give a big warm welcome to Alex Hawke, the guy I’ve told you so much about.”

“Good morning,” Hawke said, striding across the sunlit room, smiling at both of them. “And thanks for agreeing to meet on such short notice. It’s deeply appreciated. Flying down, I heard no end of lies about you two.”

“Congenital liar, Stokely is,” Lightning said, earning himself a look from Stoke. He was a big strapping Irish chap, ruddy-complexioned, and weather-burned, with short red-gold hair that also lightly covered his bulging forearms, and crinkling blue eyes. He had the stub of an unlit cigarette jammed in the left side of his mouth.

“You must be FitzHugh McCoy,” Hawke said, giving the man a stiff salute. McCoy, Hawke knew, was a Medal of Honor wi

“Welcome aboard, Commander Hawke,” the man said in a thick Irish brogue returning the salute. “FitzHugh McCoy is indeed the name, but call me Fitz. My accomplice here is Chief Charlie Rainwater. If he likes you, he’ll let you call him Boomer.”

“Pleasure,” Hawke said to the copper-ski

The keen-eyed fellow studied Hawke for some time, seeming to decide whether or not to shake his hand. He was tall and bristling with muscle, with blazing black eyes and a long narrow nose sharp as an arrow above somewhat cruel lips. His shoulder-length black hair fell about his shoulders and he was wearing buckskin trousers.

He was, Hawke had learned on the short flight down, a full-blooded Comanche Indian. A true plains warrior, he was also the best underwater demolition man in the long history of UDT and the SEALs.

He and Fitz had earned their reputations in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam as part of SEAL Team Two’s riverine operations. They specialized in making life miserable for Mr. Charlie on a daily basis. Thunder, because he always scouted barefoot, saved countless lives in the jungle, finding tripwires no one else could see, hearing VC footsteps no one else could hear, smelling a VC ambush a mile away.

Boomer had earned three bronze stars in Vietnam, and one silver star. Fitz had had the Congressional Medal of Honor pi