“Not more than five or six, I shouldn’t think. Those were taken in England. On the beach below my grandfather’s house on Greybeard Island. It was summer. Just before a bad storm. See the waves breaking?”
“Alex, I don’t know what to say. It’s—”
There was a knocking at the door then, just as Alex was bending over the hospital bed to kiss Victoria.
Stoke was standing in the doorway with a huge bouquet of yellow roses.
“Man, I can’t leave y’all alone for twenty minutes y’all don’t manage to get y’allselves all blown to shit and back.”
“Hi, Stoke,” Vicky said. “Those are beautiful. Thank you.”
“Mornin’, boss,” Stoke said, handing the flowers to Vicky. “Be glad you alive, my brother. You front page news.”
“Oh, God, just what I need,” Hawke said, giving Vicky a kiss on her bandaged forehead and taking the Post from Stokely.
What he did not need at the moment was publicity. He started skimming the long article.
“It was a bomb, all right, boss,” Stoke said. “Plastic. C-4. Joint was so full of dignitaries it’s hard to say who it was intended for.”
“Anybody killed?” Hawke asked.
“Lots hurt. Just one killed. An employee. Some cat who’d only been a waiter there for about seventy years. Five hospitalized including you, Vicky. Your name is in there, too, boss. Says you were treated and released.”
“Any group claiming responsibility?” asked Hawke.
“Nope, nobody. Hell, half of Washington was in that joint last night. Target could have been anybody. The police think it was PLO, Hezbollah, or the Mujahideen, though. Least that’s what my D.C. boys are sayin’ privately.”
“Not a particularly bright idea on the part of our Arab friends, blowing up a Washington restaurant in the middle of peace talks,” Hawke said.
“Well,” Stoke said, “no actual fingers are pointed yet. Naturally, FBI, CIA, NSA, all them initials are in there now, poking around. But I hear the focus is on the PLO.”
“Why the PLO?”
“Remember that Israeli commander who bombed the shit out of Arafat’s West Bank headquarters last month? Boy had himself a reservation at eight o’clock. Bomb exploded at eight-thirty right beside his table.”
“Was he hurt?” Alex asked.
“Lucky for him, he hadn’t showed up.”
“Alex?” Vicky said softly from her hospital bed.
“Yes?”
“Do you remember that urgent phone call for me?”
“Of course, Vicky.”
“When Herbert showed me which of the telephone booths to take it in—”
“Yes? Go on.”
“Well, I’m sure this doesn’t mean anything. But when I sat down to take the call, I felt something with my foot. There was a black briefcase. It was on the floor, tucked under the little shelf where the phone sits.”
“And?”
“When there was no one on the line, other than the breathing, I mean, I hung up. I picked up the briefcase figuring someone had forgotten it.”
“What did you do with it, Vicky?” Alex asked, looking at her intently now.
“I handed it to Herbert on the way back to our table. A couple of minutes before—”
Alex and Stokely stared at her.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Don’t jump to any conclusions, darling. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. We don’t know anything about that briefcase. Now, eat your breakfast. You’re getting up and out of here. Stoke, could I speak to you out in the hall for a second?”
“You think it was for Vicky?” Stoke said as soon as they were out in the hallway, out of earshot. “Don’t make no sense at all.”
“It could have been for anybody.”
“Yeah. Could be political, could be mob stuff, type of clientele they got.”
“The doctor said Vicky could be released this morning if she’s feeling all right. I want to get her out of here.”
“Say the word. What are we doing?”
“I’m going back into the room to calm Vicky down. I want you to get my pilots on your mobile and tell them to light the candle on the G-IV, we’re getting out of town.”
“Pilots know where they supposed to be flying to?”
“Nassau. Tell them to have my seaplane meet me at the Atlantis Marina. The doctors told me last night that Vicky was going to need a couple of weeks’ rest. And she owes herself some holiday time anyway. No better place to do that than a few weeks in the Caribbean aboard Blackhawke.”
“How else can I help out, boss?”
“We’ll figure that out when we get down there.”
“We? You mean I’m goin’?”
Hawke nodded. “Yes. Please help Vicky get checked out of here. Then you go to her house and help her get a few of her things together. Maybe she could rest for a couple of hours. Then pick her up and meet me at the plane. Say three hours, max.”
“Got it, boss. What you up to on this fine morning?”
“I’ve invited the secretary of state for an early breakfast at the new house. I’ve barely seen it myself.”
“I better call Pelham and tell him to turn the perimeter alarms off. I showed him how to do it, but you know how he is. Boy is definitely not a techno-geek.”
“Pelham is the definition of old school, all right. I’ve got to go, I’m late already. I hope the secretary isn’t bringing those damn spooks with her.”
Stoke decided it probably wouldn’t be chivalrous to call his boss on that one. Best let that one pass.
“That bomb that got that waiter, boss?”
“Yes?”
“Decapitated his ass.”
“Did they print his name?”
“Yeah. Cat named Herbert Carrington.”
“Bloody hell,” Hawke said, and walked back down the hallway toward Vicky’s hospital room.
“The man that died last night,” Hawke said, crossing to her bed and taking her hand. “It was your friend. Herbert Carrington. I’m so sorry.”
“Herbert?”
Vicky looked up at him with tears in her eyes.
“It was his birthday,” she said. “Ninety-two years old and still going strong.”
27
The Russian chopper plunged from the Caribbean heavens, falling, sideslipping, and twisting all at the same time. The instrument panel was a blurred nightmare of wildly spinning needles. The terrain warning alarm was howling. The screaming tail rotor blade was about to go. Without that blade, the chopper was lost.
They were moments from entering the “crescent of death,” namely, the failure of forward velocity and total loss of control of the helicopter. Lose your tail rotor and the chopper begins to rotate.
Because of gyroscopic action, it begins to swing like a pendulum. Your chances of crashing vertically, coming down on your skids, are reduced dramatically. Which is bad because, as Manso well knew, you might actually survive a vertical crash. But if any part of its main rotor blade touches solid ground, the chopper would just do a flaming cartwheel into the jungle.
All these thoughts went through Manso’s head. In seconds it would be beyond man’s, or machine’s, ability to recover. They were plunging down through two thousand feet, with maybe a minute to live.
Castro’s hold on the control stick was unshakable. For an ailing man in his late seventies, his grip was iron.
Manso had no choice.
He pulled the slim stiletto from the sheath attached to his right leg. He showed the Maximum Leader the blade, giving him just enough time to register what was about to happen to him and release the control stick.
“Let it go!” Manso shouted. “Now!”
“I don’t negotiate with traitors!” Castro shouted back, thick white spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. “Fuck you!”
When Castro did not remove his hand, Manso jammed the blade down into his muscular thigh with all the force he could muster. Blood spurted from Castro’s wound, spraying the instrument cluster and the leader’s fatigues. It wasn’t mortal. Manso had deliberately avoided the femoral artery. Still, sticking a blade in a man’s leg down to the bone takes a lot of the fuck-you out of him.