Ted Bell - Phantom

Just as Hawke reached the stern rail, the first head popped up out of the water. The diver raised his clenched fist in victory when he saw Hawke, and any fear Alex had had for these brave men or their mission vanished.

“Stoke! Brock! Come back here and help me haul these guys aboard. You may have noticed I only have one arm, otherwise I’d do it myself.”

A second black helmeted head appeared on the surface, then a third and a fourth. Seeing Hawke lowering the platform beneath the sloppy surface of the water, they swam for it. The first diver had already whipped off his helmet and was sitting on the platform, his legs awash, talking excitedly to Hawke, Brock, and Stokely Jones.

“You guys didn’t tell us we were blowing up the Emerald City!” Lieutenant Ryan White said, rubbing his eyes. “What the hell is that place, anyway? Freaking lightning crackling around inside this big tower and, at one point while I was finishing rigging the charge at the base of the central tower, lighting started racing faster and faster in circles around the six towers on the perimeter. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen! I thought we were about to get our asses fried!”

“Tell them about the music, Lieutenant,” a diver said.

“Oh, yeah. All the towers started broadcasting this weird music,” Ryan White said. “I thought I had narcosis, but the other guys could hear it, too. It was making us sick, so we shut down our acoustics.”

“Good thing,” Hawke said, knowing they’d all dodged a deadly bullet.

Stokely helped the third diver out of the water. He got to his feet and removed his helmet. The diver looked at Ryan White and said, “Lieutenant, I’m sorry I had to shut my combat radio down. I started hearing this very weird music in my earpiece. Made me crazy. Something like narcosis, you know? Did you guys hear it, too?”

“Hell, yeah, we all heard it. Next thing I knew I was tugging at my regulator, trying to rip it loose. Just before I blacked out, I turned the volume down and got my head straight again. What the hell was that all about?”

“Perseus was attempting to save himself by convincing you four men to commit suicide,” Hawke said.

“Perseus? Who the hell is he?”

“The computer you just rigged.”

“Wait-that’s-those black glass towers-are a computer?”

“It’s a long story,” Hawke said. “More than a computer, really. An empire of the mind. How long did you set your detonation timers for, Lieutenant White? We need to be getting out of here before they start lobbing mortar shells at us.”

Ryan White looked at his dive watch and then back at the water off Nighthawke ’s stern.

“Right about… now, Commander Hawke,” he said.

A shock wave rocked the boat from below just as seven mushroomlike mounds of foaming white water appeared on the surface. They expanded to about five feet in diameter and then dissipated, leaving no trace of the catastrophic destruction that had just occurred below. Hawke couldn’t even imagine how much high-explosive Semtex it took to create even a ripple a thousand feet above the ocean floor.

Hawke stared at the undulating surface of the black water, thinking about the staggering implications of what he had just done. More important, he was wondering if he had the right to do it.

Had he even done the right thing?

All the giant leaps forward in scientific achievement, the unimaginable medical advances, reverse aging, a cure for famine, or even a To hell with it.

He realized he would never really know. Maybe someday mankind could produce something like Perseus. A superintelligent machine, but one that could be kept in check. One with hardwired incapacity for doing harm, or evil. A force that was only capable of doing good, solving insoluble problems, making the world a better, safer place.

But Perseus had not been that machine.

Ironically, Perseus’s true value, and Professor Waldo Cohen’s enormous contribution to the evolution of science, would be that Cohen had somehow strayed down the wrong path.

And that, Hawke knew in his heart, might ultimately make the right road far, far easier to follow in the future.

He turned to the man he could always lean upon.

“Stoke, it’s finished. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Great. Leave Iran without even getting to taste the caviar. Story of my life.”

Hawke looked at Brock with undisguised admiration.

“Harry?” he said.

“Yes?”

“You and I have never been close.”

“Right. Because you hate me.”

“Right. But I feel a bit differently about you now. After all you did back there. A lot of men would have died without you and your M-60.”

“Yeah? So?”

“I’d like you to join me and Stokely. Leave CIA, sign a contract with Red Banner. Pays a lot better, Harry. Less paperwork in the mercenary business than inside the Beltway.”

“Really? So-that means you, what, you like me now?”

“I didn’t say that, Harry. I paid you a far greater compliment.”

“Lemme think about it awhile.”

“Take as long as you want.”

“I’m in.”

“Yeah!” Stoke said, wrapping his massive arms around Harry and bouncing him up and down like a ragdoll. “That’s what I’m talking about!”

Lines were heaved aboard, throttles were engaged, and Nighthawke moved swiftly out into the channel.

The Trojan Horse had left the barn.

Strait of Hormuz

The sky was remarkably clear under a lantern moon.

“Mosquitoes,” Stoke, looking over his shoulder, said to Harry Brock. “Look at ’em swarm. Gotta be fifty of ’em at least.”

Harry’d come out on the stern deck for a smoke. He’d been the first to hear the snarling outboard motorboats, a vast flotilla of them, racing across the flat black sea to converge on Nighthawke ’s stern. They were pirate scows, some of them forty feet in length, the longboats Somali pirates used to board and capture defenseless behemoths off the coast of Africa. Harry once tried to explain to Stoke that the reason the tankers didn’t have armed crews had to do with the insurance.

“So who pays the ransom when the tankers get hijacked?” Stoke said.

“Uh, the insurance companies.”

“Oh. Now I get it,” Stoke had said, shaking his head.

The pirates were about four miles out and rapidly closing the distance. In the midst of them was the “mother ship,” enclosed for protection. Sirens aboard Blackhawke sounded General Quarters, and gunners climbed up inside their turrets, wheeling about on their ring mounts to face the threat aft. Threat is maybe a teensy bit too strong a word for these assholes, Stoke thought. Pests, maybe? Spray ’em with Raid, he told Harry, that oughta do it. Or get one of those bug zappers. These pissant pirates chasing after a high-tech warship like Nighthawke? Oughta get their turbans out of their asses.

The longboats, incredibly fast with their three-hundred-horsepower outboards, were gaining on them rapidly.

“Boss?” Stoke said into his radio. Hawke was on the bridge radio, talking to Carstairs aboard Blackhawke, discussing the best approach to the Strait of Hormuz as soon as the team was finally back aboard their own mother ship.

“Go ahead, Stoke.”

“You know those new antiship mines we rigged in the aft tubes?”

“Yes.”

“This pirate attack might be the perfect opportunity to battle test them, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely. Good idea. Deploy as the scows move into range. Our ETA for the rendezvous with Blackhawke is twenty minutes.”

“Affirmative.”

“What mines?” Harry asked Stokely.

“Made in Israel. They’re cherry red. GPS equipped. They’ll go anywhere you send them, any depth you send them. Explode on direct contact, or by timer, or when the enemy enters a preset sonar range. Forgot the real name for them. I call ’em cherry bombs. Here’s the portside tube, the other one is over there to starboard. Each tube loads a dozen mines. You deploy them from the fire control center of this fire control panel right here. I figure we only need about four, two from each tube.”