Ted Bell - Warlord

"Ah, your Catholic brothers. Where is Smith?"

"I don't know any Smith."

Hawke looked at Bolt. The lieutenant was just as amazed as he was.

Instead of further questions, Hawke simply went down the line removing the masks from each prisoner until he came to an IRA soldier. He put the blade of his knife across the man's throat. "I'm looking for a man named Smith. Has he been here?"

In a strangled voice, the terrorist said, "He was here. But he was gone before we came."

"You know him, then."

"I've heard of him, yeah."

"What does he look like?"

"No one ever sees him."

"I said, what does he look like? Someone must have seen him." Hawke pressed his point.

"Those who have seen him will not tell you his identity."

"Why would that be?"

"They are far more afraid of him than you."

When all had been unmasked, twenty-four of the prisoners were IRA, while fifteen were Middle Eastern terrorists. The implications of this one fact were enormous.

Hawke shot out a hand and grabbed the last Pakistani by the neck, pulling him out of his loose-fitting sandals.

"Who comes to Ireland to fight alongside their brothers? Taliban? Al Qaeda?"

"Sword of Allah, praise be to God."

Hawke was still scanning all the faces.

"Smith?" he asked the man again. "Which one of you has seen Smith?" he asked the second, and third, and the fourth.

He gave up after six or seven. Smith had to be in his seventies now. These were all boys and middle-aged men. If Smith had been here at all, he was long gone.

AN HOUR LATER, HAWKE AND SEBASTIAN BOLT were sitting inside the abandoned command vehicle of Major Milo Masterman. The sun had risen fully and with it came black clouds and a fierce rainstorm that beat against the steel roof above their heads. The major had simply disappeared. Troops had fanned out through the dense forest in search of him but so far with no result. Bolt was mystified. Hawke told him they should be searching the local pubs, not the woods.

Ambrose Congreve and Bulldog Drummond had had enough of the Barking Dog and had retired to their quarters at the Swan to get a few hours of sleep before taking up the matter of a thorough interrogation of the captured terrorists. Both had congratulated the two men now sipping hot coffee inside the APC for a job well done before catching a ride back to Sligo in a British Army vehicle.

"Sword of Allah," Bolt said. "I recall the name. Heathrow, no? Terminal Four a year or so ago, wasn't it? That despicable bombing?"

"Yes."

"Behind that monstrous attack in the States, as well. A Miami hospital, if memory serves."

"The same," Hawke replied.

"So my question is the same, Commander Hawke. What the bloody hell are the Taliban doing in Northern Ireland? Fighting alongside the New IRA? It beggars belief."

"I think all these bastards are joining forces. And will go anywhere in the world, Lieutenant. Fight alongside anyone who hates Britain. Or America. Or the West in general. Remember, you had IRA bombers like McMahon training in Libya thirty years ago."

"They have the resources and the manpower to do this on a worldwide scale? Sword of Allah? That in itself is terrifying."

"It appears they do, doesn't it? The world's first transnational Islamic superpower, so to speak."

"You're right in the middle of this one, aren't you, Commander?"

"I am."

"What do you do now?"

"Defend the realm, of course."

DAYBREAK. THE VENERABLE THAMES BARGE PUDGE, narrow of beam but with eighty feet of gleaming black hull on her waterline, was docked at Greenwich Pier. Her captain, Terrence Spencer, was a ruggedly put together seaman with a broad chest, heavily muscled shoulders, and a full red beard. He stood drinking a mug of steaming coffee just outside the low-roofed wheelhouse. Terry and his young charter client were watching the rental truck being unloaded.

Terry, like his dad and gramps before him, had been a Thames riverman since he was old enough to swim. He looked at the bearded lads offloading boxes of equipment from the lorry and shook his head. What a sorry lot. He thought he'd seen it all. He had chartered the old girl countless times over the years, anniversaries, weddings, retirement parties, but this bunch was a first, he had to say.

A rock-and-roll band. Called themselves Sunni and the Scimitars.

Clever, that.

"How much longer?" he asked the band's manager and lead singer, Sunni, pronounced "Sonny." His full name was Sunni Khan. At one time, that would have been an unusual name for a Pudge client, Terry mused silently. But, now, almost eighty thousand Britons had the surname Khan. True, he had read it in the Mirror. That made Khan the eightieth-most-common surname in the United Kingdom. He'd looked up his own name, Spencer, just for fun. Number 147. Fancy that.

Sunni was a nice enough looking young kid, clean shaven, expensive leather jacket, even had a tie on. He was a student at LSE, he told Terry, and then said, London School of Economics, obviously for the brawny, brainless barge captain's edification. "Oh, is that what LSE stands for?" he asked the kid. "Always wondered about that. My daughter goes there."

"Sorry. No offense meant, sir."

"If you want to be on schedule, we need to get moving right away."

"Truck's almost empty, sir. I think you can plan to shove off in about twenty minutes or so. Sorry we're late. Few last-minute snags with the lorry rental."

The lorry had backed right up to the edge of the dock. Young toughs with beards and long stringy hair were still rolling large black boxes down the truck's ramp. Had the name of the band stenciled on each box in big white block letters: sunni and the scimitars. Terry'd never heard of them, but then he'd stopped listening to music when Sinatra died.

Some of the lads were belowdecks in the midships hold, uncrating who knows what electronic gear, amplifiers, musical instruments, and such for the afternoon cruise upriver. There was to be a concert in the meadow across from Hampton Court. The band, Sunni had told him, intended to set up their instruments atop the large midships hatch cover. A floating concert was the idea he said, a new angle. Every ticket sold out.

Floating concert, my arse, Terry thought.

These clever blokes who'd booked Pudge for a full-day stint had no idea of his boat's historic significance. Nor, if they knew, he thought, would they bloody care. Foreigners, of course. No knowledge of British history. Didn't care. Hated the country, the people, the government, from what he'd read in the Daily Mirror.

Terry had an idea: if they didn't bloody like it here, didn't like our flag, our religion, our way of life, pack up and go home! He'd never express those feelings out loud of course, very un-PC as his wife would say. He was beginning to wonder about this whole PC movement. He thought it was ruining everything, especially the truth.

Pudge had played a historic, one might even say heroic, role in the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk in World War II. Towed across the Channel by tugs for speed, the rescue barges were all rigged with sails to get them ashore upon release from the tugs. The crew of Pudge raised her sail just offshore and made a hard landing on the beach. She took on nearly three hundred soldiers. A bunch of the lads, under heavy fire, managed to shove her back into the sea, and get her under way toward home under sail.

Despite continuous strafing attacks by German dive-bombers, mine-infested waters, British destroyers being sunk to her right and left by countless batteries of heavy German guns on the cliffs, somehow, old Pudge had survived. She managed to make it all the way to Ramsgate and there delivered her precious cargo of human passengers safely ashore. Terry's grampa had been her captain then, not that anyone remembered such feats of heroism anymore.