Operation Norfolk Read online

  The guard, trying to stand up straight, moving gingerly against Hawker’s grip, said, “Many mens. Many very many. Twenties, maybe. Twenties-five. You no kill, I help you, yes? Help you fuck them good, huh, Joe? Only no kill, yes? I use my gun, help you shoot them good.”

  The little man’s manner was as nauseating as the sour smell of him, willing to turn against his comrades to save his own skin. Hawker said, “All I want from you is the key to this warehouse. Understand? Give me key, I let you live.”

  The guard was cringing now, trying to pull away, whining. “No have key, Joe. No have key. Keys inside house, Joe. But no kill, huh? No kill—”

  The vigilante shoved the little man roughly away, picked up the AK-47 that had been knocked to the ground, then got his elbow up just in time as the guard, who had been cringing with fear, threw himself full force at Hawker, the stiletto blade of a knife glittering in his hand.

  three

  Hawker ducked clumsily under the knife, just in time. The guard tumbled over him, then was immediately on his feet, crouched and ready. The vigilante, who had always considered himself quick, was just a microsecond slower in getting to his feet, and the guard got off a vicious karate kick that caught Hawker in the temple, just above the right eye. Hawker staggered backward, shook the cobwebs out just in time to parry the saber-lunge of the stiletto, and hit the guard with a glancing left hook that knocked him backward to the ground.

  The vigilante kicked at the guard’s right hand—the hand with the knife—and missed. The guard caught Hawker’s heel, yanked, and Hawker found himself on his back, expecting at any moment to feel the sickening pain of a blade sliding between his ribs.

  But the guard made a mistake. He tried to kick the vigilante into unconsciousness before finishing the job, and Hawker absorbed two more solid kicks to the head and jaw before catching the Vietnamese’s ankle, twisting, and pulling the man to the ground. Now he was on top of the guard. Catching his right wrist, Hawker twisted until the stiletto fell … twisted until the man’s wrist snapped … twisted until the man’s hand was almost backward on its joint, ignoring the shrill scream of agony. Then Hawker drove the heavy, long blade of his Randall attack knife home, through the chest cavity, into the heart, feeling the guard shiver beneath him, quivering, dying.

  Hawker stood up dizzily, feeling sick, lightheaded, almost drunk from the kicks to his head.

  The guard moaned, his eyes still open … and then was dead.

  Hawker leaned, cleaning the blade of his knife on the grass, fought the urge to vomit, then stood.

  What should he do now?

  The question came at him as if down a long tunnel. The guard had screamed, no doubt about that. Had anyone heard? Hawker looked toward the huge three-story mansion. Had that upstairs light been on earlier? In his confused state of mind, he wasn’t sure.

  He had to get control of himself, put himself on automatic pilot until his head cleared. He must call upon past experience to take over, help him go through the motions by rote until his brain stopped spinning.

  He knew that the first thing he had to do was rig the warehouse full of drugs to self-destruct. He had to make sure that the warehouse was destroyed even if the rest of his mission was a failure. The guard had said there was heroin in there. Heroin, cocaine, chemicals—all of it bound for the U.S. sailors of Norfolk if something wasn’t done.

  Trouble was, it wasn’t going to be easy getting into the damn place.

  Hawker went to the double doors. He slid out of the Colt Commando, out of the backpack, and took out a little microflashlight. Peering into his pack, he pushed aside the carefully prepared explosives until he found what he was looking for—two small plastic vials. One was an extremely powerful but inert acid, the other was a catalyst. The catalyst would activate the acid when the two were combined. Using an eyedropper, the vigilante deposited drops of liquid inside both locks of the steel doors. The acid fumed and hissed, eating away the locks’ internal works.

  When that was done, Hawker took a long wire that had alligator clips on both ends. The burglar alarm, he hoped, would be a standard one; if so, the doors would be wired to an internal electrical circuit. Any break in the circuit would set off the alarm.

  Hawker cracked one door just enough to see the conductor plates on the door seal. Then he hooked an alligator clip to each conductor plate and opened the door just enough for him to slide through—being damn careful not to kick the wire loose as he did so.

  Once the door was closed behind him, the vigilante breathed easier. There were no windows in the building, none. He patted the wall until he found the switch, turned on the lights … and saw a single large room stacked to the ceiling with boxes wrapped in plastic—black plastic, like garbage bags. He pulled the Randall once again from its leg holster and cut one of the bags. Fine white powder poured out onto the cement floor—heroin or cocaine, he didn’t know which. And he wasn’t about to taste it like the TV cops did. No cop with any brains would ever chance such a stupid thing because the stuff might be one of the junkie standards or, just as easily, LSD or mescaline or angel dust. Just a taste might send you tripping your brains out.

  Working quickly, Hawker removed from his pack a small slab of claylike material, top section blue, bottom section yellow, covered on each side by waxed paper. He kneaded the plastic explosive until the combination of the two colors made green, then broke it into three fist-size chunks. Into each chunk he inserted tiny radio detonating devices. Then after sticking each at the base of the three exposed walls, he stepped back out into the darkness, over the corpse of the dead guard.

  The wind was blowing cold off the Chesapeake, wild in the bare tree limbs, but Hawker didn’t notice, so intent was he on the house in the distance. The crossbow was strapped over his back now, and in his hands he held the Colt Commando automatic rifle.

  Playtime was over. It was time to get serious with the drug pushers employed by Con Ye Cwong.

  There was still just that one light on—the light upstairs. Apparently no one had heard the scream. With the noise of the wind and sea, Hawker wasn’t all that surprised.

  It was a perfect night for this kind of mission. It was the first of what he hoped would be many deadly blows aimed right at the heart of Cwong’s empire, and Hawker wanted the Vietnamese drug lord to feel it all the way back in the Solomon Islands.

  Hawker knew he would be going to those islands soon enough, to take the message in person. But first he wanted to knock out the American franchises.

  He crossed quietly through the shadows, moving from tree to tree, past hedges and marble statues, small fountains, figures of fat sitting Buddhas. Then he was twenty yards from the back door of the mansion, the service entrance, and still no sign of movement, no sign of another guard. Once again he got the feeling that maybe this would be easy after all. Immediately Hawker pushed the thought out of his mind.

  He walked easily across the asphalt, holding the Commando assault rifle against his leg so that it wouldn’t stand out in silhouette. Then he went up the steps and tried the door.

  The door swung open easily.…

  Hawker stopped in the doorway, looking this way and that. Guards on the dock, burglar alarms supposedly everywhere, and they leave the damned back door unlocked? That made no sense at all. What the hell was going on?

  The vigilante thought for a moment, then touched the safety tang of the rifle, switching it to semiautomatic. If he was walking into a trap, he didn’t relish the idea of having to reclip in darkness and damned tight quarters.

  From his side holster, he drew the Smith & Wesson .45 magnum, the weight of it and the checkered grip feeling good in his hand. Carrying the Commando in his left hand, he entered the house. He was in some kind of storage area—boxes, a washing machine, the smell of soap. Then he moved into the kitchen—a big commercial-type kitchen with stainless-steel tables and hanging pots. Suddenly he heard something and came to a quick stop. Something in the corner, some kind of odd scratching noise. Hawk
er twisted the lens of the microflashlight and painted the beam around.

  Rats. The kitchen was crawling with rats, dozens of them scurrying, scrabbling in fear, running from the light. Hawker shut the flashlight off quickly, not wanting any more noise. He put his hand on a table to find his way out while his eyes adjusted. But as he did so, he felt something heavy run over his hand and up his arm, scratching his neck. A big rat. Hawker turned too quickly, slapping the rodent off, but hitting something hard and sending a whole rack of pots clattering, clanking down on him, a deafening noise in the stillness of the dark house that sounded like the whole kitchen was collapsing.

  The vigilante stood breathless in the hollow silence. He heard a muted voice call something from upstairs and waited another full two minutes, hearing nothing else.

  Maybe it was going to be okay after all; maybe these Vietnamese had gotten soft and fat over here in the land of free trade and could sleep through anything.

  James Hawker made his way out of the kitchen, took two steps, and found out how wrong he was.…

  four

  Lights flashed on as Hawker stepped from the kitchen into some kind of huge hall, one of those rooms in mansions where they probably once held dinner parties and dances.

  Lights flashed on, bright burglar spotlights in the high corners of the room, and before him, coming down the wide winding stairway, were three men—three Vietnamese in baggy khakis and no shirts, with mussed hair, sparse black moustaches, and bellies hanging out. Each of them carried a weapon: one held a big chrome-plated .45 ACP, the other two Uzi submachine gun pistols.

  The one carrying the .45 spotted Hawker first, screamed out something in Vietnamese, and fired from the hip. Plaster cracked over the vigilante’s head, but first there was the echoing ker-WHACK that told him the slug had passed damn close to his head.

  He dropped to the floor, belly first, and squeezed off two quick shots, the Colt Commando jolting in his arms and making that tinny fiberglass sound. The man holding the .45 was thrown backward, screaming. The pistol went tumbling into the air as his face disintegrated into a pulpy mess and his body fell down the steps, splattering blood on the white wall.

  The other two men dove over the railing even though they were a half-dozen feet above the main floor. They reached the floor behind a table and chair set and began firing immediately, the big room echoing with gunfire.

  Wood and glass and tile shattered all around the vigilante, and he fought the reaction to close his eyes and turn his head away because, in a fire fight, as in boxing, to close your eyes is to invite disaster.

  With his thumb, Hawker hit the safety tang and the Commando switched to full automatic. Seeing the legs of one of the men, he fired off one short burst. A wild scream followed. The second man rose and tried to lunge to better cover. Hawker caught him in middive, cutting him down with a second burst that sent the man tumbling sideways, his whole body contorting with the impact of the 9-millimeter slugs.

  Hawker jumped quickly to his feet, drew his own .45 Smith & Wesson, and saw the wounded man beyond the table. The man looked Hawker full in the face, his eyes bitter as he reached for the Uzi that lay beside his bleeding legs. But Hawker finished him before he could reach it. One careful shot to the head did the trick, the .45 jumping heavily in his hand.

  In the glare of the burglar lights, Hawker yanked free the fresh clip that was taped to the Colt, ejected the old one, put it carefully in his pocket, and slid in the new one. As he sprinted across the room to the stairs, he carried the Commando in his left hand and the Smith & Wesson in his right.

  The three corpses lay bleeding nearby, the air filled with the brassy stink of their blood and the odor of gunpowder. Hawker stopped on the bottom step, waiting.

  Overhead he could hear the thudding shuffle of moving feet, could hear the occasional careless whisper of men trying to be quiet but not succeeding. A loud yell in Vietnamese, sounding like a question, changed all that. Hawker heard the question again.

  The men upstairs were calling to the three dead men, hoping the intruder had been taken, hoping the intruder was dead. Hawker was tempted to answer back, to yell something, anything, just to get a reaction. But he didn’t.

  Then: “Hey, you? Who down there? Anyone down there?” The person yelled from the second floor in broken English, his voice tentative, worried.

  Once again the vigilante restrained the urge to call an answer, to taunt them. He waited … then heard the same voice: “You policeee? You no have warrant, we make big stink, yes? You have warrant? We know rights, yes? We have big lawyer, make big stink!”

  The vigilante let the deadly silence answer, let the silence grate at the men upstairs, knowing that it was getting to them when the voice yelled, “We kill you, motherfucker! We kill you, no chance you escape now!”

  Hawker waited with growing confidence. But when he heard the hydraulic clank and whir of something moving, he realized that a house this big would likely have more than one passageway upstairs. Was the noise that of an elevator?

  The thought had hardly entered his mind when two more men came charging into the room. They came sprinting through, almost firing before they jumped from the service elevator, spraying the room with slugs from big, brutal-looking AK-47s with scythe clips, standard Soviet issue.

  The vigilante didn’t have a moment to think. He dropped to the floor and opened fire in return, holding the Commando on full automatic, squeezing off shots with the Smith & Wesson, laying a withering cover of fire that slammed his attackers in their tracks. They were dead before they hit the ground.

  Hawker turned quickly back toward the stairs knowing that, if they charged him from above now, he was dead—dead because both his weapons were nearly spent. Holding his breath in that microsecond, already sliding out of his pack, Hawker reached for the explosives. They would be his only hope.

  But the men did not charge. They waited like the cowards they were, hoping their Kamikazes would put him away before they had to show their faces.

  The vigilante quickly popped fresh clips into both the Colt Commando assault rifle and the .45, his hands deadly calm, in perfect control. This was what James Hawker did better than anything else, and probably better than anyone who had ever done it. This was what he lived for, tough missions in the dark of night, fighting on unfamiliar turf where he knew his total detachment and lack of emotion were the only edge he had.

  Again came the voice at the top of the stairs, calling in Vietnamese for an answer, hoping his fellow gang members would yell back that the intruder was dead, the trouble over.

  Hawker let silence be his only answer as he waited, the solid metal of his weapons now warm in his hands, fully loaded and ready.

  Then he heard something odd. Something heavy thudded onto the stairs, thudded and rolled. He realized what the noise was just in time and dove down the hall, the stair wall protecting him as a hand grenade exploded. It was a shrapnel offensive grenade, and it brought plaster raining down and filled the room with dust from the percussion.

  Hawker thought, They know this is a fight to the finish, or else they wouldn’t have tried that … wouldn’t have blown up part of their own house even if they are slobs.

  But he didn’t have time to think about anything else, because then they came charging at him—from the stairs and from the set of wide double doors that led to the outside, coming at him from both directions.…

  five

  Hawker took the men coming through the door first, reasoning in that millisecond that the men upstairs were the least anxious to attack. They would probably be a few steps slower, hoping it would be over before they had to put their lives on the line.

  That one bit of reasoning probably saved the vigilante’s life.

  As the three men came crashing through the doorway, Hawker held the trigger of the Commando on full fire, pointing it carefully back and forth, trying to conserve a few rounds, seeing the men’s faces grow wide-eyed with shock as the slugs slammed home, tearing through th
eir bodies. And in those long seconds, his back was completely unprotected; they could have taken him from the stairs at their leisure, gunned him down in perfect safety.…

  But they laid off just long enough.

  When the open doorway was filled with only the screams of the dying, Hawker immediately turned his attention to the stairs—just in time to see the feet, then legs, then body of the first man charge. Behind this first attacker, screaming wild battle cries, came four more, all firing at once.

  The light in the room now was hazy with dust and falling plaster and gunpowder, and Hawker squinted over the barrel of the Commando, having no choice but to hold it on full automatic.

  The first man winced, fell sideways over the railing, his arms thrown outward as if he might fly.

  The next man staggered, stumbled, his white T-shirt splotched with blackish-red holes, then fell. And in that instant, the Colt Commando went silent, its clip empty.

  Hawker raised the Smith & Wesson automatic carefully, held the iridescent orange competition sight on the third man’s chest forty yards away, fired … missed … fired again, and the slow-moving .45 slug hit the man in the head, snapping his neck back, breaking it, and most likely killing him before the lead entered the brain cavity.

  All of this happened in an instant. The final Vietnamese in the charge had decided that the stairway was not the place to be. He vaulted over the railing, an Uzi submachine gun in his left hand. Hawker shot again with the .45, this time just pointing, not aiming, and had better luck. The slug hit the man in the left hip, spinning him in midair. He landed headfirst on the hard floor, kicking crazily for a moment, then lying still.

  Then all was silent—a hollow, echoing, ticking silence of falling plaster dust and distant roar of the surf outside.

  But there was something else too. What?

  The vigilante strained to hear as he reloaded once more, strained to identify the sound. He finally realized what it might be.