Dragonfire Read online

  OTHER TITLES BY TED BELL

  THE ALEX HAWKE SERIES

  Overkill

  Patriot

  Warriors

  Phantom

  Warlord

  Tsar

  Spy

  Pirate

  Assassin

  Hawke

  NOVELLAS

  White Death

  What Comes Around

  Crash Dive

  YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

  The Time Pirate

  Nick of Time

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Theodore A. Bell

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bell, Ted, author.

  Title: Dragonfire / Ted Bell.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2020. | Series: An Alex Hawke novel

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020015891 (print) | LCCN 2020015892 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780593101209 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593101223 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.E6455 D73 2020 (print) | LCC PS3602.E6455 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015891

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015892

  Cover art: Person on motorcycle by Westersoe / GettyImages

  Cover design by Steve Meditz

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  Titles by Ted Bell

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Greybeard House

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This battered old heart of mine has finally learned

  that even if you have to wait a lifetime,

  you can find the one true love of your life.

  This book is dedicated, with abiding love, laughter,

  and admiration to my one and only Lady of Spain,

  the beautiful, gracious, and kind Victoria de la Maza.

  One in a million.

  War is never about what is in front of you.

  It is always about what’s behind you.

  And war is never about who is right, but who is left.

  —Alexander Hawke’s “The Warrior’s Code,”

  written during the Battle of Kamdesh

  October 2009

  GREYBEARD HOUSE

  Greybeard Island

  The Channel Islands, UK

  June 1939

  My dear grandson,

  In light of your recent decision, which I wholeheartedly support, and of which I’m quite sure your late father would applaud, to join the Secret Service when your Royal Navy commission expires next spring, I would like to share some thoughts that I think will serve you in good stead. I’m an old man now, Blackie, but once I was you, straining at the traces and wishing to do important work in serving your King and Country. . . .

  Be true to yourself. Honesty and integrity are absolutes, but you will need more. You will need the determination and the courage to see matters through, even when fainter hearts have already taken counsel of their fears. You will need to take hardship, danger, fatigue, and—perhaps above all—uncertainty in your stride. . . .

  You will need the strength of will and confidence to take the right road when it is not an easy one.

  Your loving grandfather,

  (Signed)

  (Letter from Admiral Lord Hawke to his grandson, Commander Horatio Black Hawke, RN Flying Service)

  PROLOGUE

  Bermuda

  Present Day

  And, pray tell, what fresh Hell is this? Mother of God!”

  Lord Alexander Hawke flung his few anguished words into the warring windstorms in the heavens high above. He was shouting down the elements, calling them out, berating the brute natural forces that had conspired to turn on him in this, his darkest hour. “Traitors, what treason is this?” His words were whipped away, lost in the blow, vanished in the operatic rumble of thunder resounding in the dark and purplish clouds on the far horizon.

  Then, of course, the rains came, solid curtains of water, a deluge upon this small spit of land, this lonely midocean isle breasting the oncoming tumult of the deep and heaving Atlantic Ocean.

  Grumbling to himself, Hawke throttled way back on the vintage motorcycle, making every effort to squint the flood of stinging rainwater from his eyes. Damn the torpedoes, he thought. Full speed ahead! Hawke wound up the revs and surged forward at a breathtaking, if not suicidal, pace.

  A dire si
tuation was, at this very moment, evolving at his Bermuda hideaway, Teakettle Cottage.

  His beloved Pelham’s life was in danger. There was not a precious second to be lost. Calling upon his reserves of resolve, he leaned hard over into a hairpin turn, his right knee grazing the macadam. Now upright once more, he was accelerating furiously into a tight descending turn. Danger lurked around every bend along the old Coast Road. Flying home on a wing and a prayer, as the RAF Spitfire lads at No. 76 Squadron would have back in the Battle of Britain.

  His iron steed was an unforgiving mistress on even the driest of the dry summer days. On a night like this? A twisting, curvy coastal road practically marinated in decades of Castrol motor oil? God help you, boy. It was, Hawke thought, like racing a school bus across a frozen lake in a whiteout snowstorm.

  As it happened, a suicidal vortex of two torrential maelstroms had come crashing ashore at the same time. Yet he somehow remained in the saddle. Cannon to the left of him, cannon to the right, volleyed and thundered. One storm, boiling up from the southernmost reaches of the Caribbean, battered him from the right. The other, a veritable freight train, roaring southward from the turbulent North Atlantic, whipped at him from the left.

  Hawke had no illusions about himself now; he knew he was little more than a bit player, a sole actor occupying center stage at this epic meterological drama, The Tempest. God’s Perfect Storm. But was he up to tonight’s performance? The stomach for it? Or the huevos, as his Spanish friends call them?

  Alexander Hawke, age thirty-five, had always kept himself in impeccable shape. His profession, senior counterterrorism officer at MI6, demanded it. Rising daily at dawn and beginning with free weights, squats, push-ups, and lunges, et cetera, the much-decorated fighter pilot performed the Royal Navy airman’s standard exercise routine with a vengeance. Afterward, a six-mile swim in the open ocean. Three miles down to Bloody Bay on Bermuda’s north shore and three miles back.

  With his lean, muscular build, his sharply etched features, his prominent chin, and aquiline Roman nose, his fine head of unruly black hair and startling glacial blue eyes—which not a few London gossip columnists had said resembled “liquid pools of frozen Arctic rain”—he was no pretty boy. He was, in the end, simply a creature of radiant violence, a warrior to his molten core.

  Also, a gentleman spy and a bit of a dandy for all that. A well-regarded citizen of London town of whom it was oft said, “Men loved to stand him a drink, whilst women much preferred him horizontal.” Some wag once opined that this was the reason his mug had appeared so frequently on the cover of Tatler magazine’s annual “Bachelor of the Year” edition.

  The overpowered Norton was now racing flat out on twisting rain-slick roads. The bike was not cut out for this kind of a double-triple-whammy confluence of typhoon crap. Most definitely not. The old girl was a dry-track bike built for flats and racing against other vintage bikes, full stop. Not this bleeding nightmare. Bloody hell . . .

  Suddenly, the bike went airborne. He’d completely miscalculated the sudden drop off of the steep hill that made a sharp descent down to Blackbeard’s Bay. Undaunted by his error, the decorated ex–Royal Navy fighter pilot summoned an old air-combat trick. In the dogfight of your life, when all the chips are down and the fit has most certainly hit the bloody shan, with both your engines flamed out and a big fat bogie right up your arse and lighting off air-to-airs into the bargain, what do the Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines do then, flyboy?

  First, you mentally slow everything down, relax your grip on the stick a bit and force yourself to summon up every ounce of luck, every bit of skill you’ve got and even ones you’ve not, and you bloody well laser-focus on perfecting a soft landing. . . . Ah, here it comes!

  “Hold fast,” he said to himself, repeating the old credo of Nelson’s Navy. Those two words, Admiral Lord Nelson’s lifelong credo, tattooed on the underside of Hawke’s left wrist were his permanent reminder of a temporary feeling: “Hold fast!” In red ink and acquired one very late red-light night when he and his sidekick, Stokely Jones Jr., had been barnstorming about Bangkok’s infamous Soi Cowboy district in hot pursuit of the rumlike Mekhong Thai whiskey and other pleasures of the flesh . . .

  * * *

  —

  The wind and rain lashed the rider. Yet Hawke managed to zone in tight, but stay loose. Not fight the bike, but “fly with your eyes,” as he called his technique. He’d done a bit of road racing in his twenties. Just pick the exact spot where you want the vehicle to go next and maintain a quiet mind, a light touch on the throttle . . . yes . . . and a bit of rear brake here, easy . . . steer with your eyes . . . and . . .

  Touchdown! Still upright. Bloody hell! One day, one more of these mistakes might bloody well kill me.

  Hawke’s most urgent thoughts now were of his beloved lifelong friend and gentleman’s gentleman, Pelham Grenville.

  “Hold fast, Pelham,” he whispered. “Hold fast, old son!”

  And now it was Pelham’s life that hung in the balance. The old dear had somehow, through no fault of his own, fallen into the hands of a truly evil animal, a nightmarish creature only thinly disguised as a human being.

  The monstrous American assassin, now in the service of one Vladimir Putin, was known politely as “Mr. Smith.” Mr. Smith’s given name went unsaid in polite company. It was actually an acronym derived from the days when the British trade clippers carried massive shipments of manure from the West Indies back to England. In the beginning they stowed the cargo low in the bowels of the ships to minimize the stink above deck. But the fleets were plagued with horrific fires and explosions for many years. Finally, they realized that the gases generated down low in the hold were the cause. And going forward, all the bales of animal waste carried the stenciled words “Stow High in Transit.”

  Shit. That was Mr. Smith’s given name and it suited him to a T.

  And now this fiend in human form had managed to gain entry to Teakettle Cottage, Hawke’s quaint bungalow overlooking the sea. And the man was holding Pelham as ransom to ensure Hawke returned home. This West Texas cowboy chap, this former rodeo star and CIA contract killer, went by the highly unlikely name of “Shit Smith.”

  Smith was a murderous psychopath who enforced Putin’s every will and whim with the blade of his razor-edged Bowie knife. His two-foot-long blade was always holstered to his right thigh. He was a man who belied the old verity “Never take a knife to a gunfight.” Shit Smith would never take anything but a knife to a gunfight. He could pull the Bowie from its holster and hurl it with deadly accuracy as fast as any gunman could pull a trigger.

  Smith was just one of countless Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and other contract killers around the globe who, for a brief time, had been out for Hawke’s head, and all the fortune and fame that came with it. Putin had been offering a vast sum with a single condition: In order to reap the Kremlin’s rewards, the killer must arrive at the Kremlin in Moscow in person. He must deliver Alex Hawke’s head to Vladimir Putin on a sterling silver platter. The reward—ten million pounds British sterling. Cash, of course.

  Hawke, who knew the Russian leader on a personal level, had ensured that Vlad got to keep his ten million pounds sterling in one of his Swiss bank accounts. He had dispatched all the would-be assassins to hell.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty minutes earlier, Hawke had been interrupted at a black-tie dinner party at Shadowlands, a sprawling twenty-two-acre estate that had once belonged to the American businessman Vincent Astor. Now it was home to Hawke’s closest friends, Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve and his wife, the lovely Lady Diana Mars. After being seated at the table, and just as the roast of veal was being served, a servant had hastily bent down and whispered into Hawke’s ear.

  “Sorry to disturb,” he had whispered. “There is a phone call from Teakettle Cottage.” Pelham, Lady Mars’s butler said, was now on the line asking for him. �
��Most urgent, Your Lordship,” the man in the crisp white jacket with silver buttons had said.

  Hawke went straightaway to the library, pulled a chair up to the fire, and took the call and a sip of his claret.

  “Pelham,” Hawke said, “it’s me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “M’lord, you must return home at once,” he said. “N-now.”

  And indeed it was most urgent. According to Pelham, a strange man clothed entirely in black, nearly invisible in the downpour of rain, had appeared outside the cottage door. The stranger had been asking after his lordship’s whereabouts and demanding entry to the cottage to wait for him. Finally, he had succeeded in forcing himself inside despite Pelham Grenville’s most extreme objections.

  Alex heard the palpable terror and tremor in his old friend’s voice. When asked if he was all right, Pelham had whispered, “He c-cut my hand, Your—Your Lordship, the . . . Sorry . . . the right one . . . I’m afraid, sir. . . .”

  “How deep is it, Pelham?” Hawke said. “Tell the truth for God’s sake!”

  There was a brief pause and then Pelham said: “Ah, the blood flows like wine, m’lord.”

  This degree of detached coolness under fire could have come only from a blythe spirit like Pelham Grenville. He of the heart of purest gold and the spine of Sheffield steel. Hawke could now overhear the shouted threats and epithets of the intruder before he violently ripped the phone from the old fellow’s hand. Clicked and disconnected. Hawke silently uttered a profanity, the one word, he’d vowed never to say aloud.

  Less than thirty seconds after that call, the British spy sprinted out across Shadowland’s expansive lawns and gardens onto the broad hewn-stone drive outside the row of garages. He climbed aboard his beloved bike and the race-modified engine instantly roared into throbbing life.

  Someone, lost in the mists of time, had once said that Alex Hawke was a man who was “naturally good at war.” At his squalling birth on a stormy night up in Hawkesmoor’s third-floor nursery, his father, the late Admiral Lord Hawke, had proclaimed to the midwife and to his darling wife: “He is a boy born with a heart for any fate, Mother.”