For a while, Gomez thought the angry red letters carved into his hand were WW. After a couple of days, he realized maybe he was looking at the letters upside down.

Maybe it was MM instead of WW .

Mickey Mouse? Marilyn Monroe?

The Mao-Mao Club?

Yeah.

Maybe it meant he was a member.

The Staniel Cay Yacht Club baked beneath a torpid afternoon sun. The old haunt had been built in the late forties, sometime just after the war and prior to the time in the fifties when, in Hawke’s view anyway, a vast majority of the world’s architects had gone completely off the rails.

The pink-hued British Colonial-style clubhouse had the faded faзade and the boozy, sunburnt charm of a timeworn playboy. Little of the former glamour remained but, underneath it all, Hawke saw as he strode toward it down the long dock, good bones.

Still, to call it a yacht club was stretching things a bit.

Yachts? Certainly a few serious sport-fishing boats showed up from time to time, especially when the marlin were running. Most of the time, however, there were just small fishing gigs and dories bobbing in the clear blue waters around the docks.

It was a club only in that its membership shared a common partiality to lethal rum beverages, ice-cold Kalik beer, and fishing lies of an order of magnitude seldom found outside these parts of the Caribbean. The “president” of the club was whoever was sober enough to remain standing when the bar closed.

The faded club rules, mimeographed and tacked above the bar, stated that it was absolutely forbidden to sleep on the horseshoe bar. Still, in the very early morning, it was not uncommon to find a few members dozing peacefully atop it.

Suffice it to say, one didn’t stroll through these aged portals expecting limbo nights, cocktails with tiny umbrellas, or the quaint melody of “Yellowbird” wafting through the palms. Perhaps the club had seen better days. Perhaps, worse.

The music on the club’s PA system consisted of either reggae in the evenings, or, as now, scratchy recordings of early American blues-men such as Son House or Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Amen Lillywhite, the club’s chief bartender, was all smiles when Hawke and Congreve walked in. He was an ancient blackbird of a man, tall and bare-chested with golden hoop earrings. His enormous white grin and a necklace of shark’s teeth had been a primary attraction at the club since the night it opened.

“Welcome, welcome, gentlemen!” he boomed. “What can I get for you two young fellows?”

“Two ice-cold beers would be lovely,” Congreve said.

News both good and bad traveled fast in Staniel Cay. Amen, presiding at his horseshoe bar, was at the very epicenter of information flow on the small island. News of the launch moored at the end of the dock reached his ears seconds after its arrival. His excitement grew when he learned the name Blackhawke was scribed in gold leaf on the launch’s transom. The famous yacht had arrived almost a week earlier, mooring in the deeper water offshore. This was the first time her launch had ventured into Staniel Cay.

It was dark and cool inside the bar where Hawke and Congreve stood waiting for the Russians. The two agents had finally arrived, but remained out on the docks, having a frightful row. Meanwhile, the two Englishmen, each sipping from a cold bottle of Kalik, were gazing up at a wall covered with faded snapshots, a kaleidoscopic jumble of sunny days and rum-soaked nights.

There was an eclectic mix of locals, charter skippers, international boat bums, rich American or British yachtsmen, and even a surprising number of movie stars. Everyone posing with his or her arms around Amen. Amen’s appearance changed with the passing decades, but he was the only constant.

“I’d say there are only three ways of getting one’s picture up on this wall, Constable,” Hawke said. “No doubt you have arrived at a similar conclusion, you being the famous bloodhound, after all?”

“Better hound than hare,” Congreve replied, rubbing his chin and perusing the photographs. “I would say that there are actually four.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve got to be rich, famous, or an alcoholic,” Ambrose declared.

“And the fourth?” Hawke asked, delighted.

“All of the above, of course.”

“Precisely,” Hawke said, looking at his friend with an admiring smile. “Ambrose Congreve, Scotland Yard’s own Demon of Deduction,” Hawke added.

Alex then looked out toward the docks, frowning. The Russians were still there, shouting. Arguing about just how much money they might gouge out of the rich Englishman, Hawke imagined. Bloody hell, he hated waiting.

“What the devil is keeping those two? And what are they going on about anyway?” Hawke asked. “Are we having this bloody meeting or are we not?”

“I’ve been eavesdropping. They’re fighting over a woman. Grigory came back to their boat last night and found Nikolai having a go at someone Grigory fancied. Not being very nice to her either, apparently. Someone named Gloria. A local girl from what I can make out.”

“Your Russian seems sound enough.”

“Flawless.”

“Here’s the thing. Go tell those bastards I’m walking out of here in fifteen seconds.”

“Right-ho,” Congreve said, and pushed through the screen doors and out into the sun.

Hawke looked around the ancient saloon. Every arched wall was festooned with fishing nets, buoys, giant mounted marlin and sailfish, conch shells, shark jaws, and endless strings of Christmas lights. Somehow, he thought to himself, it all worked.

Two or three “members” were seated at the bar, wholly absorbed in some kind of dice game, paying scant attention to Hawke or anyone else. The tables were all empty. Lunch crowd gone, cocktail crowd not yet arrived. Good.

The two crewmen from Hawke’s launch had scouted the yacht club yesterday and proclaimed it ideal. Now, both armed, they had stationed themselves none too discreetly on either side of the club’s front door.

The younger of the two, ex-U.S. Army sharpshooter Tommy Quick, was happily tossing fried bacon rinds into the waters surrounding the docks. In the gin-clear water, Tom could see literally dozens of large nurse and bull and sand sharks cruising over the white sandy bottom, instantly rising to snap up his treats as quickly as they hit the surface.

Hawke had met Sergeant Thomas Quick at the U.S. Army’s Sniper School at Fort Hood. Hawke had audited a course there one summer and successfully recruited the Army’s #1 sniper. Quick could easily see that working for Alex Hawke would be a far more exciting and lucrative career than anything the U.S. Army offered.

The world knew Hawke as one of the world’s most powerful businessmen and head of a massive conglomeration of diversified industries. A very select group of people knew that he frequently did highly secret freelance work for the governments of the United States and Great Britain.

Since joining Hawke, Inc., Quick had bought gold mines in South Africa, been in a room deep in the Kremlin while Hawke chatted with the Russian defense minister, and spent a long night helping Hawke attach limpet mines to the hulls of ships full of illegal weapons sitting in the bay off Bahrain. On the first anniversary of his employment, Quick had given Hawke a gift that the man still wore, an Army Sniper School T-shirt that read:

The older crewman, Ross Sutherland, who was actually on permanent loan to Hawke from the Yard’s Special Branch, kept one eye on the two bickering Russians and one hand inside his shirt, lightly gripping the nine-millimeter Glock he always wore strapped under his arm. These Russians didn’t look like much, but, in his years spent protecting Hawke, he’d learned the hard way never to go by appearances.