Free Phantom: An Alex Hawke Novel by Ted Bell Page B

leaned forward and whispered fiercely into the man’s ear.
    “I said I’m his bodyguard. That includes his hair. Understand me?”
    Hawke applied increasingly severe pressure to the base of the man’s thumb until he grimaced in pain and nodded his head. The Russian rose to his full height, rubbed his wrist vigorously, smiled down at Hawke, and said, “It’s a long trip, you know, here to St. Petersburg. I’m sure we shall all meet again.” Then he turned on his heel and returned to his table.
    Hawke rose with Alexei in his arms and quickly but somewhat discreetly left the dining car. He needed to return the child safely to their locked compartment. Given the presence of two KGB assassins aboard the Red Arrow, it promised to be a very long night. Two killers on a train. Like an Agatha Christie novel, except you already knew who the true villains were.
    But who was the intended victim?
    Surely there were many inside Russia, the so-called Tsarists, who wanted Hawke dead.
    But both Anastasia and Kuragin had said there was a price on Alexei’s head. People in power who didn’t like the idea of a tsar’s descendant waiting in the wings to take the throne at some future moment.
    It hit him like a lightning strike to the heart.
    These two thugs weren’t aboard the Red Arrow to kill him.
    They meant to murder the heir to the crown. The child of the Tsarina.
    They meant to kill his son.

Eight
    H awke sat in the darkened compartment, smoking incessantly to stay alert. He’d bought a few packs of Sobranie Black Russians in the rail station at St. Petersburg. Despite the black wrapper with its fancy gold tip, they were foul, but effective. The rhythmic click-clack on the tracks threatened to hypnotize him, and he fought it with nicotine. He was seated on one of the small, upholstered chairs in the center of the compartment’s sitting room.
    In the adjoining room, mercifully, Alexei was sleeping peacefully on the lower berth, his teddy bear clutched tightly. Hawke had rocked him to sleep and kissed his warm cheek before tucking him in. He’d then propped a sturdy wooden chair against the bedroom door to the train’s corridor, feeling only slightly more secure. He’d left the sliding door between their two rooms open and could hear the reassuring sound of his son snoring softly. It was a sound like no other he’d ever heard.
    The only light in Hawke’s tiny room came from a dim violet-blue nightlight, a spiritlike apparition near the floor that gave the small sitting room a rather eerie, stage-set feeling. Like a bad horror film, Hawke thought, some kind of Hammer Films vampire movie.
    In his right hand, Hawke held his SIG .45 pistol, a hollow-point round already in the chamber. He’d positioned his chair to one side and in the shadows, so as to be out of the line of fire of someone forcefully entering the room. But he would have a clear shot at anyone coming through that door without an invitation.
    He would shoot to kill if, indeed, circumstances warranted it.
    For a man expecting a pair of KGB or criminal thugs to burst through his door with guns blazing, Alex Hawke was surprisingly relaxed. He was not the type of man who could be prodded into deciding what he might or might not do under any possible circumstances. And this was certainly not due to bravery, or coolness, or any especially sublime confidence in his own physical prowess or power. It was a powerful instinct to go with his gut and it hadn’t failed him yet.
    And, he was, as one of his superior officers in the Royal Navy had said, “Simply good at war.”
    From time to time he’d rise and stretch, the long hours of sitting starting to wear on him. He looked at the large face of his black Royal Navy dive watch, the luminous numbers clearly legible. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. He’d been in (or, rather, on ) this bloody chair for six full hours.
    He could feel himself losing his edge.
    Inaction is the enemy of action, he reminded himself.