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Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar, Hawke thought. And Blinker Godfrey had provided more than enough charts, facts, figures, sat photos, and mind-numbing reports to whet their brass whistles. Endless stuff.
    Why? Hawke had wondered, squirming in his chair. It was not a difficult concept to comprehend: France and Red China, sailing jointly into the Indian Ocean. You can actually express that notion in one sentence. Maybe ten words. Most situations Commander Hawke dealt with were like that. Straightforward and not irreducible. In Royal Navy parlance, however, that one sentence had translated into forty-eight hours of squirming around in a smoke-filled room trying to find comfort on a hard wooden chair.
    British Naval Intelligence, Gibraltar Station, had an especially nasty habit of providing far too much unnecessary detail. This tendency was personified in one Admiral Sir Alan “Blinker” Godfrey, a pompous chap who never should have been let anywhere near a PowerPoint computer presentation. Even back in the day, when the old walrus had his antiquated overhead slides to present, he simply didn’t know how to sit down and shut up. More than once he’d caught Hawke at the back of the briefing room fingering his Black-Berry and made unpleasant remarks about it.
    So, overbriefed and underslept, Hawke finally escaped. He cleared the Spanish border checkpoint at the Rock and headed out along the sad and condo-ruined coast of Spain. As he wound up the C Type’s rev counter, he found himself turning over the salient points of the prior evening’s brief in his mind.
    The bloody French were at the heart of the matter. Their Foreign Trade minister, a corrupt and virulent anti-American somehow related to Bonaparte, was a constant worry. No surprises there; the man had been making relations with France increasingly difficult for some time. No, the truly worrisome mystery at this point was French involvement with the Red Chinese. Eyebrows were raised when Brick Kelly called them that; but “Red” was an adjective CIA Director Kelly had never stopped using, since, as he said in the briefing, “If that group of Mandarins in Beijing ain’t red, then I don’t know who the hell is.”
    Kelly then put up a chart: in the preceding year, Red China had quadrupled her military budget to eighty billion U.S. dollars. She was buying carriers and subs from the Russians and building her own nuclear missile submarines as fast as she could. In the preceding months, Kelly said, hard American and British intelligence had shown France and China engaging in secret joint naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait on seven different occasions.
    Christ, what a stew.
    The Taiwan Strait, between the People’s Republic of China on the mainland and that offshore thorn in her side, Taiwan, was as dangerous a stretch of water as there was; it, rather than the Gulf, got Hawke’s vote as the place most likely to spark a world war in years to come. Not that anyone in the Admiralty was asking his opinion. He wasn’t paid for his geopolitical savvy. He was in Gibraltar for the briefing solely at Kelly’s request. There was, the director said, a new assignment. A matter of some urgency, he said.
    As his dear friend, Ambrose Congreve of Scotland Yard, had observed on numerous occasions, it was simply cloak-and-dagger time again. This notion, the prospect of his immediate assignment, a hostage rescue, soon had a salutary effect on his mood. Hawke had always found the classic covert snatch to be one of life’s more rewarding endeavors. The former hostage’s appreciative smiles upon rescue were priceless reminders of why one played the game.
    This particular hostage was exceptionally lucky. According to Kelly, only the actions of an alert station chief in Marrakech had alerted the Americans that one of their own was in trouble. He’d been stepping out of his car at La Mamounia just as a drunk was being loaded into the rear of a black sedan. The drunk looked American,