“Are you saying he doesn’t care what Hector says?”
“Three or four years ago when Hector first came to his attention, I think Fidel found him extremely irritating. Believe me, I warned Hector repeatedly, tried to get him to use reason, to control his tongue. He ignored me. Flouted me.
“I think Fidel intended to imprison Hector when he had said enough to convict himself with his own mouth. I told Hector he was playing with fire. But as Fidel got sicker, I think he lost interest. He just listens to the reports now, asks a few questions about the size of the crowds, who was there, and goes on to another subject.”
“Surely Fidel doesn’t intend that Hector Sedano rule after him?” Admiral Delgado asked, his disapproval of Castro’s attitude quite plain.
“If we are to have a chance at the prize, we must strike when Fidel breathes his last,” Maximo said. “And quickly. Alejo Vargas must be assassinated within hours of Castro’s death. Within minutes.”
“We would have to kill Santana too,” the general said. “I have trouble sleeping nights knowing he is out there listening to everything, planning, scheming at Alejo’s side.”
“Who is going to do this killing?” the admiral asked.
No one spoke.
“Our problem is going to be staying alive,” the general said, “because Alejo Vargas and Santana will eliminate us at the slightest hint that we might be a threat.”
“What about Hector?”
“Hector will have to dodge his own bullets.”
“You are sheep,” Maximo muttered, loud enough for them to hear, “without the courage to take your fate in your own hands. The wolves will rip out your throats.”
Toad Tarkington and his wife, Lieutenant Commander Rita Moravia, were seated in the back corner of the main wardroom aboard United States, drinking after-dinner coffee and conversing in low tones. A naval test pilot, Rita was on an exchange tour with the Marine squadron aboard Kearsarge so that she could gain operational experience on the tiltrotor Osprey prior to its introduction into navy squadrons.
As usual when he was around Rita, Toad Tarkington had a smile on his face. He felt good. Life is good, he thought as he watched her tell him what their son, Tyler, now four years old, had said in his most recent letter. She had received the missive earlier today. Of course Tyler wrote it with the help of Rita’s parents, who looked after him when Rita and Toad were both at sea.
Yes, life is good! It flows along, and if you surround yourself with interesting people and interesting problems, it’s worth living. Toad grinned broadly, vastly content.
“May I join you?” Toad and Rita looked up, and saw the new chief of staff standing there with a cup of coffee in his hands.
“Please do, Captain. Have you met my wife, Rita Moravia?”
Gil Pascal hadn’t. He and Rita shook hands, said all the usual getting-acquainted things.
After they discussed the command that the captain had just left, Pascal said, “I understand that you two have known Admiral Grafton for some years.”
“Oh, yes,” Toad agreed. “I was just a lieutenant in an F-14 outfit when I first met him. He was the air wing commander, aboard this very ship in fact. We went to the Med that time, had a run-in with El Hakim.”
“I remember the incident,” Pascal said. “The ship went to the yard for a year and a half when she got back to the States. And Admiral Grafton was awarded the Medal of Honor.”
Toad just nodded. “Rita met the admiral a few months later in Washington,” Toad said, trying to move the conversation along. Conversations about El Hakim made him uncomfortable. That was long ago and far away, when he was single. Now, he realized with a jolt, things were much different—he had Rita and Tyler.
He was thinking about how being a family man changed his outlook when he heard Rita say, “Toad has served with Admiral Grafton ever since then. Somehow he’s always found a billet that allowed him to do that.”
“You know Admiral Grafton pretty well then,” Pascal said to Toad.
“He’s the second best friend I have in this life,” Toad replied lightly. He was smiling, and deadly serious. “Rita is numero uno, Jake Grafton is number two.”
From there the conversation turned to Rita’s current assignment, evaluation of the new V-22 Osprey. After a few minutes Toad asked Rita, “May I get you more coffee?”
At her nod, Toad excused himself, took both cups and went toward the coffee urn on a side table. Normally a steward served the coffee, but just now they were cleaning up after the evening meal.
Captain Pascal asked, “Have your husband’s assignments hurt his career?”
Rita knew what he meant. Toad had not followed the classic career path that was supposed to lead to major command, then flag rank. “Perhaps.” She gave a minute shrug. “He made his choice. Jake Grafton appeals to a different side of Toad’s personality than I do.”
“Oh, of course,” said the captain, feeling his way. “Spouses and friends, very different, quite understandable …”
“Jake Grafton can trade nuances with the best bureaucrats in the business, and he can attack a problem in a brutally direct manner.” Rita searched for words, then added, “He always tries to do the right thing, regardless of the personal consequences. I think that is the quality Toad admires the most.”
“I see,” said the chief of staff, but it was obvious that he didn’t.
As Toad walked toward the table with a coffee cup in each hand, Rita Moravia took a last stab at explanation: “Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington are not uniformed technocrats or clerks or button pushers. They are warriors: I think they sense that in one another.”
The shadows were dissipating to dusky twilight as Ocho Sedano walked the streets toward the dock area. Over each shoulder he carried a bag which he had stitched together from bedsheets. One contained a few changes of clothes, a baseball glove, several photos of his family—all that he wished to take with him into his new life in America. Truly, when you inventory the stuff that fills your life, you can do without most of it. Diego Coca said to travel light and Ocho took him literally.
The other bag contained bottles of water. He had searched the trash for bottles, had washed them carefully, filled them with water, and corked them. Diego hadn’t mentioned water or food, but Ocho remembered his conversation with his brother, Hector, and thought bringing water would be a wise precaution.
He also had two baked potatoes in the bag.
Diego would laugh at him—they were not going to be at sea long enough to get really hungry, or so he said.
Please, God, let Diego be right. Let us be in America when the sun rises tomorrow.
There would be a man waiting in the Keys, waiting on a certain beach. Diego showed Ocho a map with the beach clearly marked in ink. “He was a close friend of my wife’s brother,” Diego said. “A man who can be trusted.”
The boat was fast enough, Diego said, to be in American waters at dawn. They would make their approach to the beach as the sun rose, when obstructions to navigation were. visible, when they could check landmarks and buoys.
Diego was confident. Dora believed her father, looked at him with shining eyes when he talked of America, of how it would be to live in an American house, go to the huge stadiums and watch Ocho play baseball while everyone cheered … to have a television, plenty to eat, nice clothes, a car!
Dios mio, America did sound like a paradise! To hear Diego tell it America was heaven, lacking only the angel choir … and it was just a boat ride away across the Florida Straits.
Of course, Diego said they would probably get seasick, would probably vomit. That was inevitable, to be expected, a price to be paid.
And they could get caught by the Cubans or Americans, get sent back here. “We’ll be no worse off than we are now if that happens,” Diego argued. “We can always try again to get to America. God knows, we can’t get any poorer.”
Dora with the shining eyes … she looked so expectant.
She was the first, the ve
ry first woman he had ever made love to. And she got pregnant after that one time!
When she first told him, he had doubted her. Didn’t want to believe. She became angry, threw a tantrum. Then he had believed.
He thought about her now as he walked the dark streets, past people sitting in doorways, couples holding hands, past bars with music coming through the doorways. He had spent his whole life here and now he was leaving, an event of the first order of magnitude. Surely they could see the transformation in his face, in the way he walked.
Several people called to him, “El Ocho!” Several fans wanted to shake his hand, but no more than usual. This was the way they always acted as he walked by—this was the way people had treated him since he was fifteen.
He left the people behind and walked past the closed fish markets and warehouses. His footsteps echoed off the buildings.
The boat was in a slip, Diego said, behind a certain boatyard.
He rounded the corner, saw people. Men, women, and children standing in little knots. Hmm, they were right near the slip.
They were standing around the slip.
He saw Diego standing on the dock, and Dora.
People stepped out of the way to let him by.
“All these people,” he said to Diego, “Did you announce our departure at the ballpark? I thought we were going to sneak out of here.”
Diego had a sick look on his face. “They’re going with us,” he said.
“What?”
“The captain brought his relatives, my brother heard we were leaving, talked to some of his friends … .”
Ocho stared at the boat. The boat’s name on the stern was written in black paint, which was chipping and peeling off. Angel del Mar, Angel of the Sea. The boat was maybe forty feet long, with a little pilothouse. Fishing nets still hung from the aft mast. The crowd—he estimated there were close to fifty people standing here.
“How many people, Diego? How many?”
“Over eighty.”
“On that boat? In the Gulf Stream? Está loco?”
Diego was beside himself. “This is our chance, Ocho. We can make it. God is with us.”
“God? If the boat swamps, will He keep us from drowning?”
“Ocho, listen to me. My friends are waiting in Florida. This is our chance to make it to America, to be something, to live decent … . This is our chance.”
People were staring at him, listening to Diego.
Ocho looked into the faces looking at him. He tore his eyes away, finally, looked back at Diego, who had his hand on Ocho’s arm.
“No. I am not going,” He pulled his arm from Diego’s grasp. “Go with one less, you will all have a little better chance.”
“You have to go,” Diego pleaded, and grabbed his arm.
“Ocho,” Dora wailed.
“You have to go,” Diego snarled. “You got her pregnant! Be a man!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Eighty-four people were packed aboard Angel del Mar as she headed for the mouth of the small bay under a velvet black sky strewn with stars. A sliver of moon cast just enough light to see the sand on the bars at the entrance of the bay.
The boat rode low in the water and seemed to react sluggishly to the small swells that swept down the channel.
“This is insane,” Ocho said to Diego Coca, who was leaning against the wall of the small wheelhouse.
“We’ll make it. We’ll reach the rendezvous in the Florida Keys an hour or two before dawn. Vamos con Dios.”
“God had better be with us,” Ocho muttered, and reached for Dora. The baby didn’t show yet. She was of medium height, with a trim, athletic frame. How well he knew her body.
As far as he knew, he was the only one on the boat who had brought water or food. Oh, the other passengers had things, all right, sacks and boxes of things too precious to leave behind: clothes, pictures, silver, Bibles, rosaries, crucifixes that had decorated the walls of their homes and their parents’ and grandparents’ homes.
Boxes and sacks were stacked around each person, who sat on the deck or on his pile. Men, women, children, some merely babies in arms … It appeared to Ocho as if the Saturday night crowd from an entire section of ballpark bleachers had been miraculously transported to the deck of this small boat.
The breeze smelled of the sea, clean, tangy, crisp. He took a deep breath, wondered if this were his last night of life.
He pulled Dora closer to him, felt the warmth and promise of her body.
Well, this boatload of people would make it to Florida or they wouldn’t, as God willed it. He had never thought much about religion, merely accepted it as part of life, but through the years he had learned about God’s will. He was not one of those athletes who crossed himself every time he went to the plate or prepared to make a crucial pitch, vainly asking God for assistance in trivial matters, but he knew to a certainty that most of the major events of life—be you ballplayer, manager, father, husband, cane worker, whatever—are beyond your control. Events take their own course and humans are swept along with them. Call it God’s will or chance or fate or what have you, all a man could do was throw the ball as well as he could, with all the guile and skill he could muster. What happened after the ball left your fingers was beyond your control. In God’s hands, or so they said. If God cared.
For the first time in his life Ocho wondered if God cared.
He was still thinking along these lines when the boat buried its bow in the first big swell at the harbor entrance. Spray came flying back clear to the wheelhouse. People shrieked, some laughed, all tried to find some bit of shelter.
People were moving, holding up clothing or pieces of cardboard when the next cloud of spray came flying back.
The boat rose somewhat as she met each swell, but she was too heavily loaded.
“We’re not even out of the harbor,” muttered the man beside Ocho. His voice sounded infinitely weary.
Dora hugged Ocho, clung to him as she stared into the night.
She barely came to his armpit. He braced himself against the wall of the wheelhouse, held her close.
The boat labored into the swells, flinging heavy sheets of spray back over the people huddled on the deck.
The door to the wheelhouse opened. A bare head came out, shouted at Diego Coca: “The boat is overloaded, man! It is too dangerous to go on. We must turn back.”
Diego pulled a pistol from his pocket and placed the muzzle against the man’s forehead. He pushed the man back through the door, followed him into the tiny shack and pulled the door shut behind him.
The man next to Ocho said, “We may make it … if the sea gets no rougher. I was a fisherman once, I know of these things.”
The man was in his late sixties perhaps, with a deeply lined face and hair bleached by the sun. Ocho had studied his face in the twilight, before the light completely disappeared. Now the fisherman was merely a shape in the darkness, a remembered face.
“Your father is crazy,” Ocho told Dora, speaking in her ear over the noise of the wind and sea. She said nothing, merely held him tighter.
It was then he realized she was as frightened as he.
Angel del Mar smashed its way northward under a clear, starry sky. The wind seemed steady from the west at twelve or fifteen knots. Already drenched by spray, with no place to shelter themselves, the people on deck huddled where they were. From his position near the wheelhouse Ocho could just see the people between the showers of spray, dark shapes crowding the deck in the faint moonlight, for there were no other lights so that the boat might go unnoticed by Cuban naval patrols.
“When we get to the Gulf Stream,” the fisherman beside Ocho shouted in his ear above the noise of the wind and laboring diesel engine, “ … swells … open the seams … founder in this sea.”
In addition to heaving and pitching, the boat was also rolling heavily since there was so much weight on deck. The roll to starboard seemed most pronounced when the boat crested a swell, when it was naked to the wind.
Ocho Sedano buried his face in Dora’s hair and held her tightly as the boat plunged and reared, turned his body to shield her somewhat from the clouds of spray that swept over them.
He could hear people retching; the vomit smell was swept away on the wind and he caught none of it.
On the boat went into the darkness, bucking and writhing as it fought the sea.
Late in the evening William Henry Chance met his associate at the mahogany bar in El Floridita, one of the flashiest old nightclubs in Old Havana. This monstrosity was the dazzling heart of prerevolutionary Havana in the bad old days; black-and-white photos of Ernest Hemingway, Cary Grant, and Ava Gardner still adorned the walls. The place was full of Americans who had traveled here in defiance of their government’s ban on travel to Cuba. As bands belted out salsa and rhumba, the Americans drank, ate, and scrutinized voluptuous prostitutes clad in tight dresses and high heels.
Chance’s associate was Tommy Carmellini, a Stanford law school graduate in his late twenties. The baggy sportscoat and pleated trousers did nothing to show off Carmellini’s wide shoulders and washboard stomach. Still, a thoughtful observer would conclude he was remarkably fit for a man who spent twelve hours a day at a desk.
“Looks like the Cubans have come full circle,” Chance said when Carmellini joined him at the bar. He had to speak up to be heard above the music coming through the open windows.
“Goes around and comes around,” Tommy Carmellini agreed. “I wonder just how many different social diseases are circulating in this building tonight.”
When they were outside on the sidewalk strolling along, William Henry Chance pulled a cigar from the pocket of his sports jacket, which was folded over his left arm. He bit off the end of the thing, then cupped his hands against the breeze and lit it with a paper match. The wind blew out the first two matches, but he got the cigar going with the third one. After a couple puffs, he sighed.
“Smells delicious,” Carmellini said.
“Cuban cigars are the real deal. Gonna be the new ‘in’ thing. You should try one.”
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