And yet . . .
A familiar feeling of déjà this-ain’t-over vu snuck up my spine as Doc and I conducted our personal mission debrief at the bar in the Panama Queen hotel. It was well past three in the morning. The bartender had gone home, leaving us in the trusted hands of Dr. Bombay, whose contribution to the proceedings was invaluable. But even with his guidance, I knew we had a lot more work to do.
Ken, of course, was ecstatically happy. Not only had the Chinese and Venezuelans been busted, not only had we gained a wealth of intelligence on a heretofore top-secret submarine, but the State Department had been kicked in the gonads.
I’m guessing that was worth more to him than everything else, but who am I to say?
As far as I knew, Ken and his cohorts remained convinced that the canal was Fidel’s master plan for revenge. They were wrong, clearly. As nasty as it would have been, it didn’t meet Fidel’s requirements for dealing the capitalist pigs a death blow that had his signature on it. Too subtle for an old commie.
Back in the sixties when he allowed Khrushchev to locate his ballistic missiles on the island, Fidel had been thinking of Armageddon. He’d only want more now.
“If he put a nuke in the canal, that I could understand,” I told Doc as we reached round thirteen in our personal debrief. “But there was no nuke on that ship.”
“The Chinese wouldn’t have let that happen,” said Doc. “Too much money to be made.”
I sipped my drink. Fidel wasn’t beyond using a nuke, and it was reasonable to think that he had enough connections among hardliners in Russia to find someone willing to sell him one. Maybe he’d managed to scrape together enough cash to buy it.
But Putin wouldn’t let that happen. He might want to tweak the U.S., but if a Russian A-bomb turned an American city into ashes, the Europeans buying his natural gas would get very, very nervous. Anything that hurt his gas and oil sales would hurt the Russian economy, threaten his leadership, and dent his personal pension plan.
Maybe he didn’t buy it from Russia. Pakistan, India—anyone with the capacity to make a weapon could “lose” it as well.
“Hard to imagine that we wouldn’t have heard any rumors about that,” said Doc. “Maybe not out of Cuba, but certainly on the seller’s end. Besides, if something like that was for sale, don’t you think the crazy Saudi would have outbid him? Bin Laden’s richer than Fidel by far. He could buy Cuba twenty times over.”
“True.”
“Junior’s coming along,” said Doc, sensing that we’d already kicked the subject to death. “Really bucking for a place in the field.”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you like him, Dick?”
“Who says I don’t like him?”
“You don’t use him.”
“He’s in Cuba, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’m using him, ain’t I?”
“I guess.” Doc studied his glass for a second, then emptied in a gulp, ice and all. He spent the next minute or so grinding the ice cubes into tiny shards, savoring the cold. “You have been kind of tough on him.”
“If you think I’ve been tough on him, just wait. I’m betting springing Trace was his idea.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“It was reckless.”
“They got her out.” Doc leaned over the bar and scooped his glass into the bin of ice. He swirled the glass, settling the ice, then filled it to the rim with gin.
“They were lucky they got her out,” I said. “It could just as easily have gone the other way.”
“Luck is a matter of perspective,” said Doc. “Somebody once told me, a good shooter makes his own luck. He trains, he prepares the mission, he executes.”
I hate it when someone uses my words against me.
“I like the kid,” added Doc, hoisting his glass. “Reminds me of another young and rash SOB I knew back in my early days in the navy.”
“Clearly you hung around with the wrong kind.”
“Still do,” he said. “Still do.”
Actually, if we’d known what Junior was about to do next, even Doc would have been angry with him.
After they got themselves sorted and settled following the escape, Crusty took them east of Havana where a trusted cousin lived in a small village.39 Though surprised to see him and the other three unexpected guests, the cousin invited them in and gave them something to eat. The appearance of distant relatives out of the blue was not without precedence, either in Crusty’s family or for most of the island’s residents, especially when the family had “lost” members to emigration over the years. Cubans as a general rule are generous hosts, and it would be a rare family that didn’t welcome even the blackest sheep for a short stay.
Of course, Crusty didn’t tell the cousin what was going on, only that he’d come to the island to see a great-aunt on his mother’s side (the opposite branch of the family from the cousin, so cross-verification wasn’t a problem) and then decided to visit some of the other relatives while there was still time. He introduced Trace as a “friend,” adding just enough winks to piss Trace off. Shotgun and Junior were passed off as friends who’d wanted to see the country, and whose presence was not necessarily legal (from the U.S.’s point of view), a common enough occurrence in Cuba that it aroused no undue suspicion.
What it did do was invite a lecture from the cousin, who interpreted the statement as meaning they were left-leaning Americans interested in the “Cuban miracle.” Shotgun and Junior were treated to a discourse on the realities of that miracle, including a catalog of every hardship the cousin’s family had ever endured, starting with the confiscation of their property and ending with a chronic toilet paper shortage, both of which seemed to provoke equal outrage in the cousin.
Junior was bored and went off in a corner to play with his laptop. (The beta version of the new Rogue Warrior™ game, in case you’re interested.) Shotgun, on the other hand, was the perfect audience. He kept smiling and nodding while pulling the occasional bit of snack food from his pocket.
In the morning, Crusty’s cousin went off to work at a local farm. Trace decided to scout the village. She wasn’t just doing sightseeing—our stashed boat was more than a hundred miles away, and it would be easier to simply steal one here. She took Shotgun with her, leaving Junior and Crusty to get some sleep.
Junior napped for an hour or two, but nerves eventually got the better of him, and he got up to do some work. After making sure they were alone in the house, he fired up his laptop.
The night before, he’d played games. Now he felt as if he ought to be working. Connecting to the Internet via the satellite modem, he called up Google Earth and surveyed the general area. Then he ran down the news, both in Cuba and the rest of the world. Then finally, bored but feeling that he ought to be productive, he tapped into the Rogue Manor network back home and reviewed the files that were on Raul’s hard drive.
Pornography filled about half of the drive. Most of the text documents were endlessly boring speeches, including the one that had helped alert the CIA to the canal conspiracy. The other files were e-mails and various odds and ends in different formats that Junior had a hard time deciphering. His Spanish had improved considerably over the past few days, but there were still vast gaps in his vocabulary and comprehension. He spent more than twenty minutes puzzling over a file that turned out to be a simple Excel spreadsheet listing restaurant bills, apparently some sort of expense voucher.
Junior was just starting on a new file when he smelled Crusty’s cigarette smoke wafting into the room, a kind of early warning that the former chief petty officer was on his way.
“Computers cause cancer,” said Crusty, leaning over Junior’s shoulder.
“Like cigarettes?”
“At my age, tobacco’s good for you,” said Crusty, taking the pack from his pocket. “And sterility. You got that thing two inches from your balls.”
Junior didn’t think Crusty’s medical advice could be trusted. St
ill, he shifted around and put the laptop on the seat of the chair next to him.
“Help me with some of these, would you?” he said. “I can’t figure out what they mean.”
“What do I look like?” Crusty scowled. The correct answer would be: a crazed armadillo. He took a slow drag from his cigarette, then waved his hand, shooing a nonexistent fly. “You think I’m a computer gizmo guy?”
“They’re some sort of memos or something in Spanish. This one’s about serum or something.”
Junior held the laptop screen for him. Crusty stuffed the cigarette in his mouth, folded his arms, then leaned so close to the screen Junior thought he was trying to put his head through it.
“Inoculations,” said Crusty. “This is a list of inoculations. People getting shots, and where. Shot shots. Not bullet shots.”
“Yeah, I got that,” said Junior, pulling the computer back. That jogged his memory about a memo on the drive directing “recipient” to proceed to the Assembly for inoculation. He began searching for it.
“These are big shits, you know,” added Crusty.
“Big who?”
“Big shits. That’s the mayor of Havana. That’s the party secretary. That’s—”
“Do these words tell you what the disease is?” asked Junior. He’d selected a different memo, and held up the computer again.
“Hmmmph,” said Crusty when he finished reading it.
“Well?”
“They’re to report to the Assembly building this week for an immunization. This is a reference here to Fidel’s death.”
“I saw that.”
“It hasn’t happened. But they mentioned it. Which is strange. Here, give me this damn thing.”
Crusty took the laptop and read the memo. Despite his hostile attitude toward computers, he actually seemed to know his way around them pretty well. He brought up a number of different memos and read through them quickly.
“They’re not supposed to go into the area around Vianna Norte before getting the shots,” said Crusty finally.
“Why not?”
“Beats the hell out of me. Maybe so they don’t pick up the disease.”
“Vianna Norte?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s the name of the place where the inoculation is being shipped from,” said Junior. He got up, then took the computer back. “Here’s the memo about when it’s arriving—from Vianna Norte. That must be where the lab is.”
“And all the sick people,” said Crusty.
Junior didn’t pay attention. He was already trying to locate Vianna Norte on Google Earth.
( II )
I woke in Panama City to the buzz of my sat phone. Pulling it from the side table, I flicked it on, held it to my ear, and heard Ken Jones tell me I was a genius.
A chill shot up my spine.
“What do you want now, Ken?”
“You’re a genius, Dick. And a true American hero.”
Damn, I thought to myself. The day hasn’t even started yet and here it’s all shot to hell.
Ken had taken to heart what I’d said about Fidel wanting something more apocalyptic to go out on. He’d put several analytical teams to work assessing the situation and reviewing spy data. Somewhere between wearing out their erasers and playing wastepaper basketball, they’d come up with a new theory not all that far from the one Doc and I had kicked around during our bar debrief: Fidel was going to nuke New York.
Or some other East Coast city. Most likely New York. Maybe.
Unlike us, the analysts (presumably) hadn’t been drinking when they contemplated this, and so they were able to arrive at a conclusion that never occurred to us: the Cubans hadn’t bought a bomb. The Soviets had left it behind in 1962.
“I doubt that’s possible, Ken.”
“That was my reaction, too.” Ken’s voice was in its aw-shucks mode, the sort he uses when he doesn’t want someone to know that he knows that he’s the smartest person in the world. It’s meant to seem self-depreciating, though of course it’s actually the opposite.
“No one stood on Cuban soil and counted the warheads going in,” said Ken. “Or the missiles. It’s been buried in a cave there all this time.”
“Which cave?”
“I don’t know which cave. That’s immaterial,” said Ken. “It’s not there anymore.”
“Where is it?”
There was plenty of sarcasm in my voice, believe me, but it went right over Ken’s head.
“The Cubans sent a merchant ship out from one of their western ports two days ago, when it looked like Fidel was going to finally die. They haven’t called it back yet. We think that’s the ship where the bomb is.”
The ship in question, Cuba Libre, had had a somewhat checkered history as a Soviet merchant ship during the 1970s and ’80s. Though not quite old enough to have been involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis itself, it had shipped regularly back and forth between Russia and Cuba, bringing the socialist haven bourgeoisie supplies like wheat and rice that the workers’ paradise couldn’t grow or buy on its own.
At some point, the Russians had turned the ship itself over to Cuba, perhaps as a partial payment for the services of Cuba’s army in Angola, where the ship made a few stops during Cuba’s nonimperialistic imperialism foray there. It had plied the Caribbean waters for a few years, allegedly transporting fruit and vegetables, though the CIA files showed its services had been retained by at least two companies that had ties to drug dealers in Panama. For the past six or seven years, it had sat at anchor, rotting away—until six months ago, when spy satellite photos showed that it had suddenly been refurbished and painted.
Cuba Libre wasn’t a warship, just a plain jane merchant vessel, and there had been no reason to keep too close an eye on it. Work had been finished a few months back, but the ship had stayed at its moorings east of Havana, according to the various satellite and other reconnaissance data.
Until the other day.
“Where’s it going?” I finally asked the admiral.
“Not clear.”
“Stop it and find out.”
“I’m glad you feel that way.”
Used to be, there was a suspicious merchant ship on the seven seas, the navy—any navy, not just ours—stopped it, got the captain and the papers, and found out what the hell the story was.
Oh, but gentle reader, that was before the days of twenty-four-hour news channels and wall-to-wall political correctness. Murderers aren’t criminals anymore; they’re people with inappropriate attitudes toward social norms. A gun dealer who sells weapons to a terrorist group is an entrepreneur. North Korean vessels loaded with missiles for Syria aren’t a threat to world peace; they’re a vital cog in world trade.
Stopping a vessel because it happened to be Cuban had apparently become a crime on par with destroying the habitat of the wild Philadelphia spotted frog. The navy could only board the ship if there was a real reason to do so.
“Why don’t you tell the IRS that they didn’t file all of their required tax forms,” I told the admiral. “They’ll stop them in a flash.”
“Be serious, Dick.”
Here’s what the admiral meant by “be serious”: he wanted yours truly to board the ship and find out what the hell was aboard it. I would do this under cover of darkness, of course, with absolutely no commission from the U.S. government, and no connection thereto.
Unless, of course, I found something. Then the entire Atlantic fleet, waiting just over the horizon, would zoom in on the ship and blow it out of the water.
Whether or not I got off first, I suspected.
“I have two men I want you to take with you,” added the admiral as he finished outlining his plan. “They’re experts in nuclear weapons. They’ll be able to tell you the most likely hiding places. And if you find a bomb, they should be able to diffuse it without it blowing up.”
Did he say “should”?
Yes, though he skipped over it very quickly. That’s not the sort of sentence
where I like to see qualifiers.
“I still have people I have to get out of Cuba,” I told him.
“I thought you said that was under control.”
“It is under control. That’s why I have to get them out.”
“Dick, let me take care of that for you.”
I laughed.
“I’ll take care of my people, you take care of the Libre Cuba or Cuba Libre or whatever they’re calling that floating typhoid trap.”
“Dick, your country is calling you.”
Ken Jones as Uncle Sam.
Frightening.
“Just have the navy stop the damn ship and be done with it,” I told him. “The hell with political correctness. Get one of the SEAL teams—”
“You of all people should know the bullshit I have to put up with, Dick. You know what kind of hell will break loose if we’re wrong.”
“You can be wrong, Ken? Really?”
The admiral sighed. It sounded staged.
“That ship is sailing in the general direction of New York, Dick. Don’t you have relatives there?”
“It’s sailing or drifting?”
“I find your humor in the face of this potential disaster highly inappropriate.”
“Some people might call what you’re asking me to do piracy.”
“I’d call it a smart business decision to remain one of our prime contractors.”
Yes, I agreed. No, I wasn’t entirely convinced that Fidel had sat on a nuke for nearly fifty years, then loaded it into a dilapidated tub and set it off for New York.
But hell, Fidel was up to something big. And after everything Fidel and I meant to each other, I couldn’t let him get away with this.
Besides, when was the last time I turned down a chance to board a ship at sea?
Back in Cuba, Junior had convinced Crusty that they should ride to Vianna Norte and visit the lab where the inoculations were being prepared, and see what they could see. He didn’t use advanced psychology or emotional blackmail or tug on Crusty’s patriotic strings—the plain truth was that Crusty was bored. As I’m sure Junior was.
RW15 - Seize the Day Page 33