Obviously, the man should be promoted to admiral posthaste.
He treated us to a toast in the wardroom, then led us to one of the command ship’s secure spaces so I could brief Ken, Laundry, some other analysts, and a flock of Naval Intelligence types and other assorted hangers-on on what had transpired on the ship.
I brought the bottle with me, of course.
When I was done talking, Ken nodded to Laundry, who gave a quick and rather subdued overview of what had happened after we left the ship. The vessel had radioed Havana and said it had been attacked by American agents—so much for Ken’s insistence on using a third party to preserve deniability. Several men had been killed; at least two others were believed to have gone overboard, including the doctor.
“They asked for further instructions,” said Laundry. “They were told to proceed as planned to New York.”
“Obviously, you didn’t do a good enough job searching, Dick,” said Ken. “Now we’re back at square one. We’ll have to stop the damn ship ourselves.”
“Hey listen, Admiral, that’s bullshit,” said Mongoose, standing up. “We went through that whole fuckin’ ship—there wasn’t no bomb there, believe me. If Dick couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there.”
“Your loyalty is admirable,” said Ken. I think he meant that to be an insult. “Understandable. All right. I want a workable plan to stop the ship within the hour. Dismissed.”
“Still thinks he’s in the navy,” whispered Doc, sitting next to me.
I didn’t hear him. My thoughts were elsewhere.
“I’m surprised you let us down,” said Ken, walking over as the others shuffled out. “But I guess it was inevitable. You’re not perfect.”
He sounded almost relieved, as if he had been betting against me all along, and was now finally pleased that I had “failed.”
“How big is the sick bay on this ship?” I asked him. “How many beds? A hundred?”
“God, Dick, I don’t know. We’d have to—”
“On most merchant vessels, sick bay is a closet; you’re lucky if there’s aspirin in stock. But theirs was a floating hospital. Test tubes, everything.”
“What are you getting at?”
“The person we should be talking to is the doctor,” I told him.
“Granted. But—”
I got up. “He’ll know whether there was a bomb aboard the ship. And I have my own questions for him.”
“You can’t ask them. The cover story is, you and the others died at sea. He’s the only survivor.”
“Why the hell do we need a cover story? At this point.”
“Dick, the cover story is the whole reason you’re here. Capisce?”
That’s Italian for, Do you understand, or do I have to break your kneecaps?
“Then I guess my work here is done,” I said, standing up. “I’d like to get some rest.”
“Very good,” said Ken.
Three guesses where I headed. The first two don’t count.
The doctor was guarded by a pair of plainclothes CIA paramilitary types as well as two of the ship’s marines, all of them standing at drill-sergeant attention in the passage outside sick bay. This actually made it easier for me to get in—I nodded to the Christians in Action, who nodded back and stepped aside. The marines, seeing that it was OK with the spooks, didn’t say boo.
The doctor was sitting up, but he was still pretty out of it from the drugs we’d given him in the helicopter. I grabbed a chair and sat next to him, asking in Spanish how he was doing.
He had a little trouble focusing. When he managed it, however, he jerked back.
“I’m not going to harm you,” I told him. “What’s your name?”
He didn’t answer.
“My name’s Dick Marcinko,” I told him. “What’s yours?”
Still no answer.
“I can call you asshole, if you want,” I said, switching to English.
“Spencer Rodriguez,” he answered.
“Good.” I didn’t believe him, of course—how many Cubans have you ever met with the first name of Spencer? But even a lie was better than silence. “Why were you aboard that ship? Were there many sick men?”
I asked in Spanish. He didn’t answer. I tried the question again, speaking much more slowly, just in case my pronunciation was the problem. But he sat stone-faced.
I tried in English. He still didn’t answer.
“You are a doctor, right? A real doctor? Not a fake.”
“I am a physician, as educated as any American.”
“What was in the test tubes?” I asked. “There were test tubes in those refrigerators in the sick bay. What were they for?”
No answer.
“Was it poison?” I asked.
Nothing. But I realized the way to get him to talk was to make him angry, or question him in a way that pricked his ego.
“You were going to hurt people?” I said. “As a doctor, you’re sworn not to, right?”
He seemed on the verge of saying something, but held it in.
“An American doctor wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“Phhhew.”
“So was that medicine? To help people?”
He pressed his lips together.
“No. It was a kind of poison, wasn’t it?” I said as everything slammed together in my head. “You’re going to infect the crew with some sort of disease. It’s biological warfare.”
The doctor put his teeth against his lower lip, then clamped his mouth shut.
I went to find the admiral.
Back at the hospital, Junior joined the line of men going down the steps. He was still unclear about what was going on.
Tables had been set up near the landing at the bottom of the stairs. The men and their bags were being searched by security people and staffers, all of whom were wearing surgical masks and gloves as the people upstairs had.
Junior still had the pistol and his sat phone. Knowing either might give him away, he looked around for a place to hide them. He got rid of the gun by pretending to tie his shoe near the base of the stairs, then slipping it under the open tread. But the line began moving before he could get rid of the phone. Desperate, he pushed against the man who had just surged in front of him, slipping it into the compartment on his bag.
A routine had been established at the tables. A man would give over his suitcase, then hold out his arms to be searched. Once that was done, he was led toward the wall, where someone with a camera snapped his photo. A minute or two later, he was handed an American passport.
Or what looked like an American passport. Junior guessed they were bogus, since the people here hardly looked like consular types.
At least not American. Clearly they must work for the government somehow. They looked sad, grim, as if carrying out their duty. But what was it, exactly? If they all thought that Fidel was dead, why hand out American passports? The staff hadn’t cheered upstairs; it was the patients who were happy. They were still happy now, buzzing with excitement.
The man in front of him had reached the guard and held his arms out, waiting to be searched.
“What is this?” asked the official at the desk. He pulled the sat phone from the outer pocket of the man’s suitcase. “Where did you get this?”
“I never saw it,” protested the man.
The guard next to him smacked him across the face. “Liar! Against the wall!”
The man, his face white, tears streaming from his eyes, began to protest. The guard took out his pistol.
“Against the wall!”
“I did nothing.”
A loud pop reverberated through the vestibule. The Cuban collapsed to the floor, a bullet hole in his forehead.
“Take him away,” the guard told an aide. He turned back to Junior. “Next. Empty your pockets.”
M.W. and Red had completed the circuitous route from Jamaica and were closing in on the hospital. Worried about his last encounter, M.W. had equipped the plane with more antennas, newer radio freque
ncy scanners, and a more powerful ECM jammer obtained from the Russian black market via an Israeli who owed him serious favors. The Russian electronic-countermeasures suite was arguably as good as anything the U.S. had, outside of dedicated ECM aircraft; no radar would be able to see him once he flipped his fuzz switch, though the fact that the ECMs were on would tell them he was there.
The jammer wasn’t selective; it worked on all electronic devices. M.W. and Danny had discussed the possibility of using it to jam the local communications if things got hot, and now that the aircraft was within range, Danny asked M.W. to block the radios the Cuban security people were using.
Reluctantly—as I said, jamming the signals would make it obvious someone was around—M.W. agreed.
“Look at all these damn boats,” said Red, using the night glasses to survey the marina. “There have to be a couple of hundred. More.”
“What the hell are they doing out here?” said M.W. “This isn’t a tourist area. From what Danny told us, the place is a mental institution—a prison. Right?”
“Get closer.”
Red watched as two launch-type boats pulled from the pier, then began treading slowly toward the boats at the far end of the complex.
“They’re leaving now that Fidel’s dead,” she said. “That makes no sense. Now’s the time people should stay. With Fidel gone, Cuba can breathe again.”
“They only think he’s dead,” M.W. reminded her.
“The Cubans think he’s dead. And they’re letting them go.”
“Doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe it does,” said Red, reaching toward the com panel. “How do I dial Dick’s sat phone?”
Junior felt as if he were in a trance. Whatever he’d felt earlier when he’d shot his first man up close in the head, he felt ten times worse now. The Cuban had been killed because of him.
A shooter has to get past moments like that, or else he’s no good to anyone.
Or worse, he’s dead.
The fact that he’d been dreaming about being a shooter since he was a kid, and even more than that, his need to prove himself to me, really hurt him then. He was faced with the reality of what that all meant, and it paralyzed him—he literally walked stiff-legged to the desk, mechanically holding out his hands, then going and getting his photo taken, following the guards’ directions like a mindless drone without comment.
But on the other hand, the shock may have helped him get past the security people. His reaction was just the sort of reaction they expected from a scared shitless patient—even if he was a good ten or twenty years younger than everybody else in line. And he wasn’t the only one who was shocked—everyone up close, guards included, seemed a little dazed. No one bothered to ask why he didn’t have a suitcase, or ask anything at all.
People think courage means you’re not scared. Hell no. Everybody gets scared somewhere along the line. The important thing is what you do, what you manage to do, when you are scared.
What Junior did was this:
Passport in hand, eyes so glassy that everything around him was a blur, he walked out the now open door, passed by several security people and hospital staffers, and went down to the piers. He was in a boat before he knew it, heading out in the middle of a boatlift that rivaled Dunkirk in size, and had the potential of Hiroshima in impact.
( V )
You have to analyze those vials,” I told Ken when I found him. “And you have to press that doctor to find out what the hell is going on. He knows. He’ll talk, if you put the screws to him.”
“You’re not talking about torture, are you, Dick?”
This isn’t the time or place for a long discussion on “interviewing” techniques, what works and what doesn’t, where something is appropriate and how far you can pressure someone before anything they say becomes bullshit. The point here is that Ken—the number two man at the CIA—wouldn’t make a move without calling in his team of lawyers to paper him with excuses, or whatever fancy bureaucratic word he’d substitute if he was writing this.
You can complain all you want about the government’s hiring “mercenaries” and handing terrorists over to third-world countries, but it’s happening because people don’t have the balls to stand up and say, “This is a hard omelet we’re making here, and in the process there are going to be some eggshells on the floor.”
No, we don’t have to throw out the Constitution. What we have to do is stop letting hissy fits over pseudo issues get in the way of good judgment.
How did George Washington deal with Major André after he ‘facilitated’ Benedict Arnold’s desertion?42 There’s your role model.
I didn’t give that lecture in the operations center of the ship. What I said was, “Let me talk to him.”
“He’s in my custody right now, Dick,” answered Ken. “I’m here. I can’t just let it happen.”
“Right.”
I took a step back, gave the most proper salute I could summon—they would have been proud of me back in boot camp—and turned on my heel. Then I marched double-time to the wardroom where the CIA officer I’d handed the test tubes over to was having a cup of coffee. I told him I needed one of the test tubes.
He didn’t argue. Might have been the four-letter verbs I used.
I was on my way back up to do a little show and tell with the doctor when my sat phone rang. It was Red.
She hadn’t quite connected the dots, but I had. I changed direction again, returning to Ken.
“A few hundred prisoners escaping Cuba at the same time, when obviously the government knows about it,” I told him. “Castro’s revenge.”
“Biological warfare, Dick?”
“It’s easier to do than a nuke.”
It didn’t take long for Ken to confirm that there were boats moving out from Cuba; already there had been a report from a navy surveillance plane of an unusual number of small craft in the waters east of Havana. The coast guard, navy, Immigration all scrambled to deal with the exodus.
“We’ll turn them back,” said Ken.
“That may be a problem,” said one of the analysts. “The Cubans have put a couple of their own vessels out from Havana. They may want to keep them from returning.”
“Then we’ll sink every boat if we have to.”
I had only one problem with that—Junior was almost surely on one of those boats.
Probably, if I’d asked, Ken would have lent me the Seahawk that had brought me to the ship so I could get down to Cuba and find out what was going on.
But he was busy, so I didn’t bother asking.
“We need to get south in a hurry,” I told the pilot when I rounded him up belowdecks.
We were airborne in thirty seconds.
( VI )
Junior didn’t speak when he got on the boat. Two Cubans were already aboard. Obviously excited about getting away, they took almost no notice of him as he sat on the bench at the back of the open cabin. The night had turned chilly—it was now under fifty degrees—but neither seemed to mind.
A handful of the boats had radios, but most, including Junior’s, did not. There were no supplies on board, not even a candy bar. There were life rings, but no other equipment beyond the simple instruments at the helm.
The engine made a dull, even purr as it came to life. One of the Cubans cast off, and the boat began making its way out of the marina. A dozen other boats did so at roughly the same time. Two or three dozen others were already out ahead of them; another two or three dozen would come right behind.
The breeze off the ocean smacked Junior’s face. Gradually, he started to come back to his senses. There wasn’t a Eureka moment; God didn’t reach down and tap him on the shoulder, and nothing in his imagination shook him and told him to get ahold of himself. But at some point, he did.
He got up from the bench where he’d been sitting and walked over to the man at the wheel.
“Where are we going?” he asked in English.
The man looked at him for a moment, then laughe
d uproariously.
“To freedom! Fidel is dead,” said the Cuban. His English was heavily accented.
“Why did we wait until he died?”
“It was promised to us that we would be free.” The Cuban looked at him more carefully than before. “What happened to you? You don’t remember?”
“How wouldn’t he know this?” asked the other. Then, in a more ominous tone, he told Junior that he didn’t recognize him.
“I came just today. To the hospital,” said Junior.
“Hospital. Right,” said the first man. He turned to the other and said something in Spanish. They both laughed.
“Your English is very good,” said the first Cuban.
“I’m an American,” Junior confessed.
The man smirked. He didn’t believe Junior, or thought he was just getting into the spirit of his new land.
“Why did they give us shots?” Junior asked. “Before we left?”
“Inoculations.”
“Against measles,” added the other man. “Everyone in America has measles. We have to be very careful.”
“But I had a shot for that when I was a kid.”
“So did everyone,” agreed the first man. “But the Americans don’t. This is a booster, to protect us.”
Junior knew that Americans didn’t have the measles—the disease had practically been eradicated a generation or two before. So why would they need a booster?
Obviously, they didn’t. Either this was some sort of ridiculous Cuban paranoia, or something else was going on.
Part of Junior’s brain was still frozen by the brutal killing of the innocent man in line, and his role in it. But the rest was working fine, and began agitating for some sort of logical answer to the question of what was going on. He thought of what he’d seen in the basement, thought of all the people with masks.
“We were poisoned,” he realized finally. “They gave us some sort of disease, which we’re going to spread as soon as we get to America.”
The Cubans looked at him as if he were crazy.
“We can’t go on,” he said, grabbing for the wheel.
RW15 - Seize the Day Page 39