Angels of Maradona

by Glen Carter

  Jack fumbled for the sat phone, which he uncoupled from the computer. He punched in a series of numbers. A second later someone answered at the Reuters office in New York. Jack knew Seth Pollard wouldn’t be there, but he asked for the newsroom anyway.

  A moment later a gruff voice came on the line.

  “Is Seth Pollard on assignment?” Jack asked.

  “Who’s asking?” the voice said.

  “Jack Doyle. Looking for Seth.”

  There was silence broken by bursts of static. Finally the voice spoke again. “Jack Doyle, Brian Hoskins here. You sound like you’re a million miles away.”

  “Not quite. Brian, I really need to speak with Seth.”

  “That’s the problem,” Hoskins said. “Us too. But can’t reach him, haven’t been able to for about two days now. Fuckin’ freelancers operate on their own timeline.”

  “Where in Afghanistan is he?” Jack didn’t like the sound of it. Seth took chances and Afghanistan was unforgiving.

  “Afghanistan?” Hoskins said. “That was two weeks ago. Seth’s in Colombia, chasing rebel soldiers up near Santa Marta somewhere.”

  Christ. Seth had seen her all right. “No word since Tuesday?”

  “None. And we’re getting worried so for Chrissake if you hear from him tell him to pick up a phone.”

  “I will,” Jack promised, then punched off.

  Pollard had gone missing the same day he’d sent the e-mail.

  Jack rolled the tape again and checked the racing time code. It had been shot shortly after noon two days ago.

  The woman on the video was Kaitlin O’Rourke.

  FORTY-ONE

  It was a good thing Jack was sailing single-handed, because for the next two days he shuffled around Scoundrel like an automaton, with no appetite and a foul mood to match the low black clouds trailing his wake and taunting him before moving in to test his sea legs.

  The last time he checked, Jack was ten miles southwest of the Florida Keys, in a sector normally thick with gleaming white charter boats hunting grouper and damselfish. Not today. The ominous weather system had driven them ashore. Taking no chances, Jack thought, as he stared glumly at the wall of black on his stern.

  He’d printed a frame of the Kaitlin video and tacked it to a bulkhead where he spent long moments trying to figure out how his producer had survived the attack at Café Umbria. But, more importantly, why she had allowed everyone to believe she was dead. Her father, her friends. The whole damn world. Kaitlin O’Rourke, deceased. Killed in a suicide bombing in Cartagena, Colombia. Case closed. Not anymore. The question now was why?

  Doyle studied the image, absorbing every feature and angle, every hue of colour, searching for anything that might reveal it wasn’t Kaitlin at all, but an illusion constructed from the trickery of light and shadows. Wishful thinking, too, Doyle thought which was to be expected given the circumstances. In the end he decided that it was Kaitlin’s face, and he had absolutely no idea how that could be possible.

  That morning he’d received the reply to an e-mail he’d sent sixteen hours earlier. It meant a change in his itinerary. He took an hour to plot his new course, and after checking the weather twice he decided he’d make a beeline for his new destination. Lunch was something he ate out of a can while he checked a satellite photo he’d downloaded from the Florida weather service. The lifting wind told Jack he was in for a wet miserable afternoon and quite possibly a sleepless night unless he was able to outrun the weather, which was highly unlikely. At a GPS speed of seven point two knots the separation between Scoundrel and the storm was closing fast. Jack ran the mental checklist of things he needed to do to ride out the storm chasing him. The hairs on the back of his neck tingled with electricity as the ocean rapidly turned darker shades of green. He reefed the sails and when he settled into the cockpit the first bulbous drops of water beat like war drums on the deck.

  Jack checked the wind-speed indicator and saw it was rising quickly. He darted below to retrieve his foul weather gear, for a moment stopping at the bulkhead where her picture was tacked. She’d survived, he thought. Even if she’d been hurt in the explosion, she was clearly now recovered. What didn’t make sense was the charade of her death. He stared into her eyes – windows, they say, to the deepest part of someone. The eyes he recognized, but as Jack pulled himself up through the companionway into the darkening weather, he wasn’t at all sure about her soul.

  FORTY-TWO

  The storm beat on Scoundrel for fifteen hours. A merciless harangue of lashing rain and howling wind that drove her stern into the sea with the force of a giant jackhammer. When it was over, Doyle was exhausted. On rubbery legs he came below for food and rest, and after shedding his waterproof gear he plopped down at the navigator’s table and bent his sopping head closer to the radio. By the sounds of it, two sailboats had gone down, their crews rescued by the gutsy crew of a Coast Guard helicopter. These guys never got enough credit or pay, Doyle thought. Risking their lives to pluck the doomed from stormy seas. Doyle knew he could have been one of them. Damn impatience had nearly cost him his life.

  He spent the morning putting his boat together again, and even though fatigue dulled his vision, six hours after that, Doyle was close enough to Cuba to see white sugary sand and towering palm trees. The GPS showed he was on a straight course for Marina Hemingway, and although the wind was waning, there was still enough to fill her sails as he skirted the coastline.

  1500 hours. The sun burned hot on Jack’s shoulders as he watched two gulls spread their wings to gain altitude above the deep emerald water of the Straits of Florida before it turned shallow and became brilliant blue. He rubbed at three days’ stubble and massaged his bare chest, fingers slippery on a mélange of sweat and sunblock. Doyle thought about the man he was going to meet. A friend he’d contacted. It had been a long time, and for a fleeting moment Doyle wondered whether to trust him. What choice did he have?

  Doyle took a long pull on a bottle of cool water, squinted across shimmering waves towards shore, and drew in a lungful of air that slid down with the consistency of honey. He’d shave and shower before making shore, his first shower since leaving Bark Island. Jack checked the compass and corrected his course ten degrees to port to tighten her approach. He then lifted the bottle and poured half its contents over his head, running fingers through thick dark hair until it was slick against his scalp.

  He had taken on the colour of rawhide, bronze like the summers when he was a kid aboard his father’s boat. He wore tattered denim shorts and leather topsiders that gripped the deck when he made his way forward, hunkering down to lower his centre of gravity as he dashed from port to starboard, sometimes pulling tight a line or checking a cover. Occasionally Scoundrel dug deep, soaking Doyle with salty spray, forcing him to grab something before tumbling overboard. What good were man-overboard drills when you were single-handed? No one to throw you a line. Jack didn’t know why he’d never learned to swim. He guessed it was because the water in his part of the world froze you to death before you had a chance to drown. On more than one occasion, with ten-foot waves beating on him, he was grateful for his survival suit and the fact Scoundrel was as solid as she was. There was a small brass plate in the cockpit that Jack polished until it gleamed. It said she was hull number ninety-five, a cutter-rigged ketch handmade by craftsmen on the shores of the Hudson River thirty years ago. Jack bought her after selling a hundred acres of his family’s land to Boston developers, on which they built condos on craggy hillsides with an ocean view and million dollar price tags. Weekend retreats for Boston yuppies. Jack snickered at the fleet of Beemers and Audis parked at Finnegan’s Saturday afternoons. He was paid a heap for his land, but he’d also demanded and received final say on the design of the condos. He would never have sold otherwise, and in the end the properties had blended in perfectly. Others didn’t agree, including Argus. It seemed O’Rourke didn’t agree with anything Doyle did. He figured he’d taken his old man’s place on O’Rourke’s shit list
. In a way who could blame him?

  The Russian’s e-mail had been short: a time and place in old Havana where Jack would be met by his “associates.” Jack was looking forward to seeing his old friend again. He thought back to the time they met.

  The Moscow summit was handed to Jack on a silver platter. “Pack your bags and call me the minute you arrive,” Carmichael had said to him. “Now move your ass and don’t screw up.” Twelve hours later Jack arrived.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked Carmichael on the phone from the airport.

  “Who sleeps?” Carmichael had responded. “Your first feed window is booked for two hours from now. Get going.”

  Forty-five minutes later Jack joined the media circus – a dozen reporters doing their stand-ups in Red Square with the snow-capped onion domes of the Kremlin behind them. The satellites bounced their stories at newsrooms in New York and Atlanta. The two world leaders were closer than they had ever been to a major agreement on arms control – even Reykjavik. The underlings were sweating the details on warhead reductions and verification protocols. A communiqué would seal the deal for both sides.

  Jack first saw the Russian at the hotel on Baltchug Street in Novokuznetskaya near the Moskva River. A meet-and-greet for western reporters and their East Bloc “counterparts” from outfits like Pravda, Izvestia, and state-run television.

  Network news anchors swept into the room past tall red velvet curtains. Czarist princes trailing producers and sycophants. Staking territory like rutting stags.

  That night, Doyle recalled, an American senator had arm-wrestled a Soviet air force general to the floor. It was front page the next day in a hundred newspapers.

  They gulped good vodka and stuffed their faces with caviar canapés. The smoke from Russian tobacco formed a cumulus cloud high in the inverted cup of a golden-domed ceiling three storeys high.

  Jack had struck up a conversation with the Russian easily. Raspov, as he remembered, seemed almost too eager. Always ready with the next drink, background stuff on the arms control apparatchiks milling about the room. After an hour his new friend made an offer. “Let me show you Moscow, Jack.” Why not? Jack thought. Five minutes later they were racing through Moscow in a wrecked Lada that had no heat and no headlights. They drank till three in the morning at smoky nightclubs along Leninskiy Prospekt.

  “Your man’s gonna cave,” Jack had said to the Russian after his seventh shot of iced vodka. “Thanks for the cigar.”

  “You’re welcome. What choice does Gorbi have?”

  “So Reagan wins.” Jack smiled.

  “Don’t fool yourself into believing that. Gorbachev will end communist rule in my country – not Ronald Reagan. He started along that path well before Reykjavik – before Reagan liked to call us the ‘Evil Empire.’”

  “Gorbi’s gonna cave,” Jack repeated, looking smug in the flare of a match, blowing cigar smoke towards the ceiling.

  “I think so,” the Russian had replied.

  When Jack and his new Russian friend uselessly exhausted themselves arguing Soviet-US politics, they had talked about sailing and cigars, and Russian women.

  On the way back to Jack’s hotel the Russian pulled over. In the darkened Lada he handed Jack an envelope. Suddenly he didn’t seem quite as drunk. “No questions. Just take it. You’ll know what to do.”

  Jack however was drunk. It took him a while, but he finally stuffed the envelope in his pocket as they were pulling up outside Jack’s hotel. “Thanks, com…comrade. A re…reporter never reveals his sources. You can count on me.”

  “I am,” the Russian had replied. “Goodnight, Mr. Doyle.”

  Jack was awakened the next morning by the head-splitting ring of a telephone. It was Carmichael and he didn’t bother saying hello or even how’s it goin. “CNN says the Russians are going to cave.” Then silence.

  Jack rubbed his face and reached for a glass of water, instead knocked it over. Cursed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Paul Rimbey at CNN is reporting that the Soviets are ready to make substantive concessions on all nuclear weapons. How come we don’t have it?”

  Shit. Doyle hung up, cutting Carmichael off in mid-sentence. Five minutes after a panicked shower he pulled shut his door and headed for the hotel’s media centre. Something fell out of his pocket. Doyle bent over to pick it up, the vice closing on his cranium. He exhaled painfully and with tremulous hands he opened the envelope, extracting a thick wad of official looking papers. Russian was impossible to decipher but “Top Secret” in thick red ink looked the same in any language. Doyle began to read, eyes widening until his forehead hurt. A moment after realizing what he held in his hands, he stumbled, cursing in disbelief, towards the biggest story of his career.

  FORTY-THREE

  Jack wasn’t worried about sailing single-handed in Cuban waters until he saw the speck on the horizon off his bow. He grabbed the binoculars and pressed them to his face. It was the last thing he wanted to see.

  He moved quickly to reef his canvas, and in thirty seconds his boat was dead in the water. Jack brought the binoculars up again and spotted the rooster tail, then the sleek cigarette boat, three men in uniforms bouncing in their seats like bronco busters. Cuban uniforms were a problem, especially if you were a drug smuggler which Jack wasn’t. Sometimes it didn’t matter. They’d rip your boat apart looking.

  Creeps in these uniforms once sank a tugboat with seventy-two Cubans on board – forty-one died, most of them women and children trying to escape Fidel’s revolution. Jack remembered the pictures of corpses soaked in diesel fuel – faces frozen in horror. Jack was worried. He dropped the binoculars and dove below. The sat phone was worth a fortune, the computer too. He stowed both, and emerged a few seconds later, still as a statue as the boat got closer. Below the surface of the water he spied schools of dazzlingly coloured fish, frantic and directionless as they shot between razor-sharp coral, a tiny biomass sticking to his underbelly. He hoped for the best. It was all he could do.

  The thunder of her jet-powered engine rumbled across the straits, and as she drew closer Jack saw the weapons. The gunboat maneuvered through a wide circle. They swept their eyes along the length and beam of Scoundrel, leering in a way that made Jack feel the cuckold. When they got close enough one of them swung a grappling hook and pulled Scoundrel into them.

  “Buenos dias,” Jack shouted above the rumble of the engine.

  One of them jumped on board. The commander, Jack guessed. Mr. Cocky with a practiced swagger that challenged Jack before the man had spoken his first words. He ignored the gringo, ducked his head to take a quick look down below and muttered something to the others.

  Jack dropped the smile. Through his peripheral vision he watched the two underlings, who were watching their commander, hands tickling their side arms. The commander turned and straightened, came up an inch short of Jack’s chin. Great, Jack thought. The Napoleon complex – with weapons. Jack held out his passport.

  The captain took it and opened it to the photo, and after a tense moment said, “Senor Jack Doyle.” His accent was thick as espresso, black eyes like lumps of coal embedded beneath a Neanderthal’s brow.

  Jack glanced at their weapons again. Still holstered. No one seemed to be in a hurry to shoot him – yet. He nodded, waited as the boats rocked into one another, the dull grey fiberglass chaffing at Scoundrel like a schoolyard bully.

  “Your destination?” The captain flipped lazily through Jack’s passport.

  “Marina Hemmingway.” Jack’s throat felt as though it were coated with sawdust.

  “No weapons…drugs?” Eye contact then, challenging. Jack thought he heard holsters being unsnapped – decided it was just his imagination. The boats bumped gently into one another. Two gulls squawked overhead, adding to his tension like a colicky child on a white-knuckle landing.

  “No. I’m a journalist.” It seemed immediately like an incredibly stupid thing to say.

  The commander waved the comment away, and then
looked again at Jack’s passport, like he couldn’t decide if the guy standing there was the guy in the picture. Skinnier in the flesh, Jack guessed. The commander positioned his hands on his hips and spread his legs. “I am thinking maybe the gringo’s coming to Kooba to smoke our cigars and fuck our women.”

  The two others grunted in agreement.

  “What about it Senor Doyle? Kooban woman are easy, eh? A few American dollars for unemployed doctors and lawyers.”

  Jack’s heart raced. He didn’t like where this was headed. He was sure now the other guys had their hands on their weapons. “Meeting a friend,” was all he said.

  They locked eyes again. Shiny hair gel, Jack noticed. Gel with flecks of some kind. In a place where soap was hard to come by, this man had hair products. The commander continued to glare at him, mouth clamped shut. Jack searched for the right words because the ones on his tongue weren’t going to cut it. How’s the wife and kids? Nice hair. The damn gulls were back. Heckling him.

  Finally the commander said, “Raspov says welcome to Kooba.” He placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “The Russian is waiting,” he added with a grin. “But first, we’re thirsty.”

  Jack gulped. Smiled his relief. So the old Russian had lots of friends and now they were his friends. Why not? he thought, as he went below to fetch four ice-cold beers.

  They followed Jack until he was past Barlovento Harbor where the river Jaimanitas leads to the mouth of Marina Hemingway. The captain of the patrol boat saluted and then slammed the throttle forward. Heat thermals shimmered from her stern as she leapt from the water and headed back out to sea.