by Cuba (lit)
"Eighty-fourea"...whispered Ocho Sedano.
"What happened to the boat?"
"It sank."- .
"And the people?"
"They went into the water... sharks."
"Sharks?"
"Some people were swept over the side during a storm our
first night at sea. Diego Coca shot the
captain, some people died of thirst... Diego jumped
into the sea. The children died of exhaustion and hunger,
I thinkit is really impossible to say. There was no
food or water, only rain to drink. When
the boat sank those who were left were eaten by sharks.
If they didn't drown. I hope Dora drowned.
"The old fisherman and I were spared.... Did you
find
him? The old fisherman? Did you see him in the
ocean"..."...He clawed at Autrey James, who
drew back out of reach.
"Noea"...the interpreter said. "You were the only one."
They went away men, all of them, left him to eat
the food and stare at the ceiling and think about the fact
that he was alive and all the others were dead.
The others were dead. He was alive. What did that
mean?
Was God crazy?
Why me?
He was thinking about that when someone came to put solution
in his eyes again. This time the solution made him cry.
He sobbed for a minute or two, then his body gave
out and he slept.
"Why did you not put the gold in a bank vault?"
Mercedes had asked this question of Fidel several years
ago, when he first told her of the gold pesos. As
she sat on her mother-in-law's small porch
completing her blouse, she remembered the
question, and Fidel's answer:
"If we kept the gold in a bank, the international
bankers would have learned of it eventually, would have
demanded that we post it as security for a loan. Then
a hurricane would come or the bottom would drop out
of the sugar market one year, and the gold would be gone."
"But the gold does not help Cuba. Why own it?"
"The gold is oursea"...he said obstinately. "When it
is gone it is gone for all Cubans forever."
"But you hid it, so it is gone now."
"Oh, no. You and I know where it is. As long as it
is hidden, it belongs to Cuba."
She couldn't shake himhe had the peasant's love
of the secret hoard, the instinctual drive to bury a
can of money or hide it in a mattress, just in
case. No matter how bad things got in the house,
the money was always there,
STEPHEN COONTS
hidden, an asset that could be tapped to stave off
starvation or disaster.
He said as much when he admitted, "In the middle
of the night, when I am alone and the world is heavy on
my shoulders, I remember we still have the gold."
Fidel and Che Guevara hid it together, for Cuba.
Guevara was killed in Bolivia and
apparently took the secret to his grave.
Fidel didn't want tohe told the one person
on this earth he trusted.
She wished she didn't know this thing. As she worked on
the last seam of the blouse, she thought about this great
secret, about what she should do.
Mercedes Sedano had confided in no one, had
written nothing down. With Fidel dead the gold was
only one heartbeat away from being lost forever. She
must do something, but what?
Fidel had been a knot of contradictions. She
had argued with himchallenged the macho man hmfand he
had admitted some of his failures, which was a rare
moment for him. Not all of his errors, but some.
"I am the only communist in Cubaea"...he said,
laughing. "Becoming a communist was a mistakeof
course I can never say that hi public. We had
to declare our independence from the American financiers and
corporations. In the fullness of time it turned out that
the Russian horse couldn't run the race, which was
unfortunate, but that didn't mean we were wrong in the
first place."...He shrugged.
He had the Latin's ability to accept life's
vicissitudes as they came with courage and grace.
"The best thing about communism was the
dictatorship. The economic twaddle meant
nothing. Someone had to show the Cuban people they could stand
on their own feet, that they didn't need to sell their
souls to the Americans or the Catholic
Church."...He smiled again, made a gesture toward
heaven. "The truth is we were too poor to afford the
Church or the Americans."
If Santana or Vargas tortured her, she would
tell them
about the gold. To suffer horribly and die for a
secret that you thought illogical was worse than
stupidit would be a sin.
Did he ever wonder what she would do if she found
herself in this situation?
She finished the last seam, shook out the blouse, and
held it up so she could view it.
Had Fidel really trusted her to make the decision
that was best for Cuba, or did he just think that she would
keep her mouth shut?
For Maximo Sedano the question was simple and stark:
Where was the gold?
Rumors had circulated for forty years, and not a
flake had ever surfaced. Several men swore they
had helped melt the coins into ingots in a smelter
in the basement of the Ministry of Finance, but
they never knew what happened to the ingots. Alejo
Vargas had been running the secret police for
twenty years and the Ministry of Interior for the last
ten and probably hunting for the gold for at least
nineteen, and he hadn't found it. At least
Maximo didn't believe he had. In forty years
no loose ends had unraveled... so there must have
been no loose ends.
The conclusion Maximo drew from these facts was that
only a very few peopleFidel, perhaps his brother
Raul, maybe Chehad known the secret in the first
place. Today the secret might be known by a few people
who had been close to them. In any event, there were
no elderly workmen about who liked to run their mouth when
they drank their rumVargas would have found anyone like that
years ago.
So the gold wasn't made into statues, poured like
concrete into a floor or foundation, made into bricks
and used to construct a state building, or
transported to some flyspecked hovel and buried
under the floor. No. If the gold had been hidden
this way, someone involved in the labor would have talked
during the last forty years.
If there were secret records waiting to be discovered
or
STEPHEN COONTS
letters in bank vaults, Maximo would never discover
them. All he had were his wits.
With Fidel dead and Alejo Vargas ascendant,
Maximo was using his wits now, applying them as never
before.
In search of inspiration, he walked the streets of
Havana to the Museum of the Revolution.
Like so many revolutionarie
s who swashbuckled through the
pages of human history, after his victory
Fidel found it expedient to enshrine himself as the
savior of the nation so that he might remain at the
helm permanently. Of course, to properly do the
job it was also necessary to build a monument to the venality
and depravity of his enemies, because great heroes need
worthy opponents. Amazingly, all this good,
evil, and greatness fit neatly under one roof: the
presidential palace that had been the residence of
Fulgencio Batista.
Maximo walked quickly through the exhibits that
detailed Batista's corruptionwhat he sought would
not be there.
He quickly found what he was looking for. Fidel the
savior,
"El Lider Maxima"
portraits, busts, memorabilia, candid and
posed photographs, heroic paintingsall of this was
enough to turn the stomach of anyone who had actually known
the man, Maximo thought. Alas, Fidel had been
very flawed clay: megalomaniacal, filled with a
sense of his own magnificent destiny, boorish,
opinionated, pigheaded, insufferable, prejudiced,
loquacious to a fault, and, all too often, just
plain wrong. What a tragedy that this
self-annointed messiah was stranded in this third world
backwater and never had the opportunity to save the
species, which he could have done if only God had
sent him to Moscow or Washington.
Maximo tried to stifle his disgust and concentrate upon
the displays before him.
Fidel and Che Guevara, Camilo
Cienfuegos, the other immortals ... The
university, the Moncada Barracks, the trial,
prison, handwritten letters, exile, guerrilla
days ...
He carefully looked at everything, then wandered on.
He came to a room devoted to the fall of
Havana; Fidel riding into the city on a tank,
ecstatic children. Then Fidel the ruler; Fidel the
baseball player; Fidel and Che fishing
in the Gulf Stream; Fidel with Hemingway,
Richard Nixon, Khrushchev, Kosygin, the
famous and the infamous, always togged out in those abysmal
green fatigues; dozens of shots of Fidel with his
mouth open in front of crowds ... God, how the
man Could talk to a captive audience!
Maximo was in the next room looking at photos
of Fidel eating rice and beans with schoolchildren when the
incongruity of the photo of Fidel and Che fishing
struck him. Odd, that.
He went back to it. The two were on some kind of
fishing boat, with fighting chairs and big rods,
fishing for marlin probably.
Wait a minute ... The marina where Maximo
kept his boat... When he first moved it there the
harbormaster had once told him that Fidel used
to leave from that marina to fish.
Now he remembered. Yes. The old man said
Fidel and Che fished often, every few days, went out
by themselves, often spent the night at anchor in the
harbor. After a year or so they tired of it, the old
man said wi/lly, never came back. The boat
belonged to the Cuban Navyseized from an
Americanand was eventually converted to a gunboat.
He could remember the old man talking,
could see the wind playing with his white hair as he
stood on the dock in the sun talking about his hero,
Fidel, about that moment one day long ago when their
lives came close together.
The harbormaster had been dead for years. The new
man was far too young to remember anything.
What if the gold were on the floor-of Havana
Harbor?
Each night Fidel and Che could have lowered hundreds
of pounds of it over the side of the boat free from
observation. Given enough nights ...
Over time the gold could have gradually disappeared
from the Finance Ministry. If no one but Fidel and
Che handled the gold, there was no one to talk.
Maximo could see logistical problems with this
possibility, of course, but not insurmountable ones.
He left the museum deep in thought.
"The air force's AW AC* reports that the
Cuban military is moving toward the silo
sites, Admiral."
The briefer was a commander, the senior Air
Intelligence officer on the carrier
battle-group's staff.
"The troops are being moved from barracks in the
Havana area. We can see tanks and
trucks, which presumably contain supplies and
troops. The columns are moving slowly, eight
to ten miles per hour. Cuban troops have already
arrived at missile site number one. Just arriving
on sites two and three. We estimate that there will
be no Cuban military presence on sites four
though six until tomorrow morning after dawn."
"Why so slow"..."...Jake Grafton asked.
"These are old tanks, Soviet T-54's.
We think they see no reason to risk breakdowns
by driving faster. The consensus seems to be that the
Cubans aren't on full alert."
"Okay"
Jake Grafton said, because there was nothing else
to say. The god of battles was dealing the cards.
The briefer continued, pointing out bridges and
crossroad choke points, and Jake tried
to concentrate, which was difficult. When the briefer
finished, Jake dismissed his staff and sat staring at
the map on the bulkhead.
The plan was good: the weather would be typical, the
forces he had should be adequate, they knew their
jobs ... but if the Cubans fired those missiles
at the United States, two Aegis cruisers were
all he had to prevent the missiles from
reaching their targets.
Should this whole operation be delayed until
antimissile batteries could be moved to south
Florida?
Every hour of delay meant more American troops would
die taking those missile sites. Yet if the
missiles success-
fully delivered their warheads, the results would be
catastrophic.
He looked again at the planat the timing, at the
units assigned.
Biological weapons. Poliomyelitis.
He could always use more people, of course. One of the
primary goals of warfightingsome people argued, the
only
goalwas to direct overwhelming force at the point
where the enemy was most vulnerable. Or as Bedford
Forrest put it, "Get there firstest with the mostest."
Already the Cubans were digging in around silos one and
two. What if the forces he had committed couldn't
crack those nuts?
The urge to wait for a bigger hammer had Jake
Grafton in its grip now. He felt like David
with his slingshot. Maybe he needed more Aegis
cruisers, some Patriot missile
batteries, more cruise missiles, troops,
Ospreys, airplanes.
If one of those missiles got through ...
He found a handkerchief in his hip pocket and
mopped his face.
His stomach tried to turn over.
He hadn't felt like this since Vietnam. Way
back in those happy days he had been responsible
only for his bombardier's life and his own miserable
existence. All things considered, that load had been
relatively light.
This load ...
Well, Jake Grafton, Uncle Sugar's
been paying you good money all these years while you
've been getting fat and sassy on the long
grass. It's payback time.
In midafternoon Toad Tarkington went to the communication
spaces to call his wife, Rita Moravia, on
one of the ship-to-ship voice circuits. He had
done this a time or two before and the chief petty officer
was accommodating when the circuits were not in use for
official business. This afternoon he asked the chief for
an encrypted circuit but they were all busythe chief
handed him a clear-voice handset.
Toad called
Kearsarge
and left a message for his wife. Ten minutes
later she called him back.
"Hey, Toad-man."
"Hey, Hot Woman."
Tonight, he knew, she would be flying a V-22
Osprey, hauling troops to missile silo two.
"Just wanted to hear your voiceea"...Toad said, as
matterof-factly as he could. He could envision this
conversation coming over radios in ships throughout the
battle group and in Cuban monitoring stations.
He had no intention of giving away secrets nor
of entertaining kibitzers.
Rita was equally circumspect. "Got a letter from
Tyler. He wrote it with Na-Na's help, of
course."
"How's Ty-Guy doing?"
"He has a girlfriend, the Goldman girl across the
street."
"That's my boyea"...Toad said. "A lover already. A
chip off the old brick."
Aboard
Kearsarge
Rita was holding the handset in a death grip. She
loved life: her son, her husband, her
job, the people she worked withevery jot and comma of her
life. Oh, of course there were days when the stress and
problems threatened to overwhelm her ability to cope,
but somehow she managed. In the wee hours of the night
when she paused to evaluate, she knew that she
wouldn't change a thing. Not one single thing.
Now she realized that Toad hadn't spoken in
several seconds.
"I wouldn't change a thingea"...Rita said.
"I was thinking the same thingea"...he said.
"From day one."
"I remember the first day I saw you. Wow."
"When we were at Whidbey, I thought you hated me."