Coonts, Stephen - Jake Grafton 7 - Cuba

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."