by Ted Bell
“I don’t expect trouble. A fairly pathetic duo. But keep your eyes open all the same, Tom. You look a proper steward, but you’re armed to the teeth, I suppose?”
Quick opened his loose-fitted starched white jacket to reveal twin holsters strapped across his chest, a pair of nine-millimeter automatics in each one. There was a bandolier of extra magazines around his waist.
“Ah, good. I wonder. Do you find yourself missing good old Fort Hood much, Sergeant Quick?”
“Every minute of every day, sir,” Tom said, smiling.
“Good lad. I’m grateful to have you aboard.”
“Shall I escort the guests up here when they arrive?”
“Yes, and do me a small favor, would you?” Hawke asked, keying the code that would close the metal box. “Would you return this box to the library? I believe you know where it’s kept? And, also, there is a rather large black Halliburton travel case in the same locker.”
“Yes, sir. I know the one.”
“Please bring the case up to wherever Congreve has us dining this evening. And stow it out of sight.”
“Yes, sir. You’ll be in the small dining room, just off the library,” Quick said, and turned to go. He paused. “Sorry, the wine steward asked if you’d chosen a dinner wine.”
“Do we have any more of this sixty-four Montrachet left?”
“I’ll speak to the steward, sir.”
“Good. I hate to waste good wine on bad company, but perhaps it will loosen their tongues.”
“I’ve got the audio recording system set up in the dining room, sir.”
“Fine. Keep a close watch while these two redbirds are aboard, Tommy. I don’t want them going anywhere on the ship unaccompanied. Even if they need to use the head, someone stands outside.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Hawke rose and strolled over to the ship’s stern rail. He gazed out over the polished black ocean and breathed deeply. On the horizon, humped silhouettes of islands, bone-white in the moonlight, looked, in a trick of light, like a slouching white bear, sleeping. About half a mile out, he could see the launch approaching. Her bow was up on a plane, throwing white water to either side, red and green running lights winking. A long trail of frothy wake streamed behind her in the moonlight.
Christ, it was beautiful. Was that why, since he’d arrived in these islands, he’d noticed this strange feeling, like a tug on his soul? He could have invited Victoria down here to share all this with him. Bad idea, he’d finally decided. The trip was, after all, strictly business. Sticky business, probably. Make that definitely. Maybe even risky business.
Vicky. The mental picture of her standing right here at the rail was so strong he felt he could almost reach out and stroke her lovely hair. It had been a long few weeks since she’d waved good-bye to him on a rainy afternoon outside his home in Belgrave Square.
Something caught his eye and he looked up just in time to see a flaming star’s brief arc across the deep blue bowl of the heavens.
So lovely here. A dusting of stars and a fat moon played hide-and-seek now among a few tattered clouds. The hearty salt tang in his nostrils smelled of seaweed and iodine. Something about the place was definitely tugging at his heart. Caribbean moons and stars were not the sort of thing a boy of seven or so would remember, of course. He had little memory of being here at all. Still, here he had been, and now his work had brought him back.
Gazing out, Hawke was astounded to find his eyes tearing up. What on earth? He was hardly the type to get all leaky about a pretty view or even a beautiful woman, was he? He shook his head, trying to clear it. Something about this place that—
He had turned and started to go below when it hit him. A kind of chill ran through him, then a shudder so severe it rattled his bones. He staggered, reached out, and gripped the rail with both hands. He’d gone all lightheaded and short of breath. Seeing his knuckles go white on the rail, he realized he was literally holding on for dear life. Had he actually blacked out?
He managed a few deep, slow breaths and it seemed to calm him a little. Still, his heart was jackhammering in his chest. Was this what a heart attack felt like? A stroke? Good Lord, it couldn’t be! He was only thirty-seven years old. He exercised like a fiend, smoked only the occasional cigar, drank only the odd cocktail or two. He was fond of his wine, true, but that was good for you, wasn’t it? he asked himself, weaving his way over to the banquette where he collapsed.
If this was some severe illness announcing itself, the timing couldn’t be worse. He clasped his hand to the back of his neck, squeezing hard, feeling the spike of panic abate just a bit.
He’d been thinking, while shaving just this very morning, that he’d never felt better in his life. In a world besieged by dirty little wars and full of evil, dangerous people, he was doing his duty. Work he felt was vitally important. At the same time, he’d managed to rebuild his family fortune and fund causes and charities he believed in.
And, at last, he’d met a beautiful woman he couldn’t get off his mind, Dr. Victoria Sweet. Doc, he’d taken to calling her. She wasn’t practicing much medicine anymore. She’d been a pediatrician, specializing in children’s neurological disorders. Then she’d published a children’s book called Whirl-o-Drome that had become an enormous success on both sides of the ocean. Hawke had adored the story. And so had the public. There was talk of Hollywood.
He leaned his head back on the cushion and looked up into the night sky. He remembered the rainy night Vicky had read the thing aloud. It was soon after they’d met. And he remembered telling her that such wonderful stories would probably do more, for far greater numbers of children, than her medical practice might ever accomplish. Especially Whirl-o-Drome.
It was a tale of a child’s enduring love. A young boy, whose father’s Spitfire has been shot down in flames during the Battle of Britain, is sent to live in a seaside village with his aunt. Every night, he goes down to an old amusement park by the sea and rides the Whirl-o-Drome, an ancient merry-go-round with toy airplanes secured at the ends of long poles. The little planes spin round and round, and climb or dive when the children use the airplane’s control stick.
One night, just before closing and after many, many rides, the boy’s little silver plane comes to life. The lights inside the cockpit suddenly illuminate. Needles are spinning on the dials. Tiny red lights are winking out on the wing tips. Suddenly, the boy hears static and a faint voice. It’s coming from the headphones of an old leather flying helmet that has somehow appeared between his feet. He places the helmet on his head and pulls the goggles down over his eyes. Suddenly, a button he’s never seen before begins to glow bright red at the center of the console. The voice in the headphones tells him to push the red button in front of him. He does, and the little airplane disengages from the arm of the ride, and the boy soars out over the sea.
“Climb, climb!” says the strangely familiar voice in his earphones, and the boy pulls back on the stick, soaring higher and higher. Finally, he bursts through a canyon of clouds into clear starlit air. He sees an old Spitfire doing barrel rolls in the moonlight. He races to catch up with the plane and sees the number on its wing.
Number Seven. His father’s number.
“Timmy? Is that you?” the voice in his earphones says. The voice sounds an awful lot like—
“Y-yes?”
“See that big bright moon on the horizon? You stay right off my starboard wing and follow me all the way there. There’s something I want you to see!”
“Are you really—Number Seven? Because Number Seven was my father’s plane and—”
“It’s me, Timmy,” the voice said. “It’s your father. You can find me up here most nights, if you’ll just believe in your little plane.”
It was a lovely tale.
“Skipper?” Tommy Quick said. “Sorry to bother you. But the guests have arrived.”
“Ah, yes. The guests. Thank you, Tom. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
He realized his heart was still racing.
He willed the image of Vicky to appear out there before him. He let her smiling eyes finally cause the triphammer of his heart to slow gradually to a near normal pace. What on earth was the matter with him? He wouldn’t admit it, even to himself, but this wasn’t the first time he’d suffered one of these little, what did they call them, seizures. They’d begun shortly after Blackhawke had arrived in the Caribbean. Ironic. People came here to relax.
After a little while, he felt somewhat like his old self once again. He sprang from the banquette and headed for his stateroom to shower and dress for dinner. He looked at his watch on his way down the aft stairway. He had maybe ten minutes to collect himself before it was time to go down and suffer his insufferable guests.
13
The huge twin rotor blades of the olive-green Kamov-26 helicopter started spinning rapidly as Manso spooled up the revs of the jet turbine engine. He looked over at his lone passenger, Fidel Castro.
“All buckled in, Comandante?” he asked over the intercom. Both of them were wearing headphones with speakers. It was the only way you could communicate because of the turbine engine’s whine.
“Sí, Manso. Vámonos!” Castro said.
Manso flipped a switch that killed any transmission in the leader’s headphones.
“Havana Control, this is Alpha Bravo Hotel One,” Manso said. “Do you copy?”
“Copy loud and clear, Alpha Bravo, you’re clear for takeoff. Over.” Manso recognized the silky voice of Rodrigo del Rio, owner of the Club Mao-Mao and, more importantly, Castro’s former deputy head of State Security. Now he’d been bought and paid for by Manso. His loyalty to Manso was unquestioned. Only this morning, the air traffic controller typically in the tower at this time of day had been stabbed to death in his bed by del Rio. Rodrigo had used his weapon of choice, a gleaming pair of silver scissors that had earned him the nickname Scissorhands.
“Roger that, tower,” Manso said.
He took a deep breath and said the three code words that would change Cuba forever. Upon hearing the code, Rodrigo, in concert with Manso’s brothers Juan, General of the Army of the West, and Carlos, Commander in Chief of the Navy, would unleash their forces. They would initiate the first military takeover of Cuba in forty-some years.
“Mango is airborne.”
“We copy that, Alpha Bravo,” Rodrigo said. “Mango in the air. Over.”
Safety checks complete, rotors engaged, the Kamov-26 rose vertically some forty feet into the air. Manso tilted the nose over to initiate forward velocity and roared across the bay. The old yacht club fell away quickly, but Manso liked to fly low, almost brushing the tops of the sailboat masts in the marina.
The skippers on the fishing trawlers all knew el jefe’s chopper on sight, and he saw many of them lift their caps and wave as Manso executed a sharp looping turn to the southeast and headed back across the Malecón that ran along the bay, climbing up over Morro Castle and the crumbling city of Havana.
“The speech, it was excellent, Comandante,” Manso said, once they were out over the countryside.
Castro turned and gave him a look. Manso knew as the words were coming out that it had been a foolish remark. They’d known each other too long for such trivialities. Castro had an innate genius when it came to selling himself. It had allowed him to dazzle millions of people around the world. This speech was simply more anti-American self-promotion, done brilliantly, nothing new.
Beads of sweat had popped out on Manso’s brow and threatened to run down into his eyes. He realized he was too nervous for small talk. Tense. It would be wise to just shut up and fly.
“Gracias,” Castro said, the word dripping sarcasm, and turned to gaze out the window at his failed utopia, falling away beneath him as the chopper gained altitude. God knows what he’s thinking, Manso thought, surreptitiously eyeing his leader. Look at him. He has confronted and defeated ten American presidents. He has made himself a martyr through sheer defiance, spitting in the face of Uncle Sam. With the Cold War ended, he has used America’s outdated trade embargo to further burnish his shining star. A cunning actor, strutting across the stage of the world, occasionally luring popes, potentates, terrorists, and presidents to the little island, adding a little glamour to his cast.
This earnest, brave-hearted, little off-off-Broadway production, Castro’s Cuba, had been running for over forty years. The star of the show was still shining bright, his name still up in lights all over the world.
The secret? Manso had learned it well from Escobar. Every great hero needs an implacable enemy. El jefe had the perfect enemy. The one country the world loves to hate. America. Manso had watched, first Pablo and then Fidel. He’d learned every sleight of political hand and every brilliant move, and was now ready to implement his former masters’ concepts for himself.
Castro, at seventy-five, obviously had no idea what the immediate future held for him, or Manso would be dead. Were there even a trace of suspicion, the leader would never be up in this helicopter alone with him. So, why the tightness in Manso’s chest, the sweat stinging his eyes?
It had been a tense six months. Days and nights of endless planning and tense debate. Even this simple moment, timing a flight from the Havana Yacht Club to Telaraña, had been a subject of elaborate study and conjecture.
In the beginning, the problems they had faced had seemed insurmountable. Manso’s rebellious confederates needed constant reassurance. Manso, however, had been steadfast in his belief that such an operation could succeed, and even have a kind of simplicity.
They had not been easy to convince, of course. But gradually, Manso had been able to boost their confidence: The unthinkable could be thought, and the undoable could be done. He had been unwavering, and in the end, he had prevailed.
He told them in detail about the perfect simplicity of Batista’s coup back in 1952. Like their own, the ’52 rebellion had originated with a few young military officers, mostly campesinos and middle class. They had become completely disenchanted with the corruption of President Prio’s regime and recruited Batista, a former president himself, to lead the coup that would bring down Prio.
It had gone off precisely as planned. Perfectly.
Batista had arrived in the capital at 2:43 A.M. one Wednesday morning. It was Carnaval, and the merrymakers were still reveling in the streets. Batista was wearing brightly colored slacks and a sports jacket. The guards at Camp Colombia, where nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s armed forces were housed, didn’t even notice him. He literally did a samba through the security gates with his boisterous comrades singing and laughing.
The higher-ranking officers at the camp were all sound asleep. Many had been drinking heavily and simply passed out on the floors of the barracks. At Batista’s signal, they were all arrested and driven to Kuquine, Batista’s palacial country estate outside the capital. Not a single officer had offered any resistance.
Simultaneously, rebel officers were taking over the telephone company and the radio and television stations. By sunrise that morning, the entire operation had been completed.
President Prio returned to the capital and tried to rally his supporters. But without the army or access to the radio and television, his old civilian government was paralyzed. Prio was forced to acknowledge the inevitable.
The only thing Manso always left out of the story was el presidente Prio’s addiction to morphine. When the man wasn’t sleeping, he was sleepwalking. Batista knew this, of course, and used it to his great advantage. Castro, of course, was another story. He hardly ever slept and was constantly surrounded by secret police and vigilant bodyguards.
The plotters had decided to give their operation the code name Mango after a popular song that ridiculed Fidel in his omnipresent green fatigues. Their joke was that you can’t have “mangos” without “mansos.”
Secrecy surrounding Operation Mango had been keeping Manso awake lately. The possibilities of a leak increased with every passing day. He’d lain sleepless many nights during these last months of intens
e planning, wondering who might betray him, even accidentally.
He had constantly reminded his band of rebels, “When you are sitting on a secret this big, be careful. Because everybody notices that there is something under you.”
And right now, he felt surely the man next to him must see the enormity beneath him. He drew his sleeve across his brow, wiping the sweat from his eyes, hoping Castro wouldn’t notice.
“Did you ever read the book The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Manso?” the voice of the comandante crackled suddenly in his earphones. El jefe had been gazing out the side window of the cockpit and Manso thought he had dozed off.
“No, Comandante,” Manso said, intensely relieved that Castro’s mind was on his books at the moment.
“Too bad,” Castro said. “There is a wonderful parable in the book. The hero, who is a young Hollywood film producer, is on a cross-country airplane trip. He is interested in learning to fly, so he goes up into the cockpit. The questions he asks, the pilots think he could learn solo flying in ten minutes, he had such a mentality.”
“Sí, Comandante,” Manso said, a hot spasm of nerves suddenly sizzling at the edges of his brain. Where was this going?
“The plane is flying over a large mountain. Just like the one up ahead of us. Do you see the one I mean?”
“Sí, sí, Comandante,” Manso said. “It’s no problem. Our altitude—”
“Listen to the story, Manso. This mountain is important in the story. The producer tells the pilot and copilot to suppose they were railroad men. And they wanted to build a railroad through the mountains below.”
“Sí, sí. But the mountain is in the way, no?”
“Claro que sí,” Castro said in agreement, looking down through the lexan nose of the cockpit at the green mountain now fast disappearing between his feet.
“They have surveyor’s maps. Showing three or four possibilities, no one better than the others. So, he asks them what they would do, since they have no basis for a decision. The pilot says he would clear the forest on the left side of the mountain and put his railroad there. The copilot says no, it would be simpler to go around to the right where the river has already cleared the trees. I paraphrase, of course, but this is the point. No one is sure.”