Cuban Death-Lift

by Striker, Randy

  Four miles out to sea, the lights of Havana began to fall away, lifting, holding, and finally sinking in my wake. Starry night, two days past the quarter moon. Florida Straits were still busy with frail red and green glow of distant running lights. The Freedom Flotilla was still going full tilt, hell-bent on carrying as many refugees to the freedom dream of America before the two big C’s—Castro and Carter—got together and decided too many people were dying in that torturous expanse of water and, besides, neither of them was benefiting from it as they thought they would.

  Plenty of American boats still making the crossing to Mariel Harbor. And that was good. I needed the boats for cover.

  About twenty miles out, close to international waters, the gunboat suddenly backed engines and turned around. For one wild second, I thought they had stopped to sweep their guns across Sniper; stopped to send me to the bottom right there without a trace. But they hesitated only long enough to pick up a course back to Mariel Harbor, then rumbled away into the black wash of night sea. I didn’t wait around to watch. I shoved both throttles ahead full bore, feeling the burst of acceleration pull my head back. The Si-Tex radar screen, bolted above the cabin controls, was throwing small bursts of green light across the grid, and I headed for the biggest pack of boats I could find at a crashing thirty-four knots.

  I ran an unyielding rum line for almost twenty minutes before I picked up the first white mastlights of the small flotilla bound for Mariel, starlike on the horizon. I grabbed the Bushnell zoom scope and got a rolling look at them: three cruisers and a ragged trawler. I switched off my running lights and swept out around them, keeping my distance. And when I had a clean angle, I flipped the running lights back on and approached from their stern. I was probably well out of Havana radar range. But even if I wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter. On a grid big enough to scan forty miles, they would lose me among the indistinct blur of the other boats.

  So I pulled throttles back and stayed tight astern of the four other boats. They were making about fourteen knots, and when I had my speed adjusted to theirs, I locked the Benmar autopilot in temporarily while I got a cold Hatuey beer from the cooler and added a healthy pinch of Copenhagen between lip and gum. I felt the old anticipation come over me; the good feeling of the hunter on the track of the deserving prey. In about fourteen hours, the Castro gun goons were going to get the surprise of their lives. Their job was to stop unauthorized Cubans from getting out of Mariel—and they wouldn’t be expecting a blind-sided attack from someone trying to get in. Still, I had to have some luck. The narrow untended tidal creek the chart showed to be west of Mariel Harbor would have to be deep enough for me to get in. And there would have to be cover enough for me to camouflage Sniper. And, also, the Cubans would have to fall for the drug runners’ radio-distress ploy that would explain my final disappearance. But I had already had the best kind of luck. Radio Havana had, according to Lobo, reported an attack on Mariel by a band of anti-Castro Cubans. They would have no choice but to explain the second attack in the same way. . . .

  The tidal river was deep enough. But not by much.

  I had pulled away from my screen of boats an hour before sunrise three miles offshore. It’s not true about it being always darkest before the dawn. Not on the open ocean, anyway. There was no sun, but the sea took on a pearly luminescence. The water changed from black to turquoise—a turquoise of such intensity that it seemed as if it would discolor the black hull of my cruiser. The wind freshened, blowing waves across the bow. And the rolling expanse of sea, wind, and waves seemed energized by an incandescence of its own, as if the radiance had been accumulated over a million days beneath the Gulf Stream sun.

  Below Mariel Harbor, it was a wilderness coast: cliffs topped by banyan trees and yellow bamboo. A rivulet toppled down one hillside, ending in a waterfall that sprayed down onto the rocks and sea below. Wind brought the scent of the mainland over the water, and it smelled of dank earth and frangipani and jasmine. The river I was seeking would be somewhere dead ahead, beyond the reef, and it was time for me to make my disappearance official. To the people in the radar room, I would be some unknown vessel hopelessly off course, searching for Mariel. Now the unknown vessel would sink.

  I took the mike in my hand and, ridiculously, tried to disguise my voice—as if anyone in Cuba would know my voice:

  Mayday, mayday, this is the power vessel Assail . . . we’ve hit some coral . . . boat’s going down fast . . . engine’s on fire . . . need assistance immediately. . . .

  I repeated the message three times, adding bogus loran coordinates—four miles from my true position—to the name of the imaginary vessel. After the last transmission, my voice straining with a quality of panic, I mimicked a loud woofing explosion, then let the set go dead.

  Good luck, Cubans. You rarely answer an American distress call anyway—no matter where it’s at. But if you do come in search of the damaged Assail you’ll find nothing. And that will make us both happy. . . .

  Quickly I hustled up to the flybridge. The reef lay ahead, and I wanted some visual altitude to run it. The sun was a fiery haze in the east now, and the coral stood out black below transparent waves and green sea. I powered along the seaward edge of it, looking for the current thrust from the river which I knew would create a natural channel through the reef.

  And there it was: a snaking path of olive water through the coralheads and staghorn which led to calm water beyond the reef, and then a narrow entranceway of water guarded by mainland buttonwood and black mangrove trees—the tidal river.

  I considered not marking the channel with the plastic milk bottles weighted with lead I had made—but then decided I had to take the risk of their being noticed. I would be leaving by darkness, probably, and ramming Sniper up onto the reef would leave me stranded in Cuba.

  And I couldn’t afford to be stranded.

  Not after what I had planned.

  So I dropped three markers: one at the seaward exit, one at the narrowest bight, and the last at the river entrance to the reef. And then I nosed Sniper up the river at dead slow, sticking to the concave banks where the current would have dug out the deepest channel. It was one of those mangrove rivers with a vegetable bottom of muck and leaves. Heat came off the water, and limbs from mangroves slid across the hull of Sniper as we made our way. There was a dank and eerie silence about the narrow river interrupted only by the whine of mosquitoes and the occasional chatter of a kingfisher, and when my props kicked up mud, a visceral odor of sludge erupted behind.

  The river deepened, narrowed even more, then branched into a crooked Y. I nosed up one branch, touched engines into reverse, then backed two boat lengths down the narrowest creek and switched off the engines.

  I had a lot of work to do. I cut mangroves and covered those parts of Sniper which might be seen from the air, then went below and got the fake battery from the forward bilge.

  “Until then, she’s resting in a pleasant cottage at the Naval Academy,” Lobo had told me.

  The Naval Academy—the stone castle on the cliff above Mariel Harbor. Big mistake, Lobo. You should have never mentioned it.

  I uncapped the battery and, once again, inventoried its deadly contents.

  Plenty enough to do the job.

  I was sweating from my work with the machete cutting tree limbs, so I grabbed a towel and wiped at my face while I went through my drawers beneath the master berth, looking for pencil and paper. I knew what I wanted to do: jerk everything I could remember about the terrain around the Naval Academy to the mental surface, then make a detailed map. Circles would represent guard outposts. X’s would mark where I would put the explosives. I wanted to work out every possible means of escape, including the possible use of another tidal creek that branched off a finger of Mariel Harbor and, according to the chart, dead-ended only a mile or two from the mangrove river where I now waited. Repetition and concentration—I wanted to sear every alternative into my mind so completely that I wouldn’t have to take time to think. Because, in
the circumstances of war, makeshift planning can leave you very dead indeed.

  So it was while rummaging through the drawers looking for paper and pen that I found it.

  The book I had given Androsa Santarun to read: H. M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle. It was placed on top of a pile of miscellaneous gear, face down, spine crinkled, opened to her place. The instant irritation I felt at seeing so rare a book treated so badly was replaced by the immediate realization that I had returned the book once to the ammo-box library.

  But was it before Androsa left Sniper or after?

  I couldn’t remember.

  I picked it up carefully, closed it. But there was something wrong. The book closed—but not properly; just the slightest spring of foreign matter between pages. I leafed through the fine old volume and found it: a letter to me from Androsa. I remembered her that day atop the flybridge writing and reading, using my stomach as a pillow. So she had been writing to me—and had used the strange code message I was to send from Key West to tell me where to look.

  I took out the letter, unfolded it, and read it quickly. Then I dropped the note on the bunk, went to the icebox, and got a beer, because I needed it. And then I read the letter again, still in shocked disbelief.

  My Dearest Dusky—

  I write this now because I know they will be calling for me soon and that I will leave you and never see you again. In a way, leaving you will be the hardest thing, but it is something I must do. The last two years of my life have been very dark years, Dusky. And for a short time you brought some light to them. I can’t allow myself to think how it might be if we could be together longer, because it is impossible, and there is nothing sadder than hoping for the impossible. You think you know about me, Dusky, but you don’t. But I know about you. This morning while you made breakfast I found a piece of torn paper. It was just a corner you had overlooked, but it was enough to tell me it was a CIA bio sheet, and I know now what I had suspected—that you are more than a charterboat captain. For some reason, I was disappointed to find it. But I know that you were sent to help in some way, but you cannot help. I mentioned that I had a half brother who was killed by Castro’s men. That is true, Dusky, but I did not know until we found that sinking boat, Storm Nest. The man who had been murdered so horribly was my own dear, dear Alvino. His father, who is a good man, married my mother and adopted me. I loved my brother very much, so you can imagine what a horrible decision it was for me when, two years ago, a General Halcón approached me upon Castro’s arrival in New York and, in secrecy, told me that if I did not help him pose as a double agent my brother would be killed. So for these last twenty-four months I have been, in truth, a double agent working against America, the country I love. I do not know how Alvino got the boat and tried to make his escape, but I do know it was the Cubans who trailed him and murdered him. The agent who died in my arms told me. Before his escape, Alvino had warned them of Halcón, and the agent had found out about my arrival and was coming to warn me when they killed him. That is when I realized just what a foul creature I have become, Dusky, because it was I who told the Cubans of the plot to kill Castro. I sentenced those three men to death, and now that my dear brother is gone I can atone for it. Or at least try to. You must not worry about me, Dusky. It is almost funny—the thing I hate so much will not allow them to kill me. . . .”

  And then followed the number of a post office box which I was to give to my superior; the box contained, Androsa wrote, a list of secret information she had given the Cubans.

  Sweat rolled down my nose and plopped onto the paper. I got another beer and sat down at the little galley booth. Mosquitoes had found my hiding place in the mangroves, and I swatted at them absently while rereading the letter, letting the woman I had loved and lost shed light on the past mysteries of Mariel.

  But I hadn’t truly lost her. Not yet. I finished puzzling over the strange wording of the letter’s last sentence, then hid it away and turned my attention to drawing a good map of the terrain around the Naval Academy. I had already lost one of the rare people to “the stout wind.” I wasn’t about to lose another one.

  17

  So don the armor, MacMorgan. In days of yore it would be breastplate and plumed helmet and a two-handed sword forged from Spanish steel. Those were the days for you and the dead Irishman, MacMorgan; times when a man could set out on a good horse to right wrongs, slay the dragon, and do honorable battle with windmills and adversaries alike.

  But now the armor is nothing more than the wellloved black Navy watch sweater, the lucky British commando knickers, and the face shadow from the olive-drab Special Forces tube. The sword is the waterproof knapsack on your back with its deadly cargo of RDX explosives and plenty of extra shafts for the Cobra crossbow slung over your shoulder. And the white steed is nothing more than your own good legs or, in a pinch, the Dacor TX-1000 competition fins you carry just in case. . . .

  Strange thoughts as I moved through the black marsh below the cane fields and the small village at the southern point of Mariel Harbor. Flashbacks and the haunting rush of déjà vu: You have been here before, MacMorgan, for now and all time because this is what you do best and, deep in your brain, love most—the stalking of an enemy, like all warriors before and those to come. . . .

  I forced my mind clear. I was getting sloppy, letting my thoughts rove. I had been lucky so far. Everything had gone smoothly. Almost frighteningly smoothly.

  I had worked my way cross-country from the tidal creek where Sniper was hidden to the backside of the peninsula with the little military outpost and amphibious landing strip and air tower. From a clump of bushes I had watched the soldiers walk the beach, ducking back into my cover with every sweep of the big searchlight. The beach was well fortified with bunkers and machine guns—but they didn’t expect an attack from the mainland.

  And so it was easy for me.

  I had moved undetected through the rear of the encampment. Was close enough to one barracks to watch the off-duty soldiers laughing and smoking within the lighted window, planted quarter blocks of the RDX well behind the barracks, then added a half block at the foundation of the squat blue air tower. No mass slaughter, this—just enough explosives to bring the control tower toppling and to turn the night sky to bright day, but not close enough to do more than throw the soldiers unhurt from their bunks.

  I had no desire—or reason—to kill hundreds. Just wanted to get their attention so I could steal the lady back. But if someone got in my way . . .

  So I had moved south through the night, down the west coast of the harbor. The American boats of the Freedom Flotilla rested at calm anchor, throwing white starpaths across the water with their cabin lights. Two thousand boats filled with desperate waiting people, ironically serene in the harbor—none of them knowing what was about to happen.

  The marshland broke into firmer slough, and I made my way through the chest-high grass to the embankment where the dirt road began its twisting run up the cliff to the Naval Academy. I saw the flickering light of an approaching motorcycle and dove back into the grass until the rider was well out of sight.

  The road would be the quickest route, but probably the most dangerous. So I hustled across the road and . . . and stopped dead in my tracks. I hadn’t seen the soldier in the shadows by the tree. He was doing something. And then I realized: urinating. So I was right—the road was guarded. I dropped down onto my belly, feeling warm ditchwater seep through the wool watch sweater. He zipped up his pants, turned toward me. And just as I was about to rush him, cold steel of Randall attack-survival knife a good weight in right hand, the guard suddenly yelled and jumped back. I ducked at the first explosion of his automatic rifle, knowing that I had been seen and that I was a dead man. But the fire stopped abruptly. I watched the guard switch on a flashlight, reach down, and pick up a water moccasin as thick as my arm. Down the road, other guards were yelling, asking just what in the hell was going on. The soldier with the snake went lumbering down the road to show them.
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br />   I had no choice now. The dark thrust of wilderness before me was the only safe way to the stone castle atop the cliff. So climb it, MacMorgan. Hear the tranquil irony of owls calling and coons foraging through the brush while you pull yourself from tree to tree on a quarter-mile forty-degree grade and hope the woman is up there as she is supposed to be, and hope the dragon is somewhere nearby. . . .

  Captain Lobo hadn’t lied about the cottage. It was made of wood and roofed with tile, and it was very pleasant indeed. It was located in a clearing with other cottages—all billets, probably, for the Naval Academy students. But strangely, all the other cottages were empty, dark. It didn’t make any sense. I rested in a clump of bamboo thinking. Too little sign of students, and a damn sight too many guards around the four-story stone block hulk of Academy. Maybe they had evacuated the students because of the influx of Americans to Mariel. But why?

  Why . . .

  Things had gone too smoothly. Emerson wrote about the one perfect law: compensation. Now the scale would swing back, because this part of my little journey would be deadly as hell. Twice I had almost been detected by guards on my approach to the string of cottages. One soldier had stood close enough for me to smell the sweat on his shirt. I could have killed either of them, but that would have ruined everything. I wasn’t ready. Not yet.

  I stayed in the shadows pulling myself along on my belly. Below, the searchlight from Pier Three scanned back and forth, painting the boats and the harbor in a stark white light. I took a final look through the window of the cottage and saw what I had hoped to see: Androsa Santarun, looking oddly more beautiful for her weariness, sitting in a straight-back chair leafing through a magazine. Captain Zapata sat across from her, AK-47 on his thin legs, watching her with a leer of unmistakable intent in his eyes. The massive bulk of General Halcón paced back and forth across the bare wooden floor, chain-smoking.