by David Poyer
All at once, it was dark, like a great eyelid closing on the world. Tomás swallowed again, wishing the lump in his gut would dissolve. Looking at the dead bones had made him afraid. Those bones had dreamed of freedom, too. Had come the same way, across the Bahía Jigüey. Only the patrol had caught them. No burial, nothing. Just shot them like dogs, like animals.
How many thousands lay along the shores of their country, at the bottom of the sea, buried in mass graves, victims, victims? … One man had aborted the glorious revolution into bloody tyranny. And then like an infection, it had spread. Bolivia, Venezuela, Zaire, Angola, Somalia, Nicaragua. “One, two, many Vietnams,” Castro had ranted. And darkness and terror, murder and war had stretched their shadows from Havana across the world. How long would it last? He’d given up asking. It was time for him to go, that was all he knew.
“Okay, let’s get moving,” he said.
They emerged with a clatter and rustle, a scrape and bump. Paddles splashed. Then they were afloat, and the wind came gusty and faintly chill. Blowing from the east, he thought. That would help.
During the day he’d memorized the chart. He didn’t know the ocean, but he could read a map and judge distances. He figured they were three or four kilometers from a passage between Cayo Romano and Cayo Coco. It was narrow; on the map, the two almost touched. There had to be guard posts there. So he didn’t dare use the motor. He didn’t dare put up the sail, either. It would be too easy to spot through binoculars or a night-vision device.
No, they’d have to paddle.
They moved through the darkness, helped by a wind that felt heavy, cold, stronger than he’d expected. The boat was pitching already. The skiff was a black wedge astern. He worried again about Graciela, then put it out of his mind. He couldn’t help, if this was her time. He didn’t see how women stood it, blood, pain … . All he had to do was get them through. If they could just do that … if they could only do that.
He figured they had about an even chance.
THREE hours later, hours of paddling and drifting and anxious peering through the dark, he figured they must be near the passage. The sea had smoothed, which meant they were in the shelter of land. He clambered up onto the corrugated-metal roof of the cabin and balanced there, opening his eyes wide.
He gradually became aware of two darker masses hemming in the black of the water: two points of land, stretching out to meet ahead of them. Only the map convinced him they didn’t, that there had to be a way through, however narrow.
Suddenly, a light stabbed out, swept around ahead of them. A string of red balls arched up, hung in the sky, then went out. Finally, the searchlight went out, too, slowly, fading gradually back into the somber, chill darkness. Only then did the tap-tap-tap of the gun reach them.
He stood there for a long time, watching, listening. Tracers, but what were they firing at? Was someone else trying to get through? If so, they’d send out a boat to check for survivors, no? But the only sound was a muffled thunk as a paddle, thrust by tiring arms, knocked against the hull. Then came a whisper that might be the wind in palm trees off to the right. The searchlight stabbed out again, scribed a semicircle across the black water, the beam clearly visible in the humid air; then it faded out. He wished desperately that he could run the engine. But that would be fatal. They’d be out after them in minutes. No, they had to paddle. Too bad he had only one arm.
But looking back and down, he could tell even in the dark that one man wasn’t rowing. He leaned down and grabbed. Colón’s shoulder quivered under his grip.
“You son of a bitch! Why aren’t you rowing?”
“I’m tired. Let the others row!”
“Gordo hijo de puta,” Guzman said in his most intimate exsergeant tone. “I don’t give a fuck who you used to be; you’re a worm now, a gusano, just like me. And if you don’t put your back to that paddle, I’m going to kick your ass overboard and let you swim in to your border guard buddies. And I don’t give a fuck if you shoot me or not.” He shook him. “Grab that paddle, cabrón!”
FIFTY feet behind, in the skiff, Graciela lay sprawled under the thwarts. Her back lay flat against the bottom. It felt good, being able to lie down. But she felt so huge, so swollen, as if she were ready to split apart. She was barely aware of the cold hand of the old woman gripping hers.
AHEAD of her, Miguelito stared into the darkness. His hands hurt where they clenched the wood. He wished he was in the bigger boat. But Tomás had told him to stay with Tia Graciela. But what if they started firing? All he had was a machete. Maybe he could cover her with his body … . Would that stop the bullets? He shivered in the cold wind.
A drop went spat, then, sometime later, another.
It began to rain, gently at first, then with increasing force. And gradually the two boats started going up and down, only a little at first, a suggestion. Then they began to roll.
Tomás swung himself down from atop the cabin. He crouched behind it, squinting out as the rain stung his eyes like cold wasps. He couldn’t see what was ahead, only that it was black. The boat rolled harder, a strange heavy motion, and someone screamed as a wave broke over the side and showered them all. “Start throwing the blocks over,” he ordered. “Hurry. Hurry! Not all, about half of them. Not you, you men keep paddling!”
“We can’t, Tomás. We’re exhausted.”
“Can’t we put up the sail?”
“Not yet. This wind’ll push us right back on the shore. Just keep paddling, damn it!”
“We really can’t,” Julio said. “Tomás, we really can’t. It’s really hard; we’re finished.”
Tomás didn’t answer him. It was too dangerous. But in the end, he couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“Okay, Augustín, start the engine.”
The clatter when it kicked over was incredibly loud. Tomás felt cold sweat wring out all along his body. The wind would blow the sound west. If the border troops heard them, they’d either fire or else send out a boat. It wouldn’t be that hard to find them. They couldn’t evade. They could still end up like that other boat, only on the sea beach instead of the bay. Like those skeletons …
After a long time, the light stabbed out again. Only this time, it had crept aft a little.
“How far out do the patrols extend?”
“I don’t know,” Tomás said. “Rámon, you know that?”
“Ten miles?”
“And after that?”
“We’re clear, I think.”
“There they come,” said Julio quietly.
Tomás whipped his head around and saw the lights come out from the shore. Red and green and white, startlingly bright against the black land, they moved rapidly out across the water. The light smeared off the waves in long trails. They could hear the motor, too, a deep grumbling song of power.
“What do we do, Tomás?”
“Guzman? Now what?”
“Shut up. Just keep going,” he shouted at them, but his bowels felt loose. They’d gambled and they’d lost. No chance of fighting them off out here. The patrol would stand off and shoot them to pieces. If they surrendered, they might save the children’s lives, at least.
The motor ran and ran. The boat rolled dizzyingly in the dark. Clutching the top of the cabin, Tomás stared alternately into the lightless gulf ahead and back at the lights behind. They grew steadily brighter. They were gaining. He couldn’t think of anything else that he could do, though. Just hope Augustín could keep their worthless motor running, that some current wasn’t pushing them backward, that they wouldn’t capsize or smash themselves on some reef unmarked on the rudimentary map they sailed by. And that the beasts that guarded the perimeter of their cage would blink or yawn or look away.
After a long time, it started to rain again. The lights of the other boat stopped closing. They dimmed, then faded as the rain pelted down.
Staring into the darkness, he listened tensely to the uneven, faltering throb and hum from aft.
BUT when the sky grew light a
t last, the motor was still running, and they saw that they were surrounded by the open sea. When a wave lifted them, they could glimpse a dark low line astern. That was all that remained of the cays, of the border guards, of Cuba. Looking at each other, they tried tentative haggard smiles. They’d made it. They’d escaped.
Then, as the light increased, they looked out to the east, to the north, at the low, sullen, tumultuous sky. And their smiles faded to horrified stares.
From the east, from the north, waves beyond anything they’d ever conceived in nightmare toppled in endless ranks. The boat rolled with sickening jerks, slamming down with a hollow metallic thunder. Already vomit stained the gunwales, and the fragile boards and plywood and nailed tin that cupped them groaned as they worked.
They weren’t sailors. Most of them had never seen the sea before. They hadn’t expected green waves taller than houses, or a sky gray as poured lead, with the flicker of lightning from low, menacing thunderheads.
But to their surprise, they weren’t alone.
They’d expected that, to be alone. But other boats dotted the waves around them. They disappeared and reappeared as the waves shouldered under them. Some had sails up. Other were only specks. But they were all headed west. And they were all moving, borne along on an immense river in the sea itself.
Seasick and afraid, the fifteen people in the two little boats faced the ocean with a hand-stitched sail, a toy compass, and a motor that against all expectation ran on and on, steady save for a choked, bubbling snarl when the violently pitching stern plunged it down into the foaming sea.
27
THE metal gangway that rattled under his boots, the quarterdeck he paused at were low compared with Barrett’s. The fantail was small and cluttered. But the OOD looked squared away in summer whites. Dan saluted the flag, faced left, tapped off another. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Permission granted. Help you, sir?”
“Here to see Lieutenant Prince. He aboard?”
Waiting, snatching an hour away from the ship, he stood looking down the length of USS Dahlgren, DDG-43.
The Coontz class had started life as “destroyer leaders,” DLGs. Now they were guided-missile destroyers. Whatever you called them, he thought, they looked like warships. They had the big raked stacks that had descended in U.S. destroyers in a straight line from William Francis Gibbs’s great liners. They bristled with guns, antennas, masts, directors. Most striking of all was the beautiful curve of their main deck. It swept in one rising line from counter to bullnose, then terminated abruptly in a bow like the nose of a mako. They looked capable and dangerous, as if they could punch through a sea or an enemy with equal ease.
And Dahlgren had. Her waffle-ironed hull plates showed where the seas of decades had hammered them in. Her rows of combat ribbons and the stenciled symbols on guns and directors showed that she had bombarded hostile coasts, guarded convoys, shot down enemy aircraft.
“Dan?”
“Hey. Larry!”
Larry Prince was one of the greatest épée fencers the Naval Academy had ever produced: Eastern Intercollegiate, NCAA, three times Maryland state champion, Princeton-Cornell Memorial Fencing Champion. “Good to see you,” he said, shaking Dan’s hand. “You’re keeping yourself in shape.”
“Heard you were over here. Thought I’d come over, say hi.”
“Glad you did. How’s Betts? Didn’t you have a kid?”
“She left,” said Dan, and Prince looked at him for a moment. “Took my little girl with her.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Well … come on up. Meet the guys.”
They ascended through decks and passageways, Dan feeling steadily more oppressed, as if the low cable-festooned overheads were pressing down on him. The hot fan-stirred air smelled of food and oil. Finally, Prince held a door open. Dan hung his cap on a wooden peg and went in.
The wardroom was half the size of Barrett’s, with worn carpets and comfortable-looking metal chairs. Officers in khakis were sitting around drinking coffee, smoking, reading the Guantánamo Bay Gazette and limp worn copies of Playboy and the Naval Engineers Journal. They glanced up as Prince introduced him. “Dan came over from Barrett,” he finished. “What are you over there, Dan—Operations?”
“Combat systems.”
“What, plain old weapons officer ain’t good enough anymore?” one of the men said.
“We don’t have mess decks, either,” Dan said. “Now it’s the ‘enlisted dining facility.’”
“You guys classmates?” a heavyset black guy asked, getting up, holding out a big soft hand. “Leo Abbott. I was a plebe when you were segundoes.”
“Not another frickin’ ring-knocker,” said one of the smokers in the chairs.
“You’re surrounded. Dan, this is Wilson Benedict, our tame mustang. Jaze Walberg, he’s in charge of keeping all the scuttlebutts broke-dick.” Dan tried to register names as he shook hands. It was always disorienting going aboard another ship, as if the people you knew so well, the chief engineer, the comm officer, the bull ensign, had been reincarnated with different faces, different voices. It made you wonder how much of what you knew of any man was just a role.
“Want some eggs? Mess decks do eggs benedict Sundays, with hollandaise sauce. Gonna win us the Ney award one of these days. We grind our own coffee, too.”
“Sounds good. Thanks.” The messman set him a place and for a while they didn’t say much.
“When you doing your battle problem, Dan?”
He said around a mouthful, “Friday. You?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Good luck.”
“I think we’re ready,” said a lieutenant. “The skipper got Ming to promise the guys three days in Jamaica if we pass. I think we’ll make it.”
“Ming?”
“Well, you call the chief engineer ‘Cheng,’ right? We call the weps officer ‘Wang,’ the ops officer ‘Fang.’ That makes the exec—”
“Ming the Merciless. I get it.” Dan grinned with them. “How about the captain?”
“He’s just ‘the captain.’”
“We got some sheet cake from last night. Want a piece?”
The others came over as Prince dipped a knife in a glass of water and subdivided the cake with navigational precision. The steward poured more coffee.
“Hear you got trouble over there,” said Abbott. “On BFB.”
“What’s BFB?”
“Butt-fucking Barrett,” he said. The others laughed.
Dan laid his fork down. “What the fuck’s that mean?”
“Take it easy. We heard you lost a queer, that’s all. Isn’t that why the kid jumped overboard?”
“We’re not really sure.”
“Did you know him?”
“He was in my department. Yeah, I knew him.”
A lieutenant (jg) said, “Be tough on his parents, but you know, it was probably the best thing for him.”
“I don’t see how,” said Dan. He didn’t like hearing his ship put down, and he didn’t like talking about Sanderling as if he were some kind of defective part best disposed of over the side. “I wish he’d talked to me before he did it. I’ve been … wondering how to look at it.”
“How to look at queers? Shit, it’s unnatural.”
“Tell ’em, Marco.”
“What’s it say in the Bible? I forget exactly, but it’s against it. Like, isn’t that why God destroyed Sodom?”
“‘For even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the women, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly.’”
“Wayne’s our Protestant lay leader. Isn’t it the worst sin there is, Wayne?”
“Not exactly, but you can’t be a Christian and a practicing homosexual.”
“You mean God won’t forgive them?” Dan asked him.
“God will forgive everyone, but only if they repent and have a sincere determination n
ever to repeat their sin.”
“I’m not religious myself,” said the lieutenant (jg) they called Marco. “I don’t know about the theological stuff. I look at it from an evolutionary viewpoint. Like, nature doesn’t do anything doesn’t help the species to survive. You ever see two gay mallards together? Or a lion sucking another lion’s dick? Faggots are sick, that’s all. Doc, what do you think?”
“This is Doc Gehlen,” said Prince, nodding to the civilian who’d just come in, “our resident shrink. He’s teaching one of those extension courses. What do you think, Doc? Ever run into any queers?”
“Lots,” said the civilian, helping himself to the cake. “Is it a sin? I don’t believe in sin. Is it a sickness? The ones I’ve seen have all been disturbed individuals in one way or another. I would call it a … personality disorder. A compulsion, like pyromania or bestiality.” He took a bite, considered, then added, “Of course, my sample may be skewed. The happy ones might not bother coming to see me.”
“Are they born that way?”
“I don’t buy Freud’s theory that it’s rooted in the relation with the maternal figure. But it happens early.”
Marco said, “Hey, whatever. I knew a guy—he was standing in the shower on the Iowa when this pansy comes up and just grabs his dick, you know? He told me they caught eight guys in a daisy chain on the Oh-four level one night. Every one of ’em tested positive.”
“Yeah, they all got that gay cancer. They just don’t show it yet.”
“I don’t want them around. What if they sneeze on you?”
“That’s not what I joined the Navy for. I thought it was one place where you didn’t have to put up with the fucking feminists and lesbos and gays.”
“They’re security risks. Every spy we’ve ever had has been a homo.”