The early-morning sun rose over the ravaged city. More injured were found and carried to the hospitals, more dead to the morgues. Troops with fixed bayonets walked the streets to prevent looting. Flames still raged in the dock area, but the firefighters were making headway. The vast cloud still bloomed black in the sky, and airline pilots reported that easterly winds had carried it as far as Mexico City.
Sickened by the sights they witnessed that night, Sandecker and Giordino were glad to see daylight again. They drove to within three blocks of Cathedral Plaza and were stopped by wreckage blocking the streets. They walked the rest of the way to the temporary children's hospital to find Jessie.
She was soothing a small girl who was whimpering as a doctor encased a slim brown leg in a cast. Jessie looked up at the admiral and Giordino as they approached. Unconsciously her eyes wandered over their faces, but her weary mind did not recognize them.
"Jessie," said Sandecker softly. "It's Jim Sandecker and Al Giordino."
She looked at them for a few seconds and then it began to register. "Admiral. Al. Oh, thank God you've come." She whispered something in the girl's ear, and then stood and embraced them both, crying uncontrollably.
The doctor nodded at Sandecker. "She's been working like a demon for twenty hours straight. Why don't you see to it she takes a breather."
Each man took an arm and eased her outside. They gently lowered her to a sitting position on the cathedral steps.
Giordino sat down in front of Jessie and looked at her. She was still dressed in combat fatigues. The camouflage pattern was now blotched with bloodstains. Her hair was damp with perspiration and tangled, her eyes red from the pervasive smoke.
"I'm so glad you found me," she said finally. "Did you just arrive?"
"Last night," replied Giordino. "We've been looking for Dirk."
She gazed blankly at the great smoke cloud. "He's gone," she said as if in a trance.
"The bad penny always turns up," Giordino muttered absently.
"They're all gone-- my husband, Dirk, so many others." Her voice died.
"Is there coffee anywhere?" said Sandecker, changing the tack of the conversation. "I think we could all use a cup."
Jessie nodded weakly toward the entrance to the cathedral. "A poor woman whose children are badly injured has been making some for the volunteers."
"I'll get it," said Giordino. He rose and disappeared inside.
Jessie and the admiral sat there for several moments, listening to the sirens and watching the flames leap in the distance.
"When we return to Washington," Sandecker said at last, "if I can help in any way. . ."
"You're most kind, Admiral, but I can manage." She hesitated. "There is one thing. Do you think that Raymond's body might be found and shipped home for burial?"
"I'm sure after all you've done, Castro will cut through any red tape."
"Strange how we became drawn into all this because of the treasure."
"The La Dorada?"
Jessie's eyes stared at a group of figures walking toward them in the distance, but she gave no sign of seeing them. "Men have been beguiled by her for nearly five hundred years, and most have died because of their lust to own her. Stupid. . . stupid to waste lives over a statue."
"She is still considered the greatest treasure of them all."
Jessie closed her eyes tiredly. "Thank heavens it's hidden. Who knows how many men would kill for it."
"Dirk would never climb over someone's bones for money," Sandecker said. "I know him too well. He was in it for the adventure and the challenge of solving a mystery, not for profit."
Jessie did not reply. She opened her eyes and finally took notice of the approaching party. She could not see them clearly. One of them seemed seven feet tall through the yellow haze from the smoke. The others were quite small. They were singing, but she couldn't make out the tune.
Giordino returned with a small board holding three cups. He stopped and stared for a long moment at the group threading their way through the rubble in the plaza.
The figure in the middle wasn't seven feet tall, but a man with a small boy perched on his shoulders. The boy looked frightened and tightly laced his hands around the man's forehead, obscuring the upper part of his face. A young girl was cradled in one muscled arm, while the opposite hand was clutched by a girl no more than five. A string of ten or eleven other children followed close behind. They sounded as if they were singing in halting English. Three dogs trotted alongside and yapped in accompaniment.
Sandecker looked at Giordino curiously. The barrel-chested Italian blinked away the eye-watering smoke and gazed with an intense wondering expression at the strange and pathetic sight.
The man looked like an apparition, exhausted, desperately so. His clothes were in tatters and he walked with a limp. The eyes were sunken and the gaunt face was streaked with dried blood. Yet his jaw was determined, and he led the children in song with a booming voice.
"I must go back to work," said Jessie, struggling to her feet. "Those children will need care."
They were close enough now so that Giordino could make out the song they were singing.
I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy. A Yankee Doodle do or die. . .
Giordino's jaw dropped and his eyes widened in disbelief. He pointed in uncomprehending awe. Then he threw the coffee cups over his shoulder and bounded down the steps of the cathedral like a madman.
"It's him!" he shouted.
A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam. Born on the fourth of July.
"What was that?" Sandecker shouted after him. "What did you say?"
Jessie jumped to her feet, suddenly oblivious to the wrenching fatigue, and ran after Giordino. "He's come back!" she cried.
Then Sandecker took off.
The children stopped in midchorus and huddled around the man, frightened at the sudden appearance of three people shouting and running toward them. They clung to him as life itself. The dogs closed ranks around his legs and began barking louder than ever.
Giordino halted and stood there only two feet away, not sure of what to say that was meaningful. He smiled and smiled in immense delight and relief. At last he found his tongue.
"Welcome back, Lazarus."
Pitt grinned impishly. "Hello, pal. You wouldn't happen to have a dry martini in your pocket?"
<<78>>
Six hours later Pitt was sleeping like a stone in an empty alcove of the cathedral. He had refused to go down until the children were cared for and the dogs fed. Then he insisted that Jessie get some rest too.
They lay a few feet apart on double blankets that served as pads against the hard tile floor. Faithful Giordino sat in a wicker chair at the entrance of the alcove, guarding against invasion of their sleep, shushing an occasional band of children who played too close and too loud.
He stiffened at the sight of Sandecker approaching with a group of uniformed Cubans at his heels. Ira Hagen was among them, looking older and far more tired than when Giordino had last seen him, hardly twenty hours previously. The man next to Hagen and directly behind the admiral, Giordino recognized immediately. He rose to his feet as Sandecker nodded toward the sleeping figures.
"Wake them up," he said quietly.
Jessie struggled up from the depths and moaned. Giordino had to shake her by the shoulder several times to keep her from slipping back again. Still bone-tired and drugged from sleep, she sat up and shook her head to clear the blurriness.
Pitt came awake almost instantly, his mind triggered like an alarm clock. He twisted around and elbowed himself to a sitting position, eyes alert and sweeping the men standing around him in a half circle.
"Dirk," said Sandecker. "This is President Fidel Castro. He was making an inspection tour of the hospitals and was told you and Jessie were here. He'd like to talk to you."
Before Pitt could make a remark, Castro stepped forward, took his hand, and pulled him to his feet with surprising strength. The magnetic brown eyes met with piercing opali
ne green. Castro wore neat, starched olive fatigues with a commander in chief's shoulder insignia, in contrast to Pitt, who still had on the same ragged and dirty clothes as when he arrived at the cathedral.
"So this is the man who made idiots out of my security police and saved the city," said Castro in Spanish.
Jessie translated, and Pitt made a negative gesture. "I was only one of the luckier men who survived. At least two dozen others died trying to prevent the tragedy."
"If the ships had exploded while still tied to the docks, most of Havana would now be a leveled wasteland. A tomb for myself as well as half a million people. Cuba is grateful and wishes to make you a Hero of the Revolution."
"There goes my standing in the neighborhood," muttered Pitt.
Jessie threw him a distasteful look and didn't translate.
"What did he say?" asked Castro.
Jessie cleared her throat. "Ah. . . he said he is honored to accept."
Castro then asked Pitt to describe the seizing of the ships. "Tell me what you saw," he said politely. "Everything you know that happened. From the beginning."
"Starting with the time we left the Swiss Embassy?" Pitt asked, his eyes narrowed in furtive but shrewd reflection.
"If you wish," answered Castro, comprehending the look.
As Pitt narrated the desperate fight on the docks and the struggle to move the Amy Bigalow and the Ozero Zuysun from the harbor, Castro interrupted with a barrage of questions. The Cuban leader's curiosity was insatiable. The report took almost as long as the actual event.
Pitt related the facts as straight and unemotionally as he could, knowing he could never do justice to the incredible courage of men who selflessly gave their lives for people of another country. He told of Clark's magnificent holding action against overwhelming odds-- how Manny and Moe and their crews struggled in the dark bowels of the ships to get them under way, knowing they could be blown into atoms at any moment. He told how Jack and his crew stayed with the tugboat, towing the death ships out to sea until it was too late to escape. He wished they could all be there to tell their own stories, and he wondered what they might have said. He smiled to himself, knowing how Manny would have turned the air blue with pungent language.
At last Pitt told of being swept into the city by the tidal wave and blacking out, and how he regained consciousness hanging upside down from an overhead jewelry-shop sign. He related how staggering through the debris he heard a little girl crying, and pulled her and a brother from under the wreckage of a collapsed apartment building. After that he seemed to attract lost children like a magnet. Rescue workers added to his collection during the night. When no more could be found alive, a policeman directed Pitt to the children's hospital and relief center, where he was discovered by his friends.
Suddenly Pitt's voice trailed off and he dropped his hands limply to his sides. "That's all there is to tell."
Castro looked at Pitt steadily, his face filled with emotion. He stepped forward and embraced him. "Thank you," he murmured in a broken voice. Then he kissed Jessie on both cheeks and shook Hagen's hand. "Cuba thanks you all. We will not forget."
Pitt looked at Castro slyly. "I wonder if I might ask a favor?"
"You have but to name it," Castro quickly answered.
Pitt hesitated, then he said, "There is this taxi driver named Herberto Figueroa. If I were to find him a restored 'fifty-seven Chevrolet in the States and have it shipped, do you suppose you could arrange for him to take delivery. Herberto and I would both be very grateful."
"But of course. I'll personally see to it he receives your gift."
"There is one more favor," said Pitt.
"Don't push your luck," whispered Sandecker.
"What is it?" Castro asked courteously.
"I wonder if I could borrow a boat with a crane?"
<<79>>
The bodies of Manny and three of his crew were identified. Clark was fished out of the channel by a fishing boat. Their remains were flown back to Washington for burial. Nothing of Jack, Moe, and the rest ever turned up.
The fire was finally under control four days after the death ships were blown out of existence. The final, stubborn blaze would not be extinguished until a week later. Another six weeks would pass before the last of the dead were found. Many were never found at all.
The Cubans were meticulous in their accounting. They eventually compiled a complete list of causalities. The known dead came to 732. The injured totaled 3,769. The missing were calculated at 197.
At the President's urging, Congress passed an emergency aid bill of $45 million to help the Cubans rebuild Havana. The President also, as a gesture of goodwill, lifted the thirty-five-year-old trade embargo. At last Americans could legally smoke good Havana cigars again.
After the Russians were expelled, their only representation in Cuba was a Special Interests Section in the Polish Embassy. The Cuban people shed no tears at their departure.
Castro still remained a Marxist revolutionary at heart, but he was mellowing. After agreeing in principle to the U.S.-Cuban friendship pact, he unhesitantly accepted an invitation to visit with the President at the White House and make an address before Congress, although he did grumble when asked to keep his speech to twenty minutes.
At dawn on the third day after the explosions an old peeling, weather-worn vessel dropped anchor almost in the exact center of the harbor. Fireboats and salvage craft swept past her as though she were a disabled car in the center of a highway. She was a squat workboat, broad and beamy, about sixty feet in length with a small derrick on the stern whose boom extended over the water. Her crew seemed oblivious to the frenzy of activity going on around them.
Most of the flames in the dock area had been extinguished, but firemen were still pouring thousands of gallons of water on the smoldering debris inside the heat-twisted framework of the warehouses. Several blackened oil storage tanks across the harbor sputtered with stubborn flame, and the acrid pall of smoke reeked of burned oil and rubber.
Pitt stood on the bleached deck of the workboat and squinted through the smoky yellow haze at the wreck of the oil tanker. All that remained of the Ozero Baykai was the scorched superstructure on the stern that rose grotesque and distorted above the oily water. He turned his attention to a small compass he held in one hand.
"Is this the spot?" asked Admiral. Sandecker.
"Cross bearings on the landmarks check out," Pitt answered.
Giordino stuck his head out the wheelhouse window. "The magnetometer is going crazy. We're right over a heavy mass of iron."
Jessie was sitting on a hatch. She wore gray shorts and a pale blue blouse and looked like her old luscious self.
She flashed a curious look at Pitt. "You still haven't told me why you think Raymond hid the La Dorada on the bottom of the harbor and how you know exactly where to look."
"I was stupid not catch on immediately," explained Pitt. "The words sound the same, and I misinterpreted them. I thought his last words were `Look on the m-a-i-n s-i-g-h-t.' What he was really trying to say was `Look on the M-a-i-n-a s-i-t-e."
Jessie looked confused. "Maine site?"
"Remember Pearl Harbor, the Alamo, and the Maine. On or about this spot in 1898 the battleship Maine blew up and launched the Spanish-American War."
An edge of excitement began to form inside her. "Raymond threw the statue on top of an old shipwreck?"
"Shipwreck site," Pitt corrected her. "The hulk of the Maine was raised and towed out to sea, where she was sunk with flag flying in 1912."
"But why would Raymond deliberately throw the treasure away?"
"It all goes back to when he and his marine salvage partner, Hans Kronberg, discovered the Cyclops and salvaged the La Dorada. It should have been a triumph for two friends who fought the odds together and stole the most sought-after treasure in history from a possessive sea. And it should have had a happy ending. But the tale turned sour. Raymond LeBaron was in love with Kronberg's wife."
Jessie's
face tensed in understanding. "Hilda."
"Yes. Hilda. He had two motives for wanting to get rid of Hans. The treasure and a woman. Somehow he must have talked Hans into making another dive after the La Dorada was raised. Then he cut the lifeline, leaving his friend to die a horrible death. Can you imagine what it must have been like, strangling in agony deep inside a steel crypt like the Cyclops?"
Jessie averted her eyes. "I can't bring myself to believe you."
"You saw Kronberg's body with your own eyes. Hilda was the real key. She outlined most of the sordid story. I only had to fill in a few details."
"Raymond could never commit murder."
"He could and he did. With Hans out of the picture he went one step further. He dodged the Internal Revenue Service-- who can blame him when you remember the federal government collected over eighty percent of income above $150,000 in the late fifties and sidestepped a time-consuming lawsuit from Brazil, which would have rightly claimed the statue as a stolen national treasure. He kept quiet and set a course for Cuba. A shifty man, your lover.
"The problem he now faced was how to dispose of it. Who could afford to pay even a fraction of twenty to fifty million dollars for an art object? He was also afraid that once the word was out the current Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, a racketeer of the first magnitude, would have it seized. And if Batista didn't grab it for himself, the army of Mafia hoods he invited into Cuba after the Second World War would. So Raymond decided to carve up the La Dorada and sell it bit by bit.
"Unfortunately for him, his timing was bad. He sailed his salvage boat into Havana on the same day that Castro and his rebels swarmed into town after toppling Batista's corrupt government. The revolutionary forces immediately closed down the harbors and airports to stop Batista's cronies from fleeing the country with uncountable wealth."
"LeBaron got nothing?" asked Sandecker. "He lost it all?"
"Not entirely. He realized he was trapped and it was only a question of time before the revolutionaries searched his salvage boat and found the La Dorada. His only option was to hack out whatever he could carry and catch the next plane back to the States. Under cover of night he must have slipped his salvage boat into the harbor, hoisted the statue overboard, and dumped it on top of the site where the battleship Maine had blown up seventy years before. Naturally he planned to come back and retrieve it after the chaos died down, but Castro didn't play according to LeBaron's rules. Cuba's honeymoon with the United States soon fell apart and he could never return and raise three tons of priceless treasure under the eyes of Castro's security."
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