Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  Fuentes’ eyes darted toward him, then skipped quickly away. “You are making a huge mistake, you know. No matter what happened back there on land, it can be dealt with. Nothing has to change, as regards our plans…”

  “You can save all that,” Deal told him, waving the pistol. “You get us to Key West, then you’re on your own. Bring someone else back to Cuba. I know plenty of builders who’ll be happy for the chance.”

  “DealCo,” Deal heard the booming voice behind him, then. He turned to see his father pushing himself up from the cushions, his eyes vacuous but suddenly owl-wide, a loopy salesman’s smile on his grizzled face. It was that same manic energy that had emanated from him back in the hospital. “DealCo’s who you want,” he proclaimed.

  “Dad…” Deal said. He’d noted the look in those eyes. Whomever the words were directed toward stood in some other dimension.

  “I know the top dog over there,” the old man bellowed in the general direction of Fuentes. “There’s nothing they can’t handle. Let me make a few calls…”

  His father pushed himself up from the cushions just as the prow of the Bellísima dropped into a trough, then cleaved a following swell. The old man lost his balance and toppled sideways. As Deal lunged for him, he caught sight of Fuentes, clinging to the wheel with one hand, rummaging for something in a cockpit compartment with the other.

  Fuentes came out with a flare pistol and was just bringing it around when Deal let his father go and strode forward, swinging his arm in a broad arc. The pistol he was holding cracked into Fuentes’ arm near the wrist. There was a snapping sound that might have been a bone breaking, and a cry, followed by a muffled explosion and a jolt of sulfurous flame as the flare burst from the stubby barrel and began to careen about the closed pilothouse like some hissing, insane creature.

  Deal threw one arm up over his face and bent to snatch his father by the collar. He had just dragged the old man through the pilothouse door when the flare finally burst, filling the cockpit with a blossom of brilliant red and gold. The windowpane in the door blew out in a shower of superheated glass pellets, and the force sent Deal tumbling across the deck, all the way to the transom.

  Deal struggled groggily to his feet, his ears ringing from the explosion. His old man stood nearby, bent at the waist, his hands propped on his thighs, peering down at him in concern.

  “How you fixed, there, son?” the old man asked.

  “I’m all right,” Deal said. There’d been nothing familiar in the question. Just the idle curiosity of a man who didn’t know he’d damned near died.

  Flames danced inside the pilothouse now, he saw. Fuentes’ body had been blown halfway out one side window. The man lay motionless, head and hands dangling down as if in an endless dive.

  The engines of the Bellísima were still laboring, he realized, though the boat had its heading and was now wallowing in the swells. “Stay right here,” he said.

  He pushed past his bewildered father and snatched a fire extinguisher mounted by the pilothouse door. He shoved his way inside past the inert body of Fuentes, coughing in the acrid smoke as he doused the burning boat cushions with CO2, then kicked the smoldering remains out onto the deck and over the side.

  He tossed the canister onto the deck, then hurried back into the pilothouse, tearing off his shirt and using it to clutch the blackened and smoking wheel.

  The instrument panels were blank, the radio controls a melted mass. He’d expected nothing as he clutched the scorching wheel, but amazingly, the Bellísima’s rudder responded to his touch. In moments, he had turned the boat’s prow back into the swells. He felt the engines shudder, but hold.

  He glanced at his watch. Out of Cuban waters by now, he thought; they had to be. That much was good news. But how much damage had the boat received? He could smell burned plastic and rubber, but whether it was the wiring eating itself up as he stared or simply the remnants of the melted cushions was impossible to tell. Electrical fires could smolder for a long time before they blew back up full force. Little currents of flame could be burrowing down every conduit in the ship at this very moment.

  He turned loose of the wheel for a second and hurried outside, searching about the decks for the fire extinguisher he’d tossed aside. He’d intended to take the canister in and give the instruments a good dousing, when he heard his father’s voice.

  “I’ll bet this here is trouble,” the old man called, his tone jolly. He was pointing back in the direction they’d come, toward a set of running lights that was rapidly closing toward them. A cutter with a searchlight sweeping the heaving waters before it, Deal saw, and at the same time he remembered something.

  “Come in here and hold this wheel,” he called to the old man. “Do you think you can do that?”

  The old man stared at him, offended. “Of course I can. Just who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

  “I wish I knew,” Deal said. Then he was off and running toward the saloon and the heavy teak table where he’d planted that listening device on a day that seemed to have existed about a hundred years ago.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  “The signal’s gone,” the technician at the console said, glancing up at Vines.

  Vines pointed at the man’s earphones. “You mean the audio’s out?”

  The man stared back at him patiently. “I mean we’ve lost the signal altogether.”

  Vines glanced at Russell Straight and Driscoll, who stood nearby in the cramped control room, then turned back to his technician. It could have been a recording studio or command central for a radio station, but they were an unlikely-looking foursome for the entertainment field.

  “Maybe they’re out of range,” Vines said.

  The technician stared his patient stare. “They’re out of Cuban waters,” he said. “They’re not out of range.”

  “Then what’s wrong?” Russell said.

  “Maybe nothing,” Driscoll said. His expression suggested otherwise.

  “Give me those coordinates,” Vines said.

  The technician nodded and punched a series of buttons on his console. In moments a sheet chunked up from a clattering printer. The technician glanced at the sheet, then handed it over to Vines.

  Vines studied it briefly, then offered something like a smile as he pushed by Driscoll and Russell Straight.

  “Hey,” Russell called as Vines headed off down a narrow hallway. “What about Deal? Where are you going?”

  “To start World War Three,” Vines called back. And then he was gone.

  Chapter Forty

  “We must turn back,” the captain of the Cuban vessel said. “We are no longer in Cuban waters.”

  “We will turn back soon,” Zeneas told him, his expression resolute. He put his finger on the blip that formed at ten o’clock when the cutter’s radar made its sweep. “When we complete our business.”

  The captain shook his head, tracing an imaginary line between the cutter and the motor yacht they had pursued. “It is impossible,” the captain said. “The Americans…”

  Zeneas pressed his hand down atop the captain’s. The man caught his breath, suddenly unable to speak. There came the faint sound of cracking glass, and a bubble of blood oozed slowly down the broken face of the radar screen.

  “The Americans are not here to bother us,” Zeneas said. “Do you see any Americans out there? Do you see a sign that says ‘Turn Back’?”

  The captain’s face was ashen, but he managed to shake his head. “Nor do I,” Zeneas said. “Let us complete our mission and then go home.”

  He withdrew his hand from atop the captain’s and stood staring. “Call your weapons room, Captain. I won’t waste another instant with you.”

  The captain stared down at his bleeding hand, then back at Zeneas. He glanced at the door that led from the command bridge. Zeneas could see the thoughts that paraded behind the man’s eyes as if he were inside his brain. He had heard the stories. They all had.
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br />   The captain nodded curtly, then picked up the intercom. “Lock torpedoes on target,” he said.

  Something was spoken on the other end, and the captain repeated his command. Zeneas listened for a moment, then gave a final nod.

  The captain depressed the key with a finger of his good hand and gave the command. There was a faint shudder and a burst of flame as the first of the deck-mounted torpedoes left the cutter and splashed down into the water, followed closely by a second.

  “Take no chances, Captain,” Zeneas said, his eyes fixed on a point in the darkness before them. The motor yacht had ceased to send its homing signal and had doused its running lights, but that had come too late. It would make no difference now.

  The captain spoke again into his microphone. A third shudder moved through the steel superstructure beneath Zeneas’ feet, and then a fourth. Zeneas smiled, watching the faintly phosphorescent trails unfurl out into the darkness. It only pained him that he would not be there to see the expression on the old man’s face.

  Chapter Forty-one

  The pilot of the F-16 was screaming just above the wave-tops of the Florida Straits at less than fifty feet, not all that unusual when skirting this close to Cuban waters. Normally, they held their runs thirty miles or so out from shore, but these were not normal circumstances.

  In any event, his altitude might not necessarily keep him off the enemy’s radar screens, but it wouldn’t make things any easier for them, either. Less than ten minutes before, he’d been sitting in the ready room of the Noble Eagle Alert Facility on the grounds of Homestead Air Reserve Base at the southern tip of the Florida mainland, whiling away his duty stretch by watching a Clancy film on DVD. It had just gotten to the part where the Nazi who’d blown up the Super Bowl was about to climb into his sedan and turn the key that would splatter his body parts across a goodly portion of Munich when the call came in.

  The pilot was airborne inside of four minutes, and less than five minutes after that had picked up the two blips now displayed on the radar screen just above his left knee. He was closing on the first, in fact, when the first explosion tore the sky apart just in front of him.

  “Holy shit!” he called, as the fireball blossomed a few hundred yards away. He pulled hard on the stick, banking away as the invisible force field buffeted the plane. A few seconds later and the explosion might have taken him out. At first, in fact, he had taken it for enemy fire and was calculating his response as he spiraled skyward, automatically locked in evasive mode.

  As he came out of a roll, already three miles up, he caught sight of the mushroom cloud that rose high above the water below and realized what had happened. He checked the radar display at his knee again and confirmed his suspicions. Where two blips had appeared only moments before, only one now displayed. And that craft appeared to be turning in a wide arc, heading back the way it had come.

  The pilot leveled off the F-16 and pressed the button that opened his secure line. It took less than a minute to describe the situation and to receive his orders. Before the Cuban vessel had quite completed its turn, the pilot of the F-16 had activated the other cockpit screen, the four-by-four square that glowed just above his right knee like the readout of a miniature arcade game. The two AGM Mavericks that the F-16 carried were G class, containing chips and circuitry that allowed them to make target entry just at waterline.

  And they would be so instructed in this case, the pilot thought. He made the proper entries on his keypad to arm the missiles, and then the F-16 dove.

  ***

  Zeneas was already out of the command cabin and moving along the rail toward the ship’s stern, when he noticed a young seaman bursting through the opposite door of the compartment, shouting something at the cutter’s still-glowering captain, waving a scrap of paper torn from a printer and jabbing frantically toward the sky.

  Zeneas turned to glance into the inky darkness and saw nothing at first. The smoky haze that had lingered following the explosion of the Bellísima had begun to dissipate, though, and gradually the sight took shape: At first it was a tiny wedge of darkness against the slightly lighter backdrop of sky, but it was growing larger at an alarming rate, doubling and redoubling its size by the instant.

  A jet, he realized, the noise of its engines still yet to catch up with its incredibly expanding shadow. Americans, he thought next, and felt a smile of satisfaction cross his features. A bit too late for the cavalry’s charge, wasn’t it?

  He might have made some gesture of insult, in fact, if he’d thought the pilot could see it. And that is when he saw the burst of white smoke bloom at one wingtip of the approaching jet, followed in the next moment by another.

  Something lurched inside Zeneas’ chest, his body registering the truth of what was to come even before his mind could comprehend. He turned toward the command bridge, as the jet soared on past the cutter, banking up and away even as the thundering roar of its engines washed over him.

  “We are in Cuban waters…” he cried, hearing indignation and outrage in his voice. It could not happen, he was thinking. It would not be countenanced by the regime…

  His hand had just fallen upon the lever that would open the door to the bridge compartment when he felt the strange sensation: exhilaration at first, a sense of being propelled through an open portal to somewhere at amazing speed. There was heat, too—one searing jolt of it—along with a brilliant flash of light that also brought with it the agony.

  Melting, he thought. What it means to melt…

  And then there was one more pillar of flame leaping up toward the nighttime sky, and finally, there was nothing at all.

  Chapter Forty-two

  The Florida Straits Dawn

  Bits of wreckage, little of it recognizable, littered the swells, which were moderate this day—no more than six to eight feet—and still gray in the early light. There were bits of styrofoam and chunks of wood and some of fiberglass, along with an occasional plastic jug or bottle and scrap of cloth mixed in with clots of seaweed and bits of matter too vague to be distinguished.

  There was no evidence really that any of it had been part of any boat destroyed. It could all have simply been swept out to sea along with the normal, steady exodus of trash from Havana Harbor.

  The last was the idle thought that crossed Deal’s mind as he dug his tiny paddle into the gray water, trying to keep the nose of the raft pointed into the waves. His old man held a paddle, too, but he was making no normal use of it. He held the thing upside down, in fact, and was tracing his finger along the flat surface of its business end as if a message had been printed there.

  “You say this fellow you’re talking about”—the old man broke off and glanced up at Deal—“this Barton Deal…”

  “That’s you,” Deal said, digging his paddle deep. “You’re Barton Deal.”

  “Whoever he is,” the old man said with a dismissive wave. “This fellow pretended to kill himself and then ran off to Cuba, never even told his family?”

  “He never did,” Deal said. He tried to meet the old man’s gaze, but those eyes were locked somewhere on another place.

  The old man snorted. “Why would a man do such a thing?” he said, disbelief evident in his tone.

  “I don’t know,” Deal said. “I’ve been hoping you might tell me.”

  The old man glanced at him. “How the hell would I know?”

  Deal stared back. Not a glimmer in those steely eyes. “You could help with the paddling, at least,” he said. “For all we know, we’ll wash right back to Cuba.”

  The old man snorted again. “You don’t know anything, do you? This here is the Gulf Stream, boy. All we have to do is stay afloat. We’ll end up in Europe one day.”

  “You seem awfully confident.”

  “I’ve read what the big fellow says, that’s all.”

  “What big fellow?”

  The old man gave him a disgusted look, then consulted his paddle and began to recite, as if the words
were printed in front of him: “…this Stream has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it…”

  He broke off there to command Deal’s attention with a snap of his fingers. “That’s Cuba we’re talking about, you know.”

  Deal nodded. “I guessed as much.”

  “Only because I told you.”

  “Dad…”

  The old man held up an imperious hand. “Just listen,” he said. “…because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments are all gone…”

  The old man was staring at him with an imploring look on his face now. “That’s how we know we’ll get to Europe, don’t you see.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” Deal said. “Not without food and water.”

  “Food and water, my eye,” the old man said, sweeping his arm out over the sea. “You’re not paying attention…”

  He was off again, then: “…the palm fronds of our victories, the worn lightbulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream.” The old man concluded with a dramatic flourish and sat quietly staring at him, waiting.

  “That’s amazing,” Deal said, finally. His shoulders were aching and he longed simply to slide back and drift, though that would surely mean the end.

  “It’s better than that,” the old man said. “It’s Hemingway.”

  Deal shook his head, savoring the five seconds’ respite as the raft slid down the side of a swell. “I mean, how you remember all that, and you don’t even know your name.”

  “Who says I don’t?” the old man demanded, his eyes flashing sudden fury. “Who the hell are you to talk to me like that? I’ve bested many a better man than you, my boy.”

  With that, he snatched up the paddle by its handle and swung it without warning, the leading edge narrowly missing Deal’s skull. He was positioning himself for another backhanded swipe when Deal let go of his own paddle and did the only thing he could.