Under the mast an old woman sat weeping. She was the one who grieved for the captain, for some of the people who were washed overboard that first night. She wept silently, her shoulders shaking, her breath coming in gasps.
He wanted to hug her, to comfort her, but there was nothing he could say. His brother Hector would have known what to say, but Ocho did not.
He looked longingly at Dora, Dora who was once beautiful, and he could think of nothing to say to her. Nothing.
All the promise that life held, and they had thrown it away on a wild, stupid, doomed chance. Diego had led them, prodded them, demanded they go, and still he could think of nothing to say to Diego.
He was so tired, so lethargic. He had pumped for hours, just keeping up with the water. If the water came in any faster … well, he didn’t want to think about it. They would all die then. They would have little chance swimming in the open sea.
Ocho slumped over onto the moving deck. He was so tired, if he could just sleep, sleep … .
The old fisherman shook him awake. The sun was setting, the boat still rolling her guts out in the swell.
“A fish …” He held it up, about eighteen or twenty inches long. “No way to cook it, have to eat it raw. Keep up your strength.”
With two quick swipes of his knife, the fisherman produced two bleeding fillets. He offered one to Ocho, who closed his eyes and bit into the raw fish. He chewed.
Someone was clawing at him, tearing at the fish.
He opened his eyes. Diego Coca was stuffing a piece of the fish in his swollen mouth.
The old man kicked Diego in the stomach, doubled him over, then pried his jaws apart and extracted the unchewed fish.
“He’s manning the pump that keeps you afloat, you son of a bitch. He has to eat or every one of us will die.”
Diego got a grip on the fisherman’s knife and lunged for him.
He grabbed for the slippery flesh, swung wildly with the knife.
This time the old man kicked him in the arm. The knife bounced once on the deck, then landed at an angle with the blade sticking into the wood, quivering.
The fisherman waited for the boat to roll, then kicked Diego in the head. He went over backward and his head made a hollow thunk as it hit the wooden deck. He went limp and lay unmoving.
Retrieving his knife, the fisherman ate his chunk of raw fish in silence. Ocho chewed ravenously, letting the moisture bathe his mouth and throat. He held each piece in his mouth for several seconds, sucking at the juices, then reluctantly swallowing it down.
Dora watched him with feverish eyes. He passed her a chunk of the fish and she rammed it into her mouth, all of it at once, chewed greedily while eyeing the old man, almost as if she were afraid he would take it from her.
After she swallowed it, she tried to grin.
Ocho averted his eyes.
“Your turn on the pump,” the old man said.
Diego lay right where he had fallen.
Ocho got up, went into the wheelhouse and down into the engine room. The water in the bilge was sloshing around over his shoes as he began working the pump handle, up and down, up and down, endlessly.
Hours later someone came to relieve him, one of the men in the captain’s family. Ocho staggered up the stairs, so exhausted he had trouble making his hands do what he wanted.
The people on deck had more fish. Ocho sat heavily by the wheelhouse. In the dim light from the stars and moon, he could see people ripping fish apart with their bare hands, stuffing flesh into their mouths, wrestling to get to fish that jumped over the rail when the boat rolled.
He collapsed into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER TEN
One of the butlers unlocked the bedroom door and took Mercedes to see Colonel Santana, who was standing behind Fidel’s desk sorting papers. He didn’t look up when she first came in. She found a chair and sat.
“The government has not yet decided when or how to announce the death of el presidente. No doubt it will happen in a few days, but until it does you are to remain here, in the residence, and talk to no one. Security Department people are on the switchboards and will monitor all telephone calls. The telephone lines that do not go through the switchboard have been disconnected.”
He eyed her askance, then went back to sorting papers. “After the official version of Fidel’s death is written and announced, you will be free to go. I remind you now that disputing the official version of events is a crime.”
“Everyone swears to your history before you write it?” she snapped.
Santana looked at her and smiled. “I was searching for the proper words to explain the nub of it and they just came to you”—he snapped his fingers—“like that. It is a gift, I think. When you say it so precisely, I know you understand. Ignorance will not be a defense if there is ever a problem.”
Mercedes got up from the chair and left the room.
She wandered the hallways and reception rooms, the private areas, the offices, all now deserted. Every square foot was full of memories. She could see him talking to people, bending down slightly to hear, for he had been a tall man. She could not remember when he had not been the president of Cuba. When she was a girl, he was there. As a young woman, he was there. When she married, was widowed, when he took her to be his woman … always, all her life there was Fidel.
Such a man he had been! She was a Latin woman, and Fidel had been the epitome of the Latin man, a brilliant, athletic man, a commanding speaker, a perfect patriot, a man who defined machismo. The facets of Fidel’s personality that the non-Latin world found most irritating were those Cubans accepted as hallmarks of a man. He was self-righteous, proud, sure of his own importance and place in history, never admitted error, and refused to yield when humiliated by the outside world. He had struggled, endured, won much and lost even more, and in a way that non-Latins would never understand, had become the personification of Cuba.
And she had loved him.
In the room where he died the television cameras and lights were still in place, the wires still strung. Only Fidel’s body was missing.
She stood looking at the scene, remembering it, seeing him again as he was when she had known him best.
Still magnificent.
Now the tears came, a clouding of the eyes that she was powerless to stop. She found a chair and wept silently.
Her mind wandered off on a journey of its own, recalling scenes of her life, moments with her mother, her first husband, Fidel … .
The tears had been dry for quite a while when she realized with a start that she was still sitting in this room. The cameras were there in front of her, mounted on heavy, wheeled tripods.
These cameras must have some kind of film in them, videotape. She went to the nearest camera and examined it. Tentatively she pushed and tugged at buttons, levers, knobs. Finally a plate popped open and there was the videocassette. She removed it from the camera and closed the plate. There was also a cassette in the second camera.
With both cassettes concealed in the folds of her dress, Mercedes strode from the room.
A wave breaking over the deck doused Ocho Sedano with lukewarm water and woke him from a troubled, exhausted sleep. Angel del Mar was riding very low in the water. Even as he realized that the bilges must be full, another wave washed over the deck.
Ocho dashed below. The old fisherman slumped over the pump, water sloshed nearly waist-deep in the bilge. Ocho eased him aside, began pumping. He could feel the resistance, feel the water moving through the pump. He laid into it with a will.
“Sorry,” the old man said weakly. “Worn out. Just worn out.”
“Go up on deck. Dry out some, drink some water.”
The old man nodded, crawled slowly up the steep ladder. He slipped once, almost smashed his face on one of the steps. Finally his feet disappeared into the wheelhouse.
Three rain showers during the night had allowed everyone on board to drink their fill, to replenish dehydrated tissue, and when Ocho last looked
, there were several gallons of water in the bucket under the tarp that no one could drink.
Ocho was no longer thirsty, but he was hungry as hell. There had been no more fish. Without line, hooks, bait, or nets they were unable to catch fish from the sea. Unless the creatures leaped onto the deck of the boat they were out of reach. So far, there had been no more of those.
The tarp they caught the water in gave the liquid a brackish taste, which everyone ignored. Still, water on an empty stomach made one aware of just how hungry he was.
Ocho pumped, felt his muscles loosen up, enjoyed the resistance that meant the pump was moving water. After fifteen minutes of maximum effort he could see that the water level was down about six inches. He settled in to work at a steady, sustainable pace.
The horizon remained empty. Empty! Not a boat or sail. Endless swells and sky in every direction.
It was almost as if the Lord had abandoned them, left them to die on this leaky little boat in the midst of this great vast ocean, while planes went overhead and boats and ships passed by on every side, just over the horizon.
We won’t have to wait long, Ocho thought. Our fate is very near. If the chain on this pump breaks, if we run out of energy to pump, if the swells get larger and waves start coming aboard, the boat will break up and the people will go into the sea. That would be our fate, to drown like all those people who went overboard that first night.
They are dead now, surely. Past all caring.
Amazing how that works. Everyone has to die, but you only have to do it once. You fight like hell to get there, though, and when you arrive the world continues as if you had never been.
As he pumped he wondered about his mother, how she was doing, wondered if he should have told her he was going to America.
An hour later Ocho was still pumping, the water was down several feet and the boat was riding better in the sea. And he was wearing out. He heard someone coming down the ladder, then saw feet. It was Dora.
She clung to the ladder, watched him standing in water to his knees working the pump handle up and down, up and down, up and down.
“It’s Papa,” she said.
He said nothing, waited for her to go on.
“I think he has given up.”
Ocho kept pumping.
“Speak to me, Ocho. Don’t insult me with your silence.”
Ocho switched arms without missing a stroke. “What is there to say? If he has given up, he has given up.”
“Will we be rescued?”
“Am I God? How would I know?”
“I am sick of this boat, this ocean!” she snarled. “Sick of it, you understand?”
“I understand.”
She sobbed, sniffed loudly.
Ocho kept pumping.
“I don’t think you love me,” she said, finally.
“I don’t know that I do.”
She watched him pump, up and down, rhythmically, endlessly.
“Doesn’t that make you tired?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
He wiped the sweat from his face with his free hand. “All of us, sooner or later, yes.”
“I mean now. This boat is going to sink. We’re going to drown.”
He looked at her for the first time. Her skin was stretched tightly over her face, her teeth were bared, her eyes were narrowed with an intensity he had never seen before.
“I don’t know,” he said gently.
“I don’t want to die now.”
He lowered his face so that he wouldn’t have to look at her, kept the handle going up and down.
She went back up the ladder, disappeared from view.
Ocho paused, straightened as best he could under the low overhead and looked critically at the water remaining in the boat. He was gaining. He stretched, crossed himself on the off chance God might be watching, then went back to pumping.
The CIA’s man in Cuba was an American, Dr. Henri Bouchard, a former college professor who lived and worked inside the American Interest Section of the Swiss embassy, a complex of buildings that in former days housed the American embassy and presumably someday would again. The Cubans watched the American diplomats very closely, so this officer had no contact with the agency’s covert intelligence apparatus on the island. He kept himself busy watching television, listening to radio, collecting Cuban newspapers and publications and writing reports based on what he saw, heard, and read. His diplomatic colleagues were congenial and the life was semi-monastic, which he found agreeable.
The man who ran the covert side of the business was a Cuban who had never set foot inside the U.S. Interest Section and probably never would. He owned a wholesale seafood operation on the waterfront in Havana Harbor. Every day the fishing boats brought their catch to his pier and every day he purchased what he thought he could sell. Both the price he paid and the price he charged were set by the government: had there not been a black market for fish he would have starved.
The cover was decent. A Cuban fishing boat could meet an American boat or submarine at sea, passing messages or material in either direction. The spymaster’s delivery trucks visited every restaurant, casino, and embassy in the capital. With people and things coming and going, the old man could keep his pulse on Cuba. He was called el Tiburón, the Shark.
William Henry Chance had no intention of ever meeting el Tiburón unless disaster was staring him in the face. The CIA man in the American Interest Section was another matter.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Chance. Delighted to meet you, of course.”
Dr. Bouchard shook hands with Chance and Carmellini as he peered at them over the top of his glasses. He led them down several narrow hallways to a tiny, windowless cubicle in the bowels of the building.
“Sorry to say, this is the office. Security, you know. They used to store food in here. Damp but quiet.” He took a stack of newspapers off the only guest chair and moved them to his desk, extracted a folding metal chair from behind his desk and unfolded it for Carmellini, then settled into his chair.
The knees of all three men almost touched. “So how are you enjoying Cuba?”
“Fascinating,” Chance muttered.
“Yes, isn’t it?” Professor Bouchard beamed complacently. “Six years I’ve been here, and I don’t ever want to leave. I don’t miss the snow, I’ll tell you, or the faculty politics, feuds, dog-eat-dog jealousy over department budgets—thank God I’m out of all that.”
Chance nodded, unwilling to get to the point.
“We met once or twice before, I think,” Chance reminded Bouchard.
“Oh, yes, I do seem to recall … .”
They discussed it.
“My associate, Mr. Carmellini. I don’t think you’ve met him.”
The pleasantries over at last, Chance edged around to business. “You have a few items in your storeroom that we need to borrow, I believe.”
“Certainly. The inventory is in the safe. If you gentlemen will step into the hall for a moment …”
They did so and he fiddled with the dial of the safe. When he had the file he wanted and the safe was closed and locked, he seated himself again at his desk. Chance sat back down. Carmellini remained standing.
“This is the inventory, I’m sure. Yes. What is it you want?”
“Two Rugers with silencers, ammunition, two garroting wires, two fighting knives, a dozen disposable latex gloves, two self-contained gas masks—”
“Let’s see …” The professor ran his finger down the list. “Guns, check. Ammo, okay. Knives … knives … oh, here they are. Wires, garroting, check … gloves … masks. Yes, I think we have what you need. Do you want to take this stuff with you?”
“I think so. In a suitcase of some kind, if you can manage that.”
“I’ll have to give you one of mine. You can return it or pay me for it, as you prefer.”
“We’ll try to return it.”
“That’s best, I think. The accounting department is so difficult about
expense accounts. You gentlemen wait here; I’ll see what I can do. While you’re waiting, would you like a cup of coffee, a soft drink?”
“I’m fine,” Chance said.
“Don’t worry about me,” Carmellini said.
“This will take a few minutes,” the professor advised. “Would you like to wait in the courtyard? The flora there is my hobby, and the eagle from the Maine Memorial is a rare work of art.”
“That’s the big eagle over the doorway?”
“Yes. After the revolution Castro demanded it be removed from the Maine Memorial. That was about the time he announced he was a communist, before the Bay of Pigs. Difficult era for everyone.”
“Ah, yes. We’ll find our way.”
“I’ll look for you in the courtyard when I have your items,” the professor said, and scurried off.
The eagle was huge. “Quite a work of art,” Carmellini muttered.
“Too big for you,” Chance said.
“I don’t know about that,” Carmellini replied, and glanced around to see if there was any way to get the thing out of the mission ground with a crane. “Run a mobile construction crane up to the wall, send a man down on the hook, haul it out. I could snatch it and be gone in six or seven minutes.”
Chance didn’t even bother to frown. Carmellini had a habit of chaffing him in an unoffensive way; protest would be futile.
“The professor is the most incurious man I’ve ever met,” Tommy Carmellini said conversationally a few minutes later.
“He doesn’t want to know too much.”
“He doesn’t want to know anything,” Carmellini protested. “People who don’t ask obvious questions worry me.”
“Hmmm,” said William Henry Chance, who didn’t seem at all worried.
The professor came looking for them a half hour later. After he had scrawled an illegible signature on a detailed custody card, Chance offered the professor a photo of a man that his surveillance team had taken outside the University of Havana science building. The man was in his sixties, slightly overweight, balding, and looking at the camera almost full face. He didn’t see the camera that took the picture, of course, since it was in the van.
“If you could, Professor, I would like you to send this to Washington. I want to know who this man is.”
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