Cuba

by Stephen Coonts

  “American?” Dr. Bouchard asked, accepting the photo and glancing at it.

  “I have no idea, sir. We’ve seen him around here and there and wondered who he might be. Would you have the folks in Langley try to find out?”

  “Of course,” the professor said, and put the photo in his pocket.

  Toad Tarkington was in a rare foul mood. He snapped at the yeomen, snarled at the flag lieutenant, fumed over the message board, and generally glowered at anyone who looked his way.

  This state of affairs could not go on, of course, so he went to his stateroom, put on his running togs, and went on deck for a jog. The tropical sea air, the long foaming rollers, the puffy clouds running on the breeze, the deep blue of the Caribbean—all of it made his mood more foul.

  None of the leads to find the Colón had borne fruit. The ship was still missing, the captain and crew had stayed aboard her all the time she was tied to the pier in Guantánamo, the gloom seemed impenetrable. The air wing was still searching, but as yet, nothing! And of course the temperature of the rhetoric coming from the White House and Pentagon was rising by the hour.

  Toad was jogging aft from the bow when a petty officer from the admiral’s staff flagged him down. “The AIs have a photo of the Colón!”

  “Where is she?”

  “Aground on a reef off the north shore of Cuba.”

  Toad bolted for the hatchway that led down into the ship, the petty officer right behind.

  The photo was of the Colón, all right. The ship looked as if it were wedged on some rocks, almost as if it grounded during a high tide. Now the tide was out and the Colón was marooned.

  “When was this picture taken?” Toad demanded of the air intelligence officers.

  “Yesterday.”

  “And no one recognized it?”

  “Not until today.”

  Toad growled. “Have you passed this to the admiral?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Show me the location.”

  The AI pinpointed the location on a sectional chart.

  Toad called Jake Grafton. “I want to see that ship,” Jake said. “As soon as possible. We’ll take an F-14 with a TARPS package.” TARPS stood for tactical air reconnaissance pods. Each pod contained two cameras and an infrared line scanner.

  Cuba is an island surrounded by islands, over sixteen hundred of them. Most of the islands on Cuba’s north shore are small, uninhabited, rocky bits of tropical paradise, or so they looked to Jake Grafton, who saw them through binoculars from the front seat of an F-14.

  The ship was about three miles offshore, stranded on rocks that just pierced the surface of the sea. The breaking surf looked white through the binoculars.

  The freighter was plainly visible, listing slightly. Some of the weapons containers were visible on the main deck. Jake checked the photo in his lap, which was taken yesterday by an F/A-18 Hornet pilot with a handheld 35-mm camera. Yep, the containers visible in the photo were still in place aboard the ship.

  Although the Cubans claimed a twelve-mile territorial limit, the United States recognized but three. Nuestra Señora de Colón was stranded on a reef in international waters, the AIs assured Jake. They had checked with the State Department, they said.

  South of the ship was the entrance to Bahia de Nipe, a decent-sized shallow-water bay.

  Was the ship on her way into the bay when she went on the rocks?

  Jake was making his initial photo passes a mile to seaward of the Colón. In the event the Cubans chose to send interceptors to chase him away, he had a flight of F-14s ten miles farther north providing cover. Above them was an EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare airplane, listening for and ready to jam any Cuban fire-control radar that came on the air. According to the electronic warfare detection gear in Jake’s cockpit, he was being painted only by search radars. That, as he well knew, could change any second.

  He had just completed a photo pass from west to east and was turning to seaward when the E-2 came on the air. “Battlestar One, we have company. Bogey twenty miles west of your posit, heading your way. Looks like a Fulcrum.” A Fulcrum was a MiG-29.

  Jake keyed his radio mike. “Roger that: I’ll make one more photo pass before he gets here, then exit the area to the north.”

  He tucked the nose down and let the Tomcat accelerate. The plane was alive in his hand—the descending jet bumped and bounced in the swirling, roiling tropical air under the puffy cumulus clouds drifting along on the trade wind.

  “Cameras are on and running,” Toad Tarkington said from the back seat.

  Staying just outside the three-mile limit, Jake flew past the stern of the stranded freighter one more time, which meant he was probably getting fine views of her stern and oblique views of her flanks.

  “Since we’re here …” he muttered, and dropped a wing as he eased the stick and throttles forward.

  In the back seat, Toad Tarkington was monitoring the recon package. “I sure am glad we’re staying out of Cuban airspace,” he told Jake. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable outside the twelve-mile limit, but that’s asking too much of this technology. A ship sitting on the rocks like this, looks like a setup to me. They’re looking to mousetrap some dude flying by snapping pictures and perforate his heinie.”

  “Yeah,” said Jake Grafton, and leveled off at a hundred feet above the water. He had the F-14 flying parallel with the axis of the ship, offset with the ship to his right since the reco package was mounted under his right engine.

  “Got the cameras and IR scanner going?”

  “Oh, yeah, looking real good,” Toad said, just as he picked up the seascape passing by the canopy with his peripheral vision. He looked right just in time to see the freighter flash by, then Jake Grafton pulled back on the stick and lit the afterburners. The Tomcat’s nose rose to sixty degrees above the horizon and it went up like a rocket, corkscrewing back toward the ocean, as the E-2 Hawkeye radar operator called the bogey for the Showtime F-14 crews who were Jake’s armed guard. Both RIOs said they had the bogey on radar.

  “Like I said,” Toad told Jake, “sure is great we’re staying outside Cuban airspace.”

  “Great,” his pilot agreed.

  “Don’t want to piss anybody off.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Wonder why that ship ended up where it did?”

  “Maybe the photos will tell us.”

  “Bogey is six miles aft, Battlestar One,” the E-2 Hawkeye radar operator said, “four hundred knots, closing from your eight o’clock.”

  “You wanna turn toward him, Admiral, let me pick him up on the radar?” Toad asked this question.

  “No, let’s clear to seaward.”

  “I got him visual,” Toad said as the Tomcat climbed past fifteen thousand feet. “He’s a little above us, pulling lead.”

  “Pulling lead?” Jake looked over his left shoulder, found the MiG-29.

  “He could take a gunshot anytime,” Toad said.

  “He’s rendezvousing,” Jake said, “Gonna join on our left wing, looks like.”

  And that is what the MiG did. He closed gently, his nose well out in front, his axis almost parallel, a classic rendezvous. The MiG stabilized in a parade position, about four feet between wingtips, stepped down perhaps three feet. Despite the bumpy air the MiG held position effortlessly.

  Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington sat staring at the helmeted figure of Carlos Corrado in the other cockpit. Toad lifted his 35-mm camera, snapped off a dozen photos of the Cuban fighter and the two air-to-air missiles hanging on the racks.

  “Think he knows we were inside the three-mile limit?” Toad asked Jake.

  “His GCI controller told him, probably.”

  Corrado stayed glued to the F-14. He paid no attention to the other Tomcats that came swooping in to join the formation, didn’t even bother to glance at them.

  Jake Grafton slowly advanced his throttles to 95 percent RPM. The MiG was right with him. Leaving the power set, he got the nose coming up, began to rol
l away from the MiG, up and over to the inverted and right on through, coming on with the G to keep the nose from scooping out … a medium-sloppy barrel roll.

  Now a barrel roll to the left. The two F-14s behind Carlos Corrado moved into trail position, behind and stepped down slightly, to more easily stay with the maneuvering airplanes, but Corrado held his position in left parade as if he were welded there.

  Now a loop. Up, up, up and over the top, G increasing down the backside, the sea and sky changing position very nicely, the sun dancing across the cockpit.

  “This guy’s pretty good,” Toad remarked grudgingly.

  “Pretty good?”

  “Okay, he’s a solid stick.”

  Now a half loop and half roll at the top, fly along straight and level for a count of five, roll again and half turn into a lopsided split S, one offset from the vertical by forty-five degrees. Coming out of the dive Jake let the nose climb until it was pointed straight up; he slowly rolled around his axis, then pulled the plane on over onto its back and waited until the nose was forty-five degrees below the horizon before rolling wings level and beginning his pullout. Through it all Carlos Corrado stayed glued in position on Jake’s wing.

  Coming out of the last maneuver, Jake Grafton turned eastward. The MiG-29 stayed with the American fighters for fifteen more minutes, until the flight was near the eastern tip of Cuba, Cape Maisi, and turning south. Only then did Carlos Corrado wave at Jake and Toad and lower his nose to cross under the F-14.

  Out of the corner of his eye Jake saw Toad salute the MiG pilot as he turned away to the west.

  “Wonder why that ship ended up on those rocks?” Toad Tarkington mused aloud. Jake Grafton, Gil Pascal, Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt, Toad, and several of the photo interpretation specialists were bent over a table in the Air Intelligence spaces studying the photographs from the F-14’s reconnaissance pod.

  “Maybe the person at the con was lost,” the senior AI speculated.

  “Or didn’t know the waters,” the marine suggested.

  “Maybe the Cubans wanted it there,” Gil said.

  Jake Grafton used a magnifying glass to study photos of the island closest to the stranded freighter.

  “Here’s a crew setting up an artillery piece,” he said, and straightened so everyone could see. “If they planned to strand the ship on those rocks, one would think they would have set up guns and a few SAM batteries in advance.”

  “Maybe that’s what they want us to think.”

  “How far is the ship from the nearest dry land?”

  “Three point two nautical miles, sir.” That was one of the photo interpretation specialists, a first class petty officer. “If you look at this satellite photo of the main island, Admiral, you will see that there are two SAM batteries near this small port ten miles south of where the Colón went on the rocks.”

  “That’s probably where the ship was going when it hit the rocks,” Jake said. “Or where it had been. So how many artillery and missile sites are in the area?”

  “Four.”

  “We’ll have EA-6B Prowlers and F/A-18 Hornets overhead, HARM missiles on the rails, F-14s as cover. The instant one of those fire-control radars comes on the air, I want it taken out.”

  “When do you want to land aboard the ship?” Eckhardt asked.

  Jake Grafton looked at his watch. “One in the morning.”

  “Five hours from now?”

  “Can we do it?”

  “If we push.”

  “Let’s push. I talked to General Totten in the Pentagon. He agrees—we should inspect that ship as soon as possible. For me, that’s five hours from now. We will go in three Ospreys. The lead Osprey will put Commander Tarkington and me on the ship; Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt will be in the second bird leading a rescue team to pull us out if anything goes wrong. The third Osprey will contain another ten-man team, led by your executive officer.”

  Captain Pascal zeroed in immediately. “Do the people in Washington know that you intend to board that ship, Admiral?”

  “No, and I’m not going to ask.”

  “Sir, if you get caught—a two-star admiral on a ship stranded in Cuban waters?”

  “The ship is in international waters. We must find out what happened aboard the Colón after it left Guantánamo. The stakes are very high. I am going to take a personal look. While I’m gone, Gil, you have the con.”

  “Admiral, with all due respect, sir, I think you should take more than just one person with you. Why not a half dozen well-armed marines?”

  “I don’t know what’s on that ship,” Jake explained. “There may be people aboard, there may be a biological hazard, it may be booby-trapped. It just makes sense to have a point man explore the unknown before we risk very many lives. I am going to be the point man because I want to personally see what is there, and I make the rules. Understand?”

  The news about the loss of a ship loaded with biological weapons arrived in Washington with the impact of a high-explosive warhead on a cruise missile.

  When the National Security Council met to be briefed about the ship the president was there, and he was in an ugly mood.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said, interrupting the national security adviser, who was briefing the group. “We decided to remove our stockpile of biological and chemical warheads from Guantanamo Bay when we heard Castro might be developing biological weapons of his own. Is that correct?”

  “The timing was incidental, sir. They were scheduled to be moved.”

  “Scheduled to be moved next year,” the president said acidly. “We hurried things along when the CIA got wind that El Gato might be shipping lab equipment to Cuba. Will you grant me that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Just for the record, why in hell were those damned things in Gitmo in the first place?”

  “A computer error, sir, back when the Pentagon was prepositioning war supplies at Guantánamo. Somehow the CBW material got on the list, and by the time the error was discovered, the stuff was on its way.”

  The president’s lip curled in a sneer. “Did this circle jerk happen under my administration?”

  “No, sir. The previous one.”

  The president glanced at the ceiling. “Thank you, God.”

  He took a deep breath, exhaled, then said, “So we decided to clean up old mistakes. We didn’t want to take the chance Castro knew of our CBW stockpiles at Gitmo when we started fulminating about his.” The president was addressing the national security adviser. “But to cover our asses, you wanted a carrier battle group that just happened to be in the Caribbean to keep an eye on things while you got the weapons out. Just having the navy hanging around would keep the Cubans honest, you said.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And now a ship full of weapons from the Gitmo warehouse is on the rocks off the Cuban coast.”

  “The ship is on the rocks, but we don’t know if any weapons are still aboard.”

  “Are you going to court-martial the admiral in charge of the battle group?” the president asked the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Howard D. “Tater” Totten, a small, gray-haired man who looked like he was hiding inside the green, badged, bemedaled uniform of a four-star army general.

  “No, sir. He was told to quote ‘monitor’ unquote the situation in Guantánamo, not escort cargo ships. He actually had the cargo ship that was hijacked escorted out of Cuban waters, but he didn’t direct that it be escorted all the way to Norfolk. No one did, because apparently no one thought an escort necessary.”

  “Was the ship hijacked?”

  “We don’t know, sir. We’ve been unable to contact it by radio.”

  “How are we going to find out if the weapons are still aboard?”

  “Send marines aboard tonight to look.”

  “I don’t think that ship is stranded in international waters,” the secretary of state said.

  “Your department told us it was,” Totten shot back.

  “That was a first
impression by junior staffers. Our senior people demanded a closer look. We are just not sure. The determination depends on where one draws the line that defines the mouth of the bay. Reasonable people can disagree.”

  Totten took a deep breath. “Mr. President, we don’t know what happened aboard that ship. We don’t know if the weapons are aboard. If they have been removed, we need to learn where they went. Now is not the time to split hairs over the nuances of international law. Let’s board the ship and get some answers, then the lawyers can argue to their hearts’ content.”

  “That’s the problem with you uniformed testosterone types,” the secretary of state snarled. “You think you can violate the law any time it suits your purposes.”

  The president of the United States was a cautious man by nature, a blow-dried politician who had maneuvered with the wind at his back all his life. His national security adviser knew him well, General Totten thought, when he said, “Preliminary indications are that the stranded ship is in international waters, Mr. President The naval commander on the scene has the authority to examine a wreck in international waters if he feels it prudent to do so. Let him make the decision and report back what he finds.”

  “That’s right,” the president said. “I think that is the proper way for us to approach this.”

  “Will you pass that on to the battle group commander?” the national security adviser asked General Totten.

  The general reached for an encrypted telephone.

  Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington went aboard the V-22 parked at the head of the line on the flight deck of USS United States. Marines filed aboard the second and third airplane. Tonight the carrier was thirty miles northeast of Cape Maisi—the distance to the stranded freighter was a bit over a hundred miles.

  Jake was more nervous than he had been in a long, long time. Before he left the mission planning spaces this evening, he looked again at the chart that depicted the threat envelope of the two surface-to-air missile sites on the Cuban mainland just a few miles from the stranded freighter, Nuestra Señora de Colón. The freighter was well inside those envelopes, and the Ospreys would be also.