Cuba

by Stephen Coonts

  Idly he wondered about the microbiologist who ran the program. Who was he? What were his motivations? Perhaps that question answered itself in a totalitarian society, but it was worth researching, when he had some time. If he ever had some time.

  “Ready?” Chance muttered to Carmellini, who drained the last of his coffee.

  The two men paid their bill in cash and left the casino. They got into a car parked at the curb, one driven by one of their associates, and sped off into the night.

  In a dark, deserted lane on the outskirts of the city the car in which Chance and Carmellini rode met the former telephone van they had used before, but now it bore the logo of a wholesale food supplier.

  Inside the van Carmellini and Chance changed into black trousers, a black pullover shirt with a high collar, black socks, and black rubber-soled shoes. When they were dressed, they sat listening to the insects, drinking water, monitoring a radio frequency. One of their colleagues was observing the science building at the university. He checked in every fifteen minutes. So far he had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Why did you get into this line of work?” Chance asked Carmellini as they sat listening to the chirp of crickets.

  “The challenge of it, I guess. I had an uncle who cracked a few safes … he was a legendary figure. The only time he ever went to the pen was for tax evasion: he did a couple years that time. I was always asking him questions. He told me if I wanted to be a safecracker, go to work for a firm that manufactured and installed the things. That was good advice. I installed safes for several summers while I was in college, got too cocky for my own good. Thought I had this stuff figured out, you know? One thing led to another, and before you know it I was cracking the things.”

  Chance nodded.

  “Here I am still at it. Only this time I won’t go to the pen if they catch me.”

  “Yeah. The Cubans will probably execute us as soon as Vargas gets through with us, if there’s anything left to execute.”

  “The way I figure it, I finally made the big leagues.”

  “You optimists, always looking on the bright side.”

  “Which brings up a point. You got us garroting wires and knives and pistols. I never carry weapons. I’m a safecracker, not a killer.”

  “You’ll probably become a dead safecracker if they catch you in there.”

  “I’ve never carried weapons. Ever.”

  “A wise precaution if you are burgling gentlemen’s safes. You’re in the major leagues now.”

  “Listen, Chance—”

  “This isn’t a game, Tommy. Speaking for myself, I want to keep breathing. You’ll do as I say.”

  The driver parked the van in an alley near the science building. He sat hunched over the wheel watching people on the sidewalks as Chance and Carmellini examined the building through binoculars. They were behind him, in the body of the van, looking forward through the windshield.

  The way in, they decided, was through the roof. To get there, they would need to go into the building beside the science building, a lecture hall, ascend to the top floor, then get access to the roof. From here they would need to cross to the roof of the science hall, then find a way in.

  The lecture hall was locked at night, though it was not guarded.

  It was one in the morning when the van stopped in the empty alley behind the lecture hall. The two men in back pulled on latex gloves, swung on backpacks, then went out the van’s side door.

  The door was not wired with an alarm. Carmellini picked the lock in thirty seconds, and they were in.

  The van drove away as the door closed behind them.

  They stood in the darkness letting their eyes adjust to the gloom.

  Carmellini led off. Behind him Chance took out his pistol and thumbed off the safety, keeping the pistol pointed downward at the floor.

  The weak light filtering through windows in classrooms and thence through open doors to the hallway did little to alleviate the darkness. The floors were uncarpeted concrete, the walls massive masonry, the ceilings at least twelve feet high. The building was devoid of decoration or even a trace of architectural imagination.

  Carmellini moved like a shadow, making no detectable noise. Chance seemed to be making enough noise for both of them. He could hear himself breathing and his heart pounding, could hear the echoes of his footfalls in the cavernous hallways.

  Keeping near the wall, they climbed the stairs to the second floor. Carmellini moved slowly, steadily, listened carefully before turning every corner, then lowered his head, keeping it well below the place one would naturally look for it, and peeped around the corner. Then he slithered around the corner out of sight; Chance followed as silently as he could.

  The top of the staircase put them out on the fourth floor of the building. There had to be another staircase, probably very narrow, leading to the roof: Where might it be?

  Carmellini was ready to go explore when he suddenly held up his hand. He held a finger to his lips.

  Chance listened with all the concentration he could muster.

  He could hear something! Voices?

  Carmellini slowly inched along the hallway toward an open door, then froze there.

  He came back down the hallway to Chance, put his lips against Chance’s ear. “A couple of kids making love.”

  The silenced Ruger felt heavy in Chance’s hand.

  “Gonna kill ’em?”

  Not shooting them was a risk, sure.

  Chance listened carefully. The lovers were whispering. No other sounds.

  “Find the stairs up.”

  The stairs were at the end of a hall, behind a locked door. Carmellini worked on the lock in the darkness for almost a minute before he pulled the door open.

  They closed the door behind them and climbed the totally dark staircase, feeling their way. They ended up in a stuffy, black attic. Chance used the flashlight. Furniture, desks, chairs, stacked everywhere. In the middle of the attic was another stairway up.

  The door to the roof was also locked, this time with a padlock, which was on the interior side of the door.

  “What if there is a padlock on the other side?” Chance asked.

  “Then we’re screwed. Unless you want to kick this thing down.”

  “No.”

  “Let’s try to get this lock open, then the door.”

  “Okay.”

  The lock was rusty, corroded. After several minutes’ effort Carmellini admitted his defeat and used a wire saw to cut through the metal loop of the lock. That took two minutes of intense effort but didn’t make much noise, considering.

  With the lock off and hasp pulled back, they pushed at the door. It refused to open. With both men heaving, the door slowly opened with great resistance, and groaned terribly.

  “That’ll wake the dead,” Chance muttered, and wiped the sweat from his face as Carmellini slipped out onto the roof.

  Chance followed along.

  The metal roof sloped away steeply in several different planes. Moving on hands and knees they worked themselves over toward the edge that faced the science building.

  “Let me do this,” Carmellini whispered, and extracted the rope from his backpack. “Get out of the way, up by the door.”

  Chance went.

  The glare of the city and the streetlights below illuminated the roof quite well, too well in fact. While it was easy to see where to walk, anyone below who bothered to look could probably see the black shapes silhouetted against the glare of the sky.

  Chance huddled against the dormer that formed the staircase up from the attic. He watched Carmellini on the edge of the roof, shaking out the rope, checking the grappling hook. Now he began to twirl the hook above his head, letting out more and more line to make the hook swing an ever-larger circle. Just as it seemed the circle was impossibly wide, he cast the line and hook across the chasm separating the buildings at a metal vent sticking up out of the roof.

  The hook made an audible metallic sound as it hit th
e far roof, then it began sliding off.

  Carmellini quickly pulled in line in huge coils, but too late to stop the grappling hook from sliding off the roof.

  He kept pulling on the line. In seconds he had the hook in his hand and bent down against the roof.

  Someone was down below. Even back here Chance could hear voices. He scanned the surrounding roofs, the streets that he could see, the blank windows looking at him from other buildings.

  Minutes ticked by, the voices below faded.

  Now Carmellini was standing, swinging the rope and hook, now casting it … and it caught! He tugged at it, worked his way back up the roof to where Chance was kneeling.

  Carmellini put the end of the rope around the dormer, pulled it as taut as possible, then tied it off.

  “Well, there is our way across,” the younger man said. “You want to go first, or should I?”

  “Anchored solid, is it?”

  “You bet.”

  “Age before beauty,” Chance said, and tugged on leather gloves, wrapped his hands around the rope. He worked out hand over hand, then draped his lower legs over the rope. His backpack dangled from his shoulders.

  Hanging from the rope like this took a surprising amount of physical strength. The rope sagged dangerously with his weight, becoming a vee with him at the bottom, which made it more difficult to move along it.

  Gritting his teeth, trying to keep his breathing even, William Henry Chance worked his way along the rope, taking care not to look down. At one point he knew he was over the chasm but it didn’t matter: if he slipped off the rope the fall would kill him, whether he hit the roof and slid off or missed it clean.

  He kept going, doggedly, straining every muscle, until he felt the bag dragging along the roof of the science building. Only then did he unhook his legs from the rope and let them down to the roof. Still pulling on the rope, he heaved himself up by the vent and grabbed it.

  The grappling hook was holding by one tong. He wrapped the rope around the vent and set the hook, then tugged several times to make sure it would hold.

  Wiping his forehead, he breathed heavily three or four times. He had one hand on the rope, so he felt the tension increase with Carmellini’s weight. He peered at the other building. Carmellini came scurrying along the rope like a goddamn chimpanzee.

  The younger man was over the gap between the buildings when the rope broke, apparently where it was anchored atop the lecture hall. Carmellini’s body fell downward in an arc and disappeared from view. An audible thud reached Chance as Carmellini’s body smacked against the side of the science building.

  “Our Lady of Colón was under this storm system, out of sight of the satellites passing over, for six hours,” Toad Tarkington explained to Jake Grafton. They were bent over a table in Mission Planning, studying satellite radar images. “When next it reappeared, it was steaming for Bahia de Nipe at twelve knots, yet its average speed of advance while it was out of sight was two knots.”

  “Two?”

  “Two.” Toad showed him the positions and measurements.

  “So it was stopped somewhere.”

  “Or made a detour.”

  “What if the ship rendezvoused with another ship and the warheads were transferred?”

  “Possible, but if you look at these other ship tracks, it doesn’t seem very likely. All these other tracks were going somewhere, with speed-of-advance averages that seem plausible.”

  “Okay. What if the ship stopped and the crew dumped some of the weapons in the water? Maybe all of them. Dumped them in shallow water for someone to pick up later. How deep is the water in that area?”

  “That area is the Bahamas, Admiral. Pretty shallow in a lot of places in there.”

  “Have NSA put that area under intense surveillance. Have them study every satellite image since that storm passed. If those warheads were dumped overboard from the Colón, someone is going to come along to pick them up. We have to get there before that somebody gets them aboard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ask Atlantic Fleet to get a P-3 out to that area as soon as possible, have the crew search for anchored or stationary ships. Any ships not actually under way. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jake Grafton rubbed his forehead, trying to decide if there was anything else he should be doing.

  “Uh, Admiral …” Toad began, his voice low. “I want to thank you for saving my assets last night. I about had a heart attack after we jumped over that rail, everything behind us blowing up, wondering if we were going to go into the water or splatter ourselves on a rock pile. That was truly a religious experience.”

  A wry grin crossed Jake Grafton’s face. “Wish I had paid more attention to where those rocks were before crunch time arrived. Talk about jumping out of the frying pan into the fire! For a few seconds there I thought we had had the stroke.”

  “You didn’t know?” Toad was aghast.

  “What say we don’t mention this to Rita or Callie?” Jake said, and walked away. He had another meeting to attend.

  William Henry Chance grabbed the rope, which extended over the side on the science building roof into the darkness. The rope was still taut. Tommy Carmellini must be hanging on the end of it!

  Chance braced himself and began pulling, hand over hand, and almost ruptured himself.

  He got no more than six feet of rope up when he realized he wasn’t in the right position. Moving carefully, he braced himself against the vent pipe and got the rope over his shoulders. Now he used his whole body to help raise it.

  Two more feet.

  Four.

  A dark spot, a head, coming above the eave, struggling to climb.

  Chance held the rope steady as Carmellini heaved himself over the edge of the roof and began crawling up the slope, still holding onto the rope.

  “Man, I thought I had bit the big one,” Carmellini said between gasps. Leaning against the chimney, Chance blew equally hard.

  “I’m getting too old for this shit,” Carmellini muttered.

  “Next time get a desk job.”

  “Why in hell do you think I went to law school?”

  Chance coiled the rope and inspected it. It had frayed through where it was wrapped around the dormer on the other building. He showed the place to Carmellini, then put the rope in his knapsack.

  “Let’s go.”

  Carmellini used a glass cutter on a pane of a dormer window, then they went in.

  Chance took a chance and used the flashlight. This attic was stacked with laboratory equipment: dishes, warmers, mixing units, microscopes, a spectrometer, a bunch of equipment large and small that he couldn’t identify.

  “Let’s put on our masks,” Chance said, “just in case.”

  They donned the gas masks, made sure the filter elements were on tight. The mask could provide only filtered air: it had an inhalation and exhalation valve and a black faceplate with two large clear lens to see through. The mask was attached to a hood that went over the head and shoulders of the user. Pull strings sealed the hood so air could not get in around the user’s neck. When they had the mask on, both men removed the leather gloves they had been wearing and donned a pair of latex gloves. They stuffed their trousers inside their socks.

  With Carmellini in the lead, the two men stealthily descended the stairs.

  The laboratory was in the basement, so Chance and Carmellini had to pass through the main floor to get there.

  The elevator would be the best way from the top of the building to the bottom, but it might be monitored from the guards’ station at the main entrance. Certainly it should be: nothing could be simpler than to have a warning light come on when the electric motor that ran the elevator engaged. Chance and Carmellini took the stairs.

  Carmellini was leading the way now. Using the flashlight, he examined the door to the staircase for alarms, then opened the door a crack and examined the stairwell. Fortunately the stairwell was lit. If this building were in the States it would be
festooned with infrared sensors, motion detectors, microphones, and remote cameras controlled from a central station. However, this was Cuba.

  At each landing, Carmellini extended a small periscope and looked around the corner.

  On the second floor his inspection of the stairs leading down revealed a camera mounted on a wall above the landing, focused on the door in from the main floor. There was probably a camera mounted above the door to the main floor, a camera that looked back toward this camera.

  Carmellini studied the camera through the periscope, twisted the magnification to the maximum and refocused. He kept the instrument steady by bracing himself against the wall.

  The security camera was fifteen or twenty years old if it was a day. No doubt there were ten or twelve cameras on a sequential switch, so the video from each one was shown in turn on a monitor at the guard’s station. The guard was probably reading something, eating, talking to another guard, if he was paying any attention at all.

  From his backpack Carmellini removed a strobe unit and battery. He plugged the thing together, switched on the battery, and waited for the capacitor to charge. The bulb had a set of silver metal feathers around it so that the light could be focused. Carmellini tightened the feathers around the bulb as much as they would go. When the capacitor’s green light came on, he eased the light around the corner, exposing his head for the first time. One quick squint to line up the light, then holding the thing tightly against the wall to steady it, he retracted his head, closed his eyes and buried his head in the crook of his arm. William Henry Chance did likewise. The short, intense burst of light should burn out the camera’s light-level sensor, rendering it inoperative.

  The flash was so bright Carmellini saw it through his closed eyelids.

  The two men slipped down the stairs. Standing just under the camera that had just been disabled, Carmellini used the periscope again. Yes. Another camera, just over the door to the main floor.