Cuba

by Stephen Coonts

  The lights would come on soon, powered by the emergency generator.

  He opened the duffel bag and began extracting items. The first item he removed was a telescoping rod which he extended and positioned over the safe’s combination dial; he secured it there with clamps placed on each side of the safe. Working quickly, with no lost motion, he clamped a small electric motor to the rod, then adjusted the jaws protruding from the motor so that they grasped the dial of the safe.

  Other sensors were placed on the top, bottom, left, and right sides of the safe door. These sensors were held in place by magnets.

  Wires led from the sensors and electric motor to a small computer, which he now took from the bag and turned on. There was one lead remaining, which he connected to a twelve-volt battery which was also in the bag.

  As he waited for the computer to boot up he checked all the leads one more time. Everything okay.

  Tommy Carmellini pursed his lips, as if he were whistling.

  This contraption was of his own design, and with it he could open any of the older-style mechanical safes, if he were given enough time. An electrical current introduced into the door of the safe created a measurable magnetic field. The rotation of the tumblers inside the lock caused fluctuations in the field, fluctuations that were displayed on the computer screen. Finally, the computer measured the amount of electric current necessary to turn the dial of the lock; an exquisitely sensitive measurement. Using both these factors, the computer could determine the combination that would open the safe.

  Sitting cross-legged in front of the safe with the computer on his lap, Carmellini tugged the latex gloves he was wearing tighter onto his hands, then manually zeroed the dial of the lock. Now he started the computer program.

  The dial rotated slowly, silently, driven by the electric motor clamped to the rod. After a complete turn the dial stopped at 32. The number appeared in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. After a short pause, the dial turned to the left, counterclockwise, as Carmellini grinned happily.

  In his mind’s eye he could visualize the lock plates rotating, the tumblers moving … .

  The line on the screen that tracked the magnetic field twitched unexpectedly. Carmellini frowned. He hadn’t moved, the building was quiet.

  Another squiggle, so insignificant he almost missed it. And another.

  Someone was coming. Someone was walking softly down the hall; the sensors were picking up the shock waves of their footfalls as the waves spread out through the structure of the building.

  Careful to make no noise at all, Tommy Carmellini set the computer on the duffel bag, stood up and moved over behind the door. As he did he drew the Ruger from its holster under his shirt and thumbed off the safety, then turned off the light attached to his headband. Now he transferred the pistol to his left hand. With his right he reached into a hip pocket and extracted a sap, a flexible length of rubber with the business end weighted with lead.

  The darkness appeared total as his eyes adjusted. Gradually a bit of glare from headlights faintly illuminated the room.

  Carmellini had good ears, and he couldn’t hear the footfalls. He could hear the tiniest whine, however, that the electric motor made as it turned the dial of the lock, the distant honking of some vehicle blocks away, and faintly, ever so faintly, the wail of a fire or police siren.

  Tommy Carmellini stopped breathing, stopped thinking, stood absolutely frozen as the knob on the door slowly turned, then the door began to open.

  William Henry Chance walked slowly back and forth in front of the glass doors that marked the main entrance to the Ministry. The duty officer and his two men were in the basement, doing God knows what to the emergency generator. Chance wondered how long it had been since the generator had been fueled, oiled, checked carefully, and started.

  The second hand on his watch seemed frozen. He checked his watch, walked, watched cars and trucks pass by, adjusted his duty belt and pistol, reset the cap on his head, strolled some more, promised himself he wouldn’t look at the luminous hands on his watch, finally peeked anyway. A minute. One lousy minute had passed.

  Someone was coming along the sidewalk … a uniformed guard carrying an AK-47 at high port. He must be stationed at one of the side or rear entrances. The man stopped, slightly startled, when he saw Chance’s figure standing in the door. Now he peered closer. And saluted.

  “Sir, I am looking for the duty officer.”

  “He is in the basement, starting the emergency generator. Is there someone else at your post?”

  “Uh, yessir. I was coming around to check if—”

  “I think you should stay at your post. The emergency power for the building will come on in a few minutes, then you can make your request of the duty officer.”

  “Yes, sir. But the last time we started that thing, all the alarms went off, every one of them. The duty officer always wanted the alarms off before he turned the power back on.”

  “I am sure he will take care of that. He knows the system.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And when was the emergency generator last used, anyway?”

  “The big storm last year, sir. Eight or nine months ago, I think.”

  “Go back to your post”

  “Yes, sir.” The man saluted, turned, and marched down the sidewalk. Chance could hear his footsteps for several seconds after he disappeared into the gloom.

  The guy accepted him as Cuban, as had Lieutenant Gómez and his men. If they only knew the hundreds of hours of language classes that Chance had endured to learn the accent, to get it exactly right!

  All in anticipation of a moment that might never come. Yet the orders did arrive, and here he was, walking around in the foyer of secret police headquarters in Havana spouting Cuban Spanish like José Martí.

  He went to the guard’s station, used his flashlight to examine the equipment there. The video monitors were of course blank, everything off, but where was the tape? If the power came on while he was there he didn’t want to give Alejo Vargas a souvenir videotape of the men who cracked his safe.

  Ah, here was the videotape machine, in this cabinet. He pushed the eject button, futilely. Without power the machine would not eject the tape that it contained. He used the Ruger—four shots into the heads of the machine.

  The brass kicked out on the floor. He picked them up, pocketed them.

  More pacing. Each minute was an agony of waiting.

  When the power was restored to the building, he had expected the alarms to go off in Vargas’s office, and to have to cover Carmellini as he made his exit. By whatever means necessary, he intended to be the only man at the main entrance when Carmellini emerged. Yet if alarms were a normal occurrence, perhaps violence would not be necessary.

  The silenced Ruger rode inside his shirt under his left armpit. The pistol was an assassin’s weapon, shot a .22 Long Rifle hollow-point bullet that would do minimal damage unless fired into someone’s brain at point-blank range. Wounds in the limbs or body would be painful but not immediately incapacitating. The Ruger’s only virtue was the silencer that dramatically muffled the report, reduced it from an ear-splitting crack to a soft, wet pop that was inaudible beyond a few feet.

  He wondered how Carmellini was coming on getting the safe open. Come on, Tommy!

  Footsteps from within the building.

  Here came a flashlight.

  “Ah, Colonel, the lieutenant sent me to tell you that it will not be much longer, that the generator will start very soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “He is having difficulty, the mechanical condition is not as it should be.”

  “I understand. I have faith in your lieutenant.”

  The man went back down the hallway in the direction from whence he came.

  More pacing.

  At least three more minutes had passed when the lieutenant came down the hallway. The occasional flicker of passing headlights revealed him to be a large, rotund man.

  “I am sorry, Colo
nel, but we cannot make the cursed thing run.”

  “No harm done, if your guards stay alert. And I can always come back tomorrow for my errand, I suppose.”

  “We will stay alert, sir. Our duty is our trust.”

  “You and your men have done what you can, have you not?”

  “We could awaken Colonel Santana, I suppose. Perhaps he knows more about the generator than any of us.”

  Chance tried to keep his voice under control. “Colonel Santana is in the building, then?”

  “Yes, sir. He came in about an hour ago. He went to his apartment on the top floor. I think he was investigating the incident of the two saboteurs that were killed near a high-voltage tower south of town.”

  “A high-voltage tower? That sounds like attempted sabotage.”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “I hadn’t heard of that incident.”

  “Enemies of the regime, sir. Apparently some of them were successful.”

  “Santana is the very man I came to see,” Chance declared. “Still, I did not expect to find him asleep. I suggest you give the generator one last mighty heroic effort, and if you are unsuccessful, I shall awaken Colonel Santana.”

  When the doorknob had turned as far as it would go, the door to Alejo Vargas’s office slowly opened. Tommy Carmellini was behind the door, still as a statue in the park, with a sap in his right hand and the silenced Ruger in his left.

  Now a flashlight beam shot out, swung quickly around the room, hit the safe and swung away for an instant, then returned to the door of the safe. The apparatus Carmellini had attached to the door was quite plain in the small beam, as was the tangle of wires that ran to the computer.

  Faster than he would have ever believed possible, the door smashed Tommy Carmellini in the face. The impact stunned him, threw him backward against the wall.

  The man sprang into the room, swung something that smacked Carmellini in the skull and made him see stars.

  He was falling, off-balance, the other man coming for him in a brutal, ferocious way, when he got the Ruger more or less pointed and began pulling the trigger as fast as he could. He could barely hear the pops.

  He fell to the floor and his assailant leaped on him, began smashing him in the face with his fist, repeatedly.

  Swinging his right hand with all his might, Carmellini hit the other man in the side of the head with the sap. And again.

  The man was slumping, falling to the left.

  Carmellini gathered his strength and smashed the man again, one more time, square in the head.

  The man rolled onto the floor, slumped on his back.

  Carmellini sat up, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Part of his face was numb, he was drooling from a mighty punch to the mouth.

  He forced himself to his knees. He pocketed the sap, reached for the flashlight, which was lying on the floor still lit. He played the light on the face of his assailant.

  Santana.

  Oooh, damn!

  He checked the pistol. He had fired at least five shots. A couple of the spent brass were lying near Santana, who had a bloody place on his chest, one on his neck. Hit twice, at least.

  Maybe one of the little .22 bullets would kill him.

  Maybe not.

  Tommy Carmellini found to his surprise that he didn’t care one way or the other.

  He put the pistol back in its holster, wiped his face with his shirt, and went back to the computer.

  The combination was right there on the screen, all three numbers. The dial wasn’t moving.

  He tried the handle, put some weight on it. It moved.

  The safe was open!

  He wiped his face on his sleeve, willed himself back to his task. First he stowed the computer and sensors and telescoping rod in his duffel bag. Then he opened the safe, examined its contents with Santana’s flashlight, then turned on his headband light.

  Lots of papers, files, two shelves of them. The top shelf consisted of files on people, each file had a person’s name. These were the files he had come to find. He raked these into his duffel bag.

  Ah, on the second shelf … files labeled with numbers. He looked inside one. Engineering drawings, possibly of a warhead …

  He dumped everything that looked interesting into his duffel bag, including the stack of files on Vargas’s desk.

  Oh, here was a file about supplies from a Miami laboratory supply house … one about susceptibility studies, lethality, vaccines … he stuffed all these in the bag, began checking another handful.

  The hell with it! He would take everything. The files on the bottom shelf might prove as interesting as those on the top. The bag would be heavy, but he could lift it. He transferred the files to the bag as quickly as he could.

  When he had all the files, he hoisted the bag experimentally. Eighty pounds, at least. Room for a few more things …

  What else did Vargas keep in his safe? A small laptop computer. Well, he certainly didn’t need that anymore. Into the bag with it.

  He was pawing through one of the side drawers when he sensed movement behind him.

  As he turned Santana’s fist grazed his jaw—his turn had been just enough to save his life. The headband and light flew away, somewhere, the little beam flashing around crazily.

  He groped for his sap, swung it in a roundhouse right and connected with bone.

  Santana went sideways to the floor.

  No time for this! The man is too dangerous!

  He pulled out the Ruger, thumbed off the safety and was ready when Santana came off the floor again. The pistol coughed.

  Santana’s momentum drove his body forward and he collapsed against Carmellini’s feet.

  The American stepped around the body. He put the pistol away, stowed the headband light, zipped the duffel bag closed.

  After a quick last look around, Tommy Carmellini went to the door, made sure it would lock behind him. He came back for the duffel bag, hoisted it to his left shoulder.

  Out in the dark hall, he pulled the door shut, made sure it was locked, then walked quickly down the dark hallway for the stairs.

  Tommy Carmellini held the Ruger down by his leg as he descended the stair and walked across the lobby toward the shadowy figure standing in the doorway.

  As he walked the lights came on. Instantly an alarm sounded, loud enough to wake the dead.

  He squinted against the light. That was Chance standing in the doorway.

  “Into the car, quickly now,” Chance said. The alarms were wailing and every light in the building was on, with not a soul in sight. If they could be gone before the lieutenant and his men got back up here, he wouldn’t have to kill them—they couldn’t have seen his face very well in the darkness.

  His watch read 2:04 A.M.

  Chance stood in the doorway with euphoria flooding over him while Carmellini stowed the bag in the backseat of the car, got into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. Three long strides, he jerked open the passenger’s door and jumped inside, and Carmellini fed gas.

  The lights in the rest of the city were still off, however, so when the car pulled away from the building the night swallowed it.

  “What did you get?”

  “I got the safe open—took two drawers full of files, everything made of paper that was in there, some files from a desk. Got a laptop, too.”

  “Well done.”

  “Someone came in while I was there. Santana, I think. Left him for dead.”

  “Was he dead?”

  “I didn’t take the time to check, and to be honest, I really don’t care one way or the other. I put six bullets into the son of a bitch and whaled on him a while with the sap. If he isn’t dead he ought to be.”

  Chance flipped on the interior light of the car, just long enough to check Carmellini’s face. “Looks like he got a piece or two of you.”

  “Oh, yeah. He was damned quick.”

  “Did he get a look at your face?”

  “I don’t think so. Pretty dark. And he�
��s probably dead. Don’t sweat it”

  Chance grunted and stared out the window at the dark, decaying city.

  The voyagers on the Angel del Mar saw a ship during the night. It came out of one dark corner of the universe and passed within a half mile of the derelict as the people aboard shouted and waved the single working flashlight.

  The ship was a freighter of some type, huge, with lights strung all over the topside and superstructure. It raced through their world and disappeared into the void as quickly as it came, leaving the people gasping on deck, exhausted, starved, devoid of hope.

  A child had died earlier in the evening, just at sunset, and some of the people aboard had wanted to eat it. “She is beyond caring, and her body can give us life,” one man said, a sentiment several agreed with.

  The old fisherman went below to tell Ocho, who was taking his turn on the pump, which meant he had to pump out the water that had accumulated because the man before him could not keep abreast of it, as well as the water that came in on his watch. He was on the ragged edge of total exhaustion, but he listened to the old fisherman as he struggled with the pump handle.

  “Maybe …” Ocho began, but the old man would not listen.

  “To eat her would be sacrilege, the moral death of every one who tastes her flesh or watches others eat it. All flesh must die, but to face God with that on our souls would be unforgivable. Come with me! Come!”

  He half dragged Ocho up the ladder. Together they swung hard fists left and right, reached the corpse, and tossed it into the sea.

  In the fading light the old fisherman stood with his back to the wheelhouse and shouted at the others, some too weak to move. He damned them, dared them, kicked at those who came too close, punched one man so hard he nearly went overboard.

  The child’s body floated, supported by the great vast moving ocean, just out of reach, moving with the rise and fall of the swells. Some of the people looked at it, others refused to. When the last of the light faded the body disappeared into the total darkness.

  Ocho went back down the ladder to the hold, which reeked of vomit and filth. He worked the pump handle like an automaton.

  Finally the fisherman relieved him, helped him up the ladder.