Cuba

by Stephen Coonts

  “Yes, yes. I understand. But I have a problem that—”

  He clapped his hands over his ears. “No, no, no. You have made a great mistake,” he said.

  She sat calmly, waiting for him to lower his hands. When he saw that she was not going to speak, he did so. “I must show you my work,” Bouchard said, and dug into a drawer. He came up with a handful of paper, which he thrust at her. “I recently completed a major study of—”

  She refused to touch the paper. “Fidel Castro is dead,” she said.

  Bouchard froze. After a few seconds he remembered the paper in his hand and laid it on top of the nearest pile.

  “I was there when he died. We were filming a statement to the Cuban people, a political will, if you please.” She produced two videotapes from her large purse and laid them on the nearest pile.

  “He died before he finished his speech,” she explained. “Which is inconvenient and, in a larger sense, tragic.”

  “I assure you, Señora Sedano, that I am a poor scholar, mediocre in every sense, employed here in Cuba because I tired of the publish-or-perish imperative of the academic world. My work is of little import to the United States government or anyone else. I do not work for the CIA. There has been some mistake.”

  Mercedes maintained a polite silence until he ran out of words, then she said, “Fidel and I watched an American movie a few months ago, about dinosaurs in a park—an extraordinary story and an extraordinary film. We marveled at the magic that could make dinosaurs so lifelike upon the screen. It was almost as if the moviemakers had some dinosaurs to film. Perhaps the magic had something to do with computers. However they did it, they made something that had been dead a very long time come back to life.”

  Bouchard didn’t know what to say. Agency regulations did not permit him to tell anyone outside the agency who his employer was. He twisted his hands as he tried to decide how he should handle this woman who refused to listen to his denials.

  “Did you say something?” she asked.

  “I don’t like movies,” Bouchard muttered. “There are no good actors these days.”

  “Perhaps not living,” said Mercedes Sedano. “But you must admit the magicians have given new life to some dead ones. You and your friends could perform a great service for Cuba if you would take these videotapes to the moviemakers and let them bring Fidel back to life. For just a little while.”

  Bouchard picked up the cassettes, held them in his hands as he examined them.

  “I suppose the cultural attaché might be able to pass these things along,” Bouchard admitted. “What is it you wish Fidel had lived to say?”

  Mercedes nodded. She looked Bouchard straight in the eyes and told him.

  Maximo Sedano huddled in his great padded leather chair at the Finance Ministry staring out at the Havana skyline. He took another sip of rum, eased the position of his injured hand. He was holding it pointed straight up. The doctor who set the broken bones in his fingers assured him elevating the hand would help keep the swelling down.

  That pig Santana! He whipped out his pistol and smashed it down on the fingers of Maximo’s left hand so quickly Maximo didn’t even think of jerking it away. Three broken fingers.

  Then the son of a bitch laughed! And Vargas laughed.

  Vargas had whispered in his ear: “You aren’t going to be the next president of Cuba, Maximo. You have no allies. Delgado and Alba will obey me to their dying day, as you will. You have a wife and daughter and your health. Be content with that.”

  He said nothing.

  “Your brother Hector is in prison charged with sedition. I suggest you meditate upon that fact.”

  Maximo sipped some more rum.

  His fingers hurt like hell. The doctor gave him a local anesthetic and a half dozen pills when he set the fingers, but now the anesthetic was wearing off and the pills weren’t doing much good.

  He probably shouldn’t be drinking rum while taking these pills, but what the hell. A man has to die only once.

  Where was the $53 million?

  Somewhere on the other side of the black hole that was the Swiss banking system.

  Face facts, Maximo. You can kiss those bucks good-bye. Those dollars might as well be on the back side of the moon.

  He spent some time dwelling on what might have been—he was only human—but after a while those dreams faded. The reality was the pain in his hand, and the fact that he was stuck in this Third World hellhole and would soon be out of a job. Whatever government followed Fidel would appoint a new finance minister.

  He had no chance of succeeding Castro, and he let go of that fantasy too. He didn’t have the allies in high places, he wasn’t well enough known, and if he had been he would be in a cell beside Hector this very minute.

  Hector’s plight didn’t cause him much concern. He and Hector had never been close, had never had much in common. Well, to be frank, they loathed each other.

  A pigeon landed on the ledge outside his window. He watched it idly. It searched the ledge for food, found none, then took off.

  Maximo watched it. The pigeon circled the square in front of the ministry and landed on a statue that stood near the front door. Maximo had never liked the statue, some Greek goddess with a sword. Still, it gave the building a certain tone, so he had never ordered it moved.

  Statues. At least he got the goddess instead of that larger-than-life bust of Fidel that the Ministry of Agriculture—

  He stared at the goddess. She was made of bronze. Some kind of metal that had turned green as the rain and sun and salt from the sea worked on it.

  The bust of Fidel in front of the Ministry of Agriculture was of course manufactured and erected after the revolution.

  So were the statues in the Plaza de Revolucion. And some of the statues in Old Havana, at the Museo de Arte Colonial, at the Catedral de San Cristobal de la Havana, on some of the minor squares.

  After the revolution! After the government collected all the gold pesos, or before?

  The Museum of the Revolution! The old presidential palace was converted to a propaganda temple that would prove to all generations the venality of Batista, the dictator Fidel had overthrown. Maximo recalled reading somewhere that Fidel had personally supervised the renovation and conversion of the old building.

  Thirty-seven tons of gold. Fidel had squirreled it away somewhere.

  What he needed to do was go to the Museum of the Revolution, lock himself in a room with the collection of Havana newspapers. After the revolution, after the gold was collected, what was Fidel doing?

  Thirty-seven tons of gold.

  “One sample vial from the Cuban lab contained a new, super-infectious strain of poliomyelitis. The viruses are so hot they kill in seconds.”

  The members of the National Security Council didn’t say anything.

  “The scientists said they never saw anything like it,” the national security adviser continued. “The four sample vials contained three different strains of the polio virus. Two of the vials contained the same type of virus.”

  “Is the vaccination we were all given as children effective against these strains?” The chairman of the joint chiefs asked this question.

  “Apparently not. The scientists will need more time to verify that, but apparently … no.”

  The president looked glum. “Talk about a choice. We can wait until the Cubans use that stuff on us or we can bomb the lab right now.”

  “No, sir,” the chairman said. “There is no guarantee a bomb would kill that virus. Bombing the lab would probably just release the viruses to the atmosphere and kill everyone in Cuba who happened to be downwind.”

  The silence that followed that remark was broken by the secretary of state, who asked, “Do the scientists have an estimate on how long those viruses can live outside the lab?”

  “Not yet,” the national security adviser replied. He took a deep breath and referred back to his notes. “Here is the situation in Cuba as we believe it to be: We received a report
two hours ago from our man in Havana who says he was told earlier today that Fidel Castro is dead. He is sending some videotapes in the diplomatic pouch.”

  “Dead, huh?” said the president. “I’ll believe it when they put his corpse on display in a tomb on the Plaza de Revolucion.”

  Someone tittered.

  The national security adviser continued to read from his notes. “Review of the documents from the safe of secret police chief, Alejo Vargas, indicates that the Cubans have installed biological warheads on intermediate-range ballistic missiles.”

  “What?” the president demanded. He pounded on the table with the flat of his hand to silence everyone else. In the silence that followed, he roared, “Where in hell did those people get ballistic missiles?”

  The national security adviser looked like he was in severe pain. “From the Russians, sir. In 1962. Apparently the Russians left some behind after the Cuban missile crisis. You may recall that Castro refused to let the UN inspection team into the country to verify that all the missiles had been removed.”

  “How good is this information?”

  “The man who sent it is absolutely reliable.”

  The president mouthed a profane oath, which the chairman of the joint chiefs thought a succinct summation of the whole situation.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In a country as poor as Cuba safe houses were hard to come by. The one that William Henry Chance and Tommy Carmellini found themselves in was an abandoned monastery on a promontory of land on the south coast of the island. Surrounded by tidal flats and dense vegetation, the sprawling one-story building was an occasional refuge for drug smugglers and young lovers, who had left their trash strewn about. The rotten thatched roof remained intact over just one room, the kitchen. A roaring fire burned in the fireplace, which apparently the monks had used primarily for cooking.

  From the window three fishing boats were visible, wooden boats with a single mast, manned by one or two men. The crew of two of the boats were rigging trot lines, the other was hauling in a net. Chance examined each through binoculars. They looked harmless enough—he doubted if any of the boats had an engine or radio.

  “What do you think?” Carmellini asked.

  “We have a little time, but I don’t know how much.”

  “Guess it depends on how efficient the secret police and the military are.”

  “Umm,” Chance grunted, and after one more sweep of everything in sight, put down the binoculars.

  Tommy Carmellini sat feeding sheets of paper from the secret police files into the fire as fast as they would burn. He merely scanned the pages as he ripped them from the files and tossed them into the flames.

  “Vargas and his guys were certainly thorough,” Carmellini commented. “They looked under every rock.”

  “And found every slimy thing that walks or crawls,” Chance agreed. Vargas’s laptop was on, so Chance resumed his examination of the files.

  “Sort of like J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “Secret police are pretty much alike the world over,” Chance muttered. He moved the cursor to the next file on the list and called it up.

  “How many missiles are there on this island?” Carmellini asked as he tore paper.

  “I have found six missile files, so far. There may be more—I see some references to material that doesn’t seem to be on this computer.”

  “Six? With locations?”

  “Names only. Every missile has a name: Miami, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Charleston, New Orleans, and Tampa.”

  “What about Mobile?”

  “Don’t see it on here.”

  “Birmingham, Orlando, the army bases in Alabama?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I find it hard to believe that in the decades since 1962, the Cubans have managed to keep the secret of their ballistic missiles.”

  Chance didn’t reply. He had never agreed with the agency’s spending priorities, which were heavily slanted toward reconnaissance satellites. The people in Washington were sold on high-tech computer and sensor networks for the collection of intelligence. Hardware and software didn’t turn traitor and were easy to justify to the bean counters. The spymasters seemed to have lost sight of a basic truth: networks could only collect the information their sensors were designed to obtain. And they could be fooled. If garbage goes in, garbage comes out.

  Ah, well. The world keeps turning.

  “How long is that going to take?” Chance asked, referring to the files and the fire.

  “Couple hours at this rate.”

  Chance glanced at his watch. A few minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon. The rendezvous with the submarine was set for ten o’clock tonight, almost nine hours away. “If we have to run for it, we’ll take everything we haven’t burned.”

  He and Carmellini and the four U.S. Navy SEALs on guard in the grasses and bushes out front would try to escape if the Cubans attacked the place. Two speedboats were fueled and ready inside the old boathouse, and a submarine would meet them fifty miles south.

  Unfortunately he had no way of knowing if the submarine was already lying submerged at the rendezvous position or if the skipper planned to arrive punctually. If he was already there, Chance, Carmellini, and the SEALs could leave now. If the sub wasn’t at the rendezvous, the two boats would have to spend the afternoon and evening rolling in the swell, hoping and praying the Cuban Navy didn’t come over the horizon.

  We’ll wait, Chance decided, glancing at his watch again, though Lord knows the waiting was difficult.

  It would be a serious mistake to underestimate Alejo Vargas. The Cuban secret police had over forty years of practice finding and arresting people who sneaked onto the island—one had to assume they were reasonably good at it.

  Chance didn’t want to get into a firefight with the Cuban military or secret police. Leaving a body behind would be bad, and leaving a live person to be captured and tortured would be absolute disaster.

  If the Cubans came riding over the hill, Chance and his entourage were leaving as quickly as possible. They could take their chances on the open sea. That decision made, Chance turned his attention back to the computer screen in front of him.

  Two months ago when he and Carmellini were handed this mission, William Henry Chance would not have bet a plugged nickel they could pull it off. Polish the Spanish in over a hundred hours of classes, be in the right place at the right time when the power went off, break into Alejo Vargas’s safe in secret-police headquarters, carry out the files that Vargas had spent twenty years accumulating, the files he could trade for political support after Castro’s death.

  Amazingly, they had pulled it off. Every file that went into the flames was one Vargas would never use.

  Chance glanced at Carmellini, who was using a stick to stir the fire, keep the paper burning.

  Yep, they had pulled it off. And stumbled upon a biological weapons program and Fidel’s collection of old Soviet ballistic missiles.

  Six missiles. No locations.

  The locations must be well camouflaged or the satellite reconnaissance people would have seen them long ago. On the other hand, if they knew what they were looking for …

  Chance went to the door, called softly to the SEAL lieutenant. “Mr. Fitzgerald, would you set up the satellite telephone again?”

  “Of course. Take about five minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  While the lieutenant was getting the set turned on and acquiring the com satellite, Chance continued to check the computer. When he hit a file labeled “Trajectories” he sensed he was onto something important.

  The file was a series of mathematical calculations, complex formula. Hmmm … Let’s see, if one could figure out where the warheads were aimed, then one could use the known trajectory to work back to the launch site. That’s right, isn’t it?

  “Mr. Chance, they’re on.” The lieutenant handed him the satellite phone.

  In Washington, D.C., the director of the CIA and the national security
adviser listened without comment as the voice of the agent in Cuba came over the speaker phone. He gave them the news as quickly and succinctly as he could. They had the secret-police files, were burning them now though the task would take several more hours, they had a computer containing a file of what appeared to be missile-trajectory calculations, and there were at least six ballistic missiles in Cuba, maybe more. Chance gave the men in Washington the names of the missiles.

  “Well done,” the director said, high praise from that taciturn public servant.

  When the connection was broken, the national security adviser and the CIA director sat silently, lost in thought. The spymaster was thinking about Alejo Vargas and the possibility he might seize control of the government in Cuba upon the death of Castro. The other man was thinking about ballistic missiles and microscopic viruses of poliomyelitis.

  “Another Cuban missile crisis,” muttered the adviser disgustedly.

  The CIA director grinned. “Why don’t you look at the silver lining of this cloud for a change? Fate has just presented us with a rare opportunity to clean out a local cesspool. We ought to be down on our knees giving thanks.”

  The adviser didn’t see it that way. He knew the president regarded the upcoming death of Castro as a political opportunity, a chance to change the relationship between Cuba and the United States and escape the bitter past. Perhaps the president would decide to just ignore the weapons, pretend they didn’t exist. Then he could hold out the olive branch to the Cubans, get what he wanted from them, get credit for progressive leadership from the American electorate, and negotiate about the weapons later.

  Tommy Carmellini was burning the last of the files when William Henry Chance noticed that two of the fishing boats were no longer in sight. “When did they leave?” he asked the naval officer, Lieutenant Fitzgerald.

  “Several hours ago, sir. I noticed one of them going west under sail then, but I confess I haven’t been paying much attention to the others.”

  Carmellini checked his watch—5:30 P.M. Still three or four hours of daylight left.