Cuba

by Stephen Coonts

  A murmur of assent went around the table.

  Tater Totten sighed, took his letter of resignation from an inside jacket pocket and unfolded it, placed it on the table in front of him. Then he took out another letter, a request for immediate retirement, and placed it beside the first. He smoothed out both documents, put on his glasses, looked them over.

  The secretary of state was sitting beside him. She looked over to see what Totten was reading. When she realized she was looking at a letter of resignation, she leaned closer.

  “What is today?” Tater whispered. “The date?”

  “The seventh.”

  General Totten got out his ink pen, wrote the date in ink on the top of the letter of resignation and the letter requesting retirement. Then he signed both letters and put his pen back in his pocket.

  “ … our willingness to work with the new government. In fact, I think this would be an excellent time to end the American embargo of Cuba … .” The national security adviser was talking, apparently reciting a speech he had rehearsed with the president earlier today. As the adviser talked, the president had been looking around the room, watching faces for reactions. Just now he was looking at Tater Totten with narrowed eyes.

  He knows, the general thought.

  When the adviser wound down, the president spoke before anyone else could. “General Totten, you look like a man with something to say.”

  “We can’t ignore six ICBMs armed with biological warheads. We can’t ignore a lab for manufacturing toxins. We can’t ignore a warehouse full of stolen CBW warheads.” He leaned forward in his chair, looked straight at the president, whose brow was furrowing into a scowl. “Fifty million Americans are within range of those missiles. We must move right now to disarm those missiles, put the Cubans out of the biological warfare business, and recover those stolen warheads. We have absolutely no choice. When they find out what the threat is, the American people are not going to be in the mood to listen to excuses.”

  Tater Totten looked around the table at the pale, drawn faces. Every eye in the room was on him. “If one of those missiles gets launched at America, everyone in this room will be responsible. That is the hard, cold reality. All this happy talk about lifting embargoes and a new era of peace in the Caribbean is beside the point. We can’t ignore weapons of mass destruction aimed at innocent Americans.”

  The silence that followed lasted for several seconds, until the president broke it. “General, no one is suggesting we ignore those missiles. The question is how we can best deal with the reality of their presence. My initial reaction is to wait until a new government takes over in Cuba, then to talk with them about disarmament and return of the stolen warheads in return for lifting the embargo. Reasonable people will see the advantages for each side.”

  “Your mistake,” General Totten replied, “is thinking that reasonable people will be involved in the negotiations. Reasonable people don’t build CBW weapons of mass destruction—unreasonable people do. Unreasonable people use them to commit murder for ends they could achieve in no other way, ends they think are worth other people’s blood to attain. Now, that, by God, is reality.”

  The secretary of state had snaked the chairman’s letter of resignation over in front of her while he was speaking. Now she showed it to the director of the CIA, who was on her left.

  “What is that document?” the president asked.

  “My letter of resignation,” Tater Totten said blandly. “I haven’t decided whether to submit it now or later.”

  As the president’s upper lip curled in a sneer, the secretary of state put the letter back on the table in front of the general.

  “Totten, you son of a bitch! I’m the man responsible.”

  “I have to sleep nights,” Tater shot back.

  “You reveal classified information to the press, I’ll have you prosecuted.” The president knew damn well that Totten would hold a press conference and tell all. “You’ll spend your goddamn retirement in a federal pen,” the president snarled.

  “Bullshit! When the public finds out about polio warheads on ICBMs aimed at Florida, the tidal wave is going to wash you away.” General Totten pointed a finger at the president. “Don’t fuck this up, cowboy: there are too many American lives at stake. Now isn’t the time for a friendly game of Russian roulette.”

  “Okay,” the president said, lifting his hands and showing the palms. “Okay! What’s the date on that letter?”

  “Today.”

  “Make it a week from today. We’ll do this your way, and a week from today you’re permanently off to the golf course with your mouth welded shut.”

  Totten got out his pen, changed the date on both the letters, and passed them across the table to the president, who didn’t even glance at them.

  “Better get cracking, General,” the president snarled.

  “Yes, sir,” said Tater Totten. He rose from his chair and walked out of the room.

  At the same time the president and National Security Council were meeting in Washington, the Council of State of the communist government of Cuba was meeting in Havana.

  “Where is Fidel?” someone roared at Alejo Vargas as he walked into the room, flanked by Colonel Santana on one side and a plainclothes secret policeman on the other. Santana limped as he walked. He was heavily bandaged about the head and left arm, and moved like a man who was very sore.

  Vice President Raúl Castro watched Alejo Vargas take his seat at the table beside the other ministers. His face was mottled, his anger palpable. He motioned for silence, smacked a wooden gavel against the table until he got it, then looked Vargas straight in the face.

  “Where is my brother?”

  “Dead.”

  “And you have hidden the body.”

  “The body is being prepared for a state funeral. I didn’t think anyone would object.”

  “Liar!” Raúl Castro spit out the word. He stood, leaned on the table, and shouted at Vargas. “Liar! I think you murdered Fidel. I think you murdered him so that you could take over the country.” He waved at the window. “The people out there think so too. You have murdered my brother and arrested the man that he hoped would eventually succeed him, Hector Sedano. Jesus, man, the whole country is coming apart at the seams; they are rioting in the streets!”

  Alejo Vargas examined the faces around the table while Raúl shouted. Maximo Sedano was there, his face impassive. Many of the faces could not be read. Most of them merely wanted food to eat and a place to live, something better than the people in the cane fields had. They went to their offices every day, obeyed Fidel’s orders, took the blame when things went wrong—as they usually did—watched Fidel take the credit if things went right, and soldiered on. That had been a way of life for these people for two generations—forty years—and now it was over.

  “ … the people loved Fidel,” Raúl was saying, “honored and respected him as the greatest patriot in the history of Cuba, and I think you, Alejo Vargas, had a hand in his death. I accuse you of his murder.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Santana told him, but Raúl turned on him like an enraged bear.

  “I am vice president of the republic, first in line of succession upon the death of the president,” Raúl thundered at the colonel. “Maintain your silence or be evicted.”

  Alejo Vargas had already removed his pistol from his pocket while he sat at the table listening to Raúl. Now he raised it, extended it to arm’s length, and squeezed the trigger. Before anyone could move he pumped three bullets into Raúl Castro, who fell sideways, knocking over his chair. The reports were like thunderclaps in the room, leaving the audience stunned and slightly deafened.

  Alejo Vargas got to his feet, holding the pistol casually in front of him in his right hand.

  “Does anyone else wish to accuse me of murder?”

  Total, complete silence. Vargas looked from face to face, trying to make eye contact with everyone willing. Most averted their eyes when he looked into their face.

&nb
sp; “Colonel Santana, please remove Señor Castro from the room. He is ill.”

  As a bandaged Santana and the plainclothesman were carrying out the body, Alejo Vargas again seated himself. He placed the pistol on the table in front of him.

  “I will chair this meeting,” he said. “We are here today to decide what must be done in light of the recent death of our beloved president, Fidel Castro. He fought a long, valiant fight against the disease of cancer, which claimed him four days ago. Of course the news could not be publicly announced until the Council of State had been informed and decisions reached on the question of succession.

  “I do hereby officially inform you of the tragedy of Fidel Castro’s passing, and declare this meeting open to discuss the question of naming a successor to the office of president.”

  With that Vargas reached across the table and seized the gavel that Raúl Castro had used. He tapped it several times on the table, sharp little raps that made several people flinch.

  “This meeting is officially open,” he declared. “Who would like to speak first?”

  No one said a word.

  “The news of our beloved president’s death has hit everyone hard,” Vargas said. “I understand. Yet the business of our nation cannot wait. I hereby nominate myself for the office of president. Do I hear a second?”

  “I second the nomination,” said General Alba, his voice carrying in the silence.

  “Let the record show that I move to make the nomination unanimous,” Admiral Delgado said, his voice quavering a little.

  “I second that motion,” General Alba replied, “and move that the nominations be closed.”

  One would almost think they rehearsed that, Alejo Vargas thought, and gave the two general officers a nod of gratitude.

  Sharks!

  The silent predators came gliding in even as Ocho Sedano watched with his face in the water, gray, streamlined torpedoes swimming effortlessly through the half-light under the surface. They seemed to be swimming toward the place where the Angel del Mar had just gone under. No doubt the turbulence and noise from the sinking boat attracted them.

  The people thrashing about on the surface were also making noise. Nature had equipped the sharks to sense the death struggles of other creatures, and to come to feed.

  He raised his head from the water, shouted, “Sharks. Sharks.” His voice was very hoarse, his throat terribly dry. He sucked up a mouthful of salty seawater, then spit it out.

  “Sharks! Do not struggle. Swim away from the wreck, from each other.”

  He didn’t know if anyone heard him or not.

  A scream split the air, then was cut off abruptly, probably as the person screaming was pulled under.

  Another scream. Shouts of “Sharks!” and calls to God.

  He felt something rub against his leg, and kicked back viciously. With his face in the water he could see the shark, a big one, maybe eight feet; swimming toward the concentration of people in the water.

  He turned the other way, began swimming slowly away.

  The old fisherman was nearby, doing the same.

  “Do not panic,” the old man said. “Swim slowly, steadily.”

  “The others …”

  “There is nothing we can do. God is with them.”

  He heard several more screams, a curse or two, then nothing. He didn’t want to hear. And he was swimming into the wind, so the sound would not carry so well.

  Dora was back there. If she got off the boat. He couldn’t remember if she leaped from the boat before it sank. Perhaps she drowned when the boat went down. If so, that was God’s mercy. Better that than being eaten by a shark, having a leg ripped half off, or an arm, then bleeding in agony until the sharks tore you to pieces or pulled you under to drown.

  That there were still things on this earth that ate people was an evil more foul than anything he had ever imagined.

  He tired of swimming and stopped once, but the old fisherman encouraged him.

  “Don’t die here, son. Swim farther, get away from the sharks.”

  “‘They’re everywhere,” Ocho replied, with impeccable logic.

  “Swim farther,” the old man said, and so he did.

  Finally they stopped. How far they had come they had no way of knowing. The sea rose and fell in a timeless, eternal rhythm, the wind occasionally ripped spume from a crest and sent it flying, puffy clouds scudded along, the sun beat down.

  “We will die out here,” he told the old man, who was only about ten feet away.

  The fisherman didn’t reply. What was there to say?

  Even the tragedy of Dora couldn’t keep him awake. He kept dozing off, then awakening when water went into his nose and mouth.

  In the afternoon he thought he saw a ship, a sailing ship with three masts and square sails set to catch the trade winds. Maybe he only imagined it. He also thought he saw more contrails high in the sky, but he might have imagined those too.

  He would swim until he died, he decided. That was all a man could do. He would do that and God would know he tried and forgive him his sins and take him into heaven.

  Somehow that thought gave him peace.

  “Gentlemen, your backing this morning touched me deeply.”

  Alejo Vargas was sitting with General Alba and Admiral Delgado in his office at the Ministry of Interior. Colonel Santana was parked in a chair near the window with his leg on a stool and a bandage around his head.

  “What happened to you, Colonel?” General Alba asked.

  “I was in an accident.”

  “Traffic gets worse and worse.”

  “Yes.”

  “Gentlemen, let’s get right down to it,” Alejo Vargas began. “Right now I don’t have the support of the people. The mobs are out of control. We must restore order and confidence in the government; that is absolutely critical.”

  Delgado and Alba nodded. Even a dictator needs some level of popular support. Or at least acceptance by a significant percentage of the population.

  “I propose to move on two fronts. I will send a delegate to Hector Sedano, see if he can be enlisted to endorse me. Getting out of prison will be an inducement, of course, but one can’t rely on anything that flimsy. I thought of naming him as ambassador to the Vatican.”

  “That would be a popular move,” Alba thought, and Delgado agreed.

  “All my adult life I have been a student of Fidel Castro’s political wiles,” Vargas continued. “I learned many things from watching the master. This may seem to you gentlemen to be heresy, but without the United States, Castro would have lasted only a few years in power—had the world turned in the usual way he would have been overthrown by a coup or mass uprising when it became obvious that he could not deliver on his promises. Fidel Castro survived because he had a scapegoat: he had the United States to blame for all our difficulties.”

  “One should not say things like that publicly, but there is much truth in that observation.”

  “The Yanquis never failed to play their part in Fidel’s little dramas,” Delgado agreed, and everyone in the room laughed, even Santana.

  When his audience was again attentive, Alejo Vargas continued: “I propose to unite the Cuban people against the United States one more time, and this time I shall be out in front leading them.”

  Jake Grafton had dinner that evening with the commanding officers of the units in the battle group. In addition to the skippers of the ships, the marine landing force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt, and the air wing commander aboard United States were also there. Held in the carrier’s flag wardroom, the dinner was one of those rare official functions when everyone relaxed enough to enjoy themselves. Surrounded by fellow career officers, Admiral Grafton once again felt that sense of belonging to something bigger than the people who comprised it that had charmed him about the service thirty years ago. The tradition, the camaraderie, the sense of engaging in an activity whose worth could not be measured in dollars or years of service made the brutally long hours, the fam
ily separations, and the demands of service life somehow easier to endure.

  He was basking in that glow when one of his aides slipped in a side door and handed him a top-secret flash message from Washington. Jake put on his glasses before he took the message from the folder.

  He scanned the message, then read it again slowly. Ballistic missiles in Cuba, biological warheads, Castro dead—he thanked the aide, who left the room.

  Jake read the message again very carefully as the after-dinner conversation buzzed around him. The message ordered him to stage commando raids on the suspected ballistic missile sites, “as soon as humanly possible, before the missiles can be launched at the United States.”

  “Gentlemen, let us adjourn to the flag spaces,” Jake Grafton said, and led the commanders from the wardroom.

  When the group was together in the flag spaces, with the door closed behind them, Jake said, “The course of human events has catapulted us straight into another mess. I just received this message from Washington.” He read it to them. When he finished, no one said anything. Jake folded the message and returned it to the red folder.

  He turned to the captains of the two Aegis-class guided-missile cruisers that were assigned to his battle group:

  “I want you to get underway as soon as you get back to your ships. Take your ships through the Windward Passage, then proceed at flank speed to a position between the island of Cuba and the Florida Keys that allows you to engage and destroy any missiles fired from Cuba toward the United States. Make every knot you can squeeze out of your ships. Every minute counts. When you come up with an estimated time of arrival, send it to me. We won’t lift a finger against the Cubans until both your ships are in position.”

  He shook hands with the captains, and they strode out of the room.

  “The rest of us might as well get comfortable. Looks like we are in for a long evening.”