Cuba

by Stephen Coonts

  The translator interpreted.

  “Where am I?” Ocho asked.

  “Aboard Hue City, a United States Navy ship. You were rescued by a helicopter. The man who saw you in the water wants to shake your hand when you awaken. He saved your life. May I call him?”

  “I would like to meet him.”

  It felt very comfortable lying there, looking at the fuzzy beds and blurred people bustling about, checking him over, so different from Angel del Mar. Or floating on the sea.

  Maybe he was dead. He examined that possibility but concluded it was not so. This was not a bit like the heaven he envisioned, and he was hungry. He told the interpreter of his hunger, and the man went to talk to the doctor, who had wandered off.

  They brought food about the same time that Autrey James came breezing in with one of his pals, who had a camera. James was a happy fellow with a wide smile—the white teeth in a dark face were the only details that Ocho could see. James got down beside the bed and posed while the man with the camera took many pictures. Another man with a camera came, some kind of television camera, and he and James shook hands again. Several men in khaki stood behind the camera watching.

  The interpreter relayed the questions from Autrey James and the television cameraman. When did you leave Cuba, What was the name of the boat, How many people were there?

  “Eighty-four people.”

  “Eighty-four?” asked the interpreter in disbelief.

  “Eighty-four,” whispered Ocho Sedano.

  “What happened to the boat?”

  “It sank.”

  “And the people?”

  “They went into the water … sharks.”

  “Sharks?”

  “Some people were swept over the side during a storm our first night at sea. Diego Coca shot the captain, some people died of thirst … Diego jumped into the sea. The children died of exhaustion and hunger, I think—it is really impossible to say. There was no food or water, only rain to drink. When the boat sank those who were left were eaten by sharks. If they didn’t drown. I hope Dora drowned.

  “The old fisherman and I were spared … . Did you find him? The old fisherman? Did you see him in the ocean?” He clawed at Autrey James, who drew back out of reach.

  “No,” the interpreter said. “You were the only one.”

  They went away then, all of them, left him to eat the food and stare at the ceiling and think about the fact that he was alive and all the others were dead.

  The others were dead. He was alive. What did that mean?

  Was God crazy?

  Why me?

  He was thinking about that when someone came to put solution in his eyes again. This time the solution made him cry.

  He sobbed for a minute or two, then his body gave out and he slept.

  “Why did you not put the gold in a bank vault?”

  Mercedes had asked this question of Fidel several years ago, when he first told her of the gold pesos. As she sat on her mother-in-law’s small porch completing her blouse, she remembered the question, and Fidel’s answer:

  “If we kept the gold in a bank, the international bankers would have learned of it eventually, would have demanded that we post it as security for a loan. Then a hurricane would come or the bottom would drop out of the sugar market one year, and the gold would be gone.”

  “But the gold does not help Cuba. Why own it?”

  “The gold is ours,” he said obstinately. “When it is gone it is gone for all Cubans forever.”

  “But you hid it, so it is gone now.”

  “Oh, no. You and I know where it is. As long as it is hidden, it belongs to Cuba.”

  She couldn’t shake him—he had the peasant’s love of the secret hoard, the instinctual drive to bury a can of money or hide it in a mattress, just in case. No matter how bad things got in the house, the money was always there, hidden, an asset that could be tapped to stave off starvation or disaster.

  He said as much when he admitted, “In the middle of the night, when I am alone and the world is heavy on my shoulders, I remember we still have the gold.”

  Fidel and Che Guevara hid it together, for Cuba. Guevara was killed in Bolivia and apparently took the secret to his grave. Fidel didn’t want to—he told the one person on this earth he trusted.

  She wished she didn’t know this thing. As she worked on the last seam of the blouse, she thought about this great secret, about what she should do.

  Mercedes Sedano had confided in no one, had written nothing down. With Fidel dead the gold was only one heartbeat away from being lost forever. She must do something, but what?

  Fidel had been a knot of contradictions. She had argued with him—challenged the macho man himself—and he had admitted some of his failures, which was a rare moment for him. Not all of his errors, but some.

  “I am the only communist in Cuba,” he said, laughing. “Becoming a communist was a mistake—of course I can never say that in public. We had to declare our independence from the American financiers and corporations. In the fullness of time it turned out that the Russian horse couldn’t run the race, which was unfortunate, but that didn’t mean we were wrong in the first place.” He shrugged.

  He had the Latin’s ability to accept life’s vicissitudes as they came with courage and grace.

  “The best thing about communism was the dictatorship. The economic twaddle meant nothing. Someone had to show the Cuban people they could stand on their own feet, that they didn’t need to sell their souls to the Americans or the Catholic Church.” He smiled again, made a gesture toward heaven. “The truth is we were too poor to afford the Church or the Americans.”

  If Santana or Vargas tortured her, she would tell them about the gold. To suffer horribly and die for a secret that you thought illogical was worse than stupid—it would be a sin.

  Did he ever wonder what she would do if she found herself in this situation?

  She finished the last seam, shook out the blouse, and held it up so she could view it.

  Had Fidel really trusted her to make the decision that was best for Cuba, or did he just think that she would keep her mouth shut?

  For Maximo Sedano the question was simple and stark: Where was the gold?

  Rumors had circulated for forty years, and not a flake had ever surfaced. Several men swore they had helped melt the coins into ingots in a smelter in the basement of the Ministry of Finance, but they never knew what happened to the ingots. Alejo Vargas had been running the secret police for twenty years and the Ministry of Interior for the last ten and probably hunting for the gold for at least nineteen, and he hadn’t found it. At least Maximo didn’t believe he had. In forty years no loose ends had unraveled … so there must have been no loose ends.

  The conclusion Maximo drew from these facts was that only a very few people—Fidel, perhaps his brother Raúl, maybe Che—had known the secret in the first place. Today the secret might be known by a few people who had been close to them. In any event, there were no elderly workmen about who liked to run their mouth when they drank their rum—Vargas would have found anyone like that years ago.

  So the gold wasn’t made into statues, poured like concrete into a floor or foundation, made into bricks and used to construct a state building, or transported to some flyspecked hovel and buried under the floor. No. If the gold had been hidden this way, someone involved in the labor would have talked during the last forty years.

  If there were secret records waiting to be discovered or letters in bank vaults, Maximo would never discover them. All he had were his wits.

  With Fidel dead and Alejo Vargas ascendant, Maximo was using his wits now, applying them as never before.

  In search of inspiration, he walked the streets of Havana to the Museum of the Revolution.

  Like so many revolutionaries who swashbuckled through the pages of human history, after his victory Fidel found it expedient to enshrine himself as the savior of the nation so that he might remain at the helm permanently. Of course, to p
roperly do the job it was also necessary to build a monument to the venality and depravity of his enemies, because great heroes need worthy opponents. Amazingly, all this good, evil, and greatness fit neatly under one roof: the presidential palace that had been the residence of Fulgencio Batista.

  Maximo walked quickly through the exhibits that detailed Batista’s corruption—what he sought would not be there.

  He quickly found what he was looking for. Fidel the savior, “El Lider Maximo,” portraits, busts, memorabilia, candid and posed photographs, heroic paintings—all of this was enough to turn the stomach of anyone who had actually known the man, Maximo thought. Alas, Fidel had been very flawed clay: megalomaniacal, filled with a sense of his own magnificent destiny, boorish, opinionated, pigheaded, insufferable, prejudiced, loquacious to a fault, and, all too often, just plain wrong. What a tragedy that this self-annointed messiah was stranded in this third world backwater and never had the opportunity to save the species, which he could have done if only God had sent him to Moscow or Washington.

  Maximo tried to stifle his disgust and concentrate upon the displays before him.

  Fidel and Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, the other immortals … The university, the Moncada Barracks, the trial, prison, handwritten letters, exile, guerrilla days …

  He carefully looked at everything, then wandered on. He came to a room devoted to the fall of Havana; Fidel riding into the city on a tank, ecstatic children. Then Fidel the ruler; Fidel the baseball player; Fidel and Che fishing in the Gulf Stream; Fidel with Hemingway, Richard Nixon, Khrushchev, Kosygin, the famous and the infamous, always togged out in those abysmal green fatigues; dozens of shots of Fidel with his mouth open in front of crowds … God, how the man could talk to a captive audience!

  Maximo was in the next room looking at photos of Fidel eating rice and beans with schoolchildren when the incongruity of the photo of Fidel and Che fishing struck him. Odd, that.

  He went back to it. The two were on some kind of fishing boat, with fighting chairs and big rods, fishing for marlin probably.

  Wait a minute … The marina where Maximo kept his boat … When he first moved it there the harbormaster had once told him that Fidel used to leave from that marina to fish.

  Now he remembered. Yes. The old man said Fidel and Che fished often, every few days, went out by themselves, often spent the night at anchor in the harbor. After a year or so they tired of it, the old man said wistfully, never came back. The boat belonged to the Cuban Navy—seized from an American—and was eventually converted to a gunboat.

  He could remember the old man talking, could see the wind playing with his white hair as he stood on the dock in the sun talking about his hero, Fidel, about that moment one day long ago when their lives came close together.

  The harbormaster had been dead for years. The new man was far too young to remember anything.

  What if the gold were on the floor of Havana Harbor?

  Each night Fidel and Che could have lowered hundreds of pounds of it over the side of the boat free from observation. Given enough nights …

  Over time the gold could have gradually disappeared from the Finance Ministry. If no one but Fidel and Che handled the gold, there was no one to talk.

  Maximo could see logistical problems with this possibility, of course, but not insurmountable ones.

  He left the museum deep in thought.

  “The air force’s AWACS reports that the Cuban military is moving toward the silo sites, Admiral.”

  The briefer was a commander, the senior Air Intelligence officer on the carrier battle group’s staff.

  “The troops are being moved from barracks in the Havana area. We can see tanks and trucks, which presumably contain supplies and troops. The columns are moving slowly, eight to ten miles per hour. Cuban troops have already arrived at missile site number one. Just arriving on sites two and three. We estimate that there will be no Cuban military presence on sites four though six until tomorrow morning after dawn.”

  “Why so slow?” Jake Grafton asked.

  “These are old tanks, Soviet T-54s. We think they see no reason to risk breakdowns by driving faster. The consensus seems to be that the Cubans aren’t on full alert.”

  “Okay,” Jake Grafton said, because there was nothing else to say. The god of battles was dealing the cards.

  The briefer continued, pointing out bridges and crossroad choke points, and Jake tried to concentrate, which was difficult. When the briefer finished, Jake dismissed his staff and sat staring at the map on the bulkhead.

  The plan was good: the weather would be typical, the forces he had should be adequate, they knew their jobs … but if the Cubans fired those missiles at the United States, two Aegis cruisers were all he had to prevent the missiles from reaching their targets.

  Should this whole operation be delayed until antimissile batteries could be moved to south Florida?

  Every hour of delay meant more American troops would die taking those missile sites. Yet if the missiles successfully delivered their warheads, the results would be catastrophic.

  He looked again at the plan—at the timing, at the units assigned.

  Biological weapons. Poliomyelitis.

  He could always use more people, of course. One of the primary goals of warfighting—some people argued, the only goal—was to direct overwhelming force at the point where the enemy was most vulnerable. Or as Bedford Forrest put it, “Get there firstest with the mostest.”

  Already the Cubans were digging in around silos one and two. What if the forces he had committed couldn’t crack those nuts?

  The urge to wait for a bigger hammer had Jake Grafton in its grip now. He felt like David with his slingshot. Maybe he needed more Aegis cruisers, some Patriot missile batteries, more cruise missiles, troops, Ospreys, airplanes.

  If one of those missiles got through …

  He found a handkerchief in his hip pocket and mopped his face.

  His stomach tried to turn over.

  He hadn’t felt like this since Vietnam. Way back in those happy days he had been responsible only for his bombardier’s life and his own miserable existence. All things considered, that load had been relatively light.

  This load …

  Well, Jake Grafton, Uncle Sugar’s been paying you good money all these years while you’ve been getting fat and sassy on the long grass. It’s payback time.

  In midafternoon Toad Tarkington went to the communication spaces to call his wife, Rita Moravia, on one of the ship-to-ship voice circuits. He had done this a time or two before and the chief petty officer was accommodating when the circuits were not in use for official business. This afternoon he asked the chief for an encrypted circuit but they were all busy—the chief handed him a clear-voice handset. Toad called Kearsarge and left a message for his wife. Ten minutes later she called him back.

  “Hey, Toad-man.”

  “Hey, Hot Woman.”

  Tonight, he knew, she would be flying a V-22 Osprey, hauling troops to missile silo two.

  “Just wanted to hear your voice,” Toad said, as matter-of-factly as he could. He could envision this conversation coming over radios in ships throughout the battle group and in Cuban monitoring stations. He had no intention of giving away secrets nor of entertaining kibitzers.

  Rita was equally circumspect. “Got a letter from Tyler. He wrote it with Na-Na’s help, of course.”

  “How’s Ty-Guy doing?”

  “He has a girlfriend, the Goldman girl across the street.”

  “That’s my boy,” Toad said. “A lover already. A chip off the old brick.”

  Aboard Kearsarge Rita was holding the handset in a death grip. She loved life: her son, her husband, her job, the people she worked with—every jot and comma of her life. Oh, of course there were days when the stress and problems threatened to overwhelm her ability to cope, but somehow she managed. In the wee hours of the night when she paused to evaluate, she knew that she wouldn’t change a thing. Not one single thi
ng.

  Now she realized that Toad hadn’t spoken in several seconds.

  “I wouldn’t change a thing,” Rita said.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” he said.

  “From day one.”

  “I remember the first day I saw you. Wow.”

  “When we were at Whidbey, I thought you hated me.”

  “And I thought you didn’t like me.”

  “Thank God you finally screwed up the courage to kiss me.”

  “Wish I could now,” he shot back.

  Tears ran down her cheeks. She wanted to tell him how much he had meant all these years, how grateful she was that they shared life, and nothing came out. She put her hand over the mouthpiece so he wouldn’t hear her cry.

  “Next time we’re together, better not wear lipstick,” he said.

  “I never wear lipstick,” she managed, her voice barely under control.

  “It’s a good thing, too,” he said, his voice cracking.

  The silence grew and grew.

  “Well, I gotta go,” Toad finally said. “They wanna use this circuit to trade movies or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Vaya con Dios, baby.”

  “You too, Toad-man.”

  Toad found Jake Grafton in Combat huddled with Gil Pascal, the chief of staff. He listened to the conversation for a moment, then realized that the admiral was trying to assure himself that he had adequate forces to win. Tonight!

  After a bit Jake turned toward Toad. “Let’s have your two cents,” he said.

  “If we need anything, sir, it’s a bigger reserve. We have three V-22s with twenty-four marines each to go wherever they are needed. A while ago the CO of the carrier’s marine det asked if he and some of his people could get in on the fun. He called Kearsarge and found there is one extra Osprey. It’s being used as a backup to the first wave, but if it isn’t needed, then it’ll be an extra.”

  Gil Pascal frowned. “The carrier’s marines haven’t been briefed,” he pointed out.

  Jake glanced at Toad and raised one eyebrow.

  “Sir, I was hoping you would let me go with them,” Tarkington replied cheerfully. “I’m as briefed as it’s possible to get.” Actually, as Ops, Tarkington wrote the plan.