by Cuba (lit)
STEVEN COONTS
CUBA
Admiral Jake Grafton is overseeing a
shipment of nerve gas being transferred from a
top-secret U.s. stockpile at
Guantanamot Bay. But a power struggle inside
cuba has ignited an explosive plot and
turned a horrific new weapon on the U.s.
Now, Jake must strap himself into the cockpit of a
new generation of American aircraft and fly blind in
to the heart of an island that is about to blow -- and take
the whole world with x*
St. Martin's Paperbacks
NOTE:
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be
aware that this book is stolen property. It was
reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the
publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has
received any payment for this "stripped book."
CUBA
Copyright [*copygg'1999 by Stephen Coonts.
Ml
rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information address Still Martin's Press, 175
Fifth Avenue, New York, N.y.
10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number
ISBN: 0-312-97139-7
Printed in the United States of America .
St. Martin's Press hardcover edition still
August 1999 St. Martin's Paperbacks
edition still May 2000
Still Martin's Paperbacks are published by St.
Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New
York, N.y. 10010.
To Tyler
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In theory a speculative work of adventure
fiction has the same requirement for technical
accuracy as a story about space aliens set in the
thirtieth century, yet as a practical matter
many readers demand that this author at least stay in
reality's neighborhood while spinning his tales.
For their aid in contributing to technical accuracy the
author wishes to thank Michael R. Gaul,
Captain Sam Sayers USN Ret., Mary
Sayers, Captain Andrew Salkeld USMC, and
Colonel Emmett Willard USA Ret., as
well as V-22 experts Colonel Nolan
Schmidt USMC, Lieutenant Colonel Doug
Isleib USMC, and Donald L. Byrne
Jr. As usual, the author has taken liberties
in some technical areas in the interest of readability
and pacing.
Emestina Archilla Pabon de Pascal devoted
many hours to helping the author capture the flavor
of Cuba and earned the author's heartfelt thanks.
A very special thank-you goes to the author's
wife, Deborah Buell Coonts, whose wise
counsel, plot suggestions, and endless hours of
editing added immeasurably to the quality of this tale.
Cultivo una rosa blanca, Enjulio como en
enero, Para el amigo sincere Que me da
su mano franca.
y para el cruel que me arranca El
corazon con que vivo, Cardo ni oruga
cultivo; Cultivo la rosa blanca.
Jose Marti
I grow a white rose
In July the same as January,
For the sincere friend
Who gives me his open hand. And for the cruel one who
pulls me
away
from the dreams for which I live,
I grow neither weeds nor thistles,
I grow the white rose.
V8I9
PROLOGUE
His hair was white, close-cropped, and his skin
deeply tanned. He wore only sandals,
shorts, and a paper-thin rag of a shirt with three
missing buttons that flapped loosely on his
spare, bony frame. A piece of twine around his
waist held up his shorts, which were also several sizes
too large. His dark eyes were restless and bright behind his
steelframed glasses, which rested on a large,
fleshy nose.
The walk between the house and barn winded him, so he
sat on a large stone in a bit of shade cast by a
cluster of palm trees and contemplated the gauzy
blue mountains on the horizon and the puffy clouds
floating along on the trade wind.
A man couldn't have found a better place to live out
his life, he thought. He loved this view, this
serenity, this peace. When he had- come here as a young
man in his twenties he had known then that he had found
paradise. Nothing in the first twenty-six years of his
life had prepared him for the pastel colors, the
warmth and brilliance of the sun, the kiss of the eternal
breeze, the aroma of tropical flowers that filled
his head and caressed his soul.
Cuba was everything that Russia wasn't. After a
lifetime in Siberia, he had wanted to get down and
kiss the earth when he first saw this land. He had
actually done that, several times in fact, when he had
had too much to drink. He drank a lot in those
days, years and years ago, when he was very young.
When the chance to stay came he had leaped at it,
begged for it.
"After a time you will regret your choiceea"...the colonel
said. "You will miss Mother Russia, the sound of
Russian voices, the young wife you left
behind...."
"She is young, intelligent, ambitious.;.."...he
had replied, thinking of Olga's cold anger when
informed she could not accompany him to Cuba. She was
angry at
him
for having the good fortune to go, not angry at the state
for sending him. She had never in her life been
angry at the state for anything whatsoever, no
matter how bleak her life or prospectsshe
didn't have it in her. Olga was a good communist
woman, communist to the core.
"She will be told that you have died in an accident. You
will be proclaimed a socialist hero. Of course,
you may never write to her, to your parents, to your
brother, tor anyone in the Soviet Union.
All will believe you dead. For them, you will be dead."
"I will have another life here."
"These are not your peopleea"...the colonel observed pointedly
a bit later in the discussion, but he didn't listen.
"Olga is a patriotea"...he remembered telling the
colonel. "She loves the state with all her soul.
She will enjoy being a widow of a socialist hero.
She will find another man and life will go on."
So he stayed, and they told her that he was
dead. Whether she remarried or stayed single, got
that transfer to Moscow that she dreamed about, had the children
she didn't want, he didn't know.
Looking at the blue mountains, smelling the wind,
he tried to conjure up the picture of her in his mind
that he
had carried all these years. Olga had been
young then so he always remembered her that way. She
wouldn't be young now, of course, if she still lived; she
would be hefty, with iron gray hair which she would wear
pulled back in a bun.
His mind was blank. Try as he might, he couldn't
remember what Olga looked like.
comPerhaps that was just as well.
He had found a woman here, a chocolate brown
woman who cooked and washed for him, lived with him,
slept with him and bore him two children. Their son died
years ago before he reached manhood, and their daughter
was married and had children of her own. His daughter cooked
for him now, checked to make sure he was all right.
Her
face he could remember. Her smile, her touch, the
warmth of her skin, her whisper in the night...
She had been dead two years next month.
He would join her soon. He knew that. He had
lost seventy pounds in the last twelve
months and knew that something was wrong with him, but he
didn't know just what.
The village doctor examined him and shook her
head. "Your body is wearing out, my friendea"...the
doctor said. "There is nothing I can do."
He had had a wonderful life here, in this place in
the sun in paradise.
He coughed, spat in the dirt, waited for the spasms
to pass.
After a while he slowly levered himself erect and
resumed his journey toward the barn.
He opened the board door and stepped into the cool
darkness within. Little puffs of dust arose from every
footfall. The dirt on the floor had long ago
turned to powder.
The only light came from sunbeams shining through the
cracks in the barn's siding. The siding was merely
boards placed on the wooden frame of the building
to keep out the wind and rain ... and prying eyes.
In truth the building wasn't really a barn at
all, though the corners were routinely used to store
farm machinery and fodder for the animals and occasionally
to get a sensitive animal in out of the sun.
Primarily the building existed to hide the large,
round concrete slab in the center of the floor.
The building was constructed in such a way that there were
no
beams or wooden supports of any kind above the
slab. The roof above the slab was merely boards can-
tilevered upward until they touched at the apex of the
building.
The white-haired old man paused now to look
upward at the pencil-thin shafts of sunlight which
illuminated the dusty air like so many laser beams.
The old man, however, knew nothing about lasers, had
never even seen one: lasers came after he had
completed hjs schooling and training.
One corner of the building contained an enclosed
room. The door to the room was locked. Now the old
man fished in his pocket for a key, unlocked the
door, and stepped inside. On the other side of the
door he used the key to engage the lock, then
thoughtfully placed the key in his pocket.
He was the only living person with a key to that lock.
If he collapsed in here, no one could get in
to him. The door and the walls of this room were made of
very hard steel, steel sheathed in rough, unfinished
gray wood.
Well, that was a risk he had agreed to run all
those years ago.
Thirty-five ... no, thirty-eight years ago.
A long time.
There was a light switch by the door, and the old man
reached for it automatically. He snapped it on.
Before him were stairs leading dewji.
With one hand on the rail, he went down the stairs,
now worn from the tread of his feet.
This door, these stairs ... his whole life. Every day
... checking, greasing, testing, repairing ...
Once rats got in down here. He had never found
a hole that would grant them entrance, though he had
looked carefully. Still, they had gotten in and eaten
insulation off wiring, chewed holes in boards,
gnawed at pipes and fittings. He managed
to kill three with poison and carried the bodies out.
Several others died in places he couldn't get to and
stank up the place while their carcasses
decomposed.
God, when had that been? Years and years ago ...
He checked the poison trays, made sure they were
full.
He checked consoles, visually inspected the
conduits, turned on the electrical power and
checked the warning lights, the circuits.
Every week he ran a complete set of
electrical checks on the circuitry, checking every
wire in the place, all the connections and tubes,
resistors and capacitors. Occasionally a tube
would'be burned out, and he would have to replace it. The
irony of burning up difficult-to-obtain
electrical parts testing them had ceased to amuse him
years ago. Now he only worried that the parts would
not be available, somewhere, when he needed them.
He wondered what they were going to do when he became
unable to do this work. When he died. Someone was going to have
to take care of this installation or it would go to rack and
ruin. He had told the Cuban major that the last
time he came around, which was last month, when the
technicians came to install the new warhead.
Lord, what a job that had been. He was the only one
who knew how to remove the old nuclear warhead, and
he had had to figure out how to install the new one.
No one would tell him anything about it, but he had
to figure out how it had to be installed.
"You must let me train somebodyea"...he said to the
major, "show someone how to take care of this thing. If
you leave it sit without maintenance for just a few months
in this climate, it will be junk."
Yes, yes.-The major knew that. So did the people in
Havana.
"And I am a sick man. Cancer, the doctor
says."
The major understood. He had been told about the
disease. He was sorry to hear it.
"This thing should be in a museum nowea"...he told the
major, who as usual acted very military, looked
at this, tapped on that, told him to change a
lightbulb that had just burned outhe always changed dead
bulbs immediately if he had good bulbs to put inthen
went away looking thoughtful.
The major always looked thoughtful. He hadn't an
idea about how the thing worked, about the labor and cunning
required to keep it operational, and he never asked
questions. Just nosed around pretending he knew what he
was looking at, occasionally delivered spare parts,
listened to what the old man had to say, then went
away, not to reappear for another three months.
Before the major there had been a colonel. Before the
colonel another major... In truth, he
didn't get to know these occasional visitors very
well and s
oon forgot about them.
Every now and then he would get a visitor that he could not
forget. Fidel Castro had come three times. His
first visit occurred while the Russians were still here,
during construction. He looked at everything,
asked many questions, didn't pretend to know anything.
Castro returned when the site was operational.
Several generals had accompanied him. The old
man could still remember Castro's green uniform, the
beard, the everpresent cigar.
The last time he came was eight or ten years ago,
after the Soviet Union collapsed, when spare
parts were so difficult to obtain. That time he had
asked questions, listened carefully to the answers, and the
necessary parts and supplies had somehow been delivered.
But official visits were rare events, even by the
thoughtful major? Most of the time the old man was left
in peace and solitude to do his job as he saw fit.
Truly, the work was pleasanthe had had a good life,
much better than anything he could have aspired to as a
technician in the Soviet Rocket Forces,
doomed to some lonely, godforsaken, windswept
frozen patch of Central Asia.
The old man left the power on to the consolehe would
begin the tests in just a bit, but first he opened the
fireproof stee] door to reveal a set of stairs
leading downward. Thirty-two steps down to the
bottom of the silo.
The sight of the missile resting erect on its
launcher
always took his breath for a moment. There it sat, ready
to be fired.
He climbed the ladder to the platform adjacent to the
guidance compartment. Took out the six screws that
sealed the access plate, pried it off, and used a
flashlight to inspect the wiring inside. Well, the
internal wiring inside the guidance unit was getting
old, no question about it. It would have to be replaced
soon.
Should he replace the guidance wiringwhich would take
two weeks of intense, concentrated effortor should he
leave it for his successor?
He would think about the work involved for a few more
weeks. If he didn't feel up to it then, it would
have to wait. His health was deteriorating at a more or
less steady pace, and he could only do so much.
If they didn't send a replacement for him soon,
he wouldn't have enough time to teach the new man what he
needed to know. To expect them to find someone who already
knew the nuts and bolts of a Scud I missile
was ridiculous. These missiles hadn't been
manufactured in thirty years, were inaccurate,
