Cuba

CHAPTER SEVEN

The emotional impact of what he had done didn’t hit Maximo Sedano until the jet to Madrid leveled off after the climbout from Havana airport.

He took the transfer cards bearing Castro’s thumbprint from his inside left breast pocket, and holding them so no one else in first class could read them, studied them carefully.

He was holding $53 million in his hands and he could feel the heat. Hoo, man! He had done it!

He took a chance, a long chance. When he walked into Castro’s bedroom he had had the real transfer cards in his left jacket pocket and the ones bearing his bank account numbers in his right. Mercedes wasn’t there that second time he was admitted, which was a blessing. His former sister-in-law was too sharp, saw too much. She might have decided something was wrong merely from looking at his face.

So it was just Fidel and a male nurse, a nobody who handled bedpans and urinals. There wasn’t a notebook or ledger anywhere in sight, and Fidel certainly was in no condition to closely scrutinize the cards. He signed the cards, transferring the money to Maximo, then let Maximo put his thumb in an ink pad and press it on each of them.

Fidel said little. He had obviously been given an injection for pain and was paying minimal attention to what went on around him. He merely grunted when Maximo said good-bye.

The Maximo Sedano who walked into that bedroom was the soon-to-be unemployed Cuban finance minister with a cloudy future. The Maximo Sedano who walked out was the richest Cuban south of Miami.

Just like that!

The icing on the cake was that the Swiss accounts should have perhaps a million more of those beautiful Yankee dollars as unpaid interest. Every penny was going to be transferred to Maximo’s accounts at another bank in Zurich. It wouldn’t be there long, however. Tomorrow morning after he turned in these transfer cards to Fidel’s banks, he would walk across the street and send the money from his accounts to those he had opened in Spain, Mexico, Germany, and Argentina. These were commercial accounts held by various shell corporations that Maximo had established years ago to launder money for Fidel and the drug syndicates, accounts over which he had sole signature authority. The shell corporations would quickly write a variety of very large checks to a half dozen other companies Maximo owned. After a long, tortuous trail around the globe and back again, the money would eventually wind up in Maximo’s personal accounts all over Europe.

The scheme hinged on the bank secrecy laws in various nations, not the least of which was Switzerland, and the fact that anyone trying to trace the money would see only disorganized pieces of the puzzle, not the big picture.

Maximo smiled to himself and sighed in contentment.

“Would you care for a drink, sir?” the flight attendant asked. She was a beautiful slender woman, with dark eyes and clear white skin.

“A glass of white wine, please, something from Cataluña.”

“I’ll see what we have aboard, sir.” She smiled gently and left him.

Maximo told himself that he would find a woman like that one of these days, a beautiful woman who appreciated the finer things in life and appreciated him for providing them.

His wife was expecting him to return to Cuba in three days: “I must go to Europe in the morning,” he had told her. “An urgent matter has arisen.”

She wanted to go with him on this trip of course — anything to get off the island, even for a little while.

“Darling, I wish you could, but there wasn’t time to make reservations. I got the only empty seat on the airliner.”

She was not happy. Still, what could she say? He promised to bring her something expensive from a jeweler, and that promise pacified her.

The flight attendant brought the glass of wine and he sipped it, then put his head back in the seat and closed his eyes. Ah, yes.

He had a new identity in his wallet: an Argentine passport, driver’s license and identity papers, a birth certificate, several valid credit cards, a bank account and a real address in Buenos Aires, all in the name of Eduardo José Lopéz, a nice common surname. This identity had been constructed years before and serviced regularly so that he might move money around the globe when drug smugglers sought to pay Fidel Castro. Becoming the good Señor López would be as easy as presenting the passport when checking into a hotel.

He had the papers for two other identities in a safe deposit box in Lausanne, across the lake from Geneva.

Maximo Sedano fingered the bank transfer cards one more time, then reclined his seat.

How does it feel to be rich? Damned good, thank you very much.

Lord, it was tempting. Just walk away with the money as Señor López, and poof! disappear into thin air.

And yet, the gold was there for the taking. His plans were made, his allies ready … all he had to do was find the gold and get it out of the country.

He reclined his seat, closed his eyes, and savored the feeling of being rich.

Doña Sedano was sitting on her porch, inhaling the gentle aroma of the tropical flowers that grew around her porch in profusion and watching the breeze stir the petals, when she saw Hector walking down the road. He turned in at her gate and came up to the porch.

After he kissed her he sat on the top step, leaned back so he could see her face.

“Why aren’t you in school, teaching?” she asked.

He made a gesture, looked away to the north, toward the sea.

There was nothing out that way but a few treetops waving in the wind, with puffy clouds floating overhead.

He turned back to look into her face, reached for her hand. “Ocho went on a boat two nights ago. They were trying to reach the Florida Keys.”

“Did they make it?”

“I don’t know. If they make it we won’t hear for days. Weeks perhaps. If they don’t reach Florida we may never hear.”

Dona Maria leaned forward and touched her son’s hair. Then she put her twisted hands back in her lap.

“Thank you for telling me.”

“Ocho should have told you.”

“Good-byes can be difficult.”

“I suppose.”

“You are the brightest of my sons, the one with the most promise. Why didn’t you go to America, Hector? You had plenty of chances. Why did you stay in this hopeless place?”

“Cuba is my home.” He gestured helplessly. “This is the work God has given me to do.”

Doña Maria gently massaged her hands. Rubbing them seemed to ease the pain sometimes.

“I might as well tell you the rest of it,” Hector said. “Ocho got a girl pregnant. He went on the boat with the girl and her father. The father wants Ocho to play baseball in America.”

“Pregnant?”

“Ocho told me, made me promise not to tell. He did not confess to me as a priest but as a brother, so I am exercising an older brother’s prerogative — I am breaking that promise,”

She sighed, closed her eyes for a moment.

“If God is with them, they may make it across the Straits,” Hector said. “There is always that hope.”

Tears ran down her cheeks.

It was at that moment that Dona Maria saw the human condition more clearly than she ever had before. She and Hector were two very mortal people trapped by circumstance, by fate, between two vast eternities. The past was gone, lost to them. The people they loved who were dead were gone like smoke, and they had only memories of them. The future was … well, the future was unknowable, hidden in the haze. Here there was only the present, this moment, these two mortal people with their memories of all that had been.

Hector stroked his mother’s hair, kissed her tears, then went down the walk to the road. When he looked back his mother was still sitting where he had left her, looking north toward the sea.

Ocho was probably dead, Hector realized, another victim of the Cuban condition.

When, O Lord, when will it stop? How many more people must drown in the sea? How many more lives must be blighted and ruined by the lack of opportunity here? How many more lives must be sacrificed on the altar of political ambition?

As he walked toward the village bus stop, he lifted his hands and roared his rage, an angry shout that was lost in the cathedral of the sky.

The pain was there, definitely there, but it wasn’t cutting at him, doubling him over. Fidel Gastro made them get him up, had them put him in a chair behind his desk. He wanted the flag to his right.

Mercedes and the nurse helped him into his green fatigue shirt

He was perspiring then, gritting his teeth to get through this.

“Do you know what you want to say?” Mercedes asked.

“I think so.”

The camera crew was fiddling with the lights, arranging power cords.

“I want to say something to you, right now,” she whispered, “while you are sharp and not heavily sedated.”

His eyes went to her.

“I love you, Fidel. With all my heart.”

“And I you, woman. Would that we had more time.”

“Ah, time, what a whore she is. We had each other, and that was enough.”

He bit his lip, reached for her hand. “If only we had met years ago, before—”

He winced again. “Better start the tape,” he said. “I haven’t much time.” He straightened, gripped the arms of the chair so hard his knuckles turned white.

With the lights on, Fidel Castro looked straight into the camera, and spoke: “Citizens of Cuba, I speak to you today for the last time. I am fatally ill and my days on this earth will soon be over. Before I leave you, however, I wish to spend a few minutes telling you of my dream for Cuba, my dream of what our nation can become in the years ahead ….”

The door opened and Alejo Vargas walked in. Behind him was Colonel Pablo Santana.

“Well, well, Señor Presidente. I heard you were making a speech to the video cameras this afternoon. Do not mind us; please continue. We will remain silent spectators, out of the sight of the camera, two loyal Cubans representing millions of others.”

“I did not invite you here, Vargas.”

“True, you did not, Señor Presidente. But things seem to be slipping away from you these days — important things. The world will not stop turning on its axis while you lie in bed taking drugs.”

“Get out! This is my office.”

Alejo Vargas settled into a chair. He turned to the camera crew. “Turn that thing off. The lights too. Then you may take a short break. We will call you when we want you to return.”

The extinguishment of the television lights made the room seem very dark.

Colonel Santana escorted the technicians from the room and closed the door behind them. He stood with his back against the door, his arms crossed.

“If you are pushing the button near your knee to summon the security staff, you are wasting your time,” Vargas said. “Members of my staff have replaced them.”

“Say what you want, then get out,” Castro said.

Vargas got out a cigarette, lit it, taking his time. “I am wondering about Maximo Sedano. The night before last he was here, you signed something for him, he left this morning on a plane to Madrid, with a continuation on to Zurich. What was that all about?”

Fidel said nothing. Mercedes noticed that he was perspiring again.

“I am in no rush,” Vargas said. “I have all the time in the world.”

Fidel ground his teeth. “He went to move funds. On a matter of interest to the Finance Ministry.”

“The question is, where will the funds end up when their electronic journey is over? Tell me that, please.”

“In the government’s accounts in the Bank of Cuba, in Havana.”

“I ask this question because the man who was here last night did not see you check the account numbers in any book or ledger. You have the account numbers memorized?”

“No.”

“So in reality you don’t know where Maximo Sedano will wire the money?”

“He is a trustworthy man. Loyal. I cannot be everywhere, see everything, and must trust people. I have trusted people all my life.”

“How much money are we talking about, Señor Presidente?”

“I don’t know.”

“Millions?”

“Yes.”

“Tens of millions?”

“Yes.”

“Dios mio, our Maximo must be a saint! I wouldn’t trust my own mother with that kind of money.”

“I wouldn’t trust your mother with a drunken sailor,” Mercedes said. “Not if he had two centavos in his pocket.” She handed some pills to Castro, who glanced down at them.

“Water, please,” he whispered. He put the pills on the desk in front of him.

Vargas continued: “If we ever see the face of Maximo Sedano again, Señor Presidente, you have me to thank. I am having one of my men meet the finance minister in Zurich. We will try to convince Maximo to do his duty to his country.”

Mercedes handed Fidel a glass of water. He picked up several of the pills, put them in his mouth, then wallowed some water. Then he put the last pill in his mouth and took another swig.

Vargas was a moral nihilist, Castro thought, a man who believed in nothing. There were certainly plenty of those. He had known what Vargas was for many years and had used him anyway because he was good at his job, which was a miserable one. We entrusted it to a swine so that we need not dirty our hands.

Another mistake.

“I need rest,” he said, and tried to rise.

“No,” Vargas said fiercely. He leaned on the desk with both hands, lowered his face near Fidel. “You still have a statement to make before the cameras.”

“Nothing for you.”

“You think you have nothing to lose, do you not? You think, Alejo could kill me, but what is that? He merely speeds up the inevitable.”

Fidel looked Vargas square in the eye. “I should have killed you years and years ago,” he said. He took his hands from the arms of his chair and wrapped them around his stomach.

“There is no regret as bitter as the murder you didn’t commit. How true that is! But you didn’t kill me because you needed me, Fidel, needed me to ferret out your enemies, find who was whispering against you and bring you their names. Help you shut their mouths, cut out the rot without killing the tree.

“Kill me? Without me how would you have kept your wretched subjects loyal? Who would have kept these miserable guajiros starving on this sandy rock in the sea’s middle from cutting the flesh from your bones? Who would have provided the muscle to keep you in office when the Russians abandoned you and nothing went right? When everything you touched backfired?

“Kill me? Ha! That would have been like killing yourself.

“Now I have come for mine. Not centavos, like in the past. I want what is mine for keeping you in power all these years, for keeping the peasants from slicing your throat when in truth that was precisely what you deserved. You are a miserable failure, Fidel, as a man and as a servant of Cuba. And you are going to die a revered old man — God, what a joke! Hailed as the Cuban Washington for the next ten centuries ….”

Vargas sneered.

“Now I have the power of life or death, Fidel. I think you will make your statement in front of the camera. You will name me, Alejo Vargas, your loyal, trusted minister of interior as your successor, you will plead with all loyal Cubans everywhere to recognize the wisdom of your choice.”

Sweat ran in rivulets from Fidel’s face, dripped from his beard. His voice came out a hoarse whisper. “Forty years’ service to my country, and you expect me to hand Cuba over to you? To rape for your profit? Not on your life.”

“Don’t be a fool. You have nothing to bargain with.”

“Kill me. See what you gain,” Fidel said, his voice barely audible.

“You’ll die soon enough, never fear. But before you do Colonel Santana will butcher Mercedes on this table while you watch.”

“Have you no honor?”

“Don’t talk to me of honor. You have told so many lies you can’t remember ever telling the truth. You have profaned the Church, denied God, sent loyal Cuban soldiers to die in Angola, demanded that generation after generation give their blood to fulfill your destiny as Cuba’s savior. You have impoverished a nation, reduced them to beggary to salve your ego. I spit on you and all that you would have us become.”

And he did.

Fidel brought a hand up to wipe away the spittle. “Fuck you!” he whispered.

“And you too, Líder Maximo!” Vargas shot back. “I do not pretend to be God’s other son, strutting in green fatigues and spouting platitudes while the people worship me. But enough of this. Before we get to the camera, tell me where the gold is.”

“The gold?”

“The gold, Fidel. The gold from the peso coins that the Ministry of Finance melted down into ingots, the gold ingots that you and Che and Edis López and José Otero carried away. How much gold was there? Forty or fifty tons? You certainly didn’t spend it on the people of Cuba. Where is it?”

A grimace twisted Castro’s lips. “You’ll never find it, that’s for certain. Edis and José died within weeks of Che. I am the only living person who knows where that gold is; I am taking the secret to my grave.”

“The gold isn’t yours.”

“Nor is it yours, you son of a pig.”

“We will let you watch us cut up Mercedes. We will make a tiny incision on her abdomen, pull out a loop of small intestine. I will ask you questions, and every time you refuse to answer Colonel Santana will pull out more intestine. You will tell us everything we want to know or we will see what her insides look like. Colonel?”

Santana grabbed Mercedes by the arms. With one hand he grabbed the front of her dress and ripped it from her body.

Fidel Castro’s jaw moved. Then he went limp, slumping in his chair.

“Fidel!” Mercedes screamed.

Vargas leaped for Castro, pried open his jaw and raked a piece of celluloid from his mouth with his finger.

“Poison,” he said disgustedly. He felt Castro’s wrist for a pulse.

“Stone cold dead.” He tossed down the wrist and turned toward Mercedes.

“You gave him the poison! He had the capsule in his mouth.”

Alejo Vargas slapped her as hard as he could.

“And this is for insulting my mother, puta!” He slapped her again so hard she went to her knees, the side of her face numb. “If you do it again I will cut your tongue out,” he added, his voice almost a hiss.

Then Vargas took a deep breath and steadied himself. The sight of Fidel Castro’s corpse drained the rage from him and filled him with adrenaline, ready for the race to his destiny. He had waited all his life for this moment and now it was here.

“Listen to this,” the technician said, and handed the earphones to William Henry Chance. They were crammed into a tiny van with the logo of the Communications Ministry on the side. The van was parked on a side street near Chance’s hotel, but with an excellent view of the Interior Ministry.

Chance put on the headphones.

“We recorded this stuff early this morning,” the technician told Chance’s associate, Tommy Carmellini. “Getting to you without stirring up the Cubans was the trick. Wait until you hear this stuff.”

“What is it?” Carmellini asked.

“Vargas and his thug, Santana, in the minister’s office. They’re talking about a speech they want Castro to make in front of cameras. A political will, Vargas called it. They are writing it, debating the wording.”

“What do they want it to say?”

“They want Castro to name Vargas as his successor, his heir.”

“Will he do that?”

“They seem to think he will.”

“Have we heard anything back from Washington about that ship reference — the Colón? … Nuestra Señora de Colón?”

“No. Something like that will take days to percolate through the bureaucracy.”

“I was hoping the reference to North Koreans and biological warheads would light a fire under Somebody.”

“It always takes a while before we smell the smoke of burning trousers.”

Carmellini watched Chance’s face as he listened to the tape. William Henry Chance, attorney and CIA agent, certainly didn’t look like a man who would be at home in the shadow world of spies and espionage. But then appearances were often deceiving.

Carmellini had been a burglar — more or less semi-retired — attending the Stanford University Law School when he was visited one day by a CIA recruiter, a woman who took him to lunch in the student union cafeteria and asked him about his plans for the future. He still remembered the conversation. He was going into business, he said. Maybe politics. He thought that someday he might run for public office.

“A prosecution for stealing the Peabody diamond from the Museum of Natural History in Washington would probably crimp your plans, wouldn’t it?” she said sweetly. He gaped. Sat there like a fool with his mouth hanging open, the brain completely stalled.

He had seen her credentials, which certainly looked official enough. Central Intelligence Agency. The Government with a capital G. But there had never been the slightest hint that anyone was on his trail. Not even a sniff.

“It would do that,” he managed.

After a bit, the question of how she knew formed in his mind, and he began trying to figure out how to ask it in a nonincriminating way.

“You’re wondering, I suppose,” she said matter-of-factly between sips of her coffee, “how we learned of your involvement.”

Unable to help himself, he nodded yes.

“Your pal talked. The Miami PD got him on another burglary, so he threw you to the wolves to get a lighter sentence.”

Well, there it was. His very best friend in the whole world and the only guy who knew everything had sold him out.

“You need some better friends,” she said. “Your friend is a pretty small-caliber guy. A real loser. He got eight years on the state charge. Moving stolen property across state lines is a federal crime of course, and Justice hasn’t decided if they will prosecute.”

It quickly became plain that at that moment in his life, the CIA was his best career choice.

After finishing law school, Carmellini spent a year in the covert operations section of the agency. Now he was an associate of William Henry Chance, who had been with the CIA ever since he left the army after the Vietnam War. The cover was impeccable — both men were really practicing attorneys and CIA operatives on the side.

Carmellini remembered the first time he met William Henry Chance. He was running a ten-kilometer race in Virginia one weekend when Chance came galloping up beside him, barely sweating, and suggested they have lunch afterward.

Chance mentioned a name, Carmellini’s boss at the agency. “He said you were a pretty good runner,” Chance said, then began lengthening his stride.

Tommy Carmellini managed to stay with Chance all the way to the tape but it was a hell of a workout. Chance didn’t work at running; he loped along, all lean meat, bone, and sinew, a natural long-distance runner. Carmellini, on the other hand, was built more like a running back or middle linebacker.

About half of Carmellini’s time was spent on agency matters, half on the firm’s business. He was a better covert warrior than he was a lawyer, so he had to work hard to keep up with the bright young associates who had not the slightest idea that Carmellini or Chance were also employed by the CIA.

Sitting in a telephone company van in the middle of. Havana listening to intercepted conversations, Tommy Carmellini wondered if he should have told the CIA to stick it. He would probably be getting out of prison about now, free and clear.

And broke, of course. His friend had fenced the diamond and spent all the money, never intending to give Carmellini his share.

On the table were a set of photos the technicians had taken of the University of Havana science building. They had had the place under surveillance for the last two days.

Carmellini looked at the photos critically, as if he were going to burgle the joint. There were guards at every entrance, some electronic alarms: getting in would take some doing.

After a while Chance handed the headphones to a technician. He sat looking at Carmellini with a frown on his face.

“I think Vargas plans to kill Fidel,” Chance said finally.

“When?”

“Soon. Very soon. Today or tomorrow, I would imagine.”

“And then?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

The men left alive aboard Angel del Mar were unable to get the engine restarted, so it drifted helplessly with the wind and swell. Ocho took his turn in the tiny, cramped engine compartment. Something down inside the engine was broken, perhaps the crankshaft. Rotating the propeller shaft by hand made a clunky noise; at a certain point in the shaft’s rotation it became extremely difficult to turn. Admitting finally that repairing the motor was hopeless, Ocho backed out of the small compartment. His place was taken by someone else who wanted to satisfy himself Personally that the engine was indeed beyond repair.

After a while they all gave up and shut the door.

Without the engine they had to work the bilge pump manually. Fifteen minutes of intense effort cleared the bilges of water. With daylight coming through the hatch one could just see the water seeping in between the planks where the sea had pounded the caulking loose. It took about fifteen minutes for the bilges to fill, then they had to be pumped again. A quarter hour of work, a quarter hour of rest.

“If we can just keep pumping,” the old fisherman said, “we stay afloat.”

“If the water doesn’t come in any faster,” Ocho added. He was young and strong, so he spent hours sitting here in the bilge working the pump, watching the water come in.

Twenty-six people remained alive. The captain’s body was still in the wheelhouse, where he had fallen. No one wanted to take responsibility for moving him.

After a morning working the bilge pump, Ocho Sedano stood braced against the wheelhouse and, shading his eyes, looked carefully in all directions. The view was the same as it was yesterday, swells that ran off to the horizon, and above it all a sky crowded with puffy little clouds.

At least the sea had subsided somewhat. The wind no longer tore whitecaps off the waves. The breeze seemed steady, maybe eight or ten knots out of the southwest.

One suspected the boat was drifting northeast, riding the Gulf Stream. The nearest land in that direction was the Bahamas.

The United States was north, or perhaps northwest now. A whole continent was just over the horizon, with people, cities, restaurants, farms, mountains, rivers … if only they could get there.

Well, someone would see this boat drifting before too long. Someone in a plane or fishing boat, perhaps an American coast guard cutter or navy ship looking for drug smugglers. They would see the Angel del Mar drifting helplessly, give the people stranded on her water and food, then take them to Guantanamo Bay and make them walk through the gate back to Cuba. Or maybe they would be taken to hospitals in America.

Already some of these people needed hospitals. They had vomited too much, been without water for too long. They had become dehydrated, their electrolytes dangerously out of balance, and if left unattended would die. Just like the people swept over the side last night.

Of course, knowing all this, there was absolutely nothing Ocho Sedano could do. He too felt the ravages of thirst, felt the aching of the empty knot in his stomach. Fortunately he had not been seasick, had not retched his guts out until he had only the dry heaves like so many of these others lying helpless in the sun.

The wheelhouse cast a little shade, so he dragged several people in out of the sun. Maybe that would help a little.

The sea seemed to keep the boat broadside to it, so the shade didn’t move around too much, which was a blessing.

There wasn’t room in the shade for everyone.

“The sail,” said the fisherman. “There is an old piece of canvas around the boom. Let’s see if we can get it up.”

They worked with the canvas in the afternoon sun for over an hour, trying to rig it as a sail. It wasn’t really a sail, but an awning. Finally the fisherman said maybe it was best used to catch rain and protect people from the sun, so they rigged it across the boom and tied it there.

Ocho dragged as many people under it as he could, then lay exhausted on the board deck in the shade, his tongue a swollen, heavy, rough thing in his dry mouth.

Sweating. He was going to have to stop sweating like this, stop wasting his bodily fluids. Stop this exertion.

Nearby a child cried. She would stop soon, he thought, too thirsty to waste energy crying.

He sat up, looked for Dora. She was sitting in the shade with her back against the wheelhouse. Her father, Diego Coca, lay on the deck beside her, his head in her lap. She looked at Ocho, then averted her gaze.

“What should I have done?” he asked.

She couldn’t have heard him.

He got up, went over to where she was. “What should I have done?”

She said nothing, merely lowered her head. She was stroking her father’s hair. His eyes were closed, he seemed oblivious to his surroundings and the corkscrewing motion of the drifting boat. His body moved slackly as the boat rose and fell.

Ocho Sedano went into the wheelhouse. Above the captain’s swollen corpse the helm wheel kicked back and forth in rhythm to the pounding of the sea.

Ocho held his breath, turned the body over, went through the pockets. A few pesos, a letter, a home-made pocketknife, a worn, rusty bolt, a stub of a pencil, a button … not much to show for a lifetime of work.

Already the body was swelling in the heat. The face was dark and mottled.

He dragged the captain’s stiff body from the wheelhouse, got it to the rail and hooked one of the arms across the railing. Then he lifted the feet.

The dead man was very heavy.

Grunting, working alone since none of his audience lifted a hand to help, Ocho heaved the weight up onto the rail and balanced it there as the boat rolled. Timing the roll, he released the body and it fell into the sea.

The corpse floated beside the boat face up. The lifeless eyes seemed to follow Ocho.

He tore himself away, finally, and watched the top of the mast make circles against the gray-white clouds and patchy blue.

When he looked again at the water the captain’s corpse was still there, still face up. The sea water made a fan of his long hair, swirled it back and forth as if it were waving in a breeze. Water flowed into and out of his open mouth as the corpse bobbed up and down.

The long nights, the sun, heat, and exhaustion caught up with Ocho Sedano and he could no longer remain upright. He lowered himself to the deck, wedged his body against the railing, and slept.

“That freighter that left Gitmo last week, the one carrying the warheads?”

“I remember,” Toad Tarkington said. “The Colón, or something like that.”

“Nuestra Señora de Colón. She never made it to Norfolk.”

“What?” Toad stared at the admiral, who was holding the classified message.

“She never arrived. Atlantic Fleet HQ is looking for her right now.”

Toad took the message, scanned it, then handed it back.

“We sent a destroyer with that ship,” the admiral said. “Call the captain, find out everything you can. I want to know when he last saw that ship and where she was.”

In minutes Toad had the CO on the secure voice circuit. “We went up through the Windward and Mayaguanan passages,” Toad was told. “They were creeping along at three knots, but they got their engineering plant rolling again and worked up to twelve knots, so we left her a hundred miles north of San Salvador, heading north.” The captain gave the date and time.

“The Colón never arrived in Norfolk,” Toad said.

“I’ll be damned! Lost with all hands?”

“I doubt that very much,” Toad replied.

Toad got on the encrypted voice circuit, telling the computer technicians in Maryland what he wanted. Soon the computers began chattering. Rivers of digital, encrypted data from the National Security Agency’s mainframe computers at Fort Meade, Maryland, were bounced off a satellite and routed into the computers aboard United States.

On the screens before him he began seeing pictures, radar images from satellites in space looking down onto the earth. The blips that were the Colón and her escorting destroyer were easily picked out as they left Guantánamo Bay and made their way through the Windward Passage.

The screens advanced hour by hour. The three-knot speed of advance made the blips look almost stationary, so Toad flipped quickly through the screens, then had to wait while the data feed caught up.

Jake Grafton joined him, and they looked at the screens together.

The two blips crawled north, past Mayaguana, past San Salvador, then they sped up. The destroyer turning back was obvious.

As Jake and Toad watched, the blip that was the Colón turned southeast, back toward the Bahamas archipelago. Then the blip merged into a sea of white return.

“Now what?”

“It’s rain,” Jake said. “There was a storm. The blip is buried somewhere in that rain return. Call NSA. See if they can screen out the rain effect.”

He was right; the rain did obscure the blip. But NSA could not separate the ship’s return from that caused by rain.

“See if they can do a probability study, show us the most probable location of the Colón in the middle of that mess.”

The computing the admiral requested took hours, and the results were inconclusive. As the intensity of the showers increased and decreased, the probable location of the ship expanded and contracted like a living circle. Jake and Toad drank coffee and ate sandwiches as they waited and watched the computer presentations.

Jake wandered around the compartment looking at maps between glances at the computer screen and conversations over another encrypted circuit with the brass in the Pentagon. The White House was in the loop now — the president wanted to know how in hell a shipload of chemical and biological warheads could disappear.

“What do you think happened, Admiral?” Toad asked.

“Too many possibilities.”

“Do the people in Washington blame you for not having the Colón escorted all the way to Norfolk?”

“Of course. The national security adviser wants to know why the destroyer left the Colón.”

Toad bristled. “You weren’t told to escort that ship, you were told to guard the base. Escorting that ship out of the area wasn’t your responsibility.”

“Somebody is going to second-guess every decision I make,” Jake Grafton said, “all of them. They’re doing that right now. That comes with the stars and the job.”

“Hindsight is a wonderful thing.”

“I’ll be out on the golf course soon enough, and the only person who will second-guess me then will be my wife.”

Despite the best efforts of the wizards in Maryland and aboard ship, the location of the Colón under the rain of the cold front could not be established. Jake gave up, finally.

“Tell them to move forward in time. Let’s see where the ship was after the storm.”

But when the rain ceased, the computer could not identify the Colón from the other ship returns. There were thirty-two medium- to large-sized vessels in the vicinity of the Bahamas alone.

Toad stayed on the encrypted circuit to the NSA wizards. Finally he hung up the handset and turned to the admiral.

“They can assign track numbers to each blip, watch where they go, and by process of elimination come up with the most likely blips. There is a lot of computing involved. The process will take hours, maybe a day or two.”

Jake Grafton picked up the flight schedule, took a look, then handed it to Toad. “Put the air wing up in a surface search pattern. Let’s see what we can find out there now.”

Toad turned to the chart on the bulkhead. “Where do you want them to look?”

“From the north coast of Cuba north into the Bahamas. Look along the coast of Hispaniola, all the way to Puerto Rico. Do the Turks and Caicos. Have the crews photograph every ship they see. Have NSA establish current ship tracks, then match up what the air crews see with what the satellite sees. Then let’s run the current plot backward.”

“Someone got a lucky break with the rain storm,” Toad commented. “Maybe they were playing for the break, maybe it just happened.”

“Send a top secret message to the Gitmo base commander. Find out everything they know about the crew of that ship.”

Jake Grafton tapped the chart. “The president gave everyone in uniform their marching orders. Find that ship.”