Cuba

CHAPTER ELEVEN

After Rita pulled them out of the ocean and flew them back to the carrier, Toad Tarkington and Jake Grafton were checked in sick bay, then they showered and tried to snatch a few hours’ sleep.

Toad gave up on sleep — too much adrenaline. He lay in his bunk thinking about leaping over the bridge rail without knowing whether rocks or water lay beneath, and he shivered. The shock of the impact with the water had been almost a deliverance.

He turned on the light and looked at the photos of Rita and Tyler he had taped to the bulkhead. Really stupid, Toad-man, really stupid. Grafton must have checked the location of the rocks, knew where he could jump and where he couldn’t, and you never once thought to look.

He got up, dressed, and headed for the computers, where he typed out a classified E-mail for the people at the National Security Agency. After breakfast he was ready to brief Jake Grafton and Gil Pascal.

“Before she was stranded, Nuestra Señora de Colón went into this little Cuban port at the west end of Bahia de Nipe. She was there for six hours, then she steamed out and went on the rocks where we found her. If you look at this satellite photo you can see a boat nearby, probably taking the crew off after she piled up. The folks at NSA in Fort Meade say they can see ropes from the ship to this boat that the crewmen could slide down.”

Toad Tarkington stood back so Jake Grafton and Gil Pascal could study the satellite photos that he had pinned to a bulletin board in the mission planning spaces.

“Where are the weapons now?” Gil Pascal asked.

“In this fish warehouse.” Toad pointed at the photo with the tip of a pencil. “Right here.”

“It’s an easy SEAL target,” the Chief of Staff commented.

“Too easy,” Jake Grafton said, then regretted it.

“When did the freighter reach this port?”

“Noon, three days ago.”

“And they spent the afternoon off-loading it?”

“Yes. It went onto the rocks that night.”

“Too easy.” Now he was sure.

“What do you mean?”

“These people aren’t stupid. They know about satellite reconnaissance; they knew we would see them off-loading the ship in this port; they wanted us to see that. The question is, Why did they go to all the trouble of putting on a show for us? What are they hiding?”

Toad flipped through the satellite photos, looking at date-time groups. “Here is the ship coming into the bay, there it is against the pier at Antilla, here it is being offloaded, here is an IR photo of it going out to the rocks after dark, here is an IR shot of the freighter and the boat that probably took the crew off.”

“Radar images?”

Toad had a handful of those too.

“I want to know where this ship was between the time the destroyer left it and the time it showed up in this Cuban port.”

“NSA is still working on that stuff. Perhaps in a few hours, sir,” Toad said.

“Call me.”

“The weapons weren’t on the ship,” the national security adviser told the president in the Oval Office. “The ship was empty when it went on the rocks. Apparently the Cubans booby-trapped it — the thing exploded a few minutes after the admiral went aboard to inspect it.”

“Casualties?”

“None, sir. We were lucky. If the admiral had taken more people with him, I can’t say the results would have been the same.”

“So where are the weapons?”

“NSA thinks they are in a warehouse on the waterfront in the center of the town of Antilla. They are studying the satellite sensor data now.”

“Shit!” said the president.

William Henry Chance and Tommy Carmellini ate dinner in the main restaurant of the largest casino on the Malecon. The fact that 99 percent of the Cubans on the island didn’t eat this well was on Chance’s mind as he watched the waiters come and go amid the tables filled with European diners. Plenty amid poverty, an old Cuban story so common as to be unremarkable.

Carmellini merely played with his food; he was too tense to enjoy eating, had too much on his mind. Chance tried to concentrate on a superb string quartet playing classical music in the corner of the room.

To the best of his knowledge, he and Carmellini had not been followed on their expeditions around the capital, although he knew very well that a really first-class surveillance would be impossible to detect. With enough men, enough radios and automobiles, the subjects could be kept in sight at all times yet no one would be directly behind them, following where they could be seen or noticed. The subjects would seem to be alone, moving of their own will through the urban environment, yet their isolation would be an illusion.

He knew all that, yet he could detect no tails or signs of people that might be watching, taking an interest in him or Carmellini. Chance was no neophyte — he had a great deal of experience in this line of work, he knew what was possible and he knew what was likely.

He thought about all these things as the flawlessly decked-out Cuban waiter served coffee. The music formed a backdrop to the babble of conversation from his fellow diners, who were gabbing in at least five languages, perhaps six.

Chance sipped the coffee, let his eyes wander the room. No one was paying the slightest attention. Not a single furtive glance, no hastily broken eye contact, no one studiously ignoring him.

Well, if he and Carmellini were going to do it, tonight was the night. The longer they stayed in Havana, the more likely it was that they would attract the interest of the Department of State Security, the secret police. The interest of Santana and Alejo Vargas.

The truth was that Vargas might have burned them, might have devoted the resources necessary to learn everything about them. Vargas or his minions might be waiting tonight in the science hall, waiting to catch them red-handed, to embarrass the United States, perhaps even to execute Chance and Carmellini as spies.

In this line of work the imponderables were always huge, risks impossible to quantify. Still, he and Carmellini were going to have to look inside that building, see what was there.

If there was a biological weapons program in Cuba, it had to be in that building, which housed the largest, best-equipped laboratory known to be on the island. And the most knowledgeable people were nearby, the microbiologists and chemists and skilled lab technicians that would be needed to produce large quantities of microorganisms.

Chance was well aware that the most serious technical problem a researcher faced when constructing a biological weapon was how to keep the microorganisms alive inside a warhead or aerosol bomb for long periods of time. Some biological agents were easier to store than others, which was why they were most often selected for weapons research. For example, the spores of anthrax were very stable, as were the spores of the fungal disease coccidioidomycosis, which incapacitated but rarely killed its victims. Of course, the naturally occurring strains of an infectious disease could have been altered to make the microorganisms more stable, more virulent, or to overcome widespread immunity: years ago researchers produced a highly infective strain of poliomyelitis virus for just these reasons.

Idly he wondered about the microbiologist who ran the program. Who was he? What were his motivations? Perhaps that question answered itself in a totalitarian society, but it was worth researching, when he had some time. If he ever had some time.

“Ready?” Chance muttered to Carmellini, who drained the last of his coffee.

The two men paid their bill in cash and left the casino. They got into a car parked at the curb, one driven by one of their associates, and sped off into the night.

In a dark, deserted lane on the outskirts of the city the car in which Chance and Carmellini rode met the former telephone van they had used before, but now it bore the logo of a wholesale food supplier.

Inside the van Carmellini and Chance changed into black trousers, a black pullover shirt with a high collar, black socks, and black rubber-soled shoes. When they were dressed, they sat listening to the insects, drinking water, monitoring a radio frequency. One of their colleagues was observing the science building at the university. He checked in every fifteen minutes. So far he had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

“Why did you get into this line of work?” Chance asked Carmellini as they sat listening to the chirp of crickets.

“The challenge of it, I guess. I had an uncle who cracked a few safes … he was a legendary figure. The only time he ever went to the pen was for tax evasion: he did a couple years that time. I was always asking him questions. He told me if I wanted to be a safecracker, go to work for a firm that manufactured and installed the things. That was good advice. I installed safes for several summers while I was in college, got too cocky for my own good. Thought I had this stuff figured out, you know? One thing led to another, and before you know it I was cracking the things.”

Chance nodded.

“Here I am still at it. Only this time I won’t go to the pen if they catch me.”

“Yeah. The Cubans will probably execute us as soon as Vargas gets through with us, if there’s anything left to execute.”

“The way I figure it, I finally made the big leagues.”

“You optimists, always looking on the bright side.”

“Which brings up a point. You got us garroting wires and knives and pistols. I never carry weapons. I’m a safecracker, not a killer.”

“You’ll probably become a dead safecracker if they catch you in there.”

“I’ve never carried weapons. Ever.”

“A wise precaution if you are burgling gentlemen’s safes. You’re in the major leagues now.”

“Listen, Chance—”

“This isn’t a game, Tommy. Speaking for myself, I want to keep breathing. You’ll do as I say.”

The driver parked the van in an alley near the science building. He sat hunched over the wheel watching people on the sidewalks as Chance and Carmellini examined the building through binoculars. They were behind him, in the body of the van, looking forward through the windshield.

The way in, they decided, was through the roof. To get there, they would need to go into the building beside the science building, a lecture hall, ascend to the top floor, then get access to the roof. From here they would need to cross to the roof of the science hall, then find a way in.

The lecture hall was locked at night, though it was not guarded.

It was one in the morning when the van stopped in the empty alley behind the lecture hall. The two men in back pulled on latex gloves, swung on backpacks, then went out the van’s side door.

The door was not wired with an alarm. Carmellini picked the lock in thirty seconds, and they were in.

The van drove away as the door closed behind them.

They stood in the darkness letting their eyes adjust to the gloom.

Carmellini led off. Behind him Chance took out his pistol and thumbed off the safety, keeping the pistol pointed downward at the floor.

The weak light filtering through windows in classrooms and thence through open doors to the hallway did little to alleviate the darkness. The floors were uncarpeted concrete, the walls massive masonry, the ceilings at least twelve feet high. The building was devoid of decoration or even a trace of architectural imagination.

Carmellini moved like a shadow, making no detectable noise. Chance seemed to be making enough noise for both of them. He could hear himself breathing and his heart pounding, could hear the echoes of his footfalls in the cavernous hallways.

Keeping near the wall, they climbed the stairs to the second floor. Carmellini moved slowly, steadily, listened carefully before turning every corner, then lowered his head, keeping it well below the place one would naturally look for it, and peeped around the corner. Then he slithered around the corner out of sight; Chance followed as silently as he could.

The top of the staircase put them out on the fourth floor of the building. There had to be another staircase, probably very narrow, leading to the roof: Where might it be?

Carmellini was ready to go explore when he suddenly held up his hand. He held a finger to his lips.

Chance listened with all the concentration he could muster.

He could hear something! Voices?

Carmellini slowly inched along the hallway toward an open door, then froze there.

He came back down the hallway to Chance, put his lips against Chance’s ear. “A couple of kids making love.”

The silenced Ruger felt heavy in Chance’s hand.

“Gonna kill ’em?”

Not shooting them was a risk, sure.

Chance listened carefully. The lovers were whispering. No other sounds.

“Find the stairs up.”

The stairs were at the end of a hall, behind a locked door. Carmellini worked on the lock in the darkness for almost a minute before he pulled the door open.

They closed the door behind them and climbed the totally dark staircase, feeling their way. They ended up in a stuffy, black attic. Chance used the flashlight. Furniture, desks, chairs, stacked everywhere. In the middle of the attic was another stairway up.

The door to the roof was also locked, this time with a padlock, which was on the interior side of the door.

“What if there is a padlock on the other side?” Chance asked.

“Then we’re screwed. Unless you want to kick this thing down.”

“No.”

“Let’s try to get this lock open, then the door.”

“Okay.”

The lock was rusty, corroded. After several minutes’ effort Carmellini admitted his defeat and used a wire saw to cut through the metal loop of the lock. That took two minutes of intense effort but didn’t make much noise, considering.

With the lock off and hasp pulled back, they pushed at the door. It refused to open. With both men heaving, the door slowly opened with great resistance, and groaned terribly.

“That’ll wake the dead,” Chance muttered, and wiped the sweat from his face as Carmellini slipped out onto the roof.

Chance followed along.

The metal roof sloped away steeply in several different planes. Moving on hands and knees they worked themselves over toward the edge that faced the science building.

“Let me do this,” Carmellini whispered, and extracted the rope from his backpack. “Get out of the way, up by the door.”

Chance went.

The glare of the city and the streetlights below illuminated the roof quite well, too well in fact. While it was easy to see where to walk, anyone below who bothered to look could probably see the black shapes silhouetted against the glare of the sky.

Chance huddled against the dormer that formed the staircase up from the attic. He watched Carmellini on the edge of the roof, shaking out the rope, checking the grappling hook. Now he began to twirl the hook above his head, letting out more and more line to make the hook swing an ever-larger circle. Just as it seemed the circle was impossibly wide, he cast the line and hook across the chasm separating the buildings at a metal vent sticking up out of the roof.

The hook made an audible metallic sound as it hit the far roof, then it began sliding off.

Carmellini quickly pulled in line in huge coils, but too late to stop the grappling hook from sliding off the roof.

He kept pulling on the line. In seconds he had the hook in his hand and bent down against the roof.

Someone was down below. Even back here Chance could hear voices. He scanned the surrounding roofs, the streets that he could see, the blank windows looking at him from other buildings.

Minutes ticked by, the voices below faded.

Now Carmellini was standing, swinging the rope and hook, now casting it … and it caught! He tugged at it, worked his way back up the roof to where Chance was kneeling.

Carmellini put the end of the rope around the dormer, pulled it as taut as possible, then tied it off.

“Well, there is our way across,” the younger man said. “You want to go first, or should I?”

“Anchored solid, is it?”

“You bet.”

“Age before beauty,” Chance said, and tugged on leather gloves, wrapped his hands around the rope. He worked out hand over hand, then draped his lower legs over the rope. His backpack dangled from his shoulders.

Hanging from the rope like this took a surprising amount of physical strength. The rope sagged dangerously with his weight, becoming a vee with him at the bottom, which made it more difficult to move along it.

Gritting his teeth, trying to keep his breathing even, William Henry Chance worked his way along the rope, taking care not to look down. At one point he knew he was over the chasm but it didn’t matter: if he slipped off the rope the fall would kill him, whether he hit the roof and slid off or missed it clean.

He kept going, doggedly, straining every muscle, until he felt the bag dragging along the roof of the science building. Only then did he unhook his legs from the rope and let them down to the roof. Still pulling on the rope, he heaved himself up by the vent and grabbed it.

The grappling hook was holding by one tong. He wrapped the rope around the vent and set the hook, then tugged several times to make sure it would hold.

Wiping his forehead, he breathed heavily three or four times. He had one hand on the rope, so he felt the tension increase with Carmellini’s weight. He peered at the other building. Carmellini came scurrying along the rope like a goddamn chimpanzee.

The younger man was over the gap between the buildings when the rope broke, apparently where it was anchored atop the lecture hall. Carmellini’s body fell downward in an arc and disappeared from view. An audible thud reached Chance as Carmellini’s body smacked against the side of the science building.

“Our Lady of Colón was under this storm system, out of sight of the satellites passing over, for six hours,” Toad Tarkington explained to Jake Grafton. They were bent over a table in Mission Planning, studying satellite radar images. “When next it reappeared, it was steaming for Bahia de Nipe at twelve knots, yet its average speed of advance while it was out of sight was two knots.”

“Two?”

“Two.” Toad showed him the positions and measurements.

“So it was stopped somewhere.”

“Or made a detour.”

“What if the ship rendezvoused with another ship and the warheads were transferred?”

“Possible, but if you look at these other ship tracks, it doesn’t seem very likely. All these other tracks were going somewhere, with speed-of-advance averages that seem plausible.”

“Okay. What if the ship stopped and the crew dumped some of the weapons in the water? Maybe all of them. Dumped them in shallow water for someone to pick up later. How deep is the water in that area?”

“That area is the Bahamas, Admiral. Pretty shallow in a lot of places in there.”

“Have NSA put that area under intense surveillance. Have them study every satellite image since that storm passed. If those warheads were dumped overboard from the Colón, someone is going to come along to pick them up. We have to get there before that somebody gets them aboard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ask Atlantic Fleet to get a P-3 out to that area as soon as possible, have the crew search for anchored or stationary ships. Any ships not actually under way. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jake Grafton rubbed his forehead, trying to decide if there was anything else he should be doing.

“Uh, Admiral …” Toad began, his voice low. “I want to thank you for saving my assets last night. I about had a heart attack after we jumped over that rail, everything behind us blowing up, wondering if we were going to go into the water or splatter ourselves on a rock pile. That was truly a religious experience.”

A wry grin crossed Jake Grafton’s face. “Wish I had paid more attention to where those rocks were before crunch time arrived. Talk about jumping out of the frying pan into the fire! For a few seconds there I thought we had had the stroke.”

“You didn’t know?” Toad was aghast.

“What say we don’t mention this to Rita or Callie?” Jake said, and walked away. He had another meeting to attend.

William Henry Chance grabbed the rope, which extended over the side on the science building roof into the darkness. The rope was still taut. Tommy Carmellini must be hanging on the end of it!

Chance braced himself and began pulling, hand over hand, and almost ruptured himself.

He got no more than six feet of rope up when he realized he wasn’t in the right position. Moving carefully, he braced himself against the vent pipe and got the rope over his shoulders. Now he used his whole body to help raise it.

Two more feet.

Four.

A dark spot, a head, coming above the eave, struggling to climb.

Chance held the rope steady as Carmellini heaved himself over the edge of the roof and began crawling up the slope, still holding onto the rope.

“Man, I thought I had bit the big one,” Carmellini said between gasps. Leaning against the chimney, Chance blew equally hard.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Carmellini muttered.

“Next time get a desk job.”

“Why in hell do you think I went to law school?”

Chance coiled the rope and inspected it. It had frayed through where it was wrapped around the dormer on the other building. He showed the place to Carmellini, then put the rope in his knapsack.

“Let’s go.”

Carmellini used a glass cutter on a pane of a dormer window, then they went in.

Chance took a chance and used the flashlight. This attic was stacked with laboratory equipment: dishes, warmers, mixing units, microscopes, a spectrometer, a bunch of equipment large and small that he couldn’t identify.

“Let’s put on our masks,” Chance said, “just in case.”

They donned the gas masks, made sure the filter elements were on tight. The mask could provide only filtered air: it had an inhalation and exhalation valve and a black faceplate with two large clear lens to see through. The mask was attached to a hood that went over the head and shoulders of the user. Pull strings sealed the hood so air could not get in around the user’s neck. When they had the mask on, both men removed the leather gloves they had been wearing and donned a pair of latex gloves. They stuffed their trousers inside their socks.

With Carmellini in the lead, the two men stealthily descended the stairs.

The laboratory was in the basement, so Chance and Carmellini had to pass through the main floor to get there.

The elevator would be the best way from the top of the building to the bottom, but it might be monitored from the guards’ station at the main entrance. Certainly it should be: nothing could be simpler than to have a warning light come on when the electric motor that ran the elevator engaged. Chance and Carmellini took the stairs.

Carmellini was leading the way now. Using the flashlight, he examined the door to the staircase for alarms, then opened the door a crack and examined the stairwell. Fortunately the stairwell was lit. If this building were in the States it would be festooned with infrared sensors, motion detectors, microphones, and remote cameras controlled from a central station. However, this was Cuba.

At each landing, Carmellini extended a small periscope and looked around the corner.

On the second floor his inspection of the stairs leading down revealed a camera mounted on a wall above the landing, focused on the door in from the main floor. There was probably a camera mounted above the door to the main floor, a camera that looked back toward this camera.

Carmellini studied the camera through the periscope, twisted the magnification to the maximum and refocused. He kept the instrument steady by bracing himself against the wall.

The security camera was fifteen or twenty years old if it was a day. No doubt there were ten or twelve cameras on a sequential switch, so the video from each one was shown in turn on a monitor at the guard’s station. The guard was probably reading something, eating, talking to another guard, if he was paying any attention at all.

From his backpack Carmellini removed a strobe unit and battery. He plugged the thing together, switched on the battery, and waited for the capacitor to charge. The bulb had a set of silver metal feathers around it so that the light could be focused. Carmellini tightened the feathers around the bulb as much as they would go. When the capacitor’s green light came on, he eased the light around the corner, exposing his head for the first time. One quick squint to line up the light, then holding the thing tightly against the wall to steady it, he retracted his head, closed his eyes and buried his head in the crook of his arm. William Henry Chance did likewise. The short, intense burst of light should burn out the camera’s light-level sensor, rendering it inoperative.

The flash was so bright Carmellini saw it through his closed eyelids.

The two men slipped down the stairs. Standing just under the camera that had just been disabled, Carmellini used the periscope again. Yes. Another camera, just over the door to the main floor.

He waited ten more seconds for the capacitor to fully charge, then stuck it around the corner and flashed the light.

“Let’s go!”

With Chance behind him, Tommy Carmellini went down the stairs to the main floor and used his periscope to examine the landing on the stairs leading down. Nothing.

On down to the landing, peeking around the corner.

“Motion detector,” he whispered to Chance.

Chance was breathing heavily inside the mask. It wasn’t the exertion, he decided, but the tension. He must be audible at fifty paces. He tried to ignore the sound of his own rasping and listen.

Were the guards coming? Two cameras were down — had they noticed? Would they come to inspect the things?

Or were the guards congregating right now, calling in troops?

“Microwave or infrared?” Chance asked, referring to the motion detector.

“One of each.”

“Beautiful.”

“Probably two independent systems.”

“Oh, Christ!”

“That’s a poor way to install them, actually. This is old technology, Mission Impossible stuff. We’ll just walk by the infrared detectors — all this clothing will help shield our body heat. If we move right along we should be okay.”

“And the microwave system?”

Carmellini had already removed a device the size of a portable CD player from his backpack. “Jammer,” he said, and examined the controls.

He turned it on and, holding it in front of him, walked down to the motion detectors. The one on the left was the microwave one, with a coaxial cable leading away from it. Carmellini pulled the cable an inch or so away from the wall and wedged the jammer into that space.

“Come on,” he whispered, and opened the door into the basement.

The two men found themselves in a hallway. Directly over their head was a camera that pointed the length of the hall, covering the door halfway down that must lead into the lab.

Carmellini took a small battery-powered camcorder from Chance’s backpack. He held it under the security camera for about a minute, filming the view down the hallway, then pushed the play button. The device now replayed the same scene on a continuous loop, and would do so until the batteries were exhausted. He slid a collar around the coaxial cable leading from the camera, tightened it, then used a pair of wire cutters to slice the coax away from the security camera.

The door into the lab had an alarm on it, one mounted high.

“The alarm rings if the circuit is broken,” Carmellini whispered. “It’s designed to prevent unauthorized exit from the lab, not entry. Won’t take a minute.”

He worked swiftly with a penknife and length of wire. By wiring around the contact on the door and jamb, he made the contact impossible to break.

Sixty seconds later he gingerly tried the door. Reached for the handle and—

Locked!

Now to work with the picks.

“They locked an emergency exit?” Chance demanded.

“Yeah. Real bastards, huh?”

Tommy Carmellini knew his business. When the lock clicked, he put his picks back in his knapsack, pulled the knapsack into position, and palmed his pistol.

“You ready?”

“Yeah.”

Carmellini eased the door open, looked quickly each way with just one eye around the jamb.

The door opened into a well-lit foyer. The entire opposite wall of the room was made of thick glass, which formed a wall of a large, well-equipped laboratory. No people in sight. And no security cameras or motion detectors.

Both men came in, pistols in their hands and pointed at the floor. Chance pulled the door shut behind them.

They knelt by the long window and with just their heads sticking up, surveyed the scene.

Row after row of culture trays, units for mixing chemicals, deep sinks, storage cabinets, big sterilizing units, stainless steel containers by the dozen, analysis equipment, retorts, microscopes …

“Holy damn,” Carmellini said softly. “They are sure as hell growing something in there.”

“Something,” Chance agreed.

On the end of the room to their left was a large air lock.

“That’s the way in.”

“Do we have to go in?”

“We need samples from those culture trays.”

Chance led the way. He walked, holding the pistol down by his right thigh.

Around the corner slowly, looking first.

There were actually two air locks. After they went through the first one, they found themselves in a dressing room with a variety of white one-piece coveralls hanging on nails. Each man donned one, pulling it on over his clothes, then zipping it tightly, fastening the cuffs with Velcro strips. Gas masks were there too, but they were already wearing masks.

The second lock was equipped with a large vacuum machine which suctioned dust and microorganisms from the white coveralls.

They opened the door to the lab and stepped inside.

“The culture trays,” Chance said, and led the way. From his backpack he took syringes, quickly screwed on needles.

The glass trays sat on mobile racks, three dozen to a rack. They were readily transparent, so he could look inside, see the bacteria growing on the food mix at the bottom of the tray.

He selected a rack of trays, pulled one tray from the rack and laid it on the marble-topped counter nearby. He opened it. Used a syringe. With the syringe about half-full, he unscrewed the needle, deposited the syringe in a plastic freezer bag and sealed it.

Meanwhile Carmellini had been exploring. As Chance sealed up his second sample from this rack of trays, Carmellini came back, motioning with his hand. “Better come look. Looks like they are growing several kinds of cultures.”

The second kind looked similar to the first, but the organisms were of a slightly different color. Chance selected a tray, took a sample, then replaced the tray on the rack, as he had the first one.

He was finishing his second sample from this batch when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Carmellini motion for him to get down.

He dropped to a sitting position, finished sealing the syringe bag.

He put the samples into his knapsack, reached up on the countertop for his pistol.

Carmellini was creeping along below the counter with his pistol in his hand.

Someone was in the air lock. By looking down the aisle between the counters Chance could just see the top of his head as he pulled on the gas mask in the dressing room.

Whoever it was was coming in.

Carmellini looked at Chance, lifted his hands in a query: Now what?

Chance made a downward motion. Maybe this person would just come in, get something, then leave.

It would be impossible, he decided, to sneak out while the person was in the lab. Although the lab was large, at least a hundred feet long, anyone in the air locks could be seen from anywhere in the lab unless the viewer was behind a piece of large equipment.

Shit!

Well, the Cubans were about to discover that their lab was no longer a secret. That was not a disaster; unfortunate, perhaps. Perhaps not.

The person coming in wore a complete protection suit and mask. Not a square inch of skin was exposed.

Large for a woman. A man, probably. Almost six feet. Hard to tell body weight under a bag suit like that, but at least 180 pounds.

He checked the safety on the pistol. On. With his thumb he moved it to the off position, checked it visually.

Now the person was coming out of the air lock, walking purposefully down the aisle between the counters and trays of cultures.

William Henry Chance stood up, pointed the pistol straight in the face of the masked person walking toward him.

The man froze. If it was a man. Stopped dead and slowly raised his hands.

Out of the corner of his eye Chance saw Tommy Carmellini moving toward the Cuban.

“Find something to tie him with,” he said loudly, hoping Carmellini would understand his muffled voice.

Carmellini seemed to. He held up a roll of duct tape. He moved toward the man, who turned his head so that he could get a good look at Carmellini.

Carmellini had his pistol in his hand. His holster was under the white coverall, as was Chance’s, so both men had carried their pistols with them in their hands.

Now Carmellini placed the pistol on a counter, well out of the man’s reach. He walked behind him.

The man pushed backward, slamming Carmellini against a counter.

Damnation! Chance couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting Carmellini. As if the .22-caliber bullets in the Ruger would drop a big man at this distance.

Chance walked around the counter, up the aisle, intending to shoot the Cuban in the head from as close as he could get.

Carmellini kicked violently and the Cuban went flying back into a rack of culture trays. Three or four of the trays fell from the rack and shattered on the floor.

The man launched himself at Carmellini, who ducked under a right cross. The man kept right on going, heading for the pistol lying on the counter.

Carmellini caught him by the back of his coverall and swung him bodily around. With a mighty punch he sent the man reeling backward, straight into the rack of culture trays he had already hit. The man slipped, fell amid the broken glass.

Without sights, wearing the silencer, the Ruger was hard to aim. Chance squeezed off a round anyway. Where the bullet went he never knew.

Before he could fire again the man screamed in agony. All his muscles went rigid. He bent over backward, screaming in a high-pitched wail.

“Let’s go!” Carmellini yelled.

The man got control of an arm. He tore at his mask, trying to get it off, all the while screaming and thrashing around on the floor amid the broken glass.

“Holy shit.”

The stricken man finally just ran out of air. All motion stopped. He was bent over backward, almost double, his head within a few inches of his heels.

Careful not to step on the broken glass, Chance bent over the man. He carefully took off the gas mask.

Eyes rolled back in his head, every muscle taut in a fierce rigor, the man seemed almost frozen.

“He must have torn his suit,” Chance muttered to himself. The Cubans must have vaccinated everyone with access. Why didn’t the vaccination protect him?

“Let’s get our asses through the air lock and get the fuck outta here,” Carmellini said loudly.

They stood in the vacuum room for the longest time, neither man willing to be the first to leave.

“We must go,” Carmellini said at last, after almost ten minutes of suction, after using a high-pressure jet of air from a hose to blast every nook and fold of the coverall.

They hung the coveralls on the nails. Stood in the next air lock, were vacuumed again, then they were out, still wearing their gas masks.

“We might kill everyone in Havana,” Chance said.

“We’ll never know it,” Carmellini shot back. “We’ll be in hell before they are.”

“Can’t figure out why the vaccination didn’t protect him.”

“Later. How the hell are we going to get out of here?”

“The easiest way is to just walk out the front door, shoot both the guards, and walk around the corner to the van.”

“They’ll see us going up the stairs.”

“The elevator. We’ll use the elevator. Keep the pistols where they can’t see them.”

“You are fucking-A crazy, man. One crazy motherfucker.”

The elevator was right there with the door open. Chance walked in. When Carmellini was aboard, he pushed the button to take it up.

With their pistols down by their legs, they walked out of the elevator, straight for the guard shack at the front door.

Only one man was there, reading something. He looked up as they approached. Now he stood.

“Qué pasa—?” he began, and Chance shot him in the forehead from six feet away.

The guard toppled over backward.

Chance and Carmellini kept going, out the door at a walking pace, down the sidewalk under the streetlights looking like two refugees from a flying saucer, and around the corner. They jerked open the rear door of the van and jumped in.

Chance ripped off the mask.

“Let’s get the hell outta here,” he roared at the driver, who was as surprised at their sudden appearance as the guard had been. “Drive, damn it, drive!”

As the van jostled and swayed through the city streets, they sat in the back staring at each other, waiting for the disease to hammer them.

Waited, and waited, and waited …