Cuba

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

As Jake Grafton and the others climbed the stairs toward the roof of La Cabana Prison, Tommy Carmellini doused his flashlight and held it in his left hand. He stood in the darkness waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light.

He had a pistol that the marines aboard ship had given him, a 9-mm, that felt cold and comforting in his grip. He closed his eyes, listened to the cheers and shouts from the roof, waited until he heard the chopper and Osprey get airborne.

Finally the corridors of the old fortress grew quiet.

Santana was in here someplace.

Jake Grafton had his thing and he was hard at it. William Henry Chance had his thing, trying to control biological and chemical weapons in Third World countries, and he had died doing it. Tommy Carmellini’s thing was cracking safes. Sure, he was doing it for the CIA now instead of stealing diamonds from rich matrons, but somehow that wasn’t enough. There comes a time in a man’s life when he begins to tally up the score. When Carmellini realized Grafton wasn’t going to take the time to step on the cockroach Santana, he knew he had to.

He stepped forward now, walking the way Hector had indicated that Santana had gone.

Taking his time in the near-total darkness — there was just enough light to see the outline of the corridor — walk — ing, listening, walking, listening again, Tommy Carmellini moved to the end of the corridor and stopped.

He could hear metal on metal, as if someone was trying to open a lock. The sound came from the corridor on the right.

Tommy Carmellini bent as low as he could get, eased his head around the corner.

Yes, the sound was clearer now.

Ever so slowly he edged around the corner, crossed the corridor to the other side, began moving forward into the blackness, toward the sound.

The noise stopped.

Carmellini froze. Closed his eyes to concentrate on the sound.

The pistol was heavy in his hand.

The sound began again.

Forward, ever so stealthily, moving like a glacier, just flowing slowly, silently, effortlessly ….

The man was just ahead. Working on a lock. Probably on one of those steel gates.

Again the sound stopped.

Carmellini froze, not trusting himself to breathe.

The other man was here, he could feel him. But where?

Time seemed to stop. Tommy Carmellini held his breath, stood crouched but frozen, knowing that the slightest sound would give away his position.

Santana was …

Suddenly Carmellini knew. He was right …

There! He pointed the pistol and pulled the trigger.

The muzzle flash strobed the darkness, and revealed Santana swinging the butt of his rifle, swinging it at Carmellini’s head.

He tried to duck but the rifle struck his shoulder and sent him sprawling. He held on to the pistol, triggered two more shots, which came like giant thunderclaps, deafening him with their roar.

The flashlight was gone, lost when he fell. His left shoulder was on fire where the rifle butt struck him, his arm numb. He could hear Santana running, shuffling along, the sound fading.

He felt for the flashlight with his right hand, couldn’t find it, paused and listened and searched some more. There! He picked it up without releasing the pistol. Now he put the pistol between his legs, tried to work the flashlight with his right hand. It was broken. He set it on the floor out of the way.

He listened, heard the faintest of sounds, then nothing.

Tommy Carmellini slowly got to his feet and began moving back the way he had come, after Santana.

“Showtime One Oh Two, Battlestar Strike. You are cleared to engage the bogey with a gun. Weapons free gun only, acknowledge.”

“Weapons free gun only, aye,” sung out Stiff Hardwick, and jammed his throttles forward to the mechanical stop. The engines wound up quickly; Stiff eased the throttles to the left, stroked the afterburners. The big fighter leaped forward and began closing the five-mile gap between the two planes.

Carlos Corrado glanced over his left shoulder, for the hundredth time, expecting to see nothing, but this time he saw the plume of flame that was Hardwick’s burners. The Yanqui must be right behind me.

Enough!

He slammed the throttles to the hilt, dropped the left wing and pulled right up to six Gs. The MiG-29 then showed why it was one of the most maneuverable fighters in the world — it turned on a dime.

As it did, Carlos Corrado fought the G and flipped his radar switch to the transmit position.

Leveling up after a 180-degree turn, the radar scope came alive … and there was the American — close. Too close! Jesus Christ!

Without time to even consider the problem, Carlos Corrado punched off an Aphid missile, which roared off the rail in a blaze of fire straight for the F-14.

Sailor Karnow saw the bogey wind into a left turn, and called it to Stiff, who instinctively lowered his right wing to stay in the MiG’s rear quadrant.

What Stiff wasn’t prepared for was the unbelievable quickness with which the MiG-29. whipped around and pumped off a missile.

The sight of the fiery exhaust of the Aphid missile coming at him from eleven o’clock and the wailing of the ECM in his ears, telling him that he was being painted by a MiG-29 pulse-doppler radar, reached Stiff Hardwick’s brain at the very same instant. Before Stiff could react in any way, the missile shot over his canopy inches above his head. Fortunately for Stiff and Sailor and their progeny yet unborn, the Aphid had not flown far enough to arm, so the missile passed harmlessly.

“Holy shit!” Sailor shouted into her oxygen mask.

Stiff Hardwick hadn’t spent the last four years flying fighters for nothing — his instincts were finely honed too. As the Aphid went over his head, he jerked the nose of his fighter toward the closing MiG, visible only as a bogey symbol on the HUD, and pulled the trigger on the stick. The 20-mm M-61 six-barreled cannon in the nose lit up like a searchlight as a river of fire streaked into the darkness.

Carlos Corrado saw the finger of God reaching for him and slammed his stick back, then sideways. The MiG’s nose came up steeply and the right wing dropped in a violent whifferdill that carried it up and out of the way of the fiery stream of cannon shells.

Completing the roll, Carlos Corrado pushed the nose of his MiG downward, toward the city, and let the plane accelerate without afterburners, the light of which would beacon to the American. Or Americans, if there were more than one, which was probable.

Carlos pulled out just above the rooftops and thundered across the city. He had lost track of the enemy’s location because he could not see him visually or with his radar. He desperately needed his GCI site just now to call the enemy’s position, but of course the GCI people had been knocked off the air and were either dead or drunk.

Still, the contest appealed to his sporting instincts. He decided to try for one in-parameters missile shot before he called it a night and went looking for a bar.

His radar was still on, still looking at nothing.

Without further ado, Carlos pulled the stick back and let the MiG’s nose climb. Up past the vertical, G on hard, the MiG used its fabulous turning rate to fly half of a very tight loop. Upside down with its nose on the horizon, Carlos slammed the stick sideways and rolled upright. The F-14 was out to his left, turning toward him. Corrado flipped his switches to select an infrared missile, turned toward the American until he got a tone in his headset, and squeezed it off.

Then he killed his radar and turned hard ninety degrees right to exit the fight.

“Oh, no,” Stiff Hardwick swore as he saw the missile coming at him from ten o’clock.

He lit his afterburners and dropped the right wing slightly and willed the Tomcat to accelerate, trying to force the missile into an overshoot, while he punched off chaff and flares with a button on his right throttle.

The missile tried to make the turn but couldn’t. Perhaps the IR seeker in the nose locked onto a flare. In any event, as it flew past the tail of the Tomcat its proximity fuse caused the warhead to detonate, spraying shrapnel into empty air.

The MiG-29 was gone. It had disappeared.

“You know, dickwick,” Sailor Karnow told her pilot, “I think God is really trying to tell us something.”

Carlos Corrado knew that he had had more than his share of luck this night. Although he was flying a tremendously maneuverable airplane, the electronic detection and countermeasures systems were generations behind the F-14 that had followed him around. Why the F-14 had not shot him down he couldn’t guess, but he was wise enough to know that luck sorely tried is bound to turn.

He decided to put his MiG on the ground while it was still in one piece. Fortunately there was an airport nearby, Havana’s José Marti International, right over there in the middle of that vast dark area. Since there was a war on, someone had turned off the runway lights.

Corrado pulled off the power, let the fighter slow to gear speed, then snapped the landing gear down. Flaps out, retrim, and swing out for an approach to where the runway ought to be. On final he turned on his landing light and searched the darkness below.

There! Concrete.

He squeaked the MiG on and got on the brakes.

He left the landing light on to taxi.

“Showtime One Oh Two, the MiG is landing at José Martí.” That was the air force controller in the Sentry AWACS plane.

Stiff Hardwick was climbing through five thousand feet at full power when he heard that transmission. Fortunately he had committed a map of the Havana area to memory, so he knew precisely where José Marti International lay. He cut the power and lowered the nose.

“What in hell do you think you’re doing, Stiff?” Sailor demanded.

“Shut up.”

“We barely got enough fuel to make the tanker as it is, pea brain. You go swanning around down here for a few more minutes begging that Cuban to give you the shaft and we’ll be swimming home.”

“I’m gonna get that Cuban son of a bitch. Gonna strafe him on the ground. Gonna kill that bastard deader than last week’s beer.”

Sailor Karnow knew the pilot was serious. Here was a frustrated man if ever she had met one. As the plane dove for the black hole that was José Martf International, she tried to reason with Stiff:

“You can’t shoot the guy on the ground at a civilian airport. There’s no lights down there, you might kill a bunch of civilians!”

“There he is! I can see the fucking guy taxiing — he’s still got his landing light on! There he is!”

Sailor Karnow was losing her patience. “You pull that trigger, Jake Grafton will cut your balls off, you silly son of a bitch!”

Stiff Hardwick knew the jig was up. Sailor was right — he hated women who were always right. He reached up and safetied the master arm switch. And kept the Tomcat coming down.

Edged the throttles forward as he dropped lower and lower, boresighting that barely moving plane down there with the single landing light shining forward. The needle on the airspeed indicator crept past Mach 1.

The radio altimeter deedled, he kept going lower ….

“Don’t fly into the ground, you idiot!” Sailor pleaded from the rear cockpit.

The fear in her voice probably saved both their lives. Stiff eased back on the stick just a smidgen, an almost microscopic amount, so the F-14 rose another ten feet above the ground as it roared over Carlos Corrado’s taxiing MiG-29 like a giant supersonic missile. The American fighter passed a mere four feet over the MiG’s tail; the shock wave shattered the MiG’s canopy.

Then Stiff pulled the stick back in his lap and lit the burners and went rocketing upward like a bat out of hell.

“Better get on the horn and get us a tanker, baby, or you’re gonna be my date in a life raft tonight.”

Sailor had the last word. “Honest to God, dickwick, you oughta think about taking up another line of work.”

Tommy Carmellini wondered if he had managed to put a bullet into Santana. That was a lot to hope for, but still … three shots, and the man no more than five, six feet away?

With luck.

A man needs luck as he goes through life. Life is timing, and timing is experience plus luck.

Carmellini wondered just how much experience sneaking along dark corridors Santana had had through the years. He hadn’t impressed Carmellini as the sneaking type. One never knew, though.

He found himself moving slower and slower, listening with his eyes closed, concentrating. He could hear …

Breathing. Coming from somewhere ahead. Definitely breathing.

Jake Grafton had Rita circle out over the harbor while he talked to other airplanes he had inbound. After a few minutes, he told her to fly toward the university.

Looking through the infrared viewer, he could see that the streets around the university were deserted. Not a car or truck moving, none parked, no people.

Alejo Vargas was down there, all right.

Jake got out of the copilot’s seat and went aft to talk to Hector Sedano, who was sitting beside Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt. Jake pulled one of the Spanish-speaking marines along to translate.

“Do you know of the biological-warfare laboratory in the science building of the university?”

No, Hector didn’t. Jake took a minute to explain.

“My government has sent me to destroy the polio viruses that are in that lab, and the equipment that was used to grow them. Do you have any objection to me doing that?”

Hector did not, as long as innocent lives were not lost unnecessarily.

Talking loudly over the aircraft’s high internal noise, Jake continued while the young marine, a buck sergeant, translated: “I promise you, we will proceed with all due care. The stakes are very high, those viruses must be destroyed. If you will join me in this humanitarian effort representing the new Cuban government, I believe the job can be done with a minimum loss of life.”

“Tell me of this laboratory,” Hector Sedano demanded. “What you know of it, and how it came to be.”

The feeling was coming back in Tommy Carmellini’s left arm. It hurt like hell now, like someone had tried to carve on his shoulder with a dull knife.

Ignore the arm. Listen!

He froze. He hadn’t realized it, but there were cells on both sides of the corridor, cells with open doors.

Santana must be in one of them. Which one?

A sound like a sigh.

He heard it! From the left, maybe ten feet.

Frozen like a chunk of solid ice, Carmellini didn’t move. He continued to breathe, but very shallowly, taking all the time in the world.

Minutes passed. How many he couldn’t say.

He could hear the murmur of the mob somewhere below. No doubt they had turned all the prisoners loose.

The other man was being extremely quiet. Extraordinarily so.

Carmellini finally began moving, reluctantly, ever so slowly, like the shadow of the sun as it marches across a stone floor. And he made about the same amount of noise.

He was in the cell, feeling his way … when his left foot touched something that shouldn’t be there.

Like a cat he reacted, the pistol booming faster than thought.

In the muzzle flash he saw that Santana lay stretched on his back on the floor, his eyes open to the ceiling.

The bastard was dead.

From the cockpit Jake Grafton could see the crowds below on the streets. Rita had the Osprey flying at 2,000 feet, and Jake could see the swarms of people with his naked eye, without using the infrared viewer, though he used it occasionally to check on the progress of the crowd.

Rita swung the Osprey over the university district, and he picked out the science building.

He watched the mass of humanity flow into the district, surge along toward the science building.

He used the viewer, steadied it carefully and cranked up the magnification. Yes, the knot of humanity at the front of the crowd, that had to be around Ocho. El Ocho, as the Cubans called him.

The boy was fearless. This afternoon when Jake explained to Ocho that there was a strong probability that the soldiers would refuse to fire on the civilians, might even disobey their officers if ordered to fire, Ocho merely nodded.

Perhaps the ordeal in the ocean had toughened Ocho, or perhaps he had always been impervious to fear. That emotion affected people in an extraordinary variety of ways, Jake knew.

Looking through the viewer it was difficult to be sure, but apparently soldiers were joining the crowd with Ocho as he walked along.

He wanted to let Hector accompany Ocho, but his better judgment told him no. A single sniper, one frightened soldier, and the last best hope of Cuba might be dead in the street. With the viruses still in that lab, that was a risk Jake Grafton was not yet prepared to take.

As he watched, he wished he were with Ocho. That walk must be sublime, he thought.

Ocho Sedano knew a great many people because he had spent years accompanying his brother to speeches, sitting in planning sessions, helped him dig holes to hide weapons.

Many more people, however, knew Ocho. Every Cuban between eight and eighty knew of the star pitcher who threw the sizzling fastballs and hit home runs when his turn came to bat. Many people recognized him, shouted to him as he walked along, then decided to shake his hand and join the throng behind him.

As the human river turned the corner onto the avenue that led to the university, a knot of soldiers left the shelter of a doorway and came toward Ocho. He didn’t stop, kept striding along the center of the street.

“Halt!” the senior officer shouted. He was a major. “You are entering a military area! You can go no farther!”

Ocho didn’t even slow his pace. The soldiers had to join the crowd to keep from being trampled.

“You! Stop these people! This is a secure area, by order of Alejo Vargas.”

“We will not stop.” Ocho laughed. “Do you think you can stop the sun from rising?”

The soldiers hurried along, trying to talk to Ocho, who refused to slow his pace.

“You are El Ocho?” one of the younger soldiers asked.

“The days of Vargas are over, my friend,” Ocho explained. “Give away your gun and come along with us.”

The sheer numbers and weight of the people pushing along frightened the major, who had a pistol in his hand. Even as his subordinates handed their weapons to the nearest people in civilian clothes, he placed himself in front of Ocho, who didn’t stop walking.

“I order you to stop, Sedano!” he shouted, and pointed the pistol at Ocho’s head.

“You would make me a martyr, would you?” Ocho asked the major, who was trying to match Ocho’s stride. “Look around you, man. No one can stop them.”

The major fired the pistol into the air. His face was drawn and pale, almost bloodless. “Stop or I shoot you down, as God is my witness.”

“Mi amigo,” said Ocho Sedano, “for days at sea I was ready to die; all the fear drained from me. There is none in my heart now. My death will not stop these people: nothing can stop the turning of the earth. Still, if you feel you must kill me, make your peace with God and pull the trigger.”

Then he smiled.

El Ocho was a madman, the major realized. Or a saint. The major wiped at the perspiration on his forehead, and handed Ocho the pistol.

Ocho passed the weapon on. He put his arm around the major’s shoulders. “Come,” he said. “We will walk to the promised land together.”

Like a wall of water rushing along a dry arroyo, the human river flowed along the avenue toward the university as airplanes droned through the darkness overhead.

In the foyer of the science building, Alejo Vargas heard the airplanes. He looked at the politicians and young soldiers who waited silently behind him, blocking the doors to the stairs and the elevator, and he looked at his aides, who were nervously looking out windows, trying not to fidget.

Where was Santana?

The man should be here: he was Alejo Vargas’s one loyal friend on this earth.

Vargas paced back and forth, stood in the doorway and listened to the airplanes, wondered if the troops he had hidden in the surrounding buildings were loyal, would still fight. Over two thousand heavily armed men were waiting for the Americans. This time the Yanquis would not escape: this time there would be prisoners to parade before the cameras, vanquished foes to kneel at his feet as Cuba cheered. This time …

A car rocketed up to the front of the building and a man leaped out, a uniformed colonel with the Department of State Security. He ran up the stairs, came running through the door, saw Vargas and ran toward him.

“The television,” he said breathlessly. “On the television, they are showing a tape of Fidel.”

“Yes?” said Vargas, his brows knitting.

“Fidel made the tape before he died. He wants Hector Sedano to be the president after him.”

“What?” Vargas didn’t believe a word of it.

“They run the tape, which takes about six minutes, then run it again, over and over and over.”

“That’s impossible,” Vargas said, turning toward the politicians, who had moved closer. “Fidel made no such tape before he died. He wanted to make a tape naming me as his successor, but his illness prevented it.”

“They are showing a tape on television,” the colonel insisted. “Fidel says the nation must change, and Hector Sedano is the man to lead that change.”

“It’s a trick!” Vargas roared. “The Yanqui CIA is playing a trick on us.”

Every face was openly skeptical.

“Fidel is dead! Don’t you people understand that?”

A rising symphony of babbling voices and helicopter noises came through the open door.

“What is happening?” Vargas demanded, turning in that direction. “Where are the soldiers?”

He saw heads climbing the stairs, many heads, then a mob of people in civilian clothes and army uniforms poured through the doorway, forcing their way in. The room filled rapidly.

People in the doorway stood aside for two men who walked through together, one a tall, rangy young man and the other of medium height, wearing a one-piece faded prison jumpsuit.

They stopped in front of Vargas.

Hector’s voice was plainly audible to every person in the room when he said, “Alejo Vargas, I arrest you in the name of the Cuban people for the murder of Raúl Castro.”

Vargas’s hand darted inside his jacket for a pistol, but before he could get it out a dozen hands reached for him, pulled him to the floor, and took the weapon from him.