Cuba

PROLOGUE

His hair was white, close-cropped, and his skin deeply tanned. He wore only sandals, shorts, and a paper-thin rag of a shirt with three missing buttons that flapped loosely on his spare, bony frame. A piece of twine around his waist held up his shorts, which were also several sizes too large. His dark eyes were restless and bright behind his steel-framed glasses, which rested on a large, fleshy nose.

The walk between the house and barn winded him, so he sat on a large stone in a bit of shade cast by a cluster of palm trees and contemplated the gauzy blue mountains on the horizon and the puffy clouds floating along on the trade wind.

A man couldn’t have found a better place to live out his life, he thought. He loved this view, this serenity, this peace. When he had come here as a young man in his twenties he had known then that he had found paradise. Nothing in the first twenty-six years of his life had prepared him for the pastel colors, the warmth and brilliance of the sun, the kiss of the eternal breeze, the aroma of tropical flowers that filled his head and caressed his soul.

Cuba was everything that Russia wasn’t. After a lifetime in Siberia, he had wanted to get down and kiss the earth when he first saw this land. He had actually done that, several times in fact, when he had had too much to drink. He drank a lot in those days, years and years ago, when he was very young.

When the chance to stay came he had leaped at it, begged for it.

“After a time you will regret your choice,” the colonel said. “You will miss Mother Russia, the sound of Russian voices, the young wife you left behind ….

“She is young, intelligent, ambitious ….” he had replied, thinking of Olga’s cold anger when informed she could not accompany him to Cuba. She was angry at him for having the good fortune to go, not angry at the state for sending him. She had never in her life been angry at the state for anything whatsoever, no matter how bleak her life or prospects — she didn’t have it in her. Olga was a good communist woman, communist to the core.

“She will be told that you have died in an accident. You will be proclaimed a socialist hero. Of course, you may never write to her, to your parents, to your brother, to anyone in the Soviet Union. All will believe you dead. For them, you will be dead.”

“I will have another life here.”

“These are not your people,” the colonel observed pointedly a bit later in the discussion, but he didn’t listen.

“Olga is a patriot,” he remembered telling the colonel. “She loves the state with all her soul. She will enjoy being a widow of a socialist hero. She will find another man and life will go on.”

So he stayed, and they told her that he was dead. Whether she remarried or stayed single, got that transfer to Moscow that she dreamed about, had the children she didn’t want, he didn’t know.

Looking at the blue mountains, smelling the wind, he tried to conjure up the picture of her in his mind that he had carried all these years. Olga had been young then so he always remembered her that way. She wouldn’t be young now, of course, if she still lived; she would be hefty, with iron gray hair which she would wear pulled back in a bun.

His mind was blank. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember what Olga looked like.

Perhaps that was just as well.

He had found a woman here, a chocolate brown woman who cooked and washed for him, lived with him, slept with him and bore him two children. Their son died years ago before he reached manhood, and their daughter was married and had children of her own. His daughter cooked for him now, checked to make sure he was all right.

Her face he could remember. Her smile, her touch, the warmth of her skin, her whisper in the night …

She had been dead two years next month.

He would join her soon. He knew that. He had lost seventy pounds in the last twelve months and knew that something was wrong with him, but he didn’t know just what.

The village doctor examined him and shook her head. “Your body is wearing out, my friend,” the doctor said. “There is nothing I can do.”

He had had a wonderful life here, in this place in the sun in paradise.

He coughed, spat in the dirt, waited for the spasms to pass.

After a while he slowly levered himself erect and resumed his journey toward the barn.

He opened the board door and stepped into the cool darkness within. Little puffs of dust arose from every footfall. The dirt on the floor had long ago turned to powder.

The only light came from sunbeams shining through the cracks in the barn’s siding. The siding was merely boards placed on the wooden frame of the building to keep out the wind and rain … and prying eyes.

In truth the building wasn’t really a barn at all, though the corners were routinely used to store farm machinery and fodder for the animals and occasionally to get a sensitive animal in out of the sun. Primarily the building existed to hide the large, round concrete slab in the center of the floor. The building was constructed in such a way that there were no beams or wooden supports of any kind above the slab. The roof above the slab was merely boards cantilevered upward until they touched at the apex of the building.

The white-haired old man paused now to look upward at the pencil-thin shafts of sunlight which illuminated the dusty air like so many laser beams. The old man, however, knew nothing about lasers, had never even seen one: lasers came after he had completed his schooling and training.

One corner of the building contained an enclosed room. The door to the room was locked. Now the old man fished in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. On the other side of the door he used the key to engage the lock, then thoughtfully placed the key in his pocket.

He was the only living person with a key to that lock. If he collapsed in here, no one could get in to him. The door and the walls of this room were made of very hard steel, steel sheathed in rough, unfinished gray wood.

Well, that was a risk he had agreed to run all those years ago.

Thirty-five … no, thirty-eight years ago.

A long time.

There was a light switch by the door, and the old man reached for it automatically. He snapped it on. Before him were stairs leading down.

With one hand on the rail, he went down the stairs, now worn from the tread of his feet.

This door, these stairs … his whole life. Every day … checking, greasing, testing, repairing …

Once rats got in down here. He had never found a hole that would grant them entrance, though he had looked carefully. Still, they had gotten in and eaten insulation off wiring, chewed holes in boards, gnawed at pipes and fittings. He managed to kill three with poison and carried the bodies out. Several others died in places he couldn’t get to and stank up the place while their carcasses decomposed.

God, when had that been? Years and years ago …

He checked the poison trays, made sure they were full.

He checked consoles, visually inspected the conduits, turned on the electrical power and checked the warning lights, the circuits.

Every week he ran a complete set of electrical checks on the circuitry, checking every wire in the place, all the connections and tubes, resistors and capacitors. Occasionally a tube would be burned out, and he would have to replace it. The irony of burning up difficult-to-obtain electrical parts testing them had ceased to amuse him years ago. Now he only worried that the parts would not be available, somewhere, when he needed them.

He wondered what they were going to do when he became unable to do this work. When he died. Someone was going to have to take care of this installation or it would go to rack and ruin. He had told the Cuban major that the last time he came around, which was last month, when the technicians came to install the new warhead.

Lord, what a job that had been. He was the only one who knew how to remove the old nuclear warhead, and he had had to figure out how to install the new one. No one would tell him anything about it, but he had to figure out how it had to be installed.

“You must let me train somebody,” he said to the major, “show someone how to take care of this thing. If you leave it sit without maintenance for just a few months in this climate, it will be junk.”

Yes, yes. The major knew that. So did the people in Havana.

“And I am a sick man. Cancer, the doctor says.”

The major understood. He had been told about the disease. He was sorry to hear it.

“This thing should be in a museum now,” he told the major, who as usual acted very military, looked at this, tapped on that, told him to change a lightbulb that had just burned out — he always changed dead bulbs immediately if he had good bulbs to put in — then went away looking thoughtful.

The major always looked thoughtful. He hadn’t an idea about how the thing worked, about the labor and cunning required to keep it operational, and he never asked questions. Just nosed around pretending he knew what he was looking at, occasionally delivered spare parts, listened to what the old man had to say, then went away, not to reappear for another three months.

Before the major there had been a colonel. Before the colonel another major … In truth, he didn’t get to know these occasional visitors very well and soon forgot about them.

Every now and then he would get a visitor that he could not forget. Fidel Castro had come three times. His first visit occurred while the Russians were still here, during construction. He looked at everything, asked many questions, didn’t pretend to know anything.

Castro returned when the site was operational. Several generals had accompanied him. The old man could still remember Castro’s green uniform, the beard, the ever-present cigar.

The last time he came was eight or ten years ago, after the Soviet Union collapsed, when spare parts were so difficult to obtain. That time he had asked questions, listened carefully to the answers, and the necessary parts and supplies had somehow been delivered.

But official visits were rare events, even by the thoughtful major. Most of the time the old man was left in peace and solitude to do his job as he saw fit. Truly, the work was pleasant — he had had a good life, much better than anything he could have aspired to as a technician in the Soviet Rocket Forces, doomed to some lonely, godforsaken, windswept frozen patch of Central Asia.

The old man left the power on to the console — he would begin the tests in just a bit, but first he opened the fireproof steel door to reveal a set of stairs leading downward. Thirty-two steps down to the bottom of the silo.

The sight of the missile resting erect on its launcher always took his breath for a moment. There it sat, ready to be fired.

He climbed the ladder to the platform adjacent to the guidance compartment. Took out the six screws that sealed the access plate, pried it off, and used a flashlight to inspect the wiring inside. Well, the internal wiring inside the guidance unit was getting old, no question about it. It would have to be replaced soon.

Should he replace the guidance wiring — which would take two weeks of intense, concentrated effort — or should he leave it for his successor?

He would think about the work involved for a few more weeks. If he didn’t feel up to it then, it would have to wait. His health was deteriorating at a more or less steady pace, and he could only do so much.

If they didn’t send a replacement for him soon, he wouldn’t have enough time to teach the new man what he needed to know. To expect them to find someone who already knew the nuts and bolts of a Scud I missile was ridiculous. These missiles hadn’t been manufactured in thirty years, were inaccurate, obsolete artifacts of a bygone age.

It was equally ridiculous to expect someone to remove this missile from the silo and install a new, modern one. Cuba was poor, even poorer than Russia had been when he was growing up. Cuba could not afford modern missiles and the new, postcommunist Russia certainly could not afford to give them away.

Not even to aim at Atlanta.

Those were the targeting coordinates.

He wasn’t supposed to know the target, of course, but that rule was another example of military stupidity. He took care of the missile, maintained it, tested it, and if necessary would someday fire it at the enemy. Yet the powers that be didn’t want him to know where the missile was aimed.

So when he was working on the guidance module he had checked the coordinates that were programmed in, compared them to a map in the village school.

Atlanta!

The gyros in the guidance module were 1950s technology, and Soviet to boot, with the usual large, forgiving military tolerances. No one ever claimed the guidance system in a Scud I was a precision instrument, but it was adequate. The guidance system would get the missile into the proper neighborhood, more or less, then the warhead would do the rest.

The old warhead had an explosive force equal to one hundred thousand tons’ equivalent of TNT. It wouldn’t flatten all of Atlanta — Atlanta was a mighty big place and getting bigger — but it would make a hell of a dent in Georgia. Somewhere in Georgia. With luck, the chances were pretty good that the missile would hit Georgia.

The new warhead … well, he knew nothing about it. It was a completely different design than the old one, although it weighed exactly the same and also seemed to be rigged for an airburst, but of course there was no way for him to determine the altitude.

Not that it mattered. The missile had never been fired and probably never would be. Its capabilities were mere speculation.

The old man took a last look at the interior of the control module, replaced the inspection plate and inserted the screws, then carefully tightened each one. Then he inspected the cables that led to the missile and their connectors. From the platform he could also see the hydraulic pistons and arms that would lift the cap on the silo, if and when. No leaks today.

Carefully, holding on with both hands, he climbed down the ladder to the floor of the silo, which was just a grate over a large hole, the fire tube, designed so the fiery rocket exhaust would not cook the missile before it rose from the silo.

The rats may have got into the silo when he had the cap open, he thought. Yes, that was probably it. They got inside, found nothing to eat, began chewing on wire insulation to stay alive.

But the rats were dead.

His woman was dead, and he soon would be.

The missile …

He patted the side of the missile, then began climbing the stairs to the control room to do his electrical checks.

Nobody gave a damn about the missile, except him and maybe the major. The major didn’t really care all that much — the missile was just a job for him.

The missile had been the old man’s life. He had traded life in Russia as a slave in the Strategic Rocket Forces for a life in paradise as a slave to a missile that would never be fired.

He thought about Russia as he climbed the stairs.

You make your choices going through life, he told himself, or the state makes the choices for you. Or God does. Whichever, a man must accept life as it comes.

He sat down at the console in the control room, ran his fingers over the buttons and switches.

At least he had never had to fire the missile. After all these years taking care of it, that would be somewhat like committing suicide.

Could he do it? Could he fire the missile if ordered to do so?

When he first came to Cuba he had thought deeply about that question. Of course he had taken an oath to obey and all that, but he never knew if he really could.

Still didn’t.

And was going to die not knowing.

The old man laughed aloud. He liked the sound so much he laughed again, louder.

After all, the joke was really on the communists, who sent him here. Amazingly, after all the pain and suffering they caused tens of millions of people all over the planet, they had given him a good life.

He laughed again because the joke was a good one.