19

The Caribbean

The storm that had begun in the Gulf of Mexico carved out a wide path as it rolled in a southerly direction. Around Havana winds measured forty miles an hour; over the Isla de la Juventud and south-east between the shoreline of Cuba and the Caymans they were fiercer, reaching fifty and sixty. Later in the morning, when the storm would move due west of Jamaica, hundred-mile winds would rage over the Caribbean.

Had La Mandadera sailed from Cabo Gracias a Dios some two hours earlier, it could not have avoided the impenetrable black heart of the storm that would make the sea west of Jamaica a roiling nightmare; as it was, the ship still couldn’t escape brutally damaging gales and cold blinding rain squalls that assailed it after it had passed between the Caymans and Jamaica. Captain Luis Sandoval, whose experience of tempests had never lessened his fear of them, estimated the wind at between fifty-five and sixty miles an hour, ten on the Beaufort Scale.

His ship lurched and plunged on huge swells. Leaden clouds darkened the early sun as they raced. Rain, sometimes turning to a hard hail, relentlessly scoured the decks. There was a deranged fusion here of elements and artifacts, weather and steel, cloud and smoke, one became the other in that dire place beyond boundaries. Day turned back to night within a matter of minutes, a weird compression of time, a suspension of natural laws.

Steffie Brough lay on her bunk. The tiny cabin pitched and rolled as if on castors, and the ceiling rose and fell. Waves covered the small porthole. The battered ship creaked. In her imagination Steffie could see bolts and screws come loose and whole metal panels crash into the sea.

She shut her eyes and fought the urge to throw up. She clutched the side of her bunk and held on, thinking that with every pitch of the vessel it would surely capsize and sink to the bottom of the sea.

Once, when she propped herself up on an elbow and tried to rise, she was thrown back against the wall and struck her head, which ached now. She hauled a blanket up over her face and tried to make herself very small – microscopic – as if she might go unnoticed by the vicious weather.

She heard the cabin door open. Gunther Ruhr, soaked, hair plastered across his head, came inside. He was dripping; his feet squelched. She didn’t look at him. She kept her face under the blanket. She heard him dry himself with a towel, then he was so curiously silent for a long time that she sneaked a look.

He was standing at the small sink, the mirror – sharpening something – swish, swish, swish, the sound of an old-fashioned razor on a leather strap – swish, swish, swish – she saw it was no razor, but his knife – and he was whistling under his breath, a whistle that was practically a throaty whisper, spooky and tuneless –

The cabin shifted, spun round. She was back home, she was riding her mare across wintry fields, and she’d never gone near the old Yardley farm, it was just too dull and drab, it didn’t attract her, so instead she rode over Crossfields Hollow and into the village where she stopped by the ice-cream shop and had a chocolate cone and then and then and then …

She felt Ruhr pull back the blanket. She turned her face away from him. He held his knife in one hand. Steffie drew herself back as far as she could until her spine was pressed to the wall. Ruhr looked the length of her leg to the place where his fingerprints had left bruises from before. She snatched the blanket, covered herself.

He sat down, placed the knife upon his thigh.

He listened to the way the storm blasted the ship. If there were different kinds of weather to suit different personalities, storms were what most pleased Gunther Ruhr. They created chaos, they broke down peace and order. They raged for hours and drove the sea and the sky together in one cauldron of turmoil. They sank ships. They excited him; liberated him.

Waves rose across the deck; up and down, down and up, the sea tossed La Mandadera as though it were a craft made from matchsticks.

Ruhr laid a finger against the scar the girl had inflicted around his eye with her nail. Then he picked up his knife from his thigh and drew the blanket back from Steffie Brough’s body; she held the edge of the blanket tightly, resisted, refused to yield even when he slid the point of the blade gently across her cheek and drew to the surface of her skin a thread of blood. She would hold on forever if she had to, she’d struggle no matter what it took –

Without any trouble, Ruhr hauled the blanket back and laughed. He cuffed the child and she cowered, huddling in the corner, staring at Ruhr with hatred and fear and hopelessness.

The knife flashed just as there was a loud knock on the cabin door.

In the dark hold one of the lashes that bound the missile had come undone. The cylinder, with its armed nose-cone, tipped forward at an angle of twenty degrees. A report had reached Luis Sandoval on the bridge that the weapon was listing in an alarming way. A simple man, he did not know that the missile would not explode accidentally. He believed there was every chance of a holocaust and so he sent an agile seaman, harnessed for his own safety, with an order for Gunther Ruhr to descend inside the hold and secure the proyectil.

Santiago de Cuba Province

The outer reaches of storm spread inland toward the province of Holguin, where General Capablanca was forced to postpone his diversionary manoeuvres; tanks were stuck on beaches, sodden soldiers sheltered beneath trees, aeroplanes were grounded, ships anchored unsteadily three miles out in the Atlantic.

The ill-tempered gale blew over Bayamo and into the Sierra Maestra, where several hundred anti-Castro rebels sheltered in damp caves with their rifles. Then it slashed across Santiago itself, whipping the Bay, blowing down telephone lines, taking off the roof of the Leningrado Restaurant on San Juan Hill, flattening cabins at the Daiquiri Motel on Baconao Park Road, sinking a fishing-boat two miles out of Siboney Beach.

From the rain-washed helicopter in which Frank Pagan uneasily sat, nothing could be seen of the ground below nor the sky above. The chopper, rocking in wild currents of air, was piloted by a blunt torpedo of a man Estela Rosabal had summoned – former Lieutenant Alejandro Bengochea, a sixty-three-year-old flyer retired from the Cuban Air Force.

It was the worst ride in Pagan’s experience. He expected the flying machine to plummet down at any moment through rainy turbulence and explode on the landscape, but Bengochea, as if he had a special contract with gravity and air currents, kept the machine magically airborne. Bengochea, who wore an old revolver on his hip, spoke no English, nor did he appear to question his flying mission – it had come to him from none other than General Capablanca’s esteemed daughter, and that was good enough for him. Had Estela asked him to fly through a ring of fire or aim directly for the moon he would have done so.

For most of his adult life, Bengochea had built his world around the Capablanca family. He was a courtier, Estela his princess. He had known her since she was a small child. He even had home movies, which he sometimes watched all these years later in his small empty apartment in Marianao. They depicted him with the princess riding on his shoulders at the age of seven or building sandcastles with her on the beach at Varadero. The Capablancas had been his only family in a life of unbroken solitude imposed upon him by a military career of complete dedication.

Nothing scared Alejandro Bengochea. Notions of immortality were for the very young. He’d fought against the Yanquis at the Bay of Pigs, flown helicopter missions in Angola ten years ago, been imprisoned and tortured in the time of the Batista regime, he had even fallen out of favour with Castro’s government in the early 1970s (he was “a reactionary”, they said), only to be spared imprisonment by the intervention of General Capablanca. What was there to be afraid of? His body was scarred everywhere, one eye had been partially blinded under the ministrations of Batista’s thugs. Now he wore black glasses as if they were fixtures never to be removed, not even in sleep. He was a human being living beyond his span. Lucky Alejandro he was called. But he knew how to fly this helicopter with amazing skill, how to keep it aloft in gales.

Here and there, between squalls when the wind withdrew, the beaten landscape could be seen – beaches, a shoreline, sand dunes, visible only for seconds then swallowed again. Pagan shut his eyes. The roar of the helicopter was stunning, thudding inside his head. What he’d seen of the ocean appalled him. White, frenzied, it seethed and foamed furiously over sand and sea-walls. He would not have been surprised to see it reach up and drag the helicopter down into its demanding depths.

The storm caught the chopper, raised it in the sky like a leaf. Alejandro Bengochea enjoyed it. The weather challenged, even amused him, as if this were a personal test between himself and the vicissitudes of the planet. He took the chopper up and up, forcing it beyond the reaches of pandemonium into a momentary calm, an oasis in the sky.

Through another brief window in the ragged rain squall Pagan saw that the helicopter was directly over water now. Land was no longer visible. Fall from this place and you were a dead man; in that frightening, tumultuous sea your body might never be found.

He constantly scanned the waters. How was it possible to spot anything down there in that fury? And if you stared long enough and hard, you could even begin to hallucinate the appearance of small islands, or whales, or sea-troubled freighters – greys imposed on greys, and nothing distinguishable. Pagan, whose usual determination was weakening, felt the search was hopeless. But Bengochea loved this sea-hunt with all the devotion of a bird-watcher on the trail of a rare species. He wouldn’t give up and go back to the shore.

The chopper rocked, lost height, Bengochea laughed; he had a relationship with destiny quite alien to Pagan. Down and down the helicopter went, until it seemed inevitable it would plunge into the water.

“There!” Pagan pointed downward.

A freighter, camouflaged by the sea, pitched. Waves frothed over the deck. The ship looked appallingly insubstantial on the swell, something that might have been set on a pointless journey by a child’s hand.

Blinding rain and spray rose up. There was nothing to see, no world beyond violent water, no sky, no ship, nothing.

The freighter seemed to have vanished entirely, leaving Pagan to wonder if, after all, he’d seen anything.

The intensity of the storm overwhelmed Captain Luis Sandoval. His radio had ceased to function, his navigational equipment was useless. Locked in his sightless, airless bridge, a glass prison, he guessed he was some nine miles from Santiago. His first mate was an experienced old seaman named Zaldivar, but even this seasoned mariner had no idea of the exact location of the freighter. The storm reduced perceptions, destroyed instincts, threw men back on guesswork.

Luis Sandoval cursed this weather, this tormenta. When he looked up he prayed for a break, a sign of sunlight – but the rains kept coming and the decks were submerged. From the engine room had come an ominous report that about nine inches of water had collected below and that the pumps were labouring. This goddam bitch of a boat! Sandoval thought. This puta!

Zaldivar, his white beard grizzly, his face etched by the acid of too many suns, was a superstitious man who blamed the presence of Ruhr and el proyectil malvado for the freighter’s predicament. Without the crippled alemán, none of this would have happened. Hadn’t the day begun quietly? Hadn’t there been a clear sky and a quiet sea? Aiee, it was the fault of the freak with the vile hand. There could be no disputing Zaldivar’s nautical logic, grounded as it was in a system that transcended the empirical. The sea operated under the laws of its own gods, who were furious beyond all reason.

Sandoval ceased to listen to the old man’s babblings. He peered from the bridge. Along the deck he saw, as if it were a figure from an hallucination, Gunther Ruhr moving toward the hold. A rope was tied round his waist and snaked behind him to some safe point. He was going to secure the missile. Zaldivar rubbed his beard and shook his head as Ruhr opened the hold and vanished into darkness.

“El Diablo,” the old sailor remarked quietly.

Sandoval looked upward. Out there in the dense structure of the squall he saw a flying ghost, a bizarre outline that was gone before he was certain he’d ever registered it.

Ruhr could barely catch his breath in the storm. Only when he reached the hold and lowered himself into the darkness were his lungs able to function again. Exhausted by the struggle along the deck, he sat on the floor, breathing fast and hard until his energies returned. He turned on a flashlight and saw how the cruise missile, having slipped one of the mooring cables, lay out of balance. It was no great matter to secure it again. He followed the line of loose cable to a metal hook on the wall and there he anchored it, making certain it was tight. His hands were cold, his fingers stiff.

The freighter rose in the swell, dropped again. The storm was magnificent still. He hauled himself out of the hold, clutching the rough fibres of the damp rope knotted round his waist. The other end of the rope was tethered to the handrail about thirty feet along the deck. He loved the idea of his life hanging by such a feeble lifeline.

He reached the deck.

Seventy feet above him, a grey helicopter swayed in the gale.

Alejandro Bengochea took the chopper down toward the deck of the ship, but it was hard to hold the machine steady against the energetic frenzy of the wind. At sixty feet he was driven back; the chopper swung in a great circle, then returned to roughly the same point. Bengochea, sometimes bellowing with a sportsman’s laughter, sometimes quietly coaxing his craft, fought to hold the machine steady. Both chopper and freighter seemed tied together now as if bound by strands of the same rainy web.

Pagan saw the deck briefly, then it was gone under water; up again, wet timbers, an upturned lifeboat, tar-black smoke zipping away from the funnel. The figure who appeared on the deck seemed to have come out of nowhere; he was roped and threading his way astern like a man following a string through a maze.

Pagan, whose stomach came into his throat, felt the helicopter turn at an awful angle, tilting back down toward the ship before righting itself and hovering one more time, like a demented albatross, over the deck. There was the figure again, looking up this time at the chopper.

Pagan recognised the man. As soon as he did so, he took the rope-ladder from behind his seat and pulled it out. “I’m going down,” he said.

Bengochea smiled with approval and gave a thumbs-up sign. Pagan, despite the obstacle of being born English, was a man after his own heart.

The chopper dropped another few feet. The daring Bengochea, the crazy Bengochea, would have landed the machine directly on the deck of La Mandadera if he’d had the manoeuvrability. Now the helicopter hung some fifty feet over the deck, dangerously close to the masts of the freighter. The ship, rising and falling twenty-five feet on the vicious swell, threatened at times to crest high enough for its masts to crash into the underside of the chopper or to snag the rotor blades. To avoid this calamity required very fine judgment on Bengochea’s part, an instinct for prediction in unpredictable circumstances – two feet higher, then three, four, whatever it took to keep the chopper just beyond the reach of the masts.

Pagan opened his door, was almost sucked out into the skies. It was madness, and he knew it. He also knew there were certain kinds of lunacy you could transcend briefly because the fear of the moment carried you over the hurdle of craziness, imposing upon you an illusion of indestructibility. The notion of throwing down a rope-ladder from a helicopter perched precariously above a freighter sailing in a violent sea seemed almost logical to him just then; and he himself the kind of man who, because he was on the side of the angels, the elements would not destroy.

Sweet Jesus! how frail the rope-ladder looked as it unfolded on its way to the deck.

Alejandro Bengochea dropped as low as he could but the wind bedevilled his machine and he had to rise again another twenty feet, and now the deck seemed a long way down and the rope ladder too flimsy altogether. It blew violently back and forth beneath the chopper, more a means of transportation for a trapeze artist than for a London policeman with a wound in his chest and no great fondness of heights.

Pagan took a breath, stepped out into nothing.

Rain swirled in cold haloes about his head. His hands, gripping the fibrous rope, were red and numb. He hung in the air, defying physics and sanity. He imagined the storm picking him off the ladder and spitting him out into the maelstrom of the sea.

He held on tightly; with the determination of a man who has no desire to look death in its seductive eye, he lowered himself. The storm threatened to suffocate him. He could barely get air into his lungs. Turning his face out of the direct roar of the wind, he gasped.

Gunther Ruhr clutched the sixty-foot rope that would lead him back towards the cabin. His balance on the watery deck was poor and sometimes he slipped, tumbled, but always managed to rise again. Once, seeking a moment’s shelter in a doorway, he wiped water from his eyes and observed the man who hung from the rope-ladder. The ladder twisted round and was knocked by the sea-wind back and forth, but the man – the man was unmistakable. And Gunther Ruhr smiled.

It was a fine effort on Pagan’s behalf. Ruhr, who realised he had underestimated his adversary, grudgingly admired the sight of the Englishman clinging to the ladder and descending rung by miserable rung toward the deck. Ruhr stepped out of the doorway, and, removing his gun from his belt, he fired once, more as a form of greeting than anything meant to hurt Pagan, who ducked his head and almost slipped from the middle of the ladder to fall the final twenty feet to the deck.

Ruhr continued along the deck, holding hard to the rope. He had thirty, perhaps thirty-five feet to go before he reached the tiny room and the girl. Turning, he looked up again at the acrobat Pagan.

Once, during an August Bank Holiday in Margate when he must have been about nine or ten years old, Pagan had thrown up during a ride on a roller-coaster. He remembered the screaming wind in his face, the shrieks of girls, and the way the thin trail of his vomit had caught the breeze and flown away and how his Aunt Henrietta had shoved a handkerchief into his face with a sigh and a tut-tut and I should’ve known you wouldn’t have the constitution for this, Frankie. Silly, silly boy, oh dear, oh dear …

Where was Auntie Henrietta now when he really needed her? Pagan wondered. What the hell? He needed something more than her big white handkerchief that smelled of mothballs, he needed a bloody weatherproof parachute. The rope ladder was tossed first to the left, then to the right, and Pagan held on, watching Gunther Ruhr move along the deck, waiting for the German to fire the gun again. Ten feet, fifteen, Pagan wasn’t sure how far he’d have to drop to hit the deck, but he didn’t like his chances anyway. Overhead, the chopper roared and the big blades churned the air; the tumult thrust at Pagan, threatening to blow him back up far enough so that he’d collide with the blades. Hamburger meat. Mince. Razored neatly out of existence.

Oil drums slithered and clattered across the deck, then bounced overboard; a Cuban flag, looking like a used designer tissue, was sucked away, as if it had imploded. On the bridge, Luis Sandoval shook his head in disbelief. The man who was coming down the rope-ladder was clearly loco, and so was the pilot of the helicopter. Who these men were, and what their purposes might have been, were matters of no importance to Sandoval. They were intruders. They were no part of any plan. He unlocked the rifle cabinet. He handed a weapon to Zaldivar, and kept one for himself. Both men loaded the weapons then continued to watch the maniac descend from the chopper which, at any moment, was certain to collide with the freighter’s masts – kaboom!

“He’ll never make it to the deck,” Zaldivar said.

Sandoval shrugged. “He might. He’s crazy enough.”

“I’m not going out there,” Zaldivar said. “Let the storm take him. Let the storm take the German and his goddam missile as well.”

Inside her cabin Steffie Brough felt the ship tilt, then correct itself again. Water covered the porthole, darkening the cabin. She felt claustrophobic. Even though she knew the deck would be exposed and unsafe, she needed to get out of this wretched coffin. She couldn’t breathe. She’d been in this stale little room for too long. She wanted air, rain in her face. Mainly she didn’t want to be here when Ruhr came back with his knife. Especially that. It was better to get out and take her chances with the weather than to wait in this place for his return.

She tried the door, but it was locked. She yanked on the handle – nothing. The ship listed again, and she was thrown back across the bunk. She got up, hammered on the door, but of course nobody came to answer because nobody heard her voice.

The only voice in the world was that of the wind.

Was the storm faltering? Losing some fraction of its power? It was hard to tell because it was a deceptive thing, dying for thirty calm seconds then flaring up again just as you imagined it was fading. In one such lull Frank Pagan hit the deck, bent his knees, curled his body forward to spare himself the jarring effect of contact between skeleton and wood. He lost his balance at once, slid on his back and skidded toward the side of the freighter, seized a rail, held on, his mouth and eyes flooded with salt water. He blinked, saw Gunther Ruhr some yards ahead.

Staying upright was impossible. Pagan fell again, tumbled forward, came to a halt on his arse. Ruhr looked back, fired his gun, Pagan pulled his head involuntarily to one side but the shot was wide anyway. He stood again and aquaplaned a few feet as the freighter creaked then listed to the starboard side. The ocean swept the deck and Pagan, with as much strength as he could still muster, clenched the rainslicked handrail.

Staggering, he followed Ruhr. He almost missed the hold because its hatch was closed save for a narrow space at one side where it had either been carelessly placed or budged by the storm. He almost missed seeing the section of covered missile below him in the dim light. For the moment he passed it by, rather as a man might hurry past a glass case in a museum that contains artifacts of no fascination for him.

He tried to keep Ruhr in sight. Catching up with him was impossible. His principal objective was not to be washed overboard. Ruhr clutched his rope, his lifeline, hurried, hurried, slid, hurried. Pagan, his breath knocked out of him by the storm, kept following. He took his pistol out, thinking he might wound Ruhr and stop him. He fired but couldn’t hit anything on board a ship that bucked like a mad horse. Water streamed across his face and eyes and into his mouth. He thought it was possible to drown without having to sink underwater to do it.

Ruhr glanced back once, then kept moving, holding still to his safety rope. Pagan fired his gun again – useless, useless; and then the wind blew him back and the Bernardelli was jerked out of his hand and carried overboard and he saw it vanish into the heart of the foam.

Ruhr kept moving with the assistance of the rope. Pagan, scudded by water, cuffed, landed on hands and knees. He crawled, rose, glanced up at the helicopter: it looked fragile and exposed and altogether unnatural where it hung. How much longer could Alejandro keep it hovering there? Pagan had to find the kid, get her into the chopper, and get the hell off this ship.

Drenched, blinded, he kept going.

Gunther Ruhr, about twelve feet from the door of the cabin, looked back at Pagan. It was amusing to see the Englishman struggle to stay upright – but then the whole day was one of imbalances and upsets, of symmetry broken down, composure destroyed. Ruhr wiped his eyes with his knuckles, saw the place where he’d tied the rope, saw the cabin door.

He turned to look back one more time at Pagan.

Frank Pagan thought he saw Gunther Ruhr toss back his face and laugh. It was something of which he’d never be certain.

Steffie Brough hammered and hammered on the door until her fists ached. Useless. Then she tugged again and again on the handle.

– Why hadn’t Ruhr come back?

– She caught the handle, twisted, cursed, strained.

– The bloody thing wouldn’t turn, wouldn’t, just wouldn’t.

She closed her eyes; small tears slithered out from under her eyelids. There has to be something, she thought. There has to be some kind of way out. She kicked the door panel, nothing yielded.

She took a deep breath, bit her lower lip in sheer determination, puffed out her cheeks, pulled together every fragment of strength she could find. She hauled on the handle, and felt a screw pop out from damp wood, a small, rusty screw, and the handle itself was loose and a second screw fell away and the door, warped by seasons and sea-changes, split slightly. In the core of the wood were tiny worm-holes, small tunnels that released very fine sawdust. Now the entire handle came away in her fist and she opened the door and the sea blast winded her.

She saw Gunther Ruhr coming along the deck.

He was attached to a rail by a length of rope. It was knotted only twelve inches from the open door of the cabin. She was conscious of a second man hanging on to the rail, trailing Ruhr from behind.

She stepped forward. The idea that came to her was both inevitable and compelling. She had to do it.

With frantic fingers she took the loose end of the knot, the kind known to sailors as a double timber-hitch, and passed it through two loops of rope, which undid the knot swiftly. She dropped the rope. She heard Ruhr shout at her in alarm. Released from his anchor of safety he slipped. She saw him fall flat on his back. The rope curled about his ankle and he slithered toward the side, toward the dreadful sea, even as the other man hurried to prevent him sliding out into the waves.

Fingers clamped on Ruhr’s wrist, but he kept slipping away.

“I cannot hold,” he shouted. “I cannot hold, Pagan –”

“You have to fucking hold, you bastard!”

Pagan groaned, clenched his jaw, caught Ruhr’s shirt under the neck and pulled with all his strength, dragging Ruhr back from the edge. He couldn’t let Gunther go, not now, not after all this distance had been travelled. If he released Gunther, then what had been the point of everything? He owed it to the dead men in Shepherd’s Bush to take Ruhr back to London. He owed it to the soldiers murdered during the hijack of the missile in Norfolk. And he owed it to Steffie Brough, to her parents, to all the people Gunther Ruhr had hurt.

He couldn’t let Ruhr slide into the sea. Couldn’t lose him.

The German wasn’t heavy, but the effort of rescuing him drained Pagan. He hauled him away from the rail, then released him; Ruhr lay flat and drenched and breathing badly near the cabin door. Landed, Pagan thought. Like a bloody great fish. Harpooned at last.

Pagan’s sense of achievement lasted a second before he felt his heart frost over.

In his good hand Gunther Ruhr held the pistol which he had produced from the belt of his trousers. He pointed the gun directly at Pagan. “You overlooked this, Frank. Stupid of you.”

Pagan stepped back, alarmed. Why had he forgotten Ruhr’s gun? Why the hell hadn’t he let Ruhr slide into the bloody sea? Too damned anxious, Frank. Too damned keen to play Mr Justice, to take Ruhr back to London and the law. He didn’t deserve due process, did he? He was a killer, a terrorist. He had no sense of right and wrong, no charity, no humanity. He didn’t deserve his moment in a court of law, for Christ’s sake. Pagan glanced at the girl, who was clinging to the cabin door as if her life depended on it.

Ruhr said, “Wonderful effort, Pagan. But futile –”

The ship bucked suddenly again. The swell, surging under the hull with great might, momentarily forced the bow out of the water. The deck tilted up. Gunther Ruhr, slick and wet, slid seven or eight yards on his back away from Pagan, flailing his arms like a man tumbling down a slippery chute.

It was an opportunity, and Pagan had to seize it before the ship righted itself. There might never be another. Fighting to keep his own balance, he caught the girl by the hand and they ran skidding together towards the rope-ladder which shimmied and flapped as if possessed by a life-force of its own, and was difficult to grasp. Pagan finally gripped it, brought it under control, helped the girl on to the first sodden rung. The climb was strenuous. The ladder blew sideways, the helicopter swayed, all the balances were so delicate that everything seemed destined to fall at any moment from the sky. The girl climbed a couple of rungs, and Pagan came behind. There was a lull then, a few wonderful seconds in which the storm abated a little. Pagan and the girl were able to advance about one third of the way up, which was when Steffie Brough stopped climbing.

“Keep going, for Christ’s sake.” Pagan looked down – always a mistake. He saw Gunther Ruhr, upright now, trying to steady himself on the deck for a shot.

“Can’t,” the girl said.

“Yes you can.”

“My legs won’t work. They won’t work. I can’t make them work.”

“Bloody hell.” Pagan heard the sound of gunfire; overpowered by a revitalised wind, it was strangely unthreatening. But it came close, and he knew it. So did Alejandro Bengochea, who had been watching Ruhr from the cabin. He turned the helicopter away from the Mandadera and out over the water beyond the range of Gunther Ruhr’s gun.

Pagan reached up with one hand, placed it against Steffie’s spine, pushed gently, tried to ease her further up the ladder. She moved then, one slow rung at a time, panting, terrified of falling. He supported her even when the ladder swung to positions that made climbing impossible.

Once, unable to resist the impulse, he glanced at the sea again. An evil dream of endlessly falling.

The chopper kept moving back toward land as Pagan and the girl made their way slowly upwards to the cabin. The rain was falling hard, but the closer the aircraft came to the shore, the more the wind dropped and the sea quieted because the storm was pulling back and rolling out, to renew itself with a vengeance, across the Caribbean. It wasn’t completely dead yet. It gusted, still creating havoc as Pagan and the girl pulled themselves up, exhausted, gasping, inside the cabin.

Pagan slumped in the narrow seat, squashed alongside the child. His eyes stung from salt, his hair was plastered to his skull, his clothing and skin so completely soaked he had no idea where fabric ended and flesh began; the storm had welded him to his clothes. His skin was numb.

“We’ve got to keep the ship in view,” he said to Bengochea.

Bengochea appeared not to have understood. Pagan grabbed his arm, pointed down towards the sea. “The Mandadera. We’ve got to follow the bloody ship to Santiago. Understand?”

Bengochea shook his head and pointed to the dials in front of him. “Necesito gasolina. Comprendo?”

“Gasolina?”

Bengochea rapped a dial in front of him with his fingertips. “See? Vacante. Comprendo?”

The chopper lurched suddenly; the fading storm, as if made petulant by its failure to down the craft, seized the machine and gave it one final, terrible shake. The girl, stricken by panic, pressed her face into Pagan’s shoulder. The helicopter dropped rapidly, but then the storm, like a fist at last unlocking, released it; now there was only rain and a slight wind and a green rainswept landscape just beyond the shoreline ahead.

Pagan stroked the girl’s wet hair. She was uncertain about his touch, but she tolerated it the way a suspicious animal might put up with a stranger’s caress.

Bengochea flew directly toward the coastal road that linked Manzanillo with Santiago. On an airstrip outside Palma Soriano, forty miles from Santiago, he brought the craft down. He got out. Pagan watched him walk towards a one-storey building where he went inside. The girl, her face still pressed against Pagan’s shoulder, stared vacantly across the tarmac. She shivered, said nothing. Pagan looked out at the grey sky and listened to the way rain fell sharply on the roof of the cabin. He was bitterly cold, sneezed once or twice, longed for a good fire, warm clothes, dry shoes.

Soon the Mandadera would reach the safe harbour of Santiago. Presumably Ruhr and the missile would go ashore there. In her rather glassy, dazed manner, Estela Rosabal had said that the missile – according to her husband – was intended to do nothing more than discredit Castro.

Pagan mulled this over while he waited for Bengochea to return. A missile to discredit Castro, to make him look like a warmonger. To justify his overthrow. To justify the coup Magdalena had talked about. Fidel has a missile! Look! He intends to use it! He intends to blow up some part of the world! Crazy bastard! But Rosabal overthrows the old dictator in an heroic coup; nuclear holocaust averted by dashing new President of Cuba. Wasn’t that what Estela had whispered? Rafael believes he will be the next president.

Question: What nation would be most threatened by a missile on Cuba?

That was obvious. Ergo: by overthrowing Fidel and destroying the missile, Rosabal would be nothing less than a saint in American eyes. American aid would flood the island. American trade would bring riches. Rich tourists. The old guard would flock back to Havana: gamblers, call-girls, pimps, the drug-dealers, gunmen, low-lifers, outlaws, the dubious bankers and lawyers.

Pagan sneezed again and lost his chugging train of thought. His chest throbbed. His eyes watered. His mind was a cold, numb place. What he wanted was dryness, and food, then sleep.

Bengochea came out of the building and walked back towards the helicopter. He was smiling. He had clearly found a source of fuel. He looked up at Pagan and made a thumbs-up sign.

“Abundancia,” he said cheerfully. “Immediatamente.”

Rafael Rosabal had flown by jet through the edge of the storm from Havana to Santiago. There he’d been met by a half-dozen of Capablanca’s officers – two of whom carried expensive cameras to photograph the missile in the launch position.

Followed by a truck containing a score of armed soldiers, Rosabal was driven by jeep out of the storm-swept city and along the coastal road toward Siboney. The nice irony did not escape him. It was from a farmhouse at Siboney that Castro had planned his first assault on the Batista regime in 1953, six years before his ultimate triumph. From this place Castro’s revolutionaries had carried out a failed attack, a comedy of errors and confused timing, on the garrison at Moncada. Now monuments to the dead rebels lined the roadside and the farm had become a shrine to deify El Viejo. It was one of Communism’s many hypocrisies: God was an unofficial entity, forbidden, but men like Castro could ascend to the vacant summits formerly occupied by the deity.

The jeep took Rosabal to a site about two miles from Siboney, a secluded meadow, ringed by trees and sheltered somewhat from the wind, where the missile would be placed. A house – in the possession of a farmer sympathetic to the new revolution – had been placed at Rosabal’s disposal. Rosabal sat silently with Capablanca’s officers on the screened porch and listened to what was left of the storm and waited.

He would have preferred better weather, but the storm was gradually diminishing; the Mandadera would surely reach its destination. The missile would get here. Delayed, but it would still get here.

Rosabal looked at his watch every so often. Now and again he rose and walked up and down the porch and stared out across the meadow, watching rain sweep through the trees. He was tense. The moment he’d worked for was almost here. The time he’d dreamed about for so long was almost upon him. How could he remain perfectly cool?

He thought about Magdalena Torrente.

He was positive he’d hit her with his second shot. He’d seen a look of pain go across her face before she vanished inside the unexpected Lada. When she’d disappeared, he had telephoned influential friends at the Ministry of the Interior, who immediately set in motion an intensive search of Havana for the Lada and its occupants. At Rosabal’s insistence, the search, though widespread, was being conducted with a certain discretion. Delicate matters of state, Rosabal had explained, were involved. Make no noise. Do not arrest people carelessly. When the occupants of the Lada were discovered, the female passenger was to be shot on sight.

Magdalena Torrente meant nothing to him anyway. Nor had she ever. She was somebody he fucked, somebody who brought him bundles of cash contributed by the misguided. It was almost as if he were being paid exorbitant sums of money for servicing her.

Rosabal sat down. Suddenly he could feel building inside him the kind of doubts he so rarely entertained these days. What if everything went wrong? What if Magdalena Torrente survived and informed the fidelista authorities about Rosabal’s revolution? What if this, what if that? He had to keep cool, serene, maintain a calm centre. The poor boy, the cane-cutter’s son from Guantanamo, still lived somewhere inside him, that undernourished child who felt he did not deserve any kind of success. He was angry all at once with the ghost of his upbringing. A familiar darkness clouded his vision. It was not the time to be insecure. It was time for resolve, for confidence. It was time to assassinate the past.

Rain pelted the windows, but the heavy skies were less ominous now. The officers smoked cigarettes, studied the rain, said nothing. They too were tense. Now and then a vehicle passed on the road nearby, at which times Rosabal always stared at the meadow expectantly. But the truck carrying the missile did not appear.

When the telephone rang Rosabal’s first reaction was one of unease: bad news, he was sure of it. Perhaps the scheme had been discovered and already those forces aligned against Castro had been routed and arrested, and the names of the conspirators given to Castro loyalists.

An officer picked up the phone. The caller wanted the Minister. Rosabal took the receiver and heard the voice of a certain Captain Sanchez of the political police in Havana. The connection was terrible. Sanchez’s voice echoed.

“We found the car in San José de las Lajas driven by a certain Alberto Canto. A physician, Minister.”

“And?”

“He was taken for questioning.”

“Has he spoken? Did he mention the woman?”

“He said she was badly wounded. He claims she was going to make her way to Matanzas. It seems she intended to arrange some kind of black-market transportation back to the United States. He didn’t think she could possibly survive. The wound is deep.”

“Shoot the physician. Concentrate on the woman. It can’t be impossible to find a wounded woman in the fifty miles between San José and Matanzas.”

“We’re looking, Minister.”

“Look harder. Report to me the moment you have killed her.”

Rosabal put the receiver down. So she was wounded, badly so. Poor, ambitious Magdalena, who thought she had it all. He shook his head. Ambition could sometimes be a deceiver. Rosabal smiled to himself, then turned to look across the meadow.

There it was. At last. There it was.

The big truck carrying the tarpaulined missile and the control module came slowly across the muddy path that traversed the meadow. It was followed by a van in which sat a group of technicians who were here to disarm the missile. Gunther Ruhr was visible behind the windshield of the large truck. Next to him was a driver provided by the General.

Rosabal stepped from the porch. Magnetised by the missile, unmindful of the rain – softer now – that fell upon his eyelids, he hurried across the glistening grass to the place where the truck had come to a halt.