20
Santiago de Cuba
Alejandro Bengochea’s optimism about refuelling quickly was unfounded. It took almost an hour for a fuel truck to show up and another fifteen minutes during which he haggled with the driver and a bribe was eventually negotiated. Pagan, an impatient man at the best of times, was sorely tested by the length of the transaction. He had images of Gunther Ruhr and the missile disappearing from the face of the earth.
Then, at the conclusion of the deal, the chopper would not start. Plugs and cables in the engine were damp, electrical connections failed to make contact. It took Bengochea another hour of patient labour to bring the machine back to life and fly the forty miles from Palma Soriano to the city of Santiago. He cursed for a while, muttering about low-grade plugs and cables without waterproofing, thieves and cheats and black-marketeers who profited from the re-sale of state petrol.
In the grey morning light the storm’s path was evidenced by fallen trees and upturned huts and cars that had been tossed on their sides. Inside the city itself were houses without roofs and statues that had been blown ingloriously down and small parks where everything had been flattened – plants, trees, fences. Rain thudded against the skin of the helicopter, but the wind had died to fifteen, twenty miles an hour.
Pagan saw the docks come in view below the railway station. A score of ships were anchored there. They flew a variety of flags – South American, East European, Scandinavian, Panamanian. Alejandro Bengochea directed the chopper up and over the harbour, while Pagan, conscious of the silent child who sat directly behind him breathing in a shallow, monotonous way, scanned the vessels below. Rain blew over unloaded cargo; discoloured crates littered the docks, unpacked agricultural machinery lay exposed; brand new trucks, recently unloaded, filled up with rainwater.
The Mandadera was docked between a Norwegian freighter and a Venezuelan tanker. Bengochea steered the chopper over her deck. There was no sign of life. Ruhr and the missile had already gone.
Bengochea was undismayed by the ship’s emptiness. He flew back over the city, surveying the streets, eyes narrowed; how could a missile be hidden from view? Since the ship could only recently have docked, the missile couldn’t have gone far. It wasn’t the kind of cargo a truck could transport quickly and easily. Bengochea took the chopper up higher, following the line of the coast that led out of Santiago in an easterly direction.
Pagan had the nagging feeling that he should cut his losses and somehow get the girl back home and forget Ruhr and the nuclear hardware. But how could he simply take Steffie Brough back to London and leave Ruhr and the weapon behind? No: he couldn’t go back, not now, not after all this; besides, he had the belief, common to men who are more optimist than cynic, that the deeper the shit one had to go through to get to it, the happier the ending had to be.
Hold the thought, Frank.
Bengochea flew out of the city in a northerly direction. He passed over a rum factory and a flour mill and an oil refinery. There was no sign of a truck carrying a missile through the streets. He turned the helicopter around and flew south-west, back in the direction of the sea. Donde? he kept asking. Donde? Shaking his head in frustration, he flew the chopper low along the shoreline. Then he swung away from the water’s edge and back through the rainy haze. The Sierra Maestra mountains, forlorn and unwelcoming, could be seen in the distance.
“It’s got to be some bloody place,” Pagan said. The nuclear needle in the haystack.
Bengochea may not have understood the words, but he recognised Pagan’s tone. He shrugged sympathetically, then lowered the chopper so that it barely skimmed the tops of trees.
Bengochea turned the aircraft round again. He flew directly over Puerto Siboney, then swung inland away from the beaches, over farmlands and a coffee plantation.
And then the missile was suddenly visible in a meadow surrounded by tall trees. It sat on the back of a long truck and looked incongruous in this rainy pastoral setting. Pagan saw it too. He wanted Bengochea to bring the chopper down into the field, his first quick impulse, but there were too many people on the ground. From a height of fifteen hundred feet Pagan could see men work around the missile, which was being raised by hydraulic jacks into a launch position on the back of a long truck. Uniformed soldiers stood guard in the grassy field.
As a ruse to discredit Castro, Pagan thought, it was elaborate and convincing, right down to the detail of the missile being cranked into a firing position. Somebody down there would have the responsibility of taking pictures, of course. Photographers, not scribes, were the true recorders of history. Nothing in this world was so persuasive as a striking image, one the masses might digest easily: here was Castro’s dangerous missile in true living colour, proof of his nuclear calumny. Universal recognition – you didn’t even have to be able to read to grasp the horrifying potential of it. And Rosabal would have himself snapped with the missile in the background, naturally. The hero. The saviour. The man who rid the world of crazy old Fidel.
Pagan gestured for Bengochea to circle the meadow again. Looking down, he saw two figures approach the missile-truck. One was Gunther Ruhr. The other might have been Rosabal. Bengochea flew round a couple of times, dropping as low as he thought prudent.
But now there was gunfire from the soldiers in the field. It came uncomfortably close to the cabin. Bengochea pulled the chopper up deftly, but he wasn’t swift enough to avoid several shots slamming into the fuselage. Steffie Brough, silent for the last hour, whimpered when she realised the helicopter was being fired upon. Pagan tried to comfort her with some soothing words, but he’d never been very good with kids.
Bengochea went higher as a spray of bullets pierced the window of the cabin and continued past his skull and exited through the roof. Then he took the chopper up beyond the range of gunfire.
Looking down, Pagan saw Rosabal and Ruhr move toward the control module. Was Ruhr about to show Rosabal what the machine was made of? A sightseeing tour? Pagan shuddered at the notion of those two fine upstanding characters controlling a missile. He wished for a grenade, something that would wipe out both Ruhr and Rosabal and render the missile utterly useless at the same time.
He gazed down from a height of three thousand feet into the trees. Think. There must be some course of action to take. He concentrated, but couldn’t come up with anything. He understood only that he couldn’t ask Bengochea to fly back in again, because he couldn’t risk Steffie Brough’s life a second time.
In the rain, Gunther Ruhr and Rosabal watched the chopper retreat above the trees, then hover for a time at a safe distance.
“Who is in that goddam helicopter?” Rosabal asked.
Gunther Ruhr said, “A man called Frank Pagan.”
“Pagan?”
“An English cop. You know him?”
“By reputation. We can take care of him,” Rosabal said.
“Don’t underestimate him.”
Rosabal made a dismissive gesture. Pagan was a dogged bastard. How in God’s name had he managed to come all the way here? But what did it matter now? Pagan didn’t worry him. Automatic rifle fire would either bring the chopper down or drive it away if it returned. Rosabal had no time to be bothered by anything so trivial as an English policeman in a helicopter. He absent-mindedly watched one of the cameramen take photographs of the weapon.
Gunther Ruhr looked at the missile. It was beautiful in the rain. “It’s time for me to leave. The missile is delivered and armed. That’s what my contract called for.”
Rosabal raised his face, looked at the sky. The chopper was hovering beyond the trees about a mile away. Then he turned to Ruhr, whose colourless face and lips offended him; for a second his attention was drawn down to the ugly hand, which hung at the German’s side.
“Don’t rush away, Gunther,” he said.
“Why should I wait? Is there some problem? I was promised air passage to Haiti after delivery. I was also promised a considerable sum of money when I reach Port-Au-Prince. I hope you are not thinking of double-crossing me. If anything happens to me, I can guarantee you the kind of exposure that will bring your little world down around your ears.”
Rosabal smiled. “Nobody is going to double-cross you, my friend. Relax.”
“So why are you asking me to stay?”
“Because this intrigues me. Because I want to know more. Because you’re obviously a splendid teacher.” Rafael Rosabal, adept at flattering men whose lives had inspired very little approbation, smiled a warm smile. We’re friends, Gunther, we are in this together, the smile said.
Rosabal indicated the rectangular control module, from which the wet tarpaulin had been removed. Both men climbed up on to the truck. The door of the module was opened; they squeezed inside.
It was a small chamber some eight feet by seven. There was barely enough room for two men to sit in cramped positions in front of computer screens, directional equipment and the firing mechanism. From the control centre to the missile, which was raised to an angle of some forty-five degrees at the front of the truck, ran sets of cables that relayed commands to the missile’s navigational system.
“I am interested in the controls,” Rosabal said. “Show me.”
Ruhr turned on switches. The screens flickered.
“You enter data here and the missile goes wherever you want to send it,” Ruhr said. “Within its range, of course.”
“Fascinating.”
Ruhr touched the instrument panel. He loved it. The design was economical, splendidly functional. He ran the tips of his fingers lightly over the console. He demonstrated how one plotted a course for the missile. There was fervour in the way Ruhr talked; it was the attitude of a man bewitched by his subject. Rosabal was more interested in Ruhr’s nuclear fascination, his obsession with destruction, than in the technical details with which the German was bombarding him. Technical matters always made Rosabal’s eyes and mind glaze over. He really didn’t care how a thing worked, only that it did.
“It would be interesting … to fly the missile,” Rosabal said.
Gunther Ruhr said nothing. He thought how exhilarating it would be to see the missile riding the skies through the rain, unerring, a twenty-foot steel arrow piercing the heart of its target.
Rosabal pressed the tips of his fingers together, placed them against his lips in an attitude of deliberation; an uninformed observer might have thought he was praying. But Rosabal was imagining Miami, a city he’d never visited, one he’d seen only in books and movies. He was imagining the hotels of the Art Deco district, old men and women sitting on the porches of pink and turquoise hotels, frowning at the hazy sea; he was imagining the exclusive little shops of Coral Gables and the huge hotels on Collins Avenue and the Cuban cafés along Calle Ocho where the troublemakers gathered to squabble about politics in Havana. And then he remembered his sick father who had gone to Guantanamo, to the American Naval Station, and asked for asylum in the United States, how he’d been laughingly turned away, and then made to disappear by Castro’s political police afterwards.
Yes, it was right, everything he had planned all along was correct and just. He had absolutely no doubt.
He looked at Gunther Ruhr and he asked, “Can you make it fly?”
“Of course,” Ruhr replied. He could hardly breathe: was he being asked to do the very thing he’d dreamed of doing?
“Then why don’t you?” Rosabal asked.
Ruhr felt a shiver of anticipation; the hairs on the backs of his hands bristled. “What target would please you?”
Some hours before the capture that would result in his execution, several hours before he lied to his interrogators about Magdalena Torrente’s whereabouts, Alberto Canto had driven his car to a secluded place and bandaged her side. He’d applied antibiotic cream over the wound, then gauze. The ointment came from Russia, he apologised, and its potency was suspect, but it was all he had in his possession. He wished he had an X-ray machine to assess the damage and fix the position of the slug in her body. The repair he made was a temporary measure, and a poor one at best; she’d need treatment within a few hours at a good hospital. Her breathing was unsteady, her temperature certain to rise. Either she would have to return to the United States or run the risk of a hospital in Havana, where her illegal status might be discovered, and the consequences dire.
She announced she’d fly herself to Florida if a plane could be found. Astonished by her confidence, Canto argued she was certainly in no condition to fly an aircraft despite the painkiller he’d injected into her. Consider the turbulent weather, Canto had said. The darkness. Consider the seriousness of your wound. Your condition is terrible.
Canto had strongly recommended trying to find a pilot to take her. If she had to fly home, she shouldn’t be at the controls herself. But she defied him. She could do it alone. She stubbornly insisted. He argued from the medical point of view but Magdalena Torrente, unmoved, had reservoirs of determination that Canto could not even begin to fathom.
At the airstrip outside San José de Las Lajas she stole without difficulty a small plane, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, made in the United States and imported circuitously into Cuba, that belonged to some official in the Ministry of Construction. She’d learned how to steal planes from the old fliers at the exile training camps in the Everglades. Canto still tried to prevent her. There on the rainy field, barely able to hear each other over the scream of the wind, they had argued passionately. It was madness, Canto had shouted. She couldn’t fly a plane in her state. If she didn’t get to a hospital quickly she might haemorrhage, perhaps bleed to death. But in the end Magdalena’s determination overcame the physician’s compassionate caution.
She wasn’t troubled about flying, despite the weather and her condition. Canto’s painkiller kicked in quickly; besides, the storm had begun to diminish by the time she was ready to fly out of San José de Las Lajas. She embraced the physician, expressed her gratitude, kissed him, and left a smear of her own blood on his shirt.
There were maps in the cockpit. The instrumentation was simple. She took off into the driving rain, looking down once for a sight of the physician, but Canto had gone.
She had lied to him. She had absolutely no intention of flying this plane to Florida.
Inside the cramped control module Rafael Rosabal pretended to deliberate a moment before he answered Gunther Ruhr’s question about a target.
“I think Miami,” he said.
Alejandro Bengochea landed the chopper in a field a mile from the missile. He got out, checked the body of the craft, which had been struck on the fuselage by rifle fire but the fuel line was intact.
Pagan stepped down from the chopper and gazed thoughtfully into the rain. What was he supposed to do next? His head ached, his mind was an empty room. Armed with an ancient revolver he had borrowed from Bengochea, a gun that should have been retired years ago, how could he possibly slip past soldiers with automatic weapons and get to Ruhr? Even if he did, how could he disable that bloody missile?
He was aware of Steffie Brough watching him. He looked up, half-smiled, tried to appear encouraging, the friendly, reliable London cop who knew which bus to take to Battersea Park or the quickest way to Buckingham Palace. There was some element of accusation in her trance-like expression, as if she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t going home. She breathed upon the glass and, like a small child fascinated by condensation, drew a shapeless pattern with a fingertip. Then she turned her face away from Pagan, her profile sullen.
Pagan looked across the field. He was wet, but wetness and misery had quickly become conditions of his life, and almost acceptable. He turned Bengochea’s revolver over in his hand, and stared once more across the meadow. He shrugged. It wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had, but it was the only thing that occurred to him.
“I’m going back there,” he said to Bengochea.
“Que?”
“On foot. Alone. Solo.”
Bengochea looked puzzled.
Pagan said, “You stay here. Keep an eye on the girl. If I don’t come back, you take her to the British Embassy in Havana. Understand?”
Pagan turned, walked away from the helicopter, looking back once. Steffie Brough wasn’t watching him, but Alejandro Bengochea was still shaking his head. He hadn’t entirely understood Pagan’s words although he was convinced that the Englishman, even if a little estupido, was nevertheless a brave man.
Magdalena had flown for three hours at seven thousand feet, trying to keep the Bonanza above the turbulence, but the erratic wind shook the plane. When she climbed higher, clouds obscured the Central Highway she was trying to follow. She didn’t want to fly without some kind of direct visual guide. She came down again to about three thousand feet.
Then the painkiller began to wear off. It was hard to find a comfortable position. Maybe there wasn’t one. She swallowed two of the codeine Canto had given her, but they didn’t quell the fire in her side.
Rain pummelled the plane. Mist and cloud created mysterious shapes around the cockpit. She lightly touched the place Canto had bandaged. Painful. It was weird to realise you had a bullet in your body, a foreign piece of metal in your system. What had it shattered? What had it punctured? Was some vital organ threatened?
But was it any more weird to have a foreign object in your body than to have a broken heart?
Sweat formed on her brow, ran down into her eyes. And yet she was cold, cold inside.
She gazed down at the highway. At some point she would have to fly south-west to Bayamo.
And then Bayamo to Santiago. About a hundred miles. Less than an hour’s flying time.
If she could make it.
When she’d flown three hundred miles, the sky had turned to a fuzzy kind of grey. There was light but no sun. The harsh unremitting rain created a bizarre tattoo on the cockpit. She wiped sweat out of her eyes, concentrated on the skies ahead, the highway below.
Why was she so damned cold? Then so warm?
She looked down at her bandage. Redness seeped through the material.
I lost more than blood, she thought. I lost myself.
She touched the bandage, brought her hand up; her fingertips were red.
Think good things. But she couldn’t keep her head from filling with images of Rafael. His lovely deceptive face kept rising in her mind.
If he materialised here right now, if he appeared beside her in this cabin and asked for forgiveness, what would she say?
Yes.
Yes I forgive you again.
You’d do that, wouldn’t you? You’d do it all over again. You never learned a thing. Where Rafael was concerned, her heart always flew ahead of her reasoning like a canary sent by coal-miners into the deep, unmapped caverns of underground shafts to check for poisoned air.
Her love was more than a sickness. She breathed her love for Rafael. It was as necessary to her existence as oxygen. It was inside her the way her bloodstream was. And yet it was poisoned.
She loved him. And she wanted him dead.
She looked down at the grey-green landscape; she could see the ocean flooding over beaches, great clouds of spray.
She flew over Bayamo at one hundred and thirty miles an hour. The pain burned all the way through her. She shut her eyes because it was so goddam fierce. She hadn’t ever known anything so intense. Once, years ago, she’d had an abortion, the consequence of a dalliance with a young boy at a military camp in the Everglades, and the doctor had done something wrong and her womb had become infected, and she remembered the way pain seemed to scream inside her; but even that agony, which had been like a hat-pin pressed into the walls of her womb, was nothing to what she felt now.
She dropped her hands from the controls. She was cold, so damned cold, and even though she had no mirror she knew she was pale and the skin under her eyes black. There was sweat on her upper lip and her hands shook and something made from steel, some kind of pincer, clutched her intestines. She cried aloud. She felt herself slip toward black-out; around the periphery of her vision was darkness. She opened a window, let the cold wet air blow at her and keep her awake.
She placed her hands on the controls again and steadied the plane, but her grip was loose and weak and the tips of her fingers numb in a way that filled her with dread. She thought she could hear a spectre whisper, a nearby voice, a hint of a song she’d never heard in her life before now – seductive, distant, bitter-sweet.
She didn’t want to hear that song. She knew what it meant and it scared her, but the fear lasted only a moment before she moved beyond it to some other level of understanding, that place where all outcomes are neither sad nor joyful, good nor bad, but simply inevitable.
Pagan sneaked between the trees that surrounded the field. There was perhaps a score of men, many of them armed, clustered around the missile. Was he mistaken or had the angle of the missile changed since he’d last seen it? It seemed to have been raised to a higher elevation. It pointed toward the sky with a certain dark purpose, angled at approximately seventy-five degrees. Through the rain he could see the open door of the module. Although his angle of vision prevented him from seeing anything more than shadows, he was certain that Ruhr and Rosabal were inside.
Pagan crouched, tried to make himself invisible. If he stepped out of the trees he’d be seen and shot. How was he meant to reach the module? The only possibility that suggested itself – tucking his head well down and running hard at the module – was ludicrous, and utterly suicidal, and he wasn’t in much of a mood to slit his own throat. Not yet.
There had to be a better way.
He considered circling the meadow, making an approach from another direction, but the obstacles were exactly the same. Uniformed men carefully watched both landscape and sky in all directions.
It was useless. There was nothing he could do. He could crouch here in the trees five hundred feet away and fire the old revolver towards the missile-truck and perhaps puncture a tyre if he got really lucky. Terrific. But as soon as he fired he’d be shot at: end of Frank Pagan.
He stared at the missile.
It moved noticeably by perhaps a foot, then it stopped. Pagan held his breath. They were playing with the thing from inside the module. Perhaps Ruhr was simply demonstrating it.
Perhaps not. But Pagan didn’t like the suspicion that formed in his mind just then.
No, no. They couldn’t be planning to fire the bloody thing. Not in a hundred years. Ruhr was just showing Rosabal how it worked, that was all, then it would be dismantled, and defused, and destroyed. Wasn’t that the plan? Yes, yes, of course that was the bloody plan, what else could it be?
Pagan felt an extraordinary sense of futility. If the men inside the module intended to fly the bird, he couldn’t do anything to stop them – except take a pot-shot at the control module with Alejandro’s stupid revolver. What else was there to do?
He aimed the revolver at the control chamber on the back of the big truck; he was very careful, lining up the module in his sight with a kind of concentration that made his head ache. If he struck the module with a shot – perhaps he might hit something important: the wiring, the connection cables, perhaps his bullet might penetrate the shell of the control centre and rupture some essential component inside. You couldn’t bank on perhapses, you couldn’t pay bills with them.
His hand trembled.
He squeezed his finger upon the trigger.
He fired.
His shot passed through the space between missile and module, harmless, feeble, desperate. The fire was returned, the air split by the vicious spray of automatic weapons. He threw himself flat and crawled toward a clump of shrubbery as he listened to the air whine around his skull.
But there was another sound now, and it came from the sky.
He looked up.
Magdalena had flown three times over the city of Santiago de Cuba before she found what she was looking for. Dimly, she registered the meadow, the ring of trees, the missile-truck fifteen hundred feet below her. It was tiny and it wouldn’t stay still in her vision, and spots the shape of amoebae kept prancing in front of her eyes. But it was the chill that bothered her more than anything else, the voracious cold that consumed her. She’d never known such a sensation before.
The death cold, she thought.
The cold of the coffin. Frozen earth.
She passed across the field, wheeled the small plane, made a second sweep; the craft lost height, dropping two, three hundred feet. Then she must have blacked out briefly because she couldn’t remember bringing the plane even lower, bringing it down to a height that was only five hundred feet over the missile truck. She clutched her side, drew her hand away, saw how her palm and fingers were covered with blood that had seeped through Canto’s bandage. But the bloodied hand was no longer her own, it was some ghostly thing, an appendage without substance. And it seemed to her that the blood froze on her flesh, and changed to crystals, pale pink crystals that were swept from her skin by the draught that rushed through the open window.
Dying, she thought. Dying, dying.
She made another pass over the field.
She was so low now she could see the faces of the men who fired guns at her. Their bullets slammed against the fuselage. She watched the marksmen rush out of her path as she flew no more than fifteen feet over the surface of the meadow.
Dying, she thought again.
It had its own kind of perfect madness.
The truck loomed up in front of her. The missile, angrily poised as if for flight, the open door of the control module – she saw these things rush towards her, and then it was as if everything in the world were being sucked in by her propellers, leaves, blades of grass, men, guns, clouds, everything was disappearing inside the slipstream of her rushing aircraft, crowding her vision, her brain, stifling her ability to take air into her lungs.
Inside the module Gunther Ruhr set the course of the missile. He calculated it would strike directly into the heart of Miami. But accuracy wasn’t very important when you were talking about the total devastation of a city; a mile or two either way hardly mattered.
“How much damage will it do?” Rosabal asked. “How many will die?”
“Consider Hiroshima,” Ruhr answered.
Hiroshima. Two hundred thousand people had died there, many thousands more had become sick from radiation. The city had been totally destroyed. Rosabal said nothing. He heard gunfire outside, ignored it. He merely imagined the chopper was circling the field again. Sooner or later it would be shot out of the sky. Nothing in the external world was important; only this small chamber mattered.
“This will be worse,” Ruhr said cheerfully. “Much worse. Ten times as many people will perish. Perhaps more.”
“Do it,” Rosabal said.
Ruhr leaned forward over the console. Like a cardshark about to shuffle a deck, a conjurer ready to perform an illusion, he rubbed his hands together a few times as if to stimulate his circulation, then he held both hands over the console. He might have been born for just this moment, his trick of all tricks.
“Do it! Goddamit, do it now!” Rosabal snapped.
Gunther Ruhr smiled; it was perhaps the singular most blissful expression that had ever appeared on his face. His hands dropped toward the console.
In a fraction of time too small for even the finest chronometers to measure, too short for the senses to organise detail from chaos, Magdalena saw Rafael Rosabal in the open door of the module. His face was turned slightly away from her, but his profile was visible, unmistakable. She felt her chilled blood rush to her head and through the window of her small failing plane could smell wet grass and black mud – and then everything came together in that one chaotic reduction of time, module and aeroplane, sky and mud, Magdalena and the man she loved, the man with whom she might now spend eternity if there happened to be one, it all fused, melded, and even as it came together it also exploded and blew apart, white flame conjoining the aircraft and the missile-truck, searing the fuselage, disintegrating the module and the men inside it, setting aflame the cables that married the missile to its control centre, then finally toppling in fire the missile itself, which rolled from the truck and slithered from its erector and slumped, fuses melted and shot, navigational system destroyed, its function rendered harmless, into the soft mud.
Frank Pagan saw Magdalena for only a second as the plane savagely struck the module, and then he closed his eyes against the intense heat he could feel roll across the meadow toward the trees where he stood. When he opened his eyes he looked at how tall flames rose in a great white dance from the truck, a noisy dance set to the strange crackling music of fire. There was a quality of illusion to his perceptions: had he really seen her in the tiny cockpit of that doomed plane? Had he imagined it?
He stepped back under the cover of the trees. The soldiers who had been shooting at him only minutes before were running from the fiery ruin of the truck as fast and as far as they could, some with their uniforms on fire. He saw one wing of the plane collapse like burning paper, but after that there was very little distinction between objects trapped in the furnace. They all glowed with the same hallucinatory intensity.
He turned and ran as quickly as he could to the place where Bengochea and the child waited in the helicopter.
Cabo Gracias a Dios, Honduras
The storm uprooted the tent of Tomas Fuentes and blew it across the airstrip toward the ocean, where anchored boats precariously rode the swell. A freighter that had set sail some thirty minutes before had already turned back, and another small ship was reported capsized. On the airstrip, fighter-planes were chained to stone chocks lest they drift and roll in the wind. Tomas watched his tent go flying off like a great bird with drab olive plumage and the grace of an ostrich, and then it was lost from sight. Bosanquet’s tent went the same way, flapping like loose laundry, dragging its guy ropes behind it.
Fuentes studied the roiling sea just as the wind ripped the panama hat from his head and launched it up into the tall branches of trees where it was blown from left to right, up and down, then out of sight, a symbol – if Fuentes wanted to see it this way – of a lost cause.
He preferred to think of it as a cause postponed. There would be other days, and they would be stormless, and the sea clear all the way to Cuba and that hijo de puta, Fidel Castro.