Stephen Coonts
Cuba
To Tyler
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In theory a speculative work of adventure fiction has the same requirement for technical accuracy as a story about space aliens set in the thirtieth century, yet as a practical matter many readers demand that this author at least stay in reality’s neighborhood while spinning his tales. For their aid in contributing to technical accuracy the author wishes to thank Michael R. Gaul, Captain Sam Sayers USN Ret., Mary Sayers, Captain Andrew Salkeld USMC, and Colonel Emmett Willard USA Ret., as well as V-22 experts Colonel Nolan Schmidt USMC, Lieutenant Colonel Doug Isleib USMC, and Donald L. Byrne Jr. As usual, the author has taken liberties in some technical areas in the interest of readability and pacing.
Ernestina Archilla Pabon de Pascal devoted many hours to helping the author capture the flavor of Cuba and earned the author’s heartfelt thanks.
A very special thank-you goes to the author’s wife, Deborah Buell Coonts, whose wise counsel, plot suggestions, and endless hours of editing added immeasurably to the quality of this tale.
EPIGRAPH
Cultivo una rosa blanca,
En julio como en enero,
Para el amigo sincero
Que me da su mano franca.
Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazón con que vivo,
Cardo ni oruga cultivo;
Cultivo la rosa blanca.
I grow a white rose
In July the same as January,
For the sincere friend
Who gives me his open hand.
And for the cruel one who pulls me away
from the dreams for which I live,
I grow neither weeds nor thistles,
I grow the white rose.
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.