But what if he does? What if he has the numbers written down in a book or diary and hands the transfer order to Mercedes to check? What then?
Fifty-three million. More money than God has.
He remembered the old days when he was young, when Castro walked the earth like Jesus Christ with a Cuban accent. Ah, the fire of the revolution, how the true believers were going to change the world!
Instead, time changed them, America bled them, and life defeated them.
Maximo had been loyal to Fidel and the revolution. No one could ever say he was not. He had been with Fidel since he was twenty-four years old, just back from the university in Spain. He had endured the good times and the bad, never uttered a single word of criticism. He had faith in Fidel, proclaimed it publicly and demanded it of others.
Now Castro was dying. In just a few days he would be beyond regrets.
Fifty-three million.
The pounding the overloaded boat had taken bucking the heavy Gulf Stream swells opened the seams somewhat, and now the fisherman was pumping out the water with the bilge pump, which received its power from the engine-driven generator.
“As long as we can keep the engine running, as long as the seams don’t open any more than they are, we’ll be all right.”
“How much fuel do we have on board?”
The fisherman went to check.
Ocho was at the helm, steering almost due east. With the wind and sea behind her, the Angel del Mar rode better. Now the motion was a rocking as the swells swept under the stern. Very little roll from side to side.
Of the eighty-four people who had been aboard when the boat left the harbor in Cuba, twenty-six remained alive. The captain’s body lay against the wheelhouse wall.
Ocho found Diego’s pistol and put it in his belt. He physically carried Diego from the wheelhouse and tossed him on the deck.
Fifty-seven living human beings, men, women, and babies, had gone into the sea. There was no way in the world to go back to try to rescue them. Even if he and the fisherman could find those people in the water, in the darkness, in this sea, the pounding of heading back into the swells would probably cause the boat to take on more water, endangering the lives of those who remained aboard.
No, the people swept overboard were lost to their fate, whatever that might be.
The living twenty-six would soon join them, Ocho told himself. The boat was heading east, away from Florida.
Perhaps if the sea calmed somewhat, they should bring the boat to a more southerly heading and return to Cuba.
That, he decided, was their only chance.
Cuba. They would have to return.
Why wait? Every sea mile increased the likelihood of the engine quitting or the boat sinking.
He turned the helm a bit, worked the boat’s bow to a more southerly heading. The roll became more pronounced. The wind came more over the right stern quarter.
How long until dawn? An hour or two?
The door to the wheelhouse opened. Diego was standing there, the whites of his eyes glistening in the dim light. “Turn back toward Florida! No one wants to go back to Cuba.”
“It’s the only way. We’ll all die trying to make it to Florida in this sea.”
“I was dead in Cuba all those years,” Diego Coca shouted. “I refuse to go go back! I refuse.”
Ocho hit him in the mouth. One mighty jab with his left hand as he twisted his body, so all his weight was behind the punch. Diego went down backward, hit his head on the deck coaming, and lay still.
Dora wailed, crawled toward her unconscious father.
Ocho closed the door to the wheelhouse, brought the boat back to its southeast heading.
Soon the door opened again and the fisherman stepped inside. “We have fuel for another ten or twelve hours. No more than that.”
“We’ll be back in Cuba then.”
“That’s our only chance.”
The stars in the east were fading when the engine quit. After trying for a minute to start the engine, the fisherman dashed below.
Ocho abandoned the helm. The boat rolled sickeningly in the swells.
At least the swells were smaller than they were earlier in the night, in the middle of the Gulf Stream.
The fisherman came up on deck after fifteen minutes, his clothes soaked in diesel fuel. “It’s no use,” he said. “The engine has had it.”
“What about the water in the bilges? Is it still coming in?”
“We’ll have to take turns on the hand pump.”
“What are we going to do about the engine?” Ocho asked.
The fisherman didn’t reply, merely stood looking at the swells as the sky grew light in the east.
CHAPTER SIX
The van drove up to the massive, 250-feet-tall extra-high-voltage tower beside the drainage canal on the southern outskirts of Havana and backed up toward it. The base of the tower was surrounded by a ten-foot-high-chain link fence with barbed wire on top. The access door in the fence was, of course, padlocked.
The driver of the van and his passenger were both wearing one-piece overalls. They stretched, looked at the wires far above, and scratched their heads while they surveyed the ramshackle four-story apartment buildings that backed up to the canal. One of the men extracted a pack of cigarettes from his overalls and lit one. The nearest apartments were at least sixty meters away, although for safety reasons the distance should have been much more. Each of the extra-high-voltage (EHV) lines overhead carried 500,000 volts.
The driver of the van was Enrique Poveda. His passenger was Arquimidez Cabrera. Both men were citizens of the United States, sons of Cuban exiles, and bitter enemies of the Castro regime.
Poveda had parked the van so that the rear doors, when open, almost touched the gate in the chain-link fence. Now he reached into the van, seized a set of bolt cutters, and applied the jaws to the padlock on the gate. One tremendous squeeze and the bar of the padlock snapped.
Cabrera threw the remnants of the padlock into the back of the van. He opened the gate in the fence, set a new, open padlock on the hasp, and stood looking up at the tower.
The best way to cut the power lines the tower carried would be to climb the tower and set shaped charges around the insulators. Unfortunately, the lines carried so much juice that the hot zones around the wires were eleven feet in diameter, more in humid weather. No, the only practical way to cut the lines was to drop the towers, which would not be difficult. A shaped charge on each leg should do the job nicely. Cabrera looked at the angle of the wires leading into the tower, and the angle away. Yes, once the legs were severed, the weight and tension of the line should pull the tower down to the side away from the canal, into this open area, where the lines would either short out on the ground or break from the strain of carrying their own weight.
Timing the explosions would be a problem. This close to all that energy, a radio-controlled electrical detonator was out of the question. Chemical timers would be best, ones that ignited the detonators after a preset time, although chemical timers were not as precise as mechanical ones.
All that was for a later day, however. The decision on when the tower must come down had yet to be made, so today Cabrera and Poveda would merely set the charges. They would return later to set the timers and detonators.
Poveda finished his cigarette and strapped on his tool belt. This was the fourth tower today. Only this one and one more to go.
“You ready?” he asked Cabrera.
“Let’s do it.”
Ocho Sedano lived with his older brother Julio, Julio’s wife, and their two children in a tiny apartment atop a garage just a few hundred yards from Dona Maria’s house. Julio worked in the garage repairing American cars. The cars were antiques from the 1950s and there were no spare parts, so Julio made parts or cannibalized them from the carcasses behind the garage, cars too far gone for any mechanic to save. When he wasn’t playing baseball, Ocho helped.