“I know. I was seventeen years old then, and like everyone else we rioted with joy.” He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, then looked up, blinking. “There will be no joy in the riots that will come. There will only be madness. It is the motto of our country come to pass—Patria o Muerte, Homeland or Death—and the people will choose death when Fidel dies and the revolution collapses. Everything will end in the Valle de la Muerte.”
Carrie shrugged. “It all sounds very dramatic, Doctor, but when you get right down to it, what are you telling us? More nothing. Fidel Castro could live for years.”
“Fidel Castro will be dead in thirteen days,” the doctor answered. “And I have given the Brotherhood the means of killing him without leaving any trace. When the deed is done, they will begin their Operación de Venganza and Cuba’s freedom shall be gone forever.”
“Operation Vengeance? What exactly is that?” Black asked.
“On the twelfth of April 1962, President John F. Kennedy promised that the United States would never intervene militarily in Cuba’s affairs. It is a promise that has been kept by every American president since that day. That promise is about to be broken.”
“How?” Carrie Pilkington queried, an urgent note in her voice.
“The Brotherhood is planning a terrorist attack on the United States that will make your nine-eleven pale into insignificance. Hundreds of thousands will die and there is no way to stop it.”
PART TWO
IGNITION
12
The Tiburon Blanco made her way slowly down the Caribbean coast of Cuba, every inch the hired sportfishing boat taking two well-heeled tourists onto the ocean waves in search of black marlin, tuna and mahi-mahi. The outriggers were extended, bait was cut and sometimes Holliday or Eddie would troll an empty line from the fighting chair just in case someone was paying too much attention.
Holliday was well aware that the U.S. intelligence community had a Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collector—a polite euphemism for spy satellite—dedicated to the Caribbean, and Cuba in particular. He also knew, despite public denials, that the Pentagon still carried on weekly U2 flights over Cuba in an upgraded version of the venerable old spy plane that had first uncovered the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The BASIC satellites were so good they could read the time on your wristwatch from fifty miles up, so Holliday wasn’t taking any chances; to keep his face from view he wore a long-billed New York Yankees ball cap whenever he went out on deck.
It was almost five hundred miles from Havana to La Boca at the mouth of the Rio Agabama, and it took them a week to get there. According to Montalvo Arango, to travel at night was dangerous. If there was any chance of being spotted by la guardia costera, it was after dark. The old fisherman told them it was more a matter of the coast guard being seen than the coast guard seeing them; a guardia costera ship—usually nothing more than a harbor patrol boat—spent more time ferrying people to Mexico for a price than guarding the sovereignty of the Cuban coast. When they weren’t smuggling people, they were usually smuggling drugs either in or out of the country, so as a rule it was best to keep out of their way.
At sunset the Tiburon Blanco would head into the shallows and find a small bay or cove where they could anchor for the night. Arango would use a hand line to catch enough fish for their dinner, open a jar of his own pickled mangoes for dessert and that and a few glasses of Ron Mulata would end their day. Holliday and Eddie occupied the two bunks in the forward cabin and Arango spread a blanket and slept under the worn canvas of the flying bridge. The whole cycle would begin again the following morning at dawn.
On the evening of the seventh day, they reached La Boca, the mouth of the Rio Agabama. Like most rivers in Cuba that ran down to the sea, the Agabama’s delta was a mangrove swamp that extended for more than three miles before they actually reached the river itself. The swamp smelled terrible.
“Ay! Este sitio huele a huevos podridos!” Eddie said.
“The rotten egg smell comes from the sulfur dioxide in the silt,” said Holliday.
“Sometimes you are like an encyclopedia, mi colonel. You know everything.”
“Blame my uncle Henry. He had a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica, Fourteenth Edition. Twenty-four volumes. He made me read one whole volume every summer. I reached the volume with mangrove swamp in it just after I got back from Vietnam.”
“Lotta good crab in there,” grunted Arango. The evening before, the old man had managed to catch them half a dozen spiny lobsters and they’d feasted on lobster tails and garlic butter as a change from their fish diet. According to Arango, catching one of the creatures illegally was good for five years in El Condesa. Six of the creatures would probably get you life.
The old man eased the boat carefully up the river, watching the color of the water and moving the wheel in tiny increments to avoid the thin gray lines of mud that lay like long, dangerous fingers out into the main stream. Go aground in the mud and you’d have to wait for the next high tide, and that wasn’t good at all; the mouth of the Rio Agabama wasn’t the safest place to be.
“Why?” Holliday asked, standing beside Arango in the wheelhouse. “What’s the problem?”
The old man lit the stub of his cigar with a kitchen match and pointed a bony brown finger. “Por ahí,” he said. “That is the problem.”
A football field away, hidden by the mangroves, a pair of eighteen-foot flatboats appeared, each equipped with some sort of long-shaft mud motor. There were three men in each of the two boats and they were coming fast. The engines of the boats had a familiar growl and it only took a few seconds for Holliday to identify the noise. It was the same roar made by the Ural motorcycle Maximenko had lent to them back in the baracoas of Havana.
The men at the throttles of the boats were both standing; their passengers were seated, weapons across their laps. From where Holliday stood they looked depressingly like AK-47s.
“Can we outrun them?” Eddie asked, coming forward from the cockpit.
“We can try,” said Arango. He reached out and pushed the twin throttles as far as they would go. The Tiburon Blanco shivered like a Thoroughbred coming out of the starting gate, and the bow lifted upward, hard.
Holliday looked back as they left both boats behind. The man in the bow of the lead boat put down the AK-47 in his lap, then picked up something equally familiar.
“Oh, shit,” said Holliday. The man in the boat stood up, the RPG tank killer mounted on his right shoulder. There was no time for explanations. Holliday pushed the old man out of the way and spun the Tiburon Blanco’s wheel hard to starboard. There was an echoing boom from the lead boat and a trail of smoke as the warhead roared across their stern within a foot of hitting them. The warhead hit the river behind them and exploded, sending up a fifty-foot geyser of stinking mud and water.
“Esos cabrones intentó matar a mi barco!” Arango roared furiously. Cigar fuming, he went down into the forward cabin, muttering under his breath and leaving Holliday at the wheel without another word.
“Where are they?” Holliday yelled, looking back over his shoulder.
“Getting closer!” Eddie responded, raising his voice above the roar of the engines and the pounding of the hull as they hammered up the river.