Cuban Death-Lift (10 page)

“Sleep okay?”

The woman climbed up the steps to the main cabin. She wore khaki pants, pulled tight at the waist but baggy, and a burnt-orange blouse that accented the color of her eyes. For the first time, her hair was down, long and raven-black, hanging over her left shoulder. There was no puffiness in her face, and the fresh light made her look more Indian than Cuban.

“I slept quite well, thank you.”

She hung over the railing of the fighting deck, looking landward.

“Is that Cuba?” As evenly as she said it, there was still just the slightest hint of excitement in her voice.

Before us, the bleak facades of pre-Castro high-rises and factories had disappeared into rolling hills and cliffs banking into the sea. On the hills was the green of bamboo and the deeper green of ficus and gumbo limbo trees.

“Yeah,” I said, “that's Cuba.”

I could understand her excitement. It wasn't just the mission. I knew that. It was the impact of seeing her native land after such a long absence. I knew how I had felt upon seeing the United States after my first long hitch in Nam—and America was still mine; not the victim of some raving maniac for a dictator. It was even before “our” demonstrators turned destructive.

But Cuba was no longer hers. It was a homeland of the past, like someone well loved and lost.

“Pretty country, isn't it?”

“Yes. It sure is, Androsa.”

It was the first time I had called her by her first name, and instinctively, she turned toward me when I said it. Her mahogany eyes were moist, brimming, close to tears. But her guard was down only momentarily, and she turned quickly away.

“There's nothing to be ashamed of, Androsa. It's only natural that you should feel—”

She cut me off. “Mr. MacMorgan, how I feel is none of your concern.” She had her back to me, trying to get her emotions under control. “And if our business relationship is to continue civilly, I would much prefer that you called me by my surname.”

“Santarun, right?”

“Well, Miss Santarun might be more appropriate.”

“Fine. In that case, I much prefer that you
don't
call me by my surname. Dusky will do. MacMorgan sounds too much like a hamburger chain.”

The emotion was still on the surface, and she couldn't help the smile. She hurried by me, back into the cabin, calling as she went, “Do you want some more coffee?”

“Yeah. And put another pot on—that is, if you don't mind.”

She came up with a fresh mug and put it on the console in front of me. “Mr., ah, Dusky . . . I'm sorry if I am brusque. But this is a business venture. It seems to me that it's all part of your job—”

“No one likes being treated like hired help, Miss Santarun.”

Her eyes flashed. “But dammit, you
are
hired help. You're being paid and paid well—far too much, to my mind.”

I held my hands up. “Hold it, hold it. We were starting to get along fairly well, there. Let's just treat each other like human beings, that's all I ask. Now let's change the subject.”

She took a deep breath, then sipped at her coffee. There was no mistaking the face she made. “This coffee's terrible,” she said.

“You had your chance to make it. Besides, I like it terrible. It keeps me awake.”

She tasted the coffee again, adjusting to the strength of it. “I guess you did have a long night. Was there any trouble?”

“Staying awake was the toughest thing, like I said. A lot of distress calls on VHF—mostly in Spanish. So I played a little game to keep my mind on what I was doing. You know how a kid counts telephone poles on a long car trip? Well, I counted boats. One way or another, we passed two hundred and fiftyseven. Busy night.”

“And how far are we now from Mariel Harbor?”

“Mile and a half, two miles. It won't be long.”

She strolled around the aft deck, stretching, combing through her long black hair with her fingers. “Dusky,” she said, “what kind of boat is that back there, right behind us?”

I didn't even turn around. “Him? Oh, he's been tailing us ever since we got into Cuban waters. It's a gunboat. A Cuban gunboat.”

The bitterness in her voice was like a living thing. “You're wrong about that, Mr. MacMorgan. It's not a Cuban gunboat. It's a
Castro
gunboat. Believe me, there's a difference. . . .”

The gunboat trailed us on toward the mouth of Mariel Harbor, keeping a discreet distance. In the fresh daylight, we moved over the black water past wooden swordfishing boats, their orange bouys marking miles of line—and their spritsail masts probably doubling as radio transmitters.

Abruptly, the water changed; the bottom came up from six hundred fathoms to fifteen fathoms, the hue of the sea was a soft blue jell, and you could see big fish moving among the safety of coral heads below, and the white sand, flourlike, on the bottom. From the flybridge, the water was like tinted glass and it seemed as if we were aviators at a dreamy low altitude, and the shadow of
Sniper
pressed on before us, cloudlike on the white sand.

The first view of Mariel Harbor is the picture of industry: a dozen smokestacks, a power plant, and a cement factory beneath scarred hillsides on the eastern edge of the entrance. Khaki-colored dumptrucks rumbled along dirt roads barely slowing for muledrawn carts. And from my vantage point a half mile out to sea they looked like toys, and the exhaust from the factory stacks curved away with the wind and blended with the low mountain clouds.

“Have you ever been here before—to Mariel?”

The woman stood beside me, her eyes taking in everything as we approached. I had dropped
Sniper
down to twelve hundred RPM, lining her up with the middle channel marker, taking her in slow.

Behind us, the gunboat slowed also.

“When I was a child, yes,” she said. “My father brought me here. The power plant was not built then. And the cliffs were covered with trees.”

“It must have been pretty.”

She nodded. “But not as pretty as other parts of Cuba.”

“I've never been here, but when I was a boy I had a friend who was a very fine writer, and he told me about Mariel. He said they used to smuggle Chinese out of this harbor. One his friends lost an arm here. He didn't say how.”

Her thin laughter was edged with bitterness. “So now Mariel is for smuggling Cubans. Let's hope we both keep our arms.”

The entranceway to the harbor was narrow, less than a quarter mile wide, and a half-dozen American boats—cruisers, shrimp boats, and a couple of small skiffs—were anchored off the entrance in the clear water. The crews and the Cuban-Americans who had come to claim relatives were all topside in the sun, lounging and smoking nervously. It was a running tide, outgoing, and empty Coke cans and garbage bags and wine bottles flowed out to sea. A narrow paw of beach curved around on the west side of the entrance furred with tall casuarinas, which blocked our view of the harbor proper. But even above the pines I could see the masts and rigging of a thousand boats—with untold more blending into the distance.

They were all there from America.

All waiting to load with refugees and relatives.

No wonder Castro was making a half million or more a day.

I pulled downtide of one of the shrimp boats, the
Debra Jane,
and stuck both engines in idle when we were close enough to carry on a conversation.

I scanned the shrimp boat's decks for someone who looked as if he might speak English. There were six or seven people topside, all Cuban-Americans.

I turned to the woman. “Ask them why they're laying off. Ask them if we shouldn't go on into the harbor.”

Androsa cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled at them in a firm Spanish alto. Immediately, everyone on deck of the
Debra Jane
was answering her one question in a barrage of rolling dialogue, everyone talking at once.

When they had finished, she said, “We're supposed to wait here for the authorities.”

“Ah.”

“Don't think I don't recognize that look on your face, Mr. MacMorgan. You think it funny that ‘Cubans' love to talk. And you think it's stupid that the people on that boat should take so long to give me a simple answer to a simple question.”

“Something like that.”

“Oh, so you admit it!” She really was surprised, and the anger left her face momentarily.

“I try to make it a point not to lie to myself. That means I only lie to myself about half the time. But as you said: you asked them a simple question. I just don't understand why Spanish people all feel obliged to talk at the same time.”

“It offends you?”

“It confuses me—and I guess that's the same thing.”

“It's called ‘different cultures,' Mr. MacMorgan. Our society is built upon the family, and our families are built upon warmth and loyalty—and interaction. Everyone feels free to talk because we are all members of the same family.” She snorted lightly, her perfect nose flaring. “Truthfully, I don't even know why I feel obligated to explain it to you. I've seen the look in your eyes from a thousand different gringos. When you grow up as an outsider in America, you come to know the look of a racist.”

“So now I'm a racist?”

“Aren't you?”

“If not liking a bunch of people to talk all at the same time is being a racist, then I'm a—”

I didn't get a chance to finish, and the woman didn't get a chance to get any madder. The gunboat that had been trailing us came up close on
Sniper
's stern, and an authoritative voice said something over a loudspeaker.

“What did he say?”

She looked smug. “Something that will appeal to the verbal economy your race seems to cherish.”

“Christ, Androsa, you know how to run a thing into the ground. I understood what he said about anchoring. But I didn't get the rest of it.”

The gunboat was a storm-gray cruiser, made of wood—smaller than the old PT boats. What appeared to be the captain stood beside the bow-mounted high-caliber machine gun. He wore a baggy light-blue uniform that looked like a chef's suit. His hat was light-blue, peaked and narrow, similar to the hats Japanese soldiers used to wear. He looked at me menacingly.

Androsa said, “He told you to back off and anchor immediately.”

“That's all?”

“He also said we should prepare to be boarded. . . .”

 

We were boarded not by one captain, but two.

There was the naval officer, master of the gunboat. His name was Zapata. Captain Zapata was in his early thirties, all five feet eight inches and 145 pounds of him. He had bad teeth and a fixed expression of contempt, and he chain-smoked Partagas cigarettes. His flunkies stayed behind on the gunboat, their uniforms looking even baggier. But in their arms they cradled a weapon that I knew well: the scythe-clipped Russian AK-47 assault rifle.

And they looked as if they knew how to use them.

With Zapata was an army officer. His uniform seemed well-tailored in comparison. It was more green than khaki, and the jacket was belted with leather, shoulder and waist. He wore a sidearm and medals. I wondered if they had been one of Castro's token offerings after the revolution—or maybe he had won them in Africa.

A lot of Cuban soldiers were in Africa.

The Russians use them like German shepherds.

So they both came aboard, Zapata first, the army officer—with the unlikely name of Captain Lobo—second. Lobo was a stocky guy, something under six feet, 240 pounds maybe. Some muscle. A lot of fat. Black shadow of beard, and black eyes that betrayed the malevolence behind the cordial smile.

Some pair, Zapata and Lobo. Zapata swaggered his air of contempt up onto the aft deck of
Sniper,
and Lobo grinned his way up behind.

First impressions can fool you. I stood there loose-limbed, taking them all in, trying to smile and look harmless myself. It seemed certain that Zapata would be the one in charge.

But no, it was the grinning one.

It was Lobo. Zapata looked me up and down, his bad teeth slightly bared, and started to say something—but Lobo cut him off.

There was no doubt then who was running the show.

Lobo widened his smile, took a step closer to me, gave me the standard Spanish greeting, then asked,
“De donde es usted, Capitán?”

He wanted to know where I was from. I looked at him blankly, shrugged my shoulders, and gestured with palm upward and turned to the woman.

“I never could understand that stuff,” I said stupidly.

Her eyes showed that she wasn't fooled. “What a shame, Mr. MacMorgan. It must be dreary down there in your little crevice of existence.” And without waiting for a reply—as if I had one for that—she took control of our end, talking with the two Cubans.

They wanted to see my papers. And her papers. And wouldn't we be more comfortable in the cabin with something cool to drink?

So we filed through the salon and took a seat at the little booth made of the old hatch cover, sanded silk-smooth and covered with epoxy.

My old friend Billy Mack had made it for me. But now that seemed like a long time ago.

Androsa and I sat on one side; Zapata sat scrunched between the cabin wall and the bulk of Lobo. Lobo seemed pleased to be dealing with the woman. And no wonder why. The essence of her filled the cabin. Even Zapata felt obligated to take off his little Jap hat in her presence. While Lobo talked, his black eyes leering, Zapata sat and smoked and looked at Androsa.