Cuban Death-Lift (23 page)

There was more gunfire now; soldiers shooting wildly. The place was getting hot as hell.

“Dammit, Androsa,” I whispered hoarsely, “don't you think I've figured it out by now? The letter you left me was the final tip off; General Halcón was your father. So you killed him. He was one evil bastard, and now they're trying to kill us so stop that crying—”

“No!” There was a strange hysteria in her voice now. She took my face between her soft hands, peering at me in the darkness, making me listen to the unbelievable. “No, Dusky. You are so wrong. It is worse, much worse. It was not Halcón. No, I'm glad he is dead. But it is the other I should have killed. But I couldn't! Dusky, Fidel Castro is my father! It is him I should have killed. . . .”

Too preoccupied to be shocked, I punched the button of the detonator roughly.

And that's when all hell broke loose. . . .

The bonefish moved over the flats in shafts of gray light, and the bottom was turtle grass and white sand and you could see the shadows of the fish as they traveled over the bottom in the clear water.

I stood at the window of my stilthouse watching them as they turned as one, slowed, then vectored to feed, throwing their milky wake. It was a glassy day in the decline of May; the expanse of shallow water moved away from my stilthouse swollen and metallic, shimmering in the distance with the quality of mirage.

“So who came out in the cruiser with you?”

I turned from the window and looked at Norm Fizer. His briefcase was on the table, papers spread before him. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him wearing something other than a suit—let alone something so casual as the brown tennis shorts and Bjorn Borg slipover shirt he wore now. Saigon, I decided. A rare day, that.

“Norm,” I said, “I asked you who you brought out in the cruiser—”

“Dammit, Dusky, I
know
what you asked me.” He smacked his pen down on the table in bad imitation of someone who is supposed to be mad. “I know because it's the third time you've asked me, and for the third time you'll find out when I get this damn report of yours straightened out—and I still can't figure out how you knew I brought someone out here with me.”

I wagged my finger at him like a tolerant instructor. “Can't fool a fool, Stormin' Norman. Even tied to my stilthouse the way it is, the trim keeps shifting. Not much, but enough to tell me that Navy launch is either haunted or there's someone else with you.”

“Okay,” he said, frustrated. “I brought you a little surprise. Ever since you got back from Cuba you've been mooning around like some lovesick kid, and I decided to bring you a little something to cheer you up. You refused to let us fly you to the clinic in Washington, so I decided that to preserve your mental health I had to do something.”

I crossed the plank floor of the stilthouse, yanked open the door of the gas fridge, got out two cold bottles of beer, and hunted for the opener. “Hey, you've dealt with those military headshrinkers before. They only want to know two things: why you hated your father, and the size of your . . . well, you know what. If that's analysis I can do without it.”

“But you have been acting listless ever since—”

“The hell I have!” I said it too loud, the emotion blowing the credibility of the denial. Fizer hastened to cover his face with a big hand, trying to hide a smirk.

I plopped down in my baggy reading chair, put my feet up, and pulled at the beer. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Let's get on with it—but I don't see why. I already filled out one report.”

Norm shuffled through some papers. “Yeah, you filled out a report all right—the way one person fills the bleachers at Yankee Stadium. Here it is, and I quote: ‘After detonating said diversion, the lieutenant in question accompanied me down the mountainside to Pier Three, where we convinced a captain in the Cuban army to transport us back to my boat via fast military launch.”

“So that's what happened.”

Fizer looked at me wryly. “But it does leave a few questions unanswered.”

It did indeed. So I sat in the chair and fiddled with a new ultralight reel I had bought—a very fine German Quick with the asbestos drag system that might be the best made—and I told him about it.

The diversion had worked beautifully. The RDX explosives around the perimeter of the harbor had gone off with a massive
woof
and white glare that made the big searchlights seem pale in comparison. Our only tense moment was halfway down the mountain when the Cuban soldiers and sailors went pounding by us, headed for the Naval Academy like ants from a trampled nest. After that, we could have walked down the road to Pier Three singing and shouting. With no communication possible from the stone castle, Fidel Castro and his entourage were under heavy attack as far as the military around Mariel was concerned. It left the harbor wide open for our escape—once we found a boat fast enough and small enough to make it up the tidal creek to
Sniper.
And we had found one—one of the twin-engine patrol boats tethered to the quay surprisingly alone, but we had a visitor—Captain Lobo. After I treated him to a proper welcome—a few well-placed jabs that sent him crashing to the floor—he became very cooperative indeed, sniffling and whining and begging me not to kill him. He begged all the way back to Key West, where I turned him in.

Fizer scribbled in his report as I talked, big hands clumsy, seeming to balk at the secretarial work required of them. He looked up, paused and then said, “It's kind of surprising they didn't send some fighter planes after you once you made it back to your boat and headed for the States.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is kind of surprising. Maybe with all the other American boats out there in the strait they didn't want to take a chance of strafing the wrong vessel. Or maybe they just didn't know it was me. But it was surprising.”

It was, of course, a lie. Ten miles from international waters a big Cuban jet copter had come hovering over us, searchlights throwing a dazzling glare across
Sniper.
Immediately, Lobo recovered much of his surliness and went running to the aft deck waving his arms, expecting them to fire on the two Americans who had kidnapped him. But the assault never came. The chopper hovered above us as if awaiting orders, then banked away, back toward the mainland. Lobo was outraged. He couldn't understand it. But I did. Androsa, leaning against me as I stood at the controls, had told me about the Cuban revolutionary who, more than two decades before, had come down out of the mountains of the Isle of Pines to take a lover in the village on the Ensenada de Siguanea and how a girl child was born, and how he had abandoned the two of them to pursue what he was convinced was his destiny. Yet even after their years on diametrically opposed paths, he could not destroy the woman who was his daughter, and she could not kill the man behind the dictator she loathed. So only the three of us knew—or would ever know, because I had given her my word, and Fidel Castro sure as hell wasn't going to tell the world about the bastard child who had, in her own way, defeated him.

The voice of Norm Fizer brought me from my thoughts. “Another thing that isn't clear is why Lieutenant Santarun requested immediate duty in Europe. She was very vague about that.” He eyed me slyly. “Did you have some kind of lovers' spat, or—”

“As I'm sure that goddam computer of yours up in Washington told you, the lady spent a week with me right here after our return. And it was a very pleasant week, and we did not quarrel.” I shrugged. “Maybe she just didn't feel comfortable with all the new Cuban agents we have floating around this country thanks to the way the refugee exodus was handled.”

And that was true. Castro was infamous for changing his mind. And if he reconsidered and decided he wanted another chance to see his daughter, it would be a simple matter . . .

Fizer stood up abruptly and checked his watch. “Well, Captain MacMorgan, I guess that just about does it. I've got a tennis date in Atlanta in . . . three hours, so I'd better get moving.” He finished his beer in a gulp and began to stuff papers into his briefcase. “By the way,” he said, “we turned over those two agents who posed as cameramen to an allied country of ours along with that Lobo character. I was rather surprised to learn there's a sizable community of expatriate Cubans living in London, and that the British had sent one of their agents from a Commonwealth island south of Cuba to . . .”

And that's when I heard the lumbering weight of him upon the steps of the stilthouse and heard the unmistakable brogue of his voice:

“Is it that ye think me some kind of a bloody suit that ya keep me closeted in that stinkin' motorboat o' yers, Captain Fizer?”

And he came clomping through the doorway, big Irish face flushed beneath the Viking beard, left arm in cast and sling, a patch of gauze taped to the side of his head.

“Jesus H. Christ!” I said, honestly stunned.

“No, 'tis only meself, brother MacMorgan—but close enough!”

Fizer had a wry smile on his face. “I believe you've met Captain Westy O'Davis, Dusky. Great Britain traded your three Cubans for this one Cayman agent—and frankly, I'm not sure we got the best of the bargain if he's as much like you as he seems.”

“Hah!” The Irishman posed, offended, then marched over and gave me a bearlike slap on the shoulder. “I've come ta take ye up on your kind offer, Yank. This ugly brute of a friend o' yers says yer in need o' some recreation, so it's meself who have come ta lead ya in some beer drinkin', an' ta tell you some tall tales—an' did ya know there's a thousand bonefish feedin' right outside, one as big as God himself? It's true, Yank, it's true.” He grinned at me and winked. “I swear it on the grave of me own dead mother. . . .”

Less than ten minutes after the props of my thirty-four-foot sportfisherman,
Sniper,
almost cut the girl into fish bait, the boat exploded.

Not my boat. Some kind of commercial trawler. Hard to tell for sure—there wasn't much left of it.

It went up with a dazzling flash and rumble on the near horizon, turning the full-moon night to eerie day and lighting the mangrove jungle shorelines of the Ten Thousand Islands in a Kodalith of stark whites and shadowed blacks. It was so unexpected that for one crazy moment I grabbed my head, thinking that I had been clubbed. But then, in the brightness of the explosion, I saw the burning four-foot wall of shock wave coming at us, and all we could do was hold fast and bow into it.

We were supposed to be on a vacation cruise. A little rest and recreation for me and a wild Irish friend of mine, Westy O'Davis. I had met O'Davis down in Mariel Harbor, Cuba. Mariel was an ideal place for making quick friends and influencing deadly enemies. The Irishman had, in a period of less than twenty-four hours, become a close friend. He also happened to have saved my life. Twice.

And he wasn't about to let me forget it.

So he had come to visit me on my little house built on stilts out on the clearwater flats of Calda Bank, near the pirate island of Key West. That's where I run
Sniper
out of as a charterboat. For years it was a valued way of life—working as a fishing guide, going down every morning to the docks at Garrison Bight where my sign reads:

 

I didn't make much money as a fishing guide. But on the other side of the ledger, I had all the good, clear fishing days a man could want, pretty nice tourist people to show a good time to, and best of all, I was my own boss.

Once I also had a fine wife and twin boys who were the best of both of us. But then the drug pirates got them, and I had nothing.

So I went back to doing what I did best—the deadly trade I learned as a Navy SEAL. Revenge is not an ideal reason for living, but it's certainly one of the most compelling. And I have lived fully since.

Especially in Mariel Harbor, Cuba.

So, after that ordeal, it seemed reasonable that O'Davis and I take a little time off. O'Davis, who works for that labor-union-ruled island called Great Britain, is a leprechaun giant with red beard, copper hair, and a Viking face who speaks with the amused black humor of the Irish poet. O'Davis had gone to Mariel from his island home in the Caymans, where his cover occupation includes leading scuba diving tours and squiring around the pretty tourist ladies.

But he had had enough of government work and killing, and so had I, so we had spent that first week on my stilthouse drinking cold beer, battling good fish on light tackle, and telling tall tales. Then one night, while I sat with beer, a good book, and a fresh dip of Copenhagen, O'Davis began to go through my library of Florida charts. He unrolled them one by one, studying them, humming some strange tune as he did. I watched his broad face in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp.

“I want those all rolled back and catalogued the way I had them, O'Davis.”

“Tum-da-dum-dum-dum . . . what?” And when I repeated it, he made a face of mock outrage. “An' do ya' think me some kind of slovenly child, Dusky MacMorgan, that ya' be remindin' me to care for yer precious charts?”

“I do.”

“Hah! An' now yer laughin' at me to boot!” He made as if to throw down the chart he was holding, then thought better of it. “So this is the thanks I get for savin' the life of the likes of you—and a big, ugly brute you are, too. . . .”