Mambo (46 page)

It was not only the sad-faced child that made Luis Sandoval uneasy. A conspiracy of nature also contributed to his discomfort; he had heard over the ship's radio news of a storm front moving across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Caribbean. Scanning the dark sky proved nothing. He saw only a certain starry clarity. But in this part of the world he knew storms could spring up out of nowhere, streaking darkly from skies that only minutes before were clear. They could race across the heavens, dense cloud masses blown by great winds, rains that fell without apparent end, coastal regions submerged under insane tides. He'd seen it many times and, in those circumstances where science was impotent, a man was thrown back on older gods; Luis Sandoval often crossed himself during storms.

When the missile was safely lowered in the hold, Fuentes and Bosanquet disembarked and reboarded the launch that would take them back to the shore. Luis Sandoval gave the order for the freighter to sail a north-easterly course between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica to Santiago de Cuba, a journey of more than nine hours. Not a difficult trip normally, but there was a nervousness about his ten-man crew that Sandoval disliked.

Anchor was weighed, the ship's engines came rambunctiously to life as if iron bones were shaking beneath the decks.
La Mandadera
set sail, turning in a wide, ungainly arc away from the Honduran coastline. Sandoval observed Gunther Ruhr go down inside the hold. A pistol in the German's belt was visible beneath the blue denim jacket he wore. A great square of light rose from the hold, traversed now and then by Ruhr's enormous shadow.

Luis Sandoval stood on the bridge. The ship's awful cargo was something he didn't want to ponder; the cause of freedom sometimes involved undesirable things. He turned his thoughts instead to the child in the cabin, the scared little girl who sat on the edge of the bunk and had, by all reports, refused water and food.

Sandoval had a daughter of roughly the same age as that sad girl who wouldn't eat and wouldn't talk. He sympathised with the waif, even if he didn't understand her predicament entirely – but what could he possibly do to help her? She was Ruhr's property, or so Tomas Fuentes had hinted during the loading process, and she was to be left completely alone. And Sandoval would never interfere with a man like Gunther Ruhr.

In her coffin-like cabin Steffie realised that it was the blood that so appalled her. It had run down her inner thigh and she'd cleaned it with the sleeve of her jacket but now she thought she could feel it again, warm upon her flesh. She wondered if she were damaged inside somehow. For her age she was lamentably ignorant of her body and knew only what little her mother had told her and what she'd picked up from her friends – a mixture of fact and foolishness. She'd never paid much attention in biology class except when Charlie Hapgood, the blushing, timid teacher, had shown nude illustrations. Now she wished she knew more.

She shut her eyes, laid her small white hands in her lap, tried to forget how Ruhr had undone the buckle of his belt and stood over her, how even then she'd scratched and fought and kicked to no avail, how she hadn't been able to avoid seeing him and the way he was aroused.

She'd bit into her lip to keep from screaming as Ruhr forced her to accept him. He was whispering kindnesses, tender words she couldn't understand because they were in German, but she knew he was speaking to her from his innermost self, as if a part of him was untouched by cruelty –

But the pain! She'd stuffed her mouth with the edge of a blanket as he crushed her into the cot and moved inside her, growing harder and bigger with every motion – and then he gasped, and his words had come faster then, less tender, harsher, and his nails had dug into her hips. He rolled away from her almost at once and lay in silence looking up at the roof of the tent.

Puddles gathered in folds of canvas. Olive puddles, olive light. She'd closed her eyes and turned her back to him, smoothing her skirt down, trying to show she felt no pain. Trying to be brave.

She heard him rise and go out of the tent. When he'd come back it was dark and he told her they were leaving at once. She found it hard to walk, legs unsteady, muscles stiff. He helped her board a launch; the black sea scared her almost as much as Ruhr's touch.

When she was obliged to climb the scary ladder into the freighter, she thought: I hate you. I'll kill you one day. He was immediately beneath her, climbing, looking up her skirt – but what modesty did she have left?

Now she sat without moving inside the small cabin. There was a tiny porthole but no view. What difference would a view make anyhow? Sea was sea. She studied her hands. Broken fingernails, colourless, unvarnished. She'd broken them in the struggle against Gunther Ruhr. Once she'd been proud of her fingernails, attentive to them, painting them this colour and that – how long ago and silly it seemed to her now, such a petty vanity.

She got up, walked around the cabin, and felt the ship lurch briefly. She lay down, closed her eyes, listened to the rhythm of the engines,
dahda dahda dahda
. On and on. She rose again, went to the cabin door, found it locked; surprise, surprise. She walked back to the bunk. Face down now, head buried in the smelly grey blanket.

She felt so incredibly lonely. But she wasn't going to get weepy about it. That wouldn't serve any purpose. She listened to the ship, couldn't really help listening. Ruhr would come back, she knew that. He'd come back and unlock the door and step inside.

She knew he wasn't finished with her.

Something echoed in the back of her mind from days and days ago, a whole lifetime, something she'd glimpsed in a newspaper, the kind of paper with pictures of tits on page three, a paper her parents never purchased, a story about some girl in Cambridge, a prostitute Ruhr had picked up, a sensational tale of how he'd tried to do this terrible thing to her, shove something sharp up inside her, and that was all she'd read because her father had confiscated the paper. She remembered the girl had been reported as saying
I
thought he was going to kill me
.

Now she thought,
Something sharp
.

What came to her mind was the sheathed knife that lay strapped to his shin.

In the dank hold which contained the relics of a past cargo – shapeless bananas turned to foul mush – Ruhr worked under a bright lamp. Now and again an inquisitive crew member peered down into the hold, and Ruhr would curse and gesture with his pistol.

He worked with the kind of concentration one might see on the face of a zealous bible scholar studying gospel. It was exacting work and required all his patience. He used wrenches and special screwdrivers from his precious canvas bag. He removed a plate from the side of the cylinder, exposing a confusing bundle of different-coloured wires – reds, whites, yellows, blacks, purples. There was nothing simple in the nuclear world.

These wires were connected to a variety of receptacles, openings into which the pins of the armed nose-cone would fit. Male, female. Since Ruhr had had the warhead specially assembled for him, the regular correspondence of male to female, of pin to receptacle, the precise sequence mandated by a classified technical manual was not going to make the missile functional.

Peering into the guts of the thing, Ruhr began to make his adjustments, carefully severing certain wires and splicing them with others. He did it without reference to any diagram but schemata he carried in his head. He was conscious of nothing except for what lay beneath his hands. Even the bad hand, limited as it was, seemed to shed its deformity and take on new agility as he explored and snipped, spliced and joined – a surgeon, he thought, somebody repairing arteries and redirecting them; an inventor modifying a tested device; an artist bent over a demanding sculpture whose finished intricacy he alone knew.

Erected, ready to launch and travel the distance from Santiago de Cuba to Miami, Florida – some five hundred and fifty miles as both crows and missiles flew – this lethal tube would, if released, destroy the downtown, the bridges, the water supply, the freeways, hundreds of thousands of people in an area that stretched from Coral Gables to Miami Beach. This warhead would inflict upon Miami more devastation than that wrought on Hiroshima in 1945 by the atomic bomb.

If it were ever released.

Of course it would not be, a fact that caused Ruhr a moment of regret. The responsibility for destruction on such a vast scale was something he would have accepted gladly. But he had been paid only to deliver an armed missile, not to light its fuse.

A slick of sweat ran over his eyelids. The intimacy he forged between himself and the missile was more rewarding than any he'd ever shared with a human. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, thought of the child locked in a cabin above him. She'd fought him, resisted. He admired her spiritedness. He stared into the body of the cylinder, the veins, the sinews, and he thought of how he'd laid this complex machine wide open with simple instruments. There was a parallel here, a correspondence that couldn't possibly escape him – when he was finished with this operation, he'd go upstairs to the locked cabin.

He picked up a screwdriver; it glinted under the powerful lamp. The slight scratch the girl had inflicted under his right eye with her fingernail began, some two hundred and fifty miles out from Cabo Gracias a Dios, to throb.

Pinar del Rio Province, Cuba

It was not a comfortable flight. The black twin-engine Cessna (a doper's plane painted the colour of night) bounced through layers of turbulence like a shuttlecock in an angry game of badminton. Salgado, the pilot, a Cuban-American with the physique of a linebacker, was imperturbable, a fatalistic observer of the elements. “If we don't have no control, man, what's the point of worrying?” he'd asked a concerned Pagan who sat in the front passenger seat.

The Cessna dropped through clouds; the sea was agitated. Lightning flared over Key West and the Straits of Florida.

“Hey, something nasty's on its way, man,” Salgado said with the confident air of a hardened weather-watcher. Pagan saw the moon being sucked behind speeding clouds. The lights of the Florida Keys vanished. The plane flew south-west toward the Gulf of Mexico where more lightning lit the sky with hard white electricity. Some fifty miles north of Pinar del Rio, Salgado turned south.

Cuba was visible, mysterious and mainly dark. The Cessna tipped, tilted, battered by a sudden uprising of air currents. Pagan stared at the green instrument lights, which meant nothing to him; how absurd it was to be suspended in black air, kept aloft by a device one didn't understand and whose instrument display was baffling.

He nervously pressed the palms of his hands together. It wasn't altogether comforting to know that Salgado, according to his own boasts, had flown surreptitiously into Cuba more than fifty times. A piece of cake, man, was how he put it when he detected Pagan's misgivings. He knew how to outfox Castro's observation posts. Just the same, Pagan's throat was very dry. He wondered what the penalties were for armed illegal entry into Cuba. He assumed Communist countries were not in the vanguard of charitable treatment toward prisoners, especially those who violated borders with Pagan's disregard.

The Cessna began to come down more rapidly now. How Salgado knew where he was going to land mystified Pagan. There were no obvious markers, no well-defined runways. The airstrip, such as it was, had been hacked out of a tobacco field. Salgado's guides were thin moonlight and instinct. He flew as if navigating blindfold. The wings of the plane brushed branches and shook foliage before it came finally, thankfully, to a safe landing.

Pagan stepped down. There was a scent of tobacco in the air, strong and vaguely bitter. What was supposed to happen next? Did Salgado fly out and simply leave him here in this dark, lonely place? No sign of habitation anywhere, no lights, just unbroken night. In a few hours it would be dawn.

Salgado came out of the cockpit. “This is goodbye, man. I gotta get back before that storm becomes real bad. Somebody's gonna meet you here.”

“When?”

“This is Cuba, friend. Time ain't measured by watches in this place. They got their own system.”

“Terrific.” Pagan didn't care for this information at all. He wanted to hear that Cubans were punctual and reliable and kept all their appointments.

“Adios,” Salgado said.

“Wait –”

“Relax, man. Somebody's gonna show. Count on it.”

Pagan was silent. He watched Salgado climb back up into the cockpit. The Cessna turned around, stopped, then began its run, taking off over the field, skimming trees, vanishing, a black plane in a black sky. With the departure of Salgado the night was emptier than before, as if Pagan's one thread back to safety had been snapped and here he was, stuck, uncertain, in an inhospitable country.

The night yielded nothing. The call of disturbed birds, frogs croaking, the wind occasionally rushing through plants, nothing else. He felt blind, robbed of any sense of direction.

Ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, passed before a lantern appeared on the edge of the field, swinging slightly as it came closer. It illuminated the broken-nosed face of a middle-aged man who wore a black shirt and blue jeans and a straw hat.

“You are Pagan?” Pronounced
pah-gan
.

Pagan said that he was. The man came closer, shining his lantern directly into Pagan's eyes. The stench of kerosene was overwhelming. Pagan stepped away from the flame.

“My instructions are to take you to the highway. A car waits for you there.” The Cuban, who said he was known as El Boxeador, spoke an English that was understandable if slowly enunciated.

“How far is the main road?”

“Two miles. Not far.”

Pagan, wondering about the nature of the network that had made this trip possible, the collusion between Salgado and El Boxeador, walked behind the lantern. He decided they had to be part of some drug-smuggling ring that Navarro had exposed but chose, for his own reasons, not to prosecute.