Mambo (56 page)

“It would be interesting … to fly the missile,” Rosabal said.

Gunther Ruhr said nothing. He thought how exhilarating it would be to see the missile riding the skies through the rain, unerring, a twenty-foot steel arrow piercing the heart of its target.

Rosabal pressed the tips of his fingers together, placed them against his lips in an attitude of deliberation; an uninformed observer might have thought he was praying. But Rosabal was imagining Miami, a city he'd never visited, one he'd seen only in books and movies. He was imagining the hotels of the Art Deco district, old men and women sitting on the porches of pink and turquoise hotels, frowning at the hazy sea; he was imagining the exclusive little shops of Coral Gables and the huge hotels on Collins Avenue and the Cuban cafés along Calle Ocho where the troublemakers gathered to squabble about politics in Havana. And then he remembered his sick father who had gone to Guantanamo, to the American Naval Station, and asked for asylum in the United States, how he'd been laughingly turned away, and then made to disappear by Castro's political police afterwards.

Yes, it was right, everything he had planned all along was correct and just. He had absolutely no doubt.

He looked at Gunther Ruhr and he asked, “Can you make it fly?”

“Of course,” Ruhr replied. He could hardly breathe:
was he being asked to do the very thing he'd dreamed of doing
?

“Then why don't you?” Rosabal asked.

Ruhr felt a shiver of anticipation; the hairs on the backs of his hands bristled. “What target would please you?”

Some hours before the capture that would result in his execution, several hours before he lied to his interrogators about Magdalena Torrente's whereabouts, Alberto Canto had driven his car to a secluded place and bandaged her side. He'd applied antibiotic cream over the wound, then gauze. The ointment came from Russia, he apologised, and its potency was suspect, but it was all he had in his possession. He wished he had an X-ray machine to assess the damage and fix the position of the slug in her body. The repair he made was a temporary measure, and a poor one at best; she'd need treatment within a few hours at a good hospital. Her breathing was unsteady, her temperature certain to rise. Either she would have to return to the United States or run the risk of a hospital in Havana, where her illegal status might be discovered, and the consequences dire.

She announced she'd fly herself to Florida if a plane could be found. Astonished by her confidence, Canto argued she was certainly in no condition to fly an aircraft despite the painkiller he'd injected into her. Consider the turbulent weather, Canto had said. The darkness. Consider the seriousness of your wound. Your condition is terrible.

Canto had strongly recommended trying to find a pilot to take her. If she had to fly home, she shouldn't be at the controls herself. But she defied him. She could do it alone. She stubbornly insisted. He argued from the medical point of view but Magdalena Torrente, unmoved, had reservoirs of determination that Canto could not even begin to fathom.

At the airstrip outside San José de Las Lajas she stole without difficulty a small plane, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, made in the United States and imported circuitously into Cuba, that belonged to some official in the Ministry of Construction. She'd learned how to steal planes from the old fliers at the exile training camps in the Everglades. Canto still tried to prevent her. There on the rainy field, barely able to hear each other over the scream of the wind, they had argued passionately. It was madness, Canto had shouted. She couldn't fly a plane in her state. If she didn't get to a hospital quickly she might haemorrhage, perhaps bleed to death. But in the end Magdalena's determination overcame the physician's compassionate caution.

She wasn't troubled about flying, despite the weather and her condition. Canto's painkiller kicked in quickly; besides, the storm had begun to diminish by the time she was ready to fly out of San José de Las Lajas. She embraced the physician, expressed her gratitude, kissed him, and left a smear of her own blood on his shirt.

There were maps in the cockpit. The instrumentation was simple. She took off into the driving rain, looking down once for a sight of the physician, but Canto had gone.

She had lied to him. She had absolutely no intention of flying this plane to Florida.

Inside the cramped control module Rafael Rosabal pretended to deliberate a moment before he answered Gunther Ruhr's question about a target.

“I think Miami,” he said.

Alejandro Bengochea landed the chopper in a field a mile from the missile. He got out, checked the body of the craft, which had been struck on the fuselage by rifle fire but the fuel line was intact.

Pagan stepped down from the chopper and gazed thoughtfully into the rain. What was he supposed to do next? His head ached, his mind was an empty room. Armed with an ancient revolver he had borrowed from Bengochea, a gun that should have been retired years ago, how could he possibly slip past soldiers with automatic weapons and get to Ruhr? Even if he did, how could he disable that bloody missile?

He was aware of Steffie Brough watching him. He looked up, half-smiled, tried to appear encouraging, the friendly, reliable London cop who knew which bus to take to Battersea Park or the quickest way to Buckingham Palace. There was some element of accusation in her trance-like expression, as if she couldn't understand why she wasn't going home. She breathed upon the glass and, like a small child fascinated by condensation, drew a shapeless pattern with a fingertip. Then she turned her face away from Pagan, her profile sullen.

Pagan looked across the field. He was wet, but wetness and misery had quickly become conditions of his life, and almost acceptable. He turned Bengochea's revolver over in his hand, and stared once more across the meadow. He shrugged. It wasn't the best idea he'd ever had, but it was the only thing that occurred to him.

“I'm going back there,” he said to Bengochea.

“
Que
?”

“On foot. Alone.
Solo.
”

Bengochea looked puzzled.

Pagan said, “You stay here. Keep an eye on the girl. If I don't come back, you take her to the British Embassy in Havana. Understand?”

Pagan turned, walked away from the helicopter, looking back once. Steffie Brough wasn't watching him, but Alejandro Bengochea was still shaking his head. He hadn't entirely understood Pagan's words although he was convinced that the Englishman, even if a little
estupido
, was nevertheless a brave man.

Magdalena had flown for three hours at seven thousand feet, trying to keep the Bonanza above the turbulence, but the erratic wind shook the plane. When she climbed higher, clouds obscured the Central Highway she was trying to follow. She didn't want to fly without some kind of direct visual guide. She came down again to about three thousand feet.

Then the painkiller began to wear off. It was hard to find a comfortable position. Maybe there wasn't one. She swallowed two of the codeine Canto had given her, but they didn't quell the fire in her side.

Rain pummelled the plane. Mist and cloud created mysterious shapes around the cockpit. She lightly touched the place Canto had bandaged. Painful. It was weird to realise you had a bullet in your body, a foreign piece of metal in your system. What had it shattered? What had it punctured? Was some vital organ threatened?

But was it any more weird to have a foreign object in your body than to have a broken heart?

Sweat formed on her brow, ran down into her eyes. And yet she was cold, cold inside.

She gazed down at the highway. At some point she would have to fly south-west to Bayamo.

And then Bayamo to Santiago. About a hundred miles. Less than an hour's flying time.

If she could make it.

When she'd flown three hundred miles, the sky had turned to a fuzzy kind of grey. There was light but no sun. The harsh unremitting rain created a bizarre tattoo on the cockpit. She wiped sweat out of her eyes, concentrated on the skies ahead, the highway below.

Why was she so damned cold? Then so warm?

She looked down at her bandage. Redness seeped through the material.

I lost more than blood, she thought. I lost myself.

She touched the bandage, brought her hand up; her fingertips were red.

Think good things. But she couldn't keep her head from filling with images of Rafael. His lovely deceptive face kept rising in her mind.

If he materialised here right now, if he appeared beside her in this cabin and asked for forgiveness, what would she say?

Yes
.

Yes I forgive you again
.

You'd do that, wouldn't you? You'd do it all over again. You never learned a thing. Where Rafael was concerned, her heart always flew ahead of her reasoning like a canary sent by coal-miners into the deep, unmapped caverns of underground shafts to check for poisoned air.

Her love was more than a sickness. She breathed her love for Rafael. It was as necessary to her existence as oxygen. It was inside her the way her bloodstream was. And yet it was poisoned.

She loved him. And she wanted him dead.

She looked down at the grey-green landscape; she could see the ocean flooding over beaches, great clouds of spray.

She flew over Bayamo at one hundred and thirty miles an hour. The pain burned all the way through her. She shut her eyes because it was so goddam fierce. She hadn't ever known anything so intense. Once, years ago, she'd had an abortion, the consequence of a dalliance with a young boy at a military camp in the Everglades, and the doctor had done something wrong and her womb had become infected, and she remembered the way pain seemed to scream inside her; but even that agony, which had been like a hat-pin pressed into the walls of her womb, was nothing to what she felt now.

She dropped her hands from the controls. She was cold, so damned cold, and even though she had no mirror she knew she was pale and the skin under her eyes black. There was sweat on her upper lip and her hands shook and something made from steel, some kind of pincer, clutched her intestines. She cried aloud. She felt herself slip toward black-out; around the periphery of her vision was darkness. She opened a window, let the cold wet air blow at her and keep her awake.

She placed her hands on the controls again and steadied the plane, but her grip was loose and weak and the tips of her fingers numb in a way that filled her with dread. She thought she could hear a spectre whisper, a nearby voice, a hint of a song she'd never heard in her life before now – seductive, distant, bitter-sweet.

She didn't want to hear that song. She knew what it meant and it scared her, but the fear lasted only a moment before she moved beyond it to some other level of understanding, that place where all outcomes are neither sad nor joyful, good nor bad, but simply inevitable.

Pagan sneaked between the trees that surrounded the field. There was perhaps a score of men, many of them armed, clustered around the missile. Was he mistaken or had the angle of the missile changed since he'd last seen it? It seemed to have been raised to a higher elevation. It pointed toward the sky with a certain dark purpose, angled at approximately seventy-five degrees. Through the rain he could see the open door of the module. Although his angle of vision prevented him from seeing anything more than shadows, he was certain that Ruhr and Rosabal were inside.

Pagan crouched, tried to make himself invisible. If he stepped out of the trees he'd be seen and shot. How was he meant to reach the module? The only possibility that suggested itself – tucking his head well down and running hard at the module – was ludicrous, and utterly suicidal, and he wasn't in much of a mood to slit his own throat. Not yet.

There had to be a better way.

He considered circling the meadow, making an approach from another direction, but the obstacles were exactly the same. Uniformed men carefully watched both landscape and sky in all directions.

It was useless. There was nothing he could do. He could crouch here in the trees five hundred feet away and fire the old revolver towards the missile-truck and perhaps puncture a tyre if he got really lucky. Terrific. But as soon as he fired he'd be shot at: end of Frank Pagan.

He stared at the missile.

It moved noticeably by perhaps a foot, then it stopped. Pagan held his breath. They were playing with the thing from inside the module. Perhaps Ruhr was simply demonstrating it.

Perhaps not. But Pagan didn't like the suspicion that formed in his mind just then.

No, no. They couldn't be planning to fire the bloody thing. Not in a hundred years. Ruhr was just showing Rosabal how it worked, that was all, then it would be dismantled, and defused, and destroyed. Wasn't that the plan? Yes, yes, of course that was the bloody plan, what else could it be
?

Pagan felt an extraordinary sense of futility. If the men inside the module intended to fly the bird, he couldn't do anything to stop them – except take a pot-shot at the control module with Alejandro's stupid revolver. What else was there to do?

He aimed the revolver at the control chamber on the back of the big truck; he was very careful, lining up the module in his sight with a kind of concentration that made his head ache. If he struck the module with a shot – perhaps he might hit something important: the wiring, the connection cables, perhaps his bullet might penetrate the shell of the control centre and rupture some essential component inside. You couldn't bank on perhapses, you couldn't pay bills with them.

His hand trembled.

He squeezed his finger upon the trigger.

He fired.

His shot passed through the space between missile and module, harmless, feeble, desperate. The fire was returned, the air split by the vicious spray of automatic weapons. He threw himself flat and crawled toward a clump of shrubbery as he listened to the air whine around his skull.

But there was another sound now, and it came from the sky.