Cuba (49 page)

camera came, some kind of television camera, and

he and James shook hands again. Several men in

khaki stood behind the camera watching.

The interpreter relayed the questions from Autrey

James and the television cameraman. When did you

leave Cuba, What was the name of the boat, How many

people were there?

“Eighty-four people.”

“Eighty four”…”…asked the interpreter in disbelief.

“Eighty-fourea”…whispered Ocho Sedano.

“What happened to the boat?”

“It sank.”- .

“And the people?”

“They went into the water… sharks.”

“Sharks?”

“Some people were swept over the side during a storm our

first night at sea. Diego Coca shot the

captain, some people died of thirst… Diego jumped

into the sea. The children died of exhaustion and hunger,

I thinkit is really impossible to say. There was no

food or water, only rain to drink. When

the boat sank those who were left were eaten by sharks.

If they didn’t drown. I hope Dora drowned.

“The old fisherman and I were spared…. Did you

find

him? The old fisherman? Did you see him in the

ocean”…”…He clawed at Autrey James, who

drew back out of reach.

“Noea”…the interpreter said. “You were the only one.”

They went away men, all of them, left him to eat

the food and stare at the ceiling and think about the fact

that he was alive and all the others were dead.

The others were dead. He was alive. What did that

mean?

Was God crazy?

Why me?

He was thinking about that when someone came to put solution

in his eyes again. This time the solution made him cry.

He sobbed for a minute or two, then his body gave

out and he slept.

“Why did you not put the gold in a bank vault?”

Mercedes had asked this question of Fidel several years

ago, when he first told her of the gold pesos. As

she sat on her mother-in-law’s small porch

completing her blouse, she remembered the

question, and Fidel’s answer:

“If we kept the gold in a bank, the international

bankers would have learned of it eventually, would have

demanded that we post it as security for a loan. Then

a hurricane would come or the bottom would drop out

of the sugar market one year, and the gold would be gone.”

“But the gold does not help Cuba. Why own it?”

“The gold is oursea”…he said obstinately. “When it

is gone it is gone for all Cubans forever.”

“But you hid it, so it is gone now.”

“Oh, no. You and I know where it is. As long as it

is hidden, it belongs to Cuba.”

She couldn’t shake himhe had the peasant’s love

of the secret hoard, the instinctual drive to bury a

can of money or hide it in a mattress, just in

case. No matter how bad things got in the house,

the money was always there,

STEPHEN COONTS

hidden, an asset that could be tapped to stave off

starvation or disaster.

He said as much when he admitted, “In the middle

of the night, when I am alone and the world is heavy on

my shoulders, I remember we still have the gold.”

Fidel and Che Guevara hid it together, for Cuba.

Guevara was killed in Bolivia and

apparently took the secret to his grave.

Fidel didn’t want tohe told the one person

on this earth he trusted.

She wished she didn’t know this thing. As she worked on

the last seam of the blouse, she thought about this great

secret, about what she should do.

Mercedes Sedano had confided in no one, had

written nothing down. With Fidel dead the gold was

only one heartbeat away from being lost forever. She

must do something, but what?

Fidel had been a knot of contradictions. She

had argued with himchallenged the macho man hmfand he

had admitted some of his failures, which was a rare

moment for him. Not all of his errors, but some.

“I am the only communist in Cubaea”…he said,

laughing. “Becoming a communist was a mistakeof

course I can never say that hi public. We had

to declare our independence from the American financiers and

corporations. In the fullness of time it turned out that

the Russian horse couldn’t run the race, which was

unfortunate, but that didn’t mean we were wrong in the

first place.”…He shrugged.

He had the Latin’s ability to accept life’s

vicissitudes as they came with courage and grace.

“The best thing about communism was the

dictatorship. The economic twaddle meant

nothing. Someone had to show the Cuban people they could stand

on their own feet, that they didn’t need to sell their

souls to the Americans or the Catholic

Church.”…He smiled again, made a gesture toward

heaven. “The truth is we were too poor to afford the

Church or the Americans.”

If Santana or Vargas tortured her, she would

tell them

about the gold. To suffer horribly and die for a

secret that you thought illogical was worse than

stupidit would be a sin.

Did he ever wonder what she would do if she found

herself in this situation?

She finished the last seam, shook out the blouse, and

held it up so she could view it.

Had Fidel really trusted her to make the decision

that was best for Cuba, or did he just think that she would

keep her mouth shut?

For Maximo Sedano the question was simple and stark:

Where was the gold?

Rumors had circulated for forty years, and not a

flake had ever surfaced. Several men swore they

had helped melt the coins into ingots in a smelter

in the basement of the Ministry of Finance, but

they never knew what happened to the ingots. Alejo

Vargas had been running the secret police for

twenty years and the Ministry of Interior for the last

ten and probably hunting for the gold for at least

nineteen, and he hadn’t found it. At least

Maximo didn’t believe he had. In forty years

no loose ends had unraveled… so there must have

been no loose ends.

The conclusion Maximo drew from these facts was that

only a very few peopleFidel, perhaps his brother

Raul, maybe Chehad known the secret in the first

place. Today the secret might be known by a few people

who had been close to them. In any event, there were

no elderly workmen about who liked to run their mouth when

they drank their rumVargas would have found anyone like that

years ago.

So the gold wasn’t made into statues, poured like

concrete into a floor or foundation, made into bricks

and used to construct a state building, or

transported to some flyspecked hovel and buried

under the floor. No. If the gold had been hidden

this way, someone involved in the labor would have talked

during the last forty years.

If there were secret records waiting to be discovered

or

STEPHEN COONTS

letters in bank vaults, Maximo would never discover

them. All he had were his wits.

With Fidel dead and Alejo Vargas ascendant,

Maximo was using his wits now, applying them as never

before.

In search of inspiration, he walked the streets of

Havana to the Museum of the Revolution.

Like so many revolutionaries who swashbuckled through the

pages of human history, after his victory

Fidel found it expedient to enshrine himself as the

savior of the nation so that he might remain at the

helm permanently. Of course, to properly do the

job it was also necessary to build a monument to the venality

and depravity of his enemies, because great heroes need

worthy opponents. Amazingly, all this good,

evil, and greatness fit neatly under one roof: the

presidential palace that had been the residence of

Fulgencio Batista.

Maximo walked quickly through the exhibits that

detailed Batista’s corruptionwhat he sought would

not be there.

He quickly found what he was looking for. Fidel the

savior,

“El Lider Maxima”

portraits, busts, memorabilia, candid and

posed photographs, heroic paintingsall of this was

enough to turn the stomach of anyone who had actually known

the man, Maximo thought. Alas, Fidel had been

very flawed clay: megalomaniacal, filled with a

sense of his own magnificent destiny, boorish,

opinionated, pigheaded, insufferable, prejudiced,

loquacious to a fault, and, all too often, just

plain wrong. What a tragedy that this

self-annointed messiah was stranded in this third world

backwater and never had the opportunity to save the

species, which he could have done if only God had

sent him to Moscow or Washington.

Maximo tried to stifle his disgust and concentrate upon

the displays before him.

Fidel and Che Guevara, Camilo

Cienfuegos, the other immortals … The

university, the Moncada Barracks, the trial,

prison, handwritten letters, exile, guerrilla

days …

He carefully looked at everything, then wandered on.

He came to a room devoted to the fall of

Havana; Fidel riding into the city on a tank,

ecstatic children. Then Fidel the ruler; Fidel the

baseball player; Fidel and Che fishing

in the Gulf Stream; Fidel with Hemingway,

Richard Nixon, Khrushchev, Kosygin, the

famous and the infamous, always togged out in those abysmal

green fatigues; dozens of shots of Fidel with his

mouth open in front of crowds … God, how the

man Could talk to a captive audience!

Maximo was in the next room looking at photos

of Fidel eating rice and beans with schoolchildren when the

incongruity of the photo of Fidel and Che fishing

struck him. Odd, that.

He went back to it. The two were on some kind of

fishing boat, with fighting chairs and big rods,

fishing for marlin probably.

Wait a minute … The marina where Maximo

kept his boat… When he first moved it there the

harbormaster had once told him that Fidel used

to leave from that marina to fish.

Now he remembered. Yes. The old man said

Fidel and Che fished often, every few days, went out

by themselves, often spent the night at anchor in the

harbor. After a year or so they tired of it, the old

man said wi/lly, never came back. The boat

belonged to the Cuban Navyseized from an

Americanand was eventually converted to a gunboat.

He could remember the old man talking,

could see the wind playing with his white hair as he

stood on the dock in the sun talking about his hero,

Fidel, about that moment one day long ago when their

lives came close together.

The harbormaster had been dead for years. The new

man was far too young to remember anything.

What if the gold were on the floor-of Havana

Harbor?

Each night Fidel and Che could have lowered hundreds

of pounds of it over the side of the boat free from

observation. Given enough nights …

Over time the gold could have gradually disappeared

from the Finance Ministry. If no one but Fidel and

Che handled the gold, there was no one to talk.

Maximo could see logistical problems with this

possibility, of course, but not insurmountable ones.

He left the museum deep in thought.

“The air force’s AW AC* reports that the

Cuban military is moving toward the silo

sites, Admiral.”

The briefer was a commander, the senior Air

Intelligence officer on the carrier

battle-group’s staff.

“The troops are being moved from barracks in the

Havana area. We can see tanks and

trucks, which presumably contain supplies and

troops. The columns are moving slowly, eight

to ten miles per hour. Cuban troops have already

arrived at missile site number one. Just arriving

on sites two and three. We estimate that there will

be no Cuban military presence on sites four

though six until tomorrow morning after dawn.”

“Why so slow”…”…Jake Grafton asked.

“These are old tanks, Soviet T-54’s.

We think they see no reason to risk breakdowns

by driving faster. The consensus seems to be that the

Cubans aren’t on full alert.”

“Okay”

Jake Grafton said, because there was nothing else

to say. The god of battles was dealing the cards.

The briefer continued, pointing out bridges and

crossroad choke points, and Jake tried

to concentrate, which was difficult. When the briefer

finished, Jake dismissed his staff and sat staring at

the map on the bulkhead.

The plan was good: the weather would be typical, the

forces he had should be adequate, they knew their

jobs … but if the Cubans fired those missiles

at the United States, two Aegis cruisers were

all he had to prevent the missiles from

reaching their targets.

Should this whole operation be delayed until

antimissile batteries could be moved to south

Florida?

Every hour of delay meant more American troops would

die taking those missile sites. Yet if the

missiles success-

fully delivered their warheads, the results would be