Vargas said nothing, merely blinked.
“Actually, his suggestion about the account numbers at the president’s residence is a good one. If there was a leak, it was probably there. Fidel probably left the book lying around — he had no organizational sense.”
“And?”
“I know of no one in Cuba with the computer expertise to get into the Swiss banks electronically and steal that money, but there are plenty of people in America who could. A lot of them work for the American government.”
“People were stealing money from banks long before computers were invented,” Vargas objected. “Anybody could have bribed a bank officer and stolen that money. The Yanquis are the most likely suspects, however.”
Vargas well knew that everything that went wrong south of Key West was not the fault of the United States government, but he was too old a dog to think that the people who ran the CIA were incompetent dullards too busy to give Cuba a thought.
“The Americans say that shit happens.”
“They often make it happen,” Vargas agreed, and stood up. “Let us talk to Maximo. Perhaps we can save a soul from hell.”
Going down the stairs Vargas said to Santana, “Maximo has been plotting to get himself elected president when Castro passes: Today would be a good time to let him know that such a course is futile.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Some pain, I think. Nothing permanent, nothing life-threatening. We will need his expertise in finance later on.”
“Yes, sir.”
A petty officer came to find Jake Grafton. The sailor led the admiral to the Air Intelligence spaces, where he found Toad and the AIs gathered around a television monitor.
“A P-3 took this sequence a few hours ago,” Toad told the admiral, “in the Bahamas. It’s an anchored North Korean freighter. The P-3 is going to fly directly overhead here in a minute and get a shot looking straight down. We’ll freeze the video there.”
The perspective changed as the plane came across the top of the ship. The clear blue water seemed to disappear, leaving the ship suspended above the yellow sandy bottom. Just before the P-3 crossed above the ship, Toad froze the picture.
He stepped forward, pointing to dark shapes resting on the sand under the freighter. “I think we’ve found the rest of the stolen warheads,” he said. “The people on the Colón dumped them here in the ocean for the North Koreans to pick up later.”
Jake stepped forward, studied the picture on the television screen. “Can this picture be computer enhanced?”
“They are working on that in Norfolk right now.”
“How certain are they about the identification of the ship?”
“Very sure. Undoubtedly North Korean.”
When the National Security Council met to be briefed about developments in Cuba, the president’s mood was even uglier than it had been a few days before. He listened with a frozen frown as the briefer described the biological warfare research laboratory in the science building at the University of Havana. He covered his face with a hand as the briefer explained that some of the warheads from Nuestra Señora de Colón appeared to be resting on a sandy ocean floor in the Bahamas, with a North Korean freighter anchored nearby.
“The good news,” the briefer said brightly, “is that the freighter seems to be in Bahaman territorial waters.”
“Do you have a plan?” the president asked General Totten.
“Yes, sir. At our request, the Bahamans have formally requested that a United States ship board and search the North Korean freighter, which has violated their territorial waters. The nearest U.S. ship will be there in three hours.”
“And if the North Koreans raise the anchor and sail away?”
“We’ll stop the ship anyway, remove any United States government property that we find.”
“Another international incident!” the president grumped. “The North Koreans will shout bloody murder, then the Cubans will join the chorus.”
The national security adviser jumped right in. “Sir, the Cubans can’t prove we had CBW warheads in Gitmo.”
“Can’t prove? If Fidel Castro doesn’t have a stolen artillery shell on his desk right now I’ll kiss your ass at high noon on the Capitol steps while CNN—”
“Sir, we think—”
“Let me finish! Don’t interrupt! I’m the guy the congressmen are going to fry when they hear about this fiasco. Let me finish.”
Silence.
The president swallowed once, adjusted his tie. “And now,” he said, trying to keep the acid out of his voice, “we learn the Cubans have a biological weapons lab in a building in the heart of Havana, at the university there. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What I would like to know is this: Have the Cubans got any way of using biological weapons on the United States right now? Today? Have they got a delivery system?”
“Sir, we don’t know.”
“Well, by God, in my nonmilitary opinion we ought to find out just as fast as we can. Does anybody in this room agree with that proposition?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Another thing I want to know: Somebody explain again how the goddamned Chemical Weapons Treaty will make countries like Cuba decide not to build biological and chemical weapons.”
The silence that followed that question was broken by the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Tater Totten:
“The Chemical Weapons Convention. Agreement won’t dissuade anyone who wants these weapons from building them. All it will do is force us to rid ourselves of the weapons that deter others from using these things. Chemical and biological weapons are only employed when a user believes his enemy cannot or will not retaliate in kind. Your staff knew that and wanted the treaty anyway so that you could brag about it on the stump and win votes from soccer moms who don’t know shit from peanut butter.”
The president eyed General Totten sourly, then surveyed the rest of them. “At least somebody around here has the guts to tell it like it is,” he muttered.
The chairman continued: “Doing the right thing isn’t the same as getting the right result. We could use more of the latter and less of the former, if you ask me.”
“Don’t push it, General,” the president snarled.
The gray-haired general motored on as if the president hadn’t said a word. “To get back to your question, of course the Cubans have a delivery system, or several. Biological weapons are the easiest of all weapons to employ. The delivery system could be as simple as planes rigged to spray microorganisms into the atmosphere: after all, Cuba is just ninety miles south of Key West; jets could be over Florida in minutes. Or a few teams of Cuban saboteurs could induce the toxins into the water supply systems of major cities — tens of millions of people could be infected before anyone figured out there was even a problem.”
Here was the classic dilemma: The U.S. was prepared to fight a nuclear war to the finish and lick anyone on the planet in a conventional war. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent on networks and communications, on precision weapons and missile systems, on an army, navy and air force that were the best equipped, trained, and led armed forces on earth. So if there were an armed conflict, no sane enemy would confront the United States on a conventional or nuclear battlefield: guerrilla warfare and terror weapons were the alternatives.
“What the Cubans probably don’t have,” General Totten continued, “is the engineering and industrial capacity to turn tankfuls of toxins into true weapons, weapons that are safe to handle, can be stored indefinitely, and aimed precisely. That’s why they want to get their hands on that shipload of biological warheads.”
“So how do we prevent the use of CBW weapons?” the president asked.
“You have to deter the bad guys,” Tater Totten explained. “You have to be willing to do it to them worse than they can do it to you. And they have to know that you will.”