“The Wonsan is turning northeast,” Rita observed. “She’ll probably go between Cat Island and San Salvador.”
“Let’s go down,” Jake Grafton said, “hover in front of this guy, see if he’ll stop” He was sitting on the flight engineer’s seat just aft of the pilots.
Five minutes later the Osprey was in helicopter flight with the rotors tilted up, descending gently in front of the Wonsan, which was up to five or six knots now. Jake Grafton could see four people on the bridge, standing close together and gesturing at the Osprey. The copilot was watching the clearance, telling Rita how much maneuvering room she had.
“Closer,” Jake said.
Rita Moravia kept the Osprey moving in. Luckily the wind was from the west, so she could keep the twin-rotor machine on the starboard side of the freighter, yet pointed right at the bridge. This kept the wind on her starboard quarter.
She stopped when the distance between her cockpit and the bridge glass was about fifty yards. The right rotor was still well above the top of the freighter’s crane, which was mounted amidships.
“Closer,” Jake said again, “but watch your clearance.”
The copilot glanced nervously at Jake. “Give me clearance,” Rita snapped at him, which brought him back to the job at hand.
She maneuvered the Osprey until it was completely on the starboard side of the Wonsan, then she dropped it until she could see the length of the bridge.
The captain — he might have been the captain, wearing a dirty, white bridge cap — stepped through the door of the bridge onto the wing and stood looking into the cockpit, fifteen feet away. He had his hands pressed against his ears, trying to deaden the mighty roar of the two big engines. The downwash from the rotors raised a storm of sea spray, which was soaking him, and now it carried away his hat.
“Closer,” Jake said one more time.
“The air is sorta bumpy coming around this superstructure.”
“Yeah,” the admiral said.
Ten feet separated the nose of the V-22 from the rail of the bridge wing. Rita eased the Osprey forward a foot at a time, until the refueling probe and three barrels of the turreted fifty-caliber machine gun that protruded from the nose were no more than eighteen inches from the rail.
“Aim the gun at the captain,” Jake said.
The copilot flipped a switch, then looked at the captain’s head, and the machine gun faithfully tracked, following the aiming commands sent to it from the gunsight mounted on the copilot’s helmet.
The captain’s face was now less than ten feet from Jake Grafton’s. He was balding, a bit overweight, in his late fifties. The rotor wash lashed at him and tore at his sodden clothes, making it difficult for him to keep his footing. Groping for a rail to steady himself against the fierce wind, he looked at the three-barreled machine gun, which tracked him like a living thing, then at Jake Grafton on the seat behind the Osprey pilots.
The captain turned and shouted something over his left shoulder; he held on with both hands as he went through the door onto the enclosed bridge.
“Watch it,” Jake muttered into his lip mike. “This guy may be fool enough to turn into you.”
Rita was the first to realize what was happening. She felt the need to turn left to hold position. “The ship is slowing,” she said. “I think he’s stopped his engines.”
In a few seconds it became obvious that she was correct. Rita backed away until the distance between the cockpit and ship was about fifty feet.
“I think he lost his nerve, Admiral.”
“Look at the stuff on his deck,” the copilot said, pointing. “Looks like he pulled up a bunch of warheads.”
The freighter was drifting when the destroyer arrived a half hour later and coasted to a stop several hundred yards away. In minutes the destroyer had a boat in the water.
When armed Americans were standing on the Wonsan’s deck, Jake tapped Rita on the shoulder.
“Let’s go home.”
“I listened to the tape from Alejo Vargas’s office this afternoon,” Carmellini said to Chance. They were walking the Prado looking for a place to eat dinner. To have a decent selection and palatable food, the restaurant would have to be a hard-currency place. Although the best restaurants were in ramshackle houses in Old Havana, tonight Chance wanted music, laughter, people.
“Someone told Vargas all about the break-in at the university lab, the contamination, the dead lab worker. They spent most of the day running the fans at the lab, trying to lower the count of the stuff in the air before they went in.”
“What did they say about the dead man, why he died?”
“That had them stumped. He was vaccinated. They called in a Professor Svenson.”
“Olaf Svenson?”
“No one used a first name.”
“It must be him. I’ve heard of him. Damned potty old fool. He was at Cal Tech for years. Thought he was at Colorado now. A genius, almost won a Nobel Prize.” He snapped his fingers. “That photo we gave Bouchard — that must have been Svenson.”
“Well, he is their main man down at the lab, to hear the conversation at Vargas’s office.”
“So why did the lab worker die? Wasn’t he vaccinated?”
“The stuff mutated, according to the professor. Mutated again, he said.”
“Well, what the hell is it? Did they say that?”
“Some kind of polio.”
“Polio doesn’t kill that quickly,” Chance objected.
“This kind does. The lab worker wasn’t the first, apparently. The professor wanted to dissect him like the others but Vargas ordered the body burned immediately.”
They paused on a corner, watched the people who filled the sidewalks under the crumbling buildings. Just down the walk to the left a Cuban was trying to sell trinkets to a pair of Germans and having no luck. To the right a tall young white guy, American or Canadian probably, was locked in a passionate embrace with a local girl.
“Sun, sex, and socialism,” Carmellini muttered. “Makes you wonder why there aren’t more Cubans.”
Chance closed his eyes, enjoyed the caress of the breeze on his face and hair. He could hear snatches of music amid the honk of car horns and traffic sounds. Havana was very much alive this evening, as it was every evening.
Finally he opened his eyes, looked again at the Cubans and tourists swirling about him. And Carmellini standing there, quite nonchalant, looking bored.
“Do they have any ideas about who broke in?”
“Americans. CIA scum. No evidence, but they’re sure.”
Chance nodded.
“There was talk,” Carmellini continued, “of rounding up likely suspects, doing some thorough interrogations, just to see what might turn up. That was Colonel Santana’s suggestion: apparently he is a rare piece of work. Vargas overruled him. Said they couldn’t torture tourists every time the CIA did something they didn’t like or soon they wouldn’t have any tourists.”
“Sensible.”
“Anything else?”
Carmellini shrugged, scratched his chin. “I listened to almost three hours’ worth of that stuff, and you know, they didn’t mention Fidel Castro even once.”
“Didn’t say his name?”
“Nope. And the technician said he hadn’t heard them mention Castro all day.”
“Curious.”
“It’s odd. I would have thought—”
After a bit Chance said, “The lab is just the tip of the iceberg. There must be machinery for drying out the cultures, for packing the microorganisms into warheads or mixing them into some sort of chemical stew to be sprayed from planes. There must be trucks that transport this stuff from place to place. And then there are the weapons: where the hell are they?”