He tired of swimming and stopped once, but the old fisherman encouraged him.
“Don’t die here, son. Swim farther, get away from the sharks.”
“‘They’re everywhere,” Ocho replied, with impeccable logic.
“Swim farther,” the old man said, and so he did.
Finally they stopped. How far they had come they had no way of knowing. The sea rose and fell in a timeless, eternal rhythm, the wind occasionally ripped spume from a crest and sent it flying, puffy clouds scudded along, the sun beat down.
“We will die out here,” he told the old man, who was only about ten feet away.
The fisherman didn’t reply. What was there to say?
Even the tragedy of Dora couldn’t keep him awake. He kept dozing off, then awakening when water went into his nose and mouth.
In the afternoon he thought he saw a ship, a sailing ship with three masts and square sails set to catch the trade winds. Maybe he only imagined it. He also thought he saw more contrails high in the sky, but he might have imagined those too.
He would swim until he died, he decided. That was all a man could do. He would do that and God would know he tried and forgive him his sins and take him into heaven.
Somehow that thought gave him peace.
“Gentlemen, your backing this morning touched me deeply.”
Alejo Vargas was sitting with General Alba and Admiral Delgado in his office at the Ministry of Interior. Colonel Santana was parked in a chair near the window with his leg on a stool and a bandage around his head.
“What happened to you, Colonel?” General Alba asked.
“I was in an accident.”
“Traffic gets worse and worse.”
“Yes.”
“Gentlemen, let’s get right down to it,” Alejo Vargas began. “Right now I don’t have the support of the people. The mobs are out of control. We must restore order and confidence in the government; that is absolutely critical.”
Delgado and Alba nodded. Even a dictator needs some level of popular support. Or at least acceptance by a significant percentage of the population.
“I propose to move on two fronts. I will send a delegate to Hector Sedano, see if he can be enlisted to endorse me. Getting out of prison will be an inducement, of course, but one can’t rely on anything that flimsy. I thought of naming him as ambassador to the Vatican.”
“That would be a popular move,” Alba thought, and Delgado agreed.
“All my adult life I have been a student of Fidel Castro’s political wiles,” Vargas continued. “I learned many things from watching the master. This may seem to you gentlemen to be heresy, but without the United States, Castro would have lasted only a few years in power — had the world turned in the usual way he would have been overthrown by a coup or mass uprising when it became obvious that he could not deliver on his promises. Fidel Castro survived because he had a scapegoat: he had the United States to blame for all our difficulties.”
“One should not say things like that publicly, but there is much truth in that observation.”
“The Yanquis never failed to play their part in Fidel’s little dramas,” Delgado agreed, and everyone in the room laughed, even Santana.
When his audience was again attentive, Alejo Vargas continued: “I propose to unite the Cuban people against the United States one more time, and this time I shall be out in front leading them.”
Jake Grafton had dinner that evening with the commanding officers of the units in the battle group. In addition to the skippers of the ships, the marine landing force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt, and the air wing commander aboard United States were also there. Held in the carrier’s flag wardroom, the dinner was one of those rare official functions when everyone relaxed enough to enjoy themselves. Surrounded by fellow career officers, Admiral Grafton once again felt that sense of belonging to something bigger than the people who comprised it that had charmed him about the service thirty years ago. The tradition, the camaraderie, the sense of engaging in an activity whose worth could not be measured in dollars or years of service made the brutally long hours, the family separations, and the demands of service life somehow easier to endure.
He was basking in that glow when one of his aides slipped in a side door and handed him a top-secret flash message from Washington. Jake put on his glasses before he took the message from the folder.
He scanned the message, then read it again slowly. Ballistic missiles in Cuba, biological warheads, Castro dead — he thanked the aide, who left the room.
Jake read the message again very carefully as the after-dinner conversation buzzed around him. The message ordered him to stage commando raids on the suspected ballistic missile sites, “as soon as humanly possible, before the missiles can be launched at the United States.”
“Gentlemen, let us adjourn to the flag spaces,” Jake Grafton said, and led the commanders from the wardroom.
When the group was together in the flag spaces, with the door closed behind them, Jake said, “The course of human events has catapulted us straight into another mess. I just received this message from Washington.” He read it to them. When he finished, no one said anything. Jake folded the message and returned it to the red folder.
He turned to the captains of the two Aegis-class guided-missile cruisers that were assigned to his battle group:
“I want you to get underway as soon as you get back to your ships. Take your ships through the Windward Passage, then proceed at flank speed to a position between the island of Cuba and the Florida Keys that allows you to engage and destroy any missiles fired from Cuba toward the United States. Make every knot you can squeeze out of your ships. Every minute counts. When you come up with an estimated time of arrival, send it to me. We won’t lift a finger against the Cubans until both your ships are in position.”
He shook hands with the captains, and they strode out of the room.
“The rest of us might as well get comfortable. Looks like we are in for a long evening.”
Ocho Sedano looked at it for fifteen minutes before the thought occurred to him that he should find out what it was. Something white, floating perhaps fifteen feet away, slightly off to his right.
Now that the existence of the white thing had registered on his consciousness, he made the effort to turn, to stroke toward it.
He had been in the water all day. The sun would soon be down and he would be alone on the sea. After the sharks this morning there had been only Ocho and the old man; now the fisherman no longer answered his calls. Hadn’t for several hours, in fact. Maybe he just drifted out of hailing range, Ocho thought. That must be it.
The sharks killed all the others, sparing only the two men who had gone off the sinking boat first and swam away from the group. At least he thought the others were dead — he had no way of knowing the truth of it.
He had thought about the decision to swim away from the sinking Angel del Mar all day, off and on, trying to decide just what instinct had told him and the old man to get away from the others. Drowning people often drag under anyone they can reach — no doubt that knowledge was a factor in the old man’s thinking, in his thinking, for he did not want to put the responsibility for his life on anyone but himself.
Perhaps those who were attacked by the sharks were the lucky ones. Their ordeal was over.
Dora — had she been one of them?
Diego Coca was already dead, of course. He died … a day or two ago … didn’t he? Jumped into the sea and swam away from the Angel del Mar.
Ah, Diego, you ass. I hope you are burning in hell.
He reached for the white thing, which of course skittered out of reach. He paddled some more, reached up under it.