Castro howled in pain, releasing his hold on the control stick. He looked down at his bloody leg in shocked disbelief. Manso yanked the knife out of the leader’s thigh and threw it clattering to the cockpit floor between his foot pedals.
He then grabbed the blood-covered control and hauled back on it, twisting hard left. The chopper kept plunging for a few desperate seconds as Manso worked the controls, cursing and praying at the same time. There was now a big green mountain in his immediate future. With seconds to live, he wrestled the beast, twisting, tugging, pumping. His only chance was to drop the helicopter as rapidly as possible. And hope to come down vertically.
Suddenly, he felt it responding and stabilizing. He had it under control. Still breathing hard, he banked and started climbing, with the mountain still looming massively before him. Too late? His skids were brushing the treetops as Manso held back on the stick, holding his breath, his heart exploding in his chest. He was waiting for the shuddering crunch of the undercarriage hitting solid wood, which would bring him crashing into the face of the mountain.
It didn’t happen.
He gained a few hundred feet of breathing room, banked hard right, and found himself in clear air. He took a peek at Castro. The man was obviously in shock. He was losing a fair amount of blood and had gone a deathly shade of gray. His eyes were cloudy, out of focus.
“Comandante, I will radio for emergency medical to stand by for our landing. Press your finger into the wound. Hold on. We should be on the ground at Telaraсa in ten minutes.”
He got on the radio and made the request.
“Everything okay up there, Colonel?” the tense voice in his earphones said.
“Sн! Viva Cuba!” Manso responded.
Castro was silent and remained so for the short balance of the flight. Ever the survivor, he’d wrapped his own belt around his thigh and cinched it tight, staunching the bleeding.
The sun was dipping below the western horizon when Manso flared up and prepared to land. A large concrete structure, only recently completed, stood astride a wide river, flowing out to the sea. Now the giant structure was bathed in pure white light. Manso had not seen it since its completion and the mere sight of it gave him enormous satisfaction.
To a spy plane or satellite it could be anything. A convention hall, a movie theater. Better yet, a ballet theater. The Borzoi ballet. This huge building would house the world’s largest and deadliest submarine.
An encircled red H, newly painted on the broad, flat roof of the building marked the helicopter landing pad. As Manso hovered over it, he could see a squadron of heavily armed men forming up into a solid perimeter around the pad.
Manso turned to Castro.
“On behalf of our entire crew, let me be the first to welcome you to Telaraсa, Comandante,” Manso said when the skids were solidly down. “You will notice a few changes since your last visit.” The Maximum Leader grunted but said nothing. Two soldiers approached the helicopter at a run from either side as Manso shut down the engines. They pulled open the doors and the pilot and his passenger stepped out onto the brilliantly illuminated pad. Castro limped some twenty yards, head held high, glaring at the soldiers who ringed the chopper. No one around the perimeter said a word.
“Lower your weapons!” a defiant Fidel Castro shrieked at the soldiers. “I said lower your fucking weapons!”
Without a word, and only out of respect, every soldier lowered his gun.
“El jefe needs immediate medical attention,” Manso said to his brother Juanito, who had come forward to embrace him. “He has lost a lot of blood.”
“Sн,mi hermano,” Juanito de Herreras said. “The emergency medics are on the way. Welcome and well done.”
Juanito called to Castro. “There is someone most anxious to speak to you, Comandante,” he said. “Here he comes now.”
The formation of soldiers parted and allowed a man onto the pad. He strode toward Manso, Juanito, and Castro, smiling. He was young and handsome, and bore a striking resemblance to someone Castro had not seen in over thirty years.
“Comandante,” Manso said to Castro, “may I present the new presidente of Cuba?”
“Bienvenidos,” Fulgencio Batista said.
It was the grandson of the man Castro had overthrown more than thirty years earlier. The new presidente was to be Fulgencio Batista’s grandson!
Fidel Castro shot Manso a look of palpable hatred.
This was simply more irony than he could stand.
28
Gomez ducked inside the cool gloom of St. Mary’s Cathedral. It was the Naval Air Station’s oldest and most beautiful church.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, hot as hell out in the sun, and he was supposed to be at the pistol range. He’d slept in all morning, then had a long liquid lunch and decided to blow off target practice. Brewskis and bullets don’t mix, he knew that much. Hell, he had a couple of missing toes to prove it.
He’d been blowing off a lot of stuff lately. He’d even spent another few nights in the brig after a stupid fight he got into with a noncom who’d called him a dumb spic in the mess hall. He couldn’t remember who’d started it, but he’d finished it. Look at it this way. He went to the brig. The noncom went to the infirmary. So, you gotta ask yourself. Who won?
Gomez walked quickly up the left side of the nave and entered the confessional booth. As soon as he was seated, the small partition opened and he could see the silhouette of Father Menendez through the screen.
“Father, forgive me, for I have sinned,” Gomez said. “It has been six months since my last confession.”
Gomez took a deep breath and tried to get his act together. He realized that he was literally shaking. He shook out a few Tic Tacs and popped them into his mouth. He probably smelled like a goddamn brewery. His mouth was dry as dust, too. He’d woken up feeling like a lizard lying on a hot rock.
“Have you had sex outside of your marriage?” the priest asked.
Sex?
Sex had been one of the last things on his mind for nearly a month. But this Menendez, he always wanted to hear about sex. He steered every confession that way. He always asked if you had “spilled your seed.”
Gomez was worried about much more important things than screwing some chiquita and spilling any goddamn seed. Rita had sent him to church to talk about his drinking. His “violence.” What lovely Rita peter maid didn’t know was that his drinking was the result of a few underlying problems.
Problem, name it. Solution, beer. Secret of a happy and successful life.
The nuns at the Catholic schools he’d gone to in Miami always said you should treat your body like a temple. In the last few months, Gomez had been treating his more like an amusement park. And, lately, the combination of beer, Cuban rum, and tranks he’d been on was starting to get to him in some fairly scary ways.
He put his hands together as if in prayer and squeezed them between his knees to stop the shaking.
He began his confession.
“Father, I—” He stopped. “Father, give me a second—please. I’m praying.”
And the truth of it was that he was praying.
At six o’clock on that very morning, Gomez had been sitting in his small kitchen with a gun in his mouth. He was staring out the window at the sunrise. He’d been up all night. There was an empty rum bottle on the kitchen table. A lamp cast its yellow glow on an unfinished letter to Rita and a picture of him and his family.
The barrel of the gun in his mouth tasted like the Hoppe’s gun oil he remembered as smelling pretty good when he was a kid. Didn’t taste all that great, however. Felt like his teeth were coated with it. Pretty goddamn ironic. This was the exact same revolver his grandfather carried at the stupid Bay of Pigs. Grandpa gave the gun to Gomez upon his graduation from St. Ignatius High School. The pistol held six bullets. Gomez had loaded one bullet into the cylinder and spun it a few times.