Santana shrugged grandly. “You must stay with us and make no calls. You may telephone anyone anywhere, if the telephones work, when we get to Havana. Not before.”
“That’s reasonable. Sure.”
“And we, of course, accept your offer of professional secrecy. No stories about us. No names. Ever. You must swear it.”
“I swear. When do we get to Havana?”
Around midnight the three men, with Jack Yocke wedged in the backseat, drove through a steady rain to a marina. Yocke never knew where the marina was because the Cubans made him wear a blindfold. He was led from the car to a slick gangplank which he stumbled up carrying the computer. Only when he was in a little cabin below decks was he allowed to remove the blindfold. His escort tossed the vinyl bag on the deck, then left, closing the door behind him.
The engine on the boat was already running, a muffled throbbing that pulsated the deck and bulkheads. After sitting in the darkness a few minutes Yocke tried the door latch. Locked. There was a tiny porthole, but the view was only of black water and shimmering lights.
Within minutes the boat got under way. The deck tilted and the vibration changed and the noise level rose. Yocke checked his watch: twelve forty-six a.m.
Yocke tried to decide how large the boat was. It wasn’t little, he concluded. But it wasn’t a ship. It turned too quickly. He stretched out on the couch bunk in the darkness and tried to sleep.
After a half hour or so the motion of the vessel changed. She began to roll and pitch with authority. Sometime later the motion changed again as the growl of the engine rose. Now the motion was more vigorous, the roll and pitch moments sharper and quicker.
The day had been a long one. Jack Yocke slept.
He awoke sometime later. The vessel was pounding in the sea, the engines throbbing heavily. They were pushing her hard. He wedged himself into the bunk and in minutes was again asleep.
Hector Santana shook him awake at five a.m. “You may come up on deck now.”
The boat was still pitching enthusiastically. Worse than when he went to sleep, but not as badly as it had several hours ago. Above the engine noise Yocke asked, “Where are we?”
“Just off Andros Island.”
“Are we in the Gulf Stream?”
“We’ve crossed it. The ride was much worse.”
On deck the only illumination was from several little red lights above the chart and binnacle in front of the helmsman. The rain had stopped. The boat appeared to be a giant cabin cruiser. This high above the water the motion was even more pronounced. Yocke found a handhold.
A ghostly white wake stretched away behind the boat straight as a highway into the vast, total darkness. Not a star or other light in the entire visible universe.
He could hear a radio, the announcer speaking in Spanish. When his eyes became better adjusted, he could just make out the figures of four or five men huddled around it.
“How goes the revolution?”
“Fighting in the cities. Much of the army is still loyal to Fidel.”
“Where will we land?”
“Caibarién.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning, before dawn.”
“How fast are we going?”
“Twenty-eight knots.”
After a few moments, Yocke asked, “This your boat?”
“Belongs to a friend.”
“Nice of him to let you use it like this.”
“He will report it stolen this evening.”
“Why are you going to Cuba?”
“It’s my country.”
Yocke eased himself to another handhold. His eyes were fairly well adjusted now and he could just make out Santana’s face. “Uh-uh. Nope. Yesterday evening I told you why I wanted to go, but you didn’t bother to tell me why you and your friends were going. And I didn’t ask.”
“We noted the omission. Very good manners for a reporter. Tomás thought too good. I said no. He is diplomático, I said. Finally Tomás agreed.”
“Perhaps you can tell me now.”
“Maybe later. We’ll see. If you’re still alive.” With that Santana went below.
CHAPTER TWELVE
At dawn the blackness faded to slate gray. A gray, indefinite sky above a gray sea. Visibility about a mile in fog. There were no other vessels to be seen, no land, nothing but gray in every direction.
The helmsman slowed the boat to two or three knots and it began to roll and pitch sloppily. On the low fantail, behind the raised bridge, the other passengers baited fishing rods with small fish and rigged them to troll. One man went up on the high fish platform. Jack Yocke had no desire to join him. The motion of the boat would be much worse there.
Sandwiches and coffee were brought up from below. Yocke had had two bites before he realized he had made a mistake. He puked over the rail and the wind sprayed some of it over the men sitting on the fantail watching the fishing rods. They were angry at first, then they laughed.
“Go below and lie down,” Santana told him.
Yocke was back on deck in two minutes, heaving again. The motion of the boat was impossible to endure in the confined spaces below.
He ended up lying on the deck forward, crawling to the rail to puke, then lying on his back waiting.
Hours passed. He was reduced to dry heaves.
Oh God, he was sick. Every now and then he could hear the Cubans on the bridge laughing. He didn’t care. He didn’t care if he died here and now. Nothing was worth this.
Once he heard a plane. A jet. Oh, to be up there, sitting in a comfortable, stable seat, one that didn’t bob and roll and go endlessly up and down, up and down….
Since there was absolutely nothing in his stomach at this stage, he merely curled into the fetal position and retched until he gagged, then retched some more.
He resolved never again to travel by water, anywhere. To never again set foot on boat, ship, ferry, scow, schooner, sloop, anything that floated. If he couldn’t go by air or rail, he wouldn’t go.
When Jack Yocke finally felt better it was after twelve o’clock on his watch. He sat and stared at the sea. The visibility had improved — maybe three or four miles — and the clouds were broken, with sunlight shining through in places, making the sea a brilliant blue. The sunlight on the sea hurt his eyes. He got up and staggered along the deck edge, holding on like grim death, to the bridge area. How had he managed to get to the forward deck when he was so sick?
“Drink this. It’s water,” Santana said, and he obeyed.
His stomach was still queasy, but nowhere near as bad as it had been.
For the first time he seriously examined his companions, of whom five were visible above decks. Santana, the two from yesterday — Jesús Ruiz and Tomás García — and two more whose names he never learned. Ruiz was the helmsman while García spent his time listening to a shortwave radio. Yocke got a chance to observe García closely for several minutes, and he seemed to be monitoring the VHF band.
Santana saw him looking over García’s shoulder. “That jet two hours ago was U.S. Coast Guard. They saw us with their radar but never got a visual identification. They reported our position, course, and speed to their headquarters in Miami, which presumably passed it to the two cutters that are somewhere out here.”
“Where?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Did we change course after the jet passed?”
“Yes. We are now headed northeast, toward Andros Island.”
“What are we worried about? We’re just out here fishing.”
“Fishing,” Santana agreed. Automatically he checked the rods and the angle of the lines.
“No luck, huh?” Yocke said, also looking.
“We had a tuna strike this morning, while you were sick. I had them take the baits off. We are just trolling bare hooks.”