“Maybe we should try to catch something.”
“We don’t have the fuel to waste on a fight. And the fish would be killed for no reason. That,” Hector Santana added with a glance at the reporter, “would be a sin.”
Jack Yocke listened to the news, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English from a U.S. station, and watched the men. He avoided drawing them into conversation, and none of them except Santana approached him to talk.
All afternoon the Cubans huddled near the radio and chafed, each man in his own way. The revolution was in full swing, people they knew and cared deeply for were risking everything, including their lives, yet here they sat on a fifty-foot boat on a vast, empty sea, going nowhere at three knots.
Yocke was as impatient as the rest. He reminded himself that his interest was strictly professional. Well, sporting too, in that he was rooting hard for the underdogs, yet somehow this thought tweaked from him a pang of guilt, which annoyed him. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t a Cuban or that Cuba had become a poor, starving bucolic workers’ paradise under the magnificent benevolence of the “maximum leader.” For thirty-one years Fidel Castro had been the Cuban saint, a sugarcane version of George Washington, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and St. Paul, togged out in army fatigues and spouting revolutionary bullshit that the vast majority of Cubans believed or at least tolerated. It wasn’t until the Soviets had cut them off the dole and starvation threatened that the Cuban people had finally held up a yardstick to see how tall Fidel really was.
Yocke vomited again in late afternoon, but afterward the queasiness seemed to leave him. Weak and dehydrated, he still felt better.
As evening came the visibility lifted significantly. Just before dark Yocke could see land off to the northeast and east, a dark line on the horizon perhaps ten miles away. It was difficult to judge and he didn’t ask. As the light faded the two men on the fantail reeled in the fishing lines and stowed the rods.
When the night enclosed them completely and the only lights in the universe were the red glow from the binnacle and chart table, Santana spoke to the helmsman. He spun the wheel and pushed the twin throttles forward. The fantail descended and the bow rose as the screws bit into the sea.
With Santana bending over the chart and Ruiz at the helm, the boat glided through the night. García played with the Loran and the other two acted as lookouts.
Yocke stood on the left rear corner of the bridge, out of whispered earshot and out of the way, and watched. He was the first to see the weak flashes of light off in the darkness a little to the left of their course, and pointed them out to Santana.
Ruiz cut the throttle. The boat rose and fell gently on the swell, enveloped by darkness. Santana pointed a flashlight with a cone of paper taped around the head in the direction of the first light and keyed it several times. At the answering light, Ruiz advanced the throttles.
After five minutes or so and another hurried conference over the chart, the Cubans killed the engine. One man went forward to lower the anchor.
Rocking in the night, they waited. Jack Yocke could just faintly hear breakers crashing on a beach. Or perhaps against rocks.
Santana came over for a moment beside him. “Be very quiet. Stay here on the bridge,” he whispered. “If there is any trouble, lie down and do not move.” To reinforce his message, he tapped the reporter’s arm gently with a revolver.
Yocke looked. García came up from below decks with a rifle of some kind. He moved forward of the bridge. The man on the fantail also had a rifle or perhaps a submachine gun. It was very difficult for Yocke to see clearly in the haphazard starlight coming through gaps in the cloud cover overhead.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Ruiz muttered something in Spanish to Santana about the time.
Yocke didn’t realize they had company until the other boat bumped against theirs. Other men came aboard. After a quick conference on the fantail, everyone except Ruiz went to the fantail to help.
The job took about fifteen minutes, as close as Yocke could tell. Box after heavy box was handed from the smaller boat to this one, then carefully carried below. Over thirty boxes, perhaps three dozen.
Then the other boat was pushed away into the darkness. Ruiz started his engines, waited just a moment to ensure that the other boat would drift clear, then engaged the screws and advanced the throttles. He brought them up slowly and steadily as the speed built until the two throttles were against the forward stops and the bow was leaping off swells and whacking into others. Yocke found a handhold.
After a while Santana and the others came up from below and stood joking and laughing on the bridge. They were in a jovial mood. They passed a bottle around, then Santana brought it over to where Yocke sat and offered him a swig.
Yocke declined. “My stomach.”
“I understand. Perhaps when we reach Cuba.”
“What do you guys have in those boxes?”
“You don’t really want to know. You’re just an uninvited hitchhiker, remember?”
“Amazing how your accent goes and comes.”
“Accents are useful. They are like clothes. One dresses the part. Always.”
“Watching you load those boxes, I finally realized how big a fool I’ve been.”
Santana tilted the bottle. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Well, perhaps. If so, that is progress. Most fools live their entire lives without ever knowing wisdom.” He belched. “I think there’s one swallow left. You never know, it might be your very last.”
Yocke took the bottle and drained it. The rum burned all the way down. He wound up and threw the bottle as far out into the wake as he could. He didn’t see it splash.
“None of us ever know, do we?”
“That is right,” Santana agreed cheerfully enough and left him to examine the chart and fiddle with the Loran and confer in a low voice with Ruiz and García.
In a few minutes García made himself comfortable across from Yocke. He still had the rifle. He rested it across his knees.
The hours passed. Sometimes the ride would grow rougher or smoother for a time, but the throttles stayed against the stops. Ruiz worked the helm only to hold his course. He did have to work at it. After a few hours Santana relieved him and he went below. García smoked cigarettes and never moved.
When Ruiz came back on deck at midnight, Yocke asked Santana if he could go below and get his gear. Santana got it for him.
Yocke donned a sweatshirt and pulled a sweater over it. Using the vinyl bag for a pillow, he stretched out on the deck.
When he awoke he was aware that the boat was not rolling as before. She was now moving directly across the swells and pitching heavily, the engine still at full cry.
All the men were on deck, looking away to port. Yocke joined them and peered into the darkness. Beside him García pointed.
A white masthead light was just visible, another light under it. “Cuban patrol boat.”
“Has he seen us?”
“Sí. I think so.”
Yocke moved over to where Santana stood, beside the helmsman. He was looking at the chart.
“Where are we?”
“Here.” Santana jabbed with his finger. The spot he indicated was ten miles or so north of the Cuban coast. “The patrol boat has us on radar.”
“You could run east away from him.”
“No. We have been picking up radar signals from the east. There is a patrol boat over there too, though farther away. We were trying to go between them.”
“You have a radar detector?”
“Yes. One of your American ones for detecting police radar. We have modified it to receive different frequencies. It works quite well.”
“So what are you going to do?” Yocke looked again at the lights on the horizon. Was the Cuban boat visibly closer or was that his imagination?
“We can try for shallow water. We don’t have many options.”