Castro's Bomb (2 page)

Who the hell cared what killed him?
 
If thirst and exposure didn't get him, then the Commies would, or maybe he’d provide a feast for the sharks.
 
Did sharks jump into small boats when they smelled death?
 
Or was it barracuda that did that?
 
Or maybe it was piranha?
 
Or maybe somebody at a Havana bar had been pulling his leg and it was none of the above.

His situation reminded him of Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea."
 
He'd seen the movie starring Spencer Tracy but hadn't read the book.
 
He found Hemingway boring, as if that mattered right now.
 
Nobody was going to write a thing about old man Charley Kraeger and the sea.

He wanted to cry out and perhaps he did in his anger, pain, and frustration.
 
He was becoming more and more delirious.
 
Twenty years as a CIA agent and this was his reward, to die in the bottom of a small boat in the middle of a very large ocean.
 
It wasn't fair.
 
Hell, he'd been an agent long before there had even been a CIA.
 
Kraeger had served in the OSS in World War II and had jumped into occupied France where he'd had the intense satisfaction of killing his first Nazi, a Gestapo officer no less.
 
He'd been wounded, decorated, and called a hero and now this was how he was going to wind up.
 
He was going to die alone and in filth and no one was around to know about it.
 
Forty years of life shot to hell.

Unless, of course, the commies figured out where he was and shot up the boat and dropped his butt into the briny deep for all the little fishes to eat.
 
Back in Washington, they'd probably wonder for a while what happened to good old Charlie Kraeger who nobody liked anyhow because he was a dinosaur.
 
His superiors had broadly hinted that he was a little too old for field work and now he agreed with them.
 
False pride had played a real part in his being in this deadly situation.

He managed to pull himself up to a sitting position.
 
It took almost all his remaining strength.
 
Water, water everywhere and not a damn drop to drink was what he saw – that and a small boat coming toward him.
 
Even through his blurred eyesight, he recognized it as a Cuban patrol boat.
 
It began to fire at him.
 
Bullets splashed around his little boat.

Shit.

The worst part was that he'd failed and that made him want to cry, except that forty-year old CIA agents weren't supposed to cry.
 
He knew a secret, a secret, a secret.
 
But the sun was so bright and so hot and he was so thirsty, he couldn't remember it.
 
But he had a secret, a secret.

But what the hell was it?

Oh yeah.

War.
 

The Coast Guard Cutter Willow was old, which was normal for the Coast Guard, because the Guard was generally last on the military's budget.
 
The glamorous Air Force was first with all its shiny bombers, sleek, sexy fighters, and neat missiles.
 
It was followed by the Navy with its massive carriers and growing fleet of nuclear submarines, and then came the Army and the Marine Corps and, bringing up the rear, the Coast Guard.
 
Some Guardsmen wondered why they bothered, but not all of them.
 
Most were dedicated and did what they could with what they had.

The Willow's skipper, Lieutenant Commander Paul Watkins was one of the dedicated ones, and he loved his old ship.
 
He was forty-four and the Willow was only a few years younger, having been built in the mid-nineteen thirties.
 
He was never going to be promoted and neither he nor the Willow would ever get a better assignment than this.
 
Nobody on the Willow complained.
 
Cruising the Caribbean in the winter wasn't bad duty at all.
 
It beat the hell out of Lake Superior in December.
 
His friends laughed that Watkins was married to the guard and he admitted it wasn't far from the truth.
 
He'd risen from the ranks, a rarity in itself, and never married.
 
His friends also joked that when he retired he'd take the cutter home with him.
 
That was going a little too far and he told his friends to screw themselves which, depending on how much they'd drunk, generally resulted in laughter.
 
Truth be told, he would love to take the Willow home, but where the hell would he park it?

Ironically, the Willow's hull had recently been strengthened so she could serve on the Great Lakes where there was so much ice.
 
Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis and now she was well away from the Great Lakes and any sign of ice, except in the soft drinks and ice teas served by the mess crew.
 
Neither her captain nor her crew complained about having to spend the onset of winter, 1962, in the warm sun rather than the frigid northern waters.
 
There was even a rumor that the ship had been forgotten by the brains in Washington and would be spending a long time cruising the Caribbean.
 
No such luck.
 
Watkins was in daily contact with his superiors.

Watkins loved his ship.
 
He only wished the Coast Guard had come up with something more dramatic or elegant for her name.
 
Willow was just too gentle for a ship of war.
 
But then, he recalled that the Royal Navy had a whole class of ships named after flowers.
 
Willow, he decided, was better than being captain of something named the Petunia.
 
Or, he shuddered, the Pansy.

Watkins understood why he was never going to get promoted.
 
There were simply too many qualified candidates for too few open slots and, hell, he was getting old.
 
Command and rank would go to the young, eager, and better educated hotshots.
 
The fact that he was short, overweight, and a little slovenly in appearance didn't help either.
 
He was not recruiting poster material.

"Skipper?"

"I'm still here," Watkins said to Lieutenant Harkins, his young and just a little bit up tight executive officer.
 
One good thing about the Coast Guard was that they weren't crazy about the perks of rank, which meant that shipboard life was a lot more casual than on a regular navy ship, and Harkins was finally beginning to understand it.
 
The young man was actually a very nice guy when he loosened up.
 
Watkins thought it might help if he could get him drunk and laid.

"Radar's picking up something.
 
They think it might be a Cuban patrol boat."

Watkins yawned.
 
The Willow was going nowhere slowly, cruising in large circles and making less than ten knots while looking for anything suspicious, which generally meant finding small boats filled to overflowing with refugees from Castro's communist paradise.
 
Why, he wondered,
 
if Cuba was such a worker's paradise, were so many people so damned anxious to flee it that they'd risk their lives sailing the Caribbean in dinky little boat?.
 
They'd already rescued a number of grateful Cubans and, sadly, picked up the bloated corpses of some who'd died in the attempt.

"The Cuban Commie bastards have an inalienable right to be out in the Gulf in international waters just like we do," Watkins said.
 
"How far away is she and what is she doing?"

"Maybe ten miles away, skipper, and she's cruising in a straight line.
 
It almost looks like she's aiming for some specific point in the ocean."

Intrigued, Watkins arose stiffly from his chair on the bridge and walked over to look at the radar screen.
 
As always, the technology meant little to him, except he'd just been told that the blip that kept jumping up and down was likely a Cuban patrol boat.
 
He nodded solemnly, pretending he understood what he was looking at.

"Can you see what he's aiming towards, if anything?"

Petty Officer Wade, the radar operator shook his head.
 
"There may be something a few miles ahead of him, but it's really small.
 
Like flotsam and jetsam, skipper."

"Flotsam and jetsam, Wade?
 
Who the hell are you trying to impress with your knowledge of nautical talk?
 
Flotsam and jetsam are a comedy act, like Martin and Lewis."

Wade laughed and Watkins leaned over the screen, even Harkins grinned.
 
Now he could see the little squiggle that was what Wade was talking about.
 
Curiouser and curiouser, he thought.
 

"Whatever it is, it's dead in the water," Wade said helpfully.

"Could it really be a small boat?" Watkins asked and Wade nodded.
 
It could.

"Well let's see," Watkins said thoughtfully as he pulled out the stub of his last cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it.
 
"We got a Cuban patrol boat making like a bat out of hell for a place in the ocean where what might be a small boat is dead in the water, and add to that the fact that we're all bored to tears.
 
Oh what the hell, boys and girls, let's have some fun."

He grinned and turned to his executive officer.
 
"Make all speed and let's cut this Cuban son of a bitch off.
 
If he wants that flotsam and jetsam so badly, then we want it worse.
 
Oh yeah, sound general quarters, too."

The Willow was old, but not slow.
 
She could do maybe twenty knots if pushed and it looked like the Cuban boat was only making twelve.
 
Nor was the Willow in any way helpless.
 
At more than two thousand tons, she was a larger cutter than the more recent ones, and a veteran of World War II where she had done some sub-chasing and convoy duties.
 
This meant she carried a pair of three-inch guns, which along with her anti-aircraft batteries, would more than outgun any Cuban patrol craft.
 
The Willow's crew had joked that maybe they outgunned the entire pissant Cuban navy.

The Cuban was now visible off the Willow's starboard, while her target remained invisible.
 
"Cut him off at the pass," Watkins ordered.
 
"If he wants that boat or whatever it is, he's not going to get it.
 
And get some people up here with both still and movie cameras.
 
If this turns shitty, I want documentation that our cause was just.
 
And if it isn't just, the film will go in the ocean along with anyone who took the pictures."

Harkins grabbed his arm.
 
"Skipper, spotters off the port see the target and it does look like a small boat and it also looks like she's sinking."

Flashes of light came from the Cuban.
 
"Jesus," said Harkins, "Machine gun fire.
 
She's shooting at the boat."

Watkins grinned wickedly.
 
"Hell no, she's shooting at us.
 
Now we have every right to defend ourselves."

Harkins was shocked.
 
The Cuban was clearly shooting at the boat and not at them.
 
"Sir, do you want to start World War III?
 
Didn't President Kennedy and Khrushchev just prevent it?"

"Yeah," Watkins said reluctantly.
 
"I guess we can't sink the little commie shit, but we can scare it.
 
That goddamn Cuban definitely doesn't want us to reach that boat, and that really makes me want to get there first."

Harkins looked relieved.
 
"So what are we going to do?"
 

"We fire a shot across the Cuban's bow.
 
One shell from a three-incher ought to wake their asses up."

One of the guns fired and, seconds later, a large spout of water exploded about two hundred yards in front of the Cuban, which suddenly lost way, wallowing in the swells.
 
Watkins laughed.
 
Whoever was steering the damned thing had just flinched big time.
 
Watkins laughed.
 
The Cuban was probably crapping his shorts.
 
"Can you get closer with the next shell?"

Before he got an answer, the Cuban turned away and began to head back to its homeland.
 
Someone with more courage than sense, turned the machine gun on the Willow, kicking up splashes in her direction.
 
Nothing hit the cutter, but Watkins was enraged.
 

"Dammit, now we got real proof.
 
Sink the little shit."

Watkin's XO shook his head.
 
"Better not, sir.
 
There's already gonna be hell to pay for shooting first at the Commie."

"Not a chance, Harkins.
 
We got proof on film that the Cuban opened fire on a helpless ship in peril which is against all the laws of the sea."
 
Watkins took a deep breath and gathered himself.
 
"Naw, you're right.
 
Let them go.
 
They'll go home, tell their story about us Yankee bullies, and forget it ever happened.
 
Hell, we never hit them did we?
 
If they do bitch, then we just roll out the films.
 
In the meantime, let's see what the hell was so damned important."

If I'm dead and this is heaven, then it isn't what I expected, Kraeger thought as he slowly regained consciousness.
 
For one thing, since when did heaven roll slightly and since when did heaven have bare light bulbs in the ceiling.
 
And heaven should have clouds and not starkly painted ceilings.
 
And be painless.
 
Christ, he hurt like hell from a number of places.
 
If this was heaven, it was a serious disappointment, and he’d wasted a number of Sundays going to church with his parents.