The Aztec Heresy (5 page)

He turned the wheel a few degrees, disappearing around the flank of the tanker on the windward side. The huge wall of rotting steel now stood between him and possible watching eyes on the shore. Twenty yards along he saw the gaping hole in the ship’s side, turned the wheel slightly once more, and guided the
Panda
inside the yawning cavern of the old ship’s hull.

With almost idiotic irony the idea had come from a James Bond movie. Produced in 1977, three years after the grounding of the SS
Angela Harrison
off the beaches of Baracoa, the film’s plot revolved around a giant supertanker that swallowed submarines. The idea that a supertanker could open up its bow section and inhale a couple of nuclear subs was obviously science fiction. The idea that a wrecked tanker on an isolated coast could camouflage an active base for a Russian-Cuban Foxtrot-class submarine was not. In the mid ’80s, while there was still money in the Soviet coffers, the hull of the old tanker had been gutted and refitted as a staging base for covert submarine patrols. By the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and the beginning of what Castro began calling the Difficult Times, there was barely any reason for a Cuban navy, let alone four expensive-to-operate examples of what was already an outmoded class of nonnuclear submarine; there was, however, a reason to keep one of them: Admiralty Shipyard’s Hull B-510, launched on October 20, 1983, and handed over to the Cuban Revolutionary Navy in February of the following year. The reason was as ironic and fundamentally ludicrous as the plot for the James Bond Movie
The Spy Who Loved Me.

Since 1972 the United States Navy, in conjunction with the CIA and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, had been tapping the Soviet telephone cables in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Barents Sea using induction recording equipment that was serviced as regularly as a mailman’s route. For a decade the Americans had been listening in on secret military communications between Soviet naval bases and their superiors in Moscow. Eventually, late in 1982, the Soviets discovered the so-called tap-pods, which had numerous parts within them stamped ‘‘Made in the U.S.A." Even though the taps had been discovered, it was still regarded as one of the great intelligence coups of the Cold War. The Americans, in their inevitable arrogance, had never considered that the same thing might be done to them.

The arrogance wasn’t entirely misplaced. Most secure military and intelligence communications outside the United States were carried on encrypted satellite signals, and had been since Telstar and the earliest telecommunications satellites of the sixties. There was only one place where this was not the case: Havana.

The U.S. Special Interest Section of the Swiss embassy knew perfectly well that the huge Signals Intelligence Center at Lourdes, just beyond the airport, was capable of trapping and tracing any satellite calls made to the mainland, so the nine heavily encrypted high-speed data lines running out of the embassy used the original Cuban American Telephone and Telegraph cable that ran from Havana Harbor to Key West, coming to the surface in a concrete conduit between Fort Zachary Taylor Park and Whitehead Spit. The cable, installed in 1921, was still the only direct-dial link between the two countries. Turnabout was fair play and Cuban intelligence had been tapping the cable since 1986, using the Foxtrot B-510 to service the intercept.

Once every ninety days the submarine would leave the safety of its iron nest, follow the Old Bahamas Channel northwest to the Florida Straits, and take up a position at the thirty-fathom line between Old Man Key and Key West. It was the previous mission to the tap that had provided the initial red flag for a DEA-Coast Guard sweep, and that in turn had led to Arkady’s unscheduled visit to the SS
Angela Harrison.

Cruz eased back even more on the
Panda
’s throttle as he slipped in through the gaping hole in the old ship’s side. His eyes adjusted quickly to the sudden dimming of the light as he passed into the cavernous hold. The B-510, all 299 feet of her, was snugged up against the concrete berth that had been constructed to accommodate her on the leeward side of the
Angela Harrison
’s hull. Like most of the old Russian cold-water submarines, she’d been originally painted a dull gray-black. Operating in Caribbean waters, she had wisely been painted over with a high-quality nonreflective and much lighter blue. Surfaced, even in broad daylight, the B-510 was almost invisible from anything more than five hundred yards.

Cruz gazed fondly up at his sinister-looking command, her squat conning tower studded with periscopes and snorkel equipment, her bows, now at low tide, revealing the torpedo tubes carved the same way as an old Buick Roadmaster, like the taxi his cousin Pascual drove in Havana. Unlike most of the modern nuclear-powered missile submarines, the B-510 retained the narrow, fleet look of her immediate ancestor, the German Type XXI of the Kriegsmarine developed at the end of World War II. The B-510’s hull configuration, basic design, and even her diesel and electric engines were much the same as the old Nazi boat’s, probably because they’d been conceived by the same engineers. The biggest difference was the lack of deck armament. The Type XXI had carried two antiaircraft guns, fore and aft; the B-510 had no weaponry at all beyond a few personal small arms on board and the six forward torpedo tubes and the two tubes aft:
Pedo
y Pinga,
as the crew called them—the fart and the dick. Not that it mattered much; there wasn’t much an antiaircraft gun could do against an F-18. Unlike most submarines and other vessels in what had once been the Soviet navy and the remnants of the Cuban navy, the B-510 had been given a name,
Babaloo,
written in bold black letters on her bow. On the conning tower there was a cartoon of Desi Arnaz playing the congas and, in English, the words ‘‘Honey, I’m Home!’’ The name and the cartoon, surprisingly enough, had been laughingly confirmed by the Great One himself.

Arkady switched off the
Panda
’s engine and let the small boat slide through the inky, oily water until it bumped against the old truck tires arranged as fenders along the concrete dock. His first officer, Enrico Ramirez, was supervising the loading of the
Babaloo
’s cargo: a dozen 65-76 ‘‘Whale’’ torpedoes, each one packed with 921 pounds of high-grade heroin where there normally would have been an explosive charge. The heroin was manufactured from the highest-grade Afghani opium, which was shipped to a government pharmaceutical lab in Zengcheng, China, where it was processed first into morphine and then into heroin. From there it was sent to the Pearl River port of Xintang, where it was loaded onto any one of a number of China Ocean Shipping Company vessels scheduled for off-loading in Cuba, generally bulk carriers of grain or smaller break-bulk carriers of mixed cargo. Arriving in the port of Manzanillo on the south coast of Cuba, the heroin was then packed into the old Soviet torpedoes for loading onto
Babaloo
. The grain and the heroin were paid in barter for sugar, and the heroin was then transshipped to the Yucatán aboard the Foxtrot for final delivery across the border into the United States. With the early-warning system provided by the regular phone taps in Key West, the system was foolproof. No Coast Guard ship would dare to stop a Chinese government vessel on the high seas, and since the Cuban navy no longer had any submarines, nobody was looking for one. Like any criminal activity of that size, there had been leaks every now and again, but the conspiracy was so involved and far-fetched that even the wildly paranoid Drug Enforcement Agency dismissed the rumors as addle-brained myths. If six-thousand-pound shipments of heroin really were regularly chugging their way underwater across the Caribbean like so much dirty laundry, they might as well hang up their badges and go home. Even if it was happening they didn’t want to think about it. Neither did Arkady Cruz. He’d never seen himself as a drug dealer, and his involvement with a madman like the megalomaniac Angel Guzman was repulsive. On the other hand, it was Guzman’s hard cash that kept the old Foxtrot seaworthy, and Arkady Tomas Cruz was willing to play Faust to Guzman’s Lucifer if it meant keeping the
Babaloo
afloat.

He tied off the
Panda
and went up the stained concrete steps to the pier. He paused to light yet another Popular, then crossed to the winch, where Ramirez was watching as the big gray torpedoes were being loaded through the forward hatch.

‘‘How goes it, Rico?’’

‘‘Well enough. Not much warning. These weren’t supposed to go out for another two weeks.’’

‘‘Don’t complain. We get to go for an unexpected cruise.’’

‘‘
Muy bueno,
I get to listen for AWACS and Coast Guard sonar pings for thirty-six hours in a boat full of the stink of fifty men sharing two showers and three toilets.’’ He paused, thinking for a moment, then shook his head. ‘‘Make that two toilets. The forward one isn’t flushing again.’’

Arkady Tomas laughed. ‘‘Put Payo on toilet paper rations. The
sargento
is the one who plugs it all the time.’’ The truth of course was that the
Babaloo
was old, getting close to thirty, and was never intended to cruise the tropics. She was a cold-water boat and she was aging quickly. ‘‘When can we get under way?’’ he asked, pinching out the Popular and flicking the butt into the black oily water lapping against the concrete pier.

‘‘Call it three hours,’’ said Ramirez. ‘‘Just after dark. The tide will be at its highest and it will be dark enough.’’

‘‘There is no darkness anymore,’’ grumbled Arkady. ‘‘They fly those Predator drones like mosquitoes with infrared eyes. I want you to dive the boat as soon as we’re over the reef.’’

‘‘Aye aye,
Amiral,
’’ said Ramirez.

‘‘
Amiral,
my ass,’’ said Arkady Tomas, grinning back at his old friend.

6

"Tell me again why we’re driving down the M1-11 in the fog on a visit to a theological college in Cambridge,’’ said Billy, squinting through the windshield of the Renault Laguna they’d rented at Heathrow. ‘‘Something about a Jewish Franciscan monk from Switzerland who was friends with a typewriter salesman during World War Two, wasn’t it?’’

‘‘He wasn’t a typewriter salesman. His name was Olivetti. He
made
typewriters. Millions of them.’’

‘‘But the Franciscan monk was Jewish, right? And a spy as well?’’

‘‘You’re teasing me,’’ said Finn.

‘‘I’m in awe of you,’’ said Billy Pilgrim. ‘‘To the undiscerning eye you appear to be an attractive woman in her late twenties with a pleasant disposition and a lovely smile, when in fact you are a time bomb, ticking away toward your next explosion. Your life appears to be an endless game of hares and hounds and one is never quite sure which is the hare and which is the hound.’’

‘‘But I’m not boring—you have to admit that,’’ she said and smiled at her friend.

‘‘Boring? No. Quite exciting, actually. One minute we’re being shot at in the middle of London and the next minute we’re battling Malay pirates side by side with a modern-day Robinson Crusoe obsessed with cheese.’’

‘‘You’re making it sound crazy on purpose,’’ said Finn. ‘‘It wasn’t that strange.’’

‘‘No, no,’’ said Billy airily, ‘‘just another day at the office for our girl Fiona.’’ He squinted. ‘‘What does that sign say?’’

‘‘A-1134,’’ answered Finn.

‘‘Bloody hell,’’ said Billy, throwing the wheel to the right. The big Renault rose to the occasion and they lurched onto the exit ramp.

They made their way through the foggy, rather narrow streets of Cambridge, students in little groups appearing through the mist like ghostly flitting bats in their academic gowns. The occasional car went by, its headlights like the glowing yellow eyes of an owl surprised in flight. ‘‘The whole place seems deserted,’’ commented Finn. ‘‘No people, no traffic. It’s like a ghost town.’’

‘‘Mid-June,’’ explained Billy. ‘‘End of term. Everyone’s going home for the hols except for the swots.’’

‘‘Swots?’’

‘‘Nose-to-the-grindstone suck-ups, brownnosers who’ve offered to do scut work for their professors.’’

‘‘Just like Columbus, Ohio,’’ said Finn with a smile.

‘‘Tush and pish, Miss Ryan. I bet you were a swot yourself.’’

‘‘Never. If I wasn’t off on a dig with my parents I was working at Mickey-D’s, just like the rest of my friends, and getting tanked on Saturday night.’’

‘‘Fiona Ryan as a bad girl,’’ said Billy. ‘‘Hard to imagine.’’ He squinted through the windscreen. ‘‘Bloody hell,’’ he muttered again.

‘‘It’s on a street called Ridley Hall Road,’’ said Finn, looking down at the map of Cambridge in the Blue Guide. They reached the end of the Fen Causeway, then turned right. ‘‘Off Malting Lane.’’

‘‘That’s not far from the old Granta Pub,’’ said Billy. ‘‘Good shepherd’s pie if I remember my school days.’’

‘‘I thought you went to Oxford.’’

‘‘But I had a lady friend in Cambridge.’’

‘‘What happened to her?’’

‘‘Sadly she couldn’t abide boats. She married a doctor and moved to New Zealand. Rather a rich gynecologist’s wife than an impoverished duchess, I suppose.’’

‘‘Turn here,’’ said Finn, pointing to the left. A street appeared, wisps of fog caught in the branches of a row of ancient alder trees. ‘‘Right this time,’’ she said a few seconds later. And then they were on Ridley Hall Road.

‘‘Hardly rates as a road,’’ said Billy, pulling the car to a stop. ‘‘Only a block long.’’ On their left was a big slate-roofed institutional building, added to over the decades in varying shades and styles of brickwork that went from dark red to pale yellow, windows from Victorian arched through midcentury sash and modern thermopane.

‘‘That has to be Ridley Hall,’’ said Finn.

‘‘Which makes
that
the residence of our mysterious Franciscan,’’ said Billy, nodding to his right. ‘‘Poplar Cottage.’’

‘‘I don’t see any poplars,’’ said Finn, ducking down to look through Billy’s window. ‘‘And I wouldn’t call that a cottage.’’ The house opposite Ridley Hall was a large, slightly sooty-looking place with half a dozen eaves and at least that many chimney pots sprouting up from every corner. It was two and a half stories, covered in a nicotine-colored stucco, the windows tall, arched, and covered with what appeared to be heavy drapes. It was the sort of place where the upstanding citizenry in Sherlock Holmes stories lived, or a suspicious-looking clergyman in an Agatha Christie tale. As though to offset the building’s slightly dowdy outward appearance, the narrow front garden was a riot of color, flowers blooming everywhere.