Part 7 (1/2)
”You had your chance to make it. Besides, I like it terrible. It keeps me awake.”
She tasted the coffee again, adjusting to the strength of it. ”I guess you did have a long night. Was there any trouble?”
”Staying awake was the toughest thing, like I said. A lot of distress calls on VHF-mostly in Spanish. So I played a little game to keep my mind on what I was doing. You know how a kid counts telephone poles on a long car trip? Well, I counted boats. One way or another, we pa.s.sed two hundred and fiftyseven. Busy night.”
”And how far are we now from Mariel Harbor?”
”Mile and a half, two miles. It won't be long.”
She strolled around the aft deck, stretching, combing through her long black hair with her fingers. ”Dusky,” she said, ”what kind of boat is that back there, right behind us?”
I didn't even turn around. ”Him? Oh, he's been tailing us ever since we got into Cuban waters. It's a gunboat. A Cuban gunboat.”
The bitterness in her voice was like a living thing. ”You're wrong about that, Mr. MacMorgan. It's not a Cuban gunboat. It's a Castro gunboat. Believe me, there's a difference. . . .”
8.
The gunboat trailed us on toward the mouth of Mariel Harbor, keeping a discreet distance. In the fresh daylight, we moved over the black water past wooden swordfis.h.i.+ng boats, their orange bouys marking miles of line-and their spritsail masts probably doubling as radio transmitters.
Abruptly, the water changed; the bottom came up from six hundred fathoms to fifteen fathoms, the hue of the sea was a soft blue jell, and you could see big fish moving among the safety of coral heads below, and the white sand, flourlike, on the bottom. From the flybridge, the water was like tinted gla.s.s and it seemed as if we were aviators at a dreamy low alt.i.tude, and the shadow of Sniper pressed on before us, cloudlike on the white sand.
The first view of Mariel Harbor is the picture of industry: a dozen smokestacks, a power plant, and a cement factory beneath scarred hillsides on the eastern edge of the entrance. Khaki-colored dumptrucks rumbled along dirt roads barely slowing for muledrawn carts. And from my vantage point a half mile out to sea they looked like toys, and the exhaust from the factory stacks curved away with the wind and blended with the low mountain clouds.
”Have you ever been here before-to Mariel?”
The woman stood beside me, her eyes taking in everything as we approached. I had dropped Sniper down to twelve hundred RPM, lining her up with the middle channel marker, taking her in slow.
Behind us, the gunboat slowed also.
”When I was a child, yes,” she said. ”My father brought me here. The power plant was not built then. And the cliffs were covered with trees.”
”It must have been pretty.”
She nodded. ”But not as pretty as other parts of Cuba.”
”I've never been here, but when I was a boy I had a friend who was a very fine writer, and he told me about Mariel. He said they used to smuggle Chinese out of this harbor. One his friends lost an arm here. He didn't say how.”
Her thin laughter was edged with bitterness. ”So now Mariel is for smuggling Cubans. Let's hope we both keep our arms.”
The entranceway to the harbor was narrow, less than a quarter mile wide, and a half-dozen American boats-cruisers, shrimp boats, and a couple of small skiffs-were anch.o.r.ed off the entrance in the clear water. The crews and the Cuban-Americans who had come to claim relatives were all topside in the sun, lounging and smoking nervously. It was a running tide, outgoing, and empty c.o.ke cans and garbage bags and wine bottles flowed out to sea. A narrow paw of beach curved around on the west side of the entrance furred with tall casuarinas, which blocked our view of the harbor proper. But even above the pines I could see the masts and rigging of a thousand boats-with untold more blending into the distance.
They were all there from America.
All waiting to load with refugees and relatives.
No wonder Castro was making a half million or more a day.
I pulled downtide of one of the shrimp boats, the Debra Jane, and stuck both engines in idle when we were close enough to carry on a conversation.
I scanned the shrimp boat's decks for someone who looked as if he might speak English. There were six or seven people topside, all Cuban-Americans.
I turned to the woman. ”Ask them why they're laying off. Ask them if we shouldn't go on into the harbor.”
Androsa cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled at them in a firm Spanish alto. Immediately, everyone on deck of the Debra Jane was answering her one question in a barrage of rolling dialogue, everyone talking at once.
When they had finished, she said, ”We're supposed to wait here for the authorities.”
”Ah.”
”Don't think I don't recognize that look on your face, Mr. MacMorgan. You think it funny that 'Cubans' love to talk. And you think it's stupid that the people on that boat should take so long to give me a simple answer to a simple question.”
”Something like that.”
”Oh, so you admit it!” She really was surprised, and the anger left her face momentarily.
”I try to make it a point not to lie to myself. That means I only lie to myself about half the time. But as you said: you asked them a simple question. I just don't understand why Spanish people all feel obliged to talk at the same time.”
”It offends you?”
”It confuses me-and I guess that's the same thing.”
”It's called 'different cultures,' Mr. MacMorgan. Our society is built upon the family, and our families are built upon warmth and loyalty-and interaction. Everyone feels free to talk because we are all members of the same family.” She snorted lightly, her perfect nose flaring. ”Truthfully, I don't even know why I feel obligated to explain it to you. I've seen the look in your eyes from a thousand different gringos. When you grow up as an outsider in America, you come to know the look of a racist.”
”So now I'm a racist?”
”Aren't you?”
”If not liking a bunch of people to talk all at the same time is being a racist, then I'm a-”
I didn't get a chance to finish, and the woman didn't get a chance to get any madder. The gunboat that had been trailing us came up close on Sniper's stern, and an authoritative voice said something over a loudspeaker.
”What did he say?”
She looked smug. ”Something that will appeal to the verbal economy your race seems to cherish.”
”Christ, Androsa, you know how to run a thing into the ground. I understood what he said about anchoring. But I didn't get the rest of it.”
The gunboat was a storm-gray cruiser, made of wood-smaller than the old PT boats. What appeared to be the captain stood beside the bow-mounted high-caliber machine gun. He wore a baggy light-blue uniform that looked like a chef's suit. His hat was light-blue, peaked and narrow, similar to the hats j.a.panese soldiers used to wear. He looked at me menacingly.
Androsa said, ”He told you to back off and anchor immediately.”
”That's all?”
”He also said we should prepare to be boarded. . . .”
We were boarded not by one captain, but two.