Nelson DeMille - The Cuban Affair

I went back to the cocktail table, called the waitress over, and settled the bill.

Sara said, “We’ll be out of Cuban territorial waters by midnight.”

“We will.” I thought back to my last days and hours in Afghanistan. The short-timers, who’d gone through hell without even a small pee in their pants, were all jittery that something was going to happen before they boarded the freedom bird home. I mean, after you’ve cheated death for so long, you become paranoid, sure that death had just remembered you were leaving.

Sara said, “I think he knows.”

If he did, we might be waiting in that mangrove swamp for awhile. And Jack would be treading water while Felipe was in the cabin opening up the throttle as he took a direct heading for Miami, ahead of the storm and the Cuban gunboats. I mean, the money was still in Camagüey, his girlfriend was screwing around with the captain, and the police were closing in. Felipe would like to say adios to all that shit.

Sara and I sat in silence and waited for the desk clerk or Felipe to appear. Or the police.

I looked at my watch, stood, and said, “Time to go.”

“Where?”

“Let’s find out.”

Sara stood, and we collected our backpacks and walked to the lobby. I checked with the desk, and a phone message had just come in. I read the message slip — Anchors Aweigh. Will Try To Be At Sol Club 10:30 — and gave it to Sara.

She read it and looked at me. “Mac, this could be the last time we can be together. The car is locked. Let’s go upstairs.” She had the key card in her hand.

That was tempting. And it’s sort of an Army tradition that you try to get laid before you try not to get killed. But I wanted to get out of the hotel. “Have you ever done it in the back seat of a station wagon in a mangrove swamp?”

She smiled. “I’ll try anything once.”

We left the Melia Hotel. I took the car keys from Sara, unlocked her door, and got behind the wheel. I fired up the Perkins boat engine, drove down the driveway, and headed west on the beach road.

She said, “This has been the best week of my life.”

Were we in the same place? “Me too.”

“You’ve got balls. And heart.”

“And you’ve got guts and brains.” And I meant it.

“We’re a good team.”

“We are.”

“What time will we be in Key West?” she asked.

“In time for lunch.”

“I’ll buy at the Green Parrot.”

Table for two? Or three? Maybe four with Jack.

“I’ll tell Felipe after lunch that I’m not going back to Miami with him. And I’ll tell him why.”

Then maybe I should buy lunch.

“All right?”

I thought about all this — past, present, and future — and I came to the conclusion that Sara Ortega was my fate. This was where my journey had taken me. And this was good. I took her hand. “All right.”

We continued along the dark beach road. The sky was looking more ominous, with black smoky clouds racing across the face of the moon.

Sara said, “There’s the sign.”

I slowed down, and my headlights picked out a faded wooden sign: SWAMP TOURS. I turned left onto a dirt road that was hemmed in by thick tropical growth. The road was rough and the steamer trunks started to bounce, so I slowed down and shifted into first gear. My headlights showed a straight path through the ten-foot brush, and I switched to parking lights.

Felipe said it was half a mile to the floating dock, and within five minutes I could smell the swamp, and a minute later I could see the sheen on the water and huge mangrove trees rising from the dark wetlands.

I slowed to a crawl as I approached the water and stopped at the shoreline. Around me was a small clearing — a turn-around and parking area in front of the floating dock. There were no boats at the dock, no vehicles, and no people except us. I shut off the parking lights and we sat there, staring into the darkness.

Sara said, “Back the wagon up to the dock.”

“Right.”

I maneuvered the Buick wagon around in the tight space and backed it up close to the floating dock. I killed the engine and said, “Let’s check it out.”

We got out of the wagon and looked around.

The fleeting moonlight reflected off the black, shiny water, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see that a thick wall of vegetation crowded the small clearing. Exposed roots from the giant mangroves provided some traction and kept the Buick from sinking into the waterlogged mud.

I walked onto the floating dock, which was not much more than a log raft, held together with rope, about five feet wide and ten feet long, jutting into the swamp. The dock was tethered to stakes at the shoreline by two ropes. It would not support the Buick, but it seemed steady and sturdy enough to allow the transferral of the cargo between the wagon and our boat. I couldn’t help but imagine that the station wagon was a big panel van, filled with a dozen steamer trunks. This would have worked. Assuming we’d made it to Camagüey. And here. Well, we’d never know.

“Okay. This is good.”

Sara was staring out at the mangrove swamp. “Can the boat get through there?”

Hopefully, Felipe had already answered that question for himself.

I looked into the dark swamp. Mangroves grew up to the shore, but there was a channel through them, obviously man-made for boats to navigate the wetlands. It was hard to judge measurement in the dark, but it seemed that The Maine , with a 16-foot beam, could come sternway through the mangrove trees — very slowly and carefully — and reach the floating dock. The problem was not the channel through the mangroves — it was the depth of the bottom, which I guessed hadn’t been dredged because swamp boats were usually flat-bottomed. The Maine , however, had a keel that was about five feet below the waterline. And even if we had seven feet of water at high tide, there were mangrove stumps out there, and roots that could foul the propeller. The good news was that we were light on fuel and cargo. Four thousand pounds of money might have put us too close to the bottom. Every cloud has a silver lining.

“Mac?”

“Well... it’s doable.” Which didn’t sound like a sure thing. I added, “If The Maine can’t get to us, we can swim to her.”

“What about our cargo?”

“Well... I don’t see why we can’t use this dock for a raft and meet the boat in deeper water.”

She nodded.

I was tempted to point out that Felipe was more of an optimist than a sailor, but this may have been his only option. And I didn’t like to second-guess men under my command when they showed initiative — even if they had a stupid solution to a problem.

“We’ll see how it goes at ten-thirty.” I looked at my watch. It was now 8:45. We had a long wait. But I’d rather wait here for The Maine than wait in the Melia for the police.

I checked out the ropes that tethered the floating dock and saw they were one-inch hemp lines, easily cut with my Swiss Army knife.

Sara stood on the dock and asked, “If we have to make this dock into a raft, how do we move it into the swamp?”

Good question. The dock seemed too big and heavy for us to move it by hanging on and paddling with our feet against the incoming tide, but I suggested we could do that if we waited for the tide to start running out.

Sara replied, “I don’t want to wait... Maybe we can do what the balseros do when they’re launching their rafts from the wetlands.”

“Which is?”

“They use poles — to push off into the deeper water.”

Right. I think Huck Finn did that. “Okay. Good solution.” I suspected she was smarter than her young boyfriend. Anyway, if we had seven feet of water here at high tide, as per Felipe, we needed at least a ten-foot pole.