proud sons of Oriente!”
Castro walked up to Manso and stared hard into his eyes. Then his face broke into a grin and he embraced the startled boy in his two strong arms.
Manso was too shocked to speak.
“This man you killed. His name was Dimitri Gokov. We suspected the Russian of being a double agent, spying for the americanos. This very morning, another Soviet agent confirmed under torture that Gokov was part of a U.S. group plotting an overthrow of our revolutionary government.”
“Comandante, I don’t—”
“You are a brave boy. And you have an absolutely amazing sense of timing! Had we caught you yesterday, you would have been shot!” Castro said, and laughed. In Castro’s mind, Manso’s pinata had sent a brilliant, if unwitting, message to both the politburo in Moscow and his enemies in Washington. He embraced Carlos and Juanito and handed all three brothers small black boxes. The three brothers looked at each other, grinning. Inside each box was a shiny golden star attached to a red silk ribbon.
In time, he further rewarded Manso with a commission in the Air Force. He gave Juanito and Carlos commissions, too, in the Army and Navy. All three had shown surprising initiative and risen swiftly to the highest ranks.
Carlitos was now one of the highest-ranking officers in the Navy. Both he and Juanito, comandante of the Western Army, had also secretly returned to the lucrative narco trade they knew so well. Manso’s only fear was that Carlitos’s insatiable love of the product was increasing his already frightening instability.
Carlitos was valuable, but he would have to be watched. Pitting brother against brother, Manso gave that responsibility to Juanito.
Castro’s reprieve had been the beginning of a long, profitable relationship for all of them. Those closest to the leader always reaped the largest rewards. As Fidel himself had once remarked, “I bathe myself, but I also splash others.” There were rumors of hundreds of millions in Castro’s Swiss bank accounts. Manso grew adept at siphoning off his share and more.
In time, all three brothers grew immensely rich from many sources. It was far easier to export your product to America from Cuba than it was from Colombia. Juanito, through his vast drug-running operations in the Exumas, got the product into Cuba. Manso and Carlos got it out of Cuba and into the United States. There were rumors, of course, about narco traffic at the very highest levels of the Cuban military. But Manso’s private security force made sure it was all kept very quiet.
Even the leader, if he knew of the de Herreras brothers’ sideline businesses, never mentioned it. El jefe was famously antidrug, and had even been trying to negotiate some kind of crackdown with the U.S. for years.
Manso and his leader had grown ever closer over the years. The leader, who was never able to sleep at night, would roam the streets of the old city with Manso, pouring out his frustrations and fears. Time passed, and the two men became, not brothers, because their age difference was too wide, but something akin to father and son.
Fidel had been born in 1926 at Las Manacas, near Biran, in northeastern Cuba. Manso had been born twenty- five years later in Mayari, the nearest neighboring town to Biran. They shared a common loathing for the gringo imperialists who had exploited the natural resources and the peasants of their beloved Oriente. This had been one of the earliest bonds between the aging leader and the promising young Manso.
He looked at his leader now, red-faced and shaking his fists in the anger he seemed to summon so easily. Manso took a sip from the cup of the warm lemonade and tried to relax. He was going to need every ounce of his courage and strength of mind to do what he had to do.
It had been six whole months since he’d been to Telarana. It had become too dangerous for him to be seen there. His brother Juanito had been flying down from Havana once a week, supervising most of the construction. His other brother, Carlos, had been put in charge of planning and organization. He was also in charge of Manso’s personal security force. Castro had an imperial guard said to number ten thousand. Manso’s guard, though not nearly that size, had grown exponentially in recent months.
Manso didn’t like to admit it, but his brother Carlos, who’d risen to the highest echelons of the Navy, was by far the smartest of the three and certainly the most politically astute. He was also the most unpredictable. A lifelong addiction to the poppy and the coca leaf had made him dangerously unstable.
But it was somewhere inside the scrambled brains of Carlos that the little seed of rebellion had begun to grow. Manso, with his limitless financial resources, had provided Carlos’s tiny seed with all the water and sunshine it needed to thrive.
Then there was his brother Juanito, a great general of the Army. There were in fact three distinct armies in Cuba. The army of the East, the Central army, and the army of the West. On pain of execution, the leaders of the three armies were not allowed to communicate with one another. This Manso and Carlos had used to their great advantage.
Juanito, in complete secrecy, had used his position as commander of the Western forces to turn Carlos’s little seed into the vast secret complex of bricks, mortar, missiles, and men called Telarana. Manso had originally modeled Telarana after Escobar’s own grandiose estate in the mountains of Medellin, Hacienda los Napoles.
Telarana had become far more than the jungle pleasure palace, which, to a casual observer, it still appeared to be. An influx of many millions had turned Telarana into a powerful military fortress that would soon be the birthplace of a new Cuba.
Manso looked at his chunky gold Rolex. Three-fifteen. The speech seemed to be winding up to a climax. Good. With any luck, they could be airborne in twenty minutes or so. If God was truly on his side, and how could He not be, the birth of a new Cuba was less than three hours away.
10
She lay about a half mile outside the channel markers for Staniel Cay and when she was lit up at night, as she was now, she was magnificent. The name, illuminated in huge gold type on her towering stern, said it all.
BLACKHAWKE.
Hawke’s yacht, completed in great secrecy just two years earlier at the Huisman yard in Holland, caused a unique stir wherever she went in the world. And the world, it delighted Hawke to know, had no idea just how singular a vessel this truly was.
At just over two hundred forty feet in overall length, she was a mammoth silhouette against the evening sky. Tonight, since there were to be guests, her gleaming black hull and towering white top-sides were illuminated with halogen lighting from stem to stern. Her crew, who, with the exception of the galley staff and the launch crew, wore simple summer uniforms of black linen, had been given the night off.
Congreve, who loved messing about in kitchens, had sent Slushy, the executive chef, ashore. He’d elected to do the cooking tonight himself. Local lobsters, fresh corn, and salad. In deference to the Russians, he was serving caviar and iced vodka before dinner.
Twilight had congealed into starlit darkness.
The two old friends sat conversing comfortably under the umbrella of stars, as their guests weren’t due for another half hour or so. They were all the way aft on the top deck. Quick, now disguised as a steward, was serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres.
Hawke had let his parrot, Sniper, out of his cage, and the big black bird was now perched in his favorite location on Hawke’s right shoulder. The bird had been a gift from his grandfather on Alex’s eighth birthday. Hawke had no idea how old Sniper was. Parrots, he’d learned, lived to be ninety to one hundred years old.
It was Hawke’s habit at cocktail time to feed the bird whatever hors d’oeuvres were being served. Sniper seemed to like everything except pigs-in-blankets. But he had an enormous fondness for Russian caviar. At the moment, he was making do with the cheese.
Congreve was busy trying to get his pipe lit again. They were sitting some fifty feet above the water and it was breezy out on deck.
“Another Dark & Stormy, Ambrose?” Hawke asked, feeding Sniper his fifth gob of warm Brie cheese.
