The Last Witness (Badge of Honor 11)

She then spun the steering wheel left. And again floored the accelerator.

[TWO]

Latitude 23 Degrees 32 Minutes 64 Seconds North

Longitude 81 Degrees 92 Minutes 77 Seconds West

North of the Republic of Cuba

Sunday, November 16, 1:35 A.M.

“Damn it, Miguel, that’s got to be them!” First Mate Raúl Alfonso announced, peering through binoculars as he stood beside the helm of the Nuevo Día. “Those Pangas are right on the GPS coordinates they sent. But why two boats? Is one a backup? Or what . . . ?”

The sky was clear, the winds calm, the sea almost flat. The thin crescent of a new moon hung near the horizon amid a blanket of twinkling stars. The humid air was thick, its salty smell heavy.

The New Day was a faded black, rusty steel-hulled cargo vessel 280 feet in length. In addition to a regular schedule of calling on ports around the Bahamian Islands, she and her sister ship made staggered once-a-week trips to Havana from their home port of Miami. The vessels delivered items deemed by the Communist government of Cuba to be of humanitarian value—for an outrageous import tariff paid by the Cuban exiles in the States who sent them—and thus permissible to enter the sovereign island nation.

Months earlier, in another humanitarian shipment, handheld Motorola two-way radios and Garmin GPS units, possession of which Cuban law considered treason and would result in the bearer’s immediate imprisonment and likely torture, had been smuggled to Cuban fishermen inside fifty-pound bags of dried frijoles negros. Black beans, a Cuban staple, were in almost as great a demand as rice.

A chunky round-faced thirty-year-old Cuban-American, Alfonso stood five-five. He wore a mussed tan uniform, the shirt untucked and his ample belly straining its buttons.

Even with the high-powered optics and the clear weather, he could make out no more than the silhouettes of the two Pangas in the predawn darkness. The narrow, low-profile, twenty-five-foot-long fishing boats, each powered by a single outboard motor, were designed more for calmer inshore waters than for the open sea.

“Perhaps God is with us,” Alfonso said, as he passed the binoculars to the ship’s master.

“Don’t speak too soon, mi amigo,” Captain Miguel Treto replied.

Treto also was Cuban-American. At thirty-three years of age, he looked like a slightly older version of Alfonso, though not nearly as chunky. His tan uniform was much neater.

Alfonso pointed out the pilothouse window.

“Near one o’clock,” he added helpfully, “about two hundred yards out.”

“Got ’em, Raúl,” Captain Treto said, almost immediately after putting the rubber cups to his eyes. “But, like what happened last month, they could just be other fishermen. Or, worse, even a trap. Radio the code to confirm that’s really them.”

—

The previous day, the Nuevo Día had made the run from Miami to the Port of Havana. The Cuban capital was only ninety miles due south of Key West. Alfonso and the four-man crew had unloaded the cargo of forty-foot-long corrugated metal intermodal containers in just under two hours. Immediately thereafter, with paperwork complete—and none of the crew, including the captain, having been allowed ashore—lines were cast off and the ship headed back to the States.

When south of the Gulf Stream, particularly during the ten-mile approach and departure of the island, it was standard operating procedure for the captain to keep the speed of the twin diesels at a fraction of the usual twenty-knots-an-hour cruise speed. This accomplished a number of things, beginning with better fuel consumption. But more importantly it also bought extra time for the captain to locate any rendezvous target and, during a pickup, for the ship not to draw attention when suddenly slowing or stopping.

Since clearing the breakers at the mouth of the Port of Havana, the Nuevo Día had been making just over five knots per hour. She now, after four hours, was approximately twenty miles east, not far from Santa Cruz del Norte, the small fishing town (population thirty-two thousand) where the Río Santa Cruz emptied into the Caribbean.

The lumbering vessel—in addition to her red, green, and white navigation lights burning—had small clear lights on either side of the bow. They illuminated the thirty-six-inch-high rust-stained white letters that spelled out NUEVO DÍA on the faded black hull.

If they have binocs, Alfonso thought, they won’t be as good as mine.

And if I can’t make out their details, who knows what they can—or can’t—see?

Alfonso thumbed the handheld’s PUSH TO TALK key three times. That caused three clicks to sound on the speaker of any radio within ten or so miles that shared the frequency. They knew that it was possible that someone in the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias—Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces—could be monitoring radio traffic and would somehow interpret the clicks as being a signal. But, being a very common frequency and not maritime specific—not to mention the laxness of the Tropas Guarda Fronteras, especially at such an early hour—their experience had been that it also was equally entirely improbable.

TGF, the Interior Ministry’s Border Guard, used aging Soviet-built patrol boats to interdict Cubans fleeing the island and anti-Castro agents infiltrating it. But, with failing assets and regular shortages of fuel, they managed to do so only sporadically.

“Nothing!” Captain Treto said unnecessarily, as they both strained to see out into the dark distance, Treto still using the binoculars.

Then, a long moment later, a beam from a flashlight on the closest Panga lit momentarily, then lit again, and again.

“There!” Alfonso said.