Golden Buddha of-1 Read online

  From offshore, the channel that led inside to the bellows-shaped harbor was invisible until a ship was nearly on top of it. Rising two hundred feet atop the cliffs on the right stood the old colonial fortress known as Morro Castle.

  Morales noticed that Smith and the members of his mangy crew standing on the bridge seemed interested in the defenses that had been dug into the hillside when Fidel Castro had thought the United States was going to attack Cuba. They studied the gun and missile emplacements through expensive binoculars.

  Morales smiled to himself. Let them look all they wanted—most of the defenses were deserted. Only two small fortresses maintained a small company of soldiers to man the missile emplacements in the unlikely event an unwelcome vessel tried to enter the harbor.

  Morales threaded his way through the buoys and steered the Oregon deftly around the twists and turns of the channel, which soon opened into the broad, ballshaped harbor surrounded by the city of Santiago. The wheel felt strange to him, though. The odd feeling was barely perceptible, but there nonetheless. Whenever he turned the wheel, there seemed to be a short lag before the rudder responded. He made a quick but very slight turn to starboard before bringing the wheel back to port. It was definitely there, almost like an echo, a two-second delay. He did not sense sluggishness from the steering machinery, but rather a pause. It had to come from another origin. Yet when the response came, it was quick and firm. But why the hesitation?

  “Your helm has an off feel to it.”

  “Yeah,” Smith grunted. “It’s been that way for a few days. Next port we enter with a shipyard, I’ll have the spindles on the rudder looked at.”

  It still made no sense to Morales, but the ship was entering the open part of the bay off the city now, and he pushed the mystery from his mind. He called the harbor officials over the ship’s radio and kept them informed of his progress, and was given orders for the anchorage.

  Morales pointed out the buoys to Smith that marked the mooring area and ordered the ship brought to slow speed. He then swung the stern around until the bow was facing the incoming tide before ordering all stop. The Oregon slowed to a halt in an open area between a Canadian container ship and a Libyan oil tanker.

  “You may drop your anchor,” he said to Smith, who acknowledged with a nod as he held a loudspeaker in front of his face.

  “Let go anchor!” he shouted at his crew. The command was answered a few seconds later by the rattling clatter of the chain links against the hawsehole, followed by a great splash as the anchor plunged into the water. The bow of the ship became hazy from the cloud of dust and rust that burst from the chain locker.

  Morales released his grip on the worn spokes of the wheel and turned to Smith. “You will, of course, pay the pilot’s fee when you turn over your documents to the harbor officials.”

  “Why wait?” snorted Smith. He reached into a pocket of his coveralls and produced a wad of crinkled American hundred-dollar bills. He counted out fifteen bills, then hesitated, looked into Morales’s shocked expression, and said, “Oh, what the heck, suppose we make it an even two thousand dollars.”

  Without the least indecision, Morales took the bills and slipped them into his wallet.

  “You are most generous, Captain Smith. I will notify the officials that the pilot’s fee was paid in full.”

  Smith signed the required affidavits and logged the mooring. He put a massive arm around the Cuban’s shoulder. “Now about them girls. Where’s a good place in Santiago to meet them?”

  “The cabarets on the waterfront are where you’ll find both cheap entertainment and drinks.”

  “I’ll tell my crew.”

  “Good-bye, Captain.” Morales did not extend his hand. He already felt unclean just by being on board the ship; he could not bring himself to grip the greasy hand of the obnoxious captain. Morales’s easygoing Cuban warmth had been cooled by the surroundings and he didn’t want to waste another second on board the Oregon. Leaving the wheelhouse, he dropped down the ladder to the deck and descended to the waiting pilot boat, still stunned at experiencing the filthiest ship he had ever piloted into the harbor. Which is just what the owners of the Oregon wanted him to think.

  If Morales had examined the ship more closely, he might have realized it was all a façade. The Oregon rode low in the water because of specially fitted ballast tanks, which when filled with water lowered the hull to make it look as though it were loaded with cargo. Even the engine tremors were mechanically staged. The ship’s engines were whisper-silent and vibrationless.

  And the coating of rust throughout the ship? It was artistically applied paint.

  SATISFIED that the pilot and his boat had pulled away from the Oregon, Captain Smith stepped over to a handrail mounted on the deck that did not seem to serve any particular purpose. He gripped it and pressed a button on the underside. The square section of the deck on which Smith was standing suddenly began descending until it stopped in a vast, brightly lit room filled with computers, automated controls and several large consoles containing communications and weapons-firing systems. The deck in the command center was richly carpeted, the walls were paneled in exotic woods and the furniture looked as if it had come straight from a designer’s showroom. This room was the real heart of the Oregon.

  The six people—four men and two women—neatly dressed in shorts, flowered shirts and white blouses were busy manning the various systems. One woman was scanning an array of TV monitors that covered every section of Santiago Bay, while a man zoomed a camera on the pilot boat as it turned and headed into the main channel. No one bothered to give the fat captain half a glance. Only a man dressed in khaki shorts and a green golf shirt approached him.

  “All go well with the pilot?” asked Max Hanley, the ship’s corporate president, who directed all operational systems, including the ship’s engines.

  “The pilot noticed the delay in the helm.”

  Hanley grinned. “If only he’d known he was steering a dead wheel. We’ll have to make some adjustments, though. You speak to him in Spanish?”

  Smith smiled. “My best Yankee English. Why let him know I speak his language? That way, I could tell if he played any tricks over the radio with the harbor officials as we anchored.” Smith pulled back a sleeve of his grimy coveralls and checked a Timex watch with a badly scratched lens. “Thirty minutes until dark.”

  “The equipment in the moon pool is all ready.”

  “And the landing crew?”

  “Standing by.”

  “I just have time to get rid of these smelly clothes and get decent,” said Cabrillo, heading toward his cabin down a hallway hung with paintings by modern artists.

  The crew cabins were concealed inside two of the cargo holds and were as plush as rooms in a five-star hotel. There was no separation between officers and crew on the Oregon. All were educated people, highly trained in their respective fields—elite men and women who had served in the armed forces. The ship was owned by its staff, who were stockholders. There were no ranks. Cabrillo was chairman; Hanley, president; the others held various other titles. They were all mercenaries, here to make a profit—though that did not necessarily rule out good works at the same time—hired by countries or large companies to perform clandestine services around the world, very often at great risk.

  THE man who left the cabin twenty minutes later did not look like the man who’d entered. The greasy hairpiece, scruffy beard and grimy coveralls were gone, as was the foul smell. So was the Timex, now replaced with a stainless-steel Concord chronograph. In addition, the man had dropped at least a hundred pounds.

  Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had transformed himself from the grimy sea dog Smith to his true self again. A tall man in his forties, ruggedly handsome, he stared through pixie blue eyes. His blond hair was trimmed in a crew cut and a western cowboy-style mustache sprouted from his upper lip.

  He hurried down the corridor to a far door and entered a control room perched high inside a vast cavern in the hull amidships
. The three-deck-high moon pool, as it was called, was where all the Oregon’s underwater equipment was stored—diving gear; submersibles, manned and unmanned; and an array of underwater electronic sensors. A pair of state-of-the-art contemporary underwater craft byU.S. Submarines—a sixty-five-foot Nomad 1000 and a thirty-two-foot Discovery 1000—hung in cradles. The doors on the bottom of the hull slid open and water flooded in until it was level with the outer waterline.

  The remarkable ship was not what she appeared from her exterior. The outer decks and hull were disguised to make her look like a rust bucket. The wheelhouse and the unused officers’ and crew’s quarters below were also kept in a slovenly condition to avoid suspicion from visiting port officials or harbor pilots.

  Cabrillo entered the underwater operations room and stood before a large table showing three-dimensional holographic images of every street in the city of Santiago. Linda Ross, the Oregon’s security and surveillance analyst, was standing at the table lecturing a group of people dressed in Cuban military fatigue uniforms. Linda had been a lieutenant commander in the navy when Cabrillo had sweet-talked her into resigning and joining the Oregon. In the navy she had been an intelligence officer on board an Aegis guided-missile cruiser before spending four years in Washington in the navy’s intelligence department.

  Linda glanced sideways at Cabrillo as he stood quietly without interrupting. She was an attractive woman, not a head turner, but most men still considered her pretty. She kept her five-foot-eight-inch, 130-pound body in firm shape with exercise, but rarely spent extra time on makeup or hairstyle. She was one smart lady, soft-spoken and greatly admired by the entire Oregon crew.

  The five men and one woman standing around the detailed 3-D image of the city listened intently as Linda ran through the last-minute instructions, using a small metal rod with a light on the end to point out their objective. “The fortress of Santa Ursula. It was built during the Spanish-American War, and after the turn of the twentieth century it was used as a warehouse until Castro and his revolutionaries took over the country. Then it was turned into a prison.”

  “What is the exact distance from our landing to the prison?” asked Eddie Seng, the Oregon’s master of subterfuge and director of shore operations.

  “Two hundred yards less than a mile,” answered Linda.

  Seng folded his arms and looked thoughtful. “We’ll be able to fool the locals with our uniforms going in, but if we have to fight our way back a mile to the docks while herding eighteen prisoners, I can’t guarantee we’ll make it.”

  “Certainly not in the condition those poor people are going to be in,” said Julia Huxley, the Oregon’s medical officer. She was going along on the raid to care for the prisoners. A short woman, large bosomed with a body suited for wrestling, Julia was the congeniality lady of the ship. She’d served as a chief medical officer for four years at the San Diego Naval Base and was well respected by them all.

  “Our agents in the city have arranged for a truck to be stolen twenty minutes before you leave the prison. It’s used for hauling food supplies to the hotels. The truck and a driver will be parked one block from the workers’ maintenance shack situated on the wharf above your landing dock. He’ll drive you to the prison, wait, and return you to the dock. From there he’ll ditch the truck and ride home on his bicycle.”

  “Does he have a name? Is there a password?”

  Linda smiled slightly. “The password is dos.”

  Seng looked skeptical. “Two? That’s it?”

  “Yes, he’ll reply with uno, one. It’s that simple.”

  “Well, at least it’s concise.”

  Linda paused to flick a series of switches on a small remote control. The images of the city dissolved into a 3-D interior diorama of Santa Ursula Prison without its roof, revealing the inner rooms and cells and their connecting passageways. “Our sources tell us there are only ten guards in the whole prison. Six on the day shift, two in the evening and two from midnight until six in the morning. You should have no problem overpowering the two on the station. They’ll think you’re a military unit come to transport the prisoners to another secure facility. You’re scheduled to gain entry at ten o’clock. Subdue the two on-duty guards and release the prisoners, then return to the submarine and make the ship by eleven o’clock. Any later and you jeopardize our escape out of the harbor.”

  “How so?” asked one of Seng’s team members.

  “We’re told the harbor defense systems are run through an operational test every night at twelve. We’ve got to be well on our way to sea before then.”

  “Why not wait and go in after midnight, when most of the town is asleep?” asked a member of the landing force. “At ten o’clock, the local citizens will still be stirring around.”

  “You’ll cause less suspicion if you don’t sneak around the streets before dawn,” she replied. “Also, the other eight guards are usually out on the town in the local bars until early morning.”

  “You’re sure about that?” asked Seng.

  Linda nodded. “Their movements have been watched and clocked for two weeks by our agents in the city.”

  “Unless Murphy’s Law rears its ugly head,” said Cabrillo, “the release of the prisoners and the escape should go smoothly. The tough part comes when you’re all on board and we have to sail out of the harbor. The minute Castro’s harbor security forces see us pull up the anchor and turn down the channel for the open sea, they’ll know something is wrong and all hell will break loose.”

  Linda looked at Cabrillo. “We have the weaponry to knock them out.”

  “True,” Cabrillo acknowledged. “But we cannot fire the first shot. If they strike the Oregon first, however, we’ll have no choice but to protect ourselves.”

  “None of us has been told,” said Seng, “who exactly are we breaking out of jail. They must be important or we wouldn’t have contracted for the job.”

  Cabrillo looked at him. “We wanted to keep it under wraps until we got here. They’re Cuban doctors, journalists and businessmen who opposed Castro’s government, all highly respected men and women. Castro knows they are dangerous if they are free. If they reach the Cuban community in Miami, they can use it as a base to instigate a revolutionary movement.”

  “Is it a good contract?”

  “Ten million dollars if we deliver them to U.S. soil.”

  Seng and the others around the holographic display smiled. “That should add a tidy little amount to everyone’s nest egg,” he said.

  “Doing good for profit,” Cabrillo said with a wide grin. “That’s our motto.”

  AT precisely 8:30, Seng and his small force boarded the Nomad 1000 along with the two crewmen who would pilot the sub and guard it during the operation. The sub looked more like a luxury surface yacht than a submersible. Capable of running at high speeds on the surface with its diesel engines, it was battery powered beneath the waves. With a speed of twelve knots underwater, the Nomad could dive to a thousand feet. The interior was designed to hold twelve people comfortably, but Cabrillo had had her configured to carry three times that number tightly packed together, for missions such as this one.

  The entry door was closed and sealed, and the craft, secured by a large sling, was lifted by a crane into the center of the moon pool. The operator looked into the control room and was given the descent signal by Cabrillo. Then, slowly, the large craft was lowered into the black water. As soon as she settled, divers removed the sling and were carried upward to the surrounding balcony by the crane.

  “Radio check,” said Seng. “Do you read me?”

  “Like you’re in the same room,” Linda Ross assured him.

  “Are we clear?”

  “No ship movement and only three fishing boats are heading out to sea. At thirty feet, you should stay well below their keels and props.”

  “Keep the coffee on,” said Seng.

  “Bon voyage,” quipped Cabrillo.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Seng came back.
r />   A few moments later, the lights inside the Nomad blinked out and it vanished into the dark water of the harbor.

  THE pilots of the sub relied on their Global Positioning System to set them on an exact course for the section of the city docks that was their destination. Detecting the pilings by their laser monitoring system, they were able to slip between the stern and bow of two container ships unloading cargo and maneuvered their way amid the giant pilings. Once under the wharves and out of sight from anyone above, they surfaced and closed the remaining gap using a laser night-penetrating camera that magnified the city lights filtering beneath the pilings.

  “Floating maintenance dock dead ahead,” announced the chief pilot.

  There was no hard check of weapons or survival gear. Though they all carried concealed handguns, they wanted to look like a small security unit moving through town without any menacing designs on the citizens. Their only inspection was to make sure their uniforms looked neat and presentable. The combat members of the team had all been members of the Special Forces. They were under strict orders not to commit mayhem unless it was absolutely necessary in order to save lives. Seng himself had served on a marine recon team and had never lost a man.

  No sooner had the Nomad gently bumped against the floating dock than Seng, followed closely by his team, exited the sub and headed up the stairs to a little house that sheltered the dock and maintenance workers’ tools and small equipment. The door was easily unlocked from the inside, and Seng, with only a brief look to see if anyone was standing nearby, silently motioned everyone to follow him.

  The lights of the cranes and the ships they were unloading lit up the dock like daylight, but luckily the exit door was opposite and the team formed in the shadows. Then, in a column of twos and marching in cadence, Seng led them to the end of the dock and around the warehouse.