Page 96 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

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Tanya Dvorkin stood on the dock at Mariel, on Cuba's north coast, twenty-five miles from Havana, where a narrow inlet opened into a huge natural harbor hidden among hills. She looked anxiously at a Soviet ship moored at a concrete pier. Parked on the pier was a Soviet ZIL-130 truck pulling an eighty-foot trailer. A crane was lifting a long wooden crate from the ship's hold and moving it through the air, with painful slowness, toward the truck. The crate was marked in Russian: CONSTRUCTION-GRADE PLASTIC PIPE.

She saw all this by floodlights. The ships had to be unloaded at night, by order of her brother. All other shipping had been cleared out of the harbor. Patrol boats had closed the inlet. Frogmen searched the waters around the ship to guard against an underwater threat. Dimka's name was mentioned in tones of fear: his word was law and his wrath terrible to behold, they said.

Tanya was writing articles for TASS that told how the Soviet Union was helping Cuba, and how grateful the Cuban people were for the friendship of their ally on the far side of the globe. But she reserved the real truth for the coded cables she sent, via the KGB's telegraph system, to Dimka in the Kremlin. And now Dimka had given her the unofficial task of making sure his instructions were carried out without fail. That was why she was anxious.

With Tanya was General Paz Oliva, the most beautiful man she had ever met.

Paz was breathtakingly attractive: tall and strong and a little scary, until he smiled and spoke in a soft bass voice that made her think of the strings of a cello being caressed by a bow. He was in his thirties: most of Castro's military men were young. With his dark skin and soft curls he looked more Negro than Hispanic. He was a poster boy for Castro's policy of racial equality, such a contrast with Kennedy's.

Tanya loved Cuba, but it had taken a while. She missed Vasili more than she had expected. She realized how fond she was of him, even though they had never been lovers. She worried about him in his Siberian labor camp, hungry and cold. The campaign for which he had been punished--publicizing the illness of Ustin Bodian, the opera singer--had been successful, sort of: Bodian had been released from prison, though he had died soon afterward in a Moscow hospital. Vasili would find the irony telling.

Some things she could not get used to. She still put on a coat to go out, although the weather was never cold. She got bored with beans and rice and, to her surprise, found herself longing for a bowl of kasha with sour cream. After endless days of hot summer sun, she sometimes hoped for a downpour to freshen the streets.

Cuban peasants were as poor as Soviet peasants, but they seemed happier, perhaps because of the weather. And eventually the Cuban people's irrepressible joie de vivre bewitched Tanya. She smoked cigars and drank rum with tuKola, the local substitute for Coke. She loved to dance with Paz to the irresistibly sexy rhythms of the traditional music they called trova. Castro had closed most of the nightclubs, but no one could prevent Cubans playing guitars, and the musicians had

moved to small bars called casas de la trova.

But she worried for the Cuban people. They had defied their giant neighbor, the United States, only ninety miles away across the Straits of Florida, and she knew that one day they might be punished. When she thought about it, Tanya felt like the crocodile bird, bravely perched between the open jaws of the great beast, pecking food from a row of teeth like broken knives.

Was the Cubans' defiance worth the price? Only time would tell. Tanya was pessimistic about the prospects for reforming Communism, but some of the things Castro had done were admirable. In 1961, the Year of Education, ten thousand students had flocked to the countryside to teach farmers to read, a heroic crusade to wipe out illiteracy in one campaign. The first sentence in the primer was "The peasants work in the cooperative," but so what? People who could read were better equipped to recognize government propaganda for what it was.

Castro was no Bolshevik. He scorned orthodoxy and restlessly sought out new ideas. That was why he annoyed the Kremlin. But he was no democrat either. Tanya had been saddened when he had announced that the revolution had made elections unnecessary. And there was one area in which he had imitated the Soviet Union slavishly: with advice from the KGB he had created a ruthlessly efficient secret police force to stamp out dissent.

On balance, Tanya wished the revolution well. Cuba had to escape from underdevelopment and colonialism. No one wanted the Americans back, with their casinos and their prostitutes. But Tanya wondered whether Cubans would ever be allowed to make their own decisions. American hostility drove them into the arms of the Soviets; but as Castro moved closer to the USSR, so it became increasingly likely that the Americans would invade. What Cuba really needed was to be left alone.

But perhaps now it had a chance. She and Paz were among a mere handful of people who knew what was in these long wooden crates. She was reporting directly to Dimka on the effectiveness of the security blanket. If the plan worked it might protect Cuba permanently from the danger of an American invasion, and give the country breathing space in which to find its own way into the future.

That was her hope, anyway.

She had known Paz a year. "You never talk about your family," she said as they watched the crate being positioned in the trailer. She addressed him in Spanish: she was now fairly fluent. She had also picked up a smattering of the American-accented English that many Cubans used occasionally.

"The revolution is my family," he said.

Bullshit, she thought.

All the same, she was probably going to sleep with him.

Paz might turn out to be a dark-skinned version of Vasili, handsome and charming and faithless. There was probably a string of lissome Cuban girls with flashing eyes taking turns to fall into his bed.

She told herself not to be cynical. Just because a man was gorgeous he did not have to be a mindless Lothario. Perhaps Paz was simply waiting for the right woman to become his life partner and toil alongside him in the mission to build a new Cuba.

The missile in its crate was lashed to the bed of the trailer. Paz was approached by a small, obsequious lieutenant called Lorenzo, who said: "Ready to move out, General."

"Carry on," said Paz.

The truck moved slowly away from the dock. A herd of motorcycles roared into life and went ahead of the truck to clear the road. Tanya and Paz got into his army car, a green Buick LeSabre station wagon, and followed the convoy.

Cuba's roads had not been designed for eighty-foot trucks. In the last three months, Red Army engineers had built new bridges and reconfigured hairpin bends, but still the convoy moved at walking pace much of the time. Tanya noted with relief that all other vehicles had been cleared from the roads. In the villages through which they passed, the low-built two-room wooden houses were dark, and the bars were shut. Dimka would be satisfied.

Tanya knew that back at the dockside another missile was already being eased onto another truck. The process would go on until first light. Unloading the entire cargo would take two nights.

So far, Dimka's strategy was working. It seemed no one suspected what the Soviet Union was up to in Cuba. There was no whisper of it on the diplomatic circuit or in the uncontrolled pages of Western newspapers. The feared explosion of outrage in the White House had not yet happened.

But there were still two months to go before the American midterm elections; two more months during which these huge missiles had to be made launch-ready in total secrecy. Tanya did not know whether it could be done.

After two hours they drove into a broad valley that had been taken over by the Red Army. Here engineers were building a launch site. This was one of more than a dozen tucked away out of sight in the folds of the mountains all across the 777-mile-long island of Cuba.

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