“Name?” asked Cabrillo.
“In English, the Red Dawn. The shipping line is owned by the Chinese army.”
“Turn out all the outer lights, and increase speed until we are close astern of the vessel ahead,” he commanded the computer. “We’ll use her as a decoy to lead us out.” The outer deck and navigation lights blinked out, leaving the ship in darkness as she narrowed the gap between the two vessels. The lights inside the command center dimmed to a blue-green glow.
By the time the Red Dawn entered the ship’s channel and passed the first of the string of marker buoys, the darkened Oregon was trailing only fifty yards off her stern. Cabrillo kept his ship just far enough back so that the Chinese vessel’s deck lights would not cast their beams on his bow. It was a long shot, but he was betting the silhouette of his ship would be mistaken for the shadow of the Red Dawn.
Cabrillo glanced at a large twenty-four-hour clock on the wall above the window just as the long minute hand clicked onto 11:39. Only twenty-one minutes to go before the Cubans’ defense systems test.
“Following the Red Dawn is slowing us down,” said Linda. “We’re losing precious time.”
Cabrillo nodded. “You’re right, we can’t wait any longer. She’s served her purpose.” He leaned over and spoke into the computer’s voice receiver.
“Go to full speed and pass the ship ahead!”
Like a small powerboat with big engines and a heavy hand on the throttles, the Oregon dug her stern into the forbidding water and lifted her bows clear of the waves as her thrusters erupted in a cloud of froth, creating a vast crater in her wake. She leaped down the channel and swept past the Chinese cargo ship less than twenty feet away, as if she were stopped dead in the water. The Chinese sailors could be seen staring in stunned disbelief. Faster and faster with each passing second she raced through the night. Speed was the Oregon’s crowning achievement, the thoroughbred heart of the vessel. Forty knots, then fifty. By the time she passed Morro Castle at the entrance to Santiago, she was making nearly sixty-two knots. No ship in the world that size could match her speed.
The beacon lights mounted high on the bluffs were soon little more than blinking specks on a black horizon.
THE alarm spread quickly onshore that a ship was making an unauthorized departure—but the radar and fire control operators did not unleash their shore-to-surface missiles. Their officers could not believe that such a large ship was moving at such an incredible rate of speed. They assumed their radar systems were malfunctioning, and they were reluctant to unleash missiles that they did not think could lock on to such an inconceivable target.
Not until the Oregon was twenty miles out to sea did a general in Cuban security put two and two together and deduce that the sudden departure of the ship and the escape of the Santa Ursula prisoners were somehow tied together. He ordered missiles fired at the fleeing ship, but by the time the word filtered down through the sluggish command, the Oregon was out of acceptable range.
He then ordered jets from the Cuban air force to intercept and sink the mystery ship before it reached the protection of a United States Coast Guard cutter. It could not possibly escape, he thought, as he sat back, lit a cigar and contentedly puffed a cloud of blue smoke toward the ceiling. Seventy miles away, two geriatric MiGs were sent aloft and set a course toward the Oregon as directed by Cuban radar.
CABRILLO didn’t need to study a chart to see that sailing around the tip of Cuba from Santiago through the Windward Passage and then northwest to Miami was little more than a suicide run. For nearly six hundred miles, the Oregon would be less than fifty miles from the Cuban coast, a voyage in a shooting gallery. His safest option was to set a course southwest around the southern tip of Haiti and then almost due west to Puerto Rico, which was a territory under the U.S. flag. There he could unload his passengers, where they would be safe and cared for at proper medical facilities before being flown to Florida.
“Two unidentified aircraft closing,” announced Linda.
“I have them,” Murphy announced, hunched over a console with enhanced radar screens and an array of knobs and switches.
“Can you identify?” asked Linda.
“Computer reads them as a pair of MiG-27s.”
“How far out?” Cabrillo probed.
“Sixty miles and closing,” Murphy answered. “Poor beggars don’t know what they’re in for.”
Cabrillo turned to his communications expert, Hali Kasim. “Try and raise them in Spanish. Warn them we have surface-to-air missiles on board and will knock them out of the sky if they show any sign of hostility.”
Kasim didn’t have to speak Spanish to deliver the warning. He merely ordered the computer to translate his message over his radio, which was tuned to twenty different frequencies.
After a couple of minutes he shook his head. “They are receiving, but not responding.”
“They think we’re bluffing,” said Linda.
“Keep trying.” Then to Murphy: “What’s the range of their missiles?”
“According to specs, they’re carrying short-range rockets with a range of ten miles.”
Cabrillo looked solemn. “If they don’t break off within thirty miles, take them out. Better ye
t, launch one of ours. Then manually guide it for a close flyby.”
Murphy made the necessary calculations and pressed a red button. “Missile on its way.”
An audible swoosh swept the command center as a rocket lifted from an opening in the foredeck and swept into the sky. They all watched on the monitors as it raced to the northwest and soon disappeared.