scheduled, then head inland and find a spot to hole up while figuring out how to best proceed.
Their pointman, Hans, signaled that there was a dim light coming toward them. Everyone froze, and Hans and the man next to him carefully raised their rifles, aiming them at the bobbing light. Jonas extracted his brand-new HK P-9 9 mm from its holster, quietly chambering a round. His breath was fast and rapid in his ears, and he did his best to ignore the pain in his leg, straining to draw a bead on the light as it approached. The flickering light stopped, then vanished, reappeared, then vanished again. Reinmann straightened, waving at his team to stand down.
“Our contact is here.” He held up his own compact flashlight and flicked it on and off twice, waited, then flicked it on and off three times. The light answered in kind, and Reinmann motioned for Hans to go out to guide the person to them.
When the tall man returned escorting their contact, Jonas was hard-pressed to conceal his shock. The person who was to provide cover for them was a slender young woman, her hair concealed by a tightly bound kerchief, perhaps twenty years old. She didn’t smile, but looked at each man intently.
“One of my men is injured,” Reinmann said in German-accented Spanish, pointing at Jonas. “We are continuing the mission, but he will have to stay somewhere while we are gone. Can you hide him?”
The young woman glanced at Jonas, her lips tightening in a thin line at the change in plans, then nodded toward the jungle behind her. “Vámonos.”
A STEADY BEEPING SOUND made Jonas shake his head, banishing the memory back to the distant past. He thought he’d left all that behind him, buried as part of the things he’d had to do for his country. But judging by his reaction when Kate had told him where the trouble was, that wasn’t the case. Deep down, he’d known that someday, what he had done so long ago would come back to him, and now it looked as if it was finally happening.
He had kept an eye on the country, following its slow decline, especially after the Soviet Union disintegrated. Information, even from government sources, slowly dried up as Castro tightened his already suffocating hold. Gradually, Jonas had turned his attention to more-pressing matters, but every so often, a part of him remembered that first mission. He’d been a green recruit tossed halfway around the globe to a place that was completely foreign to anything he had known before. And when the chance had come to acquire a high-ranking mole in the Cuban army, he had led the operation to successfully bring the man into their fold. Now it seemed that was going to extract a price, as well.
He picked up his chirping cell phone, the tone indicating a text message was waiting. He flipped it open to read: “R59 ops room. Five minutes.”
No time like the present, he mused, slipping on his own pair of viewscreen glasses and navigating to the Room 59 virtual opps center. Two people were also logged in and Jonas nodded to Denny Talbot, the operations director for North America, and Samantha Rhys-Jones, his counterpart in the United Kingdom.
Kate and Judy appeared in the virtual space. Unlike the board meeting, people were linked face-to-face, and Jonas spotted immediately that something had gone down since he had spoken to Kate earlier that morning. Her expression was grim, her lips compressed together in a tight line. Judy, on the other hand, looked even more reserved and unflappable than ever, a sure sign that something was bothering her, as well, since the stoic side of her came out primarily during a conflict.
Kate started without any preliminaries. “Thank you all for meeting on such short notice. Directors Planchard and Ramon are attending the Middle Eastern crisis conference and Director Kun is observing the China–North Korea summit meeting, so we’re it. I trust you’ve all had a chance to review the dossier on the mission that’s just been approved. It’s a two-pronged mission, with an insertion into Cuba, as well as an undercover operative going to Miami and finding out who’s behind a possible invasion.”
“Pardon my skepticism, but are we actually going on a hypothesis that someone is actually going to attempt a Bay of Pigs sequel?” Denny crossed his long legs and leaned back, cradling the back of his head in his hands. “The Cuban army can field anywhere from forty-five to sixty thousand soldiers, probably double that with conscripts, along with artillery and land armor to match, including tanks. They don’t have much of an air force nowadays, but can probably put some gunships up to pin down a force long enough for the army to engage at will. Bottom line, while they wouldn’t stand up to any first world nation, they certainly ought to be able to pound the hell out of even a sizable insurgency force.”
Jonas leaned forward. “All good points. However, based on what I’ve seen in this dossier, there is a good chance that this group of exiles will have contacted resistance cells in Cuba, and will coordinate with them around an event that would shake the government there to its very core—like an assassination.”
Denny snorted. “Of Castro? The man’s bulletproof, for god’s sake. His own head of security estimated there’s been more than six hundred attempts to kill him over the past forty years, so what makes anybody think this time will work?”
“Yes, but when something is tried six hundred times and fails, that makes those who try the next time all the more determined to succeed,” Jonas replied.
“Yeah, I’m more fond of the maxim that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” The agency director stared at the virtual ceiling. “Sounds like a lot of running around and risking necks for one missing double agent,” Denny said.
“Gentlemen, I think the main point is being missed here.” Samantha Rhys-Jones, recruited straight from British intelligence, regarded them all with her limpid, dark brown eyes. “As I’m sure Mr. Talbot and Mr. Schrader would agree, an invasion of Cuba will likely not resemble other fourth-generation-warfare scenarios, such as the Iraq debacle. The fact is, anyone with enough money can now field a well-equipped, suitably armed force to take over a small Third World country. If the right preparations are made—and I would certainly include assassination of the current leaders to be among those preparations—along with a sizable force already there turning against the current government, then the resulting confusion could allow the overthrow of the regime. Castro certainly accomplished that with his own ouster of the Batista regime in ’59. From what I’ve seen, so far, this threat is real and should be dealt with before it gets out of hand.”
“Thank you, Samantha.” Kate brought the meeting back on track. “Recent intel indicates that some of the army generals have grown irritated at the scaling back of the military, as well as their own reassignment to oversee the country’s economic holdings. We hadn’t any more details before we lost contact with our man. However, we believe there are groups in Cuba that are considering revolution regardless of where it might lead the country, figuring that any change is better than the status quo.”
“Which could lead to regional warlords carving the country up into spheres of influence, or an even more totalitarian, corrupt, influence-peddling system arising, where bribes and threats are the only way to get things done—well, more so than they already are,” Denny pointed out. “While I’m as cynical as the next intelligence agent—it’s hard to believe that their current system is still the way to go.”
“As Raul Castro had begun training officers in the military in successful business techniques—before his brother shut it down—it’s not that far-fetched. Change can happen internally—look at Libya,” Samantha replied.
Kate’s gaze swept the virtual room. “We have an operative in mind to handle the insertion onto the island, but need a second to handle the Florida end of things. Denny, I expect you have someone to put forward?”
Jonas cleared his throat. “Actually, Kate, I’ve been giving this some
