Hawke

The band was practicing for the dedication ceremony. They stood at the end of a long concrete pier, only twenty feet from where the sub was moored. Commander Zukov thought that if he had to listen to one more stanza, he might well go insane.

“Not bad, not bad,” Admiral Carlos de Herreras said in Spanish. “I think by the time of the May Day ceremony, they’ll be perfect.” Zukov, who spoke fluent Spanish, looked at the man to see if he could possibly be serious. He was.

Zukov’s father had been a Soviet navy “adviser” to Cuba and had married a Cuban woman. So he’d grown up in a house where everyone spoke both Spanish and Russian. Born in Havana thirty-five years ago, he had not been in Cuba in many years. He was ten years old when his father had taken the family back to Moscow. He was accepted at the Naval Academy at eighteen, and became a submarine officer, gaining command of his own boat by age thirty.

Zukov’s Cuban background accounted for the fact that he happened to be standing here instead of any of a dozen former Soviet sub commanders vying for the job. He knew the language and the culture. He knew and loved the people. He had served his country with great distinction. And he’d never forgiven the politburo for their betrayal of his homeland. And his navy.

“The band, they sound pretty good to you, Commander?” the Cuban admiral asked him.

“Symphonic,” Zukov replied, straining to be heard over the orchestra, the arc welders, and the steelworkers.

A crew was already painting the sub’s new name on both the starboard and portside flanks of the gleaming black hull.

Zukov recognized the new name instantly.

Josй Martн.

Named in honor of the great patriot who had liberated Cuba from Spain after a long bloody war, the Josй Martн was a splendid symbol of the new Cuba. The excitement inside the submarine pen verged on hysteria. Flags and bunting hung from every corner of the building in preparation for the celebration of May Day, the great Communist holiday, just three days hence. The mood inside was frantic, but festive.

One man had started whistling the “Mango” melody and soon the whole construction and support battalion was singing the ironic lyrics at the top of their lungs.

The mango, the mango, even though it is green, it is ripe and ready to fall …

Mercifully, the swelling voices drowned out the band.

Admiral Carlos de Herreras, CNO of the Cuban navy, and his two brothers had boarded the sub soon after Zukov guided it expertly up the narrow shoaled river and into its slip. After the sub was properly moored and her propulsion systems shut down, Zukov had welcomed them aboard. He had offered them some chilled vodka in the wardroom, then given them the official guided tour, stem to stern.

Although their questions were outrageously naive, it was obvious the Cuban officers were more than delighted with their new toy. They were giddy with excitement, and hurried from one end of the boat to the other, laughing with glee.

The Cubans were especially excited, he noticed, when they entered the starboard hull compartment where, in their silos, twenty gleaming warheads sat atop twenty ballistic missiles. Over on the port hull, a matching set of twenty more. With forty warheads, you could blow up the world. No one had yet told Zukov what his first mission would be, and he had only a rough idea of the primary targets. But the very thought of going to war in such a magnificent machine sent an electric charge racing through him. A feeling he hadn’t experienced since the glory days of the Cold War.

The commander’s Russian crew of one hundred thirty men, all former submariners under his Cold War command, were also in a jolly mood. All of them were now, like Zukov himself, mercenaries. And all of them, after a frozen winter in Vladivostok, were equally ecstatic at the very idea of a shore leave on the beautiful tropical island of Cuba.

For Zukov, this return elicited deeper emotions.

Zukov had been deeply humiliated when the Soviet empire collapsed. As a naval officer in command on an Akula, he’d spent his entire life playing undersea cat-and-mouse with the Americans. Endless days and nights rehearsing for a war that would never get fought. He’d spent months under the polar ice cap, stalking the SSN George Washington, praying for any excuse to engage. Once he had tracked the carrier John F. Ke