Chapter 26: Landing Party

Claude hadn’t realised it would be so violent. It had been impossible to be below or even think straight, while they’d been crashing up and down at eighty miles an hour into the swell and wind, with the engines bellowing. And for ten hours, nearly! The kids had thought it was great of course, even with half of it being in the dark - rocketing into pitch black relying on the radar, and gambling there wouldn’t be a rogue wave. Luckily the sea had been a little calmer than forecast. The one upside was that Mia had finally got fed up with her bare breasts bouncing around and put her wetsuit on.

But now finally here they were, floating in near silence, four miles off the coast of Cuba, and they had satellite internet and could use their laptops, at the little table in the narrow cabin. It was absurd how they were here without having been able to plan. Well, it was absurd how they were here at all, though Mia merely seemed content with how things were going so far, and Paul clearly would follow her wherever she went.

“So the faction will be mainly watching the airport still,” said she with satisfaction. “There won’t be enough of them for everything, the secret is too enormous to have a lot of people involved, and they won’t think we can be here yet.”

“There are the two Trackimos,” Paul pointed on the laptop screen. “In that hut, in that little group just up from the beach. Together.”

“Nice and easy...” mused Mia.

“They have tried to trap us once already,” Claude remembered.

“I’ll check the history...” Paul opened the history window.

“Three?” Mia saw immediately.

“I knew she was planning something,” muttered Claude. The history showed the two trackers transmitting, and a third that had been in a different place until it stopped transmitting, the day before.

“What did she do?” asked Paul.

“Hid it,” said Mia.

“It wasn’t a spare,” Claude explained, “she let them find the second one, or she knew they would.”

Paul sensed there was something they weren’t telling him, but perhaps it was for a reason. Anyway luckily Google Earth had the whole area in high resolution. Trackimo3 had been in a cluster of eight little buildings and one larger one, in the middle of nowhere about three hundred yards north of the Guantanamo Bay base itself. Most likely it was there still, and Grace too.

“We need to plan for what to do after we’ve got them,” he said. It was odd why he had to actually say this, but the others seemed fixated on Grace and Zara.

“It’s a question,” Claude tuned in. “We need to find somewhere we can hide three aliens and ourselves, from the CIA and a Mafia drug cartel.”

“The cartel only have this boat as a link to me,” reasoned Mia. “As long as we ditch it without leaving a trail they’ll be stuck.”

“Okay,” grinned Paul, “so we sink this somewhere then there’s only the CIA, no worries.”

“A faction of the CIA,” Mia pointed out, “not the whole organisation.”

“Who is above Honeyeva?” wondered Claude. “Directing the operation. Who wants to know about the genetic engineering?”

“We’ll have to ask her,” said Mia.

“You mean...?”

“What do you think she’s been doing to Grace?”

“Yeeees...” Claude wondered how far Mia would take it. “But where?”

“Let’s get the others first,” she said, “then they can help us decide. There’s a spaceship attached to an SES satellite, that somebody’s going to notice eventually. But the aliens can communicate with it can’t they, perhaps they can move it. Then we have to have money to live and all kinds of issues. Maybe the aliens can hack more bitcoins or something. So we don’t really know what all the options are at the moment.”

“Okay,” Claude sighed, “we get them on board first. What about Honeyeva?”

“We bring her too,” Mia was definite. “That’s the only way we can ever get the aliens safe, and us too. Anyway let’s get going. It’s nearly three already so we’ve got three hours of darkness to get them out of there.”

“It’s two miles to the huts from the border fence,” Paul had been looking at the map. “We can land here just on the Cuba side, by this fence with this road. It looks empty. We go north for about seven-fifty meters, cut through the fence and go straight west over this empty terrain. That way we miss all the installations. There’s a track here, that’ll be quicker and goes pretty close.”

“Okay,” Mia grinned ferociously, “yes look there’s a path from the track there through the trees to the huts, should be good. So you’re taking the Micor to cover me, I’m going in with the Para and a pistol.”

They started one engine so Claude could take the boat well beyond the American base, then turn to go back and inshore, with the burbling exhausts pointing away from the base. Paul changed into his wetsuit and put the camouflage paint on, with Mia. They checked off night goggles, phones, maps downloaded, compass apps, wire cutters...

“Okay we’ll be off air,” Mia said to Claude again, “with the maps we’ve downloaded and gps, but no phone or internet of course. Look for our torch - four flashes - then come back in for us.” It would be weird, but people used to manage after all.

“Okay,” Claude forced himself not to tell them to be careful. “Good luck. I’ll be here.” He watched them step over into the black inflatable and settle themselves, with Paul rowing and Mia with her compass app. He cast them off and watched them disappear off into the night. Paul was doing his best, but what a way to try and learn to row!

Once they were clear Claude started one engine again and gingerly steered away to take the boat back out to sea. He tried to think if he could have arranged it some other way, feeling guilty that it was probably his messages that had led to them all being discovered. Should he have gone instead of Paul? Well Paul could do guns and he knew he himself would close his eyes as he pulled the trigger.

Paul tried to concentrate and just row: lean forwards, lift his hands to lower the blades, then lean back pulling the handles with him. Repeat. Don’t try too hard, just do it and learn the rhythm. Pull both sides equally and try not to fall over backwards if a wave made one or even both sides miss the water. Do an extra stroke on one side if Mia pointed to left or right with her phone and its lit screen.

They had about half a kilometer to row, that was about five hundred yards, or a bit more. It was going to take some time, though at least the wind was with them. He saw Mia’s teeth in the moonlight, encouraging him.

Mia.

She seemed to like him, and even did it with him, but how much did he mean to her? He wasn’t sure.

Well, okay in fact he was pretty sure she just liked him, and that was about the size of it. She felt something more for Grace, and maybe that’s what it was about, this insane thing they were doing that he didn’t dare even think about. Well, Grace had that effect on him too, really, and on Mo and even Claude.

He was on Mia’s mission, to rescue Grace, and the others. He could do guy stuff like shoot, and he was gonna shoot whoever Mia and Grace needed him to shoot. He could drive a car and a boat and do guns, and he’d try to do the right thing like he always had, and if he was going to die that’s what was going to happen. It was better than doing the wrong thing like those guys Grace and Mia had killed.

The thing on his mind was: Mia had decided in advance she was going to kill the last one, if he didn’t do what she’d decided he had to do. Was that a sin? Did he himself even believe any more? Grace’s scathing dismissal of faith had stayed with him: it was just people who told him about God.

Mia had tempted him to ‘sin’ with her, and he had; along with Mo who’d seemed to be so devout but then had been tempted and fallen and just given up on the whole thing, with realising that none of it fitted. Was that strong or weak?

Mo had had a choice between Islam and girls, basically, and gone for the girls. He’d been told he could have Islam and white girls, but apparently Mia had shot that idea down in a flaming fireball. Mo had been decent enough, as a person, to accept that; to understand, once the combination of Grace and Mia had exposed it.

Thinking about it, everything that had happened recently, that had turned his life upside-down and inside-out, hadn’t had anything to do with God, as far as he knew. It had all been brought about by girls: an atheist and a lapsed Catholic. Whom God had created, but only if He’d also created the aliens...

And where was his own faith? Where was God in this, tonight? When was the last time he’d prayed, even? Why wasn’t he praying right now? If ever there was a time, surely this was it! Well perhaps he knew what Grace would’ve said. The thought brought a smile to his face.

“What?” asked Mia.

“I was thinking about Grace.” Grace who’d shot two guys without hesitation, and then not appeared to worry about it. She knew why she’d done it, and that was enough for her.

“Me too. Swap.”

“If I prayed, she’d’ve asked what I was praying for then said, something like: ‘So if you didn’t pray, He wouldn’t bother keeping you safe?’”

“Haha,” Mia laughed quietly, “and she’d just look at you with those eyes, waiting for you to explain.”

“What’s yours?”

“I’m thinking about her face when we rock up, in camouflage.”

Claude switched off the engines, four kilometers off the coast. He could watch the satnav to see how fast he drifted back towards land. They should be back in a couple of hours, hopefully. It all sounded quite straightforward. It might need two trips in the dinghy, but he’d row one of them if the others were tired.

On reflection though ... could it really be so simple? Had he been carried along by those kids who were after all too young to know what dangers life can hold, in many ways? Could someone sneak ashore and simply cut through a fence between Cuba and the US of A? Perhaps he should look it up; he had nothing else to do anyway.