High above Cudjoe Key, bathed in tropical sunlight, Fat Albert floated in the dwindling trade winds. To the north of him, the shallow green water of Florida Bay was slick as a mossy slate roof. On the ocean side of the key, languid blue rollers, reluctant to reach the craggy island, petered out near the reef a quarter mile from shore. It was August, hot, steamy, and very still.
Fat Albert, a blimp tethered to Cudjoe Key, carried sophisticated radar systems, and was officially known as a Tethered Airborne Radar System. Technicians at the TARS base tracked low flying airplanes, drug boats, and whatever else interested the CIA, FBI, DEA, and the Weather Bureau.
On this sweltering August afternoon, Fat Albert’s radar observers tracked a line of thunderstorms, approaching from the north. Yellow and red blips on the Doppler radar screen identified areas of severe turbulence and dangerous wind-shear. The TARS commander ordered Fat Albert’s ground crew to winch him down.
Fishing the reef on the ocean side, Pepe had a sizable catch of grouper and yellow tail snapper. It was his lucky day he thought, as he eyed the nearly full fishbox. After selling the fish, he planned to hitch a ride to Key West for an evening of marijuana and unhurried sex with Rose, his favorite prostitute. She liked his tattoo with her name encased in a heart, but she didn’t ask about the dagger through the heart.
He popped the tab-top on his last can of Coors, wiped his face with a red bandanna, and sprawled across a seat, waiting for another fish to bite. He glanced southward toward Cuba and wondered what his mother and father were doing at that very moment.
At his parents small home near the beach at Cojimar, Pepe guessed that his father was playing dominoes with his friends on the front porch, and his mother was in the kitchen, steaming rice and stirring a pot of black beans for the evening meal. He could almost smell the pungent aroma of the black beans.
He wiped his face with the bandanna, looked around, and saw the huge black cloud bearing down on him. Quickly, he wound his tackle on the hand reels and scrambled to retrieve the anchor. He yanked on the anchor line. The anchor was fouled in the coral. He cursed his laziness for not setting the trip line. As he stood in the bow of his fifteen- foot boat, tugging on the anchor, the cool and sweet aroma of the storm enveloped him, but the roiling black cloud made him uneasy. “Damn,” he thought. “It might be a rough ride home.”
At the TARS base, a lightning bolt zapped a transformer. The clutch on Fat Albert’s winch disengaged, and cable unspooled with an ear splitting whine. When the emergency generator restored power, the clutch engaged with a grinding sound and stripped the gears on the drive wheel. Now, the huge reel shrieked as it spun out of control. The supervisor ratcheted the emergency brake rearward, but it overheated and failed.
Fat Albert’s handlers recoiled when lightening snaked down the cable and exploded in the machinery. The cable snapped. Fat Albert was free and heading south, dragging his cable through a stand of loblolly pines.
Flailing wildly, the cable cracked like a mule skinner’s whip, as it wrapped around trees, stripping them bare. Fat Albert dragged the cable across US 1, snaring overhead powerlines and ripping them from the poles. In the driving rain and growing darkness, bluish green sparks hissed between electrical wires and Fat Albert’s cable.
On the reef, the anchor line rasped Pepe’s callused hands, as he frantically tried to pull the anchor free. Like bullets, heavy drops of rain ricocheted off the boat and stung Pepe’s bare skin. The waves grew. Zigzag tracers of lightening crackled between the ocean and cloud, followed by explosive thunder, unnerving to Pepe. Ice cold winds plummeted from the leading edge of the black cloud, hammering the ocean with fury, while violent updrafts sucked warm moist air into the cloud’s belly. Like charges of black gun powder, the moist air fueled the raging storm. Ice cold rain, driven by the gale, riddled Pepe’s bare skin. He shivered from rain and shrank from pitching seas, lightening, and crushing thunder. Pepe knew it was his most unlucky day.
He located his dull filet knife and frantically sawed through the anchor line. When the boat lurched free of the anchor, it turned broadside into the wind and violently rocked in the foaming green water. Pepe was nearly thrown clear, but luckily stumbled to the transom seat. He pulled the starting lanyard on the outboard engine. It didn’t start.
Pepe pulled the lanyard again and his hand slipped off the lanyard, smashing his knuckles on the gunwale. Cursing in Spanish, which he felt had more authority, he yanked the lanyard again. The old Evinrude, difficult to start under ideal circumstances, sputtered and died.
Fat Albert’s cable, snarled with tree limbs, raced across Cudjoe Key to the ocean side. The heavy rain and icy down drafts pressed Fat Albert close to the boiling ocean. A hundred feet over Pepe, it gyrated wildly. Pepe thought it would crash on him, but Fat Albert raced southward. Pepe muttered a quick thanks to God for averting disaster and pulled on the engine’s lanyard, when a ripsaw noise startled him. He turned away from the motor and watched dumfounded, as Fat Albert’s braided cable dragged across the gunwale, rasping the soft wood. Just as Pepe thought the cable would saw the boat in half, a violent gust steered Fat Albert eastward, and the cable snagged between the outboard motor and the transom. The boat followed Fat Albert.
When another gust turned Fat Albert south, the boat’s transom lifted out of the water. Pepe gripped the seat as the boat’s speed increased. In less than a minute, he was going thirty miles per hour, backwards. “Holy shit,” he exclaimed in English.
Pepe watched Fat Albert gradually begin to rise. The rain slacked and the wind decreased. Fat Albert was now in bright sunshine. The waves gradually lowered, and when Pepe reached the sunshine, the ocean was flat. The boat slowed. Fat Albert had saved him. It was surely his lucky day.
As the sun warmed Fat Albert, his white skin grew taut and he rose higher. Pepe watched the cable trail Fat Albert up into the blue sky. Then, the cable lifted Pepe and his boat clear of the water. Pepe, amazed that he was flying, didn’t consider jumping out of his boat until he was too high above the water.
The TARS commander phoned Boca Chica Naval Air Station, identified himself as Colonel Clendennen, and explained to the Operations Officer that Fat Albert was drifting southward. “He’s heading to Cuba.” Clendennen tried to sound calm, but his voice was an octave higher than normal. “We can’t let Fat Albert’s sophisticated radar antennas fall into the hands of the Cuban Government,” Clendennen said.
“What do you want me to do?” The naval officer asked.
“Shoot him down.”
After a pause, the naval officer asked, “Really?”
The naval officer heard the rustling of papers.
“According to the procedure manual, I’m ordered to destroy the blimp if it appears that it will fall into the hands of a hostile government. The Department of Defense has classified Cuba as a hostile government.”
“I’m not sure,” the naval officer said. “I’ll have to clear it with the base commander.”
“How long will that take,” Clendennen asked.
“I’m not sure. I’ll get back to you.”
“Hurry,” Clendennen said. “Fat Albert’s last position was twenty miles south of Ramrod Key, moving thirty miles per hour. At that speed, the blimp should reach Cuba within three hours. That’s after sunset.”
The naval officer copied down the telephone number and radio frequency of the TARS operations center.
When Clendennen hung up the phone, he ordered Fat Albert’s twin brother sent aloft to track Fat Albert’s progress with radar.
“It’s my lucky day,” Pepe said, as he slid a boat cushion beneath him. His back rested against the bottom of the boat. Surprisingly, the fish box had wedged in the bow and not one fish had been lost. “It’s most surely my lucky day,” Pepe said aloud to no one.
Pepe, who had never flown before, saw freighters steaming below him in the brilliant blue water. They looked like toys. As he studied the blue expanse of water, he recalled his trip from Cuba to the Florida Keys four years earlier. He had bobbed for five days on an inner tube and was nearly out of water, when the Coast Guard rescued him. “Now that I think of it, I’ve had a lot of lucky days,” Pepe said.
As the blimp rose, Pepe became colder. His damp clothes felt like ice against his skin, and he briskly rubbed his arms and legs. The freighters below him were barely visible, but he could clearly see the gentle hook that the Florida Keys made from the Florida mainland to Key West. He thought he would enjoy the ride if he weren’t so cold.
At Boca Chica Naval Air Station, two “Tiger Cats” lifted off the runway. After the wingman tucked his plane close to the leader, both planes turned south and began climbing with afterburners thundering. The flight leader established radio contact with the TARS radio operator, who told them that Fat Albert was now fifty miles north of Havana and level at ten thousand feet. A minute later the radar observers in the “Tiger Cats” locked onto Fat Albert.
“We’ve got a radar lock,” the flight leader advised TARS. “When I have visual contact, I’ll let you know.”
“Roger,” the TARS radio operator replied. “The Coast Guard cutter Broward should be on station in two hours to salvage Albert.”
Another minute passed and the flight leader advised TARS that they had visual contact with Albert. TARS cautioned them to be on watch for Albert’s cable.
After a pause, the flight leader said, “Uh, TARS we’ve got a problem up here.”
“Problem?”
“Uh, yeah. Somebody just waved at me from a boat hooked to Fat Albert’s cable.”
“Who waved at you?”
“I don’t know. We’ll make another pass and check him out. Standby.”
Pepe watched the two jets roar past him and turn in a tight circle. He could hear the powerful jet engines. He wondered what they were doing.
“Uh, TARS there is definitely someone in a boat hooked to Fat Albert. What do you want us to do?”
After a long pause, Cudjoe’s radio operator said, “Standby.”
Pepe gripped the seat with one hand and waved at the passing pilots with the other. He watched them make another circle, and as they zipped less than a hundred feet from him, he yelled, “Hello!”
The pilots made another circle. At TARS, Colonel Clendennen snatched the microphone away from the radio operator. He asked the pilots if the person was alive.
“He waved at us,” the flight leader reported.
“Are you sure?”
“Actually, I think he yelled at us, too,” the flight leader said.
“You have to shoot Fat Albert down,” Clendennen said.
“Uh, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Fat Albert’s passenger might get killed.”
“What if you shot a single round to slowly let the helium out of Fat Albert?” Clendennen asked.
“That might work,” the flight leader said. “I’ll give it a try.”
“Roger,” Clendennen acknowledged.
Pepe watched the planes circle and begin to climb. He craned his neck around the gunwale to see what they were doing.
The flight leader armed his machine guns and locked his sight on Fat Albert. He depressed and released the trigger quickly, then swerved up and over Fat Albert. When he was clear of Fat Albert he extended his dive brakes, slowed the “Tiger Cat,” and rolled onto his back, executing a perfect split “S”.
Pepe had heard the sharp crack-crack of the Tiger Cat’s guns and felt his boat lurch. “Holy shit, they’re shooting at me,” Pepe shouted to no one.
“I’m circling the blimp,” the flight commander said. “I’m sure I put a hole in him. What do you want me to do?”
“Stand-by,” the radio operator said. “I’m waiting for instructions.”
Clendennen studied the radar screen over the shoulder of the technician. As the seconds ticked by on the twenty-four hour clock above the radar screen, he watched the digital readout slowly begin to reduce.
The technician punched a command into his computer and said, “Fat Albert is descending at one hundred feet per minute. At that rate Fat Albert will splash in an hour and forty-five minutes. At his present drift, I’d expect him to land about fifteen miles north of the Cuban coastline.”
Clendennen ordered the radio operator to ask the flight leader to put another hole in the blimp.
When the flight leader heard the request, he hesitated before saying, “Uh, we’ve got some company up here. Two Cuban MIGs. We’ll break off from the blimp.”
The base commander’s face turned crimson and he screamed, “Tell the flight leader to forget the Cubans. Tell him to shoot Fat Albert down.”
The flight leader switched frequencies to Boca Chica Operations and didn’t hear the transmission from TARS. He explained the situation to the navy operations officer, who asked, “How’s your fuel?”
“Thirty minutes until “bingo,” the flight leader said.
“Better get back here. I’ll notify TARS that we’ll send up another flight.”
At TARS, Clendennen yelled at the radio operator, “Where’s the damned Coast Guard?”
The radio operator changed frequencies on his console and radioed the Coast Guard Cutter Broward. He advised the Broward that Fat Albert would splash fifteen miles from Cuba.
“Roger,” the Broward replied. We’ve got him in sight. What’s his present altitude?”
“Nine thousand,” the radio operator replied, adding, “expect him to splash in one hour and thirty-five minutes.”
“Understand, nine thousand, one hour and thirty-five minutes. We’re two hours north of Cuba. It’ll be close.”
Pepe sensed the gradual decent. Except for being cold, he wasn’t uncomfortable. “I wonder what’s going on?” He muttered, watching four airplanes circle him.
When two of the airplanes flew by him, he noticed the Cuban insignia painted on their tails. For a moment, he felt proud seeing it. Then it dawned on him that he must be drifting toward Cuba. He wiggled close to edge of the seat and looked over the side. In the distance he saw Cuba.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ll be in trouble if I land there.” Beneath him he saw several fishing boats. Above him, Fat Albert seemed thinner.
Now, only the two airplanes with Cuban insignia circled him. The two American Navy jets streaked toward the Florida Keys.
For an hour and thirty minutes, the Cutter Broward trailed Fat Albert. The radar operator notified the captain that the Cuban coastline was fifteen miles ahead. The captain studied the radar screen for a few moments, then ordered the radio operator to ask TARS Fat Albert’s altitude.
“He’s below five hundred feet,” TARS replied.
“Tell TARS that there must be a hundred small fishing boats beneath Fat Albert,” The Broward’s captain said.
Pepe saw the flotilla of boats beneath him. Among the flimsy fishing boats, three Cuban gunboats churned a foamy wake, warning the fishermen to keep clear.
In the growing darkness, four MIGs and four Tiger Cats circled Fat Albert. Occasionally, a Tiger Cat dove and threatened the Cuban gunboats. Colonel Clendennen notified the navy flight leader that they were three miles from the twelve mile territorial limit of Cuba.
“You must shoot Fat Albert down in international water,” Colonel Clendennen’s shrill voice said.
“Roger,” the flight leader acknowledged. “He’s almost down. I don’t think we’ll have to shoot him. The Broward is moving into position.”
Colonel Clendennen switched frequencies to the Broward.
“We’re right beneath him,” the Broward’s captain said. “He should splash in less than a minute. It’s getting dark out here.”
Fat Albert, his helium nearly exhausted, began a lazy spiral. The Cuban gunboats maneuvered next to the Broward, ignoring Pepe’s boat.
The bow of Pepe’s boat touched the water and the stern gently settled. Almost immediately, a dozen fishing skiffs surrounded him. Fat Albert’s cable slacked, and Pepe easily lifted it over the outboard motor and dropped it into the water. When a boat sidled next to him, Pepe asked, “Where am I?”
“Cojimar,” a bearded fisherman replied, pointing at the soft twinkling lights of Cojimar. “Aren’t you Pepe Rodriguez?”
“Si,” Pepe replied. “Aren’t you Ramon Garcia?”
“Si, where are you going?” “To have dinner with my parents.”
“They’ll be glad to see you.”
Pepe pulled the lanyard on the outboard motor and it immediately started. He pointed the bow south and opened the throttle. “This surely is my lucky day,” Pepe said, patting the outboard motor.
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