Free Ghosts of Havana (A Judd Ryker Novel) by Todd Moss

contemporary race relations,” Brinkley interrupted. “But we’ve got marlin to catch. Can we get the boat loaded, gentlemen?”
    “I’ve got this one,” Ricky said as he hauled a large case onto the boat and then disappeared down the hold.
    A few seconds later, Ricky’s head reappeared. “Let’s get the rest of these down below and then I’ll run an engine check for you, Al.”
    “ Bueno , Ricky. Where’s the new GPS?”
    “In the secure case in hold four. It’s with the backup satellite phone. I’ll leave you with a spare battery, too.”
    “You’re not coming with us?” Dennis asked.
    “Not today.”
    “I’m the fucking captain of The Big Pig ,” Al said. “Plus I’ve got two Navy boys with me. You can be my radio officer, Deuce. Not a bad crew for a little fishing expedition.”
    Crawford set down a crate. “This is a shitload of gear for a fishing trip, Al. What the hell are we loading?” he asked.
    “Provisions,” Al said. “You never know what you’ll need hunting out in the open ocean. And we can’t run out of beer and Cuban sandwiches.” Al winked, then lifted a red cooler.
    “All this for marlin fishing?” Dennis asked.
    “Marlin.” Brinkley nodded. “Maybe some bonefish.”

14.
    U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.
    WEDNESDAY, 9:03 A.M.
    J udd had arrived in the office early that morning to continue working on his memo for Landon Parker. He was trying to anticipate scenarios that might go wrong in Cuba and outline responses for the State Department. It was precisely why his Crisis Reaction Unit had been created.
    This morning, however, Judd was stuck. What causes revolts? It was a question that politicians had been mulling for centuries. What final straw causes people finally to rise up and overthrow their own government? Analysts had been trying to unlock that puzzle for decades. It had been an academic interest of Judd’s when he was a graduate student and then a professor at Amherst College. Databases had been compiled with every variable possible: population, demographics, ethnic composition, corruption, and financial data. Complex statistics attempted to tease out the factors that were associated either with a rebellion or with prolonged periods of stability.
    Judd had used this exact approach of building large databases and quantitative analysis to come up with his Golden Hourtheory about the need for speed when responding to an international crisis. He had discovered that slow reaction time was statistically correlated with failure. He then made a slight—and he thought defensible—leap to claim, therefore, that waiting too long to react to a coup or outbreak of civil war meant a steep decline in the chance of U.S. policy success. It was the kind of conclusion that would be scorned in the academic community. But they gobbled it up in Washington. The Golden Hour was the basis for S/CRU. His job was built on a data model. And on Landon Parker’s enthusiastic support.
    Quick response by the United States government made intuitive sense to Judd, even if he didn’t quite fully believe the numbers himself. Correlation does not equal causation. That was the very first lesson he taught his students. But inside the American government, quantitative evidence was seen as proof , and thus was a powerful weapon in the policy trenches. Whether the numbers were right or not was entirely beside the point. That was the very first lesson he had learned from Landon Parker.
    Now he was tasked with helping Parker foresee problems in Cuba. However, this morning Judd wasn’t finding much. He looked at his two computer screens. The one on the left was unclassified, connected to the Internet. The monitor on the right was connected to SIPRNet, the government’s computer system cleared up to level Secret.
    —
    O n his unclassified computer, he opened an online window to access the Amherst College library and searched the political science journals for determinants of popular