We know that the wages of secrecy
are corruption.
We know that in secrecy,
error undetected
will flourish and subvert.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer

Motor Vessel “La Reina del Istmo” - Current Day - Late 1960s

’How do I keep finding myself in these situations?’ Javier Ernesto Chavarria Padilla asked himself.

It was, of course, a rhetorical question since he’d never been in this exact situation before, nor one even close to it. He stood in ankle-deep water trying to coax a backup bilge pump into some semblance of working order. Since skirting the southern edge of a Pacific hurricane three days ago, the Motor Vessel La Reina del Istmo had been taking on water around the starboard propeller shaft seal.

Javy thought the shaft might have bent while dropping into one of the huge troughs produced by the storm’s waves, but it could just be a damaged seal. The port shaft didn’t have a leak, but the transmission was damaged, so it wasn’t turning. If he couldn’t get the pump working, they would have to get to a dry dock somewhere or beach the ship before it sank; his money was on beaching. Still, things could be much worse.

In fact, the chief engineer could be dead, and not just laid up in Sick Bay with a concussion. Javy could have snapped in half when he crashed into a rail in engineering during the storm, or he could have broken his neck falling down a ladder when the lights went out, or the hull could have cracked wide open during the storm.

The assistant engineer could not be a complete dick, but that thought really stretched the limits of plausibility. With a normal engineering complement of six, he was finally off the bottom of the totem pole as the newest crewman in the department, but still being the only American aboard didn’t help with some people.

Javy’s father, a Navy machinist’s mate stationed at the huge base in San Diego, made his own escape from Southern California two years before Javy did, but made sure his son would be okay before he left. David Chavarria made sure his young son had a bank account he could access and a current passport, but the boy’s mother, Araceli, couldn’t. Years of fighting with Javy’s ultra-religious mother over his son’s future drove David away when Javy was sixteen. Before David transferred out of San Diego, he arranged to have half his pay wired to Javy’s account every month. Last he heard, his father was stationed at Midway Island.

Araceli Consuelo Padilla Montez believed her son should enter the Catholic priesthood and be as devout as she was. Both Javy and David disagreed. To avoid major headaches while growing up, Javy received all of his sacraments, short of Last Rites and Ordination. If his mother had her way, Javy would never receive the Sacrament of Matrimony. Javy preferred to swap the possibility of ordination for marriage at some point.

Getting from San Diego, California, to Balboa, Panama, proved much easier than Javy had expected when planning his escape. With the money in his account, he paid for passage on a cargo ship headed for Panama the day after graduating from high school in 1963. His already-issued passport also helped.