Havana

by Stephen Hunter

  He turned his vision to the city across the muddy river. One could tell that El Presidente was quite upset by the little adventure of the night, as police squad cars, the unmarked black cars of the secret police, and the jeeps of the military were everywhere, stopping cars at roadblocks, yanking occupants out to examine their documents. He watched them from across the water, nestled down deep, close to the bank. Even some airplanes buzzed overhead, old Mustangs the Americans had given their little Cuban brothers. But the planes stayed high and seemed to be merely for show; the police cars never came close, all in all; it was quite comfortable by the river, as the noon elongated into afternoon. He found a comfortable way of wedging himself into the vegetation so that crushed rushes cushioned his backside; it was like a very nice bed. He wished he had a cigar. But he saw that a cigar would be of no help in his current predicament.

  A few hours later, near nightfall, an old peasant wandered the road. He seemed in no particular hurry to get anywhere and no one would pay him the slightest attention. But at a certain moment, he disappeared into the bushes. And when Castro next saw him, he was quite close; but he had taken his old hat off, and Castro saw that he was the Russian.

  “Say, you are a tricky fellow.”

  “I may know a thing or two. Here, I bring you some treats.”

  He had food and a bag of clothes, for Castro a short-sleeved shirt to wear over his army pants. The young man took off and squirreled away his army fatigue shirt. He drew the cream-colored shirt around him, buttoned it, and it hung over his belt, partially obscuring the military nature of his pants. It wasn’t much of a disguise but it certainly was better than the sergeant’s uniform, which all of Cuba was hunting.

  He wolfed the food ravenously, for he felt as if he hadn’t eaten in days. It was a cold pork sandwich and a bottle of warm beer, but still delicious.

  “What is the word? What have they done to the men?”

  “I told you. Forget the men. The men are gone. They rounded them up and took them to the barracks and Ojos Bellos cut their eyes out and they were shot. Such is life. Such is war.”

  “All of them?”

  “Most, it is said.”

  “It shouldn’t have turned out like this. We didn’t even make it into the barracks. We were hung up outside and—”

  “I saw. Someday I will teach you how to plan and administer an attack on a fortification. You don’t just drive up to it, you idiot. What did you think would happen?”

  “I thought the soldiers would be drunk. And I did not think they would fight for Batista.”

  “They were drunk but not drunk enough. And they don’t give a shit about Batista. These are bored country boys in dull garrison duty. Give them a chance to shoot something and you make them happy. You gave them the best day of their lives. They will tell stories of the heroic defense of the one thousand against the one hundred for a century.”

  “They were lucky. I—”

  “No, you were stupid. Now stop it. Don’t argue with me. You don’t know enough to argue. You need your rest. We will move in a while.”

  “The mountains?”

  “You didn’t have a plan for this?”

  “No. I thought we’d succeed.”

  “You are truly an idiot child. You should have yourself neutered so that you don’t pass your simpleness on.”

  “I already have a son.”

  “Not that you’ve seen him in months.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “It’s all arranged.”

  “Havana! Yes, Havana!”

  “Let’s survive Santiago first.”

  “But the future is—”

  “The future is the next three days, or there is no future. I’ve made arrangements with certain people. We’ll get you out. You will go into exile. You will learn, read, study, master tactics and training, absorb organization and administration, broaden your mind and meet people.”

  “I could have done that before. Why now such a generous scholarship offer?”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re famous.”

  “What?”

  “Right now, you’re the most famous man in Cuba. Your picture is in all the papers.”

  “I am famous?”

  “Absolutely, though for differing reasons. To the police and the military and El Presidente, you are a monster. To the Americans you are a threat. To the people you are a hero.”

  This genuinely pleased the young man. A broad smile crossed his face, unbidden; he seemed to glow in the knowledge of this new thing. He was no longer a street-corner orator, a voice occasionally on the radio, an essayist for little radical papers like Alerta. No, he was famous. He forgot to ask about his wife and child, his parents, his men. All no longer existed.

  “What do they say of me?”

  “Vain boy! What, do you think this is going to get you a movie contract?”

  “No, I care only for my country and my people. I have no need of this fame except as a tool to save my country. But…”

  “But is it a good picture?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Yes, it’s a good picture. It happens to be your wedding picture. You and Mirta. They’ve cut her out of it, of course, so all the girls will like it. But it means that if you are seen, you are a phone call away from losing your eyes and getting a bullet in the skull. So we must move quickly.”

  “Off, then. But…where? How? They are everywhere.”

  “You leave it to me, sonny. This is what I do.”

  “ ‘The Blue Mountain / And River Cauto! / Sinews of the eternity which begat us. / The mountain warms us with its great heart, / Splendid son of excellence and infinity.’ There, what do you think of that?”

  “It’s quite awful.”

  “You are truly not a Cuban. That is the poem of Manuel Navarro Luna, ‘Poemas Mambises.’ It is a great work and it expresses that which is before us.”

  “You may not be terribly fond of romantic mountain poetry after you’ve spent time being hunted by men in mountains. Believe me, they don’t write poems about that kind of an experience.”

  But Castro could not be denied, for before them lay the Sierra Maestra, the blue crest of mountains that dominated the coast around Santiago. They had trooped for hours in darkness, through brush, around farms, through chicken coops, avoiding the main roads, moving ever onward, going to rest in daylight—and now, in light, had at last emerged from the city so that there was nothing ahead of them except…mountains.

  They could see the mountains, green and lush in the high summer of late July. It was like no other part of Cuba, looking more like the American West than anywhere, with woods clinging to the elevation. Beyond the crests, the mountains plunged precipitously to the sea.

  “Will we make it?”

  “We have a good lead. I do not know if they have changed their tactics yet, and turned to the countryside. I see no indication. But we will make it or not depending not on ourselves, but upon their skill. Do they track well? How well trained are the dogs? Are the trackers smart in the way they follow us, or do they lumber about with a battalion and stop to smoke twice an hour? Do they know the roads? Can they follow spoor? What is their instinct for land-form? How badly do they want it?”

  “These are soldiers and policemen. I do not think they will enjoy the deep forest a bit.”

  “That is true. But another question: Are the Americans involved? If the Americans put good men on the job—or even one good man—then we could be in trouble. A shame, but that’s the way it goes.”

  “Would they have such a man?”

  “Actually, yes. He’s here. I’ve met him. I know him slightly.”

  “You should have killed him.”

  “Actually, I killed somebody who was about to kill him. Twice even! They seemed such good decisions at the time. Now, I must admit, I have doubts about my own judgment.”

  And it seemed to work so well for such a long time. Almost gai
ly, they took a road through the sugarcane fields of the coastal plain, and workers nodded at them and the young man waved back enthusiastically. He was not recognized, and they stopped for lunch in a little group of huts in the lee of the mountains, where nobody paid them much attention.

  There was a last field to negotiate before the forestation of the slopes took over, then they were gone, happily, invisibly. But it was a raw patch where the cane had already been cut, and nothing but brown stubble remained. A smarter way might have been to travel the dirt road another few miles, and cut into the hills where the fields were thicker. But Speshnev decided the speed was worth the risk, and it was of course the wrong decision.

  Speshnev heard a faint buzz and looked upward and saw the plane. He had a hope that it had either missed them or thought of them as just two more peasants wandering this way and that across the landscape, but the plane did not miss them and it did not think they were peasants, for it banked around, vectoring lower to get a better look at them, and if there was a moment when they might still have gotten away with it on bluff, that disappeared, for the young man panicked and took off running madly for the treeline.

  Fool, Speshnev thought, but then he worried that the plane had snipers aboard, and so he too took off at a run.

  Chapter 42

  A night of screaming had passed and then another morning. And then things began to happen. Earl watched it. Captain Latavistada and some aides came out of the torture tent, much agitated. They began shouting. Ripples spread through the assembly on the barracks’ parade grounds. The soldiers formed up into loose squads, and someone began signaling a fleet of parked trucks to rev up and maneuver into a column. The captain was not quite an idiot; he knew this job could be done better with fifty men than with five hundred so he only took a hundred and fifty, ten trucks full. It took some time to get the trucks loaded, and while all this was going on, Earl sat and smoked a cigarette.

  In time he smoked another and another, and then there was still a further delay as the dogs were brought up, and one of them got away, attacked a soldier, and had to be shot, and there was a scene between the civilian dog handler and the officer in charge. Earl had smoked almost a whole pack of cigarettes by the time Frenchy returned.

  “Okay,” he said, “they think they have him. A patrol plane spotted two guys heading for the mountains east of here, maybe ten miles. When the plane came around, the guys broke and ran. It’s got to be him, right? Who else would be headed into the mountains and take off like that when spotted? And he’s one of the few who hasn’t been accounted for.”

  “Two men,” said Earl. “The Russian is still with him.”

  Frenchy nodded.

  “So we ought to get going. We can tag along with the convoy, then break off and move faster on our own.”

  “Nope,” said Earl.

  “What?”

  “I said ‘Nope.’ Meaning, no, negative, zero, nothing, no, nope.”

  “I—”

  “See, he knows where he’s going, that parade of fools has no idea, and the whole thing just ain’t going to work. We throw in with them, we are plumb flat busted before we get going. Okay?”

  “Earl, this is not a time to be playing games.”

  “I ain’t playing no games. We ain’t going to get a shot at him if we go with these boys. The old fellow running our guy is too smart for that. Tracking won’t work. The only thing that will work is interception.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You get on that phone to your friend Roger St. Whatever-the-Fuck Evans. You get him on the phone to some prissy-ass boy at Guantanamo named Lieutenant Dan Benning. Dan loves Roger. He thinks Roger’s going to get him into your outfit, so he wants to impress Roger. Here’s what we want. A U.S. Navy helicopter out of Guantanamo to pick us up in Santiago. Pick a close-by spot, I don’t know the town well enough. Tell ’em to bring their best maps of the area—that is, the best nautical maps, with offshore depths indicated. Even our navy’s smart enough to have ’em.”

  “What do you need depths for?”

  “Because I’m looking for a spot on the coast where the deep water runs in close to shore.”

  “Whoa. I am so lost. I am—”

  “He ain’t just running this boy to noplace. He’s got a plan. Best way out is by boat. It’s probably set up. They’ll go out where it’s deepest, because the boat can get in close. It means they don’t have to use no dinghy and they won’t be hung up on the surface for an hour while they’re rowing out.”

  “How the hell will you know which way they’re coming from? They could come through those hills in a hundred different ways.”

  “I’ll probably read it from the maps. But when I get there, we’ll take a look-see of the area from the air. We’ll figure out how he’ll come through. That’s where we’ll set up. Those Cuban bastards will march him right to us. And we’ll do the job they sent us to do and become big heroes and live in nice houses in Washington, D.C. Now get on that phone, sonny. Get on it fast.”

  There was only a small problem, and that was that Roger wasn’t immediately reachable by phone. He wasn’t in the office or at the club, or on any of the courts that Frenchy knew about. So, goddammit, where was he?

  “That’s your job,” said Earl. “I’ll find the guy. You find your boss. Which one do you think is harder?”

  “It’s hard to guess where he is. He…he does things, meets people, that’s his job. It’s unpredictable.”

  “Fine. It’s your goddamn future going up in smoke, not mine. I can always go back to Arkansas and hand out speeding tickets.”

  But finally Frenchy reached Roger, who neither explained nor apologized. The request was made. The flight was arranged. The pickup took place as planned.

  After clearing the city, zipping over the harbor, sliding beyond the ever-thinning slums, the chopper at last broke free to the wild coast east of Santiago. Off to the left, the mountains bulked up cool and green, but here, as they raced along the coast, the land was just hilly, crusted with scrub vegetation, thorn, sawgrass. It was emerald green, but the green of green hell. It must have been 100 degrees out.

  The sand of the beach blazed white, the blue Caribbean lapped gently against it. Vibrations, the odor of gasoline, and the roar of the engine filled the air. The bird was a Sikorsky S-55, just the newest thing. It looked like a double-decker Cadillac with a rotor and a boom attached, yet was as agile as a dragonfly, and even built up a good head of speed as it raced east down the coastline.

  Earl worked the maps with the young ensign copilot while the crew chief and Frenchy waited below and the pilot kept the bird running hot and straight. Earl and the ensign designated a spot a few miles east of El Brujo, but not quite yet to Siboney, a beach town; that’s where the bulge of dark map blue indicating navigable waters arched closest to shore. The chopper eased out of the air, kicking up sand and water as it hovered just beyond to drop off its cargo.

  Earl rolled out, the Winchester slung on his back. Frenchy followed. He’d picked up a little M1 carbine somewhere and had a Government Model .45 in a tanker’s holster. The two scrunched in the sand and watched as the helicopter rose to altitude, dipped its nose and rotor and headed back to Gitmo, fifty miles farther east. The beach was deserted.

  “Now what?” Frenchy asked.

  “Now we walk and climb.”

  “Where?”

  “Up there,” he said, and pointed. The hills rose steeply, though blanketed in forest. Earl consulted the map, upon which he’d made many notes, read the lines of the peaks a mile beyond and several thousand feet up, made further examinations through binoculars, wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his arm, pulled the hat back low over his eyes.

  “There, I’d say,” he said, pointing to a certain gap in the crests that seemed no different from any other gap.

  “Okay.”

  “We shoot a compass reading and take off.”

  “He’ll come that way?”

  “That’s the gamble.”


  “But just so I can explain to the board that ends my career, why? I mean, they’ll need a good laugh.”

  “Well, he’s looking at the same hills right now, but from about six miles inland. And he’s probably seen the trucks arrive by this time, seen them soldiers get out and form up and move out. So he knows he’s being pursued. He’ll track a way over the crest, but it won’t be the most obvious, the lowest. He’s too smart for that. He’ll stay away. But he won’t do the highest either, ’cause he’d lose too much time and he’s got a schedule to meet. He’s already made his arrangements. They can’t be changed at this time, ’cause he don’t have no walkie-talkie. Whatever they set up, that’s what they’re committed to.”

  “Yeah, well, fine, but still I count at least five gaps up there, and that’s discounting the highest and the lowest. So it’ll be one of those gaps? And you know which one.”

  “Yeah. See, he has no recon, so he doesn’t know what’s on this side. You have to see it as he sees it, and interpret it from the knowledge that he has. He has no idea that one, over there, leads to a natural fold in the earth, and that going down it would be much easier. The vegetation ain’t so heavy either. No, way he’s looking, he’ll take the one that’s the closest thing to a straight line from where he is, yet ain’t obviously, outstandingly low. So that would be the one I have selected.”

  “Man, I hope you’re right.”

  “Oh, I’m right. The question is, are you tough enough to make it? We’ve got a climb to make, double-time.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. You know why? All that goddamn tennis. I’m in the best shape of my life. Boola-boola. Let’s go make a big noise.”

  Chapter 43

  First came the difficulty of unloading. It seemed that several of the sergeants had not recovered from drunken celebration after the attack on the barracks, and had disappeared, which left the squads in command of corporals. But the men resented the corporals, who had no power to grant leaves or promotions, and who therefore need not be obeyed. So the unloading went slowly and imperfectly. Upon at last exiting the vehicles, the men would not stay formed up in squad units. Instead, this fellow saw a friend from that squad and that fellow saw a friend from this squad, and soon it wasn’t a formation at all, it was just a large group of men standing around in a sugarcane field near a village, a crowd actually, with no place to go.