Flight from a Firing Wall

by Baynard Kendrick

  Sargento Méndez got back in the cockpit and closed the door. We made a U-turn on a dime that nearly added a double hernia to my already mangled frame. Four blocks more and we were on Rodrigo, part of the Carretera Central. We headed full speed through the suburbs of Residencial Capiro and Vista Alegre.

  The next half an hour, while not the worst I ever spent in my life, still rates pretty high. Once outside of the city limits and into the hilly countryside, those two friendly enemies in the rear instead of continuing their official feuding decided to join forces for the sake of their good old patria. They started on a job of brainwashing this imperialistic interloper who had fallen into their clutches, meaning me.

  As a stimulant to my failing memory, that driving gorilla Sargento Guido Méndez, to save his tender fingers and in lieu of hot irons to put out my eyes, lit up a fresh Havana cigar.

  If he thought that the sight of that glowing red coal, waving in the darkness, would intimidate me into answering questions, it merely served to show his low mentality. Every time he took it from his mouth, I was seized with a paralyzing horror that petrified my vocal cords entirely.

  With his usual uncanny sense of perception, Capitán Rodríguez leaned forward with his elbows on the back of my seat. He opened up his inquisition by dropping a verbal bombshell on me: “You stooges of the CIA, who are sent down here to stir up counterrevolutionary troubles, are certainly blessed with a wonderful idiocy. You seem to think that we don’t keep track of all the activities of the gusanos in exile, who are busy spreading propaganda toward the overthrow of our present regime.”

  Alfredo asked, “Do you admit that you are an agent of the CIA?”

  I took a quick look at the glowing end of the cigar. “That’s one of those have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife questions. You’ve already tried and convicted me. Does it make the slightest bit of difference what I say?”

  “You’ve convicted yourself by coming here and attempting to make a secret entry.” Rodríguez’ beard was worse than Old Grandad’s. It made my neck itch, but I couldn’t move away.

  “Still, he hasn’t been tried,” Alfredo reminded him.

  “That’s quite true,” the captain agreed. “Certain questions will have to be answered for the record, gusano. It may make a great deal of difference to your personal comfort if you give some truthful answers now, and they could be substantiated later by Compañero Alfredo.

  My personal comfort! I have said that we Cubans have a very keen sense of humor! I thought of a story repeated to me by Luis Martínez concerning a member of the underground who had died and gone to hell. The devil, being rather sympathetic to members of the underground, took him on a personal tour after telling him that he would be given a choice between the Communist or the Capitalist hells. First they visited the Capitalist hell, where they watched the demons at their old routine of burning out eyeballs with cigarettes and boiling the victims in vats of oil.

  “What goes on in the Communist hell?” the newcomer asked.

  “Oh, it’s just about the same deal there,” the devil told him.

  “Well, in that case I’ll take the Capitalist hell, since I’m sure I’ll find most of my old friends there,” the lonely lost soul decided promptly.

  Just then a voice yelled up from below, “Chico, por favor, don’t be a damned fool! Come down here with us! Who ever heard of oil or cigarettes in a Communist hell?”

  Of course, I thought, by this time with all the modern improvements some inventive fiend had probably thought up shackles in a springless jeep, and the possibilities of a lighted cigar.

  “I think that he’s the type who will try to escape and have to be shot,” Alfredo said, thoughtfully.

  “Not until he’s been questioned by Compañero Piñeyro.” The captain took his beard from my neck and leaned back in his seat. “Just listen to part of his dossier and you’ll see.” He poked me in the back with his finger. “If any of my facts are wrong, gusano, don’t hesitate to correct me. Otherwise, your silence will indicate that you agree. Understood?”

  I merely said, “Sí," and sat there listening hopelessly while the captain threw the book at me. It was the first time I had ever really been told what a menace I was to the Communist world. Compared to my record of terroristic activities, as set forth by Capitán Leo Rodríguez, Comandante Ernesto García began to look like the superintendent of a Sunday School.

  “The prisoner here, who calls himself Dr. Antonio Carrillo, is a known Batistiano," my captor began. “He escaped the purge of such vermin by professing allegiance, in the early days, to Premier Fidel Castro, but it wasn’t long before his true colors showed. He became one of the most ruthless ruffians in the Villaverde underground.”

  “Now that you mention it, I remember the name,” Alfredo said.

  “It’s not surprising. Leading a band of hand-picked thugs, many of them doctors like himself, he made numerous forays from their hideout in the Escambray Mountains. His group sabotaged sugar mills, railroads, dairy farms and other industries necessary for the welfare of the people for miles around.”

  “Weren’t they wanted for rape and arson, too?” Alfredo asked.

  “You’re perfectly right,” the captain agreed. “Two militiawomen were forcibly kidnaped from Cienfuegos and when they refused to divulge information they were tortured, beaten, and subjected to everything most foul. The story was in Hoy, and you have heard the prisoner admit himself that he is know as the Casanova of the CIA.”

  Alfredo said, “I remember the arson, now. Three children were burned alive when they set fire to a country school.”

  “They burned three farm trucks too and dynamited machinery in the Manuelita Centrale—the sugar mill. Communications were interrupted when wires were torn from the poles.”

  “I recall those atrocities only too well,” Alfredo said. “I also recall when orders went out giving top priority to the task of hunting this gusano down.”

  The sergeant knocked ashes off of his cigar and I kept my mouth shut. We had fouled up some trucks in a convoy that was stopped by the road. We had also cut some telephone wires. We had started a lot of people yelling: “Fidel, yes! Communists, no!” in a number of towns and fair-sized cities. Our sex-fiend activities had somehow slipped my memory, and I’d forgotten broiling those kiddies in their school. I was confident, though, that before I was shot I would be confronted with those two unfortunate militiawomen who had been subject to our every whim. One of them would undoubtedly turn out to be Cabo Margarita with her trusty tommy gun.

  Capitán Rodríguez waited long enough to accept my silent confession, then really started going to town: “The scandalous part of this is that this man is the son-in-law of Comandante Ernesto García, one of the highest and most trusted security officers in the F.A.R.”

  He gave that time to sink in. “It was through his own daughter that the Comandante learned of this prisoner’s plans to escape on board a freighter and join the Worms in Exile in Miami. When the señora, his wife, attempted to dissuade him, instead of listening to reason he went entirely berserk.”

  “Wasn’t there something about a priest?”

  “Definitely. He had killed a holy man of the cloth and donned his cassock. Then at gun point he forced his own wife to disguise herself in the stolen habit of a nun. Comandante García made an attempt to arrest the prisoner and prevent his daughter from being forced aboard this outbound freighter at the docks near the Iglesia de Paula.”

  “That was back in 1960 as I recall.”

  “Late in the summer. When the Comandante’s men arrived and the prisoner realized that he was trapped, instead of quietly submitting to arrest he seized his own wife and used her as a shield while he shot down three militiamen, killing them all. The señora made a frantic effort to escape and flee to the protection of her father. The prisoner turned the gun on her and cold-bloodedly shot her.”

  My education in self-control was progressing fast, but at that I nearly risked the glowing cigar. If Rodríguez expect
ed an outburst he didn’t show it by a change of tone. “Meanwhile, some of his underground colleagues had come to his rescue along Desamparados. During the running gun battle that followed the prisoner was spirited away and put on a small boat bound for Key West.”

  Alfredo said, “I’ve heard that the señora survived and is now one of the most diligent workers for the Party.”

  “That’s quite true,” the captain assured him. “She’s been most active in cementing our friendship with our allies, the Russians, but not any more active than this prisoner has been in collaborating with the CIA.”

  He waited. Again my silence admitted all.

  Finally Alfredo said, “A valuable capture, Compañero Capitán. On the surface, this prisoner’s mission seems very foolhardy, not to say badly planned and reckless, for an organization such as the CIA.”

  Rodríguez laughed. “Would you call the Bay of Pigs a conservative project? It was planned by the CIA. He was delivered into our hands through the efforts of Comandante García. The details I am not at liberty to say, but I will disclose this much: he intended to sell his bag of miracle drugs on the black market. With money in hand he hoped to arrange another kidnap plot, if he couldn’t get his wife back to Miami with him any other way.”

  It wasn’t quite five o’clock when we rolled into the shoestring town of Placetas. We dropped Alfredo off at a house with a lighted window down near the end of the line. It took two minutes for Alfredo and the captain to tell each other how good they were, and for the sergeant to get out and pry the G-2 meatball loose from the rear.

  When he got back in, his cigar was out, but he sure hadn’t thrown that stink bomb stub away.

  24

  The galloping jeep took off again going into the hills. We’d made twenty-two miles in as many minutes and I still hadn’t had a word to say. The false dawn was beginning to show. They were going to have some fast shooting to do if they intended to kill me before the break of day.

  The rain had stopped. Outside of Placetas the hills became steeper. The sergeant was pushing the jeep unmercifully and treating my body the same way. I decided to take a chance. My arms and legs were totally numb. I knew that a blackout wasn’t far away. Sheer exhaustion, lack of food and sleep, and constant agony would ring the curtain down any minute.

  I said, “I give you my word not to try to escape. I’m close to a point of fainting. I’m asking you to take these shackles off. Even the lowest animal would be treated with more humanity.” My recklessness was born of despair, certainly not of bravery.

  Méndez said, “It’s up to you, Compañero Capitán. I’ll stop and free him right now if you say so. He may conk off on us any minute. He’s not going to try to make a break. You can shoot him before he gets out of the jeep. He knows he hasn’t a prayer.”

  I was seized with a terrible fit of ague as I listened for the captain’s reply. My very last hope took a nose dive when it came. Tears of frustration filled my eyes. I knew I had reached the end of the line and was finally doomed to die.

  “Save the good Samaritan act and switch on the shortwave,” Rodríguez told him. “I just don’t trust that fat slob Alfredo any more than I would a puff adder, or any more than he trusts me. He wants this prisoner for himself, and he’d like nothing better than to have us stopped between here and Sancti Spíritus and to find him riding all free and easy.”

  “I think you’ve got something there, Compañero Capitán. This highway is the main street through Cabaiguán—”

  “Exactly, Guido. My guess is we’ll run into a roadblock there, and that’s where he’s going to make his try.”

  The sergeant turned a knob on the dash. Static crackled. We had less than ten seconds to wait until a disembodied voice came through, proving the capitán dreadfully right.

  “Placetas police. Station LV-5 calling Cabaiguán security at Station LV-6. Come in, please.” Like all voices carrying a touch of doom it was unemotional and dry.

  “This is LV-6, Cabaiguán security. Go ahead, please, LV-5. We are reading you.”

  “An F.A.R. jeep containing three men, a prisoner, a sargento de primera, who is driving, and a primer capitán alone in the rear, has just left Placetas en route to Camagüey on the Carretera Central. Should arrive at Cabaiguán within the next twenty minutes. You will stop and hold occupants for further orders from the Comandante of Las Villas Province. Repeat: Stop and hold occupants. Under no conditions let them get by. Acknowledge please.”

  “This is LV-6, Cabaiguán security, acknowledging orders to stop and hold occupants of F.A.R. jeep, three men, and under no conditions to let it get by. Repeat: Stop and hold F.A.R. jeep containing three men for further orders of Comandante of Las Villas Province.”

  “This is LV-5 to LV-6: Thank you, security. That is all.”

  “Well, you heard it, Guido. We can’t get through Cabaiguán. So what now? I’ll leave it up to you.”

  The sergeant switched off the radio. “The rain has stopped, Compañero Capitán. I suggest that we leave the main highway.”

  “For where?”

  “Nazareno. There’s a trail I know just a little further along. It leads to a dairy farm just across the railroad and goes to Nazareno beyond the farm.”

  “How bad and how long?”

  “About ten kilometers from the turnoff to the town. It’s not good, but I’ve been over worse. We should make it with the four-wheel drive—if we don’t drown.”

  “And from Nazareno?”

  “There’s a secondary road through La Pozas and Santa Lucía into Sancti Spíritus. About thirty-five kilometers. We miss Cabaiguán and Guayos entirely.”

  “What about the mountain? Do we have to cross it?”

  “We go around. Skirt it, and come into Sancti Spíritus on the southern part of the town.”

  “Tenga usted compasión—Have a heart.” I must have been whimpering by then. “Do you expect me to stand forty-five kilometers of bumpy back trails with these shackles on?”

  “¡Mala suerte!— Tough luck!” the tenderhearted Méndez consoled me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to. There’s an around-the-clock militia guard on that dairy cooperative that we have to pass through.”

  Then it was the turn of the sadistic Rodríguez to fill my cup with cheer: “No hay mal que por bien no venga— It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” he said brightly. “You won’t have to wear yourself out grabbing at things to hold you down, like I will. Those shackles will keep you firm in your seat no matter what happens to the car.”

  I stared ahead in muted anguish as we turned off right into a couple of ruts. We went through a row of palms that bordered the highway with only inches to spare. The sergeant shifted to four-wheel drive. We started to climb. Cuba has more than five thousand miles of all-weather roads, including the 711 miles from Guane to Guantánamo on the first-class Central Highway. This one had never been included in the system.

  Méndez was more than optimistic when he had called it a trail. The rain might have stopped but the water hadn’t. The headlights revealed a rocky creek bed with a torrent of muddy red water rushing toward us as far ahead as the eye could see. Every turn of the wheels tossed us wildly about, increasing my four-point agony.

  It was one last jounce over the railroad tracks that finally finished me. I set my teeth and summoned all the reserves of my strength, but I didn’t have any. The rushing red water enveloped my brain. I went down and down into a luscious maelstrom of oblivion and blanked out mercifully.

  When I opened my eyes to the world again, I was lying as limp as an empty sack in the back of the jeep with Rodríguez’ arm supporting me. It took some time to adjust myself to the tingling pleasure of circulating blood in my extremities, and to absorb the fact that my arms and legs were free. Dawn was breaking in a cloudy sky. The chief landmark of Sancti Spíritus, the dominant peak in the range of mountains bearing the same name, hung menacingly over us.

  Before I had roused enough to realize what was happening, we were bumping through th
e narrow crooked, cobblestoned boquetes—streets of the older part of colonial Sancti Spíritus, itself. The varicolored houses were low and close packed. The cobbled muddy streets were just wide enough in places for the jeep to get through. We sped across the five arches of the humpbacked bridge, which had spanned the Yayabo River since Domingo Valverde y Blas Cabrera built it in 1825.

  We rolled out of a narrow lane onto a quieter wider street, and circled around to the rear of a thick-walled mansion. It looked deserted. The jeep pulled into the shelter of spacious empty stables and stopped. Méndez got out and enfolded us into semidarkness by closing an enormous swinging door.

  My stiffened muscles refused to function. Rodírguez shook me and said, “¡Pronto! Saiga del automóvil—Quickly! Get out of the car.”

  I stared at him blankly and shook my head. Literally, with one on each side to support me, they lifted me out and carried me through a side door to the stable. It opened into an equally gloomy basement cluttered with empty kegs, old crates, and odds and ends of discarded furniture.

  Still half dragging me we picked our way through the debris and paused in front of a studded oak door that might have once guarded a wine cellar. The sergeant supported me while Rodríguez used both hands to unlatch it by twisting a heavy iron ring. It opened with a dungeon squeak, its strap-iron hinges protesting shrilly.

  I don’t know what I expected to see, but it wasn’t a softly lighted room with carpeting wall to wall. They stopped me in front of an easy chair. In it propped up on pillows and wrapped in a worn crimson dressing gown sat a fragile old man, with a leonine head and pure white hair.

  “Jefe, we met with a little delay,” Capitán Rodríguez said. “The secret police are everywhere.”