RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  Tweedledee and Tweedledum chose that moment to open the closet.

  ( II )

  There can’t possibly be anything wrong with the air-conditioning,” complained Tweedledee.

  “I’m telling you, the light was on.”

  “In your dreams.”

  “It wasn’t the sensor?”

  “That one was off. Should I have told Jorge?”

  “No.”

  “I tried resetting it and that didn’t work. It has to be something with the thermostat—maybe from the fumes.”

  “What fumes?”

  “Your fumes.”

  “One of these days I’m going to strangle you.”

  “Not here. It will make a mess.”

  “Get the tools and come on. If there really is a problem, it will be something for the technicians to handle.”

  “Staying on guard here without air-conditioning—easier to sneak over the American fence.”

  I heard one of them clattering around for the toolbox in the corner of the closet. He grabbed it and went back into the hall.

  Maybe it was a good thing the Cubans had placed it near the ceiling after all.

  I grabbed two nuts from my pack and threaded them quickly onto the top screws to hold the plate in place. Then I fixed the wire I had cut earlier. I was about halfway through securing the rest of the bolts when Tweedledee and Tweedledum came back to replace the tool kit.

  “I told you it was working. Your eyes are useless.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “You didn’t feel the breeze from the vent?”

  “I hope you cleaned your crap out of the toilet.”

  “Too bad I did. I would make you eat it.”

  The door closed. I finished securing the panel, cleaned up some of the metal shavings, then went back up the ladder.

  ______

  Red was watching the compound from a cluster of trees not far from the water. She’d recovered her gear and had her radio on, listening for my signal when I came up onto the interior patio.

  “I’m here, Red. How’s it looking?”

  “Not the best, Dick. They added another set of soldiers around the raceway.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was five minutes past three.

  “It might just be the shift change,” I told her. “Hang on for a little bit, then set the fire.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Red had hooked up an incendiary device in some big tree branches nearby. She would set them off by remote control, and I would sneak out during the commotion—a basic but effective misdirection play.

  Having to get around two patrols rather than one added to the chances that Murphy might interfere. I moved out to the edge of the interior patio, looking for the soldiers in the hope of timing their routine. One of the jeeps they were using was idling on the east side of the track, the soldiers scanning the exterior fenceline. The second was moving toward it, going at a pretty good clip. Then suddenly the driver hit the brakes, pulled a three-point turn, and proceeded back the way he had come, moving very slowly.

  Again, whoever had designed the security protocol had done an excellent job, telling the patrols that they must move in a random pattern, changing their directions and pacing constantly. Shifting the number of patrols was also an excellent move, making it harder to find vulnerabilities.

  But since the actual work was being done by humans, I knew there had to be plenty of vulnerabilities. I also knew that if I watched long enough, I’d discover what they were.

  One thing was obvious right away—the guards’ attention was focused outside the wire. I could have walked naked through the yard, past the swimming pool, all the way to the ocean and they wouldn’t notice me.

  Duh!

  I hailed Red on the radio and told her what I was doing.

  “How do I get out?” she asked. “Shotgun and Mongoose had to leave because the supervisor was watching them.”

  I was about to suggest she swim out herself, when she beat me to it.

  “The only problem is getting past the guards without them seeing me,” she said.

  “So let them see you.”

  ______

  Fidel kept a pair of twenty-foot speedboats tied to a small dock at the far east side of his bunker area. The cockpits of both were covered with canvas, but I was more interested in the rope holding them to the dock—thick, old-fashioned hemp.

  The Rogue Strider would have cut nicely through both, but then it would have been obvious that someone had been there. So instead, I put the knife to a different use—unscrewing the hitch holding the line, then prying it off as if the boat had naturally pulled the faulty screw from its mooring.

  The little boats were surprisingly heavy to tow through the surf. I hadn’t gone more than fifty yards before starting to pray that someone would spot them “drifting,” even though I knew the farther from land they were the better for both me and Red. By one hundred yards, I had moved beyond prayer and had begun to curse. At 150 yards, I said to myself that enough was enough and let go of the rope.

  One of the eagle-eyed lookouts finally spotted it a few minutes later. A woman ran out after them, paused to take off her work clothes, and joined them.

  Red, of course. She carried a small rucksack with her into the water, though I doubt anyone who saw her noticed.

  Red swam west, going with the tide as the others struggled to the east as they attempted to corral the boat. Much farther from shore, I swam as quickly as I could, mostly below the waves, in Red’s direction.

  “You OK?” I asked as I caught up.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Need help.”

  “Fine. I’m fine.”

  We swam another three hundred yards or so before I found a spot where I thought it was safe to land. She crawled up out of the surf and collapsed, too exhausted to move.

  “You know, Dick,” said Red finally, “this could be considered sexual harassment.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think you just wanted to see me without my top on.”

  “I love to see you without a top on,” I told her. “But I’m an equal opportunity employer. Take off your bottom and I’ll strip, too.”

  ( III )

  I don’t know whether the video camera at the telephone company hadn’t been fixed because of basic inertia, incompetence, or simply a lack of funds. Whatever the reason, it made things a lot easier for us when we returned the trucks to Victoria de las Tunas around four the next morning. Mongoose took another page out of his early childhood, rolling the odometers on both vehicles back, making it look as if they hadn’t traveled at all. I’d love to have seen the face of the manager or whoever it was who discovered them in the lot when he reported for work at 8:00 A.M. that morning.

  At roughly that moment I was pulling into Guáimaro, a city roughly thirty miles by car to the east of Victoria de las Tunas. I’d gotten there by a method of travel particularly popular in Cuba, especially at night—I’d gone up to the main road and stuck my thumb out.

  Hitchhiking is so big in Cuba that, like everything else in the country, the government has tried to stick its hand in it. It seems every town near a highway has its own el punto amarillo, named after the yellow-uniformed government worker who’s supposed to facilitate hitchhiking. The worker collects a few pesos from you for blessing the deal. But this being Cuba, the government’s “help” is something most people try to avoid when possible. Hitchhiking at night or in the early morning can be easier than during the day, since at night you end up giving your money to the driver instead.

  Red and I rode in the cab of a delivery truck. The driver gave me a few sidelong glances, but he was much more interested in Red’s breasts, even though they were well ensconced in a sweater and a fresh change of clothes we’d liberated along the way. Red didn’t seem to mind much; then again, that might have been because she spent most of the short ride sleeping.

  Guáimaro won’t top the list of any European tourist looking for a rom
antic if cheap Cuban getaway. It is cheap, but it’s anything but romantic, a poor town in a poor country. Most of the roads in the city are dirt; the morning we were there a strong wind whipped up a fine grit storm.

  The city is important historically—it was here that the Assembly of 1869 met, approving a constitutional government and calling for the end of slavery. But our interests were strictly directed toward finding a place to sleep. Doc, who’d gotten to the city a half hour before Red and me, had found a small guesthouse or casa willing to rent to European visitors, no questions asked, even though it was very early in the morning.

  The extra euros he slipped the proprietor may have helped.

  Trace took the first watch. Within a few minutes, everyone else was snoring. Feeling a little too restless to sleep, I went out on the second-story porch Trace was using as a lookout.

  She gave me a funny look as I sat down.

  “Any trouble getting here?” I asked.

  “Easy.”

  “No complications?”

  “No complications.”

  “Something wrong?”

  She frowned, but didn’t say anything.

  “Worried about Havana?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “How’d Shotgun and Mongoose do?”

  “Same old, same old. Like a married couple. How’s Red?”

  “She did good.”

  “How are her boobs?”

  “Not as pert as yours.”

  Trace frowned. “She’s not that good a shot.”

  “No one’s as good as you, Trace.”

  Clearly she was a little jealous about my spending time with Red, though she’d never admit it. And of course if I brought it up she’d pretend she didn’t care. The interesting thing—to me, anyway—was that she wasn’t jealous of Karen Fairchild. But then I never pretended to entirely understand women, just to love ’em.

  “What’s the next move?” Trace asked finally.

  “We get over to Havana.”

  “I know that. I don’t want to ride in the back of another pickup. Especially with Shotgun and Mongoose.”

  “We’re not going to. We’re going to take a train.”

  “They have trains in Cuba?”

  Not very many, and most of the ones that they do have are about as dependable as a 1972 Ford Pinto and half as safe. The one notable exception to this is the Tren Francès, aka the French Train, which runs between Havana and Santiago de Cuba.

  Our ticket west.

  The only problem with taking the Tren Francès was the fact that the nearest station was in Camagüey, roughly fifty miles farther west. The easiest way to Camagüey was by one of the intra-city buses, but these are usually sold out days if not weeks in advance, and are generally only available to Cubans.

  Theoretically, the buses are never completely sold out, as two seats are left open to “anyone” who shows up at the station, but reality and theory are often at odds in Cuba, and a conversation with the hotel owner made it clear that there’d be little chance of getting a seat.

  On the other hand, the owner told Red, she knew someone who could take us there for a small fee. The someone turned out to be her son, who for a hundred pesos apiece was willing to drive Red and I to the center of Camagüey.

  A hundred pesos apiece was considerably more than what the bus would have cost, but I agreed to pay it when I saw that he owned a station wagon. Not twenty yards down the road, we “happened” to come upon Doc and Trace.

  “There are some guests we met at the hotel,” said Red, pointing. “Stop and let’s give them a ride.”

  The driver protested only long enough for Red to suggest that she would tell them to kick in another twenty pesos. She didn’t even have to make that suggestion when we saw Shotgun and Mongoose a short while later. It was a tight squeeze, but we made the trip in just over an hour and a half, which included avoiding a checkpoint the driver knew would give us trouble. Overpaying for basic services, especially quasi-legal ones, can have some advantages.

  Tren Francès is about on par with the older, nonexpress Amtrak trains that run up and down the northeast coast. The bathrooms don’t have toilet paper, but otherwise the trip was no worse than the ride I took last fall from Rogue Manor to my publisher’s.

  We rolled into Havana Estación Central at 0215, and made our way to the Parque Central, a large hotel in the middle of the city where Junior had made reservations for us.

  After we checked in—all separately of course—we rendezvoused down at the bar, where Sean Mako was waiting.

  Sean is another one of the young bucks we’ve been lucky to recruit to Red Cell International over the last few years. As I believe I mentioned earlier, he’s also proof of our nondiscrimination policies: Sean is a former blanket hugger, an Army Ranger who realized SEALs have more fun, at least once they’re out of the service, and came over to the dark side.

  Sean had been in Havana for the past two days, getting the place ready for us. He’d been at the train station when we arrived, making sure we weren’t watched, then shadowed us back to the hotel.

  I bought a drink and went over to his table.

  “Anyone ever tell you you look like Fidel’s long-lost younger brother?” Sean asked.

  “Fuck you very much.”

  “His picture’s all over the place,” said Sean. He took a sip of his drink, a local rum concoction. “What’s with the ‘Socialism or Morte’ shit? Those freakin’ billboards are everywhere. Man, these people are nuts to put up with this crap.”

  “You prefer Pepsi ads?” said Doc, pulling up a chair.

  “Women in tight jeans would suit me just fine.”

  “Heathen,” said Trace, grinning as she sat down.

  “If communism worked, you think they’d need slogans like that? We don’t go around putting up billboards that say, ‘Capitalism or die.’ ”

  “Maybe we should,” said Doc.

  “It’s fucked up, man. Why don’t they just, like, kick the asshole out?”

  “It is more difficult than that,” said Red. “You see, at first, Fidel seemed to many people a hero. The old government was no good. Batista . . .”

  She stopped speaking for a moment, looking around. Despite the hour, the bar was a little more than half full. No one was paying attention to us, though, and Sean had already swept it for bugs.

  “He was a terrible dictator,” continued Red. “Corrupt. Worse. He put many people in jail, destroyed many lives. Fidel was just one of many who opposed him. This was in the early 1950s and Fidel, he was a lawyer. His family was very rich, and he ran for a seat in the Chamber.”

  Red grew up in America, and ordinarily she sounds pretty midwestern, since that’s where she came from. But her tongue had taken on a slightly Cuban rhythm since we’d come to the island, and tonight she sounded positively Cuban, her accent thick.

  “When Batista suspended elections, Fidel filed a legal challenge. When he saw that the challenge would go nowhere, he turned to violence,” said Red. “He led an attack on the Moncada Barracks, far in the east, near Santiago de Cuba. It failed. He was thrown in prison. He was to be executed, but the Catholic fathers pleaded with Batista, and the death penalty was suspended.”

  “Another argument in favor of the electric chair,” said Doc.

  “He was at the Isle of Pines, the most notorious prison in all Cuba,” said Red. “In 1955, the Cuban congress passed a resolution giving all political prisoners amnesty. Castro was freed. He fled to Mexico. But the real trouble was just beginning.”

  Castro returned in another abortion of an attack on government forces in 1956, landing in the Granma at Playa Las Coloradas. The landing was an attempt at an invasion, and it was a real fiasco. Government troops played “how many rebels can you kill before reloading” from easily held positions near the beach. Most of the men with him were killed or captured, but Fidel, his brother, and some others made it to the Sierra Maestra mountains where they slowly built a guerrilla force.

  Castr
o was far from the only one opposed to Batista; even members of the navy eventually mutinied. Batista was a real slime, so bad that the U.S. not only opposed him but eventually cut off weapons sales to him. By that time—1958—Fidel’s ragtag army in the west had been organized into a pretty damn effective raiding force, specializing in hit-and-run tactics.

  By the time Batista left Havana on January 1, 1959, Fidel was not only leader of the largest and most effective guerrilla group, but he was famous as an opponent to the regime, and when he stepped into power it seemed preordained to many Cubans. The U.S. wasted little time recognizing his government. President Eisenhower—yes it was Ike who “lost” Cuba, not Kennedy—sent a new ambassador.

  Actually, Ike didn’t so much lose Cuba as think he’d found it. Like most Americans—and Cubans for that matter—Ike didn’t realize that Fidel actually hated the U.S. He didn’t just want to get rid of Batista; he was out to create a socialist paradise in Cuba, with him as its permanent protector. After gaining power, he did what all good dictators do—he killed or jailed not just his enemies, but anyone he saw as a potential threat to his rule.

  That included Red’s grandfather.

  “My grandfather had been with Fidel in the mountains in 1957, just after Playa Las Coloradas,” she told Sean, referring to Fidel’s disastrous invasion.

  Her grandfather had come to the mountains as a schoolteacher in 1955. The conditions in the small village were terrible, and it was no surprise that his sympathies were with the local people and not the absentee landowners. When Castro came east after the disaster at Playa Las Coloradas, Red’s grandfather was one of the people who helped shelter him and his small band of rebels.

  “He gave them food, helped find a place for them to stay,” Red told Sean. “Fidel was a powerful speaker. Few people who heard him would not join his movement. He promised a better way for the poor farmers. My grandfather joined immediately.”

  Red’s grandfather became the captain of a group of escopeteros, rough partisans in the mountains. (Not all the escopeteros were aligned with Fidel, but the grandfather’s group was.) After Batista was ousted, he became an important government official in the village where he had been born.