RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  “I asked you, how did you get here?” repeated the guard. The men from the nurses’ station began approaching, and I decided it was time to go. I stepped back into the elevator, letting the doors close. The soldier hit the elevator button to reopen them, but I had left the key in the control panel and quickly overrode his command. They slapped shut and I dropped to the first floor, where Red was waiting when I stepped out.

  “Someone’s coming down the stairwell from the fourth floor,” she whispered.

  “They’re looking for me,” I told her. “Let’s go down to the morgue.”

  The elevator had already begun to ascend, so I walked down the hall toward a second stairwell. When we reached the basement, we spotted a pair of bored soldiers at a card table across from the elevator. They were paying considerably more attention to their game of dominoes than anything else, but we’d taken only two steps from the stairs when one of the soldiers rose and barked after me.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he said.

  I heard him get up. Then I heard the much more distinctive sound of an AK47 being locked into firing position.

  Funny how certain sounds stay with you.

  I turned around, pointing to myself. My cap was pulled down over my face, and I kept my eyes focused on the floor. Red kept walking.

  “Yeah, you, jackass,” said the soldier, obviously a very sensitive type. “You’re not supposed to use the stairs. Who the hell are you?”

  There are several words for undertaker in Spanish, many with quite an elegant ring to them: dueño de una funeraria, empresario de pompas funebres—anything along those lines would have done. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember any of them.

  “I said who the hell are you?” demanded the Cuban, as patient as he was polite.

  “I’m here for the dead,” I told him.

  “Dead? You are here for your own funeral.”

  It took an act of sheer willpower not to tell him I was here for his or, more to the point, reach to the back of my waistband, pull out my PK, and deliver the oratory.

  “What the hell are you doing?” said Red, stomping back to retrieve me. “Do you think we can keep bodies lying around all night and day until you decided to show up? Do you understand what an important hospital this is? This is the most important hospital in all of Cuba! And what are you? You are an ant, a bug, a cockroach.”

  I turned toward her, mumbling an apology.

  “You’re not even dressed properly,” Red scolded. “Your shirt is not buttoned. You are a slob!”

  “I was just telling him that myself,” said the soldier.

  Red scowled at him, glancing up and down. “Your pants need pressing,” she said, dismissing him before turning back to me. “Come along. Do you think the body will keep in this heat? Perhaps you would like to join it?”

  “Yes, sister.”

  “I am not your sister! God help the poor devil who would be related to you. If I were her, I would pay to be orphaned completely from the family.”

  “Wait just a second,” said the other soldier, who’d been quiet until now. He got up from his table and walked over to me. Then he lifted the hat off my head. “Look at him. Look.”

  “What are we looking at?” said the other Cuban.

  Red slipped her hand toward her back, reaching for her gun, sure that I had been spotted as an imposter. But I could tell where the soldier was going, and shook my head ever so slightly to warn her off. The soldier walked over and pointed at my face.

  “He looks very much like the president, doesn’t he? A little younger,” added the soldier. “But not much.”

  Thanks for the compliment, kid.

  The first soldier took a closer look.

  “He looks as much like Castro as I look like George Bush,” he said.

  “Perhaps I should shoot you then and get a reward.”

  “Stop fooling, you asses!” Red grabbed hold of my hand. “Come on! You have work to do inside.”

  The soldiers didn’t dare follow as Red and I walked down the hallway and turned the corner. It took only a few minutes to explore the rest of the basement. Two rooms were packed with surplus equipment, old beds, mostly, but also some medical carts and assorted machines that probably predated Batista. Another four rooms were mostly empty, with a few desks, chairs, and odd scraps of furniture piled high with dust. The mortuary was the largest of the rooms and sat at the back of the hall. A pair of rolling hospital beds stood near the center of the room. A large metal gurney stood over a large drain next to them.

  “We have no corpse to wheel out,” said Red, checking the refrigerator on the wall. “That may be a problem when we leave.”

  “I’m sure we can find one if necessary,” I told her, glancing back toward the hall. “Plenty of candidates.”

  ( III )

  Now that we had the interior of the hospital mapped out and Fidel located, the next step was to wait for an opportunity to get to him. At the moment, there were too many people on his floor.

  “How long can we wait?” Red asked as I began changing into the khakis.

  I’ve waited days in a jungle for the right moment to make an ambush, but in this case the wait should only amount to a few hours.

  “You bored already, Red?”

  “Being this close to the bastard gives me the creeps.”

  “Good thing you don’t look like him, huh?”

  While we were mapping out the interior of the hospital, Mongoose settled into position to watch the outside. We’d found an apartment building roof nearly a half mile away with a view of the checkpoint at the driveway, about half of the front of the building and all of the side.

  “Bunch of VIP cars coming up the driveway,” he told us when we checked in with him. “Guards just waving them through. Armored car sitting tight. Everybody seems pretty nonchalant.”

  “They’ve been doing this for a while,” I told him. “That’s exactly what we want.”

  “What are you going to do if he dies while you’re in there?”

  “Take his place.”

  “Heh. What’s the first thing you do? Free rum for anyone over the age of twenty-one?”

  “It’d be a start.”

  Mongoose wasn’t the only one who was fantasizing about Fidel’s death. After helping me apply my makeup, Red stepped back and got a good look at me.

  “You look just like him,” she said. “Just like the bastard.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why is he still alive, Dick?”

  “Good genes, I guess.” I shrugged.

  “No. Why the hell didn’t we kill him? The CIA—why didn’t they do it?”

  “They tried.”

  “Not very hard. You know they didn’t try very hard at all. They could have gotten him if they wanted to. They should have. You know how many lives he’s ruined?”

  I really didn’t have an answer for her. The attempts by the CIA had come very early on in his reign. As part of the settlement of the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. had privately agreed not to invade the island and, at least from what I’ve seen and heard, not to kill Fidel. But after Oswald killed Kennedy, all bets should have been off. You don’t have to believe that Castro actually sent Oswald on the mission, or even that he had anything to do with it. The assassination provided the perfect excuse to liquidate Castro. The Soviets would never have dared to bring their missiles back on the island. Countless Cubans would have been better off.

  Was there a conspiracy? Is there any truth to the theories that someone inside the U.S. government made a deal with Fidel to get Kennedy, and in exchange laid off the dictator?

  I’m not the one with the answers, only the questions.

  But Red had the biggest question of all, at least for me.

  “What if we kill him, Dick?” asked Red. “What if you slit his throat when we go up there. Once he tells you where the other DVD is, and what his surprise is.”

  “That’s not in the mission statement.”

&nb
sp; Red frowned. For a moment—but only a moment—she looked just like Trace.

  “This isn’t personal,” I told her. “This is a job. Killing Fidel is not part of it.”

  “What if it’s by accident?”

  “There’s no such thing as accidents.”

  “Murphy might do it. He’s been known to show up at just the wrong time. Who will care?” she continued. “It’s not like we’re agents of the government. We’re not breaking any law against assassination.”

  “We’d be breaking the law of unintended consequences,” I told her. “And we’re not going to do it.”

  Killing Fidel before we knew where the last disc was would be worse than foolish for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it would mean our mission would fail. But Fidel’s death would also unleash whatever deathbed surprise he had planned, something the country clearly wasn’t ready to deal with.

  Even if neither of those were factors, however, killing Fidel might do the near impossible: make him a martyr and hero. Our travels around the country had shown that he was a lot less than that now. Cuba’s future depended on her people’s ability to get beyond Fidel and the past; martyring the son of a bitch would make that many times harder than it was already going to be.

  Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed squeezing his neck until his eyeballs popped out of their sockets.

  I started to explain all this to Red, but stopped as I saw her eyes moving past my head and over my shoulder. I turned, and saw one of the guards standing in the doorway.

  “Mr. President!” he said, catching a glimpse of my face. He stuttered, and started to back out.

  “Halt!” I commanded in the sharpest Spanish I could conjure. “Come here.”

  Face white, he gulped and walked toward me, AK47 at his side. He started to mumble something: an apology or a question, though a prayer would have been most appropriate—but Red slammed the side of her pistol into his head. People usually don’t collapse like a house of cards, but this soldier did, falling almost straight down and flopping arms and legs on the floor. Red gave him a sharp kick on the back of the head, smashing his forehead against the concrete with enough force to shatter his skull.

  It didn’t make a lot of sound, but I thought it might alert his partner. Grabbing my blackjack from my nearest bag, I ran over to the door and waited for him to come in.

  Five minutes later, I was still waiting. In the meantime, Red had trussed the unconscious soldier, put a gag around his mouth, and hoisted him to a gurney.

  I love strong women.

  “Go call his friend inside,” I told her. “No use taking the chance he’ll phone upstairs for help.”

  Red nodded, fixed her uniform, then went out into the hall.

  “We need help back here,” she told the soldier. “The undertaker passed out.”

  “You’re a nurse.”

  “Yes, but I can’t lift him to the table. And your friend isn’t strong enough, either. He said he needed you.”

  “Probably he’s too lazy,” said the soldier, who nonetheless seemed happy to show off. He practically swaggered down the hall behind Red, body swaying as he walked.

  Which was convenient. I’ve always found moving targets easier to hit.

  Mongoose kept tabs on the VIP visitors, watching who left the hospital and letting us know as Fidel’s guest queue wound down. I lay back on the gurney, waiting for the last one to leave so Red could wheel me up and we could get the op moving.

  Maybe we could take out Fidel, I thought. Maybe there was a way to make it work, damn the risk of a boomerang.

  While my mind was chewing that big sucker over, something of much more immediate concern popped into my head.

  The credit card.

  Red looked over at me. “Dick?”

  I sat up.

  “Give me the sat phone. I need to call Danny.”

  Doc and Trace were just sitting down to dinner with MacKenzie when Doc’s sat phone rang. Not wanting to talk in front of MacKenzie for obvious reasons, he glanced at the phone screen and announced that his wife was calling.

  MacKenzie looked relieved.

  Excusing himself, he made his way out of the room and then out of the building through a side door, looking for a spot where he could talk.

  “Where are you?” asked Danny when he called him back. “You’re not at the airport, are you?”

  “I’m outside the restaurant. What’s up?”

  “Don’t use those plane tickets. The credit card that was used to reserve the car that Dick and Red trashed was the same used for your flight. I’m trying to get new reservations now but it’s not easy. Supposedly all the flights are booked—when the hell did Cuba become so popular?”

  Actually, the link was slightly more complicated—Sean had reserved the car with a card issued from a Canadian bank to one of our dummy corporations, Planet Documentary Media. We hadn’t used the same card for Trace and Doc’s tickets—but the corporation had one other credit card account, a Visa card that, yes, was the one we used to pay for Trace and Doc’s connections in and out of Havana.

  It hadn’t clicked until I was lying on the gurney, thinking of killing Fidel. The mind works in mysterious ways, but at least it works.

  “Are they on to us?” Doc asked Danny.

  “Probably not. But—better safe than sorry. Get the hell out while the getting’s good. Take the helo if you have to. Or go to ground. Your call.”

  I’d released Doc and Trace from backing me up; Danny was telling him to use his best judgment to get the hell out. Doc thought about it for a few moments, then decided the situation wasn’t dire. He hadn’t gotten any indication from MacKenzie that the Cubans were on to him. She’d been no more or less standoffish than she had the day after her drunken fiasco. He decided that if they had made the connection, the Cubans surely would have questioned them by now—if they bothered to ask questions before locking them up. The most prudent thing to do was to hang out and do nothing to alert MacKenzie. There’d be time to decide what to do after dinner. They could take an alternate flight if Danny got one, or go to the airport and get the waiting helicopter and use it to escape. In the meantime, they’d still be available if I needed backup.

  Back to the table, Doc watched MacKenzie carefully, trying to see some hint of what she might be thinking. At the same time, he waited for an excuse to get Trace alone and tell her what was up.

  As soon as Mongoose gave us the heads-up that Fidel’s last visitor had gone, I lay back on the gurney, pulled the covers up over my beard, and turned my head to the side. I was wearing a cap over my head and a surgical mask: I was saving my good looks for Fidel.

  “You should lose some weight, Dick,” snapped Red as she pushed the bed toward the elevator.

  “You’d do better if you took the brake off.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  She pressed the button for the top floor. We had the elevator to ourselves, but not for long. Two doctors got in on the second floor, talking about a baseball game they’d seen a few nights before. Red had fixed her hair, but her top was still strategically arranged, and I doubt they even noticed I was in the car.

  They got out one floor below Fidel’s.

  “Hold it here a minute,” I told Red as the doors closed. “Let’s stop at Fidel’s floor and take another peek at the security layout.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Trade a peek for a peek,” I told her.

  Red flushed, but undid another button on her blouse. The elevator lurched upward to the next floor.

  “Remember to keep your mouth shut,” said Red.

  “Thanks for the pep talk.”

  The elevator doors opened. We started out, then stopped abruptly as a soldier put his chest in the way of the gurney.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “I’m bringing a patient,” said Red.

  “Not on this floor.”

  “No?”

  Red glanced to her left, acting confused. More
strategically, she gave the soldier a nice glimpse of cleavage.

  “I do have the wrong floor, don’t I?” she said, backing into the elevator. “This isn’t the sixth, is it? How did the elevator stop here? It’s not supposed to. I definitely pressed six.”

  The soldier stared so intensely at her I could feel the heat until the doors closed.

  “No line,” reported Red. “There are only two guards now on the door. A couple back by the nurses’ station and one at the elevator we just opened.”

  A different nurse had come on duty since Red had visited last. This one wasn’t quite as matronly, but she was bored, and came over as soon as Red wheeled me from the elevator.

  “Sssh. He’s sleeping,” Red told her, pushing the gurney past.

  “But—”

  The nurse stopped midsentence. She had caught a glimpse of my face; even with the mask, I looked like Fidel.

  “Is it— ? Is it— ? Is it— ?” she stuttered.

  Red nodded. “It’s too noisy downstairs with the visitors. He needs rest. You’re to say nothing. No calls. Do nothing unusual. Nothing—or it will be both our heads, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said the nurse.

  “He’s to be left entirely alone,” said Red, pushing me to the room opposite the stairs at the far end of the hall. “Is this room ready?”

  “Of course. All the rooms are always ready for patients.”

  The nurse went down the hall and opened the room on the left. Red pushed me in. They spent a few minutes tidying up, then Red convinced the duty nurse to go back to her post.

  “She’s gone,” Red whispered finally.

  I got up and smoothed my khakis and put on the campaign hat.

  “Very scary.” Red shook her head. “Give me a minute to talk to the duty nurse. Then I’ll go to the cafeteria and get a plate for the soldiers on Fidel’s floor. It may take a while.”

  “The Revolution has forever to evolve,” I said.

  “It’s a good thing I know who you really are,” said Red. “Or I’d shoot you.”

  Was I a little nervous?

  Hell no. Little doesn’t begin to cover it. The butterflies in my stomach were the size of linebackers. The water poured out of my sweat glands as ferociously as the Niagara River over the falls in early April.