There’s irony in that, but I don’t think the Chinese Navy would really appreciate it.
( IV )
There’s a coda to the story:
As we were leaving, an American destroyer that had been part of the surveillance team thirty-five miles to the north hove into view, every light aboard blazing. The skipper must have opened the engines and thrown everything that could burn into the turbines to make the speed. In any event, he bore down on the sub, then broadcast a message over the radio and through his loudspeakers:
“Unidentified vessel. You appear to be under attack by pirates. Do you request assistance?”
The Chinese captain politely declined.
“Are you crying, buddy?” asked the navy captain.
The response was in Mandarin, but I think you can figure out what it meant.
The Venezuelan would-be commandos were a pretty sorry lot. At least half of them got seasick during the hour and a half raft trip back to land. All were pretty damn cold when we landed, in no shape to take control of anything.
Aznar, on the other hand, was in an excellent mood. This operation was sure to get him serious recognition from the government—a promotion in rank, and very possibly future consideration as one of the Public Force’s bright young (or not quite so young) leaders.
Which made this an excellent time to tell him why I’d come.
“One of my people is stranded in Cuba,” I told him after he’d secured his prisoners. “I need to mount an operation there and I need some help. People I can count on.”
“Cuba?”
“What I need are shooters with experience, who speak Spanish, but are not necessarily guys who are currently in uniform,” I told him. “I could use retired guys, or . . .”
“Men who are on leave.”
“Exactly.”
“Yes.” He turned around. “I would say a good number of these men here are probably due for a few days of rest.”
“Paid rest,” I added. “If a dozen of your finest can meet me in Panama City tomorrow, I’ll be sure to show them a good time.”
“They’ll be there, Dick. You can count on it.”
Deputy Dog—remember him?
The deputy ambassador began foaming at the mouth when he discovered that I had pulled the rug out from under him. He commandeered a Panamanian Public Force helicopter and flew out to Fort Sherman, where Aznar had put in.
Fort Sherman was built in the early twentieth century out on Toro Point on the north side of the canal. Besides protecting the canal, it was the U.S. Army’s jungle warfare training ground, and quite a large number of Central and South American troops learned the basics of jungle fighting there. We gave it over to the Panamanians in 1999, along with its brother on the opposite coast, Fort Amador.
The Panamanians have made such great use of the property that most of it is now under the control of Mother Nature, the most ferocious landlord of all.
(Following along at home? Up-to-date maps may not list it. Look for Shelter Bay Marina, which is what they call the big cement pier. It’s across the way from Colón.)
Mongoose and I were enjoying a few cold Balboas—the local beer—with the Panamanian ops guys when Deputy Dog arrived. The prisoners were sitting at the far end of the dock area, awaiting the helicopters Aznar had called in. Aznar himself had already taken the leader and his two lieutenants for interrogation.
I didn’t go along myself; my stomach is delicate, you understand.
“You fucking son of a bitch,” said Deputy Dog, stomping toward me. “You’re going to jail for this.”
“Hey, skip, someone’s looking for you,” said Mongoose, smirking behind his beer.
“You violated—you ruined—you screwed up—our plan—”
“Your plan sucked,” I told him. “And is now obsolete. The Venezuelans are over there. They’ve already confessed. The Chinese submarine is limping home. My bet is it’ll take the longest way around possible.”
Deputy Dog said a few other things, but they were drowned out by the arriving helicopters. Finally he stomped off in the direction of the prisoners.
“Time to go, Mongoose,” I said as the drum of arriving Hueys filled the air.
Mongoose scooped up a couple of bottles for the road. “We’re riding with the prisoners, skipper?”
“Hell, no. Deputy Dog’s going to want to do that. We’re taking his helo.”
And we did, all the way back to Panama City.
( V )
By now you’re probably wondering what happened to Junior, whom we left standing in the foyer of the small Cuban detective bureau just as the real Canadian representative walked through the door.
The Canadian, a tallish fellow named Paulson with thick glasses and a Toronto accent, sauntered down the hall, announcing in a loud voice that he was from the Canadian embassy and wanted to speak to the person in charge.
Junior had two choices. He could have made a dash for it, running past the Canadian into the street, where Shotgun and Crusty would help mount a counterattack. Or he could stay and try to bullshit his way out the door.
There’s a time for running and there’s a time for bullshitting. Being inexperienced, Junior didn’t recognize the difference, and chose the latter.
“They sent you, too?” he said, approaching Paulson.
“And you are?”
“Monsieur Depoise. I just arrived yesterday and here I am. Just threw me into it.”
“What section do you work in?”
“Passports,” said Junior cheerfully. “Why they sent me here is baffling.”
“I have a writ for the filmmaker’s release,” said Paulson, reaching into his pocket.
“Great.” Junior turned and pointed toward the Cuban detective, who’d been taking all this in. “She’s upstairs. I’ll go get her.”
“Not so quickly, I think,” said the Cuban. “Let me see your credentials again.”
“Sure,” said Junior. He turned to Paulson. “I already paid the document fee, so you don’t have to worry about that. I guess I should have gotten a receipt though.”
“What fee?” asked Paulson. “And who exactly are you?”
Things would have undoubtedly gone farther downhill from there had the proceedings not been interrupted by a hundred plus decibel crack of an exploding grenade—the report of a flash-bang tossed through a window into the reception room by Crusty. At nearly the same instant, Shotgun came barreling through the front door, an AK47 in his hands.
Junior dove on Paulson and threw him to the ground. The detective was nowhere near as quick. Shotgun, operating in shoot-first, ask-questions-never mode, put three bullets in the Cuban’s chest before he could grab his service revolver from his nearby desk.
Junior’s eardrums were reverberating with the shock of the explosion, so he didn’t hear Shotgun yelling to him to go out and get the car started. Instead, he scrambled to his feet and grabbed the detective’s pistol from the open drawer. Still stunned, he took a few deep breaths, then ran up the stairs, a few giant steps behind Shotgun.
“I’m in here!” yelled Trace from the cell at the end of the hall.
Shotgun ran straight to the door, found it locked, and yelled at Trace to back away. He put a bullet point-blank into the keyhole and kicked the door into two distinct and splintered halves.
In his haste, Shotgun had missed the detective Junior had seen upstairs earlier. As Junior reached the landing, the Cuban came out of his office, pistol raised. Junior fired several times. His first bullet hit the floor; his second grazed the detective’s chest. The third, rising with Junior’s unsteady arm, got him square in the side of the head.
Shotgun was standing at the end of the hall, AK4738 ready to take out the detective.
“Hey, thanks, little buddy,” he told Junior, then went back to rescuing Trace.
Junior didn’t hear him. His ears were still ringing with the blast downstairs, but the reason was more psychological than physical. He stopped running and stood in the
corridor, staring at the blood as it spurted out from the dead Cuban’s head. It looked black rather than red, much darker than he would have expected.
It was the first time Junior had killed someone.
I’m not going to wax poetic about dead bodies, or what it’s like the first time you actually kill someone. To be honest, mostly you’re in a situation where you don’t have the luxury of thinking about what the hell you’ve done. And in those rare instances, like this one, where a few milliseconds are available, reactions are all different. You can’t make a blanket statement about someone getting all choked up—or the opposite, laughing about how mashed the person’s brains were. I’ve seen both reactions.
My philosophy comes down to this: being dead sucks. Much better to be on the other side of the gun.
“We getting the hell out of here, or what?” demanded Trace, coming out into the hall.
“Nice bracelets you got on your feet,” said Shotgun.
“Where the hell are the keys?” she asked. “Junior? Junior?”
He turned around slowly.
“Do you know where the keys are to these leg irons?”
“Downstairs.”
Paulson had gotten to his feet in the hallway. As soon as he saw Shotgun, however, he dove back to the ground, expecting to be shot.
“Who’s he?” said Trace. She stopped and grabbed Junior, shouting the question, then repeating the words slowly so he could read her lips.
“Canadian,” said Junior, retrieving the keys from the dead detective’s pocket.
If that bothered him, he never said.
“We gotta take him to the embassy or they’ll think he did it,” said Trace. Freed of her restraints, she strode to Paulson and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, then spun him up over her shoulder. Her first step was shaky, but she quickly found her balance and carried him outside.
Crusty had brought the car around.
“I hope none of you have blood on you,” he told them as they got in. “I’m sure the rental people will charge extra.”
Among the goodies Junior had smuggled into Cuba was a new Belgian passport for Trace. After dumping Paulson off at a bus stop—taking him to the embassy would have been too dangerous—they got rid of the car, then headed to a backup hotel where we’d reserved a safe room. Phase one of the operation over, Shotgun and Junior hit the bar for a quick dose of bruise-killer. Trace went to shower.
When Trace came down a few hours later, her hair was close-cropped and blond. She wore a tracksuit purchased from the foreign store across the street. And her English had a decidedly French accent.
Not sure where she picked that up.
“I’m ready for a Kodak moment,” she told Junior.
They went back upstairs. Once upon a time, passports were relatively easy to forge. Now—they’re still relatively easy to forge, if you know what you’re doing, and if you have a program on your computer and special paper that helps you do it.
Trace stood up against the wall. Junior took her photo and inserted it into the blank spot in the program template.
“You look good as a blonde,” he told her.
Trace frowned at him, without bothering to look at the image.
All that remained was finding a printer. (The paper needed to be printed by a color laser, and it hadn’t been practical to try and get that into Cuba in their luggage.) In any other city, they would have their choice of dozens of Kinko’s and computer cafés. This being Havana, however, their options were more limited. The hotel had a small business center for use by foreigners only, but it was after-hours and the place was closed.
“Maybe we can get someone to open the place up for us,” said Junior as they stood outside the door.
“Let me take a look at it.” Trace glanced around, then walked to the door. She had lost her lock picks along with all of the rest of her gear and clothes, but the lock was about as sophisticated as most locks back home.
Which meant it was easy pickings.
Trace turned to Junior and uttered the words that strike fear in the heart of every married man.
“Lend me your credit card,” she told him.
Not being married, Junior complied.
Trace slid the card into the doorjamb, leaned slightly on the knob, and opened the door.
“Go,” she told Junior after waiting a moment to make sure no alarms would sound. “Keep the lights off.”
“You mean, work in the dark?”
“The bogeymen won’t get you. I promise.”
Junior slipped inside. The room was divided by a series of carpet-covered partitions, which provided a modicum of privacy for each station—a nice touch, considering that software on each computer would record everything that was typed. But Junior didn’t need a computer.
A networked laser printer sat at the rear of the room. He found it, unplugged it from the network, and fired up his laptop. Two minutes later, the passport blank was fed out of the top of the printer.
Where it promptly jammed, about three-quarters of the way out.
“Someone’s coming!” hissed Trace outside about three seconds after Junior figured out how to open the printer.
He pushed it closed, then slipped behind it in the corner as the lights turned on. A vacuum cleaner started to hum.
Thirty seconds later, the vacuum cleaner abruptly shut off. Junior heard the male cleaner curse in a loud, gruff voice. Then he heard Trace asking if someone could help her get into her room.
Trace was speaking Spanish, but her accent was entirely her in her hips. The janitor quickly volunteered, and they left the room together.
This was Junior’s cue to get the hell out of there as well, but he couldn’t do that without the passport page. The printer refused to let go until, out of desperation, Junior sent another page through, forcing the page out. It was a little smudged, but it was clearly the best he was going to do. Junior grabbed it and got out.
On his way back to Trace’s room, he passed the janitor in the hall, staring at the cord to his vacuum cleaner, which had inexplicably frayed. There were sweat rings under the man’s armpits, and he looked as if he’d just run a marathon.
With the passport ready, Trace, et al., headed for the airport. Danny, meanwhile, was prevailing on our Christians in Action contacts to set up four plane tickets—to where didn’t matter, as long as they were out of Cuba.
They were still waiting to hear where they were each headed when they realized the red lights in front of the airport were blocking the entrance to the terminal.
“Shit,” muttered Trace.
“Think they’re looking for us?” asked Junior.
“Maybe, but it’s too late to turn back now,” said Crusty. “Just play it smooth.”
He drove right up to the roadblock and began demanding in curse-salted Spanish to be let through. The policeman simply waved at him, telling him to turn around.
“No flights, no flights,” said the man.
The Cubans, following a plan laid out by Chavez, had shut down the airport in connection with the canal plot, not realizing that it had been foiled. The runways stayed empty until the next morning at ten, when a plane from Venezuela landed. They later claimed that nothing had happened. The several hundred passengers whose flights had been canceled obviously were hallucinating, since according to the Cubans those planes had in fact landed or taken off.
Trace and the others didn’t know this at the time. Danny had no information either. The logical conclusion was that the airport had been closed because the detectives’ bodies had been found. Thinking they were only a few steps ahead of the authorities, they drove back into the city, got rid of the car, and made their way to a bus station.
It was only then that they decided to call me and tell me what the hell was going on.
If I’d been able to get my boot through the phone I would have given them all a good piece of shoe leather.
“This is what happens when you do an op without thinking it through,” I told Junio
r.
“You always say, seize the day.”
“You seize it, not screw it up.”
Trace grabbed the phone from him.
“Why are you balling Matthew out?” she asked. “I could have rotted in Fidel’s jails. Why don’t you thank him for rescuing me?”
“I’ll thank him when I see him,” I said. “After I kick him in the butt. Now how the hell are you going to get off the island?”
“We’ll go south and hook up with the backup boat,” she said.
The Cubans had already increased their naval patrols following my recent adventures with Fidel, so escaping by water wasn’t going to be as easy as Trace thought. And in any event, we had to arrange for the boat to rendezvous off the Cuban coast, something it was now too late to do. So I told her to hole up for the night, and the next day.
“You want us to spend another twenty-four hours here?”
“Work on your tan,” I told her.
I hung up before she could object.
___________________
34 That’s all the navy will tell me about that.
35 Which the lawyers say I didn’t. For the record, the Panamanians don’t have ASW equipment, and I needed something without U.S. fingerprints. I still have my regrets, whatever the suits say I should say.
36 There are various pieces of metal welded or bolted to the hull of most submarines. One of our technical consultants believes I hooked on to one of the “spikes” that is normally used in port for a kind of wire fence topside, but that would mean one of the sailors forgot to stow it. Could be. All I know is it was attached to the submarine.
37 Mysteriously, all identifying insignia seemed to have been removed.
38 They were using the weapons we’d left behind earlier, in case you’re wondering.
( I )
The fat lady had not yet sung, as Yogi Berra would put it, but she was in the wings, ready to take center stage. Getting Trace and the boys out of Cuba was going to be even easier than I thought—there was no need now for the Panamanian muscle I’d just recruited. They could use one of the backup boats, or steal one; we’d get Paul M. W. Smith and his refurbished PBM flying boat—just now back in service—to pick them up and bring them home.
RW15 - Seize the Day Page 32
