by Gregg Loomis
“What are they saying?” Gurt asked.
Paul took a deep breath. “Say we cannot enter Citadelle. Is dangerous, floors and walls not safe. We must go back. These men have orders not to allow anyone inside.”
“The place has been there for nearly two hundred years,” Lang argued, “and it’s just now unsafe?”
“Go!” One of the men was pointing in the direction of Milo, perhaps exhausting his entire English vocabulary.
Lang took a long last look at the amazing structure perched on its lofty height. He could see guns of different sizes bristling through ports. The walls of stone rose well over a hundred feet and were smooth even though they had withstood the elements for nearly two centuries.
“Go now!”
The man knew more English than Lang had anticipated.
It was obvious no amount of argument was going to change the minds of these uniforms. Gurt reached into her purse and produced a twenty-dollar bill. In these latitudes, dead American presidents frequently spoke with more authority than mere orders.
The response was silent stares from four pairs of sunglasses.
Lang pulled the reins to his left. The little horse took dainty, careful steps to turn around on the narrow path. The animal was not only as small as a burro but just as surefooted.
“No point in arguing,” he said sourly. “Let’s go.”
In single file, they reentered the coolness of the tropical forest. It was not until they were almost back to Milo that the trail permitted two riders side by side.
Gurt reined her horse in to let Lang catch up to her. “You do not plan to see this marvelous place, this Citadelle?”
Lang’s response was a grunt. “First the woman at the hotel has never heard of the biggest attraction in Haiti, perhaps the whole Caribbean, and then we find at least four armed cops, militia, whatever, guarding the place to keep away the tourists for which the country is starving. I’d say there’s something there more important than tourist dollars, something someone doesn’t want seen.”
Gurt smiled knowingly. “I suppose we have shopping to do, as Paul suggested.”
“Indeed we do.”
Cap Haitien
20:29 that evening
For dinner, Lang and Gurt had shared a pot of tenaka soup, vegetables done in an oxtail broth. She had the poulet kreyòl, he the griot, a highly spiced pork, all washed down with icy bottles of Prestige, Haiti’s beer, served in different-sized and different-shaped bottles clearly recognizable from their former lives as containing Budweiser, St. Pauli Girl, Coors and a number of other brands stamped on the bottom of the glass, a model of recycling but more a tribute to the Haitian mentality of wasting nothing. The meal was served at the hotel’s open-air restaurant beside the pool. Lang had warned Gurt to forgo the salad on the theory that in third world countries, that which isn’t bottled, cooked or canned can lead to irresistible impulses to inspect plumbing facilities.
Even if there are none immediately available.
Retreating to the lobby, another open room furnished in native carved mahogany, Lang treated himself to a Cuban cigar, a Montecristo #2. It had been his favorite smoke before Manfred’s arrival in his life had resulted in the secondhand-smoke treaty with Gurt, who had given up her beloved Marlboros.
“Do you not wish Cognac with that?” Gurt queried.
“Wish it?” Lang puffed contentedly. “You bet! But drink one? Not with what we have planned for the evening.”
Gurt lowered her voice even though the room was otherwise empty. “We have everything we need?”
Lang contemplated the glowing ash of his cigar tip. “We checked before dinner, remember?”
Gurt stood, giving Lang a seductive look. “I think I will take a nap. Perhaps you will join me?”
Lang eyed his cigar, barely half-smoked. “Perhaps you will wait a little?”
She twisted her hips suggestively. “Poor Lang. He must choose between two of his delights.”
“Haven’t you heard? The president of the United States has forbidden torture.”
Gurt parted her lips to run her tongue along them. “We are not in the United States.”
Lang brightened. “Which means there is no such thing as a ‘no smoking’ hotel room.” He stood. “Lead on, my lady! My cigar and I follow!”
She preceded him across a small but attentively landscaped courtyard, down stairs lit by gaslights, and stood in front of the door. Even in the poor light he could see her stiffen.
She turned and took the few steps required to stand beside him. “Someone is in our room.”
Lang’s joy of anticipation evaporated faster than early-morning dew in July. “You’re sure?”
“The tall tale . . .”
“Telltale, the little strip of tape under the doorknob.”
“It is gone.”
“Perhaps the maid, turning down the bed.”
“She did that while you were waiting for me at the restaurant.”
Lang slid by her, squatting beside the door. He listened for several minutes before rejoining her. “Whoever it is is still there. I can hear someone moving around.”
“We will have the hotel call the police.”
Lang thought of the woman behind the desk who might be the only person in Cap Haitien unaware of the Citadelle, remembered his remark at dinner with the waiter hovering nearby that he intended to enjoy a cigar in the lobby afterward. “Not so fast. It might be the hotel.”
“Lang, we cannot just burst into the room. He might be armed.”
Just then, a shaft of light shone from the door. Whoever was in the room was coming out.
As though by prior agreement, both Lang and Gurt flattened themselves against the building. An indistinct shape exited their room, pulling the door closed behind it and furtively scurrying toward Lang and Gurt.
Lang waited until the person was almost abeam of him before sticking out a foot. Something tripped over it and went down amid what were understandable as curses in any language.
Lang was on top of the form, his knee pressing against shoulders as he held on to the wrists, jerking them upward. Once he had a firm grip, he stood, snatching the person to their feet. He was surprised at how light, how small, the would-be burglar was.
“Mr Lowen!”
“It is the woman from the front desk!” Gurt exclaimed just as Lang reached the same conclusion.
He spun her around to face him, pushing her toward the nearest gaslight. “Care to explain what you were doing in our room?”
Her eyes sparkled with either fear or fury. “To check your air-conditioning. Several of our guests have complained the units were not working. I knocked on your door, and when I got no answer . . .”
Lang had seen no other guests, had the distinct impression he and Gurt were the only ones. Nonetheless, he let her go.
She took a step back, rubbing her wrists. “You should be more careful who you attack,” she said angrily.
“You should leave the door open when you are in someone’s room,” Lang countered. “It might help avoid unpleasant surprises for both you and your guests.”
She gave him a glare, turned on her heel and was gone.
Inside the room, the window unit was doing a workmanlike job.
Lang glanced around. “I don’t see anything missing.”
Gurt held up a paper bag that held the afternoon’s purchases. “Perhaps not missing, but someone has moved the contents around.”
At the same time, on the deserted road beside the hotel, a woman stood, talking into a cell phone.
“Yes, I looked carefully. The woman’s clothes mostly have German labels. The man’s . . . His jeans are American, but that means nothing. The wealthy all have American jeans. Two of his shirts are French; they still have the price tag.”
She paused, listening.
“No, I found no weapons but I did find something interesting: several lengths of rope, a boat anchor—a small one—and flashlights. Whatever they plan, they plan it fo
r tonight. They are scheduled to leave tomorrow. They saw me leaving their room, but I gave them an excuse.”
Another pause.
“Yes, tonight. I would expect them tonight.”
Milo
02:40 the next morning
The cab ride from Cap Haitien had been uneventful if expensive. André, operator of the vibrant blue Ford taxi, had asked no questions as to why anyone would choose to visit the little hamlet in the morning’s earliest hours. If he had curiosity, the hundred dollars pressed into his palm quenched it.
As bidden, he let them out at the bottom of the hill that rose to Milo and became a mountain as it reached ever upward to the Citadelle. Wordlessly, he wheeled the old car around and headed back the way he had come. Gurt and Lang shouldered the small backpacks they had purchased the previous afternoon.
Gurt was carefully picking her way in the ghostly light of a three-quarter moon. “You could have let him drive us into town,” she observed.
“And wake everybody? The car had no muffler, y’know.”
“Still, riding would not risk breaking our necks walking in the dark.”
“Easy enough for you to say. Last time you rode uphill, I pushed, remember?”
They finished the gentle slope in silence. At the top, the scattering of huts was dark. Somewhere, a dog barked, someone shouted and the animal went silent. To their left, a gentle whinny led them to a low wooden fence around the central corral. Lang slipped a saddle and bridle from the top slat and was approaching a horse made skittish either by the dark or the fact he was facing a stranger.
“It will give trouble if we are caught taking horses,” Gurt predicted.
“If we don’t have them back by sunup, being horse thieves will be the least of our problems.”
“Do they not hang horse stealers?”
Lang managed to slip a bridle over the horse’s head. “That was Lonesome Dove. Don’t know about Haiti. Whatever they do, we don’t want to be here when it gets light. Now, get one saddled up.”
Each leading a horse toward the increasing slope, Lang and Gurt waited until they were well past the last silent hut before mounting. The trail narrowed to the point of invisibility as it snaked upward. Lang had not been willing to follow a path he could not see with an abyss on either side, as would be the case approaching the Citadelle. Instead, he had remembered the little sure-footed horses and how they had needed no guidance from riders to find the Citadelle or home. He could only hope they knew their directions well enough to navigate without actually seeing their way.
The moon was playing peekaboo behind puffy, silver-lined clouds, drenching the mountainside in inky darkness for minutes at a time. The surrounding coolness was Lang’s first clue they had entered that part of the route that passed through tropical forest. One of the horses’ hooves struck a rock, and there was a sound from the side of the trail that could have been a sleeping human mumbling in one of the mud habitations beside the trail.
There was no doubt when they emerged from the canopy of trees. A panoply of diamond chips sparkled in the eastern sky, undimmed by the fickle moon. Like a stage setting, the Citadelle was an undefined mass of foreboding, black against the array of stars. For once the area was not cloaked in clouds. Lang would soon find out if the tiny horses could navigate by memory alone. Between here and the bastion the narrow path was a bridge across oblivion.
The both saw it at the same time: a pinprick of light flashed and died near the base of the fortress. Someone had lit a cigarette.
“If there’s one, there’s more,” Lang whispered, although the distance to the Citadelle did not yet mandate silence.
The shadow that was Gurt nodded. “But how many more?”
Lang slipped from the saddle. “With a little luck, we’ll never know.” He edged past her horse to stand behind it, placing a hand on its rump. “I’ll walk awhile, following your horse. When we get a little closer, you stop, hold my horse.”
“But you cannot see.”
“If I get close enough, I won’t have to. I’ll move on hands and knees, feel my way along.”
“But—”
“No buts. If we get any closer and one of the horses whinnies or strikes a rock . . .”
Although clearly unhappy to be relegated to the role of holding the horses, Gurt knew this was neither the time nor the place for an argument. Reluctantly, she rode ahead in silence until Lang touched her arm.
“Here, wait here.” He handed her the reins of his mount. “If I’m not back in an hour and a half, take the horses back to Milo and get to the hotel. I’ll need help.”
She started to offer a final protest, but Lang had slipped away into the darkness.
On hands and knees, Lang felt his way along the rocky path. Within minutes, his back began to throb at the unusual angle at which it was bent. Progress was slow, one hand in front of the other, making sure where he could place each knee. Once or twice, he had to stop as unseen rocks were dislodged and tumbled noisily into the void on either side. He would pause, listening for any human reaction.
So far, there was none.
After what seemed like painful hours, but his watch’s luminous dial described as twenty minutes, Lang could no longer see the Citadelle’s form against the sky. He was so close it filled his vision. Starting to stand, he froze in midcrouch as an orange dot caught the periphery of his vision. Either the cigarette smoker they had seen from the trail or another nicotine lover.
Lang moved a few inches to his right and squatted, trying to pick up a silhouette, a shape, anything that might give him an idea as to the smoker’s exact position. The mass of the old fortress and its shadow from the moon blacked out everything in front of him. His fingers searched the uneven ground at his feet and closed around a stone slightly larger than a softball.
He waited.
The cigarette glowed with what turned out to be the last puff before it was discarded in an arc of burning ashes against which Lang could see a single figure not three feet away.
Lang purposely cleared his throat.
The man in front of him grunted in surprise and Lang was close enough to hear the small sounds of movement. Pebbles underfoot crunched; metal struck metal as a weapon struck a belt buckle.
Lang timed his swing with an accuracy learned on the Agency’s long-ago training fields. Rock met skull with a grinding crunch and a grunt. He fell against Lang.
Quickly moving from under the still body, Lang searched his victim until his hand touched a weapon still grasped in unconscious hands. Running a hand down a stubby barrel, Lang quickly identified the gun as an AK-47, type 63/68. There was no chance he could see the markings stamped into the metal that would reveal its origins. He set it down beside him and fumbled off his backpack.
Minutes later, he was finishing binding the man’s arms and legs with duct tape. Task completed, he taped the man’s mouth shut and stood, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. No doubt the guy would regain consciousness shortly—he was already moaning—but Lang intended to be long gone before his companions found him in the early-morning light.
For a full five minutes, Lang stood still, listening for any evidence his presence had been detected. He heard none. Still, he didn’t dare approach the fortress by the front, the site of the only entrance. Surely it would be guarded. He had prepared for a less-orthodox entry. He moved gingerly to the side of the path. Keeping a precarious balance, he reached a point where he could see a slice of the night sky, its stars outlining the wall of the Citadelle.
Climbing that wall was out of the question without some sort of help, help that just might be provided by . . .
Lang took a length of rope from his backpack and uncoiled it. Blindly, he tied a slipknot into one end. Twirling the rope above his head like a cowboy chasing an errant steer, he let it slide through his fingers. Rope met rock wall with a faint slapping sound and Lang reeled it in to try again. On the third effort, the rope settled around a cannon’s muzzle protruding a foot or so from its gu
n port. Lang threw his weight backward, drawing the knot tight. He gave several exploratory tugs to make sure it was fast before he slung the pack back onto his shoulders and began to climb.
Unlike many fortifications that had been built with a slight slope to deflect artillery fire, the Citadelle’s walls were vertical. Above the gun port toward which he was climbing, Lang could see two more, their silent barrels protruding into the night like the gargoyles of a Gothic cathedral.
His foot found a niche in the mortar between two stones. Pulling on the rope as he braced against the wall, he was able to “walk” up the face of the fort perpendicular to it. Above his head, he could see the cannon getting ever closer. Another step, perhaps two, and he would be there.
The gun was finally within his reach. Taking one hand from the rope, he stretched toward it. At the same time his foot hit a trickle of water, a patch of moss, something slick that broke the traction between his rubber-soled shoe and the rock surface, sending him swinging pendulum-like across the face of the stone.
He clung to the rope, an umbilical cord of life that held him above a drop of thousands of feet. The swing ended abruptly as his momentum slammed him into a protruding stone, perhaps the top of another gun port. The impact knocked the breath out of his lungs and blurred his vision with colorful spots that spun in front of his eyes. Gasping to refill his lungs, he felt his grip on the line slip before his concentration could return from the pain of colliding with unforgiving rock.
He drifted back and forth in space, the cannon’s muzzle taunting him with unreachable proximity. His shoulder muscles were in rebellion, sending jolts of pain radiating from neck to wrist. Hands beginning to spasm from the physical tension, he forced one after the other to inch his way up the remaining few feet of rope toward the gun.
He was almost there when he felt an almost imperceptible slack in the line. The swinging motion had somehow loosened the knot in the rope. It was coming loose.
If it did, the next stop would be nearly a half mile below.
Gurt was trying to get comfortable sitting on a craggy rock, the reins of the two horses in her hands. Her watch told her Lang had been gone only a few minutes, but the wait was becoming burdensome. They could just as easily have found some outcropping of stone to which to tether both horses. Unspoken had been the thought that the two of them, Gurt and Lang, should not be at risk at the same time. Manfred should not be in danger of becoming an orphan at a single stroke. She accepted the reasoning, but being left out of any action still rankled her.
