Codename Wolf

by Gil Hogg

  Carmelli cut the engines. The boat rocked gently. The sea seemed untroubled. The faces of Kershaw and Yarham, lit dimly by the instrument lights, had hardened into painful lines as they waited their fate. Harkness and Burton ( I had picked up their names as we travelled) sat together on the stern transom, both nursing Uzis.

  Carmelli came out of the wheelhouse, bent down and kicked me in the ribs. “You’re going to tell me all about your career, Mr FBI, and who the hell you are. You sure gave me some pain.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “Don’t be too concerned about the programme, asshole. If you talk good, I might just crush your balls and let you take a late night swim with the skinny dippers at Playa Santa Maria del Mar.” His guffaw sounded cruel and the other two joined in.

  I knew this was coming, and I was prepared to talk for a thousand and one nights. I thought a measure of truth might help, might pull these animals, who were supposed to be on our side, around – if they believed me.

  “You want to know what happened – I’ll tell you. I’m an MI6 agent, Roger Conway…”

  “That’s the funny accent, is it?”

  “I was asked to get hold of the VRK file by the NSA. They arranged entry to your offices through a contact in the CIA. The NSA were worried they didn’t know what you guys were doing, and thought things might get out of hand.”

  “Bullshit!” Carmelli said, but I could see that inside his pyramid skull he was turning over the serious possibility that what I had said was the truth.

  “Which government you working for, scumbag?” Harkness said, coming forward and kicking me in the spine.

  I was ready to go into a heavy routine of pleading – we were in sister services, we served the same government, I was only following orders – all that, and beneath the deck grille, I had my hands on one of the bilge cocks. If all else failed, perhaps I’d send us all down. In some ways, the thought of surrendering to the warm water was less fearsome than being kicked into unconsciousness by these hoodlums.

  At that moment, a searchlight flashed on from a hundred yards away. Another boat had drifted down on us unseen. Carmelli gunned the engine of our boat, and headed away at full throttle. A loud Spanish voice on a megaphone commanded us to stop. Burton fired a burst back at the searchlight, shattering it. Our boat had an astonishing turn of speed from its twin engines, and I now suspected it was more than a fishing craft.

  I could see that Carmelli was confident of outrunning what might have been a pirate boat, but was more likely a Cuban patrol boat. If it was a patrol boat, and Carmelli was caught, he would be in difficulty explaining his three prisoners, and the quarter million dollars. I assumed he must have stashed the money on board for safe keeping – he wouldn’t have left it in the van.

  To the Cuban coastguards, the scene on our boat would look like a drug vendetta. And I wasn’t sure if it was capable of being explained to the satisfaction of the Cuban government – mistakes and misunderstandings in foreign intelligence services – if Carmelli chose to stop the craft and we were all handed over to the police. What were we doing in Cuba anyway? We had entered unlawfully. Not even the intervention of our own governments could answer that satisfactorily. We would be outlaws in the eyes of the Cuban government, however patriotic our calling.

  Carmelli’s decision to run was therefore the right one, and in any event, once he had fled and returned fire, there was no going back.

  The pursuers didn’t give up, as Carmelli’s cursing confirmed. The persistence of the chase meant that it was a Cuban government boat. Carmelli’s two gunners loosed off more bursts in the direction of the patrol boat, and there was an answering flash of firing. Yarham, Kershaw and I sank down as slugs slammed into the woodwork of the hull and cabin. The pursuer had what sounded like a medium machine-gun firing bullets of around 15 mm, capable of smashing the wooden superstructure of our craft to chips.

  Carmelli, seemingly a desk-bound slob, handled the boat with the verve of an experienced skipper. After a few minutes I spelled out of Carmelli’s oaths that the Cuban boat was about as fast as ours, and it apparently had a radar system that kept it on our course. Feinting and weaving in the dark would not achieve much.

  The Cubans began to open up more consistently with the machine-gun. The deckhouse glass was shattered, and Carmelli wounded. He collapsed in the wheelhouse. Burton took over the helm, and changed course frantically, keeping his head as low as possible, but the patrol boat was always there in the darkness, a nemesis.

  “Help Gino, will ya!” Burton yelled at Harkness.

  Harkness crawled forward, and bent over Carmelli, groping around his throat for a pulse. “Jesus, Gino’s dead!” He looked at his bloody hand and sounded surprised.

  As Harkness was pulling himself upright, Burton jerked the wheel to the left in a violent attempt to shake off the Cuban boat, and Harkness, shocked for a moment by the discovery of his dead boss, was taken off balance as he moved aft. The hull lurched steeply, and it looked for a moment that it might take water and swamp. Harkness let out a choking cry, and toppled over the low transom into the water. His cries were lost in the roar of the engine, and the crack of the patrol boat’s machine-gun.

  Burton, engrossed in the pursuit, did not hear Harkness’s cries. In a few moments he turned round from the wheel to look for his partner. “Where’s Jed?” he screamed.

  “He fell overboard,” I shouted.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, what are we doing?” Burton moaned in desperation, alone with his prisoners and a gunboat blasting his ass.

  Burton was like a kamikaze at the controls of the power boat roaring into pitch darkness. He was howling to himself like an animal.

  Below the open-planked deck which supported us, I had kept my hands on the bilge cock. Being taken by the Cubans had become emphatically the lesser of evils, even if it meant time in a Cuban jail. When there are only nasty options available, the least worst becomes desirable. My thoughts about having ruined my career disappeared. Through the gap between the decking and the hull I deliberately started to turn the ring screw, and felt a rush of cool water as the bilges began to fill. The craft pounded on, but soon began to lose its top speed, and respond more sluggishly.

  The water rose to the level of the deck planking. Burton, crazed, noticed the difference in speed and handling of the craft too late. He left the throttles wide open, and stepped down toward us, seeing the deck awash.

  “We’re fucking well sinking!” he shouted.

  I could have lashed out at Burton with my feet, and it was likely that I could have brought him down, and we three manacled men might have overcome him. Or he might have retaliated, and gone completely beserk. Instead, I shouted, “It’s all over, man. Give up, unless you want to swim to Florida.”

  Burton turned back to the wheelhouse in desperation, shut off the throttles, and hunched over the controls, sobbing.

  The boat heaved to, rocking in the swell, settling deeper. The patrol boat was out there, quiet. Another searchlight lit us. It took five minutes of questions and instructions over the loudspeaker before the Cubans felt it was safe to come alongside. Our craft now had only three or four inches of freeboard. The three of us inside were virtually afloat. I tried to persuade Burton to release us, in case we drowned, but he was too distraught to move. The Cubans eventually persuaded him to act.

  “I don’t have the key!” he shouted. “Harkness had it.”

  I explained to the Cuban lieutenant, with Yarham’s help as interpreter, that Burton and the dead Carmelli had robbed us, and were going to drown us when we were intercepted. I didn’t mention Harkness. Burton could only swear incoherently in response. The Cubans considered the position quietly. They probably didn’t believe me, or care.

  “We take you all into custody and investigate. Maybe you stay in jail for a long time. Maybe years,” the lieutenant in charge smiled.

  That much was true. Months, probably years, in a Cuban jail. Our mission aborted. My career in MI6 finished.
I told the lieutenant that there was a bag of money behind the controls. He waded forward and found it. He opened the bag and saw the profusion of neat bundles of notes. Dawn was lighting the sky faintly. I watched the faces of the lieutenant and his wheelman. It was likely that they had never seen so much money before that they could actually touch.

  “What is this, senor?” the lieutenant asked.

  “My present to you for saving our lives. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You take the money. Put us ashore at the nearest beach, and we will go away. We will vanish, vamoose, never to trouble you again. And please get these cuffs off.”

  The Cubans were impassive, but clearly wanted time to consider, and we were moved from the launch at gunpoint to a lockup cage on the rear deck of the gunboat. We watched the Santa Maria (only now could I see the noble name) go down with Carmelli’s body. The fact that the Cubans didn’t want to save the body seemed significant.

  “Think they’ll buy it, sir?”

  “Wouldn’t you? You’re a coastguard. Maybe you have a secure job and a small salary, but it’s risky work, and you have a family who need things, things you know you’ll never ever be able to provide, and suddenly you stumble across a pot of gold that’s yours for the taking. You see, Yarham, it’s one thing or the other. If they hand us to the police, they have to hand over the money to the police too.”

  “Have to?” Kershaw said.

  “If we were to tell the police that there’s a big sum of money missing, appropriated by the coastguard, the police would be unrelenting in their investigation and surveillance of the crew. These men know that. It’s not worth the pain. On the contrary, if the coastguards let us go, they know we’re not going to come back, or complain about loss of the money. They’re in the clear with the money. As far as they’re concerned we’re running drugs. We’re criminals. We’d only end up in custody if we tried to complain about the coastguards. No, it’s money for them, freedom for us.”

  “Why are they taking so long then?” Kershaw asked.

  “Counting the pile so they can believe their luck, and fondling a few notes to see if they’re counterfeit. Reasoning out the sequence of events I just gave you.”

  Without any further words with us, the wheelman started the patrol launch for the Havana shore at full power. It wasn’t clear to me where he was going for half an hour, until he cut the engine a hundred yards off the Boca de Cojimar. While the boat pitched, the crew put a small inflatable in the water, and a crewman climbed in and started the outboard. Yarham looked at me, his jaw sagged down in a grin.

  The lieutenant spoke to us when the door of our cage was opened. “I’m going to take a chance with you and put you ashore. You’ll end up in plenty trouble if you get in the hands of the coastguard or the police, so don’t get caught.” One of his men with a giant pair of cable-cutters clipped the chains on our cuffs.

  “OK, thanks officer,” I said.

  We had a deal that was cheap at the price.

  20

  I stood on the quay at Boca de Cojimar. It was five in the morning. The low sun had turned the sea to molten brass, and it hushed on the sand. The houses along the front were shuttered and yellow in the early light. A pair of gulls swooped overhead; the quay with its lumpy flagstones was deserted. I was chilled, dressed only in a wet pair of trousers, with a shirt wrapped around my neck like a scarf. I squeezed the water out of the shirt and put it on. We were all stilled for a moment, stunned by our ordeal.

  I whispered to Yarham, “We need to talk to Burton.”

  Burton had not fared well. He had regained some composure, but was still reeling from the death of his partners. He was probably wondering whether to try to break away, realising that we could not be friends. Yarham grabbed him, and then Kershaw helped to hold him. Burton was in no state to resist.

  “We’ll go back to the van,” I said to Burton. “If you don’t have a key, we’ll wire it,” I said. Hotwiring cars was something I had learned while still at the Barmby boarding house.

  Yarham took Burton’s wallet and extracted the money. “We can afford a cab,” he said, waving a wad of notes.

  “If you don’t come quietly with us, we’ll hurt you. Savvy?” Kershaw said to Burton.

  We walked the streets in the direction of the Via Monumental, hoping to get a cab. The streets were filthy and uneven if you had bare feet. We passed refuse trucks, bums asleep in doorways, roadsweepers, sanitation workers pumping drains, but no taxis. We stopped at a stand where a grubby mestiza woman with a pocked face was serving sweet lukewarm liquid from a flask. Her customers were drunks who’d come-to after a sleep on the beach and tramps like us. She was also selling hard little cakes with what looked like dead flies embedded in them; these we declined. But the stewed, milky coffee, nauseating to the well-fed and rested, was like the finest wine to me. She waved a half-empty bottle of aguardente at us, and cackled through her broken teeth. We each took a shot in our coffee for a few more pesos.

  As we walked, clustered around Burton, he showed a willingness to talk which was possibly a result of shock, and the fact that we four all followed the same profession more or less, shared a language more or less, and a culture more or less. He was the youngest of us – I guessed in his early twenties. He was chubby-faced, a baby, and I wondered whether he was a fully trained intelligence agent. He had certainly forgotten a basic lesson about keeping his mouth shut. Yarham started him going with classic questions about home and family, and then on to college and the Central Intelligence Agency. Talking about Mom, and the farm in Idaho, and law school and basketball, was a warm-up for the tough questions he would have to answer later.

  Eventually we got a cab. I had to pay the driver in advance, we looked so disreputable. I asked Yarham to tell him we’d been to a party and gambled our shoes away. When we arrived at Boca de la Chorrera where the van was parked, it seemed to have been left unvandalised. Then a black youth of about twenty came along and held his hand out. He had looked after the van by arrangement with Carmelli, and I paid him off with Burton’s money. My wiring skills were not needed because Yarham produced Burton’s key. We climbed inside, Yarham in the driver’s seat. Kershaw and I got in the back on the tray with Burton. But we weren’t going anywhere.

  Heat had already started to build in the cramped metallic interior, and I pushed my sweating face into Burton’s. “The way this can end for you is that my friend here” – I indicated Kershaw – “takes you to Havana International Airport with a one-way ticket to Mexico City. That’s the best scenario. All other scenarios are ugly. Clear?”

  Burton nodded. I had reasoned that Burton could not be released in Cuba. He would go to the local CIA with dire results for us. The only solution was to ship him out of the country, or hold him incommunicado during our task. In the meantime, he seemed sufficiently disorientated to talk. He had already shown his incomprehension that two intelligence services reporting to the same government should be fighting each other, to the prejudice of their common objective. Yarham had got Burton to understand that our objectives were actually the same as his.

  “What was Carmelli going to do with us? Who did he think we were?” I asked Burton.

  “He didn’t know who you were, just foreign agents trying to screw up our plans. Also I think he was angry about the Penn Avenue break-in, which resulted in his butt getting kicked.”

  “What I told Carmelli on the boat was true. I’m from MI6. We’re here to get intelligence on the terrorists. Do you accept that?”

  Burton hung his head. “Yeah. I don’t see who else you could be.”

  “If you cooperate with us, you get to go home, OK? Will you do that?”

  Burton nodded a guilty assent.

  “Where did the tip-off about the house in Buena Vista come from? Was it street info, or from within?”

  When he hesitated I knew it was an internal leak. He was a kid. “I don’t understand why one outfit is selling out another, shit… I think we got it from MI6. The English guy.”


  I looked at Yarham. “Then we can’t go back to the house,” he said.

  “Or to Neville. How much money do we have?” It was the grand total of Burton’s wallet. “Two-sixty dollars. Enough for clothes and somewhere to stay while we get more money,” Yarham said.

  “Where’s your HQ?” I asked Burton.

  “At the hotel. The Excelsior. We have adjoining rooms with an anteroom. We work out of there.”

  “Plush,” Yarham said, holding up a Ving card he’d taken from Burton.

  “Good. We’ll have a look, later. How many guys in your team?”

  “Just the three – was three.” Burton hesitated and smothered a sob. “We were on our own. Gino felt kinda personal about getting the goods back to Langley, didn’t want a whole mob of local agents crowding in, takin’ the applause. It was goin’ to be a big deal for us three.”

  “Were you in touch with other field agents here?”

  “Only if we needed equipment. They didn’t know what we were doing.”

  “What equipment?”

  “Guns, this van, the boat.”

  “OK, we’ll get some clothes, have breakfast, and visit your hotel. Maybe we can take a shower there.”

  Yarham left us in the van to buy underwear, shirts, trousers and moccasins for the three of us. He returned in an hour. We dressed awkwardly beside the van. When we were passably clothed, I committed the care of the van to the black youth, in case we needed it later, taking the satellite phone with me.

  We found a small café on Calle 4 where we ordered Spanish omelettes, fried bread and coffee. After a silent meal – we were ravenous, we took a cab to the Excelsior, and went up to the CIA rooms which had Do not disturb signs on the doors.

  We entered and our first move was to use the coffee machine to make fresh cups of hot, black Cuban coffee. I set Kershaw to watch Burton, while Yarham and I searched the rooms. “Ask him if he can point us in the right direction. It’ll save time,” I said to Kershaw.