“My granddaughter,” Señor Maceo said. “She manages the farm.”
Ray and I exchanged a glance. No wonder she was pissed, and who could blame her? Gramps brings home a couple of Americans shot down by a colonel in the Cuban Secret Police? That decision could land them in jail. I again questioned Maceo’s motive.
Once Señor Maceo got out, Ray pulled back the lever so we could walk over to face the beautiful granddaughter who ran the most successful tobacco farm in Cuba. She literally blocked the top of the steps, so we hesitated. I tried a big smile, which only precipitated another roll of her eyes before she stomped through the door and slammed it.
“Please excuse Nina,” Señor Maceo said. “She takes matters here at the farm very seriously, as she should. I always did …” His voice trailed off.
There we stood—marooned, on the run from the Secret Police or at least Gutierrez, my plane destroyed, and now the spark in a family dispute. What else could go wrong?
“We must eat,” the old man said, “but not until I show you why I brought you here. Come.”
He stepped around us and continued on the gravel drive around the back of the house, without even a glance to see if we were following.
Ray shook his head and scowled. “Now what? A prize cow?”
I hitched my flight bag up on my shoulder and followed after Ray. Señor Maceo paused where the drive split in two directions. Each path led toward a different barn. He waved us to follow him toward the bigger of the two, the one built into the hill.
I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Nina, the granddaughter, watching us out the rear window of the house. Our eyes met and her expression didn’t change, nor did she turn away. I felt like a trespasser.
I picked up the pace and caught up with Ray as the old man struggled to slide the big barn door open. We both pitched in and the door slid wide to reveal some antique machinery inside, with a wall of tobacco hanging behind it. The smell of decades’ worth of dried tobacco was pungent, a rich, deep aroma that produced a sensory rush in the warm morning.
Ray looked at me, then at the ceiling. I got it. He was figuring the old man must want him to fix one of the ancient tractors.
“This is the big barn, where we dry the plants. We have two levels and can handle many hectares at once.” His smile was proud as he looked around the room. “Upstairs is where the finest tobacco is kept, as it is even warmer there. The fumes rise from below, further saturating the leaves as they dry with the evaporated essence of these plants here. Other farmers have built barns to copy this one, but the aged wood and the many, many years of plants drying here cannot be copied.”
“Impressive,” Ray said. I heard his stomach growl from behind him. “Now, about some breakfast—”
“But this is not what I brought you here to see.” The old man paused. His expression was serious, almost reverent as he looked down toward the ground. He grasped his hands together for a moment and suddenly got down on one knee. Was he going to pray?
He took hold of a gap in the floor where a handle was hidden, and lifted a trap door open. Still on one knee, he glanced back toward us.
“I have a secret I have kept in the barn for over fifty years, known only to myself and Nina.” He looked from my eyes to Ray’s and back. “I thought maybe someday someone would come for it, but nobody ever has. For decades while the Beard was in power, I lived in fear of it being found. Now, things are beginning to change.”
Ray tried to look past the old man and into the dark hole.
“I have also thought that maybe there would be a sign of some kind.” The corners of his mouth turned slightly upward. “Last night, that happened.”
“What?” Ray said. “What was the sign?”
“Your plane. When I saw this from the porch my heart began to beat like it hasn’t for many years. Then, at first light, when I followed the coast until I found you in Puerto Esperanza and I saw the small Grumman there on the beach, that’s when I knew.”
“Knew what?” Ray held his palms up.
Señor Maceo lowered one leg into the darkness, turned, and lowered the other. He descended another step, then looked up at us.
“Come and see.”
30
I followed him down into the hole. I could smell earth below me, mixed with the scent of tobacco.
“Wait for me!” Ray nearly stepped on my head.
I could hear Señor Maceo below, his feet now on the ground. It was a pitch-black void with only a narrow shaft of light from above, illuminating nothing. I was surprised at the depth of the room and had lost count of the number of rungs I’d taken. The steps were sturdy and wide, more like a ship’s stair than a typical ladder.
“There’s a light switch over here.”
His voice sounded distant and there was a faint echo in the room, as if the sound bounced back off something close by. Instead of another ladder rung, I felt the ground. I moved aside and put a hand on Ray’s back as he approached the end. Just as he stumbled off, caroming into me, a few light bulbs illuminated the cavernous basement.
I saw Ray’s eyes widen and heard his sharp intake of breath before I spun on my heel to behold the most surprising sight I could imagine.
“I don’t believe it!” Ray said.
I couldn’t speak. This was—
“I’ve had this here since April 15, 1961. Early morning of that day, to be exact.”
“Why does that date sound familiar?” Ray said.
“It was the day that galvanized Castro, and the event that led Cuba into the waiting embrace of the Soviet Union,” Señor Maceo said. “You call it the Bay of Pigs invasion.”
“And this—”
“She too streaked across the sky with smoke behind one of the engines and crash landed, not in the water by Puerto Esperanza, but here in the fields of my family’s farm.”
Ray, his eyes lit up like a child’s at Christmas, reached up and put his hand on the plane’s fuselage. It was peppered with holes, much of its port wing was missing, and the port engine cowling was blackened from smoke.
“A Grumman Goose! I can’t freaking believe it. A Grumman Goose!”
The old man nodded his head. He too had a big smile, no doubt happy to share his half-century-old secret with someone who could appreciate it more than a farm worker might.
“Yours was smaller, no?”
“The Widgeon’s the smallest of the Grumman fleet,” I said. “The Goose is the next size up, then the Mallard, then the Albatross.”
The old plane was painted black but covered with thick dust and dirt from being in Señor Maceo’s improvised hanger for so many years. There were no numbers or markings of any kind, anywhere. I walked around her and checked the damage. The plane lay flat on its belly, her wheels still tucked in place. Several holes, rips, and tears were visible on the fuselage, but given that she had crash-landed, she really didn’t look that bad. The tobacco plants must have provided a cushion. I rubbed my hand along the port hatch until I found the handle. I turned to Señor Maceo, who stood just off my left shoulder.
“May I?”
“Of course.”
I pulled the handle and the hatch popped open. Ray came running around the tail as I lifted the hatch up.
“Starboard engine looks fine,” he said.
I peered into the darkened cabin and saw rectangular wood boxes stacked on top of each other. The flight deck was dark because of the windows being sooted over. The ceiling inside the Goose was a few inches higher than Betty’s, so I had more headroom. One of the boxes was cracked open, and I peeled back the lid.
Wow.
Inside the crate were several guns, but not just any guns. I pulled one out, and even though it was dusty, I could feel and smell the oiled metal.
“What’s inside?” Ray said.
I turned and his eyes nearly popped from his head.
“Is that a Thompson submachine gun?”
“Yep, and if that’s what’s in these other crates, we could start a war
down here.”
There were smaller crates too, which I assumed contained ammunition. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I crept forward through the fuselage to the flight deck.
Oh crap!
I ran and dove out of the hatch and landed hard on the ground between Ray and Señor Maceo.
Ray jumped but the old man didn’t budge.
“What’s wrong, Buck? Looks like you saw a—”
“Ghost,” I said. “The pilot and co-pilot’s remains are still strapped in. Two piles of fabric and bones.”
Señor Maceo said he hadn’t wanted to remove anything from the plane in case the authorities found it. If he buried the dead crew he might be accused of helping them escape. If he removed the weapons, he could be accused of arming dissidents. Had anyone ever come searching for the plane, he’d have shown them where it crashed. But since it was in the way of his neat rows of tobacco plants, he’d used his tractors to drag it into this basement.
“But how did you get it down here?” Ray asked.
I had already spied the answer. There was a set of solid doors on the back wall. The barn was built into a hill on the front, so from there no one would expect a rear set of doors. The old man said he’d nailed boards on the outside of the doors to conceal them after a few years had passed for fear of an accidental discovery by one of the transient workers who might expose his hidden treasure.
“I’m sure these men were important battlefield commanders who were meant to lead the invasion,” Señor Maceo said. “Their deaths led to the mission’s failure. They could be CIA—that’s why I asked if you were. I thought maybe after all these years you had come to look for your compatriots.”
Maybe the old man hoped we were scouts for another invasion. Couldn’t blame him if he wanted his farm back.
“I have never flown on a plane,” he said. “I was just a boy when the Pan Am Clipper used to come here in the 1930’s. Those seaplanes were much bigger.”
“Those were Sikorsky’s back then,” I said. “The Pan Am Clipper was founded in Key West where Ray and I live.”
“I wanted to become a pilot,” he said. “But I was destined to be a farmer, like my father before me.” Señor Maceo had a distant look on his face as if he were back in that time, wondering what his life might have been like had he pursued his dreams. “But when this beauty landed here, well, I imagined fixing it up and flying across Cuba. A silly notion, yes? For an old man like me?”
“We’re all dreamers, one way or another, Señor Maceo,” I said. “There’s nothing crazy about that.”
He beamed a crooked smile. “I knew if I could find you, that you would understand and appreciate this wish.” He paused. “I don’t know why I kept her hidden, but after so long, there was nothing else I could do. Nina always thought I was crazy—”
“You are crazy, Papi!”
Her voice from the darkness by the ladder surprised me. She stepped into the light, and my first, redundant thought was how beautiful she was. She stood next to her grandfather as she gave us looks to kill. My second thought was that I knew why she was so pissed off. Their secret was exposed—and to Yankees, no less!
31
“Can you get this beast out of here?” Nina said.
Ray shrugged. “She’s in pretty rough shape, but we need a way home, one way or another.”
“So you take my beauty, then?”
Señor Maceo beamed as he spoke of the Goose. No surprise there. But for the first time since our arrival, Nina’s eyes lit up. Not only that, she looked at us without hostility.
Ray said, “I think we—”
“Ray, can I talk to you for a second, over here?”
I led him into the shadows by the ladder.
“She’s in seriously rough shape, Buck, but what a great project!” Ray’s voice was loud, his excitement uncontainable.
“We don’t have time for projects.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “If Manny Gutierrez finds Betty, he’ll learn that this old farmer picked us up. We don’t have much time, a day, maybe two max.”
“I’ll never be able to—”
“And I don’t want to restore the Goose, I want to strip her of any parts we need to fix Betty.”
“Buck …” Ray hesitated and looked down at the ground. “Betty’s … Betty’s done, old buddy. She’s in far worse shape than this Goose.”
He looked up in time to see the quick convulsion of emotion that shook me, once.
“But—” The words caught in my throat.
“Truth is, we should take what we can from Betty to fix the Goose. Their specifications aren’t all that close, but depending on how their issues match up, I might be able to pull it off. Just depends on the condition of these engines.”
I took a few deep breaths. I knew he was right. I’d come to the same conclusion last night. And if Betty truly was dead, then I didn’t care how we got off this damned island.
Maybe there was another way.
“What about Truck?”
“Truck Lewis?” Ray said.
“He should be passing by Cuba on his way back to Key West, tomorrow, or the day after. Maybe he could swing in and pick us up?”
“Just like that? Detour into Cuban waters and pick us up lounging on the beach?”
“Damnit, Ray, we saved his ass in Panama. It’s called quid pro quo.”
I looked back at our hosts, who stood with their arms crossed and staring at us. Past them was the Beast, so dubbed by Nina. How could we possibly get that thing fixed enough to fly it out of here? Ray stepped up next to me, his face illuminated by the shaft of light from above. Was it excitement I saw in his eyes? Or awe at the prospect of such a challenge? If anyone could make the Beast work, it would be Ray Floyd.
“When all’s lost, a man has nothing but his heart,” Ray said.
All was lost all right, and my heart was crushed. I took in a long breath.
“Okay, ” I said. “Check out the Beast.”
“Gotcha.” He leapt forward.
We walked back to the farmer and his granddaughter.
“Do you mind if Ray looks the plane over to see if she can be fixed?”
“Does he know what he’s doing?” Nina asked.
Once I explained that he was a mechanic accustomed to working on antique planes, they were both excited at the prospect. Señor Maceo saw it as the culmination of his years of waiting and our arrival as a sign of things to come. Nina was thrilled at the prospect of getting the damn thing gone. But if I could get hold of Truck, there might be an easier way off this island.
“Do you have a radio transceiver here at the farm?
“To call the United States?”
“Actually, to reach a boat,” I said.
“We do have a radio,” Nina said. “It’s in the office.”
“Could I use it while Ray goes over the plane?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Come, I will take you.”
“I’m staying here to help Ray.” Señor Maceo’s excitement had turned his voice singsong.
Nina started up the ladder and I followed after her. I glanced up and was impressed to see how quickly she moved. My eyes were drawn to her rear end—I stubbed my toe and nearly fell—Be careful here, Reilly.
I thought about the secret she and her grandfather had kept so long from the State. It would be a win-win if Ray were able to salvage the Beast and get it off their farm. Assuming we didn’t get caught in the process.
Once outside, the bright sunlight made me squint. In the dark basement so long, I had forgotten it was late morning. We walked together up the gravel road toward the house. Nina wore faded blue jeans and a white button-down shirt that accentuated her dark tan, brown eyes, and sun-streaked auburn hair. The muscles in her arms were evident below her sleeves, and her narrow waist was belted in a thick cocoa leather strap.
“How long have you managed the farm?”
“Seven years now, since Papi’s first heart attack. He ran the operation for nearly fifty
years and remains very involved. He tells everyone I’m in charge, but many of our managers have worked for him all their lives. They will never accept me as the jeffe.”
We continued in silence, the only sound the crunch of our shoes on gravel. The smells of the plantation were strong and fragrant, tobacco the only scent I could identify. The humidity had built with the sun’s ascent and I was sweating.
“Where in America do you live?”
“Not far, really. Key West, Florida.”
“Ah, yes, almost as close as Havana from here. Many from this region have left for Florida.” She sighed. “Only God knows how many made it.”
She led me in a back door of the farmhouse, which turned out to be tidy and spacious. Homes of this size would hold three families in Havana. We walked through the kitchen, down a hall, and into a small room in the front. I was surprised to see a computer on the desk.
“Can you access the Internet?” I asked. Or email?
“Sorry, it’s only for inventory and recording each detail of the weather. We monitor humidity, rainfall, and temperatures, everything that might have an impact on the plants. After five years of study we have been able to predict crop yield.”
Impressive, but it wouldn’t help us get out of here. Behind the desk was an old Zenith radio connected to an antenna outside. She turned it on, and loud tinny-sounding voices burst from the speaker.
“If you have a particular channel you want, you turn this dial. Otherwise, you’re free to speak with the Ministry of Agriculture, who it’s connected with now.”
She smiled and although her teeth were very white, her top front ones were slightly crooked. I found that the tiny flaw made her more distinctive, hence more attractive.
“I’ll leave you alone, but remember, the government monitors all radio frequencies. If you expose yourself, I’ll have no choice but to turn you in. Be careful what you say, and don’t mention where you are.”
She closed the door as she stepped out. She was quite a woman, this tobacco farmer, and under different circumstances I’d have been more focused on her. Not with Gutierrez on the prowl, though.
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