Remo's bright expression darkened. "Sounds like Dracula's castle. Where is this place?"
"It is a surprise."
"Uh-huh."
They drove along in tight silence. At length, the Master of Sinanju broke it.
"What do you think of this province?" he asked.
"Florida?"
"Whatever it is called," Chiun said with a vague wave.
"Well, it's hot and steamy where it's not dank and swampy, heat rash is a big problem, the cockroaches are almost indestructible but not as bad as the snakes and gators, and there are the hurricanes."
Chiun looked over. "You prefer a northern clime?"
"Just so long as we're talking south of the North Pole," Remo said.
"My native Korea is not hot like this place. But one could get used to the heat. If one had a suitable cool place in which to dwell."
"Castles aren't cool. They're dank."
"The castle I would dwell in will be cool," Chiun sniffed. They followed their headlights back into the swamp. When the road petered out, they got out and started across the swampy terrain. The air was moist yet unseasonably cool. Katydids chirred amid the bullfrog croakings. Red eyes low in the water told of lurking gators.
The Master of Sinanju's black silk kimono became a flitting thing in the darkness, like an ebony bat on wing. Remo, also in black, moved easily between the cypress trees, avoiding when he could the watery sloughs and, at all costs, the black, sucking muck. Even in the water, their feet made no sound warning of their approach.
A bull alligator, like a floating log, turned up in their path.
The Master of Sinanju simply stepped onto his ridged reptilian back and, pausing only to drive a heel into his skull, moved on.
Remo leaped onto the gator's back and off again before it could sink in death.
The moon ghosted out of a thin boil of fast-moving cloud cover, and just as swiftly fell behind a patch of haze to shine, mistily and eerily quiet, through a dome of Spanish moss-draped cypress.
Remo and Chiun paused when the moonlight found them. They waited. In the silence, an egret took wing.
When the moon had faded behind fatter clouds, and the deep of the night returned, they resumed their silent progress.
The base camp of Ultima Hora was a dry highland surrounded by mangrove-festooned sentries, standing ankle-deep in stagnant water.
The Master of Sinanju drifted up to one of these men and broke his neck with a short chop to the base of his skull.
Remo caught the body and held the head underwater until the last air bubbles had ceased tailing upward.
They moved on, unchallenged.
The first time they were escorted to the camp, the guards had been clustered together, waiting to escort them in.
This time they were spread out in a circle surrounding the base camp. A common defensive posture, and one Sinanju had long since learned to defeat.
"Walk the circle," Chiun intoned.
With a silent nod passing between them, Remo went north, and Chiun south.
Each time they encountered a guard, they took him down. Not a shot was gotten off. Then they met at the opposite point of the circle. It took all of three minutes.
"The circle is closed," Chiun intoned.
Remo bowed.
They moved into the base camp.
There was no rattle of gunfire. The Castro dummies lay slumped on their stakes, faces torn, mossy beards askew.
Remo and Chiun moved in utter silence, their every sense alert.
All human signs of life seemed to be clustered in the tobacco-drying shed.
"I will go ahead," Chiun said. "You will guard."
Remo hesitated. His face stone, he said, "No."
Chiun turned.
"This must be done," he said coldly.
"It will be," Remo agreed. "By both of us."
The Master of Sinanju nodded quietly. Together they advanced.
Then, without warning, came the rip and pop of automatic weapons fire.
Splintery holes pocked the rude sides of the shack. The incessant chirr of katydids fell still.
The two Masters of Sinanju dropped flat on the dry ground.
Rounds whistled through the Spanish moss, making clip clip clip sounds punctuated by the creak and snap of fractured cypress branches.
"Sounds like we have a firefight on our hands," Remo growled.
Without warning, a door banged open. Remo and Chiun froze, two black shadows against the dark mossy earth.
Out of the powder smoke came a man, his body awash in the metallic scent familiar to assassin and soldier alike.
Blood.
The man paused on the open veranda, yanking an empty clip from his FAL rifle and slapping home a fresh one. He set the butt plate against his hip, moving the barrel this way and that with casual confidence.
They watched his face. It resembled sculpted brown rock inset with two black eyes that held no more expression than the buttons on an old coat. Shadows made his identity impossible to ascertain.
Nothing happened.
"Is he such a fool, that he thinks we will show ourselves?" Chiun undertoned.
"I don't think he's waiting for us," Remo said.
The wrinkled face of the Master of Sinanju grew more wrinkled still. His hazel eyes narrowed, like those of a thoughtful cat.
The salt scent of blood hung in the moist, humid air like a portent.
Chiun nodded. Remo knew then that he understood.
They waited.
The man in the camouflage uniform stepped off the shack step reluctantly and strode out into the night. A stray shaft of moonlight caught his face and they could see him clearly.
Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla. His eyes were hard, but a sad moistness hung far back in their liquid depths.
He strode out into the swamp and, like two fugitive rags, Remo and Chiun followed.
Zorilla moved with the stealth of a trained soldier.
But to the two Masters of Sinanju, he might have been an elephant dancing on its hind legs. His boots made rude splashes and crinkled undergrowth. Insects and frogs darted from his path, to come to resting places that were not abandoned even as Remo and Chiun moved stealthily by them.
Zorilla came upon the first fallen sentry. He muttered something under his breath. Then he moved on, searching.
When every body had been found, his manner grew strained. He walked more slowly now, with less care, but with long strides that turned his body a complete revolution every few feet so that the FAL muzzle, like a radar antenna, could sweep the night all around him.
They followed him to a point behind the dry hump of land, a stretch of seemingly open water. Yet Zorilla strode into it seemingly without fear of the cottonmouth moccasins that glided along, leaving V-shaped wakes.
His soldier's boots barely sank into the water.
They followed, staying low.
At the mangrove clump where Zorilla had stepped into the water, they paused.
Remo slipped a hand into the stagnant water. It was warm, pungent with life. Barely an inch beneath the surface, he felt the sliminess of submerged wood.
"Walkway," he said softly.
The Master of Sinanju nodded. Without a word of communication, they slipped beneath the water and moved through it with the soundlessness of swimming manatees.
Eyes adjusting to the lack of light, they used their ears to follow their quarry. His boots made the walkway creak, and the sound carried perfectly.
A cottonmouth, gliding along the surface, suddenly dropped toward Remo like a coil of discarded rope, its jaws distending.
Remo reached up and grasped its head, forcing the jaws together and the brittle skull apart. He released the limp reptile, shedding a cloud of blackish blood, and swam on.
When the ground began to slope upward they hung back, releasing air bubbles one at a time, three per minute, so as not to betray their position.
The creaking ceased, so they let their natural buoyancy carry them surfaceward.<
br />
Two heads broke the calm swamp surface as one. Two pairs of eyes scanned the night.
They saw a lone figure vanish between tangles of cypress, and not long after heard the sound of a car engine disturb the night. Headlight glare flared and then swept around, casting elongated shadows that made the world seem to be turning on a plate before their eyes.
"Let's go," Remo said.
They left the water erect, not seeming to hurry but moving with urgent speed nonetheless.
They found the road and spied the retreating headlights.
They were other vehicles parked there. Cars. Trucks. They picked one of the former. Remo popped the ignition with a skill picked up in the Newark streets of long ago, and soon they were following the car at a careful distance, lights doused.
They drove with a wide silence between them.
Remo broke it after a while.
"My money says Zorilla wiped out Ultima Hora."
"You may keep your money," Chiun said.
"He must have woken up and called someone."
"Obviously he woke up."
"That someone heard we were sniffing around, and ordered the operation terminated," Remo went on.
"A wise someone."
"This still smells of the CIA to me."
"I only smell blood and the lack of proper credit," said Chiun.
"Those guys back there were patriots," Remo said bitingly. "I don't care what anyone says."
His dark eyes, fixed on the moss-draped road ahead, were like pools of death.
"We may be on the same side, but I want the guy who gave that order."
"Beware of what you hope for."
"Why?"
"Because you may receive it," said Chiun, his yellowed visage tight with the wise webs of his years.
Chapter 11
Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla drove north through the Florida chill without expression. His face was stoic. He was a man. A Cuban man. As such, he was machismo personified.
Machismo left no room for regrets, never mind tears.
Still, the tears came. He could not help them. He was a soldier true. And a soldier followed orders.
But to slaughter his own men? The hope of Cuba's future? He let the tears flow. For Guillermo the brave. For Fulgencio the sly. Young men who knew Cuba only from TV travelogues and tales told by fathers and uncles. Young men who would liberate Cuba and return it to the welcoming arms of the world.
Caught unprepared, they had died shamefully. They never dreamed their own commander would turn on them and slaughter them so cruelly.
It had happened after they had aroused him from his state of unconsciousness.
"Que? What happened?" he asked.
"It was the two. The Anglo and the other," had said Jose. He of the quick smile and killer eyes. "They did this. We could not stop them, comandante mio."
"Why not?"
Ruefully, they displayed their injured hands.
"We can no longer hold our rifles, comandante," Roberto said miserably.
Zorilla was helped to his feet. He examined their fingers. Some were broken. The trigger fingers. It was as if these intruders who claimed to have been sent by Uncle Sam had set out to maim them.
"Give me a rifle," said Comandante Zorilla.
They scrounged up a single FAL whose barrel had not been bent.
He took them out to the target range and tested each of them. They could not squeeze triggers, except with their thumbs. Not that they did not try. They nearly shot one another trying, for they were very determined, this new generation of Cuban youth. At that moment, Zorilla felt a sad wave of pride in them.
When the last had failed even to strike a target, they stood about like castrated bulls, droopy of shoulder and morose of eye. Men. But not warriors. Some furtively brushed tears of shame from their eyes.
"What will we do?" asked one.
Zorilla had to clear his throat twice before he could answer. "I must contact Uncle Sam."
They all agreed this was for the best. Comandante Zorilla left them to deal, hot-eyed, with the pain in their Cuban hearts while he made the telephone call.
In the privacy of the tobacco shack he dialed the number that existed, unextractable, in his trained memory and no place else.
"Zorilla reporting," he said stiffly.
"Go ahead," a gringo voice said. There were orange blossoms in that voice. It was mellow, and laced with the mild southern accents of Florida.
"Ultima Hora must stand down."
"Repeat report."
"Ultima Hora has been rendered ineffective by two agents."
"Agents of whom?"
"They say Uncle Sam send them."
"Describe these agents."
Zorilla rattled off the descriptions with spare clarity.
"One moment," said the mellow phone voice.
The line hummed. Bullfrogs croaked in the swamp, and the tireless katydids made reedy music.
The clicking signaled the return of his immediate contact.
"Uncle Sam sent no agents. Repeat, the two you describe are unknown unfriendlies."
"The timetable must be abandoned until my men can heal."
"Negative. Timetable cannot be shelved. The MIG incident is driving events now."
"But what do I do?"
"Ultima Hora was first wave."
"I know. I am heartsick."
"Redundancy has been built into the plan. A new first wave must be set in place, and trained by you."
"But what will I tell my men? They live for this."
"We have to assume training camp compromised irrevocably. Return to headquarters for debriefing and new orders."
"But my men . . ."
"Must be decruited."
Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla's eyes went stark.
The code word had been agreed upon. Zorilla had agreed to the "decruitment" option. But never had he believed he would be forced to implement it.
"But-"
"You are a soldier. Execute instructions and report for further duty. Word comes directly from Uncle Sam."
"Si, si," muttered Comandante Zorilla into the suddenly dead telephone. Through the rush of blood to his ringing ears he never heard the receiver click.
Woodenly, he hung up, adjusted his insignia-less uniform, and picked up the sole working rifle within the sentry perimeter.
He called in his men, stood them at attention, and with the suddenly too-heavy rifle held loose in the crook of his arm like a duck hunter's, began a speech.
It was a long speech. About duty, about honor, about Zorilla's deep feelings for his men. There was sadness in his voice as he spoke, sadness in the faces of his soldiers. They knew they were to be taken off active duty. A few flinched. They steeled themselves for the actual words when their comandante, circling them on dull feet, lifted his rifle and let the shameful bullets erupt one at a time.
They fell in the time it took for a string of firecrackers to become torn red paper.
It was necessary. It was also shameful. Because he could not bear to see the looks in their wounded eyes, Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla had shot them all in the back.
Then he had gone out into the night to silence the sentries. Finding them already dead, he had fled.
And now he drove through the frosty Florida night, the firefly-like love bugs bouncing off his windshield, making noises like castoff peanut shells caught in a windstorm.
The sound reminded him of the sand against the windows of his comandancia office back in Santiago de Cuba.
There, Comandante Zorilla had been Deputy Comandante Zorilla of the Cuban Air Force. He had been a boy the day Fidel had taken the capital.
It had been a jubilant day, and when Fidel had put the nation under arms, Zorilla, a teenager, had been glad to shoulder them. On each May Day he had taken up an actual rifle and shot at rocks along Jibacoa Beach, pretending they were the helmets of crawling Yanqui Marines.
It was an exciting time to be Cuban.
He enlis
ted in the Air Force when he came of age. Flew patrols and escorts for Soviet ships. Then-Capitain Zorilla had been so valuable a pilot that they would not send him to Angola to support Socialism there.
It had been the bitterest of disappointments. Until his comrades began to filter back, telling tales of African ingratitude and the wasted lives spent defending a nation that did not care about itself, never mind Cuban sacrifice.
Capitain Zorilla had dismissed these grumblings, for he believed.
He believed even as Cuba peaked in the mid-1970s, all the while suffering horrendous losses in its fight for ungrateful peoples all over Africa.
He believed through the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, because Fidel had told him this was no superpower adventure, but a necessary defense of Socialism. Even as the Hind gunships massacred simple goatherds, Fidel had vowed this.
He believed when younger Cubans were sent to Grenada and were hurled back like toothpicks, heartless and cowardly, by U.S. Rangers.
He continued to believe as, one by one, the Warsaw Bloc fell, not to aggression or war, but to internal discontent and ineptitude.
Slowly, Leopoldo Zorilla had been forced to surrender his ideals. He visited Havana every year. Every year Havana remained static, the streets choked with inferior Soviet cars and proud pre-revolutionary American cars. The buildings decayed and declined. And no new buildings were built. It was as if Havana-and all of Cuba-were frozen in the late 1950s, not progressing, only deteriorating.
The rations grew steadily worse. Meats became scarce. The Berlin Wall fell. Germany was reunited. The world was at last emerging from a long political Dark Age.
Yet the regime only grew more strident, more uncompromising.
When three Miami-based exiles were captured attempting to make contact with Cuban dissidents, a Popular Provincial Court sentenced them to death. But it commuted to thirty years the sentences of the two who had been born in Miami to exiles. The third, a defector, had been summarily executed by firing squad. Even in the worst days of the Cold War, this had not been done.
The Council of State had given as the reason the doomed man had deserved his fate that he had "enjoyed the fruits of the Revolution, then betrayed it."
In the meantime, under Option Zero-the Presidential decree that required all members of the armed forces to forage the countryside for their own food-Comandante Zorilla had taken to eating banana rats, which he caught in traps because the state's meat-mostly Bulgarian chicken-was so bad. So much for the "fruits of the Revolution." Still, he had reasoned, it was better than eating alligator, as some did.
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