Killing Che

by Chuck Pfarrer

  He had been twenty-three years old.

  From out of the darkness came the sound of the pick breaking up the rocky earth and the chuffing of a shovel. A proper grave was being dug, a meter deep, anyway, and Rolando would soon be buried as befitted a man who’d given his life for what he believed. There would be no graveside eulogies. Guevara had spoken to the men when the column had stopped and the guards had been posted. He’d reminded them that the first to fall in combat was Cuban. He told them that sacrifice would unify them, Bolivians and Cubans together, and unity was the only way their army would grow. What lay before them was more toil and more sacrifice, but all of them knew that.

  What Guevara did not tell them was that he had searched the length and breadth of his heart and found it impossible to feel grief. He was not uncaring, but death had taken from him so many comrades, so many friends, that he had accepted its demands as a matter of doing business. These words, he knew, the others would find incomprehensible, even heartless, and he kept them to himself.

  Guevara had long expected the first loss, but it had come somewhat sooner than he anticipated. That was possibly good. The comrades had been blooded. Now it was important that the men be kept hard at it, and after he’d concluded his remarks, he had them distribute and cook three days’ rations. He told the column leaders that they would be moving soon after moonrise. Guevara planned to march fifty kilometers, up the Masacuri River and then east into the San Marco Mountains. He planned to outdistance and outmarch any army unit sent to pursue them. The mules and horse were again loaded, and all the men had eaten and drawn water. Now all that remained was for the grave to be finished and for Guevara, somehow, to smother the thought that had embroidered itself onto his consciousness: Rolando was nothing.

  There was a voice at his elbow.

  “It’s time, Comandante,” Joaquin said.

  Guevara took the beret from his head and placed it in Rolando’s dead hands. Tuma and Willy pulled the poncho over his face and snapped the buttons all around. Carefully, they lifted the corpse and carried it to the grave. Guevara stood and slipped his rifle sling over his shoulder.

  As the rations were being prepared, Joaquin had set up the radio and listened to the government’s news broadcast out of Santa Cruz. In a conversational tone, he reported what he had heard. “The army claims to have killed nineteen guerrillas.”

  “They always win on the radio,” Guevara answered. “What did they report for casualties?”

  “Thirteen dead, seven wounded.”

  It was curious that the government had revealed a true statement of its own losses. Joaquin continued: “Voice of America is reporting the army has sealed the roads into Santa Cruz.”

  “If they want the roads, they can have the roads.”

  Guevara looked up into the sky. It was gray where the clouds were and blue and silver around the moon. “The moon’s high. We’ll move until daylight, then rest the men. We should be able to find some cattle to eat north of the Masacuri.”

  The word was passed, and the columns moved out. Guevara stood and watched the men go by, nodding occasionally to the shadowed figures as they passed up the trail and into the darkened woods.

  Pombo walked out of the gloom, and Guevara heard his voice.

  “Where is the boss?”

  “Here.”

  Pombo stepped over to Guevara. “Did you find my pack?” Guevera asked.

  “We searched the ambush site, Comandante. It’s gone. They took everything. I’m sorry.”

  Guevara cursed himself. The pack had contained a clean pair of trousers and a uniform shirt as well as extra magazines for his pistol and rifle. More important were his books and some papers. The loss was not irreplaceable; his operational diary and maps were carried on the old mare. But Guevara was certain he’d sent Pombo to the exact place he’d dropped his rucksack. It was likely that the army had recovered it.

  “Did you eat?” Guevara asked.

  “Yes,” Pombo said. “I’ve had plenty.”

  Pombo joined the column and stepped off into shadow. Guevara walked with Joaquin awhile in silence. The platoon hiked past Tuma and Willy, placing the last stones on Rolando’s grave.

  They continued for a while, neither speaking, and then Joaquin said quietly, “I fucked up. If I had put guards farther upstream—”

  “What would be different?” Guevara asked. “Someone else would be dead. Maybe you. Maybe the hunting party. Maybe me.”

  Joaquin shook his head. He was not as unbreakable as Guevara.

  “A commander prepares the field of battle, but he doesn’t roll the dice.”

  “I placed the men on the sandbar—in the open.”

  “And they beat back and defeated the enemy,” Guevara said. “You did your job, friend. Your men did well. Go on, join your unit.”

  Joaquin entered the column behind Tuma, and Guevara stood off the trail watching the pack animals shuffle past. Dark on dark, the men walked past him like ghosts.

  We are nothing.

  Guevara glanced up again at the moon. He held his hand up and looked hard at it. He was shaking, but no one could see. No one but him.

  17

  “YOU GOT LUCKY they were only shooting thirty-caliber. Fat bullets. Cracked ribs are better than being dead.” Charlie said this slowly as he wrapped a long bandage around Hoyle’s chest. Santavanes stood by, helping to hold Hoyle’s left arm above his head and watching him sweat and grunt.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Like Chinese opera,” Hoyle said.

  Curiously, only Charlie laughed.

  Hoyle sat at a long table in the casita at Vallegrande. The house sat on an isolated tract of woodland to the north and west of town. Lighting was provided by kerosene lamps, and a ten-horsepower generator noisily made electricity for the radio and safety lights in a photographic darkroom Smith had set up in the back part of the house. It was a low building, stucco with a tile roof, unremarkable inside and out. It was here that Valdéz and Santavanes had established the comm station, and Smith had decided that it would become their base of operations after the bombing in Camiri.

  Charlie finished binding Hoyle’s ribs and turned him toward the lamp to examine the gash on his forehead. “You have a head like an anvil,” Charlie said.

  Blood was still caked behind Hoyle’s ears, though the wound to his scalp had been stitched in the field. Charlie fiddled with the cut for a few moments, pouring iodine on it, and Hoyle finally shooed him away.

  “How do you feel?” Smith asked.

  “Like shit,” Hoyle said, and he stood and tried to stretch. The pain thwarted him, and Santavanes guided him back to the chair.

  “Jesus,” Hoyle muttered. There was still the possibility that he had suffered internal injuries, though after hiking back to the road, he had been pronounced healthy by a Bolivian army doctor. That meant nothing. Twice during the long, clanking truck ride to Vallegrande, Hoyle had pissed blood. In the morning a Bolivian army helicopter would take him to La Paz, where he was to be examined by a surgeon from the American embassy. Hoyle knew, as Smith did, that it would be a couple of weeks before his broken ribs would heal. Until then he was useless in the field.

  Hoyle was more self-critical than critically wounded, though his chest felt like someone had run him through with a dull shovel. His indignity was not eased by the fantastic tale of bravery told by Sergeant Merán, or the offer made by the young lieutenant to write Hoyle up for a Bolivian Legion of the Condor. Hoyle told Smith plainly what had happened—that they had blundered into the guerrillas and that the Bolivians had melted away at the first shot. Of the fifteen Bolivian soldiers who had accompanied Hoyle upriver, Sergeant Merán was the only person not killed or wounded. Death, once again, had taken Hoyle into its mouth and vomited him out.

  The swirl of adrenaline still gripped him, and as he remembered the firefight for the hundredth time, it seemed he had been transported outside his body. When the images from those terrible minutes flashed to mind, Hoyl
e saw himself as though he had watched the fight from above the trees. He saw himself lift the radio operator from the ground; he saw Merán pull the young soldier away; and he very plainly saw his own figure, a tall man carrying a black rifle, running through the brush, shoulders hunched as the bullets and tracers ripped bark off the trees around him. These memories came back so vividly that for several seconds he was unaware of Charlie standing in front of him, holding a glass of bourbon and a codeine tablet. At last Charlie said, “Boss?”

  Hoyle swallowed the tablet with a shot of whiskey. The bourbon warmed away the tang of blood in his mouth.

  He sat quietly, trying to extinguish the memory of the fight. It could not be said that Hoyle had been unafraid as the bullets flew. Fear snatched at him as it did any person. But fear, especially fear in combat, was something Hoyle had long ago learned how to deconstruct. A quiet sort of fatalism was his armor; even in the moment he was struck down, when the first bullet ripped off the heel of his boot and the second slammed into his flak jacket, Hoyle did not fear. The rest of it was a darkening blur.

  Contact was never as bad as what came after—the empty space behind his heart, the sweat and the sustained effort to keep dreams at bay. All of this Hoyle would try to compartmentalize. This was not done consciously, but as a matter of routine. He had a place prepared for the remembrances of battle, a place without nostalgia, deep and out of the way. This was the mechanism by which he kept the violent moments from having power over him. From the memory of the firefight, he would strip all emotion, boil it down into the essence of tactical fact, a perfectly aloof nugget of history. Hoyle could not know that this method of denial would not work forever—he knew only that it had worked so far.

  As the memory of the actual fight was dismantled, other things surfaced in his mind. It was more difficult for him to forget the confusing, terrifying seconds when he had regained consciousness on the sandbar. Unable to move, hardly able to breathe, he’d heard the guerrillas coming closer, counting the dead and numbering him among the corpses. This was what gnawed him, that confused moment and then the long, dreadful seconds when the shadow fell across him, when he knew the guerrillas were standing over him and all he could do was play dead and wait for the explosion of a point-blank shot behind his ear.

  Hoyle was gradually aware that Valdéz and Santavanes were looking at him. They were not staring, just looking thoughtfully, for both had been in Hoyle’s place. Santavanes knew Hoyle from Vietnam, and Valdéz had worked with him in Laos. They shared history as well as the profession of violence. Like Hoyle, they’d both had to dig graves in their minds.

  Hoyle looked past the lantern’s steady light out the front door. The dusk was a deep shade of blue. In the forest around the house, crickets sang steadily, and somewhere a monkey hooted. Even after the whiskey and the pill, something ached in Hoyle’s guts, burned him like a spark thrown off of a hot fire. It was a plain, uncomplicated emotion, but like a spark, it could expand, open out, and blossom into something complex and soul-destroying. What smoldered within him was a thing more virulent and lethal than fear: It was shame.

  Hoyle had lived, and men in his charge had died. He could not rationalize their deaths. The Bolivian soldiers were cowardly, and when they ran away, they were shot down. They had run and died, and Hoyle had played dead and lived. He was no better than the Bolivian corpses and he held up his glass, and Charlie came again with the bottle, pouring it nearly full.

  It would be Smith’s job to write a report of the firefight, detailing the accidental contact with the main body of the guerrilla force and listing the army’s casualties. After the guerrillas fled, a search was made of the riverbanks. Hoyle had thought it likely that at least two guerrillas were hit, but no bodies were found. In the brush above the river, the army found a rucksack and cartridge belt, the only items, besides footprints and spent cartridges, left by the guerrillas on the field.

  Now the rucksack sat on the table in the main room of the casita. Santavanes snapped open a switchblade knife, cut open the straps, and dumped the contents on the table. Smith spread them out with his hands, and Santavanes sliced his way into each pocket of the backpack, looking for concealments.

  Valdéz was an extremely well-organized man, and he meticulously laid the contents of the pack out on the table. There was a pair of olive-green trousers and a uniform blouse, a pocketknife, spoon, tin cup, plastic bowl, and box of waterproof matches. A poncho and a blue plastic waterproof tarp. Some rope, a hatchet, and a folding shovel. A lensatic compass—U.S. Army issue—two magazines for an automatic pistol, and two magazines for an M2 carbine. There were colored pencils, red, green, and black, a ballpoint pen, and a spiral-bound student’s notebook. The notebook’s pages were blank. These were the tools, trinkets, and treasure of a common soldier.

  Bound up with rubber bands, a green plastic sheet was wrapped around three books. Santavanes popped open the elastic and handed the books to Hoyle. The topmost was a dog-eared copy of Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung, in French. A psychology text was an odd thing to carry into combat. As Hoyle ran his thumb down the back cover, the fly sheet peeled away. Under it, pasted against the end board of the book, was a Paraguayan passport. Hoyle removed the document and opened its front cover. The picture was of a balding, middle-aged man in horn-rimmed glasses. The name on the document was Ramito Belendiz Ramerize; his occupation was listed as trade representative for the Organization of American States. There were several visas stamped into the pages, European and South American travels, but Hoyle dismissed the document as stolen and set it aside.

  He reached into the pile and lifted a small memoranda book bound in fake green leather. He thumbed through it; printed on page after page were columns of three-digit numbers. “Looks like communication codes.”

  Folded in half, and half again, a piece of notebook paper was stuck in the leaves of the little book. A spidery hand had drafted a brief message, acknowledging receipt of something called “Manila transmission 156.” The note was half encoded, three-digit numbers positioned above half the words, a fairly routine use of a communication system called a onetime pad. But under the text and its cipher was a scrawled three-letter signature: Che. The letters were in cursive, all lowercase and slanted up and to the right. They were underlined by a single stroke.

  Santavanes looked over Hoyle’s shoulder at the signature. His voice was hoarse, and it seemed as though his words were never meant to be said aloud. They had simply escaped his mouth.

  “Che?” he said. “Che Guevara?”

  “Bullshit,” Valdéz spat. “That asshole is dead.”

  Hoyle looked at the signature. Perhaps it was half a signature, perhaps someone’s initials.

  Valdéz crowded in and looked at the paper himself. “No” was all he said.

  Hoyle handed the paper and the memoranda book across the table to Smith, who took them both by the corners and held them in the lantern light to peer at them intently. His round spectacles became pools of light.

  “Mr. Santavanes, we’ll need photographs of all of this stuff. Make a transcript of the documents. Cable them urgent to Langley.”

  “You can’t do that,” Valdéz said. “They’ll go apeshit—”

  “They can make their own assessment,” Hoyle said.

  “No one’s seen Che Guevara in public in three years—don’t you think there’s a reason?” Valdéz waved his hand over the little green book, like a magician trying to make it disappear.

  Smith was silent. Hoyle poured himself another whiskey—just half. His ribs no longer ached, and the codeine was making him feel magnanimous.

  “Do you know where he is, Mr. Valdéz?” Hoyle asked.

  “He’s not here. He got killed in the Congo. And if he didn’t die there, Castro killed his ass when he tried to come back to Cuba,” Valdéz said.

  In fact, no one Western intelligence service knew where Guevara was, or even for certain that he had been in Congo. Despite the various and strongly held opinions of its ope
ratives and analysts, the CIA didn’t know. Hoyle was Guevara agnostic; he knew only that whoever commanded the guerrilla column was a master practitioner.

  As the silence lengthened, Valdéz sputtered: “You send that up there, and the Directorate of Operations is going to go hermatile.”

  “The directorate thinks it’s possible there are already Cubans in here,” Smith said.

  “Santavanes and me are the only Cubans in here,” Valdéz scoffed. He was taking this personally.

  Hoyle casually set aside the booklet and the paper. “Three years ago, Guevara gave a speech at the United Nations.” He leaned back slowly in the chair, and his face was lit by the lantern. “The Cuban delegation stayed at the Algonquin Hotel. We did a black-bag job and got Guevara’s fingerprints off a glass in the bathroom.”

  “How do you know that?” Valdéz asked, like a kid quizzing his father about Santa Claus.

  “I was on the entry team,” Hoyle said.

  Santavanes smiled at Hoyle. “Mi hombre,” he said slyly.

  “Bag that stuff and courier it to Langley,” Smith said. “Have it dusted for prints and run against the files.” He used the back of his fingernail to push the items across the table to Santavanes. “If this stuff is Guevara’s, it’ll have prints.”

  While Santavanes gathered up the books and papers, Charlie looked at the small possessions on the table. He noticed that the rifle magazines were .30-caliber—the same sort of bullet that had smashed Hoyle’s ribs. Charlie kept this observation to himself.

  There was another book in the waterproof packaging, a worn-out hardback that had done much traveling. A russet-colored stain sauntered across the cover of André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine. Hoyle lifted the book, and a photograph slid from the pages.