Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit

by Barry, Mike

  For men needed death.

  He picked up the valise and walked slowly away from there. The road, as far as he knew, was only a mile down and he thought that he could find it through the forest. The jeep, hopefully, would be where it had been ditched. It had been a good idea to keep hold of it after all. The jeep would put him on the road toward the capital and somehow from the capital he would find a way out. The airports would be blocked but he would somehow get a private plane, put a gun to someone’s head and get out of there. You could not go as far as he had without going further. Otherwise, it would make no sense at all.

  For Wulff, everything made sense now.

  He got through the forest and toward the jeep. It was not too difficult, at least not as hard as he had feared it would be but it certainly would have been a lot easier with Stevens. That man really knew his terrain.

  XVII

  Taking the jeep down the road he found himself running up flat against a military convoy. He could see the trucks in the distance, soldiers hanging from them, handholds on the slats, looking in his direction and in that instant he knew that there was very little time in which he could judge and control the situation. Hunched over the wheel of the jeep he used his free hand to dig out a pistol, felt the cold metal leap into his hand and then, driving one-handed he made his decision which was to attack by driving on through, take the chance that the convoy had nothing to do with him and that he might be well past them before word got through that he was the man they were seeking. In any country under any circumstance you had to have a kind of blind faith in the continuing and compulsive stupidity of the military. It was a constant. If it wasn’t a constant it ought to be. He kept his head down, shoulders over the wheel, looked as expressionless as possible and wheeled the jeep toward the side of the road, decelerating on the rutted shoulder then to give the convoy the widest possible gap through which to pass.

  The distance narrowed, closed completely and then he was amidst Cuban military. Soldiers hung over the sides of trucks staring absently through the trees, mumbling to themselves. In the center of the trucks men with stripes on their sleeves hung on for balance with an expression no less miserable than that on any of the soldiers. Four of the trucks passed Wulff so closely that he could feel the breath steaming from the soldier’s mouths.

  Then he was past them and moving over a hill.

  He put the clutch in, cautiously shifted up a gear and then drove for speed. The speedometer hovered to fifty but over that point the vehicle seemed to be on the verge of coming apart, bolts and joints chattering within it ominously. Stevens had had this thing at eighty without a shake. Stevens had been a hell of a driver, that was all. Anything mechanical was obviously within Stevens’ strength; it was the question of dealing with people which gave him difficulty. Scratch one for Stevens. Scratch two. A few cows on the roadway far down scattered to the sound of his horn, moving with surprising speed for cows and he drove on through. Then, behind him, he heard the sound of engines.

  He turned. The truck filled with soldiers was behin him no more than a hundred yards. They were leaning out, gesticulating, waving at him to stop. Wulff floored the accelerator.

  Obviously they had found out who he was and at least one of them, functioning as point, was coming on back in pursuit. No rear view mirror in the jeep; he had not even thought to look behind. He had been loping along, dreaming, already calculating his method of access to the airport and all the time they had been closing in.

  If Stevens had been along this would not have happened.

  He would not think of Stevens. If he allowed himself to think of Stevens, it would lead to remorse or regret, or at the very least preoccupation, and he could not afford them now. Also, there was nothing to feel guilty about. If he had not killed Stevens, Stevens would have killed him. He downshifted the jeep, put it in second and floored the accelerator. The vehicle almost stalled, taking power unevenly, groaning, protesting, but then it seemed to come together in a different way and it lurched out of its bind. He was going at sixty miles an hour. Looking behind him he saw that the truck had closed no ground; in fact he might have dropped it ten yards behind him.

  The first shot came. It went well over his head; he could see the projectile whisking, disappearing down the road. Then there was a whole hail of secondary shots, scattering fire on the sides and rear of the jeep, some bullets like fish moving around his head, a firmament. The accelerator could go no further to the floor. Reluctantly, however, the jeep was still accelerating. It was going at seventy-five now and there was no shudder in the metal. Keep it in low gear then; that had been the trick all along. He bent over the wheel, opening ground. Now, on a long, flat rise he was able to maintain speed where the truck could not. It fell behind him and then out of sight. The bullets ceased. Wulff held the wheel steadily.

  He found himself on the outskirts of a small village of some sort. Buildings were closer together; men sat by the side of the road in chairs, smoking. Out in the fields he could see other figures. Toiling on crops no doubt. The village made him slow, he had to do it or risk seriously injuring someone. He was not yet ready to do that. Children in the street scattered before him as the jeep plowed through. The truck was still not in sight behind him. He was going to make it. He was going to get through this.

  A man stood in the center of the road holding a rifle. He raised the rifle and put a long, flat shot across the hood. He was screaming something in Spanish but Wulff did not understand it and then he was atop the man so quickly that the man just barely evaded him, leaping to one side. He levelled the rifle again. Wulff saw all of this compressed into a few seconds that seemed to take place very slowly. Driving away from the man one-handed he reached into his pocket, took out a pistol, aimed and fired.

  The man fell away. Then again he may simply have ducked the shot or collapsed from sight; it was impossible to tell at this rate of speed. He put the pistol away, drove two-handed again. He had either killed the man or he had not. He had either added another to the body count or then again he had added no one. Did it matter? Bodies were all over. Life and death were academic to the people with whom he was dealing now. It was just a matter of getting through.

  He was going to get through. Now, seeing signs, arrows, intersection indications he knew exactly where he was. He was no more than four or five miles from the airport at which he had landed. This airport was a military installation of some sort; it was off the main channels. Good. He would not have to deal with traffic then. He picked up a sign and got onto a two-lane highway. Here, for the first time, there was a little traffic, most of it composed of ten and twelve-year-old American cars but no one took any notice of a civilian in a jeep holding a valise against him with a single elbow as he drove. Wulff wished that he had a hat with which to conceal himself but a hat hardly seemed necessary. Everyone was concentrating on his own destination. Latins drove with complete absorption. No one was interested in him here.

  No sign of the truck. He guessed that he had shaken it for good. Maybe they were investigating the corpse up ahead. The sun was finally going down now—the last sun that Stevens ever saw—dropping somewhere in the mountains. The mountains that Delgado had talked about from which the revolutionaries had come. He took a bypass road and found himself almost immediately dumped onto the airstrip. Compression. Everything in Cuba was smaller: the people, the landscape, the airfields. The lives. The deaths.

  A helicopter with someone in it was revving up near the roadway on a small strip of gravel. Private area no doubt; the military’s playpen. Wulff rolled the jeep down a few yards from the copter, stopped it, yanked up the brake but left the motor running. As Stevens had said you never knew when you might need the thing. He took the valise out from his side, leapt down and carried it over to the copter.

  A man wearing dark glasses was in the cockpit. He looked down at Wulff without expression, then shook his head and went back to the controls.

  Wulff took out a pistol and aimed it at the man, then
held it until the man’s gaze returned and their eyes locked. The man seemed very interested in the pistol. Wulff let him think about it for a while, simply holding it in position. The man’s mouth fell open. His hands fell away from the controls and very carefully he stood.

  “A ramp,” Wulff said.

  The man nodded slowly. He understood English. Good. That was very good. He went away from the cockpit. A hatch opened and a small ramp fell down. Wulff, holding the pistol steadily, struggled with his valise up the ramp and into the helicopter.

  The man waited for him inside. He was trembling. All of his limbs seemed loose, disconnected from his body. Wulff put the valise down, eased it against a bulkhead and then straightened, holding the pistol on the man. “You will do as I say.”

  “Yes,” the man said, “I will do as you say.” His voice was unaccented. Probably American. What was an American doing here? The place was crawling with his countrymen, that was all. Cuba, like Vegas, was simply a place to go when there was nowhere else.

  “I want to go about ninety miles,” Wulff said.

  “All right. I will take you.”

  “I want to go ninety miles north and east and I want no difficulty at all. If you make any difficulty, I will have to kill you.”

  “Not necessary,” the man said. “I have children—”

  “I don’t care about your children. I don’t care about anything except this valise. If you cooperate you’ll get out of this alive. If you don’t I will have to kill you, and since I know how to fly one of these things myself you will not be missed.”

  “I’ll cooperate,” the man said, “believe me, I’ll cooperate.”

  “Fine,” Wulff said, “then let’s get going.”

  The man went into the compartment and did something with the controls. Slowly the helicopter lifted. The airfield fell away and Wulff was looking then at all of Havana.

  “I want no trouble,” the man said, “I want no problems. I will do anything you say.” And all the way up to altitude he kept on talking, talking, inexhaustibly talking but Wulff, holding the pistol easily, listened to none of it but only to the comforting, throbbing sounds of the engines, his mind only on the valise and its destination. He was damned, absolutely damned, if he was going to get into a relationship with any copter pilot again.

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  Copyright © 1974 by Mike Barry

  All rights reserved.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-4238-4

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4238-1

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