Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  The soldier gave her a hard look and extended a threatening finger. “Stay off the phone.”

  Carol nodded, trying to choke down the fear that invaded her chest and throat. From across the room, her gaze found David, who was already looking in her direction, trying to get her attention. With arched eyes and a nod, he asked her silently if she was all right.

  She wanted to say yes, but she could feel the tears pressing.

  Tomás tried not to think about all that he was leaving behind: his business,his house, his fortune, such as it was. He had his family, and when all was said and done, a man couldn’t ask for much more than that. When they reached Fort Clayton, they would be safe; after that, there would be time to manage the other problems. It was all in God’s hands anyway, and to date the Creator had never let him down.

  Harder to press out of his mind than the personal losses was the terribledread of lost opportunity. They’d been so close. Just one month before all planning and sacrifices would have been worth it. If they could have continued for just four weeks more, Noriega would have been gone, ousted from power by a liberated citizenry. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but that didn’t stop him from being sure. The seeds of bitterness began to take root in his belly, and he tried to smother them. This was not the time. The Lord had led him and his compatriots down this path for a reason, and a good Christian did not question the unspoken plan of the Almighty.

  “Shopette” called for everyone to drive to the back gate at Clayton, and from there to seek asylum. They’d assumed that it would be that easy, but when Tomás and Helena finally arrived, pulling their car off to the side of the road, they found a number of their friends clustered at the outside of the gate, the fear and frustration plainly evident on their faces.

  “They won’t let us in,” Coronado said as Tomás approached. “We asked for asylum, but they won’t let us in.”

  Tomás scowled. Truth be told, no one had thought “Shopette” through to this point; the escape plan had been in place for months, but not one of them had actually considered that they might one day launch it. Surely, if the right people found out that they needed help, then help would come, but that begged a question that now seemed so horribly obvious that he felt embarrassed that neither he nor Kurt had ever thought to ask: Who, in fact, were the right people? And how, precisely, were they to contact them at this hour?

  The first name that came to mind was Father Frank—the mysteriousoperative with whom he and Kurt had met a dozen times to exchange information or to pick up equipment—but that seemed impossible.First of all, Father Frank had no real name as far as they knew, and he seemed to come and go with all the speed and mystery of a ghost.

  Tomás did his best to calm Coronado with a hand on his shoulder. “Let me see what I can do.” Behind him on the road, he saw another set of headlights bloom and watched as Antonio pulled his car to the side of the road and exited to join his compatriots. Yet another car was close behind. If Tomás couldn’t get things straightened out quickly, there was going to be one heck of a traffic jam out here.

  As the MP at the gate stepped forward to greet him, Tomás noticed that the second guard was Panamanian, a member of the PDF. It was common for the Americans and the indigenous military to stand guard together at check points, but the second soldier put Tomás in the positionof choosing his words very carefully.

  “I need to speak to you,” Tomás said in perfect, unaccented English.

  “So speak,” the MP said.

  “Alone, please.”

  The guard shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but this is as alone as I’m authorized to get.”

  Tomás glanced at the PDF soldier, who stepped away as the MP cued him with a nod to do so. Tomás said softly, “We need asylum. We are in danger.”

  “I understand that from your friend,” the MP said, with maybe a twinge of compassion. “But I don’t have the authority to grant that.”

  “Then I need to ask you to find the person who does have the authority.”

  “I’ve called my officer in charge, sir. He’s aware of the situation, and that’s about all I can do.”

  “Can you call him again?”

  The MP answered with a frustrated, helpless look.

  Tomás nodded. Clearly, the soldier’s hands were tied. Like soldiers the world over, this one could only follow orders. Truly, it was in God’s hands now.

  Still, as he watched the PDF soldier pick up the phone in the guard shack and dial, Tomás couldn’t help but hope that God would act quickly.

  Kurt never left the car. Flanked on both sides by silent guards, he watched as the troops swarmed into his parents’ house and tore the place apart. What must they think of him, he wondered. How could he ever apologize? How could they ever forgive him?

  He prayed that they’d had a chance to get away, that the BMW they’d passed on the way in was them. If it had been, then it had been very, very close. Too close. Finally, the clock had ticked to zero. Please, God, let them get the children to safety.

  The search was still underway when they made the decision to move Kurt to his next location. Two additional soldiers he didn’t recognizeclimbed into the front seat, and they eased away from the curb.

  “Where are we going?” Kurt asked.

  No one answered. No one even bothered to cast him a glance.

  What could they possibly do to him? Killing wouldn’t give them what they wanted. Torture him? He supposed that was possible, but to what end? What would they be looking for? The names of his coconspirators?Perhaps, but that assumed that his captors knew that there were conspirators to be found. So far, it still didn’t seem as if they knew why he had been arrested. Clearly, someone at the top of the chain of command must have known, or else there wouldn’t be this full-court press; but by all indications, word of the discovery hadn’t yet filtered down to the level of the soldiers.

  A horrible thought bloomed in his head: Without an endgame for the torture, how would they know when to stop? If he spilled everythinghe knew about everything he had ever known, how would they know it was enough?

  It was a foolish thought, he realized, but foolishness was a close cousin to hopelessness, and he certainly found himself belly deep in a river of that.

  No, he told himself, torture could not be part of the plan. He was far too white and far too American to be subjected to the kind of treatmentthat might befall a Panamanian. And his wife was an American government employee. That had to mean something. Surely the United States wouldn’t tolerate the brutal mistreatment of one of its own. Then he remembered the dozens of stories of violent showdowns betweenAmerican servicemen and PDF soldiers, and how on each occasion,General Fred F. Woerner, the commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command, had ordered the Americans to back down. This was a time of turning the other cheek so many times that the bruises never went away. Kurt had referred in writing to the general as Wimp Woerner.

  Funny how intemperate words came back to haunt you. Now, as Kurt swirled down the whirlpool that his life had become, he had to wonder just how committed he himself would be, if the tables were turned, to saving the ass of a man who had worked diligently to make him look like a fool.

  You can’t do this, Kurt chided himself. He couldn’t afford to sink this low this early. God only knew how long this was going to take to play itself out. It was foolishness to jump ahead into the darkest conclusions.For the time being, he was alive and unharmed. He had no reason to think that his family was any less safe.

  Right now, the worst of it all was the confusion. It was all emotion. No one ever died of emotion. One step at a time.

  He’d almost talked himself into a kind of resigned calmness when he picked up something out of the guard’s radio chatter that made his blood run cold. A group of Panamanian citizens was seeking asylum at the back gate to Fort Clayton.

  8

  The drive seemed to take forever. The BMW sliced through the night like a knife through flesh, Papi’s anger clearly conveyedwith
a heavy foot on the accelerator. No one spoke. In the silence,Kimberly was startled by the loudness of her own heartbeat.

  She thought about asking where they were headed, but decided not to. Saying anything right now would be a bad idea. Erik was frightenedtoo, his eyes huge even in the darkness.

  Why did she have to be alone now? Why couldn’t her mother be home? Why did they have to go away at all? Aunt Elsa’s timing really sucked.

  On top of everything else, Kimberly could feel the exhaustion pressingin on her. She had no idea what time it really was, but she felt as if she’d been up for three days. Sleep, she would find, was still many hours away.

  Finally, they arrived at a military gate. Papi pulled to a stop and ran the window down to speak with the MP on duty. Without any preliminaryfanfare, the soldier asked, “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Muse,” Papi said. “Charles Muse.” He produced some identificationto prove it.

  Pausing just a moment to peer behind the driver into the backseat, the MP unholstered a Maglite and examined Papi’s identity card in the brilliant white glare.

  Over to the right, off the side of the road, Kimberly noticed a gathering of people. They all appeared to be locals, and they all looked scared to death. “Who are they?” she asked to anyone who might be interested in answering. Apparently, she was completely invisible tonight.

  The soldier handed the card back to Papi and stepped aside, and they were allowed to pass. It was interesting, Kimberly thought, that at this hour, and with this much security all of a sudden, the soldier never bothered to ask what their business was. The military posts in Panama weren’t the securest places in the world. Still, you’d think they’d have asked something.

  Nana and Papi had started talking again, but in tones so hushed that Kimberly couldn’t make out the words. They drove slowly, with the high beams on, apparently looking for a particular address. She couldn’t help but wonder just how pissed off the person was going to be when he found someone knocking on his door at two in the morning.

  “Look over there,” Nana said, pointing to the Provost Marshal’s office where she used to work. Squat and rambling, the building was lit up like a soccer stadium. “Somebody’s working late.”

  Papi said something, but again Kimberly couldn’t make out the words.

  She knew they were trying to find a Mr. Chiang’s house—that much she had been able to decipher—and from there, Mr. Chiang would know what the next step was supposed to be. Slowly, one street led to another, and finally they pulled to a stop in front of a house—an upper-end house by base standards—whose every light was turned off. It was as if it had been completely swallowed by the night.

  “Nobody’s there,” Papi observed.

  Nana shook her head. “He has to be. He’s waiting for us. This is the place we were supposed to go.”

  “You can see the same as I,” Papi said. “There’s no one home. This isn’t the place.”

  “But it is,” Nana insisted. Everyone in Panama knew where the CIA chief of station lived. “He has to be home.” Perhaps saying it enough would make it come true.

  “Have it your way,” Papi said. “But it’s clear that he wants us to think he isn’t.”

  Nana scowled. “But why?”

  “ ‘Why’ is the question of the night, don’t you think?”

  “So, what do we do now?”

  The indecision and the confusion in the car raised Kimberly’s fear to a new level. Things that she’d never thought about were happening all around her, and as they tried to fix things, the fixes were falling apart, too.

  Please don’t hurt my dad. The thought appeared out of nowhere and doubled her heart rate.

  “We go home?” Papi suggested.

  Nana didn’t honor the suggestion with a reply. “Let’s go to the Provost Marshal’s office. At least there are people there. Maybe I can find Major Mansfield. He should have some suggestions.”

  “I don’t think I need any more suggestions tonight,” Papi said. “But I could sure use some answers.”

  For Marcos Ostrander, the sound of a telephone at night always portendedbad news. As the chief of international law and relations for the U.S. Army South, he would come to realize that he was the logical choice for the call, but at that moment, pulled out of a deep sleep, all he felt was a terrible unease. These were tough times in the history of America’s relations with Panama, and he’d reached that point in his career where people no longer called him for the little stuff.

  He picked up the receiver. “Ostrander.”

  “Time to go to work, Marcos,” said the voice he recognized as belongingto Major Alan Mansfield. “We’ve got a couple dozen IPs seekingasylum down at Clayton.”

  “Asylum? What the hell for?” This wasn’t Berlin, after all. The bordersto U.S. territory—the Canal Zone, for example—were so porous that they wouldn’t hold a teaspoon of water. Requests for asylum were anything but commonplace.

  “Not on an open line. I need you down here at the fort right now.” The line went dead before Marcos could form another question. He didn’t work for Mansfield, but he owed the man enough favors that when he said jump, Marcos was airborne.

  He dressed quickly in casual clothes and headed for the front door, reminded as he always was when leaving the house, of the morning not yet six months ago when he’d found a headless corpse on his front stoop, a less-than-subtle hint from Noriega for him to straighten up his act. There had been three silver bullets left next to the corpse, along with a note warning that there were other bullets just like them that were meant for Marcos. Just days before, Marcos had learned of rampantcorruption in the Panamanian courts, in which judges were being paid off to pronounce guilt on trumped-up charges against innocent people whose only crime was to be an enemy of Noriega. Corruption exposed, it turned out, was corruption defeated, and Noriega had raised graft to too fine an art form to have it defiled by some U.S. Army lawyer.

  General Bernard Loeffke, Marcos’s boss, had gone through the roof when he learned of the threat against a senior member of his staff. MajorMansfield had been the one to deliver the message to Captain Cortizo,a senior aide to Noriega, that if Marcos so much as developed a hangnail in the immediate future, Noriega would be held personally accountable and would pay a devastating price.

  For the next two months, Marcos had traveled like the president of the United States, flanked day and night by armed guards. Noriega took his own sweet time, but ultimately he made it clear that the threat against Marcos had been lifted, and slowly things had returned to beingas close to normal as anything ever was in this part of the world.

  As in getting up at an unspeakable hour to tend to Panamanian defectors.The very notion still made his head spin.

  The Provost Marshal’s office was packed wall to wall with people who all seemed scared to death. Outside, Kimberly had noted more guns among the American soldiers than she was typically used to seeing duringher occasional trips here to visit Nana. Even the soldiers seemed kind of jumpy. Had she paid better attention, she would have noticed that the office had been purged of all Panamanian soldiers and workers.Some of the frightened civilians looked familiar to her and she wondered why, until she remembered the cluster of people she’d seen outside.

  On entering the front door, the Muse family instantly became the center of attention. Soldiers on the inside moved quickly to greet them and then to split them apart. “Come with me,” a young soldier said, gesturing for Kimberly and Erik to follow.

  “We’re with my grandparents,” Kimberly said.

  The soldier seemed not to hear. Nobody seemed to hear her tonight.

  “Please come with me,” he said. Somehow the “please” seemed to have a threatening undertone.

  Kimberly followed—as if there was a choice—trying to catch her grandparents’ eye as they moved in another direction. If they saw, they made no indication.

  The Panamanians from the gate watched as Kimberly and Erik followedthe soldier to a back ro
om, and Kimberly found something creepy in the intensity of their collective gaze. It was as if they recognizedher, but none of the faces were familiar. What was happening? The whole night was turning into an episode of the Twilight Zone. That kind of attention from strangers was horribly unsettling.

  But they weren’t all strangers. There in the back of the crowd was a face she did recognize. It was Jorge Quintero, the man who had called to see if her father was home. Just like that, a circuit closed in her brain and the fear ratcheted up another twenty points. All these people—the men, women, and children—it looked like several dozen of them—were here because of her father. Somehow, his arrest had scared this many people, and how many more?

  Her mom had told her on the phone that her dad had been into some things, but good Lord, what could cause this much disruption to so many people?

  The soldier took the kids to a tiny windowless office and invited them to sit in the available plastic chairs. Kimberly assumed that the soldier locked the door as he left, but because she had no place to go, she didn’t bother to check it.

  Daddy, what did you do, she asked silently.

  9

  Marcos Ostrander sat quietly in a chair off to the side of Mansfield’s desk while the major tried to talk sense into Charlie and Peggy Muse.

  “This is ridiculous,” Charlie said for the dozenth time. “This is my home. I have a business here. I can’t just go into hiding somewhere.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice, sir,” Mansfield said in a tone that was at once firm and respectful. “In a few minutes, or a few hours, when you step outside this office, I won’t be able to protect you. And without protection, you will undoubtedly be arrested.”

  “On what charge? I’ve done nothing wrong. We still have laws in this country. We still have attorneys.”

  Marcos saw the statement as his opportunity to say something. “I am an attorney,” he said. “And with all respect, the Panama you describeno longer exists. It’s no longer about what you did or did not do. Right now, it’s about using you against your son, and when they’re done doing that, they’ll charge you with whatever they want and manufacturethe appropriate evidence to convict you. All it takes is a wink and a nod from General Noriega, and a lengthy sentence is guaranteed.”