Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  Maybe in a case like this, there really was no “should” or “ought.” Maybe when stresses ran this high—when exhaustion and fear combinedforces—people just reacted whatever way felt best. But God almighty, did they hear themselves, she wondered? Carol was worried about her home and her dog; Uncle David and Papi were worried about their business and employees. She supposed that all those things were bad, but she’d lost her father! She’d lost everything about her life, everything she’d ever known, and they were worried about employees and pets.

  It wasn’t right. None of it was right.

  Under the circumstances, would a comforting smile have been too much to ask?

  11

  Kurt realized with no small measure of distress that sleep deprivation would be one of their primary weapons, and already it was beginning to take its toll. His head wasn’t as clear as it once had been, and he was completely unaware of the time. Curiously, he had a watch, but without a date to correlate to the time, the hands on the timepiece could just as well have been the random spin of a child’s toy. As time wore on, he realized that he was forgetting the previous answershe’d given to questions they’d asked him, and therefore he was hesitating a little too long as the interrogations continued.

  Clearly, they knew he was hiding something, but they still hadn’t been able to figure out what it was.

  Hours ago, they’d transferred him yet again, this time to the San Felipeheadquarters of the DENI. Even from the outside, the squat, sprawling building looked liked the monument to misery that it truly was. Once inside, though, the misery was trumped by terror.

  Gone was the shelter of the desk, replaced by yet another hardbackedchair facing a wall of file cabinets. The questions thus far had been cursory, exploratory. They were still hunting for what they’d actuallyfound in Kurt Muse. Clearly, whoever had betrayed him—and now, he was coming to grips with the fact that betrayal was the only possible explanation for his arrest—hadn’t done enough research to reportit all. But how could that possibly be? How could the PDF authoritiespossibly know to arrest him, yet at the same time not know why they were arresting him? And whatever the incentive for the betrayal—ithad to be either money or privilege, because that was the backbone of all Noriega betrayals—how could it have been realized without all the blanks being filled? It was a puzzle of the worst kind, and he sensed that he was embarking on a trip that would allow him infinite time to consider the possibilities.

  One thing was clear, however: There was something about Kurt, or about his situation, that made these people nervous. He sensed that it had everything to do with some combination of his American citizenshipand the fact that Annie was a DoD employee. Under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty, which the entire Panamanian hierarchy lived in fear of upsetting, local authorities had to treat American dependents with a certain grudging respect. No matter how you cut it, though, it seemed clear that they still had no idea that they’d collared the heart and soul of La Voz de la Libertad. To keep him on edge, to keep him from falling asleep, they positioned a blaring boom box on a table just next to his head. In one of life’s great ironies, the speakers sported the broadcasts of Radio Nacionale—the very station he and his friends had victimized so many times.

  Kurt nearly jumped out of his chair as the door to the tiny office where he was being held burst open to reveal a tough-as-nails DENI interrogator. He entered the room calmly, flanked by two henchmen. The lieutenant held something in his hand, and his smirk betrayed his discovery of information he thought to be valuable.

  “How long did you think you could keep your secret, Mr. Muse?” the interrogator asked in Spanish.

  Kurt felt his stomach drop. The way the man was holding the paper,he couldn’t see what it was, and he wracked his brain to sort through the possibilities. He decided to stall for time. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The smirk disappeared, replaced by a hard glare. He thrust the paperforward so Kurt could see it. “This,” he said.

  Kurt recoiled from the sudden movement and had to position his head just so to read what was clearly a list of names. It took him a coupleof seconds to realize what he was looking at, and when he did, he had to work hard not to smile. “That’s my son’s old Cub Scout roster,” he said truthfully.

  The DENI officer looked stunned, and then angry. “Do not play me for a fool, Mr. Muse. How do you explain this?” He thrust his finger at a notation next to Kurt’s name that said PDC. “You are the Americancoordinator for the Partido Demócrata Cristiano.” The PDC—translated as the Christian Democratic Party—was considered by Noriega to be a group of seditious rabble-rousers, and its members were frequently the targets of Noriega’s henchmen.

  Kurt’s relief was so profound that he could not help but laugh. “It’s a Cub Scout list! PDC stood for Picnic Day Committee. I was the chairman of the Picnic Day Committee.”

  The laughter was a mistake.

  “You think this is funny, Mr. Muse?” The officer’s eyes burned hot with anger.

  Kurt’s smile evaporated. He knew he was in trouble—deeper troublethan he’d been before.

  The officer said to his henchmen, “He thinks this is funny. He thinks this is a game. He thinks he can lie to us.”

  Kurt tried, “I don’t—”

  The DENI officer boomed, “No more lies!” He drew his 9mm Baretta from its holster as he disappeared behind Kurt.

  An instant later, Kurt felt the barrel pressing tightly against the back of his skull, and then heard the sound of the hammer being cocked.

  “You think it’s funny to lie, I think it’s funny to blow your brains out.” He pressed the barrel against Kurt’s head as if trying to push the weapon through his brain.

  The images of Annie, Kimberly, and Erik appeared in Kurt’s mind, their faces clear and beautiful. “I love you,” he thought aloud.

  By late afternoon, the atmosphere in the safe house somewhere in the middle of Fort Clayton had become miserable. A couple of hours into it, an MP had brought by some box lunches for breakfast—chicken patties that had seen way too much time in the deep fryer—and a couplehours after that, a female MP had come by and taken orders for special toiletry items targeted mainly at the ladies. But other than that, nothing but sleep broke the oppressive boredom. With every passing moment, Kimberly felt herself and her brother being pushed farther and farther away from the heart of the family.

  Ski and Mr. Silent were clearly there to protect them from any harm, and for that, Kimberly felt a certain grudging appreciation. As uncomfortable as this place was, they didn’t even get a chance to sit down. It was a little like they were enduring the same hardships as the people they were protecting, except, of course, that they would get to go home tonight to a house they recognized.

  At about 4:30, the front door opened, and five soldiers flooded into the room. Unlike the other soldiers they’d interacted with, these were actually in uniform, unafraid, it would seem, of being recognized as what they really were. In a ritual that Kimberly was beginning to get used to, none of them bothered to identify themselves. The presumptiveleader was the one with the clipboard. “Okay,” he said. “I need to know once and for all who’s going.”

  “Going where?” Carol asked, rising from the sofa.

  The question seemed to knock Mr. Clipboard off balance. “Your next location,” he said hesitantly.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Papi said. David confirmed the sentimentwith a nod.

  The leader’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed the cast in front of him. “Which are the Muse children? The Kurt Muse children?”

  The rest of the family pointed at Kimberly and Erik before they had a chance to point to themselves.

  “Well, you two are going,” the soldier said. “That’s not negotiable. For the rest of you it’s an offer that I strongly recommend you take.”

  “Our home is in Panama,” Papi said. Nana nodded her agreement.

  “Used to be,” the soldier said. “And maybe it w
ill be again, but right now, you are all wanted people. We assume—and so should you—that every Panamanian face out there on the street is an informer,and they’ll go instantly to Noriega and tell him exactly where you are. If you walk out of this house and off of this base, you will be on your own.”

  “I see no reason to repeat myself,” Papi said, and he sat back into his chair. For him, the matter was closed.

  The soldier nodded. “Respectfully, sir, I think you’re making a foolishdecision. I don’t know what your son did exactly to get in this much trouble, but whatever it was, there are a lot of people being yanked out of bed and working overtime as a result. It was big, is what I’m trying to tell you, and General Noriega doesn’t much like big things coming from Americans. This is likely to get ugly, and I have to tell you”—he looked directly at David as he said this—“if I had a daughter the age of yours, I don’t think I’d want her staying some place where her life might constantly be in jeopardy.”

  “You don’t understand,” Carol started to say, but the soldier cut her off.

  “I understand everything I have to understand, ma’am, which is everything I’m told. The rest of it, with all respect, is stuff I don’t care about. My heart goes out to you folks. This must be a terrible ordeal to go through, but here you are. Right now, I think you ought to think about what Panamanian prisons are really like, and decide if that’s the kind of place where you want to spend the foreseeable future.”

  There it was, Kimberly thought, laid out as plain and ugly as it can get, and it was as if all the air was sucked out of the room.

  “Can we have some time to think this through?” David asked.

  “Take all the time you like in the next sixty seconds.” With that, the soldier retreated to a corner near the door to give the refugees some distance to talk.

  When all was said and done, though, what was there to discuss? Nana and Papi were staying; that was a given the moment Papi made his initial statement. Everyone else was on their way. “Okay,” David said, recalling the soldier. “We’re going.”

  The soldier made a note on his clipboard. “Good,” he said. “Now I’d like you all to gather in the kitchen, please.” As he spoke, he placed a hand on Kimberly’s shoulder to usher her in the right direction.

  She resisted. “Nana? Papi? You’re not coming?”

  Nana sat quietly; Papi seemed preoccupied with distant thoughts.

  “We’ve got to go now,” the soldier pressed.

  “But where?” Why was this such a difficult question? Why did everyone refuse to answer? For crying out loud, did they think they wouldn’t find out once they arrived? And then a more likely scenario blossomed in her head. She decided that the soldiers weren’t answeringbecause they themselves didn’t know. She figured that they had ordersto come and tell them to leave. It was probably someone else entirely who actually knew where they were going.

  Carol started to cry. With Nana and Papi refusing to go, they truly were leaving their lives behind.

  Kimberly didn’t want to watch. If they didn’t want to be a part of her life right now, she didn’t want to be a part of their emotions. Keeping Erik’s hand tightly in her own, Kimberly entered the kitchen first, and was startled to see the number of people there. There were eight or nine of the plainclothes soldiers, and all of them looked very seriousand very nervous. The weaponry had increased as well, the pistols of before were replaced with black, lethal-looking rifles—M-16s, she thought, but she was never much into which rifle had what name.

  “We’re going to do this just like before,” Ski said, finding his tongue again, “only this time in reverse. When I tell you to go, I want you to go very quickly down the hill to the waiting car and get inside as quickly as you can. Understand?”

  The young Muses nodded in unison.

  Ski allowed himself a smile. “Good.” He brought a portable radio to his lips and said, “First package is ready.”

  Erik scowled at the terminology, but at a glance from Kimberly said nothing. Frankly, neither one of them had ever thought of themselves as packages before.

  The Skinners entered the kitchen a few seconds later, and Carol gasped at the number of people.

  “Not yet,” Ski said to them before they could form a question.

  “You go second.”

  Ski’s radio broke squelch and a metallic voice said, “Package one, go.”

  “This is it,” Ski barked to the others, and as he held the kids back, the entire cast of soldiers poured out of the kitchen to form a double line leading down the lawn to the cars. It almost looked like an honor guard marking the path to the waiting car for a bride and groom leavinga church, except this guard faced away from the guests of honor, with rifles to their shoulders, looking for targets to shoot.

  “Remember what I said,” Ski admonished, and then he launched the kids with a pat on their shoulders.

  They moved quickly, just as they’d been instructed, despite the urge to take in all the firepower. Erik in particular thought this was pretty cool.

  The car was yet another Toyota, this one a black sedan, and the back door was wide open, guarded by another plainclothes soldier who seemed nervous and intent on looking at everything but them. Kimberly let her brother go first, and then ducked into the backseat behind him. Her knees had barely hit the seat cushion before the door was slammed shut behind them and they pulled away from the curb in a hurry.

  “Stay low,” the driver said. Maybe it was the only words they’d been taught, Kimberly thought.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Erik asked the driver.

  The soldier behind the wheel shifted his gaze into the rearview mirror.“No, sir, I’m sorry I don’t. I only know where I’m going. And when we get there, I want you to do exactly as I say, all right?”

  “Because people are trying to shoot us?”

  The driver paused for a beat before answering. “Something like that. But you’ll be okay. We’ve got a lot of people working to make sure that you’re just fine. You remember that.”

  Kurt’s flash of terror evaporated after just a few seconds. Sitting there in a straight-backed chair in this tiny file room with a gun to his head, he’d prepared himself to die, and then just as quickly knew that the DENI officer was bluffing.

  Invoking the kind of logic that can only be born of desperation, he found himself staring at the flimsy metal file cabinet that stood only a foot or two from the tip of his nose. If the interrogator pulled his trigger,the bullet and Kurt’s brains would be drilled straight through those all-important intelligence files. There was no way they would risk damage like that to the files.

  The moment lasted for ten seconds—or maybe ten minutes, who knew?—but finally the DENI officer spat out a curse and gave Kurt’s head a shove with the muzzle of his weapon.

  Without another word, he stormed out of the room with his minions,leaving Kurt once again by himself.

  12

  There’s an athletic field on Fort Clayton that used to be used for all kinds of activities, from platoon drills to kids’ soccer games. On this afternoon, there were no kids at all on the field. Instead,there were a few soldiers tossing a Frisbee, and a cluster here and a cluster there of soldiers talking. Even at first glance, Kimberly thought that it looked all wrong. Then, when she saw a rifle propped up against a tree near one of the talking soldiers, she knew for a fact that it was all wrong.

  The driver piloted the car into a parking lot adjacent to the field and stopped at the edge of the grass, leaving the engine running. A half-dozen other cars were similarly situated all around their edge of the field.

  “What are we going to do here?” Erik wanted to know.

  “We’re just going to wait for the next part.” The driver shifted his eyes to the mirror again, and Kimberly could tell from the lines around his eyes that he was smiling. “And I think you’ll find the next part to be pretty darn cool.”

  Kimberly heard the choppers approaching before she saw them. It was a d
eep rumbling sound, not at all like the whop-whop-whop of the helicopters you hear on television. As the noise crescendoed, she knew they were getting closer. And then she saw them.

  Three sleek Blackhawks came in hot and low in a wide banking turn, flying nose to tail, and as they flared for landing on the parade field, all those Frisbee tossers and quiet gabbers were suddenly armed with rifles.

  “Your chariots are here,” the driver said, and he dropped the transmissioninto gear. The instant the Blackhawks’ wheels touched the grass, their car was moving. “The first one is for you and your family,” the driver said.

  When the Toyota came to a halt on the grass, a soldier wearing a green flight suit and a green helmet pulled the back door open. “Kimberlyand Erik?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Outstanding. You’re with me. Let’s go.”

  Kimberly then Erik stumbled out of the car and ran to the side door of the chopper, where another crewman was waiting to help them aboard.

  “We get to fly in a chopper?” Erik beamed.

  Behind them, all the waiting cars raced across the field to their assignedhelicopters. They pulled to a stop, and all the people Kimberly had seen in the Provost Marshal station poured out of the doors.

  “Have a seat,” the crewman commanded, and the kids planted themselves into the nylon-strap passenger seats in the middle of the aircraft.The crewman helped them with their seat belts, and then he reached over their heads to find a couple of flight helmets. “You two have to wear these,” he said.

  They were heavy. And huge. “It’s too big,” Erik said.

  “My orders are that you wear them. Nothing says it’s gotta fit.” Said a different way by a different man, the words might have been offensive,but the crewman’s smile pulled it off nicely.