Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  The consensus was that they had finally arrived at wherever they were going, but consensus brought no comfort. A number of Kimberly’sPanamanian counterparts speculated aloud that they were goingto jail, that their lives were ruined forever. Children started to cry.

  Kimberly said nothing, but those predictions of gloom didn’t sound right to her. If they were going to be sent to prison, it seemed a lot easierjust to do it and get it over with. God knows there were prisons in Panama. What was the sense of a long plane ride just for that?

  Besides, Kimberly had done nothing wrong. She supposed there was an argument to be made that these Panamanians who had apparentlyviolated the same laws as those broken by her father might be eligiblefor prison, but certainly not she and Erik. She’d figured all along that that was the whole reason for them being on this flight in the first place—to avoid going to jail.

  Another panicky theory among the Panamanians was that they were all going to be killed. Again, Kimberly thought, killing them would have been the easiest thing in the world, and accomplishing it didn’t require any of this enormous effort.

  No, Kimberly was comfortable with the notion that they were beingsaved from whatever danger had lain for them back in Panama, and she was likewise convinced that what she’d overheard was probablyright—that they were all being taken to the United States. Now, what might happen from there was anybody’s guess. She could only assumethat the plane was going to land somewhere near West Palm Beach, where her mother was staying, that Mom would greet them at the airport, and that the world would once again look like something that was at least close to being normal.

  It was funny, when she thought about it, how being normal had had no value to her at all until all semblance of normalcy had been stripped from her life.

  The moods of the conspirators continued to sink with each foot of lost altitude. Finally, the loadmaster returned to address the group.

  “All right, everybody listen up because I only want to say this once.” He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the engines. “We are approaching our final destination. When we land, I will tell you to join hands just as you did before, and I am going to ask you to exit the aircraft in an orderly fashion. You are in no danger, so I’ll remindyou to stay calm at all times. Are there any questions?”

  Hands went up everywhere. Someone asked, “Where are we going?”

  The sergeant just stood there, his hands on his hips, looking disgusted.“Are there any questions that I can answer—about the mechanicsof getting off the aircraft?”

  All the hands disappeared.

  Seeing no further questions, the sergeant gave a satisfied nod. “Very well, then. We’ll have you on the ground shortly.”

  And he meant shortly. Kimberly had been on many commercial flights in her fifteen years, but never had she experienced an approach like this one. After some minutes of gradual descent, the pilot nosed the aircraft forward and poured on the power. But for the seat belt cinched across her lap, she might have bounced off the ceiling. Withoutwindows to get her bearings, it wasn’t out of the question that they were crashing. About the time that she was ready to concede that that was exactly what was happening, the plane leveled off and the engines throttled back.

  They landed as if to leave a belly print on the ground, the impact jarring everyone, and igniting a chorus of frightened screams among them all. A second after the impact, the pilot hit the brakes and reversedthe thrust on the props in a deceleration that would have left skid marks if it happened on a street somewhere. Within no time at all, they’d rolled to a stop, and then Kimberly sensed that they were turning around, pivoting on their own axis until they were facing the other way.

  Now the fear in her belly bloomed large. Wherever they were going,they’d finally arrived. Dreaming and guessing no longer mattered. All that mattered now—all she had to cling to now—was the simple truth of reality. Frankly, it sucked.

  But there was precious little time to think about it. Seconds after they’d stopped, the rear cargo door started to lower, introducing a new level of noise to the already deafening humid air, and Sergeant Somebody-or-Other reappeared.

  “Up!” he shouted. “Come on, everybody up. On your feet.” He repeatedthe command in fractured Spanish.

  They all stood.

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, link up again, hand in hand. Everybody gets a partner, nobody gets left behind.” As he spoke, he walked to Kimberly, who, because she was first to board, was closest to the front of the aircraft. He put a hand on her shoulder and escorted her past all the others, back to where she was first in line again. Erik hung on to her tightly.

  “When I say go,” the soldier continued, “this young lady will lead the way out. Do not stop, do not slow down until you are at least fifty yards away from the rear of the aircraft. Stay together, don’t break the chain, and everything will be just fine. Any questions on what I just said—and I swear to God I’ll smack anyone who asks where we are.”

  They all knew better. What would be the point? Questions never brought answers anyway.

  “All right then. Go!” He gave Kimberly a gentle push; not a shove, really, but enough pressure on her shoulder to let her know there was more where it came from if she decided to resist.

  Still barefoot and wearing only the shorts and T-shirt that she’d had on since she couldn’t remember when now, Kimberly had to walk carefullyon the steel ramp to keep from stubbing a toe or even losing her balance. It seemed steeper on the way out than it did on the way in.

  She led the way into total darkness. The immediate area was lit like daylight from floodlights shining down from the back of the C-130, but beyond that, there was nothing but night. And it was a chilly night, at that. Much colder than an evening in Panama. But the humidity was all there. With the lower temperatures, the humidity felt like a chilled, wet wool coat.

  At the bottom of the ramp, she found what must have been a runway.It was a paved surface, certainly, and despite the cold darkness, it still radiated the heat of the day. As soon as they hit bottom, Erik tried to stop, but she jerked him along. “He said we have to keep walking.”

  “To where?” he demanded. It was dark out there. And not dark the way it got in Panama City in the nighttime; this was dark like in a cave. At night. With a blindfold on.

  “There must be something,” Kimberly said. “They wouldn’t send us out here if there was nothing.” As she spoke the words, she wonderedwhether she even believed them herself. Turning around, she saw that they were all still together, every one of the people she’d seen in the waiting room of the Provost Marshal on Fort Clayton was still with her, the farthest away already halfway down the ramp.

  Kimberly kept walking, just as the sergeant had told her to do. All she saw was night, and all she heard was the roar of the C-130’s engines.

  Maybe the sergeant would come clean with some details once they got settled out here.

  Where was the sergeant, anyway? Still walking, she turned around to face the crowd to see if she could catch a glimpse of him. What she saw made her heart seize. She could see him, all right. He was still on the plane, apparently still keeping an eye on them, as the back ramp started to close again.

  She stopped cold, right there on the sandy tarmac, nearly causing a chain-reaction collision with the others.

  “Kimberly!” Erik protested. “What are you—” His eyes followed her gaze and his grip tightened. “They’re leaving us?” The others turned around, too, their faces unbelieving.

  The C-130 started rolling even before the ramp was all the way closed. As the propeller blades bit into the air, the entire atmosphere seemed to rumble with the power of the engines. The prop wash createda hurricane of blowing sand and debris, causing all the refugees to shield their eyes, but none of them could stop watching.

  The plane moved surprisingly fast for such a big bird, shrinking in size as it raced away from them. As the nose rotated up for liftoff, the giant flood lights in t
he rear were extinguished, and the entire plane disappeared, leaving only the quickly diminishing sound of its engines.

  Soon, the absolute darkness was joined by absolute silence.

  15

  After the torture of the Colombian in his presence, they’d left him alone for a while in that tiny office, facing the cabinets, with the ever-present boom box blaring. Soon, they came for him again and escorted him out onto a balcony that overlooked a walled prison yard, where gaunt, forlorn prisoners gathered for what might charitably be called recreation. Maybe fifteen by twenty feet in size and topped with coils of barbed wire, there was no room for any real exercise even if it was empty. As it was, however, cramped with thirty or forty filthy men wearing the tatters that might once have been clothing, there was nothingto do but pace and smoke foul-smelling cigarettes.

  The message here was every bit as simple as the message delivered by the torture. This was Kurt’s future. In a few short hours or days, he would be one of these men, and the thought terrified him. As the prisonersin the yard looked up and made eye contact with him, it occurredto Kurt that these men were no longer men at all, not in the traditional sense that civilized people view such things. The humanity had been drained from them all—or beaten or starved out of them, perhaps—and all that was left was the basic survival instinct. As they gathered below to stare at him, they pointed and talked among themselves.Kurt couldn’t help but think of buzzards circling the sky, waitingfor a crippled animal to finally expire.

  That would not happen to him, he told himself. No matter what, he would find a way to preserve and maintain his dignity, even in this place of rapes and cavity searches, where dignity was a relative thing.

  It was impossible, under the circumstances, not to dwell on the peculiarbrand of violence that defined prison life the world over. That ultimateviolation when the choices became binary, between death or defilement. When faced with it himself—if faced with it himself—how would he choose? At the end of the day, which was indeed the dignified choice? Certainly, there was no honor in a hideous death at the hands of these jackals, yet how could one continue to live in the aftermath?

  It was well known among the informed citizens of Panama that Noriega employed rape rooms for the punishment of prisoners. In an effort to break down resistant political prisoners, Noriega fed them to wings of prisons that were populated by homosexual predators. It occurredto Kurt, sitting here on the balcony witnessing the incarnation of hopelessness, that such could perhaps be the ultimate torture. Over time, one can recover from the crooked limb or the missing eye, but how could one ever heal the wounds of prison rape?

  They kept him there on the balcony for an hour, he supposed, maybe more. He just didn’t know. Fear and exhaustion were taking their toll. Reality was beginning to slip from his grasp. It was daylight; he knew that much. But as for which day, he was less than sure.

  His next stop was likewise in the guts of the DENI station, this time to a larger room, and from what he could tell from the enthusiastic buzzing of his escorts, they had found some treasures they wanted to show him.

  The room was filled with Kurt’s personal belongings. They had his clothes, guns, books, and record collection. They had everything. All the stuff from his home and garage. What he worried about most, though, was the crew who was hovering around his Apple computer. They were in the early stages of setting it up, and when they finished, he would be sunk.

  When he thought about all the data that was stored in that computer—thecode books, the fake purchase orders, all the toys and all the paper trails they needed to tie him and all the others directly to La Voz de la Libertad—he wanted to kick himself for being so stupid. He thought of all the attention—the lip service, as it turned out—they’d paid to operational security, and wondered how he could have been so stupid as to record every transaction right there on the computer. He didn’t even try to encrypt it for God’s sake.

  Stupid.

  A PDF captain pointed to a chair and desk. “Have a seat,” he said in Spanish.

  Kurt sat.

  “If there’s something you want to tell us, now is the time to do it,” the captain said. “It’s so much easier if we learn from you what you know we will find on our own. It will feel like a goodwill gesture.”

  Kurt’s mind whirled. Could he actually help his cause by coming clean up front? Would it really make a difference?

  As soon as the questions formed in his mind, he conjured the answer.Of course it would make a difference. He forced himself to rememberthe promise he had made to himself just hours before: he would preserve his dignity at all costs. If they found the answers, so be it. What would come from that would flow of its own weight and accord.But he wasn’t going to hand them any simple answers. He hadn’t fought the noble fight for this long just to cave in under the pressure of exhaustion and fear. No, his one last battle against the Pineapple would be to make him figure out his own damn answers the hard way.

  “I don’t know what you’re speaking of,” Kurt said. “I have done nothing wrong. I have nothing to tell you.”

  The captain eyed him for a long moment. “Are you telling me the truth, Mr. Muse?”

  Kurt tried to look nonplussed. “Why would I lie?”

  The captain held his gaze for another moment, then leaned a little closer. “Let’s start with the password for your computer.”

  “There is no password,” Kurt said, instantly confused.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not. I swear to you that there is no password.”

  “My technicians tell me that there is.”

  In a flash of inspiration, Kurt understood what the problem was. Apple computers were pretty new technology then; the PDF didn’t realizethat they were dealing with an entirely different operating system. DOS-trained technicians could work for a week on Apple technology and never get past first base. “Then it is your technicians who need to be reprimanded for lying.” He found himself suppressing a smile.

  The captain’s face reddened as his jaw locked. Kurt wasn’t sure what he would do if the captain commanded him to boot up the computerfor them, but he didn’t think it would be a problem. To ask for assistance like that would be to cede some of their power, and Kurt didn’t see this particular PDF goon ceding anything.

  The captain decided to change tacks. He reached into his desk drawer and withdrew a sheet of paper, which he slid across the desk. “What is this?”

  Kurt tried to keep his face impassive even as his pulse pummeled his temples. “It looks like an apartment lease,” he said. Instantly, he cursed his own words. This was not a time to be coy. Of course it was an apartment lease. It said APARTMENT LEASE right at the very top.

  “That’s what it looked like to me as well,” the captain agreed. From his smirk and his tone, it was clear that he knew he’d caught Kurt off guard. “Why would a man with a home as beautiful as yours have an apartment as well?”

  Kurt lowered his head and dropped his voice, drawing the captain closer to hear. “It’s for my mistress,” he said without dropping a beat. He had no idea where that lie came from, but it was a gift, made all the more valuable because many men of standing in Panama had one or more mistresses, both here and in the States. Soon, he was sure, they’d find other leases, and when they checked out the addresses, they’d find that this first apartment was the exception because it was empty. In three others, they’d find that the sole resident of the apartmentwas a radio transmitter with a battery backup, set to begin broadcasting at their appointed times.

  The smile disappeared from the captain’s face.

  Kurt expounded, “I pay for her apartment, and she, well ... you understand.”

  The captain looked stunned, as if he’d been slapped. Clearly, this was not the direction he thought the conversation was headed. He stood abruptly. “Very well, then.” He motioned to one of the guards, who materialized in an instant. “Take him away.”

  The guard escorted Kurt to the next office; a
closet, really. From there, he could listen in on the technicians’ efforts to break through what they thought was his secret encryption code. Kurt allowed himselfto bask in this tiny victory, even though he knew it was short lived. The PDF were idiots, but they weren’t stupid. Sooner or later, one of them who had been to the States in the past few months would recognizethe different technology, and when they did, it would all be over.

  Sitting by himself in that tiny office, he could easily work himself to a corner from which the work room was plainly visible to him. He could see all his stuff, and he could watch to a certain degree all the goings on out there, and as he did, his mind wandered to pondering the impossible.

  Suppose they never were able to open those files? Suppose, somehow,the files got destroyed, and they never did find out the details about what they’d stumbled on and whom they’d captured? There was a possibility, he thought, that maybe his plot could live on even in his absence. Without the files, they’d never get the details of La Voz’s long-termstrategy. They’d never have the details of the broken codes, and they’d never have all the lease addresses.

  Without those computer files, all they’d have would be conjecture and accusations. They’d have the testimony of whoever had betrayed him in the first place, and he would have the protection of the U.S. government. Maybe the plan was still alive after all. So he had to make sure that they never opened his computer files.

  But how?

  When he saw them examining the 5¼-inch floppy disk with the damning files on it, he knew exactly what he had to do. If he could somehow destroy the magnetic surface of the disk drive—it wouldn’t take much, just a good scratch across the face—then he could be home free. It might be a little tough on him physically—they’d undoubtedly give him a sound beating—but wouldn’t it be worth it at the end of the day?