Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  Just seeing an American uniform and a friendly face made Kurt’s spirits soar. “Hello, Doctor,” he said, beaming. “Nice to see you again. I thought maybe they reneged.” When he stepped forward to shake Ruffer’s hand, neither Dominguez nor the tall dour-faced black man who accompanied him from time to time made any effort to intervene.

  “Hello, Mr. Muse,” Jim said. “It’s nice to see you as well. I’m just sorry for the venue. Nobody reneged. We just got off to a slow start.” He gestured to the small man in civilian clothes who stood next to him, “This is Doctor Marcos Ostrander, a lawyer with the U.S. Army South—USARSO. He’ll be accompanying me from time to time as I make my visits.”

  Kurt shook his hand. “Are you a medical doctor?”

  Marcos smiled and shook his head. “No, no such luck. I’m just a lawyer.”

  “My lawyer?”

  Marcos shook his head. “Actually, no. At least not for the long term. We’re having a hard time finding a lawyer in Panama with balls big enough to take on your case. But we’re working on that.”

  “What does ‘working on that’ mean?”

  Jim Ruffer stepped in to change the subject. “Let’s get to the businessof your physical examination,” he said. He ushered Kurt toward the exam table and pulled the privacy curtain closed. Beyond the curtain,Kurt could hear Ostrander begin chatting up the guards. “Take your shirt off, please, and your pants, down to your underwear.”

  As Kurt complied, and a routine physical exam commenced, Ruffer asked, “How are you really? Are you being treated well?”

  “I’m fine,” Kurt said. “The food is pretty awful, but I’m makingdo.”

  Ruffer nodded and applied the blood pressure cuff. “I see. Do you need anything? Anything that we can bring you?”

  “Shorts,” Kurt said, without a moment’s hesitation. “They left me my suitcase, but I don’t have any clothes suited to the heat. Running shorts would be great.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Blood pressure done, Ruffer moved on to the poking and prodding part of the exam.

  “And I want you to tell my family that I’m okay. That’s very importantto me.”

  “I understand that,” Ruffer said, lowering his voice even further. “That’s why I brought Doctor Ostrander along. He’s more or less the conduit for communication with your family. When I’m done, you’ll have an opportunity to speak with him. You tell him anything and everything he wants to know, okay? Anything that’s on your mind.”

  The physical examination lasted only a few minutes, and when it was done, Ruffer announced that he had continuing concerns about his patient’s health and that the frequency of the visits needed to be maintained. He started to make quite a speech, actually, and as he did, Ostrander moved in close to Kurt and began chatting.

  “Doctor Ruffer told you who I am?”

  Kurt nodded. “You’re my conduit.”

  “Exactly. I’m your voice to the outside world. You need something, you tell me. If I can’t be here for some reason, you tell Doctor Ruffer. The United States government is plenty pissed off that you’re being held in here without charges being filed, and we’re doing everything we can to get you out. These assholes are going to mess with your head in a thousand different ways telling you otherwise—it’s what they do—but you have to always remember that we’re out there working for you.”

  Kurt didn’t know why this was as big a shock as it turned out to be. “Thank you,” he said. “I told the doctor that I want my family to be reassured that I’m doing all right.”

  “I’ll do that. You know that they’ve all been resettled, right? All of them are okay. Perfectly safe.”

  Actually, he hadn’t been told that in as many words, and the news delighted him. “Where are they?”

  “Safe,” Ostrander said. “In the States. I’m not sure it’s prudent to go into a lot more detail than that.”

  Okay, that was fine. Kurt understood that. “Listen, if you talk to Annie—”

  “When,” Ostrander corrected. “When I talk to Annie.”

  Kurt smiled. He liked this guy. “Okay, when you talk to Annie, I want you to tell her that we have a ten-thousand-dollar certificate of deposit in the bank down here. If she needs money, she should cash that in. Tell her—”

  Ostrander interrupted with a wave of his hand. “That’s all right.”

  “No, she needs to know this.”

  “No, she doesn’t, Kurt. She’s being taken care of.”

  Kurt paused, then scowled. “ ‘Taken care of’? What does that mean?”

  “It means just what you think it means. She won’t have to worry about the CD or her life savings. She won’t have to worry about rent or a car payment. That’s all being taken care of. You can relax on all of that.”

  Kurt cocked his head. This wasn’t making sense. “Well, who’s takingcare of it?”

  Ostrander’s features hardened, and so did his voice. “They’re. Being.Taken. Care of.”

  He waited for Kurt to catch on. The government? Was that possible?

  Ostrander continued, “Now, do me a favor and catch me up on what’s been happening. We might not have time for every chapter on this visit, but start at the beginning and tell me about your arrest and your treatment thus far.”

  Inexplicably, Kurt trusted this man, this stranger. There was somethingabout the way Marcos looked at him, with a combination of toughness and sympathy that made him believe that he could say just about anything to this man. So he started at the beginning and worked in as many details as he could. He told about being picked up at the airport and about the interrogations. He told about being taken to his own house and then to that of his parents, and was about to talk about the beating of the Colombian in his presence when Lieutenant Dominguez cleared his throat and announced that it was time for the visitors to leave. Somehow, the better part of thirty minutes had evaporated.

  Kurt shook hands with both visitors, but Jim Ruffer lingered a bit on his. “We’ll see about making the food a little better, okay?”

  Kurt nodded, unsure of what he should say. He defaulted to, “Thank you.”

  He had no way of knowing—none of them did—that this would be but the first of dozens of similar meetings.

  27

  Over time, Kurt would learn to exist on the routine of prison life, as best he could construct for himself out of the nothingness of solitary confinement. Early on, he realized that mental stability was tied to physical fitness. As a practical matter, meaningful exercise was impossible, but Kurt developed a routine by which he would jog around the tiny confines of his cell. Using a Casio wristwatch that was ultimatelydelivered to him by Jim Ruffer to replace the gold one that was stolen from him, he would set the timer for fifteen minutes, during which he would run without stop in a clockwise circle around his cell. When the beeper sounded, he would reverse direction and jog for another fifteen minutes. Never a hard-bodied physical specimen, the workout was taxing in the early days of his confinement, made all the more so by his commitment to repeating the regimen three times a day.

  It was tough as hell on the knees, too, but as he got better and betterat the physical exertion, he realized that he wasn’t getting the cardiovalue that he wanted, so he added shadow boxing to the regimen. He kept his mind occupied during the workouts by singing songs in his head. When he was done, at the end of every set of exercise, a dark trail of sweat on the floor marked his path to nowhere.

  A few weeks into his incarceration, a U.S. Army cot had been deliveredto his cell, courtesy of Jim Ruffer, and that had greatly improvedKurt’s ability to sleep through the long, humid nights.

  The food was ... adequate. When you’re hungry enough, anything that doesn’t kill you is adequate. The standard prison fare consisted of a kind of rice stew with chunks of meat. It tasted neither good nor bad; it was delivered once a day, and you ate it or starved. Some decisions are fundamentally simple.

  It took a few days for Ruffer and Ostrander to make good on their pr
omise to deliver alternative food for him, and it would be years before he learned what a Herculean task it had been to make it happen. Major Correa, like prison wardens everywhere, loathed any changes to routine, and after only a week with Kurt Muse in his care, he’d been forced to enduremore change than he’d no doubt seen cumulatively over his entire career. At first, the U.S. government wanted to deliver special meals to Muse three times a day, but Correa shot that one down before it gained an inch of altitude. The final compromise was for USARSO to deliver lunch and dinner to Muse, but both at the same time, one delivery per day. Colonel Perry had objected, of course, but he’d known enough to realize a victory when he’d seen it and he’d backed off.

  For Kurt, the first indication that he would have special food occurredto him when it arrived at his cell door, four ham sandwiches on paper plates. It wasn’t much, but it was a life-saver. By happenstance, just that morning Kurt had responded to the sound of an arriving truck by peering out the window in time to see the raw materials for lunch beingdelivered. When the tarp was pulled back from the bed of the pickup truck, he was horrified to see that it was piled high with the heads of cattle. No legs, no center sections, just heads. The mystery meat in the stew turned out to be tongues, eyeballs, and whatever other meat could be gleaned out of a cow’s head. It was way more than he’d ever needed or wanted to know about the culinary secrets of Modelo Prison. In the pantheon of exquisite meals Kurt had had over his four decades on the planet—the meals prepared by family and housekeepers and even at the Union Club—none had ever tasted quite as sublime as that first ham sandwich prepared in the kitchens of Fort Clayton.

  Soon, however, a problem arose with those sublime meals. Since two meals arrived simultaneously—meticulously picked over by the guards of any side dishes or condiments—he would eat two sandwichesas soon as the plates arrived and save the other two in the bathroom,on the sink, until dinnertime.

  Unfortunately, he was not the only species living in his cell, and of all the various critters, he was nowhere near the most ravenous. Kurt discovered on the very first evening when he entered the bathroom to eat his second meal that it was covered with ants and God only knew what those other insects were, to the point that the evening meal was completely inedible.

  It was a perplexing problem: How exactly does one go about preservingone’s rightful place in the food chain? Certainly, there was no way to keep the ants from doing what they were programmed by natureto do, and it seemed short sighted to gluttonously consume all four sandwiches in one sitting and then be faced with the prospect of no additional food for another twenty-four hours. Besides, what would happen if the Fort Clayton chefs were running late, or if they just plain forgot one day? That twenty-four-hour wait could quickly grow to double that. There had to be a solution.

  Surveying his cell and bathroom, he noted that the shower never really stopped running. There probably had been a time sixty or seventy years ago when the flow valves actually worked, but those days were long past. Now, a steady flow spattered the floor twenty-four–seven, keeping the concrete shower floor perpetually covered with a thin layer of water. Where there was water, of course, there were no ants, because even in the jungles of Panama God had neglected to create an amphibious ant. Perhapshe had worn himself out with the flying roaches and vampire bats.

  There had to be a way to capitalize on that, Kurt thought. If there was a way to store his meal in the shower, he could protect it from the marauders, but the thought of water-logged bread was little more appealingthan eating the ants or the cow’s eyes. Finally, inspiration came in the form of the Styrofoam cup they’d given him for drinking water. Using the cup as a pedestal, he could put the plate with the uneaten sandwiches in the middle of the shower stall, surrounded by a protectivemoat. With no critters able to reach the food by land or by sea, he protected against aerial assaults merely by placing a second plate on top of the first, upside down.

  It worked beautifully.

  Within the first couple of weeks after his incarceration, as he was falling into the routine rhythm of visits from Drs. Ruffer and Ostrander,a third visitor stopped by, this one sent by Kurt’s dear friend and coconspirator, Tomás Muñoz. Father Kane, a Catholic priest and Tomás’s confessor, was a rotund, jovial fellow with a beard that was somehow bigger than his face and a laugh that could clear the clouds from a dark day. Kurt met with him on the third floor in the tiny receptionarea just outside the infirmary.

  After the initial pleasantries, Kurt confessed, “I’m grateful for your coming to see me, but you should know that I’m not Catholic.”

  Father Kane could not have cared less. He explained to Kurt that he was here not so much as a confessor, or even as a spiritual guide, but as a friend of a friend, who wanted to help a member of God’s flock to navigate difficult trade winds. That first meeting was made awkward by the pressing presence of two guards, whose job it was, it seemed, to eavesdrop on all of Kurt’s conversations, even when the visitorwas a member of the cloth.

  Father Kane put a stop to that right away by turning prayer into a weapon. “Let us start with a blessing,” the priest said. He grasped Kurt’s right hand in his left, and with his right, grasped the hand of one of the guards, whom he instructed to clasp hands with the second guard, who then completed the chain with Kurt. “Bow your heads please,” Father Kane said, and then he launched into one of history’s longest prayers, beseeching the Lord for his guidance in everything from Kurt’s health to a continuation of the marvelous weather.

  Through it all, the guards squirmed like adolescent boys at dancing class. Holding another man’s hand was simply not done in the Panamanianculture, and the priest understood this perfectly. He also understoodthat these good Catholic Panamanians would cut out their own tongues before they refused a request from a priest, so by the time he was done with the blessing, these guards were forever weaned from their habit of standing too close to Father Kane.

  Over time, the visitation routine fell into an every-other-day cycle, with Ruffer and Ostrander visiting on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,and Father Kane stopping in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. None of the meetings lasted more than a few minutes—forty minutes, at the most—but they became the precious moments that defined the only breaks in Kurt’s unending boredom.

  Correa allowed no visitors on the weekends. Those were the days Kurt came to dread, when the terrible thoughts would return, and no amount of running or special food could possibly compensate for the crushing knowledge that while the world continued to spin for everyoneelse, life in prison crawled along one endless second at a time.

  28

  A different kind of nightmare had settled over Annie Muse. Aunt Elsa was still in the hospice and getting weaker by the day, and the children, while finally reunited with her after that awful weeklongseparation, were doing the best that they could. Her husband, her love, her best friend was apparently a pawn in somebody’s idea of a game, but the stakes were unspeakably high.

  Early on, she’d thought it would blow over in a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks on the outside, with ample opportunity for bluster and speech making. After that, she’d assumed that she and Kurt would be reunited.As time passed, however, Kurt was being pulled father and farther away from her. She tried working the phones, but to tell the God’s honest truth, it was hard to think of who to call. Her father, John Castoro, was retired from the Operations Directorate of the CIA, and he was doing what he could, but his contacts were mostly old and no longer in power. Suzanne Alexander was pushing as hard as she could from her current post in Langley, and Richard Dotson was raising hell from the Guatemala desk in the State Department, but none of it seemed to do any good.

  The Modelo captors had allowed Kurt to write a few letters home, but they were all read by the guards and stamped CENSURADO so many times that some of the passages were illegible. She and the kids wrote to him as well, but she understood from her contacts that many of the letters never got through; or when they finally did get throu
gh, they were weeks old. It was terrible.

  All Annie really needed, all she really prayed for, was the strength to keep their lives going through this miserable time. She’d started goingto Mass three times a week, and while that helped some—helped a lot, actually, in keeping her head high and her heart focused—God only helped those who helped themselves, and she was paddling like crazy up one heck of a fast-moving river.

  The whole situation hit the children the hardest, Erik in particular, who suddenly found himself in a household of women, with no one to help him with the sports he loved so dearly. He clearly missed the long talks with his dad about nothing—the talks that used to fill hours on end. The fact that Kurt was such a terrific dad, and such a kind, caringhusband, made his absence unspeakably painful, but at the same time their love kept them all focused on the challenge of somehow bringing him home.

  Thank God for Father Frank and Marcos Ostrander.

  Father Frank had become Annie’s mysterious right hand. Thanks to him, she had a car, a house, and some spending money. Whatever they needed—no matter what it was—he would make it appear. He also helped the family cope with some of the nastier decisions that were attendantto a life akin to the Witness Protection Program. They were still in West Palm, and being that far south, it was important to keep their real identities to themselves. For public consumption, Anne Castoro(her maiden name) was separated from her husband, and she would offer no further explanation. For the kids, their father was “away.” As a practical matter, Father Frank had explained, people don’t push for details on family crises. If you don’t offer, they won’t ask.

  At the end of the day, though, life is about the little things, and Anniehad learned that neither Kimberly nor Erik had accumulated enough hours in that school year to qualify for matriculation to the next grade, so as an early order of business, Annie had to enroll them in a local school. For the sake of discipline and structure, she chose a Catholic school not far from their house. Of course, enrollment forms required transcripts, birth certificates, and shot records, and when Annierealized that she couldn’t produce them, in swooped Father Frank to save the day. Annie never saw the records, actually, and had no idea if they were the real transcripts or the product of someone’s imaginationin Langley, but ultimately she didn’t much care. Her children were where they needed to be and that was really all that mattered.