Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  Annie had pulled every string she could find, and now she found herself hounding those who were cooperating to the point that she feared driving them off. But what else was there to do? She couldn’t stop pushing. Not now. Not on the heels of the coup and the impendingdeath threat to her husband. Kurt needed her to be strong and activenow more than ever before.

  It was so easy to feel as if no one was listening. The government apparatus was so huge and so complicated, fraught with so many conflictingpriorities, that she wondered sometimes if it was even reasonableto expect powerful people to pay close attention to one man’s plight.

  Then, one day in early November, she found a letter in the mail that reaffirmed her belief in God and the government and in the goodness of people, no matter how lofty their station in life:

  The White House

  Washington, DC

  October 30, 1989

  Dear Mrs. Muse:

  Your letter of September 13, 1989, and the accompanying letterfrom your husband are poignant reminders of the sacrifice your family has made for democracy in Panama.

  We are doing everything we can to bring about an end to this crisis and the release of your husband. I know this is a very difficulttime for all of you.

  Your husband is a brave man; his courage and conviction have my respect and admiration. I also recognize the burden you and the rest of your family bear. You, too, have earned my respect and gratitude.

  Once this crisis is over and your husband is free, I hope you, and he, and Kimberly will visit the White House so that I can thank you all in person.

  God bless all of you.

  Sincerely,

  George Bush

  Annie read the letter over and over, to herself and to her children. Respect. Admiration. Gratitude. These things did matter. They mattered to her, to her children, and to the president of the United States. Kurt was a brave man, and it was important that he be recognized as such. But more than that, Annie saw in the letter a subliminal message that she should take heart, have faith that her suffering and that of her family would not go on forever.

  “Once this crisis is over and your husband is free ...”

  Not “if” this crisis ends, but “once this crisis is over.” That was a sign, wasn’t it? The president of the United States of America isn’t glib or careless in his wording of correspondence. No, he’s precise in all such things, and for her, the message was clear. Kurt’s ordeal would end. Soon.

  Visits with Kurt Muse had become Jim Ruffer’s primary responsibility. Before each meeting, he would convene in the Tunnel with Colonel Green—a Delta operator whose name was clearly not Green, and who, for all Ruffer knew, may not even have been a colonel. The man never even wore a uniform. They’d meet for at least ninety minutes before each meeting at Modelo, and then again for at least four hours after the visit was completed. They had Jim drawing pictures and locating equipment with a level of precision that was far and away more demandingthan counting steps from here to there and the other things they had him looking for after the elections.

  Last week, they’d been so intent on knowing specifically what kind of lock Kurt’s cell had that he’d raced ahead of the escorting guard just to get a look. It was a stupid thing to do, he realized, not just because it could have gotten him shot but also because it potentially showed their hand, but how the hell else was he supposed to get that kind of information?

  In the eight months that Ruffer had been making these treks to Modelo, he’d come to develop a level of respect for Kurt Muse that frankly inspired him. Here was a man who had lost everything, yet despitethe occasional ups and downs, the occasional paranoia and fear, he kept an outlook on life that was first and foremost optimistic. Surroundedby misery and subjected to unspeakable hardship and degradation,Kurt had somehow kept an air of humor about him that Ruffer didn’t know that he could maintain in a similar circumstance.

  There was a pervasive innocence about Kurt’s worldview—a profound disbelief that the kind of cruelty he witnessed could actually existin the world—that Jim Ruffer found instructive and refreshing in his own life.

  He’d come to look forward to his visits with Kurt, come to see them as visits with an old friend. He prayed that whatever lofty plans the Delta dogs had in store would somehow liberate this fine man from his cell; but after countless trips to this fortress, he honestly didn’t see how it was possible.

  42

  7 Oct 89

  Dear Anne, Kimberly and Erik

  Thank you so much for your wonderful cards to me. You are so thoughtful. I feel now that it should have been me that wrote to you. After all, I have visited with Kurt so frequently and truly have some marvelous impressions of him that could have been shared with you over the months. Because he is so special, I believe that I have received much more than I have given: To be with Kurt is to receive! He too is very thoughtful and once he stopped me at the end of a visit and apologized so solemnly for not having thanked me at an earlier visit for having brought him something. Under the circumstances, I didn’t even think of being thanked. Kurt is very thoughtful of those around him. I have come to love the man and our visits are a big part of my life. But I have never mentioned it to him. A lot about our relationship goes unsaid. It is kind of extraordinary.When I am with Kurt, Marcos and usually a prison guard or medic are always there. Kurt and I act somewhat formal. I have tried to preserve the formality so that the whole event has a down-to-business officialism about it. My hope, each visit, is to be with him, cheer him and remind him of the real world that we both know—the physical exam just being a medium for the contactthat I felt I must protect.

  Kurt is a wonderful fellow. He has a beautiful sense of humor that is at no one’s expense. He seems happy to me though I know that to some extent he tries extra hard to seem well to please us. He also can be very honest and open about his feelings. This is good too and keeps him emotionally healthy.

  Marcos Ostrander has a great respect for Kurt and an extreme sense of devotion to his welfare. Kurt couldn’t have had a better man than Marcos. I’ve never been there when the two of them talk. I try to engage Dominguez and the others in conversation to lengthen the time of their visitation. Once I put Dominguez to sleep right in his chair while I rambled on and on about English history and poisonous spiders. Another time I talked so well that Marcos and Kurt must have gotten tired of waiting and came back in to break it up. By the way, when I get back to my office I write up the entire visit in as much detail as I can remember. I’ll turn these over to Kurt when we finally all go home together—soon I hope.

  Well, I had better end this letter here. But I have enjoyed writingthese things to you immensely. Kurt speaks so highly of you, Anne. He is certainly your greatest admirer. He is very, very proud of you. And, I might say, that you can all be very proud of him. He is a true and brave man. I have the greatest respect and admiration for him. And because all aspects of life can be a blessingfor us, you will get him back better than ever because he has chosen to make it that way.

  God bless you all. I send you the heartfelt love and respect from the Ruffers.

  Sincerely,

  Jim Ruffer

  43

  Kurt knew this would be the day he would die.

  It was late in the morning, one day in November when something had clearly gone terribly wrong. The corridors of Modelo Prison reverberatedwith the sound of booted feet, not running, exactly, but movingquickly, the staccato beat of foot falls punctuated by shouted orders and the distinctive clack of weapons being charged and the unmistakablerattle of belted ammunition.

  The first bullet fired will be aimed at the head of Kurt Muse ...

  Kurt jumped to his feet and put on his shoes; this was part of a ritualhe’d practiced more than a few times, whenever he sensed that the goons were coming to harass him or toss his cell. In this environment, shoes were essential. Without them, he felt one tick too vulnerable, one inch too far from the possibility of making a break if the occasion arose. Wat
ching those poor souls in the prison yard, roaming in rags that left them nearly naked, he realized that clothes were an issue of dignity as well as practicality. Thus, another of his rules was to never be naked in the presence of the guards. The fact of his tiny bathroom, located at a right angle to the rest of his cell, made a certain degree of modesty possible, and Kurt capitalized on it by taking his showers only at night. He kept his clothes as clean as possible by washing them regularlyin the shower, and he hung them to dry by pressing bunches of the garments through the expanded metal grates that served as bars on his windows to the prison yard.

  In recent weeks, since the aborted coup, they’d been rotating him between this cell on the third floor and a nearly identical one on the fourth. He didn’t understand the logic, and never bothered to ask, but he figured it had something to do with either messing with his head, or with confounding any rescue attempt that might be mounted by the U.S. government. The reality probably lay somewhere in the middle of those options, though to Kurt the notion of an organized rescue was absurd at both the political level and the practical one. This was a fortress, for God’s sake. No one could possibly lead a breakout withoutkilling huge numbers of people.

  For Kurt, that meant that he had to make his own escape opportunities.In his wildest daydreams, he fantasized about grabbing one of the guards’ M-16s and shooting his way out of the building, but as intriguingas that was, the fantasy always ended with the inevitability of Kurt’s bullet-riddled body dropping like a sack about three feet beyond the first door.

  More recently, just before the coup and Lieutenant Dominguez’s removalfrom duty, he had devised a plan that he thought might actually have worked: a good old-fashioned bribe. Dominguez frequently complainedabout how woefully small his pension would be following his retirement in a few years. Kurt figured that $20,000 in cash would be enough to convince Dominguez to look the other way one night while Kurt walked out the front door to a waiting car. There might have to be some pretense to make the plan workable, but Kurt was certain that Marcos Ostrander would be more than capable of stitching something like that together. It was a high-risk plan, no doubt, but if the alternativewas a lifetime of confinement in a concrete cage, then a little risk would be just fine with him.

  He’d been on the edge of suggesting the plan to Ostrander when the coup went down and Dominguez went away. It would take months to cultivate with these regular army types the kind of friendly relationship he’d developed with Dominguez. Lesson learned: think less, act faster.

  On this morning, as the prison teemed with heavily armed soldiers, Kurt sensed that something unique and terrifying was in progress. Clearly, they were expecting the impossible, some kind of storming of the prison. Kurt felt his heart beginning to race. If that was the plan, then someone was botching the hell out of the element of surprise.

  He watched in stunned horror as a PDF soldier set up a 5.56mm SAW—Squad Automatic Weapon—mounted on a bipod. The weapon required the gunner to sit on the floor and was fed by a side-mounted box of linked ammunition. The gunner set up his weapon directly in front of Kurt’s cell, a spot from which he could protect the entire hallwaywith a fusillade of withering fire. Or, by simply pivoting the weapon, he could shred Kurt Muse with a single short burst.

  Kurt didn’t know how, and he didn’t understand why, but in an instanthe convinced himself that these were his final moments on the planet. He started to sweat profusely as his heart rate tripled. In moments,his T-shirt was soaked with flop sweat. He was shaking for God’s sake, uncontrollable quivers in his hands and legs, his whole body quaking in a way he had never experienced. So, this was what abject terror felt like. This was what panic was all about.

  The crash dive in his emotions happened with frightening speed, overcoming him in seconds, and even as he told himself that he had to calm down, his body refused to cooperate.

  It didn’t help at all that the soldier in the corridor was so thoroughlyenjoying his terror. The soldier watched Kurt’s meltdown with a smug smile, ostentatiously fingering the cartridges in the box. “These are for you, no?” the man said in fractured English.

  Those are for me, yes, Kurt thought.

  His mind reacted to the panic by instantly jumping to places he didn’t want to go. He thought yet again of the anxiety and the hardshiphe’d brought down on his family. He thought of his children and of Annie, his wonderful, beautiful Annie, and of the terrible grief and anger she would feel when he was gone. He thought of the apology he would never have the chance to utter to his father and mother.

  He thought with crushing bitterness of the fact that the Pineapple had won. He would have the body of an “American spy” to drag in front of the cameras as a warning to any others who tried to rise against him.

  Then he thought of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the reward that he prayed awaited him on the other side of this life. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and Kurt figured there had to be an impending executioncorollary. His faith had never come close to the relationship that Annie enjoyed with her Creator, but in that moment it occurred to Kurt with perfect clarity that death was not an event to be feared. Rather, it was the necessary next step in life, and as such it should be embraced as the natural order of things. God would not have put him here in this spot if this were not the spot where he belonged.

  The realization brought a sense of peace and relief almost instantly. In the clarity of that moment, he felt angry with himself for having given the guard in the hallway such a show. For Noriega and his henchmen,people responsible for so many murders over the years, the sense of victory would not come so much from the fact of his death, but from the stories of his panic and emotional meltdown. The very thought of being the subject of that conversation pissed Kurt off.

  Okay, he thought, that show is over. Right by-God now. If they have to shoot me, let the bullets fly. Just please, God, give me the strength to stand tall when it starts.

  Before those shots were fired, however, he had one last detail to take care of. He lifted his Bible from where he’d left it next to his cot and retreated into his bathroom. There he jotted his good-bye to his family on the onion skin paper. Just a quick note, “Annie, Erik, Kimberly,I love you so much. I will miss you terribly. Love, Dad.”

  That done, he tore the page out of the Bible, folded it into the tiniestpossible ball, and stuffed it deeply into the seam of his pants pocket. When the Americans took custody of his body, they would search his clothing carefully, and he hoped they would find the note and deliverit.

  That done, he returned to his cot and lay down. Kurt watched the guard watching him for a while, and then he fell asleep.

  When he awoke, the crisis had apparently passed, and the guard was gone.

  44

  Dear Kurt,

  There are so many things that happen that I wish I could rememberto tell you.

  Like: The many nights I sit up with Kimberly talking about how wonderful you are. She wants to marry someone just like you. Then we spend some time talking about your qualities.We’ve decided that you have no bad points. Tonight she said what’s that saying about being away from each other and love. I said, absence makes the heart grow fonder. “Yes it does.”

  We spend hours talking about our hopes, our doubts. We supportone another.

  Another beautiful thing is that K & E are getting along so beautifully. K talks to E, compliments his clothes, his sense of humor.She’s so thankful that he’s not obnoxious, in love with himselfor insensitive. Erik is such a gentle soul. Last Fri. K & E played electronic Battleship. They also spent 2 hours talking to one another & looking at old pictures. There’s a growing bond between them.

  We spend so much of our time talking about you. We’ve started the Advent wreath. We say our prayer before dinner, eat and then light a candle and read the reading for the day. I’ve always wanted to spend some of our time in prayer and we are.

  I adore you,

  Annie

  Annie sat quietly at the dining room
table—her command center in Burke, Virginia—as Father Frank sipped his coffee and ticked off one element of bad news after another. Intellectually, she understood how grateful she should be for Father Frank’s unflinching candor in his presentation of the facts and in his faithful relaying of information from, to, for, and about Kurt, but on an emotional level, a part of her craved some sliver of happy news, even if it was a lie.

  She knew now, through Marcos Ostrander, of the machine gun in the corridor and of Kurt’s epiphanal acceptance of his impending death, just as she knew that the encouragement and sense of hope that had been triggered by President Bush’s letter was short lived, replaced by endless weeks of more of the same. Now that the holidays were approaching,it was hard to fight off the crushing sense of sadness, the thought that one day she might have to face the reality of a future without Kurt. The thought was too much to bear, and she forced it out of her mind. Again.

  When Father Frank was done with this latest update, the two of them sat in silence, sipping their coffee. This was Annie’s opportunity to say something; to make a speech, to vent her frustration, or to ask a series of questions, all of which she had done uncountable times in the past. Today, though, she felt as though she had nothing left.

  “I’m sorry that the news isn’t better,” Father Frank said.

  Annie shrugged, hoping it was a gesture of bravery, not resignation. “The news is what it is.”

  Father Frank shifted in his chair and cleared his throat, seeming suddenly uncomfortable. “There is one thing we haven’t yet tried,” he said. “We at the Agency think that the approach of Christmas gives us a unique opportunity for a personal appeal.”