Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  It was the thought of the chopper that snapped Kurt to wakefulness.What the hell was a chopper doing in so close to the prison? Rolling off his cot, he hurried to the window for a look.

  Sure enough, a Cobra gunship hovered in the air at an altitude of maybe a hundred feet, just hanging there over the prison wall. On the ground below, prisoners and guards alike scurried for cover, even as the guards in the towers made threatening movements with their rifles without making the fatal mistake of actually pointing them in the directionof the menacing bird.

  It was an odd sight, and it was one that brought a sense of pride to Kurt’s soul. Those young men at the controls—he could make out the features of their faces from here—were his countrymen, and no matter how the Pineapple blustered and blew, nothing the Maximum Leader did or said could begin to touch the firepower of the U.S. Army.

  While Kurt watched, the Cobra’s gunner—sitting in the chopper’s front seat—made eye contact and pointed. Instantly, the aircraft started drifting closer. A punishing dust storm bloomed in the rotor wash as all manner of trash and prison yard debris was hurled in all directions. As the Cobra moved closer and closer, it continually lost altitude until the nose of the chopper was level with Kurt’s third-floor window. For a moment,he thought the pilot might land the Cobra right there in the yard.

  But they weren’t interested in landing; it seemed that they were interestedonly in looking at Kurt through his window. As ridiculous as that sounded, it was the only theory that made sense. The chopper crew knew that their presence at the wall would raise a ruckus, and they certainly knew that it would draw every face to every window in the prison. It couldn’t be a coincidence that this airborne ballet only began when Kurt’s face joined the others.

  The Cobra was so close now that Kurt feared that the rotor disk would start digging a trench in the concrete wall. So close that he could count the front-seater’s teeth. In addition, Kurt could swear he saw a thumbs-up. They held there for a couple of seconds, staring each other in the eye, and when a huge grin bloomed on the crewman’s face, Kurt couldn’t help but return it.

  They had just come by to say hello, and there’d no doubt be hell to pay when word of what they did got back to their commanding officer.For the first time in God knew how long, Kurt felt emotion pressingbehind his eyes. This time, though, it wasn’t sadness or self-pity; this time it was that intense pride and emotional lift that comes from witnessing a simple act of kindness. Clearly, Ostrander and Ruffer had passed along Kurt’s love of helicopters to the people who had the power to alter the flight routes of the choppers at Quarry Heights, and clearly that word had gotten back to these two yahoos in the Cobra. He’d never met them, and probably never would, but he loved those two pilots right at that moment as intensely as he’d ever loved anyone but Annie and the kids.

  As the Cobra pivoted and pulled away with a full-throttle roar, Kurt knew how foolish he’d been to think that he might have been forgottenby his government. He found himself grinning like a kid on Christmas as he watched the departing chopper grow smaller with distanceand finally disappear from view. He was still smiling when he turned back into his cell.

  The smile disappeared in the space of a heartbeat when he saw that the corporal had brought his M-16 to his shoulder and that the muzzlewas leveled at Kurt’s chest.

  For what felt like a long time—maybe as long as five or ten seconds—the jailer and his prisoner just stared at each other. For the first time, Kurt saw the anger in the other man’s eyes. He was a soldier, after all, relative competence notwithstanding, and he’d just been humiliated with a demonstration of the PDF’s emasculation. At most, they could pretend to be a military force. At most, they could intimidate the weak, but even then, it was only the weak who had no powerful friends.

  What better way to jam a thumb into Uncle Sam’s eye than to shoot the man who had brought about so much of the current troubles?

  But he didn’t shoot, and as reasonableness displaced the anger, the corporal became a professional soldier again. He lowered his gun and settled himself back into his seat, where he would await his orders.

  In prison, the smallest excitement—the slightest departure from endless routine—kept the blood pumping for a long time, and the visit by the helicopter gunship kept the place alive for hours, but sooner or later, the excitement passed, and normalcy returned. For Kurt, this meant that it was time for him to exercise. After that, he would pray and maybe work on another letter to Annie. The helicopter would give him something to go on about, even though mentioning the morning’s events would guarantee that the letter never cleared the censors.

  His knee was bothering him more and more as he ran his short course, and unlike times in the past, reversing direction did nothing to relieve the discomfort. Both knees were hurting now. Add to that the fact that his arms were growing too short for his rapidly progressing myopia, and there was no choice but to finally conclude that he was getting too damn old for this shit.

  Cáceres came for him around eleven in the morning, when Kurt was lying on his cot, thinking about anything except his current situation. “Muse!” the lieutenant barked in Spanish. “Get up. You have visitors.”

  Kurt was on his feet in an instant. He needed this. This was a good day for visitors. “Who is it?”

  The corporal fumbled with the lock, slipping it from the hasp. “Come,” Cáceres commanded.

  The corporal fell in behind with his M-16 at the ready as the lieutenantled the three-man parade down to the main level, where an American Army lieutenant colonel sat ramrod straight in a wooden chair. The lieutenant colonel looked vaguely familiar, but Kurt couldn’t place the face. The army officer stood as Kurt entered the tiny interviewroom and offered his hand.

  “Hello, Mr. Muse, I’m Robert Perry, the Treaty Affairs officer here in Panama. How are you, sir?”

  Kurt shook the hand gratefully. Of course. It had been nine months, but this was the first American Kurt had encountered after his arrest—the man who brought Jim Ruffer to DENI headquarters. They were meeting in a room Kurt hadn’t seen in months, and they were surroundedby a throng of prison guards. If he hadn’t known better, Kurt would have bet there was a craps game being tossed in the middle of the crowd somewhere.

  “You look confused, Mr. Muse,” Perry said, gesturing to the unoccupiedseat with an open palm. “Please have a seat and I’ll try to explain.”

  Kurt sat, but he didn’t like the feel of any of this. Certainly, there would be no relaxing.

  “In my official capacity, I have certain rights and obligations, and as an American citizen, you likewise have certain rights and obligations.I’ve asked the prison staff to gather so I could review some things.” He gave a nervous little smile when he was done with this preamble,as if to give Kurt a chance to acknowledge the words or ask for an explanation.

  Kurt nodded. So far, he hadn’t heard anything that was too difficult to understand. He did get the impression, though, that Perry had rehearsedhis words.

  The lieutenant colonel continued, “You’re aware, are you not, that General Noriega has threatened to kill you if things don’t go his way in the ongoing discussions between our governments.”

  Kurt cast a sidewards glance toward the corporal and his rifle. “I’ve heard the rumor, yes.” In the background, he became aware of another break in routine as commotion within the prison walls seemed to peak in intensity. The guards were aware of it, too. They started shifting their weight uneasily as the sound of approaching helicopters again cut the calm of the warm afternoon. Only this time, there was more than one chopper, and they seemed to be circling the prison. Everyone, in fact, seemed unnerved by it all. Only Perry seemed nonplussed.

  Perry raised his voice to keep ownership of the moment. As he spoke, his eyes never left their lock on Kurt’s even though his message was clearly meant for the others in the room. A big Puerto Rican U.S. Army sergeant in the corner—Perry’s driver, Kurt figured—had grown pale and was visibly trembling, swea
t pouring off of him.

  Perry looked as crisp and as cool as if he were in an air conditioned room. “Kurt,” he said, “you have undoubtedly heard that General Noriega has announced that any armed conflict between our two great countries will result in reprisals against American citizens, and that you will be the first to die.”

  Kurt swallowed hard, wondering where this was going. “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I want you to know that if anything happens to you no one will walk out of this prison alive.”

  The stenographer froze. Somebody gasped.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Kurt?”

  An official of the U.S. government had just threatened to execute his would-be murderers. What does one say to such a thing? Vaguely aware that his mouth was agape, Kurt nodded.

  Perry smiled and stood, again extending his hand. Kurt returned the gesture, and as the visitor left, there was a dizzying sense of finality to all of this. His stomach churned, not with a sense of dread, but with a sense of hope and empowerment.

  Cáceres moved quickly to roust Kurt back up the stairs to his cell, ordering the guards to return him there at once. The guards in turn barked the appropriate orders, and Kurt complied, but this time, there was none of the regular taunting or pushing. Maybe it was just the lingeringeuphoria of Perry’s little speech, but Kurt could have sworn that they now seemed a little nervous in his presence.

  As he climbed the concrete steps, he thought about how he was goingto word all of this in his letter to Annie.

  PART 3

  Acid Gambit

  49

  It was nearly midnight—twenty minutes till tomorrow—and Staff Sergeant Jim Nelson and his crew were finally airborne, ready to execute the mission they’d been planning since May and practicingsince July. This guy Muse—Parker Sturbridge called him Moose because of his size and because it was Parker’s job to carry him if he couldn’t or wouldn’t walk—was one hell of a guy. Jim and the rest of the Delta operators knew all about their precious cargo’s refusal to acceptan easy out through that letter from his wife, and anyone with balls that size deserved to be snatched back into the world.

  Jim’s job was to be in on the explosive entry, unless that didn’t work for some reason, in which case his job was to rappel down the side of the prison and cut through the bars with a cutting torch. That explainedthe big bomb on his back. Nothing like having a few dozen pounds of oxygen and acetylene strapped to your spine when you’re planning to fly into a wall of tracer fire. Jim was sitting in the forward-mostspot on the portside outboard bench of the MH-6 Little Bird chopper, facing the direction of flight because the oxygen and acetylene tanks wouldn’t let him face out to the side like the other five members of his team. He kept his ankles crossed between the bottom of the bench and the top of the landing skid, keenly aware that a flimsy nylon strap was all that kept him from tumbling into the night. Yee-flippin’-ha.

  They’d been waiting for weeks in Hangar Three at Howard Air Force Base for the balloon to go up at midnight. For the time being, they were slicing through the darkness, awaiting the arrival of H hour at midnight, when the peaceful night would be torn open like nothing the Panamanian people had ever seen. The targets were selected and clear, and the rules of engagement were even clearer. Operation Just Cause, which had been the nation’s greatest secret for weeks and was soon to be known as anything but, was a war against Noriega and the PDF. It was a war of liberation, not of conquest, and America’s elite special forces teams had been entrusted with the two highest-priority objectives. Delta was tasked with these priorities: Objective One, the capture of Manuel Noriega, and Objective One Prime, the liberation of Kurt Frederick Muse.

  The stakes could not have been higher. Delta’s previous high-profile mission at Desert One in Iran had been such a royal disaster that anythingless than unbridled success here in Panama would be vilified as a failure. A lot of good men had died that night, and a lot of careers had been needlessly ruined because of politicians’ (and command officers’) unspeakable ineptitude. Not that they caught the blame, of course—unless you count Jimmy Carter, who arguably lost the White House because of it. Rear-echelon types with their paneled offices and stars on their collars reserved only credit for themselves. When it came time for blame, there were plenty of company officers and noncoms to pad the list.

  They had discussed these things among themselves from time to time as D day and H hour approached, but none of these things were of any concern to Jim Nelson tonight. Starting in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, and carrying on through the night, and perhaps into the days to follow, all that would matter was the mission, and that was about all there was room for in his head right now.

  This tiny piece of the overall operational plan for the invasion of Panama, this Objective One Prime, was listed on the chart as OperationAcid Gambit, named as most such covert ops are by two words randomly generated by a computer. Jim didn’t begin to think that he knew all the details, but what he did know impressed the hell out of him. When the balloon finally went up on this op, dozens of the most lethal warriors on the planet would swoop into action, backed up by some of the most lethal machinery ever devised by man.

  Jim’s was one of four Little Birds from the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment with orders to set down on the roof of Modelo Prison, where twenty-three Delta operators would disembark to do their jobs. Meanwhile, somewhere out there in the night, two AC-130 Specter Gunships were circling in the darkness waiting for their signal to turn the Comandancia into pea gravel, while the whole operation was supported with God only knew how many helicopter gunships. Elsewhere in the country, madness was going to rain down from every direction once Just Cause got under way, but for the time being, all those other ops were simply someone else’s business.

  Orbiting in the night as they were, Jim turned all the details of Acid Gambit over in his mind. They’d rehearsed this thing dozens of times since the summer, even going so far as to construct an exact three-quarter-scalereplica of the prison in the wilds of Hurlburt Field, Florida. The level of detail was both amazing and frustrating, drawn largely from interviews of former prisoners, most of whom had never seen the prison in its entirety, but only their little sections of it. The path from the roof to the cellblocks was the biggest question. They’d been able to get their hands on some architectural drawings, and they’d been gathering intel data since the week after Kurt had been arrested,but significant holes still remained in their knowledge base, and those holes had been filled with educated best guesses, which in Jim Nelson’s mind was the same damn thing as a wild-ass guess.

  But what the hell? With as much firepower as they were bringing along, even the most outrageously wrong guess could be turned right again. If doors turned out not to be where they’d thought, they could always make a new one on their own.

  Early on, Acid Gambit had just been one more planning mission, so similar to the countless dozens of similar planning missions that Delta took on. The vast majority never came to fruition for any number of reasons: in some cases Uncle Sam lost his nerve, and in a few others, the bad guys just got lucky; but mostly, when 0300 missions got scrubbed it had something to do with unreliable intel. For a while, it had been looking as if the precious cargo for Acid Gambit was going to get whacked in his cell, rendering the whole plan moot. Jim Nelson had really come to respect the guy. He showed a lot of guts. Jim was happy as hell that his Aztec Cycle rotation allowed his team—G Team—to be on the op now that the trigger had been pulled.

  They’d thought they were close twice before, first pretty early on, and then again immediately after the coup, but on both of those occasions,the hammer was released gently, and they were forced to stand down. Jim didn’t know how he’d respond if that happened again tonight. He was ready to go, dammit.

  Of course, all the planning, and all the rehearsal—they’d been mounting weekly midnight raids on the roof of the Department of Defense’s elementary school (ironically, a school that Annie
Muse had visited often before being evacuated to exile) ever since they’d arrived in-country all those weeks before—would mean nothing once the shootingstarted. Wild-ass guesses could quickly become death sentences when the operation went hot. It was the part of Jim Nelson’s job that he found most enthralling and most frightening. You can plan and rehearsedown to the smallest detail, but at the end of the day, every plan assumes a certain reaction on the part of the bad guys, and if that reactiondoesn’t materialize, then everything flowing downstream from it will be entirely different than any scenario they’d thought of. After two or three iterations, the plan might as well never have existed.

  Of all the variables, the one that weighed heaviest on the rescue mission was the one solitary soldier outside Moose’s cell. Apparently, some Treaty Affairs officer had made a pretty good speech that was supposed to build hesitation into the guard’s trigger finger, but you never knew how seriously some people took their sense of duty. One way or another, Kurt Muse was going home tonight, but it would be a hell of a lot better for all if he could cross the threshold alive.

  On the second Little Bird, Staff Sergeant Peter Jacobs had the assignmentto rappel from the roof of Modelo Prison, dangle in midair outside Muse’s cell window, and take out the executioner before he had a chance to react. It was the one segment of this op that Jim was happiest he hadn’t drawn. There was something unsettling about the thought of dangling without cover as the entire world tried to kill you, and yet staying composed enough to hit your target with one shot. Of course, the others on the roof planned to rain enough lead down on any potential sharpshooter that the bad guys would be too busy burrowingthrough the concrete to take decent aim.

  Once the hallway executioner was neutralized, the rest should be easy—a standard shoot and swoop. As of eleven o’clock this morning, they knew exactly which cell the precious cargo was in—verified by an airborne eyewitness—and thanks to information leaked by an Army lawyer-doctor team, they knew virtually every detail of the cellblock level where Muse was being held. They even knew what kind of lock was on the door to Muse’s cell. All the prisoner had to do was stay alive long enough to be rescued, and they’d be able to bring a happy ending to his story.