The Betrayal Game - [Mikhal Lammeck 02]

by David L. Robbins

  The wings waggled as Pronto adjusted to a cross breeze. Calendar stared where the ground was supposed to be and could not tell what lay ahead. The Helio slowed, almost drifting downward, slowly, maddeningly, leaving plenty of time for Calendar to conjure trees and power lines out of the night. The red and green flashlights remained the only illumination as the plane sank, sank, then bounced hard.

  The hands of the assassin behind him went to both of Calendar’s shoulders, clutching in fright. Calendar swept the man’s grip away, angrily disengaging himself from the touch of fear. Get off me! he thought. Pronto straightened the taxiing Helio and depowered the prop. They’d landed on a road, a narrow asphalt stripe cut through a dense forest. Calendar wiped his lips, gazing out the windows at the walls of tree trunks on either side.

  “Holy shit,” he muttered, forgetting for the moment he was wearing a microphone. Ten feet left or right.

  Pronto laid on the brakes and used just enough prop to turn the Helio around, to face the direction from which they’d flown in. With damp hands Calendar undid his seat belt. He yanked off his headphones and pulled the door handle. Jumping out on the road, the spinning prop wash rippled his jacket.

  “Go, go, go!” he shouted at the darkened snipers in the backseats, pistoning his arm. He reached in to grab duffel bags to toss them on the asphalt. He did not touch the Cubans, letting them fumble out of the plane on their own. Shapes appeared out of the darkness, Unidad men. Calendar had nothing to say to them, though they were his assets. As soon as the last assassin was out, Calendar gave them all a thumbs-up, then climbed back into the plane. Animatedly he pointed up the road, for Pronto to hit the gas and get back in the air.

  The pilot took his foot from the brake, goosed the throttle, and the Helio began to taxi. Again the colored flashlights came on ahead, marking the road. Pronto spiked the rpm’s. In seconds the Helio’s wheels came off the road. Calendar did not buckle his seat belt. Instead, he pivoted to look back. The red and green lights went out. Instantly, they were replaced by other flashes, orange ones.

  Gunfire.

  “Shit!” Calendar yelled into the cockpit, drowned by the prop and engine. Urgently he twirled his index finger, signaling Pronto to come around over the landing zone.

  Pronto circled above the scene, banking Calendar’s window to the chaos below. Calendar kept his eyes on the ground, catching pops of gold and orange flecking the dark. He followed the ambush by the flashes of gunplay. Troops had the landing zone surrounded, their guns sparked in a broad circle. From the amount of rounds fired, the ambush looked to be in squad strength, forty or fifty soldiers. The Unidad team and the assassins defended from the center, trapped on the open road, dashing to escape into the trees but running right at soldiers.

  The ambush was over before the Helio could make a third loop. The road and the trees lapsed back to darkness.

  Suddenly, Pronto yanked the plane out of its circling bank. Calendar, without his seat belt, pitched sideways, slamming his head against the window. Before he could curse, a series of flashes blinked on the ground like firecrackers. Castro’s troops had turned their rifles to the sky, at the sound of the unseen plane. It would take a lucky potshot, but with enough of them shooting...

  Sparks struck on the engine cowling; a bullet had zinged off it. Pronto pulled on the yoke and worked the throttle for all the climb he could get. Calendar tugged his gaze off the ground to face into the blank sky. In his earphones, Pronto muttered, “Hijo de puta.”

  The entire operation had been rounded up. All the training, resources, plans, lives squandered.

  “Goddam underground,” Calendar growled into his mike. “Riddled with informants.”

  Pronto nodded.

  “All the best people left for Miami,” the pilot answered. “There’s nothing but pendejos left in Cuba. That’s why we’re coming back.”

  The Helio leveled off at six thousand feet. Calendar buckled his seat belt. Pronto angled west, away from distant Havana. Calendar sat back and shut his eyes. Images of the four men he’d left dead on the road waited for him, and visions of Fidel’s firing wall, after questioning, for those who were captured alive.

  He opened his eyes to stare into the blur of the prop. The images departed.

  Calendar looked across the huge island sliding by below, soon to give way to the dark coast and Florida Straits. In an hour, he’d land in Key West. He’d pour himself a drink or three in his room.

  He balled a fist, slamming it into the roof of the plane, once, twice, a third time. With every punch, he shouted, “Damn it! Damn it!”

  “Hey!” Pronto shouted into the earphones. “Easy, man. You’re gonna dent the plane. Jesus.”

  Calendar lowered the fist, knuckles throbbing from the pounding. He stared at glowing Havana off to his right.

  “How hard can it be to kill this guy?”

  He rammed his fist one more time into the ceiling.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  March 13

  First Avenue

  Miramar

  Havana

  TOWERS OF SMOKE CORKSCREWED out of the blaze. The fire, raging on tons of spilled oil, burned out of control in the first minutes after the initial explosion. By the time fire crews responded, the outcome was decided: nothing could save the refinery. Arcs of water soaked the steaming superstructure, but could not keep it from buckling. The high-leaping flames turned aside the darkness with a flaring, frightening light.

  Dr. Mikhal Lammeck drank a morning beer, popped peanuts in his mouth, and watched. His Spanish was good enough to follow the television news commentary: last night, sometime after midnight, underground wreckers, backed by the rebel mercenaries and America, had sabotaged a Texaco refinery in Santiago de Cuba. The refinery had been chosen by the underground for destruction because, two years ago, it was one of the first U.S. assets in Cuba nationalized by the revolution.

  The news show switched to film of the refinery taken only an hour earlier. The skeletal remains were scorched. Firemen continued to douse it with water.

  Behind Lammeck’s sofa, a warm Caribbean breeze filtered in the window. The sheer curtains hoisted, causing a cotton caress to rise and fall along his neck. A salted scent from the Florida Straits trailed on the wind. Lammeck smiled at the mayhem on the TV. The announcer stated that Castro would speak that afternoon in Havana’s Parque Central. Fidel would address the sabotage and rising tensions in the country. A gathering of twenty thousand was expected. Arrive early, the announcer advised.

  Lammeck stood. He shut off the television, closed the wooden doors of the RCA cabinet to hide the screen. Leaving the den, he went to the front hall. He lifted his briefcase and stepped outside into the early sun. The 9:00 a.m. taxi he’d arranged to pick him up idled at the curb.

  He rode to Cespedes Avenue, to the National Archives. Lammeck instructed the driver to go the long way, on the coast road, the Malecón. He enjoyed the view of the ocean, the varying moods of the blue water against the seawall. Along the way were monuments, parks where kids tossed baseballs, and the crumbling facades of marvelous Spanish architecture. The highway curved south at Morro Castle, at the mouth of Havana Bay, past the spot where the U.S. warship Maine blew up at the end of the last century, igniting the Spanish-American War. The taxi drove by leviathan warehouses that, until Fidel seized them, had belonged mostly to American corporations. The biggest was the pier for American Fruit, the company that for sixty years was the largest landowner in Cuba. The name of the firm remained painted on the immense metal roof. The ships that docked at these quays now had the hammer and sickle emblazoned on their smokestacks.

  Lammeck gave the driver a hefty tip and told him to come to the house tomorrow morning, again at nine. Inside the archive, he walked to the carrel he’d staked out as his own, in a sunny corner of the second floor. The old librarians saved it for him each morning. He sat with books untouched from the previous day’s work. Some of the reports were in English, left behind by American
administrators and accountants. Lammeck’s Spanish skills were enough to decipher the rest.

  Out of his briefcase he took a notebook brimming with notes. He flipped to the place he’d left off, and resumed his research into the long history of the plundering of Cuba.

  ~ * ~

  Lammeck did not arrive early to the Parque Central. The crowd was a sprawling throng by the time he reached Prado Boulevard. Traffic was blocked on the approaching streets. Lammeck did not edge forward for a spot to see or hear better. Instead, he nudged his way to the outdoor bistro of the Inglaterra Hotel, across the street from the park.

  He waited to catch the busy eye of Gustavo, the waiter he’d been grooming with large gratuities. Gustavo waved a hand in recognition. Lammeck pointed at the packed portico and shrugged. Gustavo stuck out his bottom lip and nodded over the packed heads. He lifted one finger, to signal Give me a moment.

  Quickly, the waiter emerged from a thicket of guayaberas and cigarettes to guide Lammeck to an elevated table set for him on the small bandstand. The hotel’s five-piece band would not be playing during Fidel’s speech. A cold beer waited on the table. Lammeck slipped Gustavo five pesos.

  Across Prado Boulevard, in the heart of the parque, stood a statue of José Martí, the greatest hero of Cuba’s liberation from Spain. Martí was Fidel’s role model: both men were prolific political writers, supporters of equality for all races, uncompromising in their desire for independence. The two were children of Spaniards who’d come to Cuba at Spain’s invitation to whiten the island’s population. Both were filled with that fierce Spanish brand of personal honor. In 1895, still a young man, Martí was shot dead out of the saddle of a pale horse. The hero’s bronze face looked across Fidel’s crowd. Lammeck wondered if the similarities would continue, and martyrdom awaited Fidel, too.

  Gustavo brought Lammeck a cubano sandwich, a grilled and pressed concoction of ham, roast pork, cheese, and pickle on Cuban bread. Sipping beer, he counted the platforms hastily erected around the park for the television cameras. Castro, like his American opposite Kennedy, knew the value of this new medium. The two men made better use of television than any other world leaders.

  Lammeck finished his sandwich and beer. He had a good view of the stand a hundred yards off where Castro would speak. The television announcer’s estimate of twenty thousand in attendance seemed conservative, the park and streets teemed with a festival air. Vendors worked the crowd selling tobacco, lottery tickets, nuts, and sweet rolls off trays strapped around their necks. Gustavo brought Lammeck a fresh beer. Then, with no introduction, Fidel ascended the platform.

  Like a jet engine, the crowd sent up a deafening roar. Fidel waited before a bouquet of microphones, nodding, clasping his hands behind his back, an austere and martial air about him. Ten other men stood on the stage. Half wore beards and khaki uniforms like Fidel. The others, civil servants of the revolutionary government wore guayaberas. Lammeck recognized only one on the stage beside Fidel, the most famous of the barbudos, Che Guevara.

  At last, Castro raised his hands. The crowd quieted on cue, practiced. A red light glowed on top of one of the TV cameras. Castro stepped to the microphones.

  “Students, workers, and citizens all.” In person, his voice emerged in a lower timbre than on the TV newscasts Lammeck watched in the States. Fidel spoke in rapid-fire bursts, without notes or cue cards. Lammeck was pleased to understand so much of Castro’s speedy Spanish.

  Even from a distance, he saw how Castro’s lips inside his beard curled outward when he spoke, like the bell of a trumpet. Fidel leaped on his sentences, knifing his hands to punctuate. He rose to his toes, fell to his heels, and rocked as if the words coming out of his mouth had a recoil. A sea of heads nodded in unison. The crowd interrupted him a dozen times with applause. Fidel did nothing to quiet them in these moments of approval. He let them express themselves, their fervor for him. Lammeck noted the makeup of the crowd: blacks, whites, men and women, young and old, men in business suits, factory workers, students, brown girls with babies on their hips, all side-by-side to hear and be heard in the park.

  Fidel was a remarkable orator. Lammeck had seen only short squibs of his speeches. On American newscasts, Castro was always fiery, but with nothing of the power and charisma he displayed in front of his people. Lammeck was impressed, too, with the man’s mind; it must have been extraordinary, to speak so confidently, eloquently, and at such excruciating length.

  Lammeck raised his hand to catch Gustavo’s attention for another beer. He mimicked forking a bite off a plate, their signal for an order of flan.

  Castro, after relating at length the virtues of the revolution, turned his attention to Kennedy and America. Lammeck, who’d begun to slouch in his chair, perked up.

  “President Kennedy always finds an occasion to make his insidious statement that he loves the people—but not the revolutionary government—of Cuba. Well, then, let Mr. Kennedy realize that the government is the people.”

  The crowd shouted “Fidel, Fidel!” Castro, with his impeccable timing, paused, then kept the momentum building.

  “Let Kennedy realize that he cannot separate us from the people, as we cannot separate him from the monopolies and the millionaires.”

  More applause.

  “The people and the revolutionary government in Cuba today are the same thing, just as the millionaires, usurers, and the government in the United States today are a single thing.”

  The crowd chanted “Castro, yes! Yanquis, no!” Fidel waited, pursing his lips and nodding while above him the bronze Martí gazed over his shoulder. Castro let the crowd settle, then drove home his point with a finger jabbing the sky.

  “This is not a government by a rich caste, not a government of thieves, not a government of exploiters, not a government of petty politicians, not a government of high ranking officers. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. This is the revolution of the humble, by the humble, and for the humble!”

  The enormous gathering went wild. Castro stood wrapped in the rumble of his citizens. Lammeck raised the last of his beer in admiration.

  He got a quick sense that Fidel might have seen him lift his glass, for across the thousands of cheering voices the bearded caudillo nodded solemnly straight at Lammeck.

  Once Fidel began another stanza of the speech, Lammeck tucked pesos under his emptied dessert plate. He stood slowly, in case Castro really had seen him.

  He stepped down off the bandstand, to make his way through the crowd to an open street, to hail a taxi for home and an afternoon nap. He’d had one more beer than he should and this made him sleepy; he’d leave for tomorrow his research at the archives. Before he could walk away from the Inglaterra, Fidel launched into a sermon about the CIA, the Pentagon, and the impending invasion of the island by Cuban exiles backed by America.

  Surprised, Lammeck stopped to listen. He said aloud to no one, “How the hell does he know?”

  “Everyone knows,” answered a voice in English beside him. Lammeck shot the man a look. He was heavyset, about Lammeck’s age, but not familiar, though he looked back with a smile as if they were old friends.

  “Walk with me, Professor Lammeck?”

  The man held out an ushering hand. Lammeck hesitated.

  “Do I know you, señor?”

  “No. I apologize if I have startled you. I am Police Captain Johan.”

  “Have I done something wrong?”

  “No, Professor. Absolutely not.”

  Again, the man gestured with his open hand for them to walk. Unsure, Lammeck accepted and strode ahead on Prado, along the rim of the tightly packed crowd. Castro continued his breathless screed against the CIA and the U.S., preparing and alerting his country for the impending assault.

  Johan walked beside Lammeck without speaking, until they reached the outer edges of the crowd. Castro’s voice still boomed in the distance behind them.

  “How do you know who I am, Captain Johan?”

  Th
e policeman smiled. He was of Lammeck’s generation and seemed of similar temperament, thoughtful before speaking.

  “You are quite well known, Professor. Your work precedes you, even in Cuba. I’ve looked forward to meeting you for some time.”

  Lammeck was quietly pleased to be recognized. But how could this Johan know Lammeck was coming to Havana?

  Before he could ask, the policeman pointed across the boulevard.

  “Ahh, there. Do you know this building?”