The Estonian architect had designed Castro’s lair as if it were really three buildings, one inside each other. I was in the outer shell. This was used by Fidel as a kind of official vacation house, a palace where VIPs and foreign visitors could be entertained. The rooms were unimportant for anything else, sacrificial lambs in the event of a bombing attack.
The next layer in, separated from the others by thick, shock-absorbing walls, was an official workplace for Fidel’s secretaries and other hangers-on when he was in residence. There were two entrances to it, both through the outer “house.” In each case, they were located at the bottom of an L-shaped staircase covered by video cameras and protected by claymore mines. Though not powerful enough to damage the double doors, the claymores would make mincemeat out of anyone attempting to get in against Fidel’s wishes.
Fortunately, I wasn’t taking either entrance.
My path was through the utility tunnel, which ran like a tree trunk from the outer to the inner sanctum, with branches in between. The trunk had thick walls to protect it from attack. Of course, these walls could not cover the entire tunnel, since technicians needed access to make repairs: the Achilles’ heel of any modern-day fortress.
The main entrance to the tunnel was a door-sized opening in the closet just off the hallway near the front entrance. This was inconvenient for a number of reasons—the most prominent that it was dangerously close to the video camera covering the entrance area—so I chose the backup, which was in the wall in the servants’ wing. Eight hex-head screws held the plate to the wall. I unscrewed them with the RotoZip, slipped a set of magnetic connections against the sensors to keep from alerting the system that the panel was off, and then removed the plate. Strapping an LED miner’s light on my forehead, I crawled up into the shaft, pulling myself between the conduit and the water pipes until I reached an overhead trunk that swung toward the main line.
From there, it was easy. A ladder was embedded in the wall, and once I got past the air exchange area, all I had to do was climb straight down.
A long way down.
I had to thread my way through a tangle of wires twice before I reached the access panel to Fidel’s inner lair. I clipped the alarm, then pulled the RotoZip from the fanny pack, slipped in the drill bit, and went to work removing the screws from the back end.
The top lip on this panel was much narrower than the one on the panel I’d come in through, and it slipped off as I drilled through the last screw. I managed to grab it before it toppled down, but I dropped the power tool in the process; it must have hit every rung before landing in the well at the bottom of the shaft.
There was nothing I could do about the noise, except hope no one was around to hear it. I left the RotoZip where it had landed and leaned forward through the hole, sliding the panel down toward the floor gently. I watched the patched alarm cord as it stretched . . . and stretched. Until finally I had to stop, still far from the floor.
According to the plans, the panel should have only been less than a foot from the floor.
The detection system included a coded relay set on the panel, making it impossible to simply bypass. I held the panel with my left hand while I fished with my right through the fanny pack for another connecting wire. The panel wasn’t all that heavy, but in my awkward position it began to feel like a piece of solid lead. I found the wire and slipped it in place, maintaining the connection while I lowered the panel to the floor.
Or rather, lowered it about a third of the way to the floor. The Cubans had decided to place the panel at the top of the utility closet rather than the bottom. And the ceilings here were twelve feet high.
I didn’t have any more wire on me. So I pulled the plate back inside with me, looking for a place to stow it. But the rungs were too narrow to hold it, and the bottom of the passage was too far away. I tried wedging it into the tangle of wires and conduit that ran up the sluiceway at the side, but the panel was too heavy to stay without being secured in some way.
Pausing to rest, I noticed that a large plastic wire harness held the wires together about six feet over my head. The harness looked thick enough to hold the panel if I put it there. But it was just a little too far for the wires I’d used to patch the alarm to reach.
There were plenty of other wires in front of me. Why not cut one, use it temporarily, and then patch it back together on the way out?
Why not, Pilgrim? Why not?
Not knowing what each specific wire was for, I realized I was taking a risk that I’d cut off something that would set off an alarm. But it was either that or toss the plate down, which would bring the troops right away. I stayed away from the round wire sets that looked like they were for data links, and chose one of the two flat ribbons, hoping they were connected to television antennas or something similar. A snip here, a snip there, and my cheat wires now reached six feet.
My left arm was threatening to sheer out of its socket by the time I finally wedged the panel into the wire harness. I bent one of the cables around to snug it in, then peered back through the space into the utility closet.
Nobody there but a few inquisitive spiders.
Since they had the plans and seemed to know so much about the bunker, it wasn’t hard to guess that the Christians in Action had made a play at bugging Fidel’s lair while it was being built. Just in case they had, I whispered sweet nothings to Ken and company under my breath as I tiptoed down the hall. The walls were lined with paintings. And they weren’t the kind you find at Wal-Mart. They were Renaissance old masters, and if they were reproductions, they were damn good ones.
Stolen?
The thought occurred to me. I took my miniature camera out and snapped a few photos, then proceeded down the hall to Fidel’s office.
Fidel had made a big show of giving up smoking several years before the bunker was built; the government media had done numerous stories on how he had kissed his beloved stogies good-bye on doctor’s orders.
He’d kissed them all right. And from the stench in the hall he was kissing them still—then lighting them up and puffing away, maybe three or four at a time. There was no smoke in the house, but even with what must have been a state-of-the-art ventilation system, the place smelled like slowly simmered tobacco.
It was worse inside el Jefe’s office. The floor was lined with thick rugs; I could practically see the smoke wafting from them as I walked across the floor.
The safe was located in the wall at the right of the console behind Fidel’s desk. I dropped to my knee, took out the stethoscope,19 and began playing doctor.
Many people with old-fashioned tumbler safes grow tired of the hassle of running the dial left and right and left again before turning the handle. They tend to leave the combination preset—doing the first two numbers, with only the last remaining. So the first thing I did was rotate the dial slowly, listening for a click. When I heard it, I leaned on the handle.
But Fidel’s an anal SOB, and he’d set his lock accordingly.
I slipped off the earset and connected the stethoscope to a small machine roughly the size of an iPod Shuffle. Then I turned the dial slowly while the machine listened. The machine tracked the different clicks as I went back and forth, and presented me with a set of eight possible combinations.
The safe opened on the second set. I undid the suction cup, rolled the stethoscope up, and pulled open the door.
Nothing would please me more than to report that the Western Hemisphere’s biggest communist had a store of child pornography hidden in his safe. But if it was there, I didn’t see it.
I did see at least one hundred stacks of American one-hundred-dollar bills, neatly piled at the bottom of the safe. I was sorely tempted to slide a few hundreds from each stack. I doubt Fidel would have known the difference.
Some old photos sat in a beat-up old shoe box on the shelf above the money. There were also a pair of revolvers and a tin box contained a baptism certificate and some booties.
What I was looking for sat in a manila
envelope at the side.
Testamento.
Inside was a DVD.
And another. And four more, making a total of six in the envelope.
Taking them all was an option, but not a very good one. I turned and looked around the office. There was a credenza catty-corner from the desk with a TV and DVD player. Very nice of Fidel to be so helpful.
The first DVD I slipped in was a collection of old home movies showing Fidel as a child. I watched thirty seconds’ worth, then tried the second.
The lights came on in an office exactly like the one I’d shot my video in. And there he was, looking just like me.
I slapped the TV off, swapped discs, and tucked the real one into my fanny pack. Then I put everything else in the safe.
A bookshelf took up one side of the room. Naturally I had to look over his collection before leaving. And wouldn’t you know, down at the very bottom, in the right-hand corner next to some old dictionaries, was a copy of Rogue Warrior, the beginning of the franchise.
First edition, too.
A better man would have resisted the impulse to pick the book up and inscribe it: Fuck you very much, el Jefe.
I had just put away my pen when the light went on in the hallway outside.
___________________
12 Gene isn’t his real name. Duh, like I’m going to name him and get him fired.
13 The ship was probably a Russian Project 205EM guided-missile patrol craft, most likely Ship 262, which we were to encounter later on. Doc couldn’t make out the details in the dark.
14 For obvious reasons, I’m going to skimp here on the precise nature and benefits of the intelligence.
15 I’m not supposed to say where it is, but if you put your ruler on Guantanamo and drew a straight line north to the water, you wouldn’t be far off.
16 After I wrote this, Jamie asked that I not ID the aircraft since it might make it obvious which airline was involved, and cost him his job. So the exact ID has been deleted. If you fly medium distances anywhere in the U.S. or Europe, you’ve probably been on this type of plane.
17 Again, Jamie says that identifying the precise method might ID not just the plane but the airline. We should note that the 727’s basic design was changed after Cooper’s jump to make it much harder to do what he did.
18 I’m sure some of you would have enjoyed seeing me swimming in the cement in the back as the drum spun. To you I say, fug yourself.
19 Did I explain that the stethoscope was digitally enhanced? To give you an idea of how powerful it is, a doctor using it to hear a heartbeat would blow his eardrums out if the volume was cranked to high.
( I )
I deally when you’re doing a sneak and peak, you have someone watching the command post or security people, ready to warn you if they’re coming. In the old days, this was done with a set of binoculars and Mark-1 eyeballs: a member of the team would be strategically placed, watching to sound the alarm. The new school approach substitutes high-tech toys—audio and video bugs, for example—in place of the human eyes.
But that’s in an ideal world, and few ops are ideal. In this case, placing sensors would have been more trouble than they were worth. Red was watching, but it was impossible for her to cover all angles. She’d settled on making sure no one approached from the base; there was no sense covering the security kiosk at the front of the house, since guards could pass from the kiosk into the inner parts of Fidel’s house without showing themselves.
And the truth is, it was my own fault the guards had come. The wire I had cut in the shaft was not connected to an antenna but a motion sensor in the foyer. My cutting the wire had apparently lit a button on the panel in the security office, and two of the guards had come down to figure out what the hell was wrong with it.
But first they had to search the entire suite, part of their security protocol.
Smart protocol.
Damn.
On the bright side, if I hadn’t stopped to autograph the book for Fidel, they probably would have seen me in the hallway, since they had an unobstructed view when they came in. But that unobstructed view now meant I couldn’t leave the office: one man stayed at the foyer, covering the other as he went through the rooms.
Smart. Damn again.
I edged close to the door. Taking out the men wouldn’t be hard—I could knock out the first when he came in, grab his gun and eliminate the second.
If I did that, I’d probably escape—with the emphasis on “probably,” a word that I still don’t like, even when I’m using it. But the mission would definitely be blown to hell.
Better than dying in Cuba, though.
I slipped my hand to the blackjack in my back pocket. The soldier finished looking in Fidel’s kitchen, then crossed the hallway to the bedroom. He started laughing about something—for all I know there was an inflatable doll on the bed—and came out haw-hawing so merrily even Shotgun would have been outlaughed.
He ducked his head into the office. I raised my arm . . .
Then he ducked back, still laughing, and continued down the hall.
The soldiers were perfect examples of how you can have the best set of security protocols in the world, do a decent job training your men, and still get blindsided by expectations. The men came downstairs expecting that there was a short or some other malfunction that had messed up the systems and set off the alert. Though they had been trained and were fearful enough of their supervisors to check the suite before doing anything else—something the supervisors had no real way of checking—their search was perfunctory at best. They believed there was a problem with the sensor, and that’s how they acted. After all, they’d been in the security booth and knew no one had come past them. While they weren’t stupid enough to disregard standing orders, they weren’t smart enough to think outside the box, either.
Not that I was complaining.
I was too busy holding my breath as Tweedledum checked the rest of the suite. Tweedledee remained in the foyer, scraping his feet and apparently poking the device he thought had failed.
The men had clearly been in the suite before—which was a break for me, since if they hadn’t they probably would have spent more time there, maybe even pretended to be el Jefe. They also wanted to get back upstairs, where one of the early World Cup qualifying matches was on TV. The guard searching the place walked right by the closet where the panel was off without bothering to open the door, then returned to his companion in the hallway.
“Clear,” said Tweedledee. “What are you doing?”
“It’s probably a loose wire.”
“It’s not going to help if you fiddle with it. You’ll make it worse.”
“Not necessarily.”
“The technician will just have to come.”
“It won’t be cleared then until next week. We’ll have to stay inside the suite every shift. No TV.”
More rules. Good ones, too. But rather than increasing security, they decreased it—the guards didn’t want to hang around without some diversion.
“Maybe there is something we can do,” said Tweedledee.
“The sergeant is a jackass.”
They bitched and moaned a bit more, the way soldiers do when talking about an unfair—in their eyes—superior. They also monkeyed with the microphone system. Finally, Tweedledum told Tweedledee to go back upstairs and check to see if it was OK.
“Just call Jorge.”
“Then he’ll report we reset the circuit. Make sure no one sees you. Be quiet. We’ll say it was a fluke.”
Silence. Then the question soldiers have asked since time began.
“Why me?” asked Tweedledum.
“Because I have to take a dump,” said Tweedledee.
“It’s against the rules.”
“Should I do it in the hall.”
“Upstairs—”
“I’ll never make it.” He was already walking toward it.
“You’re always in the bathroom.”
The lavatory door close
d. Tweedledum left the suite. I gave the office a quick glance, making sure everything was back in place, then hightailed it to the closet.
The first order of business was replacing the wire so the motion detector would work. But I couldn’t undo the alarm wire until I got the shaft cover back into place. And I couldn’t do that until I recovered my RotoZip, which was lying somewhere down at the bottom of the shaft.
Putting the access plate back into place would make a fair bit of noise; there was no way to do that with my two friends in the suite. I decided, therefore, to try patching the broken wire first, in hopes that they would go back to their game. Since I couldn’t take the wire off the cover until it was back in place, I picked out another wire, spliced it, and made my repairs. Only then did I clamber down to fetch the RotoZip.
The toilet flushed just as I returned. I stuck my head through the opening, listening as Tweedledee emerged from the bathroom a new man. Five or ten minutes later, his compatriot called down on the radio, telling him that the detector was working.
And that the Cubans had just scored.
“On my way,” said Tweedledee, hustling to catch the replay.
I drilled new holes for the panel’s screws, then replaced the originals with my own. Each had to be glued in place—a tedious process, since it meant pressing each one against the hole in the panel and counting to two hundred while the glue set.
With everything finally set, I eased the panel down the ladder, balancing it against my shoulder. Getting it through the opening wasn’t difficult, but turning it around and pulling it into the exact right spot so that each screw would go into the right hole was a serious bitch.
Where have you heard that before?
The lip at the top of the panel was so narrow it was almost impossible to grip as I pulled it back toward me. Finally I reached into the bottom of my fanny pack and took out one of the suction cups I’d brought along in case I needed assistance climbing. I attached it to the back of the panel, and used it to hold the panel in place. The top screws went in easily, but the holes on the side were slightly off, and I finally had to snap off two of the screws I’d inserted to get it in place.
RW15 - Seize the Day Page 12