RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  It hurt, even though my pesos were counterfeit.

  I checked the DVD back at the hotel. Fidel’s florid face filled the screen. There he was, bushy beard and overgrown eyebrows.

  “Man, you guys could be brothers,” said Shotgun.

  “Who says we’re not?”

  Fidel started talking. The Revolution was continuing, etc., etc. Red turned away.

  I would have too, except that suddenly Fidel’s threats and predictions grew very specific.

  “. . . And I guarantee you, fellow Cubans, fellow members of the glorious generation of socialist men and women, that the Yankee bourgeoisie decadent capitalists will feel my death even more strongly than you will. And that within twenty-four hours, they will begin dropping like flies of the most horrible disease imaginable. This is my last gift to you . . .”

  ___________________

  20 Red’s grandfather’s family owned a small plot of land, but it was smaller than the limit Castro’s government imposed. Though compensation was promised to those whose land was seized, the amount was small and in many cases it was never paid. Red’s grandfather spoke out about this, and many other issues.

  21 Technically, the Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, National Assembly of People’s Power.

  Never strike a king unless you are sure you shall kill him.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, JOURNALS

  ( I )

  Technically, the existence of another disc was not my problem. My job was done—I’d been retained, under somewhat difficult circumstances I might add, to swap two DVDs, and I had done so. I’d also gotten my people and we were on our way out.

  But the admiral didn’t see it that way. In his view, I’d been hired to swap the discs, whether there were two or three or twenty-three hundred.

  I argued, though not very hard. I’ve never been one to live by technicalities. And I was starting to like Cuba.

  “We’re pumping our sources,” Ken told me when we talked by secure sat phone. I’d taken the precaution of using one of our rentals and driving a good distance from the city, far away from eavesdroppers and signal stealers. “We should have the definitive location in twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Dick, you’re not thinking of leaving Cuba, are you?”

  “Thinking? No. On my way? Yes.”

  “Dick—it’s not like you to leave a job half finished.” Ken never was very good at math.

  “I’m sorry, Ken. I’ve already done more than I signed up for.”

  “Dick, I’m counting on you. You know you’re the only person in a position to carry this out quickly. We don’t know what Fidel’s real health is. He could go at any minute.”

  I’ll spare you the rest of his wheedling. I agreed to stay for twenty-four hours while the Christians in Action did their best to figure out where the missing disc was.

  “And what about this plague?” I asked. “What’s that about?”

  “You’ve seen the video?”

  “No, it came to me in a dream.”

  “It’s all bullshit, Dick. Fidel doesn’t have the capacity for any sort of biological weapon. It’s all a load of crap.”

  “I doubt he’d make a boast like that if he didn’t think it was true. He doesn’t want to be remembered as a liar.”

  A mass murderer, maybe. Just not a liar.

  “Our people don’t think it’s real,” said Ken. “It doesn’t jibe with the intelligence we have.”

  We don’t know it, so it can’t be true. Classic Christians in Action thinking.

  “Twenty-four hours,” added Ken. “We’ll have the information for you by then.”

  “I’ll call you,” I promised.

  “Where will you be?”

  “Disney World.”

  Havana, Orlando—almost the same thing.

  We spent the next twelve hours reloading.

  Doc and Trace had already checked in for their flight. I decided not to pull them off. If we did go after the disc, we’d need to get more gear into the country, and it would be easier to arrange things with them starting offshore.

  The rest of us headed for an unlicensed—aka illegal—guesthouse about twenty miles from the city that Sean had said always had vacancies. I figured we’d spend the night and next day resting up and waiting to see if the admiral bucked usual CIA procedure and came back with useful information.

  Everyone was antsy the next morning. Mongoose had gotten up early and was practically tearing the walls down, treading back and forth in his room, waiting for first light, breakfast, and something to do. Red was a bit calmer, chatting with the owner, but I could tell from her knitted brow when she glanced across the room that there was no way she was spending the day hanging out.

  Thank God for Shotgun. He was his merry, hungry self when he came down to breakfast, laughing as Mongoose grumbled, and helping himself to a full plate of sugar-drenched cakes the matron had made, charming her with his appetite. He helped himself to more coffee, insisting that her cooking was the best he’d ever had. If the paperwork hadn’t been so onerous, I’m sure she would have adopted him right there.

  In Canada, Doc and Trace arranged some new finances and credit cards, funding bank accounts we could tap into from Cuba. They found a “facilitator” who was able to provide them with some European identity documents to go along with the accounts and some new identities. And then they went shopping, buying clothes and some other items to make a lengthy stay in Cuba comfortable.

  Junior returned to Jamaica—grousing, of course—and took over for Danny as our main contact. That let Danny fly over to Miami, where he went to work looking up some friends and near friends and near near friends to see if they might have any information about Fidel’s deathbed surprise.

  Did I mention Junior was grousing?

  I’m being generous. He wasn’t happy with the assignment, and didn’t mind telling me about it. He wanted to join Doc and Trace, and he tried arguing his way into that part of the mission.

  “I can speak Spanish,” he said.

  “Not as well as they can. Besides, that’s irrelevant to their cover and not what we need right now.”

  “You won’t let me go because I’m your son.”

  “That’s a crock of shit,” I told him.

  “That I’m your son, or that’s the reason you won’t let me go?”

  “Both.”

  “I am.”

  “Your DNA doesn’t matter, Junior. One way or the other. You have a job. Now do it.”

  “Why don’t you love me, Dick?” he blurted.

  “Love’s got nothing to do with it. Stop whining, or I’ll kick your butt into next week.”

  I may not have been his dad, but I sure sounded like it. Matt grit his teeth and kept them clamped shut.

  I really can’t blame him for wanting to be where the action was. Support people and backbenchers are critical to a successful operation, but it’s hard to see that when you’re young and full of spit. Been there myself, and I definitely got a case of red ass trying to keep myself on the bench.

  Frankly, if the four of us had had to stay at that guesthouse all day, red asses would have been the least of my troubles. Fortunately, the lady who owned the place supplied us with an excellent diversion.

  We’d given her a cover story about coming to Cuba from Spain to fish. Just after breakfast, she recommended a local guide who had a boat. She helped us make the arrangements—undoubtedly with a small commission—then sent us off with some food. Mongoose’s mood brightened; as we walked down the pier he started talking about how all Filipinos were great fishermen, and how his great-grandfather had once caught a shark with his bare hands.

  “What did he do, hold the bait in one hand and knife him with the other?” said Shotgun.

  “No, he fell in the water while they were fishing, and the next thing he knew, the fin was right there,” said Mongoose. “So, he had no knife. He had nothing but his bare hands and feet. The shark came, he gave it a cho
p on the snout. As it went past, he grabbed the top fin. Instantly, they were underwater.”

  Mongoose has a way of saying instantly that makes you feel like your heart just skipped two beats. Bullshit or not, everyone hung on every word he said.

  “They went underwater. My grandfather started pounding on the fish’s head. The shark snapped, but it stayed underwater. Finally, my grandfather realized what the solution was. He leaned forward, and jabbed his right eye in the shark’s eye. Like this.”

  Mongoose went to demonstrate on Shotgun, but he was not quite quick enough. His friend intercepted him, and the pair grappled, rolling to the dock laughing hysterically.

  Red shook her head. “All a joke. And I believed him.”

  The words she added in Spanish were somewhat less generous.

  “You all right there, Red?” I asked.

  “I don’t like fishing, Dick.”

  “What else you want to do?”

  She shrugged.

  “Listen, I’m not going to play headshrink,” I told her. “If there is something you want to do, tell me. We have a few hours today. Tomorrow, we’re back to business.”

  “I would like to go to Cayos Verona,”22 she blurted. “But I don’t want to go alone.”

  It took about three hours for Red and I to drive down to Cayos Verona, the small town on the southern coast of the island where her grandfather had lived before becoming a schoolteacher in the western mountains. While Red had been in Cuba many times, she had never come here, only to Havana and two other cities to the west where relatives still lived.

  The area was famous for its tobacco, and we passed barns and tobacco sheds that looked like they were brand-new, shining in the sun as they waited for a new crop to be grown. Most of the houses, though, looked like they’d been plucked from the edge of hell. A good number were tin-roofed shacks that had been battered in a hurricane months before and not yet been repaired. We drove on, following a route too obscure to host any checkpoints, until we finally reached Cayos Verona on the coast.

  The village consisted of perhaps a hundred houses, clustered on streets that spread from a tiny town square like spider legs. A small church sat across from the square, and that was our first stop.

  When I say the church was small, I mean it was barely bigger than your average school bus. As a matter of fact I’m not sure a school bus could have fit inside if the doors were removed. The front doors of the church were open, and we went in.

  Rather than stepping up, we went down two steps into the nave. The place felt cool and damp; very little light came in through the windows, and it was so quiet I could hear Red breathing heavily as she walked up the aisle toward the altar.

  I stood in the back and watched as she went up and knelt near the cross, praying as she imagined her grandfather did as a boy. The church didn’t have any pews, but it had everything else that made it a church—the altar, a beaten-to-hell (literally) Christ on the cross at the front, a lit candle on the side.

  Red crossed herself and came back down the aisle, deep in thought.

  “Can we see the town?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  We walked down a packed-dirt street to the right, playing friendly tourist.

  Not too friendly—I had my pistol under my shirt and my eyes were roaming back and forth, looking for trouble. If things got hairy, we had a pair of MP5s and some flash-bangs in the car. But the only trouble I spotted was in the form of two kids, maybe seven or eight years old, who ran up to Red and started calling her aunt. It was probably a semi-scam—other strangers had probably given them candy or money when flattered—but Red was touched, and she bent down and started talking to them, asking them about the village.

  Within seconds, an older woman appeared in the doorway of the nearest house. She came out and scolded the boys, who bolted down the block. Red went over and introduced herself, explaining that she had had a relative who lived in the village many years before.

  Both women were suspicious of each other: the older woman because Red might be a government spy, and Red for obvious reasons. But within a few minutes they had reached some sort of unspoken agreement to trust each other—and not to ask certain questions, like who exactly Red’s relative was. If asked, Red would have stuck to the cover story that we were from Canada, but she wasn’t asked. Instead, we were escorted through the village, introduced to whoever passed by, and treated to a running commentary of life on the southwestern shore of Cuba.

  It was a hardscrabble life, not something you could romanticize. These people were very poor. But they were also generous with what they had, and much more open with strangers than even the friendliest town in South Carolina, which in my experience has been among the friendliest places in America.

  The village fishermen—all three of them—were out on their boats, but our guide took us down to the dock, very proud of all eighteen wobbly feet of it. Then she went back to the center of town and rounded up a few of her neighbors. We had lunch in the backyard of the village’s grandest house, a one-story brick building on the highest ground (by about three feet) above the town square. There was a seemingly bottomless pot of rice and chicken, with tiny little peppers that sparked in your mouth and made the homemade liquor they served taste even better. The fact that I didn’t smoke scandalized the locals; even the women smoked fat cigars here.

  “Thank you,” said Red as we drove back toward our guesthouse. “I appreciate it more than I can say.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She had her head back on the seat, eyes almost closed. The day seemed to have tired her out ten times more than any of the operations we’d pulled already.

  None of the last names of the people Red had met were familiar. But she hadn’t come to see anyone specific. She was more visiting her grandfather, or to be more specific her memory of him.

  We were a few miles from the house when suddenly she sprang forward. Hand on the dash, she turned to me.

  “You think things will be better when Fidel goes?”

  The easy answer would have been sure. But it wouldn’t have been honest.

  “No way of knowing.”

  “I think it will be,” she said. “Definitely.”

  Shotgun and Mongoose were sitting in the parlor when we got back, watching the news with the woman who owned the place. We sat down and joined them. A few minutes later, the announcer said with great portent that freedom fighter Imad Mughniyah had been killed by a car bomb in Damascus.

  The Israeli government was being blamed for his death, apparently triggered by a car bomb.

  Remind me never to double-park in Damascus.

  We all observed a moment of silence for the dead bastard . . . a moment of silent jubilation. Imad Mughniyah was a Hezbollah slime who’d planned at least one hijacking, numerous kidnappings, and a number of suicide bombings, starting in the 1980s. Our paths had crossed once or twice, and not very pleasantly.

  I did feel a twinge of regret at his passing: it meant I’d never have the chance to get the bastard myself.

  ( II )

  Ken was in a cheery mood when I checked back in.

  That was a very bad sign.

  “We have two possible locations,” he said, as if he were checking off the options for lunch. “One’s in Communist Party Headquarters. Fidel has an office there. The other is out east—way out east, where he first set up his guerrilla command.”

  “These are guesses, right?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Ken, you’re a lousy poker player. How good is your intel on this?”

  “Good. Not the best, but good.”

  There was no point in pressing him any further. Instead, I asked if there was anything new on the other matter—Fidel’s deathbed surprise.

  “We’re working on it. How long before you have this wrapped up?”

  That was the end of our conversation.

  “WAG planning,” said Doc, when I spoke to him by sat phone a little while later. “My favorite kin
d.”

  WAG = Wild Ass Guess. WAG planning is a specific version of wishful thinking generally practiced by Can’t-Cunt officers seeking to justify their existence. Having been a chief for a number of years, Doc had a great deal of experience dealing with such plans, and their fallout.

  “We’ll start in Havana,” I told him. “Party Headquarters is worth a sneak and peak.”

  “Matter of opinion.”

  “Getting tired of Cuba, Doc?”

  “Tired of Fidel. You see what happened to Mughniyah?”

  “Yup.”

  “Real shame if that happened to Fidel.”

  “For the moment, we have every incentive to keep him alive.”

  “Maybe that’s the idea.”

  The thought had crossed my mind—that Fidel had actually set the plan up as some sort of twisted insurance against an American plot to assassinate him. But it was a little too convoluted for that.

  I gave Doc the option of taking a pass on the project.

  “No, I’m in. And Trace is chomping at the bit to get back. What sort of goodies should we bring?”

  We spent the next day in Havana, touring Plaza de la Revolución, the big square in front of Communist Party Headquarters that’s ground zero for the Cuban government. The center of the park features a monument to José Martí, the late nineteenth-century Cuban patriot and freedom fighter who must roll over in his grave every night.

  Even though Fidel has co-opted him, Martí’s a guy anyone who really thinks they value freedom ought to study. Among other things, he’s the fellow who said, “It’s better to die standing up than to live kneeling down.”