RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  I rolled to my right, nearly retching from the stench of bird crap as I struggled to my feet. The room was so dark I couldn’t see my gun lying in the boards and debris next to me; I had to feel around for it and was ready to give up two or three times before I found it.

  Expecting the floor to give way any second, I walked forward slowly, hand out until I touched a wall. Then I felt my way around to the door. The good news was, there was enough light in the hallway for me to see. The bad news was, it came from the bubblegum machines on the police cars, shining through the upper windows at the front of the building, where there was still glass.

  I found the stairs and started down, still trying to clear the cobwebs from my brain. As I reached the second floor, I heard someone running up the steps from the basement. One hand on the banister, I leapt over the side to the first-floor landing, crashing into José Martí’s back as I came down.

  It’s not every day you flatten a national hero. I would have savored the memory if the circumstances were different.

  “I think it’s time to renegotiate our price,” I told José, picking him up by the scruff of the neck. “I think free is good.”

  Apparently he didn’t agree, and began screaming as I pulled him back down the steps with me. I slammed him against the side of the wall a few times, but that only made him angrier, and finally I had to pitch him ahead of me into the dimly lit basement.

  Though poorly lit, the basement was dry and clean—or at least the parts that I could see were. Crates were stacked at least chest high nearly wall to wall. José had enough gear to equip half of Cuba’s army.

  Which was only fair, since that was probably the source of most of his stash.

  I picked him up by the scruff of his neck and asked where the explosives were.

  “You idiot! The police are surrounding the building. We’ll never get out.”

  “Where are the explosives?” I said. I pushed the MP5 into his chest. “I’m not asking again.”

  He pointed to the corner. I dragged him with me. There were boxes marked for plastique, nitro, and dynamite.

  There were also grenades. I helped myself to four.

  “Open the dynamite,” I told him.

  “The police are going to arrest us.”

  “You maybe. Not me.”

  Reluctantly, José Martí pulled down one of the crates marked dynamite and opened it.

  “Blaster caps?” I asked.

  “Caps?”

  “I want to blow the fucking stuff up.”

  “Fuses—there.”

  The box at the left had a collection of old-fashioned blasting fuses, the kind you may have seen in the movies with a braided fuse similar to what you’d see on a firecracker.

  I love firecrackers, but using them to set off dynamite is not my idea of fun. But it was my only option.

  “Stand against the wall,” I told José Martí.

  “You’re an American,” he said, finally figuring out my accent.

  “And you’re going to be dead if you don’t stand against the wall.”

  José Martí raised his chest. “I’m not going to aid Yankee aggression.”

  I raised the submachine gun. His patriotism evaporated and he stepped back against the wall.

  I pulled a wick off one of the fuses and tied it into another fuse. I made a quick arrangement of the fuses and dynamite, then lit the rat’s tail in the middle. The fire sparked, then slowly began working its way toward the sticks.

  Not slowly enough, in my opinion.

  “Let’s go, José,” I yelled.

  He was happy to comply, beating me to the steps.

  Just as he had predicted, the police were surrounding the building; we could see the lights of their cars revolving through the windows at the front.

  “Which way is out?” I asked José as we got to the first floor.

  He didn’t answer. I grabbed his back and pushed him down.

  “No problem waiting here until the dynamite explodes,” I said.

  “The side,” he managed, pointing. “I’ll show you.”

  I followed into a side room. He ran to the corner, then began clawing at a stack of boxes.

  “Help me get them out of the way,” he said.

  I grabbed a few and tossed them down. I expected to see a hole in the wall, but there was none.

  With the boxes gone, José Martí put his hand up against the wall and started pounding it with the side of his fist. The wallboard cracked.

  “Like this,” I told him, reaching up and booting through with my heel. The board gave way, revealing a hole just large enough for us to crawl through. But it wasn’t to the outside—it was to the building next door.

  I pushed him through, then grabbed his leg and pulled myself over him into the next room.

  “The dynamite, the dynamite!” he whined.

  “Now where do we go?”

  “We won’t make it!”

  “Sure we will,” I told him.

  But he was right—at that moment, there was a tremendous explosion below us, and a good portion of the building shot upward like lava bursting from a volcano.

  ( IV )

  The force of the explosion threw Red backward on the roof, and she tumbled toward the edge that faced the street we’d taken to get there. By the time she stopped rolling, the secondary explosions had begun. Crate after crate of ammo and other goodies began cooking off in the fire. Yellow and red flames shot upward, towering high into the night. Havana hasn’t seen such fireworks since the Spanish blew up the Maine in 1898.

  The police scrambled for cover, called for backup, and ordered coffee, donuts, and marshmallows. Red scrambled back the way she’d come, climbing down to the ground and then circling around toward the front of the building, hoping that I had somehow managed to escape the explosion.

  She wasn’t very hopeful, actually. She was literally praying for a miracle, rattling off Hail Mary’s like the old Italian ladies at six o’clock mass.

  I was on my knees at that moment myself, though I was crawling rather than praying.

  The basement walls of José Martí’s building had channeled the main force of the explosion upward, reducing the shock on the neighboring buildings. Even so, the corner of the building we were in collapsed, sending two walls tumbling together. Jose led the way to a set of steps that went downward. Going down didn’t strike me as a particularly bright idea, but I followed him anyway. The steps led to a steel door with a number combination lock. He pressed a few numbers, got it open, and pushed into a narrow, dank passage.

  I had to move my shoulders sideways to get through. Something had hit José Martí when the building exploded, and he was limping heavily. If it weren’t for that, he probably would have been able to slip away from me. Even so, I had to summon a burst of speed when we came to a set of stairs going upward. I grabbed the back of his shirt as he hit the street, halting him.

  “We can’t stay here. The police will block off the entire area,” he said. “They will make arrests. Everyone will be arrested. Americans especially.”

  “This way,” I told him, pulling him toward what I thought was the street Red and I had come down.

  “This is behind the building.”

  “I want the alley where I met you.”

  “The explosion surely demolished it.”

  “The alley,” I told him.

  He put his head down and turned to the right. As we started to walk, I heard more sirens.

  “I’ll kill you if you try to get away,” I told him, sliding the gun against his back as a reminder. “Don’t try anything.”

  He started walking. The MP5 is a small gun, but it’s still large enough to be noticed on the street. I kept it down by my side, staying close to the buildings as we walked. We walked in a big circle toward the alley. Red, meanwhile, had gone as close as she could to the building. Blocked off by the police, she came around in the other direction. We met about two blocks from the alley, fifty yards from a police checkpoint.r />
  She broke into a trot when she saw us.

  “Thank God. I thought you were dead,” she told me, hugging me.

  “Not yet.”

  Jose Marti looked at us. I think he thought I was going to let him go.

  Fool.

  “You owe us some guns,” I told him. “I want them now.”

  He shook his head. “My guns, all of my guns, were in that basement. You blew it up.”

  “Then take me to one of your competitors.”

  Unlike José Martí, Peiro Garcia lived outside the city, in a large (for Cuba) detached house protected by six or seven guards and two Dobermans. He wasn’t much for conversation, or for haggling. Even with José Martí’s professional discount, Garcia still wanted seven hundred euros per gun.

  He did, at least, throw in six mags per gun, and a thousand loose rounds each.

  With the purchase complete, José Martí had gone from asset to liability. I couldn’t just let him go. Even if he didn’t want revenge—ha, ha—he’d have no problem trying to cut a deal at my expense if the police picked him up. He might have known only that I was an American, but that was more than enough to get the security apparatus very hot and bothered.

  José undoubtedly did the math and realized what his likely fate was, so he tried to head it off as we drove away from Peiro. We were in one of the rentals, picked up from its stashing point behind a church about a mile and a half from the center of town.

  “Get me to America. Get me to America and we’ll call it all even.”

  “Why? So you can spy for Fidel?”

  “I hate Fidel.” He spit on the floor of the car. “Take me to America. I have a network of suppliers—they can be useful. I hate Fidel.”

  “You’re a bullshit liar,” said Red.

  “I am a liar, yes, when I have to be. But you’ll have no trouble from me if you take me to America. I can help you. Tell me what you are planning—only take me out with you.”

  I had no intention of telling José Martí what we were doing, of course. But Ken might welcome him. He’d send him to some out of the way army base in the Midwest, debrief him, then persuade him to return to Cuba as a “friend.” Bankrolled by the CIA, he could be an even bigger player in the underground economy.

  I was just mulling how we might get him back when Red grabbed my arm.

  “That’s a checkpoint,” she warned, pointing ahead to a small line of cars on the road ahead. “They must have set it up after the explosion.”

  We were nowhere near the explosion, but her guess was probably on the money.

  “If they stop us, we’ll all hang,” said José Martí.

  “Hang tight,” I told them, cranking the wheel hard to the left.

  My choice of escape routes was deeply flawed: the police had blocked off the road with a large truck. When I saw it, I turned down a second road to my right. This one wasn’t blocked off, but it was filled with police conducting follow-up checks of people they’d stopped at the roadblock and in the immediate area.

  One of the officers tried waving me down. I waved back—with the rear end of the car, fishtailing it against his side and sending him airborne into a parked police van nearby.

  That may have made his friends mad. They began shooting at us. I cranked the wheel sharply and sideswiped another car. I reached the end of the block, then turned left onto a wider street and headed toward the water.

  It was a little before dawn, and Havana was just waking up. A number of early risers were out, but the traffic was light enough on the Malecón that I managed to get a good head start before the first police car appeared behind us. We had a four-block lead.

  I’d stretched it to six blocks when the bus appeared in front of me, leering slowly from a side street like a dazed circus elephant looking for its bath. I hit the brakes and cranked the wheel to the right, broadsiding the bus. Somehow still moving, I twisted the car around and got it down the street the bus had just come out of. But a truck was stopped halfway down, and when I veered away from it, I found myself moving head-on for a black Russian Lada. I tried to pass him on the right, running up for the sidewalk, but there wasn’t enough space or time. We crashed together, the impact twisting the Lada into the truck and wedging us against the side of the building.

  Red threw off her seat belt as soon as the car stopped moving. She took her gun and batted out the shattered windshield, climbing onto the hood. I followed her.

  “Get the guns from the trunk,” I told her. “And as much of the ammo as you can carry. I’ll take José.”

  But when I slid back into the car, I saw that José Martí wasn’t coming to America, at least not in this life. He hadn’t been wearing his seat belt, and had been tossed so hard against the side window that his head had gone through. His neck was now impaled on part of the glass and twisted metal; the entire back of the car was washed in his blood.

  That was one way to solve the problem of what to do with him, I guess.

  ( V )

  Escaping the police wasn’t hard. The bus had stalled in the middle of the intersection on the main road, and by the time the cops who’d been chasing us got through the traffic and avoided the other victims, we were long gone.

  More difficult was finding a place to hide the weapons.

  We took a zigzag course away from the accident, walking through a drowsy residential area. After walking for four or five blocks, I spotted a set of steps that led to a courtyard behind a row of apartments. We ran down the steps, went into the courtyard, and stuck the rifles behind some bushes at the edge of the wall.

  It was a lousy hiding place. I knew as soon as we put the guns there that we’d never come back for them; it would be way too dangerous. But we couldn’t walk through Havana with them. All of the trouble we’d gone through to get them, all of the money we’d spent, the bruises—had all been a waste. Worse, they cost us my submachine gun, as well as several dozen bullets.

  I wished I’d spent the night at the bar, communing with the good Dr. Bombay. I would have been way ahead.

  The far side of the courtyard opened into another underpass leading to the neighboring street. Red and I paused in the middle to regroup, straightening our clothes before going back out on the street. Some of José Martí’s blood had splattered on my shirt. I took it off, balled it up, and threw it down. My black T-shirt reeked of sweat, but at least there was no blood on it.

  Red looked a little worse for wear herself. She’d torn both knees of her jeans, and sported a black eye.

  “If we run into the police, we’ll tell them we’re lovers and just had a quarrel,” Red said as we walked. “They’ll believe it.”

  I’m not so sure they would have, but fortunately her theory was never tested. We hopped on the first bus that passed.

  It was only after it began moving again that I realized it was going the wrong way—back in the direction of the accident. We held our breaths as the damaged bus came into view. But the police waved the driver past the tangled remains. We stayed on for four more stops, then got out and found another bus that took us right to our hotel.

  The newspapers didn’t carry any stories about the explosion in the heart of Havana’s black market, nor did Doc and Trace’s minder mention it when she showed up to take them to breakfast that morning.

  The minder’s name was Margaret “Maggy” MacKenzie. She gave a cock and bull story about how her great-grandparents had come to Cuba as immigrants from Ireland around the turn of the century, had settled there and done relatively well for themselves. Their descendants had worked hard and become, as she put it, “privileged.” But their consciences bothered them greatly, and when the Revolution came they had wholeheartedly welcomed Fidel and the party.

  Not a word of the story was true. We’d put Junior to work checking Maggy MacKenzie’s background with our Christians in Action friends, and had found, surprise, surprise, that they had a fat dossier on her—and not just because she “escorted” a large number of journalists on their visits to t
he country.

  Maggy MacKenzie had gone to Cuba in the 1980s from the U.S., by some accounts an idealistic college girl and by others simply a young woman looking for a little excitement and danger. Instead, she had found romance, at least long enough to get pregnant. But the father abandoned her; then her baby died in childbirth. Either convinced that socialism was the best blueprint for mankind, or too ashamed or depressed to go home, MacKenzie eventually got a job with the government as a low-level clerk.

  The Christians in Action weren’t sure exactly when she got involved with the Cuban security apparatus; they would have known about her from the very beginning, but at what point they took a real interest in her wasn’t clear. In any event, she had become a translator, then a media specialist, gradually winning more important assignments. She was now a party member and highly trusted, or she wouldn’t have been ushering documentary makers and newspeople around Havana.

  The fact that the Agency had that much detail on Maggy MacKenzie indicated that they had probably tried turning her into a spy at some point. We don’t talk about things like that, though. Presumably, it didn’t work, or her file would not have been available.

  Presumably.

  Breakfast at the hotel featured an array of Danishes that would have made Shotgun weep. Trace doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth and stuck to coffee. Even Doc passed on all but a single rum cake.

  “Not hungry?” asked MacKenzie.

  “Gotta watch my weight,” he said.

  “You? On a diet?”

  There was a certain twinkle in her eye. As breakfast went on, it became obvious that she had a bit of a crush on him. Doc and Trace began using that to their advantage. The original plan had been for Doc to plant a series of small surveillance bugs as they went. When it became obvious that MacKenzie was going to spend a lot of time talking to him, Doc handed the bugs off to Trace, and she began placing them,23 leaning against a wall here, a loose shoelace there. She could have taken a video camera from her purse and nailed it to the wall opposite the main entrance of the building, and MacKenzie wouldn’t have noticed. Doc took great pleasure in explaining how his camera worked—an explanation I would have loved to hear, since he typically can’t explain how a razor works, let alone something complicated.