RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  What Doc can do is talk your ear off, and he talked MacKenzie’s into his pocket.

  Just for the record, I should note that his wife—Donna—is absolutely a saint . . . unless someone messes with her man. Let me put it this way. Donna, who retired as a navy senior chief, would cut the heart out of anyone who put their hands on her husband. And she would do it with great precision, as she was a corpsman . . . or corpseman, as the case may be. You don’t mess with Ms. Donna.

  Doc knows this, of course, and even in the name of duty he’s careful where to draw the line. But even Picasso would have been jealous of the line he drew with MacKenzie; in short order, she was leading them through the building, discoursing on the alleged virtues of the island’s supposed democratic-socialist system. Trying to keep herself from gagging, Trace asked if she could interview the cabinet secretary.

  MacKenzie’s voice betrayed more than a little doubt when she said it might be arranged, but Doc ignored that.

  “We should check the lighting then,” he said. “To make sure I can shoot. I wouldn’t want to waste your time.”

  “My time is your time,” answered MacKenzie.

  “Great,” said Doc.

  God help me, thought Trace, but she kept her mouth shut as MacKenzie took them down the hall to the cabinet secretary’s office on the first floor. The secretary’s office consisted of two rooms. The outer room, generally occupied by an aide, was used as a waiting area, with a couch at one end of the aide’s desk and some files at the other. There was a simple key tumbler in the doorknob not much more sophisticated than what’s found in the average home in the States. There were no alarms.

  The aide seemed to have gone out for a cigarette or was on some errand, because the outer office was empty. The door to the secretary’s room was closed.

  “Lighting’s not that good here,” said Doc, shaking his head regretfully. “Maybe in the inner office?”

  “I’m afraid the secretary can’t be disturbed,” said MacKenzie.

  “He’s in there?” said Trace, starting for the door.

  “I’m sorry, no,” said MacKenzie, her voice halfway between command and alarm.

  She touched Trace’s shoulder, trying to stop her; Trace flashed a look so venomous that Doc was sure she was going to belt her.

  “I’m just knocking,” said Trace. “No harm in asking.”

  MacKenzie gave her a dirty look, but Trace is the queen of dirty looks, and the glare was hardly enough to keep her from trying to get into the room. But the cabinet secretary was not in.

  “What about Provisional President Castro?” said Trace, using what was then Raul Castro’s official title. “Are we going to have a chance to interview him?”

  “He’s a very busy man.”

  “Maybe we could see his office,” said Trace. “To check the light.”

  “We’ll worry about that if he agrees to an interview,” said MacKenzie. Her tone made it clear she wasn’t going to even ask.

  After a medicinal session with Dr. Bombay, I had a brief but refreshing nap, then got up and strolled around the neighborhood surrounding our two-star hotel, which was located on the outskirts of Havana’s tourist area near the Old City. After a brief constitutional—during which I determined we were not under surveillance—I bought a few newspapers and ordered a coffee at a small café next to the hotel.

  José Martí’s death in the car accident had been ignored by Granma, the party’s official paper, but it hadn’t been entirely kept from the press. A small item appeared on page five in the Hoy, Havana. (The name means Today, Havana. Like, get a move on.) The destruction of the bus was tied into the explosion in Havana’s black market shadowland the night before. According to the police, a dispute between different bourgeoisie criminal elements had erupted in an all-out war. José Martí represented one faction; the story ended before naming the other.

  Inquiries were being made, said the reporter. At least one arrest was imminent. My money was on the public official whose car we had stolen, which of course had been found at the scene. He might have an ironclad alibi, but you’d expect that from a wily criminal.

  “Hey, don’t I know you?” Shotgun asked, walking up to my table.

  I gave him a frown and gestured for him to sit down. I hate being interrupted when I’m reading the paper.

  “I’ll have like the biggest cola you got. And what sort of, like, cupcakes do you have?” said Shotgun to the waiter when he arrived.

  I helped with the translation.

  “Mongoose just checked in,” Shotgun said when we were alone. “Doc and Trace are still on tour. Nothing exciting going on.”

  I put down the paper and leaned back in my seat. My sixth sense—the trouble alert that goes off when something is screwed up—was bothering me. I couldn’t pin it down though. I definitely trust my instincts—you don’t get a scarred carcass without learning a few things you can’t explain, even to yourself. But I couldn’t get my unconscious to cough up the problem.

  I tried focusing my mind on the problem of weapons, which we still lacked. Assuming we couldn’t pick up the AKs and my MP5—and that was a good assumption—we were down to four submachine guns, the ammo in them, and three spare magazines. We had six pistols, and enough spare bullets for a dozen magazine changes, give or take a loose bullet or two.

  Resupply through the black market was out of the question; the area would be under a virtual lockdown that night.

  In theory, we wouldn’t need weapons for the op at Party Headquarters; it would be a finesse operation from the get-go. But they would be nice if and when Mr. Murphy intervened and the shit hit the fan.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said Red, strolling over. She looked almost demure, wearing a sleek blue dress that clung to her curved but trim hips. She slid into the seat across from me looking as fresh as if she’d spent the last two weeks alternating bubble baths with downtime on the beach.

  “His thoughts are worth a dollar,” said Shotgun. “Probably more. They’re always costing someone somewhere something.”

  “You’re very profound, Shotgun.”

  He laughed and looked up at the waiter, who was just approaching with rum cakes so soaked with liquor that they smelled as if they would spontaneously combust. Shotgun’s eyes opened wide, and a grin grew on his face.

  “Better bring more,” he told the waiter.

  “What else did we use that credit card for?” I asked Red. “The one Sean used for the rental?”

  “Should have been just the rental,” she said.

  “Mmmm.”

  That was standard operating procedure, but there was always a possibility that there’d been a slipup somewhere along the way. It was the sort of detail Mr. Murphy loved to take advantage of.

  “How else can they trace that car to us?” I was talking out loud, but I was really asking myself.

  “They can’t,” said Shotgun. “We didn’t even get gas.”

  “Worst case, they can trace it to Sean, and he’s out of the country,” said Red.

  I mentally ticked down all of the other possibilities I could think of. Not finding one that positively linked us, I let it go. I had to trust that the gears in my brain would turn up whatever was bothering me eventually.

  Experience showed that they would. Though whether they would do so in time for me to deal with the problem rather than react to it was an open question.

  ___________________

  22 You can look for it, but you won’t find it. The name is a pseudonym. The description is accurate, except for the parts that aren’t.

  23 If you’ve ever been on a tour of the Christians in Action HQ at Langley, you’ll remember the display case in the main corridor with actual “bugs” used during the Cold War. A couple of them are the size of pencil erasers. The new generation bugs are even smaller.

  Ours are better.

  ( I )

  The external doors and windows in the Party Headquarters Building were protected by a standard burglar alarm
system, which would sound as soon as a connection was broken. Backing those up were motion detectors in some of the hallways and rooms. Getting around the system wouldn’t have been too difficult, but it would have taken considerable time, and still left the surveillance cameras and guards.

  So I decided we’d get in through the bathroom.

  More specifically, through a small exhaust fan above a washroom at the rear of the auxiliary building attached to the back of the main structure.

  The fan was somewhat similar to those used in American homes, except that the fan vented directly to the flat roof above it. Trace had confirmed this fact during a break on her tour, even noting that there were only four bolts holding it in place. She’d also placed video bugs both inside and outside the lavatory that we could watch to make sure the way was clear. There were stairs a short distance down the hall; as an extra bonus, this portion of the hallway was not protected by a motion detector or any other sort of security device.

  In short, the fan was the perfect entry point.

  Almost.

  Bathroom exhaust fans tend to be on the small side. The ones here at Rogue Manor—put to good use daily—measure just over a foot diagonally. The fan in Communist Party Headquarters was industrial-sized, but even when it was removed, the housing was barely big enough for a person to squeeze through.

  Red could make it. Trace, if she squeezed her assets together, would just fit. None of the rest of us had a chance.

  And that’s how it became ladies night at Communist Party Headquarters.

  Doc and Trace began the evening at the Parade Room, a corrupt bourgeoisie restaurant owned by the Cuban government in the heart of the business district. Since it was owned by the government, naturally prices were triple what they might have been anywhere else in the universe. A hundred and twenty euros for a piece of strip steak? That’s a rip-off even if it’s called Steak Libre.

  Trace excused herself just before dessert, claiming woman problems and saying she’d prefer to skip the night’s worth of bar-hopping they’d already planned. MacKenzie gave her a sympathetic nod, then turned and smiled at Doc.

  “But we can go on, no?”

  “Absolutely. We’re going to see Hemingway’s hangout, yes?”

  “The Bodeguita del Medio, first. Then La Floridita for daiquiris.”

  She mentioned a couple of the other bars.

  “Join us if you feel better,” Doc told Trace.

  “Tomorrow, maybe,” she said.

  Trace bent forward a little as she walked from the table, hamming it up just a bit. She walked down the block, certain she was being followed—not just by Mongoose, who was her protective shadow, but by a plainclothes Cuban security officer as well. That was good—we wanted him to follow her all the way to the hotel room. Trace adjusted her speed to make sure he had no trouble.

  The hotel room was bugged—again, something we put to work in our favor. Trace moaned and groaned, got some aspirin from the desk, drew a bath, turned on the television, and fell asleep.

  Maybe not sleep-sleep. It only sounded like sleep, thanks to the small digital recorder she left playing on the bed, right next to the bug. Meanwhile, Trace went out the window and climbed up to the roof above. While the plainclothes shadow pulled up a seat in the lobby—he would stay there for another two hours before heading home—she met Mongoose around the block.

  Red and I had already completed a recee of the Headquarters Building. It turned out that the disturbance in the black-market district the night before played in our favor. The Cuban authorities were determined to stamp out what they perceived as a turf war, and flooded the area with police. Most of the patrols that ordinarily sat on their thumbs outside the Party Building and in the nearby streets were assigned to sit on their thumbs near the black marketeers. A single uniformed car was parked near the front of the building, its driver fast asleep.

  Inside, there were only two security men, who took turns making hourly patrols of the entire building, starting in the basement. They followed a strict pattern and walked very slowly, making it easy for us to use our video bugs to track them.

  The bugs that Trace and Doc had planted transmitted a very weak signal that was collected and amplified by a device the size of a paperback book, which in turn relayed them to a receiver station.

  If we’d been in the States, I would have put the monitoring station in a van, staying mobile a few blocks from the building. Unlike what you’ve seen on TV and in the movies, I didn’t need much space. The monitoring equipment was a battle-hardened laptop that weighed all of eight pounds; the receiver was even smaller. The laptop screen could show me several images at once, and software in the unit could be set to alert me to sudden noises or different shapes in the video stream.

  But while vans are pretty common in the States, they’re not nearly as common or readily available in Havana. Given all of the complications of the night before, I decided that instead of going through the hassle of obtaining one, I’d simply locate my tactical headquarters in a nearby building. The one I selected had the added bonus of providing a clear view of the rear grounds of the Party Building. It did this because the building had no back wall.24 We rendezvoused there just before midnight.

  Trace changed on the way over and like Red was dressed in classic black. She rouged her face with some burnt cork, dulling the highlights.

  “Takes ten years off,” I told her.

  “Fuck you very much.” She turned to Red, who was similarly attired. Both had their gear in black body-hugging rucks and belly packs. “You ready?”

  “Yup.”

  The ladies went off and I settled down in my new palacio, clearing off enough of the crumbling cement and debris on the floor to sit without putting a permanent pimple in my delicate derriere.

  “Dark eyes, this is Spider,” said Shotgun, who was driving a scooter on the street. He would make the rounds while I was helping the others, making sure no one jumped on my back while I was doing the same for them. “Snow White and Evil Stepsister just passed by.”

  “Good. Copy, Spider.”

  Trace had picked the code names. She called herself Snow White, saying she liked to work against type.

  The park behind the Party Building provided cover for all but about ten yards of the approach. The final ten yards were lit by spotlights at the top of the building. After crossing through this space, Trace and Red would hug the building for no more than twenty-five feet until they reached a low set of trees at the southeastern side of the auxiliary building. From there, the shadows as well as the angle of the main building and the nearby trees would give them plenty of cover.

  I lost sight of them after they cleared the open space, but I could hear Trace’s hard breath over the radio as she ran. They made their way to a low roof at the rear of the auxiliary building, then climbed rungs installed in the masonry by workers who needed access to the air conditioners on the roof.

  Their first order of business was to visit the air-conditioning unit that served the main part of the building. They pulled out the fuses, then went over to the smaller wing at the rear where the fan was located. Red put a lighter to the tar covering the connectors holding the assembly to the flashing and roof as she isolated the screws.

  “Phillips head,” she told Trace. “The tops are pretty beat.”

  “We better drill them.”

  Trace took the RotoZip and went to work. But halfway through the second screw, the tool began making the noise your car battery makes two weeks out of warranty on the coldest morning of the year.

  “Fug,” said Red.

  Either Mr. Murphy had used the tool for an all-night battery-draining house-building party, or I had broken it when it fell at Fidel’s bunker. They tried to use a standard Phillips head, but the screws were too stripped for that. So they went to their backup, a folding hand-cranked drill. Someone who was really skilled with it might get through wood reasonably fast, but going through metal with it was a different story, even with the finel
y polished bits they’d brought along. They drilled, hacked, and pulled, spending more than ten minutes per screw—not exactly the way we’d planned.

  Red had just dropped into the restroom when the guard started his round.

  Which wouldn’t have been a problem, if he hadn’t decided to start at the back of the building, breaking the pattern he’d used every other time we’d watched.

  And on the second floor, which was the top of the annex where Trace and Red were.

  “Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf is in the stairwell. I’m not sure where he’s going,” I warned, watching him on the monitor.

  “Is he coming here?”

  “Affirmative. He’s walking pretty quick. He’s at the corner.”

  That was less than ten feet from the restroom. Trace flattened herself on the roof and waited.

  The reason he’d started here became clear a moment later, when he pushed into the women’s room. Apparently he’d decided the men’s room was too far, and he needed a seat for what he had to do anyway.

  Red slipped into the stall, one foot on the toilet seat, the other bracing the door as the lights turned on. She held her breath, praying silently that the guard wouldn’t choose her commode.

  He didn’t—but he did go into the one just next to hers. He sat down and went to work.

  The fan apparatus was too heavy to put back quietly. Fortunately, the hole was out of eyeshot from the guard’s stall.

  Red practically gagged as the guard grunted and hissed. Job finally done, he started humming. He flushed twice, washed his hands, and went out.