RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  “What should we do?” Trace asked me. “Can we go back the way we came?”

  “Negative,” I told her. “Hang tight until I think of something.”

  “Start thinking real fast,” said Trace. “They’re all around us.”

  ( IV )

  Even if Trace and Red hadn’t been virtually surrounded, it would have been time for me to leave my post anyway. The police were going door to door, looking for anyone who had seen a bearded child pervert who looked vaguely like Fidel, and sooner or later they were bound to come to the apartment building.

  Sooner, actually—I could hear people below looking out their windows and asking what was going on.

  I got Shotgun on the horn and told him to get back up here on the double.

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  That wasn’t exactly what Shotgun said. His mouth was full of food, so what he said sounded more like, “Mrumphg gaw cutsuck.” But that was close enough.

  I made it down one flight of steps when I heard a door opening below. People flooded out from the apartment, heading for the front. I did a one-eighty, slipping down the hallway. But it turned out to be a dead end, blocked off by two apartments.

  If you can’t beat the police, join them.

  I knocked loudly.

  “Poliza!” I yelled, in the threatening guttural tone that works so well on the highway patrol. “Open up!”

  There was no answer. That was even better—I put my shoulder to it and thumped.

  All I got was a bruised shoulder. Breaking doors down is a lot harder in real life than it looks in the movies.

  I’ll hit my head against a wall all night, but not the rest of my body. I turned and began knocking on the next door.

  “Police! Quickly!” I yelled.

  This time, I heard the rumble of footsteps. A large, fairly rotund man pulled open the door.

  “They’re escaping!” I yelled, dashing into the apartment. “The fire escape! Where’s the fire escape?”

  A woman about the same age as the man but rail-thin pointed a trembling white hand toward a window at the right, just past the kitchen. I ran to it, threw up the sash, then bolted onto the fire escape outside. I ran down two floors, then went over the rail, jumping to the sidewalk and running up the street.

  Two blocks away, I found a house with a garage very close to the road. Ducking behind the bushes, I pulled out the radio and went back online.

  Shotgun was two blocks south. I gave him directions.

  “Take me just a minute, Dick. Gotta duck some of these police cars.”

  “Well get moving. Trace and Red need us.”

  “Too bad we can’t take a cop over there, huh?”

  “Hold that thought, Shotgun. Hold that thought.”

  Police cars are absurdly easy to steal. For one thing, cops almost always leave their keys in them, especially when responding to a possible crime scene. For another, put three or four of them together in a bunch, and no one will notice that another is missing.

  After Shotgun picked me up, we circled around to the far side of the police activity, then closed in on their exposed flank—a pair of police cars parked a few feet at the northeastern end of the block.

  “Hot shit!” said Shotgun, slipping from the scooter. He ran to the car, hit the button for lights and sirens, then laid some rubber as he accelerated away.

  It took a few seconds for the police to react. Then there was a mad scramble for the remaining cars.

  “Snow White, Prince Charming has just kissed the frog,” I told Trace and Red. “Get the hell out of the castle.”

  Meanwhile, Shotgun was re-creating the classic sixties movie Bullet. He took the car down the wide boulevard, feinted toward the cemetery—the gates were locked or I’m sure he would have driven through—then made a beeline for the Malecón. Thirty yards after reaching the highway, he slammed the brakes on and jumped out.

  He was still laughing his head off as I sped up on the scooter. It’s nice to see someone who really enjoys his work. He hopped on the back and we took off west, leaving the scene just as the light of the first police car began flickering at the bottom of my rearview mirrors.

  As soon as Trace and Red saw the cars zipping by, they ran south through the park, crossed Avenida de La Independencia, and then worked their way through to Calzada de Ayestarán. There they got into one of the rental cars we had stashed for an emergency, and after a sufficient series of switchbacks and a quick change of clothes, rendezvoused with Shotgun, Mongoose, and me in a tiny after-hours café overlooking the harbor.

  “Wow, where the hell have you been?” said Mongoose as they walked in. “You look like shit.”

  Trace gave him the evil eye. Red collapsed in the chair next to me. Shotgun laughed, then went and got another round of drinks.

  When the girls revived, we compared notes. Despite all the fun we’d had, the mission had been a bust. The missing DVD was still missing.

  “Not entirely a bust,” said Red. She took out the list of people to be arrested when Fidel died. “This may be useful.”

  Not to be outdone, Trace pulled the hard drive she’d stolen from her pocketbook. “Fidel’s secretary may have trouble using his machine tomorrow.”

  I slid the hard drive into the pocket of my tourist-issue sport coat—yes, I’d changed, too—and ordered another Sapphire.

  “Maybe the drive will tell us where the DVD is,” said Red. “If we could put it into another computer.”

  “Good thinking, Red. We’ll get it to Junior and see what he can come up with.”

  “Ya oughta have him come to us,” said Mongoose. “He’s going stir crazy in Jamaica.”

  “Shotgun will take it to him on the first flight out we can find,” I said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because your Spanish is the worst of the bunch,” I told him. “And besides, they’ll never find it in all the food you carry.”

  Shotgun grumbled a bit, but made the 6:15 A.M. plane to Mexico, transferring to another aircraft that flew him over to Jamaica. The hard drive was encrypted, but defeating the encryption was as easy as blowing a little cold air on it.

  Nitrogen oxide, actually.

  The encryption in most computers, especially personal computers, uses a set of chips to apply complicated mathematical equations that scramble the data. Basically, the chips act like translators. If you could peek into the chip as it’s working, you could figure out the equation that’s being used to conduct the translation. Once you know that, you can unscramble the data.

  That’s the layman’s explanation. Junior—and Shunt, who taught him how to do it—make it seem a lot more complicated, talking about nanos and micro-heads and all kinds of crap, but I’ve watched them do it and it’s easier than making ice cream. They freeze the chips involved in reading and encrypting the data, put in a piece of software that Shunt wrote, punch a few buttons, and download the data to a fresh drive. Add a few fancy words to the process and you can make a mint as a consultant to the NSA, affectionately known (or not known, as the case may be) as No Such Agency.

  While Red and I took Shotgun to the airport, Mongoose dropped Trace off at her hotel.

  She was just about to go through the revolving door at the front when she spotted MacKenzie walking toward the reception desk. Trace quickly turned around and headed for the back door. But as she turned the corner, she noticed someone watching it. Rather than risk being seen, and realizing that by now MacKenzie would have called up to her room anyway, Trace went down the block to another tourist hotel, this one with a retail shop in the lobby. She bought a tracksuit, and after dumping her clothes in a waste can, jogged back to her hotel.

  MacKenzie was waiting for her, face red and lips sputtering.

  “Where have you been?” demanded the Cuban minder.

  “I went out for a jog.”

  “A jog?”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  MacKenzie began sputtering to the effect that Trace and Doc were guests of
the Cuban government and every breath they took had to be pre-approved, stamped, and OK’d. Trace frowned, but didn’t say anything. MacKenzie had a hangover of major proportions, but the broomstick that was bothering her undoubtedly belonged to whichever superior had found out about her date the night before.

  Doc was sitting on a couch a few feet away, sipping a coffee and doing his best not to laugh. He’d already received an apology from Ms. MacKenzie for “whatever may have happened the night before” as well as a series of embarrassed sighs.

  “So, did we get the interview with the president?” Trace asked as the minder ran out of wind.

  “There will be no interview with the president,” said MacKenzie. “Or the cabinet secretary.”

  “Maybe we can go over to the Party Building,” started Trace, “and find someone to talk—”

  “We will not be going over there. The building is off-limits until further notice.”

  Trace glanced over at Doc. “What will we do?”

  “There will be something better.” MacKenzie pressed her lips together. “A press conference.”

  Doc got up and ambled over.

  “As a general rule, I miss press conferences,” said Trace. “They’re pretty boring.”

  “This one is very important for the future of Cuba,” said MacKenzie. “President Castro will attend. And acting President Castro. You will be glad you were there.”

  An hour or so later, Doc and Trace found themselves in an auditorium with several hundred other journalists, at least a portion of whom were legitimate, though a sizable minority were probably spies. Raul, considerably more sober than the last time Trace had seen him, opened the session with a speech so long and boring that even Fidel would have been bored. And in fact, el Comandante en Jefe might have fallen asleep behind stage, since he didn’t come out for more than an hour after the press conference began. By then, his brother had ruined his grand opening, and the surprise: el Jefe was announcing his retirement as Cuba’s dictator.

  Journalists are cynical by nature, but not one person in the entire audience snickered. A few may have snored, at least a dozen yawned, but most dutifully noted that this was an historic moment for Cuba.

  Fidel’s retirement ranked right up with John Gotti’s announcement that he was getting out of the gangster business, or better yet, Putin’s stepping down as head of Russia. True, something changed, but no one seriously believed that Fidel was letting go. Once you’ve been king of the hill, no matter how small the hill, you don’t go back to being a peon. Even the way Raul kept glancing over at his brother every few seconds while they were together onstage made it clear who was really going to be in charge.

  The questions were mostly planted, the answers about what you’d expect. It sounded more than a little like a Nobel Prize ceremony honoring one of history’s all-time great leaders, not the man who took a beleaguered nation and turned it into one of the poorest in the hemisphere.

  The only consolation was that Fidel looked sick as hell. He’d come straight from the hospital, and according to the rumors Doc heard while waiting with the other camera crews, was due to go back via ambulance as soon as the dog and pony show was over. He didn’t take any questions, leaving everything to Raul. He left before the food.

  While Doc and Trace pretended to be titillated at seeing the great dictator and his brother in the flesh, Red, Mongoose, and I bumped our way eastward on a tag team of buses. With each new bus we boarded, the notion that vehicles should ride on shock absorbers and springs became more and more theoretical. Fortunately, I can sleep just about anywhere when I have to, and as far as I was concerned the trip was a succession of twenty-and thirty-minute snoozes punctuated by the occasional poke in the ribs by a Cuban matron who found my snoring annoying. It reminded me what it was like trying to catch some rest with my first wife.

  We arrived in Holguín around five the next morning. After shuffling to the nearest open restaurant for breakfast, we went our various ways. Mongoose and I played tourist, renting a quartet of hotel rooms—always good to have backups—and then checked out the Natural Science Museum and points of more immediate interest, such as the nondescript shop two blocks from the bus depot where we could get authentic-looking official documents at a very reasonable price.

  Red scoured the city in search of a vehicle she could buy without too much hassle. She ended up getting a deal on a 1960s-era Triumph motorcycle. It looked like an old Bonneville, though so many of the parts had been replaced and reworked that its exact vintage was hard to discern. A new bike called for new clothes, and she spent the rest of the day outfitting herself before gassing up at the local servicentro and taking off for Baracoa. Using only her GPS and instincts, she navigated muddy, rutted, and unmarked roads up and down the Sierra Maestra mountains, until she reached La Farola, the Cuban equivalent of a superhighway connecting Baracoa with Guantanamo province and the rest of the world.

  Yes, superhighway is meant sarcastically.

  Twice Red ran off the road, once into a ditch and the other time into the jungle brush. She got into the city around sunrise the next day, found an illegal boarding house to stay at, and after a quick nap went to survey the town.

  By that time Mongoose and I were on our way to Frank Pais Airport, south of Holguín, where we boarded a flight for Baracoa. Cuba’s airlines are on a par with Red China’s—circa 1958. We flew in a Cubana de Aviación “Aerotaxi” An-2. I can’t blame you if you’ve never heard of the aircraft. It’s a Russian-made biplane that would look right at home in the original King Kong movie. The cabin is actually spacious—if you’re a midget. The plane’s single propeller engine—well it is a big propeller—sounded like a washing machine trying to walk its way up the basement steps. My teeth vibrated in sympathy with it as it started, and by the time we were in the air every bone in my body was humming.

  Mongoose spent the entire flight with his fingers digging into the seat.

  I will say the scenery was interesting. The mountains were spectacular, though generally when I’m flying in an airplane I like to fly above the landscape, not below it.

  Mongoose knelt and kissed the dirt as soon as we got off the plane. We found our bags, then hired a pair of campesinos who offered their truck as a taxi into town.

  You wouldn’t know it to look at it now, but Baracoa has played a critical role in Western history. Columbus landed here in 1492. Things went downhill for the Taino natives from there. Spanish real estate barons swept in and established the town in 1511, making it the oldest European settlement in the country.

  I wouldn’t be completely surprised to find that there are still some buildings from then. The town isn’t all that much bigger than it was in the sixteenth century. It’s certainly poorer. Take away the handful of hotels, and the place would look like a Spanish city circa 1700 or so. That and the crystal-blue water on its beaches are its main attractions these days. The few tourists who come here are searching not so much for old Cuba or to re-create fantasies about the conquistadores or to walk in the surf Columbus and his sailors peed in, but for cheap, rustic isolation.

  Which told me that Ken’s so-called intelligence on where the missing copy of Fidel’s last tape was kept was probably as accurate as the CIA briefings I used to get in Vietnam . . . not worth the paper they weren’t written on.

  The museum was easy to find. It was right in the center of town, a one-story metal-roofed building whose clay bricks had been aged to make it look just as old as its neighbors. It wasn’t quite finished yet, or at least not open. I played dumb tourist and went up, knocked, hanging around for a while before a local woman came up and told me the place was closed. She directed me toward the tourist office. She stopped midsentence, wrinkled her nose, and then told me in very thick Cuban Spanish that I looked very much like Fidel.

  “Are you his son?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked. “I don’t really speak Spanish.”

  “Son, boy—you look like el Jefe, the president. Fidel Castro.”
/>   “I’m not him.”

  “Well, you look like him. Be careful.”

  “I try.”

  Mongoose and Red had done a complete survey of the area while I was playing tourist. The local police department was small, and looked like it closed up shop when the sun went down. But strangers clearly stood out here, and we’d have to figure that we’d be noticed and probably remembered anywhere we were seen.

  “So we go in after midnight,” said Mongoose after we met up at the Revolution Hotel on the beach just before dinner. The bar looked better than the one at our hotel—it was actually a bar, rather than a desk with a few chairs in the corner of the lobby.

  “How do we get in?” asked Red.

  “We sneak in the basement door at the back, assuming Dick’s right that there’s no burglar alarm.”

  “What if he’s wrong?”

  “Dick’s never wrong.”

  Mongoose was so sincere I was tempted to give him a big wet one on the forehead—then kick him in the behind for being either naive or an ass-licker.

  Red displayed the proper cynicism, giving a snort even Trace would have admired.

  I picked up my rum and Coke. The place was so isolated the only gin available was Polish antifreeze, not worth jilting the Doctor over.

  Mongoose continued to lay out the mission, doing a reasonable job sketching a straightforward sneak and peek of an unoccupied and unguarded building.

  Just the sort Murphy likes to hide in, I thought several hours later as I checked around for signs of a watchman. I didn’t spot one on my first pass, nor on my second, so I snuck around to the back of a feed store across an alley from the rear of the museum. Then I watched patiently for more than an hour before concluding that the building really wasn’t being watched.

  Another bad sign, but now that we were here, there was no sense not having some fun.