Trace and Shotgun were still out taking a look at the town. So Crusty and Junior hopped in the car and headed toward Vianna Norte.
The town was a speck on the map all the way on the northern side of Cuba. If there’d been good roads in that direction, it would have been about an hour and a half drive, if you obeyed the speed limit. It actually took closer to two and a half. Not much happened on the way. Crusty and Junior went through two apparently impromptu checkpoints manned by local policemen. Their passports showed they were well-off Europeans, a fact reinforced by the rental car, which very few Cubans would own.
It probably didn’t hurt that upon handing over their documents, Junior added five convertible pesos to each passport. The cops waved them through without so much as a lecture about the need to wear seat belts—something Crusty refused to do because he felt it hurt his digestion.
(“At my age,” he says, “I wouldn’t mind taking a flight through the windshield. A different way to go out.”)
As I’ve said before, Cuba’s a beautiful place, and the scenery was enough to keep Crusty, who was driving, from complaining too much as they drove. But about five miles outside of Vianna Norte, things started to change. Junior noticed that the buildings they were passing were empty and that a number had even been bulldozed. Given Cuba’s perpetual housing shortage, this was unusual. No replacements were nearby, either, at least not that they could see. Even the large billboards that you see everywhere in Cuba proclaiming the greatness of the socialistic state were missing.
Two miles from where the map indicated Vianna Norte lay, Junior spotted a pair of towers flanking the roadway ahead. At first glance, they looked as if they were water towers. But as he looked around at the empty land he realized there would be no need for storage tanks here.
“I think we’re being watched,” he told Crusty.
“Maybe I should stop and moon ’em.”
They were just coming up a shallow rise; as they reached the peak, Junior spotted a flashing light in the middle of the road ahead.
“Another roadblock,” Junior told him.
“Really? It looked like a merry-go-round.”
“I’m running out of five-peso notes.”
“Then we’ll tell them we gave at the office.”
As they drew closer, Junior sensed that five pesos wasn’t going to cover it.
“Troop truck behind them,” he told Crusty. “Quarter mile away. And there’s an armored car or something. There’s a dip in the road; I can’t see.”
“Two dips in the road,” said Crusty, slowing as two men got out of the car and began walking toward them.
Crusty rolled down the window, preparing what would have been, for him, a friendly greeting—which meant he planned on holding the usual curse words as he asked what the hell they were up to. But the man who came around to the driver’s side of the car didn’t give him a chance to speak.
“Out of the car,” he demanded.
The other man came around to Junior’s side and said the same thing.
“Now just a minute,” said Crusty, fingering the pesos Junior had just handed him. “I have our passports.”
“I’m not interested in your passports,” said the man, pulling a revolver from his belt and pointing it at Crusty’s head.
( III )
If there is one thing you could say about Crusty, it’s that he knows his revolvers.
“Smith & Wesson, Model 19 Combat Magnum with K-Target frame,” he mumbled as he got out of the car. “Four-inch barrel. Which would make it one of the very original models.”
Not quite the gun aficionado, the details were lost on Junior, who in any event was looking at a more pedestrian though just as deadly Beretta automatic. Both men got out of the car slowly, hands high. They were prompted to turn around, and one by one searched, none too gently. Though the first man had claimed they weren’t interested in their passports, their wallets and documents were confiscated and then inspected.
“You are Spanish?” asked the police officer who did the frisking.
“I’m from Barcelona,” said Crusty. “He’s Belgian.”
“How come you speak like a Cuban?”
“I have family here.”
“Where?”
Crusty named a town about ten miles away. It wasn’t just to give them an alibi to be on the road; he wasn’t about to point the Cuban authorities toward his real relatives.
“And why are you on this road?”
“Driving to my family.”
“And you?”
Junior pretended not to understand what he said.
“He’s a friend of my son’s,” said Crusty. “He’s a doctor and may want to invest in a business here. A cigar factory.”
The officer scowled.
“You can’t get there from here.”
“Why not?” asked Crusty.
“You came from Havana?”
“We were in Colon, looking for an old friend.”
“Who?”
“Juan Gonzalez. He wasn’t there.”
The man walked to the other side of the car.
“You are a doctor?” he asked Junior.
Junior pretended not to understand. Crusty translated into pigeon French, and Junior nodded.
“A doctor, and you want to invest in cigars?”
“They’re good for your health,” said Crusty quickly. “Everyone knows that.”
The Cuban frowned, then walked back to the car blocking the road to use his radio.
“Maybe they want a bribe,” whispered Junior.
“They can scratch my ass if that’s what they’re after.”
The officer finished his conversation and strode back.
“You take the car,” he told the other Cuban. “I’ll take them.”
“What?” demanded Crusty.
“No more out of you, old man. Both of you are coming with me, under suspicion of being spies.”
Under any other circumstances, Crusty would have complied. But the Cuban had used the magic words “old man.”
It was one thing for Crusty to talk about his age, and quite another for someone else to.
“Who are you talking to?” Crusty demanded.
“You, old man.” The Cuban thrust the Magnum toward his head. “You’re older than all of us combined.”
“And you’re stupider than all of us combined.”
“Stupid.” The Cuban extended his gun. His finger was already on the trigger. “Stupid? The only stupid one I see here is you, you ignorant ancient skunk.”
“That’s because you can’t look in a mirror.”
“If you don’t get in that car—”
The Cuban never finished what he was going to say. Crusty had leapt from his feet, twisted in the air, and delivered a flying kick to his arm.
Besides being a terminal crank, Crusty is a sixth-degree black belt in karate. He’d probably be higher ranked, but he has trouble finding sparring partners who don’t mind listening to his complaints while he throws them to the mat.
The gun went flying. The Cuban, relatively large, staggered back. He got his balance just in time to receive another kick, this one to the head à la Bruce Lee. Blood spurted all over the place as he recoiled to the ground.
“You got blood on my Keds,” complained Crusty. And he started kicking the downed Cuban in earnest.
As Crusty hit his Cuban, Junior tried bowling over the one near him. Unfortunately, the man outweighed him by a good hundred pounds at least, and Junior bounced back against the car.
Luckily for Junior, the Cuban had put his pistol back in his holster. As he reached for it, Junior threw himself against his legs, tackling him.
The gun went off as they fell. Junior felt himself go slightly faint. Sure that he was dead, he decided to go out with a flourish, pushing hard into the Cuban’s midsection and pummeling anything he could reach. He kicked and scratched and pounded, eyes closed. He felt sure that when he opened them St. Peter would be standing above, shaking hi
s head.
But it wasn’t St. Peter he saw when he opened his eyes—it was Crusty, who’d run over and demonstrated some more of his kicking techniques, rendering this Cuban unconscious as well.
“Let’s go, come on,” said Crusty, but Junior couldn’t hear him—the gun blast had temporarily deafened him.
“In the car. Come on,” said Crusty, pushing Junior into the vehicle as he grabbed the Beretta that had fallen nearby.
Junior’s hearing started to return after they’d gone a mile. No one had started to follow them yet, but that was just a matter of time.
“Pull over near that tobacco barn,” he told Junior.
“This is no time to take a leak,” said Crusty.
“I don’t have to pee. I want to hide the car here.”
“What the hell do you want to do then? Walk back?”
“Crawl if I have to. I want to get a look at what they were guarding, don’t you think?”
“Waste of time. They were probably looking to kidnap us.”
“No, they accused us of being spies.”
“What do you expect them to say?”
“They were only being nasty until you said I was a doctor,” said Junior. “That scared them. Something really interesting must be going on down there.”
The first Trace knew of any of this was when Junior called her on the sat phone shortly after he’d hidden the car inside the barn. She responded like the calm, cool leader she is.
“You stupid idiot, Junior. What the hell were you thinking?”
“There’s something going on down here, Trace. Something very strange.”
“Something strange is going to be going on in your backside if you’re not up here when Dick comes to pick us up.”
“What time is the pickup?”
“We haven’t arranged it yet.”
“We’ll be back in time.”
“How are you going to do that? Are you going to walk?”
“If we have to.”
“Don’t go anywhere until I get back to you,” said Trace. “You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
Note that he didn’t say he was listening, much less that he would do what she said.
About two minutes after Junior got off the sat phone with Trace, two troop trucks sped past the barn, obviously thinking they had fled down the road.
“Think they’ll be back?” Junior asked.
“The question isn’t whether,” said Crusty. “The question is when.”
Junior wanted to circle around to Vianna Norte, and suggested that they walk behind the building as a start. It wasn’t a bad idea, Crusty told him, but it was also the first thing the soldiers would think of if they came back and found the car. It was smarter to cross the road and go from there. As an extra bonus, that direction was north and would take them closer to the coast—an important consideration should the soldiers not get tired of looking for them before dark.
The problem was that there was almost no cover in that direction. The ground looked as if it had been parched clean.
Junior trotted for the first half mile. Crusty . . . Crusty walked. And not particularly fast. Junior kept circling back, urging him to hurry.
“At my age, hurrying is only helping the undertaker,” he growled.
Junior scouted ahead, then came back, repeating this for the next half mile or so. The ground remained parched as far as he could see.
Finally he heard a vehicle in the distance. He ran to Crusty, and got him to flatten himself on the ground while the car passed, driving in the direction the troop trucks had taken. Junior didn’t get a good look, but he thought it was the car that had blocked the road earlier.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” he told Crusty.
“It took me long enough to get down here,” answered Crusty. “I might as well enjoy it for a while.”
“Come on, before they come back.”
“Kids. Always in a goddamn hurry.”
Crusty rose and, despite his complaints, moved forward at a somewhat quicker pace. Once again, Junior went and scouted ahead, trotting toward a rise about a half mile off.
He crawled the last hundred yards, but instead of finding more troops or a lookout tower, all he saw was the start of a jungle. The first twenty yards or so were sparse, with bushes scattered amid a few trees. But fifty yards in it was almost impenetrable. He pushed his way in a hundred yards or so; when he didn’t see anything except for trees and brush, he went back and found Crusty, who was just reaching the tree line.
“We can use the jungle for cover and get close to Vianna Norte,” Junior told him. “Then when it’s time to bug out, we can slip north to the coast. It can’t be more than a mile or so.”
“Humph,” said Crusty.
“If you don’t want to come, I’ll go myself.”
“I don’t want to come,” said Crusty. “But I am, aren’t I?”
It took Junior and Crusty nearly an hour to make their way through the belt of thick vegetation that Junior had found. Eventually, the trees and brush thinned out to the point where it was easy to move. Using the sun as a guide, they began moving northeast, aiming to cut around and approach Vianna Norte from the north. Twice they nearly tripped over buried foundation stones, the apparent remains of small buildings, probably houses, that had been leveled years before. The uniform thickness of the trees told Junior that the area had been cleared until perhaps fifteen or twenty years before; he wondered why the jungle had been allowed to take it back over.
“Maybe one of Fidel’s mistresses liked the color green,” snapped Crusty when he asked.
“The area where we were, that was cleared much more recently,” said Junior. “It looks like it was bulldozed pretty recently.”
“Maybe one of Fidel’s mistresses liked the color gray.”
“Maybe it was farm fields,” said Junior, answering his own question. “And they razed it, so no one could hide near the road.”
Crusty grunted, about as close to a compliment as he ever got.
After another hour of walking, they were surprised to hear the sound of the surf. They made their way through the trees and found themselves on a bluff overlooking the sea. The waves crashed roughly against the rocks below.
Crusty studied the rocks and the bend in the coastline, trying to orient himself. According to the map, Vianna Norte was about a mile from the water; they’d been two miles or so west of it when they were stopped.
“We came a little too far toward north,” he said finally. “Vianna Norte should be east of us about two miles.”
“Two miles is nothing.”
“For you, maybe. Don’t forget we have to go back.”
“Worst case, they can pick us up here,” said Junior. “Besides, what else do we have to do?”
“If I’d known there was going to be this much goddamn walking involved, I would have stayed home,” said Crusty, falling in behind him.
Crusty’s estimate of the distance to Vianna Norte was off by nearly a mile, but well before they reached its outskirts they ran into a tall chain-link fence.
This wasn’t the leftover remains of some long-abandoned rich man’s estate; it was shiny and new, not more than a few months old, if that.
It was also topped with barbed wire.
Crusty probably wouldn’t have wanted to climb the fence anyway, but the wire at the top made him positively stubborn when Junior suggested it. Finally, Junior agreed that they should look for an easier place to get through “before doing anything too optimistically strenuous,” as Crusty put it. So they started walking along it to the south.
Before they’d gone more than a hundred yards, they found a spot where a large tree had crashed into the fence. Most of the chain-link section was still intact, but the trunk held down the barbed wire. Junior pulled himself up and hopped over, trotting back toward the north. Grumbling and cursing beneath his breath, Crusty followed.
They hadn’t gone very far when Junior spotted another fence paralleling the f
irst. A little farther on, he spotted a squat brick building set into the side of a hill. He worked his way up the fence line in the direction of the ocean, until he found a better view of the building.
“Looks like a hospital,” Junior told Crusty when he finally caught up to him. “But with all these fences, maybe it’s a prison.”
“Same thing,” said Crusty.
It can be hard for the uninformed to distinguish between hospitals and prisons in Cuba, at least from the outside, since many mental hospitals are actually prisons. But this facility was fairly unique, as Junior saw when he climbed a tree several yards behind the fence and got a good look at the grounds. There was a wide, deep dent in the coastline directly in front of the building. And in the middle of the dent was a marina.
A very large marina, in fact. There were at least a hundred boats moored near the rocks. They were skiffs and pleasure boats, a few small cabin cruisers and powered whaleboats. Maybe a third had canvas coverings; the others were completely open. Not one looked to be more than a few months old.
“Well, there’s how we’re getting off the island,” said Crusty. “Assuming we can find one with gas.”
“Why the hell do you think they’re there in the first place?” said Junior. “If this place is a prison or even a hospital, why would they have a marina? With brand-new boats?”
Even Crusty couldn’t supply an answer to that, sarcastic or otherwise.
They moved down the fence line closer to the water. There was a single guard post on the northwest corner of the compound where they were, but it was easily avoided by moving farther west. The boats themselves were unguarded; it wouldn’t be very hard to swim out and take one. The only question was whether they would have any fuel, but as Crusty pointed out, the boats couldn’t have floated there by themselves; there must at least be fumes in the tanks.
As far as Junior could tell, there was no one guarding them, though they were visible from the shore and the building. Once night fell, however, there’d be little trouble escaping detection.
RW15 - Seize the Day Page 34