The Prisoner of Guantanamo

by Dan Fesperman

  “You’re just the man I wanted to see,” Whitaker said. “Especially if you’re headed back to our château.”

  “You need something?”

  “No. Just make sure you check the mail on the kitchen table. It’s not every day that a perfumed envelope arrives from Puerto Rico. Nice handwriting, too. Laying the groundwork for your next leave, big guy?”

  “Woo-hoo!” Tyndall offered, fanning the flame. No one turned toward Pam, but Falk knew they were dying for a glance. She obliged them by standing.

  “Here, Whitaker. Take my seat. I’ll leave you boys to the kiss-and-tell.”

  She kept it light, but not without a passing glance at Falk that was several degrees cooler than a moment ago. So much for shared trust.

  But that was the least of Falk’s worries. At the mention of a perfumed envelope—from Puerto Rico, no less—he could already guess at the fragrance, a bouquet now blooming in his senses despite the mess hall’s stale funk of overcooked eggs and wet mops. It was an island scent, part hibiscus and part spice, and it called from deep in his past. The idea of that letter sitting out on the kitchen table where anyone might open it made him weak in the knees. He had best be on his way.

  “See you later,” he said, moving quickly with his tray. At least no one knew the real reason he was blushing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE LETTER MIGHT as well have been booby-trapped from the way Falk approached it. It sat on the kitchen table, as promised, but he was still working up the nerve to touch it. Leaning forward for a closer look, he instantly recognized the handwriting. Then there was the fragrance, streaming like smoke from a campfire. Unmistakably hers, no matter how unlikely.

  Up to now his plans for the day had been pretty straightforward. He would tend to the needs of the Ludwig case and try to squeeze in another session with Adnan. General Trabert had told him to put regular duties aside, but it wasn’t the kind of work you shut down with the flip of a switch, particularly with subjects like Adnan. A breakthrough could be like a paper cut, clotting quickly unless you immediately dug deeper. Although Tyndall’s interruption may have already acted as a suture.

  But now there was the letter to deal with. Falk circled the table. He opted first for a delaying action, heading briskly down the hall, dripping sweat in a burst of nervous energy. The heat, his lack of sleep, and this new development had his engine on the verge of overload.

  He stopped at his bedroom door for a wary inspection. Nothing had been disturbed as far as he could tell. Not that any change would be noticeable in this wreckage—bed unmade, drawers ajar, a T-shirt still damp with day-old sweat draped on a chair. Newspapers and magazines were splayed on the nightstand, along with a file folder he should have returned yesterday. An appraising eye might have detected any number of reasons for further curiosity here.

  He continued this cautious survey room by room, as much to calm himself as to search for anything amiss. Whitaker’s quarters were neat as a pin. A half-completed letter home sat on the bedside table next to a humming clock. Falk caught the words “boredom” and “my darling” before moving on, shamed. Whitaker had presumably left the house just before arriving at breakfast, and the letter must have come just beforehand—an early delivery, but the times often varied here. Falk hadn’t been at the house since heading to Windmill Beach at 4 a.m. At Gitmo, even in private quarters your privacy wasn’t guaranteed. Anyone might have come and gone in the meantime.

  He returned to the kitchen and picked up the envelope. It was sealed with cellophane tape, perhaps as an extra precaution. Or had someone on the base done it after inspecting the contents? The postmark was three days old. Not bad for Gitmo. It must have arrived on yesterday’s plane out of Roosevelt Roads Naval Air Station, in Puerto Rico. He pried open the flap, and the smell of hibiscus intensified. For all his momentary paranoia, plenty of pleasant memories stirred as well. He recalled their first dance, her cheek brushing his. Later the scent had filled the hotel room, the young Marine hardly believing his luck. Months later, even when he knew far more, he had never stopped believing in her devotion, at least at some level. She said as much herself, in letters that had looked just like this one, minus the tape. But that was another era, another age here on the Rock.

  Two pages of pink stationery were folded inside. Before reading them Falk looked over his shoulder, then walked to the front screen, glancing down the street toward the golf course before shutting the door. He sat down on the big brown couch by the window. First he counted the paragraphs. Five. The real business was always transacted in the third, but out of nostalgia he started at the beginning:

  Dear Revere,

  I have miss you much and so greatly. It has been so many years, and still can I see you with me. Do you remember our nights so wonderful together? We are in my dreams dancing late into starlight.

  Same as always, so far—the halting English, charming in its clumsy syntax. If she was a professional, shouldn’t it be flawless? But how could anyone not fall for a line so perfectly misshapen as “dancing late into starlight.”

  Last month I hear you are in Cuba, doing work for the country. It is for you very good. I hope you will find the time there to think of me and write to me.

  Now for the business at hand.

  Do you remember Harry our friend who lives nearby? He is wanting to see you also, and will wait for it to be soon. That way when you visit you can see us all.

  The summer has been not so bad, and I have sometimes a new job.

  And so on, for another several sentences of little consequence, small talk that fell flat after such a promising beginning. Then the usual conclusion, with its flourish of schoolgirl confections.

  Love,

  Elena

  XXXOOO

  Hugs and kisses, like always. Only this time they seemed like regular X’s and O’s, game pieces waiting to be deployed, with the outcome uncertain.

  He sighed, folding the delicate paper back into the envelope. Should he burn it? Shred it? Eat it, for Chrissakes? Every option seemed belated. By now its presence must have been noted somewhere on the base. So he stuffed it into his pants pocket, realizing too late that he would now be carrying the scent if he met Pam later.

  The news, it seemed, was that their “old friend” Harry wanted a meeting. Well, it would have to wait. Perhaps Falk would even ignore the summons altogether. In any event, what he needed most right now was a little sleep, tortured or not.

  He was good at resting under pressure, having learned at an early age to shut his eyes as all hell broke loose in the next room, pushing himself beneath the surface of the sheets as if swimming for deep water, a chill refuge where no one else would care to follow. At Gitmo the technique was doubly helpful, easing him away not just from his troubles but from the heat, which settled heavily onto his chest the moment he crawled into bed. Deeper now, he thought, his breathing steady and slow. The light faded as a strange pressure built in his ears, as if he were a diver, and soon enough he had reached the desired level.

  In what seemed like only seconds he was fighting for the surface, drawn by a persistent noise that he could no longer ignore. He lurched upward, gasping, bathed in sweat. And there it was again, a banging at the screen. A voice called out, vaguely familiar.

  “Sir? Mr. Falk?” Then another round of knocking. “Are you here, sir?”

  It was his MP escort from this morning. He checked his watch, shocked to see that it was almost 2 p.m. He had slept for five hours.

  “In here, soldier. I’m coming.” He threw on a shirt, still fighting the grogginess. On his way to the door he couldn’t resist a glance toward the kitchen table, and was alarmed to see that the letter had disappeared, but then he remembered he had stuffed it in his pocket.

  “What is it?”

  The MP stepped forward, cap in hand.

  “It’s Sergeant Ludwig, sir. They found him.”

  “Alive?”

  “No, sir. Drowned.”

  Bad news, but a blessedly
quick resolution. Easier for the family and certainly easier for Falk. He’d wager that a blood test would show alcohol, no matter what the man’s buddies thought. Almost everybody succumbed to it eventually down here, if only for one night.

  “Sorry to hear it. But thanks for letting me know. Guess I should get down there.”

  “Actually, sir, I’m supposed to take you to a meeting.”

  “A meeting?” Probably a damage-control session. Trabert’s idea.

  “With the Cubans, sir. At the North East Gate. He washed up on their side.”

  “No way.” It was stunning. Downright impossible.

  “Yes, sir. The general wants you to accompany Captain Lewis when he goes to retrieve the body. I gather they’re a little upset over there.”

  Damn right they were. Unless centuries of wind and current patterns had suddenly reversed course, or Ludwig had gone on some sort of record endurance swim, it should have been impossible for him to have ended up on the Cuban side.

  So much for quick resolutions.

  “Lead the way, soldier. It’ll be just like old times.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The North East Gate is a reminder of the intent and capability of our adversaries to gain our operational information. Those adversaries can see us easily and clearly, hear us through sophisticated signal devices, and continually attempt to manipulate and distort our true purpose at Joint Task Force Guantánamo.

  —From “OPSEC Corner,” a regular feature

  of JTF-GTMO’s weekly newspaper, The Wire

  THE NORTH EAST GATE was tucked in a remote corner of the base. It was a backwater Checkpoint Charlie with palm trees, the biggest difference being that its confrontations occurred well out of public view.

  During the Cold War both sides had booby-trapped the approaching roads and spiked the plains with mines. Sometimes they exchanged gunfire. More often the tension escalated into something resembling frat house pranks. The Cubans used to get their kicks by tossing stones at Marine Observation Post 31, a small concrete barracks and watchtower overlooking the gate from a facing hill. They especially liked to do it at night, figuring that a direct hit would awaken any soldier trying to sleep. The Marines answered by blocking the line of fire with a forty-foot fence, just like the ones that driving ranges put next to highways to keep golf balls from hitting cars. The Cubans counterattacked by climbing the new fence to mount coat hangers, which clanked and rang through the night like wind chimes. Then they lit up the barracks with a spotlight, which the Americans extinguished without firing a shot by unveiling a huge red-and-gold Marine Corps emblem on the illuminated hillside.

  Falk had sometimes patrolled the area as a Marine, walking the nearby roads in the swelter of full combat gear—weapon, flares, radio, food rations, and eight clips of ammo. It was a strange little world that turned spooky after dark, glowing a phosphorescent green through the lenses of his night-vision goggles. Every banana rat stirring in the brush had sounded like the advent of a commando raid.

  During the first year of his posting the Berlin Wall came down, and for a few weeks the fenceline was tense. The last known exchange of gunfire took place the following month. But by the end of his third year the crumbling Soviet Union had cut Cuba loose from its purse strings, which left the enemy with more important worries than a few jeering Marines. Cuban bodies had sometimes washed up on the American side in those days, but they were civilians, not soldiers—would-be refugees who had drowned or were shot while swimming for freedom. No one ever made a big deal about it as long as the Americans sent the bodies back, and every now and then someone made it through alive.

  Today the atmosphere was calmer than ever. The Americans had dismantled the booby traps and cleared their mines, replacing them with noise sensors and motion detectors. And for all the talk about OPSEC and renewed vigilance, they no longer staffed the observation post 24/7, relying instead on motorized patrols. Recently General Trabert had ordered the removal of a few coils of razor wire.

  The Cubans had never gotten around to clearing their own mines, and whenever there was a brush fire a couple dozen more cooked off, exploding like bullets tossed into a campfire. The few remaining coat hangers had rusted into place.

  But the North East Gate was still the one point along the perimeter where the two old adversaries regularly came face-to-face. It was the turnstile for the few aging Cubans who still commuted to on-base jobs. In the early 1960s there had been three thousand of them, daily enduring the taunts and abuse of Castro’s guards in exchange for dollar wages. Only nine remained, and the youngest was sixty-four. They arrived at 5:30 a.m. and departed at 4:30 p.m., and every two weeks they carried home pay envelopes stuffed with American cash for themselves and about a hundred pensioners.

  The only other regular contact was a monthly meeting between the commander of Guantánamo’s naval base, Captain Rodrick Lewis, and his Cuban counterpart from the Revolutionary Army’s Brigada de la Frontera, General Jorge Cabral. Their meetings were friendly and low key. In order to avoid unpleasant surprises, they gave each other advance notice whenever one side or the other was about to build something new or engage in a military exercise. General Cabral had learned of the imminent arrival of hundreds of prisoners from Afghanistan well before most of the American public.

  They took turns acting as host. Usually there was little official business to discuss, so they talked instead of baseball, or fishing, or of the meal that had been set before them. As if to affirm the informal nature of their relationship, they sometimes engaged in small barters of contraband—a box of Cuban cigars for a carton of Marlboros, a country-western CD for a homemade cassette of salsa. Any issue that arose between meetings was generally handled by e-mail, unless there was a wildfire to fight, in which case they convened like old generals at the front, marshaling their resources to defeat the common foe.

  But the discovery of Sergeant Ludwig’s body called for extraordinary measures. No American had ever turned up dead on the wrong side of the fence. For the moment, Cold War tension was back in vogue, and Falk was about to get a front-row seat.

  He arrived at the observation post to find three Humvees already parked. One had the general’s two-star flag. Trabert was inside, waiting to take care of the necessary introductions.

  “Falk, this is Captain Lewis. I want you with him when the Cubans hand over the body.”

  The captain cut an impressive figure. He was a tall, trim African American with a calm demeanor. It would have to be. His job as base commander required the skills of a small-town mayor as much as those of a military leader. Base families got skittish in a hurry when they were this isolated. They hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of an al-Qaeda prison being built in their backyard, but they’d been pleasantly surprised by the vigor it injected into base life. Lewis had even joked about reinstalling the town’s one and only stoplight, which had been retired to the base museum. From everything Falk had heard, the captain had been quite content to stay out of Trabert’s hair, and vice versa, which made this meeting seem all the more awkward.

  “I’ll be introducing you to General Cabral,” Captain Lewis said.

  “As what?”

  Lewis turned toward the general.

  “What was the agreed-upon terminology, sir?”

  “Liaison from the civilian side, representing Sergeant Ludwig’s family. There will be no mention of your employer. The captain will do all the talking, Falk, but keep your eyes open.”

  “For anything in particular?”

  “Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “This whole thing’s out of the ordinary.”

  “All the more reason for another set of eyes.”

  Falk wondered if Lewis was unhappy about his presence. Cluttering the usual one-on-one intimacy, especially with a civilian, seemed indelicate at best. He noticed that Lewis had brought along a recent copy of Sports Illustrated with a cover story on a Cuban-born pitcher, perhaps as a peace offering. Trabert’s maneuvers would probably cra
mp his style. But Falk wasn’t about to get in the middle of an Army-Navy dustup, if it should come to that.

  “So how will this work?” he asked Lewis.

  “Pretty much like always. We’ll go down to the guardhouse on our side of the fence with a couple Marines in tow. The Cubans will send an escort to take us across. This one’s their show, so we’ll meet in what used to be the currency exchange hut, on their side.”

  “You going, too?” Falk asked the general.

  Trabert shook his head.

  “Don’t want to make it bigger than it already is. But I wanted to be here in case there’s a hitch.”

  “Any reason to think there will be?”

  “With new ground and old enemies, you never know.”

  Falk noticed a slight frown from Lewis, but the captain held his tongue. Then, with a glance toward the window, Lewis said, “Looks like they’re here. That’s General Cabral’s ride.”

  A green truck with a canvas canopy had just pulled up on the Cuban side beneath a big white sign with red and black lettering that said, “República de Cuba. Territorio Libre de America.” It was a Cuban taunt: “Territory Free of America.” Soldiers jumped from the open tailgate.

  “Looks like they’ve brought a few more than usual,” Lewis said, not sounding thrilled. Trabert nodded, as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed. Then he trained a pair of binoculars on the scene.

  “C’mon,” Lewis said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Two Marines led the way. Also accompanying the captain was a staff interpreter. As they emerged from the shade of the observation post the sunlight struck them like a blade. A big iguana, legs pedaling, scuttled out of the way as they strolled downhill across the red-and-gold globe of the Marine Corps emblem. It looked like someone had recently touched up the paint job. Overhead, a pair of turkey vultures circled in formation with four skinnier, scarier birds that looked straight out of a Gothic drawing. It would have seemed ominous if they weren’t already such a common sight.