by Gil Hogg
I was running with moisture, and so was Yarham, yet neither of us spoke.
Gomez laughed. “The red spy will have an excellent view of the gold spy, or vice versa. I can promise my friend’s knife will be razor sharp. The removal of your cock, or balls, will take just a second. Food for the cat!” Gomez stood up, opened the door and shouted, “Hussein!”
Hussein was the one who had held the gun on me in the car. He was a very short, fat man, still in his clean white shirt and black trousers. He had a long kitchen knife in one hand and a coil of cord in the other. His expression was morose, a workman absorbed in the job he was about to perform.
“Which spy do you want, my friend?” Gomez asked him.
Unhesitatingly, Hussein pointed at me.
“Wait, I think I prefer the red. Do you have a view, Mr Red? Would you prefer to give the honour to Mr Gold?” We waited, a minute of terrifying silence for me. “OK, take the gold,” Gomez laughed.
Hussein bent down to untie my belt. He began to pull at my trousers. He dropped them to the floor with my underpants. I felt his fingers on my shoulder as though I was being anaesthetised and my body was already partially numb. My head pounded with the dreadful anticipation.
“No, no, wait, Hussein. I think Mr Red. Yes, I insist, Mr Red.” Gomez collapsed on his chair in a fit of coughing and chuckling, clapping his hands on his knees.
Hussein sighed, and moved expressionlessly to Yarham. He untied Yarham’s belt, tore open his flies, and using the knife, hacked away his underpants. Yarham’s cheeks were death-white. The great jaw clamped shut. His flaccid cock and balls hung over the edge of the seat.
“What is it to be, Hussein?” Gomez asked. “Wait. Does Mr Red have a view? Your cock or your balls? A difficult choice, eh? Perhaps Mr Gold has an opinion. What would you advise, Mr Gold? Cock or balls?”
Hussein picked up Yarham’s dick and dropped it contemptuously.
“Very well, then. Proceed,” Gomez said, taking that gesture as a decision.
Hussein cut a short length of cord, but I could neither watch nor suffer this ordeal any longer.
I tried to sound calm. “I’ll tell you what you want to know, Mr Malmuni.”
A sign of life flickered from Yarham.
“Of course you will. Ha, ha!” He signalled Hussein to leave the room. “No, leave your tools my brother. You might need them yet.”
I had toiled in my thoughts since our arrest to find an acceptable story to tell. I could probably bank on Gomez knowing nothing specific about the C3 operation, or Carmelli’s CIA fiasco. All Gomez would know, I guessed, was that to carry out his project, he had to evade the Cuban Secret Service, and might come under surveillance by CIA agents. I would have to take the chance that Dolores was not a double agent who had revealed everything. But it would only make Gomez lose patience if I claimed we were ordinary tourists doing the rounds of the nightclubs. No, I had to give something, or Yarham would lose his dick.
“We’re nothing to do with the CIA, Mr Malmuni. We’re British. And if you’ve lived in London, you’ll know the English accents.”
Gomez was thoughtful, and too good at poker to show surprise. “You are intelligence agents?”
“Yes. British.”
Gomez nodded. “Working with the CIA?”
“No. We don’t talk to them, but our bosses in England might.”
Gomez was suspicious. “You come here, you liaise. You talk together. You share.”
“No. Like two separate companies.”
Gomez relaxed slightly. Whether he believed or not, he understood. “What are you doing, then?”
“We have had agents here for sixty years or more. Routine visit. We went to the nightclub to have a drink, watch the girls.”
“You hang about for several days, watching, asking questions. You don’t like girls.”
“My colleague liked the club, the band, the floorshow, so we came here more than once. Wherever we go in Cuba we hire a local and ask questions. It’s our job.”
“You have AIDS?”
I could see why Gomez had preferred to emasculate Yarham. “I’m HIV positive. I take a lot of pills.”
Yarham’s stupified eyes enlarged. Gomez looked nauseated. “Your names and department?”
I gave him the names we had assumed in Mexico City, telling him that because of our Latin connections we worked in Latin America. I said we were astonished that we had been picked up and asked him why. Gomez preened himself, wriggled comfortably in his silk gown and lit another cigar. He looked as though he was preparing to talk about himself.
“I don’t believe you. You tell a very fancy story. Don’t tell me such lies!”
I was at my most plaintive. “We really are from British intelligence.”
“You know what we’re doing here don’t you?”
“I haven’t any idea. I never knew you were here until you kidnapped us.”
“Two members of British intelligence arrive. They start asking a lot of questions about our processing plant.”
I had talked us into a corner and there was nowhere to go. “That’s what we do. We’re always asking questions. Mostly we don’t find out anything worth telling our boss about.”
Gomez laughed at first. “I don’t believe you. Yes, I will believe you are British agents. No, I won’t believe you know nothing about us. What am I going to do with you?”
“Let us go and we’ll go on our way… ” It was a fatuous request. Jose had told all. I wasn’t believable.
“You think somebody is building a rocket site here?” Gomez said jokingly.
“I doubt it. It didn’t work in the sixties. It won’t work now.”
Gomez the leader was considering. “Technology has moved on since the sixties. The island is well placed. A rocket can fly lower and faster now, and deliver a bigger warhead. Theoretically, Washington and New York could be destroyed. Flattened. In a few hours.”
“It’s possible technically,” I said. “But if Kruschev couldn’t do it from here, nobody could.”
“September Eleventh was utterly impossible and unthink-able until it happened.”
“But the US would retaliate against Havana, and probably Riyadh, Baghdad, even Mecca and Medina. Millions would die, including us, here!”
“Martyrdom!”
“How could you possibly develop such weaponry in the Middle East?” I asked, determined to keep him talking, although I knew the cause was lost.
This riled Malmuni. “Ah, you greedy westerners screwed the balls off Eastern Europe after it collapsed, and their scientists found a home in the Middle East… You have to give clever people something to eat, not tell them to take their doctorates and fuck off… ”
He was interrupted by a piercing, intermittent alarm, the weird, strident shrieking of a beast in pain. His homily ceased. His confident expression froze. Yarham and I were forgotten. He stood up quickly and rushed out of the room.
25
Roped to the chair, powerless, the alarm drilled into my head painfully. I could hear shouting and boots thudding along the corridor outside the room. The knife and cord still lay on the bed. I made efforts to move my chair closer to the bed, although the hope of getting hold of the knife was slim.
“We’ll never do it this way. Let’s try to get back to back, and you might be able to have a go at my wrists,” I said, and Yarham silently complied.
As we struggled, propelling our chairs with our toes and shifting our weight, there was an explosion from outside which shook the flimsy wooden building, then another and another. Plaster and dust fell from the ceiling.
“It’s a raid!” I was filled with hope, and made a frenzied attempt to jerk my chair to back Yarham’s.
Then the door opened, and Dolores Martinez came in, hugging a bundle wrapped in a towel which she dropped on the bed. She gave no greeting and hardly looked at us. She seemed unreal and she moved in a cloud of womanish sweat. She held her fingers to her lips. She had a knife in her hand, and quickly se
vered my bonds at the wrist, dropping the knife on my lap, my bare lap where my penis lay shrivelled and inert. At any other time this would have been a pinnacle of embarrassment. She moved like a sleepwalker. Her black hair with its gold streaks hung in disarray over her damp forehead. Her breasts swung loose under a thin T-shirt. She wore a pair of tracksuit trousers. The pink painted toenails of her bare feet looked incongruous. She fled from the room without a word.
I cut my ankles free, and paused, before I attended to Yarham, to flick the towel off the parcel Dolores had brought. It contained a Uzi submachine-gun and magazines, and a Colt Double Eagle 45 with a box of shells. When Yarham was free, and had dragged his trousers up from his ankles, he grabbed the Uzi without any direction from me. “Fucking bastards,” he mumbled to himself.
“Go easy with that thing. You know it?” I said, as he clipped in a magazine and racked the gun fiercely. But he seemed to know what he was doing. He cradled the gun in one arm and picked up the knife. He had been crazed by his experience with Hussein.
I checked that the Colt was loaded, removed the safety catch, and pushed the box of shells into my pocket, as the door opened.
Hussein, carrying an automatic pistol, was framed in the doorway. Behind him issued the din of automatic rifle fire and exploding grenades. He stood still, his moon face impassive, but his eyes flickering, startled at what he saw. In that second, and before I could begin to react, Yarham dropped the Uzi, and hurled himself at Hussein, plunging the blade into his throat. I dragged them both inside and shut the door. Hussein collapsed on the floor spouting blood, jerking like a dying turkey, and Yarham was still at him with the knife.
I was splashed with blood, and Yarham’s shirt and trousers were soaked. “Steady on, man, or the dry cleaning bill will be enormous.”
Yarham had hardly spoken since the emasculation episode, and he had a wild look in his eye. I could understand it. He’d been scared near to the stopping of his heart. He wasn’t listening to me. He made as if to go out of the door.
I grabbed his arm. “We’re not going out there until we have an idea what’s happening, and a plan. And you’re going to follow my orders, understand?”
He nodded reluctantly. “If I’m going to die, it’ll be with my boots on, firing this!”
“More importantly, with your trousers on,” I said.
Heavy small-arms fire was going on within the building, and as far as I could tell, very little from outside. That seemed to me to suggest that the CIA had actually got a commando party into the building. It couldn’t be the Cuban police or army, because they would have set up a siege and megaphones, and demanded a surrender. I stood still. I didn’t intend to risk my skin by rushing into a firefight.
“We need to get better observation, Yarham.” I drew up the blind cautiously, to disclose floodlit lawns, and beyond, a wood. “Not a sign of life, this side. Those lights are very powerful. The ranch would never have installed them. They’re part of Gomez’s defence system.”
“I think the action has all been on the other side of the building,” Yarham said. He was coming to.
We had to cross the hall and have a look out of the window of the opposite room. When I opened our door I could see that the opposite room, which was open, was deserted. We slipped across the empty hall into a bedroom lit by the outside floodlights. The beds were upsided and resting against the shattered widows as barricades, and there were three dead men on the floor, slumped over their weapons. I turned one over with my foot. He had been shot in the head. He was wearing the familiar white shirt, open at the neck, with rolled sleeves.
“They look like Gomez’s people. Keep a count, Yarham. We have to notch up ten.”
The gunfire was still going on more sporadically now at the other end of the wing. I crept up to the open window and looked out. The area, lit only by lights from the motel and flames from adjoining buildings, presented a quite different picture. Cavernous holes had been blown in the road and the lawns. Lumps of earth and rocks were strewn across the gardens. It looked as though there had been a bombing raid. Bodies lay on the ground. I counted five.
“So what happened?” Yarham said. We were both astounded at the carnage.
“My guess is that the CIA planned a commando attack on the building, fine, but failed to anticipate that Gomez had set up booby trap defences, fearsome defences. I’d say the whole building is ringed with mines, even that peaceful side we saw. The CIA hit the minefield and to give them due credit, some kept on going, and are still at it!”
“Where do we come in, Captain? Or go out.”
“I think we practise masterly inactivity until the shooting is over, then work our way down the hall, go through each room, mop up any opposition, make a body count, and retire to the missile site. Oh yes, and we’ll get you some decent clothes. You look as though you’ve been working in an abattoir.”
I thought that there was a strong likelihood that the CIA would have cut the telephone lines from the camp, not wanting any calls from staff to the police or the army, but I was aware that intervention would come soon. The Gomez team were occupying the Campismo Mercados as sole guests, but there were Cuban staff and management. A frightened Cuban servant had only to walk to San Cristobal, or use a mobile phone. The police or the army or both would arrive soon. Yarham and I therefore had to be out of this place quite quickly, and this gnawed at me for ten or fifteen minutes as we waited, listening to the gradually reducing gunfire.
“Come on, man, let’s go. One room at a time. Shoot first. I’ll guard the rear,” I said.
“How do we know the difference between CIA and terrorists?”
“Unfortunately we don’t. Equally, the CIA will think we’re terrorists and shoot first, and the terrorists will think we’re CIA and shoot first.”
“So we kill everybody?”
“Can you think of a safer way?”
We agreed that the only exception was Dolores Martinez, and began to move down the hall, Yarham in the lead with the Uzi. The rooms on the left were generally empty and untouched, those on the right had seen action, with the furniture turned over, and smashed windows – and the occasional body. I could distinguish now between the CIA and Al Qaeda. The CIA were wearing khaki denims with camouflage patches. The terrorists still wore their black trousers and mostly white shirts. We moved methodically. I kicked each door open. Yarham entered first, his gun cradled at the ready, while I kept an eye on the hall.
The gunshots had ceased. We paused to listen. There was silence. A man came down the hall toward me, a blur in the poor light. I fired. The Colt had a whack like a cannon. The man dropped without a murmur, his throat pulped. He was in the dress of the terrorists. I stepped over him, the fumes from the Colt pricking my nostrils, and we went on, from room to room, counting the toll.
“These guys intended to fight to the death, and they have,” I said.
At the end of the hall, where the most intensive hand-to-hand fighting had taken place, the woodwork and doors were splintered by high-velocity bullets which had penetrated the thin construction. With two more rooms to go, we stepped into one where two men were on their feet, bending over, examining a dead man. They spun around at the noise. The bigger man, in denim, with a black beret on his head, had his hand at his side holding a revolver. The smaller man, with a black mask over his head revealing only his eyes, had a submachine gun cradled in his arm which he was bringing to the ready.
I was standing behind Yarham’s shoulder. I took in the red complexion and the neat ginger moustache of the big man. He probably had a family in Montana. Instantly, his light eyes searched us, two bloodied Caucasians, trying to place us, seeing fighters and concluding foes.
I wanted to say, “Wait, man. We can talk. We’re on the same side,” but words were useless. His companion’s gun was nearly up. It was kill or be killed. Yarham sprayed them with slugs as though he was putting out a fire.
I did not pause, but continued the search. The lobby and office were deserted, the
staff shack a few yards from the house was in blackness. We changed our shirts for white T-shirts we found in a drawer in one of the bedrooms, and went over the body count – nine Al Qaeda, no Gomez, and thankfully, no Dolores. It wasn’t surprising that the pair had escaped while they had the opportunity. There were six dead CIA inside, including two Caucasians who might have been the leading US agents, and the rest Cubans. A quick search of the bodies inside the house revealed nothing, except that one of the Caucasian CIA men, whom we had counted as dead, had a shoulder wound. I shook him into consciousness.
“Listen, buddy, we’ll get you out of here and fix your wound. We need a vehicle. You got a vehicle? You’ll end your days in a Cuban army prison if we don’t get you out. We don’t have much time.”
The CIA agent was in too much pain to resist, or to trouble about precisely who I was. Any saviour would do. I was banking on the fact that the raiders had a line of vehicles nearby, and that their vehicle minders had probably fled. It seemed easiest to solve the transport problem this way, rather than try to hi-jack an Al Qaeda vehicle, assuming we could find one. I prodded the CIA agent into the lead, and we gingerly followed the tracks of others through the devastated part of the minefield. I looked across at the staff shack and saw a light.
“Swap guns, Yarham, and take our man to the gate. Wait for me there. I’ll go across and have a look at the staff quarters, just to be sure. There’s a light showing. I think the local staff will all have run like hell.”
I moved out of the moonlight into the shadow of the staff building. The blinds were closed. I crept through the open doorway in darkness into a hallway. I heard a woman’s voice speaking low, but edgy, full of emotion, and speaking in English – I assumed it was the common language of Dolores and Gomez. I stepped into the room, a seedy lounge leading to the bedrooms. Gomez had laid his revolver on a side table covered with greasy magazines. He was standing before Dolores, who was hunched on the edge of a chair, her arms wrapped around her breasts protectively.