by Gil Hogg
I had the Uzi with my nervy finger on the trigger. “Don’t make me kill you in front of the lady,” I said, thinking at the same time that I was a damn fool not to gun him down without a word.
Gomez smiled thinly, but at ease, and I knew he would be as ready to lose his life as his comrades had been. If he had been alone, I’d have killed him without any preface. And if he moved, I intended to kill him, Dolores present or not. Dolores looked up at me blankly, gave an involuntary cry and lunged forward, whether out of relief or to shield Gomez, I didn’t know. In the instant that she stepped in front of the barrel of the Uzi, Gomez fled out of the open door behind him, and along a back verandah. I followed, loosing off a burst as he jumped over the rail. He disappeared down the hill, into the dark foliage of the wood. Pursuit was out of the question.
I went back to Dolores. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”
I took her arm and pulled her along, down the path to the gate. She still had bare feet and moved with difficulty over the sharp stones. Yarham and our CIA prisoner were waiting. The CIA man led us down the main road for a hundred yards, a journey made in a silence, broken by his heaving breath and moans. In a lay-by, there were two jeeps and two sedan cars, but no guards. I decided that a battered Subaru sedan might be the least obtrusive. The keys were in the ignition, the tank was nearly full. In a few moments we were on the road to Mariel, with Yarham at the wheel, Dolores slumped in front beside him.
I attended to Wayne – as he identified himself – in the back of the car. I stanched the bleeding from the wound in his shoulder, and applied a tight bandage from one of the medical kits in the car. Yarham drew my attention to a train of lights a couple of miles away, approaching on the winding road, winking like glow worms. We were driving without lights, and I ordered Yarham to pull off the road, into a field. We waited in the hot darkness, the old car smelling of engine oil, grimy plastic seats, and a faint scent from Dolores. In a few minutes an army convoy of four armoured cars, an armoured personnel carrier full of troops with rifles, and a staff car came past us. As soon as they had disappeared, we got back on the road and made all speed for Mariel.
I had decided that Wayne could be of further use to us. He looked to me to be around thirty-five, and that almost certainly meant he was a fully trained agent, and a party to the CIA plan of attack. He wasn’t badly hurt; the muscles and blood vessels in his upper arm were torn, and possibly the bone was chipped; although his wound could poison. He was in serious pain. He was shaken by his ordeal, and in a receptive state of mind.
“Wayne, I want to tell you who I am. I’m a British agent of MI6, working with US intelligence. I’m here to do the same thing you are – put these terrorists out of business. OK, the attack at the camp was costly, but we can still go on and destroy the site.”
“Three of us?” he asked, seemingly untroubled by my thin explanation.
“Four, if you include Dolores. Sure, we can do it. Tell me how you were going to do it.” Dolores was still hunched over and did not react to my inclusion of her.
Wayne didn’t take very long to weigh up the pros and cons of revealing the plan. “I don’t know whether I should be talking to you guys, but I guess I heard you were around… and OK we want the same thing… We reckoned on wiping out Al Qaeda at the ranch, making the destruction of the site a demolition job.”
“Makes sense. What about the fissile material in the warheads? What were you going to do with that? Did Langley give you specific instructions on how to handle it?”
Wayne hesitated. “Tell you the truth, this is a kind of save-the-world mission, and we’ve never had instructions from Langley. Red Lomas, the chief, said we just go ahead and do it, and take the applause afterwards. We were going to drop the warheads down a thousand-foot nickel mine shaft and throw in a few grenades to block it off.”
I didn’t know any more than Wayne did about disposal of nuclear warheads, and it did not sound like a very satisfactory idea.
“Tell me about the actual demolition of the rockets and launchers.”
“We were going to blow shit out of them. Drive in a couple of trucks loaded with HE. Detonate the explosives. There’s a lot of chemicals on site for rocket fuel. Would have been a blaze you could see from Miami.”
“We can still do that, Wayne. You have the trucks and explosive in place?”
“Yeah, but what does MI6 have?”
I gave a little laugh. “We don’t have anything at the moment. We’re only in the planning stage. You guys have beaten us to the punch. So we have no option but to try to finish off what you started.”
“I understand… go ahead…” Wayne groaned, and closed his eyes.
“No problemo,” Yarham echoed, coming further out of the cataleptic state that had gripped him since his dick was endangered.
I gave Wayne a needle full of morphine, and let him lapse into a stupor. I was feeling rather pleased, already framing a report in my mind about how I led an assault on the Al Qaeda terrorists against almost insuperable odds, wiping most of them out, and how I went on to demolish their site.
“Ambitious, don’t you think, Captain?” Yarham said, startling me as though he knew my thoughts.
“Let’s see how we go. If friend Wayne’s associates have set it up, we need only light the fuse, so to speak.”
Yarham grunted irritably. “If I was Gomez on the loose, and saw my plans being wrecked, and death didn’t matter a damn, you know what I’d do?” He paused, and I switched my mind to Gomez, whom, in the flush of victory, I’d ignored. “I’d arm a warhead and get a rocket away without waiting for the fine detail of plotting its course, and if I could, I’d arm any other warheads and detonate them on site.”
“Gomez doesn’t have the capability to do that immediately, man!” I said loudly and confidently, although I had no confidence.
26
Yarham’s suggestion about Gomez unsettled me. I argued with him whether Gomez would want to hurt an inoffensive country like Cuba, and whether Gomez would have the personal expertise to arm the warheads; whether technically the warheads could be exploded on the ground without a lot of work. But in any event there was no doubt that Gomez was a complete nihilist, and left free, a menace.
“If you’re right, Gomez will run for the site. We’ll find him there,” I said. “Is that right, Dolores?”
I hadn’t begun to think about how to deal with Dolores. She had joined us like a shadow. She stirred, and spoke expressionlessly. “I think so. He is a very determined man. And there’s something I should tell you. Although the missile firing is not ready, one missile has been placed on readiness. This was done for this kind of emergency. Discovery by the Cuban authorities, you know. It will take maybe twenty-four hours to arm and load. Ayoub Sabri, whom you may know as Hertz, was killed at the ranch, but Malmuni can do it.”
“We’ll have to move our collective ass,” Yarham said, cheered at the suggestion that we had twenty-four hours.
“Oh, and by the way, Dolores, thanks for what you did back there,” I said, but she showed no sign of having heard me.
I had to travel to Mariel via the Hotel Yara in Havana, to retrieve the money and the satphone. It took a long time, and except for Yarham at the wheel, we were comatose by the time we reached Mariel. There, I prodded Wayne into consciousness, and he directed us to an old factory, in a rickety block of similar premises, guarded by an armed Cuban. The guard accepted us as part of Wayne’s force when I half-carried Wayne through the doorway. I sat him down in the office cubicle inside the doors. I intended that we should take the place over for our operations, and I ordered Yarham to bring the car inside and close up. The factory had been cleared from its previous use, and on the broken concrete floor were two ten-ton trucks loaded with explosive.
“We were going to drive them through the gates,” Wayne said.
“Can you handle one of these?” I asked Yarham.
“A kamikaze run, you mean?” he said, cocking an eyebrow.
“No,” Wayne said, “we aimed to give the driver and his support crew time to get out, and detonate electrically.”
He showed us the mechanisms. Apart from switching on the radio controls, the vehicles were wired and ready to go. The guard had the keys.
“What about the warheads?” These worried me.
“They’re on the site. It is in fact the workings of an old nickel mine. We didn’t expect serious opposition. Maybe a few Cuban guards. We aimed to drive in the trucks, settle the resistance if any. Dump the warheads down a shaft, follow them with a few grenades, then retire and blow the trucks.”
There, with changes in the dramatis personnae, was my plan.
Wayne had been very helpful. He had lost a lot of blood – my first aid was not very effective – and apparently he was suffering. I promised, in return for his help, to get him to a doctor. I was doubtful about Dolores, whether she might act as a magnet for Gomez, who might by now realise that she had sold him out. I decided to leave Wayne, Dolores and the car in the factory with the guard, while Yarham and I made a reconnaissance of the site.
“I’ll take Wayne to a doctor while you do that,” Dolores said.
It made perfect sense. But, while Dolores had saved our lives, she was a spy and a deceiver, a woman of strange allegiances, a woman whose mind I simply could not plumb. I didn’t trust her, fascinating as she could be on a relaxed occasion. And I didn’t want to lose sight of her, in case somebody as obsessional as Gomez might be drawn back to her out of love or revenge – enabling me to deal with him, as I should have done at our earlier meeting.
“No. It’s too dangerous. When I get back from the recce, in about an hour, we’ll all go together. There’s one other thing I’ll ask you to do, Dolores. Find out how our man Kershaw is. I don’t even know the name of the hospital.”
Dolores agreed and I told her the story of Kershaw’s misfortune. “Give me a phone and I’ll see if I can trace him,” she said.
In the first light of dawn, we walked the several blocks of filthy, uneven and deserted streets. Yarham had an old piece of canvas over his Uzi. I had the Colt in my belt. As we stumbled along, a couple of drunks getting back from a party, I began to consider how we would make our entry. Our chances of doing so surrepticiously were slight – there were dogs and guards. I was thinking of climbing the wire at the rear, when Yarham reminded me.
“Mines, Captain.”
If Al Qaeda had booby-trapped their living quarters, the likelihood that they would have done the same at their workplace was strong. Therefore any entry other than the main gate was dangerous. When we were a few yards from the gate, we tucked ourselves away behind a rusty iron fence. I could get a view across the compound to the crumbling brick buildings within. There were signs of movement inside the wire. Dogs roamed the compound, barking occasionally. Through the cracks in the doors of the building, lights were shining.
“I think we do it all in one, like Wayne’s pals. We bust in through the gate with the trucks,” I said.
“Sounds easy, Captain,” Yarham said ironically.
It was in fact very dangerous, and near suicidal if there was determined opposition, but I could think of no other way. I only wanted to recite the plan, to hold it up to the light in all its naivety.
“Suppose the grenades we throw down the mineshaft set off the warheads,” Yarham said.
“I wish you wouldn’t bother me with these theoretical difficulties, man.”
We walked back to the CIA factory in silence. I left Yarham and the guard to keep the area under surveillance while I drove the Subaru, with Wayne and Dolores, to find a doctor.
“Your friend Kershaw,” Dolores said, “I found out from the newspaper office. They remembered the story of the beaten up white man. They said he died.”
I had expected this. “He was badly beaten. I’m sorry. He was doing a good job.”
Nobody else said anything.
Dolores directed me to a relatively prosperous part of the town outside the main shopping and market area, with small but expensive detached houses. She accompanied Wayne into the doctor’s surgery – which was not officially open, while I waited outside. I had given her enough money to calm the medico if his sleep was disturbed or if he was touchy about treating a gunshot wound.
I had bought Wayne a pair of trousers and a T-shirt at a market stall, and had struggled in the car to remove his denims and dress him, to avoid suspicion. After twenty minutes, during which I began to regret my generosity with my time, Dolores came out to the car. “The doctor says Wayne needs to go to hospital.”
“We’ll take him to hospital when I’ve finished the job, in a few hours. I might need him. Get the doctor to give a painkiller.”
“It will knock him out and he won’t be able to help.”
“Not too much then. Is the doctor reliable? I mean will he keep his mouth shut?”
“He ought to. He’s been paid enough.”
I didn’t want to get involved in admitting a patient with a gunshot wound to hospital. I might find myself in custody, answering questions. I didn’t want Dolores involved either. At this point, although I didn’t say so, I planned to dump Wayne at a hospital casualty department without explanation, when I was ready to leave Mariel. Dolores pleaded that we couldn’t continue to drive Wayne around, and as a compromise I agreed to leave them both at a hotel while I went back to the factory. But we couldn’t go to a hotel until I had bought Dolores shoes, a jacket and a comb. These small tasks took an interminable time. The market stalls were still setting up.
I at last obtained two adjoining rooms on the first floor of a small hotel, the Avila, in the downtown commercial district. Money assisted the reception staff to avoid looking too closely at our unkempt condition. We helped Wayne upstairs and put him to bed.
“I’ll watch him, but if he gets too bad, I’m going to call a cab and take him to the hospital,” Dolores said.
“You could get into trouble if you do that. I have to leave it to you.”
“Good luck with… what you have to do.”
I had to believe she would stay with Wayne and wait for me, unless Wayne’s condition became too acute, because there was no other course for me. We went into the next room. She said she would lie down, but didn’t feel tired. I put my arms around her and thanked her again for saving our lives.
“I don’t even know your name, and it’s not Wolf, is it?” She summoned up two small dimples in her cheeks which I had never noticed before, and I told her. “Rojairr, I like that,” she said.
“And I don’t know who you really are.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Gomez’s lover?”
“That’s what you call business… But he is a man. A strong man.”
When she said Gomez was a man, I took it that she was paying him a high compliment, a mix of sexual power and drive. “You were trying to get him to leave you at the camp, to get away?”
“Yes, my feelings… ”
“It’s hopeless dealing with him, Dolores. He’s programmed to kill or be killed on this mission, didn’t you realise this?”
“Yes, but… ”
“And you were Arias’s lover?”
She shrugged. “He too is an impressive man. He has no chance now. He wanted the best for Cuba.”
“You really cared for him?”
“Yes.”
“Two men at once?” I asked, thinking of my own paltry position between two such giants, and feeling slightly put down.
“Two men – why not?”
“Why did you do me out of the half-million?”
She laughed faintly. “Because the CIA plan was going forward. I didn’t want complications. Did you feel bad?”
“I did. What did you do with the money?”
She was wistful. “Some I kept. I like money. I need it. Some, most, I gave to Alfredo.”
“Why were you working with the CIA?”
“Is there any other game in town?”
“Mine.”
“I didn’t know about you, Rojairr. You were very charming, and interesting. You had the password. And the money. But I wondered about you.”
I still couldn’t fathom whether she was a patriot or a moneygrubber, but even in her stained clothes, with dishevelled hair, and bruised-looking hollows under her sleepless eyes, she was a deep well into which I wanted to plunge. I closed my arms more tightly round her, and felt the wild surge within her own body, as though these memories of her lovers had excited her, or she wanted to bury the memories in the sweaty present, in that plain room, on the narrow bed, with the unconscious Wayne a few feet away.
I laid her down gently, and lay beside her, and she unfolded like a flower. We clung to each other until the last waves had subsided, and there was only the reality of partly undressed wet bodies, and the smell of human juices. It was so far from my ideal of the luxurious penthouse suite above a blue harbour, where I would bed the beautiful spy, but no less sweet for that… Only now I began to chastise myself for wasting precious time when I had urgent work to do.
“You’re beautiful, Rojairr.”
“But not serious, like Arias and Gomez?” I said, levering myself up off the bed, and going into the bathroom.
“You’re fun. You take me away to… to a make-believe world,” she called.
I returned to the bedroom, to the grim present of Arias and Gomez. “So who do you really work for, Dolores. Yourself?”
“I thought it would be obvious to you. The United States.”
“Tell me another.”
“It’s true. You don’t have to believe me. It doesn’t matter between us one way or the other.”
I gave a silent groan at the nonsense of my calling. “You’re kidding. You mean you’re a US agent?”
“Sure. And citizen.”
“Which department?”
“You wouldn’t know, Roger, and it doesn’t matter. It’s in Washington. It’s called C3.”