by Gil Hogg
27
I left the hotel grinding my teeth at Dolores’s revelation. It was no use asking why I wasn’t told that C3 had a fully trained Cuban operative in place. The answer was that nobody in C3 had thought I needed to know, or probably nobody knew that I didn’t know. Maybe Dolores wasn’t rated very highly alongside the machinations of the Disciples. It was no use thinking how much easier my task might have been had I known who Dolores Martinez really was, because it was too late.
Instead, I tried to concentrate on the demolition job. It was necessary to go through with it now, rather than wait for darkness. I had to assume Gomez was arming a missile, and there was always the possibility that the Cuban army would latch on to the site. I would have liked to finish Gomez, but I decided that Yarham and I would have to get out of Cuba immediately after the demolition, whether we got Gomez at the same time or not. We didn’t have time to chase him further.
I drove the car down the rubbish-strewn lane approaching the CIA factory, dodging rusty oil drums and wooden crates. I turned in to the factory doorway and Yarham was waiting, an old straw hat pulled down on his head. He looked every bit like one of the dirty, unlucky people who roamed these streets. He approached the car before I climbed out.
“I’ve seen Gomez, riding around in his black Toyota. He was at the site for a while, and then out. Are you sure you weren’t followed?”
It was a possibility I hadn’t even considered. “I don’t think so. There are so few cars, I think I’d have noticed. But get your Uzi, and we’ll take a ride, see if we can pick him up.”
We patrolled the streets around the site, looking for the Toyota. We made a wider sweep into the town. “I think it’s right to do this, but we can’t give it much more time,” I said.
“There!” Yarham shouted. About three blocks ahead of us, idling in the sparse traffic, was a mud-splattered and dented black sedan. “I think that’s him.”
I thought we could pull alongside Gomez’s car, force it off the road, and hit him, gangster fashion. I would have to wait until we were in a less populous area, but the desolate streets around the site would be ideal. I kept a couple of blocks behind. Gomez was heading back in the direction of the site. He was well in front for a few minutes, easily in sight, and then he disappeared. We drove a few blocks, peering into the distance, and around corners, but no Gomez.
“He must be going back to the site. This is the general direction,” Yarham said.
I drove hard in that direction, but saw no sign of him, only empty pot-holed streets with abandoned rusting car bodies. “What would he have been doing in town?”
“He has to eat,” Yarham said, reminding me that we hadn’t eaten for hours.
I had a dismal thought – about Dolores and Wayne. “Gomez couldn’t possibly have found the hotel, could he?”
“Do you want to check, sir?”
I thought it would be a cautious move. I drove back to the hotel fast, keeping my foot down on the wheezing engine, and using the gears until the car screamed. I pulled up outside, and raced through the lobby and upstairs. I could see from the landing that Wayne’s door was ajar, and that gave me a jab of anxiety. Something had gone wrong. When I reached the door, I halted involuntarily. It was apprehension. I gently pushed the door wider. Inside, Wayne was prone on the floor. He lay in a red flag of stain, his face blue, eyes half open, his throat cut.
I had a sick feeling in my guts as I strode across the room, and thrust open the adjoining door.
Dolores had made a fight of it. The bed was tossed, and the sheets flecked with blood – but she was not there!
I clattered down the stairs and ran back to the car. “Wayne’s been killed and Dolores abducted. This is zero hour,” I said to Yarham as we drove back to the site. “We take the trucks, and go in now.”
“Very good, Captain,” Yarham said unenthusiastically. “What are you going to do about Dolores?”
“There’s nothing I can do. Gomez has her. He could have killed her at the hotel, but didn’t. What that means, I don’t know. I think we have to… regard her as dead.”
“Going after her at all shows he’s not thinking straight. He should be getting the rocket away,” Yarham said.
It was one of those practical observations which made me value Yarham. “She betrayed him. His feelings for her must be a strange concoction of passion and hate, enough to divert him. And he has time. Dolores said that there were chemical processes which were prolonged, fuelling I suppose.”
I felt that luck had favoured us so far, Yarham and me, and couldn’t be expected to last; I ought to shorten our programme. The driving in and detonation of the trucks would be sufficient. We would retire immediately. The warheads would have to take their chance in the blast. Then, at last, we would be on our way with all speed to the south coast to hire a boat for Jamaica. Dolores was heavily on my mind, but, as in the case of Kershaw, I couldn’t help her now. I explained my abridged proposal.
“I think that’s a better plan, sir,” Yarham said, relieved. “Have you thought that Gomez only has one place to take Dolores?”
“The missile site? I know.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to the plan?”
“No. If we delay, we’re in danger of not doing the job, and that could be fateful, one life against many lives.”
At the factory it took a half an hour to get the tired engines of each of the trucks started and warmed up. We were nearly asphyxiated by the diesel smoke in the shed. I rehearsed Yarham on the procedure for the radio detonation – at least that equipment was new. I bestowed the radio control on Yarham with his technical skills.
When the two trucks were running throatily, we each mounted, and they roared in low gear, their arthritic chassis creaking, as we came out of the factory doors, into the lane. I had my automatic with me, and Yarham had the Uzi. Other than those two items, the only piece of valuable equipment was the satellite phone which was locked in the Subaru, with the holdall of cash under guard by our Cuban helper.
I gripped the wheel with clammy hands, and moved the slack gear-shift up as the vehicle gathered speed. This was the moment.
When we were crashing through the ruts three hundred yards from the gates, as agreed, we moved abreast on the road, and accelerated up to about twenty-five miles per hour. The gates were opposite an intersection, and if we could stay together, we could hit the gates directly without reducing speed. I kept looking across to make sure I was keeping up. I could see Yarham grinning and waving – a display of bravado which I encouraged with a thumbs up sign, as we bore down on the gates, the two vehicles grinding along wheel-to-wheel.
I put my arm up to shield my face as the bumper struck the wire gates, but the truck crunched through easily, tearing away the wire and pipe frame without even breaking the windshield. I let the vehicle go on across the compound at a lower speed, to splinter one of the shed doors that had been visible to us in our surveillance. Yarham’s vehicle smashed through the other door seconds later.
Our plan, which seemed to have worked, was not to try to drive right inside the shed, where we might be vulnerable, but merely to shatter the entrance and retreat.
I leaped out of the cab. I could see one of the vehicular launching ramps, and a crane, with a rocket suspended in its claws to be loaded. There were no people about; even the dogs had been scared into retreat. Just inside the door was the black car. Gomez was here somewhere – and, presumably, Dolores.
Along one wall was a row of shining tanks with gauges, pipes, and what looked like condensers or coolers. An instrument panel glowed with lights; a bank of computer screens flickered. The air had a sickly sweet smell, and there was a sense of life and activity about the tanks. All this I absorbed in a flash.
I heard the chatter of Yarham’s Uzi and a feeble return of fire. A voice boomed out of a loudspeaker. “Don’t move, Mr Gold. I can see you. I have cameras everywhere. You can’t see me. I have you covered. Drop the weapon. Your brave companion, Mr Red, has
run away. You will die if you run.” It was Gomez. “Move inside,” he commanded.
I stood still, and a shower of automatic rifle fire pocked the cement floor at my feet.
“Move or die, Mr Gold.”
I moved. I dropped the Colt and looked around as I went nearer to the platform. Gomez was at the controls above me, looking down. “I don’t think your brave friend will do anything drastic while I have you and Mrs Martinez, and I need only a little time. You will have a front- row seat for this major attack on the US mainland.”
One of Gomez’s men marched me upstairs to the platform. The crane had swung the barrel of the rocket into place on the launcher. Apart from the man on the crane, and the one holding a submachine gun on me, I could see no others. And there couldn’t be many more. Gomez confronted me on the platform. “Welcome to the performance, Mr Gold. A once-in-a-lifetime performance for you to see, ha ha! Come join the audience, I think you know Mrs Martinez.”
He gestured to a rack, further along the platform, to which Dolores was tied, arms outstretched, ankles lashed, head slumped like a crucified sinner. She lifted her head as the worker behind me jolted me in the spine with the barrel of his gun. I remembered the blood on the sheets at the hotel. Her cheeks had been slashed with a knife, her t-shirt torn open and her breasts slashed. Her chest was a curtain of blood. She was expressionless and speechless, but her eyes contained cold chips of crystal.
“A woman’s beauty is transitory, eh, Mr Gold?”
I was full of inexpressible rage against Gomez, but all I could do was murmur to her, “Don’t give up.”
I had to let Gomez’s man lash me to the rack alongside Dolores, while Gomez returned to his technical work at the instrument panel. I kept as tense as I could, so that when I relaxed, the bonds might be slightly looser. I could see that the man wasn’t used to this task and he did it poorly – but for the time being I was held tight.
While Gomez’s attention was off me, I struggled unobtrusively, but feverishly, to free myself. I watched the crane man retreat. Another man appeared with various tubes and wires which he fitted to a panel near the base of the missile. Gomez had become absorbed in his controls and the progress of the work. But without looking up, he spared a moment to taunt us about the expected victims. “Not the fate of three thousand, Mr Gold, but the fate of three million,” he said, and then returned to his instruments. I guessed he would come back to us to taste the moments before launch.
If, as seemed likely, Yarham had escaped, would he detonate the trucks and blow me to pieces as the best way to save possibly three million people? It was a simple sum, and Yarham would understand it. After all, it was the same reasoning we had applied to Dolores.
At that moment, a piercing intermittent alarm, like the one at the Campismo Mercados, sounded. There were shouts in a language I didn’t understand, and the crane driver and the man who had tied me picked up submachine guns and scuttled into cover.
I assumed Yarham was trying something on. There was a rattle of gunshots. Gomez disappeared from the platform. Dolores had torn one wrist out of the bonds, and she quickly undid the other, and her ankles. She had no time to free me before Gomez, gun in hand, appeared at the head of the stairs. She screamed, and threw herself at him, an avenging fury. She caught him off balance, and together they tumbled down the stairs. The speed and savagery of her onslaught had momentarily overcome Gomez, and he was stunned in the fall. Dolores landed on top of him, at the foot of the stairs. She plunged her long-nailed fingers like daggers into his eyes, again and again. Hearing his cries, his men turned their guns on her, and riddled her body. Then they took cover and started to exchange shots. I concluded the fight was with Yarham, who was cautiously behind the black Toyota.
Out of panic, I had managed to tear my wrists out of my bonds by this time. I picked up Gomez’s semi-automatic pistol which was lying on the deck. Gomez, below, was crawling around in sightless circles howling like dog, while his eyeballs dripped out of his face like broken eggs. Dolores, nearby, was a bloody heap. I slipped downstairs quickly. I kicked Gomez as I passed, but I didn’t kill him – that would have been a kindness. I took a couple of shots at Gomez’s defenders, and ran to join Yarham behind the car.
“Let’s get out of here, double quick,” I said.
We retired carefully, Yarham keeping up a steady return of fire. We began to get the impression that the terrorists, technicians rather than riflemen by choice, weren’t minded to attack, and were glad to see us go. Nobody had guessed that the trucks were not merely battering rams, but bombs ready to explode. We dashed across the compound into the road. The dogs were cowed by the noise, and those which chose to attack were shot by Yarham. There was no pursuit.
At five hundred yards, I ordered Yarham to operate the radio control. I felt a sharp ground-shock like an earthquake, then another. And with a skull-crushing roar, an inferno exploded out of the site, sending a fireball up hundreds of feet into the air. As the rocket fuel ignited, the fireball pulsed further and faster with successive explosions. The sky was filled with a black-leafed orchid of gargantuan dimensions.
The heat and smoke of the blast soon engulfed us, and we had to jog with little visibility, choking, for the last half-mile to the CIA factory. The loyal guard was still there. We took him with us in the old Japanese sedan, and with Yarham driving, found our way out of the town. We let the Cuban out on the fringes of the town, with a roll of dollars, and pointed the nose of the car toward Marea del Portillo on the southern coast. As we moved south, a curtain of pitch darkness behind us blotted out the sun.
“Do you think the intense heat might… set off the nuclear warheads, sir?”
“Yarham, I’m thinking of a glass of red wine and a steak, but keep moving at a brisk pace, will you?”
28
I decided that it would be too risky, for a variety of reasons, to pause long enough on the island of Cuba to have a bath, shave, a few bottles of wine and a good meal, badly as I wanted these things. Instead we embarked dirty, smelly and hungry on the boat which Yarham chartered at Marea del Portillo, bound for Jamaica. It was a fast cabin cruiser, used for deep-sea marlin fishing, basic but effective, with a Cuban skipper and a boat boy.
The skipper asked no questions after the price was settled. When Yarham asked the skipper about food, he pulled out a bottle of good Caney rum, and pointed to the maize fritters wrapped in newsprint, on the bench in the galley, which I supposed he had bought at a local stall as a snack.
As we headed out of port I felt the rum warming my belly and I gnawed at the fritura de maiz. I jotted down the report I proposed to send by the satellite phone, which I had composed in my head as we jolted across Cuba in the car. “It’s important to get a report back soonest, Yarham, because our masters have certainly got wind of events here – and they’re likely to panic.” The explosions at Mariel would have been detected and photographed.
“How will you explain the ahh… pause in compliance with the order to return, Captain?”
“Say I didn’t get it.”
“Then you better chuck the phone overboard when you’ve sent your report, because it’s logged in there.”
“Thanks, Yarham. I need you to keep me straight on these things.”
“It’ll be a difficult report, Captain, because it has been a not uneventful mission, and there are some interesting aspects to cover.” Yarham tiptoed awkwardly over the words.
He had touched on a sensitivity that had been exercising my mind. “It’s important that we both tell the same story, man. You know, just in case we get separated.”
I was probably being over-cautious, because the likelihood was that Yarham would not be debriefed. Although he was in practice my assistant, he was officially an administration officer, and his grading meant that he didn’t, in the view of the authorities, have the wit to form a view worthy of debriefing. The only reason he had been able to take part in a field operation was that I had the clout to insist upon it. At the same time, he wa
s fully trained in field operations.
“I’d appreciate your guidance,” Yarham said.
“It’s occurred to you, I suppose, that there’s nobody to contradict what we say?”
“Indeed, except Burton. It gives you a certain… freedom of interpretation, sir.”
“Burton is a jailbird and a drug smuggler, and we haven’t risked our lives to write a report that shows anything but the professional excellence of our work. Agreed?”
“Absolutely, Captain.”
“Very good. Something like this, I thought.” I handed him my scribbled note. Al Quaeda were ready to release nuclear missiles targeted New York and Washington within hours therefore immediate response necessary. Led force supported by the CIA which destroyed all known Al Qaeda personnel and missile site. Heavy CIA casualties.
“Very short and snappy, sir. How will you get over why you didn’t call in aid from Washington?”
I squinted out at the sun-dappled sea, and thought about this. “Mmmmm. You mean taking too much on myself? C3 being peeved that they couldn’t initiate a bit of precision aerial bombing surgery on the Cuban mainland? Well, try this. I pencilled: Al Qaeda found to be on countdown to release nuclear missiles targeted New York and Washington. Immediate local response essential. Insufficient time to call air strike. Led force supported by CIA in attack. Destroyed all known Al Qaeda personnel, including missiles and site. Heavy casualties. Returning. Now, how about that?”
“That’s it, sir. Pretty impressive. You don’t intend to say anything about Carmelli and the coastguards, or the fate of Burton?”
“Not at the moment. What’s the point? It’ll only start up a whole lot of internal enquiries. No, I think we should make a virtue out of CIA support.”
I went over our venture in detail with Yarham as the fibreglass hull of the boat hammered across the rippling sea, and sent the report on the satphone. Then we sluiced away the maize grease with large drafts of rum, and both fell asleep in the cabin, exhausted.