Cuban Death-Lift

by Striker, Randy

  Hang on, good lady. It’ll take me about twenty minutes to get everything set. And when I get back, Zapata and Halcón are going to get the Cobra crossbow cure for insomnia.

  I worked my way to the drive which led down to the road. I RDX’ed the poles holding power terminals, located the three droplines which ran to telephones within the academy, and carefully cut one side of each line. If there was an incoming call, people inside could hear—but not be heard. And they could call out—but not be heard. Nothing suspicious about that. Phone trouble is the common complaint of the world. The main radio tower for the academy was down the road and up a bluff. I went unbothered cross country and taped the final half block of the explosive to that.

  Okay, Halcón, it’s show time, you bastard. Your people killed one very fine Irishman, and now you’ve stolen one of the bravest and most beautiful women I have known. It’s show time, Halcón, and you’re the main attraction.

  I waited a long time before crawling across the clearing to the cottage again. One hundred yards away, I could see the dim shapes of the guards moving about the perimeter of the stone academy. Small orange eyes of their cigarettes glowed occasionally in the darkness. A broad third-floor window was lighted. Music filtered from it: the intricate intersectings of a J.S. Bach fugue, the harpsicord music seeming incongruous with the setting. A brown shade was pulled the length of the window, and against that scrim two men stood in silhouette.

  And when I saw the silhouettes, I stopped. Electrified.

  Jesus Christ, MacMorgan, you may have bought it this time. Some great timing, buddy. Some perfect night to try to bust up Mariel Harbor. . . .

  My breath coming harsh and shallow, I watched the two men against the backlighted window. Even at that distance their silhouettes were unmistakable. One was the Hitchcock-like mass of General Halcón. He had obviously left the cottage and gone into the academy while I made my rounds. His head was bowed slightly, jowls hanging. He said nothing, only shrugged occasionally. The other man was doing all the talking. He had a long ragged beard like some dark prophet. Surprisingly, he did not wear the familiar field cap. But the long Cohiva cigar was there, and he used it to gesture as he spoke with great animation.

  It was Fidel Castro.

  As if in a trance, I felt my hands remove the sling of the Cobra crossbow. I mounted one of the aluminum shafts with the triangular killing point, then used the self-cocking slide to arm it. With deadly calm hands, I lined up the custom-built sights on the expanse of window, zeroing in on the dot between head and beard. If I pulled the trigger, the arrow would cover the hundred-yard distance in just under one second. It would burst through the glass like a .357 slug through tissue paper, and probably exit on the other side of Castro’s temple.

  But I didn’t pull the trigger.

  I couldn’t. It was just the childish termination of the hunter sighting the forbidden game; the culmination of some macabre force within me that demanded all but the final step. And I thought:

  If I were any one of two million Cuban-Americans—or any one of seventy percent of your own people—you would be dead right now. And if it weren’t for ten thousand Americans sitting down there in that harbor you might be dead anyway.

  A sound nearby made me lower the crossbow—a heavy rustle of bushes between me, and the window where the dictator still lectured Halcón. I watched the bushes tremble slightly, then stop. I waited, wondering if a guard and a machine gun might be positioned within the clump of foliage.

  But then I could wait no more.

  I had to move and move fast. I knew my plan was sound. There would be no trouble killing the woman’s guard—or guards—quickly and noiselessly. And with the RDX planted at broad intervals around the southern mainland perimeter of the harbor, the massive series of explosions would draw most—if not all—soldiers and armaments outward, leaving us a clear escape route across the harbor. And once the blast went off, the Naval Academy would be without lights or radio communication. And you could bet, with Castro there, the whole damn Cuban army would be moving in to defend it like hornets heading for a trampled nest.

  So I crawled on hands and belly, crossbow ready, along the hedge of the cottage. Carefully, I edged one eye over the ledge of window—and saw nothing. Staying in the shadows, I moved around to the door, cracked it, then swung it open.

  The woman was gone, all right.

  But her guard wasn’t.

  Poor Captain Zapata had suffered the final indignity. He lay bleeding on the floor, horribly cut. Androsa’s blouse rested in shreds upon the bed. A chair was overturned. The scenario became grimly clear: a beautiful woman alone with the scorned soldier, so he had tried to take her. And she had been lucky enough to find a way to fight back—his own knife, probably. So she had ruined him; killed him as he deserved to be killed, took his rifle and escaped. . . .

  Took his rifle.

  And suddenly the realization of what she would do next moved through me like a drug. The rustling in the bushes . . . and her promise to atone for the death of her brother, the murder of the three CIA agents, and her two years as a double agent. I didn’t wait to move cautiously now. I threw myself away from the corpse of Zapata and the cottage, running fast, running low, headed for the clump of bushes which I knew sheltered Androsa Santarun.

  But I was too late.

  Just as I was about to dive for her, the AK-47 rattled orange flame, and beyond the window, the massive head of General Halcón disappeared like a bad dream while the silhouette of the dictator hesitated, then dove to safety.

  I heard the screams of the guards and the sound of heavy footsteps running. I pulled her roughly out of the bushes. She was crying, sobbing hysterically.

  “Androsa, Androsa, are you hurt . . . ?”

  The guards were coming closer now. Somewhere someone fired wildly into the night.

  “Androsa, are you all right?”

  “I couldn’t do it, Dusky, I couldn’t. I had the gun on him but I couldn’t—”

  “Androsa, dammit, you did do it—Halcón’s dead. Now we have to get the hell out of here.”

  Lights flared on all across the clearing. A guard running toward the cottage saw us, stopped, then swiveled to fire. I shoved myself down on top of her and took him cleanly with the Cobra, one gleaming arrow through the chest.

  More soldiers were coming now. A siren blared. I took the remote-control detonator from my pocket and thumped back the cover.

  It was now or never. I pulled Androsa down behind me into the cover of the wilderness mountainside. My foot hit something in the darkness and we both went tumbling into the safety of a gulley. Her face was hot and wet as I pulled her close against my chest. Still she sobbed, pouring out some strange confession that I couldn’t quite comprehend and, finally, couldn’t let myself believe.

  “. . . I . . . I wanted to kill him so badly, but back on the Isla de Pinos, when he was hiding in the mountains there—”

  There was more gunfire now; soldiers shooting wildly. The place was getting hot as hell.

  “Dammit, Androsa,” I whispered hoarsely, “don’t you think I’ve figured it out by now? The letter you left me was the final tip off; General Halcón was your father. So you killed him. He was one evil bastard, and now they’re trying to kill us so stop that crying—”

  “No!” There was a strange hysteria in her voice now. She took my face between her soft hands, peering at me in the darkness, making me listen to the unbelievable. “No, Dusky. You are so wrong. It is worse, much worse. It was not Halcón. No, I’m glad he is dead. But it is the other I should have killed. But I couldn’t! Dusky, Fidel Castro is my father! It is him I should have killed. . . .”

  Too preoccupied to be shocked, I punched the button of the detonator roughly.

  And that’s when all hell broke loose. . . .

  18

  The bonefish moved over the flats in shafts of gray light, and the bottom was turtle grass and white sand and you could see the shadows of the fish as they traveled ov
er the bottom in the clear water.

  I stood at the window of my stilthouse watching them as they turned as one, slowed, then vectored to feed, throwing their milky wake. It was a glassy day in the decline of May; the expanse of shallow water moved away from my stilthouse swollen and metallic, shimmering in the distance with the quality of mirage.

  “So who came out in the cruiser with you?”

  I turned from the window and looked at Norm Fizer. His briefcase was on the table, papers spread before him. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him wearing something other than a suit—let alone something so casual as the brown tennis shorts and Bjorn Borg slipover shirt he wore now. Saigon, I decided. A rare day, that.

  “Norm,” I said, “I asked you who you brought out in the cruiser—”

  “Dammit, Dusky, I know what you asked me.” He smacked his pen down on the table in bad imitation of someone who is supposed to be mad. “I know because it’s the third time you’ve asked me, and for the third time you’ll find out when I get this damn report of yours straightened out—and I still can’t figure out how you knew I brought someone out here with me.”

  I wagged my finger at him like a tolerant instructor. “Can’t fool a fool, Stormin’ Norman. Even tied to my stilthouse the way it is, the trim keeps shifting. Not much, but enough to tell me that Navy launch is either haunted or there’s someone else with you.”

  “Okay,” he said, frustrated. “I brought you a little surprise. Ever since you got back from Cuba you’ve been mooning around like some lovesick kid, and I decided to bring you a little something to cheer you up. You refused to let us fly you to the clinic in Washington, so I decided that to preserve your mental health I had to do something.”

  I crossed the plank floor of the stilthouse, yanked open the door of the gas fridge, got out two cold bottles of beer, and hunted for the opener. “Hey, you’ve dealt with those military headshrinkers before. They only want to know two things: why you hated your father, and the size of your . . . well, you know what. If that’s analysis I can do without it.”

  “But you have been acting listless ever since—”

  “The hell I have!” I said it too loud, the emotion blowing the credibility of the denial. Fizer hastened to cover his face with a big hand, trying to hide a smirk.

  I plopped down in my baggy reading chair, put my feet up, and pulled at the beer. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s get on with it—but I don’t see why. I already filled out one report.”

  Norm shuffled through some papers. “Yeah, you filled out a report all right—the way one person fills the bleachers at Yankee Stadium. Here it is, and I quote: ‘After detonating said diversion, the lieutenant in question accompanied me down the mountainside to Pier Three, where we convinced a captain in the Cuban army to transport us back to my boat via fast military launch.”

  “So that’s what happened.”

  Fizer looked at me wryly. “But it does leave a few questions unanswered.”

  It did indeed. So I sat in the chair and fiddled with a new ultralight reel I had bought—a very fine German Quick with the asbestos drag system that might be the best made—and I told him about it.

  The diversion had worked beautifully. The RDX explosives around the perimeter of the harbor had gone off with a massive woof and white glare that made the big searchlights seem pale in comparison. Our only tense moment was halfway down the mountain when the Cuban soldiers and sailors went pounding by us, headed for the Naval Academy like ants from a trampled nest. After that, we could have walked down the road to Pier Three singing and shouting. With no communication possible from the stone castle, Fidel Castro and his entourage were under heavy attack as far as the military around Mariel was concerned. It left the harbor wide open for our escape—once we found a boat fast enough and small enough to make it up the tidal creek to Sniper. And we had found one—one of the twin-engine patrol boats tethered to the quay surprisingly alone, but we had a visitor—Captain Lobo. After I treated him to a proper welcome—a few well-placed jabs that sent him crashing to the floor—he became very cooperative indeed, sniffling and whining and begging me not to kill him. He begged all the way back to Key West, where I turned him in.

  Fizer scribbled in his report as I talked, big hands clumsy, seeming to balk at the secretarial work required of them. He looked up, paused and then said, “It’s kind of surprising they didn’t send some fighter planes after you once you made it back to your boat and headed for the States.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is kind of surprising. Maybe with all the other American boats out there in the strait they didn’t want to take a chance of strafing the wrong vessel. Or maybe they just didn’t know it was me. But it was surprising.”

  It was, of course, a lie. Ten miles from international waters a big Cuban jet copter had come hovering over us, searchlights throwing a dazzling glare across Sniper. Immediately, Lobo recovered much of his surliness and went running to the aft deck waving his arms, expecting them to fire on the two Americans who had kidnapped him. But the assault never came. The chopper hovered above us as if awaiting orders, then banked away, back toward the mainland. Lobo was outraged. He couldn’t understand it. But I did. Androsa, leaning against me as I stood at the controls, had told me about the Cuban revolutionary who, more than two decades before, had come down out of the mountains of the Isle of Pines to take a lover in the village on the Ensenada de Siguanea and how a girl child was born, and how he had abandoned the two of them to pursue what he was convinced was his destiny. Yet even after their years on diametrically opposed paths, he could not destroy the woman who was his daughter, and she could not kill the man behind the dictator she loathed. So only the three of us knew—or would ever know, because I had given her my word, and Fidel Castro sure as hell wasn’t going to tell the world about the bastard child who had, in her own way, defeated him.

  The voice of Norm Fizer brought me from my thoughts. “Another thing that isn’t clear is why Lieutenant Santarun requested immediate duty in Europe. She was very vague about that.” He eyed me slyly. “Did you have some kind of lovers’ spat, or—”

  “As I’m sure that goddam computer of yours up in Washington told you, the lady spent a week with me right here after our return. And it was a very pleasant week, and we did not quarrel.” I shrugged. “Maybe she just didn’t feel comfortable with all the new Cuban agents we have floating around this country thanks to the way the refugee exodus was handled.”

  And that was true. Castro was infamous for changing his mind. And if he reconsidered and decided he wanted another chance to see his daughter, it would be a simple matter . . .

  Fizer stood up abruptly and checked his watch. “Well, Captain MacMorgan, I guess that just about does it. I’ve got a tennis date in Atlanta in . . . three hours, so I’d better get moving.” He finished his beer in a gulp and began to stuff papers into his briefcase. “By the way,” he said, “we turned over those two agents who posed as cameramen to an allied country of ours along with that Lobo character. I was rather surprised to learn there’s a sizable community of expatriate Cubans living in London, and that the British had sent one of their agents from a Commonwealth island south of Cuba to . . .”

  And that’s when I heard the lumbering weight of him upon the steps of the stilthouse and heard the unmistakable brogue of his voice:

  “Is it that ye think me some kind of a bloody suit that ya keep me closeted in that stinkin’ motorboat o’ yers, Captain Fizer?”

  And he came clomping through the doorway, big Irish face flushed beneath the Viking beard, left arm in cast and sling, a patch of gauze taped to the side of his head.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” I said, honestly stunned.

  “No, ’tis only meself, brother MacMorgan—but close enough!”

  Fizer had a wry smile on his face. “I believe you’ve met Captain Westy O’Davis, Dusky. Great Britain traded your three Cubans for this one Cayman agent—and frankly, I’m not sure we got the best of the bargain if h
e’s as much like you as he seems.”

  “Hah!” The Irishman posed, offended, then marched over and gave me a bearlike slap on the shoulder. “I’ve come ta take ye up on your kind offer, Yank. This ugly brute of a friend o’ yers says yer in need o’ some recreation, so it’s meself who have come ta lead ya in some beer drinkin’, an’ ta tell you some tall tales—an’ did ya know there’s a thousand bonefish feedin’ right outside, one as big as God himself? It’s true, Yank, it’s true.” He grinned at me and winked. “I swear it on the grave of me own dead mother. . . .”