As Yocke watched, Santana ran the boat into a cut on the bank sheltered by several trees. A half dozen men came aboard and carried the LAW rockets, still in their olive-drab boxes stenciled U.S. ARMY, over a plank to a truck barely visible amid the vegetation.
When the job was complete, the men piled into the truck and drove away. Everyone went with them except Santana. He stood on the bridge with Yocke. “Well,” he said, “that’s done.”
“What next?”
“Unless you’re in the mood for a swim, I suggest you go ashore. Better take your stuff with you. Oh, and take my bag from the galley ashore with you. And this.” Santana drew his revolver from his waistband and tossed it at the reporter, who barely caught it.
With Yocke standing on sand trying to readjust his muscles to the absence of motion, Santana maneuvered the boat from the cut and slowly eased her several hundred yards out into the inlet, where he killed the engine. He went forward and heaved the anchor overboard.
He worked on the boat for ten or fifteen minutes while Yocke sat on the vinyl suitbag watching. The quiet was uncomfortable after two nights and a day listening to the engines. Yocke could hear birds singing somewhere and the slap-slap of water lapping at the shore, but that was about it. No engine noise, no jets overhead, no barely audible radio or television babble. Just the chee-cheeing of the birds and the water.
The pistol felt strange in his hand. Yocke examined it. A Smith & Wesson .357. It wasn’t a new gun or even in very good condition. He could see bare metal in places where the blueing was gone. But the thing that struck Jack Yocke was the weight. This thing was heavier than he thought it would be. He knew very little about firearms and had handled them on only a few occasions. Looking into the chambers from the front, he could see the bullets. Shiny little pills of instant death. Ugliness. Everything he didn’t like about the world and the people in it was right here in his hand.
He carefully laid the pistol on top of the computer case and wiped his hands in the sand.
Santana came off the boat in a clean dive and began swimming. The sun was up now and the water was a pale, sandy blue. The man swam efficiently, without wasted effort.
He was standing beside Yocke taking off his wet clothes when a dull “crump” reached them and the remains of the fish tower toppled slowly into the water. Ten seconds later another explosion, more powerful but still strangely muffled.
Santana stripped to the skin and opened his bag. He had his underwear and trousers on when he next looked at the boat. She was down visibly at the head and listing.
“How deep’s the water there?”
“Sixty or seventy feet, maybe. That’s the channel.”
“Clear as this water is, she’ll be visible from the air.”
“No one will look from the air for a few days. Then it won’t matter. We’ll be in Havana.”
“Or dead,” Jack Yocke added.
“You are very intuitive. Your grasp of the situation is really remarkable.”
“Fuck you very much.”
The forward deck was completely awash when Santana stood and dusted the sand from his trousers. He tucked the revolver into his waistline and let the loose shirt hang over it. “Come on,” he said, slung his bag over his shoulder and began walking as Yocke hurried to pick up his gear.
From a low dune a hundred yards or so inland Yocke paused and looked back at the inlet in time to see the water close over the bridge of the boat. Hector Santana kept walking. He didn’t bother to look.
“Campaigning with Cortés,” Jack Yocke muttered under his breath. He shifted the computer strap to ease the strain on his shoulder and hefted the vinyl suitcase. “Or perhaps, Walking Across Cuba by Jack Yocke, ace reporter and world-class idiot.”
An hour passed as they walked. Yocke got thirsty and said so. Santana didn’t say a word.
They were on a dirt road leading through sugarcane fields. The cane was knee high or so and green, rippling from air currents that never seemed to reach the two hikers. Away off to the south, the direction they were walking, Yocke could see clouds building over low hills or perhaps mountains. “Are there mountains in Cuba?” he asked.
They passed several empty shacks. One had an ancient, skinny chicken wandering aimlessly in the yard. No other living thing in sight.
“Where is everybody?” he asked. “Maybe we ought to look around for some water, huh? I’ll bet they got a well or something.” Santana kept walking without replying. “What’s wrong with that idea, Jack?” Yocke muttered loud enough for the Cuban to hear.
“Hey, Hector,” Jack Yocke said five minutes later. “Wanta tell me where we’re going? If we’re going to walk clear to Havana maybe I should lighten the load. What d’ya think?”
When Santana didn’t reply, Yocke stepped near his ear and yelled, “Hey, asshole!”
“Did it ever occur to you,” Santana said patiently, “that if we are stopped by Cuban troops, the less you know the better? For you, for me, for everyone?”
They walked for another hour. A small group of shacks came into sight and Santana headed for them. He went into the yard and motioned for Yocke to stay. Then he went up to a porch and looked through the screen. “María? Carlos?”
Santana went inside. Yocke sat on his vinyl bag and took his shoes off and massaged his feet. A skinny chicken came over to watch. Does Cuba have any chickens that aren’t skinny?
An old car, almost obscured by grass and weeds, sat rotting in a shed beside the house. Yocke went over and examined the car as murmurs of Spanish came through the window. An ancient Chevrolet sedan. Forty years old if it was a day. There wasn’t enough paint even to tell what the original color had been. The back window was missing. Several chickens had obviously been raising their families on the rear seat.
At least he wasn’t seasick. That was something. He was hungry enough to eat one of those scrawny chickens raw. He was watching one and trying to decide if he could catch it when Santana and a young woman came out of the house. The woman stood by Yocke as Santana went over to the car, got in, and ground on the engine.
Amazingly enough, a puff of blue smoke came out from under the car and the engine caught.
Santana backed the car into the yard. The woman opened the rear door and raked the chicken shit and straw out onto the ground. Santana got out of the car, leaving the engine running. “This is it. This is our transportation to Havana.”
“You gotta be shitting me!”
“Put your stuff in the trunk.”
“Can I have some water?”
“In the house. They don’t have any food, so don’t ask.”
The young woman took him inside. There was an old woman in a rocker, and she nodded at him. His escort dipped him a glass of water from a pail that sat in the kitchen. He drained it and she gave him another.
“You speak English?”
“A little,” she said.
“What’s your name?”
“María.”
“You know Santana?”
“Who?”
Yocke jerked his head toward the yard. “Santana.”
“Oh. Pablo.” She smiled. “He’s my brother.”
Yocke handed back the glass. “Thanks. Gracias.”
“De nada.”
Santana was waiting in the car. Yocke walked around and opened the front seat passenger door. “You ride in back,” Santana told him. “María’s coming with us.”
Yocke dusted the rear seat as best he could and sat. The odor of chicken shit wouldn’t be too bad at speed if they kept the windows down. María came out of the house with three or four plastic jugs filled with water. She put them in the trunk and climbed in beside her brother.
As they rolled out of the farmyard, Yocke could hear the transmission grinding. Or the differential. Perhaps both. “This thing’ll never make it to Havana.”
“Beats walking,” Santana said.
They had gone just a mile or so when they came to a two-lane asphalt road running east and west. S
antana turned right, west.
For the first few hours the car made good time, rolling along at twenty-five or thirty miles per hour, Yocke estimated. The speedometer needle never moved off the peg. The few vehicles on the road were all westbound. The flatbeds of cane trucks were packed with people, the old cars similarly stuffed and riding on their frames. Occasional knots of people walked west alongside the road.
Cane fields swept away to the horizon to the north and south across the flat, rolling fields, under a bright sun. Here and there shacks near the roads stood deserted and empty, with not even a chicken or pig in sight.
After two hours they came to a town. It was a real town, with streets and throngs of people in the streets. The car took an hour to creep through as Santana leaned out and shouted to knots of people in doorways, huddled around radios, “Que pasa?”
“The prisons have been emptied,” Santana told Jack Yocke at one point. “The guards refused to fire on the people, who liberated the prisoners.”
On the west side of town the road was jammed with walking people: men, women, children, the elderly, the lame. The western pilgrimage grew denser at every crossroads, every village.
The Chevy proceeded little faster than the walking people, who gently parted in front of it to let it past and closed in again behind, like water in the wake of a boat’s passage.
The radiator boiled over around noon. The three of them piled out and sat beside the car in a little shady strip as the human stream trudged by. Some of the people carried chickens and ducks with their feet tied together. Every now and then a man passed with a pig arranged around his shoulders.
Yocke mopped his face with his shirttail and relieved himself beside the road. Everyone else was doing likewise. There was no embarrassment: there was nowhere else to do it. He stood there with his back to the road looking out across the miles of growing cane and breathing deeply of the sweet odor, and made a wet spot on the red earth.
An army truck came by, also headed west. In addition to the troops packed willy-nilly in the back, civilians had clambered aboard, poultry, kids, and all. Yocke thought the truck looked like Noah’s ark as it slowly breasted the human sea, trailing diesel fumes. He caught a glimpse of a goat amid the people and protruding rifles.
Eventually the steam from the Chevy’s tired engine subsided. Water from bottles in the trunk was added, the worn-out radiator cap was replaced and carefully wired down, then Santana got behind the wheel and cranked the engine. It caught. For Santana’s benefit, Yocke raised his hands in thanksgiving, then took his place amid the chicken dung.
In late afternoon the radiator failed catastrophically. Clouds of steam billowed from around the hood.
They pushed the car off the road, into the cane, and took what they could carry from the car. Yocke had to have the computer. He took the toothbrush and razor from the vinyl bag and put them in his pockets. His passport and money were already in his pocket. He changed shirts and socks. The rest of it he left.
As Yocke stood on the road beside the car waiting for the others, another army truck approached. A young woman sat on the left front fender facing forward with her blouse open breast-feeding a baby, her long, dark hair streaming gently in the shifting air currents. Her attention was concentrated on the child. She appeared golden in the evening sunlight. Yocke stood transfixed until the truck was far up the road and the young madonna no longer visible.
His companions were already walking westward with the throng. Jack Yocke eased the strap of the computer on his shoulder and set off after them.
At dusk, with the sunset still glowing ahead of them, they came to a burned-out Soviet-made armored personnel carrier—APC—sitting fifty feet or so off the road in a drainage ditch. Jack Yocke walked over to look.
A missile had punched a neat hole in the side armor; explosion and fire had done the rest. Burned, mutilated bodies lay everywhere, perhaps a dozen. Several reasonably intact bodies lay on the side of the ditch. These men had been shot by someone who had gotten behind them. The holes in their backs were neat and precise. Very military. The bodies had begun to bloat, stretching the clothing on the corpses drum-head tight.
One of the men was very young, just a boy really. He had been dead a while, perhaps since this morning. Flies crawled around his mouth and eyes and ears. A shift in the breeze gave Yocke a full dose of the stench.
He staggered out of the ditch retching.
Santana and the young woman were waiting for him. Together they rejoined the human river flowing westward in the gathering dusk.
They reached the outskirts of Havana about nine p.m.
The streets were packed. People everywhere. Water could be had but no food. Those who had poultry or the carcasses of dogs built a fire out of anything that would burn and roasted them. The smoke wafted through the streets and between the buildings: the shadows it cast under the flickering streetlights played wildly over the crowd. Some people were drunk, shouting and singing and scuffling.
Government warehouses had been looted earlier in the afternoon, Santana learned, but the food had been eaten by those who carried it off. Mañana, tomorrow, the Yankees would send food. That was the rumor, oft-repeated, as hungry children wailed endlessly.
Castro was being held by the revolutionary committee, according to the radios, which were being played at maximum volume from every window. Fidel and his brother and the top government officials would be shot tomorrow in the Plaza de Revolución. Viva Cuba! Cuba Libre!
People stretched out in the street to sleep. Whole families. The crowd swirled and eddied and flowed around them, flowed toward the center of the city and the government offices around the Plaza de Revolución. Yocke followed Hector Santana and his sister.
The American was exhausted. The endless walking, the lack of sleep and food—these things had taken their toll. He wanted to slump down on the first vacant stretch of pavement he came to and sleep forever.
On he trudged, following Santana, following the crowd through the smoke and noise and dim lights.
When he reached the plaza he stopped and gaped. It was huge, covering several acres, and was packed with people. There wasn’t room to lie down. People stood shoulder to shoulder, more people in one place than Jack Yocke had ever seen in his lifetime. The crowd was alive, buzzing endlessly with thousands of conversations. As he stood and looked in awe, chants broke out. “Cu-ba, Cu-ba, Cu-ba,” over and over, growing as tens of thousands of voices picked it up. The sound had a low, pulsating thud to it that seemed to make the building walls shake.
Then Yocke realized he had lost Santana. He didn’t care. He had to sleep.
He turned and retraced his steps, away from the plaza. Several blocks away he found an alley. It was full of sleeping people. He felt his way in, found a spot, and lay down. The chanting wasn’t as loud here, two blocks from the square, but it was clear, distinctive, sublime. “Cu-ba, Cu-ba,” repeated endlessly, like a religious chant.
Jack Yocke drifted into sleep thinking about dead soldiers and madonnas on army trucks and listening to that relentless sound.
They shot Castro around ten o’clock the next morning. He was shot first. The dictator was led out onto the platform where he had harangued his fellow countrymen for thirty-one years. Behind him were arrayed his lieutenants. All had their hands tied in front of them.
Yocke listened as a speaker read the charges over a microphone that blasted his voice to every corner of the square. Yocke understood little of it, not that it mattered. He elbowed and shoved and fought his way through the crowd, trying to get closer.
Ten men and women were selected from the crowd and allowed to climb up to the platform. Castro was led to a wall and faced around at the volunteers, who were lined up and given assault rifles by soldiers who stood beside them.
The speaker was still reading when someone opened fire. Three or four shots, ripping out. Castro went down.
He was assisted to his feet. The speaker stopped talking.
Someone sh
outed an order and all ten rifles fired raggedly.
The dictator toppled and lay still.
The soldiers took back their rifles and the members of the firing squad were sent back into the crowd. More leaped forward, too many. Ten men and women were selected and the rest herded back, forcibly, as three of the dictator’s comrades were led over to stand beside his body. A jagged fusillade felled all three.
The scene was repeated four more times. Then a man with a pistol walked along and fired a bullet downward into each head. After six shots he had to stop and reload. Then six more. And finally four more.
“Viva Cuba! Viva Cuba! Viva Cuba!”
For the first time since the drama began, the reporter tore his gaze from the platform and looked at the faces of the people around him. They were weeping. Men, women, children—on every face were tears. Whether they were weeping for what they had lost or what they had gained, Jack Yocke didn’t know.
About two that afternoon he was wandering along a mile or so from the square, by the front of a large luxury hotel on a decently wide street that had obviously been built in the bad old days B.F.—Before Fidel—when he heard his name called.
“Jack Yocke! Hey, Jack! Up here!”
He elevated his gaze. On a third-floor balcony, gesturing madly, stood Ottmar Mergenthaler. “Jesus Christ, Jack! Where the hell you been?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THREE hours into his first day as a junior—very junior—weenie on the Joint Staff of the JCS, Lieutenant Toad Tarkington was wondering if perhaps Captain Grafton hadn’t been right. Maybe he should have asked to have his shore tour cut short and gone back to sea. Sitting at a borrowed desk in an anonymous room without windows deep in the Pentagon, Toad was working his way through a giant hardbound manual of rules and regulations that he was supposed to be reading carefully, embedding permanently in the gray matter. He glanced surreptitiously around the large office to see if there was a single other O-3 in sight.
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