Killing Che

by Chuck Pfarrer

Tania knew, as did every player in the Game, that an individual was rarely of such value.

  “You are an important operative who has served long in a critical position,” Diminov said.

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Major Vünke,” the aunt began, sounding very much like a grade-school teacher chastising a impertinent child, “a many-layered operation has been put into place to support you. Three regular KGB officers are in Bolivia on your behalf: Diminov, Sergev, and myself. We are all in-country under illegal cover. We are here to secure your release from Bolivian custody and to return you to the East. Much time, effort, and money have been spent, not to mention the lives placed at risk to get you out.”

  “Am I to be traded for someone else?”

  “Our orders are to cooperate with the Americans to get you out of South America. To Vienna and then to a fraternal country. We have no embassy here in Bolivia. To exfiltrate you, we are, to a certain extent, dependent on the good graces of the Americans.”

  “In return for my release, what do they want?”

  There was a pause. Diminov knew this to be the fulcrum point of the discussion, the aim and issue upon which the entire enterprise would turn. It was the aunt who spoke.

  “The Americans want only one thing. They want you to guide Sandoval and D’Esperey to the guerrilla encampment in the Ñancahuazú. You are to tell Guevara the place of the supply drop, near the junction of the Iripiti and Ñancahuazú rivers. At a point following this, you will be extracted from the field by an American Special Forces team, given a clean set of documents, and allowed to depart to Vienna.”

  “Why don’t you send me to Vienna now?”

  “It is not that simple.”

  “You can’t smuggle me out of the city and across the border?”

  “No,” Diminov said.

  “You’re lying.” Tania’s rising ire flickered in front of a blossoming and terrifying doubt. “I could leave on my own…” Her voice trailed into nothing.

  “How?” Diminov asked.

  Silence.

  He went on, “Do you have papers?”

  “No.”

  “Money?”

  “Some,” she answered.

  “Major Vünke, let me review the operational situation for you. You have been in service, under deep cover, illegal cover, in one of the most repressive countries in Latin America. The Bolivian government is one of the most subservient and brutal tools America possesses in Latin America. Your cover has been blown, utterly. The National Police do not think you are a simple smuggler; nor do they think that I am involved in the narcotics trade. They know what you are—an officer in a foreign and hostile intelligence service. You were released only because a demand was made by American intelligence. Your release was granted contingent to our continued cooperation.”

  Tania again felt as though blows were being rained on her. Diminov continued to speak, but his words seemed delivered in handfuls, picked up and heaved at her, empty things with all the meaning wrung from them.

  “They let you go because they know you have no means to escape the country. Your name and photograph are at every border crossing. If you did have enough money to bribe your way across the frontier, say, to Paraguay or to Chile, what would you do then? How would you secure papers to travel? And the countries through which you must pass—all of them are capitalist, all beholden to the United States, and then, of course, there is Interpol, another instrument that would be used against you. The entire international criminal apparatus would be brought to bear because you would be indicted as a drug smuggler by Bolivia.” Diminov shook his head. “The Americans agreed to your release because they knew you could go nowhere. The price of letting you go is one more operational act on your behalf.”

  “I am to betray Guevara.”

  The aunt said, “This is an assignment. The orders come from the center.”

  “Why don’t they simply say murder?”

  “Who do you work for, Major Vünke?” Diminov said. There was no trace of menace in his voice.

  “The Stasi,” Tania answered.

  “And for whom have you worked since you were assigned to Cuba?”

  “KGB.”

  “It is through us that you hold your commission,” Diminov said.

  “The files and your ridiculous medals…”

  The aunt crossed her arms. Diminov leaned back in his chair. His voice was even and reasonable. “The file is real enough. You are a commissioned officer in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti and continue to be obligated as one.”

  Tania grunted. “What more can I do for proletarian internationalism?”

  Diminov paused. “Is there reason for us to doubt your loyalty?”

  “My loyalty to what?”

  “The revolution.”

  “What will happen to Guevara?”

  Diminov stood and fixed his gaze on Tania. “What happens to Guevara does not concern you or me. What happens to the men with him is also not our concern. I am ordered to get you out of the country, back to the East, and that I will accomplish. I cannot do that without the help of the Americans. In order for the exfiltration to go forward, you must direct Guevara to the supply drop.”

  He stood and walked toward the window. “Major Vünke,” he said. “You have been through a terrible experience. The circumstances of your service have been difficult. You have shown dedication beyond the cause of duty, and the intelligence you have produced has been of the highest value—”

  Tania stirred in a nausea of self-loathing. “I don’t need to be cheered for.”

  “Do you want to go home?” the aunt asked flatly.

  “Yes.”

  “Then there is one more thing you must do.”

  38

  CHARLIE DROVE THE Impala up the autopista to El Alto, ten kilometers distant and almost five hundred meters above the center of La Paz. The traffic was light, and the day was sunny; in the passenger seat next to him, Hoyle seemed distracted, even melancholy, as the car drove up the long incline.

  Charlie had picked him up at the safe house at Plaza España at noon. Rather, Hoyle had met him there, for Charlie had arrived early and parked down the block. Hoyle had arrived at the safe house by taxi, carrying an overnight bag. As he entered, Hoyle noticed Charlie parked down the block—he was an uncommonly observant man—and while Charlie waited, Hoyle had a beer and an orange and reemerged precisely at noon. Charlie knew Hoyle had spent the night someplace else, but he did not ask where. It did not concern him, even if it did interest him slightly; at any rate, Charlie did not wish his own comings and goings minutely examined, so he had no problem with Hoyle’s private business.

  Charlie recalled plainly the altercation between Smith and Hoyle at the casita: One component of their argument had involved a woman. Charlie felt no conflict over keeping Hoyle’s secret. That argument had also been over Hoyle’s beating of Major Placido. Charlie still bore a raw, ragged scar under his eye where Placido had clipped him with the pistol. Although Charlie did not feel completely avenged, he did take some happiness in the diminishment of Placido. Charlie had always liked Hoyle—to his mind, Hoyle was the most likable of all the gringos—and although he did not consider the man a friend (one is not often friends with gringos), Charlie was happy to help him, genuinely help him, and to keep his little secrets.

  Hoyle sat quietly as Charlie drove off the autopista onto the Avenida Juan Pablo and then to the military airfield next to the airport. The grandly named Oficina de la Inteligencia del Aire was a rust-streaked Quonset hut at the south end of the runway. A captain was eventually located (he had forgotten the appointment), and given to Hoyle were several metal and plastic cylinders, each about the size of a beer can; film canisters from a Fairchild F-1 aerial camera.

  The camera had been flown by helicopter over the lower reaches of the Ñancahuazú Valley. Reconnaissance cameras were usually considered spooky things, often the highest sorts of technology, but the F-1 was old, a surplus workhorse from Worl
d War II. Hoyle was not surprised to see it tossed into a corner with a dirty white sheet draped over the broad, stubby lens.

  In this case, it was not the camera that was special but the film. The Bolivians had been asked to overfly and photograph the area around the recently captured farmhouse. They hadn’t been told that the film they were using was of the latest type, a high-resolution infrared that would show heat sources under the tree canopy. The same type of film was being used in Vietnam. Charlie had given the pilots the canisters the week before and asked for routine photo coverage. The film would now be taken back to the safe house and processed secretly.

  Hoyle seemed only slightly less distracted as they drove downhill and back into the city. Almost the entire trip passed without a word; Charlie was by nature quiet, and Hoyle was obviously in thought. As they drove into the basin containing La Paz, the sky seemed to yawn and tip open before them; the autopista continued down, curved and recurved, and the city sprouted on all sides, impossibly jumbled and dust-colored. Huayna Potosí loomed above everything; the mountain occupied a whole part of the sky and collected about its top a blue-gray ring of cloud. Charlie played the radio, pop music with English lyrics and rapid-fire commercials that blended together in Hoyle’s mind. By degrees, he unplugged first the Spanish and then the English from comprehension, and as they turned off the highway, he barely attended the bewildering avalanche of syllables.

  On Avenida Peru, they stopped and bought beer at a pushcart. Shadows were already cusping the shantytowns, and the air was slowly made purple. Hoyle gathered up twenty-four bottles of Taquiña to take back to the safe house; he also bought soft drinks for Charlie, delighting the cart’s proprietor, a round-looking Paceña who opened her mouth into a cracked and uneven smile. As they loaded the beer into the back, a beggar tossed his sponge over two lanes of traffic, dodged across the busy avenue, and washed all the Impala’s windows before Charlie could run him off. Hoyle gave him the change from the beer, and Charlie hissed at the boy, sputtering a curse at him in Guaraní.

  They returned to the safe house to find a note from Smith. He’d been by at midafternoon and had taken an embassy car back to the military airfield. They’d probably passed each other along the autopista. Smith and Valdéz were taking a helicopter to Camp Esperanza to check on Major Sheldon and the training base at Santa Cruz. Santavanes was sleeping off a hangover in one of the bedrooms. Hoyle set to work with the film, and Charlie loaded the beer into the refrigerator, certain that Santavanes would seek relief when he woke up.

  After about two hours, Hoyle laid out the negatives on a light table plugged into a socket in the kitchen. He scanned the illuminated negatives with a stereoscope before making individual prints. The photos were astounding.

  The infrared film had seen “through” the canopy and revealed Camps 1 and 2 in incredible detail. Hoyle was astounded by their intricate layout. Each was surrounded by a series of camouflaged trenches and rifle pits. Camp 2, located on a steep mountainside, was practically unassailable. This confirmed the wisdom of trying to lure Guevara away from his bases. To assault such well-laid-out positions would be suicide.

  Scanning the film, Hoyle was able to fix with certainty the main assembly areas and trails leading north, but he was puzzled that the infrared had detected only a handful of men on the ground.

  “Anything?” Charlie asked.

  “We found the camps,” Hoyle said, “but not the people.”

  Charlie looked at one of the negatives on the light table. He could see plainly the zigzag lines of the rifle pits and the scattering of white dots that indicated human beings. There appeared to be fewer than a dozen men at Camp 2.

  “Maybe they moved out.”

  Hoyle shook his head. “Look at the trench lines. They’re still being extended. They’re working on the camp.” Where was the main column? Why would they continue working on a camp if it had been abandoned?

  “I have to see Zeebus,” Hoyle said. The film had been sent via diplomatic pouch, which meant that a favor was owed to Cosmo. Hoyle had made a dinner date with him for this evening.

  Charlie shrugged. “Then it’s Los Escudos. You’ll eat well.” Charlie considered Zeebus a gringo of the more common sort, meaning loud, ill-mannered, and stupid to the way of things. Charlie did not fault Zeebus for his appetite, however, and his favorite restaurant was one of Charlie’s as well.

  “Would you like to join us?” Hoyle asked.

  Charlie smiled at the invitation. It would not have come from Zeebus or Smith, nor probably from Santavanes or Valdéz. Most Americans wished to avoid fraternization, as Charlie was considered “help,” not management. The Cubans were a different matter. Though outwardly friendly, Santavanes and Valdéz were not without racial awareness. Charlie was unashamedly cholo, a Native American back a thousand generations; and there was a line, indelible and ancient, between cholo and Castilliano. This was not something Hoyle could solve; Charlie suspected that, like most gringos, Hoyle was aware of race only as it concerned blacks and whites, not Indians and those of Iberian descent. Los Escudos was owned by a chola, so Charlie would be welcomed there, and that may have been why the invitation was so ready. Charlie had never detected in Hoyle any trace of racism, but he did sense a small blind spot—Bolivia, like all Latin countries, had its conventions regarding nativos. Gringos like Hoyle always seemed unaware of the line that divided Indians and Europeans.

  At any rate, Charlie had private business of his own tonight. He declined the invitation graciously and asked permission to check on his apartment, a small place behind the bus station. Hoyle knew he was not often there. They made arrangements to meet in the morning and drive back to the military airfield, where they’d catch an airplane back to Vallegrande.

  Hoyle dutifully telephoned Zeebus at the embassy and confirmed the arrangements for dinner. On the way over, he checked his post office box, though, having seen Maria off at eleven that morning, he figured a note would be unlikely. There was none, and Hoyle tried not to be disappointed as he drove across the city to Los Escudos.

  As usual, the meal was a spectacle. Magda, the owner, beamed and clucked as Zeebus put away plate after plate. Hoyle ate, and the food was quite good, especially if one’s goal was to be stuffed to bursting and put into a digestive coma. Zeebus asked after Smith, hoping he had been stung by a scorpion, bitten by a rabid dog, or better, died of some slow, ghastly diarrhea that made him shit out his brains. Hoyle had to break the bad news that Smith was alive and well.

  “How did your spooky film work out?” Zeebus asked.

  “Okay.”

  Zeebus chewed. “How about the Igloo White stuff?” Igloo White was the code name of a program that used ground seismic intrusion detectors to monitor the Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam. Hoyle had ordered a dozen of the sensors to place in the Ñancahuazú Valley. The sensors, too, had come via diplomatic pouch.

  “You opened the boxes,” Hoyle said.

  “Of course. You would, too. I don’t know what’s going on, but I deserve to have a suspicion.”

  Hoyle took a sip of beer.

  “Come on, buddy,” Zeebus said, “give me something.”

  “We found some trails.”

  “Hmm.”

  Hoyle sat, saying nothing more.

  Scraping up some sauce, Zeebus went on: “We put down some of that stuff in Quang Nam, in I Corps—right off Red Route One. Really high-speed stuff. The things were supposed to smell human sweat. Detect humans by their odor. The sensors got dropped in by airplane, not hidden, you know, just parachuted into the trees, and the gooks found a couple of them. They had no idea what they were—they probably suspected they were some kind of listening devices. So they sent them to Moscow for analysis. The Russians figured out what they were and what they did. Next time we sent a team in for a recon of the trail, we found all these clay pots stuck up in the tree branches. The pots were full of shit and piss. Goddamn if that didn’t set off the sensors. They signaled that there were hundreds of thousand
s of slopes out there in the jungle. They were picking up the piss and registering it as humans.”

  “We’re not going to put in shit detectors,” Hoyle said.

  “That stuff is all shit,” Zeebus said. “If you want to kill somebody, you’ve got to send people to do it. All this remote-control crap. Give me a cloak and dagger anytime.”

  “Well, we haven’t found them yet,” Hoyle said. “It’s a big jungle.”

  “Too bad. Of course, being a contractor, like you are, the longer the job, the longer you get paid.”

  “What have you got going on in La Paz?” Hoyle asked.

  “Shit, you don’t tell me anything, why should I tell you?”

  “Just because Smith torques you off, don’t take it out on me.”

  “You’re his buddy.”

  “I work for him.”

  Zeebus narrowed his eyes. “Well, that’s your own fault, isn’t it?”

  “I wish I’d had you there for some career advice, Cosmo. You really are a genius.”

  Zeebus smiled. “I heard about the beef with Major Placido.”

  “A misunderstanding.”

  “You’ve got a temper.”

  If these assholes keep killing prisoners, this thing in the valley will get bigger.”

  “You think kicking their asses will teach them manners?”

  “I don’t want my job made harder.”

  “Just so you know, there’s still major fucking heartburn over this at the embassy. Ambassador Hielman’s just waiting for you two guys to step on your dicks out there. He sent a query to State when he heard you duked out Placido.”

  “I know you’ll put in a good word for me.”

  “You’re not helping yourself any.”

  Zeebus ate a flan. They talked of his coming transfer to Berlin; the paperwork seemed to be progressing slowly, but he was confident he’d soon be freed from La Paz. Zeebus seemed only slightly embarrassed when they were joined by a woman named Uta, a clerk from the Swiss delegation. She was jolly and big-boned and transparently in love with Zeebus, who, Hoyle noticed, wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. Hoyle remained at the table only long enough to be introduced and to tell her that he was a petroleum geologist conducting surveys in the south, a friend of Cosmo’s from college. Uta said she’d met Zeebus at a church picnic, and Hoyle wondered if the whole world was filled with liars. He excused himself, pleading another engagement.