Killing Che

by Chuck Pfarrer

  Joaquin stumbled when he saw the expression on Guevara’s face. He had not heard Tania’s words, no one in the camp had, but all had seen Guevara slap her down. In ten years Joaquin had never seen such a look on the comandante’s face—rage, astonishment, and grief.

  “What has happened?” Joaquin asked. He tried to lift the woman by the elbow. She remained limp. “What did you do?” he asked her. “What happened?”

  Tania could only look down.

  “Leave us please, Joaquin,” Guevara said.

  The big man retreated. All eyes were on Tania and Guevara; maybe twenty yards distant, they could be seen but not heard.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “Always.”

  “In Germany?”

  She nodded.

  “In Prague?”

  “Since we met. Always since I have known you.”

  “Then I am a fool.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  Guevara glared at her. Their passion was a distant thing and he did not feign now to tell her that he had loved her. The wind stirred the trees and as the leaves murmured, it occurred to him to shoot her. This thought stayed with him for several minutes. He had long held the power of life and death in his hands—perhaps for the first time, he held the scales over someone he knew to the depths of his soul. He felt his throat tightening and the slow, sharpening pain unwinding in his chest.

  “And them?” He jerked his head at Sandoval and D’Esperey.

  “They know nothing. I informed on them, as I did on you.”

  “For money?”

  At this Tania flinched. “No,” she cried, “never.”

  “Why did you tell me now?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just remain silent? Why didn’t you let me walk into the ambush?”

  “I couldn’t do it,” Tania said. “I could not be part of your murder.”

  “Why not?” Guevara asked flatly. “I’m only a fool, like other fools.”

  The full scope of Tania’s duplicity evolved in his mind. There was almost nothing in his private or public life that he had not told her. He had confided everything, entrusted her with his most important plans; he’d talked to her about his failure in the Congo, of his troubled relationship with Fidel and Raúl. He stood reeling, struck stupid to think that everything he’d ever said to her was known by the Soviets—and now by the Americans.

  Shame bawled around her, and Tania hung her head. She fully expected to be executed. What she did not expect was for Guevara to reach down and put his hand gently on her arm.

  She lifted her face, and his dark eyes burned through her. His expression was without anger but was equally without gentleness. There are qualities that cannot stand alone. Mercy is one; it can exist only as an admixture of compassion, which is itself an alloy of many things—love, understanding, empathy.

  “Get up,” he said.

  Tania came to her feet. She stood swaying with her arms wrapped around herself, a picture of abject misery.

  “Go back to the others,” Guevara said firmly. “Don’t tell anyone what you have done.”

  HOYLE’S AMBUSH HAD been laid in tiers overlooking the junction of the Ñancahuazú and Iripiti. Both of the fire teams of Famous Lawyer had been camouflaged and arrayed on the hillsides, their automatic weapons and sniper rifles commanding the flat, broad field where the Ñancahuazú turned slightly north and the Iripiti entered steeply from the west.

  The ambushers were decked in various patterns of camouflage, none of it U.S. issue. They paraded an assortment of weapons, Belgian FN rifles and Russian-made AK-47s. Also of foreign provenance were the small items they carried, knives large and small, cups and canteens, compasses, backpacks, belts and holsters. Pains had been taken to make sure each operator had equipment that was nonattributable—not overtly American.

  Hoyle carried one of the team’s Springfield sniper rifles, perhaps the only piece of certifiably American hardware that would be brought into the field. It was the weapon the Green Berets had christened “Cruel Jane,” the long gun designated for night shooting. Bolted above its receiver was the bulky tube of a starlight scope. The night sight gave the rifle an awkward, top-heavy appearance, equal parts cumbersome and fierce, a thing of great power and menace.

  Major Holland’s entire team, as well as Santavanes and Valdéz, had been positioned in an inverted V facing the river. The ambushers had been hidden artfully, and the bait was displayed to maximum effect. At the edge of the clearing, several parachutes had been draped in the trees. The canopies billowed in the wind that came from the canyons, promising bounty.

  The moon did not rise at all after dusk, and the stars were breathtaking; the Southern Cross rose over the bottom of the valley, and the Milky Way swayed through the entire sky, a turbid river of light. They waited in silence, not one man moving and no one speaking.

  At three A.M. Hoyle switched on the starlight scope and pointed it at the clearing. For the period of his watch, he scanned through the nearly pitch black, the night scope rendering a world of light and dark green. Across the clearing, he could see the strange, billowing contours of the parachutes. He scanned carefully for upright shapes, and also for movement close to the ground—men walking or crawling. There was no motion other than the lazy blousing of the canopies.

  Hoyle strained to hear each sound in the night: the peep of frogs, the rattle of insects, the small murmur of the breeze through the leaves. He tuned in to the noise, placing the sounds in a sort of audio perspective about him: tree frogs here, crickets there, in front of him the steady hissing of the river. Hoyle knew that total silence often announced the presence of the enemy. These were little tricks learned in Vietnam. All had served him well, like the plan for this two-sided ambush with its carefully laid fields of fire. The flat ground across the river was a perfect killing field, as perfect as Hoyle could make it. All it needed was victims.

  But none came; dawn stole across the mountains, and it became slowly and embarrassingly obvious that their bait had been ignored. The forest around them was alive with the uninterrupted calls of a hundred species of winged creatures. Hoyle stood in the foxhole and stretched his legs. “We’ve been burned,” he said quietly.

  Santavanes flicked a large black scorpion off the hand guard of his rifle. Hoyle watched as the arachnid went flailing through the air, pincers waving and tail plunging about. It landed in the leaf clutter, quickly righted itself, and scuttled from view.

  Valdéz was sanguine. “Fuck this,” he said.

  Hoyle agreed. They were now faced with the delicate task of disengaging. It was not as simple as walking away from the clearing. They had announced the location to Guevara, even if he had not answered, and it had to be assumed that he had not shown for a reason. It was unlikely that he just didn’t want the supplies.

  Everything pointed to the conclusion that Guevara had figured out it was a trap. He had deduced this on his own, or he had been told. Tania, whom no one, Russian or American, considered stable, may have warned him. So advised, Guevara might himself lay a counterambush. Hoyle knew that Guevara surely would send a reconnaissance team to watch the clearing—Hoyle always attributed to his foe sound tactical sense, and if he thought to do it, he figured Guevara would as well.

  It was with the greatest caution that the Green Berets gathered together, keeping as much undercover as they could. It was not the time to discuss what had gone wrong. It was time to get out and remain as invisible as possible. Hoyle had gone into the field intending to engage the enemy on terms that had not developed, and it fell to him to conduct the most difficult of all military maneuvers—withdrawal.

  Hoyle’s route took them north. The two fire teams walked as close as possible to their assigned bearings, scrambling sometimes up heavily vegetated slopes, kicking their feet into the damp earth and pulling themselves up by roots and branches. On the ridge above the river, both groups altered course to remain undercover.

  At about noon Hoyle came upon a trail about two hundred feet ab
ove the river valley; running north and south, it had been hacked out of the underbrush, carefully leaving overhead cover in place. Hoyle halted the patrol and laid out a hasty ambush as he studied the tracks. Thirty men, give or take, had passed before the last rain. Some were heavily laden and a few were barefoot. Most of the traffic had gone south.

  Hoyle did not wish to seek an extemporaneous engagement; nor did he have the manpower to pursue and locate Guevara’s main force. Hoyle signaled to Santavanes, who removed a pointed cylinder from his pack. One of the Igloo White sensors, the contraption resembled an elongated and camouflaged funnel. Santavanes stepped about ten feet off the trail and pushed the end of the device into the soft ground. Using the heel of his boot, he sank it into the leaf clutter until only an inch or so remained above the dirt.

  Santavanes bent over the gizmo, set the transmission ID code, the sensitivity of the sensor, and the number of days the device would be active. In the shade of a small bush, the device was almost impossible to see. If Guevara used the trail again—if even one man passed—the sensor would detect vibration through the earth and send a radio message indicating time, number of people, and direction of traffic. For the next thirty days, it would monitor the trail night and day, rain or shine.

  In another three hours, the groups had laid a dozen more sensors and linked up on Hill 556. The helicopter appeared only twenty minutes late, and they were taken back to the casita.

  Unknown to Hoyle, the pains he had taken in their extraction had been necessary. Guevara had sent Tuma and Begnino downriver to a promontory overlooking the Saladillo. They had taken a position just forward of the hillcrest, looking down on the river. They could not see the drop zone exactly, but their vantage commanded a view almost to the Palmarito, the place Hoyle had laid the first sensor. Hoyle had managed to retreat unobserved by only the barest of margins.

  Tuma and Begnino had watched for an hour and then turned south toward the camps. As they started their return, they plainly heard a Bolivian helicopter pass down the other side of the valley. They could not know that this helicopter bore an ambush party. Nor could they have any idea where it landed, for the hilltop Hoyle picked as a landing zone was not visible from the river. Tuma and Begnino reported back to Guevara having seen nothing.

  They had seen almost everything.

  AN AIR OF TENSION hung around the camp. Guevara, oddly, seemed calm, even withdrawn. He sat on his hammock and smoked his pipe while working parties were arranged by Pombo and Joaquin to move upriver and recover the few remaining supplies. Moro had handed Guevara a vial of hydrocortisone from the medical cache. Moro told him there were only a dozen tablets. Guevara took this news with a composed indifference, though he did not know what he would do when these pills ran out.

  Like Guevara, Tania had retreated to a corner of the clearing and sat blank-faced, staring out into the jungle. It was impossible for the men not to connect and compare the two individuals, Tania on one end of the camp, almost catatonic, and Guevara on the other, willfully composed. No one approached Tania, and she said nothing. This added, hour by hour, to a sense of anxiety felt by all.

  At five in the afternoon, Guevara called for D’Esperey, who walked to the comandante’s hammock and watched him lace his boots. He was again taken aback by Guevara’s appearance; his clothing was filthy, and his eyes seemed sunken. It surprised D’Esperey that Guevara had not bothered to bathe or change clothes.

  Puffing on his pipe, Guevara said, “Get out a notebook. This is what I want you to do.” Soon D’Esperey was scribbling notes. “You have to get back to Havana as quickly as possible. We need more troops. Tell Fidel to send in another group. We need to take some pressure off the valley. Tell him, ‘Do not fail to open a second front.’

  “After Havana, I need you to return to France and organize a support network. I want it to have the broadest base possible—of course, it should be headed by the Party, but it should broadly include members of the left, whatever their persuasion. Journalists are to be specifically cultivated; activities of the Bolivian guerrillas should be made into news. If we win a thousand victories out here and no one knows, our work will be for nothing.

  “I’ll give you letters for Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell, asking them both to organize an aid fund for the Bolivian liberation movement. These letters are to be published widely. Use your connections in the French Communist Party to organize channels for sending aid—money, electronics, and medicine.”

  He spoke also of recruiting a communications specialist and purchasing long-range radio equipment. D’Esperey earnestly ticked off his assignments, adding enthusiastic exclamations here and there. He was not aware that Guevara had watched him closely. Guevara was a good judge of men. He knew that D’Esperey could be of use, but not in the field. That was reserved for stouter hearts.

  Next Guevara called for Sandoval, who came to the hammock without D’Esperey’s sense of awe. Sandoval said that he was at Guevara’s command but made no pretenses of serving as a guerrilla. Guevara had in mind for Sandoval a more specific task.

  “My strategic objective is to seize political power in Argentina. What I want is to get together a group of dedicated countrymen, the best people available. I’ll season them in combat for a year or two up here, form a column, and then enter the country, again in the north, but probably not in Salta.”

  Sandoval knew well the tribulation of Masetti and the failure of the armed group sent in with him. Sandoval had escaped both extermination and any share of the blame.

  “You’re going to head this up,” Guevara said. “I want you to remain in Buenos Aires as long as possible before you have to join the forces in the mountains. You’re going to be the principal coordinator, sending me people.” Guevara paused and his eyes clicked over the camp. “I want a first-rate job. Not like this shit we have going on here.”

  Duty-bound, Sandoval told Guevara about Tania’s shenanigans with the taxi in La Paz, though he did not mention the continuing oddness at the hotel in Sucre. Guevara shook his head. Sandoval was fishing for the reason the comandante has slapped her, but Guevara did not go into it. He continued to tell Sandoval of his plans. The column in Bolivia was to be the mother column; he intended within a year to have gathered together five hundred fighters, Peruvians, Bolivians, Paraguayans, and Argentines. From this mother column, he would split off units and send them into adjoining countries. Sandoval was to get in contact with specific members of the Argentine left, in particular Eduardo Jozami, and as soon as possible send five men to begin training.

  Sandoval’s mind wandered. Guevara seemed unaware of the precariousness of his position. Everything about the operation seemed amateurish—Tania’s waywardness, the compromise of the farmhouse, the deplorable state of morale. The Zinc House had been intended to be the central link of the logistical operation. Camps 1 and 2 were never meant to be combat positions. Now, at a stroke, and before anyone was really ready, the valley had exploded into war. Sandoval was also concerned that the Bolivian Party was not supporting the guerrillas in the field. Many things worried Sandoval: how the guerrillas would stay supplied, how they would recruit among the peasants, how he was to communicate with them. None of this seemed to bother Guevara. He put forward his plans, though they seemed occasionally fantastic. Sandoval was to coordinate with Pombo on the issues of transporting people and logistical support.

  “How am I to coordinate with Pombo when he’s in the field?”

  Guevara waved his hand. “Work out a communications plan.”

  Sandoval frowned but did not say anything.

  “Soon we’re going to pull the army to us and bash in their brains,” Guevara said.

  Sandoval did not doubt him, but he could not help but wonder: And what then?

  44

  HOYLE’S TEAM RETURNED to the casita, the mood notably somber. The ambush had not succeeded, but the patrol had been extracted without loss. The group had located a main trail above the river and put down sensors—this was itself
no small triumph. If the guerrillas moved north, it was likely they would use that same trail; the path had been sturdily constructed and was concealed from the air. Guevara’s back door was now alarmed, and the Bolivian army was camped out on his front lawn.

  Still, there were several failures to report, and after Hoyle and Famous Lawyer had conducted their debriefings, Smith worked up a cable to Langley. He was careful to lace good news into his bad. Smith was a master at this. He knew that what counted most back at Langley were not results but the perception of results. The cable was pretty close to what they wanted, next to Guevara’s head on a platter and his column shot and heaped into a ditch.

  Guevara was in a battle for his dream and for his life. Smith’s conflict was more accurately about his career—which amounted to pretty much the same things, a dream and a life—though in his case, hanging in the balance were not the aspirations and welfare of three hundred million South Americans.

  Hoyle took his turn in a makeshift shower set up behind the tents. The water was cold and so full of minerals that it barely allowed the soap to lather. Hoyle scrubbed himself as clean as he could, washing the dirt from his skin and the camouflage paint from his face and hands. As he washed away the dirt he felt a little better.

  For the period of the mission, all of his humanity had been stuffed into a separate compartment. While he was “in,” all the animal parts of his brain were switched on, his senses sharpened to the point of Zen, eyes and ears keen and the colors vivid and hot. It had taken all of his concentration to walk into the jungle hunting men, all of his wits and luck besides. Now that the animal centers of his brain were gradually switching off, emotion came rushing back in. The passion he felt for Maria stung like a handful of thorns. The first seeds of anger were sprouting, taking root in the black, shady dust of self-pity.

  Hoyle dressed in dry khakis, and everyone assembled at the casita for dinner—arroz con pollo again, but this time it was made by Charlie and not laid down along Cuban lines. It was very good, and there was plenty of it and beer as well. Hoyle ate with Smith in the kitchen. After the meal, they walked out by the airfield and held a council of war.