Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  And as he dove into the darkness he saw a figure on the platform where Repin had stepped aboard the patrol boat, and it registered: Scuba diver; man in scuba gear on the ladder; and he was leaping into darkness.

  On the deck of the patrol boat there were voices, alien, faraway, the Spanish like a language he had never heard before. “Cast off! In the name of Christ, cast off!” And there was movement on the ladder where the scuba diver was.

  He twisted through the air and landed on his right foot, but off-balance. He tried to turn his body back toward the hatch, but his momentum carried him toward the stem, almost over the transom, and he stumbled over something yielding and heavy and went down, his right arm and the shotgun turned under him, and his head ducked as if he were going to do a somersault; then his back came up against the transom with a concussion that almost knocked the wind out of him. Yet he got his legs down and slithered forward until his shoulder met the yielding mass he had fallen over, and then, hurting in his back and his shoulder, he had the shotgun up and ready to fire.

  There was no light at all now except for the flashlight that had fallen on the deck and that had rolled almost over into the scuppers on the port side as the boat rolled. The patrol boat had put out its own lights; men were shouting and the engines were roaring and the black bulk of the patrol boat began to slide away as if it were sinking, but it was only moving a few yards away from him to get running room, and then the engines rose to a higher pitch and suddenly it was gone, and he was aware of a void to his left where it had been.

  And, with the engine sound going away, he could hear now the quick, disturbing sound of a dying man’s breathing. The breath came in little sighs, little whines of despair with a groan at the end of each one. The deck under his left elbow was greasy with blood and the man’s breath came like the panting of a dog that has been out running.

  He fired one shot toward the open hatch, and a string of shots came back at him. The dying man was pushed up against him as if he were cuddling up for warmth, the force of the bullets pounding the breath out of him so that there was no more panting, but only a long, dignified, quiet gurgle as he gave it up. Tarp fired another shot at the muzzle flash and waited until the rolling light stuck its finger into the open hatch and showed him the top of a head when he fired again; the light rolled on, but not before he saw movement, and he pumped and fired.

  The patrol boat was going away at flank speed. Tarp was still watching the hatch, which he could almost see as his eyes adjusted; as he waited, part of his mind was thinking, sorting it out, and telling him, There were two operations laid on here; one was Repin’s with the Cuban navy and one was something else that Repin didn’t know about, and now the navy’s getting out because their part is over and they want to stay clean.

  From the hatch, a voice said, “Oh, Jesu, help me,” and Tarp fired another shot at it and waited. The dropped flashlight rolled back the other way and showed the hatch empty. Tarp counted twenty and moved to the dead man’s feet, from where he could reach far over to his left and grab the flashlight and shine it where he wanted. In that dead light, the hatchway looked as if it had been attacked by crazed carpenters.

  Tarp got up on one knee. From there he could see the top of the man’s head. By stretching, he could see part of his back. The man was very still. A machine pistol was gripped in one hand, the arm twisted under him on the stair.

  Tarp got up and went closer and saw that the man was dead. He forced the body down the ladder with his feet, sitting on the deck and pushing with both feet, and it went slowly down with the unwilling heaviness of dead weight.

  Tarp started the engine and put the boat on a course that would take it westward, parallel to the coast and into the Caribbean. Heading straight for Florida would be stupid.

  He was shaking a little. He sat at the controls and held on to the wheel and waited to run down. When he felt better, he lifted his left pant leg and shone the flashlight on it. An inch-long piece of wood from the flying bridge was stuck into the muscle like a spear. He found pliers and pulled it out and let it bleed.

  He looked over the two dead men. Both carried machine pistols and diver’s knives. Their flashlights were identical rubber-coated, heavy-duty marine lights. They wore identical dark T-shirts and dark cotton pants with cargo pockets, dark-brown canvas shoes.

  He turned over the man on the deck. He was young, dark; he had grown a brave little mustache. Tarp pulled up what was left of the T-shirt and searched the abdomen, then opened the pants and pulled them down. There was a plastic-covered card taped below the man’s navel. Tarp pulled it loose. It had been laminated; it was dark green, with a legend in black letters and a thumbprint but no photograph.

  A get-out-of-jail-free card. There was one just like it on the other man. Other than the cards, there was no identification, no wallets, no keys. Nothing.

  DGI, he thought. Dirección General de Inteligencia. The Cuban KGB.

  Tarp squatted on the deck and scowled at the moonless sky.

  It made no sense.

  He knew what had happened well enough: somebody had busted Repin’s deal with the Cuban navy captain and the DGI men had been put aboard to deal, not with Repin, but with the man who had brought Repin back. The navy captain had divorced himself from all that as quickly as he could, so that, if there were repercussions later, he could claim to have done his duty both to Cuba and to Repin. And the DGI men had come aboard Tarp’s boat to capture or kill him. But if they failed, then Tarp would go free.

  That made no sense.

  Tarp thought of the figure in scuba gear whom he had glimpsed on the patrol boat’s ladder.

  They planted a bomb on me, he thought. He wrapped his arms tighter around his knees and stared at the darkness. He knew it now as surely as he knew that he had killed two men. It would have taken only minutes for the diver to plant a limpet mine under the sportfisherman’s hull. Then the DGI men would have killed him or captured him and they would have left the boat to drift and then blow up. There would have been no loose ends that way.

  Tarp felt as if a gentle wind were blowing over his scalp. He was sitting on a bomb whose timer was running.

  There was an inflatable forward of the cabin, and he raced to make it ready. Even with the help of the two flashlights, it took him valuable minutes to loosen it and get it into the water and pull the inflation lanyards. There was a small British outboard in clamps next to where it had been stowed, and he loosened those and screwed the little one-lung engine to the wooden transom with impatient movements.

  He grabbed the .22 from its hiding place and climbed into the dinghy. The jointed oars seemed useless for moving the stubborn hull, which rose on a slight swell and seemed to go nowhere. Tarp pulled harder, waiting for the limpet mine to blow, imagining the inflatable lifting suddenly on the explosion and the fabric tearing, the floor erupting under him, ripping him apart, striking his legs and spine and genitals with the force of a runaway truck. He pulled as hard as he could. The inflatable coasted down the swell; when it rose again, the sportfisherman was fifty feet away. He rowed for ten minutes, when the fishing boat was a small silhouette against the pale light above the Cuban coast, and then he rested, his breath rasping, his arms weak.

  He had brought the stainless-steel bottle of gasoline from the boat and he poured gas into the little motor’s fist-sized tank. The motor was a noisy workhorse that would push the inflatable all the way to Florida if he would let it. And if I had the gas.

  He started the engine and headed slowly up the coast. His watch told him it was half an hour since Repin had boarded the patrol boat. Eleven minutes later, there was a roar of fire behind him, and any doubt he had had about what the scuba diver had been doing was removed. The light trickled down over the water toward him like an oil slick as red fire went up like a ball, turned orange, then gold, and then sank quickly to a low glare of yellow. Gasoline was burning on the surface where the boat had been, but the boat was gone.

  He went slowly westwa
rd, steering by the lights of the coast and the stars that showed through muggy haze. There was no use trying to get out into the Gulf. If the Cubans didn’t get him, the Coast Guard would.

  He turned in toward the Cuban mainland, and, a quarter of a mile out, cut the engine and went over the side, slashing the inflatable and letting it sink on the engine’s weight before he struck out for shore.

  Moscow here I come, he thought wryly.

  Chapter 6

  He lay on a sandy ridge twenty yards above the coarse grass that marked the edge of the beach, with broken butts of palm fronds around him like big celery stalks. Behind him were small pines, on which he had draped his clothes to dry. Now, in the daylight, he gathered the clothes and brought them down to the place among the palms so they would not be seen.

  He cut the American labels from the clothes. He wanted Cuban identification and Cuban money, and for that he would have to find Repin. Moving around was going to be dangerous, because Cuba was a country as localized and as organized as a medieval manor; any stranger would be reported. Every city block, every rural crossroads, had its Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, which functioned as neighborhood council and intelligence center and which could put together anything from a party to a purge.

  He was hungry. Today he could ignore hunger. Tomorrow would be different. He would have to get to Havana and make contact with Repin quickly. How long before Repin returned to Moscow? he wondered. More to the point, how long before the DGI put the military and the militia on him? Or would they know that the boat had blown up and believe that both he and their men were gone?

  A helicopter came over at ten o’clock. Tarp, wearing only the dark-blue briefs that looked like swimming trunks, walked boldly to the water’s edge and stood there, hands on hips, staring at the water. When the chopper passed over, he waved.

  A few minutes later, he heard voices. He knelt by his clothes with one hand under them, holding the .22. They came closer, and he could tell that one was a woman’s. Then words — English words — became understandable. “Definitely not what I … Incredible! Night after … Betrayal … take me for, anyway?”

  The word serious was used several times.

  A male voice said, “Yeah.” In very American English. Tarp kept his head down. They passed on his left, going toward the beach.

  “I’m really, I mean I’m really disappointed. I mean, I’m disappointed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you think?”

  “They’re not serious.”

  “It’s really disappointing.”

  He peered through the palms and saw a young man and woman. She had very pale hair that looked almost white in the sunlight, but her skin was burned pink. She was wearing a dress that looked like a piece of Edwardian underwear, white, frilly, eyeletted, with a very full skirt. She was carrying her shoes in her left hand and just then she was digging the toes of one foot into the sand like a pouting child. The boy with her might almost have been a clone of the younger Agency man, for he had the same look of rather brutish innocence, that amoral California quality of brainless muscle. He wore shorts and a bright-yellow T-shirt with a decoration on the front.

  “Nightclubs,” Tarp could hear the girl saying. “Goddamn nightclubs just make me barf. Don’t they, Rick?”

  “They’re sickening.”

  “And all this booze? I don’t think they’re serious about the freeze. Do you?”

  “I think they’ve been corrupted.”

  “Bourgeois.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tarp wriggled into his trousers and slid the .22 under the shirt, which he left lying under the palm stumps.

  “Do you think they’ve betrayed the revolution?” the girl was saying.

  “Don’t talk so loud.”

  “Well, do you?”

  Tarp stood up. Even barefoot, he towered over them, the low, sandy ridge giving him more height. The girl saw him first and her mouth opened in a perfect circle. It was small and soft and pink, like a baby’s, and it stayed opened, looking astonished.

  “Comrades,” Tarp said. He walked down the sand hill toward them. “Comrades both!” He tried a Russian accent and it came out like Repin’s voice.

  “Comrade?” The girl had taken the boy’s hand and they both looked terrified of him.

  “Comrades,” Tarp said again. His mind was jumping ahead: here he had two people who would not question his identification and who had no Committee for the Defense of the Revolution to which to report. “Comrades, I am not being able to help overhearing what you are saying next to me while I am enjoying the Cuban sunshine on my visitation to this lovely island.” He smiled. His smile was never very jolly, and it sometimes was worse than his frown. It had the effect of moving the girl closer to the young man, and her mouth opened a little wider. She had no makeup on, except around her eyes, and she looked about fifteen. “You are Americans?”

  “We’re here for the freeze,” the young man said. “The International Friends of the Nuclear Freeze Movement.”

  “Ah. Yes?” Repin had said something about the freeze movement as a reason for the ballet troupe’s being there. “Ah. I, too.”

  “You’re here for the freeze day?” the girl said with what seemed to be suspicion. It might simply have been disinterest.

  “Ah, in a manner of talking. Yes. You have transport, have you, back to Havana?”

  “The bus, yeah,” the boy said. The girl frowned up at him. “Don’t you have transportation?” she said. Now she sounded quite suspicious. Perhaps she had a CDR block group, after all.

  “Of course!” A bus. What kind of bus would they take back to Havana? And how was he going to get on it without any money? “You took bus all the way out here from Havana, my friends?”

  “It’s a tour,” the boy said.

  “Everything’s a tour,” the girl added.

  Tours meant tour guides; tour guides meant intelligence agents, or reports, at the very least. He began to regret speaking to them. “Well, I have to go, Comrades,” he said. “I have an appointment.” As he turned away, the boy said quickly, too loudly, “We weren’t complaining, you know!”

  “Oh, Rick!” the girl muttered.

  Tarp turned back. “You are worried about what I will say I heard, my friend?”

  “No, no. I just wanted to be straight with you. You know. We were just having a private, uh, conversation. About all the great things they’ve done for us. It’s a great tour. Really.”

  “Oh, Rick!” the girl said. Her voice was nasal. She faced Tarp, pink with defiance. “Actually, we were bitching a lot!” she said. “You heard us, right? So why pretend? We’ve never been to Cuba before, we wanted to see how the revolution works, and they keep taking us to nightclubs, and they keep giving us booze, and they keep showing us apartment houses, and … We just came to demonstrate for world peace, you know?”

  At the edge of his vision, Tarp saw another figure approaching along the same route that the two Americans had taken to the beach. He wanted to kick himself for getting into such a stupid situation. Yet, being in it, he had to stay with it. He tried to frown as Repin did, and he tried to make his voice even more like Repin’s as he said, “Comrades, is wrong to question the judgment of the people’s representatives. Who are you, to reject nightclubs when workers all over Cuba dream of nightclubs? Who are you, but children of the bourgeoisie, looking for the titillations of playing at workers? Who are you, but decadent Americans, still hand in hand with Rockefellers and United Fruits, sneering at the nightclubs of the twenty-sixth of July? Who are you” — he said, his voice rising as he heard footsteps crunching over the palm fronds — “but the offspring of the middle class, trying to satisfy corrupted urges by playing at work while you sneer at the pleasures of the workers? Shame, I say. Shame, Comrades! Do not criticize until you have earned the right to criticize!”

  “Bravo,” a firm voice said behind him. Tarp turned slowly and tried to look surprised. “Bravo, Comrade.” She wa
s quite sincere. She was also tall, strong, dark, strikingly handsome. She put out a brown hand. “Juana Marino.”

  Tarp tried to think. He had already made a Russian of himself; the French identity was no good. Too smart! “Yegor Solkov,” he said.

  “You are Russian?” she said in Russian.

  “Most assuredly.”

  “Thank you for what you said,” she told him in lightly accented Russian. “These two have done nothing but complain since they landed.” She smiled at the Americans as if she had said something complimentary about them.

  “They are children,” he said. “Your guests?”

  “I am their guide. From the Bureau of Tourism and Solidarity.”

  “Of course. You have a group?”

  She nodded. “Thirty. We are here looking at the cement plant. All but these two. It is hard to know what they want. Machine guns and urban revolution, perhaps. They do not seem to understand that Cubans like nightclubs and baseball, and that cement plants and furniture factories are necessary to us.”

  “Maybe they want to see spies and counterrevolution and another Bay of Pigs,” Tarp said. He laughed. The woman laughed, too. It was a beautiful laugh, musical and open. She glanced at her watch.

  “Time to wipe their noses?” Tarp said in Russian.