Havana es-3

by Stephen Hunter

  But he was gone, except for the sounds of his pistol, which he had drawn as he fled, firing off seven rounds as fast as he could and screaming "Assalto! Assalto!"

  He was the hero, not Castro, for in that moment the entire complexion of the event changed.

  Castro, out of the car, saw that he was too late, but still thought that if the column moved quickly it could penetrate the barracks, bring fire on the soldiers, overwhelm them with fear, cajole them into dropping their arms, and therefore take over the city.

  But he turned now and saw chaos. When he leapt from his car, that was the signal-he had forgotten. All the other cars halted, and the men now poured from them, rifles and shotguns at the ready, hungry for the battle that now seemed destined not to occur in the barracks itself, but here on the Avenue Moncada at a kind of forty-five-degree angle to the barracks.

  "The cars!" he screamed. "You must get back into the cars!"

  It began slowly. A shot spanged off the hood of a car, and then another, and then another. The noise was almost more terrifying than the prospect of death, for when the bullets fired, their noise filled the air and beat against the eardrums, and in the next second, they smacked into automobile metal with a vibratory clang.

  Castro saw that now was the only moment he would have.

  "Attack!" he cried. "Open fire! Kill the bastards."

  With that he ran to the front of his own wrecked vehicle, seized a machine pistol from the ground where one of the two now moaning soldiers had tossed it in the moment of his ugly smashing, turned and pointed it at the windows and doors looming ahead to the left, and unleashed a roar as he emptied the magazine in one shuddering, lurching burst.

  A few men raced past him, rushed through the checkpoint, and began to move in on the barracks. But a blast of fire from the windows drove them back or pinned them down.

  All along the line, the rebels retreated to their vehicles and fired, their.22 and shotgun blasts filling the air. The whole side of the corner of Moncada seemed to dance as the rebel rounds tore against it, blowing out windows, pulverizing the facade. And then, as if a storm had spent itself, the men stopped shooting, all reaching the end of their magazines in the same second.

  The soldiers by this time were fully awakened. An officer inside must have realized what was happening and rallied them. By whatever presence, at each window and doorway it seemed three men appeared, each with a rifle, and each shooting as fast as he could.

  Now it was a torrent of fire from the building, and it was the cars that shuddered when hit by the fusillade. Windows smeared, then shattered, tires flattened, shocks gave up. The cars, like dying animals, settled brokenly toward the pavement, screams arose from the hit, a man or two fell limp and dead.

  Castro struggled with the machine gun, got another magazine from the soldier's belt into it, and again sprayed the building. He watched his bullets dance along, and for a moment was buoyed by the power he unleashed, having in his mind a recent event where the power of the guns was directed only at him.

  But then the soldiers above opened fire, and he dropped in a blizzard of detonations, as rifle rounds from a hundred weapons sought him out.

  "What do we do?" someone asked.

  "We must be strong! We must be brave. We must hold. Guitart is inside. He will attack them from the rear."

  But at that moment a squad of soldiers broke from the barracks, headed across the street and began to work their way along the wall, where they had another angle from which to fire at the gaggle of revolutionaries. Shots began to bang this way and that off the cars. From somewhere farther out in the parade ground, a machine gun post jumped to life. A fusillade of bullets chopped into the ground and the cars, bringing up clouds of dust where it struck.

  They fired tracers, and the flickering of the illuminated rounds filled the street with light. Then, a car exploded, its tank punctured by one of the burning bullets. A plume of feathery flame rose, tumbling, revealing the carnage.

  The parade of wrecked vehicles lay in the street, all tattered from gunfire. Among them, the rebels cowered, rising now and again for a shot with the little.22 rifles, which sounded like twigs breaking against the shovel-poundings of the heavier battle weapons inside.

  Feeling insanely untouchable, Castro walked along the line, screaming imprecations at his men.

  "Fire on them! Mow them down! Give them a taste of lead! Show them no mercy!"

  But his screams seemed to have no effect on the crouching men.

  Finally, one looked over at him from the shelter of the car he cowered behind.

  "It's finished. We are running out of ammunition. There are too many of them."

  "No," he said, "you must stay and fight till the end. Cuba demands it."

  "Cuba doesn't demand my death," said the man.

  "Guitart and his men are inside. They will bring fire on them from behind and we will move into the courtyard. Have faith, my broth―"

  "Guitart is dead. I saw him shot down."

  "No, my brother, he―"

  "We are doomed!" screamed the man. "Order a retreat! We have failed."

  Castro looked up and down the line; some men returned fire, but for each shot a rebel fired, a storm of rifle and machine gun bullets answered. Two cars burned. Guitart and his people were dead. Across the street, he could see soldiers creeping among the line of officers' houses, moving closer under fire-and-advance maneuvers. It meant that he would soon be under direct fire from three sides. And behind the soldiers would be the torturers.

  "Fall back!" he screamed. "Retreat and regroup for another night, my brothers. I will cover you."

  He watched them melt into the night, those that could. They scampered off, drawing fire. Some fell and died. Some fell and crawled. Some made it and disappeared into the houses down the road.

  At last he was quite alone except for the wounded and the dead, in the flickering of the firelight. Most of the shooting from the barracks had stopped and he saw why. Soldiers on either end of the column of wrecked cars slithered along, dipping in and dipping out. A grenade went into a car and detonated with a flash. A soldier bayoneted a man on the ground, dead or not.

  He fired at them with the submachine gun, driving them back, but then he was out of ammunition.

  He tossed the gun away and picked up the other one.

  "You will not take me alive, you bastards!" he screamed. "You are the milk of pigs, and you defile Cuba."

  He stood up, fired quickly, still driving them back, but then that gun too, was out of ammunition.

  "Are you quite done?" someone said.

  He turned.

  "You!"

  A man stood in the ragged linens of a peasant, under a straw hat pulled low. But it was the Russian.

  "Yes, me, you idiot."

  "How did you get here?"

  "What a ridiculous question. Not as ridiculous as this travesty, but still ridiculous. The question is: how am I going to get you out of here."

  "They are―"

  "Not yet. Not quite yet."

  He smiled. He pulled two amazements from the pockets of his baggy trousers. Grenades.

  "Best drop under cover, you brainless young idiot. Do I have to tell you everything?"

  Castro knelt between two cars, and the Russian quickly pulled the pin from each grenade and tossed them into the Avenue Moncada. The two blasts occurred simultaneously.

  And with that they were off, dashing between two houses, cutting down an alley, then down another one. Soldiers followed, but they dipped down another alley. Ahead, Castro could see an old farmer's truck pulled by the side of the road, its engine idling.

  "What is―"

  "Never mind. Your luck hasn't quite run out, but it will if you delay."

  They ran to it, climbed in, and pulled themselves under a tarpaulin, where Castro discovered to his horror the truck's cargo was manure.

  "Oh, Christ!" he said.

  "If you are too pretty for shit, my friend," said the Russian, "then you are
too pretty for revolution."

  He smiled, banged on the back of the cab, and with a lurch the ancient vehicle took off.

  The Russian looked over.

  "I think we've made it, for now. The glorious socialist future awaits your next brilliant decision."

  Chapter 40

  First the long passage of shot-up, burned-out automobiles. Already children scampered upon them in the wash of morning light, while crowds fought to get closer to look at the ruination, but were held back by soldiers. The signs of battle were everywhere, in the pools of blood that lay coagulating on the Avenue Moncada, in the smell of burned powder and gasoline and raw, ripped metal, in the debris upon the street. A few small fires still burned, so the smoke was in the air too, and the odor of the blood. Ahead, where the corner of the barracks loomed yellow and white in the sunlight, the ratholes of gunfire riddled the pretend medievalism of the structure. Most of the windows were shot out.

  Frenchy and Earl sat in their station wagon on the street near Guardhouse 3, waiting as a major spoke on the radio headset to a headquarters somewhere, checking their credentials before allowing them to pass.

  The Cuban soldiers were full of themselves, their juices all aflow, their eyes bulging with drama, self-importance, pride of victory and machismo. Every one of them swaggered, carried or wore his weapon at a rakish angle, smoked cigars or cigarettes or drank from an extra rum ration released by Major Morales, the hero of the day, who had rallied the men inside, killed the first invaders, then poured fusillade after fusillade down on the rebels crouching behind their automobiles. The major was almost certainly drunk himself by this time-on victory and praise, but also on rum, a shield again his pain: his younger brother, a lieutenant, was officer of the day and had been shot down by Guitart in the first seconds of the fight.

  Earl could read the battle from what he saw, as he and Frenchy waited. He saw how it really hadn't been a battle at all, which meant there'd been no real victory either. The attackers never got inside and the defenders just blasted them from the relative safety of the barracks windows or the wall along the parade ground. Worse still, the attackers had no support, no artillery or mortars, not even grenades or much in the way of automatic weapons. It was more a gesture than anything, and it had produced nothing but failure.

  "Whoever dreamed this one up ought to be busted back to recruit," he said bitterly to Frenchy, for it offended him to see something done so stupidly, and to see so much blood spread across the pavement because of it.

  "It wasn't exactly von Clausewitz, was it?" said Frenchy.

  "Well, I don't know who von Klauzerwittz is, or was, but it wasn't even Dugout Doug, that's how bad it was."

  "Roger wilco," said Frenchy, then turned to a major who had just hung up the radio headset, "Are we clear now? Have you called your headquarters?"

  The major turned, instantly transformed by whatever message he had gotten at the other end, and began to backpedal pathetically.

  "I am so sorry, Senor Short, I did not know, I have only this minute learned, and I have been ordered to assist in any way possible."

  "No problem, mac," said Frenchy. "Just let us inside so we can see what's what and get a message off to my headquarters as soon as possible."

  "Yes, sir, yes, sir," and with that he turned, made signals of urgency and importance to all the soldiers lounging arrogantly about and pretending to be war heroes, and they parted, pushed back the crowd and opened a path. Frenchy drove the black Ford forward, through the checkpoint, and into the courtyard of the barracks, where only a few rebels had penetrated.

  "Are you ready for this?" Frenchy said to Earl. "You thought you saw it all in the Pacific, Earl. But just like the man says, you ain't seen nothing yet. This'll clear your sinuses."

  They pulled over, and got out.

  The screaming was general.

  By this time, the military had captured at least sixty men in various places around Santiago, some just blocks away, some in the military hospital where they'd gone for medical assistance, some in the Hotel Rex down the street, some a far distance gone. They were in the process of running the interrogations there in the yard.

  Most had been beaten in the capture, and some now were being beaten even more savagely. Yet this was not torture. This was simply how things happened and as Earl looked about he saw a dozen or so brutal dramas playing out. In one corner, two soldiers held a rebel down or against a wall while two others beat him with rifle butts-not so hard as to knock him out, but just hard enough to deliver maximum pain. All over the yard it was the same: rifle butts smashing the nose or shattering the teeth, or breaking the knee, the ankle, the instep. The prisoners didn't scream much, as most were beyond it. One man's face was lost in a mass of blood, and was so seriously injured, by Earl's reckoning, that he could not possibly survive.

  "See, these guys don't mess around, do they?" said Frenchy.

  "That's just the warm-up," said Earl, and nodded toward a tent erected a little farther down the Avenue Moncada, in front of the central entrance to the barracks. That was the source of the screams. That was where security guards formed a cordon around machine gun positions, the whole area already marked off from the general traffic by a wall of barbed wire.

  "They do the hard work in there, I'm betting."

  "You're right," said Frenchy.

  "Let's mosey over and take a lookie-see," Earl said. "I want to get a good sense of whose side I'm on."

  "Yeah, sure. We can get a header on where he is."

  "If he's the guy at all."

  "Oh, he's the guy."

  They moseyed over, and of course a lieutenant warned them away, but Frenchy whispered the magic three letters of the outfit, flashed a credential, and the lieutenant looked nervously about to the major from outside, who nodded, and the man let them pass.

  No one interfered. They walked forward but stopped as a man was led outside. Bandages covered both eyes, but they had been sloppily applied, and from underneath each a river of blood flowed jaggedly down his face. The man could hardly walk. He was babbling pathetically, and then he went down to his knees, sobbing.

  "Watch yourself," said an officer. He pulled a Star automatic from a holster, thumbed back the hammer and leaned over and quickly shot the man in the back of his neck. The victim pitched forward, his skull hitting the asphalt with a thud. He was still, yet more blood coursed from the head wound, to mingle with the blood from his eyes.

  The officer holstered his pistol, yelled and two men came over and dragged the corpse away.

  "That was," the officer said to the two Americans, "the traitor bastard Santamaria. Oh, he thought he was so clever, but look how he ended up. That is the way we handle treason in Cuba."

  "We could learn a lesson from you," said Frenchy.

  "You could indeed."

  "What are you finding out?"

  "See the intelligence officer inside. Latavistada. He is in charge. He has all the answers. He does the cutting."

  "It's the man we think it is? This is what I have heard."

  "That is the name given up from the lips of the condemned."

  "Does anybody know where he has gone?"

  "They had no plan. There are no escape routes. He fled, that is all, the coward. We will catch him, and then Ojos Bellos will have a conversation with him and then he will be shot, like that dog Santamaria."

  "Thanks," said Frenchy.

  "Of course. We are partners in this, your country and mine."

  Through this exchange, Earl stood mute, as if paralyzed. His face had gone dull and it showed nothing, not horror, not repugnance, not judgment. He had seen so many bodies in his time and so much killing that nothing here was worth reacting to; it was only to be remembered.

  He and Frenchy ducked inside.

  There Ojos Bellos, Captain Ramon Latavistada, his uniform smeared with blood like a butcher's, worked his magic. The screams were intense, the pain horrific, and the man chained before him writhed and shivered and begged. For h
is part, the captain was not frenzied or excited in the least. He worked slowly and precisely, with a doctor's delicate touch. He cut, he whispered a question, he listened gravely, he consulted with staff, he checked this information against other information, he cross-checked, he indexed, he made certain good notes were being taken, and then he went back to work. He affected the anguish of a country doctor telling a longtime patient the news was bad. He pretended that what he had to do was hurting him as much as them, and he begged them to cooperate, and then he cut them, cut them some more and cut them yet again.

  "You're the Americans we were told to expect?" asked a young SIM staff lieutenant.

  "That's us. What have you got?"

  "It is this Castro, as we suspected. He seems to have invented this thing quickly. A month ago most of these men were dream revolutionaries, fantasists, pretenders. Then the call came, and it is amazing how quickly they gave up normal lives to assist the man. He has a gift, that is for certain. Of course by now they thought they'd be sipping champagne in the presidential palace, not dangling on a chain while Ojos Bellos worked upon them. We will get him, though."

  "How did he get away?" Frenchy asked.

  "He fought till the end. Most left before he did. Most recall him there, shouting, giving fire. He has balls, that one. It must be said. That is why he is dangerous. He has the conquistador blood. That is why he must be hunted and shot."

  "So nobody saw him leave."

  "Ojos Bellos is working under the following theory: that it is logical that a man wounded earlier in the fight and not able to flee, he alone would have been there and seen what happened. So we are checking and cross-checking, and attempting to come up with a prisoner who was taken there at the site, after a wounding. Alas, many of those men did not survive the wrath of the soldiery."

  "They were shot on the spot?"

  "A mistake, I admit it. But if such a man exists, Ojos Bellos will find him. Nobody can hide a thing from Ojos Bellos. He learns everything, eventually."

  "We'll wait. I want the latest intel to flash to Washington. You can imagine how upset they are."