Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  Kimberly started to cry. “Daddy, what’s going on? What are they doing here?”

  “Don’t worry about that, sweetie. You just move away from here as fast as you can and get to a telephone.”

  “What am I going to say?”

  “You say exactly what happened. You tell Mom that the army came and arrested me. She can take care of everything.”

  “But she’s not—” Kimberly cut herself off before stating that her mother was out of the country. That was probably a detail that the PDF didn’t need to know. Kurt sensed it and smiled. She had a good head on her shoulders. She’d find a way to get through this.

  Please God, let that be true.

  Kimberly stood there for a long moment, staring, searching for something to say that would somehow make this better. But if those words existed, she didn’t possess them. In the end, all she had left was, “I love you, Daddy.”

  Kurt pulled her close to him for one last embrace. “I know you do, sweetheart. And I love you, too. Tell your brother and your mom that my heart is with you all, always.”

  Kimberly wouldn’t let go. If she hugged him long enough, then maybe she’d never have to go away. If she kept her eyes closed, maybe she’d wake up and all of this would never have happened. In the end, Kurt pushed her away.

  “Go,” he whispered, and he looked away. This was not the time to show the kind of emotion that welled within him. The Muses had never been criers, and Kurt wasn’t about to start a new tradition with all these people watching him.

  Kimberly understood and stepped back. “Bye, Daddy,” she said, and she headed for the front door.

  She didn’t think it was possible, but somehow the crowd of army and police vehicles had grown even larger outside. Even as everyone watched the front of the house, no one seemed to notice her, a white girl in a pink T-shirt and denim shorts, leaving barefoot through the front door. At first, she tried to keep herself from running, from attractingtoo much attention. By the time she got to the end of the driveway,though, she didn’t care anymore.

  She started to run, and as she did, she heard one of the soldiers yell, “Alto! Stop!”

  The harshness of the order made her run even faster, and as she did, she heard the staccato beat of heavy boots following her.

  “Alto!” he yelled again, only this time from much closer.

  Kimberly didn’t know where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there, but she was absolutely certain that above all other things in the world, she wanted to outrun this thug on her heels. She didn’t dare look. She didn’t dare slow down or change course, becauseas it was, she was charging headlong down the steep incline, and any sudden move—

  She felt herself airborne even before she realized that she’d tangled her feet. When she hit the ground, it was on the concrete, and she hit hard on her knees. A bolt of pain launched all the way up to her thighs as the rough cement tore the meat from her kneecaps.

  The soldier was on her in an instant, grabbing her by her arms and yanking her to her feet.

  “Get your hands off of me!” Kimberly shrieked. As she yelled the words, she could see the effect they had on the soldier. He was not one of the DENI thugs; he was rank-and-file PDF, just a guy doing his job, and he clearly was not comfortable roughing up a young girl. That she would shout it so loud and draw so much attention made him very uncomfortable.

  “You are coming with me,” he said to her in Spanish, tightening his grip on her arm. “I have orders to keep you at the house.”

  “You do not!” Kimberly shouted back at him, in unaccented Spanishwith better diction than he. “Your captain said I could go. He said I could leave! Ow, you’re hurting me!”

  The soldier blushed a deeper red, but his grip did not loosen. “Please do not make this more difficult that it has to be,” he said.

  Kimberly stared for a long moment, then straightened herself and jerked her arm away. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going.” Trying her best to be stoic, she silently followed the goon back up toward the house, ignoring the tickle of the blood tracing down her shins. From the foyer, she could see the invaders inside, sifting through all the things that did not belong to them. She hated these men more now than at any other moment in her life. Her dad was nowhere to be seen, already taken into another room somewhere, for God only knew what purpose.

  Over near the stairs, Captain Quintero sensed the movement and turned his handsome face to greet her. “I thought you left,” he said.

  “This goon chased me down,” Kimberly spat. “Look what he did to me.” She gestured to her bleeding knees, but the captain seemed unmoved.

  “I thought she was running away,” the soldier said quickly. He sounded as if he were whining. “If you said—”

  Quintero dismissed the soldier’s concern with a wave of his hand. “Let her go,” he said. “She is not important to us.”

  And just like that, she was free.

  This time, as Kimberly ran, the soldiers stepped out of the way to let her pass. As she burst through the cordon at the foot of her driveway, she stopped and gasped as she saw a second cordon forming up at the bottom of the hill. “My God, what’s happening?” she asked to the night.

  She needed a phone. She also needed a home and a bed and her books for the biology test tomorrow. She needed her mother and her father, and even her annoying little brother. For the time being, though, all she had was the still night air. And her fear.

  The party. They would have a phone. She could call somebody from the Arosemenas’ house. She could call Mom. She always knew what to do.

  The panic started to build exponentially now, and Kimberly found herself struggling for control. She had the phone book, didn’t she? Surely the number was there. It had to be; that was why God had prompted her to take it in the first place.

  Except for the Muses, it seemed that everyone who lived on the street was related to each other, all of them an offshoot of the Arosemenafamily: uncles, cousins, grandparents, and assorted friends and hangers-on. When they threw a party, it was always packed to the rafters, and this one was no exception. Desperate for help, Kimberly knocked heavily on the front door.

  The girl who answered it, Maria, was a neighborhood acquaintance,and she instantly read the panic on Kimberly’s face. “Dios mio, what’s wrong?”

  Kimberly stepped past her into the entryway. “I need a telephone.”

  Maria looked past the new arrival at the cluster of cars and soldiers on the street, then shot a concerned look.

  “My father’s been arrested,” Kimberly said. “I need to call my mother.”

  Nicole, a second acquaintance, joined them in the foyer.

  “Señor Muse has been arrested,” Maria told her, eliciting the gasp she’d no doubt been expecting. “But I’m sure everything will be just fine.”

  “It’s not going to be fine!” Kimberly screamed, bringing silence to everyone around her. She felt the heat of their eyes and in that moment, she seethed with anger. She was angry at all of them for their pity and for the normalcy of their lives. “Now, can I use your phone or not?”

  4

  It’s terrible watching a relative die. The hospice in West Palm did its best to keep the experience manageable, but at the end of the day, it was a place dedicated to death. The slowly decaying shell that Annie Muse had moved into the hospital bed three days ago was not the vital Aunt Elsa whom she’d come to adore. The second wife to Annie’s grandfather, who had predeceased her by quite a number of years, Aunt Elsa was a force of nature, always on the go, always doingsomething at full speed. She still tried, even as the cancer moved from her stomach to her pancreas and beyond, and those very efforts to keep going somehow made it all that much sadder.

  At least there was dignity at the hospice—something that hospitals never provided and rarely cared about. The dignity came in the form of honesty. Medical jargon and euphemisms for the inevitable gave way to blunt surrender and acceptance of impending death. The staff was solicitous
and friendly, and under the circumstances Annie wasn’t sure she could ask for much more.

  It had been a long day, and Annie still had much to do. She’d returnedto Aunt Elsa’s apartment a few hours ago and had spent the evening rifling through the reams of papers that never seem important until the end of someone’s life. The apartment was a comfortable one, situated one block from the water on A1-A in West Palm Beach. Annie’sUncle Larry was staying there, too, lending a hand, and it had been kind of fun to spend the evening chatting with him about the old times, even as it was decidedly less fun to talk about the future.

  The apartment was designed as a loft, and Larry had graciously offeredto sleep on the sofa in the living room, while Annie settled into her grandmother’s bed upstairs. Sleep eluded her, though, as she stared at the ceiling, her mind awash in the staggering details of all that needed to be done. It helped that Aunt Elsa was so actively involved in the funeral plans. Ever the efficient manager, Annie had already caught her grandmother sitting upright in her hospice bed with her ever-presentyellow legal pad, orchestrating the details of her own farewell. She was particularly emphatic about who could speak and who could not. Catholics could be long winded, Elsa had pointed out, and she didn’t want any speeches that went on past people’s ability to comfortablyendure.

  It hurt Annie to think about how much she would miss her when she was gone.

  The phone awoke Annie a little after midnight, before she’d even known she’d fallen asleep. The shrill ring cut like a knife, tripling her heart rate. Good news never came at this hour. Assuming that Aunt Elsa had slipped away during the night, she let it ring twice, steeling herself for the bad news.

  “Hello?” At first, all she heard was background noise—the sound of a party—but after just a second or two, she also heard the sound of snuffling.

  “Mom?”

  At the sound of Kimberly’s voice, her heart rate doubled again. “Hi, sweetheart, what’s wrong?” She worked hard to keep the panic out of her voice.

  “There are soldiers at our house. Daddy’s been arrested.”

  The words hit like a lightning bolt. A kick to the stomach. Without prompting, Kimberly poured out what she knew in a continuous, unbrokennarrative. She heard all about how Kurt had been running late from the airport, and about the call from Jorge. Annie recognized the name immediately, and with it came full realization of the impending tragedy.

  Annie did the math in her head. Kurt’s flight had landed around eight o’clock, and now it was after midnight. That was four hours. Things were spinning wildly out of control, and they’d lost valuable time.

  “Listen to me, Kimberly,” Annie said quickly. “This is very important.Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know you are, sweetheart, but you have to be strong now, okay? You need to take a deep breath and be strong.”

  “What’s happening? Why are they at our house? Why have they arrestedDaddy?”

  “I don’t know,” Annie said, wincing at the lie. “Is Erik with you?”

  “He’s at the Prietos.”

  That wouldn’t do. He needed to be with the rest of the family. “I need to call them,” Annie said. “Where are you now?”

  “I’m at the Arosemenas. They’re having a party.”

  Annie nodded. “Okay, fine. Ask Señora Arosemena if she has a telephonebook and get me the Prietos’ number.”

  “I have our directory,” Kimberly said. “The one from the hall upstairs.”

  Annie couldn’t believe it. “They let you take the phone book with you?”

  “They didn’t know I had it,” Kimberly said. “I stuffed it down my shorts.”

  Annie laughed in spite of herself. It was brilliant, really. The Latin American machismo would never allow one of the soldiers to search a young girl; certainly not in so inappropriate a spot as her pants. “Good thinking,” Annie said. “Let me have the number for the Prietos.” She jotted the phone number in the margin of the funeral plans.

  “Very good, sweetheart. Since you have the book, I need you to give me one more number.” It was a name she was sure Kimberly didn’t know.

  Why did this have to happen now, when the children were on their own? They’d taken such care to protect the kids from information that could harm them; it seemed unfair that this would befall the family when the children were most defenseless. If only there were real magic in the world, a way to trade places and put them safely in Florida while Annie faced danger that would terrify an adult. And perhaps ruin a child.

  Annie would have given her life simply to hug her daughter. But that was not to be. Not tonight. Not until the nightmare was over.

  After writing down the second phone number, Annie got her head back in the game. “All right, Kimberly, you have to do something for me now, okay? I need you to call Nana and Papi and have them come and pick you up. They’ll take you to their house. Give them my numberhere at Aunt Elsa’s. Can you do that for me?”

  “Are we going to be okay?” Kimberly asked.

  “You’ll be just fine. You and Erik will both be just fine. But I won’t lie to you. You’re in danger, and you have to move quickly.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Later. There’s no time to explain now. Just call Nana and Papi. Right now. I’ll call the Prietos and have them bring Erik to Nana’s house.”

  “I’m scared, Mom.”

  “So am I, sweetheart. I’m a little bit scared. But everything will be just fine in the end.”

  “Promise?”

  Annie hesitated just a beat too long. “I promise we’ll all work our hardest. How’s that?”

  It would have to do.

  5

  Jorge Quintero had picked up Tomás at the airport and driven him home. For the past three hours, they’d been sitting in Tomás’s living room, trying to think of what to do. Tomás’s wife, Helena, sat with them. What Tomás knew, Helena knew; that was the nature of their marriage.

  “If things were normal, he would have called by now,” Helena said.

  “Things are clearly not normal,” Tomás agreed. “But we can’t jump directly to the conclusion that he’s been arrested.”

  “Well, we’d better conclude something,” Jorge said. “It’s getting late. If we’re in danger, we’re running out of time to respond.”

  They’d talked through the circular logic before, and they knew they’d do it again. On a table near the sofa, the police scanner continued to monitor the radio waves. They were strangely silent tonight. Certainly, there was no mention of anyone being arrested at the airport.

  Jorge considered that an encouraging sign until Tomás pointed out that if their network had, in fact, been broken, radio traffic would be the first thing to cease. The PDF weren’t the smartest group on the planet, but they weren’t idiots.

  The entire team had been put on alert. All over the city, the small cadre of friends who had worked so hard for so long were listening simultaneouslyto their own scanners, while keeping an ear to their portable radios. All of them were working secretly to find out through friends and relatives whether they had heard rumors of something happening, taking care not to raise suspicion in case all of this turned out to be nothing.

  Tomás thought back to the beginning of this crazy endeavor, back to the head rush on that hot October night in 1987 when they first signed their own death warrants. For months before, they’d been foolingaround with their radios, playing tricks on PDF soldiers, dispatchingthem on useless missions to dead-end streets. Tomás had been especially fond of singling out an individual soldier, using his radio code name, and berating him for showing such disrespect to his neighbors.Kurt’s approach had always been more brash and mean spirited, threatening troops from nonexistent sniper positions, and pulling other pranks that Tomás found to be unnecessarily dangerous.

  On October 11, 1987, the fun turned to fear in a single one-minute broadcast.

  It had been Tomás’s idea. As the owner of a commu
nications company,he’d always been the technical genius of the group. One day while he was diddling with his radio dial, he discovered a weak signal that seemed to be carrying the same words and music as Radio Nacional,the powerful nationwide FM station. But this signal was a weak low-band broadcast. It took him only a few seconds to figure it out, and the discovery nearly made him dizzy: he’d stumbled on the radiolink to the repeater station.

  In an area as mountainous as Panama, effective transmission requiredantennas positioned on the highest ground. It was impractical, however, to locate studios on mountaintops, so the stations themselves beamed low-band transmissions only as far as the mountaintop, where the signal was boosted and beamed to the rest of the world on a stronger signal and better frequency. It’s a technology used all over the world, and in that moment, an idea bloomed that was so brilliant in its simplicitythat he was shocked that it hadn’t occurred to him before.

  Tomás could still remember the look of excitement on his friends’ faces as he detailed his plan. The linking frequency was so weak, he explained,that it could easily be overpowered by a cheap transmitter easilyprocured in Miami. By overpowering the link, they could hijack Radio Nacional’s 50,000-watt transmission, and the government would be powerless to stop them. The only defense would be to take the stationoff the air completely.

  La Voz del la Libertad was about to be born.

  The first hurdle was obtaining the transmitter. Unlicensed radio equipment was illegal in Panama. Period. And no radio licenses were issued to anyone but Noriega cronies. To be caught with transmitters—even the portable radios or the scanners that had by that time become permanent fixtures in the conspirators’ lives—was to experience the business end of a rubber hose on your naked flesh. None of them flinched at the risk. They were neck deep as it was, after all, and the prize was a valuable one.

  Surprisingly, the most difficult hurdle was bureaucratic, not technical.That low-band linking transmission turned out to be a violation of international law. It utilized a frequency that had been set aside for use by Costa Rican fishing vessels, and as such the Miami radio wholesaler wouldn’t issue the chips to anyone who was not a Costa Rican fisherman.