Havana (13 page)

The sergeant laid his ambush well. He was not without experience, having fought in Argentina, Peru, Colombia and the Dominican Republic at different times in his career, in some cases escaping just ahead of the firing squad. But that was another story.

He did not select the first, or even the second, bend in the road that ran down Ciego de Avila province, about five miles inland from the sea, in the sudden burst of mangrove swamps. He knew that if his target had any security, security would be at its highest at that first bend, and again at the second bend. By the third bend, they would have settled down and grown used to the closeness of the trees, the sudden sense of impinging jungle after so long on sparse scrublands where cattle fed randomly.

He also needed two trees, unusually tall for the vegetation.

One tree was not enough.

It was a question of timing. The car had to slow to round the bend, and as it cleared the turn, but before it began to accelerate, the first tree had to be downed. It would take any driver three seconds to respond. By the time he had braked, and begun to turn around, or back up if he were clever, the second tree would come down, trapping the vehicle.

That's when his gunners would fire. He had three Thompsons, each with a fifty-round drum, and it was important that all three fire at once and that they lay down continuous fire. The car had to be still. He did not think these men were well enough trained to efficiently engage a moving target, even with the fast-firing Thompsons. He wanted the guns blazing for a good three to five seconds. He wanted the Cadillac ripped by three machine guns. Then he himself, on the other side of the road where the car would almost certainly stop, would raise up and quickly close the distance from the other side. He would pull his Star 9mm from his holster, advance to the automobile, and quickly fire a head shot into each of the four men, living or dead. Then it was only a matter of pulling their own automobile out and heading toward Cabanas Los Pinos, where a boat awaited them with their money aboard and orders to sail to Florida.

The sergeant was pleased. He had five good men besides himself. The innards of the two chickens he had slain last night had revealed by the sacred laws of
Santeria
that prospects were excellent. He had prayed hard to Odudua, mistress of the darkness of that blend of Bantu religion and Catholicism, and knew that she favored him, for she favored all killers. Her mission was to harvest their bounty and take it with her across the river to her dark land. The blood of the chickens, their squawking as their guts were pulled living from them, merely excited her.

The sergeant found his two trees without difficulty, an exceedingly good omen. He had examined the cuts his men had made in the trees and saw that the trunks had been expertly brought to the brink of collapse and one or two more ax strokes would deposit them exactly where he wanted them. The men with the Thompson guns knew how to shoot them well enough. He knew his Star intimately, and knew it would not fail him.

He checked his watch. It was nearly six; he knew the time was close but that he had a good hour before sundown.

“Sergeanto,” came an excited cry from the man who'd just come sprinting around the bend, “I can see the big black car with the American flags on its fenders.”

“Be ready, my boys. It is time and then we will be gone from this godforsaken country.”

The men scattered to find their positions.

 

“My, my, my, my,” said the congressman, “at last we git to look at something
different.
Not better, mind you, but
different.
Trees, or what they might call trees in some primitive place like Mississippi or Alabama.”

“Yes, sir, Harry,” agreed Lane Brodgins. “That flat land was damned boring. Like Kansas, only no damned cowboys or Indians to make it interesting.”

“Lane, I ever tell you 'bout the time Joe Phillips of Montana's 13th and I got in a hell of a row over a navy typewriter reconditioning installation I had all sewn up for Fort Smith, but he had his heart set on setting up somewhere way the Sam Hill out there?”

“No, sir, don't believe you did,” said poor Lane, whose capacity for eating Boss Harry's shit was beyond legendary and near to entering mythical.

“Well, I don't know how that fella got it in his mind the United States Navy needed to fix up its old typewriters way out yonder in the purple west. But I decided…”

Earl tried to close it out and concentrate. He saw the low dark trees suddenly rising up to swallow the Cadillac and nudged his elbow into Pepe's subtly, then with his hand pressing flatly downward signaled the driver to slow down.

“We slowing down, Pepe?” asked Boss Harry.

“Señor, I think is a curve coming up.”

“Let's just take it easy through here,” said Earl. He knew that nothing would happen on a road so straight and open that you could see a man three-hundred yards ahead and there wasn't a stick of cover anywhere. He supposed a sniper could take a long shot but doubted if anybody down here had that skill. He also worried about a mine or a command-detonated bomb of some sort, but again, nothing in Cuba had communicated the possibility of that kind of sophistication.

Darkness didn't swallow them, but it did grip them, as suddenly the trees, though rarely higher than a man, clustered close to the road, and through them, he could see pools of standing water, knotty clusters of tropical vegetation, the occasional bright flare of jungle blossom, the flutter and slither of pink shapes indicating the presence, here as elsewhere close to the sea, of pelicans.

The car slowed as Pepe negotiated the first bend, got around it, and saw a mile of straight road ahead before the road disappeared in blackness.

“You can speed up now, Pepe,” said Lane. “We want to git there before dark. This here has been a long damned sit.”

“Didn't know your goddamned island was so big,” said Boss Harry. “I had the idea it was a little old place, and there wouldn't be so many miles between bars and women.”

“In Guantanamo City, señor, is plenty bars and women, I tell you that.”

“Now
that's
the kind of spirit I like!” said Harry. “I'm going to need a refresher pretty damned soon, and I don't mean no Coca-Cola!”

 

Speshnev had a car and a machine gun. The former he stole, the latter he rented. It took the last of his casino earnings, but he managed, rather quickly, to bribe an NKVD security goon assigned to a Russian freighter moored in the harbor to sneak into the strong room and remove one PPsH submachine gun, and one drum—seventy-one rounds—of 7.63mm ammunition. It was to be returned within twenty-four hours or the goon would come looking for Speshnev. The goon was a former Black Sea Marine, reportedly the toughest of the tough, so Speshnev had no desire to disappoint him. Now the gun lay across the seat awkwardly, its drum precluding easy stowage and causing it to roll about as he accelerated through the gears. Speshnev also had a direction and a route. A source in the American embassy had told the unctuous Pashin that the schedule had the congressman heading north to Guantanamo today, leaving at 9
A.M.
With stops for lunch, they should pull in by eight in the evening, time enough for a night of carousing in the low dives of Guantanamo City.

He drove madly, following the big road through Matanzas, Cienfuegos and Villa Clara provinces, honking rudely at lorries, careening around buses, fighting the traffic desperately. Around Sancti Spiritus, the traffic lessened, with the majority of it siphoning off toward the south, toward Santiago. But he knew the Americans would cling to the upper road along the Caribbean coast, through Ciego de Avila and Camaguey, then on to Las Tunas and Holguin, that way avoiding the mess around Santiago. Effectively bypassing it—a faster way, though longer—they would then head south, and veer directly toward Guantanamo. He hoped that the Americans would stop for a nice lunch, would poke about here and there, and wouldn't press on.

Americans are lazy, he told himself. They are addicted to comfort. They're stupid. They're—

But he realized that Swagger wouldn't be stupid. He roared ahead.

The damned gun rolled to the left as the car accelerated, down empty roads, surrounded by arid meadows where here and there a cow grazed.

 

“Why are we slowing down?”

“I need to check some things,” said Earl.

“What, Earl,” said Brodgins. “We've still got a far piece to travel. The congressman is hot and tired.”

Earl didn't say a word. He had commanded Pepe to stop and ahead he saw that the road took an aggressive left-hand crank, which mandated another slowdown, almost to a crawl. Something about it bothered him. So now he climbed from the front seat, hung himself over the open door, and just looked. What he was looking for was—well, he couldn't put a name to it. They had eased through two natural ambush sites without a problem, and according to the map would soon enough be beyond the swamps, and then could take their southern turn and head down to Gitmo.

But he was looking for something: some anomaly, some clue that things weren't as they should be. His eyes scanned, and what he saw was only dusty road disappearing as it bent to the left, low trees on each side, no movement, no wind, nothing at all. It was ungodly hot, and mosquitoes hummed around him, as the sweat crested to his skin and broke free.

“Aren't you being a little melodramatic here, Earl,” Brodgins called from inside the car, where the air conditioning still pumped out cold, stale air. “Sir, can't you just tell him to get us there? This ain't easy on any of us.”

“Earl, do you see something?” the congressman called. “Is that it? Lane, old Earl, he does have pretty good instincts for this sort of thing, I think you'd agree.”

“Yes, sir, but sometimes these folks get an exaggerated sense of their importance.”

Earl ducked back inside the car.

“All right,” he said, bending forward. “Let's go. But Pepe, when you git around that corner, I want you to punch it. I don't like the fact that we'll be slowing down.”

“Earl,” said Brodgins, “we are
stopped
now. So what is the big deal about
slowing down
a hundred yards ahead? You have to be consistent in this. It has to make some sense.”

“Well, Mr. Brodgins,” said Earl, “we are stopped of our own volition. No one could anticipate us stopping here. But when we reach that curve, any idiot could see that's a place where we
have
to slow down. That's the difference.”

“Think Earl scored a point on you there, Lane,” said Harry, merrily. “Earl, you take your time. Just let's get us through this, so we can head on.”

“Yes, sir,” said Earl. He turned to Pepe. “You have to slow down, as I say, but once you're clear and you have open road, you punch it, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said the driver.

Speshnev saw before he heard. What he saw was dust, hanging above the trees, like a squall of smoke. Immediately as that perception dawned on him, he jammed his brakes on, stopping fast, skewing to one side.

Then the gunfire broke out.

He heard automatic weapons, a group of them, all ripping away simultaneously. They fired and they struck automobile, for in each percussion came the reverberant
whang!
of a high-speed missile hitting metal hard.

Speshnev knew the action was all taking place just a few hundred yards ahead, right beyond the bend in the road.

He prayed he wasn't too late. He leaned over, seized the PPsH machine gun with its absurdly swollen drum, pulled it out.

They were still shooting as he began to move through the trees, toward the site of the ambush.

 

The car slowly picked its way around the bend. Ahead lay nothing but straight road.

“Is okay, señor,” said Pepe.

“Is fine, Pepe,” said Lane Brodgins. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

Pepe's foot went to caress the gas pedal but exactly in that moment Earl jabbed his foot over and crushed the brake to the floor.

“BACK!” he commanded and possibly there was a moment, even two, of ridiculous silence, as a sense of unreal confusion filled the automobile, the bodyguard ripping at the gear shift to find reverse, the driver stunned by his sudden action, trying to respond, the two men in back themselves stunned, aware that something unplanned and unwanted was happening, unsure entirely about the bodyguard's sudden speed of movement. Then the windshield shattered into a quicksilver smear of webbing and punctures as glass bits spewed at painful velocity into the car, and the interior was suddenly full of the presence of alien things among them, hard and cruel and without interest in them except as targets. The car shuddered as gunfire thudded against it, and the sound of metal banging loud arrived in the same second, to overload all senses and drive them toward stupefaction. A bullet struck Pepe in the head, like a fastball, and the sound of that—missile striking and tearing into bone—filled the car with horror, accompanied by the pink steam that blew outward from the horrible wound and the instant sense of destruction as the ruined head slid forward.