Six Minutes To Freedom (5 page)

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Authors: John Gilstrap,Kurt Muse

BOOK: Six Minutes To Freedom
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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 communications 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.
Enter Kurt and his family’s printing business. Overnight, Tomás and friends printed themselves purchase orders for a fictitious Costa Rican fishing company. Using a credit card and the purchase order, they mailed a request for their chips to be delivered to Annie’s APO address on Albrook Air Force Station.
By early October, they were ready to go. At least they thought they were. Truthfully, even Tomás wondered if he hadn’t forgotten something.Surely it couldn’t be so simple to hijack a nation’s national voice. They needed to test their theory.
Using Kimberly Muse’s boom box without her permission, Tomás walked down the street from Kurt’s house, listening to Radio Nacional’snormal broadcast of news and music, while Kurt pointed their new toy toward the repeater tower in the distant hills. At a specific time, Kurt keyed the mike on his transmitter, and for just a couple of seconds, Radio Nacional was off the air.
“Holy shit,” Kurt exclaimed when Tomás returned to the terrace. “This actually works. We own the airwaves.”
Tomás grinned, as if to say, “Of course.”
With the feasibility established, they now needed a date and a text. For all they knew, this one broadcast would be their only shot, and they wanted to get it right. They wanted the biggest audience possible, and that fact alone made selecting the date an easy task.
On October 11, Loyalty Day, Noriega would swagger into a baseballstadium packed with citizens and brag about his power and accomplishments before a crowd who had no choice but to cheer. The speech would be broadcast live throughout the country. The audience couldn’t possibly get any bigger than that.
But what would they say? It had to be something good, something that would capture the hearts and minds of the people and cause them to cast Noriega and his henchmen out of office in the next election, some nineteen months in the future. Tomás had ceded the words to Kurt. He was the one with the fleetest tongue, the one who knew how to stitch flowery sentences together. When he was done, the message was a thing of beauty.
Finally, they needed a voice. Kurt tried a couple of takes himself, speaking into the microphone of a small cassette recorder, but he could never get the timbre of his voice the way he wanted it. It had sounded okay to Tomás, but Kurt was a perfectionist on these things, and he was determined to make a recording that sounded professional, while at the same time disguising his voice enough so that he would not be instantly recognized by all of his friends and acquaintances.
Kurt had tried recording under a towel and blanket, hoping to get the reverb in the signal that would make it sound professional, but all he got was a muffled mess. Ditto his attempts to record through a handkerchief. There had to be another way. There had to be a trusted friend with the kind of voice they needed.
They turned to a friend from the Rotary Club, Enrique Fernandez. Enrique was an outspoken opponent of the Noriega regime, and he came from a long line of prominent Panama City residents. He even had a background in radio, as Kurt recalled, with the kind of hypnotic baritone voice to which people loved to listen.
The very nature of a conspiracy such as theirs required that the deepest secrets sometimes be shared. None of them liked it, but all of them agreed that the voice on the tape had to command respect. Tomás and Kurt both shared concerns about Enrique’s trollop of a wife, but what she didn’t know could never hurt them. Besides, if Enrique agreed to put his voice on the tape, neither he nor Betty would be inclined to point any fingers.
Enrique recorded. It was perfect.
When Loyalty Day dawned, Kurt, Tomás, and Jorge gathered in the apartment owned by Tomás’s mother—among them all, the apartment with the clearest view of the mountaintop repeater tower—and they waited for the moment to arrive. As with any major speech, even the U.S. president’s State of the Union address, pregame coverage preceded the address, with commentators saying all the right things. Finally, the moment arrived.
The conspirators waited, all of them panting. Tomás remembered it as the most stressful moment of his life. Timing was important here. If they went too early, the government would merely shut down the radiostation, and all the effort would have been for naught. So they waited, listening as Noriega glad-handed his way up to the podium.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the anouncer said, finally, “I now present to you our esteemed leader and commander-in-chief of our glorious armed forces, General Manuel Antonio Noriega.” The stands erupted in cheers and applause, and Kurt reached for the button.
“Not yet,” Tomás had urged. “Wait till the noise dies down. Wait till he starts speaking.”
Like all politicians everywhere, Noriega took his time absorbing the adulation, smiling and waving to people in the crowd. He waved his hand for silence, but of course silence takes time when a crowd is whipped to a frenzy.
At last, the baseball stadium grew quiet. Noriega took a breath. “Thank you fellow citizens ...”
“Now!” Tomás said, and Kurt pushed the transmit button.
All over the nation, millions of citizens heard a soothing baritone voice intone, “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a message of hope from the free and democratic people of Panama. Our date with destiny approaches. One day we will finally have an opportunity to cast our vote against the tyranny of General Noriega’s dictatorship. It is up to you, and it will not be easy. You know the many tools that the oppressors have to keep us from the polling places. We beseech you to be brave, to persevere. We beseech you to vote. Together we can bury General Noriega’s dictatorship under a mountain of ballots.
“Workers, students, professionals, soldiers, housewives, unite! Cast your vote to end the dictatorship. Be courageous. Do not fear them. Remember that we are millions and they are but a few thousand thugs. The end of their dictatorship is near! Together we can run them out!
“The free and democractic people of Panama now return this radio station to its broadcast of oppression.”
When the broadcast was over, it was as if no one in the spacious apartment could breathe. On the radio once again, the Pineapple continuedto drone on, unaware of the sedition he had just endured.
The next day, the hunt would begin, and within a month, La Voz de la Libertad would be interrupting morning and evening drive-time radio. There was no turning back.
Sitting now in his living room, with Jorge at his side, Tomás rememberedthe fear in his gut from Loyalty Day. It had returned. They had been betrayed. The others could talk of hope and doubt, but in his heart, Tomás knew that it could be no other way. If Kurt were free, he would have called; if he’d been in an auto accident on his way home from the airport, Tomás would have seen it along the roadside. Arrest was the only reasonable explanation of his continued absence.
When the phone rang, Tomás knew that the end had come. Whateverfleeting traces of hope remained in his heart evaporated when he heard Annie’s voice on the other end. She knew little more than he did, it turned out, but she knew for a fact that Kurt had been arrested. Beyondthat, the rest was more or less academic. Annie spoke hurriedly yet clearly and was off the phone in a minute or two, promising to call back when she had a chance. In the meantime, if Tomás or the others needed anything, Annie gave him her number in West Palm.
Tomás closed his eyes when he heard the click of the receiver, takinga moment to gather himself. When he opened them again, Jorge and Helena were staring at him expectantly. Tomás wanted to say something profound, but his voice wouldn’t work. He pulled Helena into his arms and nodded to his friend.
Jorge looked stunned as he brought his portable radio to his lips and keyed the mike.
In five homes, scattered throughout the city, men who’d pledged their lives to a cause jumped when their receivers broke squelch. They prayed individually for news that would make them all sigh with relief.
Instead, it was Jorge’s leaden voice delivering the message that they hoped they’d never hear: “Shopette, shopette, shopette.”
 
Across town, Pablo Martinez jerked awake with a start, his sleep shatteredby the sound of footsteps running down the hall of his apartment.Before he had time to put the pieces together, his bedroom door crashed open, revealing the disheveled and unnerved silhouette of his twenty-seven-year-old son, Antonio. The young man was wide-eyed and breathless.
“The DENI arrested Kurt Muse,” Antonio blurted. “Jorge just broadcast ‘shopette’ on the radio. We have to go. Pack your things.” Just as quickly as he’d arrived, Antonio was gone, back down the hallwayto his own room.
Next to him in his bed, Pablo’s wife, Victoria, sat bolt upright. “What is he talking about? Why was Kurt arrested? Why is Antonio so upset?”

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