Under Siege (28 page)

Eventually the steam from the Chevy’s tired engine subsided. Water from bottles in the trunk was added, the WOM-Out radiator cap was replaced and carefully wired down, then Santana got behind the wheel and cranked the engine. It caught. For Santana’s benefit, Yocke raised his hands in thanksgiving, then took his place amid the chicken dung.

In late afternoon the radiator failed catastrophically. Clouds of steam billowed from around the hood.

They pushed the car off the road, into the cane, and took what they could carry from the car. Yocke had to have the

computer. He took the toothbrush and razor from the vinyl bag and put them in his pockets. His passport and money were already in his pocket. He changed shirts and socks. The rest of it he left.

As Yocke stood on the road beside the car waiting for the others, another army truck approached. A young woman sat on the left front fender facing forward with her blouse open breast-feeding a baby, her long, dark hair streaming gently in the shifting air currents. Her attention was concentrated on the child. She appeared golden in the evening sunlight. Yocke stood transfixed until the truck was far up the road and the young madonna no longer visible.

His companions were already walking westward with the throng. Jack Yocke eased the strap of the computer on his shoulder and set off after them.

At dusk, with the sunset still glowing ahead of them, they came to a burned-out Soviet-made armored personnel carrier-APC’-SITTING fifty feet or so off the road in a drainage ditch. Jack Yocke walked over to look. where A missile had punched a neat hole in the side armor; Ir explosion and fire had done the rest. Burned, mutilated bodies lay everywhere, perhaps a dozen. Several reasonably intact bodies lay on the side of the ditch. These men had been shot by someone who had gotten behind them. The holes in their backs were neat and precise. Very military. The bodies had begun to bloat, stretching the clothing on the corpses drum-head tight.

One of the men was very young, just a boy really. He had been dead a while, perhaps since this morning. Flies crawled around his mouth and eyes and cars. A shift in the breeze gave Yocke a full dose of the stench.

He staggered out of the ditch retching.

Santana and the young woman were waiting for him. Together they rejoined the human river flowing westward in the gathering dusk.

They reached the outskirts of Havana about nine p.m.

The streets were packed. People everywhere. Water could he had but no food. Those who had poultry or the carcasses of dogs built a fire out of anything that would burn and

them. The smoke wafted through the streets and between the buildings: the shadows it cast under the flickering tilde streetlights played wildly over the crowd. Some people were drunk, shouting and singing and scuffling. Government warehouses had been looted earlier in the afternoon, Santana learned, but the food had been eaten by those who carried it off. Mafiana, tomorrow, the Yankees would send food. That was the rumor, oft-repeated, as hungry children wailed endlessly.

Castro was being held by the revolutionary committee, according to the radios, which were being played at maximum volume from every window. Fidel and his brother and the top government officials would be shot tomorrow in the Plaza de Revolution. Viva Cuba! Cuba Libre!

People stretched out in the street to sleep. Whole families. The crowd swirled and eddied and flowed around them, flowed toward the center of the city and the government offices around the Plaza de Revolution. Yocke followed Hector Santana and his sister.

The American was exhausted. The endless walking, the lack of sleep and food-these things had taken their toll. He wanted to slump down on the first vacant stretch. of pavement he came to and sleep forever.

On he trudged, following Santana, following the crowd through the smoke and noise and dim lights.

When he reached the plaza he stopped and gaped. It was huge, covering several acres, and was packed with people. There wasn’t room to lie down. People stood shoulder to shoulder, more people in one place than Jack Yocke had ever seen in his lifetime. The crowd was alive, buzzing endlessly with thousands of conversations. As he stood and looked in awe, chants broke out. “Cuba, Cuba, Cuba,” over and over, growing as tens of thousands of voices picked it up. The sound had a low, pulsating thud to it that seemed to make the building walls shake.

Then Yocke realized he had lost Santana. He didn’t care. He had to sleep. He turned and retraced his steps, away from the plaza. Several blocks away he found an alley. It was full of sleeping

He felt his way in, found a spot, and lay down. The wasn’t as loiad here, two blocks from the square, it was clear, distinctive, sublime. “Cuba, Cuba,” repeated endlessly, like a religious chant.

Jack Yocke drifted into sleep thinking about dead soldiers and madonnas on army trucks and listening to that relentless sound.

They shot Castro around ten o’clock the next morning. He was shot first. The dictator was led out onto the platform where he had harangued his fellow countrymen for thirty-one years. Behind him were arrayed his lieutenants. All had their hands tied in front of them.

Yocke listened as a speaker read the charges over a microphone that blasted his voice to every corner of the square. Yocke understood little of it, not that it mattered. He elbowed and shoved and fought his way through the crowd, trying to get closer.

Ten men and women were selected from the crowd and allowed to climb up to the platform. Castro was led to a wall and faced around at the volunteers, who were linup and given assauh rifles by soldiers who stood beside them.

The speaker was still reading when someone opened fire. Three or four shots, ripping out. Castro went down.

He was assisted to his feet. The speaker stopped talking. Someone shouted an order and all ten rifles fired raggedly.

The dictator toppled and lay still.

The soldiers took back their rifles and the members of the firing squad were sent back into the crowd. More leaped forward, too many. Ten men and women were selected and the rest herded back, forcibly, as three of the dictator’s comrades were led over to stand beside his body. A jagged fusillade felled all three. The scene was repeated four more times. Then a man with a pistol walked along and fired a bullet downward into each head. After six shots he had to stop and reload. Then six more. And finally four more.

“Viva Cuba! Viva Cuba! Viva Cuba!”

For the first time since the drama began, the reporter tore his gaze from the platform and looked at the faces of the ‘p around him. They were weeping. Men, women, children-on every face were tears. Whether they were weeping for what they had lost or what they bad gained, Jack Yocke didn’t know.

About-two that afternoon he was wandering along a mile or so from the square, by the front of a large luxury hotel on a decently wide street that had obviously been built in the bad old days Before Fidel-when he heard his name called.

“Jack Yocke! Hey, Jack-I Up here!”

He elevated his gaze. On a third-floor balcony, gesturing madly, stood Ottmar Mergenthaler. “Jesus Christ, JacLike” Where the hell you been?”

Three hours into his first day as a junior-very juniorweenie on the Joint Staff of the JCS, Lieutenant Toad Tarkington was wondering if perhaps Captain Grafton hadn’t been right. Maybe he should have asked to have his shore tour cut short and gone back to sea. Sitting at a borrowed desk in an anonymous room without windows deep in the Pentagon, Toad was working his way through a giant hardbound manual of rules and regulations that he was supposed to be reading carefully, embedding permanently in the gray matter. He glanced surreptitiously around the large office to see if there was a single other 0-3 in sight.

He was going to be the coffee and paperclips guy. He knew

in his bones. Rumor had it there were other peasants with

tracks on the staff, although he hadn’t yet seen a live

At the next desk over a female navy lieutenant commander was giving him the eye. Uh-oh! He turned the page he had been praying over for five minutes and examined the title of the next directive in the book. Something about uniforms, shiny shoes, and all that. He initialed it in the stamped box provided, sneaked a glance at the lieutenant commandershe was still looking-and pretended to read.

Without moving his head he checked his watch. Ten thirty-two. Oh, my God! He would be dead of boredom by lunchtime. If his heart stopped right now he would not fall over, he would just remain frozen here staring at this page until his uniform rotted off or they decided to buy new desks and move this one out. Maybe some of these other people sitting here at the other twenty-seven desks were already dead and nobody knew. Perhaps he should get a mirror and check all the bodies for sips of respiration. Maybe-the telephone buzzed softly. His first call!

He grabbed it and almost fumbled the receiver onto the floor. “Lieutenant Tarkington, sir.”

“Is this Robert Tarkington?” A woman’s voice. “Yes it is.”

“Mr. Tarkington, this is Nurse Hilda Hambocker, at the Center for Disease Control?”

He glanced around to see if anyone was eavesdropping. Not noticeably so, anyway. “Yes.””

“I’m calling to ask if you have known a woman named Rita Moravia?”

“Let’s see. Rita Moravia … a short, squatty woman with a Marine Corps tattoo and a big wart right on the end of her nose? I do believe I know her, yes.”

“I mean, have you known her? In the biblical sense, Mr. Tarkington. You see, she’s one of our clients and has given your name as an “intimate” partner.”

T lieutenant commander was all ears, surveying him from beneath a droopy bang.

-ea”…That list of partners is modestly short, I trust.” Oh, no. Tragically long, Mr. Tarkington. Voluminous. Like the Manhattan telephone directory. We’ve been calling three months and we’re only now getting to the Ts.”

“Yes. I have known her, Nurse Hamhocker.”

“Would you like to know Miss Moravia again, Mr. Tarkington?”

“Well, comyes, this very minute would be just perfect. Right here on my clean borrowed desk while everyone watches. But you see, the dear little diseased squatty person is never around. Not ever!”

“Oh, my poor, poor Horny Toad. It’s that bad, is it?”

“Yes, Rita, it’s that bad. Are you ever coming home?”

“Christmas leave starts in a week, lover. I’ll be coming into National on United.” She gave him the flight number and time. “Meet me, will you?”

“Plan on getting known again in the parking lot.”

“If you’ll make that a backseat, I’ll say yes.”

“Okay, the backseat.”

“I’ll hold you to that, Toad. “Bye.”

“‘Bye, babe.” He cradled the instrument and took a deep breath.

The lieutenant commander arched an eyebrow and raked her errant bang back into place. Then she concentrated on the document on the desk in front of her.

Toad took another deep breath, sighed, and resumed his study of the read-and-initial book. Ten minutes later he found a memo that he read with dismay. “Staff is reminded,” the document said-rather too officially and formally for Toad’s taste-“that classified information shall not be discussed over unsecured telephones. [Numerous cites.] To ensure compliance with this regulation, all telephones in the staff spaces are continuously monitored while in use and the conversations taped by the communications security group.”

“Stepped in it again, Toad-man,” he muttered.

His stupor had returned and was threatening to become terminal ennui when Captain Jake Grafton entered the room, scanned it once, and headed in Toad’s direction. Toad

as the captain walked over and pulled a chair around. As usual, both officers wore their blue uniforms. But, Toad ced with a pang, the two gold stripes around each of his sleeves contrasted sharply with the four on each of the captain’s.

“Sit, for heaven’s sake. If you pop up every time a senior officer comes around in this place, you’ll wear out your shoes.”

“Yessir.” Toad put his bottom back into his chair. “Howzit going”?”

“Just about finished the read-and-initial book.” Toad sighed. “What do you do around here, anyway?”

“I’m not sure. Seems to change every other week. Right now I’m doing analyses of countemarcotics operations from information sent over by the FBI and DEA. What can the military do to help and how much will it cost? That kind of thing. Keeps me jumping.”

“Sounds sexy.”

“Today it is. And it has absolutely nothing to do with training troops and aircrews or sustaining combat readiness.”

“Exciting, too, eh?” Jake Grafton gave Tarkington a skeptical look.

“Well, at least we’re pentaguys,” Toad said earnestly, “ready to help chart the future of mankind, along with a thousand or so equally dedicated and talented Joint Staff souls. Makes me tingle.”

“Pentaguys?”

“I just made that up. Like it?” The lieutenant’s innocent face broke into a grin, which caused his cheeks to dimple and exposed a set of perfect teeth. Deep creases radiated from the corners of his eyes. The captain grinned back. He had known Tarkington for several yearv, one of Toad’s most endearing qualities was his absolute refusal to take anything seriously. This trait, the captain well knew, was rare among career officers, who learned early on that literally everything was very important. In the highly competitive world of the peacetime military, an officer’s ranking among his peers might turn on something as trivial as how often he got a haircut, how he handled himself at social functions, the neatness of his handwriting. For lack of a neat signature a fitness report was a notch lower “than it might have been, so a choice assignment went to someone else, a promotion didn’t materialize…. There was an acronym popular now in the Navy that seemed to Jake to perfectly capture the insanity of the system: WETSU comWe Eat This Shit Up. One battleship captain that Jake knew had even adopted WETSU as the ship’s motto.

Toad Tarkington seemed oblivious to the rat race going on around him. One day it would probably dawn on him that he was a rodent in the maze with everyone else, but that realization hadn’t hit him yet. Jake fervently hoped it never would.