Under Siege

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jack Yocke was pecking randomly and morosely on his computer keyboard when Ott Mergenthaler walked by, then sat on the edge of the desk as he played with a piece of paper. “I read your story,” Ott said, “on the Jane Wilkens murder over in the Jefferson projects.”

“Umph.”

“It’s good, real good.”

“They aren’t going to run it now. Going to save it for some Sunday when they need some filler. If they run it at all.”

“It’s still a good story.”

“Too many murder stories are bad for a paper, y’know? The matrons in Bethesda don’t want to read that crap. The White House and political reporters take all the space anyhow. What could possibly be more important than Senator Horsebutt’s carefully staffed and massaged opinion about what the Soviets ought to do to qualify for American foreign aid?”

“So what are you working on today?”

“Oh, just trying to get someone in the police or the DEA or the FBI or the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to say that there is a connection between the Harrington murder — he was the cashier at Second Potomac S and L — and the Judson Lincoln murder. Lincoln ran a chain of check-cashing outlets here in the metro area. Apparently they’ve just been sold to some outfit nobody ever heard of.”

“What makes you think the killings are connected?”

“The men were shot about four hours apart, apparently by professionals. Both were in finance. Harrington, at least, was laundering money for someone. Coincidence, maybe, but I got this feeling.”

“What do the pros say?”

“They aren’t saying anything. Absolutely nothing. They just listen and grunt ‘no comment.’ ”

“So what else is new?”

“The world just keeps on turning.”

“That’s page one news.”

“This rag needs some real reporters. Not blood-and-guts guys like me, but some dirt sniffers who will get the real news, like who Senator Horsebutt is fucking on Tuesday nights and an opinion from his doctor on how he manages. Perhaps a think-piece listing the names and vital statistics and track records of all of America’s top bimbos. Why are we scribbling stories about problems at the sewage farm when we could be picking on rich and famous assholes and selling a lot more papers?”

“Lighten up. And quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

“I’m maudlin, I know.” Yocke stretched and grinned. “But self-pity soothes a tortured soul, Ott. You ought to try it sometime.”

“I gave it up when I quit smoking.”

“What windmill are you tilting at today?”

“I don’t see my columns quite that way, Sancho. My literary efforts, short and sweet as they are, are really the beating heart of this newspaper that you so irreverently called a rag, the newspaper that pays your generous and unearned salary, by the way.”

Ott hoisted his cheeks off the desk. He tossed the paper he was holding in Yocke’s lap and walked away. Yocke unfolded it. On the sheet was Ott Mergenthaler’s column for tomorrow’s paper, printed in three columns.

Unnamed sources in the Justice Department were quoted as saying that the evidence against Chano Aldana was weak. An acquittal was a definite possibility. Ott chided, gently and eruditely, as was his style, the prosecutors and Justice Department officials who had induced a grand jury to indict on weak, hearsay evidence. He also carved off a polite piece of the administration officials who had moved heaven and earth to extradite a man from Colombia that they probably couldn’t convict.

Yocke refolded the paper and tossed it on top of one of his piles.

Mergenthaler’s column in the Post the following morning should have caused a two-kiloton explosion in William C. Dorfman’s office, but amazingly, no one on the White House staff saw it that morning. No staffer had time to read anything in the newspaper until early afternoon, because at seven a.m. a thunderbolt arrived from Havana: another Cuban revolution was in full swing.

The evening before in Havana army troops had fired upon a mass rally of over forty thousand people protesting the government’s food rationing policies. Some reports said over a hundred people had been killed and several hundred wounded: the casualty figures varied wildly from source to source. This morning half the army was locked in combat with troops loyal to Castro. A group of students had seized Radio Havana and were proclaiming a democracy.

The Washington Post staff, with better sources than the White House or the State Department, knew about the revolution at six-thirty a.m., only an hour after the students went on Radio Havana chanting, “Comunismo está muerto.” Communism is dead.

Jack Yocke heard the news at eight-oh-five at police headquarters. He charged out of the building and headed for the Post.

Breaking into a conference of editors in the newsroom, he blurted, “I speak Spanish.” None of the editors discussing how to cover the Cuba story seemed to hear him. He danced from foot to foot. This was his break, the one he had been waiting for. He knew!

He scurried off to find Ottmar Mergenthaler. The columnist was not at his desk. There he was, coming out of Bradlee’s office. Yocke intercepted him.

“Ott, I got to talk to you. You gotta help me. I gotta go to Cuba.”

“Sure, Jack. Sure.”

“I speak Spanish. I’ve been taking a class. You’re not listening, Ott! I write good blood-and-guts. Great blood-and-guts. I’ve paid my dues covering cops. I deserve a shot. Ott, you ancient idiot, I speak Spanish!”

“I’m listening, Jack. But I just write columns around here.”

“Be a pal. Go in and see Bradlee. Hell, call Donnie Graham if you have to. But get me to fucking Cuba!”

Mergenthaler stopped, took a deep breath, and rolled his eyes. Then he turned around and walked back toward Bradlee’s office. “Wait here, goddammit!” he growled when Yocke tagged along immediately behind him, threatening to step on his heels.

Ooooh boy, what a break this would be, Jack Yocke told himself as he waited. His big assets were that he was young, single, low salaried, and spoke Spanish … sort of. Callie Grafton would probably give him a C for his first semester. No reason to burden Ott or Bradlee with those trivial details, of course. As far as they were concerned he had no nervous family to bug the editors if he went and might even speak a little Spanish, like he claimed.

Every writer needs a war, at least one good one, to get famous in a hurry. You mix the blood and shit and booze together and anoint yourself and then, by God, you’re Ernest Hemingway.

There are just so damn few good wars anymore! A revolution in Cuba wouldn’t be a zinger like Korea or Vietnam, but Castro wouldn’t go quietly, without a fight. Whatever happened, it would be better than covering cops. Jack Yocke assured himself of that. He had the talent to make it something big if he got the chance.

Two minutes later Ott returned.

“Okay, Ben is going to talk to foreign. Better get your passport in case they decide to request a visa for you. But you’d be helping out the regulars. Remember that, Junior.”

Yocke grabbed the older man by his ears, pulled his head down and kissed him soundly on his tan, bald pate.

“Thanks, Ott,” Yocke called as he trotted away. “I owe you.”

That day Jack Yocke took the problems as they came. He encountered the first one when he got back to his apartment to throw some clothes in a bag.

What do you take to a revolution? Some underwear, sure. A suit and tie? Well, maybe. Why not? Tennis shoes would be good, some slacks and pullover shirts. Cuba’s in the tropics, right? But it might get chilly at night this time of year. Maybe a sweater or sweatshirt. Socks. He wadded all this stuff into a soft, fake-leather vinyl bag and tossed in a razor and toothbrush and toothpaste.

Cuba. In Latin America. Cuba’s bacteria have undoubtedly been recycled through fifty generations of immune natives and have probably grown virulent enough to disembowel a gringo, like the bacteria the Mexicans are so proud of. Yocke added all the antidiarrhea medicine in his bathroom to the bag.

His passport was in the top left drawer of his dresser, under the hankies. He didn’t bother packing any hankies.

With the encased laptop computer that he had signed for from the Post dangling from a strap over his shoulder and the fake-leather bag banging against his leg, he hailed a cab — hey, he was on the expense account — and rode with nervous anticipation back to the Post. He kept the cab waiting while he trotted into the building and rode up to the travel office.

Trying very hard to conceal his nervousness, he stood in line until he had his tickets and money. They were really going to let him go!

He didn’t feel safe until he was on his way to the airport. Then he sat back and grinned broadly. This was his chance! All the writing he had ever done had been mere preparation for this story. And he felt confident. He was ready.

After he had checked his bag at the ticket counter and gotten his seat assignment, Jack Yocke wandered into a newsstand and bought a carton of Marlboros. He took the cigarette packs out of the carton and stuffed them around the computer inside its case. Fortunately there was room. Then he went to the bar and watched the latest news on the Cable News Network.

While Yocke was sipping coffee from a paper cup, one of the CNN White House correspondents assured the audience that President Bush was closely monitoring the situation in Cuba.

That statement had been given out by the White House press flacks upon the order of William C. Dorfman.

Actually the President was at that very moment discussing with Dorfman and the chairman of the national Republican party a matter more weighty than a revolution in Cuba. The American people had recently elected a larger Democratic House and Senate majority, and two of the loyal Republican congressmen who would be unemployed in January wanted government jobs.

Dorfman suggested ambassadorships: he named several possible small nations in sub-Sahara Africa. The national chairman thought the two Republican legislators might prefer to be assistant secretaries of something or other. “Who the hell wants to go to equatorial Africa?”

The men in the Oval Office had their feet up and were in no hurry. Dorfman had canceled most of the President’s regular schedule today so he would have plenty of time to closely monitor the Cuban thing.

At noon the President went down to the White House situation room for a briefing. He was back at twelve-fifteen and when lunch was brought in turned on the television to see what the media were saying. Various loyal army units in the provinces had capitulated to mobs that had besieged their barracks shouting for food. Fidel Castro had appeared on Havana television — the show ran thirty seconds of poor-quality tape — and blamed the “riots” by “counterrevolutionaries” on Yankee imperialists. He announced that the traitors who had seized Radio Havana that morning had been captured and shot.

“There’s no organized opposition,” Bush informed his guests. “The lid just blew off.”

CNN then ran a story about several dozen major corporations buying up huge tracts in West Virginia to open landfills for the entire eastern seaboard’s garbage. The President watched while he ate a BLT on whole wheat with a double shot of mayo. The governor of West Virginia, a Democrat, was outraged, but the yokels in the legislature refused to forbid landfills or even regulate them. Apparently a lot of West Virginians thought their children and grandchildren wouldn’t mind living on top of New York City’s garbage and drinking the effluvia in their water so long as they got jobs driving the bulldozers.

“Makes you wonder about democracy, doesn’t it?” the national chairman muttered. “If the Russians and Cubans only knew.”

Bush finished off the last bite of the BLT and jabbed the remote control, turning off the television. He asked the national chairman what the Democrats thought about foreign aid to the Soviets.

They were deep into that subject when an aide motioned Dorfman from the room and showed him Mergenthaler’s column.

Dorfman ate three Rolaids as he read. When he finished he snapped, “Get Cohen on the phone,” and went to his office to take the call.

“I’m calling about Mergenthaler’s column, Gid.”

“What about it?” Cohen was equally brusque.

“Somebody over in your empire told him you guys can’t convict Aldana.”

“That’s somebody’s opinion. I don’t know whose. It isn’t mine.”

“You gonna call a press conference and deny it?”

“Deny what?”

Dorfman held the phone away from his ear and looked at it distastefully. If the man was as stupid as he sounded, he wasn’t qualified to prosecute a traffic ticket.

“Are you or are you not going to convict Chano Aldana?”

“I’m not a psychic.”

“You want me to tell the President that?”

“If the President wants to talk to me about the case against Aldana, I’ll be delighted to brief him. We have evidence. Mountains of it. We’re still sifting through it page by page. We think Aldana’s guilty and we’ll try to prove it.”

“The President will want you to say that in a press release.”

“Have you talked to him about it?”

“Not yet, but—”

“If the President wants a press release, we’ll do one. I don’t advise it. If we start issuing press releases to deny leaks we’re going to be as busy as the sorcerer’s apprentice. Call me back when you find out the President’s decision.” The attorney general hung up.

The President did want a press release. Dorfman had his youngest, most junior aide call the attorney general and deliver the message.

When Jack Yocke had collected his bag from the luggage carousel at Miami airport, he found a pay phone with a Miami telephone directory still attached. He looked up an address, then hailed a cab in front of the terminal.

2422 South Davis was smack in the middle of the Cuban section of town. The business signs were in Spanish. Latin rhythms floated from passing cars. Yocke paid the cab driver and stood on the sidewalk for a moment watching the passing swarms of humanity.

The storefronts looked Mexican. Maybe that’s what Cuba looks like, sort of Matamoros East without the tourists, whores, and sex shows.

The black lettering on the glass of the door between a dress store and what he took to be a laundry had been painted freehand by someone in a hurry. CUBA LIBRE, it said, like the rum drink. “Free Cuba.”

Jack Yocke opened the door and went inside. He walked along a hall, then began climbing a flight of stairs. The worn steps creaked as they took his weight. At the top of the stairs was another door, one with no glass. He tried the knob. It turned.

The small office was empty. Two closed doors against the back wall presumably led to offices that overlooked the back alley. He could hear people, men and women, arguing in Spanish behind one of the doors. Yocke took a seat and arranged his bag and computer on the chair beside him.

He crossed his legs and tried to figure out what the conversation was about. No soap. These people didn’t speak Spanish like Mrs. Grafton. They should have taken her course.

The phone rang. And rang. And rang, while the argument continued unabated.

It stopped, finally. Shortly thereafter a woman opened the door and started. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Jack Yocke. You the receptionist?”

“How long have you been sitting here?” She had a definite accent and her skin was a warm brown.

“Just a couple of minutes.” About fifteen, actually. “Your door was unlocked and … I hope you don’t mind.”

“We’re closed.”

A man came from the inside of the office and stood in the doorway looking at Yocke. “I don’t know him,” he told the woman. His accent was less pronounced than the woman’s, but noticeable. He was a slight man without a trace of excess flesh. His skin stretched tightly across his face; his eyes were deeply set.

Yocke took out his wallet and removed his press card. He handed it to the woman and smiled broadly. “Jack Yocke, Washington Post.”

The man snatched the card and looked at it incredulously. “You, reporter?”

“Yes. I—”

“Out! Take your card.” The man threw it at him. “Beat it! Scram! Right now, hombre.”

Yocke pocketed the card. He slowly arranged the strap of the computer case over his shoulder and hefted the vinyl bag. “Could I get your name for my story? I don’t know much Spanish, but I know bote and viaje por mar and a couple more words. I know that Santa Clara is a city in Cuba. And I can add two and two.”

“Tienes las orejas grandes y la mala lengua.”

“Yep. Big ears and a bad mouth. That’s me.”

They stared at him openmouthed. The phone started ringing again. They let it ring.

“What you want?” Back to English.

“Same as you. To go to Cuba.”

“Why?”

“I’m a reporter. They’re having a revolution.” Jack Yocke grinned.

The phone was still ringing. The man and woman looked at each other.

“No,” she said.

“Sí.” The man stood partially aside. “Come in.”

“Why don’t you answer your phone?”

“Reporters.” He spit out the word. “They have treated us as cracked pots — that is the words, no? — for years, ignored us, and now they drive us loco. ‘A story, now give us a story! Tell us of Cuba and Fidel.’ Now you want to spill on us some of the ink you use for your football and your stories of foolish rich men and silly women with the big tits, eh? Truly, señor, yours is a miserable profession.”

There were two other men in the room. Cubans. In their thirties, lean and wiry, they were sitting in straight-backed chairs and they didn’t rise. They did, however, scrutinize Yocke’s face with the coldest stares he could remember.

The cadaverous man who had admitted him closed the door carefully and said, “But first let’s establish just what your real profession is, señor.”

Yocke turned to face him. “What do you think my profession might be, if I’m not a reporter?”

The man went behind the desk and opened a drawer. He extracted a large revolver and pointed it straight at Yocke. “Oh, let me think. What a puzzle! Can you help me?”

The revolver looked like as big as a cannon. The black hole in the muzzle looked large enough to drive a car through. Jack Yocke grinned nervously. No one else smiled.

“Perhaps you are of Fidel. Perhaps you are CIA. Those possibilities leap immediately to my mind. Sit!”

Yocke sat.

“Now. Put that thing over your shoulder on the floor there beside you. Place your hands on the table in front of you, señor, and remain still as the most dead man you ever saw, or Holy Mother! I will make you very very dead very very quickly.”

The two spectators came over and, carefully staying out of the possible line of fire, emptied Yocke’s pockets, turning them inside out. The contents they put on the desk.

“Stand in the corner, señor, facing the wall.”

Jack Yocke obeyed.

He heard the door open, then fifteen seconds later close again. He heard the sounds of zippers being opened. His computer case. Maybe his suitbag.

“You could call my editor at the Post and ask him what I look like.”

“I know I look like a fool, señor. For that I blame my father. But a fool I am not. If you are a Fidelista or a CIA, you have a wonderful cover. I expect no less. Por favor, señor, do not twitch like that! The noise of this pistol is distressing in such a small room.”

After several minutes the cadaverous man, who was the only one who had spoken, told Yocke, “Turn around.”

The reporter did so. The contents of his wallet were spread all over the desk. One of the Cubans was punching the buttons of the computer, slowly, randomly, absorbed, while he watched the screen. The third man was pawing through Yocke’s clothes and underwear, which were piled on the floor.

With his gun just under his right hand, the man at the desk was ripping open cigarette packs. He crumbled the cigarettes into piles of tobacco and paper and randomly ripped apart filters with his fingernails. It took two more minutes. Satisfied at last, he raked the mess into a trash can beside the desk. Most of it went into the trash, anyway: the rest went onto the wooden floor.

Now the man wiped his hands together to get rid of the tobacco crumbs, then picked up the revolver. He pointed it at the reporter’s belly button.

“Ahora bien, we will come to Jesus, as you say. The truth.”

“My name is Jack Yocke. I’m a reporter for the Washington Post. I left Washington this morning to go to Cuba. I figured that none of the other correspondents trying to get there would think of going over to Cuba with the exiles. So I flew into Miami Airport and looked in the telephone book. I looked under ‘Cuba’ and found an address for Cuba Libre. I hailed a taxi. Here I am. That’s the truth.”

The man stared. The other two finished their explorations and joined in the scrutiny.

“We don’t have time for your games. We have things to do.”

“Take me with you to Cuba, please. I’m asking you as nice and polite as I know how.”

“What makes you think we are going to Cuba?”

“Please, mister, don’t jerk my chain! Some of the Cubans must be going! If you guys aren’t, who is? I need to get to Cuba one way or the other. What the hell you want me to do — hire an airplane and parachute out of it? Goddammit, my paper wants stories from Cuba and sent me to get them. I won’t write a story about you or mention your names without your approval. Is that what you’re worried about? You can be a confidential source. I’m just asking for your help. But with or without you, I’m going to Cuba.”

The three men glanced at each other. Nothing was said.

After several seconds, the man behind the desk put the pistol back in the drawer and gestured. “Your things.” He shook his head. “Only in America …”

His name was Hector Santana. He didn’t introduce the other two, but Yocke later learned their names: Jesús Ruiz and Tomás García. The three conferred briefly in whispers in the far corner, then Santana faced him again.

“You must understand the danger. There is much danger. We will go by boat. We will have to avoid your Coast Guard, which will be alert for boats going to Cuba, and we will have to avoid the Cuban Navy, which will be even more alert. If we are caught by the Americans, we will be in serious trouble. If we are caught by the Cubans, we will be dead.”

“I understand. I want to go.”

“You say it so easily, so lightly. A ride in a pedal-boat on a park lake! You would risk your life for your employer’s sake, to write a story for a newspaper?”

“Well, it does sound sort of stupid, when you put it like that. But yes, I—”

“You are a fool.”

“You’ll be just as dead as I.”

“Ahh, but we are fighting for our country. For Cuba. You, you risk your life for money, for glory. And those things they are as nothing. They are as smoke. You are a very great fool.”

“You’ve told me the risks. You’ve given me your opinion. I still want to go if you’ll take me.”

Santana shrugged grandly. “You must stay with us and make no calls. You may telephone anyone anywhere, if the telephones work, when we get to Havana. Not before.”

“That’s reasonable. Sure.”

“And we, of course, accept your offer of professional secrecy. No stories about us. No names. Ever. You must swear it.”

“I swear. When do we get to Havana?”

Around midnight the three men, with Jack Yocke wedged in the backseat, drove through a steady rain to a marina. Yocke never knew where the marina was because the Cubans made him wear a blindfold. He was led from the car to a slick gangplank which he stumbled up carrying the computer. Only when he was in a little cabin below decks was he allowed to remove the blindfold. His escort tossed the vinyl bag on the deck, then left, closing the door behind him.

The engine on the boat was already running, a muffled throbbing that pulsated the deck and bulkheads. After sitting in the darkness a few minutes Yocke tried the door latch. Locked. There was a tiny porthole, but the view was only of black water and shimmering lights.

Within minutes the boat got under way. The deck tilted and the vibration changed and the noise level rose. Yocke checked his watch: twelve forty-six a.m.

Yocke tried to decide how large the boat was. It wasn’t little, he concluded. But it wasn’t a ship. It turned too quickly. He stretched out on the couch bunk in the darkness and tried to sleep.

After a half hour or so the motion of the vessel changed. She began to roll and pitch with authority. Sometime later the motion changed again as the growl of the engine rose. Now the motion was more vigorous, the roll and pitch moments sharper and quicker.

The day had been a long one. Jack Yocke slept.

He awoke sometime later. The vessel was pounding in the sea, the engines throbbing heavily. They were pushing her hard. He wedged himself into the bunk and in minutes was again asleep.

Hector Santana shook him awake at five a.m. “You may come up on deck now.”

The boat was still pitching enthusiastically. Worse than when he went to sleep, but not as badly as it had several hours ago. Above the engine noise Yocke asked, “Where are we?”

“Just off Andros Island.”

“Are we in the Gulf Stream?”

“We’ve crossed it. The ride was much worse.”

On deck the only illumination was from several little red lights above the chart and binnacle in front of the helmsman. The rain had stopped. The boat appeared to be a giant cabin cruiser. This high above the water the motion was even more pronounced. Yocke found a handhold.

A ghostly white wake stretched away behind the boat straight as a highway into the vast, total darkness. Not a star or other light in the entire visible universe.

He could hear a radio, the announcer speaking in Spanish. When his eyes became better adjusted, he could just make out the figures of four or five men huddled around it.

“How goes the revolution?”

“Fighting in the cities. Much of the army is still loyal to Fidel.”

“Where will we land?”

“Caibarién.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning, before dawn.”

“How fast are we going?”

“Twenty-eight knots.”

After a few moments, Yocke asked, “This your boat?”

“Belongs to a friend.”

“Nice of him to let you use it like this.”

“He will report it stolen this evening.”

“Why are you going to Cuba?”

“It’s my country.”

Yocke eased himself to another handhold. His eyes were fairly well adjusted now and he could just make out Santana’s face. “Uh-uh. Nope. Yesterday evening I told you why I wanted to go, but you didn’t bother to tell me why you and your friends were going. And I didn’t ask.”

“We noted the omission. Very good manners for a reporter. Tomás thought too good. I said no. He is diplomático, I said. Finally Tomás agreed.”

“Perhaps you can tell me now.”

“Maybe later. We’ll see. If you’re still alive.” With that Santana went below.