Havana

Chapter 45

There was nothing to be done. They would die or they would not die. What could be done had been done.

Speshnev, with his strong wrists and fingers, kept the boy's face buried in the vegetation. With his knee locked into the boy's buttocks, he pinned him to the earth. They lay in the brush, in stickers and thorns, amid snakes and scorpions, under a fiery sun on an airless day. They lay as intimately as inverted lovers, though no sexual tension was felt by either. There was too much fear for that. A slight rush of wind moved leaves against each other, a dry, crackly rubbing.

Speshnev had the discipline himself not to look, but he knew the boy lacked it, which is why he pinioned him so. You could never tell. Some men, for some reason, have a special sensitivity to another's eyes upon them. When hiding or sneaking or crawling or penetrating, a key rule: never, ever look at the man you're trying to evade or fool. To do that is to risk alerting him and if he's alerted, you are dead.

They lay deep in the brambles, which snarled about them, scraping and cutting. They were surrounded in vegetation, in so far and so tight no one could believe a man, much less two, could penetrate that deep. Speshnev's clothes were dark enough and, with his body, he covered the creamy lightness of the boy's thin shirt. Hours seemed to pass. He would not allow the boy any movement at all, and he himself had acquired a stillness that was unto death. Many men can't be still for very long. The blood courses, the muscles tighten, and, moreover, any impingement on the flesh increases thunderously in its sensation. Many cannot endure such a willful torture.

Speshnev could and he didn't care if the boy could or couldn't, the little monster wasn't going to give himself or anyone else up.

Something stung him. Something crawled up him. Some sweat-or was it blood? — ran down from the dark bandanna about his head, tickling him as it went. He took an ascetic's pleasure in tracking each of these discomforts. Locked savagely beneath him, the boy squeaked somehow, shuddered a bit, but could not escape the clench that bound the two together.

The soldiers were only fifty feet away now. Speshnev hadn't looked at them for an hour, but he'd registered them in detail earlier. They had no rifles, no packs, and they had sweated wholly through their khakis in the long, fast, demanding climb upwards. Some had pistols, others had machetes. None had hats. They seemed to have recovered quickly, more quickly than he had anticipated. Possibly the officer beneath, Ojos Bellos, had chosen only athletes for this mission. The man was not quite a fool. Athletes would find their breath faster, focus their vision more sharply, commit more assiduously to the physical demands of the ordeal.

"All right," an officer screamed in Spanish. "Another ten feet, and halt. Do not rush yourselves. Look very carefully and methodically, if I catch anyone not paying attention, I will beat him myself, do you understand?"

The line of soldiers edged forward through the heavy brush, wading through a sea of thorns.

"Lieutenant, it hurts and my feet are so delicate," mocked a man, to much laughter.

"Lopez, you I will personally humiliate with a horsewhip. Now shut that fat mouth of yours, and do your duty."

More laughter, but still, these boys were professional. Speshnev guessed that it was three-to-two against.

He pressed harder against the boy. A mosquito hummed in his ear. A fly bit him. A new track of sweat or blood coursed down his face.

"So what are we looking for?" asked Frenchy.

"I don't know," said Earl. "If I see it, I will know."

They were about three hundred feet back down the mountain, on the sea side, having backed off the crest as the soldiers came up and established their blocking positions. Earl was locked against a tree trunk, the heaviness of the wood supporting his binoculars as he scanned, steadily, left to right.

"Suppose they don't come this way."

"They'll come this way. It's the only way."

"How do you know?"

"Because now he has to come over under cover. So you look at the covered areas. Some are so dense a man couldn't get through. Some are so light, a man, especially two, could easily be seen. So he's got to come over in one of three zones, where the brush is thick enough to cover him but not so thick as to slow him down."

"It all looks the same to me," said Frenchy, a few trees away, arranged similarly to Earl, staring into binocs as well.

"I know that," said Earl. "That's why I'm doing the looking."

Frenchy said nothing. He had nothing to say. It was hard for him to pay close attention to the monotony of the crest of the mountain where it was tangled in brush. It was green twisted into a kind of matting atop the spine of the mountain, of unvarying density and coloration.

"How the hell can you see so much?" he complained.

Earl didn't reply. He was too busy looking.

"Maybe he won't even come this way. Maybe he'll go parallel along the mountain to some other spot, and maybe go over tonight. He saw those troops, too. Maybe he had time to get the hell out."

"Then what's he do?"

"Well, I don't know. Works his way to Havana."

"Havana's four hundred miles away."

"Goes back to Santiago."

"Filled with soldiers and people who'd sell him out in a second."

"Maybe he just hunkers down in a cave."

"This kid? With his sense of importance, his conviction of specialness? He's going to hide in a goddamn cave?"

"Well, what's here for him?"

"The boat."

"Well, we're still not sure there is a boat."

"No," said Earl, " you're the only one who isn't sure there's a boat."

After a bit Frenchy turned around to regard the deep blue Caribbean, cupped in the arms of a bay, but from this height also yielding a vision of horizon. A tawdry wooden craft seemed to be meandering about, with dirty sails, dragging some fishing netting. A negro crew struggled to look lively on its raggedy, narrow deck.

"Oh," said Frenchy. "I hadn't noticed it."

"Yeah, well, no fishing boat runs that deep in the water and it don't head in to shore, particularly on the one place the map shows is deep enough for it to get in real close by accident. That's the 4 P.M. bus out of here."

The boot was American. He had seen them in the war, toward the end, in the false peace before he was re-arrested, that one strange month of May 1945, when Americans and Russians mingled freely in the rubble of the Third Reich, and one world seemed gone forever and a new one, a better one, aborning from the destruction and the vodka.

The Americans made fine boots. Unlike Russian boots, which were simply bags of unfinished leather sewn brutally to a sole in the approximately appropriate shape, the American boot was designed exactly to the contours of the foot, it was drawn tight by a netting of laces, it never slipped off or grew wobbly and if lost would be replaced in minutes. Pity the poor Soviet soldier who lost a boot; he'd go without until…well, until.

Speshnev had ample opportunity to study this boot, particularly. It was seven inches from his eyes. It was planted firmly against the rocky ground by a private in the Cuban infantry, presumably a stout farm lad, judging by the evident stockiness of his ankle and the length and breadth of the foot. He put it where he put it, which was just in front of Speshnev's face and that was, actually, quite a lucky thing. Had he placed it closer, he might have stepped on Speshnev's face, felt the give of flesh beneath, and blasted away with the Star pistol he brandished. Had he been farther, he might have had a good angle through the dense thickets of bramble and thorn and caught a glimpse of the non-organic, and done the same ugly deed with his pistol.

But as it was he was simply set against the earth, and Speshnev, on top of his frozen ward, lay concentrating on his boot because he could look no other place. What he could hear sounded like an ax blade whizzing close by, hungry for his scrawny neck. But it was actually the blade of the machete the young soldier wielded as he probed and flicked and stabbed, searching for the bodies of hiding men, unaware utterly, for now, that those men were literally at his feet.

The whisper of the blade waved magically through the brush, and Speshnev felt its breeze, and particles of leaf and branch its edge liberated, as they drifted down upon him.

Then silence.

Then the sound of rush, as an artillery shell comes in, the one that gets you-he knew this, having been blown up twice, once in Spain, once outside Novograd-and the blade struck earth savagely but two inches from the end of his nose, and vibrated ever so gently. The soldier was stabbing randomly into the brush about his feet.

Beneath, the boy squirmed; but Speshnev had iron fingers about his mouth, crushing his lips to deadness, so he could not involuntarily give a coward's squeak and reveal them.

The blade probed, came closer, and withdrew.

"All right," the sergeant called. "Move forward another ten feet. He's got to be here somewhere."

"I think this greaseball has shit himself to nothingness," came a jeer, followed by laughter.

"If so, you'd smell the shit. I think he's somewhere down the hill and he's put a bullet in his greaseball head."

The soldiers moved onward. It would be another hour before they were far enough away for Speshnev to move, and then he'd only have a few minutes before the main body of troops got up here, with the dogs, and picked up the trail ahead.

"Are we safe?" muttered the boy, when at last Speshnev released his iron grip.

"Hardly," said the Russian.

"They're over," said Earl.

"How do you know? I didn't see a thing."

"The birds. A flock of 'em just blew out of the brush, fast and sudden."

"Earl, birds fly out of the jungle all the time."

"When they take off on their own, the head Johnny goes first, his lieutenants follow, then come the privates and then the gals. When they all blow out at once, they've been startled."

"Maybe it was a boar or a coyote."

"Ain't much moving about a forest during daylight, and with all them soldiers over there, there'd be even less. No, it's them."

Earl slipped the binoculars back into their case. He picked up the rifle, ran a last check over it, unlocking and easing back the bolt to double-check that a.30–06 nested comfortably in the chamber, then quietly relocked it, rechecked the safety. By this time, Frenchy had come over and kneeled next to him with his carbine at the ready.

"Okay," said Earl, "he's got to go left because it's thinnest there. He's got to get down fast because that boat is getting in close and his meet-up is probably scheduled for 1600 hours and that boat just can't linger there forever, not with all the naval activity this close to Gitmo. He'll go down left, there's a natural fold he'll be in, then they have to avoid that open field, so they'll have to detour around that before they reach a last line of trees. I'm betting there's a creek over that way, 'cause you can see the trees are greener, they're getting more water."

"I didn't see that."

"No, you didn't. Anyhow, I have no way of knowing which way they'll go around that field, but I do know they won't walk down the middle of it. I'm betting men racing down a hill ahead of dogs and troops are going to be hellish thirsty and the temptation of that water will be too much, since they have to go that way anyhows. So that's where they'll head. And that's why we have to be there first. He'll pick up we're on him if we're still moving into place as he gets there."

"Sounds good to me," Frenchy said sportily.

"It don't matter how it sounds to you," Earl replied. "That's how we'll do it."

In many ways, coming down is worse than going up, especially if speed is an issue.

Speed was an issue.

Speshnev could see the trawler just a few hundred yards off the beach, yet it was still half a mile away-downhill-and the craft couldn't linger there forever. He knew he had to move them quickly.

But that meant his muscles and the boy's had to work against gravity and momentum, always on the tippy, tippy edge of disaster, their legs buckling in pain as the fibers clenched in exactly the opposite way as they'd clenched when climbing.

He heard the boy huffing and puffing beneath, and there was an edge of panic to all that labored breath. Once, already, the boy had lost control, and gone shooting by him, hellbent on destruction, on a broken leg or shattered ankle, and Speshnev had grabbed him and a chunk of brush simultaneously and guided them to a slow-down and then a stop.

"I can't go any further."

"If you value your eyes, you'll stop complaining and start moving."

"Oh, Christ," said the boy.

"Yes, call to Christ, but whomever you call to, get going."

"I am so thirsty. I have dust in my throat."

"There's a whole ocean out there for you."

Speshnev looked back. As yet no dogs had crested the hill, but it could happen at any second, and here, where the forest was thin and rocky, where their feet kicked up puffs of dust and shale, they'd be easily spotted and brought under fire. And under fire, there'd be no escape. The Cubans weren't any kind of shooters, but there were enough of them, and their fusillade would either bring down the runners dead and wounded, or pin them for more leisurely fates.

"Go, go."

Off they ran, trying to control the wildness that built in their limbs as they rushed down, fast but not too fast, close to the edge but not over it.

The boy gasped in agony, and even the mighty Speshnev, escape artist and ambush master, assassin and agent, guerilla and infantry commander, had to admit this was the most difficult moment in his long war against the forces of darkness. His ankles ached in the effort and the body's fear undercut everything. He didn't think they'd make it, not without a bad fall and if the fall were bad enough, it could end them. And the boat was so close.

The boy collapsed, heaving.

"I can't go on. I'm spent. Leave me."

"Stop it. I don't have that choice."

"I'm gone, blown, finished. I have no―"

"Look, ahead, beyond the meadow. Do you see it?"

"The boat? It could be miles away, that's how little chance I have of―"

The dogs barked. Speshnev looked up and saw three of them, unleashed, against the crest. They howled to indicate they'd picked up the scent and waited patiently for their masters and permission to bound down the hill.

The boy was beyond caring.

"Not the boat," Speshnev said. "No, look down there, just beyond the field. See where the trees are so much greener? Water. There's a creek bed there. We'll head there, we can make it before the men get over the top. Water, Castro, it'll revive you. Once you get the water, you'll recover instantly. You're simply dehydrated, that's all. Come on―"

And he lifted the boy up, feeling the tremors of surrender in the lax musculature and the heart beating desperately, the lungs sucking over dried lips for oxygen, and never quite getting enough. "Come on, now, just fight it another two hundred yards, and there's salvation!"

Frenchy had never believed in it. Not for a second. It seemed some fantasy to him, some improbable crusade that this Davy Crockett from Arkansas were pulling on him. But then he saw them: two men, one of them demonstrably the young political leader Castro, rushing helter-skelter downhill exactly where Earl had said they'd come, their arms windmilling for balance as they fought the pull of gravity, both ashen and desperate, both craven with thirst.

If he felt any triumph, Earl didn't show it. His manner was glum, matter-of-fact, professional. Now was time for the shooting.

Earl unslung the rifle. They were about two hundred yards out, on a slight ridge, and Earl had sited them so they had a good line of fire straight onto the widest part of the creek, where a beaten man could drown his face in sweet green water and suck it down, and cool his weary, booted feet. No limbs, no brush, nothing interceded to deflect the bullet. It was a simple matter for someone as sure a shot as Earl.

"You can make it?" Frenchy nevertheless asked, nervous.

"Should I cover and lay fire on in case you miss?"

"Shut up," said Earl.

Earl squirmed some, found a good shooting position and drew the rifle to him as, now three hundred yards away, the men rushed toward the water. They'd drink and rest for a minute, then hurry onward. Frenchy turned and saw that the trawler had gotten within fifty yards of the beach; it would be an easy slosh, and its cargo safely aboard, the boat would set fair wind for Jamaica and be gone in minutes.

Earl locked his knee and rose and hunched simultaneously behind the rifle, feeling his way into a solid shooting position. Frenchy squatted next to him, watching the prey through binoculars as they approached.

He had a moment's study of Castro, familiar from the picture but weirdly different here, in the flesh. Frenchy thought of a big baby at one of his prep schools, sent there by an overmanly father for some toughening up, a boy who cried each night and was too fat for sports. The boy disappeared one night, actually beating Frenchy out of the school, though Frenchy's crime wasn't melancholy and self-loathing but simple cheating. Castro had the same gray look of defeat, and the flesh through his face trembled at each step, loose and slack. His lips rose like a wave under the vibration as the foot struck the ground, and Frenchy saw not heroic intensity or worker's will to endure but simple, abject fear, a face bathed in sweat, a shirt translucent with the moisture it had captured, everywhere baby fat and terror at play on the big, clumsy, boy's body. He was infantile, a class goat picked on by the football captain.

Frenchy let the binocs slide left to see this mysterious Mr. X who was running the show. What he saw was a wiry European in a dark bandanna like a peasant, and a peasant's dirty smock and sandals, but something no peasant could ever have: intense and impenetrable dignity.

It occurred to Frenchy that here was the real thing, so rarely glimpsed, almost mythological in Agency culture: a high-ranking, superbly trained and motivated true Red agent. He couldn't help but be impressed, for even as he watched, he could tell the boy was lost in panic but the old goat was still clever and making shrewd decisions even as they reached the water.

"That guy looks like a Russian," he hissed, so excited he could hardly stand it. A victory of immense proportions was just before him. Kill Castro, as Plans had decreed, and capture this guy! What a coup! What secrets he could unlock! Why, you could build a whole career out of one afternoon's work and bask in sheer glory forever.

"Kill the Cuban," he said, "wound the Russian. Hit him in the leg, the knee. We'll take him. He's unarmed. Jesus Christ, what a catch."

The boy collapsed in the pond, and thrust his head into the water. But Speshnev grabbed him before he could gulp in the gallons.

"No. Don't lose control. Small, easy sips, wet your lips, let it hydrate your body. If you swallow everything, you'll bloat and your internal temperature will go out of balance and you'll collapse. I'm not carrying you."

The boy fought him for just a second, bucking like a horse to get his snout into the wet, but then yielded. He dipped in demurely, and sipped.

"Excellent," said Speshnev.

He himself at last bent to the surface and admitted the water, and felt the miracle of it as it spread hope through his body. The sheer pleasure of it was better than anything sexual.

But in a second he was back in the game, pulling the boy from the water, letting him rest on the bank, but at the same time looking around.

The boat was so close now. A line of trees cut the beach off from the creek, and then it was but a hundred yards or so until they cut across the nakedness of the sands. Speshnev looked back, at the crest of the hill. The dogs were still baying; the soldiers had not arrived yet and as the distance was over a half a mile, he knew he was too far for any kind of accurate shooting.

He took a quick scan about, and his senses saw nothing except the blend of forest and jungle that was Cuba, the palms jutting out among the pines, the odd bright flower, the singing of birds, the bright sun above, behind some clouds.

"Here, wrap this around your head, it'll keep you fresh for this last little bit. Hurry."

He pulled off his dark bandanna, soaked it in the water, then handed it over.

Then he heard the shot.

Earl didn't like it. The problem was the intimacy. In battle, over iron sights, the enemy was a blur. You pressed, the gun fired, and down he went and you moved on. If you were close enough to see the bullets hit and blow holes in him, then the fight was desperate and crazed and horribly dangerous, so there was no time for thought, you operated on instinct alone. But the sniper's curse is his intimacy and now, the magnifications of the eight-power scope blew up the faces of the men who lay before him.

He saw not a Red politico but a fat boy with greasy hair and an unmolded, unformed look to his face. And he saw the man who'd twice saved his life, crafty and professional, almost on the verge of what appeared to be a great coup. This man was the enemy, he told himself, and tried to believe it desperately.

Earl had always followed his orders. That was the compass heading of his life.

The Winchester was set solid against his shoulder, supported by bone not muscle, his body itself solid against the ground, helped by the cupping effect of the slight rise against which he curled.

"You can hit one guy, throw the bolt and hit the other, say, in the knee?" Frenchy implored.

He didn't say a word.

"You want me to get set to move down there with the carbine? If you hit the old guy in the leg, I know we can take him alive. He's no dummy. If he doesn't go with us, the Cubans will pick his bones clean in a torture chamber. He'll see it."

There was no waver in the crosshairs, so solidly was the instrument supported. He had examined each face and now set the reticule on the boy's neck, under his ear, in the softness just behind the jaw; the shot would blow out his spinal column and he would be a footnote in Cuban history. Earl knew the arc to target two was short and that he could flick the bolt in a second. He thought the Russian would be quick, but how quick? He guessed he'd roll right, and Earl could hit him in the fat part of the thigh, hoping to miss the femoral which would bleed him out in minutes. He had an image of the man squawking, his hands flown to the wound in his leg, trying to stanch the flow. He would know exactly who shot him.

He felt the trigger come back against the urging of his fingertip, as it drained the ounces out of the mechanism.

He put the rifle down.

"You know what? I ain't pulling your trigger."

Frenchy looked at him.

"What?"

"Forget it. I don't do this kind of thing. It ain't my way. Do your own killing, junior."

"I-You have to. For God's sake, Earl, this isn't a joke. This isn't a game. This is what it is, what we do, what our country needs. You have to, for God's sake."

Earl just spat into the dust.

When he looked back, Frenchy had raised the carbine and pointed it at him.

"Earl, you will do what I say. You will do it. Do you get it? You don't have a choice. Now, fast, before they get away."

Earl chuckled.

"There's another trigger ain't getting pulled, kid. Don't make me laugh."

And Frenchy didn't. The rifle came down.

"This is so wrong," he said.

"Let's let the Cubans decide what to do with this boy."

He went back to the scope and put the crosshairs into the exact center of the distance between Castro and the Russian, on the shimmering surface of the water, so that each would feel the shockwave of the bullet as it roared past, and each would know that they were taken, and saw the Russian's hand dip into the water and come out with a soaked handkerchief. The boy reached to touch it and in that instant, as each man was connected to the handkerchief between them, he pressed the trigger.

When the scope cleared recoil and came back down, mist still hung in the air from the bullet smashing into the water, and the Cuban was running crazily toward the beach.

The Russian had disappeared already.