Operation Fireball

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Our advance for the next fifteen minutes was much slower. The group made frequent pauses while Erikson reconnoitered out in front. I welcomed the rest intervals so much myself that I doubted if Slater could have continued without them.

“Cement trench,” Wilson grunted in my ear as we took evasive action after one of Erikson’s scouting trips. I saved my breath for the increasingly difficult task of slogging ahead on the slippery turf and runny clay of the hillsides.

Near the crest of a low hill Erikson motioned us to the ground again. He disappeared into the darkness. I stretched out in the ooze and tried to ignore a stitch in my side. Even above the sound of the pelting rain I could hear Slater’s heavy breathing.

“Only good thing about this kind of weather is that patrol dogs aren’t worth a damn,” Wilson observed. “Wind and rain keeps ‘em from pickin’ up a scent.” He sounded almost cheerful. “I really got to hand it to the Swede. So far it’s uncanny the way he’s led us past observation posts, trip wires, mine fields, machine gun positions, an’ God-knows-what-else. If our luck just holds …” He was silent for a moment. “Wish I had a cigarette. I—”

The words withered in his throat as a blinding light split the darkness to our left. It seemed to be just yards away. When I raised my head slightly, the brilliant beam was making a slow sweep of the area through which we had come. Fortunately it was moving away from our hill.

I had seen searchlights at carnivals but never up so close. It was huge, and so high in the air I suspected it was mounted on a truck. Faint wisps of what I thought were steam rose from the monstrous lens. Then I realized that what I thought was steam was the pyre of hundreds of night insects flying against the light even in the rain and cremating themselves.

Erikson appeared beside us. “It’s only taking in a forty-five-degree arc toward the U.S. fence,” he said. “It’s on the top of the next hill, so we’ll keep this one between us and it.” He started off.

“Good job we’re almost past it,” Wilson said fervently.

We circled the hill, paused while Erikson waited for another pass of the light to move beyond us, then pushed forward hard to get beyond its perimeter before it returned again. Slater cursed monotonously as we plunged over the uneven ground. I wondered why he didn’t save his breath.

The next thirty minutes I’d just as soon forget. Erikson drove us hard. There was only one rest period. We crashed through brush and waded through creeks. From the bold manner in which Erikson favored speed over evasion now I judged that we were at last beyond the Cuban fortifications.

“The highway is just ahead of us,” Erikson said when he finally gave us another breather. “Wilson, it’s your ball game from here. Let’s hear the game plan.”

“We go up on the road an’ grab ourselves a hunk of transportation,” Chico said in a confident tone. “Then we set sail for Havana. There’s a ten-mile unpaved stretch of road a few miles into the interior. We got to expect a checkpoint there.

“Beyond it we’ll take the fork of the road that goes inland, away from Santiago de Cuba on the coast,” he continued. “We’ll pick up a better highway at Bayamo, an’ a better one still at Holguin. From Holguin to Havana I been over the road a dozen times. A bus from Holguin makin’ local stops gets to Havana in fourteen hours. We ought to shave time from that.”

“You mean we could be on the highway for more than twenty-four hours?” Slater asked.

“Unless we get a break,” Wilson affirmed. “There’ll be some of Castro’s favorites, movable checkpoints, although the weather could keep the guards inside the pillboxes.”

“We should be so lucky,” Slater said sardonically.

“We’ll pair off two an’ two up on the road, on either side of it,” Wilson went on. “Drake, you stay with me. If whatever I flag down doesn’t stop, you’re gonna have to shoot the driver off the stagecoach. If it does stop, we’ll board it from both sides.”

“Anything else?” Erikson asked.

“Yeah. Remember, we got no friends. Ever since the Playa Giron, Castro has every—”

“The Playa Giron?”

“The Bay of Pigs invasion. Castro has not only the alzados but every citizen in the country watchin’ for CIA agents. The least little thing out of line an’ the people holler for the militia. The only exception is the place I’m takin’ you in Havana. Well, are we set?”

Everyone stood up and resettled equipment items against sodden uniforms, trying to find unchafed areas of flesh. Wilson led the way through the steamy humidity. Occasionally as we brushed against a bush the fragrance of night-blooming cereus perfumed the rain.

We reached the macadamed highway in minutes, and Wilson disposed us in pairs in the ditches on either side. “If whatever I flag down stops, pour on the coal gettin’ to it.”

“We gonna have to wait long?” Slater wanted to know.

“Who the hell knows? Especially on a night like this.”

Wilson led me fifteen yards up the ditch beyond the position he had selected for himself. “I’ll have to jump if the driver don’t hit the brakes,” he told me. “So you be high enough up the bank to pick him off with no further word from me. Shuck all your gear so you can move faster when we go for the wheels.”

He moved away from me. I took my.38 from under my jacket and inserted it loosely in my belt. A good ten minutes went by before a soft whistle drifted down from Wilson’s station. Up the highway were the hazy lights of an oncoming vehicle. From the way the lights bobbed about I judged that the pavement was badly rutted. I drew the.38, scrambled up the bank, and waited.

The lights approached us rapidly. Even above the storm I could hear grinding engine noises. The headlights suddenly picked up Wilson in the center of the road, flapping his arms like a barnyard rooster. The instant I heard the protesting shriek of worn brakes, I scrambled up on the roadway and began to run toward the slewed-sideways vehicle.

It was a long, boxy-looking unit, high off the road. I saw a Red Cross insignia on the hood. Wilson had stopped an ambulance. The action was well under way by the time I arrived. Wilson had been palavering with the furious-sounding uniformed man at the wheel. Slater loomed up, reached inside, and ripped the driver away from the wheel. He slugged the man with a gun butt before climbing into the ambulance’s front seat.

I ran to the rear. Double doors hinged at the outer edges had locking handles in the center. Another Red Cross was painted over everything except small, cracked windows. I seized a handle and jerked open a creaking door. The floor of the ambulance was three feet above ground level. I leaned inside for a look in the weak overhead light, 38 in hand. There were four stretchers, double-decked two to a side, each with an ominously still burden. There was no one else in the body of the ambulance.

A voice yelling at me brought my head around. The driver had crawled to the rear of the ambulance. On his knees, he was waving me away from the opened door while a molten-lava torrent of Spanish erupted from him. I could see sergeant’s stripes and what looked like a Schmeisser machine pistol.

At that range I thought the best I could get was a draw. I was cursing Slater for not having made sure of his man when there was the roar of a gun. A heavy slug took the sergeant in the forehead and emerged from his right ear. Erikson came into my line of vision from the other side of the ambulance.

“Why didn’t he shoot without talking?” I wondered.

“The uniforms,” Erikson said. “Chico told him we just wanted to get out of the rain.” He was flashing his light on the worn body of the ambulance. It lingered on the tires, which were large but cracked and with the remnants of heavy cleats. “Field ambulance. A real dog. A ‘49 or ‘50 Dodge all-metal panel job.”

Wilson appeared, seized the body by the heels, then dragged it across the road and tumbled it into the ditch. He joined us in time to hear Erikson’s remarks. “Four-wheel drive,” Chico added. “In this country, it’s almost a modern set of wheels. It’ll get us out’ve here.”

Erikson’s light beamed along the roof of the ambulance, where a long whip antenna was bent backward in an arc. “There must be a radio inside. That could be a plus.”

“If it’s working,” Wilson said.

“Let’s see why the sergeant was so anxious to keep you out of the back,” Erikson said to me. We climbed inside. Erikson’s light rested for a moment on the front of the ambulance behind the driver’s seat, where a rusty-looking radio was bolted to a side panel. Then his light moved onto the stretchers.

Their occupants shared a number of things in common. They were all young, they all wore Cuban Army field uniforms, and all their dead features were contorted from the hangman’s noose, whose deep-ridged marks could be seen on their throats. “Looks like the Maximum Leader is having army problems, too,” Erikson said. “The sergeant didn’t want you to see this because it would be bad for morale.” He snapped off the light. “I’m going to look at the radio, but you two get up front with Slater and let’s get moving.”

Wilson and I walked up to the cab, whose doors were high off the ground with handles at shoulder height and a running board to step up on. We swung ourselves aboard and settled down on the wide front seat. Slater was staring morosely at the dashboard while he tentatively manipulated the stick shift. “How’s the gas?” Wilson asked him.

“Three-quarters full. Man, is this thing for real?”

“Roll it an’ let’s find out.”

We started down the highway, slowly at first, then faster as Slater gained confidence. It was a rough-riding vehicle. “Shocks are gone,” Wilson observed.

“In a field ambulance, springs and shocks are designed as much for the preservation of the vehicle as for the comfort of the casualties,” Erikson said from three feet behind the front seat. “Stop at the first bridge over running water, Slater.”

I turned to look at the radio Erikson was examining. There was a small four-inch speaker behind an almost rusted-out wire-mesh aperture. Erikson moved a switch, but nothing happened. “I can see this unit needs first-echelon field maintenance,” he said, and slammed his fist into the side of the radio. There was a squawk, and as Erikson turned up the volume rapid-sounding but distorted Spanish flooded the ambulance. “Can you hear that, Chico?”

“Yeah. He’s talkin’ about the storm. The voice sounds kinda fuzzy, though.”

“The speaker diaphragm is probably cracked. Better get back here and monitor—”

“Here’s a bridge,” Wilson announced.

The ambulance shuddered to a stop. We all got out into the rain. Beneath the low stone walls of the bridge I could hear the sound of rushing water. Erikson opened the ambulance’s rear doors. He lifted a stretcher’s iron feet out of the indents in the floor that held it in place, then slid it out the opened doors. I took the front end and we carried the stretcher to the bridge.

“One, two, three!” Erikson counted. We swung the stretcher in a high arc, and a dark figure floated over the parapet and disappeared into the water below. Wilson and Slater with a stretcher suspended between them were waiting for us to step aside. The wind seemed to be blowing harder, slanting the rain in gusts. When we returned the stretcher to the ambulance, I noticed that its olive drab canvas was mottled with blood and urine stains.

Slater took the wheel again after we had disposed of the second pair of bodies. “These seat springs sag so bad my ass is right down on the frame,” he grumbled. He listened to the tattoo of the rain on the roof before he started up the engine. Both sounds were amplified by the metal shell of the ambulance. “Might as well be ridin’ inside a drum,” Slater complained.

I was in the front seat with him as we started down the road again. Rain sluiced the windshield as the Dodge thumped and banged its way from pothole to pothole. Erikson and Wilson knelt on a haversack behind the cab seat and fiddled with the radio. Our once-burdensome load of baggage had leaned itself down to the backpack radio and three haversacks. A good deal of Hazel’s money was scattered behind us in Oriente Province in the form of abandoned equipment. The remainder was still in my money belt.

“Only three channels in use on preset frequencies,” Erikson said from behind the front seat. “One strong and two weak. The strong one must be at the nearby checkpoint.”

“What’re they sayin'?” Slater asked over his shoulder.

I could understand his curiosity. Spanish is a language that sounds excited whether anything exciting is being done or not.

“The storm is causin’ some floodin',” Wilson said. He was silent for a moment. “Civilian as well as military vehicles are bein’ called in to assist. Hey! This could help.” He paused again while the cracked Spanish voice blared cadenced sentences. “All storm vehicles are to be marked with a red diamond on the windshield to assist them through difficult areas. If we had a red diamond to put on the windshield—”

“That’s easy,” Erikson responded at once. “Hand me that first aid kit on your belt, Chico.”

I turned on the seat to watch him. He used a knife to cut adhesive deftly and shape it into a good-sized diamond by using other tape as backing. Then he took a small bottle of Mercurochrome from the first aid kit. He covered the adhesive with it, working it in with a fingertip, studied it for a moment, and added another coat. He handed me the diamond with a roll of Scotch tape. “Tape it to the windshield,” he said.

“That might do it,” Wilson approved. “That’s a red diamond, right enough. It sure—”

The ambulance lurched sickeningly as it dropped off the macadam surface onto greasy mud. Slater swore luridly as he tamped the brake repeatedly to keep us from turning broadside. “Here’s your damn stretch of bad road!” he called sourly to Wilson.

“We’ll be hittin’ the checkpoint in a few miles,” Chico predicted. “When we see the lights, I’ll get outside on the runnin’ board to do the talkin'. Karl, you an’ Drake get in back on the stretchers. You don’t look Cubana enough. If they ask what’s in back, I’m gonna tell ‘em two cases of typhoid.”

We rearranged ourselves. Erikson laid his gun on his chest. I drew my.38. Erikson raised himself on an elbow to look across at me. “When we reach Havana, Wilson will take you—”

“Lights!” Slater sang out. The ambulance slowed, then stopped. Wilson jumped down into the road, circled the front, and climbed up on the running board on Slater’s side. Chico’s body shielded Slater from full view.

The ambulance inched forward again. Two pillboxes narrowed the road to one-vehicle width. A strong light from the nearer pillbox beamed outward and played on the ambulance’s windshield. It picked up the red diamond there, then shifted to Chico on the running board as Slater braked at the checkpoint.

I held my breath as a pillbox window went up and there was a rapid exchange in Spanish. Then the ambulance moved forward again. A hundred yards down the road Slater stopped and Wilson ran around the front of the cab and climbed into the front seat again. “Nothin’ to it!” he proclaimed jubilantly. “I’d have given odds those guards weren’t gonna get their asses wet.”

After that the ride was just monotonously uncomfortable. The cracked voice on the radio echoed metallically with only an occasional silence. Even on the stretcher I couldn’t get used to the constant jolting caused by worn-out shock absorbers.

“Hey, listen!” Wilson exclaimed. Erikson and I sat up on our stretchers. A new note had entered the radio’s monolog. The torrent of wordage poured forth in a higher decibel content. “He’s sayin’ that the U.S. Navy notified Havana that three sailors broke out of Gitmo takin’ an officer along as a hostage,” Wilson translated. He listened again. “But the Cubans are sayin’ they found two of their men dead inside Cuban lines an’ that the U.S. story is a cover for a CIA sabotage team dropped into the interior.”

“What does it mean to us?” Slater asked.

“That Castro is invitin’ the populace, if it catches us before the military does, to tie us hand an’ foot to four horses goin’ in different directions.”

That ended the questions. Through the windshield I could see dirty gray daylight. The rain had slackened considerably. I didn’t think it was possible for me to fall asleep, but I must have. It was Slater’s voice that wakened me.

“When we gonna skoff?” he was asking.

“When we get to Havana,” Erikson replied. “Pull in your belt.”

“Where are we?” I asked him in a low tone.

“Almost to Holguin. That should be the last checkpoint.”

“We’re making good time?”

“Almost too good.” He raised his voice. “Remember that we don’t want to reach Havana until after dark, Chico.”

I saw that Slater and Wilson had changed places and that Chico was driving. I crawled up to the front of the ambulance and tapped the dozing Slater on the shoulder. “Want to try the stretcher for a while?” I asked him.

“I’d give a hundred-dollar bill for a beer,” he said morosely as he climbed over the seat. He had dark circles under his eyes.

I reversed Slater’s route and sat down beside Wilson. Through the windshield the highway looked to be in better condition. We were on a desolate-looking stretch of road with trees growing down to its edge and only an occasional shabby hut to be seen. The rain had slowed to a heavy mist. “We’re gonna have to gas this buggy up pretty soon,” Wilson announced. “See if there’s a gas requisition pad in the tray there.”

“What does it look like?”

“A blue pad. Squarish in shape.”

I found a blue pad and a white one. “The blue one,” Wilson repeated. “The white one’s for a private car. Castro likes to know who’s doin’ the drivin’ in this country, so all gas has to be signed for. Civilians pay, but the military runs a tab.”

The gas stop was made without incident. If Cuban civilians have any curiosity about military activities, they keep it to themselves. There was a pillbox checkpoint between Holguin and Camaguey, but it was unmanned. “They must’ve pulled the boys into the interior to help out with flood relief,” Wilson deduced. “Never saw this road with so little traffic on it.”

In the late afternoon he pulled the Dodge onto a side road. A hundred yards along it he bounced us across a field into a grove of trees. “Sack time,” he said. “We’re ahead of schedule.”

He turned off the radio, and for two hours there was uneasy silence in our steel domicile. A freshening breeze whistled through rusted-out holes in the ambulance shell. From my observation, Wilson was the only one of us who slept.

He woke just when I was beginning to wonder when Erikson was going to wake him. He turned on the radio, listened for five minutes, then maneuvered the ambulance back onto the highway. “Home stretch now,” was his only comment. It wasn’t raining, but there was cloud cover enough to bring an early twilight.

Three more hours brought us to the outskirts of Havana. It was full dark. Only an occasional streetlight relieved the blackness. Wilson drove confidently. “I made a lot of dough smugglin’ into this town,” he told us. “We’re comin’ in on the airport road. The water on the left is the Almendares River.”

The cleated tires of the ambulance whined on the city streets. The storefronts were dark. The ambulance made a gradual left-hand turn onto a two-lane street. “Carlos Manuel de Cespe Avenue,” Wilson volunteered. “We’re gettin’ close.”

Erikson and I stacked the gear at the rear doors. We made a sweeping left-hand turn. “Zapata Avenue,” Wilson said like a tour guide. “Soon as we cross Paseo in the Vedado section — an’ here it is — we turn right”—the ambulance wheeled into a dimly lit street with houses closing in on both sides and pulled into the curb—“an’ abandon ship. From here we walk.”

“How far?” Slater demanded.

“Four blocks. Don’t leave nothin’ because we won’t be comin’ back to this limousine.” He climbed out and ran around to the back to open the doors. “Load up an’ let’s go,” he urged.

We set out along sidewalks littered with trash. Our boots echoed loudly in the empty, silent streets. “Where is everybody?” Slater asked uneasily.

“Curfew. You better have business to be on the street at night. Patrols pick pedestrians up on suspicion. If we get stopped, I’ll have to do my best talkin’ of the trip.” At each intersection he moved ahead of the group and checked left and right on the cross street. “Second doorway, next block,” he said at last. “If there’s anyone in sight, walk past an’ make another pass at it comin’ back.”

We hadn’t passed a parked car in the four blocks, nor had I seen one driving by. The quiet was a brooding quiet. Ahead of me, the group disappeared one by one from the cracked sidewalk into a narrow doorway. When I followed, we were crowded into a small hallway that smelled of chili and garlic. Peeling paint hung in tatters from the walls. Wilson palavered with a fat woman whose beady eyes took in the appearance of our group. He turned away from her in my direction. “Money,” he said.

I pulled out my khaki tunic, wrinkle-dried from the hours of rain. I unzipped the pouch in my money belt, took out a handful of fifty-dollar bills, which I handed to Wilson, and zipped up again. He separated six of the bills and gave them to the woman. Her greedy little eyes were not upon the money in her hand but upon the remainder, which disappeared into Wilson’s mud-stained khakis.

She buried the bills somewhere in the front of her dress, then led the way through a long corridor along which the odor of garlic-flavored chili first waxed and then waned. She tapped in a quick rhythm upon a door with a see-through window with wire mesh imbedded in heavy glass. Wilson entered first when the door opened.

Erikson tapped the door with a questioning finger as he moved through it ahead of me. “Steel-plated,” he whispered. “Both sides.” I was looking at the two men standing just inside the door to whom Wilson was passing out more fifty-dollar bills. Both had swarthy, piratical-looking faces. One even had a Pancho Villa mustache. The man nearest the door threw over a lever that forced massive bolt-arms into matching sockets at top and bottom of the door.

The mustached man was looking at the loads we were carrying. He said something to Wilson and pointed to Erikson’s backpack radio in its concealing haversack. More fifty-dollar bills changed hands, and the man shrugged and turned away.

Slater was staring around the room. Its decor was in such contrast to the scurfy hallway through which we had passed as to seem almost incredible. It was a large reception room. The floor was thickly carpeted and gilt-framed mirrors decorated the walls. The furniture was heavy, old-fashioned-looking, and its upholstery ran to velvet and plush. There was an indefinable odor in the air, sweetish but not perfumy. It had almost a medicinal base.

“What the hell kind of joint is this?” Slater asked.

“A whorehouse,” Wilson answered.

“A whore — you’re kiddin'!”

“No, I’m not. This has been my layover half a dozen times after smuggling runs. It’s the safest place in Havana. Whorehouses are illegal since Castro, but you know how that is. So these people are undercover an’ can’t lead anyone to us without leadin’ him to themselves.”

“Where are the women?”

“Upstairs. You’ll see them.”

From Erikson’s silence I gathered that the news concerning the life-style of our hideout was no news to him. The man who had levered the reinforcing bars across the door beckoned to Wilson. We followed him through another large room with murals and tapestries on the walls. A grand piano with a single sheet of music on the rack stood in a corner. Both piano and music looked as though they hadn’t been touched since 1870.

Beyond the second room we came to a carpeted stairway. A curve in the stairs led us back toward the front of the house. At the top was another steel-reinforced, barred door. “Hi, Ramirez!” Wilson said eagerly to the thick-shouldered, pockmarked man who opened the door. “Is Melia still here?”

Slater was staring down a long hallway with cubicles on either side. There were no doors on the cubicles. At each doorway stood a girl in a transparent short shirt beneath which was just girl. The coloration ranged from café-au-lait to chocolate and the breast size from pear to grapefruit.

“Hi, girls,” Wilson said expansively, smiling and waving. Several of the girls waved back.

The pockmarked Ramirez shepherded us past the array of skin tones to a good-sized room at the front of the house. I noticed that several of the girls retreated from their doorways at Ramirez’ approach, and from the expressions on their faces the feeling they had for him was not adoration.

The room to which he led us had drawn curtains. Six bunks were scattered about, and the remainder of the furniture was similarly spartan. Erikson stepped to a curtained window and drew it back slightly. Over his shoulder I could see the street on which we had approached the house. There was an overhang at our level so that the sidewalk and even the doorway through which we had entered could be seen.

Slater kept looking back at the hallway through which we had passed. “What about all those rooms with no doors?” he asked Wilson. “Doesn’t a guy get any privacy for his money?”

“What’s private about what goes on in the rooms?” Wilson returned. “The no-doors policy is to keep the girls from holdin’ out on the house if there’s any tips.”

Ramirez said something to Wilson and left us. “He said we have the run of this floor,” Wilson explained.

“You mean—?” Slater cocked an eyebrow toward the hallway.

“Correct,” Wilson said with a grin. “Take your pick by size, shape, color, or spark plug gap.”

“Listen, you two hot sparks,” Erikson interjected. “Tomorrow we have work to do and sleep tonight would be helpful.”

“Helpful but not crucial,” Wilson said. Slater laughed. They started to leave the room together.

“Before you leave, let’s all get out of these uniforms and have them laundered, Wilson,” Erikson said, bowing to the inevitable.

Slater and Wilson departed in their underwear with a pile of uniforms on Wilson’s arm. When we were alone, I asked Erikson a question that had been bothering me. “What’s Wilson telling these people to account for the Cuban uniforms and American dollars?”

“We’re supposed to be a group infiltrating from Miami. Chico says everyone in the house is anti-Castro because they have to live underground since his decree outlawing brothels. Most have also had a relative chewed up in the People’s Republic machinery.”

He crawled into a bunk and I followed suit.

I flaked out almost before I had eased stiff, sore muscles into a semicomfortable position.