Under Siege

CHAPTER TWELVE

At dawn the blackness faded to slate gray. A gray, indefinite sky above a gray sea. Visibility about a mile in fog. There were no other vessels to be seen, no land, nothing but gray in every direction.

The helmsman slowed the boat to two or three knots and it began to roll and pitch sloppily. On the low fantail, behind the raised bridge, the other passengers baited fishing rods with small fish and rigged them to troll. One man went up on the high fish platform. Jack Yocke had no desire to join him. The motion of the boat would be much worse there.

Sandwiches and coffee were brought up from below. Yocke had had two bites before he realized he had made a mistake. He puked over the rail and the wind sprayed some of it over the men sitting on the fantail watching the fishing rods. They were angry at first, then they laughed.

“Go below and lie down,” Santana told him.

Yocke was back on deck in two minutes, heaving again. The motion of the boat was impossible to endure in the confined spaces below.

He ended up lying on the deck forward, crawling to the rail to puke, then lying on his back waiting.

Hours passed. He was reduced to dry heaves.

Oh God, he was sick. Every now and then he could hear the Cubans on the bridge laughing. He didn’t care. He didn’t care if he died here and now. Nothing was worth this.

Once he heard a plane. A jet. Oh, to be up there, sitting in a comfortable, stable seat, one that didn’t bob and roll and go endlessly up and down, up and down….

Since there was absolutely nothing in his stomach at this stage, he merely curled into the fetal position and retched until he gagged, then retched some more.

He resolved never again to travel by water, anywhere. To never again set foot on boat, ship, ferry, scow, schooner, sloop, anything that floated. If he couldn’t go by air or rail, he wouldn’t go.

When Jack Yocke finally felt better it was after twelve o’clock on his watch. He sat and stared at the sea. The visibility had improved — maybe three or four miles — and the clouds were broken, with sunlight shining through in places, making the sea a brilliant blue. The sunlight on the sea hurt his eyes. He got up and staggered along the deck edge, holding on like grim death, to the bridge area. How had he managed to get to the forward deck when he was so sick?

“Drink this. It’s water,” Santana said, and he obeyed.

His stomach was still queasy, but nowhere near as bad as it had been.

For the first time he seriously examined his companions, of whom five were visible above decks. Santana, the two from yesterday — Jesús Ruiz and Tomás García — and two more whose names he never learned. Ruiz was the helmsman while García spent his time listening to a shortwave radio. Yocke got a chance to observe García closely for several minutes, and he seemed to be monitoring the VHF band.

Santana saw him looking over García’s shoulder. “That jet two hours ago was U.S. Coast Guard. They saw us with their radar but never got a visual identification. They reported our position, course, and speed to their headquarters in Miami, which presumably passed it to the two cutters that are somewhere out here.”

“Where?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Did we change course after the jet passed?”

“Yes. We are now headed northeast, toward Andros Island.”

“What are we worried about? We’re just out here fishing.”

“Fishing,” Santana agreed. Automatically he checked the rods and the angle of the lines.

“No luck, huh?” Yocke said, also looking.

“We had a tuna strike this morning, while you were sick. I had them take the baits off. We are just trolling bare hooks.”

“Maybe we should try to catch something.”

“We don’t have the fuel to waste on a fight. And the fish would be killed for no reason. That,” Hector Santana added with a glance at the reporter, “would be a sin.”

Jack Yocke listened to the news, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English from a U.S. station, and watched the men. He avoided drawing them into conversation, and none of them except Santana approached him to talk.

All afternoon the Cubans huddled near the radio and chafed, each man in his own way. The revolution was in full swing, people they knew and cared deeply for were risking everything, including their lives, yet here they sat on a fifty-foot boat on a vast, empty sea, going nowhere at three knots.

Yocke was as impatient as the rest. He reminded himself that his interest was strictly professional. Well, sporting too, in that he was rooting hard for the underdogs, yet somehow this thought tweaked from him a pang of guilt, which annoyed him. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t a Cuban or that Cuba had become a poor, starving bucolic workers’ paradise under the magnificent benevolence of the “maximum leader.” For thirty-one years Fidel Castro had been the Cuban saint, a sugarcane version of George Washington, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and St. Paul, togged out in army fatigues and spouting revolutionary bullshit that the vast majority of Cubans believed or at least tolerated. It wasn’t until the Soviets had cut them off the dole and starvation threatened that the Cuban people had finally held up a yardstick to see how tall Fidel really was.

Yocke vomited again in late afternoon, but afterward the queasiness seemed to leave him. Weak and dehydrated, he still felt better.

As evening came the visibility lifted significantly. Just before dark Yocke could see land off to the northeast and east, a dark line on the horizon perhaps ten miles away. It was difficult to judge and he didn’t ask. As the light faded the two men on the fantail reeled in the fishing lines and stowed the rods.

When the night enclosed them completely and the only lights in the universe were the red glow from the binnacle and chart table, Santana spoke to the helmsman. He spun the wheel and pushed the twin throttles forward. The fantail descended and the bow rose as the screws bit into the sea.

With Santana bending over the chart and Ruiz at the helm, the boat glided through the night. García played with the Loran and the other two acted as lookouts.

Yocke stood on the left rear corner of the bridge, out of whispered earshot and out of the way, and watched. He was the first to see the weak flashes of light off in the darkness a little to the left of their course, and pointed them out to Santana.

Ruiz cut the throttle. The boat rose and fell gently on the swell, enveloped by darkness. Santana pointed a flashlight with a cone of paper taped around the head in the direction of the first light and keyed it several times. At the answering light, Ruiz advanced the throttles.

After five minutes or so and another hurried conference over the chart, the Cubans killed the engine. One man went forward to lower the anchor.

Rocking in the night, they waited. Jack Yocke could just faintly hear breakers crashing on a beach. Or perhaps against rocks.

Santana came over for a moment beside him. “Be very quiet. Stay here on the bridge,” he whispered. “If there is any trouble, lie down and do not move.” To reinforce his message, he tapped the reporter’s arm gently with a revolver.

Yocke looked. García came up from below decks with a rifle of some kind. He moved forward of the bridge. The man on the fantail also had a rifle or perhaps a submachine gun. It was very difficult for Yocke to see clearly in the haphazard starlight coming through gaps in the cloud cover overhead.

Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Ruiz muttered something in Spanish to Santana about the time.

Yocke didn’t realize they had company until the other boat bumped against theirs. Other men came aboard. After a quick conference on the fantail, everyone except Ruiz went to the fantail to help.

The job took about fifteen minutes, as close as Yocke could tell. Box after heavy box was handed from the smaller boat to this one, then carefully carried below. Over thirty boxes, perhaps three dozen.

Then the other boat was pushed away into the darkness. Ruiz started his engines, waited just a moment to ensure that the other boat would drift clear, then engaged the screws and advanced the throttles. He brought them up slowly and steadily as the speed built until the two throttles were against the forward stops and the bow was leaping off swells and whacking into others. Yocke found a handhold.

After a while Santana and the others came up from below and stood joking and laughing on the bridge. They were in a jovial mood. They passed a bottle around, then Santana brought it over to where Yocke sat and offered him a swig.

Yocke declined. “My stomach.”

“I understand. Perhaps when we reach Cuba.”

“What do you guys have in those boxes?”

“You don’t really want to know. You’re just an uninvited hitchhiker, remember?”

“Amazing how your accent goes and comes.”

“Accents are useful. They are like clothes. One dresses the part. Always.”

“Watching you load those boxes, I finally realized how big a fool I’ve been.”

Santana tilted the bottle. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Well, perhaps. If so, that is progress. Most fools live their entire lives without ever knowing wisdom.” He belched. “I think there’s one swallow left. You never know, it might be your very last.”

Yocke took the bottle and drained it. The rum burned all the way down. He wound up and threw the bottle as far out into the wake as he could. He didn’t see it splash.

“None of us ever know, do we?”

“That is right,” Santana agreed cheerfully enough and left him to examine the chart and fiddle with the Loran and confer in a low voice with Ruiz and García.

In a few minutes García made himself comfortable across from Yocke. He still had the rifle. He rested it across his knees.

The hours passed. Sometimes the ride would grow rougher or smoother for a time, but the throttles stayed against the stops. Ruiz worked the helm only to hold his course. He did have to work at it. After a few hours Santana relieved him and he went below. García smoked cigarettes and never moved.

When Ruiz came back on deck at midnight, Yocke asked Santana if he could go below and get his gear. Santana got it for him.

Yocke donned a sweatshirt and pulled a sweater over it. Using the vinyl bag for a pillow, he stretched out on the deck.

When he awoke he was aware that the boat was not rolling as before. She was now moving directly across the swells and pitching heavily, the engine still at full cry.

All the men were on deck, looking away to port. Yocke joined them and peered into the darkness. Beside him García pointed.

A white masthead light was just visible, another light under it. “Cuban patrol boat.”

“Has he seen us?”

“Sí. I think so.”

Yocke moved over to where Santana stood, beside the helmsman. He was looking at the chart.

“Where are we?”

“Here.” Santana jabbed with his finger. The spot he indicated was ten miles or so north of the Cuban coast. “The patrol boat has us on radar.”

“You could run east away from him.”

“No. We have been picking up radar signals from the east. There is a patrol boat over there too, though farther away. We were trying to go between them.”

“You have a radar detector?”

“Yes. One of your American ones for detecting police radar. We have modified it to receive different frequencies. It works quite well.”

“So what are you going to do?” Yocke looked again at the lights on the horizon. Was the Cuban boat visibly closer or was that his imagination?

“We can try for shallow water. We don’t have many options.”

“You could turn around and go north.”

Santana was looking at the chart.

“Surely that’s better than getting killed?”

“Go sit down. Stay out of the way.”

Yocke didn’t have to be told twice.

After a quick conference around the helm, everyone except Santana went below. He took the wheel.

Yocke was watching the lights, which were truly closer, when he saw the flash. Santana saw it too and spun the wheel. The nose of the boat slewed to port. Yocke heard the rumble as the shot went over and, after a moment, the splash. Then, finally, he heard the boom of the shot.

Santana spun the wheel again, turning starboard, then steadied up after thirty degrees or so of heading change. The next shot was short, though much closer.

The stars seemed to be brighter. Yocke checked his watch. A few minutes after five a.m. He looked down toward the south. Lights. Towns, perhaps. Or villages. Cuba. God, it would be a long swim! And sharks — these waters were full of sharks.

He was thinking of sharks and wondering about the current when he saw the third flash. The gunboat was definitely closer.

This time the shot fell just in front of the bow.

“The next one’ll be the charm,” Yocke said loudly enough for Santana to hear.

“Pray,” was the response.

The other Cubans rushed up from below. Two of them went forward and two settled on the port side of the bridge. They each had a dark pipe on their shoulder, something like a World War II bazooka.

“Get over here, Yocke! By me!” Santana ordered.

“Ready?” Santana shouted.

“Sí. Adelante!”

Santana spun the wheel and the boat heeled to starboard as her nose came port. She had completed forty-five degrees or so of heading change when the gunboat fired again. Santana held in his turn until he was heading only ten or fifteen degrees south of the gunboat, running toward her at full throttle. “Not yet,” he shouted.

The swells were smaller and farther apart here in the lee of Cuba and the boat rode more steadily on the step.

Jack Yocke peered through the bridge glass trying to estimate the distance. Ahead of him, on the deck, the two men lay prone, on their elbows, each with a tube across his shoulder and pointed toward the charging gunboat.

The gunboat fired again. Santana swerved port, bringing the gunboat dead onto the nose. Just when Yocke concluded the Cuban Navy had again missed, the platform above the bridge exploded, showering the fantail with debris.

Santana chopped the throttle and slammed the transmission into neutral.

“They’re gonna hit us with the next one,” Yocke shouted.

“Everybody down. Take cover!”

“They’ll kill us,” Yocke shouted at Santana, infuriated at the man’s composure.

“They’re not in range yet.”

“Oh, damn,” Yocke muttered, and got facedown on the floor.

The seconds passed. Miraculously, the next explosion didn’t come. Yocke lay on his belly waiting, sweating profusely, and when it finally seemed that the shooting was over, he got up on his knee for a look. The gunboat was closer, much closer.

Another flash. This time the bridge glass to Yocke’s right exploded. He felt the sting of something hitting his face and instinctively raised his arm.

“Fire!” Santana shouted.

One of the men behind fired first. A whooshing crack and a great flash of light and the rocket shot forward, illuminating the surface of the black sea with the fire from its exhaust.

Then the man beside him fired. Another report and flash.

The men up forward fired no more than a second apart.

Half blinded by the flashes, Jack Yocke tried to look anyway.

One of the missiles hit a swell and detonated. Well short.

Another hit the gunboat with a flash. A second impacted almost in the same place. The fourth must have missed.

Yocke turned. The two men behind him were going down the ladder, heading below. Santana shoved the transmission lever forward and firewalled the throttle. As the stern bit into the sea he cranked the helm over.

In thirty seconds they were back, carrying more rocket launchers.

They squatted and waited.

The gunboat was obviously hit badly. Her bow turned northward and the smear of fire was visible.

Santana veered off to the south, to pass under the gunboat’s stern, perhaps a quarter mile away, Yocke guessed.

As they approached to almost abeam, tracers reached from the gunboat. The man behind Yocke fired another missile. This one impacted the Cuban gunboat just above the waterline.

Then they were by, the distance increasing.

“What the fuck are those things?” Yocke asked.

“LAW rockets.” Yocke had heard of these, though he had never seen one. Light antitank weapons.

“How many you got down there?”

“Not as many as we started with.”

“Where’d you get ’em?”

“You never stop asking fool questions, do you?”

“Sorry.”

The gunboat was on fire, dead in the water, rapidly falling astern when Yocke saw her last. His face was stinging. It was blood.

The back end of the port side of the bridge was a mess. The shell had blown out the window and passed through the supporting structure that held up the roof. Luckily the stuff offered too little resistance to activate the fuse or everyone on the bridge would have been cut to bits by the shrapnel of the exploding warhead. And the fiberglass had been cooked by the exhaust of the missiles getting under way.

To hell with these idiots!

Jack Yocke went below and found the cabin he had slept in leaving Miami and turned on the light. He was shaking like a leaf. He sat on the bunk and tried to get his breathing under control while blood dripped off his chin onto his shirt and trousers.

Ten minutes later he was looking in the mirror above the washbasin and using a towel to extract the glass shards from the cuts in his face when Hector Santana came in.

“How do you feel?”

“You want the truth or some macho bullshit from a B movie?”

“Whatever pleases you.”

“I damn near shit myself.”

Santana grinned. The grin looked wicked on that tight, death’s-head face.

Yocke averted his eyes and concentrated on raking a glass splinter from a cut over his eye. When he got it out, he said, “Why’d you let me come along?”

“Tomás and Jesús wanted to kill you in Miami. You were obviously a plant. Even if you were a reporter, you might talk, talk far too much, much too soon. I don’t like to kill unless it is required. So we brought you.”

“A great bunch of guys you are! What would you have done earlier this evening if you had run into a U.S. Coast Guard cutter? After you picked up the weapons?”

“Probably scuttled.”

“My ass! You’d have shot it out.”

“Think what you like.”

“If we had survived that encounter, you would have killed me.”

Santana shrugged. “A lot of time, effort, and money went into acquiring these weapons. Three men lost their lives. We desperately need these weapons to fight the Fidelistas. Much is at stake. Many lives. Yet you came to our office and stuck your nose in where it didn’t belong. You wanted a free ride to the revolution, as if a revolution against Castro would be some kind of a Cuban circus that you had improvidently forgotten to buy a ticket for. You wanted to sneak in under the tent flap!”

Santana snorted. “You Americans! You persist in thinking the world is a comfortable little place, full of comfortable, reasonable people, despite all the evidence to the contrary. If only everyone would buy a Sunday edition of the Post and read it carefully, perhaps write a thoughtful, well-crafted letter to the editor, then everything would be okay.”

Hector Santana sucked in a bushel of air and sighed audibly. “Have a nice day,” he said over his shoulder as he went through the door.

Jack Yocke stared at his face in the mirror. Blood was still trickling from several of the deeper cuts.

The boat glided gently through the shallow waters of an inlet behind an island as the daylight came. The remains of the fishing tower above the bridge listed at a crazy angle. The back end of the bridge didn’t look any better in the gray half light of dawn than it had an hour ago. The plexiglass fragments were charred a sooty black.

As Yocke watched, Santana ran the boat into a cut on the bank sheltered by several trees. A half dozen men came aboard and carried the LAW rockets, still in their olive-drab boxes stenciled U.S. ARMY, over a plank to a truck barely visible amid the vegetation.

When the job was complete, the men piled into the truck and drove away. Everyone went with them except Santana. He stood on the bridge with Yocke. “Well,” he said, “that’s done.”

“What next?”

“Unless you’re in the mood for a swim, I suggest you go ashore. Better take your stuff with you. Oh, and take my bag from the galley ashore with you. And this.” Santana drew his revolver from his waistband and tossed it at the reporter, who barely caught it.

With Yocke standing on sand trying to readjust his muscles to the absence of motion, Santana maneuvered the boat from the cut and slowly eased her several hundred yards out into the inlet, where he killed the engine. He went forward and heaved the anchor overboard.

He worked on the boat for ten or fifteen minutes while Yocke sat on the vinyl suitbag watching. The quiet was uncomfortable after two nights and a day listening to the engines. Yocke could hear birds singing somewhere and the slap-slap of water lapping at the shore, but that was about it. No engine noise, no jets overhead, no barely audible radio or television babble. Just the chee-cheeing of the birds and the water.

The pistol felt strange in his hand. Yocke examined it. A Smith & Wesson .357. It wasn’t a new gun or even in very good condition. He could see bare metal in places where the blueing was gone. But the thing that struck Jack Yocke was the weight. This thing was heavier than he thought it would be. He knew very little about firearms and had handled them on only a few occasions. Looking into the chambers from the front, he could see the bullets. Shiny little pills of instant death. Ugliness. Everything he didn’t like about the world and the people in it was right here in his hand.

He carefully laid the pistol on top of the computer case and wiped his hands in the sand.

Santana came off the boat in a clean dive and began swimming. The sun was up now and the water was a pale, sandy blue. The man swam efficiently, without wasted effort.

He was standing beside Yocke taking off his wet clothes when a dull “crump” reached them and the remains of the fish tower toppled slowly into the water. Ten seconds later another explosion, more powerful but still strangely muffled.

Santana stripped to the skin and opened his bag. He had his underwear and trousers on when he next looked at the boat. She was down visibly at the head and listing.

“How deep’s the water there?”

“Sixty or seventy feet, maybe. That’s the channel.”

“Clear as this water is, she’ll be visible from the air.”

“No one will look from the air for a few days. Then it won’t matter. We’ll be in Havana.”

“Or dead,” Jack Yocke added.

“You are very intuitive. Your grasp of the situation is really remarkable.”

“Fuck you very much.”

The forward deck was completely awash when Santana stood and dusted the sand from his trousers. He tucked the revolver into his waistline and let the loose shirt hang over it. “Come on,” he said, slung his bag over his shoulder and began walking as Yocke hurried to pick up his gear.

From a low dune a hundred yards or so inland Yocke paused and looked back at the inlet in time to see the water close over the bridge of the boat. Hector Santana kept walking. He didn’t bother to look.

“Campaigning with Cortés,” Jack Yocke muttered under his breath. He shifted the computer strap to ease the strain on his shoulder and hefted the vinyl suitcase. “Or perhaps, Walking Across Cuba by Jack Yocke, ace reporter and world-class idiot.”

An hour passed as they walked. Yocke got thirsty and said so. Santana didn’t say a word.

They were on a dirt road leading through sugarcane fields. The cane was knee high or so and green, rippling from air currents that never seemed to reach the two hikers. Away off to the south, the direction they were walking, Yocke could see clouds building over low hills or perhaps mountains. “Are there mountains in Cuba?” he asked.

They passed several empty shacks. One had an ancient, skinny chicken wandering aimlessly in the yard. No other living thing in sight.

“Where is everybody?” he asked. “Maybe we ought to look around for some water, huh? I’ll bet they got a well or something.” Santana kept walking without replying. “What’s wrong with that idea, Jack?” Yocke muttered loud enough for the Cuban to hear.

“Hey, Hector,” Jack Yocke said five minutes later. “Wanta tell me where we’re going? If we’re going to walk clear to Havana maybe I should lighten the load. What d’ya think?”

When Santana didn’t reply, Yocke stepped near his ear and yelled, “Hey, asshole!”

“Did it ever occur to you,” Santana said patiently, “that if we are stopped by Cuban troops, the less you know the better? For you, for me, for everyone?”

They walked for another hour. A small group of shacks came into sight and Santana headed for them. He went into the yard and motioned for Yocke to stay. Then he went up to a porch and looked through the screen. “María? Carlos?”

Santana went inside. Yocke sat on his vinyl bag and took his shoes off and massaged his feet. A skinny chicken came over to watch. Does Cuba have any chickens that aren’t skinny?

An old car, almost obscured by grass and weeds, sat rotting in a shed beside the house. Yocke went over and examined the car as murmurs of Spanish came through the window. An ancient Chevrolet sedan. Forty years old if it was a day. There wasn’t enough paint even to tell what the original color had been. The back window was missing. Several chickens had obviously been raising their families on the rear seat.

At least he wasn’t seasick. That was something. He was hungry enough to eat one of those scrawny chickens raw. He was watching one and trying to decide if he could catch it when Santana and a young woman came out of the house. The woman stood by Yocke as Santana went over to the car, got in, and ground on the engine.

Amazingly enough, a puff of blue smoke came out from under the car and the engine caught.

Santana backed the car into the yard. The woman opened the rear door and raked the chicken shit and straw out onto the ground. Santana got out of the car, leaving the engine running. “This is it. This is our transportation to Havana.”

“You gotta be shitting me!”

“Put your stuff in the trunk.”

“Can I have some water?”

“In the house. They don’t have any food, so don’t ask.”

The young woman took him inside. There was an old woman in a rocker, and she nodded at him. His escort dipped him a glass of water from a pail that sat in the kitchen. He drained it and she gave him another.

“You speak English?”

“A little,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“María.”

“You know Santana?”

“Who?”

Yocke jerked his head toward the yard. “Santana.”

“Oh. Pablo.” She smiled. “He’s my brother.”

Yocke handed back the glass. “Thanks. Gracias.”

“De nada.”

Santana was waiting in the car. Yocke walked around and opened the front seat passenger door. “You ride in back,” Santana told him. “María’s coming with us.”

Yocke dusted the rear seat as best he could and sat. The odor of chicken shit wouldn’t be too bad at speed if they kept the windows down. María came out of the house with three or four plastic jugs filled with water. She put them in the trunk and climbed in beside her brother.

As they rolled out of the farmyard, Yocke could hear the transmission grinding. Or the differential. Perhaps both. “This thing’ll never make it to Havana.”

“Beats walking,” Santana said.

They had gone just a mile or so when they came to a two-lane asphalt road running east and west. Santana turned right, west.

For the first few hours the car made good time, rolling along at twenty-five or thirty miles per hour, Yocke estimated. The speedometer needle never moved off the peg. The few vehicles on the road were all westbound. The flatbeds of cane trucks were packed with people, the old cars similarly stuffed and riding on their frames. Occasional knots of people walked west alongside the road.

Cane fields swept away to the horizon to the north and south across the flat, rolling fields, under a bright sun. Here and there shacks near the roads stood deserted and empty, with not even a chicken or pig in sight.

After two hours they came to a town. It was a real town, with streets and throngs of people in the streets. The car took an hour to creep through as Santana leaned out and shouted to knots of people in doorways, huddled around radios, “Que pasa?”

“The prisons have been emptied,” Santana told Jack Yocke at one point. “The guards refused to fire on the people, who liberated the prisoners.”

On the west side of town the road was jammed with walking people: men, women, children, the elderly, the lame. The western pilgrimage grew denser at every crossroads, every village.

The Chevy proceeded little faster than the walking people, who gently parted in front of it to let it past and closed in again behind, like water in the wake of a boat’s passage.

The radiator boiled over around noon. The three of them piled out and sat beside the car in a little shady strip as the human stream trudged by. Some of the people carried chickens and ducks with their feet tied together. Every now and then a man passed with a pig arranged around his shoulders.

Yocke mopped his face with his shirttail and relieved himself beside the road. Everyone else was doing likewise. There was no embarrassment: there was nowhere else to do it. He stood there with his back to the road looking out across the miles of growing cane and breathing deeply of the sweet odor, and made a wet spot on the red earth.

An army truck came by, also headed west. In addition to the troops packed willy-nilly in the back, civilians had clambered aboard, poultry, kids, and all. Yocke thought the truck looked like Noah’s ark as it slowly breasted the human sea, trailing diesel fumes. He caught a glimpse of a goat amid the people and protruding rifles.

Eventually the steam from the Chevy’s tired engine subsided. Water from bottles in the trunk was added, the worn-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.

A missile had punched a neat hole in the side armor; 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 ears. 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 be had but no food. Those who had poultry or the carcasses of dogs built a fire out of anything that would burn and roasted them. The smoke wafted through the streets and between the buildings: the shadows it cast under the flickering 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. Mañana, 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 Revolución. 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 Revolución. 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. “Cu-ba, Cu-ba, Cu-ba,” 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 people. He felt his way in, found a spot, and lay down. The chanting wasn’t as loud here, two blocks from the square, but it was clear, distinctive, sublime. “Cu-ba, Cu-ba,” 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 lined up and given assault 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 people 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 had 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 B.F. — Before Fidel — when he heard his name called.

“Jack Yocke! Hey, Jack! Up here!”

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