Mambo (23 page)

The man was Tomas “La Gaviota” Fuentes, a Cuban-American whose nickname, The Seagull, came from his amazing ability to fly seaplanes. Storms, whirlpools, hurricanes – Fuentes flew and landed his planes regardless. He had a madman's contempt for whatever inclement weather the gods sent down.

Fuentes looked along the beach, watching a score of fighter planes come in pairs at 1500 feet, then drop to 1200, at which point they strafed the sands, firing at bulls eyes painted in the centre of white banners. The planes, a mixture of Skyhawks, Harriers, and F-16s gathered from a variety of locations, used the inert practice ammunition known in the trade as blue slugs. Many of the banners remained undisturbed as the aircraft completed the run and veered left. Then fifty amphibious craft, each containing fifteen armed men, rolled with the tide towards the beaches. Every day the men practised wading ashore, hurrying over the sands to the cover of trees, where they disappeared swiftly and quietly.

La Gaviota took off his hat and cuffed sweat from his brow. This place was the asshole of the world. He turned away from the beach and strutted towards his large tent. Despite the fan powered by a generator, stifling air blew in self-perpetuating circles; hell wasn't, as a certain clown of a French philosopher had claimed, other people. Real hell was a canvas tent in a Central American republic surrounded by hungry dung-flies as big as wine bottles.

He poured himself a cold beer from an icebox and gulped it down quickly. He was a big man and all muscle; even the way his forehead protruded suggested an outcropping of muscle rather than bone. Each of his hands spanned twelve inches and he wore size thirteen army boots. He crumpled the can like tissue paper and turned on his radio, which was tuned to a country station beamed out of El Paso. It wasn't great reception, but better than nothing.

The flap of his tent opened just as he shut his eyes and listened to the sweet pipes of Emmylou Harris singing “Feeling Single, Seeing Double”. The visitor was Fuentes' second in command, a lackey Harry Hurt had sent from Washington. His name was Roger Bosanquet and he was some kind of limey, with an accent you could spread on a scone.

“They're getting better,” Fuentes said. “They're not perfect, but they're improving.” Here Fuentes added the words “old bean”, which he imagined was the way Englishmen addressed one another at every level of society. His attempt at an Oxford accent was appalling. Bosanquet always responded with a polite half-smile.

Bosanquet said, “The infantry coming ashore performed with precision. They can't possibly be faulted. The pilots, however, were not as accurate as they should have been. They need a little more time.” He had received training at an army school in England – from which establishment he'd been expelled for reasons Fuentes didn't know, though he had absolutely no doubt the crime was faggotry. All Englishmen were faggots. It was a law of nature.

Fuentes made the basic mistake of seeing only Bosanquet's manicured manners and his quiet subordination. He missed a certain hardness that lay in the Englishman's blue eyes. Nor did he notice the determined way Bosanquet sometimes set his jaw. He consistently underestimated the Englishman, whom he considered a
boniato
, a thickhead. But at some other level, one Fuentes did not care to acknowledge, he envied Bosanquet his education and training. His cool. His
class
.

“They don't have more goddam time,” Fuentes said. “The clocks are running,
yame
, and they're running just a little too damn fast. The aircraft are supposed to destroy Castro's defensive positions on the beach before the landings, correct? And if they don't, then the poor bastards coming ashore are walking into a slaughterhouse. Correct?”

Bosanquet wiped his brow with a red bandanna. He had served with Latin Americans like Fuentes before now and he disliked their sudden passions; they were brave soldiers but lacked detachment. It couldn't be expected, of course. Impatience and irrationality were programmed into them. They loved theatrics. They threw fits. They were unpredictable. They were not, when all was said and done, Anglo-Saxon. Bosanquet, who had done many dirty deeds for Harry Hurt in his life and who was here in this stinking place to provide a counterweight to Fuentes (and make confidential reports to Harry) spoke in a reasonable way. “With a little more accuracy on behalf of the planes, everything will work out superbly.”

“
Cojones
! Castro's apes will shoot those poor bastards in the boats like coconuts on the midway,” Fuentes snarled.

“Only if Castro's apes get the chance,” Bosanquet said quietly. “And we don't believe they will, do we? All we are doing here is to prepare our men for a contingency that isn't going to arise. Besides, it keeps them from getting bored.”

Fuentes, calmer now, mumbled and shrugged. He was into a second beer now, a Lone Star. Like all demanding leaders of men, he always thought the worst of his subordinates. They were misconceived sons of whores and yet he prayed, as any stage director will, that all would somehow be well on opening night, lines would not be fluffed, and some generous magic would inhabit his actors and raise them to the status of gods. In truth, he was reasonably pleased with his forces, but he was damned if he'd ever admit this. You didn't go round handing out Oscars before the performance.

He pulverised a mosquito on his green baize cardtable. He imagined squelching Fidel in just such a way:
schlurp –
out came the blood of Cuba.

Bosanquet opened an attaché case that contained several cashier's cheques and negotiable bonds. Fuentes looked at the stash for a second. He imagined depriving Bosanquet of the loot and making off into the hills, there to vanish and live a life of debauchery eating the pussy of coffee-coloured maidens. It was a temptation easily ignored. Fuentes had been in the Cuban Air Force until 1959; he'd been promoted to the rank of Major in the US Marines following some heroic feats of flying against Castro during the Bay of Pigs. But there was no way he could fit into an American officers' mess. He looked wrong and his accented speech was rough and his manners were uncouth, which added to his resentment of somebody like the well-spoken Bosanquet who always seemed to know the correct thing to say. But you couldn't fault Fuentes when it came to loyalty to his superiors. Besides, Harry Hurt wasn't the kind of guy you wanted to cross. Fuentes had the feeling Hurt wasn't acting alone, that a powerful, wealthy organisation existed around him, and Harry was just another ghost in a mighty machine.

Fuentes popped a third beer and tossed the aluminium tab into the blades of the fan which sucked it in, rattled it, then ejected it. “You got a lot of bread there, Roger,” he said.

Bosanquet shut the case. “Today's the day we spend it.”

Fuentes wondered how much longer a man might live in such a shitpile as this. After his retirement from the Marines he'd purchased a six-hundred-acre spread in Texas, between Amarillo and McLean, where he raised Aberdeen-Angus cattle and studied military history in his spare time. Sometimes he thought he should just have stayed home. But lonely old soldiers, like trout, were suckers for old lures. It wasn't even the money. What it really came down to was a break in the predictable tedium of life in the Texas Panhandle. Back home he had nothing but cows. Down here he had an army to drill – mainly Cuban boys recruited with great secrecy from the exile communities in New Jersey and California. A few had come from Florida, but Fuentes had not concentrated on recruiting there for the simple reason that he believed there were just too many big flapping mouths in Miami. He also had some Mexican mercenaries and a handful of Bolivians who all claimed to have been with Che at the end and who believed Fidel had conspired in Guevara's killing. In addition, he had about twenty Americans who had been in Vietnam, at least half a dozen of whom were CIA operatives in undercover roles. There was a considerable amount of hardware too: automatic weapons; grenades; rocket-launchers; a seemingly endless supply of ammunition; and the twenty fighter-planes the amazing Hurt had somehow managed to acquire in the military bazaars of the world. The F-16s had been built in Pakistan, the Skyhawks originated in South America, the Harriers, though American-made, had been bought through South African sources.

Fuentes hated Castro for the way he'd kicked ass at the Bay of Pigs. One of those bruised asses had been Fuentes' own. Cuba without Castro was Tomas Fuentes' dream. He had no idea who would take over the country after Fidel because this was information he'd never been given, nor did he particularly need it. He assumed that the next president and his government would have the support of both the Americans, which in Tomas' mind meant the CIA and some powerfully rich individuals, friends of Harry Hurt and certain important factions inside the Cuban armed forces. What did it matter? Nobody could be worse than Castro. Fuentes would do his own job, and do it to the best of his ability, and the politicians would take over when all the dust had settled.

“Listen,” said Roger Bosanquet.

Tommy Fuentes tilted his head. There was the sound of a small plane overhead. Fuentes stepped out of the tent. The plane, a Lear jet, approached from Nicaragua. It flew toward the airstrip that Fuentes and his army had hacked out of this godless landscape. The plane came in low and silvery-gold, touched down, bounced, then ran smoothly the length of the runway. Fuentes, with Bosanquet trotting at his back, walked down the hillside to the tarmac.

The Lear rolled to the place where Fuentes and Bosanquet stood. When it stopped completely the side-door opened, the gangway slithered down into place, and two men – so similar in height and appearance they might have been twins – stepped out into the insufferable weather. Both wore floral shirts and sunglasses and brand hew white linen pants and they looked like novice fishermen of the kind you find drifting in the coastal waters of Florida under the questionable tutelage of some self-appointed, dope-smoking guide. They were called Levy and Possony, and they spoke English with Eastern European accents, developed in the 1960s in Prague where they'd been dazzling physics students together at the University, brighter than all the other students and most of the professors too. They had lived for years in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and then at a secret research institute in the Negev, where they'd been regarded as scientific treasures of a kind – even if they'd been rewarded on the same salary scale as basic civil servants. It was commonly assumed, and quite wrongly, that they were too obsessed by their little world of scientific exploration to have any interest in material possessions. What was overlooked was the simple fact that Levy and Possony, after lives of poverty and wearisome antisemitism in Eastern Europe, followed by emigration to a strange land inhabited by people who spoke a language the two Czechs never mastered, longed desperately for something bright in their lives. Tired of penury in pursuit of science, weary of scratching around for grants, fed up with the bulk of their salary cheques being gobbled by patriotic taxes, they both desired less spartan lifestyles – even, to be honest, with a touch of sin thrown in.

Levy and Possony had come to the attention of the Society in the person of Harry Hurt, who saw in them middle-aged geniuses endangered by sexual dehydration and monotony. Neither was married; both were very horny in a manner befitting secular monks who had toiled for many arduous years in the rarified, lonely atmosphere of higher physics. Levy and Possony, like two figs, were wonderfully ripe for picking, and Harry Hurt, who had all the charm of an open cheque-book, plucked them carefully by moonlight, giving them money, briefcases of the stuff, vacations at glamorous resorts in exotic places where access to women was made easy for them. Possony had taken to Brazilian ladies and Levy to fellatio in a hot tub. Then a little indoctrination about how Castro loathed the existence of Israel and was practically an honorary Palestinian – wouldn't it be wonderful and, yes, patriotic, to help bring down a regime such as Fidel's? Levy and Possony, anxious only that nobody be hurt on account of their participation – an assurance gladly given by Harry Hurt, who would have assured Khaddafi a Nobel Peace Prize to get what he wanted – had their consciences swiftly appeased and agreed to a form of defection. In return for what Hurt needed, Levy and Possony would spend very pleasurable lives in some tropical paradise. They would be provided with new passports under new names, and they would be rich. And, if some future urge seized them to return to research, Hurt would cheerfully provide the means.

Now, Levy and Possony shook hands with Fuentes and ignored Bosanquet completely, as if they had intuited his lower standing. They had about them the contempt of tenants of ivory towers for those who toil in the cellars and workhouses of the world. Possony wore thick-lensed glasses through which his eyes, enlarged, unblinking, appeared to miss nothing. Levy, on the other hand, had a certain myopic uncertainty about him which suggested brilliance held in some delicate neurotic balance.

“Only mad dogs and Englishmen,” said Bosanquet, gesturing at the raging sun. It was his little turn at wit, but it went unappreciated. Noel Coward had never played in Cabo Gracias a Dios.

“We have the merchandise,” Levy said. “You have the money?”

Bosanquet opened the case. Possony counted the bonds and cheques which he did with irritating slowness, like an old-fashioned accountant who has forgotten to pack his abacus.

“Everything is in order,” Possony said.

“Now the merchandise,” Fuentes said.

“On board the plane,” said Levy.

All four men went up the gangway. The Lear jet was air-conditioned, a blessed oasis. Fuentes glanced into the cockpit where pilot and co-pilot sat. They wore holstered pistols. Levy led the way to a compartment at the rear. He unlocked a door, switched on a light. An unmarked wooden crate, measuring some six feet by four, stood in the lit compartment. There were no markings on the box.