Under Siege (27 page)

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In thirty seconds they were back, carrying more rocket launchers. They squatted and waited.

The gunboat was obviously hit badly. Her how 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 triedto 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

basin 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.

‘allyocke 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 alonle”

“Tomds and Jesfis 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 thoughtfw, well-crafted letter to the editor, then everything would be okay.

Hector Santana sucked in a bushel of air and sighed “Have a nice day,” he said over his shoulder as he 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. 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 Yoclo 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 and 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. dis’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

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that. “Come on,” he said, slung his bag over his shoulder and 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 Cortes,” Jack Yocke muttered under his breath. He shifted the computer strap to case 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 betters 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. “Maria? 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 mwrt 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?”

“Marfa.”

“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. Gr”…ias. “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. “Maria’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. Maria 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

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 pass 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 shad strip as the disy 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.