Operation Fireball (13 page)

“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.

THE SOUND
of voices woke me.

When I opened my eyes, I could see daylight around the edges of the drawn curtains. Erikson was seated on his cot in his underwear, drinking coffee. On the next cot sat a girl with high-cheekboned, Indian features and long black hair that streamed down her back. She wore the single garment that seemed to be the uniform of the establishment.

Chico Wilson came bounding into the room, his handsome face flushed. “There you are, Melia!” he exclaimed. He took the girl by the arm. “Come on. I’ve been looking for you.”

I thought the girl hesitated for a second, but she rose and accompanied him. “I will send coffee,” she said in English to me.

“Where did she learn the language?” I asked Erikson as the pair disappeared down the corridor.

“In convent school. Melia was working as an airline receptionist until her father joined one of the anti-Castro factions and got caught at it. She had an aunt who got caught in the wringer, too. Castro’s militarists took over the old city prison at Twenty-ninth and C streets, just eight blocks from here. The aunt had an apartment a block from the prison in which one window overlooked part of the outside prison yard where the drum-head court martials took place. Melia says that oftentimes her aunt’s reports were all the knowledge they had of what had happened to some of their people.”

Erikson began to dress. For the first time I noticed that our freshly laundered uniforms were spread out on a cot. “Then the aunt got caught at it, and Castro has been systematically hunting down all branches of the girl’s family ever since. This is the only place in Cuba where she’d be safe.”

“Why here?”

“The men running this brothel pay off a couple of top Castroites. The military rank-and-file are told to close their eyes. It’s one of the few places in Havana where everyone doesn’t have to show papers to military types a dozen times a day.” He looked at me. “Get dressed and round up the others. Your turn at bat is coming up now.”

I found Slater three rooms down the hall. He was seated on a chair, naked. His hirsute bulk overflowed it. His glazed eyes were on the bed where three nude girls were entangled in a fleshy mass. Their average age appeared to be about fifteen. Slater didn’t hear me come in. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Time for business,” I told him.

He removed his gaze from the bed. “Yeah,” he agreed. He rose and looked for his underwear. He reached out and gave a fatherly pat to a blocky-looking bare behind as it rose momentarily above the forest of entwined limbs. “How d’you like these squirmers?”

“Very acrobatic,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Wilson and Ramirez were arguing beside a bed on which Melia was sprawled on her back. The girl’s dark eyes expressed such sheer malevolence that I took a second look at her. Wilson flung away angrily from the powerful-looking Cuban. “He wants more money, goddamn him,” he exclaimed. “He knows I go for her.”

“Council of war,” I said. “Right now.”

Wilson accompanied us reluctantly. We sat down in close order on the cots. “Where’s the money, Slater?” Erikson asked.

“In the National Museum,” Slater said, as though he had been expecting the question. “In the basement packed in jars of earth. There was a Pan American celebration once in which Spanish-speakin’ countries contributed soil from their own land to the museum. The jars used to be on display in the main hall of the museum, but even before my time in Havana they’d been moved out of the limelight into the basement. Nobody’s thought about ‘em for years. That’s where we buried the cash.”

“The National Museum,” Erikson said thoughtfully. He looked at me. “As bad as a bank?”

“It could be. I’ll have to look it over.”

“How far away is it?” Erikson asked Wilson.

“Fifteen, eighteen blocks. Walkin’ distance. Maybe tomorrow we can—”

“This afternoon,” Erikson cut him off. “If Drake says he can handle it, we’ll go for it tonight.”

“What the hell’s the rush?” Wilson protested.

“Because I say there’s a rush,” Erikson bit off. “If we—”

He stopped as Melia entered the room carrying a tray. On it were two steaming tureens, a stack of plastic bowls, and a few plastic spoons. The girl swiftly ladled the contents of the tureens into the bowls. One contained a creamed rice with tiny bits of meat, the other a thick bean soup, fiery against the palate. Melia sat down with us, closest to Erikson. Wilson glared at her.

“What about the National Museum, Melia?” Erikson asked her.

“You are hardly in a position to be
turistas
,“ she said, smiling. “Besides, the regime opens it now only from one to three
P.M
. They don’t wish to encourage time lost from the cane fields.”

“Make arrangements with our landlords for you and Drake to go out for a couple of hours,” Erikson directed Wilson when Melia departed with the dirty dishes.

I was ready when Wilson returned. We negotiated the two sets of steel-plated doors and stepped out onto the street. Wilson set a brisk pace. His mood seemed a sullen one. The few automobiles in sight looked like a U.S. antique car rally. The majority of the militarized vehicles seemed only slightly better preserved. Soldiers were everywhere, strolling idly. Most wore sidearms.

“There you are,” Wilson said at the end of a twenty-minute walk. I looked across the street. We had moved out of the area of jammed-together apartments. The five- or six-story sandstone building covered a whole block. The lawn had been allowed to turn brown.

We circled the block. The ground-floor windows had heavy grills and window bars. On the back side, on the street with the least traffic, a row of tamarind trees that reached almost to the second floor ran the length of the building.

We continued around the building to the front entrance. We met no one on the broad entrance walk, which had a marble mosaic of the Cuban seal in its center. Inside the front door there was a heavy grill in a track that enabled it to be moved in front of the entrance after closing hours. There were only two guards visible, both elderly men. It figured when I thought about it. Castro would have the young ones in the fields working as
macheteros
.

Only a middle-aged man and woman were looking at the pictures on the ground floor. I sent Wilson to talk to the guards while I looked at the entrance more closely. I cheered up a little when I saw that the alarm system was of U.S. make. I cheered up a lot when I noticed the badly peeling window foil and corroded elements, which had obviously made the alarm system inoperative. Lack of maintenance had had no effect on the grills, unfortunately.

“The basement is off limits,” Wilson reported when he left the guards. “There’s only two of ‘em on duty nights, too.”

That was accommodating of the People’s Republic. I moved in for a closer look at the locks on the inside of the barred windows, then backed away. “I’ve seen enough,” I said.

Wilson looked surprised. Out on the street we made another circuit of the building while I took a second look at the rear of it. Evidences of neglect were everywhere. Two cornices looked ready to crumble. “All right,” I said at last, and Wilson set our course for the whorehouse. The only military thing I saw en route, aside from the ever-present uniforms, was an array of dull-gray tanks in a parklike area behind high-strung barbed wire.

Portal to portal, the round trip took us seventy minutes. Once again we were passed through the reinforced doors. When we emerged into the second-floor hallway, the noise surprised me. There was the babbling sound of many high-pitched conversations. “This is the businessman’s shift, their real moneymaker here,” Wilson explained. Passing the doorless rooms, I had opportunity to observe that the Cuban businessman was an uninhibited type.

I heard a man’s and a woman’s laughter blended in our room. Erikson and Melia were sitting together on one of the cots. Empty coffee cups rested on a nearby hassock. I had never heard Erikson laugh before. Wilson, behind me, pushed forward when he saw the pair. His face was scarlet. “You can goddamm well leave her alone!” he snapped at Erikson. He reached for the girl’s wrist and jerked her to her feet. His expression softened as he stared at her. “Come on,” he said in an abrupt change of mood. “I’ll buy you that dinner I promised you.”

“It is too dangerous for me on the street,” Melia said.

The opposition refueled Wilson’s anger. “Don’t say no to me, you whore!” He dragged the girl toward the door.

“Stay off the street unless it’s necessary, Wilson!” Erikson called after them.

Only an unintelligible growl answered him. “What did you find out?” Erikson asked. He had already dismissed the incident.

“The museum is a piece of cake.”

“It can’t be,” Erikson said flatly.

I explained about the inoperative alarm system. “Besides my own kit, all we need is a sign painter’s ladder.”

“That might not be too easy,” Erikson frowned. “Although a little money—what’s the exact setup?”

I told him about the shielding tamarind trees at the rear of the building. “The second-floor windows have no grills, and I’ve had a good look at their locks. We’ll go up the ladder, get inside, intercept the guards, slip down to the basement, retrieve the cash, and take off.”

Erikson sat in silence. “We’re going at this too fast,” he said finally. “If we had time to study the guards’ movements—but we can’t take the time.”

“We should have cords and gags for the guards.”

Erikson nodded. “Now give it to me again step by step how it will go.”

Slater wandered in, yawning sleepily. He stretched out on a cot. Erikson and I were still at it twenty minutes later when Melia rushed into the room. She had on a street dress and her features were pale. “Wilson is in trouble on the street!” she said with her words running together. “At the corner!”

I hurried to the window. “Easy!” Erikson said as I started to pull the shade to one side.

“He insisted that I go out with him,” Melia continued in a dull tone. “And I—I am not allowed to refuse. We passed a squad of soldiers—there were remarks—then an argument—he told me to run—”

Erikson was crowded in beside me as we stared out through the slitted shade. Slater had left his cot and his chin was pressing on my shoulder on the other side. There was no difficulty in seeing Wilson. He was half a block away, trying to walk toward us at the same time he argued nose-to-nose with a chunky man in uniform. There was much gesticulating. Half a dozen more uniformed men partly encircled Wilson.

Slater drew in his breath in a quick sucking sound as Wilson suddenly punched the chunky man, broke through the group, and ran for the doorway below us. The pack took up the chase. Two outdistanced the others. Wilson actually had his hand on the outside door when they collared him. They spun him back up the sidewalk, where he was engulfed by the second wave.

A knife appeared in Wilson’s hand. He slashed left, then right, and arcs of blood sprang up on the faces of the men closest to him. A soldier jumped on his back, bearing him to the sidewalk, and the rest piled on. For ninety seconds the sidewalk beneath us was a seething, writhing mass of humanity before movement ceased.

“He’s brought ‘em right to the door!” Slater said hoarsely.

It was like watching a silent movie. Wilson was hauled to his feet. Half his uniform was gone and one side of his face was streaming blood. Two men held his arms. His knife was on the sidewalk. One of the slashed men picked it up and tried to get at Wilson with it. The chunky man who seemed to be the leader of the squad stopped him. “They want him alive,” Erikson said softly. “If they suspect he’s American—”

The leader turned to look suspiciously at the door Wilson almost reached. He said something to Chico, who glared at him defiantly. The leader took two quick steps and struck him heavily in the face. Wilson bridged himself in the grasp of those who held him and tried to kick the leader in the throat. He was at once clubbed to the sidewalk. The leader made an encircling gesture to indicate the squad, then pointed to the doorway.

“That does it,” Erikson said calmly. “Melia, how do we get out of here except by the front entrance?” He picked up the backpack radio and slipped his arms through the straps.

“The doors will stop them for a little while,” she said. “But if Wilson admits he is American, the Elite Guard will appear.”

“What will our money buy us then?”

“Nothing. They are fanatics. These animals here will sell you to protect themselves.”

Slater cursed.

“So we’ll move first.” Erikson’s voice had a hard edge. “Slater, check the street.”

He went to the window again. “There’s two of ‘em posted in front of the door,” he reported gloomily.

“There is a door on this floor that leads into the next building, which is empty,” Melia said quietly. “That beast Ramirez has the key.”

Erikson studied her. “What about you if we make it out of here?”

“I would not like to be found here.” Her high-cheek-boned features spoke eloquently of how much she would not like to be found there. “No one has lived in my aunt’s apartment since she was taken away. I can hide you there if you take me with you.”

“You’ve got a deal.” Erikson started toward the door. “Get me close to Ramirez,” he told Melia.

She moved into the corridor ahead of him. I jerked my arms into my haversack straps and followed Erikson. I could hear Slater’s footsteps right behind me. I had my .38 under my shirt with the shirt button above my belt unbuttoned. “Ramirez,” I heard Melia say in a honeyed tone at the reinforced door.

The pockmarked guard turned from peering down the stairway through the small window in the door. A puzzled expression on his dark features gave way to anger when he saw Erikson with the radio on his back. He shook his head and pointed back up the corridor. Erikson closed with him, but the fireplug build of the guard made him a formidable adversary. They wrestled in a tight circle for a moment, then lunged in unison against the steel door.

There was a crunching sound as Erikson’s back collided with the door. He rebounded from it and hit Ramirez so hard that the pockmarked man did a full half-turn before he collapsed upon the carpeting. Slater dropped to his knees and began going through his pockets rapidly. “It is a flat silver key,” Melia directed him.