were wrestling with wrenches, pliers, and a block- and-tackle, attempting to ease down the wide, cinemascope screen whose upper edge fluttered and vibrated in the steadily increasing wind. An officer and two noncoms bawled conflicting instructions at the rain-soaked men.
“Looks like a Chinese fire drill,” I said as Erikson parked the pickup.
“You two stay here out of sight,” Erikson ordered as he opened the door. It blew out of his hand. “Or you’ll find yourselves hijacked into another work detail.” He recaptured the door, slammed it, and ran toward the melee at the front of the theater apron.
Wilson and I scrunched down in the cab. The pickup rocked in the wind gusts. “What a night!” Wilson muttered. “An’ we got to go a good ways on foot.”
His remark reminded me of a personal problem. I looked out at the wind-driven rain, then took off my white cap. I unfastened the tabs on my wig and removed it, rolled it tightly, pulled up my shirt, and inserted the wig in the pouch of my money belt. Then I replaced the white cap on my nude skull. A wet wig is a dead giveaway.
Wilson watched the performance. “Man, you look like a different — hey, bulls-eye! Here they are!”
Erikson and a panting Slater appeared beside the pickup. Slater looked pale, tired, and unhappy. He had a nasty-looking, bleeding gash on his left thumb. “Outside and into the back, Wilson,” Erikson directed when he opened the door. “Climb in there with him, Slater.”
Wilson started to argue, then slid sullenly from the cab. He had to help Slater into the back of the pickup. “We don’t have Slater’s seabag,” I said to Erikson as he got under the wheel again.
“We won’t have it, period,” Erikson said. “It’s impounded with his personal belongings. I’ve been trying to remember what I packed in it. Fortunately I duplicated sensitive items. I’m afraid we’re going to be short on some things. Ammunition, for one.”
My tension must have showed more than I realized. Erikson glanced over at me and smiled. He seemed in high good humor. “Relax,” he said. “We’ve got better than a five-mile ride to the northeast gate. It’s the last driving we’ll get to do on U.S. soil for a while, so you might as well enjoy it.” He glanced at his watch as the pickup bored through the rainy night.
It seemed to me that we’d gone more than five miles before he spoke again. “This is the perimeter road,” he said. I noticed that he spent almost as much time looking at the floodlighted chain link fence topped with four strands of barbed wire as he did watching the rain-swept road. We proceeded along the fence for what seemed to me a long time.
At one point Erikson’s split attention almost cost us. Headlights loomed up ahead, tracking down the center of the road. Erikson jammed the heel of his hand on the horn ring and swerved hard right. The oncoming vehicle darted sideways at the last instant, and we passed with barely a foot separating the front fenders.
“There they are,” Erikson breathed. He glanced at his watch again as I completed a breath that had stuck halfway. “That’s the motorized patrol that guards this section of fence. They’ll backtrack this way in twelve minutes, and that’s when we start moving out.” He swung the pickup off the road, doused the headlights, and scrambled from the cab.
I joined him at the rear of the pickup. We climbed into the body of the truck with Slater and Wilson, who looked as though they’d just emerged from a plunge into the bay. In the first few minutes I was out of the truck cab, I became completely soaked.
Erikson ripped off the top of the smaller wooden crate and handed me a lantern-type flashlight. “Hold it so I can see what I’m doing,” he directed. I beamed the light into the interior of the crate. It was amazing the amount of equipment that Erikson had neatly packed. Half of it I couldn’t identify, but there was enough that I was familiar with to judge we’d be in good shape for an assault upon a bank vault.
I noticed two pairs of short-handled wire cutters. I picked one up and hefted it, then looked again at the formidable-appearing chain link fence. “You’ve got the wrong kind of cutters, Karl. These will only take care of barbed wire.”
“That’s all they’re supposed to do.” Erikson was dragging material out of the crate hand over hand. “If any of us touched any part of that lower fence, the show would be over. It’s equipped with an antiintrusion device, electronically activated, so it sends an alarm to the defense center and to the guard posts if there’s any tampering with the fence.”
He lifted out a curved piece of metal that looked like a cut-out section of a steel oil drum. Wires hung down from the back of it. When he turned it over, I could see that it was layered with a substance sandwiched between the metal back plate and the inch-thick serrated steel on the front. Chico Wilson whistled. “A Claymore mine!” he exclaimed.
“Correct,” Erikson said.
I don’t know much about mines, but I do about fences. “If you think that we’re going to blow a hole in that fence with this mine, we might as well go at it with the wire cutters.”
“No sweat,” Erikson replied. He dashed a handful of rain from his face and picked up a package of what looked like flat, metal noodles. He began taping the bundle of narrow foil strips to the face of the mine. “This is called chaff or window. It gives off thousands of radar echoes, blinding alarm systems like we’re up against here.”
Wilson caught the significance before I did. “So this is a diversion? We go over the fence somewhere else?”
“Correct,” Erikson said again. He held up the end of what looked like a length of small-diameter garden hose and began hooking it into the mine. “This is a pressure-activated trigger. We’ll stretch it across the road, and when the perimeter patrol truck runs over it, off goes the mine. A two-minute timing device prevents it from being triggered earlier by unexpected traffic.”
He started toward the tail gate of the truck, carrying the mine. “The charge will be directed at the fence, and the explosion will shower it with metal strips like a tinseled Christmas tree. That will set off the alarm and keep it going until they cut off the power. Then the antiintrusion apparatus will be out for at least a couple of hours. It’ll take them at least that long to remove all these strips by hand.”
“An’ where will we be while all this is goin’ on?” Slater demanded. It was the first time I’d heard him speak since Erikson retrieved him. His voice was hoarse.
“Going over the fence a half mile down the road,” Erikson said coolly. He climbed out of the truck carefully, hugging the mine. He ran back and forth across the road for three minutes, making his dispositions. I ran with him, carrying hand tools, coils of wire, and friction tape. He employed them all with expert ease. “The Claymore is an antipersonnel mine that explodes lethal pellets in a low arc over a wide area,” he said when we were back at the mine. “It will do the same thing with the chaff.”
He stood up from his kneeling position and looked around. “Drop the tools here,” he said. He kicked them closer to the mine when I complied. “We’re going to have to travel lighter from here on. Get your seabag.”
I removed it from the truck cab and handed it to him. In turn he swung it into the back of the truck where Slater and Wilson were huddled. “Get into the Cuban uniforms and put your ponchos back on over them,” he ordered. We got into the pickup again and Erikson drove it down the road.
In four minutes he parked it ten yards off the asphalt ribbon behind a clump of jacaranda trees. I was amazed that Wilson and Slater didn’t look much different in their Cuban field uniforms. The ponchos covered most of the coarse khaki, of course. Only the peaked cloth caps with the buttonlike insignia of Castro’s guerrilla army gave outward evidence of the change.
Erikson and I changed into the Cuban uniforms while standing at the back of the pickup. Erikson passed out hand guns to Slater and Wilson, then gave each a bulging, prepacked haversack. There was a haversack for me, too. Wilson and Slater then hooked themselves into web belts with ammunition pouches, first aid kits, and canteens. Erikson laid the backpack radio and its power pack aside for himself. Against it he leaned an M-16 rifle. I knew his load totaled much more than any of ours.
Satisfied that we were outfitted properly, he handed me one pair of wire cutters and kept the other himself. He reached into the truck again and pulled a tarp away from the area near the now-empty crates. Beneath it was a two-section aluminum ladder. He handed a section each to Slater and Wilson. “When we get to the fence, join the sections together and settle it firmly,” he instructed them. “Try it. You won’t have much time.”
They practiced. Wilson looked more cheerful than at any time since the night Hazel put him on his back. The episode had done something to his
