company.”
The minibus pulled to a stop in front of the building and the two guards seated on the shaded porch tipped their chairs forward and stood up. The driver’s-side door of the minibus opened and as the driver put one leg out Turturro distinctly heard the sharp clicking sound as Veccione squeezed the trigger mechanism on top of the M72. A sound like a door slamming right beside Turturro’s ear registered and even before the first round hit, Veccione was hauling the second round out of his pack. Simultaneously he fired the virtually soundless sniper rifle, pulled back the bolt and fired a second time.
The first LAW round went through the windshield of the minibus as the two guards on the porch went down, each with a single round through the chest. The LAW round detonated in the minibus, blowing out all the windows and peeling off the roof like a tin of beans exploding in a campfire. As the first men stumbled out of the barracks doorway, Cavan began dropping them with the big boat-tail bullets, managing two center-mass shots and one head shot before the second LAW rocket went smoking through the dark doorway of the barracks, making Cavan and his single shots redundant.
The rocket exploded, lifting the corrugated metal roof a foot off the rafters and enveloping the entire scene in a roiling cloud of dust and smoke. One man, probably the driver of the minibus, staggered out of the choking cloud, his right arm in tatters to the elbow and most of his scalp and face an open, bloody wound. Turturro gripped the binoculars and forced himself to keep on watching. Beside the lieutenant colonel the bolt on Cavan’s rifle gave its lethal, heel-clicking
Turturro waited. The smoke began to dissipate in the wind as the last echoes from the LAWS rockets faded away against the hills. The gas tank on the minibus exploded briefly, bucking the back end of the vehicle into the air. All four tires were burning furiously and Turturro began to smell the raw stink of the melting rubber.
He pressed his finger to his earbud. “Go,” he said. From behind him a dozen men in camo gear with an M-4 carbine in one hand and a cane-cutting machete in the other rose out of the jungle and headed down the hillside to the clearing. Each man had a brown jute sack tucked into his belt.
Turturro stood and followed them, taking a can of red Krylon spray paint from the satchel hanging from his belt. Veccione and Cavan stayed behind, their jobs done. Turturro touched the switch on his earbud and spoke into his throat microphone again. “Get me hands and heads, gentlemen, as many as you can. Remember, we are the wrath and hammer of God come down on Fidel and his devil boys today. Let’s scare the shit out of these bastards!”
Turturro reached the bottom of the hill and crossed the parking lot to the side wall of the barracks. The smell of hot metal and burning rubber fumed like a choking pall. He shook the can of Krylon to mix the paint, then quickly drew a circle with a large Z. Beneath the design he spray-painted the slogan:
VIVA ORLANDO ZAPATA!
Orlando Zapata Tamayo being a martyr who died in a Cuban jail after an eighty-five-day hunger strike and whose ashes were now buried beside the veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Turturro smiled as he put the dot beneath the exclamation mark. Nothing like having a dead man to lead your insurrection. That was the problem with people like Adolf, Fidel or Stalin—eventually all their warts began to show; a martyr stayed dead and pure forever. He looked at his watch. Seven minutes. He switched on his throat mike again.
“Okay, people, time to make like old soldiers and fade away. Somebody’s going to get curious about all the smoke and bangs.” Turturro turned around and headed back up the hill. A few seconds later his men followed, their jute bags bouncing heavily against their hips. Nine minutes and the clearing was quiet again except for the crackling of flames as the rafters in the barracks burned. Birds began to sing in the trees again and a long, curling trail of black smoke rose into the clear blue sky of a peaceful afternoon.
16
Capitaine Julio Ortega Montez kept the ancient Air Cubana Antonov 24 cargo plane headed roughly in the direction of Mexico. The instruments were working, keeping a steady altitude of twenty-five thousand feet over the Gulf of Mexico, and the two old turboprops were spinning with no more than their usual thundering roar.
The right seat was empty, not unusual for this sort of short-hop flight; the Brotherhood liked to keep their movements and activities as private as possible. He was not flying alone, of course; as usual the man with the cases was strapped in to the bucket jump seat in the cargo hold with strict instructions not to let his precious cargo out of his sight. As well as the man with the cases, the hold held two tons of live rock lobster, five tons of pineapples and four tons of avocados, none of which any Cuban citizen would ever see, much less eat.
Knowing that, Capitaine Julio Ortega Montez reached into the breast pocket of his uniform shirt and pulled out a package of Rothman’s cigarettes, a carton of which one of his fellow pilots had picked up for him on his last Canadian flight. Smoking on any flight was strictly forbidden, but what were they going to do, fire him? There weren’t that many experienced pilots left in Cuba.
At fifty-five years of age, Julio had been flying his entire adult life. He soloed at the National Flight Academy at the age of eighteen in a Czech-made L-29 Delfin jet trainer, then worked his way up through a variety of MiGs until his body couldn’t take the g-forces anymore.
He spent some time behind a desk, but after less than six months they had him flying Air Cuba passenger flights. When he turned fifty they switched him to short-hop cargo runs to Mexico and occasionally to Venezuela. He only made fifty dollars a week when he was working, and eighty dollars a month when he was off, but that much money could go a long way in Havana these days and he augmented his government pay with a variety of black market “imports” and “exports.”
A hundred
His father had worked in the Havana Engineering Office during the Batista years, and from the stories he’d told Julio, everything had come full circle again. Under Batista, Cuba had been oppressed under a vicious, corrupt dictator who used the police and the army to punish his enemies while he consorted with gangsters.
After a few years of idyllic solidarity in the early days under the
Ortega laughed. What could you expect from a senile old fool who’d supported Gaddafi right up until they’d pulled the bald, sociopathic mass murderer out of a drainage ditch and filled him full of holes?
Ortega snuffed out his cigarette in a small glass jar with a screw top he kept in the cockpit for just that purpose. He laughed again. He supposed that crazy old dictators had to stick together. The pilot checked his watch; the ninety-minute flight was almost over; he could already see the green line of the mainland coming up ahead of him.
The pilot began to sing an old Mercedes Sosa song his mother had taught him—“Alfonsina Y El Mar”:
The four-seater Polish Wilga cruised at five hundred feet over the rugged, jungle-covered hills. “Are you sure about this?” Black asked, putting his hand on Montalvo Arango’s scrawny shoulder from the rear seat of the little plane.
“The caves near Aserradero is what the man said, senor,” said Arango, raising his voice over the rattling tumble of the unmuffled engine. “I only know what he tell me.” For five hundred dollars they had convinced a reluctant Arango to come with them, but only with the promise that if the
