" ' The Blue Mountain / And River Cauto! / Sinews of the eternity which begat us. / The mountain warms us with its great heart, / Splendid son of excellence and infinity.' There, what do you think of that?"
"It's quite awful."
"You are truly not a Cuban. That is the poem of Manuel Navarro Luna, 'Poemas Mambises.' It is a great work and it expresses that which is before us."
"You may not be terribly fond of romantic mountain poetry after you've spent time being hunted by men in mountains. Believe me, they don't write poems about that kind of an experience."
But Castro could not be denied, for before them lay the Sierra Maestra, the blue crest of mountains that dominated the coast around Santiago. They had trooped for hours in darkness, through brush, around farms, through chicken coops, avoiding the main roads, moving ever onward, going to rest in daylight-and now, in light, had at last emerged from the city so that there was nothing ahead of them except…mountains.
They could see the mountains, green and lush in the high summer of late July. It was like no other part of Cuba, looking more like the American West than anywhere, with woods clinging to the elevation. Beyond the crests, the mountains plunged precipitously to the sea.
"Will we make it?"
"We have a good lead. I do not know if they have changed their tactics yet, and turned to the countryside. I see no indication. But we will make it or not depending not on ourselves, but upon their skill. Do they track well? How well trained are the dogs? Are the trackers smart in the way they follow us, or do they lumber about with a battalion and stop to smoke twice an hour? Do they know the roads? Can they follow spoor? What is their instinct for land-form? How badly do they want it?"
"These are soldiers and policemen. I do not think they will enjoy the deep forest a bit."
"That is true. But another question: Are the Americans involved? If the Americans put good men on the job-or even one good man-then we could be in trouble. A shame, but that's the way it goes."
"Would they have such a man?"
"Actually, yes. He's here. I've met him. I know him slightly."
"You should have killed him."
"Actually, I killed somebody who was about to kill him. Twice even! They seemed such good decisions at the time. Now, I must admit, I have doubts about my own judgment."
And it seemed to work so well for such a long time. Almost gaily, they took a road through the sugarcane fields of the coastal plain, and workers nodded at them and the young man waved back enthusiastically. He was not recognized, and they stopped for lunch in a little group of huts in the lee of the mountains, where nobody paid them much attention.
There was a last field to negotiate before the forestation of the slopes took over, then they were gone, happily, invisibly. But it was a raw patch where the cane had already been cut, and nothing but brown stubble remained. A smarter way might have been to travel the dirt road another few miles, and cut into the hills where the fields were thicker. But Speshnev decided the speed was worth the risk, and it was of course the wrong decision.
Speshnev heard a faint buzz and looked upward and saw the plane. He had a hope that it had either missed them or thought of them as just two more peasants wandering this way and that across the landscape, but the plane did not miss them and it did not think they were peasants, for it banked around, vectoring lower to get a better look at them, and if there was a moment when they might still have gotten away with it on bluff, that disappeared, for the young man panicked and took off running madly for the treeline.
Fool, Speshnev thought, but then he worried that the plane had snipers aboard, and so he too took off at a run.
Chapter 42
A night of screaming had passed and then another morning. And then things began to happen. Earl watched it. Captain Latavistada and some aides came out of the torture tent, much agitated. They began shouting. Ripples spread through the assembly on the barracks' parade grounds. The soldiers formed up into loose squads, and someone began signaling a fleet of parked trucks to rev up and maneuver into a column. The captain was not quite an idiot; he knew this job could be done better with fifty men than with five hundred so he only took a hundred and fifty, ten trucks full. It took some time to get the trucks loaded, and while all this was going on, Earl sat and smoked a cigarette.
In time he smoked another and another, and then there was still a further delay as the dogs were brought up, and one of them got away, attacked a soldier, and had to be shot, and there was a scene between the civilian dog handler and the officer in charge. Earl had smoked almost a whole pack of cigarettes by the time Frenchy returned.
"Okay," he said, "they think they have him. A patrol plane spotted two guys heading for the mountains east of here, maybe ten miles. When the plane came around, the guys broke and ran. It's got to be him, right? Who else would be headed into the mountains and take off like that when spotted? And he's one of the few who hasn't been accounted for."
"Two men," said Earl. "The Russian is still with him."
Frenchy nodded.
"So we ought to get going. We can tag along with the convoy, then break off and move faster on our own."
"Nope," said Earl.
"What?"
"I said 'Nope.' Meaning, no, negative, zero, nothing, no, nope."
"I―"
"See, he knows where he's going, that parade of fools has no idea, and the whole thing just ain't going to work. We throw in with them, we are plumb flat busted before we get going. Okay?"
"Earl, this is not a time to be playing games."
"I ain't playing no games. We ain't going to get a shot at him if we go with these boys. The old fellow running our guy is too smart for that. Tracking won't work. The only thing that will work is interception."
"I don't―"
"You get on that phone to your friend Roger St. Whatever-the-Fuck Evans. You get him on the phone to some prissy-ass boy at Guantanamo named Lieutenant Dan Benning. Dan loves Roger. He thinks Roger's going to get him into your outfit, so he wants to impress Roger. Here's what we want. A U.S. Navy helicopter out of Guantanamo to pick us up in Santiago. Pick a close-by spot, I don't know the town well enough. Tell 'em to bring their best maps of the area-that is, the best nautical maps, with offshore depths indicated. Even our navy's smart enough to have 'em."
"What do you need depths for?"
"Because I'm looking for a spot on the coast where the deep water runs in close to shore."
"Whoa. I am so lost. I am―"
"He ain't just running this boy to noplace. He's got a plan. Best way out is by boat. It's probably set up. They'll go out where it's deepest, because the boat can get in close. It means they don't have to use no dinghy and they won't be hung up on the surface for an hour while they're rowing out."
"How the hell will you know which way they're coming from? They could come through those hills in a hundred different ways."
"I'll probably read it from the maps. But when I get there, we'll take a look-see of the area from the air. We'll figure out how he'll come through. That's where we'll set up. Those Cuban bastards will march him right to us. And we'll do the job they sent us to do and become big heroes and live in nice houses in Washington, D.C. Now get on that phone, sonny. Get on it fast."
There was only a small problem, and that was that Roger wasn't immediately reachable by phone. He wasn't in the office or at the club, or on any of the courts that Frenchy knew about. So, goddammit, where was he?
"That's your job," said Earl. "I'll find the guy. You find your boss. Which one do you think is harder?"
"It's hard to guess where he is. He…he does things, meets people, that's his job. It's unpredictable."
"Fine. It's your goddamn future going up in smoke, not mine. I can always go back to Arkansas and hand out speeding tickets."