20
EARLY WEDNESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 24, I HOISTED MYSELF OFF A BAR- stool in a cantina on SW 8th Street, picked up my tote bag, and went out to the street with Dix Butler to hail a cab. We were on our way to 6312 Riviera Drive. The radios in all the bars on SW 8th Street were reporting in English or Spanish that two Soviet ships had come within fifty miles of the line of quarantine the U.S. Navy had established around the island of Cuba.
There had been no day in my life like the Monday, the Tuesday, and the Wednesday just passed. In Washington, printouts were being circulated among key personnel at the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and at Langley to show the route of evacuation to underground shelters in Virginia and in Maryland. At JM/WAVE, maps of southern Florida were distributed to a few of us. As I now learned, we had built a twenty-man fallout shelter two years ago in the swamps of the Everglades, and I thought this an interesting achievement since little enough earth in the Everglades could be found two feet above water. A rumor passing from Langley to JM/WAVE had Bobby Kennedy declare that he was not going to a shelter. “If it comes to evacuation, there will be sixty million Americans killed, and as many Russians. I’ll be at Hickory Hill.”
When I passed the story on to Dix Butler, he said, “How do you know Bobby doesn’t have his own dugout at Hickory Hill?”
That may be taken as a sample of the observations being passed around Zenith. Emotions had gone careening in all directions, as if a stone had been thrown into a flight of birds. It did not seem condign that we should all die so soon. Now when I felt rage it seemed to scald my chest; sorrow was uncomfortably close to weeping; cynicism, on revealing itself, tasted poisonous. It was hard to say who had become more unpopular at JM/WAVE—Fidel Castro, the Cuban exiles, or the brothers K. Bill Harvey was convinced that there would yet be a sellout to Cuba. “If we don’t have a shooting war, Khrushchev will piss all over Kennedy in the negotiations.”
Given such quick alternations of exhilaration and gloom, the thought that there might be power never yet unleashed in oneself also had time to come forth. Miami, soft as a powderpuff, murderous as a scorpion, lay suspended like Nirvana; no one could, when all was said, resist waiting. Except for Harvey. He chafed like a boil about to burst on its incarcerating collar; it took very little effort by Dix Butler to convince the boss of JM/WAVE that he should allow us to go on a mission. Harvey was all for improvising a few missions in this week of emergency.
He did take me aside long enough, however, to say, “Hubbard, I don’t know if I give one toot whether you come back or not, but if you do, and the world continues, I want my ass covered. So you are not to tell Hugh Montague that you are going. Should he contact me concerning you, I will tell him that you took off spontaneously on a job I was restricting to Dix Butler, but that I won’t press charges, which I won’t—that is, between you and me, I won’t—unless you make the mistake of telling the truth to His Lordship. In that case, it will be your word against mine, and you are about to be counterdocumented. Since you want to go out with Butler, write a memo and sign it. You can have it say, ‘I, Herrick Hubbard, acknowledge the receipt of memo number 7,418,537 and will obey instructions pursuant to it.’”
“Have I seen 7,418,537?”
“You will now.” He read it aloud. “All personnel in Office B, JM/WAVE, are hereby instructed to remain within a ten-mile radius of Base for duration of crisis, and will keep themselves in constant availability.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“I am putting 7,418,537 out now. It will be on your desk in ten minutes. Send your reply as soon as you receive it.”
I did. I felt weightless. It occurred to me that I was absolutely free. For I might be dead in two days. So I could lie once again to Hugh Montague. Wild Bill, after all, was using us to some purpose. We would embark on Eugenio Martínez’s boat, La Princesa, with cartons of flares, and bring them into Cuba on rubber dinghies to hand them over to one of Harvey’s networks. These flares would then be available for the Cuban underground to light the way at night for an American invasion force.
It is significant to my state of mind that that was all I knew about our mission. Waiting in such passivity, I wondered if the about-to-be-born on the last day of their nine months in the womb do not also feel the high sad sentiment that all they know of existence is about to be lost forever for they are embarking on an endeavor of high risk.
I was obviously swimming in much emotional soup. I remember standing before a full-length mirror in my furnished apartment trying to attach these highly undisciplined sentiments to the stern expression on the presentable, tall young man who looked back at me. I had never felt further away from the image in the mirror. “Is this what goes on with movie stars?” I recall asking myself.
Early Wednesday afternoon, Butler drove us down to one of our proprietaries, a marina on Key Largo, and we loaded a fourteen-foot inflatable black rubber dinghy with 1,500 pounds of cement-brick and sand to simulate the weight of the equipment and men we would be carrying. Then we rode out to the smaller keys, pushing into mangrove swamps while throttling each of our twin outboards down to a purr, then vamped the craft through shallows at low tide, raising the outboards if necessary, scraping bottom. When Butler was satisfied, we went back to the mooring, carted one motor into a shed, and there in an unlit room with the engine mounted to the inside of a half-filled barrel of water, we practiced simple maintenance in the dark, stripping the little beast and reassembling it. Years ago, I had had one long day like this at the Farm, when they drove us to a cove just south of Norfolk, and brought us up to much the same sort of intense half-competence. What I had learned then I had all but forgotten; would I remember tomorrow what I was studying now?
We drove back to Miami in late afternoon, went to a cantina, had three Planter’s Punches “in honor,” said Butler, “of the plantations we will soon be restoring to their greed-ass shit-bag owners,” and drank to that, and to Berlin—a touchy toast was that—“and to Nirvana,” said Butler, which managed to startle me since I had been resting on just that word in my mind. Were we all growing telepathic now that the end of the world was near? It seemed a logical proposition. I sighed, and the Planter’s Punch carried me back to how beautiful the sea had been this afternoon outside Key Largo, a luminous pale green sea, twice luminous as the shelf dropped off into the iridescence of aquamarine. A myriad of silver minnows escorted our dinghy to the mangrove swamp, threaded the roots beneath the water and were lost to view.
Now we had gone through the door at 6312 Riviera Drive and in a wardrobe closet changed into black high-topped sneakers, black denim pants, a black turtleneck sweater, a black hood with holes for eyes and mouth. It was hot in this anteroom. The polyester suits and tropical shirts of a dozen other men were already suspended from hangers and poles, but I was comprehending why the life of the executioner must be worth its other pains. Dressed all in black, I did not seem to inhabit myself any longer so much as I was an acolyte to the communions who would guard the dominion of death; it was then I comprehended that I had never understood the Agency until this moment; now I knew why I was here. One should not spend one’s life in the halls of a great profession without descending at least once to the cellar chambers—a metaphor, but then I was consuming metaphors on this night the way others in the same brew of anxiety might chew on facts; death was but a metaphor for metaphor, even as the square root of minus one was the mandrake root to guide us into that other world where there might be no roots. I kept thinking of the minnows that swam around our dinghy before disappearing into a forest of underwater foliage not two feet deep.
The interior of 6312 Riviera Drive was barely furnished, but then the model for a barren habitat is a safe house. We passed through a living room paneled in dark wood and by an archway into a dining room where four dark Spanish chairs were grouped around a mahogany dinner table, and I thought of the solemnity of middle-class Spanish life; the wives somber, the children solemn, the father guilty beneath the moral weight of a querulous mistress furious at his parsimony even as she wears the black lingerie he has purchased for her, yes, I must be a servant of death when an empty room offered the intimate history of an unhappy family I had never seen. How close had the Russian freighters approached by now to the line of quarantine?
Beyond the dining room was a door to a glassed-in porch that looked upon a patio; at the other end was the wharf. A large white fishing boat, immanent as mausoleum marble, was rising and falling with the small breath of the tide. I had time to think of Giancana’s dead wife before I stepped on board. Below were ten men in black hoods sitting on bunks in the galley, and only a few looked up. The air proved close if not yet foul, and the lurch of the ship at its mooring was not agreeable.
We waited. We did not speak beneath our hoods. The inboard motors started up, vibrating their intent through my feet, closer to the purpose than I might be. From above, like the sounds of a surgical team impinging on one’s ear through partial anesthetic, I could hear the skipper calling out orders in Spanish. We were casting off. Down in the galley, with no more illumination coming through the portholes than the dock lights of the Miami houses along the canal, our motors sounded as alive as the growl of beasts.
We traveled at low throttle to reduce the wake, and I fell asleep passing through the narrow canals of Coral Gables into Biscayne Bay, and by the time I awakened we were in the open sea and the lights of Miami were far to the stern, their sky-glow as plum-colored as that last rose hue of sunset before evening is committed to night. Off the bow, more than a hundred miles to starboard, fainter than the penumbra of the moon, came a glow from Havana itself. It was a black night but a clear sky, and I had time to think that by tomorrow evening, both cities might be burning, and would we witness the sight from land or sea? “Eugenio is going to take us in between Cárdenas and Matanzas,” said Butler. “We’ll make Cuba by three in the morning.”
I nodded. I was still drowsy. In truth, I was stupefied. It occurred to me that death should not come to one in this thick and clouded state.
“Do you want some rum?” asked Butler.
“I’d rather sleep,” I said.
“Man, I’m drum-tight. It’ll stay that way until we get back.”
“I would have expected no less,” I told him, and went below again, thinking no good thoughts about Butler, since he had now given me to understand that sleep before combat was no virtue, but an overindulgence. If Butler’s character was not splendid, his adrenaline was nonetheless superb.
In the galley, men were lying down any way they could, two to a narrow bunk, four on the galley table, two on the galley deck, now three as I joined them. The floorboards were damp, but warm enough in any event, and since others had gone up on deck, there was room to stretch out; I slept between the sloshing of the bilge and the battering of the hull against a rolling swell. The fetid odor that rises from men who eat garlic and perspire in black clothes went through the galley; by the shielded light of a blue ten-watt bulb over the sink, I watched Cubans inching up their black hoods with the instinctive movement of a sleeper wishing to breathe more easily; then pulling them down over their face in the reflex of awakening. To what end were these hoods? Was it their families they were looking to protect, or the bonds of magic? On this dark tropical sea where the Gulf Stream met the long roll of the Atlantic, magic was only a minor ally of commerce, but on the southern shore of Cuba, incantations washed in from the Caribbean. I thought of the facsimile of the Matahambre copper mines that we had constructed at full scale in the Everglades. Over the last nine months, exile commandos had trained there for demolitions work. Mock raids had been practiced. In each training raid we had satisfied the scenario, which was to succeed (figuratively) in dynamiting the model, but we had never been able to blow up the real works. In the last attempt on the Matahambre, eight raiders went ashore in the black hours after midnight, and were flushed by a Castro patrol. Six of the commandos made it back to shore long enough to be evacuated. That had been our most ambitious effort on the Matahambre, and it, too, had failed ignominiously. They never reached shore.
Now we were being sent out. We had dispensed with detailed preparation. We were to do no more than rendezvous with a few Cubans who would know where to conceal the flares for the technological magic that would follow—a full invasion force, several orders of magnitude more mighty than santería. Half asleep, I mused.
Then it occurred to me that I might be entering sleep for the last, or for one of the last times I would ever sleep. The mystery came over me then as never before, and I understood that we live in two states of existence, wakefulness and sleep, exactly those daily manifests provided us for life and for death; we were two histories living in one; at that moment, I wished to write a last letter to Kittredge adjuring her never to give up her theoretical work, for it was profound, yes, profound, and so adjuring her, was waking up—I did not sleep after all—merely lay in the poetic detritus that blows about the marketplace of the mind as one returns from the deep, and I sat up, and felt ready for action even if there were hours to wait. Then, taking a few deep breaths of the foul air of the galley, I pulled down my hood and went on deck.
Butler was up with the skipper on the flying bridge. I knew the man, Eugenio Martínez. I had written about him to Kittredge. He had made more sorties to Cuba than any other boatman in southern Florida; he was a hero with a sad story, of which half of JM/WAVE was by now aware. He wished to bring his parents out of Havana, but Harvey had forbidden it. Even as I came up the ladder, he was approaching the subject.
“Tonight, a guy stops by me and says, ‘I have my hood on, so you do not know who I am, but I know you. You are Rolando.’
“‘If you know me so well,’ I say to him, ‘then you know I am Eugenio Martínez and am only called Rolando.’ ‘That I know as well,’ he answers, ‘but we are told to call you Rolando.’ ‘Of what use is that,’ I say, ‘when even the DGI knows Rolando is Eugenio?’ You see, Mr. Castle . . .”
“You can call me Frank,” said Dix.
“All right, Frank, Frank Castle. Frank, I will call you. The argument I hear from Mr. O’Brien, your boss, the corpulent man, is that my parents are well known at their home in Cuba, and it is certain capture for me if I try to reach them. I accept the logic of such matters because I am, by part, Spanish. If you are blessed and cursed with such blood, it becomes your duty to obey the laws of logic. That is a necessity for violent people if they detest chaos.”
This speech had been so clearly uttered that I assumed Eugenio Martínez might continue speaking. I was mistaken, however. He could serve a silence. We served with him. His silences supported as much cerebration as speech. Up on the flying bridge, we rolled in the swell—the horizon, like a compass needle, doomed forever to adjust itself. Below was the ongoing message of the inboard motors working for us, working for us. We listened to the silences in the lull between each wind. Martínez had listened for so many nights that the silence may have belonged to him. He had a long triangular face with a long Spanish nose and dark eyes in a full depth of socket that seemed ready to take in all his experience, a way, I suppose, of saying that he had seen a good deal and paid the price. I thought his eyes were haunted—had he seen as many ghosts as corpses?
That is a great deal to perceive at night under a clear but moonless sky, so I will admit that I had drunk with him two nights ago at Butler’s suggestion, and, as is obvious, honored him now. Even my father, however, fond of saying, “I wouldn’t trust a Cuban as far as I could throw him, although I would be happy to throw him through a plate-glass window,” had also said, “Give me a hundred men like Eugenio Martínez and I will take Cuba myself.” So I was pleased to be up on the flying bridge and felt as open to hero-worship as on any fevered day at St. Matt’s. It would not have surprised me if the sky behind us were to go up in a conflagration of fiery mountains, and the unspeakable white light that propelled the mushroom cloud would sear our eyes. No more would it have surprised me if Havana, down the main a hundred miles to starboard, had flared up like a rocket in a tower of flame. The reality of our situation only came to me through the flexing of my feet in response to the roll of the boat. I could sense that we must be near to Cuba. If I was not yet able to see land, Communist searchlights, full of agitation, were flashing away from twenty miles off like that flutter of heat lightning when the forces above are not yet large enough to drive a bolt through the sky.
I had studied the map and knew where the dinghies were to put in to shore, but the coast was irregular. Mangrove swamps, dignified on the map as offshore keys, sat next to coral reefs. So soon as we had transferred the men, the flares, and our ammunition from La Princesa into the dinghies, we would run due south a few miles to find our beach. Let there be, however, one patrol boat to roar out of its concealment in the mangrove keys, and we would have to race off to the nearest inlet too shallow for them to follow.
Now, the closer we came to Cuba, the more we saw of other ships. Freighters and fishing trawlers passed in the distance. A U.S. Naval convoy of eight vessels, its flagship a destroyer, out, doubtless, from Key West, sailed by to some destination in the east—was it the line of quarantine? We were traveling in radio silence. All the same, my interest in the world had diminished. What we were about to do was beginning to seem all that there was to do. For the last hour, our prácticos had been busy pumping up the rubber dinghies, checking equipment, breaking out assault rifles from the racks, and stacking cartons of flares on deck. Butler and I sat at the edges of this, ranked somewhere between Agency observers and honored guests. If we were to measure the venture by our usefulness, our presence might be a folly. I knew the physical taste of fear then, and it was nothing remarkable. An upwelling of bile embittered my nose and throat. It occurred to me that keeping control of myself might not be automatic.
Butler spoke at that instant. “You and me are in the same dinghy,” he said, his voice agreeably husky.
“Good.”
“You’ll be my passenger.”
I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or humiliated.
“These are okay men,” he went on.
“You know them?”
“I’ve trained with a couple. If it goes all right, there is nothing to it. If it goes wrong, you don’t need training. It will be a mess. For the Castros more than for us.”
“You sound like you are up on this.”
“I hit the beach at Girón.”
“You what?”
“Unofficially.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
He shrugged.
I had no idea if he was telling the truth. It seemed to me that he could be. I was angry. I had thought somehow that we were going out as innocents together. I knew that some intolerable condition between us, present at the edge of every mood since our one abominable night in Berlin, might be thereby shriven. But now I saw myself as a sacrificial clown. Yes, it was better to be angry than afraid.
I spent my last thirty minutes on La Princesa trying to familiarize myself with the Czech machine pistol handed to me. It had a curved magazine holding thirty 9mm rounds, could be set for semi or full automatic, and could probably, if need arose, be fired from the hip out of a careening dinghy. Not even hours of practice could guarantee such shooting.
The dinghies were put over the side and loaded, waterproof carton by waterproof carton. Next came ourselves, six men in each boat. Eugenio Martínez came to the rail to say good-bye.
“Suerte,” he whispered, and we clasped hands. I felt cleansed; I was setting out.
This lofty intuition was maintained for as long as it took to keep one’s balance and sit down. The swell was sullen, and we were pitching too much for spiritual illumination. “Straight in, due south,” said Martínez at the last. He would meet us at approximately this place on the waters in twenty hours—that is, at eleven tonight—it was now three in the morning—or, if we did not appear, would come back on each following hour through the night.
The dinghy had a compass and a wheel mounted on a plywood dashboard. Butler, steering the boat, was taking us in at ten knots, a speed slow enough for the muffled sound of our twin exhausts to blend with the wind. The chop was in our favor. It would not be easy to detect a black dinghy from any distance when the bob of the wave rose higher than our profile except when we were lifting over a crest. We did not speak. Words could carry more clearly than the throb of a motor. Yet, I could hear another motor, faint as the wash of surf on the shore, and realized it was our companion dinghy moving toward its separate rendezvous. The night air was heavy. We pushed forward slowly, as if ensconced in pillows, the dinghy so closely loaded that our freeboard was not six inches, and we shipped a little water with every rise and fall, and bailed it out with plastic milk jugs cut in half, painted black, attached by a length of rope to a ring in the rubber floor of the dinghy; the sound of bailing added to the quiet advertisement of our passage.
Shore was approaching. A line of phosphorescence washed onto a narrow beach. Were our people waiting for us, or would we be met by Castro’s militia? The rubber bottom grated on the sand, and I stood up with the others and stepped over the side of the dinghy into a few inches of water, my muscles as tight as a clenched fist. Without a sound, all six of us pulled the dinghy twenty feet up the beach, enough to reach the shelter of a small sea-bent tree whose leaves bent so low as to paw the ground. In the night silence, a gourd fell. Its impact on landing was as raucous as the cry of an owl. Out of the thicket behind the beach came a swarm of small sounds, crawling, creeping, unstinted, inexhaustible—in that thicket was the mill of generation itself. To the rapt advance of vegetation growing came the sounds of insects eating the vegetation.
“Hubbard,” whispered Butler, “I need you.”
He had removed the cushion of his driver’s seat from the dinghy and it now unfolded into a long black bag. We inserted our heads, turned on a pencil light, and studied his map. “We’re off the mark,” he whispered. “We can’t be off by more than a quarter of a mile, but is it to the east or the west?” I peered at the map. At the place where we were supposed to have put in, a stream flowed down from the woods to divide the beach. Where we had landed was no stream.
“Well,” I said, “the current was running west to east.”
“I know,” he said, “but I could have overcorrected.”
As we came in, I had perceived a low knoll some few hundred yards to the west of us. By the topographical lines on our map, the knoll had to be a thousand yards west of the stream.
“Go east,” I said.
Under the black enclosing blanket, we spoke with our faces inches apart. I felt a distinct desire to terminate this dialogue. Butler, however, kept studying the map as if to deny my conclusion. “You may be right,” he said at last, and we withdrew.
Now the question was whether to send a man east to reconnoiter the beach and, ideally, locate our waiting guerrillas, or push the boat into the surf once more and ride along parallel to the shore. If I had been in command, I might have sent one man east. He would attract less attention and if intercepted the shots would warn us. Butler, however, decided to get back into the water. Our reception party would be expecting a rubber boat, not a man on foot.
“One more item,” said Butler. “If there is a firefight, and we are captured, don’t get caught with that rifle.”
“I know that,” I said. Harvey not only had told me as much, but drew a finger across his neck for punctuation. Before we left, he had provided us with a cover story that could prove sufficient. We were here in Cuba as reporters for Life magazine, ready to describe a raid; Butler was the photographer, indeed he had a camera with him, and I was the writer. Our Life accreditation had been gotten ready for us overnight by a JM/WAVE shop. If we were caught, Wild Bill would contact an editor he knew at Life. The magazine would back us up. Such was our cover. Yes, here on the beach, just arrived, two stringers down from New York, Frank Castle and Robert Charles, marginal journalists shipping out on a gamble. It was not particularly reassuring cover, since I had had no time to work up my biography, but it could suffice. Who in the DGI would know a great deal about the inner workings of Life magazine?
Even as we dragged the dinghy back into the surf, my mind was developing the scenario. If captured, I would tell the DGI that I had been in Miami for only a week, long enough to meet some coyotes. I would describe the coyotes. That would check out, doubtless, with what the DGI knew. For the next few minutes, as we rode parallel to the shore not two hundred feet out, searching the beach for the mouth of a small stream, I felt as creative as an actor discovering the subtler character embedded in his role. I decided on my boyhood. It had been spent in Ellsworth, Maine. My father was a carpenter; my mother a housewife. I would have graduated from Ellsworth High, which would mark the end of my formal schooling. The DGI would not have a yearbook from Ellsworth High—conceivably the KGB, but not the DGI.
It was just as well that I enjoyed my scenario, for that proved the last fruitful meditation I was to have for a time. Around a slight turn in the beach, we came upon a stream, and Butler rapped my shoulder once in affirmation, and took us in to shore. Once again we landed, once again we dragged the dinghy into the cover of a low tree, and waited, and listened to the sounds of vegetation growing.
Since no trail went up into the bush, only the stream which was no more than a brook, we reconnoitered it far enough to post a práctico at the first bend. He was back, however, in twenty minutes. The mosquitoes had proved too fierce. Butler handed the man insect repellent and sent him back.
We waited. The password was parangón. The reply was incompetente. My hearing grew ready. Parangón—paragon. Would it come in a hoarse voice or a whisper? The insects came instead. I took out my repellent and shared it with Butler. He was impatient with waiting. Back went our heads into the black bag to study the map once more. If, for the sake of hypothesis, we had made an error of more than half a mile on the first approach, then the knoll from which I had taken my calculations could have been mistaken for another headland further down the coast. Our faces six inches apart, our breath disturbed by the anxiety that we were losing any authoritative relation to this map, we argued.
I refused to give up my interpretation. We did not remove our heads from the bag until the penultimate moment. For in another ten seconds the missing Cubans came forth from the brook in the company of our práctico, and a whispered set of greetings were joined in the darkness of the low trees that bordered the beach. I thought of how much quick happiness was available in war! I had rarely taken to strangers so much as these six Cubans who had joined us at the head of the stream, and in the dark I could not even see their faces.
In the beginning, there was much translation. Our hosts spoke a dialect I could not comprehend. So they were obliged to address themselves to a práctico who communicated with me. It took time. Whispered links were lost, and there were problems to discuss. Once the boat was unloaded, were we to drag it up the stream until we found a clearing large enough to hide it, or should we let out the air, stuff it in the thicket, and use the foot pump on our return to blow it up again? When it developed that there was no likely place upstream, we took the second course and bound the deflated rubber skin into an object the size of a large suitcase, then located a hollow for it.
Now we were ready to transport the flares. They came in forty-pound cartons. Since the guides who had come to meet us knew the turns of the stream where the Castro militia could set up an ambush, one of them took the point, another the rear, and all of us, Butler, myself, the four prácticos, and the six locals, each shouldered a forty-pound carton. That took care of all but two boxes. When the heaviest man in our welcoming party handed his machete to a friend and put a carton on each of his shoulders, Butler decided to do the same, thereupon giving me his assault rifle. Loaded with one carton and two weapons, I joined the others as we went up the brook in the dark.
We slogged along in water that came to our knees, switched from bank to bank on the rocks, slid in mud, sat down in mud, dropped a carton from time to time. In places, the stream became a pool and we walked in water to our waists. I do not know if we covered a mile, but it felt like five and took considerably more than an hour and much agonized breathing before we reached a dirt road adjacent to the watercourse and found a clearing where the cases could be stacked. A truck, we were promised, would arrive before dawn to transport the flares. The people with us knew no more than how to guide us to the clearing. Now we were told that it would be wise to return to the beach. It was always possible that the militia would drive along this road.
“I’m staying here,” said Butler, “until the truck arrives.”
One of the Cubans tried to explain the situation. If the militia were to come by and discover the cartons, that would not be good for the local community. On the other hand, it would not necessarily be a disaster since a gang from Matanzas could have been squirreling away their ordnance here. Should we be found, however, a skirmish with the militia had to ensue, and then there could be dead men to account for. It was better if we went back right now.
“Tell this dude,” said Butler, “that there is nothing more important than our flares. We are going to wait until the truck arrives.”
I never had to translate his remark. Our vehicle came along then. It was not a truck, but an old and very large Lincoln sedan, showing a faded green paint job in the dawn.
We loaded fourteen muddy cartons into the trunk and rear seat of the car, and with no more than a blanket to cover all visible loot, the driver, who looked young enough to be a student, offered one remarkable smile, his teeth as white as his mustache was black, and took off in the direction he had come.
There was now nothing to do but go back downstream. We would have to spend our day in the thicket hoping to find a place where we would not be tormented altogether by insects. Tonight, we would inflate our dinghy and return to La Princesa. I could feel Butler’s disappointment that no more had happened.
I could understand. There should have been more. It took no more than twenty minutes to return to the beach. I will not dwell on our day. We were in tropical woods and foliage. There was nothing for it but to pick a spot in the brush, drench ourselves in insect repellent, and try to sleep in the miserable condition of starting up each time a sound came from the forest. Out at sea we could hear patrol boats, and above us, in the spiderweb of sky visible through overhanging foliage, jet planes passed. Once in the morning and again in the afternoon, a helicopter took its airborne promenade along the beach. Time passed in a misery of insects macho enough to fight through repellent and make the sting. I discovered that the secret was not to push against the phlegmatic disposition of time.
At twilight, a fiery apocalypse descended in the west between green and purple clouds. With evening, the insects grew ferocious. Butler would wait no longer and had us move the rubber boat out to a sandbar near the mouth of the stream. Still protected by foliage, we took turns on the foot pump and in half an hour, it was inflated. We were loading the last of our rifles, ammunition boxes, and machetes, when a gunboat, perhaps thirty feet long, motored along, scanning the beach. If it had been less dark, we might have been detected.
Fifteen minutes later, we put out to sea. It would not take thirty minutes to reach our rendezvous, but we no longer wanted to stay on land. It was as if we had to quit the dark earth body of Cuba, too fecund, too strange. I felt like an insect buried in the thick mat of an enormous beast, nothing visible of his head, his tail, his limbs.
We rode out, hunched over in a low profile, and I, sitting beside Butler, my eye on the compass and the tide, muttered small corrections to him from time to time. Although he was never partial to the suggestions of others on how to adjust any of his skills, since he was possessive of all of them, he had come to recognize that I knew more about boats than he did, as well I should with a boyhood of Maine summers, even if little enough of it had been spent in blubbercraft stink-pots such as this, but, yes, I knew navigation, and he sensed it, and we were on the mark, and thirty minutes early. No Martínez, no sight of La Princesa, but at least we were past the coral reefs and the mangrove keys, and if a patrol boat was going to bear down on us now, it would not come from the near lee of a dark island.
With Martínez nowhere in sight, we headed further out to sea. There was the likelihood, or so we had been told in Miami, that the Cuban Coast Guard would not respect the three-mile limit if no American gunboats were visible, but we rode higher in the water now, our weight reduced by 560 pounds of delivered flares. If the twin outboards held up, our dinghy ought to compete with the speed of any old and much-repaired Cuban craft.
A half hour later, after completing the four turns of a nautical square, we came back to where I hoped and calculated La Princesa would be. It was another dark night and another clear sky, but far to the east, clouds were being driven by wind.
Butler began to question my navigation. Could I have taken us through a trapezoid? Could I swear we were in the proper place?
“We are at the coordinates of the rendezvous,” I said with all the confidence I could muster (although confidence was a tattered flag within), but I knew we could not steer by committee, so I convinced him to take one more square, this time but a half mile on each leg. At 11:15, La Princesa came motoring toward us looking as large as a galleon. Butler shook my hand. “We’ll make a team yet,” he said, and La Princesa idling, we came alongside, unloaded the dinghy, pulled it up after us, and went to the galley for coffee. I wondered if it ever felt better after a good day of rock climbing with Harlot.
It was then Butler asked about the line of quarantine. “It’s over. The Russian ships have turned back,” Martínez said. He repeated this news to the prácticos, and they received it without great happiness. There would be no invasion of Cuba now. Our flares would moulder in whichever dubious place they were stored.
Martínez had a more immediate concern, however. The other boat had missed its rendezvous. Martínez said, “That is why we were late. We waited for the others. Now we go back to look for them again.”
It was a long hour. We ground along at half throttle, suffering a whiplike roll in the new wind that came out of the east. Tropical rain followed. I could see by our nearness to the mangrove keys that we were considerably closer to land than the three-mile limit.
Martínez said, “If they were chased from shore, they will be hiding in these keys,” and he pointed with his pencil light to some mangrove isles on the chart. “I know the práctico who is leading the party. He is familiar with these lagoons. In there it is too shallow for the Castros to follow.”
“What have you heard from Mr. O’Brien?” asked Butler.
“It was he who told me about the Russians.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said: Return to Miami. Pronto.”
“Why?”
“He said to tell you he was handling all kinds of hell.” Martínez shrugged. “That may be true, but how am I to leave men behind?”
Butler nodded. He looked happy. “Hubbard,” he said, “you and me have to go out and look for them.”
Martínez nodded.
It was foolhardy. We would search through unfamiliar lagoons for Cubans who might not even be there, but I would make no objection. It was easier to go back into those waters than to live with the knowledge that Butler was my moral superior.
We were ready. On our return, we would rendezvous with Martínez at a point midway between two mangrove keys on our chart. It would be inside the three-mile limit and that could prove hazardous for him, but it was simpler for us. Every hour for the next four hours, he would make a running pass through that area, and if we were not back by then, we were all in trouble, for it would be close to dawn. Now we spent twenty minutes in the galley going over the charts to mark the shallows in each of the keys and reefs we would be exploring.
Out in the dinghy, with no more than Butler and myself for ballast, handling was lively. At twenty knots we planed from wave to wave until the roar of the echoes chased us down to low throttle again, but now we knew the speed of our craft.
The area Martínez had chosen for us to explore contained in three square miles five keys and four coral lagoons. Methodically, shallow by shallow, our twin outboards raised until we drew no more than six inches, we ventured into every pool and bottom we could find in the dark, running aground in sand and mud, backing off, only to run aground again. Our rubber bow, bent by the trap of submerged roots, sprang back when we were free, our bottom scraped on shoals, we could have been blind men feeling our way through a cave. It was curious. The deeper we explored into each shallows, the further away seemed Castro’s coast guard. I began to feel as if we were infiltrating our way into an organism. Swarms of insects welcomed us in each lagoon, and we traversed the coral reefs ripple by ripple, my eyes beginning to see a spectrum of differentiations in the dark until I hated to flash the pencil light on the chart, for it deprived me for a little while of such keen sight. I realized that I was feeling something close to affection for Butler. He had forced me into our venture, yet it was worth it. How much it was worth! Entering this wilderness of swamp, wild growth, and water was equal to exploring every cavern of myself where demeaning fear was stored. On we went.
There were few openings in the mangrove keys, and many entrances dwindled into trackless swamps, but we kept the anticipation that in one of these shallow flows we would find our people. So we thought, and at the depth of each small exploration, one of us would cry like a mournful bird, “Parangón.”
In the third hour, in the lightening air before the last dark hour preceding dawn, we heard a man croak back, “Incompetente.” So, we found him. A weak voice. He lay with one foot caked in blood on the rubber floor of his ruptured dinghy. He had ripped the boat open on a coral reef, had reached this stream, and tugging the boat behind, had lacerated his foot.
Where were the others?
Dead, he said. Captured. There had been an ambush. They had all been ambushed, and only he and his friend had escaped to the boat.
Where was his friend?
Dead. A patrol boat had chased them. His friend had taken a machine-gun bullet that blew him out of the boat. Right in the middle of the pursuit.
“Bullshit,” whispered Butler to me. “He threw the dead man overboard so the dinghy would go faster.”
“None of the story works,” I said.
It didn’t. On the pretense of looking at the blood oozing through his boot, I used the pencil light to study his face. He had a scrawny beard, a straggling mustache, a thin and sallow face—he looked like a man you would not trust: one more failed version of the son of God.
Did it matter now what he had done or failed to do? Unless he had dashed off in the boat while the others were ambushed on land, his real story, whatever cowardice it might protect, was probably true to this degree: The others were gone. He certainly had the look of a man who had lost the men around him.
There was one more question: Was the patrol boat that had chased him into this narrow inlet still circling the key?
We found the answer. We had just emerged from this swamp when a cabin cruiser with a searchlight in its bow came around a low promontory and bore down on us.
How loud was the machine gun! How dazzling its light! Tracers struck the water to the right of us, then to the left, for we were careening side to side. Were we two hundred yards from the patrol boat or was it closer?
I remember that I had no fear of dying. Adrenaline kept prayer at bay. I was enormously excited. I was full of awe. Death was a great temple and we stood at the gate—the light from the muzzle of the machine gun seemed as livid as a high-voltage spark jumping a gap. The sky seemed to jump, or was it our boat? The stars leapt like fireworks. I remember letting loose a prodigious whoop. Butler screamed at our pursuers, “Fuck your eye-e-e-e-e-e-s.” He would stand up from time to time to draw a higher angle of fire, then dip into a quick turn. Each time he stood up, the machine gun would fire at his head, and its tracers went into the air. Since those tracers were no longer kicking up water to the left or right of us, the machine gunner lost his aim and Butler would veer off at a wild angle to escape him for a few seconds. Once, we even lost the searchlight as well, and streaked in the dark around the bend of a key and on over a coral reef we had negotiated already and knew we could draft. Before that shallow, the patrol boat had to bear off. In a fury, it sounded its Klaxon. The siren screamed through the dark as loudly as if the invasion of Cuba had commenced after all. Butler was sobbing from laughing so hard. “All cops are the same,” he said. “All the world over.”
We picked up another channel on the other side of the reef, put our dinghy up to full throttle and plotted a course for rendezvous. A mile to the east, I could see our pursuer searching every lagoon and shore with its light. I punched Butler on the arm. It was inescapable. No one was worse than Butler.
“You son of a bitch, you are fucking pure,” I said, which was as much obscenity as I had ever put into a sentence. It all went into the broil. Given the noise of our outboards, he could hardly hear me.