It was May of 1955 before Batista ultimately gave in to outside pressure and granted amnesty to the political prisoners on the Isle of Pines. At last Castro was released, returned with Raul by boat to Havana. He prepared to enter politics once more. Batista was attempting to preserve a front of honest elections while holding the reins of power as tightly as ever, and friends presumed that Fidel could now climb to power by legal means. But Castro knew better.
He tried to make speeches, and found that radio time was closed to him. He sent letters to the newspapers and they were never printed. Throughout Cuba he saw nothing but oppression, nothing but the hand of a dictator. And he decided once more that he had been right the first time, that revolution was the only method of ridding Cuba of a dictator.
He went to Mexico. His wife, the sister of an ardent Batistiano, had already deserted him; now she divorced him. He had no money and little support, only his image burning in the hearts of silent Cubans. He found a man named Bayo who had led guerrilla forces in the Spanish Civil War and persuaded Bayo to help him train an army of rebels. He went through Spanish America, through the United States, struggling to raise money and forces.
He had failed once, attacking Moncada. He did not intend to fail again.
FIVE
Earl Fenton sat with his back against a scrub pine and his Sten gun across his knees. He sat still, very still, and he wished for a cigarette. A little tube of paper filled with rolled tobacco, a little paper-and-tobacco affair that you could light with a match and smoke quickly. In his mind he could taste the brisk jolt of strong smoke taken deep into his sick lungs. He could taste it and feel it.
There was a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his field jacket. There were matches, too. All he had to do was take a cigarette, scratch a match, put the two together and smoke. But you didn’t smoke when the Castristas were less than fifty yards away. You didn’t send up gray clouds to tip your hand. Instead you put your back against the trunk of a tree, set your gun across your knees. And you waited.
The soldiers—five of them, maybe six—were at the shoulder of the road on the other side of a dense growth of shrubbery. They had come in a noisy, gear-grinding Jeep and they were looking for rebels. Fenton could not see them from where he sat, but he had caught glimpses of them before, one with a full Fidel-style beard, one young and crisply smooth-shaven, a driver wearing opaque sunglasses, two or three others. And now it would be very easy to take a step or two and put the Sten gun to use. He could get one, two, maybe three of them before he was shot.
But that wasn’t good enough. Manuel, leader of the group, had explained all that. If you killed three men and then were killed yourself, you had the worst of the bargain. And they didn’t know for sure that the soldiers were looking for these particular rebels. Maybe somebody had tipped them off, maybe not.
“We must first survive,” Manuel had said. “They are many, we are few. To risk a life is not to be a hero. It is enough to be here, to be a hero. They can afford to have fifty, a hundred, five hundred men killed. When they kill a single one of us, it is a big loss.”
So self-protection came first. They would make no move until the soldiers made it necessary. They would sit quietly by and if the Castristas drove away, so much the better. Their job was to kill Castro, not his followers. That’s what they were being paid for. Even the Cubans with them realized this made good sense.
Fenton breathed shallowly and thought about cigarettes. How long had it been? Two days, five days? Somewhere in the middle, and he could not be sure of the time, could not tell because time moved differently here. It was not measured in eight-hour shifts as it had been at the Metropolitan Bank of Lynbrook. It was tricky.
Time. Fenton looked over at Garth, his great bulk crouched in the shadows of twisted, bright-leaved trees. Garth, too, held a Sten gun. Garth had killed before, he knew. And now he, Fenton, was a killer also. They had stumbled into Castristas before and Fenton had killed, had sent bullets screaming into bodies. He still remembered vividly the Sten gun bucking like an unbroken horse in his hands, but in the end the men had gone down with bullets in their flesh. And, by God, Fenton had outlived them. Fenton, Earl Fenton, a dying man—
Footsteps. He heard movement, the soldiers poking at the roadside brush with their rifles, getting ready to move around. Any moment now. He looked from Garth to Manuel, cool and sharp and aware. Then to Taco Sardo, the sixteen-year-old who spoke only Spanish and rarely spoke that. And then the girl, Maria, the one Garth was constantly bothering, the silent broody-eyed girl who accused the world with her voiceless stare. Strange that her name was Maria. Like the girl in the Hemingway novel, the novel about the bridge. She was not at all like that fictional Maria. And yet the exterior trappings were similar.
More footsteps. He saw Garth straighten up, saw Maria raise her gun and brace herself. Manuel was moving to a vantage point and Taco was following his lead. Fenton knew the procedure. Manuel would fire the first shot if the searcher got too close, and then the rest of them would begin. Manuel would wait for the right moment.
The tension was flooding his limbs now, tension and excitement that spread through his cells as cancer had spread through his lungs. Fenton got to his feet silently, crept forward, propped himself up on a boulder and sighted over the top. He could see them now. There were six. Three of them poked at the brush like idiots. The bearded one was looking in another direction through a pair of binoculars. The driver with the dark glasses was behind the wheel of the Jeep. A sixth crouched in the road. He was tying his shoelaces.
Slowly, silently, the rebels moved in. The gap was closed by ten yards, fifteen yards. The Sten gun, handy as it was, worked poorly at long range. You did better in close.
Fenton stopped, dropped to one knee. He sighted in on the driver, the one with the sunglasses. He had to be hit right away, Fenton decided. Or he would simply hit the gas pedal and get away. Why let him get away?
The man in the road finished tying his shoelaces. He straightened up, turned toward the Jeep. Then something stopped him and he turned, his eyes darting like a sparrow. He had spotted movement in the bushes and he rushed forward, his gun at the ready.
Manuel shot him through the chest.
Then all hell broke loose. Fenton squeezed the trigger and let the Sten gun leap and chatter in his hands. His first burst was wide, smashing the Jeep’s windshield, but his second burst took half the driver’s head away. The man slumped over the wheel and died. Garth and Maria had drilled two of the soldiers in their tracks. The bearded one and another were behind the Jeep, returning fire.
Fenton sent a burst at the Jeep, hoping for the gas tank. He missed. A bullet whined over his head and he flattened out, staying close to the ground, holding tight to his gun. Taco Sardo was a short distance to the left. He was trying to circle around, to move in on the two Castristas from the side. Maria was creeping off in the opposite direction. It was a pincer movement, Fenton realized. A spontaneous, intuitive pincer movement, carried out on an individual basis rather than by regiments or battalions.
He heard heavy breathing to one side. It was Garth, moving closer, face flushed with combat fever, eyes stupid but determined. Fenton jammed a fresh clip into the breech of his gun and tried several more rounds on the gas tank of the Jeep. He saw Taco on the left, then heard a quick, sharp rifle shot from the rear of the Jeep. Taco went down, moaning, clutching at his leg. Then a Sten gun, an answering Sten gun. Maria, far on the right, surprising the two soldiers with hot lead. One died with a bullet in his throat. The other, the one with the beard, threw down his rifle and stretched his hands toward the sky.