“And what should I do, Turner?”
“Stick around until Saturday. You don’t want to miss out on twenty grand, do you?”
“I told you—”
“That you don’t care about the money. I got that. But you wouldn’t throw it away if someone dropped it in your lap, would you?”
“No,” Hines admitted.
“Fine. So you hang around until Saturday. Then you grab a boat or a plane, go to the Swiss consulate and tell them you’re an American refugee, something like that. They’ll get you back to Miami and you can go it alone from there.”
“That’s the sensible way, huh?”
“Sure.”
Hines nodded to himself. There was always a sensible way, and there was another way that seemed more honest. He decided it was a hell of a shame that the honest way was never the sensible way.
“Will you put those bombs together? And explain to me how they work?”
“Why—”
“Saturday night,” Hines went on desperately, doggedly. “Saturday night you’ll show me how the bombs work. Sunday you can disappear. I don’t care. Because Sunday I’m going to blow the hell out of Castro.”
“Didn’t you hear a thing I said? Don’t you remember what you said, goddamn it?”
“I remember.”
“Then—”
“I don’t even want to talk about it. I know—I’ll be getting killed, maybe, and all for a brother who had it coming. But I don’t want to think about it, it only makes my head ache. I can’t take it any more. I don’t know what’s right or wrong, Turner. I can’t tell the heroes from the villains. It’s not black and white like a morality play. It’s all kinds of shades of gray.”
Turner dropped his cigarette to the floor. He covered it with his foot and ground it out. He did not say anything.
“All shades of gray,” Hines went on. “And it all boils down to the same thing. He killed my brother and I’m going to kill him. That’s what I keep winding up with. I can’t take the boat back to the States, I can’t run like a rat to the Swiss consulate. I have to wait here and I have to blow that bastard in two with a bomb. That’s all I can do.”
It was Wednesday morning. Maria boiled a huge pot of water over a small fire of brush and twigs. She tossed a cup or two of coffee grounds into the pot and let it boil for ten minutes. Then she ladled out cups of the hot, black coffee. Fenton took one and walked a short distance away with it, sat down and got a cigarette going while the coffee cooled a little.
It was Wednesday morning. Castro would pass along the road late in the afternoon or early in the evening. A young boy had brought the news the night before, a twelve-year-old kid with hollow eyes and beads of perspiration on his brow, who ran through the underbrush like a startled deer. Late in the afternoon or early in the evening—that was the word from the underground, passed from mouth to mouth in whispers, brought this last step of the way by this boy with hollow eyes.
Late in the afternoon, early in the evening. Fenton sucked smoke from his cigarette, took a tentative sip of the steaming coffee. He burned his mouth and cursed quietly. Late in the afternoon, early in the evening. He was as tense as a tightly coiled spring, jumpy as a hand grenade with the pin pulled. Late in the afternoon, early in the evening.
Tomorrow Castro spoke in Santiago. Or, if they were successful, tomorrow Castro spoke to the dead, spoke to other corpses in the language cadavers speak. Castro lived or died, and this would be determined soon—late in the afternoon, early in the evening.
The whole camp was rigid with a mixture of anticipation and brittle fear. The days had been bad ones lately. Tuesday, around noon, a Jeep with two soldiers in it had rolled slowly down the road. A pair of Castristas on patrol. Manuel had ordered everyone to let Jeep and soldiers pass. They could not risk exposing their position, not until the big game was in the sights of the Sten guns. A Jeep with two soldiers was no target at all when Fidel Castro himself was due to come into firing range.
But Taco Sardo forgot the order, or else ignored it. His Sten gun belched bullets over the formation of rock and the Jeep halted, a tire gone. The soldiers came out with automatic rifles in their hands, and they had to be killed at once. They could not be allowed to escape, could not be permitted to pass the word to the garrison that rebels lay in ambush along the road to Santiago.
It had been a short, desperate fight. One of the new recruits had died, a Castrista rifle bullet tearing half his face away. Garth got one of the soldiers with a Sten gun blast but the other was back in the Jeep suddenly, ready to ride to Santiago on the rims if he had to.
Two of the rebels had stopped the Jeep. Manuel shot out another tire and Taco Sardo, who had started all the trouble in the first place, quickly raced into the road to put a pistol bullet into the driver’s throat.
The Jeep would not run. Four of them together managed to push it down the road a short distance. Then, with two others to assist, they lifted the crippled vehicle and carried it from the road, hiding it in the brush. They lifted the two dead soldiers and carried them far into the hills, leaving their bodies to rot. Maria scrubbed blood from the road, Fenton picked up shards of broken glass. When they were done, no evidence of the scramble remained. The road was clear again, empty.
That had been trouble enough. That alone had swelled the tension, had drawn everyone’s nerves back like a bowstring.
There was more Tuesday evening. Fenton was not sure what had happened, but while he sat among the rocks and kept a lonely vigil over the road, there was a sharp scream, curses in Spanish, a roar of pain. And later that evening he saw Garth with deep scratches across his face. And Maria wore a deep frown, and her eyes were pools of bitterness.
Now Fenton drank his coffee and smoked another cigarette. It was a moot point, he thought, whether Castro’s convoy would arrive before the rebels succeeded in killing each other off. Matt Garth obviously didn’t learn from experience; he was going to go on until someone put a bullet in him. Taco, blood-hungry after being wounded in the leg, would shoot at anything that came within range. Manuel sat lost in thought, still the leader but now gripped by his dream of power and glory. Maria burned with fear and anger. And Earl Fenton, the quiet man, the refugee of a teller’s cage in the Metropolitan Bank of Lynbrook, the man with cancer in his lungs, drank bitter coffee and smoked strong cigarettes and waited for Fidel to come and meet his death.
Late in the afternoon.
Or early in the evening.
Matt Garth liked things simple and direct. If you made things too complicated you just loused them up. When you wanted a woman, you took her. When you were killing someone for a price, you went ahead and killed him. And when you had a burn on for some son-of-a-bitch who had been giving you a hard time, well, you belted him one.
Which was what he was going to do.
He had just finished his session as lookout. He had crouched between rocks as mute and massive as Garth himself, his Sten gun perched along a rock ledge with a fresh clip in its breech. And four soldiers came rolling along in a battered Jeep, peering into the brush in a hunt for rebels. One of them, a beardless kid, had focused a pair of binoculars upon the precise spot where Garth was sitting. And Garth’s finger was poised on the trigger. One burst of the Sten gun would have sent the four rat bastards to hell. But the kid with the glasses had seen nothing, and the soldiers were gone now.