CHAPTER FORTY

I CONCENTRATED PATROLS IN THE north end, where Uganda reached in and touched the lake. I requested one of the CIA trainer-fighter pilots fly over the area.

“There’s a stream there all right,” he reported. “Not much to it. It’s overhung by woods. Looks to me like it may be too shallow for anything as big as a Komar.”

Two nights later, Lieutenant Hawes’s boat radar picked up a Soviet Komar screaming west across the lake toward the opposite shore. He maneuvered on it in moonlight, finally sighting it as it slowed to approach a blinking light signal coming from a narrow beach. Arms smugglers.

Hawes ordered his cox’n to pull throttle and wait. There was no way of knowing how many Simba warriors might be hiding in the woods. It was my night to sleep, but the radio watch at base awoke me. Hawes on his mike gave me the lowdown.

“Take the boat when it leaves,” I advised. No way could he assault on land with only himself and four Cuban riflemen. “I’m scrambling the other Swift now, but we won’t be there until midday. I’ll see if I can get Hoare or the ANC to intercept the guns on land.”

The Komar pulled out of its rendezvous, having apparently unloaded, and headed toward the concealed stream mouth. Hawes’s Swift laid on full throttle and closed in. The Komar’s machine gun went to work, blossoming red and yellow flames. Hawes’s two 50-cals spat back. The speeding boats swerved and shifted and side-slipped to avoid targeting themselves, filling the night air with spray, the booming crackle of machine-gun fire, and dueling green or red tracers crisscrossing.

This first encounter between my people and theirs ended as suddenly as it began, with the Komar vanishing into the night-blind, forest-shrouded stream, leaving only the sound of its diminishing engines. Apparently, the creek was deeper than we thought.

“Pull out,” I ordered.

The CIA chief at Leopoldville, whose station monitored all radio traffic, picked up an in-the-clear transmission between the Komar and another source identified as Che Guevara, a.k.a. Commandante Tutu. He sounded in a rage, vowing to kill every gringo on the lake and send him to hell in the belly of a crocodile.

“Boss, I will kill him myself, verdad?” pleaded Raphael Cruz, my appointed Cuban chief. “Che, he take to his prison my brother, my cousins, and he murder them with a bullet from his pistol. He kill for the pleasure of it. He laugh when he shoot them, and I am tell he piss in their dead faces.”

I had heard such stories before of this sadist. If anyone deserved to die, it was Che Guevara. I clapped Raphael on the back.

“We will do what we can do,” I promised.

“I will piss in his face,” Cruz said.

It seemed Guevara might be directing his arms-smuggling racket from a hidden base somewhere upstream in the secret river. Since we couldn’t approach him by water without being discovered and ambushed, I radioed Kappes, who showed up at our marina the next day with about thirty fighters from Hoare’s 5 Commando. Those and my nineteen, including the lieutenants and me, added up to a good-sized, heavily armed platoon.

The Swifts dropped us off in the jungle at the mouth of the secret river where we cautiously made our way upstream. On the third day, while dodging crocodiles and snakes through a swamp, we came upon a crude camp of native-like huts concealed in the forest. The dwellings appeared hurriedly abandoned and professionally sanitized so that nothing remained behind to identify the previous occupants. Not a scrap of paper, a tin can, a bottle cap …

I ordered the camp torched. Flames popped and crackled and black smoke twisted into the sky as the column trudged back to the lake. Guevara had escaped again, but there was a new sheriff in town, and Che had to find a new base if he intended to stay.

* * *

Things settled down for about a week, until Leopoldville intercepted and cracked an encrypted transmission from Commandante Tutu. It seemed Guevara was planning a big powwow with Simba leaders near a village called Mpala on the Congo side of the lake.

I seeded out scouts and coast watchers to keep vigil and notify me of any movements. Intel from the station chief proved valid and timely. We had to move fast when one of my scouts spotted a Komar filtering in under darkness from a stream flowing out of Uganda.

As dawn approached, we located and trapped two Komars and an arms-supply trawler concealed back in a cove. I swung our Swifts wide to land troops down-lake while Mad Mike and his mercenaries slipped into the jungle to close in from the rear.

It was almost too easy. The Soviet Cubans and the raggedy-ass Simbas were either drugged up on khat or so overconfident they didn’t hear us coming. They were laughing and hooting and chattering around a big kettle on a fire in the center of the little village when Lieutenants Hawes and Holtz planted M-79 incendiary rounds directly in the center, breaking up the party in dramatic fashion.

Caught in a crossfire between Mad Mike’s fighters and my shooters, they didn’t stand a chance. I saw two Soviet Cubans bite the dust, riddled with bullets but going down fighting with their boots on. One died immediately. The other screamed his guts out before somebody put him out of his misery.

Several Simbas took off into the jungle while a handful of Che’s Cubans put up a fight from one of the grass huts. I emptied a clip into the hootch from my M-2 carbine, popped out the empty box, and slapped in another. When I looked up, I spotted a slight figure wearing camouflage fatigues and a black beret escaping out the back and racing for the trees. He carried a long package of some sort tucked underneath one arm.

“It’s him. It’s him!” Rafael Cruz shouted. “Kill him!”

He got off one shot from his M-14 rifle before Guevara vanished into the jungle. I gave chase with Rafael and Lieutenant Holtz spread out to my either side. We had the sonofabitch. He was fifty yards from the goal line and no chance of scoring a touchdown.

Or so I thought.

Ahead, two Cubans from a brush pile cracked down on us with rifles. Che had left a rear guard. Raphael yelped and went down, wounded. I hit the dirt and opened up with my carbine, throwing lead at muzzle flashes in the shadows.

“Cover me!” I yelled at Lieutenant Holtz.

He laid suppressive fire into the brush pile. I sprang to my feet and dragged Raphael back into the trees. He was conscious, but blood was spreading rapidly across his chest. He opened eyes filled with pain.

“Boss,” he said, his voice cracking. “Kill him for me. … Kill him for my … brother and my cousins.”

Suddenly, a Beechcraft appeared seemingly from nowhere, flying low and slow out of rifle range beyond where I was pinned down. It circled downwind, then returned almost immediately trailing a big hook attached to a long cable.

I couldn’t believe it. Boehm and I and our men had experimented with skyhooks at Fort Bragg during the train-up for the commissioning of SEAL teams. They were developed by Army Special Forces for snatching spies and other operators into the air and out of danger. Guevara was one wily bastard with a contingency plan for any situation.

The big package he carried when he fled must contain his harness and grab bar for the hook.

The Cubans in the brush blocking the way realized they had accomplished their mission by delaying us long enough for Guevara to escape. They tossed out their weapons and surrendered. I saw the Beech gaining altitude as it fled. At the end of its cable clung Che Guevara, grabbed from the crocodile’s jaws and whisked back into Uganda.

Right out of James Bond. You had to admire the little bastard’s élan.