Chapter 14

Cielo walked fretfully to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the thin mist. Kruger was down there striding back and forth like a colonial officer, whipping a stick against his britches; Cielo measured the distance again with his eye and turned back toward the mountain.

Vargas’s eyebrows lifted—he was awaiting Cielo’s signal. Uneasy, Cielo shook his head and went back to the trees, crossing the flat rock where the helicopter had set down last night, passing two field guns and the crated mortars. The field pieces were small ones, three-inchers.

He had another close look at the oak to which the block-and-tackle was cabled. It was the biggest tree in the vicinity and looked as substantial and monolithic as a granite mountain and Kruger, the engineer among them, had passed on its suitability as an anchor for the cable but Cielo was troubled by doubts because water was easy in the rain forest and the rock subsurface was close beneath the soil—even the biggest trees had no need to drill roots very far down; it made for a shallow purchase.

Kruger had dismissed it. The oak, he’d pointed out, was old enough to have survived a hundred hurricanes. It would support the weight of a Sherman tank, let alone a small mountain howitzer or a crate of rockets.

Vargas came across to the oak. “Before long the sun will burn this off. We need to be under cover by then.”

“All right.” He still felt nagged by reluctance but he forced himself away from it. “Let’s get started then.”

He went to the rim and watched the cable pull taut over the guy pully. The crate—twelve hundred pounds—began to skid and tilt; then it was lifted off the ground and swung far out. Vargas and two of the men prodded it with poles to slow its pendulum swing. After a time it settled down, twisting a bit in the air, hanging clear out over the face of the cliff.

Down below Kruger was watching with his neck craned back, his face pale in the mist. He began to make beckoning gestures with both hands and Cielo relayed these signals to Julio who shifted the gears and began to pay out cable from the donkey engine’s winch drum. The heavy crate began to descend, well out away from the face of the cliff, and Cielo sat back on his haunches and relaxed; it was working splendidly.

The donkey engine banged away methodically and down at the mouth of the cave Kruger had stepped to one side and was reaching up to guide the crate to its seat on the flatbed cart that waited to receive it. Four men clustered around the swaying load while it dropped slowly amid them. There was a second donkey engine in the cave, only seven horsepower but enough to winch the dolly into the cave.

For the next hour Cielo squatted on the rim relaying hand signals from Kruger at the base of the cliff to Julio at the hoist engine. It gave him a kind of peace to perform this near-mindless repetitive job. There were two small howitzers, four mortar crates (one containing mortars and three containing ammunition), two crated rocket-launchers and four crates of rockets. The rocket-launchers doubled up on one load; at seven minutes per load Kruger had calculated it would take an hour and a quarter to finish the job but it was running a little slower than that and Cielo realized the mist probably would clear before they had everything put away. But that did not particularly exercise him.

In any event near the end of the first hour the clouds came scudding over the peaks and by half past eight it had begun to drizzle, a very fine spray that pricked his face and made him smile.

The donkey engine ran out of gas. There was always something you’d neglected. They had to pause while Cielo tossed the end of the rope down to Kruger and a man went off to the camp to bring back a five-gallon jerrycan from the Jeep. Julio came over to the rim and gave him a hand hauling it up; it was heavy and the work made him sweat. Julio said, “Almost done now—just the two guns left. Then I can get back to my book. I’ve only got a couple of chapters left—I want to find out how it comes out.”

“I can tell you how it comes out. The computers take over the universe.”

“Very funny.” Julio stumped away lugging the gasoline. He was in a good mood; the helicopter had brought him half a dozen science fictions.

Vargas and his crew hooked up the first field gun and Kruger down below waited with his arms folded on his chest, head tipped back, blinking when raindrops struck his face; brooding. To Kruger everything had come out of kilter with time. The tragedy of Kruger’s existence was that he hadn’t been born early enough to be a storm trooper.

The engine coughed and started up again. Cielo looked back toward the cliff and thought of checking up on the oak tree again but he was feeling a bit lazy and his earlier unease had been settled by a gentle calm. He wagged a finger at Vargas and then at Julio; the field gun dragged along the ground a bit and then swung aloft and swayed out over the drop.

Down below him Kruger’s men stood out well away from the cliff. Kruger walked across the hardpan and dragged the dolly aside; they wouldn’t need it this time, the gun had its own wheels. Coming back onto the drop zone Kniger looked up and watched the gun descend; he began to wave the others forward and they moved in like scavengers toward a carcass. Old men now, all of them—old for this at least; they were over forty, some of them fifty or as near to it as made no difference; Vargas was what, now—fifty-six? For men like these this kind of life was nothing more than simulation.

They’d been nurtured on patriotism and old Draga’s monstrous calumnies. Time had betrayed them. When Draga was gone Cielo would have to face up to the dismal grief of disbanding them. Some of them would take it with relief, he knew—Vargas for instance. Others would lose their moorings and be swept away by the guilt of their failure: He could picture one or two of them on skid row and he didn’t know how he could prevent that. Julio had his own plans, Cielo thought—but they involved business, not insurrection. As for Kruger, that one wouldn’t suffer; he’d find another war and go off to shoot Communists somewhere.

For himself there was simply the money Draga would leave him. There was something curious in that—not long ago he’d had ten million dollars in his hands but he’d turned it over to the old man. When Julio had questioned that he’d explained that they couldn’t double-cross the old man and survive it; the old man had tentacles everywhere and how could you spend money without his getting wind of it? But that was only a half truth. In a way he loved the old man. After the old man died it wouldn’t matter if Cielo turned traitor to his cause but while Draga lived Cielo would humor him because these dreams were all the old man had left.

A boat. That was his own dream. Not a Greek yacht; just a boat—fifty feet, maybe sixty, an old one would do if it didn’t have dry rot. Something with plenty of canvas and a little diesel auxiliary. A boat and a warm-water landing where he could moor it; a house by the landing where he could moor Soledad and the children and bask away his days in a soft warm nesty feeling of family and love. All he really wanted was the old man’s half million dollars to see him through. Ah, he thought, I’m one hell of a revolutionary.

Musing, he watched Kruger’s men drag the field gun out of sight into the cave. The cable came back up and Vargas hooked it to the last gun.

The drizzle tapered off. Steam in the air now; he could hardly see the oak back there and beneath him Kruger’s face was leached of color by the gray mist. There was always rain in El Yunque but it seemed to have been heavier than usual this year—every day a half dozen squalls, some of them drenching. It was a wonder the whole mountain didn’t wash away. Everywhere you saw trees with their root systems exposed to the air where floods had carried the earth away.

He didn’t like it up here. Cabin fever was another danger; he couldn’t keep the men here forever. The schedule of rotations permitted each man a two-day furlough in the fleshpots; the men were away two at a time on overlapping days; their discipline was strong and he knew none of them would get drunk enough to let anything slip. Nevertheless they were beginning to think of themselves as prisoners. A few had their own resources: Julio would last as long as the supply of science fiction held out and Vargas had the methodical patience of a saint and Kruger, the good soldier, obeyed orders to the end but the others were restless and soon a listless apathy would infect them; they would begin to quarrel among themselves and things would begin to disintegrate. And there was Emil, if he ever returned from the city. But he saw no solution to it unless the old man died soon.

The idea had occurred to him that if push came to shove he might mount an attempt to invade Cuba, then abort it for some reason. That would push things back toward Square One for a while. It would take time to reorganize and re-equip. The thought remained in his mind as a workable contingency but he preferred to avoid it; anything like that might cause injuries and jeopardy. What was the sense in exposing the men to pointless risks? Besides, an aborted attack would disappoint the old man acutely.

Something snapped—very loud. The earth seemed to quake under him. He was watching Kruger, waiting for signals, but the noisy tremor spun him around and he was in time to see Vargas diving toward a man nearby, tackling the man, driving him down and back from the cliff—and then it registered on Cielo’s consciousness that the derrick was coming apart.

He saw in an instant what was happening: The one thing they hadn’t been able to test—the rim of the cliff itself was buckling. A fissure must have opened; rot in the rock. The telegraph pole that had been pinned into the ledge by cables and rock drills was letting go and in that split instant of time he saw the great logs scatter like toothpicks,

He whipped around to scream a warning at Kruger but Kruger had seen it, too, and was scrambling to get out from under the plummeting field gun. For a moment Cielo thought there was time, believed Kruger would make it; the angle of perspective gave him false hope. Kruger launched himself like an Olympic swimmer—a flat dive to get away from the impact area—but his soles skidded on the wet and he bellyflopped and the gun came down on him—bounced horribly and tipped over, its cable whipping like a snake, lashing its heavy loop back toward the cliff where it knocked a man—Ramirez—clear off his feet; Cielo wasn’t certain but he had the terrible feeling the cable had struck Ramirez right in the face. The man pirouetted back out of sight.

Stunned by shock and the suddenness of it Cielo climbed to his feet on rubber knees and looked left: Vargas was standing up, the man he’d rescued dusting himself off, someone else lying askew with the butt end of a telegraph pole across his chest. The donkey engine died with a sputter and Julio stared at Cielo in horror. Vargas on his big legs stumbled from side to side like a man concussed; but Cielo believed he’d not been hurt.

Juices pumped through him but he forced himself to behave with leaderly calm. He went jogging across to the man pinned under the pole. It was Ordovara and he was quite dead, his rib cage crushed; Cielo turned away, then turned back and laid a finger along Ordovara’s throat to feel for a pulse. There was none. A stink of excrement hung in the air.

He went to the lip and looked down. Two men were manhandling the capsized field gun away from Kruger who lay on his belly with both legs splayed out at weird angles. Even from up here Cielo could hear Kruger’s moans. Well, at least he was still alive but it looked as if both legs had been crushed.

He felt weight behind him. When he turned Vargas was there. Cielo pointed toward the body of Ordovara. “Get that thing off him and bring him down to the camp. Tell the others to clear up—get the equipment out of sight. Put Julio in charge. I’m going down.”

He strode along the rim, not hurrying, heading for the trail they’d cut down the side slope. It would take him fifteen minutes to cover the circuitous course but it was the only way down, short of rappelling down the cliff on a rope.

The fault, he thought, was no one’s but his own; he could lay the blame at no one else’s door. And how do I expiate this sin?

Ramirez was dead, half his face taken off by the whipping cable. The two dead men were not a major problem—only a major grief. It was Kruger who commanded his attention.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared it might be—the undercarriage of the field gun had landed square across the back of Kruger’s thighs but it was a pneumatic tire and that had absorbed a bit of the impact; the bones of both Kruger’s legs were broken but the flesh hadn’t been badly severed. Nevertheless he was already swelling up and it was obvious a good many blood vessels had been crushed. With immediate sophisticated medical attention it might be possible to save his legs. Up here there wasn’t much they could do but splint the fractures.

He took Julio aside. “You’d better break radio silence. Call in the helicopter. We’ll have to carry him up there.”

“You want to risk everyone for Kruger?”

“Do you think I should let him lose his legs, Julio?”

“He’s lost them anyway.”

“Now you’re a surgeon, are you?”

“Rodrigo—listen, think what will happen if we break security. The old man, what’ll he think? What’ll he do?”

“I don’t care right now. We owe Kruger a chance to keep his legs. Call Zapatino.”

“What if I can’t raise him?”

“You’ll raise somebody.”

Emil met Cielo at the door. The big youth’s eyes were filled with scorn. He conducted Cielo through the house to the tiled deck where his grandfather sat in a cane chair with a newspaper across his lap. Through an open door Cielo glimpsed the cathode screen of a stock market quotations machine. The old man sat with his chin on his chest and appeared to be dozing but then the newspaper rattled in his hands and he tossed it to the table beside him and lifted his eyes. He did not look well, Cielo thought. It was something other than old age or irritation; a malaise. For some time the old man seemed to have been shrinking into gauntness—Cielo wondered if he had cancer.

The old man said, “How is Kruger?”

“The chances are pretty good, they said.”

Emil said, “It shouldn’t have happened.”

“I know that.” He didn’t want to give Emil a chance to exploit it; he said, “It was my fault.”

“Zapatino tells me it was an accident,” the old man said.

“Accidents don’t just happen. Someone’s careless—then there’s an accident. We should have made surer of the rock before we bolted the derrick to it.”

Emil said, “It’s easy to say that now,” and the old man, misunderstanding him, nodded his head. Then Emil said, “It’s magnanimous of him to take responsibility for it, isn’t it. Now that it doesn’t cost him anything.”

The old man ignored him. “Kruger’s the engineer. It was his fault, then, not yours. Must you burden yourself with feelings of guilt for every mishap that takes place around you?”

“I’m in command. The responsibility’s mine. If it weren’t for me Ramirez and Ordovara would be alive.”

“If it weren’t for me they’d be alive, too,” the old man pointed out, “and if it weren’t for you they might all have died long ago in a Havana dungeon, yourself included. You mustn’t put on sackcloth and ashes for the rest of your life on their account, hijo.”

“One day I’ll get over it,” Cielo said philosophically.

Emil pressed his opening: “Papa, he broke security. We can’t dismiss that so easily.”

“I believe we’ve covered the breach as well as could be done,” the old man said. “We’ve made Kruger out to be a tourist who was changing a tire when the jack slipped in the mud and the car fell on him. It explains the imprint of the tire tread on his legs. It’s not as if he had a bullet in him—there’ll be no official inquiry. Cielo did the right thing. We’re not savages—we don’t leave men to die just because they’ve been injured.”

“All the same. They could have brought Kruger down in the Jeep. They didn’t have to violate radio silence.”

Cielo watched him loom and wondered if the youth would have the audacity to challenge him for the leadership of the group. Not yet, he thought. He’s not ready just yet. He’s preparing the ground now, that’s all.

“Breaking radio security,” Emil said, “that’s a serious mistake.”

“I had to make the decision on the spot,” Cielo replied. “I don’t regret it.”

“Then you’re a fool!”

Cielo laughed at him. It was the only way to deal with him.

The old man said, “Emil has a point, you know.”

“Not realistically. Nobody has direction finders zeroed in on us. Nobody even knows we’re here. The odds were favorable and my concern was Kruger. I stand by the decision.”

“You’re wrong,” the old man said, “at least in part. They know we’re here.”

Cielo looked from face to face. They were both watching him. “I wasn’t told that, was I?”

“I’m telling you now,” the old man said.

Emil said, “It changes things. They’re getting close—we can’t afford sloppy leadership any longer. We can’t afford to allow accidents to happen—we can’t allow security to be broken again.”

The old man lifted a palm toward his grandson. “The most important thing is that Cielo didn’t panic. It must have been a dreadful few moments. Cielo kept his head. That’s why he’s in command.”

It was a vote of confidence but Cielo thought gloomily, I wish you trusted me less.

The old man said, “They’ve traced the kidnaping of Ambassador Gordon to Puerto Rico.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I’m not blaming you. You have a distressing tendency to shoulder the responsibility for everything—I’m not putting any fault on you. The fact remains, they’ve traced you—at least they know you’re on the island and perhaps they know who you are. I believe you know two of the men involved in the investigation—Glenn Anders and Harrison Crobey. I remember the names from years ago when you trained in Alabama. Your reports mentioned Crobey several times.”

Cielo stood at the parapet. A white sloop gamboled offshore. The sun gave it the look of a hovering butterfly. Crobey, he thought. He’d always been a little afraid of Crobey, but he liked him.

“I’ve heard of Anders but I never met him.”

“He was Crobey’s liaison with Langley.”

“Yes, I suppose he was.”

“There was a young woman with Anders. Presumably a member of his staff.” The old man squirmed a bit in the cane chair and spent a moment clicking his teeth and it occurred to Cielo the old man was having trouble for some reason—searching for the right words. “There was a certain—breakdown in communications here in my headquarters. When we learned of these people’s activities we attempted to shadow them and take certain steps to throw them off the scent and discourage them. You know how these things are. Orders pass down a chain. A few links in the chain turn out to be imperfect conductors of the current—information is garbled and there’s an excess of zeal or a misunderstanding of instructions.”

Emil’s face was getting red; he was turning his back and his shoulders lifted defiantly.

The old man continued: “The young woman with Anders was killed. Not by my order, but it’s happened. Like you with your accidents, I must take responsibility for mine. The killing of this unfortunate woman may stir up the hornets in the nest. I’ve no doubt the search will be intensified. Of course the girl may have been simply Anders’ lover but I doubt it, and it makes no difference anyway. What has happened is tantamount to what happens when a police officer is killed. The department tends to drop everything else in the rush to apprehend the cop-killer. We can expect a good deal of pressure. For that reason I propose that you discontinue further shipments and arms purchases for the time being.”

Relief flooded him; he tried not to let it show.

The old man said, “We must pull in our horns and wait it out. Cover our tracks completely.”

“This killing—was it Luz?”

“No. You don’t trust Luz, do you?”

“No, I never have.”

“You needn’t be concerned about him. Luz obeys my orders without question and without deviation. He will continue to do so even if the orders come from beyond the grave. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.” The meaning was clear and it proved once again the old man’s shrewdness. After the old man died Luz would deliver the safe-deposit key to Cielo and Julio. The half million dollars: the house, the landing, the fifty-foot boat. That was the leash to which Cielo was tethered. That and his loyalty to this absurd old man.

Then he understood something else. The anguish with which the old man had skirted the issue of the CIA woman’s death, and the way Emil had flushed and averted his face—it could only mean the woman had been killed by young Emil, or by others at Emil’s command.

Cielo said, “It means postponing the attack on Havana then.”

“It can’t be helped. We must go to ground. Keep all your men in the camp, don’t let anyone out on furlough. Keep your radio receiver switched on at all times and have a man monitor it twenty-four hours a day. If we learn of any danger approaching you we’ll give you warning by radio, but you’re to use it only for receiving and you’ll make no transmissions. Questions?”

“Harry Crobey—is he in charge of the investigation?”

“We don’t know. My sources in the government are not master spies, you know. I acquire dribbles of information here and there. I know that Anders is a sort of troubleshooter for a department of the CIA headed by a gentleman named O’Hillary who seems to have all the earmarks of a clever and ambitious civil servant. Up to now the handling of the investigation of the Mexican kidnaping has been guided more by political considerations than by legalistic ones, but the murder of this girl may change that. We don’t know yet. I don’t have a private pipeline into the White House or the CIA’s top echelons. I have only friends, here and there, with their ears to the ground. Of course I have friends on the police here in San Juan. They know about Anders well enough. They haven’t been able to tell me very much about Crobey, however. He’s here and he met with Anders—just before the girl died—but the nature of his official function is obscure. We’re not even certain who he’s working for. He told a police detective he’d come to Puerto Rico to scout film locations for a Hollywood director. That’s patently ridiculous, of course, but it shows how little we’ve learned. There’s a woman with Crobey, too—either an associate or a courtesan.”

“What’s her name?”

“Marchant, I think. Or Marchand. Something like that.”

“Carole Marchand? She’s the mother of the boy Emil killed.”

“Then perhaps that’s who she is.” The old man didn’t seem interested. “I keep my lines open to the police, of course, and any information they have tends to filter back to me. But if Crobey is free-lancing we’ll have no way to anticipate his movements.”

Cielo said, “Crobey’s like a mamba. I know him—he’s dangerous.”

“We’ll see that he doesn’t find you. Your job now is to go to ground and keep the others in the burrow with you. Don’t communicate with Soledad.”

“I know that well enough,” he said irritably.

“I’m sorry. Love of a woman often makes a man foolish. I’m fortunate to be so old. Pretty girls no longer turn my head.”

That wasn’t true at all; the old man was only having his little joke as a way of easing the admonishment. There were always delectable girls around the old man. Cielo didn’t like to think how they probably must service him.

“I wonder how they traced us here,” Cielo said.

“I’ve no idea. But Puerto Rico’s a big country. Let’s just make sure they don’t trace us any farther than they already have.”

“Will you have Anders and Crobey killed, then?”

“I haven’t decided yet. The decision will depend on how close to us they come.”

Emil, throughout this, had wandered about the deck with his hands in his pockets. Cielo said, “What about Emil? Do I take him with me?”

“No. Emil will remain here and go about his business as if nothing were amiss. His absence from this house might create suspicion.”

Cielo was relieved not to be harassed by Emil’s presence; things in the camp would be tense enough without him.

Emil said, “While you’re waiting up there you might draw up the plans for the coup in detail. I’ll have a look at them afterwards. This investigation will die away like they always do. When it does we’ll make our final decisions. There’s not going to be any more foot-dragging.”

The old man smiled. “To the young everything must happen quickly.”

It was more than that, Cielo thought. Emil wanted to get the job done while the old man was still alive because only in that way could Emil be sure of securing the power he wanted for himself. The old man would see to it that Emil was looked after: Perhaps Emil even had designs on Castro’s position. Without the old man there wouldn’t be a prayer of that happening—Emil had no constituency. So he had to move fast.

All I have to do, Cielo thought, is delay things until the old man dies.

After that it would be possible to deal with Emil, because he could be isolated.

Emil watched him angrily: For an instant Cielo was afraid the youth had read his mind. Emil was clever in his brutal way.

The old man reached for the newspaper beside him. “Luz will drive you back. I know you’d prefer another chauffeur but Luz is the one I trust to make sure you’re not followed.”

On his way out of the house Cielo felt a measure of dulled contentment. The predicament now was in the old man’s lap. The old man would die soon and everything would dwindle away—all Cielo had to do was go to ground and stay there.