Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [15]
The other two men ran off, their arms filled with guns, ammunition and explosives. Manuel and the woman were behind them, Garth and Fenton close on their heels. Already the pilot was warming up the plane, anxious to get out of Cuba in a hurry.
Garth watched the girl. He lumbered through the brush with thorns snatching at his clothing but all he could think of was the girl, the way she walked. He saw her buttocks moving within the khaki pants. He wondered if she wore underwear.
He was going to have her.
He knew this, knew it for a fact. The broad was hotter than hell, he thought, and he was going to get her on her back if it was the last thing he did. If she was sold on the idea, fine and dandy. If she wanted to put out, swell. That made it easier, and why take the tough way?
But it was all up to her. Because one way or the other he was going to get in her pants, whether she liked it or not, whether she was somebody’s wife or somebody’s sister or somebody’s mother, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. If it had to be rape that’s what it was going to be. It was up to her.
The underbrush got progressively thicker and Garth waded through it like a rhinoceros charging through savannah grasses. The guy called Manuel was keeping up a running stream of chatter but Garth wasn’t listening. He was busy watching the broad.
Some party, he thought. And for this they were paying him twenty grand!
The boat took Turner and Hines to a coral reef hedging a broad bay. There a man met their ship in a rowboat. Turner and Hines joined the man and he put them ashore just outside Matanzas.
Matanzas is a commercial port on the north coast of Cuba, some thirty-six miles due east of Havana. The city’s name means slaughter in Spanish. Turner knew enough Spanish to get along. Slaughter, he thought. Not murder, not assassination. Slaughter. He wondered who was going to get slaughtered.
He found out in a hurry. The man beached the rowboat and joined them on shore. He was leading them to the Bellamar Caves, a group of limestone caverns three miles outside of Matanzas. There they would spend the night.
“¡Manos arriba!” The voice was loud, sharp. Turner whirled around, flung his hands up in response to the command. There were two tall men across the road, both bearded, both uniformed. One held a pistol.
They dogtrotted across the road, eyes bright. This was it, then, Turner thought. They had entered illegally, and Castro’s men had them already.
The man with the gun was talking now, gesticulating wildly, demanding in rapid Spanish who they were and what they were doing. The Cuban who had rowed them in looked frightened. Hines was standing numb, his hands high in the air.
Turner waited. His muscles tensed. He looked at the gun. It was pointed between him and Hines now. The soldier was getting careless.
Turner sprang.
One hand closed on the soldier’s wrist, driving the gun down. His other hand clenched into a fist that connected solidly with the side of the soldier’s head. The man reeled backward, and now everybody was getting into the act. Hines and the Cuban were on the other soldier—they had him before he had a chance to get his gun from its holster. Turner was on his man, pounding his head down against the road, beating the man to death.
It was short, and very bloody. It was a fight conducted in silence, a battle from a silent movie. It ended with two bearded soldiers lying dead in the road. Turner stood up, drained, every muscle aching. He saw Hines with his nose bleeding. The Cuban had a huge welt on his forehead, another welt on one cheek.
“This is bad,” the man said in Spanish.
“They will know we have been here. They will find these men dead and they will wonder what has happened.”
“Can we get rid of the bodies?”
The Cuban thought for a moment. Suddenly he smiled. “Help me with them,” he said. “I shall take them in the rowboat. I shall take them far out, and they will be buried at sea with full naval honors.”
“Won’t they be missed?”
The Cuban shrugged. “Many soldiers desert,” he said. “Many leave the country. These will