Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [21]
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.