Hostage in Havana - Noel Hynd

Against these dark impulses, she tried to weigh everything that her Christian faith had brought to her: having been on the threshold of suicide before, she was later grateful for not having pulled a trigger. But where was God now?

The old phrase came back: a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But how temporary was this problem? Thirty years’ worth of temporary? Would her government really get her back? Had Paul Guarneri set her up? Had he really killed a man in Havana perhaps to avenge an old family grievance? Could she believe a single word that Major Mejias had said? Or would she have been wise to believe every word of it?

In her tiny cell, as her mind tilted and rambled, she looked for ways to kill herself – theoretically, at least. She saw none, other than a hunger strike. But then, if she died in custody, wouldn’t that just be a victory for those who’d imprisoned her? A stubborn streak started to kick against her suicidal impulses. Her spirits seesawed by the hour.

On the third day she was taken out of her cell with four other women.

They were marched to a shower and told to disrobe. A male guard came by, amused, and sprayed them for lice. Then they were led to the next chamber, which was a shower. They were given a crude piece of industrial soap and told they had five minutes to wash as two fat matrons stood at the portal to the showers and watched.

The five-minute limit was the first mention of time since she had arrived. Time: she wondered if her existence over the last few days presaged the coming years.

She was led back to her cell. That night, for the first time, she felt herself start to freefall mentally. She turned toward the wall, prayed, thought of home, the long road that had led her here, and she cried for hours. She prayed that some force – human, God, Jesus, anyone who could save her now – would somehow intercede and get her out of here. She thought of her fiance, Robert, whom she had lost on the bloody streets of Kiev, and she thought of growing up in California and her grandmother’s funeral in Mexico where they prayed and sent paper lanterns down the river. She knew she was getting delirious, but it didn’t matter because the delirium was a mechanism that would take her out of this hell on earth. If she couldn’t leave physically, at least she could leave mentally.

Then she wondered if that was what had happened to Roland Violette. Had his sanity been a sane reaction against the insanity of the life he had led? She didn’t know and had too much time to think about it.

Then came another night in solitary.

Alex must have been sleeping, she realized with a start, sleeping in a sitting-up position on her mattress, because the rattle of keys awakened her. There was the grating, creaking, banging noise, of the door being opened. Then she was looking at three guards who were staring at her without saying anything. She had never seen them before, and they looked unpleasantly official.

The first two were female, one a thick woman with grayish hair pulled back and a thick middle. The younger one was slimmer and looked as if she might be part Russian. Behind them was a man. He carried an automatic weapon across his chest. The weapon was chained to his belt so that no one could grab it from him and run.

“?Levantse!” the older woman demanded. Alex tried to blink the fatigue out of her eyes. “You’re moving.”

One of them threw a pair of rubber thongs on the floor.

Alex stood. She was hardly in a position to resist. Emotionally, she was flying blind. She hoped that somehow the police had contacted the Mexican government and some steps were being taken to get her released. But she had no reason to believe anything of the sort.

She stood and slid the thongs onto her feet. She held out her hands for cuffs. The older woman curtly said that the manacles wouldn’t be necessary. They indicated she should walk. The matrons went first, followed by Alex, and finally the guard with the automatic rifle followed.

They went through two checkpoints. Alex tried to remain alert and observe as much as possible. She caught her first view of a courtyard. It was night and the yard was empty. Her eyes went to the walls. They were old, maybe fifty feet high, and patrolled with guards who commanded heavy searchlights. There was a flock of gulls far beyond, circling, and from the tone of the sky she guessed that she was somewhere near the water.

After the checkpoints, they walked her along a corridor. The path was long and dim. There was a ceiling fan that didn’t work. The paint was peeling off the concrete walls, which were yellowish, discolored, and wet with humidity. She stole a glance at a wristwatch on one of her guards. It was 2:00 a.m. It occurred to her that it was around this time of morning that she had been on her way into this island, twelve days earlier, she calculated, unless it was thirteen.

They took her through another gate. This one was metal and more modern. It led to another building: modern, glass, and steel. A walk down another corridor, this one with linoleum, and her keepers led her into a small room. They ordered her to remain standing.

“Now you wait,” the male guard said in Spanish. Quietly, she stood and waited. In her mind, a prayer was never far way.

They left her alone and closed the door. The room was stuffy and humid, even at night. There were windows with lateral bars. The building had an imprint of Russian architecture from the 1970s. There was a dreadful condemned feel to it and it leached quickly onto her.

Her tunic was scratchy. At this point, it occurred to her, she would have given a year of her life for some soap, deodorant, and clean clothes. She tried to distance herself from the thought because she knew that she didn’t want to start measuring things in years of life.

There was an animated conversation on the other side of the door, so brisk and profane in Spanish that she could barely understand it. Then the door flew open, and a very angry man rushed in. She recognized Major Mejias immediately. He was in a military uniform now. He wore a sidearm that could have brought down a charging elephant. He was dangerously agitated.

His eyes fixed quickly upon her.

“You!” he said to her in Spanish. “I curse the day I first saw you!”

“I can say the same for you,” she said.

“Shut up! Hold out your hands!” he said.

She obeyed. The guards didn’t think she needed cuffs, but Mejias did. He cuffed her hands. Beyond the doorway, two of her guards stood, watched, and smirked.

“They pull me out of bed in the middle of the night,” Mejias raged. “You’re my prisoner so I have to transport you. More trouble than you’re worth in my opinion! We should shoot you and be done with this. But this is Cuba.”

“Transport?” she asked.

“Maximum security. Middle of the island,” he said loudly and with a snarl. With a sharp yank, he tested the cuffs to make sure they were secure. They were tight. He was so rough that the sockets of her shoulders ached.

He took a blindfold out of his pocket. He wrapped it around her eyes.

“Army base in Santa Clara,” he said. “They’re going to bury you alive so deeply that no one will ever find you.”

“Is the blindfold really necessary?” she asked.

“Standard,” he said. “Ugly place you’re going to. You’ll see when you get there.”

He yanked at her arm to get her moving. She cursed back at him and he yanked harder. Then they were moving quickly down a corridor. She felt extra hands upon her, and the next thing she knew they were helping her down a short flight of steps.

“A transport van’s waiting,” he said. “Get in and keep quiet.”

They led her to a vehicle whose engine was running. There was a female with the vehicle, a guard or a soldier, Alex guessed. She could hear her voice. The driver probably. Then Alex heard a door open and she was pushed into the backseat. Someone put a manacle on her right ankle and cuffed her to the interior of the car. The doors slammed, and she heard two people jump in.

One of them, she knew by his voice, was Mejias. The other was the female. The vehicle started to move. It stopped and started. Alex guessed it was going through prison checkpoints. Then it was out onto an open road. She could tell it was accelerating, moving onto a highway, probably the one that led to Santa Clara.

Mejias and his female associate talked in hushed voices that she couldn’t hear. There was an occasional crackle of a longwave radio on the dashboard and a GPS that operated in Spanish. Every few minutes, Mejias took a call to confirm his location. The vehicle bounced as it moved along the highway. Alex managed to brush her blindfold against her shoulder so that she could develop a narrow sight line. But that gave her very little. It was an official vehicle of some sort, with boxes and crates next to her. The woman in the front seat was wearing a military uniform. That was all she could see of her: just dark hair and a shoulder with an epaulet. In front of the vehicle, all she could see was the night and the headlights along a winding highway that cut through the center of the island. Maybe it was best that she couldn’t see more, she told herself. Mejias was driving like a wild man. The vehicle hurtled forward at a mad speed. What his urgency was, Alex could only guess.

Guess, hope, and pray.

Another incoming message crackled across the two-way. Mejias answered it and signed off. Then Alex heard him speak to the woman.

“?Ahora?” he asked. Now?

“?Ahora mismo!” she said. Right now!

Something had changed. Or plans were being jerked around. All Alex knew was that the vehicle came to an abrupt halt. She heard a window come down. She peeked through her sliver of sight and saw both of Mejias’s hands on the two-way GPS.

She saw him pull it from the dashboard. She heard a clatter and guessed that he had jettisoned it. Then the car was in motion again. He ripped a vicious U-turn and from the feel of the tires, it seemed they were cutting across dirt or sand for several minutes. Then they accessed another highway or the same one in the other direction, Alex couldn’t tell which. And they were underway again.

First gear, second, third, and fourth, as fast as he could shift. It was like they weren’t driving now, more like flying low. Alex spoke out of instinct. “What are we doing?”

Cryptically, “No es lo que parece,” he answered. It’s not what it seems.

But Alex didn’t even know what it seemed like. She could only tell that the car had accelerated. The conversation between the driver and his accomplice was terse and hushed. Above the rage of the vehicle’s motor, Alex couldn’t hear anything.

The drive lasted many minutes. Eventually, Alex pushed the blindfold farther away from her eyes, so she could at least get a sense of where she was being taken. Outside, the sky was lighter. Dawn was in the offing. She wondered if it would be her last. Distantly, she recalled being warned about the military installations in Santa Clara and Camaguey. But she no longer knew where she was going. Someplace better? Someplace worse? Someplace to be incarcerated for years or hours? Or someplace to die?

The vehicle eventually turned onto what felt like a bumpy off-ramp. The boxes in the backseat slid toward her. Alex steadied herself. Next, they seemed to be on a back road, judging by the speed, then on a very bumpy narrow road, then finally what seemed like a pot-hole-ridden dirt driveway. Then the car rolled to a halt.

Both driver and shotgun rider leaped out. Alex struggled with her blindfold again, and this time she managed to push it half off. It barely mattered. The door flew open, and the woman in uniform reached in and pulled it off.

“Hurry,” the woman said in Spanish.

The other door opened, and Major Mejias reached in with both arms. He too was operating as quickly as possible. He removed the three crates from the seat next to Alex. One by one, he stacked them in a small red wagon that waited nearby. The woman pulled Alex out of the vehicle and moved her a few feet away.

“Where are we?” Alex asked, blinking against the sudden exposure to light. It was dawn and the sky was red.

“You’ll know shortly,” the woman said. Major Mejias was too busy to answer.

They were in a courtyard surrounded by walls. But Alex could hear surf. Like so much of Cuba, they were near the water. She took a reading of the light in the sky and determined where east was. There were two gates. The one behind her, behind the car, faced north. The other faced the other way, and the driveway sloped down toward it. She guessed that it led to the water and that they were, therefore, on the south shore of the island. Mejias went to the outside gate so that no one could follow them into the driveway.

“The Venezuelans took an immediate interest in you,” the woman said in Spanish. “You’re wanted by the government in Caracas. So – “

“Juanita!” Major Mejias shouted.

The woman fell silent.

“Take her inside,” he said, motioning.

Juanita, the woman in the uniform, pulled Alex by the arm. They reached a door to a small ramshackle building.

“Come along!” Juanita demanded. “You have Caracas to thank. This is better than Santa Clara!”

They reached the door and the woman pushed it open. She stepped into the building. In the dim light, two figures rose and stood to meet her.

Alex gasped as if she were receiving a visit from the dead.

Down the beach in his sniper’s lair, Perez, after days and days of waiting, finally got the high sign. He sat ready, his rifle across his lap. His cell phone rang. He answered. Perez and the caller spoke in Spanish.

“Alex is here,” the man announced. “She just entered the building. Everything is complete.”

“How many minutes?” Perez asked.

“Less than ten,” the caller said. “Watch the horizon. You’ll see a bird.”

“I’m watching it now,” said Perez. He spotted a small dot far off, maybe six miles from shore.

“Don’t miss,” the caller said. “You miss, we leave you in Cuba. You hit, and you’re on a plane to Mexico in two hours.”

“I never miss,” Perez said.

“We’ll see,” the caller said.

SIXTY-TWO

There are moments made up of too much stuff to be remembered correctly or to be assessed fully at the time they occur. For Alex, this was one. As it was, the morning had had its own peculiar madness. Events happened too quickly to fasten on any of them too firmly.

She recognized Roland Violette first. Then her eyes shifted to the other man.

“Alex! Thank God!” came the male voice. Paul rushed to her and embraced her. Juanita in the uniform was close behind with a key to the handcuffs.

“What – ?” Alex began.

“We’re going home,” Guarneri said. “Back to the U.S. That’s if our plane gets here. If the Cuban army or air force stops them we’re all shafted.”

Violette said nothing. He only twitched and stared.