Will Staeger - Public Enemy

Cooper handed the device back.

“You want to review our story, or are you all right with it,” he said.

They were bohemian newlyweds out seeing the world on an extended honeymoon. Cooper had their fake passports-they’d used these identities before, during their aborted resort-hopping trip.

Laramie shook her head. “I’m good.”

Cooper secured his backpack and swung himself onto the Mongoose.

“I’m assuming if there’s anything worth seeing,” he said, “somebody’s going to be there keeping undesirables out.”

“Like us,” Laramie said.

“Correct. What I’m getting at,” he said, “is if the shit hits the fan, I shoot, and you run.”

Something twitched slightly at the corner of Laramie’s mouth, but Cooper didn’t exactly feel comfortable calling the expression a smirk.

“You’re the operative,” she said.

Cooper disturbed some gravel as he led the way back out onto the road.

Following the GPS unit’s directions, they turned onto a narrow, paved ribbon of road that cut through a dense stand of trees. After a short ride, Cooper encountered a metal gate set back off the right side of the road. The gate blocked entry to what might once have been a dirt or gravel road but had long since been retaken by nature. He’d expected something like this, and he supposed Laramie had too: grown over and hiding the remnants of John F. Kennedy’s beef with Nikita Khrushchev stood the usual Caribbean blend of indigenous and imported foliage-part pine forest, part palm fronds, but mostly weeds.

Stenciled in faded, red letters on a yellowing sign secured to the gate by two pieces of wire, there hung a warning against aspiring visitors.

PROHIBIDO EL PASO-PROPIEDAD DE LA F.A.R.

Cooper pulled his Mongoose into a shallow ditch at the side of the road, propped it on its kickstand, and was approaching the gate for a look around when he saw the slight shimmer of movement between the trees.

He ducked low beside the gate and Laramie followed his lead. From his hiding place, Cooper was just able to make out the unmistakable figure of an armed, though distant human being. The guard stood on a hill about half a mile back from the gate, barely visible over the peaks of pine and palm. Perched on the near side of the summit was a dilapidated hut-looking no different, Cooper thought, than the endless stream of fruit stands they’d encountered on the way here, but with the alternate purpose of housing the guard currently strolling about it.

The sentry walked out of view behind the shack, then reappeared on the other side. He wore fatigues and had a rifle slung over a shoulder. He was doing something with his hand, Cooper having trouble making out the miniscule activity from this distance until he realized the guard was having a smoke. Cooper watched him for a couple of minutes, rapidly becoming satisfied that the guard looked the way a guard looks when he isn’t too concerned about the threat of encroaching trespassers.

“So we’ve got company,” Laramie said. “As expected.”

He felt her right breast kind of pillowing against the back of his left shoulder. It bothered him that he noticed which body part had touched him as she leaned in for a look, but he dismissed the increasingly, irritatingly common sensation of helplessness and did his best to train his brain on the situation at hand.

“We do.”

“Could mean nothing,” she said. “Could be Castro has kept somebody posted here for forty-four years for no significant reason. At least nothing outside of sentry duty over an abandoned military base.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Or it could mean they’ve got something worth protecting,” Laramie said.

Cooper backed away from the gate, falling in behind the stand of pines that blocked the sentry’s view of their spot on the road.

“In the mood for a hike?” he said.

“Lead the way.”

They found the perimeter fence about two hundred yards into the woods. It was chain-link fencing with rusting barbed wire trellised along the top. PROHIBIDO EL PASO and PROPIEDAD DE LA F.A.R. signs of the same style as they’d seen on the gate were wired to the fence, alternating at fifty-yard intervals. Cooper tried lifting the fence in a place midway between poles and succeeded: there was plenty of space for them to crawl underneath.

“Congratulations,” he said as he came through behind her and got to his feet. “You’re now trespassing.”

“I’ve never been good with boundaries.”

They’d been prowling for close to three and a half hours when Cooper fell into a hole.

He felt his ankle roll, attempting and failing to transfer his weight to the other foot before the sprain engaged and a stab of agony rocketed up his leg. He swore at the pain, planted a knee, then had a look around: it seemed he’d fallen into a six-foot-deep depression, which he now observed had been masked by a sea of dead leaves.

“You all right down there, operative?”

Laramie was smiling at him, and Cooper was about to devise some wiseass reply when he realized she was pointing at something behind him.

“I think you may just have found the way in,” she said.

Cooper turned to see that he hadn’t fallen into a hole at all-more of a dry canal bed. Infested with weeds and stunted pine trees, the depression was shallowest on the end Cooper had fallen into, and graduated to ten or more feet below the surface over the course of the length of a school bus. At the canal’s deepest point, Cooper saw what Laramie meant: a set of 4' x 8' plywood sheets, one nailed to the next, covered some sort of door. Cooper counted four sheets of the wood, not a single one of which was holding up worth a damn, all four boards stained a moldy brown-green and covered in moss and mushroom bursts.

Laramie was already in the canal and pulling at the plywood wall as Cooper grunted his way up and limped over. He joined in, reaching under one of the sheets of decrepit wood and pulling. A chunk of the board broke off from its host and crumbled from his hands. He did it again, pulling off a larger chunk this time. In a matter of minutes, they had enough room to walk through the opening.

Cooper deployed the Maglite he’d brought along in the backpack to reveal that beyond the plywood barrier, a short length of tunnel ran away from them, partially interrupted along the way by something resembling chicken wire. Behind the chicken wire there stood the wide, inert blades of a massive fan. The housing for the fan appeared more solid-state than the exterior section of the tunnel. It had wide spaces between the blades-wide enough for them to crawl through.

The chicken wire moved aside with little resistance, its footings long since rusted out. When Cooper got to the fan, he unstrapped his backpack, got down on all fours, and crawled under one of the blades, pushing the backpack ahead of him on the floor of the tunnel as he went. He had the sensation of crawling into the belly of a submarine, passing the vessel’s propeller as he snuck into the engine room.

Aided by the beam of the Maglite, Laramie followed him in.

They could walk upright in the tunnel. They hit a fork and Cooper chose a direction at random. He attempted to keep track of the fastest way out; he heard Laramie’s footsteps shuffling behind him. There was grit, mud, and the occasional puddle at their feet, and a kind of consistent, moldy stench. The walls were made of thin concrete, Cooper aiming the flashlight at the wall while he poked around a few places to find that the substance crumbled apart as easily as the plywood had. He wondered how grave was the risk of a cave-in.

Then they turned a corner, and Cooper caught a glimpse of blue.

It hadn’t exactly been a light at the end of the tunnel-when he dropped the beam of his flashlight and waited for his eyes to adjust, there was nothing to be seen. But when he raised the flashlight again, he saw it again-a shimmer of blue, almost the color of the sky on a clear day.