Robert Conroy - Castro's bomb

Che Guevara watched coldly and dispassionately as the six men and two women were led from their cells and out to the courtyard. Guevara was in his thirties, a former medical student, and now a key member of the new Cuban government. He was also considered a skilled and ruthless practitioner of guerrilla warfare, along with being an almost fanatic communist.

The condemned blinked at the bright sun, which they hadn't seen in days. They also had difficulty standing, much less walking. They'd been interrogated all the time they'd been in prison and all suffered broken bones and dislocated limbs as a result.

The women might have been pretty once, but their faces were shapeless and swollen and their bodies covered with burns and knife cuts. They would never attract a man again for the rest of their lives. Guevara chuckled at the thought. That wouldn't be much longer. Fidel had forbidden rape as a method of interrogation, but once they'd confessed to their treason, that rule no longer applied and they'd been abused by a number of guards.

As to the men, they too had been beaten and burned along with having their arms and legs destroyed. Electric probes had been applied to their genitals to make them talk and they had, at least after they stopped screaming.

Dominico Allessandro, hard-eyed and with a reputation for cruelty, was Fidel's special representative. It was he who had been in charge of the arrests and subsequent interrogations. He looked pleased with the results of his efforts.

"Is this all of them?" Che asked.

"Yes, and we are reasonably certain they were unable to give any information about our plans to either the Americans or the Russians."

Guevara nodded. Allessandro's use of the word 'reasonably' disturbed him, but he accepted the fact that nothing was ever certain in war, espionage, and statecraft. Fidel was furious, and both the United States and the Soviet Union would pay for their attempt to dominate and marginalize Cuba. They would have to take the chance that the Americans and Russians were still in the dark regarding their plans.

But first, these eight people had a debt to settle.

Guards tied their hands behind them and then tied them to hooks in a pock-marked stone wall. One of the men began to cry and another of the condemned told him to be brave.

"Be a man," Guevara yelled, and then laughed, but the traitor couldn't or wouldn't respond. The eight had been found guilty of trying to send information about the coming attacks to the United States and, in one case, to the Soviets.

One of the women screamed when she saw the machine gunners set up their weapon in front of them. What did she expect, Guevara snorted. She had to have known that treason was punishable by death. The sergeant in charge of the detail looked up to Guevara and Allessandro. Che gave the signal, a downward chopping motion. A moment later, the machine gun began to chatter loudly, bullets chopping into the eight people and making them writhe and jump like insane puppets. Blood and chunks of flesh flew into the air. In a few seconds, it was over and the eight slumped over as their blood soaked the sand.

"What about the Dutchman?" Che asked.

Allessandro shrugged. "He took off in a small boat that was sunk by one of our patrol craft. His body was not found and the boat may have been empty when our boat shot it to pieces. The captain decided not to stick around because an American warship was approaching."

The news did not totally please Guevara; however, Fidel's agent was doubtless right. The Dutchman, a man named Fullmer, was doubtless dead. He did wonder, however, just who Fullmer represented. Was it the United States or Russia? Or even East Germany as Allessandro suspected? The East Germans did a lot of the Soviet Union’s dirty work, as did Bulgaria. He’d decided that neither the Russians nor the Americans liked to get their hands dirty.

Guevara laughed as the bodies were dragged away. In a very short while, the point would be moot. The war both he and Fidel desperately wanted would either begin with the Soviets and Americans killing each other, or the two superpowers would be humiliated by Cuba, a country they had tried to push aside. Either way, Cuba and communism would win.

Through the haze of pain and the increasing horror of growing delirium and loss of mental and physical control, Charley Kraeger knew he was dying. His lips were cracked and his eyes were caked over from the salt spray caused by the wind and the waves hitting his little craft. His hands were torn and swollen from trying to sail away from Cuba and towards Florida.

Surrounded by water, his thirst was maddening and he was in danger of drowning in the bottom of the small boat that had failed him so miserably. Actually, he thought ruefully, the boat hadn't failed at all, and the several bullet holes that were admitting water from the Gulf of Mexico were not a failure of the boat either. It had been watertight until the Cubans began shooting at it. Nor had the outboard motor failed. It had run out of gas because Kraeger’d had no idea how much its tank held or how far it could run when he grabbed the damn thing from a fisherman's small dock. The owners had screamed and a couple of Cuban militiamen had filled the air with bullets, some of which had struck his little craft.

What he didn't know about boats would fill volumes. Hell, he didn't even know the difference between a ship and a boat, which sometimes made his more nautically inclined friends laugh at him.

Well, they wouldn't laugh at him anymore. He just hoped one or two of his drinking buddies would remember him, at least for a little while, and wonder what ever happened to good old Charley. God, why would anybody remember him? No wife and no kids, his parents dead, and only a handful of cousins scattered around the United States. No, he'd be forgotten in a hurry, and the thought depressed him.

He tried to shift his body, but the pain in his shoulder was too intense and he wound up again face down in the oily filth of the hold and trying to keep the crud out of his mouth. He hadn't actually been shot; instead, a ricochet from a bullet fired by a Cuban soldier had driven a large splinter through the meat of his shoulder like a spear. It had started throbbing sometime the day before and, in a moment of lucidity, he’d come to the conclusion that gangrene might kill him if thirst and exposure didn't. Of course, gangrene took a long time to kill and he didn’t really think he had much time left on this earth.

It was also hard to believe that exposure could be so deadly in the warm and sunny Caribbean, but he'd lost so much strength that he had begun to shiver. His throat ached and burned from where he'd swallowed salty oily water from the bilge.

He decided it really didn't matter what killed him. Soon he would be dead no matter what the cause. He also decided he wanted to take one last look at his world, even though all he'd seen before he'd slid into the bottom of the boat was the endless ocean and large, rolling waves extending on and over the distant horizon.

Who the hell cared what killed him? If thirst and exposure didn't get him, then the Commies would, or maybe he’d provide a feast for the sharks. Did sharks jump into small boats when they smelled death? Or was it barracuda that did that? Or maybe it was piranha? Or maybe somebody at a Havana bar had been pulling his leg and it was none of the above.

His situation reminded him of Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea." He'd seen the movie starring Spencer Tracy but hadn't read the book. He found Hemingway boring, as if that mattered right now. Nobody was going to write a thing about old man Charley Kraeger and the sea.

He wanted to cry out and perhaps he did in his anger, pain, and frustration. He was becoming more and more delirious. Twenty years as a CIA agent and this was his reward, to die in the bottom of a small boat in the middle of a very large ocean. It wasn't fair. Hell, he'd been an agent long before there had even been a CIA. Kraeger had served in the OSS in World War II and had jumped into occupied France where he'd had the intense satisfaction of killing his first Nazi, a Gestapo officer no less. He'd been wounded, decorated, and called a hero and now this was how he was going to wind up. He was going to die alone and in filth and no one was around to know about it. Forty years of life shot to hell.