Six Minutes To Freedom (8 page)

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Authors: John Gilstrap,Kurt Muse

BOOK: Six Minutes To Freedom
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“Alone, please.”
The guard shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but this is as alone as I’m authorized to get.”
Tomás glanced at the PDF soldier, who stepped away as the MP cued him with a nod to do so. Tomás said softly, “We need asylum. We are in danger.”
“I understand that from your friend,” the MP said, with maybe a twinge of compassion. “But I don’t have the authority to grant that.”
“Then I need to ask you to find the person who does have the authority.”
“I’ve called my officer in charge, sir. He’s aware of the situation, and that’s about all I can do.”
“Can you call him again?”
The MP answered with a frustrated, helpless look.
Tomás nodded. Clearly, the soldier’s hands were tied. Like soldiers the world over, this one could only follow orders. Truly, it was in God’s hands now.
Still, as he watched the PDF soldier pick up the phone in the guard shack and dial, Tomás couldn’t help but hope that God would act quickly.
Kurt never left the car. Flanked on both sides by silent guards, he watched as the troops swarmed into his parents’ house and tore the place apart. What must they think of him, he wondered. How could he ever apologize? How could they ever forgive him?
He prayed that they’d had a chance to get away, that the BMW they’d passed on the way in was them. If it had been, then it had been very, very close. Too close. Finally, the clock had ticked to zero.
Please, God, let them get the children to safety
.
The search was still underway when they made the decision to move Kurt to his next location. Two additional soldiers he didn’t recognizeclimbed into the front seat, and they eased away from the curb.
“Where are we going?” Kurt asked.
No one answered. No one even bothered to cast him a glance.
What could they possibly do to him? Killing wouldn’t give them what they wanted. Torture him? He supposed that was possible, but to what end? What would they be looking for? The names of his coconspirators?Perhaps, but that assumed that his captors knew that there were conspirators to be found. So far, it still didn’t seem as if they knew why he had been arrested. Clearly, someone at the top of the chain of command must have known, or else there wouldn’t be this full-court press; but by all indications, word of the discovery hadn’t yet filtered down to the level of the soldiers.
A horrible thought bloomed in his head: Without an endgame for the torture, how would they know when to stop? If he spilled everythinghe knew about everything he had ever known, how would they know it was enough?
It was a foolish thought, he realized, but foolishness was a close cousin to hopelessness, and he certainly found himself belly deep in a river of that.
No, he told himself, torture could not be part of the plan. He was far too white and far too American to be subjected to the kind of treatmentthat might befall a Panamanian. And his wife was an American government employee. That had to mean something. Surely the United States wouldn’t tolerate the brutal mistreatment of one of its own. Then he remembered the dozens of stories of violent showdowns betweenAmerican servicemen and PDF soldiers, and how on each occasion,General Fred F. Woerner, the commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command, had ordered the Americans to back down. This was a time of turning the other cheek so many times that the bruises never went away. Kurt had referred in writing to the general as Wimp Woerner.
Funny how intemperate words came back to haunt you. Now, as Kurt swirled down the whirlpool that his life had become, he had to wonder just how committed he himself would be, if the tables were turned, to saving the ass of a man who had worked diligently to make him look like a fool.
You can’t do this
, Kurt chided himself. He couldn’t afford to sink this low this early. God only knew how long this was going to take to play itself out. It was foolishness to jump ahead into the darkest conclusions.For the time being, he was alive and unharmed. He had no reason to think that his family was any less safe.
Right now, the worst of it all was the confusion. It was all emotion. No one ever died of emotion. One step at a time.
He’d almost talked himself into a kind of resigned calmness when he picked up something out of the guard’s radio chatter that made his blood run cold. A group of Panamanian citizens was seeking asylum at the back gate to Fort Clayton.
8
The drive seemed to take forever. The BMW sliced through the night like a knife through flesh, Papi’s anger clearly conveyedwith a heavy foot on the accelerator. No one spoke. In the silence,Kimberly was startled by the loudness of her own heartbeat.
She thought about asking where they were headed, but decided not to. Saying anything right now would be a bad idea. Erik was frightenedtoo, his eyes huge even in the darkness.
Why did she have to be alone now? Why couldn’t her mother be home? Why did they have to go away at all? Aunt Elsa’s timing really sucked.
On top of everything else, Kimberly could feel the exhaustion pressingin on her. She had no idea what time it really was, but she felt as if she’d been up for three days. Sleep, she would find, was still many hours away.
Finally, they arrived at a military gate. Papi pulled to a stop and ran the window down to speak with the MP on duty. Without any preliminaryfanfare, the soldier asked, “What’s your name, sir?”
“Muse,” Papi said. “Charles Muse.” He produced some identificationto prove it.
Pausing just a moment to peer behind the driver into the backseat, the MP unholstered a Maglite and examined Papi’s identity card in the brilliant white glare.
Over to the right, off the side of the road, Kimberly noticed a gathering of people. They all appeared to be locals, and they all looked scared to death. “Who are they?” she asked to anyone who might be interested in answering. Apparently, she was completely invisible tonight.
The soldier handed the card back to Papi and stepped aside, and they were allowed to pass. It was interesting, Kimberly thought, that at this hour, and with this much security all of a sudden, the soldier never bothered to ask what their business was. The military posts in Panama weren’t the securest places in the world. Still, you’d think they’d have asked
something
.
Nana and Papi had started talking again, but in tones so hushed that Kimberly couldn’t make out the words. They drove slowly, with the high beams on, apparently looking for a particular address. She couldn’t help but wonder just how pissed off the person was going to be when he found someone knocking on his door at two in the morning.
“Look over there,” Nana said, pointing to the Provost Marshal’s office where she used to work. Squat and rambling, the building was lit up like a soccer stadium. “Somebody’s working late.”
Papi said something, but again Kimberly couldn’t make out the words.
She knew they were trying to find a Mr. Chiang’s house—that much she had been able to decipher—and from there, Mr. Chiang would know what the next step was supposed to be. Slowly, one street led to another, and finally they pulled to a stop in front of a house—an upper-end house by base standards—whose every light was turned off. It was as if it had been completely swallowed by the night.
“Nobody’s there,” Papi observed.
Nana shook her head. “He has to be. He’s waiting for us. This is the place we were supposed to go.”
“You can see the same as I,” Papi said. “There’s no one home. This isn’t the place.”
“But it
is
,” Nana insisted. Everyone in Panama knew where the CIA chief of station lived. “He has to be home.” Perhaps saying it enough would make it come true.
“Have it your way,” Papi said. “But it’s clear that he wants us to think he isn’t.”
Nana scowled. “But why?”
“ ‘Why’ is the question of the night, don’t you think?”
“So, what do we do now?”
The indecision and the confusion in the car raised Kimberly’s fear to a new level. Things that she’d never thought about were happening all around her, and as they tried to fix things, the fixes were falling apart, too.
Please don’t hurt my dad
. The thought appeared out of nowhere and doubled her heart rate.
“We go home?” Papi suggested.
Nana didn’t honor the suggestion with a reply. “Let’s go to the Provost Marshal’s office. At least there are people there. Maybe I can find Major Mansfield. He should have some suggestions.”
“I don’t think I need any more suggestions tonight,” Papi said. “But I could sure use some answers.”
 
For Marcos Ostrander, the sound of a telephone at night always portendedbad news. As the chief of international law and relations for the U.S. Army South, he would come to realize that he was the logical choice for the call, but at that moment, pulled out of a deep sleep, all he felt was a terrible unease. These were tough times in the history of America’s relations with Panama, and he’d reached that point in his career where people no longer called him for the little stuff.
He picked up the receiver. “Ostrander.”
“Time to go to work, Marcos,” said the voice he recognized as belongingto Major Alan Mansfield. “We’ve got a couple dozen IPs seekingasylum down at Clayton.”
“Asylum? What the hell for?” This wasn’t Berlin, after all. The bordersto U.S. territory—the Canal Zone, for example—were so porous that they wouldn’t hold a teaspoon of water. Requests for asylum were anything but commonplace.
“Not on an open line. I need you down here at the fort right now.” The line went dead before Marcos could form another question. He didn’t work for Mansfield, but he owed the man enough favors that when he said jump, Marcos was airborne.
He dressed quickly in casual clothes and headed for the front door, reminded as he always was when leaving the house, of the morning not yet six months ago when he’d found a headless corpse on his front stoop, a less-than-subtle hint from Noriega for him to straighten up his act. There had been three silver bullets left next to the corpse, along with a note warning that there were other bullets just like them that were meant for Marcos. Just days before, Marcos had learned of rampantcorruption in the Panamanian courts, in which judges were being paid off to pronounce guilt on trumped-up charges against innocent people whose only crime was to be an enemy of Noriega. Corruption exposed, it turned out, was corruption defeated, and Noriega had raised graft to too fine an art form to have it defiled by some U.S. Army lawyer.
General Bernard Loeffke, Marcos’s boss, had gone through the roof when he learned of the threat against a senior member of his staff. MajorMansfield had been the one to deliver the message to Captain Cortizo,a senior aide to Noriega, that if Marcos so much as developed a hangnail in the immediate future, Noriega would be held personally accountable and would pay a devastating price.
For the next two months, Marcos had traveled like the president of the United States, flanked day and night by armed guards. Noriega took his own sweet time, but ultimately he made it clear that the threat against Marcos had been lifted, and slowly things had returned to beingas close to normal as anything ever was in this part of the world.
As in getting up at an unspeakable hour to tend to Panamanian defectors.The very notion still made his head spin.
 
The Provost Marshal’s office was packed wall to wall with people who all seemed scared to death. Outside, Kimberly had noted more guns among the American soldiers than she was typically used to seeing duringher occasional trips here to visit Nana. Even the soldiers seemed kind of jumpy. Had she paid better attention, she would have noticed that the office had been purged of all Panamanian soldiers and workers.Some of the frightened civilians looked familiar to her and she wondered why, until she remembered the cluster of people she’d seen outside.
On entering the front door, the Muse family instantly became the center of attention. Soldiers on the inside moved quickly to greet them and then to split them apart. “Come with me,” a young soldier said, gesturing for Kimberly and Erik to follow.
“We’re with my grandparents,” Kimberly said.
The soldier seemed not to hear. Nobody seemed to hear her tonight.
“
Please
come with me,” he said. Somehow the “please” seemed to have a threatening undertone.
Kimberly followed—as if there was a choice—trying to catch her grandparents’ eye as they moved in another direction. If they saw, they made no indication.
The Panamanians from the gate watched as Kimberly and Erik followedthe soldier to a back room, and Kimberly found something creepy in the intensity of their collective gaze. It was as if they recognizedher, but none of the faces were familiar. What was happening? The whole night was turning into an episode of the
Twilight Zone
. That kind of attention from strangers was horribly unsettling.
But they weren’t all strangers. There in the back of the crowd was a face she did recognize. It was Jorge Quintero, the man who had called to see if her father was home. Just like that, a circuit closed in her brain and the fear ratcheted up another twenty points. All these people—the men, women, and children—it looked like several dozen of them—were here because of her father. Somehow, his arrest had scared this many people, and how many more?
Her mom had told her on the phone that her dad had been into some things, but good Lord, what could cause this much disruption to so many people?
The soldier took the kids to a tiny windowless office and invited them to sit in the available plastic chairs. Kimberly assumed that the soldier locked the door as he left, but because she had no place to go, she didn’t bother to check it.
Daddy, what did you do
, she asked silently.

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