Leon Uris (16 page)

He reached for a cigar, then thought better of it.

“Do you know what I really want from Juanita de Córdoba? Aside from your beauty as a woman ... aside from all the respectability?”

“Maybe.”

“I want your power. De Córdoba and Parra. That is power ... yes ... I know I disgust you. I’m an animal. I disgust most women.”

“You’re not in keeping with yourself tonight, Rico. What did you bring me out here to say?”

The Cuban managed a rare smile. “See the Little Dove! She looks right through me. I cannot win you as a man. But maybe I could convince you by a more subtle means that a friendship between us would not be so undesirable.”

“Go on.”

Rico Parra paced the balcony. All of the cunning and danger of the man was obvious to her. The things which had made him a brilliant and brutal guerrilla commander could not be underestimated. He selected his words with meticulous care.

“Castro,” he said, “has chosen me to keep an eye on certain foreign diplomats who come in and out of the country frequently.” He stopped and looked directly into her eyes. “Castro has also given me a great deal of latitude and authority to act in any manner in any given situation.”

Juanita kept her composure. Rico Parra was impressed by her show of skill. It was a skill he wanted to have, to work for him. “I should say that Fidel has entrusted you with enormous responsibility.”

“I knew you would understand,” Rico Parra said.

André unzipped Juanita’s dress and held her from behind at arms length and studied her back. She had a most beautiful back. Most women were either bony or angular or fleshy or marred. Juanita was perfect.

“Rico was in a rare behavior,” she said.

“I’m queer for your back.”

“We had our talk. He was subdued for a change.”

“How did it go?”

“Nothing new, André darling. Parra’s same old nonsense in a different presentation. I think he’s a complete fool.”

André dropped his hands from her and pondered. “Parra’s no fool. Mistakes ... yes. But no fool. I was getting a feeling that he had taken over some of the G-2 authority. I smelled his nose in our business.”

“I couldn’t sense anything like that,” she said. Juanita went to him for the automatic response of his embrace. “Tonight,” she said, “I want to make love to you.”

“You always do, darling. You’re unselfish ... too unselfish.”

“No ... I mean ... tonight I’m going to make love to you all night ... and watch you while I’m doing it. I want to see your happiness....”

T
HE VALLEY NEAR
P
INAR
del Río brimmed with lush tropical foliage. This natural hothouse was a world wonder, a valley of rare fertility that gave the Cuban tobacco its unique and renowned quality.

A battered old Dodge, groaning from neglect, turned off the main road of the valley toward the Finca San José.

“WARNING!”
a large sign read,
“GOVERNMENT PROPERTY! GO NO FARTHER!”

The Dodge and its driver, Vicente Martínez, rattled and banged past the forbidding warning for almost two miles until the cane fields swallowed him up.

His eyes were glued to deep ruts and tire marks on the dirt road. He calculated their width and depth. This was what he had been told to look for. Monsters on wheels had passed on this ground.

Suddenly the main gate of the Finca San José loomed ahead. It had changed.

“Halt!”

Four angry Russian soldiers dashed from the guard shack, all yelling at him at the same time.

“What in the hell is this!” Vicente Martínez demanded, shoving the door open, getting out of the car and fanning himself with his wide-brimmed hat.

The Russians continued to jabber heatedly in a language he could not fathom. Vicente argued back just as heatedly in a language they could not fathom.

The old Dodge boiled over, too.

At last a Cuban officer was sent for. He arrived on the scene growling. “Who are you! What the hell are you doing here!”

“Me! What am I doing here? What are you doing here? I am Gonzoles. I come here every month since I was a child to see my grandfather.”

“Well, your grandfather is no longer here.”

“He has been here all his life, señor officer. Why should he leave?”

“He has been relocated.”

“What means by this, relocated?”

“He has moved. Did you not receive the letter?”

“Yes, I got a letter. But who can read?”

“You damn fool. Why didn’t you get it read to you?”

“Well, I get the letter and I see all the government stamps and seals in it so I think it is an order for more crops. So I throw the letter away. I want to see my grandfather.”

“You must go to the District Committee in San Cristóbal to find out where he has been relocated.”

Vicente Martínez scratched his head.

A Russian officer pulled the Cuban officer aside. “He must be taken in for questioning,” the Russian demanded.

“Oh, I don’t think that is very wise Señor Captain.”

“He may have seen too much.”

“Señor Captain, you do not understand. This man is a Cuban peasant. The families are very close. If he does not show up at his home tonight, we will have ten more of his relatives down here looking for him. It is safer to send him off.”

The Russian grunted reluctantly at the Cuban’s logic. Perhaps he was right. It would be better not to risk having any more of them around or to arouse suspicion by questioning.

“Gonzoles” was ordered to leave the area and never return.

“I need some water for my old car,” Vicente Martínez said.

They got him water. He poured some into the radiator and drank some. Then he turned and drove away, still mumbling protests.

Vicente Martínez was one of the finest lawyers in that part of Cuba. When Héctor de Córdoba practiced law in Havana, they had a number of joint clients and cases. Juanita de Córdoba was a good family friend of two decades’ standing. He was one of the first recruited.

In addition to the telltale tire marks on the dirt road he was able to spot hundreds of Russian soldiers beyond the Finca gate.

He saw something else, too.

He saw the launching tower.

The information was written and placed in the little holder of a magnetic hide-a-key. The railing of the bridge outside San Cristóbal was made of hollow tube, like most of Cuba’s bridges.

Vicente removed a loose knob at the end of the rail and placed the hide-a-key inside and returned the knob.

Later the dead-letter box was emptied and the message eventually found its way to the poultry butcher Jesús Morelos in Havana.

A
S THE TAPE CAME
to an end, everyone stood and stretched. Kramer pushed the buzzer to call the outside guards and asked that the lunch dishes be cleared and a new pot of coffee brewed.

Dr. Billings spooled on another tape. “One, two, three, four,” he counted into the microphone, adjusting the voice level.

In the second week of interrogation the atmosphere had relaxed. Boris Kuznetov had come to find the four ININ people agreeable and was less and less disturbed by W. Smith’s rapid-fire, terse questioning. After all, if one had to speak, it was far better that it was under such circumstances. The continued absence of André Devereaux annoyed him, but Michael Nordstrom personally assured him that Devereaux would return within a few weeks.

One by one they came back to the conference table from the adjoining washroom, braced for another round of questioning.

Dr. Billings scanned his notes, then said, “In the purges of 1937 and 1938 you told us the Soviet intelligence system was badly disrupted.”

“It was worse than that,” Boris answered. “By 1939 NKVD, the forerunner of the present KGB, was a total shambles.”

“What was your own status at the time?”

“I was the top student of my class in gymnasium. I went on to study for another four years at Smolensk University. And then I was invited for postgraduate work at Moscow University. I had strong recommendations.”

“When did you go to Moscow?”

“In the first semester, fall of 1939. Here I also met Olga. Her name then was Cherniavsky. She was of the family of the Soviet General Cherniavsky, all ranking Communists.”

“Her curriculum?”

“Art student.”

“Your studies?”

“Required courses, mainly. No specialty or, as you say, no major.”

“You were quite active with the Young Communists in Smolensk. Now did you continue this in Moscow?”

“Yes.”

“Diligently or because it was required of all students?”

“Diligently. At the end of the first semester I was voted Komsomol unit leader. It is an extreme honor for a first-year student.”

“Olga was in your unit?”

“Yes. A Soviet student has to fight for time to see his sweetheart. After Komsomol meetings was an excellent time ... to discuss dialectics, of course.”

They laughed.

“Isn’t it hell on young people?” Kramer asked. “No apartment rooms, freezing weather outside, or during the summer the parks are filled with blaring speeches, no cars to park in.”

“It’s difficult but, as with boys and girls everywhere, we managed. You must remember revolutionaries are apt to be prim. We are quite Victorian in our morals.”

“At the end of the first semester?”

“I was an honor student. My group leader ...”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Tomsk.”

“Go on.”

“Tomsk instructed me to go for an interview at NKVD headquarters. I was asked to transfer from the university to the College of Intelligence. At first I did not like the idea, but the choice was limited and the rebuilding of NKVD was urgent ... and my duty is my duty.”

“When did you enter?”

“Immediately. Spring of 1940.”

“Courses?”

“Politics ... our politics and economics. Mainly we were indoctrinated in military intelligence and sabotage. Everyone in the school at that time held a reserve commission.”

“What rank?”

“Few were over captain. You must bear in mind we were mostly Young Communists, all coming up together to take over the future intelligence system after the purges.”

“How many years was the full course of study?”

“It was set up for four years, but the war interrupted and the need for military intelligence was desperate. After the first winter’s siege of Moscow I was inducted into the Red Army as a captain. In the spring of 1941, April 15, to be precise, I was parachuted into Poland in the Lublin district, where the Germans had set up their government general.”

“Mission?”

“Establish a small espionage network, set up radio communications, dead-letter drops, contacts. We had two people working inside German headquarters.”

“How large was this group?”

“It varied. Never more than eight people. Our special job was to find out the time of the rail movements of German troops and equipment heading to the eastern front on the Brest-Gomel lines and its spurs.”

“You remained in Lublin?”

“Until July. Then I moved back toward Russia on foot, stopping in cities along the rail line, Brest, Pinsk, and so forth, to establish even smaller radio units. Eventually, advice on train movements would get into the hands of partisan units working in the Pripet Marshes. It was a good operation. We destroyed over ten trainloads.”

“And you made it back to Moscow?”

“Not until midwinter. I lived in the Pripet Marshes.” Boris Kuznetov related the brutal days of the Russian winter in which he lived with a partisan unit. They moved about in the bitter cold like hunted animals for whom there would be no mercy.

“As you know, I am missing three toes on my left foot due to frostbite. My eyes are also extremely sensitive to light due to partial snow blindness. By the time I reached Moscow I had lost twenty kilos’ weight, over forty American pounds. But I am lucky. Most of that particular unit died of starvation or cold. The rest of that winter I spent in the hospital.”

“No official duties?”

“No. Unless you call my marriage to Olga an official duty.”

“And you remained in Moscow?”

“Only until the spring. Again in April of 1943 I was parachuted into Poland to establish another network east of the Praga River in the Vilna-Grodno-Kovno area. This time I was better at my work and I was able to get through German lines into Moscow by December. I was so good, in fact, I was sent out again after being home only two weeks to coordinate sabotage activities of the partisan units beyond the Second Baltic Front of Marshal Yeremenko. In February of 1944 I was captured with a unit of forty men in an ambush and we were sent to a stalag in Memel. By May of that year only four of us had survived the German brutality.”

“I take it you were able to avoid being singled out.”

“The men in the unit were of exceptional courage. No one told who I was and I was able to conceal my true identity.”

“How long did you remain in prison?”

“I escaped in the summer of 1944 and reorganized a sabotage unit to coordinate with our summer offensive. When our forces passed my operation and moved into Poland and the Baltics, I returned again to Moscow. This time by train. For the rest of the war I worked at intelligence headquarters in Moscow, mainly in evaluation of information from German prisoners and information from our own sabotage units in Poland.”

“You stayed till the war ended?”

“Yes.”

“Decorations?”

“A few.”

“Order of Lenin?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Then?”

“I was discharged as a reserve colonel and invited to study advanced intelligence at the Intelligence Academy in Moscow. I remained there for the next five years.”

“Weren’t the courses for three years?”

“I was a teacher for two years.”

“How many were enrolled?”

“Three hundred, more or less.”

“Women?”

“A few. It was an extremely difficult school.”

“What percentage of people were dropped?”

“Not many. They were careful who they asked in.”

Boris Kuznetov then recited a murderous scholastic ritual that converted a normal day’s work into twelve to fourteen hours of study. At the academy he learned English, French, and German. There were intelligence courses in evaluation, analysis, coding, and ciphering. There were courses in geopolitics, psychology, advanced mathematics, art, and music. There were courses in military staff training. There was an intensive sports program and chess training.