The Prisoner of Guantanamo (7 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

The North East Gate is a reminder of the intent and capability of our adversaries to gain our operational information. Those adversaries can see us easily and clearly, hear us through sophisticated signal devices, and continually attempt to manipulate and distort our true purpose at Joint Task Force Guantánamo.

—From “OPSEC Corner,” a regular feature
of JTF-GTMO's weekly newspaper,
The Wire

T
HE NORTH EAST GATE
was tucked in a remote corner of the base. It was a backwater Checkpoint Charlie with palm trees, the biggest difference being that its confrontations occurred well out of public view.

During the Cold War both sides had booby-trapped the approaching roads and spiked the plains with mines. Sometimes they exchanged gunfire. More often the tension escalated into something resembling frat house pranks. The Cubans used to get their kicks by tossing stones at Marine Observation Post 31, a small concrete barracks and watchtower overlooking the gate from a facing hill. They especially liked to do it at night, figuring that a direct hit would awaken any soldier trying to sleep. The Marines answered by blocking the line of fire with a forty-foot fence, just like the ones that driving ranges put next to highways to keep golf balls from hitting cars. The Cubans counterattacked by climbing the new fence to mount coat hangers, which clanked and rang through the night like wind chimes. Then they lit up the barracks with a spotlight, which the Americans extinguished without firing a shot by unveiling a huge red-and-gold Marine Corps emblem on the illuminated hillside.

Falk had sometimes patrolled the area as a Marine, walking the nearby roads in the swelter of full combat gear—weapon, flares, radio, food rations, and eight clips of ammo. It was a strange little world that turned spooky after dark, glowing a phosphorescent green through the lenses of his night-vision goggles. Every banana rat stirring in the brush had sounded like the advent of a commando raid.

During the first year of his posting the Berlin Wall came down, and for a few weeks the fenceline was tense. The last known exchange of gunfire took place the following month. But by the end of his third year the crumbling Soviet Union had cut Cuba loose from its purse strings, which left the enemy with more important worries than a few jeering Marines. Cuban bodies had sometimes washed up on the American side in those days, but they were civilians, not soldiers—would-be refugees who had drowned or were shot while swimming for freedom. No one ever made a big deal about it as long as the Americans sent the bodies back, and every now and then someone made it through alive.

Today the atmosphere was calmer than ever. The Americans had dismantled the booby traps and cleared their mines, replacing them with noise sensors and motion detectors. And for all the talk about OPSEC and renewed vigilance, they no longer staffed the observation post 24/7, relying instead on motorized patrols. Recently General Trabert had ordered the removal of a few coils of razor wire.

The Cubans had never gotten around to clearing their own mines, and whenever there was a brush fire a couple dozen more cooked off, exploding like bullets tossed into a campfire. The few remaining coat hangers had rusted into place.

But the North East Gate was still the one point along the perimeter where the two old adversaries regularly came face-to-face. It was the turnstile for the few aging Cubans who still commuted to on-base jobs. In the early 1960s there had been three thousand of them, daily enduring the taunts and abuse of Castro's guards in exchange for dollar wages. Only nine remained, and the youngest was sixty-four. They arrived at 5:30 a.m. and departed at 4:30 p.m., and every two weeks they carried home pay envelopes stuffed with American cash for themselves and about a hundred pensioners.

The only other regular contact was a monthly meeting between the commander of Guantánamo's naval base, Captain Rodrick Lewis, and his Cuban counterpart from the Revolutionary Army's Brigada de la Frontera, General Jorge Cabral. Their meetings were friendly and low key. In order to avoid unpleasant surprises, they gave each other advance notice whenever one side or the other was about to build something new or engage in a military exercise. General Cabral had learned of the imminent arrival of hundreds of prisoners from Afghanistan well before most of the American public.

They took turns acting as host. Usually there was little official business to discuss, so they talked instead of baseball, or fishing, or of the meal that had been set before them. As if to affirm the informal nature of their relationship, they sometimes engaged in small barters of contraband—a box of Cuban cigars for a carton of Marlboros, a country-western CD for a homemade cassette of salsa. Any issue that arose between meetings was generally handled by e-mail, unless there was a wildfire to fight, in which case they convened like old generals at the front, marshaling their resources to defeat the common foe.

But the discovery of Sergeant Ludwig's body called for extraordinary measures. No American had ever turned up dead on the wrong side of the fence. For the moment, Cold War tension was back in vogue, and Falk was about to get a front-row seat.

He arrived at the observation post to find three Humvees already parked. One had the general's two-star flag. Trabert was inside, waiting to take care of the necessary introductions.

“Falk, this is Captain Lewis. I want you with him when the Cubans hand over the body.”

The captain cut an impressive figure. He was a tall, trim African American with a calm demeanor. It would have to be. His job as base commander required the skills of a small-town mayor as much as those of a military leader. Base families got skittish in a hurry when they were this isolated. They hadn't been thrilled with the idea of an al-Qaeda prison being built in their backyard, but they'd been pleasantly surprised by the vigor it injected into base life. Lewis had even joked about reinstalling the town's one and only stoplight, which had been retired to the base museum. From everything Falk had heard, the captain had been quite content to stay out of Trabert's hair, and vice versa, which made this meeting seem all the more awkward.

“I'll be introducing you to General Cabral,” Captain Lewis said.

“As what?”

Lewis turned toward the general.

“What was the agreed-upon terminology, sir?”

“Liaison from the civilian side, representing Sergeant Ludwig's family. There will be no mention of your employer. The captain will do all the talking, Falk, but keep your eyes open.”

“For anything in particular?”

“Anything out of the ordinary.”

“This whole thing's out of the ordinary.”

“All the more reason for another set of eyes.”

Falk wondered if Lewis was unhappy about his presence. Cluttering the usual one-on-one intimacy, especially with a civilian, seemed indelicate at best. He noticed that Lewis had brought along a recent copy of
Sports Illustrated
with a cover story on a Cuban-born pitcher, perhaps as a peace offering. Trabert's maneuvers would probably cramp his style. But Falk wasn't about to get in the middle of an Army-Navy dustup, if it should come to that.

“So how will this work?” he asked Lewis.

“Pretty much like always. We'll go down to the guardhouse on our side of the fence with a couple Marines in tow. The Cubans will send an escort to take us across. This one's their show, so we'll meet in what used to be the currency exchange hut, on their side.”

“You going, too?” Falk asked the general.

Trabert shook his head.

“Don't want to make it bigger than it already is. But I wanted to be here in case there's a hitch.”

“Any reason to think there will be?”

“With new ground and old enemies, you never know.”

Falk noticed a slight frown from Lewis, but the captain held his tongue. Then, with a glance toward the window, Lewis said, “Looks like they're here. That's General Cabral's ride.”

A green truck with a canvas canopy had just pulled up on the Cuban side beneath a big white sign with red and black lettering that said, “República de Cuba. Territorio Libre de America.” It was a Cuban taunt: “Territory Free of America.” Soldiers jumped from the open tailgate.

“Looks like they've brought a few more than usual,” Lewis said, not sounding thrilled. Trabert nodded, as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed. Then he trained a pair of binoculars on the scene.

“C'mon,” Lewis said. “Let's get this over with.”

Two Marines led the way. Also accompanying the captain was a staff interpreter. As they emerged from the shade of the observation post the sunlight struck them like a blade. A big iguana, legs pedaling, scuttled out of the way as they strolled downhill across the red-and-gold globe of the Marine Corps emblem. It looked like someone had recently touched up the paint job. Overhead, a pair of turkey vultures circled in formation with four skinnier, scarier birds that looked straight out of a Gothic drawing. It would have seemed ominous if they weren't already such a common sight.

“Cuban air force,” Lewis said.

“Yeah, nice escort.”

“Anything you need me to ask?”

“We need the exact location of where they found the body—right down to GPS coordinates if possible, not that I'm expecting any. And the exact time of discovery, plus any medical observations they might have recorded about the body.”

Lewis nodded. They'd passed a line of red-and-gold tank barriers painted with “USMC” and reached the American guardhouse, where a Marine in full gear opened a gate just wide enough to let them pass single file. Lewis hesitated at the head of their contingent, awaiting the two Cuban soldiers now crossing the paved strip in the middle of a twenty-yard no-man's-land. There was no sound but their footsteps.

“Our Marines would usually wait for us here,” Lewis whispered. “But General Cabral's e-mail said to bring them along to transport the body.”

“Is that how you heard about this? By e-mail?”

“Right before lunch. Great for digestion.”

“He say anything else?”

Lewis shook his head. “He's usually pretty chatty. But we'll see.”

The Cubans were already waiting inside the shade of the white plaster customs office. You could hear muffled conversation in Spanish through the open window, which stopped the moment they entered through a glass door.

The room was almost unbearably stuffy. An orderly was still opening windows while another plugged in an oscillating fan that looked like something out of a Sears catalog from the 1930s. The man at the head of a small table, presumably General Cabral, kept his seat, smoking a cigar. Judging from Captain Lewis's hesitancy, Falk guessed that the general was usually quicker to his feet. Finally the man stood, big and clean-shaven, hazel eyes brimming with questions. His uniform was olive drab, and nothing fancy except for the patch on each shoulder with a single star. Keep it simple, Falk supposed, just like the Big Boss in Havana. He took the cigar from his mouth but didn't offer his hand.

“Asiéntese, por favor.”

The captain and his interpreter took seats in old wooden chairs, which creaked as if they'd been there since the Spanish-American War. There wasn't a seat for Falk, so he stood next to the Marines behind Lewis, scanning the somber faces on the other side. They, too, had brought a man in civilian clothes. Maybe a doctor, but more likely from the political side, either the Intelligence Directorate or some other part of the Interior Ministry.

There was no meal, but an orderly entered with a tray of demitasse cups filled to the brim with Cuban coffee. As with the chairs, there was only enough for the two principals and their interpreters.

General Cabral then opened the meeting, apparently having decided that an introduction of lesser players was unnecessary.

“Lo siento …” he began, Falk paying attention to the interpreter, who repeated the general's remarks in the typically stilted language of simultaneous translation.

“I am sorry for these circumstances that bring us together, Captain Lewis. In a moment we will transfer to your custody the remains of your soldier. But I must comment first that this troubles me.”

“I'm troubled, too,” Lewis answered. When Cabral heard the translation he shook his head.

“No, no. My troubles are of a different nature. You have a casualty, and for that you have my sympathy. But for me the problem is much larger. What am I to tell my commanders when they ask how it was possible for an American soldier—even a dead one—to come ashore and not be discovered for hours?”

Lewis opened his mouth, but Cabral raised a hand and continued, using the cigar like a prompter to punctuate each point.

“How are we to know for sure he was dead when he first reached our waters? Why, if he was only swimming, was he in uniform? Would that not suggest to you or to me, being military men, that he was either coming from a boat or was on some sort of mission?”

Good questions. All of them. Falk noticed the Cuban civilian taking notes.

“I can assure you, speaking for all parties on our side,” Captain Lewis began, “that Sergeant Ludwig was not on any mission, official or otherwise. As for what he was doing out there in the ocean at all, much less on your side, it is as much a puzzle to us as it is to you. But I can say with complete confidence that he was acting as an individual, and not as a soldier of the United States. In fact, he was expressly acting against his orders as a United States soldier. As I told you by e-mail earlier today, his unit had already reported him missing, and some of his belongings had been found on one of our beaches, two miles from the fenceline.”

Falk was mildly surprised by the detail of the captain's candor, but he supposed that it was warranted.

“It is reassuring to know of the ‘missing man' report,” Cabral replied through the interpreter, “although perhaps that, too, is a convenient circumstance for your side. But I will take it into advisement with my commanders. We have launched our own investigation into this matter, of course.”