Spy in a Little Black Dress

XV



They were traveling east along the spine of the island, the Escambray Mountain Range.

Emiliano suggested that they stick to the back roads, just in case Colonel Sanchez had roadblocks set up on the highways to catch them. On a map she found in the truck’s glove box, Jackie saw that taking the back roads meant driving either through the jungle or along the side of the mountain range.

Driving through the jungle, they encountered roads so overgrown with vines and creepers that passage became next to impossible. While Jackie drove the truck, Emiliano stood on the front bumper, holding on to a metal pole that had been soldered upright to be used as a handhold. In his free hand, he employed a machete that he had found in the back of the truck to scythe through the dense overgrowth blocking the vehicle. The squawking of parrots in the distance created a rude counterpoint to the hacking sounds made by Emiliano’s machete. It was hard work, especially when you factored in the heat and the mosquitoes, which were a constant source of aggravation. Jackie couldn’t believe how improbably her situation with Emiliano had changed. It was like entering a movie theatre to watch It Happened One Night and have it turn into The African Queen.

They continued to wear the coveralls they had found in the truck, which seemed better suited to the terrain than their own clothes, now neatly folded and stashed in Jackie’s capacious camera bag.

As they drove east, they made conversation to pass the time and continued to exchange life histories. Emiliano learned what it was like for Jackie to have grown up with a much loved but philandering father and a controlling mother whose only aim in life was to see her daughter married well. As she spoke of this, she caught Emiliano smiling.

“What?” she asked him.

Emiliano said, “As a lector, I sometimes read from Orgullo y Prejuicio or Sentido y Sensibilidad. I was just thinking that you could have been the heroine of a novel by Señorita Austen.”

Jackie blushed, unable to hide from Emiliano that his comment had touched a hidden nerve.

As they continued east, Jackie learned what it was like for Emiliano to have grown up poor, his present success due to his loving parents’ support and the helpful intervention of the United Fruit executive who saw something in the young Emiliano that made him want to help the boy.

And now that the cat was out of the bag, they talked about Walker’s treasure and debated what it might consist of—gold bars, priceless jewelry, or maybe even the gold doubloons and pieces of eight of pirate legend.

Sometimes they wouldn’t talk at all, but just rolled along in companionable silence and stared out the window, gazing upon the incredible scenery passing by: the seemingly endless green fields of sugar cane, the deeper jade green of the jungle, and the sheer walls of the mountains.

The radio, still tuned to that Key West station, provided continuous musical accompaniment. It was now broadcasting Hank Williams’s roistering “Jambalaya,” a pleasant distraction from the scenery, which had become wildly vertiginous as the truck traversed a switchback road that clung tenuously to the side of a mountain. The roadway was only two lanes wide here, and there was no guardrail anywhere along its length to keep them from hurtling out into the abyss should the driver lose control of the vehicle.

All of a sudden, Emiliano, who was now back behind the wheel, slammed on the brakes, forcing the truck to slew crazily to the left and bringing its left rear tire, spitting gravel, perilously close to the edge of the precipice.

“Emiliano, what is it?” Jackie asked, a rising note of panic in her voice.

Instead of answering, Emiliano opened the cab door, jumped out, and walked forward several feet along the roadway. He was quickly joined by Jackie, who wanted to see for herself what the problem was.

They stood at the edge of a crater that took up almost the entire roadway. Something had gouged a huge chunk out of the road’s surface. It was easy to see that the hole was wide enough and deep enough to prevent the truck from continuing forward.

“What happened here?” Jackie asked.

“I don’t know,” Emiliano said. “Maybe a torrential rainstorm washed away some of the road. Or maybe a slight earth tremor caused this section to collapse.”

“How are we going to get around it?”

“We can’t go forward; that hole’s too deep and too wide. There isn’t enough room here to turn the truck around and go back the way we came. And I don’t see us driving backward until we find someplace wide enough to turn the truck around. That could be miles back down the road.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I guess we’re stuck here, unless you want to hike the rest of the way to Oriente Province.”

Jackie made a face and looked down at her ballet flats. “Unfortunately, I left my hiking shoes at home.”

Emiliano looked up in frustration. Jackie followed his line of vision.

Directly above the crater, about fifteen feet up the side of the mountain, was a shelflike outcropping. It seemed to be holding in place a tumble of rocks that had somehow shaken loose from the mountain above them. The accumulation of rocks had been prevented from falling farther down the slope by this small ledge.

Hearing a sound from down the mountain, Jackie went over to the edge of the road and looked over it. Below on the switchback, headed in their direction but still some distance away, was a jeep climbing the mountain road. It held four soldiers, and Jackie could see a machine gun mounted on a post at the rear of the vehicle.

“Emiliano,” she called with urgency in her voice.

Emiliano joined her and looked down. He saw the jeep and said, “Could be Sanchez’s men. Or just a random road patrol. Either way, if they stop us, we’re dead meat. We have to figure a way to get over that crater before they get here.”

As Jackie watched, Emiliano looked over at the crater in the roadway, then up to the suspended rock fall, then back down again. He did this, looking down, then up, several more times. Something was obviously going on in his mind.

“Emiliano,” she prompted him. As though shaken out of his trance, he looked at her.

“It’s odd,” he said, “but there seem to be enough fallen rocks up there to fill this hole in the roadway. If only we had some way of removing that shelf. If we could just blow it up, all those loose rocks would come tumbling down the slope and fill up this crater.” He sighed, then continued, “Where’s a stick of dynamite when you really need one?”

Jackie could see that Emiliano was unprepared to have his rhetorical question answered in so prompt a fashion. “Wait here,” she said, and ran back to the truck. When she returned to him, she was holding the messenger bag. As Emiliano looked on, Jackie reached into it and withdrew a single stick of dynamite. Emiliano’s jaw literally dropped open.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Jacqueline, what else do you have in there? A bazooka? A battering ram? A nuclear warhead, maybe? Where did you get that?”

“From the Teatro de Cinema. I took the dynamite to keep the fire from setting it off. I guess I forgot that I had it with me,” she explained with a note of chagrin in her voice.

“You forgot?” Emiliano asked in disbelief.

“Well, we’ve been on the run, and I’ve had so many more important things to think about. Besides, I had no idea where to ditch them.”

“Them? You have more than this one?”

“Oh, yes, I have a whole bundle of them. Do you want more?”

“No, I think one will suffice.” He shook his head as though unable to believe that his companion of the last few days had been walking around with enough dynamite to blow them to pieces, and yet hadn’t thought to warn him of that distinct possibility.

Her face red with embarrassment, Jackie handed him the stick of dynamite and watched while Emiliano looked it over. She saw him frown.

“Is there a problem?”

“Yes,” said Emiliano, continuing to examine the dynamite stick in his hand. “See this fuse? It’s very short. There is no way I could light it and get back down the slope before it set off the dynamite.”

They checked the other dynamite sticks and saw that all the fuses were of the same length. Emiliano looked visibly deflated. It had been such a good plan. And now it seemed like all that hope was in danger of being quashed. Jackie tried hard not to appear equally crestfallen.

“If only there was some way we could extend the fuse,” Emiliano said, succinctly defining the problem.

Jackie felt the weight of the messenger bag in her hand and a thought occurred to her. She reached into the messenger bag and, like a magician conjuring a rabbit from a hat, produced reel three of Dracula. “I was told that this movie was made on nitrate film stock. That’s extremely flammable. If we could—”

Emiliano saw where she was headed and rushed to fill in the rest. “Just take several feet of film and use it to extend the fuse, I could light the dynamite and be down the slope before it exploded. Jacqueline, you are a genius.”

Emiliano was so obviously overjoyed at Jackie for coming up with a solution that he embraced her, squeezed her tight, and spun her around.

“Jacqueline, I could kiss you,” he said with one of his uncustomary outbursts of emotion, perhaps abetted by the fact that they would soon have company to deal with.

“Why don’t you?” Jackie blurted out before she could stop herself.

Emiliano accepted the invitation and kissed Jackie full on the lips. It was the first time he had kissed her since that night in the inn, and she was reminded all over again that no matter how infrequently he used them, Emiliano definitely knew what to do with his lips when it came to kissing a woman and leaving her yearning for more. Unfortunately, thoughts of the jeep coming up behind forced them to cut this romantic interlude short.

As soon as Emiliano broke off the kiss and the scenery around her stopped spinning, Jackie opened the film can and took out the reel of film, which she handed to Emiliano. He unspooled several feet and held up the film to look at it. It appeared to be blank.

“Good,” he pronounced. “I think this is what they call the leader, so we can take some film without damaging the actual movie.”

That was Emiliano, Jackie thought, the cautious lawyer, always scrupulously tending to details.

From his pocket, Emiliano produced a pocketknife and opened the blade. He continued to unspool the reel of film until he judged that he had enough, then used the knife blade to cut off a large section of leader from the rest of the reel. He then gave the reel to Jackie; she put it back in its can and placed it in the messenger bag.

By this time, Emiliano had started up the slope. Jackie followed, and Emiliano held out his hand to steady her as she climbed up after him. It was a somewhat steep ascent, made more awkward by the loose stones beneath them that constantly threatened to undermine their balance.

Finally, after some careful tacking back and forth up the slope, they arrived at the ledge holding the pile of rocks in place. Emiliano bent down and examined the underside of the shelf, checking for the exact right place to plant the dynamite stick.

“This one stick ought to do the job if we place it right here,” Emiliano said as he wedged the dynamite in place beneath the ledge.

“You look like you’ve done this before,” Jackie observed.

“I did. I picked up a rudimentary education in explosives when I worked in the mines.”

“When was that?”

“When I was in law school.”

“I thought you said you worked your way through law school as a lector.”

“I worked in the nickel mines too. In the summers. Law school was very expensive.”

As she watched, Emiliano spliced the end of the fuse onto one end of the leader by taking the fuse and threading it through the first set off sprocket holes on either side of the film. He tugged on it gently and the two pieces held firmly together.

“There, that should do it,” Emiliano said, closing his knife and pocketing it.

They went back down the slope, being careful not to slip and fall. Once back on the roadway, they returned to the truck, which Emiliano drove back about fifty feet, judging it to be a safe distance outside the blast radius of the explosion.

“I guess we’re ready,” Emiliano said to Jackie. He reached into another pocket, took out a monogrammed silver cigarette lighter, and flicked it open, but nothing happened. He flicked it several more times, but with the same results.

“Must be out of fuel,” he said. He searched his pockets but came up empty. “Damn,” he said, “I’m all out of matches too. You?” Jackie shook her head at Emiliano.

“I guess this isn’t my day,” he said and took out his frustration on the truck by banging on a fender.

“I know,” Jackie said, looking inside the truck. “The cigarette lighter.” She pushed in on the lighter on the dashboard, waited for it to pop, then took it out and held it up to Emiliano. “That’s excellent,” he said to her. He took the lighter from her, its end glowing cherry red.

“Okay,” he told her. “Now, stay in the cab. No matter what happens, don’t come out. Not until you see me or hear from me. Got that?”

Jackie nodded to show that she understood.

“Good.”

Cigarette lighter glowing in his hand, Emiliano started up the road, then stopped and returned to the truck. He took out the monogrammed silver lighter and handed it to Jackie.

“It was a graduation gift. Please hold on to it, and you can give it back to me later.”

“Good luck,” said Jackie, feeling the inadequacy of the words to convey what she really felt. She had known him only a couple of days, and yet she found her thoughts constantly turning to him. She knew what emotional bellwether that signified. Emiliano started back up the roadway and began climbing up the slope until he was lost from sight.

Disobeying Emiliano’s orders, Jackie got out of the truck cab and walked over to the edge of the roadway. Looking down, she could see the jeep. It was still several switchbacks behind, but it would catch up to them in the next several minutes. So even if Emiliano’s plan did work, there was still the tiny matter of having a jeep filled with soldiers and a machine gun on their tail. There was no way they could hope to lose them on this narrow mountain road. She hoped that Emiliano also had some plan in mind to deal with them, because she had run out of ideas, like a car whose fuel gauge was now on empty.

Jackie returned to the truck cab. She thought about all the things that could go wrong. Emiliano sliding down the slope and breaking a leg, or worse. Emiliano underestimating the timing on the fuse and being blown to smithereens by the dynamite. Emiliano not making it back to the roadway in time and having his body pelted by a hail of shrapnel.

Instead, she tried to think positive thoughts and visualize just what was happening as she sat there. She saw Emiliano climbing carefully up the slope until he arrived at the ledge. She saw him straighten out the film leader, then hold the glowing red end of the cigarette lighter against its free end. She saw the film begin to spark as it caught fire, and the flame run down to the dynamite stick’s fuse, which accepted the fire like the handoff of the torch in a marathon race. She saw Emiliano, at the same time, running back down the slope and searching for cover before the dynamite exploded.

KA-BOOM!

Jackie was jerked upright in her seat as she heard the dynamite explode up the slope. A second later the shockwave from the explosion reached the truck and shook the cab. At the same time, the truck was pelted with shards of rock that the explosion had sent hurtling through the air in all directions. It was like a hailstorm of stones that must have lasted only thirty seconds. But Jackie was concerned to see that there was no sign of Emiliano through the smoke and dust that now shrouded the truck.

She stuck her head out the cab window and called out. “Emiliano? Emiliano!” But there was no answer.

She hopped out of the truck and ran through the dust cloud. Three-quarters of the way to the crater, she practically tripped over something in the middle of the roadway. It was Emiliano lying motionless on the ground.

“Emiliano,” Jackie called out to him as she knelt by his side to assess his condition. His eyes were closed, but his chest was heaving up and down, obviously as a result of the run down the slope and away from the explosion. Thank God for that. Very gently, she lifted a comma of hair off his forehead and could see he was bleeding from a slight cut where a piece of flying rock had obviously nicked the skin. Her tender touch must have done the trick because Emiliano opened his eyes.

“Jacqueline,” he said simply and smiled up at her. To Jackie, it was the best smile she had ever seen, and she could feel her heart expanding inside her chest, knowing that Emiliano was alive.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded at her and gave her a small smile to show that he was all right.

“Piece of pie,” Emiliano said.

“Piece of cake,” Jackie said, smiling down at him.

Ever mindful of the jeep that could catch up with them at any minute, she asked, “Can you get up?”

“I think so.”

With Jackie’s help, he levered himself to a sitting position, then slowly rose to his feet.

He and Jackie both looked ahead. To their immense relief, their plan had worked. The scree from above had rolled down the slope after the explosion had obliterated the shelf of rock and had neatly filled up the crater in the roadway, enough at least for the truck to drive over.

“We did it!” exclaimed Emiliano.

“We did it!” echoed Jackie.

“We make quite a team, don’t we?”

“We certainly do.” Jackie beamed.

Letting him use her body as support, Jackie led Emiliano back to the truck. It was good feeling his weight against her, good to support him as she now knew he would support her in any crisis to come. At the same time, she knew that she had to hurry because that damned jeep could arrive at any second.

She opened the passenger door and helped him inside. “I guess I better drive for a while,” she said, and was happy to see that Emiliano didn’t try to challenge her. They looked back and saw the jeep in the near distance and coming up fast. Obviously, they were driving quickly now to investigate the source of the explosion.

“Emiliano, what are we going to do?”

Instead of answering, Emiliano reached into the messenger bag, pulled out another dynamite stick, and lit its fuse with the still hot cigarette lighter. Then, hissing dynamite stick in hand, he jumped down from the truck cab to the ground.

“Wait here,” he shouted back to Jackie. I’ll be right back.”

As she watched, Emiliano ran forward and jammed the dynamite stick in the narrow stretch of ground between the edge of the crater and the outer edge of the roadway. He then came running back to the truck, got in, slammed the door shut and shouted, “Let’s go.”

In the rearview mirror, Jackie could see the jeep swiftly rounding the last bend and gaining on them. She put the truck in gear and jammed her foot down on the accelerator. Instantly, she could feel the loose stones that had filled up the hole in the roadway crunch beneath the weight of the truck’s heavy-duty tires. She passed the dynamite stick wedged in the ground and saw its fuse sputtering away.

Seconds after the rear end of the truck passed over the crater, the dynamite stick blew. Through the side-view mirror, Jackie could see that the explosion had blown away that narrow stretch of ground and created a V-shaped crack at the outer edge of the roadway, a downward-sloping channel that allowed all of the rocks to come pouring out of the crater and down the lower side of the mountain, like water draining out of a burst dam.

Still looking in the side-view mirror, she watched as the jeep came to a screeching halt on the far side of the crater, which, empty of the scree, was now as big a hole as it had been before the first explosion. Unfortunately, the driver put on his brakes much too late and, as Jackie looked on openmouthed, the jeep skidded forward and drove right into the crater, disappearing from sight like a tasty morsel swallowed up by a giant stone maw.

“Emiliano, you’re a genius,” Jackie told him as she continued to put distance between them and the now vanished jeep.

“And you are an incredible driver, like Juan Manuel Fangio at the 1951 Spanish Grand Prix.”

She wanted to lean over and kiss him but thought it was more prudent to keep her eyes forward and on the road. Despite the long and potentially dangerous journey still ahead, it felt like nothing could stop them now.