Hawke: A Novel by Ted Bell Page B

entrust his life.
    The flying time to his personal estate, Manso estimated, was just less than two hours. The weather was perfect, but it still promised to be an exciting flight.
    Manso’s estate occupied a good deal of the five thousand acres of an island just off the town of Manzanillo. Manso, whose boyhood nickname had been Araña, the spider, had called the place Finca Telaraña, the Spider’s Web. Originally, it had been just a casita on the balmy shores of the Golfo de Guacanayabo. A little retreat, where he and the great leader could escape the pressures of La Habana and have a little fun.
    Over the years, Manso had gotten very good at finding ever newer and more interesting ways of keeping el comandante amused. There was, of course, no shortage of girls willing to do anything for money or el jefe .
    The most recent event Manso had staged at Finca Telaraña was a tree-climbing contest. About ten local beauty queens had participated. They had stripped and raced for the trees. The winner got an expensive jeweled watch, while the losers had to shave their heads, eat a few live insects, and perform an elaborate dance number while everyone else enjoyed an exquisite buffet.
    Manso supplied the female pipeline and he kept it full. This talent had helped his career in the Air Force enormously. Not to mention the size of his personal fortune. Manso had also done many favors for his leader. Favors Castro would entrust to no one else.
    “He has become an inconvenience, Manso” was all that needed to be said. The man, or his entire family, would disappear. Always with a knife, never a gun. Guns, Manso had discovered very early in life, were no fun at all. He had grown up in the cane fields of Oriente province. He had learned that a razor-sharp machete made him the equal of bigger, stronger, and even wiser men.
    When he was still a boy, he had formed a small band known as the Macheteros. The machete wielders. Once, barely twelve, he and his two brothers had kidnapped a staff member of the Soviet consulate. The Russian bastard had insulted his mother in the street. They’d placed him in a cotton sack and taken him at midnight out into the cane fields. Swigging rum up in the cab of the stolen pickup, the three brothers laughed at the man bouncing around in the back of the truck’s bed as they careened through the tall cane.
    His two brothers held the man’s arms. Manso suddenly stepped forward and whipped off the sack covering the man’s head. When the man saw a glint of moonlight on Manso’s upraised blade, he started begging. He was still pleading when Manso casually lopped off his head, spraying the three boys with blood. It was Manso’s first taste of blood and he found that he liked it.
    He’d had the head delivered in a piñata to the Soviet embassy. This spectacular crime, and the ensuing manhunt for Manso and his two brothers, had caused them to flee their homeland. They headed straight for their uncle’s village in the mountains of Colombia. Their mother, a Colombian, had a brother who was a coca farmer in a thriving little hamlet called Medellín.
    In the long chain of lucky events that would mark his life, the murder of the Russian brought Manso to the attention of Fidel Castro himself. Normally, this would have resulted in his capture, torture, and execution. The Soviets wanted Manso’s head, that was certain. They’d even sent investigators and detectives all the way from Moscow in search of the murderous de Herreras brothers.
    By the time the Russian investigators reached Cuba, Manso and his young brothers were in Colombia, at the forefront of a burgeoning new industry. They were using high-powered speedboats, committing acts of sea piracy, and running cocaine for a Colombian madman called el doctor .

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    El doctor, it didn’t take Manso long to discover, was not a doctor at all.
    He was a murderous psychopath. A squat little man who’d gotten his start stealing headstones from the local cemeteries,