Hawke

He soloed after only six hours of instruction.

Pilots were in fact paid a lot more than the mere sicarios, or paid assassins, that Pablo employed in ever increasing numbers. It was the happiest time of Manso’s life. He was a swaggering piloto in gleaming aviator sunglasses, playing the narcos version of aerial cat and mouse with the government troops on his weekly runs to Managua in his C-123 transport plane.

With his newfound wealth, he purchased an American Cigarette speedboat. When the weather was too bad for flying, Manso and his brothers took to the sea to make their deliveries. Once the product had been delivered, they went in search of isolated tourist yachts, robbing and murdering at will.

The de Herreras brothers had become the deadliest pirates in the Caribbean. But it was not to last.

After an ill-considered midnight run north to Cuba to see their mother, a bloody shoot-out with Cuban gunboats off the Isle of Pines finally ended in their capture. The three brothers were taken to Havana. They were whisked from the airfield directly to the Palacio de la Revoluciуn and brought before el comandante.

Castro stood up behind his massive desk and stared at them, his hand on the sidearm that always hung from his belt.

“Ah,” Castro said. “The three little boys who murdered the Russian diplomat? Sн?”

“Sн, Comandante,” Manso said, smiling. “It was a great pleasure. The man was a pig. He insulted my mother in the street.”

“So, you cut his head off and sent it to the Soviet embassy in a piсata,” Castro said, walking around the desk.

Manso stiffened. Waiting in the anteroom outside the Maximum Leader’s office, under the guns of the elite guards, he’d concluded that they were all to be shot where they stood. “We will die like men,” he had told his brothers. Now, it was simply a matter of waiting for the bullets to come. He’d seen men die badly. He didn’t intend to disgrace himself.

“Sн,Comandante. I used my machete. It was a clean cut! I am a Machetero! So are my brothers. We are proud sons of Oriente!”

Castro walked up to Manso and stared hard into his eyes. Then his face broke into a grin and he embraced the startled boy in his two strong arms.

Manso was too shocked to speak.

“This man you killed. His name was Dimitri Gokov. We suspected the Russian of being a double agent, spying for the americanos. This very morning, another Soviet agent confirmed under torture that Gokov was part of a U.S. group plotting an overthrow of our revolutionary government.”

“Comandante, I don’t—”

“You are a brave boy. And you have an absolutely amazing sense of timing! Had we caught you yesterday, you would have been shot!” Castro said, and laughed. In Castro’s mind, Manso’s piсata had sent a brilliant, if unwitting, message to both the politburo in Moscow and his enemies in Washington. He embraced Carlos and Juanito and handed all three brothers small black boxes. The three brothers looked at each other, gri

In time, he further rewarded Manso with a commission in the Air Force. He gave Juanito and Carlos commissions, too, in the Army and Navy. All three had shown surprising initiative and risen swiftly to the highest ranks.

Carlitos was now one of the highest-ranking officers in the Navy. Both he and Juanito, comandante of the Western Army, had also secretly returned to the lucrative narco trade they knew so well. Manso’s only fear was that Carlitos’s insatiable love of the product was increasing his already frightening instability.

Carlitos was valuable, but he would have to be watched. Pitting brother against brother, Manso gave that responsibility to Juanito.

Castro’s reprieve had been the begi

In time, all three brothers grew immensely rich from many sources. It was far easier to export your product to America from Cuba than it was from Colombia. Juanito, through his vast drug-ru

Even the leader, if he knew of the de Herreras brothers’ sideline businesses, never mentioned it. El jefe was famously antidrug, and had even been trying to negotiate some kind of crackdown with the U.S. for years.

Manso and his leader had grown ever closer over the years. The leader, who was never able to sleep at night, would roam the streets of the old city with Manso, pouring out his frustrations and fears. Time passed, and the two men became, not brothers, because their age difference was too wide, but something akin to father and son.

Fidel had been born in 1926 at Las Manacas, near Biran, in northeastern Cuba. Manso had been born twenty-five years later in Mayari, the nearest neighboring town to Biran. They shared a common loathing for the gringo imperialists who had exploited the natural resources and the peasants of their beloved Oriente. This had been one of the earliest bonds between the aging leader and the promising young Manso.

He looked at his leader now, red-faced and shaking his fists in the anger he seemed to summon so easily. Manso took a sip from the cup of the warm lemonade and tried to relax. He was going to need every ounce of his courage and strength of mind to do what he had to do.

It had been six whole months since he’d been to Telaraсa. It had become too dangerous for him to be seen there. His brother Juanito had been flying down from Havana once a week, supervising most of the construction. His other brother, Carlos, had been put in charge of pla

Manso didn’t like to admit it, but his brother Carlos, who’d risen to the highest echelons of the Navy, was by far the smartest of the three and certainly the most politically astute. He was also the most unpredictable. A lifelong addiction to the poppy and the coca leaf had made him dangerously unstable.

But it was somewhere inside the scrambled brains of Carlos that the little seed of rebellion had begun to grow. Manso, with his limitless financial resources, had provided Carlos’s tiny seed with all the water and sunshine it needed to thrive.

Then there was his brother Juanito, a great general of the Army. There were in fact three distinct armies in Cuba. The army of the East, the Central army, and the army of the West. On pain of execution, the leaders of the three armies were not allowed to communicate with one another. This Manso and Carlos had used to their great advantage.

Juanito, in complete secrecy, had used his position as commander of the Western forces to turn Carlos’s little seed into the vast secret complex of bricks, mortar, missiles, and men called Telaraсa. Manso had originally modeled Telaraсa after Escobar’s own grandiose estate in the mountains of Medellin, Hacienda los Napoles.

Telaraсa had become far more than the jungle pleasure palace, which, to a casual observer, it still appeared to be. An influx of many millions had turned Telaraсa into a powerful military fortress that would soon be the birthplace of a new Cuba.