Hidden Terrors by Miller Mark Crispin; Langguth A. J.;

Author:Miller, Mark Crispin; Langguth, A. J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

When dusk finally settled, Burke Elbrick was blindfolded and led out of the garage and into the house. “What’s happening?” he kept asking. “I want to get in touch with my wife. What’s become of my chauffeur?”

The revolutionaries had anticipated Elbrick’s concern for his wife. The night before, they had agreed that one agonizing aspect of their life was to have a comrade disappear and not know his fate. Was he dead? In the hands of the police? Had he acted on a tip and fled the city? They resolved to spare Elbrick’s family that particular anguish. Immediately upon the ambassador’s arrival in the garage, Fernando had gone to a pay telephone on the street and called William Belton, the minister-counselor at the embassy, to assure him that Elbrick was all right.

Fernando could not know that their plan for buying time had misfired. After they placed a threatening note on the front seat of the Cadillac, the kidnappers had taken the driver’s keys away from him. His walking down from the deserted hill they thought would take an hour. But Custodio carried duplicate keys. As soon as the van pulled away, he drove down to the first house with a telephone. Within minutes the embassy knew of the calamity, and Belton was contacting the intelligence office: “The ambassador was kidnapped seven minutes ago.”

Within half an hour, Belton and the staff had copies of the three-page manifesto the kidnappers had left on the car seat. It was not reassuring. The rebels demanded the government meet two conditions: the release of fifteen political prisoners, their names to be supplied after the government had agreed in principle; and the reading of the entire manifesto over all radio and television networks.

By censoring the press, the military had tried to keep the population ignorant of the rebels’ bank robberies and raids on the arms caches at military barracks. Now, on the night of its most daring stratagem, MR-8 was demanding its due.

If they received no answer within forty-eight hours, the kidnappers said, they would execute Burke Elbrick. “Each of them,” the manifesto added, referring to the fifteen political prisoners, “is worth one hundred ambassadors….” The message ended with a broader threat: “Finally, we would like to warn all those who torture, beat, and kill our comrades that we will no longer allow this to continue. We are giving our last warning…. Now it is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

Reading that statement on the air would prove no real problem, distasteful as the government found it. But the broadcast would satisfy only the simpler of the two requirements: the prisoner exchange looked all but insurmountable. Thus, from the time of the driver’s call the entire embassy staff was, in the words of one ranking diplomat, “crapping in our pants to get Elbrick back.”

Elbrick, meantime, had no idea that his life had been threatened. In his makeshift cell, he was getting his bearings. They had taken him up many twisting stairs to a top floor and shut him in a room about nine feet by twelve.

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