The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Debes tener un nombre, amigo,” he asked the radioman.

  “Orlando, señor.”

  “De dónde eres?”

  The boy pointed in the general direction of the swamp. “Soy de aquí. De Real Campiña, qué está al otro lado de Zapata.”

  “Welcome home, Orlando.” Jack handed him a slip of paper listing two emergency frequencies monitored by the aircraft carrier Essex. The radioman, proud to be of assistance to the only Yankee on the beach, strung the antenna and tuned in the frequency. With an effort, Jack pushed himself out of the chair and stood there swaying like a drunk. He shook his head to get the cobwebs out, then stumbled across the room. “Maybe you can tell me what the fuck I’m doing here,” he said.

  The radioman didn’t understand English. “Qué dice, señor?”

  Jack had to laugh. He patted the young man on his bony shoulder. “All right, pal. Whatever we’re doing here, we’d better get it right.” Grasping the small microphone, he called: “Whistlestop, this is Carpet Bagger, do you read me? Over.”

  There was a burst of background static. Gradually a voice speaking English with a lazy Southern accent filtered through it. “Roger, Carpet Bagger. This heah’s Whistlestop. Ah’m readin’ you loud and clear. Over.”

  “Whistlestop, please pass the following message on to Kermit Coffin: Phase one of operation completed. Initial objectives are in our hands. Casualties are light. At least one LCU and one LCVP with heavy equipment and spare ammunition hit a coral reef and sank offshore. Now we’re waiting for the offloading of ammunition and mobile communication van from Río Escondido, and the field hospital from the Houston.”

  Jack started to sign off when the radio operator on the Essex told him to stand by; a message was coming through for him. Then he read it: “Combat information center reports that Castro still has operational aircraft. Expect you’all gonna be hit at dawn. Unload all troops and supplies and take your ships to sea as soon as possible.”

  Jack shouted into the microphone, “What about the goddamned air umbrella that’s supposed to be over the beach?”

  The Essex radioman, unfazed, repeated the message. “I say again, you’all gonna be hit at dawn. Unload all troops and supplies and take your ships to sea as soon as possible.”

  “Whistlestop, how are we supposed to unload all troops and supplies? The LCUs and the LCVPs that are still afloat won’t be able to get over the coral reef until high tide, which isn’t due until midmorning. Over.”

  “Wait one, Carpet Bagger.”

  A full three minutes later the radio operator came back on. “Kermit Coffin says there must be some mistake—there is no coral reef, only seaweed. Over.”

  Jack’s sentences came with deliberate gaps between the words. “Whistlestop, this is Carpet Bagger. Kindly pass the following question on to Kermit Coffin: When’s the last time you heard of seaweed cutting through a hull and severing a man’s leg?”

  Using his thumb, Jack flicked off the microphone.

  Bissell, reputed to be unflappable, blew his stack when Leo brought him the message board from the Essex. What annoyed him wasn’t what Jack McAuliffe was saying but where he was saying it from. “He’s gone ashore!” he cried incredulously.

  “He’s with the Sixth Battalion on Blue Beach, Dick,” Leo said.

  “Who in God’s name authorized him to land?”

  “It seems to have been a personal initiative—“

  The DD/O got a grip on himself. “All right. Get the Essex to pass the following order on to him. Keep the radio channel to the Essex open until the mobile communication van is offloaded from the Río Escondido and we can establish a direct link with the beaches. As for McAuliffe, he’s to get his hide back to the ship pronto, even if he has to swim out to it.”

  Glancing at the wall clock, Bissell turned back to the giant overlay. He didn’t like what he saw. First light would be seeping over the invasion beaches, but the five freighters that had brought Brigade 2506 to Cuba were still positioned inside the narrow confines of the Bay of Pigs. By now they should have offloaded their precious cargoes and headed out to the safety of the open sea. Staring at the wall map, Bissell thought he detected the distant, dull whine of disaster—the sound seemed to come from somewhere deep inside his ear. And it wouldn’t go away.

  In Miami, Howard Hunt locked the Cuban Provisional Government inside a safe house and issued “Bulletin Number 1” in its name: “Before dawn today, Cuban patriots began the battle to liberate our homeland from the desperate rule of Fidel Castro.”

  From Swan Island in the Caribbean, the powerful CIA transmitter beamed calls for the Cuban army to revolt against Castro. “Take up strategic positions that control roads and railroads! Take prisoner or shoot those who refuse to obey your orders! All planes must remain on the ground.” Between calls for insurrection, the radio—as part of JMARC’s psychological warfare campaign designed to convince Castro that an insurrection was underway—began broadcasting what appeared to be coded messages to Cuban underground units: “The hunter’s moon will rise before dawn. I repeat, the hunter’s moon will rise before dawn. The forest is blood red with flames. I repeat, the forest is blood red with flames. The Caribbean is filled with jellyfish. I repeat, the Caribbean is filled with jellyfish.”

  At high tide, the LCUs and the LCVP started ferrying equipment and supplies over the coral reef to the beach. Roberto actually kissed the first of the three tanks to roll off the landing craft, and then sent them off to beef up the units blocking the causeways. Shirtless young men were tossing cartons of Spam and tins of ammunition from hand to hand up the beach to one of the bungalows that had been turned into a depot. Up the bay, in the direction of Red Beach some twenty miles to the north, a thin plume of smoke rose into the crystalline sky. At first light, a lone Sea Fury had come in at sea level and hit one of the freighters, the Houston, on the waterline amidships with a rocket. The Second Battalion had already been offloaded onto Red Beach but the Fifth Battalion and the field hospital, and tons of spare ammunition, were still on board when the Houston, ablaze and taking water fast, settled stern down into the bay. Dozens of fighters in the Fifth Battalion drowned trying to swim to shore; the ones who made it were no longer fit for combat.

  At the end of the jetty on Blue Beach, a fighter manning one of the few antiaircraft guns ashore scanned the sky to the north through binoculars. Suddenly he stiffened. “Sea Fury!” he shouted. Along the beach, others took up the cry as they dove into hastily dug slit trenches. “Sea Fury! Sea Fury!”

  Jack, catnapping on the floor of Blanco’s Bar, heard the commotion and raced out onto the porch in time to see two of Castro’s planes roar in low from the Zapata Swamp. One peeled off and, circling, came down the shoreline, raking the beach with machine gun fire. Jack dove into a hole he’d scooped out in the sand under the porch. Fighters lying on their backs in the slit trenches fired BARs at the plane, which sped past over their heads and banked to come around for a second run. The second Sea Fury, skimming the waves, headed straight for the port side of the Río Escondido, two miles out in the bay. The plane fired eight rockets and then climbed at a steep angle and banked away to escape the .50-caliber machine guns blazing away from the side of the freighter. Seven of the Sea Fury’s rockets splashed into the sea, short of the target. The eighth struck the ship under the bridge. The explosion ignited several of the drums of aviation gasoline lashed to the deck. In an instant the fire skidded forward. From his shelter in the sand, Jack could see sailors trying to fight the blaze with hand extinguishers but he knew they would be useless against a gasoline fire. Minutes later there was a small explosion. Then a giant explosion racked the freighter as the stores of ammunition below deck went up. Men in orange life vests could be seen leaping into the sea as flames shot hundreds of feet into the air. Smoke obscured the ship for several minutes. When it drifted clear, Jack saw the Río Escondido’s stern jutting straight up, the two screws slowly churning in air as the freighter slid down into the oily waters of
the Bay of Pigs.

  Black smoke streamed from the stacks of the two other freighters in sight as they got up steam and headed to sea.

  The two Sea Furies made a last pass over the beach, shooting up Jeeps and trucks that had been offloaded, then disappeared back over the swamp. Inside the bar, Jack had his Cuban corporal raise the Essex on the radio. “Whistlestop, Whistlestop, this is Carpet Bagger. Two bogies just attacked the beach and the ships. The Río Escondido was hit and has sunk. I repeat, the Río Escondido was sunk before it could offload its aviation fuel or the communication van, or the spare ammunition. The other freighters, the ones carrying ammunition, have hauled ass and are putting to sea.” Jack smiled at a thought. “Do me a favor, Whistlestop, pass word on to Kermit Coffin that I can’t go back on board the Río Escondido because it’s underwater.”

  The laconic voice from the Essex filtered back over the wavelength. “Roger, Carpet Bagger. In the absence of the communication van we’ll need to keep this channel open. The only reports we’re getting from Blue Beach are coming from you.” There was a buzz of static. Then the Essex, with just a hint of breathlessness, said, “Combat information center has a sighting from one of our Skyhawks. An enemy battalion estimated at nine hundred men, I repeat, nine hundred men was spotted approaching the middle causeway that leads to Girón and the airstrip. Our pilot counted sixty, I repeat, sixty vehicles, including a dozen or so Stalin Three tanks.”

  Jack said, “Whistlestop, when can we expected the air cover you promised?”

  “Carpet Bagger, we are reporting three brigade B-26s seventy-five miles out and approaching. Good luck to you.”

  Jack said, “We’ll need more than luck,” and cut the microphone. He stepped onto the porch again and gazed into the shimmering waves of heat rising off the Zapata on the horizon. He could hear the dull boom of cannon as Castro’s column closed in on the unit blocking the middle causeway. In the haze, he could make out swarms of birds circling high over the battlefield.

  The young corporal came up behind him and pointed at the birds. “Buitres,” he whispered.

  Jack caught his breath. “Vultures,” he repeated.

  In Washington, Millie Owen-Brack gave a good imitation of someone at work. She was supposed to be preparing a briefing paper for Allen Dulles. The idea was for the Director to give an off-the-record interview to a columnist considered friendly to the CIA; in it Dulles would make it clear that, while America sympathized with the Cuban rebels who were trying to overthrow Castro, the Company had not organized the Bay of Pigs landings or aided the Cuban brigade in any way, shape or form during the actual invasion. Millie, her mind wandering, reworked the second paragraph for the tenth time, changing “way, shape or form” to “overtly,” then crossing that out and trying “militarily.” She left “militarily” and added “or logistically,” and then sat back to reread it. She had difficulty focusing on the sentences and turned her head to stare out the window. The cherry blossoms had appeared on the mall the week before but there was no sense of spring in the air; in her heart, either.

  The two other women who shared the office glanced up from their desks and then looked at each other; they both knew that Millie was worried sick about her husband, who was somehow involved in this Bay of Pigs business.

  Late in the morning a topside secretary phoned down to ask one of the women if Millie Owen-Brack happened to be at her desk. “Why, yes, as a matter of fact she is,” the woman confirmed.

  Millie looked up. “Who was that?”

  “Someone was asking if you were in the office.”

  The question struck Millie as ominous. “This is a Monday. Where else would I be, for heaven’s sake?”

  A few moments later the footfalls of a man walking as if he wasn’t eager to get where he was going could be heard in the corridor. Millie drew a quick breath and held it. She vividly remembered the day twelve years before when Allen Dulles, then DD/O, and Frank Wisner, his deputy, had come into her tiny office to announce that her husband had been shot dead on the China-Burma border. Dulles, a smooth man in public but awkward when it came to dealing with emotions, had turned his head away and covered his eyes with a hand as he searched for comforting words. He never found them. It was Wisner who had put an arm over her shoulder and said how sorry they all were that things had turned out like this. He had assured she would have nothing to worry about materially; the Company took care of its widows.

  The soft scrape of a knuckle on the door brought Millie back to the present. “Yes?” she called.

  The door opened and Allen Dulles stepped into the office. He had aged a great deal in the last months, and grown visibly tired. The jubilant spring to his step, the optimistic pitch to his voice were long gone. Now he slouched noticeably as he shuffled across the room to Millie’s desk. “Please don’t get up,” he told her. He sank slowly into a seat and sucked for a moment on a dead pipe. His gaze finally lifted and he noticed the look of absolute dread in Millie’s eyes. “Oh, dear,” he said. “I should have told you immediately—I don’t have bad news, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Millie let herself breath again, though her heart was still beating wildly.

  “I don’t have good news either,” Dulles went on. He glanced across the room at the two women. “I wonder if I could trouble you ladies…”

  The women grabbed their purses and hurriedly left the room.

  “Yes, well, here it is. Castro’s planes sank two ships this morning. The Río Escondido, which is the one Jack was riding, was one of them. But Jack wasn’t on it—he apparently took it upon himself to go ashore with the first wave. It’s just as well he did. The brigade’s communication van went down with the Río Escondido, so the only first-hand news we’re getting off the beach is from an impromptu hookup Jack established with the Essex.”

  “When’s the last time you heard from him?” Millie asked.

  Dulles looked at his watch, then absently began winding it. “About three-quarters of an hour ago. That’s how we learned about the Río Escondido.”

  “What’s the situation on the beach?”

  “Not good.” Dulles shut his eyes and massaged the brows over them. “Terrible, in fact. Castro’s columns are closing in. The brigade never managed to offload ammunition from the freighters.”

  “It’s not too late—“

  “The ships that weren’t sunk headed for the open sea—“

  Millie was keenly aware of the ludicrousness of the situation: here she was, a public relations flack, discussing operational details with the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. “Surely you can organize air drops—“

  “Not while Castro has planes in the air. Jack Kennedy has flatly refused…” Dulles let the sentence trail off.

  “If things get really bad,” Millie said, “you’ll extricate Jack, won’t you?”

  “Of course we will,” Dulles said, a trace of the old heartiness back in his voice. “We certainly don’t want a CIA officer to fall into Castro’s hands. Look, I know you’ve been through this before.” The Director cleared his throat. “I wanted to bring you up to date—you were bound to hear about the sinking of the two ships and start worrying that Jack might have been on one of them.”

  Millie came around the desk and offered her hand to Dulles. “You were very thoughtful, Director. With all the things you have to think of—“

  Dulles stood up. “Dear lady, it was the least I could do, all things considered.”

  “You’ll keep me posted on what’s happening to Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Director.”

  Dulles nodded. He tried to think of what else he could say. Then he pursed his lips and turned to go.

  Early on Tuesday morning, Jack—running on catnaps and nervous energy —shared some dry biscuits and muddy instant coffee with Roberto Escalona in his G-2 bungalow as they took stock of the situation. Castro’s heavy artillery was starting to zero in on the beaches; his tanks and mortars would soon come withi
n range. The brigade’s makeshift infirmary was overflowing with wounded; the makeshift mortuary behind it was filled with dead bodies and pieces of bodies. Ammunition was running perilously low; if the freighters didn’t return to the Bay of Pigs and offload supplies, the brigade would run out of ammunition in the next twenty-four hours. And then there was the eternal problem of air cover. Unless American Navy jets off the Essex patrolled overhead, the brigade’s antiquated B-26s, lumbering in from Guatemala, were no match for Castro’s T-33s and Sea Furies; three of them had been shot down that morning trying to attack Castro’s forces on the causeways. The brigade blocking units there were taking heavy casualties; Roberto wasn’t sure how long they could hold out without air support. Once they pulled back, there would be nothing to stop Castro’s heavy Stalin III tanks from rolling down to the water’s edge.

  Jack waited for a lull in the shelling, then jogged back across the sand to Blanco’s Bar. Orlando, his radioman, raised the Essex and Jack called in the morning’s situation report. At midmorning he went out onto the porch and scanned the bay with binoculars. There was still no sign of the freighters. He climbed onto the porch railing and then up to the roof. Sitting on the edge of an open skylight, his feet dangling down into the bar, he watched the contrails high overhead thicken and dissipate. Then he trained his binoculars on the horizon to the northeast, where the battle was raging for control of the middle causeway. “It was a dirty trick,” he muttered, talking to himself, shaking his head dejectedly.

  The dirty trick he had in mind was the one he’d pulled on Millie when he came ashore with the brigade. It was one thing not to resist the demon that drives you to live on the edge, quite another not to protect your wife from becoming, once again, a widow.