“Bill, is there?”
Dad would understand why I couldn’t talk about it.
“Bill?”
“Why would you even ask that question?”
“You’re a shithead, Bill.”
The crisis dragged on from day to day, hour to hour. On television, JFK looked almost too young to be president. Now, I was shocked to glimpse him one afternoon leaving SecDef Robert McNamara’s office. Lines of stress and worry seemed freshly carved into his face. General Lansdale said he was on the phone almost hourly with Khrushchev.
“We’ve let the genie out of the box,” he said, “and if we don’t put the sonofabitch back in the box, we’ll end the next war fighting each other with sticks and stones. At least those of us unfortunate enough to be left alive will.”
One little mistake, one misunderstanding, a minor error of judgment, might be the spark to blow up the whole damned world.
On August 24, a former Brigade 2506 member named Jose Basulto ratcheted up international tensions when he borrowed a thirty-one-foot power cruiser and pooled enough cash to buy a 20mm semiautomatic cannon with one hundred rounds of ammunition. Arms like that could be purchased off the streets in Miami in 1962.
Basulto and a half dozen other exiles sailed from Miami into Havana Harbor and staged a raid on the waterfront Hotel Rosita de Hornado where a large number of Soviet advisors billeted. They shelled the front of the hotel with their cannon, raked it with small arms fire, and returned to Miami.
McNamara called such quixotic ventures “insane.”
In the meantime, U-2 flights revealed Soviet ships slipping out of Black Sea harbors on their way to Cuba with greater and greater numbers of “advisors.” And, quite probably, nuclear missiles. JFK doubled the frequency of spy plane overflights of Castroland. So far, there was no substantial proof to convince the world of the presence of Soviet ICBMs.
Intelligence briefings kept those of us with a need-to-know informed of findings in Cuba by the CIA’s deep-cover network of spies and informants in-country.
A former employee of the Hilton Hotel in Havana told an operative he believed a missile installation was under construction near San Cristóbal. Another overheard Castro’s personal pilot drunk in a bar boasting about missiles. An operative reporting out of CIA headquarters located on the University of Miami’s campus maintained regular contact with a farm owner in Oriente Province. The farmer escaped to Florida, where he relayed an unusual story to Felix Rodriguez, one of the CIA’s most successful agents.
“The Russians are going crazy,” he said. “They’re trucking big loads of ice to their base. Every day they drive truck after truck of ice, and the Russians take over at the gate and drive it into tunnels they’ve built.”
Missile fuel had to be kept at a constant temperature. Apparently, cooling systems in the tunnels had broken down and ice served as a substitute.
Even such random sources as these slowly dried up as the Castros and Guevara put a clamp on the island. Since the Bay of Pigs, Castro’s security forces had used the invasion as an excuse to continue imprisoning hundreds of political opponents. Secret police prowled the shadows, while organized government watch groups spying on neighborhoods intimidated most Cubans.
In September, during a State Department brainstorming session, John McCone, the director of Central Intelligence (DCI), settled his eyes on me.
“It is imperative,” he said, his eyes holding mine, “that we obtain reliable proof that the Soviets have placed ICBMs on Cuban soil.”
I knew what he was getting at. This was a job for Navy SEALs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE EVENTS OF THAT summer and autumn of 1962, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, forced the world to confront its “greatest danger of a catastrophic war since the advent of the nuclear age.”
On John McCone’s request, I left Washington, D.C., to link up with SEALs and one of his spooks named “John” in Key West, almost within spitting distance of Cuba. SEAL Team Two’s commander, John Callahan, and I drove Lieutenant Roy Boehm and Chief Petty Officer Lump Williams to a sheltered cove at Naval Station Key West, where the submarine Sea Lion waited for them dockside in the failing light of approaching darkness. The “John” spook and a State Department goon whom I didn’t know and who refused to supply even a cover name were waiting.
Mr. State Department, dressed in Ivy League shirt, sweater, slacks and deck shoes, was a pencil dick with an Errol Flynn mustache and a Bud Abbott face. John was a photographer, a fragile Cuban twig upon which hung a pair of thick glasses. Next to John and Mr. State, Lump-Lump looked like a walking man mountain with his broad shoulders, cliff-like jaw, long swimmer’s legs, and short quills of hair driven like nails into his scalp.
“They’ll complete your briefing aboard the submarine,” I told Roy and Lump, motioning to their two mission companions.
Boehm was … Boehm was Boehm. He regarded John and the State Department weenie with some amusement. “Little fuckers ain’t going to grope me, are they?”
“They wanna suck my dick,” Lump-Lump added, glaring, “they’d better bring extra teeth ’cause they’ll be needing ’em to eat with from now on.”
Callahan and I saw the team off. “I should be with you, not cooling my ass here on safe land while you’re risking yours,” I said to Boehm.
“That’s not the way it works, skipper,” Boehm replied. “The higher up you go, the more valuable your ass becomes. We’ll pay your regards to Papa Fidel.”
Callahan and I waited out the tense hours at the Naval Station, swigging coffee and catching naps on a sofa in the Ops Center.
* * *
Once Sea Lion dove in the Florida Straits, John, Lump, and Boehm crowded into the captain’s wardroom along with Mr. State, who launched his briefing with the subdued relish of a neighborhood gossip.
“Gentlemen, you are about to embark on the most significant mission of your military careers. The forces of communism and the forces of the Free World are being cornered into a standoff the outcome of which only God knows—”
“Get down to it,” Boehm growled. “SEALs don’t need motivation speeches.”
Mr. State looked offended. He sourly produced from his travel bag a series of high-altitude U-2 photos of Bahia del Mariel, code-named Pinlon. He spread the photos on a table for the SEALs to study while he continued his briefing.
The photos showed a deep-water harbor a few kilometers west of Havana. It bulged into land like a lopsided condom with one narrow opening to the sea. Ships were tied up to piers inside the harbor. Trucks with large flatbed trailers appeared to be hauling away long cylindrical objects covered with tarps.
“We must obtain irrefutable proof that these are ICBM missiles,” Mr. State Department said. “The president will broadcast it to the world as soon as we confirm it. This time President Kennedy will not back down, not even if we verge on the threshold of a nuclear war.”
It was Boehm’s and Lump-Lump’s job to insert into Pinlon with John the spook photographer and protect his scrawny nerd ass while he sneaked up and took snapshots of the missiles. In a real war, they would have swum in, attached limpet explosives to the freighters, and blown them up with the missiles still aboard. Sayonara, motherfuckers. In the Cold War, however, it wasn’t done that way.
The three of them left the State Department goon behind the following night and locked out of the sub off the Cuban coast, using a rubber raft as transport to shore. The Sea Lion slid off as silent as a shark to wait in the black-running Gulf Stream for the team’s signal to return.
John rode the raft with two waterproof bags while Lump and Boehm swam on either side, pushing him. The gear bags contained dry clothing, rations and water, John’s cameras, binoculars, and two .38 Combat Masterpiece revolvers. The State Department had ordered them not to go in armed, as it would create an international incident if they were caught and provide Guevara an excuse to execute them. But just before they locked out, the submarine’s chief petty of
ficer secretly passed them the pistols.
As they drew near land, the mouth of the harbor turned into a narrow black vagina. Deep inside, yellow lights reflected off the water where two Russian freighters rode, tied off to long concrete-and-wood piers. Lights draped over the freighters’ sides and shining into the water were supposed to discourage underwater saboteurs and spies. Two chunky Komar patrol boats rode at anchor farther inside the harbor, their machine guns unmanned.
A flashlight dotted the darkness twice from dead ahead on Punto Barlovento, the harbor’s outer lip.
“The contact,” John whispered.
John and the contact, an elderly Cuban, embraced each other like long-lost cousins. Quickly, the team gathered up equipment, wiped out tracks, and followed the contact up a short, steep bank to the dead end of a narrow street. Dilapidated warehouses and other run-down buildings lined it. They appeared abandoned. The only illumination came from the freighters nearly a thousand yards farther along.
They came to a weathered building attached to the water by a tiny wharf on pilings. It smelled of wood rot and fish guts and hemp and seaweed. There were two doors. A tiny window in the door that opened toward the wharf let in the weak, distant light from the enemy ships and the growing wedge of approaching dawn.
John and the Cuban prepared to leave.
“Where the fuck you going, Charlie?” Lump-Lump rumbled. He called everyone “Charlie.”
“You’ve done your job. Now I’ll do mine.”
Dry land seemed to have restored his confidence. He packed his cameras into a worn satchel.
“Don’t be seen while I’m gone,” he cautioned, then left with the old Cuban.
For all Lump and Boehm knew, either John or the old man could have been double agents. Boehm visualized himself and Lump-Lump lashed to the nose of missiles as they descended onto Washington, D.C.
Sent on a mission to protect the future of the Free World—and there they sat, hiding in a smelly fisherman’s shack, armed with pistols against nuclear missiles and Castro’s machine guns.
Suffocating heat seeped into the shack as the sun rose out of Havana and climbed above them. Still no activity among the warehouses. Cubans and their Soviet cohorts must have evacuated the waterfront to help protect the secret of the arriving ICBMs.
Lump stepped outside just as two teenaged boys swung chattering and grabassing into the end of the street. They spotted Lump immediately and waved. Lump kept his cool. He waved back and laughed as he tossed the boys a colorful fisherman’s net float. They caught it and played catch with it as they ran out of sight. Lump looked grim as he retreated and closed the door. The two SEALs hissed at each other.
“Roy, they seemed to think I belonged …”
“All they have to do is to let slip one word …”
“Jesus! I don’t think they thought anything …”
“You want to bet your life on what two kids did or didn’t think?”
Boehm kept watch while Lump erased obvious signs of their presence. Then they crawled underneath the shack with their gear to hide out during the day. The crawlspace was a tight fit. Sand crabs edged up sideways and eyed them speculatively with their stilted exclamation-point eyes.
“Lieutenant, I ain’t going to one of them Cuban gulags,” Lump whispered.
“We won’t have to. They’ll execute us.”
“We fight then?”
“Lump, do you have a better suggestion?”
They huddled together in the dark mud with the crabs watching them like hangmen and the strong odor of the incoming tide in their nostrils. Boehm chuckled at the thought of the fate of the world riding on their shoulders.
“Roysi,” Lump murmured sardonically, “tell me again how much glamour there is in this job.”
* * *
Nightfall was a long time coming. Lump-Lump and Boehm, driven from underneath the dock shack by the incoming tide, finally felt secure enough to venture back inside. The two kids had probably forgotten all about seeing Lump by this time. Sounds of activity drifted to them from the direction of the docked Russian freighters. Truck engines. Winches sounded like chalk against the blackboard of the night. Incredible that security was so lax. The Reds were moving around ICBMs as casually as though they were unloading a grain elevator. Boldness, perhaps the utter unbelievability of shipping nuclear warheads into America’s own backyard, substituted for subterfuge.
“Someone’s coming!” Lump-Lump drew his weapon and spun away from the door window where he kept vigil. Roy took the other side of the door.
The door creaked open. A dark figure. Boehm yanked the man inside and thrust the muzzle of his revolver against his temple.
“Por Díos, Señor! It is only I coming for you.”
It was the old man, their guide. In broken but passable English, he explained. “They move one missile only each night. They hide from—how you say?—aircraft surveillance.” He pointed skyward and flashed a quick grin. “But this night they are seen from more near, si? Come. We have work to do.”
He led Lump and Boehm to a three-floored warehouse set in the dark along the waterfront. Missile-moving sounds came from beyond it. They hid in the shadows and watched the building for a full quarter hour. The complete lack of enemy security unnerved Boehm. This was too easy.
Presently, guns in hand, Lump-Lump and the lieutenant fast-trailed the old man across the open street and into the warehouse. The unpartitioned bottom floor appeared littered with old empty packing crates and rusted machinery of some sort. Squeaky wooden stairs immediately to the left led up to the third floor. Their stealthy footfalls on the stairs released mold and dust. They entered a room at the end of a musky hallway on the third floor and closed the door behind them.
Pale moonlight through the open shutters of a single window illuminated chairs, a table, and a bed with the bare mattress rolled back. “We are to wait here for our amigo,” explained the old Cuban, who called himself Carlito.
A quick but thorough scouting of the entire building pinpointed escape routes and defensive points. A window at the end of the third-floor hallway opened onto a neighboring rooftop. Satisfied that they were safe for the time being, the three of them returned to the hideout room and waited in the darkness while they listened to the sobering grind of machinery moving ICBMs in preparation for possible nuclear strikes against the United States.
John was in a hurry when he returned. He wore old sneakers and work clothing and carried his cameras. He jabbed a finger toward the roof. Lump-Lump remained behind to check John’s back trail before joining the others where they sprawled on their bellies at the roof’s peak, glassing the harbor below with binoculars.
Water lay still and black in its protected land cup. Komar patrol boats with their running lights extinguished inscribed slow, vigilant rounds at the vagina’s opening. Illumination came from lights strung over the sides of the Russian freighters. Stevedores rigged lines and cables around a long canvas-covered cylinder aboard one of the ships. A tractor truck had trouble maneuvering a long trailer around the sharp corner where the street turned toward the piers. Its engine moaned and groaned in granny gear until a little crane arrived to pick up the end of the trailer and move it around on line.
The truck trailer was specifically designed with chocks and blocks to receive the missile, which was still concealed beneath tarps. John used a light-grabbing telephoto lens to shoot several rolls of film as laborers transferred the Soviet freighter’s load to the Cuban truck.
“Not good enough,” John fretted, although none of us required an imagination to know what lay hidden underneath the canvas. “I must get closer.”
Boehm was cautious. Certainly the Russians would have posted security.
“It’s something I have to chance,” John decided. “There’s nothing you can do if I’m caught. Just get the hell back to sea before they trap you too. Here. Take these with you.”
He handed Boehm the film he had already shot. Boehm extended a hand to shake John’s.<
br />
“You’ve got balls,” he acknowledged.
John flashed a pleased grin and said, “I don’t intend to lose them in Cuba.”
Then he was gone. Back into the building, taking only a camera the size of his palm.
Boehm nodded at Lump. “Cover his ass. Shadow him from a distance.”
Boehm waited with Carlito, both tense and silent as they scanned the piers through binoculars and watched John shadowed by Lump approach the docks. That was one awesome piece of ordnance down there. It harnessed more destructive power than the entire U.S. fleet expended against the Japanese during all of WWII, including atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unleashed against Washington, D.C., it would turn the nation’s capital and surrounding Virginia and Maryland into a vast smoldering wasteland incapable of supporting life for thousands of years. Four or five of them would render uninhabitable the eastern seaboard from New York to Miami.
Lump-Lump returned alone, sweating, admiration in his voice. “The little bastard’s crazy. I had to drop back. He’s right in there with the workmen.”
Lump called off the passing of each quarter hour while they waited.
Sighs of relief escaped the three of them on the roof when John reappeared. He crawled toward them, grinning broadly, clearly on a high.
“I could have touched it!” he exclaimed and patted his tiny camera. “We’ve got it now. Let that bearded sonofabitch try to deny this evidence. Gentlemen, let’s get the hell out of Cuba. In two or three more days, there may not be enough left on this island to support a goat.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SAILORS WERE ALWAYS VISITING exotic ports. Amsterdam occupied a category all its own. I strolled De Wallen, the city’s largest red light district, in what I hoped was a casual tourist manner and not that of some tall, shifty-eyed perv seeking a quick tryst in one of the “kamers.” Turned out the DCI (Director of Central Intelligence), John McCone, had a mission for me when I got back from Key West. With a sly double-entendre smile, Ted Shackley called the mission a “quick in-and-out.” I figured McCone was testing me for some future purpose, since Shackley seemed much more suitable for playing the perv than I.
Night Fighter Page 14
