The DC-7’s starboard outboard engine had begun to stutter and finally stopped. The propeller continued to spin in the air flow. ‘That one always goes first.’ Blanchard’s voice had an uncanny calm. ‘I’ll feather the port outboard to save any drops left. We’re flying on fumes.’
‘Are we there, at the Sierra Maestra?’
‘How the fuck should I know? I’ve stopped counting the miles.’
Cauldwell stood up and buckled himself into the parachute harness. ‘Let’s go. You’re coming with me.’
‘But there’s only one chute.’
‘You’ll have to hang on tight.’
At that moment the inboard starboard engine coughed and stuttered. And a second later the Thunderbolt made a strafing pass and .50 cal bullets the size of courgettes stitched the passenger cabin behind them. Cauldwell pressed the transmit button for one last message: Hasta la victoria siempre!
He ripped off the radio headset and pushed Blanchard into the aisle and towards the open door. When they got to the door, Cauldwell wrapped the static line around a luggage rack fitting. They stood in the open door, the wind howling past. ‘Hold on tight.’
As Blanchard wrapped his arms around him, the Thunderbolt made another pass and the DC-7’s port wing blew into pieces just as they jumped. A moment later there was no engine noise, only rushing wind – and four seconds later the gentle pop of the canopy deploying and then no noise at all.
Cauldwell watched the DC-7 spewing flames and black smoke as it cartwheeled towards the sea. It looked like a 4th of July firework. Meanwhile the Thunderbolt had banked and was heading back towards their parachute. They were only 500 feet from the ground when the Thunderbolt’s machine guns opened up. Blanchard looked up as he heard bullets pop over his head. It reminded him of being in the firing range butts as a young recruit, but this time the bullets were louder and there was no protection. A line of holes appeared in the light green silk of the parachute canopy. A complete panel tore out and fluttered in the air; they descended slightly faster and at an odd angle. The Thunderbolt was now coming back for a final pass as they descended to treetop level. There was once again the sound of machine-gun fire, but it wasn’t coming from the Thunderbolt – it was coming from the ground. One of the rounds must have hit a control cable or the pilot. The fighter didn’t change direction or come out of its shallow dive. It ploughed into the trees.
Blanchard didn’t see the smoke or the flames, for they disappeared into the trees at the same moment. The sound of their feet breaking branches was muffled by the explosion of the Thunderbolt a couple of hundred yards away. They had landed in a pine tree, a pino de la Maestra. Their combined weight continued to pull the parachute through the tree branches until they came to a dangling halt about fifteen feet above a granite outcrop. There was the sound of crackling flames from the wreck of the Thunderbolt – and then the sound of ammunition being cooked off in the burning plane and ricocheting off the rocks and whizzing through the trees. Meanwhile, the burning fuel of the downed plane had started a forest fire.
‘Shit,’ said Blanchard. ‘Looks like we’re going to have to jump to the ground.’
Cauldwell looked at the ridged granite beneath them. ‘And break a leg and get roasted if the fire comes this way.’ He pulled the handle on the reserve chute and the canopy and lines spilled out below them. ‘We’ll slide down on this.’
‘Good idea, should…’
‘Shh … be quiet.’
‘What?’
‘Someone’s coming.’
A scruffy bearded figure wearing a beret and carrying a carbine emerged out of the shadow of the trees. He looked at them with an impish smile.
Havana: March, 1959
The revolution had succeeded and the man with the impish smile was now one of the most important men in Cuba. His office was in La Cabaña, a massive eighteenth-century fort guarding the entrance to Havana harbour. He kept referring to Cauldwell as Señor Whoever-you-are.
There were only two of them in the office. Cauldwell waited in silence while the other finished coughing. He appeared to suffer from severe asthma.
‘Pardon me, Señor Whoever-you-are, these fits just come on.’
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘You mean with the revolution – or my cough?’
‘Either.’
‘I would rather you helped with the revolution.’
‘How?’
‘I think you have your own answer, Señor Whoever-you-are. In any case, we have decided to let you and your pilot friend stay in Cuba for as long as you like.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But I think you may have your own agendas and plans. Whatever they are, I know that you are a true revolutionary.’
Cauldwell smiled.
Catesby may have wanted a revolution, but he knew it wasn’t going to happen. So he joined the Labour Party instead. He contested a seat in the 1945 election. The election was a Labour landslide, but Catesby bucked the national trend by losing miserably. A political career was not on the cards, but Catesby’s political allegiances were to prove useful.
The tap on the shoulder was inevitable. Catesby was a talented linguist, a working-class Cambridge graduate and had a good war serving in the Special Operations Executive. His profile and politics were a perfect fit for SIS during a time when the NHS was being formed and the coal mines and railways were being nationalised. But Catesby soon found there was a dark side to his new job. He was expected to spy on his left-wing friends.
»»»»
‘It’s a pity,’ said Henry Bone, ‘that Ralph Miliband doesn’t work for us.’ Bone was standing at his office window with his hands folded behind his back looking at the Epstein sculptures on the London Underground building opposite. ‘Did your friend Ralph know Epstein?’
‘I believe they met.’
‘Could you ask him if Epstein was influenced by Mayan art? Those figures look very sinister.’
‘Is that all you want me to ask him?’
‘No, there are other issues.’
‘You know, Henry, that I don’t like spying on perfectly innocent academics. If you want to find out what Ralph Miliband knows and thinks, you can read his writings and go to his lectures. He doesn’t keep anything secret.’
‘Don’t bark at me, Catesby. You don’t even know what we want to know.’
‘What is it then?’
‘The Sino-Soviet rift. We don’t know enough about the deteriorating relationship between Moscow and Peking. I think things may be getting lethal.’
‘Why don’t you ask the Americans?’
‘They’re useless. They think Communism is a monolithic international conspiracy. Any suggestion that there may be conflicts between Communist powers is heresy. As far as they are concerned, all reds are the same and they want to conquer us. We need a more subtle analysis.’
June, 1959: Zhongnanhai compound, Peking
The two men were sitting in matching red armchairs on either side of a rosewood table from the Ming Dynasty. The upper drawer of the table was elaborately carved with two phoenixes facing each other. The mythical birds were poised like fighting cocks ready to battle over which ideological path was the purest way to rise from the ashes. There was a bowl of formally arranged cut flowers on the table, including tiger lilies, orchids, peonies and peach blossoms – which symbolise long life. The flowers were cultivated in a hothouse in the Forbidden City, which was adjacent to the Zhongnanhai compound. One of the men was slim, handsome and had a look and demeanour which, although not altogether Western, was cosmopolitan and sophisticated. He was drinking whisky. The other man had a wart on his chin and a reassuring Buddha-like plumpness. His eyes were warm, but also dark and enigmatic. His teeth were bad for he had never brushed them in his life. He was drinking tea and an aphrodisiac tincture.
The Buddha-like man put on a pair of spectacles to read yet another grim report on the failure of ‘The Great Leap Forward’. The plan had begun in 1958 and it
s aim was the rapid industrialisation of China in order to catch up with and surpass the Soviet Union. The first stage was the abolition of private property and the collectivisation of agriculture. At first, the peasants ate for free in communal canteens, but a year later there was no food to eat for free or otherwise. ‘The Great Leap’ had been a massive failure. The makeshift backyard blast furnaces intended to produce steel in even the most humble villages now lay blackened and abandoned. The steel they produced proved completely worthless.
The plump man took off his glasses and looked at the cosmopolitan man. When he spoke, it was in Mandarin, a dialect that he wanted all China to learn. ‘What do you think, Feifei?’
The cosmopolitan man smiled once again at the nickname that the Buddha-like man had chosen for him so long ago. When they first met his nickname was Daluan, which means ‘big bird’.
The plump man, who was also slim and handsome all those years ago, began to call his new friend Feifei, Mandarin for ‘fly-fly’. For a while the cosmopolitan man was both Feifei and Big Bird – but Feifei was the nickname that stuck. The plump man with the wart on his chin also had nicknames. The most famous was The Great Helmsman, and he was also known as The Girth – but never to his face. Feifei, ever reserved and respectful, only ever called his colleague Comrade Chairman.
‘Why are you so silent, Feifei? Has the cat eaten your tongue?’
‘I was, Comrade Chairman, reflecting on your question.’ Feifei knew that both China and the Chairman had reached a critical turning point. ‘The Great Leap Forward’ had resulted in thirty million deaths from starvation and widespread discontent. He knew that the Chairman risked being marginalised into a figurehead. Finally, Feifei spoke. He pronounced the words in Mandarin: ‘Gan xiang gan gan.’ (Dare to think, dare to act. We can no longer waste time.) They were the exact same words that the Chairman had used to announce the beginning of ‘The Great Leap’. Feifei no longer cared if the Chairman spotted his mocking irony.
The Chairman’s eyes narrowed and seemed to focus on a distant point. ‘I have made mistakes, but I have also rescued a quarter of the world’s population from feudalism and grinding poverty. We are still, Feifei, the leading force of world Communism.’
Feifei nodded. He knew that this might have been so, but it was largely owing to his own moderate and pragmatic influence. Feifei had quietly and covertly begun to import grain from the West to relieve the famine.
‘But,’ said the Chairman, ‘we will never be reconciled with the Soviet Union – even if it means war. Khrushchev is a revisionist dog. When he gave that speech denouncing Stalin, he announced the end of Communism in the Soviet Union.’
Feifei thought the Chairman’s pronouncement a little extreme, but he was too subtle to disagree directly. He smiled and shrugged. ‘It was a cunning speech. First Secretary Khrushchev is trying to consolidate his power by crushing or isolating the remaining Stalinists who want to dispose of him. In fact, several committed suicide in the days after the speech.’
‘It is good that we no longer depend on Russian technology and Russian military weapons. We must develop our own.’ The Chairman looked hard at Feifei. ‘You know the West so much better than any of us. You must devise a plan to steal the secrets of the West.’
Feifei sipped his whisky and reflected. Following the Chairman’s thoughts was often like riding the back of a tiger. But it was possible to jockey that tiger and guide it in the right direction. ‘We must, Comrade Chairman, use the West in such a way that the West thinks they are using us.’
‘We need spies in the West.’
‘We have hundreds of spies, thousands of spies in the West. Many of the overseas Chinese look to us as their homeland.’
‘But few of them have access to the great centres of power. Have we spies among the gweilos?’ The Chairman used the common Cantonese word for Westerners. Gweilo literally means ‘ghost guy’. It came into use in the nineteenth century because the pale skin of Western sailors led the Chinese to think they were ghosts.
Feifei peered deep in thought at the antique flock wallpaper which depicted a riot of red flowers. Did China have gweilo spies? Even one? His musing was interrupted by the tinkle of young female voices from the Chairman’s private residence. It was time to leave.
»»»»
It wasn’t easy getting the armchair and sofa up the stairs and into Ralph Miliband’s flat. In addition to Ralph and Catesby, there was Isaac Deutscher, another academic. After a lot of groaning, scraped knuckles and cursing in four different languages they finally got the furniture in place.
‘Thank you, William,’ said Miliband wiping his brow.
‘I hope you like them.’ The sofa and armchair were from Catesby’s flat. ‘My sister decided she wanted something more posh. She’s a class traitor.’
‘And where,’ said Miliband, ‘is the hidden microphone?’
‘It’s in the armchair. It activates when you sit in it.’ Catesby was joking. As far as he knew, the furniture wasn’t bugged. But he did know that Ralph’s telephone had been tapped by MI5. The reds-under-the-bed paranoia had leapt across the Atlantic. If you were British and too left-wing your phone calls were no longer private. Catesby blamed the influence of the CIA. The British spies working for Washington were just as subversive as the ones working for Moscow.
‘I’ll make coffee,’ said Ralph.
As Miliband disappeared into the kitchenette, Deutscher asked, ‘How long have you known Ralph?’
‘Since 1949. We met at a dinner party and discovered that we both spoke French with a Belgian accent.’
‘And I believe,’ said Deutscher, ‘that you work for the, uh, Foreign Office.’
‘That’s right. I work for the, uh, Foreign Office.’
A rattle of cups announced Ralph’s return with the coffee. ‘Isaac,’ said Ralph, ‘is our expert on Mao and Maoism.’
Catesby smiled. ‘I wish we had an expert on Maoism.’
Deutscher sipped his coffee, then gave a heavy sigh. ‘Have you been sent here, Mr Catesby, to spy on us?’
‘I don’t call it spying,’ said Catesby, ‘I call it information gathering so that the UK government doesn’t make the same stupid mistakes it has in the past.’
Deutscher frowned. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Is the split between Moscow and Peking real?’
‘Utterly, but the West should not rejoice.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because Maoism is going to have repercussions for decades to come. It is a force of revolutionary internationalism that is going to spread revolution to underdeveloped countries.’ Deutscher paused and looked directly at Catesby. ‘And you can tell your colleagues at the, uh, Foreign Office that there is nothing they can do about it.’
‘Thanks, I’ll let them know.’ Catesby smiled. ‘Pretend for a second I’m Mao Tse-tung. What advice would you give me?’
‘I would warn you of Western powers who might try to play off China against the Soviet Union. Mao must resist that temptation. It could destroy his revolution.’
‘You ought,’ said Miliband, ‘to get your friends at the Foreign Office to read Isaac’s biographies of Trotsky. Natalia Sedova, she’s Trotsky’s widow…
‘I know,’ said Catesby with slight irritation.
‘Natalia has just given Isaac access to the closed section of the Trotsky archives.’
Catesby smiled bleakly. It wasn’t the first time he had become aware that these North London intellectuals living in exile had a better intelligence network than the SIS.
E Street Complex, Washington: 6 August 1960
The DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, was in fine form. He had just got laid after a long lunch at the Quorum Club. He felt he was doing okay for a man of sixty-seven with a club foot – although the foot was something he never mentioned or admitted.
The meeting was far more top secret than the DCI’s liaison with a female journalist in a backroom at the Quorum Club. The only others present in the E
Street office were the DDP, Deputy Director for Plans, and the Army Chief of Staff.
The DCI spoke first. ‘It is irrevocable. They are never going to kiss and make up. It is an opportunity that we cannot fail to exploit.’ The DCI looked at the Army Chief of Staff. ‘I know, Lyman, that you do not agree – and that’s why I’ve taken you into my confidence.’
The general’s trick was to speak in such measured, thoughtful tones that his views, however mad, sounded reasonable. ‘Today is an auspicious anniversary. It is fifteen years ago today that we bombed Hiroshima. It is important that the United States maintain the capability to use nuclear weapons against any nation with impunity and with no fear of retaliation. That is essential for a Pax Americana.’
As the DCI lit his pipe, he peered over his steel-rimmed spectacles with a playful smile. ‘You and Curtis are still disappointed that you never persuaded Ike to attack Russia.’
‘It is a window of opportunity that is fast closing. For years the Soviet Union totally lacked the capability to retaliate against a pre-emptive US attack. But it won’t be long before Moscow does possess intercontinental ballistic missiles – they might already.’
‘So your preferred option…’ The DCI paused to deal with his pipe. Safely lit, he continued. ‘The pre-emptive strike option no longer exists?’
‘That would appear so.’
‘Ergo, you might consider other options – such as the one we are discussing today?’
‘Possibly, but much depends on the policy of the next President.’
The recent summer conventions had just nominated Kennedy and Nixon.
‘Which horse,’ said the DCI, ‘would you prefer to back?’
The general smiled. ‘I would prefer not to say.’
‘Very wise. But I assume,’ said the DCI, ‘that you would give tentative support to our plan?’
The general frowned. ‘Yes, but tentative and reluctant.’
The Whitehall Mandarin Page 16
