Mongoose, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley

  “I understand totally. Say it as in Spanish, and it will not offend.”

  “You must know,” Blackford continued, “that our government has said that it will not engage in subversive activity against Fidel Castro.” He looked up at Ferrer. His manners were good. He did not smile derisively, and Blackford managed a straight face. “I am here for a single purpose, which is to establish whether the object that protrudes from the cave is a nuclear missile. Specifically, a SANDAL—an SS-4. My chief has examined photographs of it and the visible part of it coincides exactly with the cone of an SS-4. It is highly improbable, we would all agree, that it is in any way menacing, but we need to find out a) whether it is a missile, and, above all, b) what Castro plans to do with it. Perhaps he has in mind some exhibitionistic peace demonstration, we don’t know. I know that there isn’t anyone better informed than you on the scene, and I’m hoping you can help us.”

  “I can help you not in answering those questions, but in suggesting means of getting the answers. The top men around Castro are totally inaccessible, ever since last Saturday’s attempt on Castro himself. Raúl, Valdés, Dorticós, Che Guevara—one might as well attempt to strike down Khrushchev.”

  “Jesús, you must know that I am not at liberty to discuss with you any plans for the assassination of Castro.”

  This time Jesús did smile. There was, suddenly, a wink in his eye: “I shall continue to hold you blameless, Mr. Ohkks, for the attempts made over the past months on Castro’s life.”

  Blackford could not suppress a smile. “Saintly of you, Jesús. But you get my point.”

  “Of course I do. I look to your government for only one thing. Help in securing diplomatic recognition when that great, that heaven-sent moment comes when the monster is brought down. And if what is brewing now is something that can precipitate a definitive political crisis, then your help will be needed instantly.”

  “You should know that much work has been done on the matter you touch on, and our friends are at the ready.”

  “I am confident that is the case. Otherwise, there would be little motive in my seeing you. But now to the business at hand.”

  He turned to the wooden table and, with a pencil, began to doodle on it. “There is no question that something special is going on. My people keep their eyes on the scene, and the pace of activity in INRA is abnormal. And, of course, there is the commotion within the cave at San Cristóbal. But there is, in the thick of it all, a relatively subordinate character, and he is infinitely accessible, indeed he travels alone by automobile almost every day between Havana and San Cristóbal, where he is ostensibly engaged in some kind of quartermaster’s survey. But in Havana, he regularly goes to INRA.”

  “He is?”

  “He is an ogre called Ingenio Tamayo.”

  “Tell me about him.” Blackford suppressed what he had been told by Pano months before about Tamayo.

  “Ingenio Tamayo was trained as an officer at Managua Escuela Militar. He is four, five years younger than Fidel, and he is a sadist. While at officers’ school it is generally accepted that he was responsible for poisoning a superior officer. He gravitated always toward the underside of military life. He volunteered, just after Castro marched into Havana, to take charge of the day-and-night firing squad at La Cabaña. He always insisted on personally administering the coup de grace. When Castro has a particularly dirty job to do, he gives it to Tamayo. It was Tamayo who superintended the ‘interrogation’ of Cubela after he was caught and, before that, María Arguilla.”

  “What makes him so important to us?”

  “Somehow he got mixed up in the operation involving Major Kirov, the Soviet technician in charge of the San Cristóbal project—the new anti-aircraft weapon, I am led to believe. Whatever more there is to it, Tamayo knows. Whatever is intended to be done, Tamayo knows.”

  “Well,” said Blackford, “I take it you can bring him in all right. How do you propose to get the information you want from him?”

  “By praying that he is like other sadists—a coward. Did you, at college, read Sandor Rado? He distinguishes between brutal men, who are not necessarily cowards; and sadists, who almost always are. I suppose,” Jesús Ferrer looked doleful, “that we will have to have a field test to probe this question.”

  Blackford’s lips tightened. “I don’t believe in torture.”

  “I don’t either. But just as I don’t always practice what I believe, so sometimes I do not believe in what I sometimes practice.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “And if he breaks, how soon can I hear?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “I shall be here. Or did you plan that I should move?”

  “My people are well situated. If you are in serious danger, you will be moved. I do not expect it. Perhaps tomorrow will be a big day.”

  Blackford said, smiling, “Good, as I shall need to be going home. Tomorrow is November 22, and on November 23 Harvard and Yale meet in football.”

  “Ah, yes, I understand. And, the same day, Oxford plays rugby against Cambridge.”

  36

  When Leandro told Pushkin, in so many words, that he could recognize an SS-4 when he saw one, their relationship, without another word being spoken, evolved: From that moment on, they were co-conspirators. Leandro found himself resisting analytical implications of his new role. In fact, he was, simply, swept away by a drama to which his prisoner, yes, his prisoner, had the key.

  The formal arrangements did not alter in any way. Regulations were scrupulously obeyed. Pushkin feared most that Leandro should, for whatever reason, be relieved—replaced by another one of those automatons like Roberto, the daytime guard, who got through one comic book per twelve-hour stretch. He went so far as to suggest to Leandro that they ought not to have their rum nightcap.

  “It’s against the rules, and abiding by the rules is the prudent thing to do.”

  Leandro agreed.

  “Maybe I should complain about you?” Leandro smiled.

  “What would you say?”—Pushkin went along.

  “Oh, let me see. I could say that you are really Khrushchev’s younger brother and when you get back, you are going to cut off all aid to Cuba.”

  They spent time in light exchanges, but also in other ways. Pushkin had by now thoroughly acquainted Leandro with what it was like to grow up as a talented young man in the Soviet Union, applauding on the one hand all the opportunities he had been given to advance in his work, but acknowledging that there were many frustrations. And there was the inevitable separation from family life—“by the time I was seventeen, I hardly knew my mother or my father, even though they wrote to me dutifully.” Leandro said that in Cuba he had had a most difficult time as he had seen his father’s reaction against the regime—toward which, at the outset, he had been well disposed. But his anger had mounted as his freedom to operate his own sugar company was first diminished, then removed altogether. “We were very close after my mother died, and I loved him very much, and always he was trying to protect me. I think if he had been willing to leave Cuba alone, and then make arrangements for me, he’d have got out.” Pushkin permitted himself to say that he could understand Leandro’s father’s devotion—“You are a very special person, Leandro, with very special properties.” At this point Leandro asked if Captain Pushkin had a family he had needed to leave in the Soviet Union in order to return to Cuba, and Pushkin said no, that he had been so engrossed in his work, he had not had time to get married and raise a family. But that if he ever had a son, “I would hope he would be a little bit like you.” And Leandro had replied that since he no longer had a father, he would gladly accept Captain Pushkin as a godfather, if Captain Pushkin would pay him that honor. Pushkin reached his hand through the bars and placed it on the brown flaxen hair of Leandro, and said, with a hint of mockery in his voice, but with an overriding sense of gravity, “I baptize you Leandro, my son.”

  But there was much work to do, what amounted now
to the daily report.

  Leandro, without great difficulty, had managed to get his musical friend to give him a standby guard’s pass for the cave, and every day he reported in, as if to regular duty, at 7 P.M., one hour before he would vanish in order to take up his post guarding Pushkin at the isolated special Barracks C, a kilometer down the road, en route to the artillery range. Between six and seven in the evening, Leandro would make the rounds along the perimeter of the curtain, but every day he would find an entirely plausible reason to dip inside. At seven there were not many Soviet technicians still on duty, though Major Kirov was almost always there until after eight. The second night, Leandro entered with four cold beers in a cardboard carton. He went directly to the chief Soviet guard. “You ordered these?”

  The guard, in barely manageable Spanish, said, “Yo … no … cerveza,” and Leandro’s young face was the picture of confusion.

  Major Kirov, from his workbench, observed the sight and laughed. “Over here,” he beckoned to Leandro. “Whoever did order them is just plain out of luck, because I am going to take two of them and”—he looked over at the guard, with forlorn countenance—“and Babiski here can have one”—he motioned to Leandro to hand him the bottle—“and you,” Major Kirov squinted to read the identifying badge on Leandro’s vest pocket, “and you—Leandro Caballo—can have the fourth, in return for your promise not to tell our benefactor what happened to them.” He laughed, and returned to his desk.

  That night Leandro reported that the elevation of the missile had begun. “It is on a launcher, at an angle of about forty-five degrees. There are two tractors in front, and the work on the mouth of the cave seems to have ended—it is out about ten meters farther than it used to be, and a big rectangular security curtain has been built. The two big tanks that used to be in the rear of the cave are now on railroad tracks that stretch right to the mouth of the cave.”

  Leandro was gratified when Captain Pushkin explained to him exactly what movements were required to situate the missile in a ready-fire position. On the basis of the information Leandro then brought him, Pushkin estimated it would not take more than two days before Petrouchka was ready to go. “One day to finish moving the launcher out and set the angle of elevation and the firing azimuth, and a half day to fill the tanks—a tricky business—with the kerosene and LOX.”

  “Would they need to fire it right after putting in the fuel?”

  “No,” Pushkin said. “But within twelve to twenty-four hours. After that there is attrition in the valves, seals, and other control elements, and the missile begins to lose range. Though”—Pushkin was asking himself the question for the hundredth time—“one supposes they might not need the SANDAL’s potential range of eleven hundred miles. Hardly, if what the Cubans intend is to fire it into the ocean, which continues to be my conviction. But there is a way of finding this out, and at the right time I will tell you what it is.”

  “When will the ‘right time’ be?”

  “After they feed the LOX into the missile. At that point they must do something within a day. Of course, they can always let the oxygen out. But I can’t imagine, if they go to all the trouble of putting it in, why they would proceed simply to let it out. No; if they put it in, it will be because they intend to fire.”

  On Thursday, Leandro came in as usual at eight and was visibly distressed that Roberto felt like chatting before leaving the detention building. Was Leandro tiring of his watch duty? Roberto thought it time for a day or two off. Would Leandro accompany him to Major Tamayo to request relief? Leandro stalled, and finally, after about fifteen minutes, Roberto left.

  “Captain, Captain! They are going to insert the LOX tonight! Tonight. Beginning at midnight. The whole shift has off between six and midnight, with orders to be back on duty at the cave at midnight. The tanks have been wheeled up alongside the missile.” Leandro was excited. But not so excited as Captain Pushkin.

  Pushkin went to his desk and on a pad of paper sketched out, with painstaking clarity, a diagram of the inside of the firing cavity. He flipped the sheet over and drew on the two succeeding pages. He returned to the cell bars. “Bring your chair,” he said to Leandro, without raising his head.

  Leandro brought it up obediently by the cell bars, and sat down.

  The teacher, inside the prison cell, explained to his student outside the cell the meaning of the four valve handles in the bottom section of a nuclear missile. He pointed out the innocuous sequence, and the deadly sequence. If the tiny door, the firing door, of the shell’s casing was bolted shut with the valve handles in the one sequence—he illustrated—the missile was harmless: the radio detonation signal would then be inoperative.

  “But if the valves are in this sequence”—he pointed to the second sketch—“the missile is scheduled to explode.”

  Leandro was silent. So was Pushkin.

  “What do you want me to do, Captain?” Leandro’s voice was that of a boy asking for direction.

  Pushkin paused. Then, “Procedure specifies that the firing door be left open until immediately before a launch, with the valve handles set in the harmless sequence. Then the technician in charge, Major Kirov—theoretically, only after receiving telecommunicated orders from the Kremlin—changes the sequence into the FIRE position. The firing door is bolted shut and the missile is launched. It is off on its lethal course.”

  “Can anything then be done?”

  “Yes. After the launch, the technician sitting at radio control must do one of two things. He can push this toggle switch to the right”—Pushkin turned the page to a drawing of the radio panel and pointed—“which is the ARM mode. It activates the radio-controlled arming of the nuclear warhead, but ensures that the nuclear charge cannot explode in less than five minutes. The purpose is to prevent accidental detonation of the missile’s warhead over friendly territory.”

  “And the other toggle?”—Leandro pointed to the second switch on the drawing.

  “That is the DESTRUCT button. Flip it, and the missile’s nuclear trigger, which is ringed by conventional explosives, is disabled. The missile, without guidance, comes down, in pieces, harmless. That option is conceived as the option the command technician has if, on launch, the missile is clearly defective—if it is wobbling through the sky instead of rising cleanly into its trajectory.”

  “How long between firing and the option to destruct?”

  “A limit of five minutes. After that it is no longer within effective radio-control range.”

  There was another pause. Until, again, Leandro said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “I must think. I must carefully weigh all the alternatives.”

  Leandro drew a deep breath. “Do you want me to let you out?”

  Pushkin thought. “Not now. That might end any possibility of avoiding a catastrophe. I must stay here, and you must report to me, development by development. Everything now depends on you, Leandro”—Pushkin paused again, and then said softly, “Leandro, my son.”

  37

  They came together at Cojímar, in the large living room. Fidel Castro was elated by the drama of which he was the central figure—or at least the central actor. The central figure was the President of the United States.

  On Castro’s desk was a second telephone, a direct line to the cave. When Castro picked up the line, Kirov would answer it. Castro had already tested it. Kirov had answered sleepily when Castro picked up the phone at eight in the morning.

  “This is hardly a day for you to be sleepy, Tolstoi.”

  “I am sorry, Comandante. I only got to sleep at five. It took that long to do everything.”

  “Is everything now ready?”

  “Everything is now ready.”

  “I shall now hang up and have my technician bring you in on the radio.”

  “Very well, Comandante. Over and out.”

  Castro opened the door to an adjacent office. A radio had been installed there. Castro was not going to take any chances on a failure in communicatio
ns. “Fetch Cave One,” he ordered, stepping into the room. The operator, his dial preset, flipped a switch and a moment later spoke. “Command One calling Cave One, Command One Calling Cave One.”

  The voice of Kirov shot back. “This is Cave One, this is Cave One. Go ahead, Command.”

  Castro grabbed the microphone from the operator. “Just checking, Tolstoi. Everything seems all right.”

  “Yes, Comandante.”

  “You may go back to sleep. I shall not test again until near zero hour.”

  “I don’t think I can go back to sleep, Comandante. But maybe I’ll go get some coffee.”

  “Over and out, Command One.” Castro, who visibly enjoyed the use of instruments that effected his will miles away, gave the microphone back to the operator.

  To this meeting, they arrived early. Raúl was there at 11:15, Dorticós was there a moment or two later, followed by Che Guevara and, at 11:25, Ramiro Valdés.

  Fidel sat at the head of the dining-room table. In front of him was a Zenith shortwave radio. Next to it an AM radio, tuned to station WQAM in Miami, the Top 40 rock station with the large signal to which much of Havana was regularly tuned in, and which always reported headline news as it happened. The shortwave radio was tuned in to the powerful, clear channel CBS station in Dallas. Every now and then Castro would raise the volume. There was static, but the broadcast was audible. It was a talk show and four guests were discussing whether President John F. Kennedy was doing a good job.

  Two Democrats, two Republicans, saying the usual things—Castro could not follow, in English, anything other than simple declarative speech—but it was such speech, after all, he was waiting to hear. Meanwhile Che Guevara and Dorticós could follow the English, and occasionally one or the other of them would translate any comment of particular interest.

  Castro kept both sets on, but after a while turned them down. There was the faint monotonic sound of people talking, from the one set and, from the other, the muted beat of the rock music, implacable in its cacophony.