October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “Cho flew that one perfectly,” Antonelli commented as the Pave Hawk circled in and landed a hundred feet away. From its cabin Joe Anderson climbed out and approached while the crewmen retrieved the jettisoned SPIE rigs for the final practice.

  “Fifteen minutes, troops,” Sean said, giving his men a short break before they again took to the sky. “Bux, you’re with me.”

  Graber and Buxton walked to meet Joe halfway to the helicopter. “Nice ride, Mr. Anderson?”

  “Your flyboy should be running the rides at Disney World, Major,” Joe observed. He didn’t know that would be taken as a compliment. “And that is where you want me because it’s safer?”

  “You got it,” Sean affirmed. “I don’t want you on the ground until we have the area secured.”

  “Yeah, the nine of you, your whirlybird, and that fire-breathing Herky bird.” Joe’s eyes rolled. “Good luck.”

  Buxton looked to his commander. “He may have a point, Maj. Once we take out who we have to take out, things could still get interesting. There were a lot of troops in the area according to that last bunch of overheads we saw.”

  “Yeah.” Sean’s mouth contorted in reluctant agreement. No matter how fast Delta was, there was liable to be a large, unfriendly force nearby, if not on top of them. The Israelis had to deal with the same problem at Entebbe, with Ugandan soldiers running around in the dark. They had done the smart thing and eliminated the bulk of them before they had a chance to officially become “the enemy.” Sean and his men would have no such firepower behind them. The AC-130 Spectre gunship, a modified C-130 with 25 and 40mm cannons, a 105mm howitzer, and the advanced targeting systems to accurately fire them at night and in bad weather, was worth a lot of men on the ground, but there was no substitute for those, Sean knew, despite all the ballyhoo about the supremacy of airpower. Delta would need some help, but from where?

  “Why don’t you just rustle up some airborne guys to come in after you?” Joe asked.

  “Because doing that makes it all the more likely that Fidel will know something is up before we get a chance to do our job,” Buxton explained. “Moving anything bigger than what we’re already moving could blow the whole operation.”

  Joe looked at the distance from the Pave Hawk to the circle of drums that represented where his target would be. “I’m gonna have to go across four hundred yards of open ground to do my job, and all there’d have to be is one lucky Cuban out there to take me out? To take any of you out?”

  All it had taken was one lucky Ugandan to kill the commander of the Israeli operation at Entebbe, the mission’s only military casualty. Terrorists were supposed to be the real enemy there, but finding a nemesis was rarely a difficult endeavor if one looked hard enough. There would be opposing forces to spare down in Cuba. Delta had to get in, secure the missile, let Anderson do his thing, then get out of there, all while the loyalist Cubans had the opportunity to take potshots at them. If only the loyalists would suddenly defect to the other...

  That was it. Sean smiled at Buxton. “I think we have our security force.”

  “Who?” Captain Buxton asked, unsurprised that the Maj had again sparked on something. It was his way.

  “Our enemy,” Sean answered. “The trick is convincing them to do it.”

  That, he knew, would be the job of another.

  * * *

  “Holding court” was not the exclusive domain of the president of the Russian Federation.

  Interior Minister Georgiy Bogdanov walked directly from his Zil limousine across the darkened Kremlin grounds to the office of the president and handed him the report without hesitation. “State Security received this less than twenty minutes ago,” he said accusatorially. “Tell me to keep trusting the Americans!”

  Konovalenko read over the report, actually a news story to be printed the following morning in the paper of the American capital. That Bogdanov had received a copy of the translation in advance of him or Foreign Minister Yakovlev was not surprising. This had gone straight to State Security, as it was not from their CIA contact, and it was no secret that Bogdanov had allies in the upper echelons of the intelligence service. KGB holdovers entirely. Did nothing ever change?

  But it was disquieting. The look on the president’s face belied that as he handed the sheets to Yakovlev.

  “The Americans have started relocation procedures for their President,” Bogdanov said quite unnecessarily. It was all in black-and-white. “And a raket submarine is missing? All while our warning radars are shut down!”

  “Georgiy Ivanovich.” Yakovlev laid the report on the president’s desk. “This is an unverified report.”

  “Yes, from an agent you have chosen to handle the most delicate of tasks!” Bogdanov’s neatly combed brown hair fell forward as he shouted. A sweep of his hand pushed it back in place. “You cannot argue trust anymore, my good president. Do you not think the Americans would know these actions would concern us at a time like this? Why, then, have they not informed us in advance? Why?”

  The question was proper, Gennadiy Timofeyevich Konovalenko admitted. So were the fears that motivated it. He looked up to Yakovlev. “Has there been any word from Marshal Kurchatov on the American submarine?”

  “Just that an air search has begun in the Caribbean,” the foreign minister reported.

  “A search!” Bogdanov said sarcastically. “How very convenient this all is.”

  “We will figure this out,” Yakovlev assured him.

  “No.”

  “No, what?” the president inquired..

  “This cannot be tolerated,” Bogdanov said with a force that only a man unafraid of defying his leader could. “You cannot simply sit here and think of an explanation.”

  “What do you suggest, then, Comrade Interior Minister?” Konovalenko demanded. His puffy cheeks flushed a red that even his hardest drinking could not match.

  “See if the good American President can explain this.”

  Konovalenko sat back in his chair, rocking as he pondered what had to be done. He was treading very dangerous ground, part of which he had created by lack of foresight. His strongest ally in the military establishment, the defense minister, no less, was half a world away in the camp of his nation’s...enemy? Bogdanov’s faction in the government enjoyed the support of several high-ranking officers, men who might be unafraid to challenge the Motherland’s leadership with Kurchatov so far removed.

  He had to counter anything that would give Bogdanov and his hard-line cronies an excuse to move on his leadership. He had to prevent that. Disaster could only follow. Before they could take a mile, he would give an inch.

  “Igor Yureivich, get the translator.” The president slid the multiline phone to the center of his desk and scooted close to it. “I hope this satisfies you, Comrade Interior Minister.”

  Satisfying me is the least of your worries, Bogdanov thought. “Let us hope so.”

  * * *

  “You are kidding?” the President inquired hopefully, but with the knowledge that one did not joke about such things.

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” Bud said. Sitting next to him, across from the President, was Greg Drummond.

  “And you, Mr. Drummond, you concur?”

  The DDI was not a regular attendant at briefings in the Oval Office—Anthony Merriweather had reserved that task for himself—and the years that he had on the man sitting across the desk from him could not diminish that somewhat unnerving fact that the most powerful leader in the world was asking him for his opinion on a matter of extreme importance. He actually felt queasy at the moment. “I do, Mr. President.” The Man kept his eyes focused on the DDI. He wanted more. “The target makes sense considering Castro’s expressed hatred of the Russian leadership. They abandoned Cuba, in his eyes. The longer-range Chinese missile also points to Moscow as the target.”

  The President removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes for several seconds before laying the bifocals on his desk. “Let me see if I have this right. We have a mis
sing missile sub, the Russians have no early-warning radar functioning, and there is a thirty-year-old Soviet nuclear warhead targeted on Moscow. Well, gentlemen, if this is true, we have just been visited by Mr. Murphy himself.”

  “Sir, we need to talk to the Russians,” Bud said.

  “And you think they’ll believe this?”

  “We can’t afford to assume that they won’t,” Bud responded. “Showing trust doesn’t always mean that the picture is rosy, but if something happens and we didn’t tell them, then they will most certainly see the worst. And we won’t be able to convince them otherwise.”

  The President looked away from both men, his eyes falling upon the picture of his wife. Unlike his many predecessors, he did not reserve the credenza behind his desk for the obligatory family photos. Several were on his desk, where he could see them. They might have looked better for the cameras arrayed behind him, but then he’d never considered life, or this job, to be a photo op. Pictures held more meaning than that, and the very recent one he was gazing upon was more important than most. The first lady’s growing stomach added a beauty to her that he’d never dreamed possible. The media was joyous for their own reasons; for the first time in decades the White House would echo with the patter of little feet. To the President, it was the little feet that mattered, not the anticipated media circus that would accompany the birth of his first child.

  His stare shifted off the picture and to the room as he thought. All of this could come to an end. All of it. And for no reason other than a madman’s singular, vengeful act. “He has no idea what could happen, does he?”

  “Probably not, sir,” Bud answered. “We are living through the collision of design with circumstance. With that combination we can only imagine the result.’”

  “God. Bud, can’t we do anything quicker to take that missile out? Bomb it or something?”

  “Mr. President, a surgical strike might have a ninety-nine-percent chance of destroying the weapon. Delta would have a ninety-nine-point-one percent chance. Point one is not much of an improvement, but the extra certainty is worth the time and effort. If a bomb misses, all it would take is the press of a button to fire the weapon. We would not have time to react. Troops on the ground can adapt to the situation more quickly than any other force we can employ. If the command bunker they hit is the wrong one, they can shift to another target in seconds. Moving more aircraft in after a failed strike, even if the weapon hadn’t been fired, would be worthless; the surprise would have been lost. This is the best way.”

  “I know. It’s just the chance that something could happen before Delta goes in that worries me. I just keep wondering why Castro hasn’t done anything yet?”

  “We were, too, Mr. President, but we think we figured it out.” The DDI knew this was his territory. “We figured that Moscow was almost certainly Castro’s chosen target from a number of things. One of these was a recent speech he made where he laid blame squarely on the Russians for ‘forsaking the Revolution.’ Rhetoric, if ever there was, but he also said something else very telling. He said, ‘One day the Russian people will awake from a night’s slumber expecting to see the sun, but they will find only the darkness they themselves have created.’ ”

  The President looked to Bud. “My God.”

  “A wake-up call for the citizens of Moscow. If we’re correct, that would mean a launch in about ten-and-a-half hours,” Bud said. “Thirty-minute flight time. Arrival just in time for sunrise.”

  “Why didn’t he do that this morning?”

  “Fueling, Mr. President,” the DDI explained. “Imagery from a reconnaissance pass showed tank trucks at the site earlier. They might not have had time enough to fuel the missile for a launch today. There’s no doubt they’ll be ready for one tomorrow.”

  “So he’s sitting there waiting, a nuclear missile ready to fly, with his finger on the button. All because he wants to fulfill some grandiose prophecy.” The President’s head shook slowly. “How could any man be that cold and calculating? Does he realize how many innocent people will die?”

  “Of course he does, but you can’t apply a thinking person’s logic to a madman,” Bud said. “And that is what he is. It is what he has always been.”

  Cuba was going to be free. That was how this all started, the President thought. Now what would happen? He couldn’t answer that to his own satisfaction and could not afford to spend time pondering it right now. The liberation of Cuba was now on the back burner. The survival of the Russian capital, and possibly of much more, was in the forefront. “How do we do this, Bud?”

  “Carefully,” the NSA began. “You have to speak to President Konovalenko personally and be very honest. If you have to, tell him about the rebellion, but assure him that the Cuban military approached us. He needs to know that we’re not keeping anything from him. Anything.”

  “All right.” The President reached for the phone to call the head Russian translator—one was always on standby in the White House—but it rang just as his fingers touched the handset. “Yes.”

  “Mr. President, we have an urgent direct voice call from the Russian president. His translator is on the line.”

  “Speak of the Devil.”

  “Really?” Bud said.

  “Urgent, they say. He already has his translator on the line.” It would take several minutes to get the White House Russian speaker in place, and “Urgent” had a special meaning to it in superpower communications.

  “Take it now,” Bud said. “Konovalenko’s translator can handle both ends, and our guy can verify the tape after the call. Just remember to be straight with him.”

  “But why is he calling?” the President wondered aloud. There was only one way to find out. “Put it through.”

  “Mr. President, thank you for taking my call,” the translator said, repeating the Russian heard in the background.

  “It is my pleasure, President Konovalenko. Your translator will have to handle both ends of the conversation, as I did not want to delay speaking with you. There is...”

  “Thank you for preventing any delay. This is of the utmost urgency. The utmost.”

  The President’s brow furrowed at the double use of “utmost.” “What is the problem?”

  Problem? Bud thought, too late to realize that something was terribly wrong.

  “Why, Mr. President, are your wartime airborne command posts on alert with your highest military officer aboard?”

  Bud didn’t hear the words on the other end. All he saw was the President go absolutely pale.

  “Command posts?” the President said, reacting with a denial-like question for lack of any other response. It was also the worst thing that could have been said at the moment.

  * * *

  “Whoa!” the signals-watch officer at NORAD exclaimed. His position was in the main control room of the facility, among a hundred other watch officers who continuously monitored their displays for any events that could be considered hostile toward the United States. “I have never seen this before.”

  “What is it, Captain?” the duty officer inquired, looking over the officer’s shoulder.

  “The Moscow ABM system just fired up, Colonel. Man! Those radars are putting out some major signals.” A SIGINT—or Signals Intelligence—package piggybacked onboard one of the Defense Support Program early-warning satellites had just registered the spewing of radar energy from the Pill Box phased-array radar, located north of Moscow at Pushkino, that supported the sixty-four ABM-1 Galosh long-range antiballistic missiles ringing the Russian capital in eight sites of eight missiles each. “Whoa! There go the others.” The Flat Twin radars supporting the thirty-six shorter-range ABM-3 Gazelle missiles had now come to life. “We didn’t hear of any Russian ABM exercise, did we?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” the duty officer said. They’d better not be fucking with us. Not at a time like this. The thirty-year colonel looked toward the door up the twin stairs. Behind them might be the answer, but he couldn’t just go ask. As a duty
officer, he was privy to the special happenings at NORAD for the next couple of weeks, and he also knew that this was not supposed to happen. No, he couldn’t ask the Russians sitting in watch of his country’s strategic forces just what the hell was going on. But someone could. “Get CINCNORAD down here, pronto.”

  * * *

  Colonel Ojeda’s stare sliced into the eyes of the CIA man opposite him. It was a test. A man’s eyes, he had learned early in life, told all. If he was fearful, they shifted. If he was truthful, they would not shrink from the challenge of another’s gaze. If he was lying, the eyes would be like hollow orbs. Papa Tony’s met his with an equal test.

  “The stories were true, it would appear,” Ojeda commented, his eyes still on the American. “Eh, Captain?”

  Captain Manchon nodded as he, too, surveyed the face. “It would appear, sir.”

  “What stories?” Antonio asked. The visual contest ended with his question. The midday sun blazed down around the shade tree that they stood under, and a pervasive wetness had invaded every crevice of the CIA officer’s body. He undid three more buttons on his sweat-darkened uniform before his wondering was answered.

  “Of the missile,” Manchon began. “For many years there have been rumors of such a weapon. They began after the Russians left. At first we disregarded them as nothing. Soon they began to die away, except among many officers. Officers of rank and privilege.”

  “General Ontiveros himself often mused on the effect such a weapon would have on the Revolution, in private, of course,” Ojeda revealed. “I asked him once if the stories were true.” The colonel paused and remembered the moment. “He looked away and said nothing. The general was an honorable man.”

  Paredes knew he could not judge the man Ojeda respected above his many other superiors. Much had been said of General Eduardo Echevarria Ontiveros by the briefers from Langley, none of it very flattering. He was a staunch Communist, in opposition to the president because of his disastrous policies that had destroyed the nation’s economy. Whether he could have done better with his own brand of the same ideology was highly unlikely. But he had imparted something to the men he commanded, something beyond even loyalty. It was a wisdom of sorts, one that challenged his subordinates to challenge the ideas given them as gospel in search of a better way. Ojeda had done so, and had come to the conclusion that the ways championed by the general were not the ways of the future. In one spark of realization he had become Ontiveros’s most loyal critic, an act of quasi-treachery that might have earned him a date with the firing squad under men of less character. From the general it had won him the highest respect an officer could give a man under his command. How could he judge right and wrong in such an unconventional mating of ideals? Antonio wondered. If Ontiveros had done nothing else, he had made Colonel Hector Ojeda the man that he was.