AFTER DARK ON the same day, Cuban Freedom Fighters were landed by Marine Force Recon units both on the southwest coast and inland, near the Sierra Maestra Mountains, from which Fidel Castro had come more than thirty years ago. Make a go of it, they were told, show genuine support among the people, and we’ll support you.
IN HAVANA, CROWDS filled the streets shouting anti-American slogans, burning crudely stitched American flags, and marching on the Swiss Embassy that contained a U.S. interests section. Riot police and soldiers barely prevented the demonstrators from storming the building.
Reaction in other Cuban cities was far more muted, but anti-American demonstrations rocked cities from Mexico to Argentina.
8
ADMIRAL DANIELS WAS finishing his simple lunch of beef broth, pears, and cottage cheese in his house in Alexandria, Virginia. He moved a tetrapod-mounted magnifying glass down a very satisfying piece in the Washington Post about Cuban insurgents attacking and capturing a remote police barracks in the mountains when his nurse came in and said there was a messenger waiting with a letter. “He doesn’t look threatening, Admiral,” the retired navy medical corpsman said. “I think he works for Colonel Thayer, but I didn’t ask.”
“Please show him in,” the old admiral said, standing and putting on his suit jacket.
A man in a black chauffeur’s uniform came in, followed by the burly nurse, who stayed by the door of the dining room. The chauffeur greeted Admiral Daniels, and handed him an unsealed envelope. Daniels shook out a single sheet of paper and put on his thick glasses. He recognized Thayer’s shaky hand, large letters to aid Daniels’s near nonexistent vision. “The Keyman wants one more day. Come as soon as you can and bring your technician.”
The Keyman was their informal code for Vice President Donahue. The technician was the mysterious man-in-black’s shooter, hidden someplace and known to Daniels through a cutout phone in the District. Daniels looked up at the blurred face of Thayer’s man. “I’ll have to arrange a car and driver, then I’ll do as Colonel Thayer asks.”
“Colonel Thayer said I was to take you anywhere you directed, Admiral,” the chauffeur said.
Daniels held the letter up before tossing it into the blazing fireplace. “Did you read this?” he asked.
“Of course not, sir.”
“Then let’s go to his house in the Shenandoah.”
9
ERNESTO CASTRO, EL Nieto to his people, summoned el coronel Ramon Carvahal to his office at the old Pardo Palace in central Havana. News of the raid on a police barracks had made him very angry, and he wanted answers. Regular army troops had retaken the place, but only after the rebels had stripped it of weapons and supplies and slipped back into the forest. El Nieto was badly scared.
Colonel Carvahal knocked, entered, came to attention before Castro’s desk, and saluted. Carvahal’s relations with El Nieto were correct but distant. Carvahal considered El Nieto a pompous dilettante who had lived a soft and luxurious life while his grandfather had ruled in the name of socialism and sacrifice.
“Sit down, please, Colonel,” Castro said. “Coffee?”
“No thank you, my president.”
“What is the news from—from the mountains?”
“There are at least two bands, maybe three. A few hundred in each. It is hard to know more because the Americans are keeping our air force grounded. We do know the Americans are landing supplies by boat and helicopter from ships in the area.”
“Is there any sign of popular support?”
“That area is very poor,” Carvahal said, looking at his hands. “It was there that your grandfather began his revolution, recruiting peasants by giving them food and boots he got from the Russians. I can only assume the rebels will recruit the same way.”
El Nieto slammed a pudgy fist on the desk, rattling his coffee cup. “We must crush these insurgents! If they can take a province, a city, and hold it, the Americans will recognize a provisional government. Then they will come and bring more gusanos with them.”
“We drove them back to the sea in 1961, my president,” Carvahal said softly. “At the Playa de Cocinos. The revolution’s finest hour.” Carvahal didn’t believe El Nieto had a finest hour in him.
“The gusanos could have succeeded if the Americans had used their vast air power,” El Nieto snarled. “President Kennedy feared to do so because he feared the Russians. President Tolliver shows no such reluctance.”
“He has no international support. I think he will leave his Miami friends in the lurch.”
“He has God on his side,” Castro sneered. “Tolliver is the problem; one man. Remove him and the world will breathe again.”
Carvahal studied the fat little man. He was trying to grow a beard, the better to look the part, and had affected the green utility uniform of his grandfather, hiding away his extensive wardrobe of Italian suits. He looked like a clown, one of the sad ones. “Is that an order, my president?”
Castro jerked in his chair. He hated decisions. “Could it be done? Done without anyone knowing it was us?”
Carvahal kept his face expressionless. How nice to be paid for the same job twice. “It could be. Very expensive, though.”
“Look into it,” El Nieto said cautiously. “Someone must rid the world of this ranting preacher.”
“‘Look into it?’” Carvahal goaded.
Castro drew himself up. “Do it, but don’t get caught. Do it soon before this insurgency becomes a real threat to the Cuban revolution.”
More of a threat to your lazy ass, Carvahal thought as he left.
10
THE VICE PRESIDENT of the United States, Joseph Donahue of Connecticut, was surprised when his executive assistant informed him that the president wanted to see him in the Oval Office at his earliest convenience. He had not been invited to national security meetings nor even informed of them, since the president had rudely thrown him out after he objected to the Persian Gulf raids. He thought the president was dangerous and getting more so. He had listened to the dark predictions of Colonel Alfred Thayer. It was obvious that Thayer and others were preparing to assassinate the president, though of course the old banker hadn’t said so in so many words.
Donahue was torn. He wanted the job; he thought it was legitimately his, since he firmly believed Tolliver had stolen the election through voter intimidation and massive spending far beyond that allowed by the campaign finance laws. But could he countenance murder?
Thayer had made the “good of the nation” argument—that Tolliver’s increasing rashness was ruining world markets, shattering the wealth of entire nations, and perhaps bringing the world closer to catastrophic wars. Donahue was getting more of his information from increasingly alarmed cabinet members, notably Carolyn White, Malcolm Japes, and the Ambassador to the U.N. Christine Whitman. Carolyn was particularly concerned about the Cuban situation, where American air and naval forces remained, in contrast to their rapid withdrawal from Korean waters and the Persian Gulf after the raids.
It’s only a matter of time, Carolyn said, before one of those Kilo-class submarines the Russians sold the Cubans in the early nineties pops an aircraft carrier. What then?
Joseph Donahue straightened his tie, put on his suit jacket, and walked across the West Wing to the Oval Office.
COBRA WAS INTERRUPTED at his dinner by a loud knocking on the cabin door. “Mary” answered, and immediately brought him a blindfold. He put it on with a shrug. The guards had let him walk around the compound blindfolded during daylight for a modicum of exercise, guided by Mary or Joseph. He had been locked away for a week, but hardly mistreated. Mary had turned out to be an excellent cook with a range of dishes he wouldn’t have expected from a country woman, and Joseph brought him books and newspapers. He was getting tired of American television that seemed even more mindless than South African, and he was bored, but he knew the game and how much of it was waiting. Waiting for the split second when he completed his contract.
Two of his keepers came in an
d guided him outside. He was helped into a van that smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Soon they were rolling along a winding road. He heard the rustle of dry leaves under the tires, and felt the air coming through open windows grow chillier and drier; the van was climbing into low hills.
VICE PRESIDENT DONAHUE was admitted to the Oval Office by a uniformed marine guard. The awful Jenna Carradine had apparently left for the day. Donahue found the president seated at his desk, slumped over his Bible, open before him. The president looked as though he had aged ten years in the two weeks since their last confrontation. “Please be seated, Joseph. Better yet, pour us both a drink and then take a seat.”
The president’s voice was soft and toned with sorrow. The vice president poured generous tumblers of bourbon and brought them to the desk, and sat. The president had never once called him Joseph during the whole time he had known him.
“Mr. President?” Donahue said, when Tolliver sat silent, turning the pages of the big Bible.
The president nodded, and looked up. “We never got to know each other, Joseph, and that’s my fault. Please call me Justice, or Juss, when we’re alone. I need your help and there may be little time.”
“Of course, Mr.—Justice.”
“I’ve never shared my vision with you, because I knew you’d oppose it.”
Donahue shifted in his chair. “I still do, Mr. President.”
“Then I must convince you. You must believe so you can carry on.
“Carry on?”
“I sense I may not be able to complete the nation’s and the Lord’s work. I sense I’ll not have time.”
Donahue looked hard at the man, holding his face expressionless. Could he have found out about Colonel Thayer’s plot to kill him? Did he suspect Donahue’s guilty knowledge?
Justice studied the man he had accepted as vice president with disgust. What is he thinking? Can he know already what Clarissa knows about the reporter digging up the money-laundering scheme of Little Cheyenne, his contacts with Castro and Madame Binh, and Clarissa’s prediction of impeachment and disgrace? He turned a page in his Bible. “Joseph, I believe God has ordered a reckoning. I believe it’s here, in Revelation. The earthquake that destroyed Los Angeles, literally splitting it into three burning cities, is precisely foretold in chapter sixteen, although the city in the prophecy is Babylon, but who could but argue that Los Angeles, with its license and violence, has become Babylon?” The president turned pages back. “Revelation describes plagues, and the reasons. Chapter nine, verse twenty-one. ‘Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.’ Sound like central Africa, or Bosnia, or Iraq? Are the plagues AIDS, or Ebola, or some new horror?
“Last month Iran tested a weapon of great power, almost certainly nuclear, if crude. Chapter nine, verse one, ‘And the fifth angel sounded and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth and to him was given the key to the bottomless pit’; verse two, ‘and he opened the bottomless pit and there arose a smoke out of the pit as the smoke of a great furnace and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’ Joseph?”
“Mr. President—Justice, these are ancient words, written, it is thought, while the Divine was consuming narcotic mushrooms—”
The president continued, ignoring the interruption. “Chapter sixteen, verse eight. ‘And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.’ What does that sound like to you? Chapter sixteen, verse ten. ‘And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast, and his kingdom was full of darkness, and they gnawed their tongues for pain.’ Chapter twenty, verse one. ‘And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.’ Verse two. ‘And he laid hold of the dragon, that old serpent that is the devil and Satan and bound him for a thousand years.’ Then, verse three. ‘And cast him into the bottomless pit and shut him up and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till a thousand years shall be fulfilled, and after that he must be loosed a little season.’ Think of it, Joseph.”
The vice president shook his head. Alfred Thayer was right; the man was clearly deranged.
“‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them in battle, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.’ What is that, Joseph? St. John the Divine knew only Asia Minor, yet the prophecy looks east, always east. Gog and Magog, with numbers like the sand of the sea? China? Russia? India? Pakistan? From the east, Joseph. The end of the world will come from the east if God is denied His reckoning, and who will prevent that if we do not?”
Donahue took a deep breath. He fought down an urge to flee the presence of this madman. “Mr. President, do you believe the Bible is literal truth?”
Justice shook his head. “No, Joseph, and I’ll admit something to you I’ve admitted to no one, although I know many say it. I answered the call to preach to avoid service in Vietnam. But I did study the scripture as a fundamentalist, and preached as a fundamentalist. The words go deep inside the more they are said, and are accepted by the congregation in front of you yearning for comfort and guidance. More and more I began to believe in the warnings, the threat of reckoning, the wrath of God. What I see here is a pattern that cannot be coincidental.”
Donahue didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. “The millennium was a thousand years ago. Nothing happened then.”
“Much happened then. There were outbreaks of bubonic plague all over the world, including the one in Venice that foreshadowed the great plague of the fourteenth century. There were religious revivals and the burning of priests and heretics. There was the never explained frenzy of St. Vitus’s Dance. Monasteries were besieged and some were destroyed. Mystery cults flourished and defied the church. And darkness—ignorance, disease, and depopulation—descended upon the earth. Much happened, Joseph, but not a full reckoning.”
“And now?” the vice president said in a small voice.
“And now the second millennium has come and gone. Mankind is polluting and destroying the world. Genocide and exploitation are everywhere. Every little dictator has nuclear weapons and germs and poison gases. Who stands before the Beast? Only the United States, and she, I challenge you, sir, reluctantly.”
“I’m speechless,” Donahue said.
“Go and reflect, Joseph, and pray. See if the pattern I see is not revealed to you.”
The vice president mumbled his assent. When he stood his knees nearly buckled, but he got out of the room.
He’s mad, utterly mad, the vice president thought. He hurried back to his office and called Colonel Alfred Thayer.
THAYER PUT THE PHONE down just as Admiral Daniels came into his office. The Admiral took his usual seat as the butler who had brought him in poured a snifter of Armagnac and set it on the table beside him. “That was Donahue,” Thayer said, his voice just above a whisper. “He just spent a half hour with the Reverend Tolliver, receiving a lecture about the end of the world as described in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. The bottomless pit, Gog and Magog, the whole nonsense. Keyman is finally convinced that the president is mad and must be removed.”
Daniels shook his head slowly. “Then it must be done.”
“And done quickly. What is the status of the technician?”
“His handlers have collected him. He’ll be brought to one of the hunting cabins up on the ridge a mile from here. We shall then instruct him.”
Thayer pondered; sipped his Armagnac. “An interesting development. Donahue was very evasive in the past; no personal involvement; deniability, all that.”
“And now?”
“Now he’s very frightened, and he’s coming here.”
11
U.S. AIR FORCE and navy aircraft continued to range over Cuba, and the marines continued their ins
ertions of eager but poorly trained Cuban exiles in the southeast of the island, with tons of supplies of war. Guerrilla units expanded influence and support, if not control, in the province of Granma, near the Sierra Maestra, and raiding into the neighboring province of Las Tunas. The marines were sending more supplies, by air and sea but also directly from the naval station at Guantanamo Bay. The Russians were too poor and too busy with their neighbors to help, but they thundered nonetheless against American aggression.
COBRA WAS BROUGHT to a small cabin and locked in a Spartan but comfortable bedroom. He was given dinner. At 10:00 P.M. he heard a helicopter land close by, then take off almost immediately. Shortly thereafter, he heard two vehicles arrive on the gravel road, doors slam, and voices.
Cobra heard voices and the noise of furniture being shoved around in the main room of the cabin. He got off his bed and put on his half boots; considered a shave, but there was a knock on the door. Cobra put on his blindfold. “Come,” he said, and the door was unlocked and opened.
He was led out and seated in a straight wooden chair. To his surprise, his blindfold was removed and he was given a glass of water. Three men sat at a table facing him, about fifteen feet away. The only light in the room was from behind and above them; they were dark silhouettes casting long shadows past his chair. Cobra sipped his water and waited.
“You have been brought here,” a whispery voice said, “because a man must be killed.”
Cobra nodded, and waited some more. He wasn’t here to talk.
“We propose to pay you four million dollars, deposited according to your instructions anywhere in the world. Half now and half on completion of the mission.”
Cobra still said nothing.
“Is that a fair price?” the raspy voice said.
Cobra shifted his chair a few inches to the right. He was establishing his own space. “That would depend on the target, the location, and the time,” he said.
Behold a Pale Horse Page 21
