Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  “Comrade Fidel!” Tukov finally exclaimed, standing abruptly and snapping to attention. Another man followed Castro into the tent, and he recognized, as everybody would recognize, the smoothly handsome features of Che Guevera.

  “Greetings, Comrade Tukov!” Fidel said expansively, waving his cigar enthusiastically. “I hope you are finding everything you need as you and your men get settled in my country!” He spoke in rapid Spanish.

  Tukov replied in the same language, albeit more slowly. “Very good, Sir. Your men have been most helpful.” He gestured to the blueprints. “I am just making final decisions on the emplacements, and then we can begin excavating, clearing for the roads and the launch pads. The SAM batteries are already deployed around the perimeter, most satisfactorily.”

  “So it is true—you speak our language!” the Cuban leader declared, obviously pleased. “Tell me: how did this come to be?”

  “I fought with the Loyalists against Franco, in Spain, Comrade,” Tukov explained. “I was a young platoon leader there for more than two years, in command of two dozen brave men—all Spanish nationals,” he added, feeling a surge of pride at the memory—even as the old bitterness came back. “We would have defeated the fascists, if not for the cowardice of the Western World.”

  “True.” It was Che who answered, his voice surprisingly soft in contrast to Fidel’s effusiveness. “You and your comrades heroically carried the torch of socialism beyond the borders of its birthplace. A noble cause, indeed. But have faith: the revolution will come to Spain within our lifetime.”

  “I believe that too, comrade,” Tukov agreed, starting to relax. “Just as the two of you have brought the revolution home to the Western Hemisphere.”

  “And you and your comrades have augmented our revolution splendidly,” Castro said, striding around the spacious tent—which suddenly seemed rather small—while Guevera stepped to the table and began to study the schematic diagrams. “Your battery—correct me if I’m wrong—is of the medium-range ballistic-missile type, is it not?”

  “Indeed, Comrade Fidel,” Tukov agreed, feeling more comfortable now that he was on familiar ground. “We have four launchers for the SS-4 rockets. We expect to have the launchers installed and ready for operations by the third week in October. We have a total of six rockets for those launchers.”

  “Splendid! The range of these missiles will allow a target as far as way as Washington D.C. to be destroyed, I understand. Could they be made to reach New York?”

  “Washington is at about the limit of our range, Sir. I think New York is too far away for the SS-4 to reach, at least from here in western Cuba. I would need to do some more calculations to give you an answer with certainty—obviously, my current focus has been on readying my battery for operations. Target decisions and capability will be determined in the future.” Tukov felt vaguely uneasy with the line of questioning. He well understood the horrific power of the weapons under his command, and it was his firm belief that they would never actually be employed. The whole idea of a deadly long-range rocket force was to deter the enemy from taking action that might cause those weapons to be used.

  “Or New Orleans?” Castro continued, as if Tukov hadn’t spoken. “Surely they will reach that far. Miami, Atlanta, without question. Let the yanquis tremble with that knowledge!”

  “Indeed, mi lider,” Guevera acknowledged, in that smooth, detached voice. He turned his attention to Tukov. “The warheads for these missiles—the thermonuclear devices? You will keep them here, with your battery?”

  Tukov’s stomach began to churn. “I’m afraid not, Comrade. The doctrine of the Strategic Rocket Forces requires that the actual…devices…must be secured in a separate and highly protected location. Of course, they will be close enough that we can bring them here and mate them to the missiles in a matter of hours.”

  “Hours? Not minutes?” Castro frowned, and it was a terrifying frown indeed. But he waved his cigar and seemed to clear away his displeasure with the gesture. “General Pliyev was describing this process to me, and we have located an underground bunker—already in existence—between here and Havana. Now tell me, Colonel, do you have time to give me a tour of your facility.”

  “Of course, Comrade,” Tukov lied. He gestured to the aide who still stood by the tent door. “Cover these blueprints until I return.”

  Then he followed the two revolutionaries from the tent. He barely saw them walking ahead of him, as instead his mind focused on a stark and terrifying thought:

  These men are actually talking about firing my rockets!

  He wondered if either, or both, of them might actually be insane enough to try.

  1630 hours (Saturday afternoon)

  Approaching Key West Naval Air Station

  Key West, Florida

  “Geez—take it easy, Derek! What the hell are you trying to do?”

  As her brother banked the little Piper Cub almost ninety degrees, Stella Widener squawked a protest in spite of her best efforts at self control. The coral blue waters of the Florida Strait sparkled below her window for a second, and then the little airplane soared over land—over concrete, more specifically. Her brother grinned as he leveled the plane and began to descend toward the landing strip.

  “I wanted to check out the flight line,” he explained, with no hint of apology. He pointed past her face, out the starboard window of the cockpit. “Look at those babies lined up there. I’d heard a rumor they sent some Phantoms down here. It’s true.”

  Having grown up in a family of naval aviators, Stella was no stranger to aircraft types. She quickly spotted four large fighters hulking over the dozen delta-wing F6 Skyrays that she knew formed the permanent fighter detachment for the Key West NAS, the base where their father was currently the commanding officer.

  “They’re huge,” she acknowledged. “Except for the wings, that is.” Indeed, the F4s, which were America’s newest and most capable aerial interceptor, looked like they had shorter, stubbier wings even than the much smaller, single-seat Skyrays.

  Derek snorted. “With those turbojets, they almost don’t need wings.”

  She heard the pride in his voice and understood his emotion. During the flight down from Washington, he told her that he’d not only qualified to pilot the Phantom, but had been assigned to the squadron that would fly from the USS Enterprise, the largest and most modern aircraft carrier in the world. This quick visit, the two of them seeing their father at Key West, was the end of his leave. He was due to report to the ship, already at sea in the Caribbean, in just two more days.

  As Derek slowly brought the Cub down to land on the final short section of the long runway, Stella took a deep breath. She spotted her father, standing at ease in his summer white uniform, waiting for them beside the small hangar reserved for little piston-engine, propeller-driven planes like the Piper. His face, as usual, was a mask, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for the effort that would be required to penetrate it.

  This whole trip had come about in a whirlwind. She’d barely seen the last edits of her ground-breaking piece on the Kremlin, which had been broken into segments to run on the Nightly News for a week. As the work week neared an end, she’d wanted nothing more than to put up her heels, catch up on her rest, and maybe go see a movie with one of her girlfriends. That all changed when Derek called just before five p.m. on Friday with a plan for this excursion. After they met for breakfast Saturday morning, he’d driven them out to the small private airport, where he’d rented the Cub for the weekend. After a stop in Georgia to refuel, they were about to land on the last island in the Florida Keys for dinner with their father.

  Commander Widener strode up to the plane before the propeller stopped turning. Derek popped out through the pilot’s door, saluted, then clasped his father’s hand as the glimmer of a smile cracked the elder officer’s mask.

  Stella came around the Cub and accepted her father’s embrace, hugging him back with just a hint of reserve. “You’re looking more beautiful than ev
er, Stel,” Alex said.

  “She just got back from Russia,” Derek boasted. “She got the first American film ever shot inside the Kremlin!”

  “Really?” the commander said. He sounded surprised, though Stella had told him the news in a letter as soon as she’d landed back in the U.S. Hadn’t he read it? More likely, it hadn’t made much of an impression on him. He still seemed to view his daughter’s career as some sort of hobby. Now his head tilted to the side. “How’d you manage that?” he asked.

  The young newswoman flushed. She was used to such jabs from her fellow newshounds, but it seemed strangely inappropriate coming from her father. She was a good reporter! Yet she couldn’t suppress the vivid memory of the night in Boston—and she knew that she wasn’t above using her looks, her sex appeal, in pursuit of a story.

  “I keep telling you, Dad—she’s damned good at what she does,” Derek interjected. Stella was grateful as he gestured, turning the conversation to the hulking, modern fighters lined up on the tarmac a hundred yards away. “So it’s true—you got some Phantoms in here now?”

  From the ground they looked even larger than they had from the air. The short wings swept downward at a sharp angle. The canopy on one of the F4s was raised, revealing the two seats—one behind the other—for the pilot and weapons officer. The cockpits on the remaining fighters were closed, and looked like bulging glass eyes atop the solid mass of fuselage. An array of objects dangled from beneath the wings and fuselage of the nearest Phanton, and Stella guessed the torpedo-shaped pods might be additional fuel tanks. Stubby rockets with bristling tail fins clustered onto a weapons mount near the end of each wing.

  “They’re here for an unknown duration,” Alex Widener explained, in his precise naval jargon. “Castro’s been acting up—he’s sent some MiGs over the strait, where they’ve harassed some of our recon flights. MiG-19s, not the best Russian stuff. Just a couple days ago I scrambled a pair of Skyrays to chase them back down to their island.”

  “They sound pretty bold,” Derek noted. “Wouldn’t you love to send a few rockets up their tails?”

  The base CO nodded firmly. “That’s what it’ll take. But we don’t have the will in Washington to do anything about it.”

  “Maybe the President isn’t ready to start a war,” Stella observed pointedly.

  “It may not be his choice to make,” Alex replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Khrushchev is putting in some nukes down there. Ninety miles away from our shores—while we sit here and do nothing!”

  “Nuclear rockets?” she responded. “He wouldn’t dare!”

  Her father looked at her like he was trying to decide if she was trustworthy. She flushed under the scrutiny, but the commander merely shrugged and looked at his watch. “We’ll have dinner at the O-Club in two hours,” he announced. “Why don’t you get cleaned up from the trip? I want to show Derek around.”

  “Derek is dirtier than I am,” she replied, her tone sharpened by her father’s apparent dismissal. “I’d like to join you on the tour. Unless you think I’m going to give something classified away to the Russians!”

  Widener blinked in surprise, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “That’s my jeep over there. I’m going to leave a message in the command center, and then we can get started.”

  * * *

  A little less than two hours later, they entered the Officers’ Club and stopped in the bar while their table was readied. Stella ordered a glass of wine, while her father had his usual, a scotch and soda. Derek—who would fly them back to D.C. in the morning—settled for a Coke. The bartender then flicked a lighter first to Stella’s and then to the commander’s and the lieutenant’s cigarettes. Alex gave his daughter a slight glance of disapproval but didn’t comment—the battle over her smoking had been settled with an uneasy truce several years ago.

  “Those Crusaders on the far side of the field,” Stella asked, exhaling a pleasurable plume of smoke as she remembered the F8 fighter jets they’d seen on the tour of the base. “I’ve seen them before, but these were different. They looked like they had glass windows under the fuselage. What’s the reason for that?”

  “Very observant of you,” Derek said, obviously proud. He explained, before their father could reply. “That’s the RF8 variant. It’s a photo-reconnaissance ship, not a fighter.” He turned to Alex. “I know they’re specialized for low level recon, and you told me you think Castro has nuclear missiles down there. Don’t tell me you’ve gotten pictures?”

  “Nothing so straightforward,” the commander replied. “The RF8s are on standby, awaiting authorization. As for those rockets, it’s just a hunch of mine—and a few others. We’ve heard rumors based on eyewitness reports coming in to Navy intelligence. You know that there’s a Pan Am flight every day from Havana to Miami? Well, each one of those flights is packed with people who are eager as hell to get out of Cuba, and to get back at Castro—they hate the son of a bitch. So it’s an intelligence gold mine. I’ve heard that more than a few of them have reported on very long trailers being trucked out to remote locations in Cuba. I can put two and two together as well as anyone—except, apparently, our Commander in Chief!”

  He tossed off his drink with the last remark and glared at Stella, ready for a challenge. She just sighed and shook her head. “You still can’t get over the fact that Nixon lost, can you, Dad?”

  A potential minefield of a conversation was aborted when a white-jacketed steward appeared to escort them to their table. Alex curtly gestured at his empty glass, which the bartender replaced immediately. Stella waved him away from her half-full wine glass.

  The base commander naturally got the best table in the Officers’ Club: a semi-private space in the corner of the dining room, with a westward view of the Florida Strait, a gorgeous sunset, and a fringe of palm trees lining the beach to the south.

  “So, tell us about the Big K,” Derek suggested, using the nickname that some press outlets had applied to Khrushchev over the past few years. “Did he pound his shoe on anything? Or blow his top?”

  She laughed. “Actually, he’s kind of a funny little man. He laughed a lot and flirted shamelessly. He’s very proud of Russia, and the Kremlin—which really is a beautiful building, a palace really, as well as the seat of government. I think he let me do the story because he wanted to show it off. I got the impression he really wants to be liked.”

  “He’s got an odd way of showing that,” Alex declared.

  “Well, he’s full of bluster, that’s for sure. He even made some threats about ‘American imperialism’ and so forth, though I’d swear he had a joking gleam in his eye when he made them. I think he’s pretty insecure. Did you know that he never really went to school, that he really was raised from a peasant family? He was working inside metal boiler tanks, cleaning out coal scum, before he was a teenager. I think he’s sincere about believing that Marxism is leading his people to a better life.”

  “What do you think about that?” Alex challenged. “You’re not going Red, are you?”

  “Of course not, Dad!” she snapped, offended. “And neither is our President, just because he’s not willing to let you send bombers off to Cuba!”

  “By the time he does, it will be too late,” her father noted dourly, waving at the steward for another refill of his cocktail. “I tell you, Kennedy’s just a pretty boy—too soft for the job!”

  “He is rather handsome,” Derek teased, as usual trying to ease the tension between his sister and their father. “You must have noticed that when you interviewed him, didn’t you? Back in Boston, when he’d just been elected to the Senate?”

  She flushed angrily at the thought that Derek might somehow know what had transpired in that hotel room interview six years earlier. But her brother’s tone was light, gently mocking, and she exhaled as she realized he was just being himself.

  “His looks have nothing to do with his strength as a leader,” she retorted. “But he has a tremendous amount of charisma, and a rather unique
ability to see problems from the other person’s point of view. That might actually be a useful skill for a Commander in Chief!”

  Their food—exquisitely grilled grouper fillets stuffed with stone-crab meat—arrived, with another refill for Alex and a second glass of wine for Stella. She felt just a little light-headed but recognized that her father seemed well on his way to getting drunk. They talked about happier times as they ate, sharing memories of their mother, avoiding mention of the cancer that had struck so cruelly and fatally just three years ago. The two siblings kept the conversation going as their father seemed to sink deeper into melancholy.

  “You know, they’ve told me to find space for a Marine air group,” Alex announced suddenly, while they started to nibble at slices of tart key lime pie. He shook his head. “Do they know how small this island is? We’re a backwater, a half-assed way station on the road to nowhere!”

  The outburst surprised Stella. “But all that you said about Cuba—surely Key West is a tremendous asset for keeping an eye on Castro?” Or attacking him, she added silently.