Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  “Sure, Chief.”

  “Have you ever shot a Tommy gun before?”

  “Uh, no, I haven’t.”

  “Well, that’s why I got the extra ammo. Let’s go back to the rail.” Weber led the young sailor back to the position he’d occupied when he had been watching the ship’s wake. The chief showed him how to snap the stick magazine in place on the underside of the gun, just in front of the trigger guard.

  “This is the safety. You keep that clicked ‘On,’ unless someone like me tells you otherwise, got it?”

  “Sure.” Duncan clicked the safety on and off a few times. Next, the chief showed him how to set the gun on fully automatic and semi-automatic firing patterns.

  “There are twenty rounds in that stick. Try it on semi-auto, and squeeze off five quick shots. Aim for the horizon.”

  Duncan did as he was told, trying not to wince at the loud reports from each shot. He wished he had a target to aim at, but the chief told him not to worry. “Now try it on full auto. Again, aim at the horizon.”

  This time the gun chattered loudly, blasting out the remaining fifteen rounds in a matter of a few seconds.

  “Are you still aimed at the horizon?”

  Duncan was chagrined to note that the barrel was pointed steeply up in the air. “Uh, sorry, no, Chief.”

  “It happens to everyone. That thing climbs like a bitch. Now, I don’t think you’re going to have to shoot anyone, but shoot off another magazine just so you get the feel of it.”

  Duncan followed the instructions, and managed to do a better job of holding the barrel down, though it took a lot of effort and concentration. “You just checked out on the Tommy gun,” Weber said proudly, handing him the third magazine. “This one’s for you to keep. But put the safety back on first.”

  “So what’s this about boarding parties?” Duncan asked, doing what he’d been told. There was a broad leather strap on the gun, and he slung it over his shoulder, getting used to the weight against his back.

  “We’re going to look for some Russian ships and try to pull ’em over like we’re traffic cops,” Weber told him. “When they stop, Conning will lower a boat, and Lieutenant Decker, some other officer from Naval Intelligence who I guess speaks Russian, me, and six sailors, are going to go over and have a look around on that Russian ship. You, Seaman George Duncan, get to be one of those six sailors!”

  “Okay, Chief. You got it.”

  “I knew I could count on you,” the NCO said, clapping him on the shoulder and strolling away.

  That’s the Navy for you, George reflected, not at all displeased by the new assignment. Never a dull moment.

  1055 hours (Tuesday morning)

  Recording Room

  The White House, Washington D.C.

  They were talking about ships coming toward Cuba this morning, how many there were, and what they might be carrying. Ron Pickett could hear every word through the big earphones he wore on his head, but, as usual, he wasn’t paying any attention to those unimportant details. He had his own crucial responsibilities, and they required his undivided attention.

  Tape rolled on the dual recorders as the conversation in the Cabinet Room continued. Pickett was vaguely aware that “Big Things” were going on these days, that history was being made in this building and was being recorded on his tapes. But the significance of that history meant only one thing to the recording technician: It was absolutely crucial that these tapes be perfect.

  His eyes widened in alarm as he saw that one reel was within a minute of the end of its tape. He’d almost missed it! The shock was great enough that his hands were shaking as he quickly opened a fresh reel. He stared at the ending tape, and as soon as the tail ran through the machine, he pulled the full reel off the sprocket, replaced it with an empty one, and simultaneously fed in the start of the fresh tape.

  Only when he had the new tape secured, slowly spiraling onto the reel, did he mount the second reel, heavy with its load of blank tape, onto the feeder sprocket. When all was rolling smoothly, he let out a deep breath, unaware that he’d been holding it for nearly a minute. Nervously, he glanced over his shoulder, half-afraid that someone had seen his almost-mistake. It was just a reflex, of course—no one watched him in here. The door stayed closed at all times, except when Ron—or, rarely, someone else like Bob Morris or the President—passed through.

  It was a pleasure, in fact, to be able to do his work in such unsupervised solitude. Such a change from the way he’d grown up, when She had watched his every move, looking for reasons to criticize, to rebuke, to strike him. She had enjoyed punishing him, as She had enjoyed punishing the men who came and went from their lives. Even now, though She was dead, he could feel Her watching him, and he instinctively flinched away from Her displeasure.

  He found that his hands were shaking too much to properly label the tape, so he waited for a few minutes, thinking pleasant thoughts about vacuum tubes, about the reliability of microphones and speakers. Finally he was calm enough to label the just-completed tape in his clean, block print. He opened the cabinet and placed the reel on the shelf next to the others, realizing with surprise that he had recorded an unprecedented amount of tape in the last week. If this kept up, another crate of tapes would have to be transferred to long-range storage. He didn’t like doing that, sending them away where he couldn’t keep an eye on them, but it had to be done. There was only so much space in this small room.

  But it was his space, in his room, and that made it fine.

  1101 hours (Tuesday morning)

  Harry S. Truman Annex

  Key West Naval Air Station

  Key West, Florida

  “Operation Blue Moon” they were calling it, and it seemed like as good a name as any. Commander Widener strolled along the flight line of the RF8 Crusaders, eight of which were fueled and ready for the first flight of what might prove to be a very significant mission. He came up to the unit flight leader, Commander William Ecker, who was watching ground crews load film into his aircraft’s six cameras.

  “Obviously, we’re taking the gloves off,” the base commander said. “It takes a lot of guts to do what you guys are going to do.”

  “All in a day’s work,” Ecker replied. “Plus, at low altitude and the speed we’ll be flying at, we’ll be past before they even know we’re there. And given what we heard last night, I think it’s high time we get some close-ups of that place.”

  The veteran pilot had projected a breezy confidence since his unit had been deployed here a couple of weeks earlier, and Widener could see why his men were ready and eager to follow their commanding officer into harm’s way. Ecker had taken the time to show Widener the ins and outs of their aircraft, which were equipped very differently from the F8 Crusader that had been a workhorse fighter and light bomber for the Navy for some years now.

  The RF8 was an unarmed aircraft, strictly dedicated to the low-altitude photo reconnaissance mission. The main camera shot a forward view, four frames per second—or one frame about every 200 feet traveled by the speeding aircraft—and exposed six-inch by six-inch negatives. Other cameras took side shots, a straight down view, and images to the rear, trailing out to the horizon. Unlike the U2, The RF8 was designed to get close to its subject, using speed and surprise to avoid taking antiaircraft fire. The quality of pictures obtained could reveal far more in the way of detail than the U2 cameras, which shot from many miles in the air.

  On this mission, the Crusaders would split into pairs, with each pair assigned a different reconnaissance zone in western Cuba. They would cross the Florida Strait at wavetop height to avoid enemy radar, then pop up to about 1000 feet for their photo runs. After shooting for a few minutes, they would have exhausted their film and would head north again, flying all the way to Jacksonville, Florida, to land. The film would be removed for transport to NPIC in Washington, and the planes would return to Key West to be prepared for another round of scouting tomorrow.

  Widener stood outside of his command buil
ding as the Crusaders took off, in pairs. They veered south and traveled very fast, almost Mach 1. At their low altitude, it was only a minute or so before each plane was out of sight of the base.

  As soon as the Blue Moon flight was gone, Widener was back at his desk. He ordered fuel trucks to line up and ground crews to be ready. Next up was a flight of Marine fighters and light bombers. The first planes were due in an hour or so, and by this time tomorrow, the full MAG would have passed through. They would stop in to refuel and get any last-minute trouble spots checked out. After an hour or two on the ground, they’d be off again, destined for Guantanamo Bay.

  His paperwork cleared for the moment, Widener thought of Derek, out at sea on Enterprise. The massive fleet carrier would be involved in this operation, the commander knew, which meant that his son would be in the thick of it. Pride vied with concern as he considered that fact.

  Then his thoughts turned to his daughter. A reporter in Washington…she, too, would be have a lot of work to do in the current crisis. He thought of the rockets the President had described as being present in Cuba, and for the first time a chilling awareness hit him. In this war, his daughter might be in an even more dangerous combat zone than either his son or himself.

  1804 hours (Tuesday evening)

  Outside the Pentagon

  Washington D.C.

  Stella sat in the back of the news van, brushed her hair quickly, and checked her handheld mirror to make sure that her lipstick hadn’t smeared and that her makeup was still intact. Everything checked out adequately, and today “adequate” would have to be good enough.

  “You’re on in one, Stel,” said her director, Pat Seghers, sticking his head through the van’s open doors.

  “All right, thanks,” she replied, sliding out, taking a few steps on the parking lot so that the cameraman could get her in the shot, with the five-sided military headquarters—famous as the largest office building in the world—as a dramatic backdrop. She checked her notes one last time, then let them drop so that she could fix the camera with a dramatic, serious, and focused expression.

  Seghers held up his hand with fingers outspread, listening to a feed on his headphones. “Five, four, three…” he said, ticking off the last two seconds silently.

  “Good evening.” Stella addressed the camera squarely, maintaining a serious, stern expression. “This is Stella Widener, reporting from the Pentagon, twenty-three hours after President Kennedy’s dramatic announcement regarding Soviet strategic missiles in Cuba. The blockade, or quarantine, of that country is set to become active at 10 a.m. Eastern time, tomorrow—Wednesday. At that point, Soviet ships will be stopped, and those carrying offensive weapons will be, at the very least, turned back. The President made it clear that normal civilian goods, such as food, clothing, and presumably even manufacturing materials and supplies, would be allowed to proceed to Cuban ports.

  “As of tonight, we can report the following: Virtually all of the United States military forces, including the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, have been placed on a status of heightened alert. All leaves have been canceled, and a large movement of forces into Florida and the Gulf Coast region has commenced. Reports out of California suggest that at least two regiments of Marines based at Camp Pendleton have been embarked on ships, destined for the Panama Canal and the Caribbean Sea.”

  She paused and drew a breath, gesturing to the building behind her. “Officials at the Pentagon remain tight-lipped about the actual deployment of our naval forces at sea, but given the President’s stern warning, it can be expected that the US Navy is moving surface ships to form some kind of barrier along the quarantine boundary, reportedly about 500 miles east of the easternmost terminus of the island of Cuba itself.

  “In the meantime, we have been gathering reports from anti-Castro Cuban exiles, who as you probably know have been fleeing the communist regime in large numbers—averaging nearly a hundred people a day over the last year. Most of these exiles have landed in Florida and are establishing a large expat community in Miami. I send you now back to David Brinkley in the studio, for information on what we’ve been able to learn from these Cubans, some of whom arrived in Florida as recently as yesterday. David?”

  She didn’t have an earphone attached, so she couldn’t hear the anchorman’s reply, but she saw Seghers give the throat slash gesture telling her she was off the air. “Good job,” he told her.

  “Thanks,” she replied. “But I think it was kind of thin. I wish to hell someone in that building would give us more than a ‘no comment’ once in a while.”

  “You made the most of what you had—that’s one of the things I like about you. Now let’s get back to the studio and start collecting news for tomorrow’s report.”

  The cameraman was already loading his gear into the van. Pat climbed in the back with him while Stella, in deference to her skirt and stockings, climbed into the front seat to sit next to the driver. A moment later he put the van in gear, merging into the D.C. rush hour, slowly working his way toward the nearest bridge over the Potomac, and the city streets back to Tenleytown.

  2211 hours (Tuesday night)

  Presidium Chamber

  Kremlin, Moscow

  Khrushchev had ordered all members of the Presidium to stay in the Kremlin for as long as the crisis lasted, so even at this late hour there were a dozen Soviet bureaucrats gathered for discussion after their hearty dinner. Many of them were drinking, and some of them were drunk, though the chairman himself was having his usual evening beverage of tea sweetened with lemon. But even that usually soothing beverage couldn’t calm his churning stomach. He beckoned to Defense Minister Malinovsky and Foreign Minister Gromyko, who were discussing something privately, and they came over to sit beside him.

  “What are we going to do about this imperialist threat?” Nikita Khrushchev demanded of both men. “The Americans intend to commence their unlawful and piratical blockade tomorrow morning! Would they dare to stop our ships?”

  “They would, and they will, in my estimation,” Malinovsky said dourly. “And they have the naval power to do it.”

  “We should have sent the Baltic Fleet to escort the freighters!” the chairman declared.

  “It would have been hard to maintain the maskirovka with warships steaming along beside our missiles,” the defense minister said, reminding him of the strategic deception that had concealed the plan almost long enough.

  “True enough” Khrushchev conceded. “But now what is the status of shipping for Operation Anadyr? Those vessels that are still at sea?”

  “One important vessel, Alexandrovsk, is already past the line of demarcation for their blockade,” Malinovsky said, as if seeking a silver lining. “This ship is carrying all of the warheads, 28 of them, for the SS5 missiles. It is within 400 miles of eastern Cuba right now.”

  “Then we should order it make for a port, a Cuban port, with all possible speed, before the Americans change their minds and move the blockade in closer,” the chairman declared decisively. But then he remembered some additional details from the many briefings he’d been given on the Cuban operations. “But the missiles themselves, they are still at sea, are they not? Farther away from Cuba.”

  “Unfortunately, yes, Comrade Chairman,” the minister replied. “The ships carrying the SS5 missiles, as well as much of the fueling equipment and launchers, have yet to reach the quarantine line declared by the Americans.”

  “What about the submarines? Is there any way they can neutralize the American fleet?”

  “It would seem unlikely, Comrade Chairman. Within the whole area of operations our submarines will be vastly outnumbered by the ships of the American navy.” Malinovsky was obliged to report.

  “But the submarines can stay hidden, can they not? When they are underwater the number of American ships might be neutralized!” Khrushchev realized he was clutching at straws.

  “Submarines can hide, but freighters cannot. If a submarine struck at their surface ships, I have no dou
bt but that they would sink our cargo ships.” The defense minister turned to address Gromyko. “In fact, we received a communication from their embassy regarding the submarines, did we not?”

  “Indeed, Comrade Minister, Comrade Chairman,” the foreign minister said with obvious reluctance. “They claim to be aware of our four submarines approaching Cuban waters, and have warned us that they will be taking steps to make sure those boats do not interfere with American naval operations.”

  “What? How can they know about the submarines? And what steps can they take?” Khrushchev demanded. He was beginning to feel terribly trapped in a noose of some diabolical design. He was fiercely resentful of these fools. Why had they not mentioned some of these complications before it was too late?

  “We do not know how they found the Foxtrots,” Malinovsky responded with a shrug. “But they fact that they claim we have four, and we do have four, would make it seem that their intelligence information is accurate. Unfortunately, the Americans possess rather robust antisubmarine forces. You will recall, in the Great Patriotic War, they fought a long battle against Nazi submarines, and this allowed them to hone their tactics and skill to a very high level.”