Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  1715 hours (Saturday afternoon)

  F4 Phantom from Enterprise

  300 miles East of Cuba

  “This is Tango Three,” Derek Widener reported over the radio channel, his throat tight. Somehow he croaked out more words: “I’ve got a bright flash, over the northeast horizon. Not natural.” He felt sick to his stomach, and heard Ensign King’s gasp of horror from the rear seat

  “Reporting a strong signal, electromagnetic pulse, bearing eighty degrees,” came the dispassionate voice through Widener’s earphones. He knew he was getting a report from the electronic detection systems aboard the Stoof with a Roof, the airborne radar and electronics monitor circling below the CAP.

  Another voice, his airgroup commander, came through the headphones. “Tangos Three and Four—investigate. Be careful!”

  “Altering course to eighty degrees,” Widener replied, striving—and failing—to match his CO’s calm vocal demeanor.

  Unconsciously, he had already started his turn; the Phantom of his wingman, Tango Four, banked off to the side, mirroring his course correction. Now the pilots kicked in their afterburners, and the two F4s shot through the skies, quickly surpassing Mach 1. To Derek Widener, the fighter suddenly didn’t feel like a large aircraft any more. As it hurtled toward the source of the flash it was more like an insect, confronted by the force of something gigantic and terrible.

  In a couple of minutes, the Phantoms crossed over Grand Caicos island and continued to streak above the Atlantic. The sea below appeared azure and calm, deceptively peaceful, but it looked like a massive storm brewed in front of them. A vast wall of dark cloud churned and expanded.

  He and King watched in horror as the cloud swelled in the middle, rising and twisting, black as Hell. Blossoms of living flame billowed within that cloud, the eeriest, most chilling thing he’d ever seen. It was a pillar of water and steam, for Christ’s sake! How could it be on fire?

  “God—that looks…” He heard King’s hushed voice from the rear seat, fading away before he could find the words to complete the thought.

  And there were no words to describe it, at least not clearly. Derek’s mouth felt dry, his whole body drained of moisture, vitality, even emotion. He was just a husk of a man, and what was left of his awareness peered straight into the Abyss.

  Soon the cloud swelled at the top of a vast column of steam, smoke, and fire. There was no denying what he and King were looking at—they’d seen too many pictures of the explosions that had brought World War Two to an end.

  “Oh shit,” he whispered, not even aware of his open mic.

  “Tango Three—report!” The voice of his squadron commander crackled with authority, and seemed to inject awareness back into the numb pilot’s being. “What do you see?”

  “This is Tango Three,” Derek said into his helmet microphone, trying to hear himself over the tumble of his own raw horror. He swallowed, coaxing some moisture into his mouth.

  When he could finally speak, his voice sound flat, disembodied. “We’re looking at a mushroom cloud, some 80,000 feet in the air. I think—no, I’m sure—someone down on the surface, or underneath, has detonated a nuclear device.”

  1830 hours (Saturday Afternoon)

  Cabinet Meeting Room, the White House

  Washington D.C.

  The meeting had been proceeding for more than an hour, and the mood in the room was grim and resolute. It was clear by now that a U2 had been lost over Cuba, and it seemed hard to argue with the conclusion that it had been shot down.

  “Is there any chance the pilot survived?” the President wanted to know.

  “Not likely, Sir—not at that height,” the JCS chairman, General Taylor, acknowledged. “He’d had been flying at 70,000 feet. Although, I suppose there’s always a chance.”

  A naval courier came in and whispered to Defense Secretary McNamara, who quickly rose and walked out of the room. In the meantime, Taylor followed up. “I think we should send in those bombers, Mr. President, from MacDill AFB in Florida. They’ve been on standby for several days now, just in case those SAMs start flying, and they’re armed with the ordnance necessary to take out a SAM site.”

  “We don’t even know which site fired the missiles, do we?” JFK demanded. “No, they stay on the ground until we get more information.”

  The door to the cabinet room opened, and Secretary McNamara came back in. His expression was stricken as he stared mutely at the President, while all conversation in the room trailed off to silence.

  “Mr. President,” he said without preamble, and then he seemed to stumble, to grope for words. For once, the computer-like brain, the emotionless frame of the Secretary of Defense seemed to waver, as he wrestled with something that seemed beyond his comprehension. Kennedy sat watching him, the color slowly draining from the President’s face.

  “What is it?” JFK asked finally, his voice a dry rasp.

  The question seemed to break the spell, and McNamara blinked a few times and struggled for composure. “We have multiple reports of a nuclear explosion in the middle of one of our ASW task forces—a small fleet that had been circling a Russian submarine.”

  “My God. How bad…what details do you have?”

  “Reports are the aircraft carrier Randolph is gone, completely vanished. It looks like two destroyers are lost, as well—at least, they’ve not been able to raise Conning or Viscount by radio. Surface assets from the Enterprise task group are hurrying to the scene. She already has a couple of fighters in the air overhead. They’ve reported what looks like one capsized destroyer. There may be survivors.”

  Kennedy looked around the room. His whole body seemed to sag, and he shook his head, groping for words. He sighed, long and loudly, then suddenly, furiously, banged his fist on the table. The gesture seemed to calm him; he lifted his head and looked slowly around the horrified faces at the conference table.

  “Gentlemen,” he said finally. “It’s not a cold war anymore.”

  2300 hours (Saturday night)

  Presidium, Kremlin

  Moscow, Russia

  “What’s going on?” Khrushchev wanted to know, as a half dozen officers hurried into the room to whisper to Defense Minister Malinovksy, who gasped, his jaw sagging. It seemed to the Chairman as though the old soldier aged ten years right before his eyes.

  “Tell me!” he demanded, his voice emerging as a near-hysterical squeak.

  Malinovsky’s mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds. “Comrade Chairman,” he finally croaked. “The Americans are claiming that some of their ships have been destroyed by an…atomic device.”

  “Ships? At sea?”

  “Yes. It seems they were searching for one of our submarines, one of the Foxtrots. They are broadcasting this news over an open channel, in the clear. They have lost an aircraft carrier and some other ships.”

  “But how? What happened? Could it be an accident?” Khrushchev bounced to his feet, leaning forward. “It must be an accident! Or a mistake? They’re lying to us!”

  The Defense Minister shook his broad, gray head. “It is possibly a mistake. But I can see no reason why they would want to lie to us on a matter as critical as this. I fear that the submarine captain may have used his….special weapon.”

  It was the same explanation, the only explanation, that had immediately percolated up through the Chairman’s own fearful imagination.

  “But—I didn’t want this to happen!” declared Khrushchev, feeling sick to his stomach. He slumped back into his chair, suddenly drained of all feeling, all vitality. “It was not part of the plan!”

  “No it was not, Comrade Chairman,” Malinovsky replied lugubriously. “I didn’t want it to happen either.” He grunted, the sound a mixture of disgust, despair, and Russian fatalism.

  “It seems that it was not our decision to make.”

  The story will continue in:

  Final Failure

  Tactical Air Command

  Pre-Crisis Timeline

  1 January
1959: Fidel Castro’s rebel forces enter Havana, Cuba, and sweep the government of dictator Fulgencio “Juan” Batista from power. Fidel has not declared himself a communist, but his brother Raul is known to be a follower of the party, and his famous lieutenant, Ernesto “Che” Guevera, is well-known as a Maoist revolutionary.

  17 May 1960: An American U2 spyplane is shot down over the USSR by an SA-2 surface to air missile. Pilot Francis Gary Powers is captured and subsequently revealed as a prisoner by the Soviets after the Americans had denied the existence of the aircraft. A planned summit meeting between Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev and President Eisenhower collapses, as the Russian leader vents his outrage and a frustrated Ike is humiliated in the court of world opinion.

  3 January 1961: The United States breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba as Castro’s government leans increasingly toward the Communist Bloc. Many Cubans have been executed by the new regime, and thousands more have fled to the United States over the ninety-mile sea passage of the Florida Strait.

  20 January 1961: President John F. Kennedy takes the oath of office in Washington D.C. and gives a memorable inauguration speech, declaring: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Although JFK campaigned on closing the “missile gap” widely perceived to exist between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, he quickly learns that the gap is a fictional product of Khrushchev’s boasts. In fact, the U.S. has a much more robust and modern nuclear arsenal than does the USSR.

  20 April 1961: A CIA-planned and –controlled invasion of Cuba ends in disaster at the Bay of Pigs, as every one of the exiled Cubans in the landing force is quickly killed or captured by Castro’s army. President Kennedy refuses to commit United States naval and air forces to the doomed fight, and accepts responsibility for the debacle.

  4 June 1961: An apparently ailing President Kennedy takes a verbal pounding from Chairman Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit as the two sides cannot agree on the status of Berlin, where hundreds of East German citizens are fleeing the Communist world in favor of the thriving economies of the Western democracies. “It’s going to be a cold winter,” the President warns.

  13 August 1961: The Soviets and East Germans, acting without warning in the course of one night, seal the east/west border in the city of Berlin with troops and barbed wire. Over the next months, the Communists build a wall to make that divide permanent, as tensions between both superpowers continue to rise.

  4 February 1962: President Kennedy announces a total embargo on Cuban imports; Castro denounces “American aggression.”

  11 September 1962: The Kremlin warns that any U.S. attack against Cuba would “lead to nuclear war.” They assure the world that the only military aid the USSR is providing to Cuba is “purely defensive” in nature.

  Author’s Note

  Historians widely recognize the Cuban Missile Crisis as the most dangerous point of the Cold War—that is, the moment when full-scale nuclear war came closest to erupting. This assessment has represented conventional wisdom for a very long time, since well before the fall of Soviet communism in 1989-90. However, since that fall and the subsequent release of Soviet sources about the confrontation, as well as improved access to American sources as security classifications have eased, a new understanding of the crisis suggests that the situation was even more dangerous than the American public imagined at the time.

  Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted a nuclear war to erupt. Once the two leaders clearly understood the risks, they both took firm steps to back away from the edge. The biggest risk of an initial nuclear detonation, however, was never something that was under the absolute control of the leaders on either side. Both nations had hundreds of nuclear weapons that could be employed under the authority of relatively low-level military officers.

  Not only did the Soviets have a nuclear-armed torpedo on each of the four submarines they dispatched to support the Cuban operation, but they also had a whole host of tactical (i.e. “battlefield”) nukes on Cuba. There is no reason to expect these weapons would not have been used if the Soviet and Cuban forces on Cuba had been subject to ground attack. And such an attack was very much desired by a great many Americans, military and civilian.

  The Americans, meanwhile, had placed such reliance on nuclear weaponry that they even equipped some fighter aircraft with air-to-air missiles equipped with a nuclear warhead. (This is a weapon designed to shoot down a single enemy aircraft!) Further, the two generals most tightly woven into the command procedures of Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Power and General Curtis LeMay, were both firm and vocal advocates of an overwhelming U.S. first strike against the USSR.

  Though they undoubtedly chafed at the restrictions placed on them by civilian leadership, there is no record of either Air Force general, nor of any other U.S. military commander, seeking to act outside of the chain of command during the crisis. However, if that chain of command had been seriously compromised, the responsibility for the employment of the U.S. nuclear arsenal would, by design, have fallen to LeMay or Power. There is no way to know what would have happened, but there is evidence—in the generals’ own words—of what they wanted to do.

  Writers, naturally, are free to speculate, and alternate history, by its nature, is speculative storytelling. However, I have tried to base my speculations on things that not only could have happened, but, arguably, almost happened. To that end, I have consulted as many sources as I could find. My information on the military forces that the Soviets sent to Cuba, as well as the American forces poised to respond, is as accurate as I could make it.

  I would like to point to a couple of short cuts I’ve taken, mainly for the sake of the story and readability. First, although nearly all the ExComm discussions were taped, and in the last decade those recordings have been released to researchers and the public, I did not try to craft my scenes using the actual statements made by each ExComm member during the crisis. Instead, I made an honest attempt to create fast-moving dialogue that represented these men’s opinions, even though the words are mine. (Those were very long meetings, and it took a great deal of discussion before any consensus was reached.)

  Also, the ExComm meetings often included as many as 18-20 men (every attendee was male, this being 1962) and I streamlined the cast of characters down to a manageable number. Nikita Khrushchev likewise had a larger circle of advisers than the book represents; I combined several historical figures to create the opinions and points of view espoused in this book by Foreign Minister Gromyko and Defense Minister Malinovksy.

  When it came to the designations of various items of military equipment, I used the NATO/American designations, even when writing from the Russian perspective. The SS4 “Sandal” rocket, for example, was the R-12 rocket to the Soviets. I have characters from both sides refer to it as the SS4, because I judged that would make it easier for the average reader to keep track of what was what.

  Many of the characters in the book were real, historical figures. Others, including the Widener family, Lt. Colonel Tukov, Bob Morris, Second Lieutenant Greg Hartley, and Ron Pickett, are my creations and have been placed where their respective points of view can help tell the story. It is my hope that the resulting tale is compelling and interesting on its own merit, but that it also serves as a cautionary tale of how quickly and catastrophically events can spin beyond the control of even the most powerful of leaders.

  For additional details, and updates regarding upcoming books in the Final Failure series, please visit douglasniles.com or facebook.com/AuthorDouglasNiles.

  Acknowledgements

  I have had the pleasure of writing three alternate history military thrillers with my longtime collaborator Michael S. Dobson. Some years ago, we conceived of Final Failure together, intending it to be another jointly written book. However, due to the vagaries of the modern publishing industry, that project languished and eventually died. When I had the opportunity to pursue it as the sole author, Michael graciously agreed to let me take the idea and
develop it into what has now become a series of novels. Michael and I together came up with many of the fundamental ideas that drive the Final Failure narrative. As always, I am grateful for his friendship, generosity, and creativity.

  My sister Allison Weber and her colleague, Lourdes Zenea, provided good advice on the correct usage of Cuban Spanish in the parts of the novel where I have used a few short snippets of Español to enhance verisimilitude. Their guidance is much appreciated, and any errors that have remained in the text are my responsibility alone.

  My good friend and colleague, Lester Smith, has created Popcorn Press as—among other things—a vehicle to help writers get worthwhile projects published and made available to readers. Lester has shown a very heartening belief in this story since he first heard about it, and I am very grateful for the work that he has done in seeing that the book finally gets exposed to the light of day.