“There is a ship off our starboard bow, headed for us, approximate distance, six kilometers.” It was Eduardo.
One more time, on the radio, never mind Eduardo’s ship.
No answer.
Blackford was grateful that, by glancing at his log, he was relieved of having to analyze what to do next. He turned the dial to Channel 16, the emergency channel.
“MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY. Extreme emergency. This is the vessel Aguila, vessel Aguila. I need instant help, instant help. Any coast guard station listening, any coast guard station, or any ship at sea, please respond instantly, OVER.”
Silence. From the cockpit Eduardo’s voice reached him. Eduardo shouted: “Estimated distance, three kilometers.”
Blackford heard, on the radio, a woman’s faint voice. “This is Key West Radio, Key West Radio. The yacht—how are you spelling your name?”
“Able George Uncle Item”—Blackford turned to Cecilio: “What in the hell is the phonetic for L?”—but before getting an answer, he went on, “Lollipop Able. This is an emergency.”
“What are your call letters, Aguila?”
“Whiskey Able George 9042.”
Catalina leaned her head through the cockpit cavity. “They are closing fast, Caimán.”
“This is an emergency, Key West, a great emergency. Please dial instantly, instantly, the following number in New York: 212-679-7330. OVER.”
“Was that 212-679-7730?”
“No, operator, 7330. Emergency!”
“How shall we be billing that, sir? OVER.”
“Make it collect, OVER.”
“They will be alongside within three minutes,” Catalina reported.
With his right hand Blackford signaled Catalina to come below. To the radio operator:
“Make it collect. Mr. Oakes is calling.”
“How are you spelling that, sir?”
Blackford closed his eyes, while he said in forced rhythm, “Opal Able Kilo Easy Sugar.”
“Stand by.”
A shot was fired from the overtaking vessel. How far overhead it passed Blackford could not reckon. It was while briefly pondering the question that he heard the voice through the bullhorn. Catalina translated:
“He says to stop the engine and head into the wind immediately or the next bullets will be aimed amidships. Eduardo wants to know what to do.”
Blackford did not pause: “Direct him to go full speed away from the vessel, head downwind. Give the Cubans as small a target as possible.”
Aguila’s engine roared to full throttle, and the boat steadied as, mercifully, it went now, after so many contrary hours, downwind: south-southwest.
“Operator, are you ringing that New York number?”
“Please stand by, sir. We are ringing.”
The Cuban vessel roared forward in downwind pursuit and was soon abeam, parallel. Another machine-gun shot fired. This one pierced the chest of Eduardo, who fell over the wheel. The Cuban patrol boat slowed its speed to correspond to the ten knots the Aguila was now making. It now drew abreast of the boat. Three sailors, on deck, were readying the grappling hooks.
It was then that Cecilio Velasco made his move. He reached for a bundle that had sat in a corner of the after berth, covered with a towel. He bent over it, lighting a match. A fuse spurted out. He bounded onto the cockpit and, in an exuberant gesture as if he were a young Olympic athlete intent on throwing the discus exactly on target, he aimed his aggregation at the center of the patrol boat.
There flew from the cartridge container a cannonade of red and white flares, originally designed to reach one thousand feet into the air to signal a boat’s distress. At fifteen feet they hit two of the three surrounding Cuban seamen in various parts of their torsos, causing them to roar with pain and the helmsman of the patrol boat to veer sharply away to windward.
“Yes, who is it?”—the voice on the radio was heard.
“Anthony, this is Blackford. Listen very hard, buddy, can you hear me?”
“Yes. Are you drunk, Blacky?”
“Shut up and listen. We are being attacked right now—right now, Anthony, by a Cuban patrol boat in the Straits of Florida. Now listen hard to every syllable: I have seen with my own eyes not forty-eight hours ago four, repeat four, medium-range Russian ballistic missiles in Havana near San Cristóbal. The intention is to have them and as many as forty more installed with nuclear caps ready to fire within one week or ten days. Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. Are you in danger?”
“Hell yes, but I’ll keep talking as long as I can. We are being boarded by the Cubans. We are thirty miles from Key West, approximately at Latitude 24, Longitude 82. Massive Soviet operation under way—”
The radio turned to static. A machine gun had severed the antenna. A second burst of machine-gun fire ripped into the body of Cecilio Velasco, just after he had tossed a can of kerosene-soaked rags onto the deck of the Cuban patrol boat, which looked now to be aflame from its very bowels. A single bullet pierced Blackford through the left shoulder as he leaped into the cockpit to grab Velasco. It was a matter of two or three minutes before the patrol boat’s fire extinguishers had doused the flames.
By that time the grappling hooks were firmly on the Aguila. A Cuban sailor jumped aboard the targeted prey and throttled down its engine. In seconds he was followed by three other Cuban sailors with machine guns.
Catalina was below, standing by Blackford, taking off his bloody shirt. He drew her to the settee and they both sagged down, close together. The pain of seeing Velasco had immobilized Blackford, who cooperated sluggishly with Catalina’s attempt to improvise a bandage.
Brusquely, she was dragged off by two sailors. Two others came for Blackford, one of them with a machine gun pointed at his chest.
It was easier to jump from the Cuban vessel to the level of the fishing boat than to climb back up in a roaring sea. To get their prisoners up to the patrol boat it was necessary to winch them up on a boom.
The officer left aboard the Aguila was using a walkie-talkie. The decision was made—on board? in Havana?—to tow the Aguila back to Havana. The Cuban sailor would stay aboard and steer her.
“What about the bodies?” he asked the commander.
He heard the orders and proceeded, not without difficulty, to maneuver first Eduardo overboard, then Cecilio Velasco. To make it easier to slide them over the gunwale, he severed the lifelines with his pocket knife. The bodies floated off in the waves, leaving a trail of blood. By the time the line had been rigged, forward from the mooring winch of the Aguila to the stern winches of the patrol boat, the sharks had come. Neither Blackford nor Catalina saw this. They were below, handcuffed, in separate, tiny cabins without portholes to let in light. Blackford felt the rising hum of the engine. And he could feel, from the sway of the boat, its direction. South. He lowered his head, and prayed the Lord to keep—mi querido compañero, Cecilio Velasco. And wept convulsively at Cecilio’s departure, wondering, his focus gone, how ever it would have been feasible to engage in this surrealistic, impossible venture without his compañero, the little, cigarette-smoking, Spanish-American who wrote the book of courage.
Thirty-eight
Anthony Trust, after being cut off from Blackford, called the Pentagon. He reached the Duty Officer, identified himself as with the CIA giving the relevant credentials, and said that he had had an emergency report from a fellow agent three minutes before to the effect that Cuban patrol boats were right now firing on, and perhaps at this very moment boarding, the fishing vessel he was on, even though many miles away from territorial Cuban waters. Moreover, the vessel in question was headed for political sanctuary in the United States and returning a U.S. citizen.
He gave the position of the vessel, asked that the information be given instantly to the coast guard and to naval patrol forces, emphasized that if any protective action were to be taken it would need to be within the next hour or two before the Cuban patrol boat reached the safety of home waters, took the offic
er’s name, announced his intention of going directly to Washington on the 7 A.M. shuttle to report the event directly to the Director of the CIA, and hung up.
His intention was to dig out the Director personally. He knew that he had returned from his honeymoon. He did not know that at that moment the Director was in California escorting the body of his young stepson for burial in Seattle. He had been killed in a racing car accident.
So Anthony Trust sought out, and went instantly to see, the Deputy Director.
The atmosphere in Washington was highly charged politically. Four days earlier, Senator Kenneth Keating of New York had said that it was now “fully confirmed” to him by his own sources that missile launching sites were under construction in Cuba, “pads capable of hurling missiles into the heartland of the United States and as far as the Panama Canal Zone.”
This charge had been greeted with smiles by the Establishment. The dean of American columnists, as Walter Lippmann was commonly designated, was reputedly the “favorite columnist” of the President (in fact he was not, but it was the fashionable thing for an Establishment figure to declare, much as Reinhold Niebuhr was the “favorite theologian” of any ambitious social-intellectual). Lippmann had written, “The present Cuban military buildup is not only not capable of offensive action, but also it is not capable of defensive action against the United States.”
That very morning the New York Times had quoted “authoritative sources” to the effect that “the Cuban government has been extremely careful in recent weeks to avoid any chance of conflict with the United States.” The source went on to say to the Times that “extremely thorough” U.S. reconnaissance had yielded no evidence at all of “illegal arms shipments” to Cuba. And—the nicest touch—that not even a “water pistol, as one official put it,” had got through to Cuba. (That man will go far in this administration, Anthony Trust thought, examining the headline in the morning’s New York Times: “Castro Adopting/ A Cautious Policy. U.S. Notes Extreme Care by Cuba To/ Avoid Incidents That Could/Bring War.”
The troops were out in some concentration to confute the provocative, loose-lipped Republican senator and his fellow alarmists. McGeorge Bundy, assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, was on “Issues and Answers,” the ABC televised Sunday show, at noon, and the subject of the discussion was Cuba. Asked whether it wasn’t possible that military installations in Cuba might be converted to offensive purposes, he replied, “Well, I don’t myself think that there is any present—I know there is no present evidence, and I think there is no present likelihood that the Cubans and the Cuban government and the Soviet government would in combination attempt to install a major offensive capability.” Sure, there was stuff going into Cuba. But “that is not going to turn an island of six million people with five or six thousand Soviet technicians and specialists into a major threat to the United States, and I believe that most of the American people do not share the views of the few who have acted as if suddenly this kind of military support created a mortal threat to us. It does not.”
Anthony Trust reported Oakes’s exact words to the Deputy Director, who instantly called his counterpart in the Defense Department. It was quickly ascertained that a Coast Guard vessel had been dispatched to the location given by Anthony Trust to the Duty Officer and had encountered—nothing, save heavy seas. On the broader front, for almost two weeks a U-2 strategic reconnaissance survey of the whole island of Cuba had been scheduled as a matter of routine, but for one reason or another the flights had not happened. But acting on the impulse of Trust’s telephone call with his dramatic report on the Soviet missiles, the telegraphic order now went out: go immediately.
And that afternoon, the planes took off.
Two U-2s, manned by veteran pilots. They flew seventy-five thousand feet high, with those miracle cameras which, before needing to reload, can finger inch by inch an area 125 miles wide by three thousand miles long in four thousand paired frames, delivering ten miles of film. In each frame they recorded the latitude and longitude of the entire area, photographed by cameras that could read the headline of a newspaper lying on the ground, special radiosensitive cameras that could detect the strength of otherwise undetectable radio and radar signals and, even, record variations in land temperatures that betrayed recent movements of any heavy metallic objects.
The order from on high was to dispatch the film as soon as it was recovered from the U-2s to Washington by supersonic jet. There every skilled photographic interpreter affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, or the Defense Department who lived within one hundred miles of Washington was conscripted to duty, and they gathered at the National Photographic Interpretation Center where they worked, in relays, with their magnifying and stereoscopic instruments, around the clock.
Soon after midnight that Sunday night, one photo interpreter said to an associate, “Take a look at this.” The photo was of a semiwooded area near San Cristóbal. Indisputably they identified: four erector-launchers for medium-range ballistic missiles, eight medium-range ballistic missiles, trailers loaded with missile fuel, a motor pool of military trucks, and a tent city for about five hundred Russian troops. The tip of one missile was actually visible from under a tarpaulin, and it corresponded exactly with ballistic missiles photographed for the first time in the 1960 May Day Parade in Moscow. A mere two-week hiatus in regularly scheduled U-2 observation flights had protected the Soviet missile installations from visibility right up to the moment when what they were engaged in simply could not be hidden from such shamelessly penetrating eyes as those of the U-2.
By the end of the day the photo analysts had discerned a concentration of intermediate-range missiles near Remedios, and still another near Sagua la Grande. Once activated, the Pentagon analysts quickly calculated, the identified missiles were sufficient in number and in strength to deposit nuclear bombs over every major city in the U.S. save Seattle, where the Director happened at this moment to be, on his unhappy personal mission, and, at the same time, to wipe out fifty percent of U.S. ICBM and bomber bases.
The first team mobilized quickly. There was a problem in catching the attention of the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs because he was irreversibly launched into a speech before the Sigma Delta Chi journalism society at the National Press Club where he was explaining the relative inoffensiveness of the Cuban rearmament. Edwin Martin conceded that Castro had antiaircraft missiles, antiship rockets, rocket-launching torpedo boats, late model MIG fighter planes, and several thousand military technicians. But, smiling, he reassured his audience: “As the President has said, this military buildup is basically defensive in character and would not add more than a few hours to the time required to invade Cuba successfully if that should become necessary.” He concluded, “… taken together, the present military capabilities in Cuba would not materially increase the Cuban ability to undertake offensive action outside the island.” A waiter handed him a message asking that he call a certain number in the State Department, which call, excusing himself, the Assistant Secretary made, only to learn that his verbal assurances were not worth the paper they were written on.
The Secretary of State was giving a dinner for West Germany’s Foreign Minister, and in desperation it was finally arranged that, between toasts, a bodyguard should slip him a sealed note. The Secretary, excusing himself as one might on the way to a washroom, reached a telephone, spoke with the State Department official, exchanged circumlocutions (“Are you sure this is it?” “Yes. I am very sure this is it.”) and agreed to meet with the top team the first thing the next morning.
The Secretary of Defense was lecturing that evening at what the communicants fondly referred to as “Hickory Hill University,” the home of Attorney General and Mrs. Robert Kennedy. His lecture was not easy to interrupt, but in due course this was done, and at about midnight the Secretary of Defense went off to see some photographs.
It was not until the following morning that the Assistant f
or National Security Affairs approached the President—in his bedroom at the White House, where the President was accustomed to receive the initial daily security briefings.
He was incredulous.
Concerning the missiles, the Assistant reported firmly, there was simply no ambiguity.
The President thereupon initiated the week-long series of conferences that would culminate in his television address on the following Monday.
None of this came in time to be of any help to the occupants of the Cuban patrol boat towing the smaller fishing boat from Latitude 24 degrees, Longitude 82 degrees, southwest toward Latitude 13 degrees, Longitude 85 degrees, the Bay of Havana.
The United States Coast Guard patrol boat had reached the designated area within one hour of Trust’s telephone call, encountering, of course, only the six-foot seas and the hard northerly wind. An airplane stood by and received orders by radio to search between that point and Havana. The pilot came on the Cuban patrol boat towing a fishing boat that rode jauntily down the following seas. A radio to the Pentagon, giving their position, now only a dozen miles from Havana, elicited the instruction: Turn around, and return to the base.
It was, Blackford recognized even in a semidrugged state, too much to expect that within the three hours necessary to enter Cuban territorial waters the United States Marines would, so to speak, arrive with their bagpipes. Too much was needed for such action. Much too much, in the way of high authoritative direction, to order all of that in time, even if the logistical resources were there, standing by at attention. Blackford was certain of only this, that Anthony Trust would convey the message that mattered the most, and that in due course there would be action consistent with the imperatives of the situation: that there were Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.
His mind returned yet again to Cecilio Velasco. Cecilio, dead. Blackford had witnessed awful episodes over a period often years, and experienced awful losses, casualties of the Cold War. In Budapest he had seen a very young man, an athlete-scholar with whom he had a close friendship, hoisted by a derrick on top of a truck from which a noose had been suspended, which soon held the young man’s lifeless body. In Germany he had led a young, inspiring nobleman unsuspecting, trusting, to his execution at the hands of the CIA.
See You Later, Alligator Page 26
