by Bob Mayer
“It would weaken us in the eyes of NATO,” the President’s National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy argued.
“That’s not really a priority concern for me at the moment,” the President said. He picked up a copy of the letter transmitted from Moscow. “Khrushchev is correct in predicting catastrophe if we have a nuclear exchange.”
As LeMay began to protest, Kennedy waved him to silence. “Gentlemen, it’s not for me or you or our peers that I am concerned. It’s for the children. Do we give them a future? What are we willing to do to ensure their future?”
Before anyone could respond to that, a door swung open and an aide hustled to General Taylor’s side, leaned over whispered something to him. The General closed his eyes and a ripple of irritation crossed his face. He turned to the President. “Sir. We just lost a U-2 over Cuba. Shot down by a Soviet missile.”
“The pilot?” Kennedy asked.
“We presume he is dead.”
“We have no choice now,” LeMay said. “We must retaliate. If we don’t do something it won’t just be Cuba, they’re going to push us on Berlin, and push hard because they think they have us on the run. We launch air attacks immediately and we can start the invasion in seven days.”
The President raised a hand. “I’d like the room cleared of everyone except the Joint Chiefs.”
That took a minute and then it was just a small circle. Kennedy leaned forward. “Gentlemen, here is the deal: we pull our missiles out of Turkey and the Russians will pull their missiles and nuclear weapons out of Cuba. I’ve got Khrushchev’s personal assurance on that.”
LeMay’s snort of derision indicated what he through of the Soviet’s ‘personal assurance.’
The Commandant of the Marine Corps spoke up. “Sir, with all due respect, Khrushchev, like all the other communists, is a slavish follower of Sun Tzu. One of Sun Tzu’s tenets is to pretend accommodation of the enemy while secretly preparing for attack.”
“Sun Tzu was Chinese,” Bobby Kennedy observed. “Not Russian. And not a communist.”
“It’s like Berlin,” Kennedy said. “I got Khrushchev’s word there that he’d back up his tank first and he did.”
As LeMay opened his mouth to protest, Kennedy held his hand up, palm out, stopping him. “Listen to me. This stays in this room, gentlemen. I will gut any one of you that breathes a word to anyone except your successor. This stays here in the White House and with the Joint Chiefs from here on out.
“First, while we publicly announced we’re withdrawing all the missiles in Turkey, we’re not pulling all our missiles out. We’re going to leave some in place.”
“Now you’re talking, sir,” Le May said.
“Please listen and let me finish,” Kennedy said. “I’ve listened to you gentlemen and I’ve considered all you’ve had to say. I appreciate your patriotism and your service and your expertise. But this is my decision and this is the way it’s going to be. Not only are some of our missiles staying in Turkey, three of the nuclear warheads are going to be secretly transported into Russia and emplaced underneath the Kremlin.”
An electric silence filled the conference room at this unexpected turn of events.
“It does not stop there, though. Some of the Soviet’s missiles will stay in Cuba. Three of their nuclear warheads will be brought here to the United States. They will be emplaced underneath New York City. The people responsible for both sets of warheads, from the respective host countries, will establish a hot line directly between them. This hot line will not run through the White House, nor will it run through the Pentagon. Once these two groups are established, they will have no further contact with anyone except each other. If either country attacks the other with nuclear weapons, these two groups will detonate their weapons and Moscow and New York will be no more. This is not a quid pro quo that can adjusted or negotiated. It is a fail safe type scenario that will be a reality.”
There was a stunned silence in the conference room. LeMay opened his mouth to say something.
“No, General,” Kennedy said. “You’ve had your say. I’m doing this for the children. My brother will leave this meeting and go the Soviet Ambassador and tell him we agree to the proposal publicly. We will not attack or invade Cuba. We will publicly declare we are removing our missiles in Turkey. And that, gentlemen, is the reality.”
*****
Bobby Kennedy had just come back from talking with the Russian ambassador and relaying his brother’s public reply to Khrushchev’s public letter. He walked into the private residence, where a handful of people who were personally close to the President were eating dinner. Jackie and the kids were at Glen Ora in Virginia, out of the capitol.
Bobby was glum, not happy about the meeting with the Russian ambassador. David Powers, the man the President counted as his right hand man for personal matters, was also there. The two Kennedy brothers were talking about whether Khrushchev could really be trusted. About the letters. About the missiles. And in the midst of that, the President looked over at Powers: “Dave, you’re eating the chicken and drinking the wine like it’s your last supper.”
Powers put down his fork. “Mister President, after listening to you and Bobby, I’m not so sure it isn’t.”
The President laughed, but it was a forced laugh. “Dave, I think we’ve got this worked out. I hope we’ve got this worked out. But I’ve got a feeling the working out part is going to come back to haunt me after this is all over.”
And then he went back to talking to his brother.
A couple of hours later in the White House theater, they all watched Roman Holiday starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. Some time during the film, the President nodded off and no one dared move, for fear of waking him. Finally, though, the movie was over and it was time to get the President to bed. Dave Powers was the one who was close enough to the President to do that. He walked over and tapped the President on the shoulder.
“It’s all over, Mister President.”
Kennedy blinked awake. “No, it isn’t.”
And then Powers realized he wasn’t talking about the movie.
******
Unknown to anyone in the White House or the Kremlin, the most dangerous episode of the entire Cuban Missile Crisis was being played out on the high seas. The USS Beale, a destroyer escort, had tracked a Soviet submarine near the picket line for the blockade. Few on land realized the high stakes games played out by the American and Soviet Navys throughout the Cold War.
In an attempt to get the Russian submarine to service and be identified, the Beale began to drop signaling depth charges on the B-59 Foxtrot class submarine. The signaling depth charge had the blast of a hand grenade, not enough to damage a submarine, but enough to rattle the crew and make them think they might be getting attacked.
What the American commander of the Beale didn’t know was that the Russian submarine was armed with a 15-kiloton nuclear torpedo.
The Beale kept the pressure up, tracking the sub and dropping charge.
Below the American ship, things began to get a bit desperate. Even though the charges couldn’t sink the sub, it was like they were sitting in a metal barrel while someone was slamming on it with a sledgehammer. The temperature inside the submarine rose to 120 degrees. Oxygen began to run short. Out of radio communications with their own fleet, the crew had no way of knowing if the charges were a sign that war had begun.
Between the heat and the lack of oxygen, sailors began to collapse at their duty stations.
The captain of the B-59 ordered his weapons officer to prepare the nuclear torpedo for launch.
Fortunately for the world, the second officer, Captain Arkhipov, interceded, arguing forcefully and successfully against a launch.
The B-59 surfaced and the Americans stood to, simply watching, confirming that the two countries were not at war.
But they had just come ever so close to it. Only one Russian second in command officer away.
Penkovsky and Arkhipov.
Cha
pter Twelve
Ducharme arrived as the first assault teams descended into the Fulton Subway station, led by two tracking dogs. He wasn’t surprised to find they were TriOp, the mercenaries of choice of the Society of Cincinnati. He was a bit surprised by how quickly the NYPD ceded the operation over to the mercenaries. It made him wonder how often the two organizations had worked together before, and confirmed that in terms of power, SOC trumped NYC.
Ducharme took a position behind the point element, which consisted of the two dogs and their handlers, and a six-man assault team. Two more assault teams of six men followed. The team leader must have talked to Cane, because while he acquiesced to Ducharme’s presence, he told him he was to stay back once contact was made.
A quarter mile away from the station, they left the subway tunnel and went into a service tunnel that appeared long out of use.
But the dogs indicated someone was using it.
As far as what it had serviced, as near as Ducharme could tell, it appeared to be coal, back when that was the fuel of choice for heating buildings.
The pain in his head increased the further the assault teams wove their way into the warren of tunnels. Stress, yes, he accepted that, but he also knew it was part of his combat experience ticking, warning him.
They were in enemy territory. If the Peacekeepers had been down here for fifty-odd years, they were intimately familiar with them. There wasn’t a place in the world that Ducharme had infiltrated where the locals-the inhabitants-hadn’t known he was there, no matter how stealthy he was.
They were being drawn in. Ducharme was sure of it.
They were now in a concrete tunnel, the walls lined with cracks and chips, indicating it was old and not maintained. A train was rattling by, how close, Ducharme had no way of knowing, but it wasn’t far away.
Was the trap being set by the Peacekeepers in the form of an ambush, or in the form of the nuclear weapons they might be approaching that were going to be detonated?
The ambush happened first as a series of distinctive blasts, which Ducharme recognized, echoed down the tunnel, indicating the lead element had been decimated by claymore mines.
*****
Mary Meyer was a woman who had never gone out of her way to hide her lifestyle. Evie found that interesting as she read up on Meyer, seated on the far side of the room from Turnbull in the Anderson House. Certainly Meyer had kept some things secret, such as her affair with the President, but it was a secret hidden inside a flamboyant lifestyle of sex, drugs and art.
In Evie’s opinion, people weren’t that difficult to understand. Ninety-nine percent of what people did was habit. While most people connected profilers with serial killers, the reality was that anyone could be profiled. When she was in the CIA one of her jobs had been profiling potential threats to the United States. What did they have in common? What was similar in their upbringing? What was similar in the way they acted out?
Evie sat back in the chair, aware that Turnbull’s eyes were on her. He was a dangerous man but also predictable in his own way. As long as he needed someone, he was not a threat. If he needed someone but they were becoming a threat, he had a tipping point. Obviously one he’d reached with Ducharme in Turkey. Ducharme had become a larger threat than asset.
Evie shook her head, wondering why her mind had wandered to the conflict between Ducharme and Turnbull when the issue was Mary Meyer. A woman who’d been killed less than a year after Kennedy’s assassination, shot in the heart and head while taking a walk on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Towpath.
A black man had been arrested for her murder, but acquitted. A strange turn of events given the racial tensions at the time. Especially since the judge had ruled that nothing about Mary Meyer’s personal life could be admitted in court. The man’s lawyer had said that it was as if the only existence Mary Meyer had in the trial had been that moment on the towpath when she died.
Sex, drugs and art.
Two were ephemeral. Passing. But art. Art lasted.
Meyer had to know that she was under surveillance. During her sting with the CIA, Evie had gotten a glimpse of the surveillance state that the United States had been and is. She had no doubt that the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and others had kept Mary Meyer under deep surveillance. A woman who was with the President during the darkest hours of his life, whether it be the Cuban Missile Crisis, the death of Marilyn Monroe or the death of his child, was a woman they’d want to keep tabs on.
Having been married to Cord Meyer, a CIA agent, Meyer had to know she’d been under surveillance. She’d had to know that no matter what plan she set up, others would act quickly if something happened to her.
Thus the fake diary.
Evie closed her eyes. Think like the other person.
Art lasted.
Evie opened her eyes and began to type, expanding her search while narrowing it.
*****
Inside the vault, the digital countdown clicked below one hour.
00:59:59
*****
It was turning into a clusterfuck. Ducharme was riding this out so far, staying back from the front edges of the fire fight as more TriOp personnel assaulted down the tunnel, channeled into a narrow space already filled with their dead and wounded. The Peacekeepers were anything but as they fought back against the assault. Ducharme wondered how long the mercenaries would keep up their assault given their losses, but he had to grant Cane something—they were fighting as hard as any soldiers Ducharme had ever served with. They knew what was at stake here, most likely the city itself, and they fought furiously.
Inch by inch, body by body, the mercenaries pressed the attack forward.
Ducharme had graduated Ranger School many years ago. Where it was drilled into the Ranger Candidate’s head that the only way to break an ambush was to assault directly into it.
That was the school solution and what the TriOp men were doing.
Sometimes the school solution didn’t fit.
Ducharme backed up, searching for another tunnel. He found one: a three-foot high tube that was crowded with fiber optic cables. It was pitch black and extended as far as his flashlight could reach. He turned the light off and turned on his night-vision goggles, slipping them down over his eyes.
One thought truly disturbed him. Since the Peacekeepers knew the tunnels so well, they could have easily escaped. They’d chosen to fight. That meant they were trying to gain something, and the only thing Ducharme could figure that was, was time. They were fighting a delaying action.
Which meant they were waiting for something to happen, and that thought chilled him.
He slid into the tunnel and began crawling, hoping it would lead him in the right direction.
*****
Baths sat on a park bench, apparently oblivious of the cold. She was staring at her small notepad, re-reading the text message that she had just laboriously decrypted by hand.
The countdown had begun. Less than an hour before the Peace was finally kept by the Sword.
*****
“Half Light,” Evie said, not even aware she was speaking out loud.
“Excuse me,” Burns said, looking up from a folder on Admiral Groves that he’d been perusing.
“Proto-hard-edge-style minimalism,” Evie said. “Painted in 1964 by Mary Meyer. Not long before she was killed. After Kennedy was killed. After the Peacemakers were in place. After Jackie Kennedy gave Mikoyan that piece of paper.”
“English please,” Burns said.
Evie glanced over at Turnbull, who was now pretending to be engrossed in whatever was on his computer screen.
“Like the purloined letter,” Evie said.
“Hidden in plain sight,” Burns said.
“Exactly.” Evie stood, throwing on her coat. “Let’s go.”
Burns paused. He turned to Turnbull. “How are things in New York?”
Turnbull looked up from his computer. “Hot. Very hot. I’m allocating more assets. What are you two up to?”
“We�
�re going to the Smithsonian,” Evie said. Then she strode away, Burns behind her.
Turnbull waited until they were gone from the room, then he began making calls.
*****
Ducharme fell out of the tube into a sewage tunnel. He’d smelled it long before he fell into it, so he thought he was ready.
He wasn’t.
He threw up as he got to his feet, the smell overwhelming. It was so bad; it made him forget about the pain in his head for the moment, which made it almost worth it.
Almost.
The sound of the firefight was a distant echo, but one that oriented Ducharme. He turned to the right and moved to the sound of the guns, a maxim of combat since gunpowder was invented.
*****
At Al Asad, the lead contained box was secured inside an Air Force C-5 transport. A pair of F-16 fighters were circling overhead to escort the C-5 back to the United States.
The last of the Jupiter warheads were coming home, fifty years late.
*****
Ducharme waded through the waist-deep sludge, barely breathing. He was getting closer to the firefight.
At least he hoped he was. The echo of sound off the walls of the tunnel was disorienting. There was another sound that was growing louder, a mechanical, rhythmic thump. Ducharme bumped into something and he looked down.
In the green glow of the night-vision goggles it was hard to make it out at first. Then he realized he was looking at a severed hand. Not decomposed. Which meant the death was fresh. Which indicated to Ducharme that he was heading in the right direction. It was a small hand, a woman’s hand to judge by the fingernail polish, the size, and the rings.
Ducharme brought his automatic rifle up to firing position, tucking the stock tight into his shoulder. Since he was using the night-vision goggles and didn’t have a night sight for the weapon, he would have to aim as best he could.
