Back Channel (17 page)

“I’ll show you,” said the deputy director, an Air Force lieutenant general, and proceeded to draw from a file the photographs of a site near San Cristóbal: the missile trailers, the missile launchers, the antiaircraft batteries.

“Are you sure these trailers are carrying ballistic missiles?”

“At that size and with those launchers, the cargo can’t be anything else.”

“Missiles that could carry nuclear warheads to our shores.”

“Yes, sir. Intermediate-range. Probably the R-12. What we call the Sandal.”

Bundy nodded, outwardly calm but inwardly worried. The Sandal had an effective range of well over a thousand nautical miles. Fired from Cuba, the missile could probably carry a warhead as far north as Chicago or New York. Hitting Washington wouldn’t pose any sort of problem. A nuclear war would end in five minutes.

“Are the missiles operational?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“How long?”

“We’re not sure. We’re working on it.”

“And not a bluff, I take it—wooden missiles painted to look like the real thing.”

“No, sir. Believe me, our people can tell the difference.”

“Have you checked this with
YOGA
?” Y
OGA
being the Agency’s highest-ranking asset in the Kremlin, a colonel of military intelligence named Oleg Penkovsky.

“We’re trying. But the indications are consistent with everything
YOGA
’
S
told us about Soviet weaponry.”

“Ah. He did that missile course at Dzerzhinsky, as I recall.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bundy looked at the evidence before him on the table. The deputy director would say later that he detected in the national security adviser’s visage more sorrow than anger, and he would be right. Bundy, the DDI knew, had just today appeared on
Issues and Answers,
ABC’s Sunday-morning news program, and told the nation that the Administration had yet to see any evidence that the Soviets had plans to install nuclear weapons in Cuba. This assurance was based on the CIA’s own Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, forwarded to the White House in mid-September, which concluded that the placement of missiles in Cuba “would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy.”

But public embarrassment was not the reason for Bundy’s evident pain. The cause was the failure of his furious efforts to prevent just this occurrence.

President Kennedy had stressed repeatedly, in public and private alike, that the United States would never accept the introduction of strategic weapons anywhere else in the hemisphere. Ever since the Cuban Revolution, the American nightmare had been that the Soviets might put nuclear missiles on the island. The Administration had decided a year ago that the only way to prevent this from happening was to replace Castro with a friendly regime. The result was
MONGOOSE
, an Agency operation to use covert means, including sabotage and assassination, to topple the dictator. Bundy had been reluctant to go along but had seen the necessity: do nothing, and sooner or later the Soviets would be unable to resist the temptation.

But
MONGOOSE
had proved farcical, with nothing to show for the
money spent—although a handful of clever Cuban exiles and a couple of Mafia kingpins were each several hundred thousand dollars richer.

“Thank you, General,” Bundy finally said. “I’ll get this to the President. I suspect we have a couple of busy weeks ahead of us.”

Elsewhere in the city, the man called Viktor was listening to the raving of his contact.

“You people had her and you let her go. Why would you do that?”

“It was not my decision,” said Viktor, morosely. He adjusted the gold-rimmed glasses. They were sitting in the back of a noisy bar on Capitol Hill. Young men and women laughed together at adjoining tables.

His contact was unsatisifed. “I don’t care whose decision it was. I want to know why the hell you let
GREENHILL
go.”

“It was the judgment of my superiors. I do not fully understand.”

“Well, I think I do.” The American drained off his beer, signaled for another. “My government is split over how to deal with the missiles. The military, State, the intelligence agencies—everybody’s split. Hawks against doves. Sounds like yours is, too.”

Viktor shook his head. He pushed his glass away. The vodka was not nearly cold enough. He did not understand how Americans could manage without the bone-chilling crispness of a vodka properly served. “Her interrogator was the great Fomin himself. As you know, he is a legend in our services. He was also one of my teachers. It is not possible that he is among what you call the doves.”

“Then it wasn’t his decision.”

“Perhaps not. He is always making plans and conspiracies of enormous complexity in order to confound your side. He would have fought hard against any order to release this
GREENHILL
. Therefore it is likely that her release will serve his purposes.”

“Can you find out?”

“Fomin will not tell me. He keeps his secrets.” Viktor wiped his mouth. “Perhaps I should meet this
GREENHILL
myself.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” said his contact. “Besides, if she wouldn’t talk to Fomin, why would she talk to you?”

“I am not Fomin.” A grim smile. “Perhaps I shall leave her no choice.”

The asset known as
GREENHILL
was standing on the widow’s walk atop her grandmother’s house in Garrison, up the Hudson River from New York City. Not that Margo knew her code name. She knew nothing of the contretemps set off by Harrington’s wild idea, or the tug-of-war among the nation’s intelligence agencies set off by the mission’s collapse. She knew nothing of the CIA’s confirmation that there were nuclear warheads in Cuba, although there at least she had her suspicions.

Especially after Varna.

Margo leaned her smooth brown face into the snapping wind off the river and looked south, where the Hudson vanished around a bend. Manhattan was a good fifty-odd miles away. She wondered whether it was really true, as Tom had told her, that even at this distance the bomb’s glare could blind you.

The October sky was a delicate eggshell blue, perfect for cracking wide open. The clouds were high and wispy, and Margo imagined that she might any minute catch a glimpse of the Soviet bombers making their run, but she knew from Professor Niemeyer’s course that the state-of-the-art method for delivering nuclear weapons was the standoff position, the plane climbing and banking as the bomb was released, imparting an initial upward trajectory. By the time the weapon reached the top of its arc and began its final downward journey, the bomber was streaking in the opposite direction as fast as it could fly. Red Air
Force doctrine, Niemeyer had told them, mandated four planes to kill a large city, converging from different points of the compass, and one night their homework was to calculate the odds that two might collide as they struggled to get the lob angle just right.

Not that it would matter. A near miss counted the same as a hit to those whom the bomb would incinerate.

The past weeks had been nightmarish, and plagued by such horrid dreams that Margo no longer possessed a clear sense of the boundary between reality and fantasy. A month ago, she had been a student, a nobody, another sophomore political-science major at Cornell, worshipping along with the others the great Lorenz Niemeyer, who filled his frightening lectures on the mathematics of conflict with dozens of reasons why no sane leader would ever push the button, and no sane adviser would allow an insane leader within a mile of the nuclear codes. Then, for a wondrous instant, she had become an unexpected player in great events, part of the effort to prevent …

Well, to prevent what she was on this roof waiting to witness.

The radio said that the city was being evacuated, and Margo supposed it must be true, but no line of desperate families crammed into Fords and Chevies had made it this far north. Maybe the army was turning the traffic toward New England. Maybe her grandmother’s house wasn’t safe after all. From her perch on the roof, Margo could look across the gray autumn river toward West Point, and although Professor Niemeyer always said that nobody would ever survive the first strike to launch a second, she imagined that the military academy must be somewhere on the list of low-priority targets. In the classroom, all of this had seemed excitingly abstract. Niemeyer liked to tease them, asking how far down the list Ithaca, New York, would lie. His mockery generated an absurd competitiveness among the students, who vied with one another to invent reasons for the Russians to vaporize Cornell University. Niemeyer claimed that adults all over America played the same grim game. Margo had no parents to speak of, and she spent her vacations with her grandmother here in Garrison. Nana’s idea of a good time was to cross the river and ride the tour bus up Bear Mountain for a picnic. When Margo asked Nana last summer whether she and her friends ever talked about Armageddon, the old woman seemed to think her granddaughter was referring to the final battle in the Book of Revelation. Margo said no, she meant the risk of nuclear
war. Nana laughed and said not to worry—with Kennedy in the White House, everything was going to be fine. That was three months ago. Now it was fall, and Kennedy was still in the White House, and everything wasn’t fine, because New York was about to explode. Margo had attended segregated public schools in both New York City and New Rochelle, but she had always imagined somehow that there would be time for the Movement to gather steam, so that her own family would live where she and her husband pleased. Despite the monthly classroom air-raid drills and the twice-yearly trips down to the fallout shelter, she never imagined, in those innocent days, that she would never have a family to worry about because the world was going to end in 1962. The schools she had attended, the parks where she had frolicked, the museums where she had passed her lonely days—all would be ash.

And five million people with them.

A hydrogen bomb, said Tom, worked by implosion, not explosion: what created the blast was the pieces all being pressed together in the right combination with enormous force. After that came the light, then the heat, then the wave. He always said it that way: light, heat, wave. The light was first, as bright as a hundred suns, and your blink reflex would never be fast enough to stop the glare from blinding you. Next came the heat, but that was only local, setting fire to everything within a mile or two of the implosion. Finally came the blast wave, the wall of force knocking down everything it touched—trees, buildings, bridges, dams. In the Nevada highlands, said Tom, one bomb test had hollowed out an entire mountain peak. The military had built whole towns out there, complete with mannequins and televisions, and the blast wave had crushed them flat. You could shield yourself from the glare. You could escape the heat. But the only protection against the blast wave, said Tom, was the inverse-square law.

“Get as far away from ground zero as possible,” he said. “Figure out where the targets are, and be somewhere else.”

Niemeyer scoffed at this strategy. Nobody had ever launched an intercontinental missile in anger, he said, and nobody knew if they would hit their targets. The earth wasn’t perfectly round, the magnetic field wasn’t perfectly uniform, and the multiple launches and explosions would themselves do incalculable damage to the calculations. Some would likely hit, but the errors would be enormous. If the Russians lobbed six missiles at Washington, wrote Niemeyer in one of the
books that made him famous, the chances were that at least three of them would miss by a hundred miles, blowing up shoe factories in Pennsylvania and farms in Virginia instead.

Maybe Nana’s house wasn’t far enough, after all—

There was the promised flash, a flicker, an eyeblink, more white than gold, then swift, leaping yellow, and Margo didn’t go blind or feel the heat or feel anything, really, not least because her strong, fluid body was roiling soot—

And as she died she heard Niemeyer’s mocking laughter—

Because she had failed—

Margo opened her eyes with a silent scream on her lips. It was two in the morning, the windows were open to the autumn chill, but her slim body was drenched with perspiration. This was her second night in the room where she had spent more than half her life, and she already knew it was time to go. If the dream that had troubled her sleep since Varna could chase her even here to Garrison, it could follow her anywhere. Better, then, to dream in Ithaca, where at least she had friends. Her Nana was many wonderful things, but she was neither warm nor comforting. Her recipe for dealing with terror was to scare it out of you.

She wondered what her father’s recipe had been.

Margo climbed from the bed and padded barefoot to the casement window with its involute leading. She cranked the pane farther open, hoping the sweat would evaporate. Her nightgown billowed in the breeze. She had a sense that she was thinner. Since Varna, she had almost stopped eating, a peculiar reaction given that she was hungry all the time. At her bedside was the cup of cocoa Nana had insisted would help her sleep. Margo hadn’t touched it.

Her window gave on the side of the house, the yard where remnants of the small wooden castle of her youth still stood, the secret hideaway salvaged from the yard in New Rochelle after her mother died. In the old days, Margo and her brother used to sit inside with their milk and cookies and books, during the one hour of reading their mother required every day after school. Now, in her mind’s eye, she saw not the wreck that sat on her grandmother’s lawn, but the lively
playhouse of her New Rochelle childhood. The playhouse was where Margo would seek her own company after a scolding; it was where, after church one Christmas, her brother, Corbin, had gulled her into believing that there existed a country called “Orient Tar”; and where she and seven-year-old Kirby McKinley from down the block had shared what was for both a first kiss.