Edge of Eternity (25 page)

On balance, Tanya wished the revolution well. Cuba had to escape from underdevelopment and colonialism. No one wanted the Americans back, with their casinos and their prostitutes. But Tanya wondered
whether Cubans would ever be allowed to make their own decisions. American hostility drove them into the arms of the Soviets; but as Castro moved closer to the USSR, so it became increasingly likely that the Americans would invade. What Cuba really needed was to be left alone.

But perhaps now it had a chance. She and Paz were among a mere handful of people who knew what was in these long wooden crates. She was reporting directly to Dimka on the effectiveness of the security blanket. If the plan worked it might protect Cuba permanently from the danger of an American invasion, and give the country breathing space in which to find its own way into the future.

That was her hope, anyway.

She had known Paz a year. “You never talk about your family,” she said as they watched the crate being positioned in the trailer. She addressed him in Spanish: she was now fairly fluent. She had also picked up a smattering of the American-accented English that many Cubans used occasionally.

“The revolution is my family,” he said.

Bullshit, she thought.

All the same, she was probably going to sleep with him.

Paz might turn out to be a dark-skinned version of Vasili, handsome and charming and faithless. There was probably a string of lissome Cuban girls with flashing eyes taking turns to fall into his bed.

She told herself not to be cynical. Just because a man was gorgeous he did not have to be a mindless Lothario. Perhaps Paz was simply waiting for the right woman to become his life partner and toil alongside him in the mission to build a new Cuba.

The missile in its crate was lashed to the bed of the trailer. Paz was approached by a small, obsequious lieutenant called Lorenzo, who said: “Ready to move out, General.”

“Carry on,” said Paz.

The truck moved slowly away from the dock. A herd of motorcycles roared into life and went ahead of the truck to clear the road. Tanya and Paz got into his army car, a green Buick LeSabre station wagon, and followed the convoy.

Cuba's roads had not been designed for eighty-foot trucks. In the last
three months, Red Army engineers had built new bridges and reconfigured hairpin bends, but still the convoy moved at walking pace much of the time. Tanya noted with relief that all other vehicles had been cleared from the roads. In the villages through which they passed, the low-built two-room wooden houses were dark, and the bars were shut. Dimka would be satisfied.

Tanya knew that back at the dockside another missile was already being eased onto another truck. The process would go on until first light. Unloading the entire cargo would take two nights.

So far, Dimka's strategy was working. It seemed no one suspected what the Soviet Union was up to in Cuba. There was no whisper of it on the diplomatic circuit or in the uncontrolled pages of Western newspapers. The feared explosion of outrage in the White House had not yet happened.

But there were still two months to go before the American midterm elections; two more months during which these huge missiles had to be made launch-ready in total secrecy. Tanya did not know whether it could be done.

After two hours they drove into a broad valley that had been taken over by the Red Army. Here engineers were building a launch site. This was one of more than a dozen tucked away out of sight in the folds of the mountains all across the 777-mile-long island of Cuba.

Tanya and Paz got out of the car to watch the crate being off-loaded from the truck, again under floodlights. “We did it,” said Paz in a tone of satisfaction. “We now have nuclear weapons.” He took out a cigar and lit it.

Sounding a note of caution, Tanya said: “How long will it take to deploy them?”

“Not long,” he said dismissively. “A couple of weeks.”

He was not in the mood to think about problems, but to Tanya the task looked as if it might take more than two weeks. The valley was a dusty construction site where little had so far been achieved. All the same, Paz was right: they had done the hard part, which was bringing nuclear weapons into Cuba without the Americans finding out.

“Look at that baby,” Paz said. “One day it could land in the middle of Miami. Bang.”

Tanya shuddered at the thought. “I hope not.”

“Why?”

Did he really need to be told? “These weapons are meant to be a threat. They're supposed to make the Americans afraid to invade Cuba. If ever they are used, they will have failed.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But if they do attack us, we will be able to wipe out entire American cities.”

Tanya was unnerved by the evident relish with which he contemplated this dreadful prospect. “What good would that do?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “It will maintain the pride of the Cuban nation.” He uttered the Spanish word
dignidad
as if it were sacred.

She could hardly believe what she was hearing. “So you would start a nuclear war for the sake of your pride?”

“Of course. What could be more important?”

Indignantly she said: “The survival of the human race, for one thing!”

He waved his lighted cigar in a dismissive gesture. “You worry about the human race,” he said. “My concern is my honor.”

“Shit,” said Tanya. “Are you mad?”

Paz looked at her. “President Kennedy is prepared to use nuclear weapons if the United States is attacked,” he said. “Secretary Khrushchev will use them if the Soviet Union is attacked. The same for De Gaulle of France and whoever is the leader of Great Britain. If one of them said anything different he would be deposed within hours.” He drew on his cigar, making the end glow red, then blew out smoke. “If I'm mad,” he said, “they all are.”

•   •   •

George Jakes did not know what the emergency was. Bobby Kennedy summoned him and Dennis Wilson to a crisis meeting in the White House on the morning of Tuesday, October 16. His best guess was that the subject would be on the front page of today's
New York Times,
with the headline:

Eisenhower Calls President Weak on Foreign Policy

The unwritten rule was that ex-presidents did not attack their successors. However, George was not surprised that Eisenhower had
flouted the convention. Jack Kennedy had won by calling Eisenhower weak and inventing a nonexistent “missile gap” in the Soviets' favor. Clearly Ike was still hurting from this punch below the belt. Now that Kennedy was vulnerable to a similar charge, Eisenhower was getting his revenge—exactly three weeks before the midterm elections.

The other possibility was worse. George's great fear was that Operation Mongoose might have leaked. The revelation that the president and his brother were organizing international terrorism would be ammunition for every Republican candidate. They would say the Kennedys were criminals for doing it and fools for letting the secret out. And what reprisals might Khrushchev dream up?

George could see that his boss was furious. Bobby was not good at hiding his feelings. Rage showed in the set of his jaw and the hunch of his shoulders and the arctic blast of his blue-eyed gaze.

George liked Bobby for the openness of his emotions. People who worked with Bobby saw into his heart, frequently. It made him more vulnerable but also more lovable.

When they walked into the Cabinet Room, President Kennedy was already there. He sat on the other side of the long table, on which were several large ashtrays. He was in the center, with the presidential seal on the wall above and behind him. Either side of the seal, tall arched windows looked out onto the Rose Garden.

With him was a little girl in a white dress who was obviously his daughter, Caroline, not quite five years old. She had short light-brown hair parted at the side—like her father's—and held back with a simple clip. She was speaking to him, solemnly explaining something, and he was listening raptly, as if her words were as vital as anything else said in this room of power. George was profoundly struck by the intensity of the connection between parent and child. If ever I have a daughter, he thought, I will listen like that, so that she will know she is the most important person in the world.

The aides took their seats against the wall. George sat next to Skip Dickerson, who worked for Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Skip had very fair straight hair and pale skin, almost like an albino. He pushed his blond forelock out of his eyes and spoke in a Southern accent. “Any idea where the fire is?”

“Bobby isn't saying,” George replied.

A woman George did not know came into the room and took Caroline away. “The CIA has some news for us,” the president said. “Let's begin.”

At one end of the room, in front of the fireplace, stood an easel displaying a large monochrome photograph. The man standing next to it introduced himself as an expert photointerpreter. George had not known that such a profession existed. “The pictures you are about to see were taken on Sunday by a high-altitude U-2 aircraft of the CIA flying over Cuba.”

Everyone knew about the CIA's spy planes. The Soviets had shot one down over Siberia two years ago, and had put the pilot on trial for espionage.

Everyone peered at the photo on the easel. It seemed blurred and grainy, and showed nothing that George could recognize except maybe trees. They needed an interpreter to tell them what they were looking at.

“This is a valley in Cuba about twenty miles inland from the port of Mariel,” the CIA man said. He pointed with a little baton. “A good-quality new road leads to a large open field. These small shapes scattered around are construction vehicles: bulldozers, backhoes, and dump trucks. And here”—he tapped the photo for emphasis—“here, in the middle, you see a group of shapes like planks of wood in a row. They are in fact crates eighty feet long by nine feet across. That is exactly the right size and shape to contain a Soviet R-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile, designed to carry a nuclear warhead.”

George just managed to stop himself from saying
Holy shit,
but others were not so restrained, and for a moment the room was full of astonished curses.

Someone said: “Are you sure?”

The photointerpreter replied: “Sir, I have been studying air reconnaissance photographs for many years, and I can assure you of two things: one, this is exactly what nuclear missiles look like, and two, nothing else looks like this.”

God save us, George thought fearfully; the goddamn Cubans have nukes.

Someone said: “How the hell did they get there?”

The photointerpreter said: “Clearly the Soviets transported them to Cuba in conditions of utter secrecy.”

“Snuck them in under our fucking noses,” said the questioner.

Someone else asked: “What is the range of those missiles?”

“More than a thousand miles.”

“So they could hit . . .”

“This building, sir.”

George had to repress an impulse to get up and leave right away.

“And how long would it take?”

“To get here from Cuba? Thirteen minutes, we calculate.”

Involuntarily, George glanced at the windows, as if he might see a missile coming across the Rose Garden.

The president said: “That son of a bitch Khrushchev lied to me. He told me he would not deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba.”

Bobby added: “And the CIA told us to believe him.”

Someone else said: “This is bound to dominate the rest of the election campaign—three more weeks.”

With relief, George turned his mind to the domestic political consequences: the possibility of nuclear war was somehow too terrible to contemplate. He thought of this morning's
New York Times.
How much more Eisenhower could say now! At least when he was president he had not allowed the USSR to turn Cuba into a Communist nuclear base.

This was a disaster, and not just for foreign policy. A Republican landslide in November would mean that Kennedy was hamstrung for the last two years of his presidency, and that would be the end of the civil rights agenda. With more Republicans joining Southern Democrats in opposing equality for Negroes, Kennedy would have no chance of bringing in a civil rights bill. How long would it be then before Maria's grandfather would be allowed to register to vote without getting arrested?

In politics, everything was connected.

We have to do something about the missiles, George thought.

He had no idea what.

Fortunately Jack Kennedy did.

“First, we need to step up U-2 surveillance of Cuba,” the president
said. “We have to know how many missiles they have and where they are. And then, by God, we're going to take them out.”

George perked up. Suddenly the problem did not seem so great. The USA had hundreds of aircraft and thousands of bombs. And President Kennedy taking decisive, violent action to protect America would do no harm to the Democrats in the midterms.

Everyone looked at General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America's most senior military commander after the president. His wavy hair, slick with brilliantine and parted high on his head, made George think he might be vain. He was trusted by both Jack and Bobby, though George was not sure why. “An air strike would need to be followed by a full-scale invasion of Cuba,” Taylor said.

“And we have a contingency plan for that.”

“We can land one hundred fifty thousand men there within a week of the bombing.”

Kennedy was still thinking about taking out the Soviet missiles. “Could we guarantee to destroy every launch site in Cuba?” he asked.

Taylor replied: “It will never be one hundred percent, Mr. President.”

George had not thought of that snag. Cuba was 777 miles long. The air force might not be able to find every site, let alone destroy them all.

President Kennedy said: “And I guess any missiles remaining after our air strike would be fired at the USA immediately.”