They were silent.
Kirov was reflective. “Whatever it was that caused them to kill Olga now makes it necessary to kill me.”
Another moment or two of silence. And then Tamayo:
“Does Pushkin have a fresh code?”
“Yes. But thank God, it too is here. Tomorrow, when radioing Moscow, I am Captain Pushkin. There is one thing I worry about.”
“What is it? Anything we can do to help?”
“I worry about Lieutenant Vassilov, the KGB officer here. I wonder if Moscow will advise him separately of my execution.”
“Does he know about Pushkin coming over as replacement?”
“Not that I am aware. If he does know, then we can expect fireworks very soon, when Pushkin fails to materialize while I am still around.”
“Would we be safer if Lieutenant Vassilov met with a fatal accident? It is one of my … specialties.”
“Let me answer that tomorrow, after I have spent time at the communications center. I think I may be able to tell by playing with the radio logs whether he has had any independent messages.”
“And if he has?”
“If he has, I think you had better be ready with a plan.”
“That will hardly be easy, within the Soviet detachment.”
“He travels about. I will also give it some thought. It occurs to me that perhaps I should not sleep in my quarters tonight. If there were a knock on the door I would suffer a heart attack.”
“Do you have alternative quarters other than right here, where they would also come looking for you if they got the word?”
“Yes. The quarters I have in mind specify double occupancy of a single bed. But come to think of it, I am in extreme need of distraction.”
They shook hands.
Anatoly Kirov sat down. He took a matchbox from the corner of the table and burned the papers ordering his execution.
33
Blackford Oakes left the apartment a few moments after ten P.M. The night was moonless, as he knew it would be. He wore a bright yellow suit and a fedora, and he carried a walking stick and a small canvas duffel bag. His face, neck, and hands were blackened. He was a dude, heading out for a night on the town. Three blocks away a car, having made the signal, slowed. The door opened. Blackford stepped in.
Pano gave instructions in Spanish to the man in the driver’s seat. They drove south to Marathon, in the midsection of the Florida Keys. The powerboat was waiting.
At the dock, Blackford undressed, keeping the blackening on his skin, and put on a wet suit. The snorkel and fins were in the boat. The passage to Punta 32, as the rendezvous had been designated, would be less than two hours, traveling at full speed. If the two Cubans handling the boat thought it wise to slow down before reaching Cuban waters, it would take longer. A half a kilometer from land, by low-powered radio, the boat would signal the resistance guerrillas at Punta 32 that the swimmers were descending into the water. Blackford and Pano would slip into the water and swim toward a light that would shine every four or five minutes, dimly. The boat would retreat at slow speed for twelve miles, then, at full speed, return to Marathon.
Blackford thought back on his last passage by boat in these waters. Only, he had been headed in the other direction … and had not made it. He allowed himself, however briefly, to ponder how pleasant the sensation might be if a Coast Guard vessel were suddenly to heave by and prevent him from going in the direction he was now headed. Let this cup pass from me, Lord.
As they began to rev up to full speed, Blackford stared at the dull white-green luminosity of the wake being made by this powerful Elco. It was pleasant to reflect that nothing illegal was happening, or would happen, for the first thirty-eight miles of this crossing. Freedom of the seas! But the last twelve miles …
The communications system among the guerrillas was operative, indeed in some respects highly refined. If Cuban radar picked them up, dispatching a patrol vessel toward the projected point of entry into Cuban waters, the little radar set at Punta 32 would in turn pick up the vessel and an abort signal would go forward, followed in the Elco by a quick U-turn and 40 mph speed back toward Florida. But the Cubans didn’t have the resources to insulate the whole of their vast coastline. Night after night, a resistance boat traveled to the island with supplies, with men, or with men and dynamite, for a quickie hit-and-run.
There were no problems tonight, and shortly after one in the morning they went into the water, and waited for the shaft of light. It came almost instantly. They waved at their escorts and began noiselessly to swim in the direction of the light. The water, Blackford thought, was just the right temperature. Cool enough to refresh him, warm enough to permit him to save energy.
On landing at the beach they were met, an identifying signal exchanged with Pano. They took off their fins, put on their wet sneakers, and walked for a half hour in the direction of a village, a few of whose lights were still shining.
They stopped outside the village at a little farmhouse almost hidden by the surrounding sugarcane. It was a resistance outpost. Blackford (“Joe”) and Pano (“Bolero”) were introduced to “Miguel,” the largest Cuban Blackford had ever seen, and to “Mico,” who could not have been twenty years old. Both men were dressed in the campesino garb of sugarcane workers. They brought out heavy dark bread, fish, and warm beer. The following morning they would hear directly from “Nena.” She would report on security arrangements at San Cristóbal.
Blackford was shown his cot, in the single bedroom in the cabin. He lay back and tried to piece it together. He wrestled with it all, unsuccessfully.
The call had come that morning, from Rufus. By code, Blackford was given a number. A second code gave him the auspices under which he was to make the call, namely, from a random pay telephone. This meant, under the vexing and arduous circumstances of his life in Miami, donning a disguise. He had a dozen in the closet and elected the easiest, the beach bum with the straggly beard.
From the phone booth outside a busy McDonald’s he listened …
A U-2 flight, doing its twice-a-week run over Cuba, had yielded an anomalous picture taken over San Cristóbal. The picture was of one of the great caves that, a year earlier, had housed the Soviet missiles. Six experts had pored over the picture of the thousand-square-foot area designated the year before as SCS12 (for “San Cristóbal Site #12”). An anomaly no expert could explain was that, measured against other pictures, the cave’s mouth appeared to have increased in size. Indeed it looked, as one cryptoanalyst put it, “as though the cave had simply grown. Goddamndest thing. But the proportions of what could be glimpsed at the cave’s mouth hadn’t altered.” A quick intelligence analysis meeting had been called, Rufus presiding. There was no question that an elaborate camouflage effort had been undertaken. There was visible what was shaped exactly like the nose of an SS-4 missile. Painted black-brown, but its sharp profile unmistakable.
Could it be?
“Inconceivable,” one expert had, mistakenly, commented.
“The last time I heard that word spoken,” Rufus said icily, “was on October 15, 1962.” That was the day the photographs were developed revealing the massive Soviet missile emplacement: the beginning of the Missile Crisis.
Three hours later, the CIA task force concluded that they must mount a “ground operation.” And the obvious man to put in charge was Blackford Oakes. With his aide, Pano, he would need to go to San Cristóbal and have a look. Their mission would be expedited by the resistance, with which Pano was in close touch. Rufus spoke to Blackford about the range of possibilities opened up by the emergency expedition.
When Blackford returned to the safe house, Pano was waiting for him. He brought two letters. Twice a week, Pano, on his rounds, was handed letters addressed to Blackford and mailed in care of the Fontainebleau Hotel. Before breaking the big news to Pano, Blackford excused himself to open his mail, so welcome in his solitary circumstances in that wretched safe house.
The first was from his mother in
London. She chatted with him about this and that, about his stepfather’s declining health—“though you are not to worry, my darling Blacky. The doctor says it is only a matter of a strict diet, and more of those pills.” She hadn’t said what kind of pills. Lady Carol Sharkey didn’t distinguish between aspirin and insulin, and probably, bless her heart, didn’t know the difference between them. “When will I see you again, my beloved, beautiful” (Blackford winced) “Blacky?”
The second letter, he recognized from the coded return address in Mexico, would be from Anthony Trust. He opened it, expecting the usual political clippings. Inside it was a sealed envelope. Blackford’s heart began to pound. On the envelope was written, For Blackford Oakes, confidential.
The handwriting was Sally’s.
He excused himself again, and went into the bedroom where he tore open the letter. The message was brief:
Dear Blacky, I know that the fault can’t have been yours. The coincidence has been a nightmare, but I am over it. I am pregnant. And I long to see you again. The past is, necessarily, past. You are still my darling Blacky. It was signed, simply, S.
He needed a full fifteen minutes before reconciling himself to it: when next he left the safe house, it would be to go not to Mexico, where his heart yearned to take him, but to Cuba, where his mission, his endless mission, dictated he should go. His hand was trembling, but he knew he had to write to her, and did, before returning to the living room to break the news to Pano about the village where he and Blackford would be spending the night, after the long day that lay ahead of them.
34
That first afternoon, Nicolai Pushkin shouted himself hoarse and spent himself to the point of exhaustion. He demanded, in his remarkably fluent Spanish, to see the Soviet commandant. Then he demanded to see the Soviet Ambassador. Then he demanded to see the Foreign Minister. Then he demanded to see Fidel Castro. Where in the name of God am I! he shouted out to the lone guard outside his lone cell. He was not in a formal prison, but in a single stucco building, obviously used as prison quarters for a single prisoner. His barred cell looked directly into the guard’s cozy quarters. The thickly built guard did nothing while Pushkin expostulated, except to read, seated at his desk, his comic book.
At seven, in response to three steady knocks, the guard opened the door and took from someone outside a cafeteria tray of food. Supper. He slid it under the cell bars. Pushkin stopped talking. He grudgingly lifted the tray onto his desk. The jail cell was comfortably furnished and included a toilet and shower. He could not, however, see out the window, which was barred and eight feet above the floor, a black blind pulled down over it. The furniture was immovable.
At eight, the first guard was relieved. The night guard was a young man, perhaps twenty. His hair was longer than conventional in the army, his chin beardless, his features even, his eyes a searching brown, and he appeared preoccupied. After the first guard had left, he took up his post, and after a few minutes approached the prisoner and, at a safe remove from the long bars, said, “Roberto tells me you speak Spanish. My name is Leandro. I think we can save a lot of trouble if I tell you that I have been instructed that no request of yours is to be so much as listened to, let alone honored.”
Pushkin was caught by the mandarin Spanish of Leandro, totally free of idiomatic Cuban pockmarks. “Now there is no way in which I can keep from listening to your requests, because I am not deaf. But if you do not make any requests, you will not suffer the frustration of my not heeding them.
“In any other way,” Leandro said, pulling the chair up to the desk, “I shall attempt to oblige you. You have water, and up until midnight I can get you bananas, pineapple, coffee, and hot soup. After that, nothing until six in the morning. I am here for twelve hours. I am not permitted to sleep, of course. And the telephone may ring from time to time, as my superiors will wish to know about your—spirits. If you ask me any questions having to do with why you are here, how long you will be here, and what the likely disposition of your case will be, I can answer you with all frankness: I haven’t the slightest idea. For all I know, Fidel has declared war on the Soviet Union and you are the first prisoner.”
Nicolai Pushkin, for the first time since leaving home, felt that a human being had entered his life. After he had stopped kicking and yelling, so to speak, he had concentrated very hard on the probable reasons for his detention and that of Anatoly Kirov. He began, one by one, to examine every contingency, and explore it.
The loss of his briefcase was not serious in respect of the technical data. The Cubans could not begin to understand what the SS-4 refinements added up to. Nor, he speculated, could they necessarily infer, even from a close reading of the documents, that they had to do with a nuclear missile buried in Cuban soil.
He paused a little over that one. He simply did not know the level of sophistication of Cuban physicists. Perhaps one of them would be drawn in, and the translator would attempt to communicate what was in all those manuals. Perhaps the physicist would then say: “Jesús, Mary, and Joseph”—a favorite Latin American expletive, he had noted—“that can only mean that there is a Soviet missile somewhere in the area.”
But he doubted it.
The inflammatory document was the one ordering the execution of Anatoly Kirov. Pushkin hadn’t been told what Kirov’s crime was, but obviously it was egregious. It would have been logical to transport him back to Moscow, try, convict, and shoot him there, Pushkin thought. Shortly before his plane took off, the KGB had shoved the instructions into his hand, briefly explaining that Kirov was a demonstrated traitor, scheduled for immediate execution. Obviously they feared that conventional detention, followed by a handcuffed trip in a Soviet security van from San Cristóbal right to the apron of the Aeroflot plane, would give the traitor Kirov too great an opportunity for contact with the Cubans.
And that, he reasoned, could mean only one thing: Moscow was taking no chances on Kirov’s speaking the single sentence: “There is a nuclear missile buried in the ground in the main cave at San Cristóbal.” That’s all. Kirov could say that to a Soviet guard, confident that that guard would repeat the statement and, inevitably, that it would be overheard by a Cuban. Whatever his treason then, it obviously did not consist in his having already told the Cuban Government about Petrouchka, else such precautions would be senseless.
Of course, this did not preclude the possibility that, right now, under detention, Kirov was spilling the beans. Pushkin simply could not guess the reason for the harsh treatment.
But what were the Cubans up to?
It seemed to him, as he dwelt on it, that to this there was only the one reasonable answer: They had discovered Petrouchka. Perhaps it was a subordinate technician, a member of the sixman staff, who had tipped off the Cubans. Perhaps it was accidental.
Never mind. Sometime after eleven in the morning, the Kremlin would be aroused. Section G/L would be there, waiting for a message in the new code from Pushkin. No message. They would wait an hour, perhaps two. They would check the equipment and circuits. Then they would telephone Colonel Bilensky and ask, “Where is Pushkin?” To be sure, before asking, “Where is Pushkin?” they would need to inform Bilensky that a replacement officer for Kirov called Pushkin had been dispatched to San Cristóbal without preliminary word being given to the colonel because of the security problem involving Kirov, who was not to know that he was about to be replaced. Which would lead, naturally, to their further question, Oh, you did execute Kirov, did you not? Whereupon the colonel would send out the alarm: that no man called Pushkin had arrived, and that Kirov had been missing since the afternoon before.
That would get the Kremlin moving! Chaos at San Cristóbal! Right there alongside their secret SS-4! The Soviets would then move in in force. He smiled a smile of satisfaction. When the Soviets move in in force, they move in in force. It would not be easy to explain to Fidel Castro why he had not been informed of Khrushchev’s plan to keep the SS-4 hidden in San Cristóbal. But, Pushkin sighed, these things have a
way of working themselves out between Superdictators and Minidictators. Fidel needed the Soviet Union; though to be sure, the Soviet Union was delighted to have Castro.
The reasoning was clear in his head. He calculated that twenty-four hours from now, Colonel Bilensky would have forced Castro’s security people to take him to Pushkin, he would dust off his clothes and telecommunicate to General Malinovsky for further orders.
His spirit calmed, and he renewed his interest in Leandro.
The young guard was leaning over his desk, a heavy book on his left, the light focused over it, and, on his right, a notebook. He would read a page or two, and then write down his notes. Pushkin watched him for a half hour.
“What, may I ask, Leandro, are you studying?”
“That question you may ask, Captain. I am studying physics.”
Pushkin thought for a moment. No, it didn’t matter that Leandro should know this. “I am a physicist.”
Leandro looked up. “You are?”
“Yes. Nicolai Pushkin, Doctor of Physics, Leningrad University 1953, a sus órdenes.”
Leandro’s bright eyes were shining. “What branch of physics?”
Pushkin paused for just a moment. He decided it was best to ask his question first: “What branch of physics are you studying, before I answer you that question?”
“I am studying nuclear physics.”
“That is the subject in which I have my doctorate,” Pushkin said, thinking what-the-hell, that doesn’t mean I have been sent to Cuba to build a nuclear bomb.
Leandro stood up and drew his chair closer to Pushkin’s cell. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
“Not in the least. I am hardly busy with other pressing engagements.”
It became a three-hour seminar. There were some difficulties, mostly revolving about Spanish translations for arcane Russian terminology. Happily, most nuclear language relies heavily on Greek and Latin roots and it never proved impossible finally to communicate everything Pushkin wished to communicate. Leandro was lost in admiration of Pushkin’s knowledge. Pushkin, having gone thus far, decided there was no point in concealing that he had been in Cuba last summer (“where I really learned my Spanish, though I had studied it before”) in connection with the aborted missile arming of Cuba.
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 28