Mongoose, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley

  “They are, first, to switch the DESTRUCT toggle.”

  It amused Pushkin that Leandro, his hair over his young but furrowed brow, thumbed through Pushkin’s notepad to point to the relevant switch—“That one. We flip it to the right. That, or else, second, we prevent the radio operator from switching the ARM button. Otherwise, the missile will fly off to complete its mission.”

  “There is a third alternative,” Pushkin said.

  “Oh?” Leandro looked up.

  “A premature launch. If Soviet procedure is followed, the valve sequence will not be ordained until just before the scheduled launch. If the launch were to take place before that was done, the missile would go off, not only with the valve door open—which would almost certainly deflect it from its destined course—but transformed into an innocent piece of steel casing. One more meteoric oddity, landing in the ocean or the desert someplace.”

  “How do you cause a premature launch?”

  “A regular launch is a two-man operation. Actually, a three-man operation. The senior technician acts like an orchestra conductor. One man, when the officer in charge gives the signal, closes and detaches the oxygen pressure valve, and the second pushes the button that electrically ignites the launch trigger.”

  “To make a premature launch, then, would mean a lot of friendly people—two, three—acting together in a friendly situation, right, Captain Pushkin?”

  They ruled out the premature launch.

  And that left them with the DESTRUCT option—unless Leandro was able to establish that the missile was going up with its valves benignly configured.

  They ended their discussion shortly before midnight, Leandro visibly straining for sleep, with only three procedural arrangements agreed upon:

  1) The clod—the other guard, Roberto—had to be got out of the way. This would be arranged by Leandro’s getting from his music student friend at the cave’s guard office a written order. He would hand that order to Roberto when he came on duty at eight. It would read, “Order from the Captain of the Cave Guard”—that Roberto Gallos’s next tour of duty, from 8 A.M. until 8 P.M. on November 22, would be to render additional assistance to the corps of guardsmen engaged in looking after the security of the cave.

  Leandro nodded. He knew where his musical friend was quartered. He would endeavor to get such an order and the accompanying identification pass that night, or at seven the next morning, in time to hand it to Roberto when he arrived at eight to relieve Leandro.

  2) At eight in the morning, Leandro would report to the cave with his usual pass and constitute himself de facto commuting steward between the Soviet mess hall, a block or two distant, and the Soviet technicians behind the curtain. They had got used to him, over the past five days, and would not be surprised if he was there at eight with a tray of hot coffee and sweet rolls; again at nine with more of the same; again at ten with whatever he could lay his hands on—Coca-Cola, orangeade, pineapple juice. “Keep it up all morning long. They must get to think of you as a constant presence in the cave.”

  Leandro nodded. Pushkin paused, and wrote on his notepad in large Cyrillic script in block letters: ATTN MESS HALL: Private Leandro Caballo will expedite minor refreshments for our detachment working in the cave. Please cooperate. Pushkin scratched out the initials of the Russian commandant, Colonel Bilensky.

  3) Leandro would need to come in with two pistols, one for his own use, the second for Pushkin, in the event the decision was made that they should both attempt to descend into the cave. Pushkin must be supplied with Cuban-style fatigues and a guardsman’s pass.

  Leandro hesitated. “Ask for one more pass? I just don’t know,” he shook his head. “Maybe that would make even my good, reliable friend suspicious.” He smiled suddenly. “You could use my pass! By the time you come along, I will have been in and out so often with my Coca-Cola and coffee and hot dogs and pineapple, they will not inspect my pass anymore.”

  Pushkin agreed that that was a reasonable risk.

  And they agreed they could go no further.

  Leandro went out to find his musical friend. In a half hour, he was back with the pass to use on Roberto in the morning. It was then that he agreed to undertake an hour or two of sleep. Five minutes later, the waxed string attached to his ankle, he was slumbering.

  40

  Blackford, seated in the stiff-backed chair he had sunk into when Jesús went out, was alone now with Miguel, Mico having been conscripted to go with the assault party. He needed above all, he told himself, to think.

  But he resisted thought: He was, just now, overcome with the conviction that he had come to the end of the line, and he wondered distractedly whether, in the next world, he would be with Sally. He allowed himself a Green Pasture scene, his hand and his lovely Sally’s tied together eternally, no squabbles, no interruption, a long melody.

  But the reverie was only a matter of moments. He kept hearing, softly at first, but now insistently, the adamant grating of Jesús Ferrer’s voice—Jesús telling him that someone would attempt to assassinate the President of the United States in a matter of an hour or two, followed by something very complicated, about how nothing could be done about it.

  Cold sweat on his unshaven face, his mind wholly concentrated for the first time on Jesús’ words, he thought now only this: that he had to save John F. Kennedy from the potential assassin.

  To do this he would need to overpower Miguel.

  He slipped his right hand into his pocket and fondled with near-sensuous satisfaction the automatic pistol in his pocket. Miguel—the huge six-foot four-inch Miguel—continued to hover, his back to Blackford, over his beloved RCA, twiddling, as ever, Pancho’s dials.

  There was no alternative, Blackford reasoned. He would need quickly to kill Miguel. Too much fuss and time, reasoning with him, disarming him, tying him down, running the risk of failing; there was no time for all that.

  Blackford raised his pistol. His trigger finger tightened—and, abruptly, stopped. Jesús Ferrer’s analysis exploded in his mind. The President is going to be just as dead if the SS-4 lands in Dallas as if a sniper hits him.

  He lowered the pistol and eased it back into his pocket.

  He was now thinking clearly; finally, he thought, he was thinking again …

  “For God’s sake’s, Miguel”—Blackford found that he needed to clear his throat. He did so, and repeated himself. “For God’s sake’s, Miguel, you’ve already got the Dallas station, why are you screwing with the dials?”

  “Ah yes,” Miguel’s voice came back proudly, as he bent over his machine. “My Pancho picks up not only the CBS station in Dallas but other stations in Dallas! I am traveling from station to station, to listen to the most coverage of the Kennedy trip. CBS-Dallas is went to a quiz show halfway in the ceremonies at the airport. But now I have found a fine station, KXAS-NBC. Kennedy is still at the Love Field, but he is getting ready to get into his car.”

  Blackford left his chair and leaned back against the wall. To keep his balance. The pumping of his heart seemed to be tilting him to one side.

  Earlier, he had carefully observed the radio while Miguel was operating it. Conventional stuff: I could operate it in my sleep, he thought. Radio to CIA; to the Pentagon; to Dallas police—a matter of minutes. Just say: “Protect President en route Love Field to destination. Assassination plot confirmed.” And—just to save time—sign off, “CIA.”

  But that fancy was behind him, he reminded himself, impatient.

  Miguel had suddenly turned up the sound and Blackford heard the announcer say, “That’s quite some motorcade! The President and Mrs. Kennedy, the stars of the day. Up front with them, Governor John Connally. In the next car, the Secret Service, as usual. The third car is Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s car, and he has with him Senator Ralph Yarborough …”

  And then the icicles, riveting his thought, directing his action: the final words of Jesús Ferrer rang again in his head:

  “The President is going to be just as
dead if the SS-4 lands in Dallas as if a sniper hits him”—and so would millions of others.

  Blackford forced himself to sit down again as the merry commentary from Dallas continued, this time from the press car following the President.

  But he remained seated for only a moment.

  Blackford said hoarsely to Miguel: “I am going to take the motorcycle in the shed and go to San Cristóbal. Here I can’t do anything. There, they will have one more gun.”

  “But señor,” Miguel turned from the radio to confront Blackford, “Mr. Ferrer said you were to stay here.”

  “I do not work for Mr. Ferrer.” Blackford was on his feet. He lifted his pistol from his pocket, as if merely to check the cartridge supply.

  Miguel understood. He half nodded, turning back to minister to Pancho.

  Jesús Ferrer sat in the driver’s seat of the military supply bus Nena had provided. He had driven to within a few hundred yards of the gate of the San Cristóbal camp. Mico, wearing only a T-shirt above his khaki pants, was ostensibly working with a tire jack on a deflated right front tire. At a voice signal from Ferrer, he would be back in the front passenger seat, his Uzi back on his lap. Jesús Ferrer was listening with ferocious concentration to the shortwave radio. A makeshift antenna had been attached to the bus’s regular antenna. The signal was coming in. President Kennedy’s car had left Love Field.

  Leandro counted the trays he had brought into the cave from the mess hall since, beginning at seven in the morning, he began to act as de facto full-time busboy for the Soviet technicians. He had managed, without any difficulty, to appropriate one of the standby, freshly assembled but untested motorcycles. The Soviets, during the past month, had shipped, assembled, and stocked more than one thousand of them, for use by Cuban military patrolmen. Each was to be tested for a hundred kilometers or so before being sent off to designated Cuban military posts. Leandro happily used his, parked alongside a dozen others on the test racks, to travel every hour to Pushkin, in his little isolated prison one kilometer away.

  When Leandro had first got to the cave, after handing Roberto his notice to report for duty in the cave area, he was astonished. The missile was no longer in its customary position. It was situated alongside the cave, a hundred meters away, obviously towed there during the night on the railroad tracks he had observed being laid early in the week. He thought this development worth a special trip back to Pushkin, but then the captain told him that it was not surprising, given their decision to charge the missile the night before. “If you’re going to fire the thing, safety requires shelter for ground personnel and for the technicians who actually dictate the detonation. The obvious place for them is within the cave, and, for the missile, outside the cave. But that means, of course, abandoning any thought of camouflage. I don’t doubt they are going to fire today, under the circumstances.” Pushkin told Leandro he had better return, keep his eyes open, and report back every hour.

  There had been nothing of consequence to report at the next three visits, save Leandro’s success at circulating, unmolested—like the beer-and-peanuts boy in the bullring—inside the cave.

  On the fourth of these trips, just after noon, he was able to report excitedly to Pushkin: “I have seen the firing door cavity. I wandered off with a tray of Cocas and doughnuts to the missile—there are four or five men there—and got a good look at it as I was passing the tray around.”

  Pushkin reacted with some excitement. “The valve handles?”

  “They are in the OFF position.”

  “They are as I described?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Have you heard anything about a firing time?”

  “Only this. Kirov’s number-one technician, when I was serving him a hot dog, said to me—in pretty good Spanish—‘You’ll be bringing us more than this hot dog for lunch, won’t you, Leandro? We won’t be taking off the lunch hour. The lunch hour will be our busiest hour of the day.’”

  “You don’t need anything more than that,” Pushkin said. “Have you located the radio command terminal?”

  “I know where it is. Deep in the cave, near its base. Major Kirov has a desk just opposite, and there is a telephone on it, and a radio behind. But I have not succeeded in taking a look at it. Every time I approach it, the technician who sits there gets up, moves forward in front of the radio console, takes my Coca-Cola or hot dog, waits for me to go away, and only then goes back to his lair.”

  “But if you had suddenly to dive in there, you would know instantly, wouldn’t you Leandro, which switch you needed to flip? Where each switch is located?”

  “Yes, Captain. You don’t forget things like that.”

  Pushkin looked affectionately at his young disciple. He said in soft tones, “No. You wouldn’t forget things like that.” And then, after a moment’s thought, he shrugged his shoulders and said:

  “Leandro, you may not have a chance to make one more round-trip here before the big event. I think now is the time.”

  He did not need to say anything more. Leandro walked across the room, took the cell-door keys from the desk drawer, and unlocked the cell.

  “The pistol.” Pushkin examined it. A Spanish Llama revolver with six shells in its cylinder.

  “Do you want more cartridges?”

  “I may as well.”

  Leandro gave him a handful. Pushkin stuffed them into the pocket of the fatigues he was putting on. A plan had slowly crystallized in his mind. But for once he did not share it with Leandro.

  Captain Nicolai Pushkin stepped out of his cell into the sunlight for the first time in ten days.

  He was appropriately dressed, in Russian military khakis with a staff sergeant’s chevrons and Leandro’s pass safety-pinned to his vest pocket. The light was blinding. He lowered his fatigue cap and closed his eyes, then opened them gradually. He said calmly to Leandro, “I shall ride in the back of the motorbike. Go right to the cave.”

  In less than five minutes they were there. The entrance to the cave area, however makeshift, was formally manned. A half kilometer beyond it, at the entrance to the cave, a semicircle of thirty or forty Cuban infantrymen stood, bayonets on their rifles. Pushkin peered beyond the cave at the tumescent missile, apparently unattended, gray against the sun, the missile poised at an angle of about fifty degrees. He could see no bodies. Evidently the technicians had been ordered into the cave, whose black curtain was now collapsed. The guard lazily motioned Leandro to the barricade. Pushkin, sitting behind on the motorbike, casually exhibited his pass.

  The guard looked at it, without actually examining it. He addressed Pushkin in Spanish. “When did you join the guards’ detachment?”

  Pushkin’s Spanish was fluent, but it was not without accent. He replied with a trace of impatience, “I am a Soviet mechanic, assigned to help at the cave.”

  The guard looked over at his colleague, a wizened staff sergeant. He turned to Leandro: “You vouch for him, Leandro?”

  Leandro nodded. “Vouch for Boris? Sure. He’s been here for two months. Good man. Don’t hurt him. He loses at checkers with me.” The sergeant waved the motorbike and its two passengers in.

  They parked the bike and walked toward the cave’s entrance. Leandro departed for the commissary and in a few minutes was back carrying two trays of Coca-Colas, one on top of the other. He eyed Pushkin to take one of the trays. Both of them, tray in hand at waist level, reached the entrance to the cave. From within the shadow of its lip Pushkin could see, approaching them from the missile itself, a Soviet technician. He carried, loosely in his hand, a wrench. Clearly he had just now bolted shut the firing door. Oh God, Pushkin asked himself: Is the missile armed or disarmed? He thought furiously, and by the time the loudspeaker gave out its order, he knew what he had to do, and felt confident that, if he survived, in less than one minute he could explain to Colonel Bilensky the grave deception, the deception that might—that might yet—begin an international nuclear exchange. A world war. The order blared out:

  “St
and by for launch. Stand by for launch.”

  There was total silence at Cojímar. Only Castro counted in that room. And he was, in effect, everywhere, all the time—turning the sound from the radio up, or down; switching from rock music to commentary; making comments.

  Just after 1:30, word had come in that the presidential motorcade had started out from Love Field. To Castro’s dismay, the broadcasting station then slid into its regular daytime programming. He turned the dial, first with huge decisive movements, this way and that; then slowly, reaching for the four stations whose dial numbers he had been given as likeliest to follow the President’s path. He tried the second—and got a program on that day’s stock market and farm price movements. The third brought in a money-raising auction for the Dallas Red Cross. The fourth, “cowboy music,” as he disdainfully referred to it. He slammed his wrists down on the table when suddenly he stopped—the Miami station, KMAX, had interrupted its rock and roll and was speaking of President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. The announcer was doing a recap of the reception at Love Field and of the important political significance of the trip, given Texas’s strategic leverage in the 1964 election, only one year away …

  Castro muttered. “Why does not the idiot report on what the President is actually doing? Where he is? Che, you understand English. Tell me if I am missing anything.”

  He did not need to urge Che on. He and Dorticós were listening, heads bowed in concentration.

  Suddenly there was verbal confusion. The announcer said that something had gone wrong in Dallas. Stay tuned, he said … The sound of a firecracker. But nothing to worry about, he was certain …

  Castro turned white. “He fired! And obviously he missed! Get me Kirov,” he shouted out at the radio operator.

  “Kirov here, Cave Station, come in, Command.”

  “We are going to fire. Arm the missile.”

  “All right, sir. I am in radio contact with our technician out at Petrouchka. Hold on, Comandante.” Castro was not used to being told to wait, but today he did not complain. Within a minute, Kirov’s voice was back.