Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  “That statement also was false.”

  1910 hours EST (Tuesday very early morning)

  Chairman’s Office, Kremlin

  Moscow, Russian SSR

  Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

  Communist Party Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, his fist clenched so tightly that the paper crumpled in his hand, read a translated version of the speech as the actual broadcast—carried to Europe by America’s imperial communications satellite, Telstar—droned from a radio speaker nearby. The translation had been delivered to him just during the last hour, courtesy of the American ambassador to the USSR.

  In the large but Spartan office with the chairman was Foreign Minister Gromyko, recently returned from the United States, as well as Khrushchev’s military adviser, Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky. Gromyko’s round face was beet red, his flabby jaw clenched as tightly as possible. Malinovsky’s eyes remained downcast.

  The other two men read from their own copies of the speech, and they understood the challenge that Kennedy was presenting them all. Both studiously avoided looking at the chairman.

  “Acting, therefore, in the defense of our own security and of the entire Western Hemisphere, and under the authority entrusted to me by the Constitution as endorsed by the Resolution of the Congress, I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately,” declared the American Commander in Chief.

  “First: To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948.”

  “How dare he!” Khrushchev demanded hoarsely. “We will destroy him! He will not—he cannot—an impudent neophyte—a mere boy wearing man’s pants!” But the bombast sounded hollow even in his own ears, and the familiar fears rose up.

  Have I made a terrible mistake? If only they had discovered the missiles a week, two weeks, from now! All the launchers would be in place, ready to fire! What if…? His thoughts were jumbled, chaotic. He needed to think, to decide, to act! But all he could do was read, and listen, and feel a growing sickness in the pit of his stomach.

  The President of the United States continued. “Second: I have directed the continued and increased close surveillance of Cuba and its military buildup. The foreign ministers of the Organization of American States, in their communiqué of October 6, rejected secrecy on such matters in this hemisphere. Should these offensive military preparations continue, thus increasing the threat to the hemisphere, further action will be justified. I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventualities; and I trust that in the interest of both the Cuban people and the Soviet technicians at the sites, the hazards to all concerned of continuing this threat will be recognized.

  “Third: It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

  1914 hours EST (Monday evening)

  “The Tank:” Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting Room

  E-Ring, Pentagon, Washington D.C.

  Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay chomped down hard on his cigar, then eased the grip of his jaw so that he could furiously puff the faint coal back into fire. All the while he glowered at the man on the television screen. After a few minutes, he couldn’t stand it any longer, pulling the cigar from his mouth and glaring at the Joint Chiefs of Staff seated around him at the table.

  Clearly the chairman, General Maxwell Taylor, wasn’t going to say anything. Taylor had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, had finally risen to be the highest ranking office in the United States Armed Services. Yet now, at the whim of this piss-ant politician from New England, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed frozen and helpless.

  It was too much for LeMay. “This is goddamn appeasement! That’s what it is! Christ, we should have bombed the crap out of those sites last week, when we first found out they were there! Instead, we’re pissing around with this ‘quarantine’ bullshit. We may never get another chance like this again!”

  LeMay viewed the world from a soldier’s perspective, and he was one hell of a soldier. A man of immense physical courage, he had led waves of bombers in dangerous, low-level raids during World War Two, until he was promoted to command the devastating strategic bombing campaign that finally brought Japan to her knees. He had famously declared “All war is immoral…if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.” Now his job, one he viewed with intense and singular focus, was to see that if the next war came, the United States of America would prevail.

  “And how a blockade is going to help, when the missiles are already there, is beyond me,” Army Chief of Staff Earle Wheeler noted glumly.

  “Doesn’t he understand that we have ten times as many nukes as Khrushchev?” LeMay demanded in exasperation, realizing that Kennedy knew that fact very well. “That we have a bomber force that can hit the Russkis upside and down, without even launching our rockets? Hell, they don’t have a single bomber that can reach our territory with enough fuel left to turn around and fly home again!”

  An Air Force colonel entered the room without knocking. “Sorry to interrupt, Sir,” he said, reporting to LeMay. “But you should know that all units have confirmed Secretary of Defense McNamara’s order raising our readiness level to DEFCON 3.”

  “About goddamn time,” the Air Force chief of staff replied, stuffing his cigar back into his mouth. DEFCON 3 was still two levels short of launching the nuclear strike that Strategic Air Command had been preparing for, but at least it was a step in the right direction. The President had ordered the increase in readiness about an hour before his speech. Now additional strategic bombers were being fueled and armed, leaves canceled for airmen and officers alike, and on each base some of the pilots went to their ready rooms, standing by for orders that might come through at any time.

  But DEFCON 3 was too small of a step, for all that. Grimly, LeMay hunched forward, planting his elbows on the table as his eyes tried to bore a hole through the television screen. Kennedy had changed tacks now, directing his words—which, in Florida, were translated into Spanish and simultaneously broadcast southward from some dozen different television and radio towers—to the citizens of Fidel Castro’s island nation.

  “Finally, I want to say a few words to the captive people of Cuba, to whom this speech is being directly carried by special radio facilities. I speak to you as a friend, as one who knows of your deep attachment to your fatherland, as one who shares your aspirations for liberty and justice for all. And I have watched and the American people have watched with deep sorrow how your nationalist revolution was betrayed—and how your fatherland fell under foreign domination. Now your leaders are no longer Cuban leaders inspired by Cuban ideals. They are puppets and agents of an international conspiracy which has turned Cuba against your friends and neighbors in the Americas, and turned it into the first Latin American country to become a target for nuclear war—the first Latin American country to have these weapons on its soil.

  “These new weapons are not in your interest. They contribute nothing to your peace and well-being. They can only undermine it. But this country has no wish to cause you to suffer or to impose any system upon you. We know that your lives and land are being used as pawns by those who deny your freedom. Many times in the past, the Cuban people have risen to throw out tyrants who destroyed their liberty. And I have no doubt that most Cubans today look forward to the time when they will be truly free—free from foreign domination, free to choose their own leaders, free to select their own system, free to own their own land, free to speak and writ
e and worship without fear or degradation. And then shall Cuba be welcomed back to the society of free nations and to the associations of this hemisphere.”

  1915 hours EST (Monday night)

  Casa Uno, Government Headquarters

  El Chico, Cuba

  The Spanish-language broadcast of the address had quite a few listeners across the “imprisoned island,” with none paying more attention than a quartet of men seated around a bare wooden table on the second floor of this palatial villa. Cigar smoke clouded the air, much of it emanating from the tall, bearded figure at the head of the table.

  Fidel Castro’s eyes were narrowed and his lips compressed in an expression of unconcealed anger. To his right sat his brother, Raul, who listened with a somber air of resignation.

  “Eso es basura!” snapped the Cuban leader. “What bullshit! He accuses us of aggression! And all the while his spyplanes fly back and forth above me!”

  The third man at the table wore the uniform of a Soviet Army officer. He was Major General Issa Pliyev, commanding officer of Operation Anadyr, the Soviet project to install missiles in Cuba. In addition to the missile batteries, Pliyev commanded some 40,000 highly trained, well-equipped Red Army troops, some of them support units for the missles and supply chain. No less than 10,000 of those men were combat soldiers of the first class, organized into four motorized rifle regiments and deployed around Cuba. A squadron of IL-28 Ilyushin bombers—capable of carrying nuclear bombs—and MiG 21 fighters, the front-line Soviet interceptor, had also been delivered to the island.

  Still, Pliyev was widely known to be skeptical of the mission and its prospects, and his dour expression indicated that nothing he was hearing now did anything to improve his outlook.

  “And don’t forget la Bahia de Cochinas!” snapped the fourth man, brooding and handsome, clad in an unmarked fatigue shirt and wearing a black beret on his head. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was widely known to be Castro’s right hand man, and had been instrumental in bringing the Soviets and Cubans together for the breathtakingly ambitious Operation Anadyr. Now he inflamed El Máximo Lider’s mind as he invoked the abortive landing at the Bay of Pigs, a year and a half earlier.

  “Yes!” Castro agreed with a shout. “This President has the audacity to send our own traitors against us—only to abandon them on our shores! We know he is a coward. But is he a madman as well?”

  “Perhaps he is crazy like a fox, mi lider,” Che suggested. “The Americans are ever striving to get their lackeys to do their fighting for them—in their war against the Nazis, and too at the Bay of Pigs.”

  Castro nodded, absorbing the famed guerilla’s words, knowing of Che’s long service to the socialist cause. Now, Guevera’s eyes were bright, but he watched the Soviet general through narrowed eyes, as if wary of imminent betrayal. If Pliyev noticed the revolutionary’s attention, he gave no sign, merely scowling as he strained to make out Kennedy’s words.

  “My fellow citizens, let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead—months in which both our patience and our will shall be tested, months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”

  Abruptly, Fidel pushed back his chair so hard that it toppled over. Standing up, waving his cigar like it was a weapon, he stalked around the room. “Eso hijo de puta!” he cursed. “That son of a bitch! This means war! I will mobilize my army tonight! Let the yanquis come! They have no idea of the hellstorm that will greet them on our beaches!”

  1917 hours EST (Monday night)

  Flight Deck

  CVN-65 USS Enterprise

  Caribbean Sea

  A night landing on an aircraft carrier was never an easy task. Now, as Lieutenant Derek Widener maneuvered his F4 “Phantom” toward the stern of the massive ship, he felt the added complexity of martial tension. The tingling sense of alertness had permeated his two-hour flight, a combat air patrol over Enterprise and her supporting vessels.

  Ensign King, in the second seat, fed him altitude and bearing information as the pilot kept his eyes on his airspeed indicator, and on that broad flight deck before and below him. The Big E’s landing lights burned low, a security precaution. The presence of the dark island of Cuba—the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay lay 150 miles to the north—seemed to exert a dark gravitational pull far in excess of any natural physical force. Too, Soviet submarines were reported to be in nearby waters. Their torpedoes represented a lethal threat even to the mighty vessel.

  Still, Widener was a gifted pilot, and his skills and training took over as the big jet settled and slowed, the flight deck growing gradually larger in his field of view. The world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was a massive ship, the largest warship ever launched, and he should sure as hell be able to land on it! He watched the landing officer, and cut his engine at the man’s throat-slash sign.

  The Phantom, with its phenomenally powerful twin jet engines and ridiculously small, swept wings, thumped to the deck, and the tailhook snagged the arresting gear. With a sudden shock of deceleration, the lieutenant jerked forward, restrained by his safety harness as he felt the aircraft come to a sudden halt.

  Quickly his crew chief approached, wheeling up a ladder as Widener popped the canopy and stiffly climbed out of the seat. Ensign King followed him out of the cockpit to step onto the platform atop the large, rolling ladder.

  “Nice landing, LT,” said Petty Officer Tuttle from below, with an enthusiastic thumbs up. “You might want to hurry into the briefing compartment. The President is still giving his speech, and the comm guys have managed to pull in a live feed.”

  “Thanks, Sam, I will,” Widener replied, scooting down the ladder by sliding his hands along the twin railings. On the deck, he unstrapped his helmet as he jogged to the hatch leading into the pilots’ compartment. Inside, several dozen fliers were gathered on the bench seats of the briefing room, watching a fuzzy signal on the television set up at the podium. Widener realized he’d arrived just in time to hear the conclusion of the address.

  “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world,” President Kennedy said. For the first time in Widener’s memory, JFK look rather old and tired. His demeanor on the small screen remained stern and unwavering.

  “The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.

  “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right; not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.

  “Thank you and good night.”

  1918 hours EST (Monday evening)

  Oval Office, The White House

  Washington D.C.

  The bright klieg lights went out, and the President blinked, squinting into the sudden semi-darkness. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead as the technicians quickly began to gather up their equipment. Bobby stepped forward to offer a hand, but Jack curtly shook his head, pushing himself to his feet with only a small grimace.

  “How do you think it went?” he asked, as the two brothers and Press Secretary Salinger started for the side door.

  “It was perfect,” Bobby said sincerely. “The right tone, tough and steady—a solid, measured response.”

  “You said exactly what needed to be said,” Salinger chimed in.

  “Well, that’s it then, unless the son of a bitch fouls it up,” JFK said, holding up a hand to brace himself against the frame as he passed through the office door.

  Secret Service agent Bob Morris reached out to open the next
door, and the President nodded his thanks as he passed through. Morris fell in behind the Chief Executive as he moved toward the elevator.

  “I’m going to look in on Jackie and the kids,” Jack announced, finally leaving his brother and his press secretary behind. The Secret Service agent followed him to the elevator but stopped outside the car.

  “Good night, Mr. President,” he said.

  “Good night, Bob. And thanks,” JFK said wearily, before the door closed and the elevator carried him up to the Residence, where his wife and two children were waiting.

  * * *

  The sound room resembled a closet, wedged into a small space between the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room. Though the speech had ended several minutes earlier, two reels of tape still rolled, steadily spooling duplicate copies of dead air. Finally, Ron Pickett reached out and turned the knobs, shutting the recorders down.