Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  Now, despite the early, or more accurately middle-of-the-night, hour, the ambassador and his staff were up and expecting a visitor, having been alerted by a phone call from El Máximo Lider’s residence nearly an hour before.

  The guards at the wrought-iron gate pulled the barrier aside as Castro’s jeep raced down the shadowed, otherwise abandoned street. Alekseev himself greeted the Cuban leader as Fidel uncoiled his long frame from the small vehicle’s passenger seat and stretched beside it. Naturally, he was smoking a cigar.

  “You have a bomb shelter, do you not?” he demanded, bypassing the usual pleasantries of diplomatic greeting.

  “Yes, of course,” the ambassador replied. He had been in Cuba since shortly after the revolution, and his Spanish was passable. Most importantly, Alekseev was the Russian Castro knew and trusted better than any other.

  “Let us go there, at once!” declared the Cuban leader. “Tonight is the night that the Americans will attack—certainly from the air, and perhaps with an invasion as well. We must be ready!”

  Alarmed, the Russian led his visitor down a damp stairway and into a stone-walled passage. In moments they had entered a windowless room, and embassy guards pulled a stout wooden door shut behind them. Castro looked around skeptically, but shrugged. “It will have to do.”

  “Now, tell me how you know this about the invasion, comrade,” said Alekseev, trying to sound soothing. “Our sources have said nothing of the sort—though of course, we remain ready for anything.” He sat in a wooden chair at a long table and gestured to his guest to have a seat as well.

  But Castro was manic. He paced back and forth, filling the room with cigar smoke, ranting. “It is a matter of common sense—the odds are insurmountable that the attack will not come. And your General Pliyev, he fails to sense the urgency, the danger in the situation. Why has he not shared more information with us, his trusted—his only—allies? Why must I learn details of the blockade from American news broadcasts, when my ally, who is a guest in my country, could share that information with me firsthand?”

  “I’m sorry you’re upset, Comrade. How can I help?”

  “I must send a letter to Comrade Khrushchev in Moscow. I ask your help in drafting this letter.”

  “By all means. Allow me to bring in some stenographers, and we will begin at once.” Alekseev went to the door, barked a command in Russian, and stood back. A moment later two enlisted men bearing notepads and pens came in and took up positions at the table. “These men are both fluent in Spanish. They will record your words and then translate them for the message to Comrade Khrushchev. Now, what is it that you would like to tell our Chairman?”

  “Just this: I suspect that the war that begins tonight will be a conventional war at first, but it will very quickly escalate to a nuclear war. He must understand that I, and all of my countrymen, are willing, even happy, to die in the cause of this war. Certainly death is preferable to allowing the yanquis to make us their slaves!”

  The young scribes were writing furiously, but Castro continued unabated. “We know your troops have powerful weapons, nuclear weapons, on the ground here. We expect—no, we demand—that those weapons be employed to defeat an imperialist invasion!

  “Know that I am committed to doing everything in my power, even including sacrificing my life, to further the cause of world socialism. I expect nothing less than that every effort of every party, every person and organization in the Socialist World should be employed in common cause. And I suggest, also, that we—that Comrade Khrushchev—would do well to consider the merits of a preemptive strike. Why wait for our enemies to attack? Why yield initiative, when we can establish the ground rules for this strife?”

  He paused just long enough to puff his cigar back into a crimson, glowing coal. He waved it in the air and glared at the Soviet ambassador. “Why don’t we take action before the Americans preempt our position in this war?”

  Alekseev blinked. It was late at night—or very early in the morning—and he wasn’t sure he had heard El Máximo Lider correctly. “Excuse me, Comrade: are you suggesting that the Soviet Union launch a nuclear first strike against the United States?”

  “I am merely asking questions that must be asked,” Castro chided. “Do not put words into my mouth!”

  “Of course not,” the ambassador replied. He touched a hand to his stomach in a subtle but universal gesture, and nodded his head toward the door. “Please continue—I, er, need to step out for a moment but my men will continue to take your dictation.”

  Castro stalked and spoke as Alekeev slipped out the door. He’d implied he needed a visit to the lavatory, but instead he hastened to the embassy’s radio room, where coded transmissions could be dispatched directly to the Kremlin.

  “Quickly!” he ordered the radioman, who had been dozing in his chair. “I need to send a message to Moscow—mark it ‘Most Urgent!’”

  “I am ready, Comrade Ambassador,” said the communications man, a veteran agent of the KGB. He snatched up a pad of paper and sat up attentively.

  “’Fidel Castro is here, dictating a letter—a long letter—to Comrade Khrushchev. Most important detail: He is requesting that we, the USSR, initiate nuclear hostilities against the United States.’ Okay, send it just like that,” he told the radioman. “I have to get back to the bunker.”

  The KGB man, his mouth hanging open, watched in astonishment as the ambassador dashed out the door.

  0508 hours (Saturday morning)

  Headquarters, Soviet Air Defense for Eastern Cuba

  Camaguey, Cuba

  Colonel Georgi Voronkov was the division commander for all of the SAM sites on the eastern two thirds of the island of Cuba, all of it except the area from Havana to the western tip. His batteries lined the coasts, protected strategic rocket sites, cities, and military installations. They had been completed for weeks, at least, and some of them for more than a month. They had watched in impotent anger as the American spyplanes had flown overhead, but they had been denied permission to fire.

  Finally, however, Voronkov had received the order from General Pliyev, the authorization he’d awaited since his first battery had been set up more than a month earlier. The news had first come via the telephone, yesterday evening, but before sunrise a courier had brought him a printed copy of the orders. At last! The time had come to deny the Cuban skies to the enemy.

  It was not yet dawn when he picked up his telephone handset, after the operator had confirmed that the communications channel to each individual SA-2 battery was open.

  “By order of General Pliyev,” directed Voronkov, speaking to the officers in charge of all of the individual SAM batteries under his control. “Activate all Spoon Rest targeting radars. Track any unidentified aircraft and report their presence directly to headquarters. Confirm receipt of this order.”

  One by one the communications technicians at each site gave their vocal acknowledgement of the order. By the time the sun started to brighten the eastern horizon, the hitherto dormant air defense system over Cuba was fully active, and totally alert. Twenty-three sites along the length of the island, each with six launchers ready to fire surface-to-air missiles, came alive, radar signals beaming into the atmosphere on all sides, and directly over, the island nation.

  “Now,” Voronkov said in satisfaction, “Let them try to fly over us.”

  0900 hours (Saturday morning)

  McCoy Air Force Base

  Orlando, Florida

  Major Rudolf Anderson taxied his spyplane down the tarmac and accelerated into the slight wind out of the west. Bright sunlight dappled his canopy, and the sky was full of puffy white clouds. His U2 lifted off well before the end of the runway, the wing struts falling away as the graceful aircraft rose into the warm, humid sky.

  This would be his sixth U2 mission over Castro’s isle, all of them performed since the 4080th SRW had been moved east from Texas to its temporary home here in Florida. He and Major Heyser, who’d flown the crucial mission on 13 October
that first revealed the missile sites, had become the most experienced U2 pilots in either the USAF or the CIA. The 4080th had established its place in history, and Anderson took pride in knowing that he had played a big part in that.

  As he climbed through the clouds, weaving just a bit to stay in clear air as much as possible, he thought of his wife, Jane, back in Del Rio, Texas. That had been the hardest part of this temporary deployment to Florida—he missed her, a lot. But he had long ago learned not to speculate about when an assignment would be over. He had a job to do, and he would do it well.

  Orlando was a region of orange groves and trackless swamp, sprawled around a sweltering and unimportant little town. The area fell behind as Anderson banked gently and angled south. His mission was straightforward: he would cross eastern Cuba from north to south, getting some pictures of the garrison town of Camaguey. He would then cruise along the south coast over the major city of Santiago, passing near to the American naval base at Guantanamo, fly to the eastern tip of Cuba, then track northwest for a hundred miles before breaking for home. He was going to photograph some of the SA-2 sites, as well as the Camaguey garrison and a few other installations. It was a mission not unlike the five he had flown in the last ten days.

  Except that he didn’t know that the SAM sites had activated their Spoon Rest tracking radar. This time, they would see him coming.

  Nor did he know that Jane Anderson, back in Del Rio, had just learned that she was pregnant.

  1100 hours (Saturday morning)

  Headquarters, Soviet Military Mission

  El Chico, Cuba

  “We have an intruding aircraft, designated Target Number 33, passing over Camaguey and continuing along the southern coast of Cuba,” reported the tracking technician, watching the target acquisition radar that had just been turned on at dawn.

  He was in the main headquarters building in the former school administration building at El Chico. By turning a dial, he could look in on any of the various remote radar sets at the twenty-three SAM sites on the island, albeit at a several-second delay. Camaguey, ironically enough, was the location of the headquarters for the 27th Air Defense Division, the unit charged with controlling the SA-2 sites in Cuba east of Havana.

  “Target displays the flight characteristics of high-altitude spyplane,” added the spotter. “The 27th is requesting permission to engage the target.”

  “Where’s General Pliyev?” asked the duty officer, General Stepan Grechko. He looked at his second in command, who was another general, Garbuz. “Should we order it destroyed?”

  “Put in a call to the commanding officer,” General Garbuz suggested. “After waiting this long, I don’t want to be the one to give the order to start shooting.”

  “He announced last night his intention to take down those damned U2s,” Grechko retorted, even as a messenger tried to raise Pliyev on the phone. “And the Americans are supposed to be attacking at any time. Didn’t we hear that from him ourselves? How do we know this is not the precursor to a major air raid?”

  “We don’t,” Garbuz replied. “Still, this is just one plane.”

  “General Pliyev is not answering,” the messenger reported, after nearly a minute of listening to the phone ring.

  “The general himself believed that the major attack would commence last night or this morning,” Grechko recalled, standing to pace anxiously in the headquarters office. “Of course, that hasn’t happened yet. But because General Pliyev believed that attack would occur, our orders have been updated to engage the enemy.”

  “What do we do, then?” Garbuz demanded. Both officers were longtime veterans of the USSR military machine, where unwanted initiative was not only discouraged, but had been known to be lethal to the officer who took matters into his own hands. But the orders had been changed last night, hadn’t they?

  Garbuz stood also, walking across the room to look over the radar operator’s shoulder at the screen and its bright blip. Both generals were high-ranking officers who understood the length and breadth of the Soviet Military Mission’s responsibilities. They knew which unit was in what location, and they had more than passing familiarity with the tasks assigned to each unit.

  Now, Garbuz saw something alarming on the screen.

  “Look, the bastard’s just flown over the advance FKR battery near Guantanamo.”

  “That’s top secret!” Grechko replied, feeling a growing sense of panic. “We can’t let the Americans find out about it.”

  “No, we can’t. I think we must act, and I suggest we issue an order under both our names,” Garbuz declared.

  “Very well,” his colleague agreed. “Send this message to the 27th Air Defense Division, Camaguey,” he directed the telephone operator.

  “Destroy Target Number 33.”

  1120 hours (Saturday morning)

  Soviet SA-1 Missile battery

  Banes, Cuba

  Major Ivan Gerchenov had chafed at the overflights of the American spyplanes since his unit had become operational more than two weeks before. Now, he could hardly believe his eyes: his tracking radar had been turned on for less than eight hours, and a prominent blip—labeled Target Number 33—was approaching from the south. If it held course, it would pass directly over his position.

  He looked out of his trailer, through a medium rain that drummed against the ground all across his battery of six missile launchers. His men had spent a miserable night, and those soldiers he could see now plodded around with sodden, heavy rain slickers. Most of the rest, he knew, huddled under tarpaulins, or inside tents or the cabs of the unit’s many trucks.

  But radar had no trouble penetrating rainclouds, and the blip on the screen continued to show up clearly. The Spoon Rest radar had been tracking it for miles, but now, as it neared the battery, Gerchenov ordered the Fruit Set targeting radar to activate. Immediately that tightly focused beam picked up the unknown aircraft.

  “Target at 22,000 meters,” read the targeting officer. “Bearing 300 degrees, speed 510 kilometers per hour.”

  “Contact Division Headquarters,” Gerchenov order his switchboard operator. “Ask for instructions—tell them it’s urgent.”

  He picked up a microphone. When he spoke, his words were broadcast over loudspeakers posted throughout the battery site. “This is Combat Alert Number One!” he declared. “I repeat, Combat Alert Number One!”

  Outside, through the door of the trailer, he saw men burst from their sodden tents, racing to the launchers. He could only see two of the six from his vantage, but he watched with sublime pride as his well-trained soldiers servicing those two launchers quickly hoisted the SA-2 missiles off the transporters and carried them to the racks that would fire them into the sky. They laid them on the tracks while the launchers were still in a horizontal position, plugging in the electrical cables that would trigger the rockets when it was time to launch.

  A minute later, both launchers that he could see—and, he knew, the four that were beyond his line of vision—swiveled into launch position, lifting the rockets so that they pointed into the sky. Each launcher was receiving, over a dedicated cable, the target information from the Fruit Set radar, so the launchers swiveled slowly, keeping the rockets pointed at the unseen aircraft some twenty-two kilometers above them.

  He turned to the switchboard operator, hoping to get some response. Instead of the telephone line, however, it was the radio that came to life, spitting out a message through minimal static, despite the inclement weather.

  “Destroy Target Number 33.”

  “Fire one, and fire two!” barked Gerchenov.

  He heard the roar of rocket ignition and stepped out of the trailer, ignoring the rain, so that he could see first one, then the next, surface-to-air missile blast upward from its launcher. Each quickly disappeared into the murk overhead, leaving a churning trail of smoke to mark its paths.

  The battery commander went back into the trailer and again followed the images on the screen of the Fruit Set target radar. He saw two sm
all blips closing in on the larger dot indicating the position of Target Number 33. In a few seconds, all three blips merged together. For just a moment a larger halo of a signal expanded on the screen.

  That explosive blossom quickly faded away to nothing.

  1330 hours (Saturday afternoon)

  “The Tank” Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting Room

  The Pentagon, Washington

  “All right,” Curtis LeMay declared bluntly, after a loud, profane, and contentious discussion. As usual, his forceful personality brought the conversation of his peers, and their nominal commander General Taylor, to a close. “We’re agreed.”

  The Air Force Chief of Staff ticked off the conclusions from memory: “We need to hit Cuba with multiple waves of air attacks, and we need to do it soon. Target priorities begin with the SAM sites and the strategic missile sites, as well as air bases and other air-defense locations. The next wave will focus on military and government command centers, both Cuban and Soviet, and then we’ll take on fortified locations, especially coastal, and concentrations of ground troops. Armored vehicles will be singled out as targets of opportunity. Ports will be shut down, and key bridges will be knocked out.