In the darkness, Andrew sensed rather than saw Cullen nod. "My thoughts exactly, lieutenant."
For Cathy Malone, Christmas Eve had been pleasant but not noteworthy. Dinner with the Petty Officer Pachulski, his wife, and their two little kids had been fun, especially since her Polish-American hosts traditionally celebrated Christmas on the Eve, which meant she got a chance to watch the kids open presents and generally make a mess of the Pachulski's small quarters. The fact that she liked kielbasa, kapusta, and all the other ethnic Polish items on the table had made it a very pleasant time.
She'd gotten back to her apartment a little too early and a little too full to go to sleep. She would try to run the meal off in the morning, although the idea of going for a run on Christmas Day seemed just slightly blasphemous for a reasonably good Catholic girl, which was what she still considered herself. She still planned on a second Mass and try for a dinner invite, although maybe this one wouldn't be Polish.
She and her roommate, Alice Stockton, had stayed up to talk and allow their respective meals to digest. While this was happening, they'd had several glasses of very cheap wine and Cathy knew she'd regret it a little bit in the morning. Cheap wine gave her sinus headaches and maybe she wouldn’t go for a run tomorrow. Still, it was fun and funny when Alice got drunk enough to admit that she was sleeping with her boyfriend, a sailor stationed at Gitmo as a mechanic, and how much she liked screwing him and what she and he specifically liked to do best. Cathy had to admit she never thought people could be so creative and acrobatic. Her post graduate education was increasing. She now knew that oral sex worked both ways. Amazing.
Cathy'd dated one guy fairly seriously in college, but that had fallen apart when she wouldn't go all the way with him. Part of the way, yes, but not completely, and certainly not orally, which he told her he would happily accept as second choice. She sometimes wondered if she was being a fool. At least she was getting an education of sorts here in Gitmo. The nuns she'd had in high school would crap if they knew what she was learning about in the real world.
It was well after midnight when she finally tumbled into bed. She would not go running. She would sleep in. Thank God for holidays. With a little luck she would find someone else to feed her.
Firebells in the night was the phrase that always came to mind whenever Lieutenant Colonel Ted Romanski's phone rang in the middle of the night. He thought it was something Thomas Jefferson had said but wasn't certain. The author didn't matter; firebells in the night were never good news. The worst news was that somebody had died or been in an accident or one of the boys couldn't get his car started and needed him to drive out to the middle of nowhere to help. The best was a wrong number from a drunk trying to reach someone to give him a ride home. So far, late night phone calls hadn't been for anything serious, but there was always a first time.
He decided to answer the damn thing.
He looked and saw his wife, Midge, was also sitting upright and trying to remember where she was. As always, their first thought was that something had happened to one of their twin boys who were freshmen in college. But it couldn't be them because they were home for the holidays. One had even brought his girlfriend, which had caused some logistical problems concerning sleeping arrangements. To put it politely, Midge was pissed that her little boy was sleeping with his girlfriend. Ted thought the girl was sweet and cute and that his son was pretty damn lucky.
Romanski managed to grab it on the third ring. "Lt. Col. Romanski," he said. He felt there was fuzz on his teeth. He and Midge had been partying.
"General Bunting, Ted."
Romanski looked at his clock. It was two AM. "Good morning, general." Bunting had been his commanding officer when Romanski had been assigned to the 82nd Airborne. They had a solid history together.
"Ted, this afternoon I had a conference with the president himself and he feels that something major is going down in Cuba, at Gitmo. He specifically asked me to get Task Force Roman organized and ready to go."
"Now, sir? It's after midnight." He immediately regretted the stupid comment. He realized it must be serious. After all, Bunting just said he had been talking directly to Kennedy. He had to get his brain working.
"Yes, now, and I know it's late and it's Christmas. But the word is that the commies are likely to attack Gitmo in a couple of hours, which means it's very necessary to have a tripwire force in place and ready to go. Your people are the only ones who had any plans to reinforce Gitmo, except the Marines, who aren't in any position to help for a day or two. Ted, we've got only a matter of hours if this really happens. I don't like it any more than you do, but this comes directly from the president."
"Understood," Romanski said and hung up. He spent the next couple of minutes explaining the situation to a disbelieving Midge.
She stood and clenched her fists angrily. "Damn it, this can't be right. You just went through one war scare and now there's another one? Just what do they want? You're only a few weeks away from retirement!"
"Are you done?" he asked patiently.
"And when was the last time you actually jumped from a perfectly good airplane?"
"It was a couple of weeks ago, dear. I'm not that bad off."
Romanski commanded part of the airborne training school at Fort Benning, Georgia. He'd been a paratrooper in the 82nd as well as a Ranger, and, during the Crisis, had been ordered to create an ad hoc airborne unit made up of training cadre and other qualified personnel who were currently stationed at Benning. Their job would have been to jump or fly into Guantanamo and reinforce the small garrison. He'd managed to gather and organize a force of nearly eleven hundred volunteers. They'd been armed and ready to go until Marine reinforcements arriving at Gitmo made them redundant. It had been fun while it lasted and could have been a great ending to an otherwise ordinary career.
Still, he understood the assignment. All the other airborne units had been focused on an attack near Havana. Only his group had any plans concerning Gitmo. He wondered if his group was the only one that even knew where Gitmo was?
Midge, however, was not mollified. "And, dear God, it's Christmas. Are you going to miss Christmas again? I thought all that crap was over with."
"I have absolutely no idea," Romanski admitted as he stripped to take a shower. "But I guarantee you it'll be the last Christmas I'll miss. A few more weeks and I'm out of here." But to do what? He and Midge hadn't quite decided on their future. He couldn’t live on his army pension, so a job was going to be a necessity.
Enough feeling sorry for himself. He had to make a couple of quick phone calls. He had to get a fanout started with a goal of getting everybody who'd been in Task Force Roman at Fort Benning's Lawson Field within two hours.
Midge stood before him. Her anger had dissipated and she smiled winsomely. He still thought she was beautiful. "You need a little good luck to make it through this, soldier, and a few minutes won't matter." She gently pushed him back on the bed and grinned wickedly. "And I need a pony ride."
She pulled off her nightgown and dropped her panties. Twenty years had made her a little plump, but she was still capable of arousing him almost immediately. Also, a pony ride was a traditional farewell event every time he'd shipped out. She smiled and straddled him. He quickly grew hard and he entered her as his hands caressed her full breasts and worked their way back to her buttocks. Years of practice worked and they both climaxed at almost the same time. She got up and smiled at him. Her eyes were moist with tears she would hold in until he left.
"Now go fight your damn war and try to be home for dinner."
"You hear anything, lieutenant?"
"Only the sound of my wildly beating heart," Andrew said. He willed himself to be still. "But maybe I feel vibrations in the ground."
"Same here," said Cullen. "I wonder what those two idiots have discovered up front?"
"They've probably discovered that they're scared out of their minds and can't really see or hear anything. They've also likely discovered that they're
not going to re-enlist."
Cullen chuckled and grabbed Andrew's arm. "Motion."
Seconds later, they both saw the shapes of two hunched over men running towards them. It'd better be Hollis and Ward from the listening post, Andrew thought, and not a couple of saboteurs who'd managed to sneak by them. He belatedly realized they'd neglected to give the two men a password or countersign.
It was Hollis and Ward, and Andrew breathed a sigh of relief. Both men were excited and out of breath. Ward spoke for the two of them. "We heard vehicles, sir, lots of them. Sounds like trucks and tracked vehicles, but we couldn't see them. Too many low hills in the way."
"Any lights?" Cullen asked.
"Naw. Whatever it was they were running lights out."
Andrew told Cullen to radio the report up the chain of command. Trucks could mean anything from a military convoy to a bunch of farmers getting ready to work their fields, but tracks? Tracks could mean farm tractors but the farmers in the area were too poor to afford tractors. They also could mean tanks or armored personnel carriers, and if they came down that single lane dirt road, he had twenty men and an old machine gun to stop them with.
What it boiled down to was that his and Cullen's premonitions might just be correct. There were no saboteurs coming. Instead, they were confronting the possibility of a major Cuban attack. Why the hell had he volunteered to take guard duty? Of course, would snoozing in his BOQ bunk be any safer in the long run if the Cubans were attacking?
Andrew got on the radio and asked for clarification of his duties. He was told that, in the event of an attack in overwhelming force, he was to try and delay them, and then scoot for the rear. Delay them? With twenty men and a machine gun? Jesus H. Christ.
"Gunny, if the bad guys come down that road in force, we don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of stopping them or even delaying them for more than a very short time, as in a minute or two at most. If they come, I propose that we report the attack, annoy them for a few seconds, and retreat to the fallback position."
Cullen nodded. "Then you agree that they know we're here."
Andrew suddenly felt chilled. The Cubans had the high ground and had to have been observing them. "I believe they've been watching us and know everything about us, right down to how many of us wear jockeys and how many wear boxers."
Andrew tried to smile at the thought of Cuban spies checking out his underwear. He was wearing jockeys.
"Saboteurs, my ass," bellowed Major Sam Hartford. "I knew it!"
The phone call just received from the Pentagon said be alert for a major attack. Several outposts had reported sounds of vehicles and tanks and that could mean only one thing. The commies were coming. Or were they? Nobody would know for certain until they arrived with guns blazing. They could simply be driving around for some reason or because they wished to aggravate Gitmo's garrison and keep them up and alert on Christmas. These doubts meant that the base would have to wait to be hit and could not fire preemptively, even if they did see Cuban vehicles. As long as the Cubans were behind their border they could do whatever they wanted. That irked him. Who the hell decided that war had to be played fair?
He dressed as quickly as he could and again cursed the fact that he had to wear regular shoes and not combat boots. The shoes made the pain in his feet tolerable, while the boots would have killed him.
The jeep picked him up and drove him and a couple of other Marine officers to their assigned defensive position. They aroused no interest from the literal handful of people out extremely early on a Christmas morning.
Hartford's duty station was in a bunker that would be used as a backup command center if the real one was knocked out. The site was supposed to be a secret, even from the garrison, but he doubted there were very many secrets regarding Gitmo. The bunker was built into an old maintenance building close by McCalla Field. It had been sandbagged and set up during the previous crisis just two months earlier. He wondered if the Cubans knew it existed and had it zeroed in. What a comforting thought.
A dozen men were in the bunker, a captain, two lieutenants and a bunch of enlisted men. They all looked at him with apprehension on their faces and he wondered if his reflected the same.
Hell, he was supposed to inspire confidence, not fear. They were only lightly armed and the bunker was filled with communications gear. They could talk to anyone on the base. They could talk to the Pentagon if anyone was awake in that monstrous building. Hell, they could talk to the President of the United States if they wanted to. What they couldn't do was stop a major Cuban attack if one came.
Still, no one knew exactly what was going on. Only the marine garrison had been alerted, not the Navy, and that was the right way to do it. If it came to shooting, the marines were the best qualified to defend the base. The sailors, he thought derisively, still slept snug in their bunks and clutched their teddy bears to their chests. He stopped himself. That was unfair. A lot of sailors had been willing to fight the last time Gitmo was threatened two months ago. If the threat was real, they'd show up, draw weapons, and do their best.
He looked into the Bay. The destroyer anchored a half mile off shore looked like it too was sound asleep. So what was going on? No planes were taking off from either of the two airfields. Nor were any of the few armored vehicles the Marines owned on the move out of the motor pool and on to defensive positions. This was truly a half-assed alert.
He and his small command waited, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. After a while, the dark of night began to fade and there was the hint of dawn on the horizon. In a little while they could think about going home.
Sirens began to wail.
Shit.
Chapter Five
Cathy Malone awoke with a foul headache and to the piercing wail of sirens. What the heck was it? Was something on fire? She checked the clock on the dresser. Four-fifteen. There was the sound of distant thunder, then thunder that wasn't so distant and caused stuff on shelves to vibrate wildly like there was an earthquake. It must be quite a storm, she thought groggily.
Alice pounded on the door and opened it. Her eyes were wide with excitement. "Something big is happening. There are explosions over at the airfields. I think something must've blown up. Let's go take a look."
Cathy put a robe over her short cotton nightgown and ran outside where many of her neighbors had already begun to congregate. Their apartment building was on a low hill overlooking the bay. Below them was one airfield and across the bay was the other. A destroyer was anchored in the middle.
A jet plane shrieked overhead, flying so low that Cathy and the others actually ducked or fell to the ground. An explosion followed quickly, rocking them with its violence. Behind them, windows shattered.
"That pilot's in a load of trouble," one woman said as she picked herself up. It was Rachel Desmond. She worked for some Marine major.
"I don't think so," her husband said softly. He was another civilian worker, but one who'd retired from the navy and had seen action in World War II. "That plane's Cuban. We're under attack. This is Pearl Harbor all over again."
Cathy was stunned. She looked skyward and made out the silhouettes of other planes circling and diving over the airfields and saw others flying over the destroyer.
She grabbed Alice's arm. "Let's get dressed and see just what the heck is going to happen. I think we may be evacuated again and we'd better be dressed for it."
They had just turned to run back to the building when a massive explosion, followed by smoke and fire, erupted from the bay behind her. "That was the destroyer," someone yelled. Cathy turned. Yes, it was the destroyer. Flames were billowing from her rear. Or stern, she thought as she recalled the correct terminology. The destroyer appeared to be under way and moving slowly towards the ocean. As she watched, more planes strafed and bombed the warship, but didn't appear to cause additional serious damage.
Finally, flashing pinpoints of light from the destroyer indicated that her anti-aircraft guns were working. Her main battery opened u
p, sending larger shells into the sky where they exploded like fireworks. Rachel Desmond's husband cheered. "That's telling them," he exulted.
The destroyer was fighting back and that was reassuring. But the flaming ship was clearly heading for open sea. She was leaving them.
Cathy and Alice looked at each other. Evacuation? Maybe not this time. Maybe it was too late?
"I think I see something," Lance Corporal Hollis said. The road was still dark, although rays of light had begun to appear and make confusing shadows. "You want me to go out there again, lieutenant?"
"No point," Ross said. "If they are coming we'll know it soon enough."
"I think I can hear them," Sergeant Cullen said.
Andrew swallowed nervously. Suddenly, there was the rumble of thunder coming from behind him. Before he could say something to Cullen, there was the sound of shrieks in the air followed by sharper, but more savage, explosions.
"Oh Christ," muttered Cullen. "The base is getting bombed and we're about to get hit."
Andrew started to order all men to their positions when he realized that everyone was up and ready and looking to him for leadership.
"Tank!" Hollis yelled. "Damn, there's a whole bunch of them."
How many in a bunch, Andrew almost snapped, but thought better of it. One or a hundred, it didn't matter. They couldn't stop a thing with the weapons they had. He ordered his radioman to inform on the situation. He took a deep breath. The tanks were visible. There were three of them and they were followed by armored personnel carriers and trucks, and all were moving slowly but steadily down the road towards them.
And he had twenty men and an old machine gun to stop them. Now he knew how Custer felt when he saw all those damned Indians. He could see that the oncoming tanks were Russian T34s with 85mm guns. They each had a four man crew and two 7.62 machine guns along with the main gun. They weighed in at thirty-four tons and could do more than thirty miles per hour, which was all totally irrelevant considering that he had no way of stopping them. He wondered if he could do thirty-five miles an hour if one of them was chasing him.
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