The GAZ-13 limousine was called a Seagull because of its streamlined American-style rear wings. It could reach one hundred miles per hour, just, although it was uncomfortable at such speeds on Soviet roads. It was available in two-tone burgundy and cream with whitewall tires, but Dimka’s was black.
He sat in the back as it drove onto the quayside at Sevastopol, Ukraine. The town stood on the tip of the Crimean Peninsula, where it poked out into the Black Sea. Twenty years ago it had been flattened by German bombing and artillery fire. After the war it had been rebuilt as a cheerful seaside resort with Mediterranean balconies and Venetian arches.
Dimka got out and looked at the ship moored at the dock, a timber freighter with oversize hatches designed to take tree trunks. Under the hot summer sun, stevedores were loading skis and clearly labeled cartons of cold-weather clothing, to give the impression that the ship was headed to the frozen north. Dimka had devised the deliberately misleading code name Operation Anadyr, after a town in Siberia.
A second Seagull pulled onto the dock and parked behind Dimka’s. Four men in Red Army Intelligence uniforms got out and stood waiting for his instructions.
A railway line ran alongside the dock, and a massive gantry straddled the line, positioned to shift cargo directly from railcar to ship. Dimka looked at his wristwatch. “The fucking train should be here by now.”
Dimka was wound up tight. He had never been so tense in all his life. He had not even known what stress was until he started this project.
The senior Red Army man was a colonel called Pankov. Despite his rank, he addressed Dimka with formal respect. “You want me to make a call, Dmitri Ilich?”
A second officer, Lieutenant Meyer, said: “I think it’s coming.”
Dimka looked along the track. In the distance he could see, approaching slowly, a line of low-slung open railcars loaded with long wooden crates.
Dimka said: “Why does everyone think it’s all right to be fifteen fucking minutes late?”
Dimka was worried about spies. He had visited the chief of the local KGB station and reviewed his list of suspected people in the area. They were all dissidents: poets, priests, painters of abstract art, and Jews who wanted to go to Israel—typical Soviet malcontents, about as threatening as a cycling club. Dimka had them all arrested anyway, but not one looked dangerous. Almost certainly there were real CIA agents in Sevastopol, but the KGB did not know who they were.
A man in captain’s uniform came from the ship across the gangway and addressed Pankov. “Are you in charge here, Colonel?”
Pankov inclined his head toward Dimka.
The captain became less deferential. “My ship can’t go to Siberia,” he said.
“Your destination is classified information,” Dimka said. “Do not speak of it.” In Dimka’s pocket was a sealed envelope that the captain was to open after he had sailed from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. At that point he would learn he was going to Cuba.
“I need cold-weather lubricating oil, antifreeze, deicing equipment—”
Dimka said: “Shut the fuck up.”
“But I have to protest. Siberian conditions—”
Dimka said to Lieutenant Meyer: “Punch him in the mouth.”
Meyer was a big man and he hit hard. The captain fell back, his lips bleeding.
Dimka said: “Go back aboard your ship, wait for orders, and keep your stupid mouth shut.”
The captain left, and the men on the quay turned their attention back to the approaching train.
Operation Anadyr was huge. The approaching train was the first of nineteen similar, all required to bring just this first missile regiment to Sevastopol. Altogether, Dimka was sending fifty thousand men and two hundred thirty thousand tons of equipment to Cuba. He had a fleet of eighty-five ships.
He still did not see how he was to keep the whole thing secret.
Many of the men in authority in the Soviet Union were careless, lazy, drunk, and just plain stupid. They misunderstood their instructions, they forgot, they approached challenging tasks halfheartedly and then gave up, and sometimes they just decided they knew better. Reasoning with them was useless; charm was worse. Being nice to them made them think you were a fool who could be ignored.
The train inched alongside the ship, its steel-on-steel brakes squealing. Each purpose-built railcar carried just one wooden crate eighty feet long and nine feet square. A crane operator mounted the gantry and entered its control cabin. Stevedores leaped onto the railcars and began readying the crates for loading. A company of soldiers had traveled with the train, and now they began to help the stevedores. Dimka was relieved to see that the missile regiment flashes had been removed from their uniforms, in accordance with his instructions.
A man in a civilian suit jumped down off a car, and Dimka was irritated to see that it was Yevgeny Filipov, his opposite number at the Defense Ministry. Filipov approached Pankov, as the captain had, but Pankov said: “Comrade Dvorkin is in command here.”
Filipov shrugged. “Just a few minutes late,” he said with a satisfied air. “We were delayed—”
Dimka noticed something. “Oh, no,” he said. “Fuck it.”
Filipov said: “Something wrong?”
Dimka stamped his foot on the concrete quay. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“What is it?”
Dimka looked at him in fury. “Who’s in charge on the train?”
“Colonel Kats is with us.”
“Bring the dumb bastard here to me right away.”
Filipov did not like to do Dimka’s bidding, but he could hardly refuse such a request, and he went away.
Pankov looked an inquiry at Dimka.
Dimka said with weary rage: “Do you see what is stenciled on the side of each crate?”
Pankov nodded. “It’s an army code number.”
“Exactly,” Dimka said bitterly. “It means: ‘R-12 ballistic missile.’”
“Oh, shit,” said Pankov.
Dimka shook his head in impotent fury. “Torture is too good for some people.”
He had feared that sooner or later he would have a showdown with the army, and on balance it suited him to have it now, over the very first shipment. And he was prepared for it.
Filipov returned with a colonel and a major. The senior man said: “Good morning, comrades. I’m Colonel Kats. Slight delay, but otherwise everything is going smoothly—”
“No, it’s not, you dimwitted prick,” said Dimka.
Kats was incredulous. “What did you say?”
Filipov said: “Look here, Dvorkin, you can’t talk to an army officer like that.”
Dimka ignored Filipov and spoke to Kats. “You have endangered the security of this entire operation by your disobedience. Your orders were to paint over the army numbers on the crates. You were provided with new stencils reading ‘Construction-Grade Plastic Pipe.’ You were to paint new markings on all the crates.”
Kats said indignantly: “There wasn’t time.”
Filipov said: “Be reasonable, Dvorkin.”
Dimka suspected Filipov might be happy for the secret to leak, for then Khrushchev would be discredited and might even fall from power.
Dimka pointed south, out to sea. “There is a NATO country just one hundred and fifty miles in that direction, Kats, you fucking idiot. Don’t you know that the Americans have spies? And that they send them to places such as Sevastopol, which is a naval base and a major Soviet port?”
“The markings are in code—”
“In code? What is your brain made of, dog shit? What training do you imagine is given to capitalist-imperialist spies? They are taught to recognize uniform badges—such as the missile regiment flash you are wearing on your collar, also against orders—as well as other military insignia and equipment markings. You stupid turd, every traitor and CIA informant in Europe can read the army code on these crates.”
Kats tried standing on his dignity. “Who do you think you are?” he said. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that. I’ve got children older than you.”
“You are relieved of your command,” said Dimka.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Show him, please.”
Colonel Pankov took a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to Kats.
Dimka said: “As you see from the document, I have the necessary authority.”
Filipov’s jaw was hanging open, Dimka saw.
Dimka said to Kats: “You are under arrest as a traitor. Go with these men.”
Lieutenant Meyer and another of Pankov’s group smoothly positioned themselves either side of Kats, took his arms, and marched him to the limousine.
Filipov recovered his wits. “Dvorkin, for God’s sake—”
“If you can’t say anything helpful, shut your fucking mouth,” Dimka said to him. He turned to the missile regiment major, who had not said a word so far. “Are you Kats’s second-in-command?”
The man looked terrified. “Yes, comrade. Major Spektor at your service.”
“You are now in command.”
“Thank you.”
“Take this train away. North of here is a large complex of train sheds. Arrange with the railway management to stop there for twelve hours while you repaint the crates. Bring the train back here tomorrow.”
“Yes, comrade.”
“Colonel Kats is going to a labor camp in Siberia for the rest of his life, which will not be very long. So, Major Spektor, don’t make a mistake.”
“I won’t.”
Dimka got into his limousine. As he drove away, he passed Filipov standing on the quay, looking as if he was not sure what had just happened.
• • •
Tanya Dvorkin stood on the dock at Mariel, on Cuba’s north coast, twenty-five miles from Havana, where a narrow inlet opened into a huge natural harbor hidden among hills. She looked anxiously at a Soviet ship moored at a concrete pier. Parked on the pier was a Soviet ZIL-130 truck pulling an eighty-foot trailer. A crane was lifting a long wooden crate from the ship’s hold and moving it through the air, with painful slowness, toward the truck. The crate was marked in Russian: CONSTRUCTION-GRADE PLASTIC PIPE.
She saw all this by floodlights. The ships had to be unloaded at night, by order of her brother. All other shipping had been cleared out of the harbor. Patrol boats had closed the inlet. Frogmen searched the waters around the ship to guard against an underwater threat. Dimka’s name was mentioned in tones of fear: his word was law and his wrath terrible to behold, they said.
Tanya was writing articles for TASS that told how the Soviet Union was helping Cuba, and how grateful the Cuban people were for the friendship of their ally on the far side of the globe. But she reserved the real truth for the coded cables she sent, via the KGB’s telegraph system, to Dimka in the Kremlin. And now Dimka had given her the unofficial task of making sure his instructions were carried out without fail. That was why she was anxious.
With Tanya was General Paz Oliva, the most beautiful man she had ever met.
Paz was breathtakingly attractive: tall and strong and a little scary, until he smiled and spoke in a soft bass voice that made her think of the strings of a cello being caressed by a bow. He was in his thirties: most of Castro’s military men were young. With his dark skin and soft curls he looked more Negro than Hispanic. He was a poster boy for Castro’s policy of racial equality, such a contrast with Kennedy’s.
Tanya loved Cuba, but it had taken a while. She missed Vasili more than she had expected. She realized how fond she was of him, even though they had never been lovers. She worried about him in his Siberian labor camp, hungry and cold. The campaign for which he had been punished—publicizing the illness of Ustin Bodian, the opera singer—had been successful, sort of: Bodian had been released from prison, though he had died soon afterward in a Moscow hospital. Vasili would find the irony telling.
Some things she could not get used to. She still put on a coat to go out, although the weather was never cold. She got bored with beans and rice and, to her surprise, found herself longing for a bowl of kasha with sour cream. After endless days of hot summer sun, she sometimes hoped for a downpour to freshen the streets.
Cuban peasants were as poor as Soviet peasants, but they seemed happier, perhaps because of the weather. And eventually the Cuban people’s irrepressible joie de vivre bewitched Tanya. She smoked cigars and drank rum with tuKola, the local substitute for Coke. She loved to dance with Paz to the irresistibly sexy rhythms of the traditional music they called trova. Castro had closed most of the nightclubs, but no one could prevent Cubans playing guitars, and the musicians had moved to small bars called casas de la trova.
But she worried for the Cuban people. They had defied their giant neighbor, the United States, only ninety miles away across the Straits of Florida, and she knew that one day they might be punished. When she thought about it, Tanya felt like the crocodile bird, bravely perched between the open jaws of the great beast, pecking food from a row of teeth like broken knives.
Was the Cubans’ defiance worth the price? Only time would tell. Tanya was pessimistic about the prospects for reforming Communism, but some of the things Castro had done were admirable. In 1961, the Year of Education, ten thousand students had flocked to the countryside to teach farmers to read, a heroic crusade to wipe out illiteracy in one campaign. The first sentence in the primer was “The peasants work in the cooperative,” but so what? People who could read were better equipped to recognize government propaganda for what it was.
Castro was no Bolshevik. He scorned orthodoxy and restlessly sought out new ideas. That was why he annoyed the Kremlin. But he was no democrat either. Tanya had been saddened when he had announced that the revolution had made elections unnecessary. And there was one area in which he had imitated the Soviet Union slavishly: with advice from the KGB he had created a ruthlessly efficient secret police force to stamp out dissent.
On balance, Tanya wished the revolution well. Cuba had to escape from underdevelopment and colonialism. No one wanted the Americans back, with their casinos and their prostitutes. But Tanya wondered whether Cubans would ever be allowed to make their own decisions. American hostility drove them into the arms of the Soviets; but as Castro moved closer to the USSR, so it became increasingly likely that the Americans would invade. What Cuba really needed was to be left alone.
But perhaps now it had a chance. She and Paz were among a mere handful of people who knew what was in these long wooden crates. She was reporting directly to Dimka on the effectiveness of the security blanket. If the plan worked it might protect Cuba permanently from the danger of an American invasion, and give the country breathing space in which to find its own way into the future.
That was her hope, anyway.
She had known Paz a year. “You never talk about your family,” she said as they watched the crate being positioned in the trailer. She addressed him in Spanish: she was now fairly fluent. She had also picked up a smattering of the American-accented English that many Cubans used occasionally.
“The revolution is my family,” he said.
Bullshit, she thought.
All the same, she was probably going to sleep with him.
Paz might turn out to be a dark-skinned version of Vasili, handsome and charming and faithless. There was probably a string of lissome Cuban girls with flashing eyes taking turns to fall into his bed.
She told herself not to be cynical. Just because a man was gorgeous he did not have to be a mindless Lothario. Perhaps Paz was simply waiting for the right woman to become his life partner and toil alongside him in the mission to build a new Cuba.
The missile in its crate was lashed to the bed of the trailer. Paz was approached by a small, obsequious lieutenant called Lorenzo, who said: “Ready to move out, General.”
“Carry on,” said Paz.
The truck moved slowly away from the dock. A herd of motorcycles roared into life and went ahead of the truck to clear the road. Tanya and Paz got into his army car, a green Buick LeSabre station wagon, and followed the convoy.
Cuba’s roads had not been designed for eighty-foot trucks. In the last three months, Red Army engineers had built new bridges and reconfigured hairpin bends, but still the convoy moved at walking pace much of the time. Tanya noted with relief that all other vehicles had been cleared from the roads. In the villages through which they passed, the low-built two-room wooden houses were dark, and the bars were shut. Dimka would be satisfied.
Tanya knew that back at the dockside another missile was already being eased onto another truck. The process would go on until first light. Unloading the entire cargo would take two nights.
So far, Dimka’s strategy was working. It seemed no one suspected what the Soviet Union was up to in Cuba. There was no whisper of it on the diplomatic circuit or in the uncontrolled pages of Western newspapers. The feared explosion of outrage in the White House had not yet happened.
But there were still two months to go before the American midterm elections; two more months during which these huge missiles had to be made launch-ready in total secrecy. Tanya did not know whether it could be done.
After two hours they drove into a broad valley that had been taken over by the Red Army. Here engineers were building a launch site. This was one of more than a dozen tucked away out of sight in the folds of the mountains all across the 777-mile-long island of Cuba.
Tanya and Paz got out of the car to watch the crate being off-loaded from the truck, again under floodlights. “We did it,” said Paz in a tone of satisfaction. “We now have nuclear weapons.” He took out a cigar and lit it.
Sounding a note of caution, Tanya said: “How long will it take to deploy them?”
“Not long,” he said dismissively. “A couple of weeks.”
He was not in the mood to think about problems, but to Tanya the task looked as if it might take more than two weeks. The valley was a dusty construction site where little had so far been achieved. All the same, Paz was right: they had done the hard part, which was bringing nuclear weapons into Cuba without the Americans finding out.
“Look at that baby,” Paz said. “One day it could land in the middle of Miami. Bang.”
Tanya shuddered at the thought. “I hope not.”
Did he really need to be told? “These weapons are meant to be a threat. They’re supposed to make the Americans afraid to invade Cuba. If ever they are used, they will have failed.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But if they do attack us, we will be able to wipe out entire American cities.”
Tanya was unnerved by the evident relish with which he contemplated this dreadful prospect. “What good would that do?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “It will maintain the pride of the Cuban nation.” He uttered the Spanish word dignidad as if it were sacred.
She could hardly believe what she was hearing. “So you would start a nuclear war for the sake of your pride?”
“Of course. What could be more important?”
Indignantly she said: “The survival of the human race, for one thing!”
He waved his lighted cigar in a dismissive gesture. “You worry about the human race,” he said. “My concern is my honor.”
“Shit,” said Tanya. “Are you mad?”
Paz looked at her. “President Kennedy is prepared to use nuclear weapons if the United States is attacked,” he said. “Secretary Khrushchev will use them if the Soviet Union is attacked. The same for De Gaulle of France and whoever is the leader of Great Britain. If one of them said anything different he would be deposed within hours.” He drew on his cigar, making the end glow red, then blew out smoke. “If I’m mad,” he said, “they all are.”
• • •
George Jakes did not know what the emergency was. Bobby Kennedy summoned him and Dennis Wilson to a crisis meeting in the White House on the morning of Tuesday, October 16. His best guess was that the subject would be on the front page of today’s New York Times, with the headline:
Eisenhower Calls President Weak on Foreign Policy
The unwritten rule was that ex-presidents did not attack their successors. However, George was not surprised that Eisenhower had flouted the convention. Jack Kennedy had won by calling Eisenhower weak and inventing a nonexistent “missile gap” in the Soviets’ favor. Clearly Ike was still hurting from this punch below the belt. Now that Kennedy was vulnerable to a similar charge, Eisenhower was getting his revenge—exactly three weeks before the midterm elections.
The other possibility was worse. George’s great fear was that Operation Mongoose might have leaked. The revelation that the president and his brother were organizing international terrorism would be ammunition for every Republican candidate. They would say the Kennedys were criminals for doing it and fools for letting the secret out. And what reprisals might Khrushchev dream up?
George could see that his boss was furious. Bobby was not good at hiding his feelings. Rage showed in the set of his jaw and the hunch of his shoulders and the arctic blast of his blue-eyed gaze.
George liked Bobby for the openness of his emotions. People who worked with Bobby saw into his heart, frequently. It made him more vulnerable but also more lovable.
When they walked into the Cabinet Room, President Kennedy was already there. He sat on the other side of the long table, on which were several large ashtrays. He was in the center, with the presidential seal on the wall above and behind him. Either side of the seal, tall arched windows looked out onto the Rose Garden.
With him was a little girl in a white dress who was obviously his daughter, Caroline, not quite five years old. She had short light-brown hair parted at the side—like her father’s—and held back with a simple clip. She was speaking to him, solemnly explaining something, and he was listening raptly, as if her words were as vital as anything else said in this room of power. George was profoundly struck by the intensity of the connection between parent and child. If ever I have a daughter, he thought, I will listen like that, so that she will know she is the most important person in the world.
The aides took their seats against the wall. George sat next to Skip Dickerson, who worked for Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Skip had very fair straight hair and pale skin, almost like an albino. He pushed his blond forelock out of his eyes and spoke in a Southern accent. “Any idea where the fire is?”
“Bobby isn’t saying,” George replied.
A woman George did not know came into the room and took Caroline away. “The CIA has some news for us,” the president said. “Let’s begin.”
At one end of the room, in front of the fireplace, stood an easel displaying a large monochrome photograph. The man standing next to it introduced himself as an expert photointerpreter. George had not known that such a profession existed. “The pictures you are about to see were taken on Sunday by a high-altitude U-2 aircraft of the CIA flying over Cuba.”
Everyone knew about the CIA’s spy planes. The Soviets had shot one down over Siberia two years ago, and had put the pilot on trial for espionage.
Everyone peered at the photo on the easel. It seemed blurred and grainy, and showed nothing that George could recognize except maybe trees. They needed an interpreter to tell them what they were looking at.
“This is a valley in Cuba about twenty miles inland from the port of Mariel,” the CIA man said. He pointed with a little baton. “A good-quality new road leads to a large open field. These small shapes scattered around are construction vehicles: bulldozers, backhoes, and dump trucks. And here”—he tapped the photo for emphasis—“here, in the middle, you see a group of shapes like planks of wood in a row. They are in fact crates eighty feet long by nine feet across. That is exactly the right size and shape to contain a Soviet R-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile, designed to carry a nuclear warhead.”
George just managed to stop himself from saying Holy shit, but others were not so restrained, and for a moment the room was full of astonished curses.
Someone said: “Are you sure?”
The photointerpreter replied: “Sir, I have been studying air reconnaissance photographs for many years, and I can assure you of two things: one, this is exactly what nuclear missiles look like, and two, nothing else looks like this.”
God save us, George thought fearfully; the goddamn Cubans have nukes.
Someone said: “How the hell did they get there?”
The photointerpreter said: “Clearly the Soviets transported them to Cuba in conditions of utter secrecy.”
“Snuck them in under our fucking noses,” said the questioner.
Someone else asked: “What is the range of those missiles?”
“More than a thousand miles.”
“So they could hit . . .”
“This building, sir.”
George had to repress an impulse to get up and leave right away.
“And how long would it take?”
“To get here from Cuba? Thirteen minutes, we calculate.”
Involuntarily, George glanced at the windows, as if he might see a missile coming across the Rose Garden.
The president said: “That son of a bitch Khrushchev lied to me. He told me he would not deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba.”
Bobby added: “And the CIA told us to believe him.”
Someone else said: “This is bound to dominate the rest of the election campaign—three more weeks.”
With relief, George turned his mind to the domestic political consequences: the possibility of nuclear war was somehow too terrible to contemplate. He thought of this morning’s New York Times. How much more Eisenhower could say now! At least when he was president he had not allowed the USSR to turn Cuba into a Communist nuclear base.
This was a disaster, and not just for foreign policy. A Republican landslide in November would mean that Kennedy was hamstrung for the last two years of his presidency, and that would be the end of the civil rights agenda. With more Republicans joining Southern Democrats in opposing equality for Negroes, Kennedy would have no chance of bringing in a civil rights bill. How long would it be then before Maria’s grandfather would be allowed to register to vote without getting arrested?
In politics, everything was connected.
We have to do something about the missiles, George thought.
He had no idea what.
Fortunately Jack Kennedy did.
“First, we need to step up U-2 surveillance of Cuba,” the president said. “We have to know how many missiles they have and where they are. And then, by God, we’re going to take them out.”
George perked up. Suddenly the problem did not seem so great. The USA had hundreds of aircraft and thousands of bombs. And President Kennedy taking decisive, violent action to protect America would do no harm to the Democrats in the midterms.
Everyone looked at General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s most senior military commander after the president. His wavy hair, slick with brilliantine and parted high on his head, made George think he might be vain. He was trusted by both Jack and Bobby, though George was not sure why. “An air strike would need to be followed by a full-scale invasion of Cuba,” Taylor said.
“And we have a contingency plan for that.”
“We can land one hundred fifty thousand men there within a week of the bombing.”
Kennedy was still thinking about taking out the Soviet missiles. “Could we guarantee to destroy every launch site in Cuba?” he asked.
Taylor replied: “It will never be one hundred percent, Mr. President.”
George had not thought of that snag. Cuba was 777 miles long. The air force might not be able to find every site, let alone destroy them all.
President Kennedy said: “And I guess any missiles remaining after our air strike would be fired at the USA immediately.”
“We would have to assume that, sir,” said Taylor.
The president looked bleak, and George had a sudden vivid sense of the dreadful weight of responsibility he bore. “Tell me this,” said Kennedy. “If one missile landed on a medium-size American city, how bad would that be?”
Election politics were driven from George’s mind, and once again his heart was chilled by the dreaded thought of nuclear war.
General Taylor conferred with his aides for a few moments, then turned back to the table. “Mr. President,” he said, “our calculation is that six hundred thousand people would die.”