American tabloid

PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS!

o o o

Lockhart dispensed blankets. Pete sobered the men up with bennie-laced Kool-Aid.

They loaded the troop ship at midnight. 256 exiles climbed on-hot-wired to reclaim their country.

They loaded weapons, landing craft and medical supplies. Radio channels stayed open: Blessington to Langley and every port-of-departure command post.

The word passed through:

Jack the Haircut says, no second air strike.

Nobody proffered first-strike death stats. Nobody proffered reports on coastal fortifications.

Those spotlights and beach bunkers went unreported. Those militia lookouts went unmentioned.

Pete knew why.

Langley knows it’s now or never. Why inform the troops that we’re in crap-shoot terrain from here on in?

Pete swigged moonshine to wean himself off the bennies. He passed out on his bunk midway through this weird hallucination.

o o o

Japs, Japs, Japs. Saipan, ‘43-in wide-screen Technicolor.

They swarmed him. He killed them and killed them and killed them. He screamed readiness warnings. Nobody understood his Quebecois French.

Dead Japs popped back to life. He rekilled them barehanded. They turned into dead women-Ruth Mildred Cressmeyer clones.

Chuck woke him up at dawn. He said, “Kennedy came halfway through. All the sites launched their troops an hour ago.”

o o o

Waiting time dragged. Their short-wave set went on the fritz.

Troop ship transmissions came in garbled. Site-to-site feeds registered as static-laced gibberish.

Chuck couldn’t nail the malfunction. Pete tried straight telephone contact-calls to Tiger Kab and his Langley drop.

He got two sustained busy signals. Chuck chalked them up to pro-Fidel line jamming.

Lockhart had a hot number memorized: the Agency’s Miami Ops office. Boyd called it “Invasion Central”-the sparkplug Cadre guys never got close to.

Pete dialed the number. A busy signal blared extra loud. Chuck nailed the source of the sound: covertly strung phone lines overloaded with incoming calls.

They sat around the barracks. Their radio coughed out strange little sputters.

Time dragged. Seconds took years. Minutes took solar-system eternities.

Pete chained cigarettes. Dougie Frank and Chuck bummed a whole pack off of him.

A Klan guy was hosing off the Piper. Pete and Chuck shared a reeeeealllly long look.

Dougie Frank jammed their wavelength. “Can I go, too?”

o o o

Diversionary dips got them close. They caught the Bay of Pigs in tight and ugly.

They saw a supply ship snagged on a reef. They saw dead men flopping out of a hole in the hull. They saw sharks bobbing at body parts twenty yards offshore.

Chuck swung around and made a second pass. Pete bumped the control panel. The extra passenger had them cramped in extra tight.

They saw beached landing craft. They saw live men climbing over dead men. They saw a hundred-yard stretch of bodies in bright-red shallow water.

The invaders kept coming. Flamethrowers nailed them the second they hit the wave break. They got flash-fried and boiled alive.

Fifty-odd rebels were shackled facedown in the sand. A Cornmie with a chainsaw was running across their backs.

Pete saw the blade drag. Pete saw the blood gout. Pete saw their heads roll into the water.

Flames jumped up at the plane-short by inches.

Chuck pulled off his headset. “I picked up an Ops call! Kennedy says, ‘No second air strike,’ and he says he won’t send in any U.S. troops to help our guys!”

Pete aimed his Magnum out the window. A flame clap spun it out of his hand.

Sharks were churning up the water right below them. This fat Commie fuck waved a severed head.