Castro's bomb

Chapter Twenty-three

Summer in our nation's capital meant steamy, stifling weather that was oppressive even on good days. Only mad dogs and tourists would chose to go out in the noonday sun of Washington. An air conditioned restaurant, therefore, was an oasis and most had long lines at lunchtime.

However, many tourists were unaware that the cafeteria in the Supreme Court building was open to the public and, along with good food — bean soup was their specialty — and reasonable prices, it was comfortable.

The four of them, Elena, Cathy, Charley, and Andrew, liked to meet at least every couple of weeks and go over what was transpiring. First, each couple was planning a fall wedding. Not a double wedding. Instead, the ceremonies would be a couple of weeks apart so that each could attend. Nor was either person going to be a groomsman or maid of honor for the other. That was preserved for relatives, even though, in Cathy's case, it meant involving some really distant cousins that she hardly knew along, along with her sister and Andrew's two sisters. Andrew had a couple of marine buddies along with friends from back home to stand up for him.

Charley had no relatives that counted, so he was depending on Elena to provide the bulk of the crowd. She assured him that her Hispanic family was large and there'd be no problem. He'd asked Jock Soriano to be best man.

For Andrew, a number of questions had been answered. He had been de-briefed by Charley Kraeger at first and then, to his surprise, by Director McCone himself, after which he and Cathy had lunch at the White House with the president and first lady.

As surmised, the federal government wanted no talk about a missing nuke. There had been no mention of it in the press or elsewhere. The Soviets didn't want to admit that they'd lost one, and the United States didn't want to admit that their armed forces were threatened by one. As to the Cubans, the Russians had bullied them into silence. Therefore, it had never happened.

Andrew had to agree with their logic. Had he actually seen a bomb? Had he been able to identify the rocket that the Russians had taken as actually being nuclear? For that matter, was he even certain that the men who'd killed Guevara had even been Russians? Maybe the whole thing had been a bad but exciting dream?

Of course, he knew full well that it had been a nuke and the men had been Russians, but as long as there was the smallest possibility he was wrong the story could never be confirmed. The CIA and the army were still evaluating the relevance of proof of the existence of Soviet Special Forces. Maybe he’d write his memoirs in a few decades and tell of it. Of course, who would believe it? Maybe he should write it as a novel?

Only one fact was indisputable — Che Guevara was dead, apparently killed in the final moments of the battle for Guantanamo. The media was having a ball speculating that he might have been killed by other Cubans, and the US government was happy to let those rumors swirl.

Andrew wondered what would happen if he fought the decision and went public with what he'd seen, or thought he had seen. Perhaps he'd be recalled to the Corps and stationed in Antarctica for the rest of his life. Acquiescence seemed like a really good idea. He'd come out of it with a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.

He'd gotten a congratulatory phone call from Major Hartford who had been allowed to re-enlist. After all, he was a genuine hero for getting his men out of the camp and had gotten his picture on the cover of Time, so who cared about his bad feet?

Besides, both his and Cathy's silence came with a bonus. The CIA would bankroll his law school studies at Georgetown and then give him a job at the Agency. Apparently they needed lawyers as much as spies. Cathy, too, had been offered a job by McCone and had taken it. She was going to instruct new agents in the fine art of writing legible reports and assist those agents who weren't American born with the basics of their new language. She'd already started and was enjoying it immensely as her students were, like the men at Guantanamo, highly motivated.

If these were bribes, neither Andrew nor Cathy cared. Subject to CIA approval, Cathy had also been offered a book contract and somebody wanted to make a movie about her adventures. Hollywood had gone slightly bonkers when it came out that she'd actually gunned down a Cuban soldier who'd been threatening to kill her. There would be no mention of a nuclear rocket or the fact that the man had raped her. Cathy and he hoped that whatever money she got would help buy a house. If they got twenty thousand dollars out of the deal they could buy a really good one for cash.

They finished their lunch and walked outside where the heat hit them like a club.

"Can we go back inside?" Charley moaned.

They had a fairly long walk to their cars and they would be drenched with sweat by the time they reached them. It really didn't matter. They were happy.

Charley was the first to sense the commotion. People were gathering around a man who had a transistor radio in his hand. Voices were raised in anger and in shock. Others began to gather as well.

"What the hell?" Charley said as they walked quickly over to the nearest group of people.

The recently ended Cuban war was still the main topic of conversation in Washington and elsewhere. It had been a costly victory and the funerals of dead servicemen were still raw memories. Many wounded were still in hospitals and too many were going to be there for a very long time as they learned to function without limbs or eyes.

President Kennedy continued to take a lot of heat for his actions, or, as some said, his inactions. He remembered former President Truman's comment about not being in the kitchen if you couldn't stand the heat. Well, he thought ruefully, it was hot as any kitchen right now.

The war had cost fifteen hundred American dead and another five thousand wounded. Another score were missing and presumed dead, mainly crewmen lost with the destroyer the Cubans had sunk. The body count numbers began with the day of the attack on Gitmo and on to the end of the fighting.

Cuban casualties were not announced by Havana. However, they were estimated by the newspapers at ten times America's and the bleeding hearts in the UN were crying that the United States had slaughtered helpless Cubans in a merciless orgy of violence. Bullshit, JFK thought. Had they forgotten who'd started the war in the first place? No, he thought. They just hated the United States.

The scope of the defeat had shaken the Castro regime. Castro was now even more isolated then he had been since the Soviets, his one-time close friends, were thoroughly angry with him. It was rumored that Fidel and Raul might not last very long and would soon disappear. Contenders for the throne included Emilio Aragones Navarro, the former Cuban representative to Russia who was disavowing support for the war.

The Castro brothers were trying to make Che Guevara out to be a martyr killed by brutal Americans, as a means of getting sympathy for their regime, but it didn't seem to be working.

Another curious claimant to control in Havana was a General Cordero who appeared to be in charge of Santiago and much of eastern Cuba. It was rumored that the U.S. was bankrolling his private army.

Castro's losses extended beyond the dead and wounded. For all intents and purposes, his air force and armor no longer existed, and he was not likely to get any more planes from the Soviets or their Warsaw Pact allies. Castro's leading general, Juan Ortega, was recovering in an American military hospital and, after confirming that his family had been spirited out of Havana, was cooperating fully with his captors. He'd reluctantly come to agree that Guantanamo would not be liberated in the foreseeable future and that further blood should not be spilled over it.

CIA and State Department analysts agreed that Fidel and Raul's days were numbered. Whoever replaced them would doubtless preserve at least a semblance of a socialist regime and would attempt a balancing act between the far away Soviets and the Americans next door. Regardless, it would probably evolve into a warmer relationship between the U.S. and Cuba.

Back-channel contact with the Soviets also said that the hypothetical Luna rescued by their hypothetical forces had been damaged in transit from Havana to Guantanamo and might not have been successfully launched or even gone off. It was said that the Luna would probably have been more of a threat to those trying to launch it than any intended target.

Probably, he thought and shuddered.

Kennedy had his own enemies. With elections coming in the fall, contenders for his office had appeared from both parties. Senator Goldwater from Arizona was the heavy favorite to take the Republican nomination and he'd been vehement that the military should have gone into Havana, regardless of potential consequences. It was a stance that had many middle of the road Americans thinking was extreme and dangerous. Experts said that if he persisted, he might find himself unable to win a presidential election against either Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater was heavily involved with a senate sub-committee investigating just how and why Guantanamo had been so thoroughly surprised in the first place. Obviously, it was JFK’s fault and the president accepted that he would get the blame. After all, he was the man in charge.

Former General Curtis LeMay supported that, and another rumor had LeMay being Goldwater's vice presidential running-mate. An aging and ailing General Douglas MacArthur had criticized JFK as a playboy dilettante who'd twice caved in under pressure and who spinelessly permitted a communist nation to exist only a few miles from Florida.

Even his own vice president, Lyndon Johnson, had condemned Kennedy's actions as wrong because they were incomplete. Of course, Johnson was running to unseat JFK as the Democratic candidate. He was not given much of a chance as much of the nation was pleased that a full-scale war had been averted. Upsetting and incumbent president didn't ordinarily happen.

Still, LBJ had become a royal pain in the ass. He had the capability of splitting the Democratic Party at a time when it was necessary to show a solid front against the Republicans. In Kennedy’s opinion, Johnson had just gotten a case of religion when it came to civil rights, something the president supported but hadn’t wanted to deal with until after the 1964 elections. Now he was going to have to support LBJ’s civil rights stance in order to keep him quiet

Good thing the vice president was down in Miami, Kennedy thought. He was not trying to mend fences for Kennedy. No, he was telling the exiles how he would have won Cuba back for them if he’d been given just half a chance, and how he’d argued for taking Havana and toppling Castro. Bastard, JFK thought. Reports were that his message was not being well received by a Cuban community that had been ravaged by the war. They felt that LBJ was connected too closely with a White House that was, as Marine Commandant Shoup said in a meeting, as popular in Miami's exile community as venereal disease in a convent. Emilio Esteban and some of his force had survived their abortive invasion and escaped back to Florida where they were loudly condemning anyone connected to the current presidency.

Not everyone was against Kennedy. Former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had supported him as had most of the media and the polls showed that fifteen hundred dead Americans was more than enough to pay for retaking Guantanamo and punishing Cuba. The thought of many more dead and wounded had they war gone on had silenced most critics.

And what had the military learned, he wondered? Along with the dead and wounded, there had been shock that twenty-five American planes had been shot down by Cuba. Only six from combat with Cuban planes, and U.S. forces claimed at least twenty MiGs shot down by them. But nineteen U.S. jets had been killed by surface-to-air missiles, which had been a complete surprise. Both the navy and the air force agreed that new equipment and new tactics had to be developed to counter these, especially since the Russians had newer and better SAMs coming on line.

The army had learned that a people might just fight like sons of bitches for their own country and, even though outgunned, inflict serious casualties on a well armed invader. There were some in congress who wanted more of a presence in South Vietnam, which was threatened by a communist takeover, but JFK was fighting the urge. There were twenty thousand American military currently in that divided land and he was of the opinion that it was more than enough. If the current pro-American government in South Vietnam couldn't stand without more help, then so be it. No land wars in Asia, he kept repeating to himself, no land wars in Asia.

The door to the Oval Office swung open. Kennedy was startled. He wasn't expecting anyone and the intrusion was a serious breach of protocol. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger rushed in. His face was pale.

"Mr. President, there's been a tragedy. Lyndon Johnson was just shot by some Cuban exiles in Miami who may have been associated with that Esteban character. Sir, he's dead.”