Splashdown

Chapter 15

“Ordered to nuke Havana. Will abort. Look to LeMay.” Golovkin paled as he read.

Ivkin’s eyes narrowed dangerously at his officer’s words.

“That is the entire message, Captain.” Golovkin handed him the written transcription.

“You are certain this is the entire message? No doubts?”

The officer shook his head. “There can be no doubt, Captain. Reading it as Morse, it contains the message I have given you. If it has meaning beyond the Morse, I cannot know it.”

Ivkin dismissed the officer, who saluted and returned to his seat.

“Havana! What do you make of it?” he asked Dane and Bones, shaking the paper in his hands.

Dane remained silent. Bones followed his lead. Was this Morse coded box something the Admiral and those who planned their mission knew about? If so they had chosen not to make them privy to it. It wasn't need to know. But sitting here as a prisoner on some little known Bahamian outer island, held captive by a Russian submarine captain, it sure seemed to Dane like they could benefit from knowing a little more. Worse, Ivkin seemed to be growing more irate by the second, his face reddening as he re-read the message.

“LeMay…LeMay! I know this name…” Ivkin trailed off in thought, his fists clenched, brow furrowed.

Bones looked at Dane with an expression that said, Who's LeMay? For his part, Dane had some vague recollection of the name but couldn't place it now.

Ivkin shouted aloud in Russian to no one in particular. When no one answered him, he spoke again, this time in English, looking at Dane and Bones.

“Do you know what this means?”

“No idea,” Dane said. Bones shook his head of long hair.

“Curtis LeMay was an American Air Force General, in the early 1960's. He was known for his public clashes over policy with the Kennedy administration.”

“You sure do know a lot about American history,” Dane observed. “Know your enemy, is that it?”

Ivkin seethed. His voice trembled with rage. “I understand what happened now!” He stood from his chair, sending it sliding backwards over the tile floor, but remained at the table. Dane noticed that he now held a small, smooth rock in his hand that he rubbed like some kind of nervous tic.

“Please enlighten us,” Dane glanced at his fellow dining companions, all of whose eyes were riveted to Ivkin. Dane eyed his salad fork, lamenting the fact that steak knives had not been necessary for the meal. He slid the fork up the right sleeve of his shirt, which, after removing his sweater, was simply long underwear. He was grateful for the long sleeves.

Ivkin banged a fist on the table, rattling plates and splashing liquid from glasses. “The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. When it was over, General LeMay requested that he be allowed to bomb Cuba. This despite the fact that Mother Russia had agreed to pull out. He vigorously opposed the naval blockade.”

Again, the table was silent save for one of the Russians who knew English translating for his comrades.

Dane was careful to lay his forearm on the table next to his plate before speaking, lest an eagle-eyed observer notice his salad fork was missing. He remembered LeMay now. A hard-liner, or perhaps a whack job, depending on one’s perspective. “What's the significance?”

Ivkin's eyes grew wider. “A year earlier, in 1961 during an incident known as the Bay of Pigs, a paramilitary force under the control of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency invaded Cuba, attempting to overthrow the communist regime. They were unsuccessful.”

“So?” Bones said, polishing off his wine.

Ivkin stared at Bones with eyes that seemed full of outright hatred. Bones, even though he was used to people's reactions to his sometimes abrasive outbursts, shrank back in his chair.

“My father, a Russian diplomat at the time assigned to an embassy in Havana, was killed in that invasion when a bomb exploded outside his office. An innocent victim of American imperialism.” Ivkin ran his thumb back and forth over the stone.

As soon as the Russian translator completed his sentence the entire room fell eerily quiet. The scrabble of an unknown animal on the roof was the only sound while the sailors seemed to hold their breath.

It was Bones himself who broke the silence. “Sorry about your father, Captain. I grew up without my Dad, too. I know what it's like. It sucks.”

Ivkin pressed the heels of his hands hard onto the table as he turned to face Bones. “The message created by Gus Grissom, presumably while aboard the Liberty Bell 7 space capsule, reads: Ordered to nuke Havana. Will abort. Look to LeMay.' Consider the dates of these historical events.”

“The Liberty Bell splashdown was in July of 1961.” Dane said.

“Correct. And the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred only three months earlier in April of that same year.”

Ivkin pointed at the nuke on the table. “This bomb, carried aboard the spacecraft, was meant to be dropped on Havana, Cuba, but astronaut Gus Grissom refused to carry out his orders, instead landing here.” He moved his arm so that it pointed out to the ocean salvage site. “You are familiar with the controversy surrounding the exploding hatch that sank the capsule?”

He looked directly at Dane, his eyes now red-rimmed and bulging.

“Some people say that Grissom blew the hatch early out of panic, causing the capsule to flood.”

“Out of panic, yes! That's what he wanted them to think!” Ivkin held up the coded box high and let it fall back to the table with a thud. “But we know now that he was opposed to his mission's secret objective! Ordered to nuke Havana! He wanted others to know about his clandestine orders. Will abort! And the final piece of the puzzle, “Look to LeMay,” speaks volumes.”

“You're saying the United States ordered Grissom to secretly drop this nuclear bomb on Havana from the space capsule?”

“Yes! It could be done. Cape Canaveral is not all that far from Cuba, especially from a high altitude angled descent from the edge of space. He could have dropped the bomb from the stratosphere soon after his parachute was deployed.”

“And this in retaliation for losing the Bay of Pigs conflict?” Dane asked. It disturbed him that he could find no obvious logical flaws in Ivkin's interpretation of the puzzle, even when coupled with what he had been told in the briefing aboard the Lear.

“Yes!” Both of his fists pounded the table along with the word, the flat rock popping out of his right hand and skidding to a stop against Bones' plate The Indian SEAL picked it up while Ivkin continued.

“The CIA was humiliated in their defeat. Castro was still very much in power. Three months later, they saw the spaceflight as an opportunity to unleash total destruction on their enemy. Who would suspect a space capsule delivering a nuclear weapon?”

Bones squinted at the rock, blowing on its surface for a moment as if to clear it of dust, then staring at it again. Ivkin noticed him and extended a hand. “Give that back to me, please. “ Bones looked up from the rock and handed it to Ivkin without a word.

“What is it?”

Ivkin scowled at Bones. “It is a good luck charm, if you will, that I have carried for some time.”

“So what do you intend to do with this information?” Dane didn't want to spend any more time than necessary in the custody of the Russians. Sometimes he really wished Bones would be quiet, but at the same time he knew the crafty Cherokee was indispensible.

Ivkin eyed the bomb. He spoke in Russian and immediately four of his crew jumped up from the second table and left the room. Then he addressed Dane and Bones.

“I intend to return this bomb to the United States of America.”

“So you plan to take this…bomb, if that’s in fact what it is,” Dane said, “and bring it home with you to Moscow so that they can return it to the U.S. as some sort of public outing of their Cold War plans gone wrong?”

Ivkin spat out a hearty laugh. “Oh, we plan to do a little better than that,” he said, pouring water from a crystal decanter.

“Care to elaborate?” Dane asked when Ivkin only drank from his glass, saying nothing further.

“Indeed,” Ivkin said, placing his glass on the table.”We plan to detonate this bomb ourselves. Justice must be served.”

“Out here in the middle of the ocean?” Bones asked. “That would make for some sweet waves. If you’ve got an extra surfboard, I’m all in.”

“No. We are not at war with the Bahamas. You see, we are going to launch it from here, but it will detonate far away, on land. It is time to make preparations.”

The four men who left a few minutes ago returned with a cart. They placed the bomb on it and wheeled it away.

“So you’re not going to blow up our expedition ships?” Dane tested.

Ivkin stood there with his hands on the table, shaking his head. “Certainly not. We could use our submarine's nuclear warheads for that, even conventional missiles, were that our goal. As I have said, our target is one that will demonstrate to the world that it does not pay to deceive the Soviet Union, and that the true victor of the Cold War is only now coming to light. However, if what you say is correct, that this device is not in fact a nuclear weapon, or has been rendered inoperable from its time on the ocean floor, then the target will suffer considerably less damage.”

“And what is the target?” Dane asked.

“None other than Washington, D.C.”