“I know. It’s just the chance that something could happen before Delta goes in that worries me. I just keep wondering why Castro hasn’t done anything yet?”
“We were, too, Mr. President, but we think we figured it out.” The DDI knew this was his territory. “We figured that Moscow was almost certainly Castro’s chosen target from a number of things. One of these was a recent speech he made where he laid blame squarely on the Russians for ‘forsaking the Revolution.’ Rhetoric, if ever there was, but he also said something else very telling. He said, ‘One day the Russian people will awake from a night’s slumber expecting to see the sun, but they will find only the darkness they themselves have created.’ ”
The President looked to Bud. “My God.”
“A wake-up call for the citizens of Moscow. If we’re correct, that would mean a launch in about ten-and-a-half hours,” Bud said. “Thirty-minute flight time. Arrival just in time for sunrise.”
“Why didn’t he do that this morning?”
“Fueling, Mr. President,” the DDI explained. “Imagery from a reconnaissance pass showed tank trucks at the site earlier. They might not have had time enough to fuel the missile for a launch today. There’s no doubt they’ll be ready for one tomorrow.”
“So he’s sitting there waiting, a nuclear missile ready to fly, with his finger on the button. All because he wants to fulfill some grandiose prophecy.” The President’s head shook slowly. “How could any man be that cold and calculating? Does he realize how many innocent people will die?”
“Of course he does, but you can’t apply a thinking person’s logic to a madman,” Bud said. “And that is what he is. It is what he has always been.”
Cuba was going to be free. That was how this all started, the President thought. Now what would happen? He couldn’t answer that to his own satisfaction and could not afford to spend time pondering it right now. The liberation of Cuba was now on the back burner. The survival of the Russian capital, and possibly of much more, was in the forefront. “How do we do this, Bud?”
“Carefully,” the NSA began. “You have to speak to President Konovalenko personally and be very honest. If you have to, tell him about the rebellion, but assure him that the Cuban military approached us. He needs to know that we’re not keeping anything from him. Anything.”
“All right.” The President reached for the phone to call the head Russian translator — one was always on standby in the White House — but it rang just as his fingers touched the handset. “Yes.”
“Mr. President, we have an urgent direct voice call from the Russian president. His translator is on the line.”
“Speak of the Devil.”
“Really?” Bud said.
“Urgent, they say. He already has his translator on the line.” It would take several minutes to get the White House Russian speaker in place, and “Urgent” had a special meaning to it in superpower communications.
“Take it now,” Bud said. “Konovalenko’s translator can handle both ends, and our guy can verify the tape after the call. Just remember to be straight with him.”
“But why is he calling?” the President wondered aloud. There was only one way to find out. “Put it through.”
“Mr. President, thank you for taking my call,” the translator said, repeating the Russian heard in the background.
“It is my pleasure, President Konovalenko. Your translator will have to handle both ends of the conversation, as I did not want to delay speaking with you. There is…”
“Thank you for preventing any delay. This is of the utmost urgency. The utmost.”
The President’s brow furrowed at the double use of “utmost.” “What is the problem?”
Problem? Bud thought, too late to realize that something was terribly wrong.
“Why, Mr. President, are your wartime airborne command posts on alert with your highest military officer aboard?”
Bud didn’t hear the words on the other end. All he saw was the President go absolutely pale.
“Command posts?” the President said, reacting with a denial-like question for lack of any other response. It was also the worst thing that could have been said at the moment.
“Whoa!” the signals-watch officer at NORAD exclaimed. His position was in the main control room of the facility, among a hundred other watch officers who continuously monitored their displays for any events that could be considered hostile toward the United States. “I have never seen this before.”
“What is it, Captain?” the duty officer inquired, looking over the officer’s shoulder.
“The Moscow ABM system just fired up, Colonel. Man! Those radars are putting out some major signals.” A SIGINT — or Signals Intelligence — package piggybacked onboard one of the Defense Support Program early-warning satellites had just registered the spewing of radar energy from the Pill Box phased-array radar, located north of Moscow at Pushkino, that supported the sixty-four ABM-1 Galosh long-range antiballistic missiles ringing the Russian capital in eight sites of eight missiles each. “Whoa! There go the others.” The Flat Twin radars supporting the thirty-six shorter-range ABM-3 Gazelle missiles had now come to life. “We didn’t hear of any Russian ABM exercise, did we?”
“Not to my knowledge,” the duty officer said. They’d better not be fucking with us. Not at a time like this. The thirty-year colonel looked toward the door up the twin stairs. Behind them might be the answer, but he couldn’t just go ask. As a duty officer, he was privy to the special happenings at NORAD for the next couple of weeks, and he also knew that this was not supposed to happen. No, he couldn’t ask the Russians sitting in watch of his country’s strategic forces just what the hell was going on. But someone could. “Get CINCNORAD down here, pronto.”
Colonel Ojeda’s stare sliced into the eyes of the CIA man opposite him. It was a test. A man’s eyes, he had learned early in life, told all. If he was fearful, they shifted. If he was truthful, they would not shrink from the challenge of another’s gaze. If he was lying, the eyes would be like hollow orbs. Papa Tony’s met his with an equal test.
“The stories were true, it would appear,” Ojeda commented, his eyes still on the American. “Eh, Captain?”
Captain Manchon nodded as he, too, surveyed the face. “It would appear, sir.”
“What stories?” Antonio asked. The visual contest ended with his question. The midday sun blazed down around the shade tree that they stood under, and a pervasive wetness had invaded every crevice of the CIA officer’s body. He undid three more buttons on his sweat-darkened uniform before his wondering was answered.
“Of the missile,” Manchon began. “For many years there have been rumors of such a weapon. They began after the Russians left. At first we disregarded them as nothing. Soon they began to die away, except among many officers. Officers of rank and privilege.”
“General Ontiveros himself often mused on the effect such a weapon would have on the Revolution, in private, of course,” Ojeda revealed. “I asked him once if the stories were true.” The colonel paused and remembered the moment. “He looked away and said nothing. The general was an honorable man.”
Paredes knew he could not judge the man Ojeda respected above his many other superiors. Much had been said of General Eduardo Echevarria Ontiveros by the briefers from Langley, none of it very flattering. He was a staunch Communist, in opposition to the president because of his disastrous policies that had destroyed the nation’s economy. Whether he could have done better with his own brand of the same ideology was highly unlikely. But he had imparted something to the men he commanded, something beyond even loyalty. It was a wisdom of sorts, one that challenged his subordinates to challenge the ideas given them as gospel in search of a better way. Ojeda had done so, and had come to the conclusion that the ways championed by the general were not the ways of the future. In one spark of realization he had become Ontiveros’s most loyal critic, an act of quasi-treachery that might have earned him a date with the firing squad under men of less character. From the general it had won him the highest respect an officer could give a man under his command. How could he judge right and wrong in such an unconventional mating of ideals? Antonio wondered. If Ontiveros had done nothing else, he had made Colonel Hector Ojeda the man that he was.