With a full shift of work behind them, the group, with the approval of their uninterested duty officer, proceeded to their barracks and, as every good soldier in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces was expected to do, cleaned and prepared their personal weapons for use in any eventuality.
This final task they completed with particular care and haste, knowing that a certain “eventuality” was soon to occur.
They called him Papa Tony. It was a term representative of respect more than lineage, though the blood that filled Antonio Paredes, Jr.’s veins was of the same land as his hosts. Yet his years were insufficient to allow for parentage of any of the men he was now with. They were all senior officers in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces who had served their country with pride and distinction for decades, from a time before young Antonio had learned to walk. Some may even have taken up arms against his father in the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion. It was possible that one was even responsible for the elder Paredes’s death. But the past was simply history, Antonio believed, and it was time to write a new chapter for the books. Things changed, societies matured, and people who were once cattle in a pen had come to see the benevolent rancher as little more than a guide to the slaughterhouse. Yes, the past was very different from the present, except in one way that few would ever know. A very ironic and appropriate way. For the same reasons as his father, Antonio had returned to the land of his birth, the land his family had fled more than three-and-a-half decades before, to help bring freedom once again to a simple, beautiful people. And, as Antonio felt was a tribute to the father he never knew, he had come at the behest of the same, secretive American employer as his Papa Tony.
“Papa, do you wish to watch?”
Paredes turned toward the voice. It was Colonel Hector Ojeda, executive officer of the Second Mechanized Division, a unit located some twelve miles to the east at Falcon. It was a position he would occupy for fifteen more minutes. At that point he would become Colonel Ojeda, rebel officer and leader of the battle for his nation’s freedom.
Ojeda held a pair of French-made night-vision binoculars out for the CIA officer, who took them and followed his host to the edge of the vegetation on the hill just four miles north of the Santa Clara airfield. They settled in among a sparse grove of palms that opened into a moonlit clearing where the rise sloped downward. There was no fear of detection. The unthinkable would never happen. All threats were outside the borders, across oceans. Akin to the American maxim of personal freedom and safety, the door was unlocked on this warm autumn evening.
That was the essence of the plan to free Cuba.
“Ten minutes,” Ojeda reported. He was a tall man, thin from head to toe, which would make him appear weak if not for the eyes. Bulging, brown on white, they were set in a gaunt face that showed a tired determination known only by those who had traveled a long road to an uncertain future. His frame, never beyond wiry in his fifty-nine years, had obviously suffered from the strain of the previous three months. So much planning, so many things to accomplish in the shadows. And at any time his actions could have been discovered, with only one result imaginable. It was that knowledge that had pushed the already driven Ojeda to secure an opportunity for the future with a ruthless abandon that had silenced many of those who would not join in the fight for freedom. The affair had changed him, and he knew it.
Paredes had been changed, also. In his one month living among those who were about to inexorably alter their future, he had found an attachment to a place he had no memory of. It contradicted what he had been taught during his education in the United States about nature versus nurture. Where environment had shaped his being, it was this place, this land, that had formed it. And though the part he was to play, an officially deniable role as liaison between the rebel military commanders and Langley, was important, if small, he had come to realize that with success there would be a freedom of sorts for him personally, as well as for his hosts. In essence he was a thirty-eight year-old man who had come home.
“Watch the line of aircraft,” Ojeda directed.
Antonio braced himself against the coarse surface of a palm and brought the glasses to eye level, using his arms to form a sturdy triangle and steady the view. His left thumb activated the enhancement function of the binoculars, and a soft green luminescence escaped the viewport to paint the upper portion of his face with a glow that matched closely the color of the surrounding flora as seen in daylight.
“How long now?” Paredes inquired as he slowly swept the twin rows of Soviet-built fighters.
“Just a few minutes.”
All was still on the tarmac. Nearly an hour past midnight nothing else would be expected. But shortly a display of ingenuity, determination, and deadly ability would be offered, not only for the eyes of Papa Tony, but for the eyes of his masters, for whom a final act of convincing was necessary before committing support to the rebellion.
Antonio both heard and felt the breath of Ojeda on his neck. It surprised him some that the colonel chose not to watch the scene more closely, but then the man had lived it for so long. In each safe house — a generous term in a country where the accommodations depicted on Gilligan’s Island were ostentatious by comparison — he had been moved to, twelve in all, Ojeda had kept him intimately informed of the preparations and the participants who were signed onto the plan. So strange it was, Paredes had come to realize, that a man whom Ojeda and his comrades had respected for decades could destroy that trust and loyalty with such a minor act. They would have killed for Fidel Castro, but now they would kill to unseat him from power, from his throne of arrogance. The bullet that had killed General Eduardo Echevarria Ontiveros, hero of the Revolution and true leader of men, might just as well have been fired by volley at the presidente himself.
But acts seen as insignificant by the mighty often propelled lesser men to counter the injustice they perceived with a fury never imagined. And fury was the proper word, for it was something Antonio knew was key to Ojeda’s being, and it was something to be revealed momentarily before his very eyes.
The flashes were rapid in succession, like a string of noiseless firecrackers exploding to one’s front. The brightness flared the night-vision glasses and were compensated for automatically, the optics fully recovering by the time the sharp cracks reached Paredes and Ojeda four miles distant. A joyous yell erupted from beyond the grove of palms as the sound passed over the rebel command staff.
Like a coach looking for evidence of mistakes or missteps on the part of his team, Paredes watched for several minutes as mayhem erupted on the base below. Pilots, alerted by the blasts and the subsequent alarm, ran from their quarters to the flight line where they stood, bewildered, as they stared at their suddenly grounded aircraft. To the west of the planes a flash erupted from the base’s maintenance hangar, followed quickly by a bright orange fireball that did not subside. Fingers of orange licked out of the half-open door and the shattered windows as equipment vital to the operation of the aircraft was consumed by the inferno. A few minutes later, as the Hind pilots and crew scrambled to their ships and took to the sky, the final blow of the opening was struck.
Antonio lowered the glasses as obvious muzzle flashes erupted around and in the control tower. He turned to Colonel Ojeda, who stood in the same position as before, his eyes cast not upon the successful operation unfolding, but toward the sky almost straight up. “Sufficient for your government, Papa Tony?”