Just before they took off, JM/WAVE radioed from Miami with the news that the plan had been code-named Operation Mongoose. The fact that Ted Shackley was willing to break air silence for such a trivial piece of information—the fact that Shackley had been made a station chief at all—was one more indication of the Company’s sad state of affairs under the new president, who had recently let slip, in the goddamned New York Times, of all places, that he wanted to “to scatter the CIA to the four winds—to break it into a thousand pieces,” The ironic thing was, Melchior thought as he looked around the ragtag crew gathered in the C-47, the Company seemed to be doing a pretty good job of scattering itself.
Take Robertson for example. A plump pink specimen of American manhood with a ziggurat of Spam cans squeezed between his thick thighs. Here was a guy for whom eighth-grade arithmetic had clearly been an issue, let alone the implications of the Monroe Doctrine in the second half of the twentieth century. Now he was part of a team tasked with killing the most paranoid leader this side of the Atlantic—which fact he wasn’t going to find out until after he’d parachuted onto Cuban soil. Even before the plane rattled down the runway and heaved its belly into the air, Robertson had popped the top on the first can of Spam, and for a long time the only sound in the hold was the rumble of the engines and the softer smack of his cud. Then:
“So, uh, who’s the mongoose?”
On the opposite bench, Sturgis started at the sound of Robertson’s drawly voice. He was one of those twitchy fellows. Not scared. Just eager for the killing to start. He took a pull from the mysteriously full pint of whiskey he’d been nursing since Melchior had arrived that morning, then said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
Robertson spooned a gelatinous pink mound into his mouth. “I mean”—he pushed half-chewed meat into the pockets of his jowly cheeks—“is the mongoose Castro, or is the mongoose the Company?”
“Rip, you’re a fucking idiot.” Sturgis took another pull. “Of course the Company is the mongoose. The mongoose always kills the cobra. That’s the only reason you’ve ever heard of mongeese.”
Mongeese, Melchior thought. Meat you can eat with a spoon. If Castro needed any propaganda to support his revolution, all he had to do was broadcast footage of these two paragons of capitalism.
“Cobra?” Robertson was apparently confused by the addition of a second animal. “Who’s that?”
“Oh my fucking God. Castro is the cobra. Now shut your fucking mouth before I shove that can of Spam down your throat.”
Robertson looked at Sturgis like, Isn’t that what I’m doing?
“Without opening it, you dipshit.”
Sturgis took another pull from his pint, then offered it to Melchior. The gesture was diffident, as if he was more interested in whether the newcomer would take it than in trying to make an ally. The label on the pint said Johnny Walker Black, which Melchior doubted matched the contents. Still, it was bound to be better than the backyard rum that lay in their immediate future. Melchior ignored it anyway. Robertson might’ve been an idiot, but Sturgis had fought with Fidel Castro against Fulgencio Batista before he seemed to realized the capitalists paid better. If there was one thing Melchior hated, it was a traitor. He’d’ve sooner imbibed the piss of the whores who worked the comfort stations outside the Retalhuleu base, and God knows what was swimming around their guts.
“I’m gonna catch some Z’s.” He tapped the box of cigars on his lap. “Anyone wakes me before Matanzas gets one of these up his ass.”
He wasn’t wearing a cap, so he draped the day-old copy of the Washington Post over his face like a veil. ALLEN WELSH DULLES RESIGNS AS HEAD OF CIA IN WAKE OF BAY OF PIGS DEBACLE, screamed the headline. CHOICE OF FORMER HEAD OF ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION AS NEW DCI SUGGESTS KENNEDY SOFTENING POSITION ON CUBA. A moment later he heard Sturgis chuckle, presumably after he’d finished subvocalizing the words of the headline.
“The plural of ‘mongoose’ is ‘mongooses,’” Melchior growled beneath the paper. “Fucking dipshit.”
About twenty minutes after they cleared the East Coast, the sky began to wring itself out in one of those up-and-down squalls that plague the Caribbean at the tail end of hurricane season. For the next hour and a half the six passengers in the C-47 were bounced around like loose socks in a washing machine. Melchior had snored through hurricanes, cyclones, monsoons, and every other synonym for a tropical storm you could think of, but at the first sign of turbulence, Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor pulled an ornate silver crucifix out of his shirt and pressed it to his lips. A sibilant stream of Spanish passed from his mouth to the little crucified Jesus, interrupted by sharp groans whenever the plane hit a particularly big bump. Melchior’d been in bordellos with less moaning, and, what with the rattling of the ever multiplying empty Spam cans bouncing over the floor like Mexican jumping beans, it was impossible to get any sleep.
“Jesus, that’s starting to get on my nerves,” Robertson said, working his way to the bottom of his eighth or ninth can of Spam as he glared at the defector. “What the fuck’s he saying anyway?”
One of the Cuban exiles glared at him, but the other said, “He is praying for his safety, for our safety, for the safety and success of this mission, and for the peace and prosperity of the glorious Cuban nation and its friend and protector, the United States of America, especially its new leader, the Catholic President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, may God bless and guide him in His wisdom, you redneck motherfucker.”
He said this in Spanish, and Robertson just stared at him blankly.
“Jesus, that’s starting to get on my nerves.” He scooped up another scrotum-sized mound of Spam, licked it off his spoon as though it were ice cream. “Hey, Donny, keep it down, will ya?”
Don Gutiérrez Ravé de Méndez y Sotomayor gave no sign that he heard. “En el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo,” he finished up, then kissed the crucifix, took a breath, and started in on another round. “Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos …,”
Across from Robertson, Sturgis was shaking his head in disbelief.
“You don’t speak Spanish?”
Melchior bit back a laugh. The guy barely spoke English.
Robertson’s lower jaw hung open, exposing a mouthful of pink pulp, which, on second glance, might’ve actually been his tongue. “Why do I need to speak Spanish? We got the three-a them.” He added more meat to his mouth. “D’you speak Spanish?”
“Of course I speak Spanish, numbnuts. We’re going to Cuba, fer Chrissakes.”
“No one told me I needed to speak Spanish. No one told me shit.” He glanced significantly at Melchior. “Hey you. Domenico. Do you speak Spanish?”
Melchior had learned Spanish from the housekeepers when he was a little boy, along with Latin from the Wednesday-night and Sunday-morning masses they’d dragged him to, and French from the Cajun aunt who raised him until he was seven years old, when she came home and found her dog impaled on stakes in a pitfall in the middle of the front path.
He told none of this to Rip Robertson.
“Don’t you know who he is?” Sturgis asked.