Jack Yocke drifted into sleep thinking about dead soldiers and madonnas on army trucks and listening to that relentless sound.
They shot Castro around ten o’clock the next morning. He was shot first. The dictator was led out onto the platform where he had harangued his fellow countrymen for thirty-one years. Behind him were arrayed his lieutenants. All had their hands tied in front of them.
Yocke listened as a speaker read the charges over a microphone that blasted his voice to every corner of the square. Yocke understood little of it, not that it mattered. He elbowed and shoved and fought his way through the crowd, trying to get closer.
Ten men and women were selected from the crowd and allowed to climb up to the platform. Castro was led to a wall and faced around at the volunteers, who were lined up and given assault rifles by soldiers who stood beside them.
The speaker was still reading when someone opened fire. Three or four shots, ripping out. Castro went down.
He was assisted to his feet. The speaker stopped talking.
Someone shouted an order and all ten rifles fired raggedly.
The dictator toppled and lay still.
The soldiers took back their rifles and the members of the firing squad were sent back into the crowd. More leaped forward, too many. Ten men and women were selected and the rest herded back, forcibly, as three of the dictator’s comrades were led over to stand beside his body. A jagged fusillade felled all three.
The scene was repeated four more times. Then a man with a pistol walked along and fired a bullet downward into each head. After six shots he had to stop and reload. Then six more. And finally four more.
“Viva Cuba! Viva Cuba! Viva Cuba!”
For the first time since the drama began, the reporter tore his gaze from the platform and looked at the faces of the people around him. They were weeping. Men, women, children — on every face were tears. Whether they were weeping for what they had lost or what they had gained, Jack Yocke didn’t know.
About two that afternoon he was wandering along a mile or so from the square, by the front of a large luxury hotel on a decently wide street that had obviously been built in the bad old days B.F. — Before Fidel — when he heard his name called.
“Jack Yocke! Hey, Jack! Up here!”
He elevated his gaze. On a third-floor balcony, gesturing madly, stood Ottmar Mergenthaler. “Jesus Christ, Jack! Where the hell you been?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Three hours into his first day as a junior—very junior — weenie on the Joint Staff of the JCS, Lieutenant Toad Tarkington was wondering if perhaps Captain Grafton hadn’t been right. Maybe he should have asked to have his shore tour cut short and gone back to sea. Sitting at a borrowed desk in an anonymous room without windows deep in the Pentagon, Toad was working his way through a giant hardbound manual of rules and regulations that he was supposed to be reading carefully, embedding permanently in the gray matter. He glanced surreptitiously around the large office to see if there was a single other O-3 in sight.
He was going to be the coffee and paperclips guy. He knew it in his bones. Rumor had it there were other peasants with railroad tracks on the staff, although he hadn’t yet seen a live one.
At the next desk over a female navy lieutenant commander was giving him the eye. Uh-oh! He turned the page he had been praying over for five minutes and examined the title of the next directive in the book. Something about uniforms, shiny shoes, and all that. He initialed it in the stamped box provided, sneaked a glance at the lieutenant commander — she was still looking — and pretended to read.
Without moving his head he checked his watch. Ten thirty-two. Oh, my God! He would be dead of boredom by lunchtime. If his heart stopped right now he would not fall over, he would just remain frozen here staring at this page until his uniform rotted off or they decided to buy new desks and move this one out. Maybe some of these other people sitting here at the other twenty-seven desks were already dead and nobody knew. Perhaps he should get a mirror and check all the bodies for signs of respiration. Maybe — the telephone buzzed softly. His first call!
He grabbed it and almost fumbled the receiver onto the floor.
“Lieutenant Tarkington, sir.”
“Is this Robert Tarkington?” A woman’s voice.
“Yes it is.”
“Mr. Tarkington, this is Nurse Hilda Hamhocker, at the Center for Disease Control?”
He glanced around to see if anyone was eavesdropping. Not noticeably so, anyway. “Yes.”
“I’m calling to ask if you have known a woman named Rita Moravia?”
“Let’s see. Rita Moravia … a short, squatty woman with a Marine Corps tattoo and a big wart right on the end of her nose? I do believe I know her, yes.”
“I mean, have you known her? In the biblical sense, Mr. Tarkington. You see, she’s one of our clients and has given your name as an ‘intimate’ partner.”
The lieutenant commander was all ears, surveying him from beneath a droopy bang.
“That list of partners is modestly short, I trust.”
“Oh, no. Tragically long, Mr. Tarkington. Voluminous. Like the Manhattan telephone directory. We’ve been calling for three months and we’re only now getting to the Ts.”
“Yes. I have known her, Nurse Hamhocker.”
“Would you like to know Miss Moravia again, Mr. Tarkington?”
“Well, yes, this very minute would be just perfect. Right here on my clean borrowed desk while everyone watches. But you see, the dear little diseased squatty person is never around. Not ever!”
“Oh, my poor, poor Horny Toad. It’s that bad, is it?”
“Yes, Rita, it’s that bad. Are you ever coming home?”
“Christmas leave starts in a week, lover. I’ll be coming into National on United.” She gave him the flight number and time. “Meet me, will you?”
“Plan on getting known again in the parking lot.”
“If you’ll make that a backseat, I’ll say yes.”
“Okay, the backseat.”
“I’ll hold you to that, Toad. ’Bye.”
“’Bye, babe.” He cradled the instrument and took a deep breath.
The lieutenant commander arched an eyebrow and raked her errant bang back into place. Then she concentrated on the document on the desk in front of her.
Toad took another deep breath, sighed, and resumed his study of the read-and-initial book. Ten minutes later he found a memo that he read with dismay. “Staff is reminded,” the document said — rather too officially and formally for Toad’s taste—“that classified information shall not be discussed over unsecure telephones. [Numerous cites.] To ensure compliance with this regulation, all telephones in the staff spaces are continuously monitored while in use and the conversations taped by the communications security group.”
“Stepped in it again, Toad-man,” he muttered.
His stupor had returned and was threatening to become terminal ennui when Captain Jake Grafton entered the room, scanned it once, and headed in Toad’s direction. Toad stood as the captain walked over and pulled a chair around. As usual, both officers wore their blue uniforms. But, Toad noticed with a pang, the two gold stripes around each of his sleeves contrasted sharply with the four on each of the captain’s.
“Sit, for heaven’s sake. If you pop up every time a senior officer comes around in this place, you’ll wear out your shoes.”
“Yessir.” Toad put his bottom back into his chair.
“Howzit goin’?”
“Just about finished the read-and-initial book.” Toad sighed. “What do you do around here, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. Seems to change every other week. Right now I’m doing analyses of counternarcotics operations from information sent over by the FBI and DEA. What can the military do to help and how much will it cost? That kind of thing. Keeps me jumping.”