Life: An Exploded Diagram

A lower-sixther called Sullivan walked into the room and said, “The four-minute warning has just gone off. No, really. Didn’t you hear it? I’m off upstairs to do Stinker’s daughter before I die. Anyone coming with me? The swivel-eyed tart will never know which one of us it was.”

  “Go away, Slug,” a prefect named Bradley said from another armchair. “Or would you prefer that in language that you understand?”

  The American invasion of Cuba was code-named Operation Scabbards. It would begin with a series of massive air bombardments: three a day until missile sites and other military targets had been wiped out. Then twenty-three thousand airborne troops would seize Havana’s airport — or what was left of it — south of the city. Meanwhile eight divisions, a hundred and twenty thousand men, would land on beaches to the east and west. The Americans would converge on Havana from all three directions, isolating it and cutting it off from its inland missile bases, if any had survived.

  All well and good, except that the Americans still didn’t know about the forty thousand Soviet troops waiting to greet them. And until late on Friday, the officers who would be at the sharp end didn’t know that the Russians had nuclear battlefield weapons. When they found out, they started demanding them, too.

  Castro and his Russian allies had received a good deal of information — some of it accurate — about the American buildup. Fidel was convinced that the Yanquis hadn’t invested so much energy, and so many of their filthy capitalist dollars, in some sort of symbolic gesture. This time they would invade, for sure. He’d been anticipating — eagerly, some thought — another invasion ever since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He’d never really understood why Kennedy had pulled back that time. Maybe because he was a gutless playboy millionaire. But this time, he’d have to go for it. He was too weak to stand up to his generals, and besides, he was fighting a congressional election. He’d need to pretend to be a man of action, of decision.

  Fidel Castro was not someone who spent much time on introspection. Had he been, he might have had to admit to himself that he was a lousy politician. What he was good at, though, very good at, was Heroism. The crisis fueled him. Thrilled him. He’d spent the past week in incessant motion, snatching only short periods of sleep in the back of his car or in his underground command post across the river from the Havana zoo. To his Cuban troops, he had spoken of “patriotism” and “dignidad”— dignity. Fidel was very big on dignity, which is what you die with. To the Russians, he had spoken of the defense of Communism and the revolution, and urged them to stay off the booze, of which they were very fond.

  What was worrying him most, on Friday night, was Cuba’s vulnerability to American air attack. His own antiaircraft defenses were weak. The Russians had SAMs, surface-to-air missiles, but he didn’t have direct control over them. It seemed to him vital that the comrades not sit there twiddling their thumbs while the Yanqui bombs fell, waiting for instructions from Moscow. At two o’clock on Saturday morning, he sent a message to Aleksandr Alekseev, the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, telling him to expect a visit. Alekseev was a great admirer of Castro. But I bet he groaned when he was woken up. Castro could talk nonstop for hours. He could talk you to a standstill.

  ONLY THE SPACEMAN Yuri Gagarin had flown farther from the surface of Earth than the pilots of the American U-2 spy planes.

  More than twelve miles above the earth, U-2s cruised the half-dark margins of the atmosphere. They were defenseless, frail, terrifying things to fly. In order to soar to such heights, powered by a single engine, and stay there for many hours, they had to be extremely light. They had very long, fragile wings. Apart from the pilot, the plane’s heaviest component was the huge camera in its belly. U-2s were, essentially, gliders: gliders designed to reach the limits of the air. The pilot, in his inflated oxygen-fed pressure suit, jammed into the tiny cockpit, needed very good bladder and bowel control. And to be crazy, in a special sort of way.

  Flying at such a prodigious height, U-2s could not be shot down by conventional antiaircraft weapons or enemy aircraft. The only thing that could reach them was a surface-to-air missile.

  Early on Saturday, October 27, two U-2s took off from opposite extremities of the United States: one from Alaska, headed north, and one from Florida, headed south. Only one would return, and by the skin of its teeth.

  As Ambassador Alekseev had feared, Fidel Castro kept him up for the rest of the night. Alekseev’s Spanish was good, but less than perfect. Every now and again he had to raise a weary hand to stop the Cuban leader while the translator caught up. During these pauses, Castro paced up and down the room, stroking his beard in a manner that might have been comical under other circumstances. What Castro wanted was to communicate with Khrushchev personally and urgently. Less clear was what, exactly, Castro wanted to say.

  It was six in the morning before the text of Castro’s message was finally agreed upon. Fidel told Comrade Khrushchev that he expected the Americans to attack Cuba within the next twenty-four hours — at most, seventy-two. Massive bombing was almost certain. Full-scale invasion probable. The heroic people of Cuba would fight and die with dignidad, naturally. “But,” Castro added, “if the Americans carry out an attack on Cuba, a barbaric, illegal, and immoral act, then that would be the time to consider liquidating, forever, such a danger through a legal right of self-defense. However harsh and terrible such a decision might be, there is no alternative, in my opinion.”

  In other words, Castro was asking the Russians to nuke the United States as soon as the Americans made their move.

  Alekseev told his people to transmit the message to the Kremlin. Then he excused himself and went back to his bed, not at all sure that he wouldn’t be incinerated in it before he woke up.

  The U-2 that took off into the Alaskan night was piloted by Captain Charles Maultsby. His mission was both hazardous and routine. He would fly to the North Pole and take samples of atmospheric dust in clouds that had drifted from Soviet nuclear testing sites in the Arctic Circle. He and his colleagues did this on a regular basis. His plane was not equipped with sophisticated navigation devices. In fact, he was using the two most ancient methods known to man: the stars and a compass. Maultsby had a series of star charts tucked next to his seat. By comparing them to what he saw from his cockpit, he could figure out where he was. He had done this efficiently on previous flights, but now, nearing the Pole, these charts stopped making sense. Some kind of false dawn had dimmed the constellations; multicolored steaks of light flickered through the sky, confusing him.

  A little later, he found himself adrift in a world of frightful beauty. Sky-filling curtains of light furled and unfurled around him, phasing through iridescent shades of yellow, green, turquoise, indigo. They snaked away, faded, then returned as brilliantly vibrant cliffs dropping into dark nothingness. The thin polar clouds changed color continuously, like theatrical scrims lit by a deranged lighting engineer.

  Maultsby had flown into a vast music made visible. He had flown into the northern lights, the aurora borealis, and was lost.

  This close to the North Pole, his compass was useless; from here, it told him, all directions were south. He could not radio his base for help; the Russians might detect his signal.

  Dazed as he was, Maultsby activated the air-sampling devices, then turned his plane through what he thought was 180 degrees, to return the way he had come. He had to do this in cautious stages over a long circuit. The U-2 was so fragile that any violent maneuver, any sudden variation in speed, would tear it apart. Maultsby had a parachute and a survival kit inside his seat cushion. But this far north, no survival was possible. If he made it down onto the ice cap, the next living thing he would see would be the polar bear that fancied him for breakfast.

  “The best advice I can offer,” his commanding officer had said, “is that if you go down, don’t bother to open the chute.”

  The U-2 that took off from Florida was piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson. His mission was not routine. He would fly a circuit high above eastern Cuba looking for
Soviet air defenses.

  After an hour, he could see from his cockpit, in elaborate miniature, the white-rimmed green chain of islands, cays, off the north coast of Cuba passing below him. He activated the camera and eased his course southeasterly.

  The USS Oxford was a floating forest of radio masts and radar antennae. It coasted slowly along the edge of Cuban territorial waters, easily visible from the shore. Most of its crew wore headphones and sat listening to and interpreting the little whirrs and pings and buzzes that told them what Cuba’s defense and communications systems were up to.

  Anderson’s camera, swinging back and forth below him, had covered the eastern end of Cuba. He turned as sharply west and north as the plane would let him and set course for home.

  Two of the technicians on the Oxford sat up straight simultaneously. Each had picked up a repetitive, high-pitched psip-psip-psip. One of them said into the ship’s intercom, “Chief? Chief, we’ve got a Big Cigar.”

  Big Cigar was code for Russian radar fixing a surface-to-air missile onto a target. The Oxford’s commander radioed this information to the Pentagon immediately. There was nothing they could do to warn Anderson; like Maultsby, he was instructed to observe strict radio silence until he was back in U.S. airspace.

  It was just possible, if you spotted it in time, to dodge a SAM if you were flying a high-powered, highly maneuverable jet. You could throw your plane into a dive and turn that would leave the missile climbing blindly past you. In his ungainly aircraft, Anderson had no chance. A Soviet V-75 missile blew his U-2 to bits above the Cuban coastal town of Banes. Eerily, the tail section continued on its way, gliding out into the Caribbean Sea. Anderson was probably killed instantly; he was certainly dead before his body, in the ripped and twisted cockpit section, plunged into a field of sugarcane.

  Maultsby, baffled by the outrageous magnetic beauty of the polar light display, had not turned his plane through 180 degrees. He was forty degrees out. So at eight a.m., when he should have crossed the northern coast of Alaska, he was, astonishingly, more than nine hundred miles off course. He crossed the northern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula instead. And the Chukotka Peninsula was not part of North America. It was the easternmost tip of Asia, and it was part of the Soviet Union.

  Despite its cold and awful desolation, the peninsula boasted two military airfields and was ringed by radar stations. This was because the North Pole was one possible route for American bombers on their way to hit Russia. So Maultsby’s plane was detected almost immediately. Six Soviet MiG jets took off to intercept it. The local air defense people sent news of the interloper to Moscow, urgently. After all, if the Americans were going to start a war over Cuba, they might also be planning a simultaneous attack from the east. These messages to Moscow from Chukotka were picked up by CIA listening stations in Alaska and northern Europe. The Americans knew that the MiGs couldn’t reach Maultsby’s altitude, but would they launch a SAM? The crews of American bombers over Norway and Greece were told to turn off their country-and-western stations and go on standby.

  “FRANKLINS,” CLEM HAD said when Frankie had called at eleven thirty. He told himself that it was because he couldn’t think of anywhere else, but he had other motives that had a good deal to do with Andrew Marvell’s poem.

  Marron refused to set hoof upon the newly ruined land where the lovers’ barn, his stable, had stood. Frankie dismounted and walked the horse through a gap in the surviving trees and tethered him to a sycamore sapling. She and Clem kissed as though each possessed the only oxygen left in the world. Then he led her into the lee of the old gable wall. The morning rain had wandered off like a gray cat bored with a kill, but the wind had a cold edge. Frankie spread her waxed riding coat on the ground and they sat.

  Her father’s bare prairie now came to within twenty yards of the remains of the house. Frankie looked out at it and took Clem’s right hand in hers and tucked it up under her jumper and began to cry.

  “Hey,” Clem said. “Come on. It’s all right.”

  “No, it bloody isn’t,” she sobbed.

  And he was dismantled. He was far too young to reassure tearful girls. He had a nipple under his fingers, a partial erection in his jeans, and a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse in his jacket pocket. All he could do was wait.

  “It’s all so ghastly. So stupid.”

  He thought that praising her breast with his hand might help.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Frankie, I . . .”

  “Last Saturday,” she said, with a gulp between the words, “when I rode up and saw the smoke, I didn’t know what to think. Actually, I had the silly idea that you’d been there for ages and lit a cigarette and set the place alight or something. Then I saw it was your father on that machine, and the other men, and I —”

  “You thought we’d been found out.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him and said bravely, “But we haven’t. Obviously. I mean, I’d’ve been locked up or something.”

  She sniffed again. “Shall we have a smoke first?”

  Reluctantly, while weighing the possible meanings of “first,” he withdrew his hand. He fished a light-blue packet of Bristols out of one pocket and the dark-blue book of poetry out of the other.

  “What’s that?” she asked when he had lit her up.

  “I, er, came across something. Something you might like. A poem.”

  “Really? What’s it about?”

  “Well, it made me think about you.”

  She blew out smoke, flicked ash, and turned her wet, depthless eyes upon him.

  “Did it? Why?”

  He had not expected her to ask.

  “I . . . I dunno. It just did.”

  “I expect it’s a love poem, is it?” She put an ironic, throaty emphasis on the two words.

  “Sort of.”

  She said, “We didn’t do much poetry at Saint Ethel’s. The sisters thought it was sinful. My friend Maddie knew one called ‘Eskimo Nell’ by heart. Her boyfriend taught her it. It was absolutely filthy.”

  This was not going quite the way that Clem had planned.

  He said, “There are some quite rude bits in this one, actually.”

  “Are there? Oh, good! Let’s finish our ciggies, then you can read it to me.”

  His heart snagged. He’d imagined her reading it to herself, then looking up at him, aglow with revelation and impatient readiness.

  “Yeah,” he said. “All right.”

  Frankie flicked the end of her cigarette into the wet ferns and turned herself so that she was leaning against his left side. She closed her eyes.

  “Go on, then,” she said. “I’m listening.”

  He began, his voice clogged at first by embarrassment, then with a touch more certainty.

  “Had we but world enough, and time,

  This coyness, Lady, were no crime

  We would sit down and think which way

  To walk and pass our long love’s day.”

  When he reached the line about adoring each breast, Frankie giggled but did not open her eyes. He struggled on.

  “But at my back I always hear

  Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

  And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast eternity.”

  Clem paused meaningfully. And it seemed that Frankie had understood. She opened her eyes and stared out at the desolate landscape that their fathers had created.

  She said, “They’re going to bulldoze this bit, too. All the way back to the road, George says.”

  Clem couldn’t bear the way she used his father’s first name. The familiarity in it, and therefore a kind of forgiveness. What was more, it was intolerable, outrageous, that his father could, and did, talk to her when he could not.

  He’d gone bitter, so he hardly knew how to react when she reached her hand up to his face and said, “We’ll find somewhere else, won’t we? Or we’ll run away. Don’t be sad, Clem. It was a nice poem, by the way.”
br />   “That’s not the end. There’s quite a bit more.”

  “Is there?”

  She kissed him, then resettled herself. “Go on, then.”

  “. . . then worms shall try

  That long preserved virginity,

  And your quaint honor turn to dust,

  And into ashes all my lust.”

  “It doesn’t say that,” she said, laughing. “You made that up.”

  “No, I didn’t. Read it yourself if you like.”

  “Worms?” Frankie said, doing a little shudder. “That’s horrid, actually. I know it happens when you’re dead and everything. But yuck! It’s a bit sick, isn’t it? Is that why you like it?”

  “No. I think it’s . . .”

  He was miles from any appropriate adjective. Irrefutable might have served, but he couldn’t come up with it.

  “Let me read the rest of it,” he said.

  He mangled his way to the end of the ode. He left a pregnant pause. His underpants were charged with poetical desire. He made his move a second too late. She had stood up.

  She walked away from him and folded her arms and looked out at the brown crusts of land between her and her home. Her dark hair danced sideways in the wind, baring her neck, exposing the dark little whisper in the valley of her nape.

  She said, “Is there going to be a war, Clem?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Probably.”

  “Daddy says there won’t be. He says it’s all a sort of bluff. He says the Russians are taking the mickey; no one’s going to blow the world up over a stupid little place like Cuba.”

  “It’s not about Cuba.”

  She turned back to him.

  “Isn’t it? What’s it about, then, Clem? You’re so much cleverer than I am.”

  He said, “It’s about weapons. No one’s ever had ’em and not used ’em. Like, a long time ago, someone invented the bow and arrow. Some caveman or somethun. But he didn’t go up to the other cavemen and say, ‘I’ve invented this thing that’ll kill you, so do what I say.’ What he did was shoot some poor bugger through the guts and then say, ‘Thas what I can do, so watch it.’ Same with gunpowder, and guns. Planes, everything. Same with the Bomb.”