"And then . . . ?"
"It's automatic. There's a program called the Single Integrated Operational Plan. Our bombers and missiles take off with about three thousand nuclear weapons, and head for a thousand targets in the Communist bloc." Mawhinney made a flattening motion with his hand. "Wipe them out," he said with relish.
George was not buying this attitude. "And they do the same to us."
Mawhinney looked annoyed. "Listen, if we get the first punch in, we can destroy most of their weapons before they get off the ground."
"But we're not likely to get the first punch in, because we're not barbarians, and we don't want to start a nuclear war that would kill millions."
"That's where you politicians go wrong. A first strike is the way to win."
"Even if we do what you want, we'll only destroy most of their weapons, you said."
"Obviously, we won't get a hundred percent."
"So, whatever happens, the USA gets nuked."
"War is not a picnic," Mawhinney said angrily.
"If we avoid war, we can carry on having picnics."
Larry looked at his watch. "ExComm at ten," he said.
They left the Situation Room and went upstairs to the Cabinet Room. The president's senior advisers were gathering, with their aides. President Kennedy entered a few minutes after ten. This was the first time George had seen him since Maria's abortion. He stared at the president with new eyes. This middle-aged man in the dark suit with the faint stripe had fucked a young woman, then let her go to the abortion doctor on her own. George felt a momentary flash of pure vitriolic rage. At that moment he could have killed Jack Kennedy.
All the same, the president did not look evil. He was bearing the strain of the cares of the world, literally, and George, against his will, felt a pang of sympathy, too.
As usual, CIA chief McCone opened the meeting with an intelligence summary. In his customary soporific drone he announced news frightening enough to keep everyone wide awake. Five medium-range missile sites in Cuba were now fully operational. Each had four missiles, so there were now twenty nuclear weapons pointed at the United States and ready to be fired.
At least one had to be targeted on this building, George thought grimly, and his stomach cramped in fear.
McCone proposed round-the-clock surveillance of the sites. Eight U.S. Navy jets were ready to take off from Key West to overfly the launchpads at low level. Another eight would travel the same circuit this afternoon. When it got dark they would go again, illuminating the sites with flares. In addition, high-altitude reconnaissance flights by U-2 spy planes would continue.
George wondered what good that would do. The overflights might detect prelaunch activity, but what could the U.S. do about that? Even if the American bombers took off immediately, they would not reach Cuba before the missiles were fired.
And there was another problem. As well as nuclear missiles aimed at the USA, the Red Army in Cuba had SAMs, surface-to-air missiles designed to bring down aircraft. All twenty-four SAM batteries were operational, McCone reported, and their radar equipment had been switched on. So American planes overflying Cuba would now be tracked and targeted.
An aide came into the room with a long sheet of paper torn off a teletype machine. He gave it to President Kennedy. "This is from the Associated Press in Moscow," said the president, and he read it aloud. "'Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy yesterday he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.'"
Mac Bundy, the national security adviser, said: "He did not."
George was as puzzled as everyone else. Khrushchev's letter yesterday had demanded that the USA promise not to invade Cuba. It had said nothing about Turkey. Had the Associated Press made a mistake? Or was Khrushchev up to his usual tricks?
The president said: "He may be putting out another letter."
That turned out to be the truth. In the next few minutes, further reports made the situation clearer. Khrushchev was making a completely separate new proposal, and had broadcast it on Radio Moscow.
"He's got us in a pretty good spot here," said President Kennedy. "Most people would regard this as not an unreasonable proposal."
Mac Bundy did not like that idea. "What 'most people,' Mr. President?"
The president said: "I think you're going to find it difficult to explain why we want to take hostile military action in Cuba when he's saying: 'Get yours out of Turkey and we'll get ours out of Cuba.' I think you've got a very touchy point there."
Bundy argued for going back to Khrushchev's first offer. "Why pick that track when he's offered us the other track in the last twenty-four hours?"
Impatiently, the president said: "This is their new and latest position--and it's a public one." The press did not yet know about Khrushchev's letter, but this new proposal had been made through the media.
Bundy persisted. America's NATO allies would feel betrayed if the U.S. traded missiles, he said.
Defense Secretary Bob McNamara expressed the bewilderment and fear that they all felt. "We had one deal in the letter, now we've got a different one," he said. "How can we negotiate with somebody who changes his deal before we even get a chance to reply?"
No one knew the answer.
*
That Saturday, the royal poinsettia trees in the streets of Havana blossomed with brilliant red flowers like bloodstains on the sky.
Early in the morning Tanya went to the store and grimly laid in provisions for the end of the world: smoked meat, canned milk, processed cheese, a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of rum, and fresh batteries for her flashlight. Although it was daybreak there was a line, but she waited only fifteen minutes, which was nothing to someone accustomed to Moscow queues.
There was a doomsday air in the narrow streets of the old town. Habaneros were no longer waving machetes and singing the national anthem. They were collecting sand in buckets for putting out fires, sticking gummed paper over their windows to minimize flying shards, toting sacks of flour. They had been so foolish as to defy their superpower neighbor, and now they were going to be punished. They should have known better.
Were they right? Was war unavoidable now? Tanya felt sure no world leader really wanted it, not even Castro, who was beginning to sound borderline crazy. But it could happen anyway. She thought gloomily of the events of 1914. No one had wanted war then. But the Austrian emperor had seen Serbian independence as a threat, in the same way that Kennedy saw Cuban independence as a threat. And once Austria declared war on Serbia the dominoes fell with deadly inevitability until half the planet was involved in a conflict more cruel and bloody than any the world had previously known. But surely that could be avoided this time?
She thought of Vasili Yenkov, in a prison camp in Siberia. Ironically, he might have a chance of surviving a nuclear war. His punishment might save his life. She hoped so.
When she got back to her apartment she turned on the radio. It was tuned to one of the American stations broadcasting from Florida. The news was that Khrushchev had offered Kennedy a deal. He would withdraw the missiles from Cuba if Kennedy would do the same in Turkey.
She looked at her canned milk with a feeling of overwhelming relief. Maybe she would not need emergency rations after all.
She told herself it was too soon to feel safe. Would Kennedy accept? Would he prove wiser than the ultraconservative Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria?
A car honked outside. She had a long-standing date to fly to the eastern end of Cuba with Paz today to write about a Soviet antiaircraft battery. She had not really expected him to show up, but when she looked out of the window she saw his Buick station wagon at the curb, its wipers struggling to cope with a tropical rainstorm. She picked up her raincoat and bag and went out.
"Have you seen what your leader has done?" he asked angrily as soon as she got into the car.
She was surprised by his rage. "You mean the Turkey offer?"
"He didn't even consult us!" Paz pulled a
way, driving too fast along the narrow streets.
Tanya had not even thought about whether the Cuban leaders should be part of the negotiation. Obviously Khrushchev, too, had overlooked the need for this courtesy. The world saw the crisis as a conflict of superpowers, but naturally the Cubans still imagined it was about them. And this faint prospect of a peace deal seemed to them a betrayal.
She needed to calm Paz down, if only to prevent a road accident. "What would you have said, if Khrushchev had asked you?"
"That we will not trade our security for Turkey's!" he said, and banged the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.
Nuclear weapons had not brought security to Cuba, Tanya reflected. They had done the opposite. Cuba's sovereignty was more threatened today than ever. But she decided not to enrage Paz further by pointing this out.
He drove to a military airstrip outside Havana where their plane was waiting, a Yakovlev Yak-16 propeller-driven Soviet light transport aircraft. Tanya looked at it with interest. She had never intended to be a war correspondent but, to avoid appearing ignorant, she had taken pains to learn the stuff men knew, especially how to identify aircraft, tanks, and ships. This was the military modification of the Yak, she saw, with a machine gun mounted in a ball turret on top of the fuselage.
They shared the ten-seat cabin with two majors of the 32nd Guards air fighter regiment, dressed in the loud check shirts and peg-top pants that had been issued in a clumsy attempt to disguise Soviet troops as Cubans.
Takeoff was a little too exciting: it was the rainy season in the Caribbean, and there were gusty winds, too. When they could see the land below, through gaps in the clouds, they glimpsed a collage of brown and green patches crazed with crooked yellow lines of dirt road. The little plane was tossed around in a storm for two hours. Then the sky cleared, with the rapidity characteristic of tropical weather changes, and they landed smoothly near the town of Banes.
They were met by a Red Army colonel called Ivanov who already knew all about Tanya and the article she was writing. He drove them to an antiaircraft base. They arrived at ten A.M., Cuban time.
The site was laid out as a six-pointed star, with the command post in the center and the launchers at the points. Beside each launcher stood a transporter trailer bearing a single surface-to-air missile. The troops looked miserable in their waterlogged trenches. Inside the command post, officers stared intently at green radar screens that beeped monotonously.
Ivanov introduced them to the major in command of the battery. He was obviously tense. No doubt he would have preferred not to have visiting VIPs on a day such as this.
A few minutes after they arrived, a foreign aircraft was sighted at high altitude entering Cuban airspace two hundred miles west. It was given the tag Target No. 33.
Everyone was speaking Russian, so Tanya had to translate for Paz. "It must be a U-2 spy plane," he said. "Nothing else flies that high."
Tanya was suspicious. "Is this a drill?" she asked Ivanov.
"We were planning to fake something, for your benefit," he said. "But actually this is the real thing."
He looked so worried that Tanya believed him. "We're not going to shoot it down, are we?" she said.
"I don't know."
"The arrogance of these Americans!" Paz raved. "Flying right above us! What would they say if a Cuban plane overflew Fort Bragg? Imagine their indignation!"
The major ordered a combat alert, and Soviet troops began to move missiles from transporters to launchers, and to attach the cables. They did it with calm efficiency, and Tanya guessed they had practised many times.
A captain was plotting the course of the U-2 on a map. Cuba was long and thin, 777 miles from east to west but only fifty to a hundred miles from north to south. Tanya saw that the spy plane was already fifty miles inside Cuba. "How fast do they fly?" she asked.
Ivanov answered: "Five hundred miles an hour."
"How high?"
"Seventy thousand feet, roughly double the altitude of a regular jet airline flight."
"Can we really hit a target that far away and moving so fast?"
"We don't need a direct hit. The missile has a proximity fuse. It explodes when it gets close."
"I know we're targeting this plane," she said. "But please tell me we're not actually going to fire at it."
"The major is calling for instructions."
"But the Americans might retaliate."
"Not my decision."
The radar was tracking the intruder plane, and a lieutenant reading from a screen called out its height, speed, and distance. Outside the command post, the Soviet artillerymen adjusted the aim of the launchers to follow Target No. 33. The U-2 crossed Cuba from north to south, then turned east, following the coast, coming closer to Banes. Outside, the missile launchers turned slowly on their pivoting bases, tracking the target like wolves sniffing the air. Tanya said to Paz: "What if they fire by accident?"
That was not what he was thinking about. "It's taking pictures of our positions!" he said. "Those photographs will be used to guide their army when they invade--which could be in a few hours' time."
"The invasion is much more likely to happen if you kill an American pilot!"
The major had the phone to his ear while he watched the fire-control radar. He looked up at Ivanov and said: "They're checking with Pliyev." Tanya knew that Pliyev was the Soviet commander in chief in Cuba. But surely Pliyev would not shoot down an American plane without authorization from Moscow?
The U-2 reached the southernmost tip of Cuba and turned, following the north coast. Banes was near the coast. The U-2's course would bring it directly overhead. But at any instant it could turn north--and then, traveling at about a mile a second, it could quickly be out of range.
"Shoot it down!" said Paz. "Now!"
Everyone ignored him.
The plane turned north. It was almost directly above the battery, though thirteen miles high.
Just a few more seconds, please, Tanya thought, praying to she knew not what god.
Tanya, Paz, and Ivanov stared at the major, who stared at the screen. The room was silent but for the beeping of the radar.
Then the major said: "Yes, sir."
What was it--reprieve or doom?
Without putting down the phone, he spoke to the men in the room. "Destroy Target No. 33. Fire two missiles."
"No!" said Tanya.
There was a roar of sound. Tanya looked through the window. A missile rose from its launcher and was gone in a blink. Another followed seconds later. Tanya put her hand to her mouth, feeling she might vomit in fear.
They would take about a minute to reach an altitude of thirteen miles.
Something might go wrong, Tanya thought. The missiles could malfunction, veer off course, and land harmlessly in the sea.
On the radar screen, two small dots approached a larger one.
Tanya prayed they would miss.
They went fast, then all three dots merged.
Paz let out a yell of triumph.
Then a scatter of smaller dots sprayed across the screen.
Speaking into the phone, the major said: "Target No. 33 is destroyed."
Tanya looked out of the window, as if she might see the U-2 crashing to earth.
The major raised his voice. "It's a kill. Well done, everyone."
Tanya said: "And what will President Kennedy do to us now?"
*
George was full of hope on Saturday afternoon. Khrushchev's messages were inconsistent and confusing, but the Soviet leader seemed to be seeking a way out of the crisis. And President Kennedy certainly did not want war. Given goodwill on both sides, it seemed inconceivable that they would fail.
On his way to the Cabinet Room, George stopped by the press office and found Maria at her desk. She was wearing a smart gray dress, but she had on a bright pink headband, as if to announce to the world that she was well and happy. George decided not to ask how she was: clearly she did not want to be treated as an invalid. "
Are you busy?" he said.
"We're waiting for the president's reply to Khrushchev," she said. "The Soviet offer was made publicly, so we're assuming the American response will be released to the press."
"That's the meeting I'm going to with Bobby," George said. "To draft the response."
"Swapping missiles in Cuba for missiles in Turkey seems like a reasonable proposal," she said. "Especially as it may save all our lives."
"Praise be."
"Your mom says that."
He laughed and moved on. In the Cabinet Room, advisers and their aides were gathering for the four o'clock meeting of ExComm. Among a knot of military aides by the door, Larry Mawhinney was saying: "We have to stop them giving Turkey to the Communists!"
George groaned. The military saw everything as a fight to the death. In truth, nobody was going to give Turkey away. The proposal was to scrap some missiles that were obsolete anyway. Was the Pentagon really going to oppose a peace deal? He could hardly believe it.
President Kennedy came in and took his usual place, in the middle of the long table with the windows behind him. They all had copies of a draft response put together earlier. It said that the USA could not discuss missiles in Turkey until the Cuba crisis had been resolved. The president did not like the wording of this reply to Khrushchev. "We're rejecting his message," he complained. "He" was always Khrushchev: Kennedy saw this as a personal conflict. "This is not going to be successful. He's going to announce that we've rejected his proposal. Our position ought to be that we're glad to discuss this matter--once we get a positive indication that they have ceased their work in Cuba."
Someone said: "That really injects Turkey as a quid pro quo."
National Security Adviser Mac Bundy chimed in: "That's my worry." Bundy, whose hair was receding although he was only forty-three, came from a Republican family and tended to be hard-line. "If we sound, to NATO and other allies, as if we want to make this trade, then we're in real trouble."
George was disheartened: Bundy was lining up with the Pentagon, against a deal.
Bundy went on: "If we appear to be trading the defense of Turkey for a threat to Cuba, we'll just have to face a radical decline in the effectiveness of the alliance."
That was the problem, George realized. The Jupiter missiles might have been obsolete, but they symbolized American determination to resist the spread of Communism.