Edge of Eternity (43 page)

Nina smiled. ‘I’ll do my best, Grigori Sergeivitch.’

Anya still looked troubled. ‘The doctors made a mistake?’

‘You know doctors, they never admit to mistakes,’ said Nina. ‘They say it’s a miracle.’

‘I just hope I live to see my grandchild,’ said Grigori. ‘Damn the Americans to hell.’ He drank.

Kotya, the sixteen-year-old boy, spoke up. ‘Why do the Americans have more missiles than we do?’

Zoya answered: ‘When we scientists began to work on nuclear energy, back in 1940, and we told the government that it could be used to create a super-powerful bomb, Stalin did not believe us. So the West got ahead of the USSR, and they’re still ahead. That’s what happens when governments don’t listen to scientists.’

Volodya added: ‘But don’t repeat what your mother says when you go to school, okay?’

Anya said: ‘Who cares? Stalin killed half of us, now Khrushchev will kill the other half.’

‘Anya!’ protested Volodya. ‘Not in front of the children!’

‘I feel for Tania,’ said Anya, ignoring her brother’s remonstrances. ‘Over there in Cuba, waiting for the Americans to attack.’ She began to weep. ‘I wish I could have seen my pretty little girl again,’ she said, sudden tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘Just once more, before we die.’

*  *  *

By Saturday morning the US was ready to attack Cuba.

Larry Mawhinney gave George the details in the basement Situation Room at the White House. President Kennedy called this area a pigpen, because he found it cramped; but he had been raised in grand, spacious homes: the suite was larger than George’s apartment.

According to Mawhinney, the air force had 576 planes at five different bases ready for the air strike that would turn Cuba into a smoking wasteland. The army had mobilized 150,000 troops for the invasion that would follow. The navy had twenty-six destroyers and three aircraft carriers circling the island nation. Mawhinney said all this proudly, as if it were his own personal achievement.

George thought Mawhinney was too glib. ‘None of that will be any use against nuclear missiles,’ George said.

‘Fortunately, we have nukes of our own,’ Mawhinney replied.

Like that made everything all right.

‘How do we fire them, exactly?’ said George. ‘I mean, what does the President do, physically?’

‘He has to call the Joint War Room at the Pentagon. His phone in the Oval Office has a red button that connects him instantly.’

‘And what would he say?’

‘He has a black leather briefcase containing a set of codes that he has to use. The briefcase goes everywhere with him.’

‘And then?’

‘It’s automatic. There’s a programme 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 per cent.’

‘So, whatever happens, the US 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 advisors 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.

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 US Navy jets were ready to take off from Key West to overfly the launch pads 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 pre-launch activity, but what could the US 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 US, 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 advisor, said: ‘He did not.’

George was as puzzled as everyone else. Khrushchev’s letter yesterday had demanded that the US 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 US 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 street of Havana blossomed with brilliant red flowers like bloodstains on the sky.

Early in the morning, Tania 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 neighbour, and now they were going to be punished. They should have known better.

Were they right? Was war unavoidable now? Tania 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-Josef of Austria?

A car honked outside. She had a longstanding date to fly to the eastern end of Cuba with Paz today to write about a Soviet anti-aircraft 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 kerb, 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 away, driving too fast along the narrow streets.

Tania 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, Tania 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. Tania 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.

Take-off was a little too exciting: it was 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 Tania and the article she was writing. He drove them to an anti-aircraft base. They arrived at 10 a.m., Cuban time.

The site was laid out as a six-pointed star, with the command post in the centre 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 Tania had to translate for Paz. ‘It must be a U-2 spy plane,’ he said. ‘Nothing else flies that high.’

Tania 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 Tania 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!’