Reckless (22 page)

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘You don’t strike me as the seducing type.’

‘From your vast experience of men.’

‘No, Rupert, don’t mock me.’ Her sweet face laughed at him. ‘I admit I know nothing at all, but I’m not a fool.’

‘Not at all. You have a special destiny.’

‘Oh, phooey,’ she said.

‘Phooey?’

‘I don’t want to hear any more about that.’

‘Just tell me one thing. Are you a nun or aren’t you?’

‘I never took vows. I lived with the nuns as what they call a postulant.’

‘For fifteen years?’

‘Don’t ask me any more, Rupert. Please.’

She slipped her arm through his and leaned a little against him as they walked.

‘What you’ve done today,’ she said, ‘I’ll never be able to
repay you. But if there’s ever anything you want, you only have to ask.’

‘I don’t want anything from you, Mary.’

‘I’ve never known a man like you.’

‘I don’t think you’ve known many men at all.’

‘A person, then. All the others want something from me. They don’t see me at all. They see something they think I’ve got, that they need. But you’re different.’

He supposed she meant that men wanted her in the way that men want women. He wondered whether he was different from the rest after all.

*

Back in his own flat in Pimlico, Rupert settled down to work on the paper he was preparing for Mountbatten on his ‘Aim for the West’. He found himself unable to concentrate. Instead, he kept recalling Mary’s face, and the direct gaze of her eyes. He wondered about the unexplained facts of her life in the convent, and her mysterious special destiny. There was so much about her he didn’t know.

Other people are unknowable. Why then this urge to learn secrets, to dig deeper? There’s no end to the mystery of the human soul.

Into his mind jumped one of the philosophical topics proposed by the appropriately named John Wisdom, his teacher at Cambridge.

Other minds are, and are not, like a fire on the horizon
.

John Wisdom, keeper of the flame of his master Ludwig Wittgenstein, loved to provoke his students with ambiguous images. This one had stayed with Rupert, perhaps because it held out the promise of shared warmth.

A fire on the horizon. The remote possibility of love.

He could see Mary’s sweet unadorned face looking up at him, her brow wrinkling, trying to make him out, just as he was
trying to make her out. He saw in her face, as he had seen the first time, as he had seen again when she sat trembling in the convent’s visiting room, a look that contained all the sorrows of the world. Such a look should make the observer turn away, fearful of contamination, but he had not wanted to turn away. Her look had spoken to him saying: I know sorrow, but I also know love, and love is greater.

He laughed softly at that, alone in his room. He mocked his own pompous thought, capitalising the nouns. Sorrow and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. Oh yes? What was this capitalised Love that was supposed to trump the misery of existence? It sounded dubiously close to the Love of God, that God with whom he had parted company years ago. No God means no Love. All that is left is little love, without the capital letter. Something personal and short lived, based on need and illusion.

Even so, he thought, I look forward to seeing her next Sunday. The days will pass quickly. How different the world looks when you have hope in your heart.

Operation Anadyr, named after a river in Siberia, was launched with the utmost secrecy. In order to disguise its true purpose, the soldiers and engineers allocated to the troopships were issued fur hats, fleece-lined parkas, felt boots and skis. The rocket teams were given to understand that their destination was Novaya Zemlya, in the Arctic. The dockworkers who loaded the ships worked in fenced compounds guarded by the KGB. The ships’ captains were instructed to open their sealed orders revealing their route only once they were well out to sea.

The first ship in the armada, the
Maria Ulyanova
, sailed out of a Soviet port on July 5 1962. Eighty-five merchant ships followed, carrying everything needed for a nuclear army. The big weapons were the twenty-four R-12 missiles, and the sixteen R-14s, each designed to carry a one-megaton nuclear warhead. In support, the Army sent two tank battalions equipped with the new T-55s, a MiG-21 fighter wing, forty-two Il-28 light bombers, four motorised regiments, two cruise missile regiments and twelve SA-2 surface-to-air missile units. The Navy sent two cruisers, four destroyers and twelve Komar ships. Future plans called for a submarine base to be built on Cuba that would house a squadron of eleven submarines. To service this massive deployment the Soviet merchant ships also transported three 200-bed
hospitals, seven food warehouses, a bakery, twenty prefab barracks, ten prefab houses, ten cranes, twenty bulldozers and two thousand tons of cement. In all, Operation Anadyr carried over forty thousand Soviet personnel across the ocean.

To avoid surveillance from the air the troops remained mostly below deck. Soldiers sailing on the
Khabarovsk
, caught by a NATO plane, improvised a spontaneous party on deck, dancing with the female nurses, to dispel any hint of military purpose. On arrival in Cuba they were issued with plaid shirts and ordered to blend in with the local population.

To Khrushchev’s great relief, virtually the entire
maskirovka
fleet reached Cuba undetected. To protect his bold plan he instructed Anatoly Dobrynin, his ambassador in Washington, to repeat his assurances to the American president that he would never deploy offensive weapons on Cuba. This deception was vital to the success of Operation Anadyr. The cause was great. What did he value more highly, his own personal honour or the survival of socialism?

‘Diplomacy is a game,’ he told his friend and adviser Oleg Troyanovsky. ‘No one takes the words of a diplomat literally. We look for the truth between the words.’

‘Might that not also be true for Kennedy?’ said Troyanovsky.

‘Of course,’ said Khrushchev, troubled.

After some thought, he determined to send a second message through a very different channel. His son-in-law Alexei Adzhubei had a friend called Georgi Bolshakov, who was a junior cultural attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington. Bolshakov had an American friend, a journalist called Frank Holeman. Holeman in turn was friendly with Ed Guthman, Robert Kennedy’s press secretary. Through this chain of contacts Bolshakov had achieved several face-to-face meetings with the president’s brother. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev trusted information passed down this back channel precisely because it was unofficial, and permitted
questions to be asked and positions to be presented that could never be admitted in public.

Georgi Bolshakov was an officer in the GRU, the intelligence section of the Red Army. He was considered to be 100 per cent loyal to the Party. Even so, he was not entrusted with the secret of Operation Anadyr. He was told to repeat the assurance that the only weapons the Soviets would ever send to Cuba were for defensive purposes.

‘He will convey our message more convincingly if he believes it,’ said Khrushchev. He then told Troyanovsky his favourite anecdote about the two old Jews on a train.

‘The first old Jew says to the second, “So where are you going?” The second Jew answers, “I’m going to Zhitomir.” The first Jew nods and smiles and thinks to himself, “That sly old fox doesn’t fool me. He tells me he’s going to Zhitomir so I’ll think he’s going to Zhmerinka. So now I know he’s really going to Zhitomir.”’

*

Now that the armada had sailed, Khrushchev turned his attention to the next stage in the deception. The unloading and deploying of the nuclear missiles within Cuba had to be achieved in as complete secrecy as the loading. All local people within two kilometres of the new bases were forced to leave their homes and crops. Only Russians were permitted inside the bases. The new concrete launch pads began to be built behind high fences, screened by palm trees.

One window remained open wide. Neither the Cubans nor the Russians could fence in the sky.

Marshall Malinowsky warned Khrushchev that sooner or later the missiles would be detected by the high-flying US reconnaissance planes. The U2s flew at seventy thousand feet, out of range of Cuban anti-aircraft batteries. The Soviet SA-2s could bring down a U2, and had already done so, over Soviet
airspace in 1960. Khrushchev therefore ordered that the SA-2 units be deployed first, before the huge R-12s and R-14s became operational. At the same time he began to put pressure on the Americans to cease their surveillance flights. He spoke out publicly against the U2s that flew over international waters, and most of all over the island of Cuba, calling them harassment and warmongering.

Troyanovsky, who thought privately that the missile deployment was bound to be discovered, nevertheless did what he could to minimise the risks.

‘The Americans don’t respond well to name-calling,’ he said. ‘What they understand is making deals.’

‘What do you mean, deals?’

‘If you want something from them, offer them something they want in exchange.’

‘What do they want?’

‘Ask them.’

Khrushchev reflected on this advice. Then he sent a message, through Bolshakov, that in order to get the U2s grounded he was willing to trade.

*

The record player in the little gym by the White House pool was pumping out Hank Williams. Jack Kennedy, groaning in time to the music, was going through his round of stretch exercises to ease the pain in his back. Mac Bundy sat on the edge of the massage couch, watching him through his clear-plastic-frame glasses.

‘This damn bomb,’ said Kennedy between pulls. ‘Can’t stop thinking about it.’

‘Hell of a thing,’ said Bundy.

‘Your dad knew Henry Stimson pretty well, right?’

Mac Bundy nodded. He had known Truman’s Secretary for War pretty well himself. As a young man he had ghost-written
Stimson’s memoirs. He had more or less authored Stimson’s famous
Harper’s
article in 1947 that proved once and for all the president had had no choice but to drop the bomb.

‘Was it Truman’s decision in the end?’ said Kennedy. ‘Or was it the military?’

‘The chiefs were all against it,’ said Bundy. ‘Eisenhower, MacArthur, all of them. It was Truman’s decision, all right.’

‘And Stimson’s.’

‘You want to know something, Mr President. Henry never forgave himself for that. By September of ’45 he knew he’d started an arms race we’d never be able to stop.’

‘We sure as hell got that.’

Kennedy climbed to his feet and mopped the sweat off his face with a towel. Hank Williams started singing ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’.

‘Turn it off, will you?’

Bundy shut down the music.

‘You know, Mac, the chiefs tell me, “You just give the order, Mr President, and we’ll deal with the rest.” Like I’m not to worry my silly little head with the details. Like it’s just another war.’

‘Lauris Norstad says it’s only a matter of time,’ said Bundy.

‘They scare me,’ said Kennedy. ‘They royally screwed me over the Bay of Pigs. They knew that dumb operation was going to fail. They just assumed I’d never be able to take the humiliation, and I’d send in the Marines. So I end up with the fucking humiliation.’

He stripped off and ran a shower. Taking showers helped with the back pain too. Sometimes he had five showers a day.

Out of the shower, towelling, dressing, he reverted to his fascination with the momentous decision made at Potsdam.

‘Sometimes I wonder how it would be if we hadn’t dropped the bomb.’

‘It’d still exist,’ said Bundy. ‘The Russians would have built their bomb.’

‘Yeah, I know. There’s no going back. But seeing what that first bomb did to Hiroshima – you can’t really believe it till you see it. That’s what changes history.’

They walked back to the Oval Office together.

‘You know Henry Stimson’s whole idea about the atom bomb,’ said Bundy. ‘His idea was that it was so terrible it would make war impossible. It was the ultimate peace weapon.’

‘And here we are, relying on it for our first line of defence. Hell, what do we do if they roll their tanks into West Berlin?’

Both men knew the Soviets had eighty divisions at the gates of Berlin. Only nuclear missiles could defend that embattled island of freedom.

‘You think I want to go down in history as the president who started a nuclear war?’

In the Oval Office they found Bobby Kennedy pacing up and down, looking agitated.

‘I’ve just had a visit from Bolshakov,’ he said. ‘You know how Khrushchev’s been getting all worked up over violations of Cuban air space? Looks like he wants to do a deal.’

‘Jesus! Fucking Cuba!’ exclaimed the president. ‘Why does everyone go on about Cuba?’

‘Cuba’s Khrushchev’s Berlin,’ said Bundy.

‘So what’s this deal, Bobby?’

‘According to Bolshakov,’ said Bobby Kennedy, ‘he wants to know our price for grounding the U2s.’

‘Do we believe this?’

‘We believe he wants something. And when a guy wants something, there’s usually business to be done.’

Kennedy was under pressure on multiple fronts. His prime objective at this point was to make it to the mid-term elections without any nasty surprises.

‘What’s bugging him about Cuba?’ he said to Bobby.

‘He’s stuffing Cuba with guns.’

‘And we let him do that?’

‘You want another Bay of Pigs?’

‘I’ve got that prick Keating on my back day and night, acting like if I don’t force regime change in Cuba I’m exposing the country to – to what? Is Castro supposed to scare us?’

‘I say forget Cuba,’ said Bobby. ‘Cuba’s a pimple on our backside. But if we can use it as a bargaining chip, hey, why not?’

‘To get what?’

Bobby shrugged.

‘Berlin. We tell him, you leave Berlin alone, we’ll leave Cuba alone. At least until after the mid-terms.’

The president nodded. He turned to Bundy.