The Kennedy Endeavor (Presidential Series Book 2) Read online

  “How do we get the cores?” Cane asked.

  The rest of the TriOp team was gathered behind Cane and Ducharme. It was pretty much impossible to take a step without a boot crunching into some vestige of a human being. They were all combat veterans, but that didn’t mean they were immune to what was surrounding them.

  “Give me a minute,” Haney replied, not sounding like a guy who had a minute.

  *****

  Stretch listened to his latest set of orders and wondered in what realm of reality those in the Pentagon existed.

  “I’ve expended all my ordnance,” Stretch said, not as a protest, but as a report of the reality of the situation.

  But orders were orders.

  He banked away from Al Asad and headed back toward Objective Ark.

  *****

  Haney dropped the third core on the bed of the truck. With great difficulty, he climbed into it. Then he picked up the broken core, his hands already singed, now screaming with pain as the skin was scorched despite the gloves. He tossed it in the lead box. Then he picked up the other two cores and threw them in as well, not caring if he damaged them.

  Haney slammed the door shut, leaving pieces of skin on the metal.

  He fell to his knees and vomited, but there was nothing left in his stomach except the dead skin sloughing off inside, so he produced a pile of blood and inner stomach.

  He practically fell off the back of the truck. Keeping one hand on the side, he made his way around to the front. He grabbed the hook on the end of a steel tow cable looped around poles on the front of the truck.

  Looking up, he saw how far away the blown door was and felt despair as sharp as the pain that was wracking his body.

  He thought of his mother and her sacrifice for her country. And all his ancestors, all who’d served, back to the man who’d died in that prisoner of war ship in New York Harbor during the Revolutionary War.

  He held the hook in both hands and moved forward. One step. One step. One step.

  *****

  The news over the radio wasn’t good. Turkish jets were scrambling. Satellite imagery had picked up a large group of Kurds just a kilometer and a half away, but they were on foot.

  “Haney?” Ducharme said over the radio.

  All they could hear was heavy breathing.

  “Haney?” Ducharme repeated. He looked at Cane. “I’m going in after him.”

  “You go in there, you die,” Cane said.

  “Sir!” the man with the Geiger counter called out. “Readings dropped down. Way down. Gone in fact. He must have shielded whatever it was.”

  Ducharme didn’t wait to hear more. He ran into the hangar.

  Haney was crawling on his back, scooting his feet, hands in a death grip around the hook. Ducharme knelt next to him, taking the hook. “I’ve got it.”

  Haney looked up. “The cores are in the vault.”

  “Roger that.” Ducharme stood, cable in hand. “You did good, soldier.”

  Hany reached up and Ducharme took his hand, feeling the blood and goo rubbing against his palm.

  “Please?” Haney asked. “Mercy.”

  “My honor, sir,” Ducharme said, and he fired a round through Haney’s head.

  Ducharme shook off the death and the pain inside his own head and pulled the cable toward the entrance. Just as all the TriOp men ran in and joined him. They pulled the cable out the blown door, into the open.

  “Haul!” Cane ordered.

  In unison, they began pulling. With a screech of rusted brake pads and wheel rims with the rubber rotted off them, the truck with the lead box began slowly rolling toward the doors.

  “Halo, this is Six,” Cane said over the radio. “Give me a heavy lift cable and get to my location ASAP.”

  As they did that, Ducharme tossed a couple of flares and did a quick search of the hangar. He found Jonah’s body and patted him down, discovering his passport. And a coin in his pocket: a silver dollar. He saw the row of desiccated bodies and didn’t have to use his imagination to know what had happened to them.

  He did a quick check of all six missiles, making sure they weren’t leaving any warheads behind, then joined the line of mercenaries pulling the truck out of the hangar.

  The nose of the truck passed through the hangar door. They pulled it out and clear.

  The Halo appeared overhead, blasting sand and dirt all around. A cable snaked down to the ground. Ducharme and Cane grabbed it, and then jumped up onto the cargo bed.

  14 October 1962

  In August 1962 an Air Force U-2 ‘mistakenly’ flew over Sakhalin Island in the Soviet Far East. The next month, in early September, a U-2, purportedly operated by the Taiwanese, was lost over Western China. The official story was that the cause of the loss was unknown, but among those in the know it was widely accepted a Chinese surface-to-air-missile (SAM) had shot down the plane.

  Given that back in 1960, a U-2 operated by the CIA was shot down over Russia, and the pilot, Gary Powers, was captured, effectively destroying any chance President Eisenhower had of making headway in his subsequent summit with Khrushchev, President Kennedy had his doubts about continuing U-2 missions over areas where they could be shot down.

  The problem, of course, is that usually those were the exact places where an over-flight was needed.

  In September 1962, analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency discovered from satellite imagery that Cuban SAM sites were being arranged in a pattern similar to what the Soviets used to encircle their own ICBM bases. It didn’t take the greatest leap of logic to imagine what that portended. The DIA immediately requested U-2 over-flights to get better imagery of what was going on in Cuba at these sites.

  Kennedy, leery of being burned by the CIA as Eisenhower had been over the Gary Powers incident, where not only the plane getting shot down, but the false cover story had blown up in Ike’s face, wanted nothing to do with the CIA running such an operation.

  The debacle of the Bay of Pigs might also have had something to do with that decision. The gap between the President and his intelligence agency was wide and strained. Pressed by the DIA, the CIA and the Pentagon, Kennedy finally authorized over-flights of Cuba with the caveat that they be flown by the Air Force, not the CIA. A case might be made that an Air Force plane shot down was an act of war, while a CIA plane was an act of espionage. Splitting hairs, but in politics and public relations, such hairs were crucial.

  After some weather delays, the first flight occurred on 14 October, with a U-2 taking 928 photographs while racing over Cuba at 70,000 feet.

  The film was analyzed on 15 October.

  By that evening the analysts were certain they were looking at medium range ballistic missile bases being prepared.

  The National Security Adviser decided to wait until the following morning to inform the President, as if time would somehow soften the bad news.

  It didn’t.

  *****

  “The sons-a-bitches didn’t have a damn plan in place,” Kennedy said.

  “No escape hatch,” Mary Meyer murmured, unheard by the President in his anger as he continued.

  “They never considered the possibility the Russians would put missiles in Cuba. We’ve put missiles into Europe, but it never occurred to them that the Russians might pull something similar.”

  Kennedy was striding back and forth in a darkened Oval Office. The world outside of the White House had little idea that today was the beginning of a crisis that would bring all of them close to nuclear annihilation. Everything up until now had been the gathering of intelligence and initial maneuverings on the chessboard of world politics and military power. But that intelligence had been brought before Kennedy. And now, as the clock struck midnight, he was alone in the Oval Office with Mary Meyer, who was seated in a high-backed chair, listening as her friend and lover ranted.

  Meyer was nervous, because this was the first time she’d been in the White House alone with Jack while his wife was also in the building. Sure, Mary had been here
for social occasions, but that was always in a crowd. She’d also been here to visit the First Lady, even helping Jackie with her grand plans to update the interior of the White House. But this, in the middle of the night, alone, with the First Lady upstairs, was very different.

  But the situation was very different.

  “I pulled a bunch of the so-called brains and experts and powers-that-be together earlier,” Kennedy continued. “Get all the angles, all the bullshit. The Executive Committee of the National Security Council. EXCOMM.” He laughed, as if the term were some inside joke. “I’d have a couple of them taken out and shot if I had old Khrushchev’s power.”

  “I imagine Premier Khrushchev has his own set of problems,” Meyer ventured.

  Kennedy stopped in his pacing and gave her a tired grin. “I’m sure the old bear does. But this, trying to sneak missiles in to Cuba…it’s underhanded.”

  Meyer didn’t point out that he’d just said that the United States had its own missiles in Europe. “What did your committee suggest?”

  “Oh, yes, the great options they presented,” Kennedy said, striding toward his desk. He sat down behind it and searched through same papers.

  Meyer had to smile, seeing him sit behind the old wooden desk. “Jack.”

  Kennedy paused, surprised she’d interrupted him. “What?”

  “Take it easy.” Meyer stood and walked over, perching herself on the corner of the desk. Not in a sexual way, but a more intimate gesture: of trust.

  “You know this desk was made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute and donated by Queen Victoria to the United States in 1880?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “We were well on our way to our third war with Britain in 1856. One of our ships found the Resolute, adrift after being abandoned by a British expedition trying to find the Northwest Passage. A politician who was one of the biggest proponents of a war with England strangely proposed we fix up the Resolute and sail her back to England as a sign of good faith. A political and publicity maneuver. It eased tensions. And when the ship was finally sent to be broken-down, a desk was made. This desk. Presented to the United States at the behest of Queen Victoria.” She tapped the wood she was sitting on.

  “Your point?” Kennedy asked. “Because you always have one. You think Khrushchev is going to make a desk out of the U-2 he shot down and send it to me?”

  “Sometimes the people you view as your enemy only need a small gesture in order to stop things from escalating.”

  Kennedy shook his head. “Not likely in this scenario.”

  Meyer picked up a unique paperweight. A piece of coconut encased in wood and a clear plastic cover. Etched on the surface was: NAURO ISL…COMMANDER…NATIVE KNOWS POSI’T…11 ALIVE…NEED SMALL BOAT…KENNEDY

  “You took a chance giving this to those natives,” Meyer said. She was referring to when Kennedy carved the message on the piece of coconut and gave it to two natives after his command, PT-109, was run over by a Japanese destroyer during World War II. “They could have taken it to the Japanese.”

  “But they didn’t,” Kennedy said. “They took it to the Australian Coastwatchers.”

  “So you used an intermediary. And you told me about the Coastwatchers and how they put their lives on the line sending those messages that eventually got you rescued. Didn’t you say during the Berlin crisis that Khrushchev sent a message via one of his spies to Bobby?” she asked, referring to his brother.

  “Yes, but that fellow was recalled to Russia. And no one’s approached us yet. I think Khrushchev is pushing his hand. Vienna was a mistake, as you warned me it would be.”

  Meyer got him back on the immediate problem. “What did the EXCOMM experts offer up as solutions to your current situation.”

  Kennedy twisted in the chair, trying to relieve the back pain that always seemed to get worse under stress. “They had to come up with possible solutions on the fly.” He once more searched through the papers on his desk until he came up with a piece of legal paper on which he’d scrawled notes.

  “Here’s the collective genius. One, of course, is do nothing. The Russians having missiles in Cuba won’t mean that much in the strategic picture.”

  “I’m sure that didn’t go over well.”

  “Old Uncle Khrushchev would love if I did nothing, but that’s McNamara’s stance,” he said, referring to the Secretary of Defense. “The Joint Chiefs completely disagree, of course, with LeMay being the most vocal. But McNamara does have a point.” He met her eyes. “I never told you this, and it’s something we have to keep a lid on, but I campaigned on the missile gap and it turns out there is one, except it isn’t what the CIA and Pentagon have been putting out. We’ve got over five thousand warheads, and the Russians have around three hundred.”

  “Oh, Jack! No wonder they’re sending missiles to Cuba. Can you imagine what Khrushchev and his generals must feel like with that kind of disparity? General LeMay would be birthing nukes if he were on that end of the scale.”

  Despite the stress and the pain in his back, Kennedy laughed. “Mary, Mary. Always worrying about what people feel, even that old bear Khrushchev. The more important question is: how many bombs do we need to wipe each other out? When will it stop? And LeMay. He just wants to bomb something. Anything. Why have all those pretty planes and bombs if you can’t use them?”

  “So the CIA and Pentagon lied to you,” Meyer said.

  “They’ve lied to me about a lot of things. They’ve lied to the entire country.”

  “So how can you listen to them now?” Meyer asked.

  “Who else can I listen to?” Kennedy asked, without expecting an answer, but he got one anyway.

  “I’m here to listen to you,” Meyer said.

  “That’s why I called.” Kennedy sighed. “I’ve got to clear my head, Mary. I even stopped taking the pills.” Kennedy dropped the piece of paper. “Actually, McNamara is right. Forty more warheads for the Russians isn’t going to change the balance of power. Militarily. But putting them in Cuba changes things politically. Since it appears to change the balance of power and appearance contributes to reality.”

  “What other options were you given?”

  He glanced down at the notes. “Diplomacy. I guess we could kindly ask Khrushchev and Castro to not emplace the missiles.” He looked up. “By the way, that’s the funny thing. The DIA boys don’t even think the missiles are in place. They think they’re on board a couple of Russian ships en route, and that what the imagery picked up was the preparations for them.”

  “So it’s not yet a true crisis,” Meyer said.

  “Every mile closer those ships get to Cuba, the more of a crisis it becomes.” He looked back down. “Someone suggested sending a warning to Castro, although they were rather vague about what exactly should be the threat behind the warning, except to escalate to other options. First, and probably best, would be a blockade to stop the ships carrying the missiles. The Navy likes that one since they’ll be taking point on it. The Air Force of course wants to simply bomb all the missiles sites.”

  “And the Army wants to invade,” Meyer finished for him.

  “Everyone in uniform ultimately wants to invade. The Joint Chiefs all are for it. They see it as an opportunity. They think the Russians won’t go to war over Cuba.”

  “We were willing to go to war over Berlin,” Meyer noted.

  “Were we?” Kennedy said, and it was clear in his own mind that he’d never completely committed to that course of action. “We go into Cuba, there’s no doubt the Russians will roll over West Berlin and then where will it stop? The English and the French won’t be thrilled if Berlin is attacked as they have people there, too. We’re sitting on top of a possible World War. With a nuclear exchange more than likely.”

  “The Guns of August,” Meyer said, referring to the Pulitzer prize-winning book about the road into the debacle of World War I. She’d given it to Kennedy years ago and he’d devoured it, as he did anything that contributed to his base of knowledge.

 
“Exactly,” Kennedy said. “The Chairman wants me to go to NATO to get them on alert and to start mobilizing. But once everyone starts mobilizing, where does it stop? Who backs down first? This isn’t a handful of tanks at Checkpoint Charlie. We’re talking bombers and submarines with nuclear weapons. Missiles with nuclear warheads. It’s a slippery slope into what could be a freefall of Armageddon.” Kennedy got up, a look of irritation on his face, both from his back and the situation. “Khrushchev is a damn liar. He told me he had no designs on Cuba. And the timing. He wants to keep me from getting re-elected in ’64 if I back down. Americans won’t stand for missiles in Cuba.”

  “The election is a way off,” Meyer said, but Kennedy was working himself into a rage only a few in his inner circle had experienced.

  “He’s an immoral gangster. A thug. I don’t give a good Goddamn if the missiles are coming from Russia or from Cuba. He’s trying to blackmail me. If he gets away with this, he’ll push in Berlin again and probably some place else. Maybe Southeast Asia.”

  “We’re in Berlin, and you’ve sent advisers to Vietnam,” Meyer said calmly. “And we’ve placed Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey.”

  “Whose damn side are you on?” Kennedy demanded.

  “I’m on the side that wants to keep the Guns of August from turning into the Missiles of October,” Meyer said.

  *****

  World War I resonated differently with Russians than it did the rest of the world, so The Guns of August wouldn’t have mattered much to Khrushchev. That First World War presaged the collapse of the Czars and the entire Russian way of life into its present incarnation of Communism.

  “They know,” Mikoyan said. They were in the Premier’s office and Mikoyan was forcing himself not to fidget. It was dawn in the Soviet capitol while it was the middle of the night in Washington, DC.

  “What exactly do they know?” Khrushchev demanded.

  “They know about the sites in Cuba,” Mikoyan said. “A U-2 flew over Cuba on a flight path that indicates they were looking for the sites. Our people in Washington say that the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State and other key people were at the White House all day.”