Life: An Exploded Diagram (22 page)

J
UST BEFORE TEN
o’clock on the morning of Saturday, October 20, Clem stashed his bike inside Franklins’ unruly hedge, then froze. The sound was harsh, grating. And loud; it had come from close by. Then another, the coarse roar of some sort of machine. And above him, rooks in tumultuous outrage. The wind was light but bitter. His imitation-suede jacket was little defense against it. He stood, indecisive, shivering, then moved cautiously through the undergrowth toward the ruins of the house. When he got to the stump of its gable wall, he stopped. He stopped totally — breathing, heartbeat, brain function all at a standstill. He heard laughter, and because nothing made sense, he thought it might be his own.

It had all gone. All of it. The barn, the pines, the bramble and bracken. The low table of land that they had occupied was a smear of raw brown soil and torn roots. Beyond it, fifty feet into the vast field, a bonfire plumed smoke into the wind. As he watched, half a flight of stairs collapsed in it, like a blackened accordion. Then a huge caterpillar-tracked bulldozer reversed into his line of sight. The man perched at its controls, looking backwards, with a cigarette in his mouth, was his father. Clem dropped to the ground as if he’d been shot.

They’d found out. Him and Mortimer, they’d found out. And this was what they’d done about it. Smashed them. Erased them.

He sat with his back against the wall, numb at first, then slowly filling with fierce grief. The sound of the dozer settled into a heavy chug, then died. Voices. A second engine fired up, somewhere off to his left. Clem got to his knees and peered over the wall. His father was sitting atop the machine, speaking to someone hidden from view by the remaining walls of the house and a surviving clump of hawthorn and gorse. Clem crawled to the corner of the ruin and out behind a low, overrun bank, perhaps once the edge of a kitchen garden. He raised his head again.

Three other men, one maneuvering a tractor fitted with a toothed digging bucket. The trunks of the felled pines, decapitated, their limbs amputated. A big trailer, half full of rubble. A huge mound of brick and slate and jutting broken timbers that had been the barn.

A stocky man in dirty blue overalls and Wellington boots was poking around in the wreckage. He lifted something on the end of a stick: the sleeping bag — their sleeping bag — barely recognizable, the filthy ragged skin of an ancient roadkill.

“That look like some ole tramp’re being sleepun rough up here, George.”

Grinning.

His father laughed from on high.

“Aye. The bugger’ll get a right shock if he comes back tonight.”

The third man, rolling a cigarette, said, “’Specially if he’re got your sister with him, Will.”

Clem fell onto his back among the damp leaf fall, stunned by loss.

Frankie
.

He knelt again, and there she was, appearing and disappearing beyond the swirling smoke, she and Marron silhouetted motionless on the low swell of the land.

He went home. A few minutes after twelve thirty, the phone rang.

“Clem?”

“Frankie?”

“Clem. Oh, Clem.”

“Can you talk?”

“Only for a second. I had no idea, honestly. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“The
bastards.
”

“Yes. Can you come to the woods later? Where we used to meet?”

“When?”

“Three.”

“Okay.”

Ruth came in the back door.

“Who’re you talking to, Clem?”

“Goz.”

“Clem?”

“I’ll see you there, then. Cheers, Goz.”

He put the phone down.

“What was that all about, then?”

“Oh, nothun. Said I’d go round his later. Bloody English prep.”

Ruth hung her coat on the pegs under the stairs.

“Takun up swearun now, hev you?”

Frankie came on a bicycle. He hadn’t known she could ride one, or had one.

I
T’S VERY DIFFICULT
for a world superpower to prepare for war discreetly. When huge military convoys lumber south into Florida, when sports fields suddenly become army camps, when fleets steam out of ports, when squadrons of fighter-bombers suddenly get dispersed to obscure civilian airfields, when thousands of servicemen are told to kiss their girlfriends and wives and children good-bye, when the lights burn all night in the Pentagon, well, these things tend to get noticed.

The story of a “defensive buildup” in Cuba had been simmering in the American press for several weeks. Kennedy’s political opponents had been making a fuss about it. He’d been stung when ex-president Eisenhower, in a piece in the
New York Times,
had accused him of being “weak on foreign policy.” Code for “fluffy with the Russians.”

By the end of the first week of the crisis, JFK knew that he was going to have to go public. His speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, had written two versions of a broadcast to the nation.

Version One said, in essence, “Good evening, my fellow citizens. It is my sad duty to inform you that, as I speak, U.S. forces are bombing Cuba in advance of an all-out invasion. You might like to get yourselves ready for World War III.”

Version Two said, in essence, “Good evening, my fellow citizens. I have to tell you that the wicked Russians have put nuclear missiles in Cuba, and we won’t stand for it. So we’ve put a sea blockade around Cuba, and I’ve sent a stiff note to Chairman Khrushchev.”

Right up to the wire, it was odds-on which of these two speeches would go out.

On Monday, October 22, the White House sent a request to all TV and radio networks that they make airtime available for a presidential address at seven p.m. Its subject would be “a matter of the highest national urgency.” Hearing of this, Cuban and Russian intelligence — who had already reported the unusual levels of activity at the White House and the Pentagon — immediately informed Havana and Moscow. Reactions in these cities were very different.

It was late evening in Moscow when Khrushchev got the word and summoned his ministers to the Kremlin. He was gloomy and fretful. And deeply disappointed. His plan had been splendidly cunning. Once all the nuclear weapons systems were installed in Cuba, he would fly to Havana, where and he and Castro would sign a formal agreement on mutual defense. (The Americans would make a fuss, but since they’d done much the same thing with countries like Britain and Turkey, they’d not have a leg to stand on.) Then, and only then, he and Fidel, brother revolutionaries, would take the salute as Russian troops marched past, side by side with their Cuban comrades. And with their smart new missiles. It would present the Yankees with a shocking fait accompli.

Now it seemed to Khrushchev that this delightful scenario would be denied him.

“They’ve rumbled us,” he said. “I’m almost sure of it. Kennedy will announce an invasion. The son of a bitch may already have ordered it.
Shit!
We should have announced a defense treaty with Cuba
before
we sent the stuff in.”

No one said anything for a minute. No one was especially keen to agree with Khrushchev that he’d made a mistake.

“Comrade Chairman,” Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky said eventually, “our best information is that the Americans would not be ready to mount an invasion for several days. For a start, they do not have enough ships in the Caribbean to support such an action.”

“So they’ll send in their planes,” Khrushchev said. “And we’re not ready for air strikes. They’ll take us out in a single swipe. Then invade.”

“Will they? Will they kill hundreds, perhaps thousands, of our people, knowing that we would then have to retaliate?”

Khrushchev was silent for a moment. I’d like to imagine that the shadows inside the Kremlin deepened.

“Tragic,” he said eventually, quietly. “They hit us; we respond; it all ends up in a big war. Are we ready for that?”

Malinovsky shrugged: an articulate gesture.

Silence fell. Khrushchev broke it.

“So, how about this: we announce a defense treaty with Cuba immediately. Over the radio, so that the CIA hears it, loud and clear. We transfer control of all Soviet nuclear weapons to the Cubans. We can’t
really
do that, of course, because only Biryuzov and his people know how to use the damned things. No matter. Fidel will then announce that he will use them to defend his country from imperialist attack. The Americans believe that he’s crazy enough to do just that. So do I, as a matter of fact. They’ll mess their pants. They’ll hold off. What do you think?”

Malinovsky said, “With respect, Nikita Sergeyevich, I think we should do nothing until we hear what Kennedy says. The gutless playboy might well be bluffing.”

By contrast, in Havana, on Monday afternoon, Fidel Castro put his defensive forces on red alert and ordered his reserve forces to report to their regional headquarters. Then, energized by crisis, he went to the offices of the newspaper
Revolución
and dictated the next day’s headline:
“¡Patria o Muerte!
¡Venceremos!”
(The Motherland or Death! We Shall Overcome!)

As it turned out, the Kremlin did not have to wait for JFK’s speech.

At six o’clock Washington time, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, arrived, as requested, at the State Department. There, he was handed the text of the speech that Kennedy would make in less than an hour’s time, along with a private message to Khrushchev, which warned the Soviet leader that he should not underestimate America’s will and determination to unleash all manner of hell in order to maintain peace.

Poor Dobrynin went as white as a graveyard lily. For security reasons, the Kremlin had told him nothing about what was going on in Cuba. He went shakily back to his embassy and wired JFK’s speech and letter to Moscow.

When Nikita Khrushchev read them, his mood climbed back up the graph. He returned to the meeting, waving a triumphant fist in the air.

“We’ve saved Cuba,” he announced. “Kennedy, the coward, has announced a sea blockade. Which he has no right to do. No matter what they might think, the Yankees do not own the high seas. They are pirates now. Aggressors. We have them by the balls.”

There was applause.

Then Admiral Sergey Gorshkov, head of the Soviet Navy, spoke up.

“This is very good news, Comrade Chairman. The brave captains of our merchant fleet will be resolute in the face of this illegal act by the Americans. However, there is the problem of our submarines.”

“What about them?”

“We don’t know exactly where they are,” Gorshkov admitted. “They might be outside or inside the American blockade.”

“So radio them,” Khrushchev said. “Tell them what’s happening.”

“Unfortunately, Comrade Chairman,” Gorshkov said, “communications with our submarines are unreliable. We can only be sure of clear signals when they surface.”

“And if they surface,” Malinovsky said, “they might find themselves face-to-face with an American warship.”

“Shit,” Khrushchev said.

The Oval Office of the White House had been improvised into a television studio. At seven p.m., JFK sat at his desk, which had been draped in black cloth to cut out light flare, and addressed the cameras.

“Good evening, my fellow citizens,” he began.

A hundred million of them were listening or watching. He told them about the missiles on Cuba and how they could fly mass death as far north as Canada and as far south as Peru. He told them how the Russians had lied through their teeth about what they were doing, how they’d insisted they were merely aiding the Cubans with defensive systems. He told them that if World War II had taught us anything, it was that letting military aggression go unchallenged would lead inevitably to war. Even so, Kennedy said, the U.S. would not “prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of a worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.” Then he announced the “quarantine” and close surveillance of the military buildup in Cuba. He declared (in politer language than mine) that if any missile of any sort were launched from Cuba, America would blow the Soviet Union to kingdom come. He addressed Khrushchev personally, urging him to move the world back from the abyss of destruction. He spoke to the people of Cuba, that “imprisoned island.” He was their friend, but their leaders were Soviet puppets. He assured them that one day soon they would be free. Then he mentioned God and said good night. And all around the world, newsrooms went crazy.