The huge twin rotor blades of the olive-green Kamov-26 helicopter started spinning rapidly as Manso spooled up the revs of the jet turbine engine. He looked over at his lone passenger, Fidel Castro.
“All buckled in, Comandante?” he asked over the intercom. Both of them were wearing headphones with speakers. It was the only way you could communicate because of the turbine engine’s whine.
“Sн, Manso. Vamonos!” Castro said.
Manso flipped a switch that killed any transmission in the leader’s headphones.
“Havana Control, this is Alpha Bravo Hotel One,” Manso said. “Do you copy?”
“Copy loud and clear, Alpha Bravo, you’re clear for takeoff. Over.” Manso recognized the silky voice of Rodrigo del Rio, owner of the Club Mao-Mao and, more importantly, Castro’s former deputy head of State Security. Now he’d been bought and paid for by Manso. His loyalty to Manso was unquestioned. Only this morning, the air traffic controller typically in the tower at this time of day had been stabbed to death in his bed by del Rio. Rodrigo had used his weapon of choice, a gleaming pair of silver scissors that had earned him the nickname Scissorhands.
“Roger that, tower,” Manso said.
He took a deep breath and said the three code words that would change Cuba forever. Upon hearing the code, Rodrigo, in concert with Manso’s brothers Juan, General of the Army of the West, and Carlos, Commander in Chief of the Navy, would unleash their forces. They would initiate the first military takeover of Cuba in forty-some years.
“Mango is airborne.”
“We copy that, Alpha Bravo,” Rodrigo said. “Mango in the air. Over.”
Safety checks complete, rotors engaged, the Kamov-26 rose vertically some forty feet into the air. Manso tilted the nose over to initiate forward velocity and roared across the bay. The old yacht club fell away quickly, but Manso liked to fly low, almost brushing the tops of the sailboat masts in the marina.
The skippers on the fishing trawlers all knew el jefe’s chopper on sight, and he saw many of them lift their caps and wave as Manso executed a sharp looping turn to the southeast and headed back across the Malecуn that ran along the bay, climbing up over Morro Castle and the crumbling city of Havana.
“The speech, it was excellent, Comandante,” Manso said, once they were out over the countryside.
Castro turned and gave him a look. Manso knew as the words were coming out that it had been a foolish remark. They’d known each other too long for such trivialities. Castro had an innate genius when it came to selling himself. It had allowed him to dazzle millions of people around the world. This speech was simply more anti-American self-promotion, done brilliantly, nothing new.
Beads of sweat had popped out on Manso’s brow and threatened to run down into his eyes. He realized he was too nervous for small talk. Tense. It would be wise to just shut up and fly.
“Gracias,” Castro said, the word dripping sarcasm, and turned to gaze out the window at his failed utopia, falling away beneath him as the chopper gained altitude. God knows what he’s thinking, Manso thought, surreptitiously eyeing his leader. Look at him. He has confronted and defeated ten American presidents. He has made himself a martyr through sheer defiance, spitting in the face of Uncle Sam. With the Cold War ended, he has used America’s outdated trade embargo to further burnish his shining star. A cunning actor, strutting across the stage of the world, occasionally luring popes, potentates, terrorists, and presidents to the little island, adding a little glamour to his cast.
This earnest, brave-hearted, little off-off-Broadway production, Castro’s Cuba, had been running for over forty years. The star of the show was still shining bright, his name still up in lights all over the world.
The secret? Manso had learned it well from Escobar. Every great hero needs an implacable enemy. El jefe had the perfect enemy. The one country the world loves to hate. America. Manso had watched, first Pablo and then Fidel. He’d learned every sleight of political hand and every brilliant move, and was now ready to implement his former masters’ concepts for himself.
Castro, at seventy-five, obviously had no idea what the immediate future held for him, or Manso would be dead. Were there even a trace of suspicion, the leader would never be up in this helicopter alone with him. So, why the tightness in Manso’s chest, the sweat stinging his eyes?
It had been a tense six months. Days and nights of endless planning and tense debate. Even this simple moment, timing a flight from the Havana Yacht Club to Telaraсa, had been a subject of elaborate study and conjecture.
In the beginning, the problems they had faced had seemed insurmountable. Manso’s rebellious confederates needed constant reassurance. Manso, however, had been steadfast in his belief that such an operation could succeed, and even have a kind of simplicity.
They had not been easy to convince, of course. But gradually, Manso had been able to boost their confidence: The unthinkable could be thought, and the undoable could be done. He had been unwavering, and in the end, he had prevailed.
He told them in detail about the perfect simplicity of Batista’s coup back in 1952. Like their own, the ’52 rebellion had originated with a few young military officers, mostly campesinos and middle class. They had become completely disenchanted with the corruption of President Prio’s regime and recruited Batista, a former president himself, to lead the coup that would bring down Prio.
It had gone off precisely as planned. Perfectly.
Batista had arrived in the capital at 2:43 A.M. one Wednesday morning. It was Carnaval, and the merrymakers were still reveling in the streets. Batista was wearing brightly colored slacks and a sports jacket. The guards at Camp Colombia, where nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s armed forces were housed, didn’t even notice him. He literally did a samba through the security gates with his boisterous comrades singing and laughing.
The higher-ranking officers at the camp were all sound asleep. Many had been drinking heavily and simply passed out on the floors of the barracks. At Batista’s signal, they were all arrested and driven to Kuquine, Batista’s palacial country estate outside the capital. Not a single officer had offered any resistance.
Simultaneously, rebel officers were taking over the telephone company and the radio and television stations. By sunrise that morning, the entire operation had been completed.
President Prio returned to the capital and tried to rally his supporters. But without the army or access to the radio and television, his old civilian government was paralyzed. Prio was forced to acknowledge the inevitable.
The only thing Manso always left out of the story was el presidente Prio’s addiction to morphine. When the man wasn’t sleeping, he was sleepwalking. Batista knew this, of course, and used it to his great advantage. Castro, of course, was another story. He hardly ever slept and was constantly surrounded by secret police and vigilant bodyguards.
The plotters had decided to give their operation the code name Mango after a popular song that ridiculed Fidel in his omnipresent green fatigues. Their joke was that you can’t have “mangos” without “mansos.”
Secrecy surrounding Operation Mango had been keeping Manso awake lately. The possibilities of a leak increased with every passing day. He’d lain sleepless many nights during these last months of intense planning, wondering who might betray him, even accidentally.
He had constantly reminded his band of rebels, “When you are sitting on a secret this big, be careful. Because everybody notices that there is something under you.”
And right now, he felt surely the man next to him must see the enormity beneath him. He drew his sleeve across his brow, wiping the sweat from his eyes, hoping Castro wouldn’t notice.
“Did you ever read the book The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Manso?” the voice of the comandante crackled suddenly in his earphones. El jefe had been gazing out the side window of the cockpit and Manso thought he had dozed off.
“No, Comandante,” Manso said, intensely relieved that Castro’s mind was on his books at the moment.
“Too bad,” Castro said. “There is a wonderful parable in the book. The hero, who is a young Hollywood film producer, is on a crosscountry airplane trip. He is interested in learning to fly, so he goes up into the cockpit. The questions he asks, the pilots think he could learn solo flying in ten minutes, he had such a mentality.”
“Sн,Comandante,” Manso said, a hot spasm of nerves suddenly sizzling at the edges of his brain. Where was this going?
“The plane is flying over a large mountain. Just like the one up ahead of us. Do you see the one I mean?”
“Sн, sн,Comandante,” Manso said. “It’s no problem. Our altitude—”
“Listen to the story, Manso. This mountain is important in the story. The producer tells the pilot and copilot to suppose they were railroad men. And they wanted to build a railroad through the mountains below.”
“Sн, sн. But the mountain is in the way, no?”
“Claro que sн,” Castro said in agreement, looking down through the lexan nose of the cockpit at the green mountain now fast disappearing between his feet.
“They have surveyor’s maps. Showing three or four possibilities, no one better than the others. So, he asks them what they would do, since they have no basis for a decision. The pilot says he would clear the forest on the left side of the mountain and put his railroad there. The copilot says no, it would be simpler to go around to the right where the river has already cleared the trees. I paraphrase, of course, but this is the point. No one is sure.”
“It’s an excellent parable, Comandante.”
“It’s not finished, Manso,” Castro said sharply. He looked at his pilot. “Is something wrong? You are pale. You sweat.”
“No, no, Comandante, I feel fine. A little too much chorizo at lunch, I think. Please. Continue with the story.”
“If you’re ill, it’s dangerous. We should land.”
“Is nothing, I promise. Please tell me the end.” And, after regarding his pilot carefully for several seconds, Castro did.
“This producer, Monroe Stahr, he was a boy genius. He said to the pilots that since you can’t test the best way, you just do it. Pick a way, any way, use powder and nitroglycerine and simply blast your way right through. He said that, then he left the cockpit.”
“Ah,” Manso said.
“You do not understand the parable, my old friend, neither did the two pilots in the story. They thought it was valuable advice, but they didn’t know how to use it. It is the difference between us, Manso. I learned long ago that the best way out is always through. Never around.”
Madre de Dios, Manso thought. Does he know? Suspect? What is the point of this story if he does not?
Manso elected to make no reply, and they flew for another hour in silence. It was the longest hour of Manso’s life.
When they were some fifteen minutes away from landing at Telaraсa, Manso finally broke the silence.
“Comandante,” he said, “do you remember a certain Petty Officer Third Class Rafael Gomez? The American sailor Rodrigo recruited in Havana some time ago?”
“Of course I remember him. I read the reports. Rodrigo believes he could prove to be one of our most productive moles inside Guantanamo Naval Station. Is there a problem? Is he compromised?”
Manso took a deep breath and stepped off the wide platform that had been his support, his life, for almost as long as he could remember.
“More of an opportunity, Comandante.”
“Tell me.”
“This Gomez, he is … more than a mole. I have ordered Rodrigo to make arrangements for Gomez to smuggle a weapon inside the U.S. base. A biological weapon. A bomb containing a completely new strain of weapons-grade bacteria developed by the Iraqis. The bacteria are only a diversion. In addition to the bacteria, the bomb contains an indescribably powerful nerve toxin. With a delivery system also created by the Iraqis unlike anything seen before. Expands to cover any predesignated area, kills, and then expires.”
Castro looked stricken. His face suffused with blood as the enormity of what he’d just heard sank in. He turned in his seat and glared at his trusted friend and comrade.
“You? You ordered such a thing without my consent?”
“Sн, Comandante. I ordered it. The Cuban people have suffered the indignity of the Americans on their sovereign soil for over forty years. And you allowed them to do it! I intend to rectify this insult!”
“And Rodrigo? Don’t tell me the deputy chief of Secret Police has complicity in this? Rodrigo has aided you in this madness?”
“I have his support, yes.”
“Have you both gone insane?”
“Comandante, it is you who has allowed the American presence on our island! You should have forced them out decades ago!”
“Your ignorance of political realities would be laughable if it were not so pathetic.”
“There is a new political reality, Jefe.”
“Yes. You and your fellow traitors would rain fire down upon our heads, just like the Al Qaeda brought to Afghanistan!”
“No, Comandante. It is a brilliant plan. We will give the gringos forty-eight hours to evacuate. If they do not—well, once exploded, this bomb will kill every man, woman, and child inside the American compound within hours. Then, it simply expires.”
“My God, Manso,” Castro said, collapsing back against his seat. “What drives you to this?”
“Vengeance, my comandante. I watched Escobar. I watched you. I spent my life watching two magnificent performances. I was inspired, but I was patient. I saw how brilliantly you picked your enemies. How you would toy with them and bring the spotlight upon yourself. But this humiliation at the hand of the fucking yanquis must end. It’s my time, now. I feel this.”
“You feel it? Your time? To do what? You’re a madman! You have no credible support around you. No political infrastructure. You can’t even control your two brothers! Carlitos is totally unstable. A borderline psychotic. The state will spin out of control!”
“I will deal with my brothers when the storm subsides. I have assembled a cadre of young and trustworthy advisers. As for now, I am ready to wreak havoc and seek vengeance. I am ready to fulfill my destiny.”
“It is not vengeance you seek, Manso,” Castro said with a bitter laugh. “It is only the limelight.”
“Be careful what you say, Jefe.”
“You are beyond transparent. You think you are unique? You have a destiny? You are nothing but a pathetic clichй! You merely want the world to see your face on CNN! Once a man has all the money and power in the world, the only thing left for him to seek is fame.”
“I learned from the master, Comandante.”
“And once you blow up your little bomb, Manso, what then? What’s to stop the Americans from obliterating our country in the space of an hour?”
“They won’t lift a finger, Comandante.”
“You will not succeed, Manso.”
“I think I will. Have you ever heard of the submarine the Russians call Borzoi, Comandante?