The Russian chopper plunged from the Caribbean heavens, falling, sideslipping, and twisting all at the same time. The instrument panel was a blurred nightmare of wildly spinning needles. The terrain warning alarm was howling. The screaming tail rotor blade was about to go. Without that blade, the chopper was lost.
They were moments from entering the “crescent of death,” namely, the failure of forward velocity and total loss of control of the helicopter. Lose your tail rotor and the chopper begins to rotate.
Because of gyroscopic action, it begins to swing like a pendulum. Your chances of crashing vertically, coming down on your skids, are reduced dramatically. Which is bad because, as Manso well knew, you might actually survive a vertical crash. But if any part of its main rotor blade touches solid ground, the chopper would just do a flaming cartwheel into the jungle.
All these thoughts went through Manso’s head. In seconds it would be beyond man’s, or machine’s, ability to recover. They were plunging down through two thousand feet, with maybe a minute to live.
Castro’s hold on the control stick was unshakable. For an ailing man in his late seventies, his grip was iron.
Manso had no choice.
He pulled the slim stiletto from the sheath attached to his right leg. He showed the Maximum Leader the blade, giving him just enough time to register what was about to happen to him and release the control stick.
“Let it go!” Manso shouted. “Now!”
“I don’t negotiate with traitors!” Castro shouted back, thick white spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. “Fuck you!”
When Castro did not remove his hand, Manso jammed the blade down into his muscular thigh with all the force he could muster. Blood spurted from Castro’s wound, spraying the instrument cluster and the leader’s fatigues. It wasn’t mortal. Manso had deliberately avoided the femoral artery. Still, sticking a blade in a man’s leg down to the bone takes a lot of the fuck-you out of him.
Castro howled in pain, releasing his hold on the control stick. He looked down at his bloody leg in shocked disbelief. Manso yanked the knife out of the leader’s thigh and threw it clattering to the cockpit floor between his foot pedals.
He then grabbed the blood-covered control and hauled back on it, twisting hard left. The chopper kept plunging for a few desperate seconds as Manso worked the controls, cursing and praying at the same time. There was now a big green mountain in his immediate future. With seconds to live, he wrestled the beast, twisting, tugging, pumping. His only chance was to drop the helicopter as rapidly as possible. And hope to come down vertically.
Suddenly, he felt it responding and stabilizing. He had it under control. Still breathing hard, he banked and started climbing, with the mountain still looming massively before him. Too late? His skids were brushing the treetops as Manso held back on the stick, holding his breath, his heart exploding in his chest. He was waiting for the shuddering crunch of the undercarriage hitting solid wood, which would bring him crashing into the face of the mountain.
It didn’t happen.
He gained a few hundred feet of breathing room, banked hard right, and found himself in clear air. He took a peek at Castro. The man was obviously in shock. He was losing a fair amount of blood and had gone a deathly shade of gray. His eyes were cloudy, out of focus.
“Comandante, I will radio for emergency medical to stand by for our landing. Press your finger into the wound. Hold on. We should be on the ground at Telaraсa in ten minutes.”
He got on the radio and made the request.
“Everything okay up there, Colonel?” the tense voice in his earphones said.
“Sн! Viva Cuba!” Manso responded.
Castro was silent and remained so for the short balance of the flight. Ever the survivor, he’d wrapped his own belt around his thigh and cinched it tight, staunching the bleeding.
The sun was dipping below the western horizon when Manso flared up and prepared to land. A large concrete structure, only recently completed, stood astride a wide river, flowing out to the sea. Now the giant structure was bathed in pure white light. Manso had not seen it since its completion and the mere sight of it gave him enormous satisfaction.
To a spy plane or satellite it could be anything. A convention hall, a movie theater. Better yet, a ballet theater. The Borzoi ballet. This huge building would house the world’s largest and deadliest submarine.
An encircled red H, newly painted on the broad, flat roof of the building marked the helicopter landing pad. As Manso hovered over it, he could see a squadron of heavily armed men forming up into a solid perimeter around the pad.
Manso turned to Castro.
“On behalf of our entire crew, let me be the first to welcome you to Telaraсa, Comandante,” Manso said when the skids were solidly down. “You will notice a few changes since your last visit.” The Maximum Leader grunted but said nothing. Two soldiers approached the helicopter at a run from either side as Manso shut down the engines. They pulled open the doors and the pilot and his passenger stepped out onto the brilliantly illuminated pad. Castro limped some twenty yards, head held high, glaring at the soldiers who ringed the chopper. No one around the perimeter said a word.
“Lower your weapons!” a defiant Fidel Castro shrieked at the soldiers. “I said lower your fucking weapons!”
Without a word, and only out of respect, every soldier lowered his gun.
“El jefe needs immediate medical attention,” Manso said to his brother Juanito, who had come forward to embrace him. “He has lost a lot of blood.”
“Sн,mi hermano,” Juanito de Herreras said. “The emergency medics are on the way. Welcome and well done.”
Juanito called to Castro. “There is someone most anxious to speak to you, Comandante,” he said. “Here he comes now.”
The formation of soldiers parted and allowed a man onto the pad. He strode toward Manso, Juanito, and Castro, smiling. He was young and handsome, and bore a striking resemblance to someone Castro had not seen in over thirty years.
“Comandante,” Manso said to Castro, “may I present the new presidente of Cuba?”
“Bienvenidos,” Fulgencio Batista said.
It was the grandson of the man Castro had overthrown more than thirty years earlier. The new presidente was to be Fulgencio Batista’s grandson!
Fidel Castro shot Manso a look of palpable hatred.
This was simply more irony than he could stand.