They parked by the dock and watched troops climb the boarding plank. Six hundred men hopped on in just under two minutes.
Their short-wave set sputtered. The needle bounced to the Blessington frequency.
Stanton plugged in his headset. Pete bit his zillionth cigarette of the day.
The troop ship creaked and waddled. A fat Cubano puked over the stern.
Stanton said, “Our government-in-exile’s in place, and Bissell ended up approving those far-right boys I recommended. That’s good, but that fake-defector charade we cooked up backfired. Gutiйrrez landed the plane at Blessington, but the reporters that Dougie Lockhart called in recognized Ramуn and started booing. It’s not a big thing, but a fuck-up’s still a fuck-up.”
Pete nodded. He smelled vomit and bilge water and oil off six hundred rifles.
Stanton unhooked his headset. His Saint Christopher was fretted shiny to dull.
They kept circuiting. It was gas-guzzling Benzedrine bullshit.
Please, Jack:
Send some more planes in. Give the orders to send the boats out.
Pete got wild-ass itchy. Stanton blathered on and on about his kids.
Hours took decades. Pete ran lists in his head to shut Stanton out.
The men he killed. The women he fucked. The best hamburgers in L.A. and Miami. What he’d be doing if he never left Quebec. What he’d be doing if he never met Kemper Boyd.
Stanton worked the radio. Reports crackled in.
They heard that the air strike fizzled. The bombers nailed less than 10% of Fidel Castro’s air force.
Bad-Back Jack took the news hard. He responded in cuntish fashion: no second air strike just yet.
Chuck Rogers squeaked a call in. He said Marcello and Littell were still in Guatemala. He dropped some late-breaking stateside info: the FBI invaded New Orleans in response to fake Carlos sightings!
It was Boyd’s doing. He figured erroneous phone tips would keep Bobby diverted and help cover Marcello’s tracks.
Chuck signed off. Stanton clamped his headphones down and kept his ears perked for stray calls.
Seconds took years. Minutes took fucking millenniums.
Pete scratched his balls raw. Pete smoked himself hoarse. Pete shot palm fronds off of trees just to shoot something.
Stanton rogered a call. “That was Lockhart. He says our government-in-exile’s close to rioting. They need you at Blessington, and Rogers is flying in from Guatemala to pick you up.”
o o o
They detoured by the Cuban coast. Chuck said it added nil time to their flight plan.
Pete yelled, “Let’s get low!”
Chuck throttled down. Pete saw flames from two thousand feet and half a mile out.
They swooped below radar level and belly-rolled along the beach. Pete jammed binoculars out his window.
He saw aircraft wreckage-Cuban and rebel. He saw smoldering palm groves and hose trucks parked on the sand.
Air-raid sirens were blasting full-tilt. Dock-mounted spotlights were pre-dusk operational. Pillboxes had been set up just above the high tide line-fully manned and sandbagged.
Militiamen crowded the dock. Dig those little geeks with Tommy guns and aircraft ID guides.
They were eighty miles south of Playa Girуn. This stretch of beach was red-alert ready. If the Bay of Pigs was this fortified, the entire invasion was fucked.
Pete heard muzzle pops. Little chickenshit pepperings went bip-bip-bip.
Chuck caught on-they’re shooting at us.
He flipped the Piper belly to backside. Pete spun topsy-turvy.
His head hit the roof. His seatbelt choked him immobile. Chucky rolled and flew upside down all the way to U.S. waters.
o o o
Dusk hit. Blessington glowed under high-wattage arc lights.
Pete popped two Dramamines. He saw redneck gawkers and ice cream trucks perched outside the front gates.
Chuck fishtailed down the runway and brought the plane to a dead stall. Pete hopped out woozy-Benzedrine and incipient nausea packed this wicked one-two punch.
A prefab hut stood in the middle of the drill field. Triple-strength barbed wire sequestered it. Unsynchronized shouts boomed out-a far cry from your snappy PIGS PIGS PIGS!
Pete stretched and worked out some muscle kinks. Lockhart ran up to him.
“Goddamnit, get in there and calm those spics down!”
Pete said, “What happened?”
“What happened is Kennedy’s stalling. Dick Bissell said he wants a win, but he don’t want to go the whole hog and get blamed if the invasion goes bust. I got my rusty old cargo ship all ready to go, but that Pope-worshiping cocksucker in the White House won’t-”
Pete slapped him. The little shitbird weaved and stayed upright.
“I said, ‘What happened?’”
Lockhart wiped his nose and giggled. “What happened is my Klan boys sold the provisional government guys some moonshine, and they started arguing politics with some of the regular troops. I whipped up a crew and isolated the troublemakers with that there barbed wire, but that don’t alter the fact that you got sixty frustrated and liquored-up Cuban hotheads in there biting at each other like copperheads when they should be concentrating on the problem at hand, which is liberating a Commie-held dictatorship.”
“Do they have guns?”
“No sir. I got the weapons shack locked and guarded.”
Pete reached into the cockpit. Right upside the dashboard: Chuck’s fungo bat and all-purpose tool kit.
He grabbed them. He pulled out the tin snips and tucked the bat into his waistband.
Lockhart said, “What are you doing?”
Chuck said, “I think I know.”
Pete pointed to the pump shed. “Let go with the fire hoses in exactly five minutes.”
Lockhart hooted. “Them hoses will tear that prefab right down.”
“That’s what I want.”
The sequestered spics laughed and yelled. Lockhart took off and hit the pump shed at a sprint.
Pete ran over to the fence and snipped out a section of coiling. Chuck wrapped his hands in his windbreaker and pulled down a big wall of barbs.
Pete scrunched down and crawled through. He ran up to the hut in a deep fullback crouch. One fungo bat shot took the door down.
His crash-in went unnoticed. The government-in-exile boys were preoccupied.
With arm wrestling, card games and shine-guzzling contests. With a baby-alligator race right there on the floor.
Dig the rooting sections. Dig the blankets covered with bet chits. Dig the bunks weighted down with moonshine jugs.
Pete choked up a bat grip. On-GO: that good old boot-camp pugel-stick training.
He waded in. Tight swings clipped chins and ribcages. The government-in-exile boys fought back-odd fists hit him haphazardly.
His bat shattered bunk beams. His bat shattered a fat man’s dentures. The gators scurried outside while the getting was good.
The government boys got the picture: Do not resist this big Caucasian madman.
Pete tore through the hut. The spics made like a backdraft and got waaay behind him.
He tore out the rear door and swung at the porch-to-roof stanchions. Five swings left-handed, five swings right-switch-hitting like fucking Mickey Mantle.
The walls shuddered. The roof wiggled. The foundation shimmy-shimmied. The spics evacuated-Earthquake! Earthquake!
The hoses hit. Jet-pressure tore the fence down. Hydraulic force ripped the hut roofless.
Pete caught a spritz and went tumbling. The hut burst into cinderblock shingles.
Dig the government-in-exile:
Running. Stumbling. Doing the jet-spray jigaboo jiggle.
Call it Hush-Hush style:
WATER-WHACKED WETBACKS WIGGLE! BOOZEBLITZED AND BESOAKED BASTION BOOGIE-WOOGIES!