The hoses snapped off. Pete started laughing.
Men stood up soaked and trembling. Pete’s laugh went contagious and built to a roar.
The drill field was an instant prefab dump site.
The laughter went locomotive and shaped into a perfect martial cadence. A chant built off of it:
PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS!
o o o
Lockhart dispensed blankets. Pete sobered the men up with bennie-laced Kool-Aid.
They loaded the troop ship at midnight. 256 exiles climbed on-hot-wired to reclaim their country.
They loaded weapons, landing craft and medical supplies. Radio channels stayed open: Blessington to Langley and every port-of-departure command post.
The word passed through:
Jack the Haircut says, no second air strike.
Nobody proffered first-strike death stats. Nobody proffered reports on coastal fortifications.
Those spotlights and beach bunkers went unreported. Those militia lookouts went unmentioned.
Pete knew why.
Langley knows it’s now or never. Why inform the troops that we’re in crap-shoot terrain from here on in?
Pete swigged moonshine to wean himself off the bennies. He passed out on his bunk midway through this weird hallucination.
o o o
Japs, Japs, Japs. Saipan, ‘43-in wide-screen Technicolor.
They swarmed him. He killed them and killed them and killed them. He screamed readiness warnings. Nobody understood his Quebecois French.
Dead Japs popped back to life. He rekilled them barehanded. They turned into dead women-Ruth Mildred Cressmeyer clones.
Chuck woke him up at dawn. He said, “Kennedy came halfway through. All the sites launched their troops an hour ago.”
o o o
Waiting time dragged. Their short-wave set went on the fritz.
Troop ship transmissions came in garbled. Site-to-site feeds registered as static-laced gibberish.
Chuck couldn’t nail the malfunction. Pete tried straight telephone contact-calls to Tiger Kab and his Langley drop.
He got two sustained busy signals. Chuck chalked them up to pro-Fidel line jamming.
Lockhart had a hot number memorized: the Agency’s Miami Ops office. Boyd called it “Invasion Central”-the sparkplug Cadre guys never got close to.
Pete dialed the number. A busy signal blared extra loud. Chuck nailed the source of the sound: covertly strung phone lines overloaded with incoming calls.
They sat around the barracks. Their radio coughed out strange little sputters.
Time dragged. Seconds took years. Minutes took solar-system eternities.
Pete chained cigarettes. Dougie Frank and Chuck bummed a whole pack off of him.
A Klan guy was hosing off the Piper. Pete and Chuck shared a reeeeealllly long look.
Dougie Frank jammed their wavelength. “Can I go, too?”
o o o
Diversionary dips got them close. They caught the Bay of Pigs in tight and ugly.
They saw a supply ship snagged on a reef. They saw dead men flopping out of a hole in the hull. They saw sharks bobbing at body parts twenty yards offshore.
Chuck swung around and made a second pass. Pete bumped the control panel. The extra passenger had them cramped in extra tight.
They saw beached landing craft. They saw live men climbing over dead men. They saw a hundred-yard stretch of bodies in bright-red shallow water.
The invaders kept coming. Flamethrowers nailed them the second they hit the wave break. They got flash-fried and boiled alive.
Fifty-odd rebels were shackled facedown in the sand. A Cornmie with a chainsaw was running across their backs.
Pete saw the blade drag. Pete saw the blood gout. Pete saw their heads roll into the water.
Flames jumped up at the plane-short by inches.
Chuck pulled off his headset. “I picked up an Ops call! Kennedy says, ‘No second air strike,’ and he says he won’t send in any U.S. troops to help our guys!”
Pete aimed his Magnum out the window. A flame clap spun it out of his hand.
Sharks were churning up the water right below them. This fat Commie fuck waved a severed head.
68
Their room adjoined the radio hut. Invasion updates seeped through the walls uninvited.
Marcello tried to sleep. Littell tried to study deportation law.
Kennedy refused to order a second air strike. Rebel soldiers were captured and slaughtered on the beach.
Reserve troops were chanting “PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS!” That silly word roared through the barracks quadrangle.
Right-wing dementia: mildly distracting. Mildly gratifying: a detectable rise in contempt for John F Kennedy.
Littell watched Marcello toss and turn. He was bunking with a Mafia chieftain-mildly amazing.
His charade worked. Carlos scanned ledger columns and recognized his own Fund transactions. His indebtedness increased exponentially.
Carlos was accruing large legal debts. Carlos owed his safety to a reformed FBI crirnebuster.
Guy Banister called this morning. He said he picked up some straight dope: Bobby Kennedy knows that Carlos is really hiding out in Guatemala.
Bobby applied diplomatic pressure. The Guatemalan prime minister kowtowed. Carlos would be deported, “but not swiftly.”
Banister used to call him a weak sister. His phone manner was near-deferential now.
Marcello started snoring. He was drooping off his army cot in monogrammed silk pajamas.
Littell heard shouts and banging noises next door. He formed a picture: men slapping desks and kicking odd inanimate objects.
“It’s a washout”/”That vacillating chickenshit”/”He won’t send in planes or ships to shell the beach,”
Littell walked outside. The troopers, worked up a new chant.
“KEN-NEDY, DON’T SAY NO! KEN-NEDY, LET US GO!”
They bounced around the quad. They swigged straight gin and vodka. They gobbled pills and kicked apothecary jars like soccer balls.
The case officers’ lounge had been looted. The dispensary door had been trampled to pulp.
“KEN-NEDY, LET US GO! KEN-NEDY IS A PU-TO!”
Littell stepped inside and grabbed the wall phone. Twelve coded digits got him Tiger Kab direct.
A man said, “Sн? cabstand.”
“I’m looking for Kemper Boyd. Tell him it’s Ward Littell.”
“Sн. One second.”
Littell unbuttoned his shirt-the humidity was awful. Carlos mumbled through a bad dream.
Kemper picked up. “What is it, Ward?”
“What is it with you? You sound anxious.”
“There’s riots all over the Cuban section, and the invasion isn’t going our way. Ward, what is-?”
“I got word that the Guatemalan government’s looking for Carlos. Bobby Kennedy knows he’s here, and I think I should move him again.”
“Do it. Rent an apartment outside Guatemala City, and call me with the phone number. I’ll have Chuck Rogers meet you there and fly you someplace more removed. Ward, I can’t talk now. Call me when-”
The line went dead. Overtaxed circuits-mildly annoying. Mildly amusing: Kemper C. Boyd mildly flustered.
Littell walked outside. The chants were a good deal more than mildly pissed-off.
“KEN-NEDY IS A PU-TO! KEN-NEDY FEARS Fl-DEL CAS-TRO!”