Robert Conroy - Castro's bomb

He decided to answer the damn thing.

He looked and saw his wife, Midge, was also sitting upright and trying to remember where she was. As always, their first thought was that something had happened to one of their twin boys who were freshmen in college. But it couldn't be them because they were home for the holidays. One had even brought his girlfriend, which had caused some logistical problems concerning sleeping arrangements. To put it politely, Midge was pissed that her little boy was sleeping with his girlfriend. Ted thought the girl was sweet and cute and that his son was pretty damn lucky.

Romanski managed to grab it on the third ring. "Lt. Col. Romanski," he said. He felt there was fuzz on his teeth. He and Midge had been partying.

"General Bunting, Ted."

Romanski looked at his clock. It was two AM. "Good morning, general." Bunting had been his commanding officer when Romanski had been assigned to the 82nd Airborne. They had a solid history together.

"Ted, this afternoon I had a conference with the president himself and he feels that something major is going down in Cuba, at Gitmo. He specifically asked me to get Task Force Roman organized and ready to go."

"Now, sir? It's after midnight." He immediately regretted the stupid comment. He realized it must be serious. After all, Bunting just said he had been talking directly to Kennedy. He had to get his brain working.

"Yes, now, and I know it's late and it's Christmas. But the word is that the commies are likely to attack Gitmo in a couple of hours, which means it's very necessary to have a tripwire force in place and ready to go. Your people are the only ones who had any plans to reinforce Gitmo, except the Marines, who aren't in any position to help for a day or two. Ted, we've got only a matter of hours if this really happens. I don't like it any more than you do, but this comes directly from the president."

"Understood," Romanski said and hung up. He spent the next couple of minutes explaining the situation to a disbelieving Midge.

She stood and clenched her fists angrily. "Damn it, this can't be right. You just went through one war scare and now there's another one? Just what do they want? You're only a few weeks away from retirement!"

"Are you done?" he asked patiently.

"And when was the last time you actually jumped from a perfectly good airplane?"

"It was a couple of weeks ago, dear. I'm not that bad off."

Romanski commanded part of the airborne training school at Fort Benning, Georgia. He'd been a paratrooper in the 82nd as well as a Ranger, and, during the Crisis, had been ordered to create an ad hoc airborne unit made up of training cadre and other qualified personnel who were currently stationed at Benning. Their job would have been to jump or fly into Guantanamo and reinforce the small garrison. He'd managed to gather and organize a force of nearly eleven hundred volunteers. They'd been armed and ready to go until Marine reinforcements arriving at Gitmo made them redundant. It had been fun while it lasted and could have been a great ending to an otherwise ordinary career.

Still, he understood the assignment. All the other airborne units had been focused on an attack near Havana. Only his group had any plans concerning Gitmo. He wondered if his group was the only one that even knew where Gitmo was?

Midge, however, was not mollified. "And, dear God, it's Christmas. Are you going to miss Christmas again? I thought all that crap was over with."

"I have absolutely no idea," Romanski admitted as he stripped to take a shower. "But I guarantee you it'll be the last Christmas I'll miss. A few more weeks and I'm out of here." But to do what? He and Midge hadn't quite decided on their future. He couldn’t live on his army pension, so a job was going to be a necessity.

Enough feeling sorry for himself. He had to make a couple of quick phone calls. He had to get a fanout started with a goal of getting everybody who'd been in Task Force Roman at Fort Benning's Lawson Field within two hours.

Midge stood before him. Her anger had dissipated and she smiled winsomely. He still thought she was beautiful. "You need a little good luck to make it through this, soldier, and a few minutes won't matter." She gently pushed him back on the bed and grinned wickedly. "And I need a pony ride."

She pulled off her nightgown and dropped her panties. Twenty years had made her a little plump, but she was still capable of arousing him almost immediately. Also, a pony ride was a traditional farewell event every time he'd shipped out. She smiled and straddled him. He quickly grew hard and he entered her as his hands caressed her full breasts and worked their way back to her buttocks. Years of practice worked and they both climaxed at almost the same time. She got up and smiled at him. Her eyes were moist with tears she would hold in until he left.

"Now go fight your damn war and try to be home for dinner."

"You hear anything, lieutenant?"

"Only the sound of my wildly beating heart," Andrew said. He willed himself to be still. "But maybe I feel vibrations in the ground."

"Same here," said Cullen. "I wonder what those two idiots have discovered up front?"

"They've probably discovered that they're scared out of their minds and can't really see or hear anything. They've also likely discovered that they're not going to re-enlist."

Cullen chuckled and grabbed Andrew's arm. "Motion."

Seconds later, they both saw the shapes of two hunched over men running towards them. It'd better be Hollis and Ward from the listening post, Andrew thought, and not a couple of saboteurs who'd managed to sneak by them. He belatedly realized they'd neglected to give the two men a password or countersign.

It was Hollis and Ward, and Andrew breathed a sigh of relief. Both men were excited and out of breath. Ward spoke for the two of them. "We heard vehicles, sir, lots of them. Sounds like trucks and tracked vehicles, but we couldn't see them. Too many low hills in the way."

"Any lights?" Cullen asked.

"Naw. Whatever it was they were running lights out."

Andrew told Cullen to radio the report up the chain of command. Trucks could mean anything from a military convoy to a bunch of farmers getting ready to work their fields, but tracks? Tracks could mean farm tractors but the farmers in the area were too poor to afford tractors. They also could mean tanks or armored personnel carriers, and if they came down that single lane dirt road, he had twenty men and an old machine gun to stop them with.

What it boiled down to was that his and Cullen's premonitions might just be correct. There were no saboteurs coming. Instead, they were confronting the possibility of a major Cuban attack. Why the hell had he volunteered to take guard duty? Of course, would snoozing in his BOQ bunk be any safer in the long run if the Cubans were attacking?

Andrew got on the radio and asked for clarification of his duties. He was told that, in the event of an attack in overwhelming force, he was to try and delay them, and then scoot for the rear. Delay them? With twenty men and a machine gun? Jesus H. Christ.

"Gunny, if the bad guys come down that road in force, we don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of stopping them or even delaying them for more than a very short time, as in a minute or two at most. If they come, I propose that we report the attack, annoy them for a few seconds, and retreat to the fallback position."

Cullen nodded. "Then you agree that they know we're here."

Andrew suddenly felt chilled. The Cubans had the high ground and had to have been observing them. "I believe they've been watching us and know everything about us, right down to how many of us wear jockeys and how many wear boxers."

Andrew tried to smile at the thought of Cuban spies checking out his underwear. He was wearing jockeys.