Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

“It seems they’ll be here very soon,” the second militiaman replied. “Your shave will have to wait until after the war.”

Returning to his room in Vedado, Gilly noticed that the royal poinciana trees in his street had burst into bloom. A beautiful girl was walking along the pavement beneath the brilliant flame red blossoms. Gilly felt a sudden stab of nostalgia for a world that seemed on the point of annihilation. “What a pity,” he found himself thinking, “that all this beauty is going to disappear between three and four o’clock this afternoon!”

Havana seemed more timeless, more precarious, more enchanting than ever. The city was like Venice sinking languorously into its lagoon or Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation, a place of heartbreaking beauty threatened with doom. All that remained was to savor the moment.

The Cuban government had finally begun to make some halfhearted attempts at civil defense by announcing the formation of neighborhood first-aid teams. Local defense committees were ordered to fashion improvised stretchers out of sheets and burlap sacks. First-aid manuals were in such short supply that anybody who owned one was instructed to hand it over to the authorities. A qualified health professional would head each first-aid team, “whether or not he is a member of a revolutionary organization.” Hospitals turned away all but emergency cases to leave room for casualties in the event of an invasion. Officials offered a stream of instructions on how to prepare for American air raids:

• Keep two or three buckets of sand in the house to extinguish fires. Cover glass windows with gummed paper.

• Keep a small piece of wood handy to place between teeth when bombing begins.

• Do not gather in groups, as there will be more victims from a single explosion.

• Do not hoard food. Storing food for more than two or three days will cause artificial shortages which helps the enemy.

Along the Malecon, crowds gathered to cheer ships entering Havana Harbor after passing through the American naval blockade. Every so often people would be drenched with a great spume of seawater from the mixture of wind and waves lashing against the seawall. Robert Williams, the founder of Radio Free Dixie, led a march along the waterfront to greet several hundred East German tourists who had arrived in Havana on board one of the ships. He carried a placard reading: “ Love Thy Neighbor, Jack? ”

On a hill above Vedado, rumors of a possible American invasion were seeping through the thick stone walls of the Castillo del Principe, a colonial fortress that had served as a prison since the days of the Spaniards. The prisoners included some of the exiles captured the previous year at the Bay of the Pigs, mixed in with murderers and common criminals. As a security precaution, prisoners were no longer permitted to receive visits from relatives. Guards spread the word that they had placed dynamite in the lower floors of the massive white castle. If the Marines landed and tried to free the captives, everybody would be blown sky-high.

It had been raining much of the night at the SAM site commanded by Major Ivan Gerchenov. His soldiers had got what rest they could in the water-logged trenches. Everybody was on edge. The battery had been on full alert since late the previous evening when it received the order to switch on its radars. There were rumors that the Americans were planning a paratroop attack in the vicinity of the nearby town of Banes.

The radar screens pulsated with bleeping dots.

“Follow Target Number 33.”

Gerchenov ordered Combat Alert No. 1. The missile crews had practiced the drill many times. They transferred the missile from the transporters to the launchers, attaching the necessary cables. The Spoon Rest acquisition radar was already tracking the target. An officer called out height, speed, distance and azimuth data. The gunners raised the elevation of the launcher until the missile was aimed at the target.

The SAM site was laid out in a hexagonal Star of David formation, with the command post in the center of a fortified ring of six missile launchers. Gerchenov kept his eyes on the Fruit Set fire-control radar, which was receiving continually updated target information from the Spoon Rest radar. Before pushing the button, he needed one last instruction from regimental headquarters at Victoria de las Tunas, seventy-five miles away. The chain of command followed the geography of the island. The regiment received its orders from division headquarters in Camaguey, another seventy miles away, which was in turn waiting for a decision from El Chico.

Suddenly, a new order crackled across the radio. Despite the heavy rain, the connection was clear.

“Destroy Target Number 33. Use two missiles.”

There was a whoosh as the first missile roared into the air, chasing the distant contrail in the sky at three times the speed of sound. A second missile followed a few seconds afterward. They locked onto the target through radar, accelerating in a graceful arc. Watching the radar screen, Gerchenov could see two little dots honing in on a larger dot, gathering speed as they moved across the screen. After a few seconds, the dots merged into one and disintegrated. There was a sudden poof of light in the darkened sky. The major could see pieces of wreckage falling to earth.

“Target Number 33 is destroyed,” he reported at 10:19 a.m.

Most of the wreckage fell to earth eight miles from the Banes SAM site. One wing of the plane ended up in the center of a little village called Veguitas. A mangled and charred section of fuselage containing Major Anderson’s body landed in a sugarcane field a few hundred yards away. The tail of the U-2 glided onward to the sea.

Reconstructing the incident later, American investigators concluded that a proximity fuse had detonated the SAM missile as it closed in on the spy plane, spraying shrapnel in all directions. Several pieces of shrapnel sliced through the cockpit, piercing the pilot’s partial-pressure suit and the back of his helmet. Rudolf Anderson was probably killed instantly. Had he somehow survived the initial explosion, he would certainly have died a few seconds later, from the loss of oxygen and the shock of depressurization.

The column of trucks transporting the nuclear warheads from Bejucal to Sagua la Grande had stopped twice during the night to permit the drivers to get some rest. Everything had gone smoothly. Cuban villagers greeted the slow-moving military convoy during the hours of daylight with shouts of “ Que vivan los sovieticos!” “ Fidel-Khrushchev!” and “ Patria o muerte!” But none of the onlookers had any idea what was hidden in the boxy, humpbacked storage vans.

The convoy was within sixty miles of its destination when U.S. Navy planes flew low over the central highway. The Americans had still not succeeded in locating the nuclear warheads, despite a frantic search effort. One of the morning reconnaissance missions passed directly over the main nuclear warhead storage facility outside Bejucal, which CIA analysts were still describing as a “munitions storage site.” “Bunker not seen,” the photo interpreters reported. “No change in visible portion.” The previous day, Air Force jets had photographed the storage site for the Luna warheads, six miles east of Bejucal, without finding anything new. “No apparent change,” read the photo interpretation report on the Managua bunker. “Single fence around site is supported by Y-shaped posts. Vines have grown on fence in some sections.”