W E B Griffin - BoW 05 - The Berets Read online

  W E B Griffin - BoW 05 - The Berets

  The Brotherhood Of War The Berets

  AP WASHINGTON

  FOR NATIONAL WIRE 828PM JULY 19, 1961 APW 31/283

  SLUG: SALINGER: "NO COMMENT" RE AMERICANS CAPTURED AT BAY OF PIGS

  WASH DC July 19: Presidential Press Secretary Piere Salinger refused comment tonight on the question of American military personnel captured In Cuba during the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba, and was either unable or unwilling to identify with whom President Kennedy has agreed not to publicly discuss the Issue.

  Salinger was questioned by the Associated Press at 8:08 P.M. following tonight's nationally televised Presidential Press Conference, seeking clarification of the following exchange:

  Meg Green (Chloe go Oun-Tlxnes): "Mr. President, there have been recurring rumors of American soldiers captured when the Bay of Pigs operation failed, and rumors that at least two such prisoners have been executed. What can you tell us about this?"

  President Kennedy- "I'm sorry, Meg, Ne agreed not to get Into that In public."

  Meg Green: "Agreed with whom. Mr. President?"

  President Kennedy- "Charley Whaley. I think you were next."

  Charles Whaley (Conservative Digest): "Mr. President, were any American military personnel taken prisoner during the Bay of Pigs Invasion?"

  President Kennedy- "I just answered that."

  When pressed for clarification, Presidential Press Secretary Salinger said, "Obviously, I have no comment on that." END NOTHING FOLlOWS.

  Key West, Florida 1430 Hours, 28 November 1961

  Tom Ellis had never been on a yacht before, nor had he ever been farther at sea than up to his waist in the waters lapping a Cuban beach. He was a fair-skinned young man, slightly built with light brown hair, who looked to be about seventeen. He was in fact twenty. He was the sort of pleasant-faced young man whom older people were prone to call "son." They seldom did so twice. Tom Ellis did not like to be called "son," nor to be thought of as a pleasant young boy, and when that happened, ice came into his eyes, enough to chill whomever he was looking at.

  He wasn't sure that Over Drought II was technically a yacht. That word called to his mind the President and Jackie on his sailboat, or that rich Greek and his opera singer on his private ocean liner. Maybe there was a word that he didn't know that properly described a boat like this one. He didn't think it was motorboat. In the end he decided that Over Draught II was indeed a yacht. Yachts were luxurious boats designed for pleasure, not work, and the interior of Over Draught II was as luxurious as anything he had ever seen outside of the movies. The floors were carpeted, and there was a king-size double bed in the teak-paneled master stateroom. To his eyes the main cabin seemed a floating version of a penthouse living room. Set discreetly in a corner was a bar with its own little sink and refrigerator. There were softly upholstered chairs, nice paintings, a twenty-four-inch television, and a stereo.

  On the back of the boat, chrome-plated lettering, like the Plymouth FURY or CADILLAC Sedan Dc Ville things you saw on cars, identified the boat as first a Bertram and then as Sport Fisherman 42, which he decided made reference to the length of the boat.

  The owner was aboard, a middle-aged, silver-haired man in expensive clothing who looked the sort of guy who would own something like this. The captain had a friend with him who was also middle-aged and tanned. The captain, a good-looking guy of about thirty with blond hair, dressed very casually in washed soft khaki pants and a polo shirt, had introduced him to the owner and to the other member of the crew, who looked like a younger version of the captain. They could have been brothers, Ellis decided. The young blond guy was the mate and Tom Ellis was sailing aboard Over Draught II as the deckhand.

  "I hope you know how little I know about boats," Ellis told the mate when he was showing Ellis where to put his stuff in the little cabin up front.

  "No big deal," the mate told him. "We're fueled and stocked, and all we have to do is untie her and take her out."

  "What if I get seasick?"

  He was embarrassed to ask the question, but he had long ago learned that it was less embarrassing in the long run to ask embarrassing questions up front than it was to make an ass of yourself later.

  "It's like a mirror out there today," the mate said. "I wouldn't worry about that. But just to be sure, if you start feeling funny, take a couple of these."

  He handed Ellis a small plastic vial. The label said it was Dramamine.

  "This stuff work?"

  "Ninety percent of the time," the mate said. "There are some people who seen determined to get sea sick. It doesn't work on them."

  The boat shuddered as the engines were started, one at a time. Eflis looked at the mate with a question in his eyes.

  "Now we'll untie her," the mate said with a smile, and motioned Ellis ahead of him out of the little cabin.

  When they were on the back of the boat, on what Ellis for lack of a better word thought of as the "veranda," the mate pointed to the half-inch woven nylon rope tying the boat to the pier.

  "You handle that," he said. "I'll go forward. When Captain Bligh gives the order, you just untie it, bring it aboard, and stow it in the locker."

  He pointed to a compartment built in the low wall that surrounded the veranda.

  "Got it," Ellis said.

  If they had told him about this job earlier than they had, Ellis thought, he would have found out something about boats, learned the right words. There were certainly books that he could have looked up in the library. He watched as the mate made his way to the front, nimbly half running along a narrow walkway.

  "Let loose the lines, fore and aft," the captain called down from the roof of the cabin. Ellis had noticed that the boat had two sets of controls, one up on top and one in the cabin. For when it rained, he thought. Or for when there was a storm.

  With his luck in this sort of thing, half a mile out in the ocean there would be a hurncane.

  The mate signaled to him to untie the ropes. He had to jump up on the wharf to do it. When he was done he quickly jumped back onto the veranda.

  The sound of the diesel engines changed, and the nose of the boat moved away from the wharf.

  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, Ellis told himself. He took the vial of Dramamine pills from his pocket and popped two of them in his mouth.

  Over Draught II moved into the wide part of the harbor, then started out of it, moving between two lines of things bobbing around in the water.

  "Buoys," Ellis said aloud, pleased that he knew what they were. Like the soap, which should really be pronounced "Life boo-wee" rather than "Life Boy."

  When they hit the first swell of the deep water and the whole damned boat went up and down, Tom Ellis was glad that he'd taken the Dramamine. Soon the dull murmur of the diesels changed to a dull roar, and the boat began to pick up speed through the water.

  Thirty minutes later he was reasonably sure that he was not going to get seasick and make an ass of himself. It was actually pretty nice in the back of the boat, sitting in one of the cushioned chairs bolted to the -floor and watching the water boil up alongside the boat and fan out in back.

  The mate came back and smiled at him.

  "You doing all right?" he asked.

  "Fine," Ellis said. "How fast are we going?"

  "Oh," the mate said, and looked over the side, "I guess eighteen, twenty knots."

  Ellis did the arithmetic.

  "About three hours?"

  "About that," the mate said. "There's chow if you're hungry.

  "Food?" Ellis said incredulously. "Thank you, no."

  "You'll change your mind," the mate said. "You work up an ap
petite on a small boat."

  Ellis doubted that but said nothing.

  "There's a couple of six-packs too," the mate said.

  "Maybe later," Ellis said.

  Two hours later Ellis made himself a ham-on-rye sandwich and washed it down with a Seven-Up. It wasn't as bad as he thought it would be. He reminded himself of the philosophical wisdom that things were seldom as bad as you thought they were going to be.

  When he finished his sandwich, he climbed the ladder up to where the captain was driving the boat.

  "Is it all right if I come up here?" he asked.

  "Sure," the captain said. "Glad to have the company."

  "How much farther?"

  "Thirty minutes, maybe forty-five," the captain said. "I suppose you're all set."

  "Yes, sir," Ellis said.

  Thirty minutes later there was a blip on the radar screen. The captain pointed it out to Ellis.

  "That's probably them," he said.

  "How can you tell?"

  "You ever read a dirty book called Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller?"

  "Yeah, when I was in high school."

  "We're within a few seconds of the Tropic of Cancer," the captain said. "And that's where we're supposed to meet them."

  Two minutes later Ellis began to make out the faint outline of a boat on the horizon and just a little left of straight ahead.

  "That's probably them," the captain said. "She's not moving.

  As they approached the other boat Ellis could see it more clearly. It was about as big as Over Draught II but narrower and rode lower in the water. The hull was gray and the superstructure a garish blue.

  The captain slowed the Over Draught H as they approached, and then slowed it further when they were closer. When they were fifty yards away from the gray and blue boat, he threw the Over Draught II into reverse momentarily. They stopped dead in the water, and the boat began to roll slightly with the swells. Ellis felt a pressure in his temples. He was also a little dizzy and felt a clammy sweat.

  "Jesus Christ, God!" he prayed silently. "Not now, please!"

  There was a small boat tied to the back of the other boat. Three men in khakis Cubans climbed off the gray boat and into the smaller one, and there was the sound of an outboard motor starting.

  Ellis went inside the Over Draught II and returned with a plastic attachE case. He handed it to the mate.

  "It's not locked," he said.

  The mate nodded.

  When the small boat came to the rear of the Over Draught II, one of the men in it threw a line to the mate. He caught it and tied it to a brass stanchion. Ellis looked down into the boat. There was a black-plastic-wrapped object in the boat, around which rope had been wound and formed into a sling. When one of the Cubans in the boat saw Ellis, he tossed the loose end of the rope to Ellis, who failed to catch it. He caught it on the second try.

  The Cuban in the boat stepped from it to the teak dive platform on the back of the Over Draught II, then climbed up a built-in ladder.

  The mate and Ellis pulled the black-plastic wrapped package onto the Over Draught II.

  The captain handed the briefcase to the man who had come aboard. He put it on the wet-bait well and opened it. It contained currency, twenty-dollar bills in packets of fifty bills each. These were bound with a paper strip reading $1000 in $20. There were fifty packets.

  As if he were dealing with people who were beneath him and were likely to try to cheat him, the Cuban arrogantly selected a packet of twenty-dollar bills, ripped them free of the paper strip, and counted them.

  "It's all there," the captain said, annoyance in his voice.

  "We will see," the Cuban said, tossing the loose bills on top of the others and selecting another packet.

  By then the mate and Ellis had laid the long black-plastic wrapped package on the deck.

  Ellis dropped to his knees beside it and with a quick gesture pulled up his left trouser leg and caine out with a knife. He inhaled audibly and plunged the knife tip into the plastic. It was tough and it took him a little while to saw through enough of the plastic to make a flap. He pulled the flap aside. There was a face, eyes and mouth open. The peculiar odor of decaying flesh seemed to erupt from the plastic. Ellis's face turned white, and he jumped to his feet, turned to the Cuban (who was still counting money) spun him around, and then put the tip of the knife against his carotid artery, where the jaw meets the neck. A torrent of gutter Spanish erupted from Ellis.

  "Ellis!" the captain said in alarm.

  "That's not Commander Eaglebury," Ellis said in English. Another torrent of angry Spanish erupted, and the Cuban yelped as Ellis nicked him with the point of his knife.

  There was the sound of actions being worked. The "owner" and his "friend" stepped to the door of the main cabin. Each held an Armalite AR-15.223 Remington automatic rifle in his hands.

  "Are you sure, Ellis?" the "owner's friend" said.

  Ellis didn't reply.

  There was a yelp of pain and terror from the Cuban as Ellis nicked him with the knife, and the Cuban said something very quickly to him.

  "The lying sonofabitch says he must have made a mistake," Ellis said. "He says that he just happens to have another body, which must be the one we're after."

  He moved the Cuban to one of the fighting chairs and forced him into it with the knife point, nicking him again. Blood was running down the man's neck and onto his khaki shirt. He was wide-eyed with terror and moaning a prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  Ellis leaned over the rail and spoke to the Cubans still in the boat. "Untie it," he said in English to the mate. "I'm sending them back for the right body."

  "And if they just take off?"

  "Then I'll slit this sonofabitch's throat and feed him to the fish," Ellis said.

  "Take it easy, Ellis," the captain said.

  "Jesus Christ!" Ellis said in moral indignation. "What a rotten fucking thing to try to do!"

  And then he thought of something.

  "Hold it! Take this one with you," he said, and then repeated that in Spanish. He turned to the mate. "Help me get this over the edge," he said.

  The body was lowered into the boat. The smell of decaying flesh turned Ellis's face white again.

  Halfway back to the gray and blue boat, the Cubans in the small boat heaved the black-plastic wrapped body over the side. It disappeared from sight for a moment and then bobbed to the surface.

  Five minutes later a second body was hauled onto the Over Draught II. Ellis took his knife again and slit the wrapping. He looked at the captain and nodded his head. The captain saw there were tears in his eyes.

  "Give him the briefcase," the captain ordered icily. "And allow him to get into the boat. But don't turn it loose. We'll take them with us for a thousand yards or so."

  "I'd like to slit his fucking throat," Ellis said.

  "No, you can't do that, Ellis," the captain said evenly, then ran quickly up the ladder to the flying bridge.

  "Is there some tape or something," Ellis asked, "to seal the body bag again?"

  "I'll get some," the mate said.

  Ellis dropped to his knees and waited for the tape, holding his nostrils closed against the smell of the putrefying flesh.

  The Over Draught II moved slowly through the water for a thousand yards and then cut the small boat free. The moment it was free, the captain opened his throttles.

  The gray and blue boat made no move to pursue them, and when it was clear that they were not going to fire on the Over Draught II, the "owner" and his "friend" put their Armalite AR-15s down. The owner went into the cabin and returned with a blanket, which he laid over the black-plastic wrapped body.

  "I think we'd best leave him there," he said gently to Ellis.

  Ellis nodded, sat down in a fighting chair, and stared out over the stern, carefully not looking at the blanket and what it concealed.

  Fifteen minutes later he got up and walked into the cabin. He went to the refrigerator and took out a can of Schli
tz.

  "Jesus!" the "owner's friend" said in awe. Ellis looked at him and then out the window, where the other man was pointing.

  A hundred yards to their right the water was turbulent, and a large gray-black submarine sail rose from it. Before the hull was visible, figures could be seen on the top of the sail, and an American flag appeared, flapping in the breeze.

  The captain slowed the boat and maneuvered closer to the submarine until, at about the moment the submarine stopped dead in the water, he was ten yards away from her.