The Colonels, page 51
part #4 of Brotherhood of War Series
He tapped the hook with his finger. He asked to be connected with the manager and told him he would be very grateful if a first-class seat could be found for him on the next plane to the States.
(Two)
Near Aguada de Pasajeros, Cuba
0650 Hours, 7 April 1961
Sergeant First Class Juan Vincenzo Lopez had philosophized with maddening frequency: “Operations aren’t so bad. It’s sitting around with your thumb up your ass that gets you down.”
For Ellis, keeping the troops occupied had posed something of a problem. Troops with a lot of time to think can come up with very imaginative worst-possible scenarios for their future, and troops hiding out in the mountains of a hostile country can not play intramural softball or be assigned to whitewash rocks to keep them busy.
Then M/Sgt Karr and SFC Lopez presented Lieutenant Ellis with a proposal to go into Aguada de Pasajeros to steal a truck to provide an additional power supply; this would (a) obviate the necessity of turning the bicycle pedals at all, (b) save the batteries for an emergency, and (c) permit the team (when the word came) to get their asses down to the beach and away several hours earlier than the plan called for.
At first Lieutenant Ellis was opposed to the idea. He had been ordered to make every effort to avoid capture, so that the United States would not be embarrassed by the public display of captured American soldiers involved in what was a native Cuban effort to overthrow the communist regime of Fidel Castro. Any project like this was bound to involve some risk. But as he thought about it, he saw that the plan had two things going for it. The sooner he got the team to the beach after the invasion started, the less chance they would be captured. And putting Operation Hot Generator into effect would give his men something to think about.
He decided that what M/Sgt Karr and SFC Lopez proposed was worthy of execution. The only problem with their carefully thought-out plan was that neither of them spoke Spanish well. Consequently Lieutenant Ellis had accompanied SFC Lopez into Aguada de Pasajeros, leaving M/Sgt Karr behind and in command. The theft of a 1948 Ford pickup had gone smoothly. By noon the next day, the truck had been installed in a camouflaged position with its rear wheels off the ground, its hood removed against possible engine overheating, and its carburetor and gear box arranged so that—at just above normal idle—the rear wheel drove the bicycle pedal mechanism at precisely the right speed to power the aviation navigation aid.
SFC Lopez then devised and built a switch that would instantly switch the batteries on in the event the engine stopped. When the word came, all that would be necessary for them to do was start up the truck, wait until the engine appeared to be operating normally, and then haul ass for the beach to be picked up.
Other missions had been launched, primarily to keep up troop morale. Their execution had seen the only shots fired—three rounds from Lieutenant Ellis’s silenced .22 caliber pistol. Ellis had gone three times to the outskirts of Aguada de Pasajeros with various members of the team, where he had shot three pigs in the ear with the silenced pistol, gutted them, and then carried them back to the camp for an alfresco pig roast.
And then there was a message from Base that Ellis did not immediately recognize. He had to consult his code book (actually, two sheets of very thin paper designed to dissolve very quickly in water, or saliva) to decipher them.
“Augmentation Two Men Equipment Time M Site 8 Acknowledge”
The message required that Lieutenant Ellis make an important decision: The dropping of two men and equipment (unspecified, but he thought it was likely that it would be replacement transmitters) at Time M (first light) at Site 8 (a field three miles away) was the wrong time and the wrong place.
If he had a functioning transmitter, he could inform Base and recommend other sites and places. The area where Base intended to HALO the augmentation was one of the few places where the People’s Revolutionary Militia, or whatever the fuck those clowns called themselves, operated patrols.
The fields in that area were being sown. Lieutenant Ellis didn’t have the vaguest goddamn idea what they were planting. But whatever it was, it was stuck into the ground by three-person teams. One dug a hole, one stuck something in the hole, and the third covered the hole. The persons doing this were female, many of them young. Members of the team had spent many hours observing the native woman through binoculars. Only a few of the women, it had been determined, wore brassieres.
The area was thoroughly patrolled by two or three pickup trucks, each carrying two or more Cubans armed to the teeth. There was no evidence of counterrevolutionary activity in the area (except for one missing truck and three missing pigs), but vigilant patrol gave the revolutionary guards a splendid opportunity to swagger around the girls, manfully handling their weapons.
Lieutenant Ellis realized he had only two options. He could either use the flares to acknowledge receipt of the order and announce his preparedness to meet the augmentation team or to signal that the intended augmentation should be aborted.
He decided that he better go along with what the higher ups had in mind. Since he did not know the purpose of the augmentation team, he had to presume that inserting it had a higher priority than even the mission of “A” Team No. 6. There had probably been at least one more team like his inserted elsewhere. They would want insurance. That meant that it had been decided that inserting the augmentation team was worth the risk of losing “A” Team No. 6 and its capability.
Ellis ordered the flare signal which told Base to send the team.
That night, he divided his own team in two: M/Sgt Karr, and four others would remain at the nav-aid site. They would make every effort not to be discovered. They were authorized to eliminate the intruders or to take any other action they saw fit.
Ellis took the remaining three men with him through the woods to Site M. He sent one man who spoke passable Spanish to the high end of the field. If the augmentation team landed near him, he was to wave them into the woods, and, if necessary, provide covering fire from his machine gun.
Ellis positioned the other two men in the trees on either side of the road leading to the field. Each had a machine gun, a submachine gun, and fragmentation hand grenades. They would be in a position to delay—for a time—vehicles and personnel moving either from the town to the field or from the field to the town.
Lieutenant Ellis himself took up a position in a tree on the low end of the field. From there he could see the entire field. Everyone was in place an hour before the first faint rays of the sun were evident on the horizon.
The sun came up quickly. The sky was clear. There was no sign, no contrail of high altitude condensation. He was to wonder about that later. He thought there was always a contrail.
He saw the canopies, three of them, pop open. And as if the popping open of the canopies was a cue, he heard the faint sound of truck engines coming up the hill.
The two parachutists and the cargo bag landed almost in the center of the field. They did not run (as Ellis thought they would) for the tree line at either edge of the field. He saw SFC Haywood, whom he had sent to the far edge of the field, standing at the tree line frantically waving a handkerchief.
But the parachutists—looking down the hill—did not see him. And apparently they couldn’t hear him. They stood where they were and divested themselves of the leather HALO gear. And left it where they were.
They were, Ellis saw, in civilian clothing: flower-printed shirts and cotton pants. They were not armed, either, he saw with surprise. What they took from the cargo container was suitcases. They were either Cubans or Americans intending to pass themselves off as Cubans.
Cursing his stupidity for not thinking of it before, he realized that the jumpers had seen the trucks coming up the mountain and had realized that it was more important to get off the field immediately, even though that meant the inevitable discovery of the chutes and other equipment later.
It was also entirely possible, Ellis realized, that even though they had popped their chutes no more than 800 feet off the ground, the chutes had been seen by the truckloads of farm girls and their escorts from the People’s Revolutionary Militia.
Why they didn’t run instantly for the woods became immediately evident. A pickup carrying a cabful of revolutionary guards appeared on the road. The jumpers apparently had decided that they would appear less suspicious walking down the road than running for the trees.
It took the revolutionary guards longer to spot the two men walking down the road than Ellis thought it would. But when they saw them, the driver immediately raced toward them, skidded the truck sideward on the road, and stopped.
The guards leaped from the truck brandishing their weapons. The two parachutists, who had made no attempt to run, put their hands in the air.
Ellis slid down the tree and ran back through the woods to the road. It was further than he thought it was and when he finally reached the road, he understood why. He had become disoriented in the woods, and was much further down the hill than he had planned to be. He didn’t know exactly where he was, only that he was further down the hill than the two men he had left to guard it.
He ran up the road, once almost dropping his Thompson .45 ACP submachine gun. He had been given his choice of weapons, and he had elected to take a stockless Thompson with a 50-round drum magazine, for no better reason that he had once seen Alan Ladd use one against the Japanese on a late, late movie on television.
He heard the truck coming down the hill.
He kept running up the hill.
He saw a familiar stand of trees. He was almost to the men he had left by the side of the road. But there was no time to talk to them, to explain what had happened.
Now that he was faced with it, he knew there was no chance at all that he could stand in the road and mow the bad guys down with the tommy gun. For one thing, if he did manage to hit the pickup truck, he would more than likely kill the people he was trying to save.
He ran to the side of the road and dropped the Thompson in a ditch. Then he tore off his fatigue jacket and dropped it on the road as he ran.
When he saw the truck, he ran up the middle of the road toward it, frantically waving his arms.
The truck skidded to a halt. Two revolutionary heroes were in the back of the truck training their weapons, a Thompson and a Garand, on the two prisoners in the bed of the truck. One of them very nearly lost his seat as the truck skidded to a stop.
The driver opened the door and stepped onto the running board.
“Qué pasa?” he demanded.
“There’s more of them,” Ellis shouted in Spanish. “Fifty of them! Maybe a hundred!” He gestured excitedly behind him toward the woods.
The two men in the back of the truck stood up to get a better look. The driver of the truck ran toward Ellis, taking a Model 1911A1 Colt from a holster as he ran. He was in the process of chambering a round when the first machine gun burst came. It struck him four times in the chest and face. He stopped and dropped to his knees, a surprised look on his face, and then fell forward.
Before the driver had dropped to his knees, there was a second and longer burst of machine-gun fire from the opposite side of the road. It knocked one of the revolutionary guards out of the truck and blew off the top of the head of the second one.
Ellis ran to the truck.
The prisoners jumped out of the bed. Ellis recognized one of them, a little Jew.
“God, Ellis,” Lt. Colonel Sanford T. Felter said, “am I glad to see you!”
It was the little Jew who had been given a green beret the day Ellis had graduated from McCall. Ellis, with an OCS reflex, saluted.
Felter smiled, and returned it casually. Then he jumped into the cab of the pickup truck and raced the engine, furiously. He jumped out, raised the hood, and looked inside.
“Nothing wrong with this except old age,” he announced.
Ellis saw that burst of machine-gun fire which had taken out the driver had stitched the pickup truck. But the damage was to the door, which had been open, and there was only one neat hole in the windshield.
Felter went to the bed of the truck and handed Ellis one of the suitcases.
“There’s a transmitter in there for you,” he said. “When you get it on the air, tell him we’re on our way to Objective Delta. Your orders remain otherwise unchanged.”
By then the man with him was in the driver’s seat of the pickup truck. Felter ran around to the other side and jumped in. The truck spun its wheels and headed down the hill.
Ellis ran into the trees and lay down, his chest heaving, his eyes fuzzy.
A moment later, two more pickups came around the turn. There were two short bursts of machine-gun fire, and one more long one. And then, a moment after that, a two-or three-shot burst.
When he got to his feet, he saw that the two trucks had gone off the road, one on each side. The five men they had held were all dead. He wondered if that had been the smart thing to do, or whether it would have been better to just let the trucks pass.
It didn’t matter. He went onto the road where the machine gunners could see him. He made a gesture, “pack it up, get away,” and then he ran down the road until he found his Alan Ladd tommy gun. He picked it up and ran into the woods.
It occurred to him that he had just been in his first combat, his first firefight, and he had not fired a round.
When they got back to the camp, Lieutenant Ellis found that the blisters he earned carrying the suitcase with the transmitter in it were in vain. There were two barely visible holes in the cheap artificial leather. Two .308 inch diameter bullets had gone through the transmitter before passing out the other side.
There was nothing to do but sit tight, hoping that when they discovered the fight, Castro’s soldiers would decide that whoever had been in the area had left in the missing pickup truck.
(Three)
227 Melody Lane
Ozark, Alabama
2030 Hours, 16 April 1961
“He’s got a visitor,” Jane Jiggs said to her husband as she turned off Melody Lane and into the driveway of 227 Melody Lane. There was a Cadillac already there.
“It doesn’t have a post sticker,” Paul Jiggs said. Then he saw the CD plate. “Diplomatic plates,” he added. “It must be Jannier. I heard they were back.”
Major General Paul Jiggs started to open his door.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said.
“I don’t want to block that car,” Jane Jiggs said.
She backed out the driveway and parked the car on the street. Her husband and the two men in the back seat, a colonel and a master sergeant, got out of the car and walked across the lawn toward the house.
They were, she knew, a notification team. An ad hoc, unofficial notification team, but nevertheless a notification team about to discharge an unpleasant duty.
They had left her behind. Not out of discourtesy, she thought, but because their minds were on something else.
She caught up with them at the door in time to hear Colonel Paul Hanrahan say to M/Sgt Wojinski, “Push the doorbell, Ski.”
Wojinski pressed an illuminated button by the door. Chimes sounded.
Major Craig W. Lowell appeared at the door in a powder-blue polo shirt and pale yellow pants. When he saw them, he smiled broadly.
“My God!” he said. “This is wonderful! We’ll really have to kill a fatted calf. Jean-Philippe and Melody just this moment got here!”
There was no reply.
“To judge by your faces,” he said, “old Silver Cloud Lowell has jumped to the wrong conclusion again. Now I’m afraid to ask why you’re here.”
Colonel Hanrahan handed him the yellow teletype message:
SECRET
CIA MCLEAN VA VIA DEFENSE COMM AGENCY
FOR COMMANDING GENERAL FORT RUCKER ALA
FOLLOWING CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET EYES ONLY COMGEN FORT RUCKER QUOTE PLEASE PASS SOONEST FOR ACTION TO COL PAUL T. HANRAHAN BELIEVED TO BE AT YOUR STATION: THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR THE CIA REGRETS TO INFORM YOU THAT LT COL SANFORD T FELTER PRESENTLY SERVING WITH THIS AGENCY IS MISSING ON A FOREIGN ASSIGNMENT AND MAY BE PRESUMED DEAD. NO FURTHER INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. THE DIRECTOR BELIEVES THE ARMY IS THE AGENCY WHICH SHOULD INFORM SURVIVORS. ANY FURTHER INFORMATION RECEIVED WILL BE RELAYED AS RECEIVED. ENDQUOTE END TOPSECRET PORTION. IF COL HANRAHAN NOT PRESENT YOUR STATION PLEASE ADVISE LOCATION MOST EXPEDITIOUS MEANS. FOR THE DIRECTOR. JAMES W. STEMME. DEPDIR FOR ADMINISTRATION.
“Oh, shit!” Lowell said.
He turned from the door and went into the house. The others trooped after him.
Madame Melody Dutton Greer Jannier, very pregnant, and her husband were in the living room.
Jane Jiggs went to her and kissed her.
“How are you, honey?” she asked.
Melody gave her an impatient smile.
“What’s wrong, Craig?” Melody asked. He handed her the TWX. She read it, said “Damn!” and handed it to her husband.
Both Major General Jiggs and Colonel Paul T. Hanrahan were uncomfortable with Lowell’s violation of security regulations. Neither Jean-Philippe nor Melody should have been shown a Top Secret TWX.
“Ah, mon Dieu,” said Jean-Philippe Jannier. “C’est le petit Juif féroce, n’ est-ce pas?”
“Right,” Lowell said very bitterly. “The ferocious little Jew. I think he would like that for an epitaph.”
“We thought,” Jane Jiggs said, “that you might want to tell Sharon.”
“I’ve got a 23 laid on to take you to Atlanta,” Paul Jiggs said.
“No way,” Lowell said, firmly, coldly. “I did that the last time the Mouse was playing hero and they thought he’d gotten himself blown away.”
There was no reply.
Major Lowell said “Shit!” again, and there were tears in his eyes.
Then he asked: “How do we know he’s dead?”
“They must have a pretty good idea, Craig,” Hanrahan said, “or they wouldn’t have sent the TWX.”
“Well, I’m not going to put Sharon through that ordeal again on the strength of a CIA guess,” Lowell said, flatly.
