Cathy Malone finished her morning run, thankful that the weather wasn't terribly oppressive. It wasn't the heat, people said, it was the humidity. Bull. It was both of them.
She had run her normal five miles and endured the usual stares and occasional whistles from what she thought were really hard up sailors and marines at Gitmo. Although there were several hundred women on the base, most of them were wives, frequently officer's wives, and very much untouchable. They almost never got whistled at, poor things, no matter how cute they were, lest an officer husband or father get angry at insolent enlisted men. The rest were civilian workers like her, many of whom were older and married. She was one of the few who were both civilian and single, as well as reasonably attractive. Thus, those who knew who she was felt free to whistle at her. It was innocent fun and she often waved at them, which drew friendly laughs.
The running relaxed her, cleansed her, and she sweated profusely as she cooled down. It reminded her of her days as a cross-country runner in the small Catholic high school she'd attended in Pennsylvania. She'd been a good runner, but not a great one. No Olympics or nationals for her. Nor was she offered an athletic scholarship, because women didn't get them. The nuns at the school had mixed emotions about women in athletics. Some hated her for participating even though the school offered the sport, while others admired her for having what they cloyingly called spunk.
She'd had to work to help pay for her tuition and it had taken her more than five years to get her liberal arts degree at the University of Pittsburgh. She would become a high school English and history teacher, not solely because it was one of the few professions open to women, but because she genuinely liked teaching. The barriers to women in business were beginning to come down, but only just beginning. It didn't matter. The world of business didn’t interest her. She would teach because that's what she wanted to do.
Some of the men who had recognized her had waved instead of whistled. They knew her as the young teacher lady who'd been brought in to help enlisted men improve their reading skills so they could be promoted. After only a couple of months, she'd developed a reputation for being sincere, helpful, and successful. It made her feel that her one big adventure before settling down with a real job and real students was worth it.
In a perverse way, she liked the whistles. She almost never got whistled at back home in Pennsylvania. She didn't think she was terribly pretty. Attractive, yes, but pretty? Never.
She was about five-four, had short light brown hair, and her figure was slender to the point of being thin and, as her older sister used to joke, everyone wondered when her breasts were going to develop. Cathy was twenty-four. What she had up front was going to be it, she thought ruefully. Her sister had also joked that the real reason behind her going to Gitmo was so she could meet desperate guys who were as horny as Cathy. There were times when she wanted to strangle her sister who, she realized, might have been jealous. Cathy had gone on to college and not gotten knocked up by her high school boyfriend like her sister had, and then gotten married to the jerk at seventeen, and divorced at nineteen.
Regarding Cathy's motives in going to Cuba, her sister was somewhat correct in wanting to meet guys, but the number of dates she'd gone on so far at Gitmo was very small. Nor had they led to anything anymore consequential than some furtive gropings that she'd stopped before they'd gone any further. She had told her parents that she wanted to get over a broken relationship with a guy she'd been dating in college and they'd bought the story. However, Cathy had dumped him, not the other way around, and used that as an excuse for them to approve of her going to Cuba. She just wanted to get away from home and do something just a little exciting, and Cuba had seemed just perfect.
It was going to be a lonely Christmas, she thought sadly, but that was her choice. Well, her saving's account's choice. She'd had to decide whether to go home in the summer or Christmas, and had chosen summer. There would not be enough money for both trips. Guantanamo at Christmas had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Now so many people were taking vacation or leave that the base seemed deserted. She would have to work to find things to fill her time. She would go to church on Christmas Eve and maybe someone would invite her for Christmas Eve dinner. Good idea. She would go to church again on Christmas day and try to wangle a second meal. After all was said and done, the holidays were going to be boring. Fattening perhaps, but boring.
Not that she wished a rerun of the excitement of the Cuban Missile Crisis during which she and other civilians had been hurriedly evacuated to Virginia. Days spent stuffed in a miserable transport ship with barely adequate food and totally inadequate bathing and toilet facilities were not her idea of a Caribbean cruise. They'd all been relieved to get off the ship in Virginia. Not only were they safe in the good old U. S. of A., but they could eat and shower, along with taking a crap with some element of privacy.
Only in the last few weeks had the civilians been permitted to return. Being prudent, Cathy now kept an overnight bag filled with a change of clothing, underwear, some dry cereal, sanitary napkins and some other things she might need if another sudden evacuation should occur.
She went into the three bedroom apartment she shared with two other women, stripped off her sweaty shirt and shorts, kicked off her shoes and stepped into the shower. She thought about who she might get to invite her over for dinner. Never, never pass up a free meal.
CIA Director John McCone knew a Class-A dilemma when he saw one. His agency's reputation had almost recovered from the Bay of Pigs debacle in which he'd virtually guaranteed a decisive and swift victory over Castro. He'd announced that his Agency-sponsored invaders would meet light resistance from the poorly trained Cuban military on the invasion beaches and there would be a quick and massive popular uprising against Fidel. No problem, he and the CIA had said, and, soon after, no Fidel.
It hadn't happened, of course. The anti-communist landing force had been cut to pieces by a surprisingly strong Cuban army and air force, and the survivors forced to surrender. That President Kennedy had, in the opinion of the anti-communists, reneged on a promise to provide air cover for the invasion was but one of the causes of the debacle. Those survivors, who hadn’t managed to escape to Florida, were now languishing in Cuban prisons, primarily on the Isle of Pines on the coast south of Havana. Worse, there hadn't been the hint of a popular uprising, which led the CIA to conclude that their low estimates of Castro’s popularity were tragically flawed and that Fidel was going to be in charge of Cuba for the long haul.
For a quite a while after that, McCone had been a virtual pariah in the White House. Fortunately, he and the CIA had done a much better job when it came to proving that Castro and the Soviets had been importing medium range nuclear capable guided missiles into Cuba, which precipitated what everyone called the Cuban Missile Crisis. The relationship with the Kennedy brothers wasn't perfect, but at least McCone and the CIA were allowed to participate and their reports were given some credence.
But this report could all blow it all to hell and back.
McCone wondered just what to do with the report from one hitherto unknown agent named Charles Kraeger that said that Castro was going to attack the base at Guantanamo Bay and would do so in just a day or so.
When he first received the report, he'd been incredulous. How could Castro go against the agreement that Khrushchev and Kennedy had made to prevent nuclear war just a few weeks earlier? The agreement also said the United States would never invade Cuba. So what was going on? The answer was easy — Castro hadn't signed the agreement and Castro was nuts.