But as they filed into the transports from the long flight from Havana to East Germany, the Cuban women, over twenty of them, aroused intense curiosity among the East German soldiers. For the East German troops, used to the hard, athletic beauty of their women, the Cuban women’s beautifully developed bodies were more supple in appearance. The compañeras’ swarthy Latin color, their golden faces beaded by sweat, their combat bras damp through their dark green T-shirts, were an intriguing and welcome sight. Several of them had to press up closely against the men in the tightly packed aircraft, but not one of the men complained. It would be a long flight.
“Sicherheitsgürtel anfassen!”—”Fasten seat belts for takeoff.”
Despite some eager helpers, not one compañera needed assistance, most of the 12 °Cubans wearing red A patches on their black berets, signifying they had served in the African campaigns of “fraternal assistance,” from Angola to the Sudan. As the pilots in the two Condors began the preflight checks, the seven hundred troops in the Condors were ordered to put in their earplugs as the engines went into their distinctive high-vibration scream. For a few token Bulgarian assault troops who had never been flown into action before, the noise in the huge military plane, devoid of the insulation normally accorded passenger aircraft, was frightening.
Despite the noise and the earplugs, Dieter Meir, a tall, blond East German, the cousin of Hans Meir at Outpost Alfa, managed to introduce himself to the Cuban woman next to him.
“Ich heisse Juanita “—”My name is Juanita,” she said, putting out her hand. Seeing his surprise at her knowing German, she explained, shouting close to him in competition with the engines, “We have many experts from Germany.”
Meir nodded rather than saying anything, as now conversation was impossible; the huge Condor’s engines were in takeoff pitch as its nose wheels traced the white floodlit semicircles about Schönefeld terminal, beginning its lumbering and surprisingly bumpy roll toward the main tarmac. The second Condor was taxiing three hundred yards behind as they moved to the runway best suited for takeoff in the “Berliner Luft,” the legendary and invigorating wind that blew down across the old Prussian plain across West Berlin’s Grunewald Forest and toward the East German farms beyond Kopenick’s Forest.
When Juanita had said “Germany” rather than “East Germany” to Dieter Meir, it struck a responsive chord, for he hoped that one day, in the heart, it truly would be Germany again— not just when the politicians declared it was, but united in spirit, in the same way that he and the Cuban, from thousands of miles away, had come together in their common ideology — to help unite another country. And yet he sometimes wondered if it would ever really happen in his own country, families, like his own, separated too long, still split asunder, the lingering legacy of having been apart for so many years beyond the 500-kilometer anti-Fascist barrier.
Inside the terminal the Bereitschaftspolizei, “police band,” played a stirring rendition of “Freiheit and Peace,” at once entertaining the waiting passengers for domestic flights and being recorded by Soviet and other Eastern bloc radio and television networks to mark the historical occasion on which the socialist world had, after so much inner turmoil, risen as one in defense of the North Korean workers’ democracy in their struggle against the American assault. How typically stupid the Americans had been, to assume that after the workers’ democratic movements had erupted in the Gorbachev years somehow everyone would suddenly throw away the good socialist things with the bad and declare themselves lovers of capitalism — to trade socialist evils for the evils of capitalism, as if there was nothing in between.
Aboard the Condors none of the more than seven hundred East German, Cuban, Bulgarian, and Romanian troops could hear the ceremonies or speeches, but there was excitement in the two huge transports. Most of the troops were under twenty-five and needed to prove themselves. On the other hand, Gen. Hans Demmler, commander in chief of the Communist volunteer force, could hear the pomp and circumstance over the earphones, plugged into the aircraft’s circuits, but he took no notice of it. His hands were full, hoping that as the different segments had not time to train together for the task at hand, they would fight well as self-contained units, not that he had any choice, for full integration would be impossible with the language barriers, despite liaison officers. Right now he was checking that each AK-74 was “tipped” to protect the barrel and front sight from any damage during the flight. Although the troops had been told the flight plan called for a landing at Khabarovsk, if possible they would refuel in the air, as Moscow deemed this would be an impressive logistical display for the Americans.
The engines screamed in protest as the flaps were tested, then the brakes released, as the first Condor began the long run, gathering speed on the south runway.
The shadowy figures of the two men on top of the eight-story Kreuzberg apartment block were all but invisible, one of them leaning against the northeastern comer of the water tank for support, head bowed, right hand as one with the gripstock of the Stinger. It was not the Stinger of Afghan guerrilla fame, which in fact had often refused to fire, but the much improved Stinger-POST, incorporating the passive optical scanning function so that the taxiing Condor completely filled the aiming circle, the edge a little fuzzy due to diffused heat waves at the plane’s extremities that were rising and falling in the Stinger’s sight like a mirage. The Condor was equipped with exhaust “baffles” or shields to minimize hot exhaust trail, but as the fully loaded plane rose and banked hard right, both port and starboard engine exhausts were clear to the naked eye, let alone the Stinger. The agent squeezed the grip, the Stinger’s back-blast illuminating the rooftop momentarily, scorching the agent’s arm. The Condor, in effect a climbing fuel tank with soldiers aboard, exploded like napalm, reminding Chin of the American Challenger explosion years before, one of the Condor’s engines, part of the wing still attached, cartwheeling, disintegrating in a fizzing halo of scarlet, ripping open the night. The main body of the Condor fell as if lead-weighted onto the tarmac like a zeppelin tight with hydrogen. As it burst into flame, the first fifty rows of tiny soldiers could be seen, heads black as burnt matches, then disappearing in the orange-white inferno that raced hundreds of meters down the runway.
Suddenly the second Condor, in the process of braking, tires sparking, exploded, its four nose wheels collapsing, fuselage sliding along the tarmac like the chin of some huge dinosaur on black ice, plowing into the inferno of the first plane. In the near daylight intensity of the scene, as fire engines screamed, the Koreans atop the building three-quarters of a mile away could plainly see some Communist volunteer troops in the second Condor sliding down open ramps, most of them afire, others coming down into a fuel slick that ignited seconds later, the ribbing of the fuselage now stretched against the skin of the aircraft in an X ray of the plane, the roar like a thousand Christmas trees going up. There were no screams, or at least none that could be heard over those of the sirens. A tongue of flame like a ceremonial dragon’s shot out and around the rear cargo door of the second Condor, incinerating the remainder of the fleeing troops. Then the Koreans could hear a rattling sound, becoming louder as searchlights streamed out into the night like wildly flung straws darting over the West German apartments across the bulldozed remnants of the Wall. The rattle was the sound of machine-gun fire.