Shift: A Novel

7 John Warnock Hinckley Jr. attempts to assassinate Ronald Reagan as the president leaves the Washington Hilton Hotel. Hinkley claimed to have shot the president in order to make himself as famous as Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. At his trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Operation Mongoose

There were six people in the hold of the C-47 idling on the runway of the Retalhuleu base in Guatemala: Robertson, Sturgis, and he himself, plus two Cuban exiles who’d originally trained to be part of the Bay of Pigs, as well as a more recent defector with the unwieldy name of Don Gutierrez Rave de Mendez y Sotomayor.

Six people and one box of cigars.

Melchior—not his real name, but the most convenient one available to us—looked down at the box of cigars. He held it in his lap like a sleeping infant, delicately and firmly at the same time. Not wanting to disturb it, yet not wanting to drop it, either. He knew the cigars had something to do with the plan, but only Don Gutierrez Rave de Mendez y Sotomayor understood their exact purpose, which he refused to divulge until the team was on the ground. If that didn’t tell you what kind of asshole he was—not to mention how badly this mission had been planned—then there was his unbearable cologne, which filled up the cabin with the stink of chemical roses, or the fact that Gutierrez Rave de Mendez y Sotomayor was just his surname and that he insisted it be used in full whenever someone spoke to him. In Melchior’s experience, no one in the Spanish-speaking world could match the effete snobbery of a Cuban hacendado. The castellanos of Mexico came close, and high-born Argentinos were about as palatable as pig shit. But the sugar patrons of Cuba were the last people in the Western hemisphere to profess an unabashed belief in the institution of slavery—which belief had only become that much more entrenched since the slaves had driven them from their country.

Just before they took off, JM/WAVE radioed from Miami with the news that the plan had been code-named Operation Mongoose. The fact that Ted Shackley was willing to break air silence for such a trivial piece of information—the fact that Shackley had been made a station chief at all—was one more indication of the Company’s sad state of affairs under the new president, who had recently let slip, in the goddamned New York Times, of all places, that he wanted to “to scatter the CIA to the four winds—to break it into a thousand pieces,” The ironic thing was, Melchior thought as he looked around the ragtag crew gathered in the C-47, the Company seemed to be doing a pretty good job of scattering itself.

Take Robertson for example. A plump pink specimen of American manhood with a ziggurat of Spam cans squeezed between his thick thighs. Here was a guy for whom eighth-grade arithmetic had clearly been an issue, let alone the implications of the Monroe Doctrine in the second half of the twentieth century. Now he was part of a team tasked with killing the most paranoid leader this side of the Atlantic—which fact he wasn’t going to find out until after he’d parachuted onto Cuban soil. Even before the plane rattled down the runway and heaved its belly into the air, Robertson had popped the top on the first can of Spam, and for a long time the only sound in the hold was the rumble of the engines and the softer smack of his cud. Then:

“So, uh, who’s the mongoose?”

On the opposite bench, Sturgis started at the sound of Robertson’s drawly voice. He was one of those twitchy fellows. Not scared. Just eager for the killing to start. He took a pull from the mysteriously full pint of whiskey he’d been nursing since Melchior had arrived that morning, then said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Robertson spooned a gelatinous pink mound into his mouth. “I mean”—he pushed half-chewed meat into the pockets of his jowly cheeks—“is the mongoose Castro, or is the mongoose the Company?”

“Rip, you’re a fucking idiot.” Sturgis took another pull. “Of course the Company is the mongoose. The mongoose always kills the cobra. That’s the only reason you’ve ever heard of mongeese.”

Mongeese, Melchior thought. Meat you can eat with a spoon. If Castro needed any propaganda to support his revolution, all he had to do was broadcast footage of these two paragons of capitalism.

“Cobra?” Robertson was apparently confused by the addition of a second animal. “Who’s that?”

“Oh my fucking God. Castro is the cobra. Now shut your fucking mouth before I shove that can of Spam down your throat.”

Robertson looked at Sturgis like, Isn’t that what I’m doing?

“Without opening it, you dipshit.”

Sturgis took another pull from his pint, then offered it to Melchior. The gesture was diffident, as if he was more interested in whether the newcomer would take it than in trying to make an ally. The label on the pint said Johnny Walker Black, which Melchior doubted matched the contents. Still, it was bound to be better than the backyard rum that lay in their immediate future. Melchior ignored it anyway. Robertson might’ve been an idiot, but Sturgis had fought with Fidel Castro against Fulgencio Batista before he seemed to realized the capitalists paid better. If there was one thing Melchior hated, it was a traitor. He’d’ve sooner imbibed the piss of the whores who worked the comfort stations outside the Retalhuleu base, and God knows what was swimming around their guts.

“I’m gonna catch some Z’s.” He tapped the box of cigars on his lap. “Anyone wakes me before Matanzas gets one of these up his ass.”

He wasn’t wearing a cap, so he draped the day-old copy of the Washington Post over his face like a veil. ALLEN WELSH DULLES RESIGNS AS HEAD OF CIA IN WAKE OF BAY OF PIGS DEBACLE, screamed the headline. CHOICE OF FORMER HEAD OF ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION AS NEW DCI SUGGESTS KENNEDY SOFTENING POSITION ON CUBA. A moment later he heard Sturgis chuckle, presumably after he’d finished subvocalizing the words of the headline.

“The plural of ‘mongoose’ is ‘mongooses,’” Melchior growled beneath the paper. “Fucking dipshit.”

About twenty minutes after they cleared the East Coast, the sky began to wring itself out in one of those up- and-down squalls that plague the Caribbean at the tail end of hurricane season. For the next hour and a half the six passengers in the C-47 were bounced around like loose socks in a washing machine. Melchior had snored through hurricanes, cyclones, monsoons, and every other synonym for a tropical storm you could think of, but at the first sign of turbulence, Don Gutierrez Rave de Mendez y Sotomayor pulled an ornate silver crucifix out of his shirt and pressed it to his lips. A sibilant stream of Spanish passed from his mouth to the little crucified Jesus, interrupted by sharp groans whenever the plane hit a particularly big bump. Melchior’d been in bordellos with less moaning, and, what with the rattling of the ever multiplying empty Spam cans bouncing over the floor like Mexican jumping beans, it was impossible to get any sleep.