the only reason Jack was going there, and Cecilia knew it. But Ursula and Marjorie were at the table, and they didn’t have the need-to-know, and Cecilia knew that, too.
Colonel Supo had told him he had been thinking. And what he had been thinking was that if they didn’t interdict any of the launches crossing Lake Tanganyika from Kigoma, that might be suspicious. If, Colonel Supo said he had been thinking, one of the T-28s to which he now had access could interdict the odd launch, giving the impression that it had been discovered by accident— an air patrol had just found it by luck—that would, he was thinking, convince the insurgents that there were certain risks in sending launches across the lake.
That would make them more cautious, thus reducing the frequency and number of launches they would attempt to send across Lake Tanganyika. And, of course, if they sank the odd launch now and then, that would consign X many pounds of supplies to the bottom of the lake, and force the insurgents not only to get more supplies but also to buy another launch and find a crew capable and willing to sail it across the lake, where the enemy, it was known, sometimes got lucky and came across a launch and sank it with all hands.
That’s what he had been thinking, Colonel Supo said, and what did his good friend Lieutenant Colonel Dahdi think of his thinking?
Colonel Dahdi said he was in complete agreement with Colonel Supo, but that he would have to discuss it with Miss Taylor.
Miss Taylor, when Lunsford had discussed it with her over lunch, had thought it was a good idea, with certain caveats. She had rather liked Major Lunsford’s notion that it was better to make the insurgents’ replacements simply disappear than to engage a replacement launch under conditions in which there might be survivors who could guess that there were agents in Kigoma transmitting intel vis-à-vis the departure of launches from that port.
“And we have to be very careful, George, to make sure we don’t sink some innocent smuggler. Your ASA people in Kigoma can get a message to Kamina or the T-28s how fast?”
“They can talk to the B-26s in the air, but not the T-28s.”
“So why don’t we send Jack Portet in a B-26—not to fly it, I want the Cubans to fly it—to make sure they get the right launch, and make it disappear?”
“Great minds think alike,” Father had said to Cecilia, “about love and war.”
He did not think it necessary to tell her that he was going to tell Jack to make absolutely sure that when the trigger on the B- 26’s control yoke was depressed, firing the six .50-caliber Browning machine guns in the nose, he wanted that trigger depressed by someone who really knew what he was doing, and that Jack would almost certainly decide he was the man for the job.
“He wanted to get to Kamina before dark,” Father said. “So, how was your day at the office, dear? To tell you the truth, I’ve never really understood what a ‘cultural affair’ is. Making love to classical music?”
He waited for appreciative laughter. He didn’t get so much as a chuckle.
“They’re all a little retarded, Cecilia,” Marjorie said. “It takes some getting used to.”
“The courier from the embassy in Brazzaville brought me something,” Cecilia said. “A total of nine Cubans, including one positively identified as Captain Roberto Agramonte, have arrived, two and three at a time, on various airlines, but mostly Air France, in Brazzaville. Agramonte went right to the Foreign Ministry. Our source there said he told the Foreign Ministry people he was there to, quote, ‘coordinate the reception of Column Two,’ unquote, whatever that means.”
“It probably means no more than another fifty men,” Father said. “Guevara’s got delusions that he’s Napoleon. He’s divided the . . . what—thirty, forty—people he’s got on the plateau into the troops and the general staff. We’d call it a platoon.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to underestimate the enemy,” Cecilia said.
“What’s to underestimate? All he’s done so far is sneak into the country—think he’s snuck into the country—set himself up in a shack city on a plateau in the middle of nowhere, and get sick. And he’s supposed to be a doctor.”
“I wonder if he knows about his mother?” Cecilia asked.
“The intercept teams haven’t picked up anything,” Father said. “I suppose news like that would have to go from the Cuban Embassy in Buenos Aires to Havana, to