Adios El Jefe!

By H.H. Portmann

Adios El Jefe!


Five young boys and a younger sister are orphans who barely escaped Cuba with their lives after their families were brutally murdered by Fidel Castros’ revolutionaries in the 1950s. Ludovico Santana, his best friend Angel Rodriguez, and the others each have their own horror story about how they hid while helplessly watching their parents get raped, tortured, and killed. All five are smuggled out of Cuba by friends and relatives, and they find each other in elementary school in Little Havana, Miami. As they share their stories they form a tight bond and vow to seek vengeance.

As they grow older, they form a conspiracy they call Los Vengadores and start training themselves in the commando techniques they will need to secretly penetrate their stolen homeland and kill El Jefe, as Castro is called in Cuba. They plan to do what the CIA failed to do with over a thousand men in the Bay of Pigs disaster.

But the Vietnam War gets in their way as they reach draft age. They formulate a clever plan to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam by volunteering for an Army tactical nuclear missile system deployed in West Germany. The Pershing 1a missile carries a thermonuclear warhead that can take out an entire city – and there are 108 of them deployed in Europe to protect NATO.

But will their deployment with the Pershing 1a sidetrack them from their sworn objective to kill El Jefe?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369414965

Book preview

1

DECEMBER 22, 1981

0900 UTC

EUROPEAN THEATER

B etty slept a lot. In fact, there was a good chance she would sleep her entire life away. Her bed was a cone, about four feet in diameter at the base, tapering to a point at about fifteen feet in length. It was lined with very exotic and expensive materials, and she was monitored and protected much more closely than the British crown jewels, being continuously guarded by two young soldiers with assault rifles and orders to kill anyone foolish enough to come near her or attempt to touch her.

You definitely did not want to wake her up. If awakened, she would unleash in just the right sequence a tightly choreographed ballet of complex electrical and mechanical functions that would occur faster than the human mind could comprehend to allow her to create hell on earth for those unlucky to be within miles of her. Her heart was a small, hollow sphere of plutonium not much larger than a grapefruit. It was surrounded by a beautifully crafted shell of high explosives that, when detonated, would compress to the size of a golf ball. The plutonium primary would reach what physicists call critical mass, creating an atomic explosion of intense heat and pressure, and then a stream of neutrons and x-rays would ignite a secondary tube of radioactive and neutron-heavy materials and gases. This would fuse hydrogen atoms, producing a thermonuclear explosion that could wipe out an entire city in an instant, basically what people call an H-bomb.

Betty, a W50 thermonuclear warhead, was mounted at the tip of a Pershing 1a tactical nuclear missile deployed in West Germany during the Cold War. She and her 107 sisters were the US Army’s strongest and, to the Soviets, most fearsome weapon deployed by NATO to protect Western Europe. The Pershing 1a missiles were on mobile launchers that could, if needed, move to the West German woods and hide until the president ordered them to launch. They were incredibly quick and accurate, holding the Soviet Warsaw Pact countries at risk in the event of war. Most Americans were unaware of their existence, yet the Soviet leadership feared them to the point that they were probably the number-one Soviet target in the event of war in Europe.

How feared were they? In 1981, newly elected US President Ronald Reagan had the Soviets’ attention. The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was deteriorating, and the massive US troop presence in Western Europe, combined with very realistic annual NATO exercises, produced a tense military environment that had both sides on more of an edge than the public realized. These exercises were enormous, involving all the NATO countries and live dress rehearsals of rapidly increasing amounts of US military power, which was an imposing wall confronting any Soviet attempt at an invasion.

This came to a head in 1983 with a ten-day NATO exercise called Able Archer. The Pershing 1a missiles were about to be replaced by even more powerful, longer-range Pershing II missiles that could strike the Soviet heartland. The realistic nature of an exercise that involved heads of state; unique, new military communications; and very realistic military maneuvers led some of the Soviet high command to fear that NATO was preparing to attack. This was recounted in newspaper stories published afterward.

The Pershing 1a firing batteries, as part of the massive exercise, took their mobile launchers to the woods—albeit without the real warheads, which remained safely stored in heavily guarded bunkers, but that could change quickly if required—and the Soviets feared this. While most of the Pershing missile platoons took to the woods to hide, nine firing platoons, with their war reserve nuclear warheads mounted, remained on Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) at three heavily guarded Combat Alert Status (CAS) sites located deep in West German forests near Neu Ulm, Heilbronn, and Schwaebisch Gmünd. Those missiles, three per platoon launch pad, were on a hair-trigger alert that was constantly exercised to maintain nuclear readiness. This was the tactical point of the nuclear umbrella spear that the United States maintained to protect NATO. While not in the daily mind of the American or West German public, it was very much on the mind of the Soviet generals who had placed their own nuclear and Warsaw Pact forces on high alert, according to newspaper stories published afterward.

As the exercise ramped up, this was quite possibly the one time other than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that the world came closest to nuclear war. Fortunately, this ended without incident when the ten-day exercise concluded, but it points to the fact that the threats of using tactical nuclear weapons being thrown around by Russian President Putin today are not necessarily hollow threats or to be taken lightly.

There are tactical nuclear weapons, and then there was the Pershing 1a thermonuclear tactical weapon. Small, tactical nukes that could be delivered by smaller warplanes, fired in artillery shells, or even carried in backpacks by special forces were only atomic weapons that had a relatively low yield, such as the A-bomb at Hiroshima. An atomic weapon only detonates a primary plutonium sphere or cylinder to create an explosion of maybe ten to fifteen kilotons.

Still incredibly destructive and with horrible radioactive contamination consequences, these were firecrackers compared to the thermonuclear warheads that the Pershing 1a could deliver. In an H-bomb, the explosive yield can be increased beyond hundreds of kilotons—to even megatons—by adding more neutrons into the thermonuclear fire of the secondary. A small, tactical nuke may take out a bridge or command center. A thermonuclear nuke could take out a large city.

How do you know that a nuclear weapon will really work? How do you know the missile will really launch and reach its target accurately and the warhead will explode as it is supposed to? This took a massive, very elaborate, and complex testing program that, in the case of the Pershing 1a missiles, required the annual removal of some of the hot missiles on tactical alert in Europe to be essentially frozen in time, disassembled, and transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where they would be reassembled and launched into the Atlantic Ocean to test the system completely from end to end.

The Pershing Operational Test Unit (POTU) would tap, or secretly identify, the selected missiles months before the big event. Only the lieutenant colonel in command of POTU was supposed to know the identity of the selected unit, which would be on QRA at the time of the tap, during which a larger-than-usual contingent of POTU evaluators would descend on the site hidden in the woods. A normal countdown exercise was initiated with the receipt of the exercise nuclear release message, and the missiles would be fired up and counted down to the point of erection, as they were on a regular basis.

As the missiles on the three pads reached the erect point in the countdown, they were frozen and held, at which point the POTU evaluators stepped in and announced that one of the three platoons was tapped to go to Cape Canaveral to actually fire their missiles. The missiles and all their support equipment were powered down, carefully disassembled, and meticulously inspected prior to being containerized and flown to the Cape for reassembly. The firing crews were also frozen and quarantined before being returned to the Cape, where they would re-create the countdown and actually launch their missiles. Everything was duplicated exactly for this live test except for one thing, the warhead. The war reserve warheads were shipped separately from West Germany to the United States and would arrive at a nondescript, small, white building next to Launch Complex 16 at the Cape, where they were modified under strict security with very limited access. The plutonium pit and other nuclear components would be removed and replaced with an inert physics package of the same size and weight. The rest of the warhead, including all the complex mechanical and electronic components, remained in place as it had in Europe. The missile was instrumented extensively, so that during firing and its brief, very high-speed flight, technicians and engineers in the Complex 16 blockhouse would monitor all the telemetry events that constituted Betty’s ballet of warhead functions.

Essentially, everything happened as it would have in a real wartime launch, except that there was no atomic detonation to cause a real thermonuclear explosion. These tests were scrutinized not only by the United States to ensure the reliability and viability of its nuclear deterrent, but also by the Soviets, who anxiously observed the performance of what constituted their major retaliatory threat in Europe from NATO.

Eventually, the Cold War thawed with the ratification of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, and Betty and her Pershing sisters were completely gone from Europe by 1991. Since then, there has not been much talk of tactical nuclear weapons until Putin launched his terrible invasion of Ukraine, but it’s worth looking back at the Cold War days to see just how real the threat of tactical nuclear war that loomed over Europe was, although largely under the radar screen of the public.

Could an evil actor have somehow infiltrated the system at Cape Canaveral and caused the real plutonium pit not to be removed and a missile unknowingly launched with a live warhead that would really detonate in a thermonuclear explosion? It’s doubtful, considering the incredibly tight safeguards the United States places around its nuclear arsenal, but what if …

2

JUNE 4, 1970

09:30 EST

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA

L udovico Santana and his best friend, Angel Rodriguez, sized each other up as they stood at the Reynolds Hall bus stop dressed in their caps and gowns. Tall and lanky, Ludo had curly jet-black hair and a bushy el mostacho. His friends joked that his first name should be Carlos because he looked just like the rock star. Angel was dark, shorter, muscular, and very athletic. Gymnastics had honed his body, and he moved with a catlike grace and tended to regard people with a silent, intent look. He also had a fifth-degree black belt, and the other boys at Miami Senior High had quickly learned not to fuck with him. The same applied while they were both in college. You might say that Ludo was the brains and Angel was the b rawn.

They were on their way to their college graduation ceremony at Florida State University’s Doak Campbell Stadium. The weather was beautiful with a clear blue sky and cool temperature, ideal for an outdoor graduation ceremony. Graduation came with mixed feelings. They were glad to finally get their diplomas but were worried about getting drafted. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and a lot of their friends in Little Havana who were out of high school and working had received their notices and were already in boot camp or the jungles.

The boys had grown up together in Little Havana and had formed a strong friendship with several other boys who shared a common bond that drew them together. It was not a good bond; it was one forged in misery and hatred. All five were young boys born in Cuba before the revolution, and they were all very young when the revolutionary violence destroyed their families and left each of them with scenes of absolute horror and terror burned into their young minds.

Ludovico’s father had been the general manager of one of Batista’s flagship tobacco factories in Yaguajay in the late 1950s. Ludovico remembered late December 1958 when he was just ten years old, playing with several other factory workers’ boys in a storage barn at the worksite. The boys were climbing on the tobacco drying racks when they heard a loud commotion as several large trucks roared into the dusty courtyard and scary-looking revolutionaries jumped out, shooting their guns into the air as they scattered and entered the buildings. The boys were scared to death as they peeked silently through gaps in the barn’s old wooden siding, watching the soldiers round up and bring outside all the men and women who worked there.

They separated Ludo’s dad and his managers and foremen from the workers and had them line up in a row. To his horror, Ludo saw one of the soldiers, who appeared to be their leader, walk up to his father and hit him across the mouth with his rifle butt. His father fell to the ground, teeth knocked out and bleeding profusely. Another soldier came up and kicked him hard in the stomach and then in the head as he squirmed in agony. The soldiers laughed as the leader aimed his revolver at his dad’s kneecap and shot at close range. More blood and screams, then the other kneecap, and then in the stomach. His father was now writhing on the ground and moaning as the leader bent close and shot him point-blank in the face. Ludo was now trembling and in shock, unable to move.

The other boys continued to watch in horror as a soldier calmly walked down behind the lined-up managers and shot each one through the back of the head. There were eight of them, so he had to pause and reload as the remaining two waited their turn. The other boys’ fathers were all laborers huddled in a cowering group as the leader approached them.

Our Comandante, Fidel, has ordered that all of the Batista regime leaders will be removed from their positions and tried for their crimes. You, the workers, are now in charge. Bring your families to the estadio next week, where you will see revolutionary justice served for all.

The workers remained frightened and told the soldiers they would do as commanded. They stayed in their huddle, afraid to move, as the soldiers piled back into their trucks and roared off in a cloud of dust.

Juan Perez, Ludo’s best friend among the cigar factory boys, put his arm around the still-trembling boy and led him out the back and toward his house. Word had spread quickly, and their panicked mothers were already outside looking for their children. The soldiers had let it be known that their next stop would be at the houses of the managers they had just killed. Isabel Santana ran to her boy and handed him to her cousin, Alejandro, who would take him away to hopefully escape the island for the United States.

She returned to her home just as a truckload of soldiers drove up and asked her to identify herself. She proudly and bravely stated she was the wife of Ernesto Santana. At that point, the comandante pulled out his revolver and shot her in the head on the spot. Juan had been watching from a distance and ran away through the thick trees back to his own house, which was in the laborers’ village nearby and not under threat from these brutal men.

The other boys in Little Havana, all around the same age, had encountered similar horrible experiences. As they began to know each other and share their miserable backgrounds, they started forming a bond that grew every year. Ludo bonded this way with Angel Rodriguez, Jose Ramirez, Raul Jimenez, and Carlos Medina. In 1961, after graduating from elementary school, Ludo proposed at a small graduation party that they should formally become a group that would meet every June or July to tell each other their stories so they would never forget. He proposed they use this occasion to kick off their group. All agreed and sat to share their stories.

Ludo went first, and then it was Angel’s turn. "My family lived in a very exclusive neighborhood in Havana, and my father was one of the managers at one of the gambling houses. We were all home one evening preparing to eat when the revolutionaries showed up and banged on the door. My father answered, and they immediately took him into custody. They tied his arms and legs, kicked him to the ground, dragged him by his feet through the dirt, and then threw him into the bed