Goodbye Cuba (Goodbye Series, #1)

A chance meeting on a moonlit Havana night.
An alluring Cuban pilot and a young American soldier.
Can they outrun the threat of nuclear war?

Lieutenant Charlie Parnell grinds through his daily routine in Army Intelligence at Arlington Hall Station, Virginia. He tracks Cuban movements through Havana newspapers and Cuban radio, but what he's counting are the dreary days until his military discharge. When the colonel calls him up to the command post one day, the last people Charlie expects to meet are two suits from the CIA. Sure, Charlie's a gutsy street-smart guy who speaks fluent Spanish and has debriefed his fair share of Cuban refugees, but he's mostly a pencil pusher with a limp that's kept him out of the field. What could the nation's spy organization want with him?

As the scheme to unseat Fidel Castro unfolds, Charlie finds the plot runs deeper than the CIA has led him to believe. After the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, strategic placement of ballistic missiles has heightened the threat of nuclear war, and Charlie fears he'll end up in the danger zone with only one extremely risky escape route.

Skeptical of his CIA handlers, Charlie devises a backup plan. There's a steep cost to that too, but it's a gamble that could play out to his advantage in the end. Everything is on track until he meets an attractive Cuban pilot and her daughter. Before any of them know it, they're running for their lives.

A prior version of this book was independently published by John J. Harrigan in 2016 under the title Crosshairs on Castro.

Texte du rabat

To his CIA handlers, Lieutenant Charlie Parnell is the ideal person to assassinate Fidel Castro. Charlie is skilled, resourceful, fluent in Spanish and subject to blackmail because of secrets he possesses.

Appalled by the idea, Parnell is a bit of an overconfident con-artist, and he accepts the task, hoping to reap the rewards while outfoxing his handlers. They insert him into Cuba posing as a reporter for The Irish Times. Fidel's security chief assigns Isabel Fernandez, to be Charlie's watcher, trusting her loyalty, because she, too, is subject to manipulation. Her three-year-old daughter can be kidnapped at any moment. Fearing this, Isabel hides the girl with a Santeria cult. She quickly discovers that Charlie is indeed an American agent, not an Irish journalist. Rather than reporting this information, however, she seduces Charlie and persuades him to take her and the child with him when the CIA boat arrives to extract him from Cuba.

As the missile crisis deepens, an American invasion looks imminent, forcing Charlie and Isabel to go on the run. The security chief launches a manhunt for them. But by now Charlie has figured out the one specific spot where the peripatetic Fidel must show up. All he and Isabel have to do is hide there until Castro appears in the crosshairs of Charlie's sniper rifle. Will he squeeze the trigger?