Andersen, Kurt (45 page)

Through February and March, we all kept eating tablets of speed from Buzzy’s plastic jar as if they were Four A Day Supervitamins.

After a couple of discussions, we decided on the basic logistics for Operation Lima Bravo Juliet.

Buzzy’s military jargon made it seem less outlandish, almost sensible. “It’s a fairly standard paramilitary op,” he said.

He and Chuck both had experience with rifles. “Oswald would’ve gotten away with it if he hadn’t also shot the Dallas cop,” Chuck said. “That was his big mistake.”

“
His
mistake,” I said, “was his connection to the CIA—even if he wasn’t an agent, like that district attorney in New Orleans says, they knew who he was. They would’ve taken him out. And maybe did.”

“I don’t believe he was CIA,” Alex said. “He was a loser.”

Buzzy argued that in the post-Oswald age, snipers are exactly what the Secret Service was guarding against—they now had closed presidential limousines with bullet-proof glass and armor plating, and big security perimeters for outdoor appearances.

Chuck told us about some Levy family heroes, Czech friends of friends of his dad’s, who returned from London to Prague during World War II to use a machine gun and a bomb to kill the number-two SS guy who had helped plan the final solution.

“They got away with it?” Alex asked.

He nodded.

“Really,” Buzzy asked, “they escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia?”

“No. But they killed a dozen more Nazis in a shootout. And committed suicide before they could be captured.” Chuck also said his uncle had known one of the two guys in his Zionist guerrilla group, kids our age, who assassinated Britain’s Middle East minister in Cairo in the 1940s, with pistols, point-blank.

After a pause, he said to Buzzy, “You had pistol training in the Coast Guard, right? We could do it with pistols.”

We could.

“Yeah, well,” Buzzy said, “a sidearm would be iffy with the Secret Service right there to jump you. If you didn’t care about dying, the way to do it’d be with a frag in your pocket, a grenade, sidle up to him, ‘Hello, great to meet you, Mr. President,’
kaboom.
But I’m headed for medical school—poor people to treat, promises to keep, miles to go, etcetera.”

I was grateful that a suicide mission was off the table, and I could tell Alex was, too. Buzzy, sensing the mood in the room, flipped into teasing mode.

“I’m wondering, Mr. Bond,” he said to Chuck, “would you use your .25 Beretta or your 7.65-millimeter Walther PPK?”

Now I felt sorry for Chuck, so I told one of my dad’s few World War II tales, about an acrobat and juggler with the Copenhagen circus who formed a troupe to provide entertainment at some Nazi officers’ celebration,and then, during the finale, threw grenades into the audience.

“Because my father loved the circus and could juggle, when I was little, I wondered if that story was about
him.
”

“Nah,” Buzzy said, “that had to be a one-way mission.” He turned back to Chuck. He wasn’t ready to let him off the hook. “You’re a pilot. We could rent a plane, and you could crash it into
Air Force One.
”

“Like they tried with de Gaulle, right,” Chuck said to me, “in Algeria? You told me about it that day at the library in Evanston.”

“No,”
I said, vetoing the plan, not denying my perfect memory of that day. “Besides, how many people fly with the president? Dozens of innocent people would die.”

“That’s relative,” Buzzy said. “How ‘innocent’ the henchmen are.”

We accommodated ourselves to the unfortunate fact that if we weren’t going to shoot Johnson, people near him would probably die as well. But we would endeavor to limit what Buzzy called “the collateral damage,” a phrase new to the rest of us.

“A couple of times with de Gaulle,” Chuck asked me, “didn’t they plant bombs in the street where his car was traveling?”

“Explosives,” Buzzy said. “That’s where I was headed, too.”

I had an idea. I had the perfect idea. “Your
model
airplane, Chuck! You put some kind of bomb inside it and then fly it into him by remote control from far away. That might work, wouldn’t it?”

On Washington’s Birthday, Buzzy and Chuck returned from a weekend in Wilmette—Chuck’s brother’s Michael’s bar mitzvah was the pretext—with Chuck’s seven-foot-long silver World War II bomber in the back of Buzzy’s station wagon.

The following Saturday we all drove up to New Hampshire, ostensibly to ski but actually to practice flying “the Dauntless,” as Chuck called his model plane. Alex had wanted to bring his movie camera and film us, but Buzzy said, “Yeah, why don’t we just invite the fucking FBI to watch, too?”

Chuck hadn’t flown it in three years, not since he’d started flying for real, and he worried that his new pilot instincts would trip him up. “Because you’re not inside of it,” he said, “flying the model, it’s like you have to switch back and forth between first person and third person all the time.”

He’d also never flown it with such a heavy payload. It was packed with ten pounds of Play-Doh—or, as Buzzy said, “five kilos of simulated plastique.” It also had a hundred feet of fishing line tied to its nose, with a Ping-Pong ball on the other end.

As soon as it took off, though, Chuck looked to us like a virtuoso as he gently tugged and nudged his two control sticks but kept his eyes on the plane.

Alex complained he was cold, I lit a cigarette, Chuck said something about the rudder and new servos, Buzzy asked about the range of the radio signal and the plane’s speed.

“Three hundred, four hundred yards,” Chuck said, “and maybe thirty-five knots. Forty miles an hour.”

“I know what a knot is, man. In W-W-Two the Dauntless really
was
a dive-bomber, right?”

“Yup.”

Buzzy drove his car to the far side of the field, about a hundred yards from us, then walked to a hedgerow a hundred yards from the car and us. He had one of the two-pound walkie-talkies and the field glasses we’d bought at an army-surplus store; I had the other walkie-talkie; and Alex had his fancy graduation-gift binoculars. Buzzy had made us all study a glossary of military talk and insisted, for clarity’s sake, that we speak its language on the mission.

“Kilo Hotel, this is Bravo Foxtrot, fack, over.”

Karen Hollaender was Kilo Hotel, and Buzzy Freeman was Bravo Foxtrot. “Fack” meant “FAC”—forward air controller.

I answered. “Readable loud and clear, over.”

“Kilo Hotel, this is Bravo Foxtrot, fack, over?”

“Push the
button
to talk, Hollaender!” Alex shouted.

“Shit. Bravo Foxtrot, this is Kilo Hotel, you are loud and clear, over.”

“Dauntless spotted at a hundred and fifty meters altitude, one hundred meters southwest of me.”

“Roger.”

A couple of minutes later, Chuck had the plane flying in tight circles high above the car.

“Kilo Hotel, this is Bravo Foxtrot: engage.”

“Okay,” Chuck said to me, “tell him I’m diving.”

“WILCO, Bravo Foxtrot, proceeding with post hole, over.”

“Roger, Kilo Hotel.”

The plane started spiraling down, directly toward Buzzy’s old green station wagon. Its lawn-mower buzz got much louder.

“Whoa,”
Alex said.

The dangling Ping-Pong ball touched the car, and Buzzy’s voice shouted over my radio: “Target
marked,
over!”

The plane came out of its dive. “Roger, affirmative!” I said.

Chuck circled the Dauntless back up into the sky. Buzzy moved the car to a different corner of the field, and we did it again, and again, and again, for hours.

On the last go, the plane came down below the far treetops, and the moment after Alex shouted
“Chuck!”
and Chuck shouted
“Shit!”
at the same time, it pulled out of its dive and zoomed just barely over the trees.

“Delta Hotel,” Buzzy shouted, “over!”

“What? I mean, say again?”

“Direct hit! Bravo fucking Zulu, team! Reset to home plate! It’s Miller time, over.”

After Chuck brought in the plane for its final landing, he turned to me and said, “I guess we’re gonna do this.” I nodded. But we were playing with a model airplane. It still seemed like a game to me.

“Even if it doesn’t, you know,
work,
” Alex said, “it’ll seriously be bringing the war home. It’ll make the news. It’ll be cool.”

On the ride back to Cambridge, we talked about the possibility of things going awry, how we might escape, how much money we’d need to fly abroad. Chuck joked about “Alex’s pal Fidel fixing us up in Havana,” but Alex had done research on possible exile locales and decided that Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was the place to go, if necessary. “It’s this really sophisticated city, I mean really
happening,
with cool galleries and clubs, plus perfect weather, and really beautiful people, Christian, not Mohammedan, and,” he said, turning to Chuck, “they’ve even got a lot of Jews.” Alex already had a passport, and Buzzy and Chuck and I would all get them. Buzzy said that he’d lost his in the ‘Nam.

It still felt a bit like a game when the boys began their daily exercise regimens at the Harvard gym, as it did when we discovered, in a
Washington
Star
from the Harvard Square newsstand, that the president’s travel and appearance schedules were published every week in advance.

Buzzy and Chuck drove up to a gun store in New Hampshire and used fake IDs with aliases James Bond had used—Peter Franks from
Diamonds Are Forever
and Hilary Bray from
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
—to buy two pistols. The guns, a .32-caliber automatic and a 9mm Luger, looked a lot like the toys we’d used as props on Bond missions.

It was only when Buzzy showed me the two boxes of ammunition they’d also bought in Portsmouth—”a hundred rounds,” he said—that our scheme no longer seemed like a game. The plan didn’t envision shooting anyone, but Buzzy had insisted on getting “sidearms as a contingency,” in case things went bad. “You know the Boy Scout motto,” he said. No, we didn’t. “‘Be
prepared.
’ And by the way, not to be paranoid, but here,” he said, handing Alex and me each a box of bullets to keep in our dorm rooms. He wanted us “to have some skin in the game”—to be materially, unequivocally bound up in the conspiracy.

Buzzy conscripted all of us as his lab assistants when he mixed the sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, and acetone in their dorm room. Our Benzedrine supply came in handy that week.

We were very, very careful. We had to keep the beaker of acetone peroxide below 50 degrees as the mixture formed crystals, so we took turns, in four-hour shifts from eight
A.M.
one Saturday until eight
A.M.
Sunday, replenishing the ice in the ice bath. The second phase of lab work was much simpler, making what Chuck called “the AP putty”—acetone peroxide powder mixed with acetone and smokeless gunpowder (also bought in New Hampshire)—but it required a few days and a dozen sealed jars. Buzzy mixed up the ignition powder that would go in the nose of the Dauntless to ensure that the ten pounds of plastic explosive and buckshot in the fuselage would explode when it dive-bombed and crashed into the president.

Because we discovered that the president’s actual appearances didn’t always conform to the published schedule, we decided, in Buzzy’s phrase, to “stay nimble and opportunistic” and wait for the right moment.

Back in December, before we’d ever thought of Operation Lima Bravo Juliet, Chuck and Buzzy and I had gone down to New York, at Sarah’s invitation, to participate in a huge protest outside the army induction center. The day afterward, as it turned out, President Johnson made a surprise appearance at Cardinal Spellman’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so we were there on Fifth Avenue, carrying signs—mine was
VIETNAMESE
DON’T
DIE
PEACEFULLY
, Chuck’s was
HELL
NO
, Buzzy’s was
NAPALM:
JOHNSON’S
BABY
POWDER
, Sarah’s was simply
STOP
—and chanting “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” We watched Johnson arrive and leave Manhattan in a helicopter that landed in and took off from Central Park.

When Cardinal Spellman’s replacement was announced in early March, I had a brainstorm—I figured Johnson would return to St. Patrick’s for the ordination of the new Catholic archbishop as a cardinal, scheduled for the fourth of April, right in the middle of spring break. If Johnson once again took a helicopter in and out of the big wide-open field in the park, we would have two ideal opportunities to send in our radio-controlled scale-model dive-bomber.

One Friday in the middle of March, Alex flew home for the weekend; Chuck was writing two papers due the following Monday. Buzzy and I had just stayed up for twenty-four hours, making the acetone peroxide, and decided we needed a break. We went into Boston to see Country Joe and the Fish at the Psychedelic Supermarket. It was the first time I’d smoked grass since the fall. At some moment between “Superbird” (
It’s a bird, it’s a plane / It’s a man insane / It’s my president, LBJ
) and the “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” (
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why / Whoopee we’re all gonna die
), I knew how the night was going to end. A couple of hours later, on my bed in North House, I threw off the shackles of bourgeois individualism and the folly of bourgeois monogamy. I had a box of 9-millimeter rounds at the bottom of my jewelry box, and I’d just helped manufacture ten pounds of plastic explosive intended to kill the president of the United States. In another few weeks I might be in prison or dead. I wasn’t sure whether I’d fallen out of love with Chuck Levy, but it seemed stupid at that point to deny my desire for Buzzy Freeman.

The next morning I woke up feeling as if I’d made a quantum leap deeper into adulthood: I was only eighteen, but I was having an
affair,
which made me both happy and sad, as I imagined it was supposed to do. It had also been the most satisfying sexual experience in my nineteen months as a nonvirgin, which accrued to both the happy and sad sides of the ledger as well.