Goodbye Cuba

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.