Predator by Richard Whittle

or the newspapers; instead, it was meant to be a discussion of investment ideas between a couple of ambitious young Americans endowed with pioneering spirit and a head of state eager to explore new financial opportunities. Tacho liked wealth himself—he generally used patronage rather than violence to maintain power—and couldn’t have been more charmed by his young visitors. When Neal told him that some agronomists the brothers had met in Guatemala thought they might find it profitable to grow cacao, the basis for chocolate and other foods, Somoza was all for it.
    â€œWhy don’t you guys come down and go into business?” asked the president, who had spent his teenage years in Philadelphia and gone to college at a small business school there.
    A year later, using some of their Life and newspaper fees to buy a plane of their own, the Blues flew back to Managua. But this time they would not be meeting with Tacho Somoza: he was dead, shot on September 21, 1956, by an assassin who was himself killed on the spot. Tacho’s eldest son, Luis, was now president, and Neal and Linden visited the new ruler. They also renewed acquaintances with Luis’s younger brother, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a Class of ’46 West Point graduate known as Tachito, who served as a senior official in the National Guard and helped his brother rule Nicaragua. When the Blues explained that they were interested in starting a cacao plantation on the country’s agriculturally underdeveloped east coast, they found Tachito just as welcoming as his father had been.
    â€œWell, happy to have you here,” Tachito replied. “That would go well here in Nicaragua, and furthermore, we have some land that we’ll invest in your company for an equity position. So come to Nicaragua!”
    By 1958, Neal and Linden, ages twenty-three and twenty-two respectively, had graduated from Yale and become the principal owners of a three-thousand-acre cacao and banana plantation carved out of the jungle along Nicaragua’s northeast coast. The Somoza family owned 17 percent of the venture, which was financed by the Nicaraguan Development Bank. Before long, the plantation had five hundred employees, its own airstrip, and a house designed by Neal that the Blue brothers shared. They often flew a plane across the country to Managua, where they rented another house, this one up in the cool hills outside the capital, and socialized with Tachito and, more often, his brother Luis. The Blues also had a standing invitation to the presidential palace, and though seeing Luis could require waiting for hours in an ornate anteroom, over the next couple of years they found many reasons to stay in close touch with both the Somoza brothers.
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    On March 24, 1961, Neal passed some anxious hours waiting in the tower of Managua’s airport, trying to get word over air traffic control radio of Linden, who was overdue on a return trip from the United States. To save a stop for fuel and a day’s transit time, Linden had planned to fly in the brothers’ Beechcraft Twin Bonanza from Key West to Nicaragua via Cuba, using an international airway over the island nation’s capital, Havana. Tensions between the United States and Cuba were running high: two years earlier, Cuba’s pro-U.S. dictator had been overthrown in a revolution led by belligerent, blustery Fidel Castro, and the country had immediately become a close ally of the Soviet Union. As Castro suspected, the CIA was now trying to help Cuban exiles overthrow his Communist regime; years later, it would be revealed that the CIA was also plotting to assassinate the island nation’s new leader.
    Linden was well aware that he’d chosen a touchy moment to be flying through Cuba’s air space. “There were some clouds I didn’t want to get into,” he recalled years later. “I was talking to air traffic control Havana. As I approached the