Predator by Richard Whittle Page B

two weeks before the invasion were complicit and executed them, too.
    The abrupt and frightening confinement by Cuban authorities was a formative experience for Linden. Suddenly, through no misdeed of his own, he had lost his freedom to the whim of a regime with the absolute power to decide whether he lived or died, a regime that might have killed him just on the suspicion—false, he insisted years later—that he was in league with the CIA and Castro’s enemies. Linden and Neal Blue had always been anticommunists; now they were anticommunists with a grievance.
    The Blues left Nicaragua the next year. The brothers had joined Air Force ROTC while in college, and now the Air Force was demanding that they serve the three years they had signed up for. Commissioned second lieutenants upon graduation from Yale, they had managed to delay their service by enrolling at an agricultural university in Managua and thereby receiving graduate student deferments. By 1962, though, they could put off their obligation no longer. Besides, it was clear by now that they weren’t going to get rich growing cacao and bananas. Before returning to the United States, they left the plantation to the Nicaraguan Development Bank and the Somozas.
    Linden reported for duty first; Neal followed six months later. Though they were avid fliers—Neal had once aimed to fly fighter planes—neither signed up to become an Air Force pilot. That would have meant extending their service beyond three years, which wasn’t part of their plan. They were going to be entrepreneurs.
    In 1963, the year after the Blues left Nicaragua, a leftist rebel movement funded by Cuba and the Soviet Union began working to overthrow the Somozas. Taking their name from 1920s rebel leader Augusto César Sandino, the insurgents called themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or more simply Sandinistas. As the years went on, the Blue brothers watched the rise of the Sandinistas with much interest and concern—and they never forgot their friends in Nicaragua.
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    Two decades after leaving Nicaragua, Neal and Linden Blue were the owners of Cordillera Corporation, a private Denver company whose substantial holdings included local commercial real estate, construction businesses and ranches, oil and gas interests in Canada, aviation facilities, and 880 acres of the valley at Telluride, the Colorado ski resort—land they bought in 1983, to much local consternation, for a mere six million dollars. Neal Blue, the driving force in their investment company, had a reputation for bare-knuckle bargaining and hard-nosed tactics that would result in more than one lawsuit against the Blues and their companies over the years. Linden, widely regarded as the kinder and gentler of the two, was his older brother’s partner but had also served a term on the Denver city council in the early 1970s, attended Harvard Business School, and held top jobs at Gates Learjet Corporation and Beech Aircraft Corporation, where in 1982 he became president and chief executive officer. Along the way, Linden became an expert in, and ardent advocate of, using advanced composite materials such as carbon epoxy—a new technology in those days—to build aircraft.
    Politically, the Blue brothers were dedicated to helping President Ronald Reagan win the Cold War, which in the early 1980s appeared increasingly likely to get hot. The Soviet Union and its chief allies in Latin America, Castro and the Sandinistas, had been growing bellicose in recent years, a factor that in 1980 helped Republican Reagan make Democrat Jimmy Carter a one-term president. The year before, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, Castro had celebrated his twentieth year in power, and the Sandinistas had forced Neal and Linden Blue’s former business partner—and more recently dictator in his own right—Anastasio Somoza Debayle to flee Nicaragua. Somoza’s overthrow was