HELMUT PORTMANN
Author of the Alex Beck Novels
Five young boys and a younger sister are orphans who barely escaped Cuba with their lives after their families were brutally murdered by Fidel Castros’ revolutionaries in the 1950s.
Ludovico Santana, his best friend Angel Rodriguez, and the others each have their own horror story about how they hid while helplessly watching their parents get raped, tortured, and killed. All five are smuggled out of Cuba by friends and relatives, and they find each other in elementary school in Little Havana, Miami. As they share their stories they form a tight bond and vow to seek vengeance.
As they grow older, they form a conspiracy they call Los Vengadores and start training themselves in the commando techniques they will need to secretly penetrate their stolen homeland and kill £1Jefe, as Castro is called in Cuba. They plan to do what the CIA failed to do with over a thousand men in the Bay of Pigs disaster.
But the Vietnam War gets in their way as they reach draft age. They formulate a clever plan to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam by volunteering for an Army tactical nuclear missile system deployed in West Germany. The Pershing 1a missile carries a thermonuclear warhead that can take out an entire city- and there are 108 of them deployed in Europe to protect NATO.
But will their deployment with the Pershing 1a sidetrack them from their sworn objective to kill
El Jefe?
The Navy picks up sonar or Echoes as sound blasts from Oil and Gas seismic surveys bounce off of a mysterious underwater object moving among the drilling Platforms in the Gulf of Mexico they appear to be from some type of submerged vessel that has no other Machinery or engine noise and seems to Simply disappear after several hours. the Navy and CIA suspect some kind of submersible running on batteries but any diesel electric submarine would have to eventually surface and charge its batteries by running their diesel engines
Both the Navy and the CIA know that the massive undersea infrastructure of the Oil and Gas industry is an attractive target for any potential enemy of the United States. but the Navy’s super secret SOSUS acoustic arrays would pick up any submarine attempting to enter the gulf so it must be something else. is Cuba behind it?.. to maybe exact revenge for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion attempt? The CIA forms a special team led by Alex Beck to hunt for what they call the Phantom of the gulf. their mission is to hunt down the mysterious contact and neutralize any threat that they uncover
The Navy picks up sonar or Echoes as sound blasts from Oil and Gas seismic surveys bounce off of a mysterious underwater object moving among the drilling Platforms in the Gulf of Mexico they appear to be from some type of submerged vessel that has no other Machinery or engine noise and seems to Simply disappear after several hours. the Navy and CIA suspect some kind of submersible running on batteries but any diesel electric submarine would have to eventually surface and charge its batteries by running their diesel engines
Both the Navy and the CIA know that the massive undersea infrastructure of the Oil and Gas industry is an attractive target for any potential enemy of the United States. but the Navy’s super secret SOSUS acoustic arrays would pick up any submarine attempting to enter the gulf so it must be something else. is Cuba behind it?.. to maybe exact revenge for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion attempt? The CIA forms a special team led by Alex Beck to hunt for what they call the Phantom of the gulf. their mission is to hunt down the mysterious contact and neutralize any threat that they uncover
© 2025 Helmut Portmann, all rights reserved.