Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  The commander of the Villefranche Squadron had to be gently restrained by Aurélie Faure and a another, older woman, who had been caring for him in her absence.

  O’Reilly quickly signalled for his two Royal Marine bodyguards to leave the stateroom.

  “Mon Amiral insisted upon touring the Fleet yesterday,” Aurélie informed him, her face a picture of worry. “It almost killed him!”

  “Stop fussing, woman,” Rene Leguay complained half-heartedly, eventually struggling into a sitting position on his cot, and then levering himself to his feet.

  Swaying, he met Dermot O’Reilly’s gaze.

  “Sir, if I still had my sword, I would offer it to you…”

  “My surgeon will attend you shortly, sir,” O’Reilly promised. “In the meantime, my people need to board and inspect your ships as soon as possible.”

  “I am fine,” Leguay insisted. “Please, attend to my wounded first…”

  “You are not ‘fine’. Mon Amiral,” Aurélie objected, frowning in exasperation.

  Her concern was illustrated a moment later when Rene Leguay sagged back down onto his cot, beads of perspiration dripping from his brow and trembling from head to foot with the exertion of having got to his feet.

  Breathlessly, he looked up at the tall Canadian to whom he had just surrendered the fates of all his ships and people.

  “Will you scuttle my ships, Capitaine O’Reilly?”

  O’Reilly pursed his lips, contemplated a white lie.

  No, these people deserved the truth.

  “I don’t know. My orders are to prevent your fleet falling into the hands of the Front Internationale.” He grinned ruefully: “Judging by the battering this ship took the other day; you and I feel exactly the same way about that!”

  Chapter 15

  Wednesday 1st February 1967

  Santa Barbara, California

  Joanne Brenckmann had never seen her husband this angry. True, she had only known her husband of thirty-two years – and some – for the best part of three-and-a-half decades and therefore, she could not discount the possibility he had been angrier at some time before that, or during his various spells in the Navy, and then there had been that time he had been in England in 1963 being completely ignored by an oafish ambassador and a complacent State Department; but all in all, she very much doubted if her patient, wise, profoundly decent, kind husband had ever been this angry about anything in his fifty-seven years and, give or take, around three-hundred and sixty days on God’s Earth.

  Joanne had come in half-way through the telephone conversation with Gretchen. She and Walter thought the world of both their daughters-in-laws; which was all the more remarkable because before the event neither she or Walter could have foreseen their younger sons would marry such, on the face of it, unlikely women. Their freewheeling, musician younger son, Sam, had married the most practical, sensible woman in Christendom and together they were already raising a brood of three very young children. Meanwhile, Dan, their bookish, undriven middle son had courted and wooed an American princess, the daughter of one of the richest men on the East Coast. Perhaps, it was simply proof positive that love conquers all? It was safer not to ask the reasons why; better by far to acknowledge that they had been doubly blessed with their daughters-in-law, and leave it at that. These things happened: Walter had got lucky with her, hadn’t he? So, what was so odd about their sons hitting the jackpot too?

  Sam’s wife Judy was exactly the gentle and very, very forbearing lovely person he needed to balance the craziness of his life on the road: it came as absolutely no surprise to Joanne that there was not so much as a whisper of her youngest son philandering. Why ever would he? He knew damned well he was the luckiest man on the planet.

  As for her middle boy, if anybody in Christendom had landed squarely on his feet after threatening to be the family’s amiable under-achiever forever, it was Daniel. Dan had courted, with dogged, unflagging persistence despite more than one – more than moderately, and knowing Gretchen, probably quite cruel – rejection until Claude Betancourt’s favourite little girl had finally seen the light. Gretchen, of course, was one of those people who were always going places, fast!

  Fascinatingly, Gretchen was the one person in the family who could actually get Walter talking politics.

  Joanne frowned as she heard her husband’s spluttering attempt to get a word in edgewise; and worried briefly for his blood pressure. She worried even more when she walked into the study of the plush apartment they were renting down near the beach, and saw that Walter’s normally measured, commanding – Captain on the bridge – composure was, only temporarily, she hoped, shredded. He was red-faced and for a moment she was a little afraid he was going to start chewing the Bakelite of the telephone receiver.

  “Walter?” She mouthed. “What is it?”

  This seemed to snap her husband out of the top circle of his rage, and calm his fevered brow a degree or so.

  “Jo’s just come into the room, Gretchen,” he said gruffly. He shook his head and growled an exasperated: “Aaaargh!” Without another word he passed the handset to his wife and stalked out of the room.

  Joanne blinked at the handset.

  “Whatever did you say to Walter, dear?” She asked, mildly. It seemed like the logical thing to ask.

  “The CIA was behind the Warwick Hotel Scandal and the Nixon For President people, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Helms, Angleton and all the rest of the President’s men were in on it from the start. The Administration, the CIA and the FBI have been running a huge criminal conspiracy to cover it up from way before Nixon’s inauguration!”

  Joanne thought that was dreadful; what right-thinking person would not? However, that did not even begin to explain why her husband – a man inured to the double-dealing of powerful men, he was, after all, a career attorney – should be on the verge of apoplexy.

  “Oh, I see,” she murmured noncommittally.

  “That’s not really the thing,” Gretchen explained. She had first got to know, and trust, her mother-in-law many months before she had opened her eyes, smelled the coffee, and realised that Dan was the ready-polished diamond he was. Joanne had been there for her, supportive and understanding when she was feeling very alone, basically confronting the first real crisis of her life. It was likely there was nobody else in the world – Dan excepted, obviously – in whom she could confide her innermost thoughts.

  Not that this was a thing she did very often…

  “I did wonder. Walter seems unusually…upset.”

  “This is the thing,” Gretchen explained. “The CIA have been spying on the American people for years under the auspices of a program called Operation Maelstrom run by the Head of Counter Intelligence at Langley, a creep called James Jesus Angleton. He’s involved in the Warwick Hotel Scandal up to his neck; but that’s not the half of it. The scumbags at Langley have been spying on me, Dan, you and the Ambassador, Sam and Judy, all of us. I wouldn’t be surprised if your apartment in Santa Barbara isn’t bugged, or there aren’t spooks working for Angleton listening to this telephone call. This is incredibly heinous stuff, Jo! Honestly, you couldn’t make this up. I had to call the Ambassador to warn him that The Washington Post is splashing this on tomorrow’s edition. Everybody else will pile in after that. The White House has tried to get the Department of Justice, that fraud John Mitchell, to block it. Haldeman rang up Kay Graham and threatened to get her and Ben Bradlee thrown in jail!”

  Joanne struggled to take this, any of it, in for some moments.

  In her distraction she reflected on how sweet it was that Gretchen had always called her ‘Jo’ and Walter ‘the Ambassador’ and occasionally, ‘sir’.

  Shortly thereafter, she forced herself to face reality.

  “You’re saying that our own government has been spying on my family?”

  “Yes. And tens of thousands of other patriotic families, too. As a matter of routine, standard operating procedure, lately under cover of hunting for End of Dayers and
other terrorists but Operation Maelstrom actually grew out of an earlier surveillance project called Operation Chaos back in the late 1950s.”

  Joanne was starting to work through the ramifications.

  “So, it is true that our own government deliberately set out to destroy the Reverend King’s reputation and to make that poor girl, Miranda Sullivan’s life Hell?”

  “Yes,” Gretchen replied tersely.

  She hardly knew Sam or his wife Judy but all the other Brenckmanns, Walter senior and Dan’s big brother, Walter junior, and Jo, of course, all caught on at lightning speed. Everybody else she talked to seemed to need her to draw a diagram for them, but not the Brenckmanns!

  “Why in God’s name would they want to spy on our families?” Joanne asked, still in shock.

  If the Brenckmann’s were in the spotlight then axiomatically, it was as nothing compared to the resources the government would inevitably, have devoted to the Betancourt clan.

  Gretchen decided a little more exposition was required before she got to the nub of the matter. Facts were facts; context was everything. She had married a historian and he had gently put her right on this, and to her surprise, quite a lot of other things in the course of their as yet, blissfully happy marriage…

  But first things first!

  “We think it was LBJ who authorised the bugging operation against the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement,” she told her mother-in-law, “so this isn’t even just a GOP or a Democrat thing. Apart from the Warwick Hotel Scandal cover up, that is, that’s all Nixon’s own work!”

  Pat was speechless.

  Gretchen, realising as much gave her a few seconds to regain her equilibrium.

  “Jo. When the Ambassador has calmed down, he and I need to talk some more. Everything will go crazy when The Post goes to print, probably tonight Eastern Standard. We have to decide what we’re going to do…”

  “Do?”

  Joanne became aware of her husband’s presence at her shoulder. She looked to him, relieved to discover that his face was no longer flushed with angst and that he was his normal self again.

  “Walter’s come back into the room, I’ll pass him the phone, dear.”

  This she did and hovered, arms folded tightly across her chest, unable to stop fidgeting nervously.

  “I’m sorry about that, Gretchen,” her husband apologised. “I needed a short time-out. This is bad.” He sighed, took a long, weary breath. “I cannot continue to serve a President who spies on my family…”

  “The other thing you cannot, must not do, is sit this out in dignified silence,” Gretchen retorted, in the event with a brusqueness she had not intended. “The Administration will walk all over you if you let them. I know you have no plans to run for President next year but they don’t know that; they’ll still destroy you if they can. You have to get in the first punch…”

  “I didn’t have any plans to run for office,” Walter Brenckmann told his daughter-in-law. “But that was then and this is now. I didn’t know then that we were governed by a bunch of crooks.”

  Actually, that was not entirely true.

  He had had his suspicions all along.

  When he had heard his son, Dan’s account of how the Republican majorities in both Houses of Representatives had effectively buried the provisional report of the Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, and applied pressure to its Chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, to ‘come down harder on the Kennedy Administration’ – threatening to haul him up before half-a-dozen different Congressional and Senatorial Committees in what sounded like quasi-McCarthy era type witch hunts, he had assumed this was just a return to politics as normal.

  The whole Warwick Hotel affair had left a bad taste in the mouth. He had known something was not right about it from the start; and would have known it without The Washington Post ever having exposed even the smallest part of the scandal. The way that poor girl – Miranda Sullivan was hardly any older than his dead daughter, Tabatha, would have been now – had been treated, forced into hiding while heavily pregnant, hounded by the press and the FBI, threatened with Congressional interrogations of the kind thus far singularly lacking in the oversight of the current Administration, had been just plain disgusting.

  Up until now he had believed it was his duty to keep his head down, to work for the good of the Union in England; taken loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief as read, inviolable. Whatever one thought of the man in the Oval office one respected and saluted the Presidency.

  Yet all the time his Government had been spying on him and his family!

  If he had learned anything in the Navy, especially when he was the man in command, it paid to think for as long as time permitted; and then to make hard decisions without regret or hesitation.

  “Okay,” he said grimly.

  Joanne knew that tone; understood that her husband had just determined the right, and the only way to go forward.

  She met his gaze.

  They communed briefly, for a second or so and understood each other perfectly.

  The decision was made.

  “Okay,” he repeated, suddenly the man in command. “Can I leave it to you to fix a flight that will get Jo and I back to DC in time for us to have a conference ahead of meeting the press, Gretchen?”

  For once in her life this rocked Claude Betancourt’s daughter back on her heels. She recovered fast.

  “Are you saying what I think you are saying, Ambassador?”

  Walter Brenckmann grinned ruefully.

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “And if we’re going to do this thing, we’re going to do it properly, no holds barred. Like we mean it. Are you on board, Gretchen?”

  Both husband and wife could picture the smile spreading slowly across their daughter-in-law’s face.

  “Yes, sir,” Gretchen said.

  Chapter 16

  Wednesday 1st February 1967

  Andrews Field, Maryland

  Although there had been a change of plan, Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin had no idea if this was good, or very bad news. For him, or for his country; but then this was a situation he had got depressingly accustomed to over the last four years. In any event, he had bade farewell to his wife and daughter, and along with the man the Troika had sent to Washington to babysit him, sixty-five-year-old, and clearly ailing, Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov, addressed the Embassy’s hastily ‘California Advanced Party’, before they had all got on the State Department-supplied bus to take them and their luggage to the airport.

  Either everything had changed in the last few days or he had really been as isolated, out of the loop, mistrusted by his masters back in Sverdlovsk as he had assumed all along. The only thing he knew for certain was that Chairman Shelepin and Minister of Defence, Admiral Gorshkov were both coming to America to attend the re-dedication of the United Nations in San Francisco, an event now planned for the weekend of the 10th to the 12th of February. Notwithstanding it was impossibly late in the day, he was supposed to fly to the West Coast and ‘prepare the ground’ for his leader’s arrival in San Francisco on – or about, there was still a great deal of uncertainty about the travel arrangements – Wednesday 8th February, one very short week hence.

  Both Dobrynin and Kuznetsov had been surprised, well, speechless initially, to discover that the two leading men of the Troika were coming to America. Much as they knew Alexander Shelepin had taken a vice-like grip on their still sorely wounded Motherland, the notion that the two key players in the post-July 1964 Party hierarchy felt secure enough to both be away from the Soviet Union for perhaps, as long as a week to ten days, took a lot of swallowing. However, now that the two men were getting used to the idea they were, like true Marxist-Leninists, obsessing over a whole range of likely conspiracy theories.

  In the absence of the Troika’s two leading men, the man in charge in Sverdlovsk would be forty-three-year-old Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny, the Director of the KGB and the third, permanent member, of the ruling Troika.


  Nobody doubted that Vladimir Yefimovich was anything other than Alexander Shelepin’s – the Boss’s – man. Heart, soul and body, his loyalty was as rock solid as it was possible for it to be in the USSR.

  Semichastny was a Ukrainian whose studies at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Kemerovo had been cut short by the German invasion in 1941. Completing a degree in history at Kiev after his military service he had begun his ascent to high office in the late 1940s, before ‘teaming up’ with ‘the Boss’ in Moscow. The two men had become close friends, with Semichastny succeeding the older man as First Secretary of the All-Union Komsomol when Shelepin moved to the Lubyanka in 1958. Later, after a stint as Second Secretary of the Communist Party in Azerbaijan, Nikita Khrushchev, presumably at Shelepin’s prompting, had recalled him to Moscow to ‘chair’ the KGB at the time the Boss had taken up his post as a First Deputy Prime Minister in 1961.

  Semichastny, the man nominally responsible for co-ordinating intelligence at the height of the Cuban Missiles Crisis, had only survived the war because he had been ensconced in the deepest bunker in the Moscow Military District. In its aftermath, notwithstanding Alexander Shelepin’s protection, he had not been fully rehabilitated by the Communist Party until he resumed his former duties in the hours after the coup which had decapitated the Brezhnev administration. As befitted a man who had first been promoted to oversee the security apparatus of the Soviet State at the improbably young age of only thirty-seven, nobody doubted that Vladimir Yefimovich was an astoundingly talented ‘operator’; nonetheless, that the Boss had few, if any qualms trusting his ‘friend’ to ‘mind the shop’ in his and Gorshkov’s absence abroad was nothing short of…extraordinary.

  Anatoly Dobrynin stepped up to the half-a-dozen microphones bearing the badges and signs of the various US news broadcasters. He was uncomfortably aware that he was standing directly in front of a Boeing 707 in the livery of the United States Air Force. To be totally reliant on the charity of the Americans just to enable the party from the Soviet Embassy to attend an international conference, was a new humiliation. Unfortunately, the alternative, a three or four day road or rail trip, skirting around the Midwest, many areas of which were still closed off to civilians – while survey parties searched for atomic, biological and chemical weapons, and a myriad of suspected contaminated facilities left behind by those maniac End of Dayers – would have left virtually no time to lay any of the ground work necessary to ensure that, at the very least, the Chairman’s visit to the West Coast was not a complete, organisational disaster.