Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  ‘Yes,’ Adams had agreed, ‘you would think that, wouldn’t you!’

  Caro did not need to be told that even the best interrogators could be persuaded to believe exactly what they wanted to hear, if their subject was skilled enough, and understood the way the questioners’ minds worked.

  Neither of them had mentioned the Elephant in the room, the fact that the CIA and the pre-ponderance of FBI resources had been dedicated to Operation Maelstrom for the last few years. Conveniently, everything Dwight Christie had told the people at Quantico, confirmed the worst suspicions of the paranoid conspiracy theorists in DC. Therefore, they were hardly going to risk deconstructing his ‘confirmatory evidence’.

  Caro sat back.

  “Erin, this is going to take longer than I anticipated. Do you think you could persuade the FBI to bring us some coffee, please? Preferably, drinkable coffee?”

  The man on the other side of the table was frowning.

  “What’s going on here?” He asked.

  Erin Lambert hesitated.

  “It’s all right,” Caro assured her. “Mister Christie knows that there are armed FBI men on the other side of that mirror and that if he lifts so much as a finger against me, or you, things will not go well for him.”

  Dwight Christie’s frown turned to one of deep offence at the suggestion he might raise his hand to a woman.

  “The FBI has shared its most recent profile of you with me,” Caro explained patiently. “I am here to test it and if necessary, re-write it. Actually, I could probably do that now. However, were I to do that without properly documenting the reasons why, I’d never be able to quote my report in future academic papers. So, whether you like it or not I am going to do this by the book. When I’ve finished, the FBI can have you back. Obviously, if you elect to co-operate with me that might later form the basis of a plea for clemency, or whatever is applicable, if at all, in your case…”

  “The DOJ cut me a plea bargain back in…”

  “I’m no attorney, Mister Christie,” Caro reminded him waspishly. “But a plea deal based on falsehoods isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”

  The man thought about this.

  He shrugged.

  “You said you talked to Rachel?”

  “Yes,” Caro confirmed. “She told me that she knew the moment she laid eyes on you that you were a complete fraud, Mister Christie.”

  In fact, Rachel’s exact description of the man sitting in front of Caro now was: ‘He’s some kind of Walter Mitty character…except, on Benzedrine!’

  Chapter 67

  Thursday 16th February 1967

  Cleveland Park Police Station, Washington DC

  Just before he left the Embassy for the drive to Cleveland Park, Sir Nicholas Henderson had received one of the odder phone calls of his long, and of late, illustrious career in Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service.

  ‘You don’t know me, Mister Ambassador,’ the man at the other end of the line had explained, his Yankee drawl laconic, world-weary and somehow, immensely reassuring to Nicko Henderson, because he was already having a very bad day and given that it was still only nine o’clock in the morning, there was plenty of scope for it to get even worse.

  Sixty-one-year old William Henry ‘Bill’ Sallis II was a large well-fed distinguished man with very old-fashioned, almost Southern, courtly manners. Moreover, it transpired that he was the ‘Sallis’ in Sallis, Betancourt and Brenckmann, Attorneys at Law. More pertinent to the moment; he had been Claude Otto von Betancourt’s trusted right-hand man for well over three decades and therefore, knew where all this, and every other Administration’s since Calvin Coolidge’s back in the 1930’s had ‘buried all their bodies’.

  And, in this time of travail, he was volunteering his services to ‘the Crown’ as an act of ‘friendship across the oceans’. To wit, his own services and those of the mighty law firm he had led for the last twenty years. The law firm which was in effect, the executive arm of the sprawling Betancourt family empire.

  Bill Sallis explained that ‘it would not be appropriate for Gretchen, who has had, I believe, past dealings with Lady Rachel, and in whose debt she feels herself to be, morally at least, to become publicly involved in the present, unfortunate, circumstances; so, to cut a long story short, she sought my advice in the matter and I agreed to substitute my own, humble person for that of my goddaughter…’

  The British Ambassador had had no idea what ‘Bill’ Sallis was talking about until he discovered him waiting for him at Cleveland Park, with a gang of muscular Betancourt family retainers pre-positioned to hold back the surging throng of reporters, photographers and the agitated front men of about a dozen TV news stations.

  Mercifully, Nicko Henderson’s Greek-born wife, Mary, in a former career a war correspondent and photographer for Time-Life, was able to fill in a few of the yawning gaps in his knowledge and general awareness about who was who in the Betancourt clan. Obviously, he had met Gretchen, the favourite daughter of the great magnet and nowadays, Democrat man of affairs, and her husband, Daniel Brenckmann, Clerk to the US Chief Justice and the middle son of the sadly, now ex-American Ambassador to the Court of Woodstock. However, Nicko had not realised that Bill Sallis was ‘Uncle Bill’ to all the Betancourt siblings, or that his socialite cousin, Eleanor Louisa Winthrop – the daughter of a wealthy Boston Brahmin family - Gretchen’s mother and the second of old man Betancourt’s four wives, was presently the wife of President Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce.

  ‘Bill Sallis is one of the best-connected men in this city, darling,’ his wife had chided him, adding a pithy comment to the effect that if he did not spend so much time reading Thucydides – a reference recollecting their early courtship in Athens when she would often encounter him dressed in a crumpled suit, a silk scarf about his neck despite the ferocious heat of the Greek summer, invariably with a History of the Peloponnesian War, or some other ancient classical tome under his arm – he would have a lot more time to listen to gossip.

  Bill Sallis had already requisitioned the local Police Chief’s office by the time the British Ambassador arrived on the scene.

  “I talked Gretchen out of being seen around the station,” he stated with gruffly fond good humour. “She needs to remember she’s supposed to be Walter Brenckmann’s campaign manager these days,” he shook his head, “even if Walter doesn’t intend to get out there on the stomp until the fall.”

  Nicko Henderson had watched with fascination, and no little horror, as the Operation Maelstrom storm had continued to play out. It was as if somebody had thrown a huge rock into the DC pool of politics and giant waves were still crashing, hither and thither, in all directions. Every day there was a new, seismic shock, it seemed.

  Right now, the Russians were in town and had it not been for the assassination of James Jesus Angleton, the feared and variously loathed ‘national spy’, the unchallenged big story today, would be of the meeting of First Secretary and Chairman of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the President, in the Oval Office of the White House later that afternoon. That had been set up as a veritable media feeding frenzy; sadly, it was all rather put in the shade by the shooting at the Lincoln Memorial.

  After fighting his way into the Cleveland Park Police Station, the British Ambassador was left reflecting, that it was a pity that the American press and broadcasters had not shown as much interest in the United Nations gathering in San Francisco!

  Still, he reflected, one should always be grateful for small mercies: if Gretchen Betancourt had made an appearance this morning there would probably have been a riot!

  After much coming and going Nicko Henderson’s people had established that Rachel French had originally been conveyed to the George Washington University Hospital on 23rd Street. Although seemingly catatonic, it was established that, after she had been cleaned up a little that she was not physically injured, she had been transferred – in cuffs, no less – to Cleveland Park sometime during the night.


  “The cops think she was involved in the killing,” Bill Sallis announced, his tone suggesting that all cops were idiots. “They think she was the bait in the trap, enticing the victim to the Lincoln Memorial. I’ve been trying to explain to them the difference between probable cause – which they don’t have, nor will they ever have in this case – and the stuff Perry Mason gets away with on TV!”

  Mary Henderson, who had doggedly clung to her husband’s arm as they were buffeted into the police station, at last felt safe to detach herself from her husband’s arm, and appraised the broad – she had to admit, immensely solid, comforting – presence of the famous attorney.

  Bill Sallis, that was, not the fictional Los Angeles small screen defender…

  At that moment a stooped, grey-haired man smoking a cigarette knocked at the open door and walked into the office, with a rolling, stiff-kneed gait that spoke of a life of regular, hard knocks.

  “I’m detective McCready. Tom McCready,” he introduced himself. His tie was at half-mast and he clearly was not impressed, or in any way over-awed by the people who had commandeered his Captain’s room.

  Bill Sallis introduced Henderson and his wife.

  McCready ran a hand through his thinning hair. He was in his fifties, and nothing he did happened in a hurry.

  “Okay,” he said eventually. “What we’ve got is your woman sitting on the same bench opposite the Lincoln Memorial three days running. Same time of day, near as dammit. Just sitting there, waiting. She says she didn’t know the dead guy was going to turn up but she won’t say who she was expecting. It doesn’t look good for her, does it?”

  Bill Sallis glanced at Henderson, who shrugged, wordlessly.

  “Now I’m being told the lady worked for the Company?” The detective went on, taking a long, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, and exhaling with a sigh. “The FBI say this is their case. Two of their people are in with her now…”

  Nicko Henderson and his wife blinked.

  Bill Sallis was on his feet, brushing past Detective McCready, who watched the big man shoulder out of the door with a rueful grin playing on his lips.

  “Okay,” he groaned, shaking his head wearily. “I know your woman is involved in this thing up to her neck,” he said, without a scintilla of angst, “but you don’t need to be Chief of Police to figure out this isn’t going anywhere. Trouble is, in this city everybody thinks they’re smarter than everybody else. If it was me, I’d just have driven the lady up to the gates of your Embassy and washed my hands of it. Now, the way things are, there will be records in notebooks, custody documents, court papers and sooner or later everybody in DC will know what they ‘think’ they know about what happened yesterday.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette.

  “And… They’ll all be wrong. Because this is DC and that’s just the way it is.”

  “My, my,” Nicko Henderson half-smiled. “You are quite the philosopher detective, Mister McCready.”

  “No,” the other man took no offence at this; to the contrary, he recognised the oblique compliment the remark implied. “I’ve got fifteen months to retirement. I plan to go fishing a lot. I need this shit like I need a hole in the head.”

  He shrugged again.

  “You folks need to come with me; the Captain will be signing your woman over into your custody in about five minutes.” He chuckled. “He doesn’t want to lose his pension, either.”

  Chapter 68

  Thursday 16th February 1967

  BETASOM U-boat pens, Port de Bordeaux, France

  Two of HMS Eagle’s Sea Vixens had begun to fly noisy circles over the city that afternoon while, distantly, two of the carrier’s Fairey Gannet AEW3s had flown lazy patterns across the suburbs, the surrounding villages and ventured over the southern valleys of the Dordogne and Garonne rivers. The arrival of the Sea Vixens, rocketing low over the roof tops at around six hundred knots, threatening to barrel through the sound barrier in long, low, shallow full-power dives, had driven the majority of the rioters, who in any case, had already had their fun, off the street or underground.

  Some fifteen hours after they had tumbled out of their Westland Wessex onto the top of the BETASOM U-boat pen complex, the great still mostly intact river port city of Bordeaux was in the hands of four Royal Marines and a former Red Army defector. By rights, the situation ought to have been getting somewhat fraught by now.

  Fortunately, those Krasnaya Zarya or Front Internationale fighters who had yet to give up their weapons, had no way of knowing that Paddy Ashdown’s bandits were alone, out on an improbably thin, precarious limb, or the true paucity of Allied forces in the region.

  The 4th Tanks might only be twenty miles away at Blaye but Edwin Bramall was fully aware that he might as well have been on the dark side of the Moon!

  The flooded Gironde was between him and the city, an old ferry which had been moored in an inundated creek for four years, a few rowing boats and kayaks apart he was well and truly ‘stuffed’ when it came to riverine transportation. Worse, the two helicopters lost last night comprised half his available ‘air force’, and the two remaining aircraft were unserviceable, both in parts in barns.

  He was so hard-pressed he had had to go down on his knees and beg the Senior Service for help.

  To be fair, the Navy had been very good, quite charming about his dilemma and had promised to do what they could to help.

  It was still galling to have had to go to cap in hand…

  Out in the Bay of Biscay the County class destroyer HMS Devonshire, had stripped out the cabin of her single Westland Wessex helicopter and flown it to Blaye. Now it, and one of the Eagle’s smaller Whirlwind’s, similarly stripped down, were approaching the river port preparing to discharge their combined cargo of twenty Royal Marines – minus their normal kit, hefting personal weapons only - onto the quayside between the inner and outer tidal basins of the port of Bordeaux.

  The plan was for the helicopters to shuttle backwards and forwards transferring every available man Bramall could scrape up as quickly as possible. To add impetus to the enterprise, he was travelling in the Wessex on the first flight.

  A second pair of HMS Eagle’s Sea Vixens rocketed over the port ahead of the approach of the Wessex and the Whirlwind, as if warning anybody stupid enough to take a pot shot at the approaching aircraft exactly what the consequences of such foolishness might be.

  Edwin Bramall had informed Paddy Ashdown that he, Sergey Akhromeyev and his surviving Marines would depart Bordeaux on the second return shuttle to Blaye. They were to hand over to the reinforcements without delay. Bramall would brook no debate on the subject.

  ‘You’ve just captured the last major city still in enemy hands in Western France, Paddy! I’m damned if I’m going to let you hog all the bloody glory!”

  More to the point, the country badly needed a few more living heroes, instead of all the dead ones, it seemed to have been piling up lately.

  “The Front Internationale seems to be disintegrating everywhere,” Ashdown confided to Akhromeyev. “Like a house of cards; a couple of good, hard knocks and the whole thing is falling down. You were right all along. It doesn’t look like they’ll be anything for your Commandos up in Herefordshire to do, after all.”

  Sergey Akhromeyev thought about the proposition.

  He shook his head.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  “No?”

  Again, the Russian shook his head as the two men watched the first helicopter, the Devonshire’s Wessex flare out and touch down, rolling a short distance and coming to a halt. Men immediately spewed from it, sprinting at a crouch to defensive positions at the neck of the dock before moving, suspiciously forward.

  “You must understand that France was never a big thing for the people back home. It was always a test of how much the West cared; of how much blood it was willing to shed to defend its sphere of influence. Germany or Italy will be the next battleground, probably Italy because the people i
n Sverdlovsk aren’t idiots. Krasnaya Zarya, the Front Internationale, these are just agents of proxy, names behind which the Party can hide. If the Americans give Chairman Shelepin what he wants in Central Europe he will turn his gaze elsewhere; that is the way this game is played. That business attacking the ships at Villefranche, that was an aberration. Mixed messages inside the Troika; don’t count on that happening again. For all I know that was just politics, Soviet style. It weakens Gorshkov, even though I doubt Shelepin wants to get rid of him. Not yet. For the moment the military weakness of the Motherland can be blamed on the old Admiral, even though none of it is his fault. As I say, that’s just Soviet politics. Sometimes, I think that only you British really understand us…”

  Paddy Ashdown had been listening with mounting curiosity.

  “In what way? I’m not sure I’m with you, General?”

  Sergey Akhromeyev grinned, shook his head.

  “Oh, I think you understand me. You just don’t know it yet.”

  The first helicopter was lifting off, banking to turn away.

  More soldiers, dark, distant forms were moving away from the second aircraft.

  Sergey Akhromeyev smiled.

  “The thing that the English and the Russians have in common is a sense of the gallant lost cause, and, a ruthlessness that singles us out from all other nations. The Americans wrote your little country off after Suez; now they will keep you close because after what happened back in the Persian Gulf, and since, they fear what, left to your own…”

  At last Akhromeyev’s vocabulary failed him.

  “Devices?” The younger man offered.

  “Yes, I think so. Left to your own devices,” another smile, “they fear what you may do next!”

  Chapter 69

  Thursday 16th February 1967

  RAAF Amberley, Queensland, Australia