by James Philip
The man knocked at the door a couple of times.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes!” That was a lie.
Eventually, she splashed water on her face, wrapped herself in a towel and emerged.
The man was on his knees, dressed only in his skivvies, in the hallway scrubbing the floor.
He looked up.
“I hung my things in the John to dry,” she explained distractedly, very tired and a little faint. “My bag is in the trunk of my car.”
Nathan stared at her, chewed his lip.
“I’ll bring it in.”
She nodded, stepped past him into the bedroom. This bungalow only had the one. There was a single double bed, made up with hospital-style precision. She guessed Nathan usually slept in the cot in the living room, preferring surroundings which more closely matched the generally Spartan conditions on Strategic Air Commands bases, many of which were located so far out in the boondocks that the nearest big town was twenty or thirty miles away.
Caroline sat on the bed.
Awakening much, much later she did not recollect burrowing beneath the sheets, or her head touching the pillow. She had fallen into the darkness as if plunging uncaringly over a precipice into some black abysmal depth. Her mind had embraced nothingness, and her body had surrendered to its exhaustion. She had seen it in so many others but never experienced it; that state when one’s mind and body shuts down, a self-defensive reflex, an autonomic questing for a safe place in which to hide.
The man was sitting in a chair watching her in the gloom when she awakened.
He had pulled on pants with razor sharp ironed creases, a fresh shirt. Having been dozing he blinked alert at Caroline’s groan of regained consciousness.
It was pain which had woken her.
Her bladder felt like it was fit to burst.
Wrapping a sheet around her shoulders she scurried to the bathroom, making it just in time. When she was finished everything hurt a little less. She checked herself, the bowl of the toilet.
No blood...
The John had a soft flush; Nathan must have done something about the building’s rusting pipe work...
The man was standing outside as she emerged.
Instantly, she held up a hand.
“No, no,” she murmured. “I need a little time...”
She had a vile taste in her mouth, she was parched, and her voice was a hoarse whisper.
“No, I need a glass of water. And coffee; a little milky, not too strong.”
In the bedroom she edged back under the disturbed sheets and drew them up to her chin.
“There’s ice in the refrigerator if the water’s too warm,” Nathan muttered.
Caroline sat up, sipped, and then gulped water as if she had a desert thirst.
“More?” He asked.
“No. Coffee, I need coffee.” This said she collapsed onto the pillow and lay unmoving, utterly spent listening to the man in the adjacent kitchen. “What time is it?” She inquired when the man returned.
“Nearly seven,” he confessed.
Caroline realized she must have slept six or seven hours straight.
She grimaced as she tested the coffee; milky and sugary.
“Sugar’s good if you are in shock,” Nathan shrugged. “After what I did to you,” he shrugged again in an agony of self-loathing, “you must be pretty...”
Caroline had sat up in the bed.
She took another mouthful of coffee. It tasted like the real stuff, ground beans although the milk and sugar spoiled it completely.
“I’m not in shock, Nathan,” she reassured, stifling a yawn. “And I’m not afraid of you,” she took a breath, “or anything. I’m just a little sore downstairs, okay.”
Sore as in sore the morning after she gave birth; one kid had been the deal with Harvey, her husband. He had wanted more but then he was not the one who had to pass their goddam heads thought his pelvic passage. No, now that she thought about it she was nowhere near that sore. She was older these days and she had not had sex with a youthful, energetic, well-endowed partner for over two decades.
“Oh, right,” the boy said, swallowing hard.
Caroline was finally starting to feel half-way normal. To her ‘normal’ was when she was in control and everybody in the room was listening to what she had to say and trying very hard to appear to be paying attention. ‘Shrinking violet’ had never been her style and although today had been a truly weird day, especially the being raped part of it, her equilibrium had returned and she realized that she was definitely the one calling the shots.
“Things,” she asserted sanguinely, “are screwed up, Nathan; out there in the World and in this bedroom. That’s just the way it is. The only thing that really surprises me is that we aren’t all complete basket cases. The whole fucking World got blown up less than two years ago, the country’s in a mess and most of the northern hemisphere is a goddammed rubble field!”
The man nodded, not knowing where this was going.
“Do something for me, Nathan. Please?”
The man’s eyes narrowed in confusion, his expression boyishly quizzical.
“How’s about you give yourself a break?” Caroline went on. “After what you’ve been through you were going to get angry sooner or later. I just happened to be standing in front of you when all that existential angst you’ve been bottling up for the last eighteen months exploded.”
Nathan Zabriski said nothing.
“Boom!” She added, for effect with what she hoped was a twinkle in her eyes. “All that’s happened is that I’ve got a few bruises in places I probably wouldn’t choose to have them,” Caroline went on ruefully, “and you feel shitty about it. That’s all that’s happened.”
Caroline put down her coffee mug on the floor. She reached out and took his hand, waited until her met her eye in the gloom.
“And,” she sighed, “I’m still here.”
Chapter 7
Saturday 6th June 1964
SAM 26000, Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
John Fitzgerald Kennedy put down the handset and stared distractedly out of the window at his left shoulder. The plan had been to get back on the re-election campaign back on track. The plan had been to rap the British over the knuckles at Hyannis Port, to underline his America First credentials in the way only an incumbent President can. The plan had been to return to DC in triumph, to tour the Pentagon and the great reconstruction works; the fanfare had been choreographed, and at dusk he was to deliver a rallying call to the nation from the steps of the Capitol Building. He was the man who had saved the United States. He was the great war leader who had vanquished his nation’s deadliest foes. He was now he was the only man to lead his people out of the slough of despond...
He had been working on that speech with Ted Sorenson as SAM 26000, the long-range Boeing VC-137 flagship jetliner of the presidential air fleet had touched down on the tarmac of Andrews Field. And then the call had come through.
There had been a brief window of the best part of twenty-four hours when he honestly believed the Cape Cod Summit had killed half-a-dozen birds with one stone, and that everything would turn out fine in the end. The British had handed over Jericho – in principle, not lock stock and barrel; that would have been too much to hope for – in exchange for the promise of economic aide down the line. It was a fair deal: a new Marshall Plan in exchange for a cryptographic gold mine that would help to inform the peace feelers Secretary of State J. William Fulbright had been working on ever since the Red Army invaded Iran back at the beginning of April.
The President had worried if his state of the union address after the summit was overly condescending, gloating even, but all the telephone polling in the hours after the broadcast had been positive. A golden window of opportunity had unexpectedly opened, and he meant to drive a political cart and horses through it at a hundred miles an hour. He had planned to make a lasting peace with the war-weakened Soviet Union and to spend the months between now
and the General Election in November thumping the America First tub; Vote JFK for peace at home and abroad!
However, at this precise moment he suddenly found himself contemplating the vagaries of law of unintended consequences. The plan had never been to stir up anti-British riots in Philadelphia. The United Kingdom Embassy in Wister Park had been bombed! Over fifty demonstrators outside the embassy compound had been killed and there had been over twenty casualties inside the embassy.
And now his soul was beset by a new, corrosive unease.
The bombing of the embassy was a sign, an omen and he was beginning to suspect that far from opening a road back to the White House in November all he3 had actually achieved, was to inadvertently release some terrible, vengeful genie out of a bottle.
Lyndon Johnson had warned him that Margaret Thatcher – no matter how politically wounded – would not simply lie down in front of the ‘fucking train’. In fact LBJ had been scornful: ‘You’ve met that goddammed woman; if you or Bobby tried to put your hands up her skirt she’d rip off your balls!’
Jack Kennedy and his Vice President had been falling out for several weeks by the time they had had that long-distance telephone call over a bad line just before the final President to Premier session of the Cape Code Summit. The rift had first opened when the decision was made to row back on the Moon Program, specifically the commitment to put an American on the Lunar surface before the end of the decade enabling the project to be run, and more importantly, funded, on a minimal care and maintenance level until further notice. Of course, no official announcement would be made until after the November elections. Then LBJ had got into a fight – more a bare knuckle brawl - with the Illinois-led Midwest ‘Governor’s Council’ over the handling of the ‘Chicago situation’. None of the Governors had wanted a ‘Bellingham solution’ to what they considered, for reasons best known to themselves, to be a straightforward law and order ‘problem’ in the bombed out northern districts of the Windy City. Their argument went something like: the potential for trouble to spread was too great and there had been enough bloodshed already; surely a policy of containment, blockade and ongoing negotiation was the best way to proceed? Sacking the only man who had the native gumption to crush the insurrection in Illinois quickly, if not cleanly, Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had pretty much been the final straw for Johnson.
The President had known that was a mistake at the time but unless he carried Ohio, Indiana and at least half the Midwest he was going to get buried in November. He had needed to keep the surviving Democrat caucus in those states onside...
Now northern Illinois and eastern Wisconsin were burning. Far from containing the ‘Chicago situation’ the half-way house solution of bottling up the contagion in Chicago had allowed the cancer to ferment, fester and in recent days, malignantly erupt. Thus far a Draconian news blackout had drawn a foggy veil over what had happened in Milwaukee in the last week; but sooner or later the people would learn that a second great city on Lake Michigan’s western shores had been overrun.
It was a nightmare.
Very nearly beyond credulity in fact...
A rabble of tens of thousands of ‘religious nuts’ had driven up Interstate 94 in a ten mile long convoy of cars, pickups, trucks and coaches into the middle of Milwaukee and like a deadly virus spread out and seized the whole city in less than a day. There were stories of mass summary killings, and of men, women and children being herded into buildings and burned alive, of unspeakable atrocities being carried out against women and children....
The Council of the Great Lakes...
‘If you order me to obliterate any place on earth I can do that, Mr President,’ Curtis LeMay had told him the day before the Hyannis Port ‘talks’ with the British, ‘that’s easy. I whistle up a couple of B-52 bomb wings and it happens sometime in the next twenty-four hours. But when you ask me to deal with what’s going down in Chicago and Milwaukee two months after you ordered me to go on the defensive and re-deploy sixty percent of my in theatre ground combat forces in penny parcels all around the South, I can’t deal with a popular insurgency involving ten, twenty, for all I know a hundred thousand rebels that’s spread across two states, just like that, sir.’
‘You managed it in DC in December?’
“Mayor fucking Daley and his friends hadn’t tied my hands behind my back in December, sir!’ LeMay had been coldly civil, his voice grim.
Back in December Jack Kennedy – and many of those around him – had been convinced that LeMay was the man behind the attempted coup d’état in Washington. In the event it was LeMay who had ridden to the rescue of the union.
‘What can you do, General?’ He had asked the other man with thinly disguised exasperation.
‘I can order the units on the ground to fight and die to gain time, sir.’
‘And then what?’
‘If we’re lucky we only get to have a civil war in Illinois and Wisconsin, sir.’
This had been said with bland professional deference but lacked nothing in excoriating contempt. The President had disregarded the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee’s explicit advice in the spring and now they were reaping the whirlwind. The long and the short of it was that the Administration had betrayed the people of Milwaukee and all the other Illinois and Wisconsin towns which would soon fall under the evil cloak of the uprising; an uprising every inch as savage and merciless – albeit on a massively larger scale - as that which had ravaged the Capital in December. Jack Kennedy had no doubt that even as he sat, staring out of the window at the sun-blessed tarmac of Andrews Field where a Marine honor guard awaited his disembarkation, that innocent men, women and children were being driven from their homes, butchered in the streets, or were fleeing for their lives in their tens of thousands west of the Michigan coast. The fate of the women and girls who had fallen into the rebels hands in DC last year sent a shudder through his aching frame, and a red hot stab of disgust deep into what he still liked to call his conscience.
“Two bombs went off in front of the British Embassy,” Jack Kennedy said dully, looking across the table to where Ted Sorenson sat. “Most of the dead were demonstrators in the road outside the gate but there are a lot of casualties inside the compound...”
“That’s bad, sir.”
“Premier Thatcher’s government has fallen,” the President went on, “and Ambassador Brenckmann has submitted his resignation.” At this his lips involuntarily quirked into a parody of humor. “Again.”
The oddest thing was that although his head still told him that there was everything to play for, notwithstanding the disasters in Illinois and Wisconsin in his heart he knew the game was over.
He had lost the confidence of the Chiefs of Staff; there would be no coup but in these days he needed the military at his shoulder, not standing a respectful pace adrift of the Administration.
His rift with Lyndon Johnson was irreconcilable; to LBJ talking to the Russians was one thing, reneging on the ‘Moon deal’ another but when he had been cut out of the crucial Party meetings leading to the abandonment of the spring offensive in Illinois his personal and political ‘line in the sand’ had been crossed.
The people at State promised that when Margaret Thatcher was gone there would be a ‘more amenable’ regime in England; that the British would again resume the role of an obedient client. The Lady had promised as much at Hyannis Port; perhaps, he ought to have taken her at her word and given her sufficient ammunition to fight off her enemies? Better a headstrong partner than a morally enfeebled ally; the former might fight to the death by one’s shoulder, the latter never.
The White House Head of Protocol knocked on the door and entered.
“It’s time to go, sir.”
The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America nodded and rose, like an old man, to his feet.
He knew he had made a dreadful mistake.
I ought to have made my peace with the British.
Chapter 8
&n
bsp; Sunday 7th June 1964
Field Headquarters, 32nd Infantry Brigade, Madison, Wisconsin
Norman Schwarzkopf could not remember ever being this tired. He had been on his feet, on the move, awake for seventy-two hours straight and even his youthfully irrepressible constitution was wavering. He clambered down from the mud and dust caked Jeep and turned to watch the first of his M113 APCs jolt to a halt nearby. All the vehicles, all of his men, all of their kit and equipment, weapons and ammunition were caked in the Wisconsin mire. Either the heavens poured drenching monsoon waterfalls upon them, or a brilliant, burning, dazzling sun beat down upon the land. Off the tarmac of Interstate 94 the ground was impassably boggy for fifty to a hundred feet either side to anything but a tracked vehicle.
Schwarzkopf’s first taste of combat had been a sobering experience.
He had lost two men in the vicious fire fights which had broken out in the gently undulating fields east of Waukesha as they had fallen back to the north. Another of his men had been wounded when a man had stepped out of the trudging mass of humanity attempting to escape Milwaukee and opened fire with a pistol. Twenty miles east of Waukesha somebody had taken several pot shots at one of his M113s, rifle rounds pinging harmlessly off the monsters as their tracks ground purposefully west at a snail’s pace so as to not run down people on the road. His boys had blazed away with fifty caliber machine guns; afterwards nobody had known what they were shooting at.
Schwarzkopf made his report to his battalion commander, Lieutenant Harvey Colonel Grabowski.
“Six suspected rebels?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve done good, Little Bear!”