Ask Not Of Your Country (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 4)

by James Philip

  God was angry and perdition awaited anybody who failed to join the...crusade.

  America had been smote by the vengeance of the God; if the righteous failed to carry on his work of destruction, allowing the fallen and the impious to continue to rule on Earth, His will in Heaven would never be done and both the faithful and the heretic would burn together in Hell.

  Women were harlots, children innocents to be slain to save their pure young souls from the damnation to come.

  The Army – the Revelation Army – of the Governate was nothing less than the sword of God manifest...

  The nomenclature was still a little hazy.

  Some rebels called themselves ‘blood soldiers’ or ‘warriors’. Other preferred to style themselves ‘Revelation Soldiers’.

  The infantrymen attempting to stem the tide of insanity referred to the enemy as the ‘RS’, or just ‘crazies’.

  All of which was incidental.

  The rebels, insurgents, madmen – and women – ravaging and harrying eastern Wisconsin had carried everything before them. Those who were spared; men, women and children were swept up into its ranks. It was not so much an army that was sweeping towards Madison as a tsunami of dispossessed humanity driven ahead of unknown regiments of fanatics possessed with the moral compass of a conquering Mongol horde.

  Governor Reynolds had been briefed – fully briefed – but he had either been incapable of understanding what he was being told, or had decided to ignore what it implied for the fate of the people trapped in the path of the oncoming storm.

  There had been intelligence reports about the Council of the Lakes, its adherents – the term ‘blood soldier’ had been listed in many situation digests over the last few months – but until late February both the ‘Council’ and its ‘blood soldiers’ had been viewed as just one, essentially lesser manifestation of the violent fragmentation of the insurgency north of the Chicago ‘peace line’.

  The idea that what, hitherto, had complacently been regarded as criminal ‘gangs’ and ‘clans’, and ‘religious cults’ might someday explode out of the great city and overwhelm Milwaukee - previously a wholly, undamaged, fully functioning, economically booming city, effectively cashing in on Chicago’s misfortune - had seemed too fantastic to be taken seriously. And yet that was exactly what had happened with terrifying speed in the first days of June. It had happened so fast and so unexpectedly that even had the Chicago Front Command known what was going on it would have had neither the time, nor the military assets in place to do anything about it. With the exception of small, scattered ‘holding forces’ south of Milwaukee and encamped at Madison and Janesville in Southern Wisconsin, and Rockford in northern Illinois – in total less than four thousand combat effectives - there had been nothing to stop the insurgents between Milwaukee and the Iowa-Minnesota state line two hundred miles to the west.

  First Army, responsible for the whole Midwest was scrambling to concoct a drastically cut down version of April’s abandoned Operation Rectify which it hoped might ‘take the sting’ out of the enemy advance.

  And buy time…

  Bill Rosson was not holding his breath on that one.

  Everything he had learned in the last few days told him that his enemy would ignore an attack on its former Chicago strongholds. The enemy had moved on; holding ‘places’ for the sake of it was not ‘his’ way of waging war. He was not fighting rational men; the people coming towards him were on a...crusade. The minds of his enemies were Medieval, pre-enlightenment. He was facing a holy war not an insurrection.

  April’s aborted offensive – Operation Rectify - had envisage a general assault along the ‘peace line’ penetrating rebel strong points, sowing confusion in the ranks as the Marines came ashore at Waukegan, North Chicago and Evanston. By D+7 the ring would have been closing on the rebels; whom it was assumed would surrender or be comprehensively encircled and contained; allowing starvation and disease to eventually put the whole ‘Chicago problem’ to bed without the costly necessity of having to take back the ruined city street by street.

  That plan had been drawn up by Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, the Adjutant General of the National Guard of the West Coast Confederacy; the man who had stamped out the Bellingham insurgency, pacified Seattle and systematically restored a semblance of law and order in the Cascades, the western Rockies and the Sierra Madre. Dempsey had been ready to go at the end of March; but men like Reynolds, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago and Illinois Governor, Otto Kerner, had wanted to retain control, refused to give the military a free reign, and appealed over the heads of the Chiefs of Staff to the President.

  The rest was history; the prelude to the present disaster.

  Dempsey had been sacked, the military had been ordered to review ‘all the options’ so as to arrive at a solution which ‘reduced the hazard to non-combatants’, and troops earmarked for the Chicago Front had been siphoned off for peace keeping and civil order duties in the Deep South. Worse, ships and men previously detailed to strengthen the Great Lakes Bombardment and Marine Expeditionary Force had been redeployed to ‘show the flag’ in the Pacific when Carrier Division Seven – built around the USS Kitty Hawk, previously regarded as the ‘guard ship’ of Japan and the South China Sea – had been re-tasked to patrol the Indian ocean.

  Governor Reynolds flinched as an explosion in the near distance rattled the windows of the State Capitol. As yet there had been no direct assault on the city; the enemy was content to lob random mortar rounds and occasional long range shells onto the Madison Isthmus. Closing the lines to refugees had dramatically cut the incidence of suicide bombings and ‘mad dog’ gun and knife attacks against the civilian population; and up until a couple of days ago as many as five or six snipers had been active. The Marines had killed three and driven the others underground but for the last thirty-six hours the area around the capitol had been in lockdown.

  “Um,” the commander of the 32nd Infantry Division grunted. His temper was barely under control. “The reason I do not intend to attempt to re-open the northern ‘corridor’, Governor,” he explained with icy patience, “is that the military priority is to hold Madison. And that,” he added grimly, “is exactly what I will do...”

  “How on earth are we going to feed the people?”

  Rosson viewed the graying politician with coolly exasperated eyes.

  “Feeding the people is not my problem, sir. I’m fighting a war here not running a grocery store.” He knew he ought to shut up at that point. However, something drove him to make one last attempt to explain the new reality to the older man. Several of his staffers were already calling the state capitol ‘the Alamo’; the bigger picture was that Madison - sitting at a key junction of the Interstate’s from the south east and the east - was the Bastogne of Wisconsin. He beckoned the Governor of Wisconsin to move closer to the map table. He pointed at Madison. “My job is to buy time for Command to scrape up and deploy blocking forces between here and Minneapolis. The Navy may be able to transport forces to Duluth to reinforce the existing company-strength National Guard garrison, and if it comes to it provide fire support. None of that is going to happen if we don’t hold Madison, sir.”

  “But the people...”

  “The people aren’t going anywhere, sir,” Rosson said sadly, almost gently.

  Chapter 15

  Friday 12th June 1964

  Broad Street, Philadelphia

  As befitted the Philadelphia chambers of Betancourt and Sallis, Attorneys at Law, of Boston, Massachusetts, the newly acquired Broad Street offices were appropriately grand, positively palatial. However, other than to find Dan – if her husband was in his junior associate’s second floor broom closet – to drag him out to lunch, or just to see him, Gretchen Betancourt rarely showed her face in Broad Street.

  Whereas Dan, for all that he was the most junior associate at the firm was engaged on Federal work that could only reflect well on the partnership; her current ‘brief’ was altogether less publicly creditw
orthy. In fact, for the sake of propriety, Gretchen had temporarily ceased to be an associate at the firm.

  Normally, when she visited the Broad Street office she went in search of her husband but today Dan was at City Hall, the seat of the House of Representatives acting as Chief Justice Earl Warren’s secretary in a meeting with the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate.

  Today, she had made a beeline directly up to the senior partners’ rooms on the third floor.

  Fifty-nine year old William Henry Sallis II was a large well fed distinguished man with courtly manners. He had been with the firm thirty-seven years, the last twenty-eight of them as Gretchen’s father’s trusted right hand man. He was ‘Uncle Bill’ to all the Betancourt siblings. His cousin, Eleanor Louisa, was Gretchen’s mother and had been her father’s second wife.

  Gretchen’s mother and father had only been married half-a-dozen years, and as a girl she had treated her step-mother, her father’s third and – presumably, given his advancing age – final wife, Gloria, as her real mother. She and Gloria had got on all right until Gretchen was about fourteen, thereafter things had gone sour. Probably this was because Gretchen was Eleanor’s, her birth mother’s - spitting image, and two strong-willed women under the same roof was always a recipe for trouble. Gretchen had been sent away to boarding schools, including one at Cheltenham in the old country for a year – which she had hated – and spent her holidays in New England with her father and brothers while Gloria amused herself in Acapulco, or the French Riviera.

  She had never blamed her step-mother’s neglect on Uncle Bill.

  She had always been immensely fond of Uncle Bill.

  “Uncle!” She smiled, foregoing the business handshakes and solemn nods of acknowledgement in favor of a ‘niece-like’ hug and a pecking kiss, greeting her Uncle as she would regardless of the presence of the United States Deputy Attorney General in her firm’s Senior Partner’s Conference Room.

  The last time Gretchen had had anything to do with Nick Katzenbach was the previous fall when she had been working as an assistant counsel in the protocol office of the Justice Department. He had used her to deflect press attention from the White House in the days immediately before the Battle of Washington; provoking FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to leak false allegations that she was having an affair with him to the press. The hue and cry had not been very nice, forcing her to seek a position in another department. To cut a long story short it was Nick Katzenbach’s fault that she was in the office of Under Secretary of State George Ball at the time the rebels blew it up!

  She shook hands with the Deputy Attorney General.

  “It is good to see you so recovered, Mrs Brenckmann,” the man said. Then he thought about it, and opened his mouth to correct himself.

  “I sign myself Gretchen Brenckmann,” she said, tartly, “but all my documentation bears the name Brenckmann-Betancourt. Either appellation is fine by me, Mr Katzenbach.”

  “Nick,” Bill Sallis interjected smoothly as the trio settled in comfortable chairs, “has a little problem that he hopes our firm can finesse for him.”

  Katzenbach chuckled and shook his head.

  “It’s more Director Hoover’s problem than mine actually, Bill.”

  “Yes, quite so, Nick.”

  Gretchen frowned even though she knew it to be less than professional.

  Bill Sallis ran a hand over his balding pate.

  “Perhaps, if you would explain the, er, situation, to Gretchen, Nick?”

  There was a knock at the door and Sallis’s middle-aged graying secretary Hilda, entered with a coffee tray. Hilda was famous for keeping detailed notes on how each of her boss’s visitors liked his or her coffee. Bill Sallis half rose to his feet and smiled briefly at the newcomer. Everybody in the firm thought something had to have been going on between the two of them for years but both were such scions of discretion that even if something had been, or still was ‘going on’ between them, nobody held out any hope of finding out what, any time soon.

  “I’m here on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the Deputy Attorney General prefaced, hardly believing he was about to say what he planned to say next. “Specifically, at the request of Director Hoover who finds himself in a, shall we say, delicate position over a matter of what might possibly be great national importance.”

  Gretchen tried very hard to keep a straight face.

  It was not easy.

  The idea of a senior member of the Administration doing J. Edgar Hoover any kind of favor would have had her rolling around on the floor in agonizing stitches of laughter in practically any other circumstance.

  “You will be aware that the President has, in addition to the Bureau’s other responsibilities, instructed Director Hoover to prioritize the ongoing investigation into the plot to depose the government by force in December of last year,” Nick Katzenbach grimaced apologetically, knowing that Gretchen was the last person in America he needed to tell about that, “and the hunting down of the men responsible for the Bedford Pine Park atrocity.”

  Gretchen nodded, genuinely curious.

  “I am not here in connection with the first of the President’s ‘priorities’,” the Deputy Attorney General said quickly. “That would be inappropriate and lead to a conflict of interests since you are defending several of the alleged ring leaders of that uprising. The thing is,” he explained, “Director Hoover believes he knows who was responsible for the Bedford Pine Park shootings but has been unable to locate, or to capture those individuals. In extremis, therefore, the FBI is seeking to enlist a former criminal associate of the men responsible who may be able to lure, or entrap the killers and thereby enable the government to bring them to justice. But there is a problem. The man concerned, a former FBI Special Agent, is refusing to co-operate unless he receives cast iron guarantees of life-long immunity from prosecution for his many, and I should say, heinous crimes.”

  Gretchen thought this was beginning to sound like the script of a bad radio show detailing the exploits of a particularly inept G-man. Unfortunately, since this was consistent with the level at which she had witnessed the Federal government routinely conducting is affairs it all made a perverse kind of sense.

  She glanced to Bill Sallis.

  The older man sighed, waiting for Katzenbach to go further.

  “Director Hoover believes that the men responsible for the attempt to assassinate Dr King and other leading members of the Southern Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, have been involved in a number of brutal killings and the attempt to kill the President in Dallas. Director Hoover is of the view that these men, if they are not apprehended, will almost certainly go on to target other leading figures; for example, candidates running for the Presidency, or prominent members of civil or military society. In normal times there would be no consideration of granting the immunities under discussion. However,” Katzenbach spread his hands, “these are hardly normal times.”

  Gretchen realized she was missing something important.

  “This is all very interesting, Mr Katzenbach,” she queried, “but why are you telling me this?”

  The Deputy Attorney General picked up his coffee cup, took a sip.

  “The man whose expertise and knowledge of the primary suspects the FBI wishes t tap into,” he explained, “has made very particular demands with regard to what he construes to be a ‘cast iron’ guarantee of immunity.”

  “Oh.” No, she still did not know where this was heading.

  “Normally, I or the Attorney General would sign off on this,” Katzenbach said, telling her what she already knew, “documents would be posted and court orders issued. The deal would be cut and dried. Unfortunately, the man we are dealing with does not trust the Federal Government to keep its word. He wants his own attorney. Moreover, he wants an attorney who is so high profile that quote, ‘not even the Kennedys can silence him, or her’. End quote.”

  “The President or the Attorney General wouldn’t suborn an officer of the cou
rt,” Gretchen objected before she had thought about it.

  Actually, they might the way things were going in the Midwest, down in the South and all those miles away in the Middle East, and nobody knew how the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City at the end of August was going to turn out. Things were looking so bad for the President that he might not be even on the ticket come November...

  Neither of the men in the room spoke.

  Gretchen shrugged, narrowed her eyes a fraction.

  “Okay. We’re talking about a guy who is a little paranoid, I suppose.”

  Bill Sallis cleared his throat.

  “The Department of Justice takes the view that a person of your standing, Gretchen,” he said, as if he was making a casual observation about the coffee in the cup in his hand, “who has already metaphorically, dare one say, fearlessly, put her head above the parapet and is so much in the public eye, might be exactly the sort of attorney that our man might accept as being unimpeachably cast iron.”

  Gretchen was not often lost for words.

  Dan had remarked upon this more than once, fondly obviously; that was one of the reasons she had married him. That and the fact she had belatedly realized she had loved him ever since the night of the October War.

  “A penny for your thoughts, my dear,” Bill Sallis inquired gently.

  Gretchen did not ask if her father had sanctioned the Department of Justice’s approach; that went without saying.

  “Just so I understand what we’re talking about,” she checked because this was not a thing she could easily row back on later. “You want me to represent a really bad man to convince him to help J. Edgar Hoover catch at least two other even more evil men before they kill again? But nobody will ever know about this unless the Federal Government reneges on its word?”

  “Yes, that’s about the size of it,” Nicholas Katzenbach agreed, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Gretchen viewed him thoughtfully.

  “You’re telling me that I have to trust the Administration?”