by James Philip
“I’m sure that would be in order, Clyde,” the graying, elegant man who oozed charm from every pore of his being advised silkily. Frank Lovell smiled deferentially to Gretchen.
The cine camera on a tripod at the end of the table was already running, likewise a big reel to reel recorder wired to the circular microphone positioned in the middle of the table, as the doors to the reception room were closed. Dwight Christie’s minders had unlocked his wrists, sat him at the table and taken one step backwards. Clyde Tolson and Frank Lovell positioned themselves to the left and the right of the prisoner, each some six to seven feet distant. Gretchen and her husband were alone on the opposite side of the table, their backs to the partially draped windows. It was a dull, squally day outside, one of those days when the weather comes in off the Atlantic and produces unseasonal chills and cold quirky, gusting winds familiar to anybody who has ever walked the boardwalks of Atlantic City.
It was just ten-thirty almost to the second.
“I have organized coffee for around eleven o’clock,” Gretchen announced, taking charge of proceedings. She spoke directly to Dwight Christie as if he was the only man in the room. “Do you know who I am?”
Dwight Christie quirked an unlikely half-smile.
“Your Pa was old Joe Kennedy’s enforcer here on the East Coast,” he said. “But Mr Tolson says he wouldn’t take the case.”
Her father was very much ‘silent’ these days in the affairs of Betancourt and Sallis, Attorneys at Law. He was too wrapped up in Administration business, too preoccupied with manipulating the Democratic National Committee to risk being drawn again into the public eye. He described his work with the DNC as ‘herding cats’ and besides, he was still discreetly unraveling the murkier corners of his old friend, Joe Kennedy’s affairs. The President’s father had always intended to ‘clean house’ before he died but then he had had that stroke, and afterwards the first wave of the New England plague had carried him away with his work unfinished.
“Just for the record I am Gretchen Louisa Brenckmann-Betancourt of the Philadelphia Office of the firm of Betancourt and Sallis. To my left is my husband, Daniel Brenckmann, who has volunteered to be my assistant counsel in this matter. We are both associates of Betancourt and Sallis. It was my understanding that you required an attorney with a ‘high public profile’. Well, my father is a senior figure in the Democratic Party and a Kennedy family insider. I am currently defending the ring leaders of the December uprising. Dan is an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, and his father is currently the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. I think we qualify as ‘high profile’, Mr Christie.” Gretchen fixed the man with a thoughtful stare. “However, whether we are prepared to represent you in this matter at customary ‘public defender’ rates has yet to be determined.”
“I thought,” Christie began.
“If we are to represent you, Mr Christie,” Gretchen snapped impatiently, “you must fulfill your side of the bargain. You will give this meeting a full accounting of your subversive activities and crimes since the day you became,” she hesitated, searching for the right word, “disaffected, up until this time. If we are satisfied with the veracity of your account we will represent you. If not, then well, that will be the end of our involvement in your case.”
Dwight Christie looked at the two attorneys.
They were barely half his age; kids really.
“Do you get to speak, Mr Brenckmann?” He asked idly.
The other man grinned.
“This is Gretchen’s case, Mr Christie. I’m just here to watch her back.”
That was what the former FBI man had figured. He flicked his eyes to his left and right.
“What about attorney-client confidentiality?”
“You abrogated that right when you demanded immunity from prosecution,” Gretchen retorted. “If you want us to represent you in this matter you will accept our advice as to your best legal interests.”
“Don’t I get a say in this.”
“No.”
Frank Lovell coughed.
“I understood that we had already moved past...”
Gretchen gave the older man a withering scowl.
“We are the ones who are endeavoring, at potentially great reputational and career hazard, to assist the FBI and the Department of Justice. You came to us, not the other way around, Frank.”
The man held up his hand in a brief gesture of mock surrender.
While this small arm wrestle had been going on Dan Brenckmann had retrieved a big notebook from a slim attaché case by his chair and was beginning to make notes.
“Your full name, date and place of birth please, Mr Christie?”
“Dwight Harding Christie,” the other man replied. “Born Akron, Ohio. Fourth July nineteen-twenty.”
And so it began.
Education, upbringing, parents, siblings, war service, and Christie’s FBI career; his youthful anger at the war-profiteering of the industrial moguls, the deaths of his brothers on foreign battlefields, the complicity of the federal government and judiciary, the grasping avarice and selective amnesia of Congress and the courts which had eventually driven him into the arms of Soviet recruiters.
“I was a ‘sleeper’ for many years. Most of the fifties, I suppose. My job was to be a good agent, to embed myself in the California Field Office, to make myself the Bureau’s go to guy, Mr Reliable, so that when the revolution needed me most I’d be in the best place to serve it.” There was bitter disillusion in every word he said. “Then the World went mad. I’d never fired my weapon in anger before October 1962. I’d never killed a man until last December. The Reds just wanted people killed. It wasn’t selective. You just turned on whoever you were with at the time because the controllers reckoned we were all ‘blown’. Don’t ask me why? Don’t ask me why the revolution needed to hire the mobsters and killers it signed up. I don’t know why Admiral Braithwaite and his wife were killed. I got a call one day. Jansen, ‘the contractor’ was already in Oakland and I was to make sure ‘nothing got in his way’. The whole rebellion thing was a screw up. If we’d waited a few years the whole country would have eaten itself up anyway, we’d have just been able to walk up the steps of the Capitol Building and proclaim the revolution,” he grunted, his expression sour. “But all that was bull, too. After I got out of Berkeley I tried to make contact with other members of the network. Nobody was at home. They’d all been swept up by Mr Tolson’s boys,” he shook his head, “or they’d run for the hills. It turned out that the only man still standing was the crazy son-of-a-bitch I was hunting down when I got caught.”
Dan Brenckmann looked up from his notes.
“You were arrested in the swamps near a settlement called Sargent in Matagorda County, Texas, Mr Christie.”
The older man nodded.
“We have yet to establish the identity of the prisoner’s accomplice who was shot dead at the scene?” Clyde Tolson growled.
Gretchen met Dwight Christie’s stare with a raised eyebrow.
“Herman Stein,” Christie muttered. “He came over here in 1946. The Soviets were trawling the POW and displaced persons camps in what was left of Germany for scientists and technicians. I always assumed we got a lot of our people into Russia the way they got a lot of agents into the US on the back of Operation Paperclip. That was how Herman got in. Herman worked at the White Sands missile testing range for ten years before he was in a car smash. He retired after that. He ran the Texas-New Mexico ‘group’ but he was never ‘active’.” He glanced sidelong at Clyde Tolson. “These guys keep asking me about Red Dawn, Krasnaya Zarya, or whatever, who were supposed to be involved in the Washington uprising. I never heard of them, any of that. Krasnaya Zarya? Heck, I don’t speak Russian. I’m not some kind of mad dog terrorist.”
Gretchen contemplated this.
“If not that,” she probed, “what are you, Mr Christie?”
“You tell me, lady.”
“You may call me Gretchen, or Mrs Brenck
mann. Please don’t ever employ the word ‘lady’ again in my presence in such a pejorative fashion, Mr Christie.”
The rebuke was like a slap in the face.
“Sorry. No disrespect intended,” he apologized before he knew he had even opened his mouth. He hesitated. “Gretchen, if that’s okay?”
The young woman nodded.
Then she rose to her feet and extended her hand across the table. In a moment Dan Brenckmann had followed suit to shake Dwight Christie’s hand.
Gretchen turned to Frank Lovell.
“The managing partner of Betancourt and Sallis, Mr William Sallis, has authorized me to represent Mr Christie and to liaise with the Justice Department and the FBI on an ongoing pro bono basis in the interests of national security. Unless or until my husband’s work with Chief Justice Warren takes precedence over this work he will jointly represent the parties on the same basis going forward.”
The Brenckmanns resumed their chairs.
They looked expectantly to Clyde Tolson.
Chapter 21
Monday 15th June 1964
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
When Company ‘A’ had motored into the town a little before noon the Mayor and a crowd of gun-toting citizens had formed an ad hoc welcoming committee. It seemed that practically every veteran who possessed a gun had volunteered to stay behind until the elderly, the infirm, and all the women and children had been safely evacuated to the relative safety of Madison.
“We weren’t expecting the cavalry, Major Schwarzkopf,” Mayor Anton J. Hodge admitted. “We thought we were on our own in this fight.”
The bear-like young officer grinned broadly.
He and his men had drawn fresh fatigues and had had the run of the Wisconsin National Guard arsenal before setting off up US 151 to Sun Prairie; after the Company’s chastening recent experience running away from the rebels Schwarzkopf had jumped at the opportunity for payback.
“How many effectives do you have, sir?” He asked of the Mayor.
“About a hundred and twenty.”
The citizens of Sun Prairie were armed with hunting rifles, shotguns, revolvers and pistols that many of the men seemed to have brought back from World War II. Occasionally single shots or brief fusillades broke out in the near distance.
Schwarzkopf had been pleasantly surprised to discover the Madison arsenal was packed to the rafters with exactly the sort of firepower he needed. Each of his M113s carried a single Browning M2 50-caliber machine gun, and each of his grunts brand new M16 assault rifles, and Colt 1911 pistols. He had withdrawn six more M2s and two spare barrels for each weapon, and loaded up so much 50-caliber ammunition that his men had had to ride out to Sun Prairie sitting on top of the boxes. Almost as an afterthought two of his M113s had been loaded with 60-millimtre M19 Mortar reloads.
“Where are the bad guys?” Schwarzkopf asked as his men decamped from the big, rumbling armored personnel carriers and began to shake out into machine gun and mortar sections.
The Mayor of Sun Prairie stared distractedly at the raw, heavy metal firepower being unloaded from the backs of the M113s.
“Er, the main strength is to the south and south east. Possibly they intended to cut Route 151 into Madison but then they ran into the Marines dug in along the road. That was yesterday; overnight they started probing into the eastern streets of the town and feeling their way around to the north.”
“Right!” The towering younger man decided. “I’ll send my Recon Platoon up US 151 until they hit trouble.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Schwarzkopf was tempted to order him to pull his people out of harm’s way.
“Company ‘A’ has been sent out here to kill rebels,” he declared grimly. “Not to attempt to hold the town. We will dig in and we will kill rebels but when the time comes we will withdraw back into the Madison perimeter. If your people want to help me kill rebels that’s fine and dandy by me; but when we pull out it will be fast and dirty and we won’t be coming back for anybody we leave behind.”
Schwarzkopf was in a hurry to get forward. The ground on which Sun Prairie lay was undulating, part river valley and part farmland. There was no dominant high ground; and there would be dead areas, hollows in the surrounding fields where whole battalions might hide. His M2 machine guns were lethal out to two thousand yards, his M19 mortars out to nearly three thousand and already he was sensing a priceless opportunity to blunt the onrushing horde. If the rebels were already south of Sun Prairie his guns and mortars might catch them out in the open – vulnerable to enfilade fire - with several hours of daylight left.
He waved his men forward; the spearhead M113s lurching behind the scurrying infantrymen at a crawl, their M2s swinging from side to side. It was unreal; around him the streets were empty, intact, undamaged, typical genteel Americana, the sort of place where a man would want to bring up a young family. Not that any sane man would want to marry or start a family in the World the way it was at the moment.
From within the Madison perimeter 105 mm M2A1 (M101A1) howitzers – of which five had been mothballed in the Madison arsenal – fired ranging shots every few minutes down the east-west alignment of Interstate 94. There were only a couple of hundred rounds per barrel in the depot so the artillerymen were being frugal this early in the battle.
Schwarzkopf sent his Recon Platoon and two M113s east with orders to withdraw into the built-up area of the town on contact with the enemy and headed into the southern streets with half-a-dozen men. The citizens of Sun Prairie had dug foxholes, overturned cars and trucks to block roads and sought out the best sniping posts.
“Well I’ll be...”
The rebels were encamped in the open, shielded here and there by small stands of trees, in their thousands. They were not quite naked on the plain below Sun Prairie because the land rose and fell like long swell of a great ocean somehow frozen, maize stood chest high in the nearby fields, and elsewhere cattle grazed obvious to the drama playing out around them. There were tents, pitched where whim determined, camp fires burning and people milling, or standing in groups, dark and ragged even from a distance, and cars, flatbed trucks, , lorries, Jeeps, and riders on motorcycles in motion within the throng.
And great, streaming banners at the heart of the horde.
Because of the topology most of what he was seeing would be invisible to the men inside the Madison lines.
Schwarzkopf was scrabbling for his map.
“Run back to the comms APC,” he ordered, trying to bite down on his excitement. “Report enemy concentrations of many thousands of persons at grid references Oscar-X-ray, Oscar-Papa and Oscar-Lima and surrounding grids. I will engage from Northern flank at one-three-zero-zero hours.”
He gazed at the rebels; the nearest tents and vehicles were a lot less than a mile away. That was well within the optimum kill zone of his M2s. In an ideal world he would have waited for his spearhead to make contact with the enemy on the eastern edge of Sun Prairie. However, he had learned at Waukesha that what you wanted and what you got in combat was hardly ever the same thing.
Schwarzkopf growled orders for his mortar and machine gun teams to come forward. NOW! The M113s were to pick their way to the southern limit of the town as quickly as possible.
Sun Prairie’s civilian defenders were taking pot shots at the enemy throng.
‘CEASE FIRING! CEASE FIRING!”
The last thing Schwarzkopf wanted was for the rebels to be provoked into launching an attack on the town at a time of their own choosing before his men were dug in and ready.
The first M2s were being hastily set up when the blaring of hundreds of vehicle horns filled the fields south of Sun Prairie, and then washed, like a shrill tide around the town. The M2s of the two spearhead M113s in the eastern streets of Sun Prairie began to rattle like chain saws.
Schwarzkopf heard it, knew what it meant.
The rebels were about to surge forward along the whole front; rolling over Sun Prairie as a side show to the ma
in entertainment which was about to kick off to the south, where the horde was about to fall on the most heavily defended stretch of the Madison perimeter. The horde did not form up; it simply rose to its feet and moved to the west.
More banners were raised into the hazy summer air as dust began to rise from the countless feet and the wheels of the pickups, trucks and...tractors.
“MACHINE GUNNERS!” Schwarzkopf bellowed. “ON MY COMMAND HIT THE FLANK ONE HUNDRED YARDS BEHIND THE FRONT LINE. MORTAR MEN! YOUR TARGET IS THE CENTRAL AREA WHERE YOU CAN SEE THE BIGGEST BANNERS!”
The Commander of Company ‘A’ did not actually believe he was seeing what he was seeing. It was like watching something out of a movie; a medieval army lurching towards the enemy. There were no tactics, no stratagems; the rebels were just jogging and running towards prepared positions. It would have been suicidal even if his M2s had not happened upon the horde’s flank.
“OPEN FIRE!” He yelled.
M2s ripped at the air like multiple chainsaws, mortars popped and the long guns of the citizen defenders of Sun Prairie barked a loud, ragged volley.
Chapter 22
Monday 15th June 1964
McDermott’s Open, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Gretchen had refused – point blank – to allow Dwight Christie to be interviewed further until the amended ‘papers of immunity’ had been couriered to the Justice Department on Broad Street, just down from City Hall the temporary home of the House of Representatives, signed by the US Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and meticulously rechecked by both her and Dan separately, and together.
Finally, around mid-afternoon she was satisfied.
“Dan and I are of the opinion that this document,” she explained to her client, “is as watertight as it is ever going to be. I strongly recommend that you sign it immediately before anybody on the other side of the Delaware River gets cold feet, Mr Christie.”