by James Philip
Both Gretchen and Dan appended their witnessing signatures.
Clyde Tolson thought that was that and rose to go; Dwight Christie’s guards moved forward clanking chains.
Frank Lovell did not move a muscle.
Gretchen coughed daintily.
“The only way that Mr Christie’s constitutional rights can be protected is if his attorneys know what is going on,” she stated.
Tolson frowned angrily. Unused to having to negotiate anything with anybody he was finding the prissy attitude of the rich kid lawyer extremely vexatious.
“You are not cleared to know that, Mrs Brenckmann.”
“Then why have you been wasting my time today, Mr Tolson?” Gretchen retorted. “I am either Mr Christie’s attorney; or I am not. If the latter is the case then that’s that.”
Her tone left no doubt that she considered her time to be infinitely more valuable than that of a humble law enforcement officer like the aging gang-buster.
Tolson’s rising blood pressure was not ameliorated by the expression on Dwight Christie’s face. The former FBI man was grinning broadly. Tolson looked to Frank Lovell for support which was a waste of time because the other man had naturally, but mistakenly, assumed that Tolson and his boss, J. Edgar Hoover had thought through the consequences of the actions which had brought them all to this room.
“Director Hoover,” Tolson spluttered angrily.
“Is a servant of the laws of New Jersey,” Gretchen reminded him before he could get another word out. “As are we all. Client confidentiality has not been abolished in this state in the way it has been under emergency legislation erroneously enacted in other places.” She sat back, clasped her hands in her lap. “I would like to speak privately to my client please, Mr Tolson.”
Tolson wanted Christie manacled again.
Gretchen would have none of it. She had had enough of that nonsense interviewing her ‘Battle of Washington’ clients at various US Army and Marine Corps high security detention camps in Maryland in the last few weeks. She was not, and did not have to put up with that sort of thing in her house. And besides, unlike several of the monsters – notwithstanding she was their defense attorney she still regarded them as ‘monsters’ just like everybody else - she was defending in the forthcoming ‘Washington Rebellion’ trials she honestly did not think Dwight Christie was likely to wish, let alone do her harm. In any event, Dan would be with her.
After Frank Lovell’s intersession Dwight Christie’s hands were left unchained.
Coffee was brought in.
The big room seemed empty, echoing with only three people in it.
“That’s the first real coffee I’ve had in weeks,” the former G-man announced.
Gretchen was all business.
“Have you been mistreated whilst in custody, Mr Christie?”
“No, not really...”
“Is that ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”
“I shot another agent in cold blood, Ma’am,” he shrugged. “The guys had a right to feel aggrieved when they got their hands on me.”
Dan Brenckmann looked up from his notebook.
“Have your injuries been attended to?” He inquired.
Christie nodded. “Look, I’ve done most of the things they say I’ve done. I’ve got no beef about that. I was just about ready to put a gun to my head when I got caught. The only thing that stopped me doing it was knowing what would happen to...”
“The women you were hiding in Matagorda Country?”
“Yeah, something like that.” Christie gazed into his cup, raised it to his lips and put it down untouched. “The guy all this is about is a bad man. A really bad man. He was a bad man before his wife and two of his kids were killed in the Cuban Missiles War. Afterwards, he was an honest to God monster, I reckon...”
“This would be Galen Cheney, also known as John Herbert?” Gretchen checked, brusquely.
“Yeah, I only hooked up with him because I was investigating a couple of suspicious deaths in Colorado last fall. The Agency was keen on keeping the operation quiet because it involved members of the military...”
Gretchen’s face was suddenly creased with bewilderment.
“Which deaths?”
“There were several. A guy called Mulders, he was a Captain in the Air Force who was attached to some top secret radar program. Mulders shot his wife in the head before he killed himself. They were both in their night clothes and they had had sexual intercourse shortly before they died. The whole thing was pretty twisted. Then there was the Paul Gunther, the head of security at Ent Air Force Base on the night of the Cuban Missiles War...”
Gretchen stared at the man like she had seen a ghost.
“What did I say?” Christie asked.
“Nothing,” Dan Brenckmann said definitively.
By the time the older man switched his attention back to Gretchen she had recovered her composure.
“Nothing,” she agreed tersely.
“Gunther was supposed to have driven out into the desert one night and ended it with a Colt,” Christie explained. “Like Mulders, there was no suicide note. Not previous sign of mental instability. Both guys had young kids, spotless marriages. Gunther was on the verge of retiring. The Air Force was particularly sensitive about Gunther’s death because the car from the Ent AFB car pool that he was driving on the night of his death was the one the base CO had had signed out for the previous three weeks. Nobody who knew Gunther bought the suicide; and if it was murder there was the possibility he might not have been the intended victim. Anyhow, there was a partial right thumb print and a left ring finger print on Gunther’s car – the Air Force SIB guys knew what they were doing – and we got a match to a guy who had no reason to be in Colorado.”
“Galen Cheney?” San Brenckmann prompted.
Christie nodded.
“At the time of the October War he was working security down at an uncompleted Air Force SAGE Direction Centre outside San Antonio.”
Dan frowned, unfamiliar with the jargon.
“Semi Automatic Ground Environment,” the former G-man informed him. “One of the string of top secret air defense bases that was supposed to deal with Soviet bombers if there was ever a war. The system cost billions of bucks but nobody told the American people that it was obsolete the moment the Russians launched Sputnik.” He guffawed sadly, mostly to himself. “That’s still top secret by the way because the Government doesn’t think anybody noticed what happened to Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo and Boston...”
“My kid sister was in Buffalo, Mr Christie,” Dan said quietly.
“Sorry. I was lucky. I didn’t lose anybody close that night. But my point remains; we’re still throwing hundreds of millions of bucks at SAGE even though we know it doesn’t actually work. The country’s going to Hell but a contract is a contract, and IBM and all those other leeching parasitic computer companies are still shafting the American taxpayer.”
Gretchen had no intention of allowing the interview to meander into irrelevant areas.
“A little less polemic and a lot more facts would be helpful, Mr Christie.”
He ignored her.
“You didn’t react at all when I ran the name Mulders past you,” he observed. “But Gunther. You’d already heard that name, hadn’t you?”
Gretchen looked to her husband for moral support.
He shrugged as if to say ‘what’s the harm?’
“I was working for Justice last fall. The FBI applied to Justice to get access to all the papers the Air Force held on several apparent suicides involving its personnel in Colorado, and from memory, in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Shortly afterwards I had to leave the DOJ because somebody started spreading lies about me to the DC press corps.”
“Hoover and Tolson must have thought you were out of line.”
“At the time I thought they had a beef with my boss, Nick Katzenbach.” Gretchen’s face became a mask of concentration. “But now, I don’t know.” She let that hang in the air. “You th
ink Galen Cheney had something do with the deaths of the Mulders and Colonel Gunther?”
“Yeah. Don’t ask me to prove it though. I know he murdered a Burroughs Corporation project manager, his wife and two young children on the night of the Battle of Washington. A guy called Carl Drinkwater. He was on duty at Ent Air Force Base, the headquarters of the air defense system on the night of the October War. He was the senior civilian contractor on site. I reckon that was why he and his family were targeted. Cheney killed Carl first, then the two kids. He raped Drinkwater’s pregnant wife, then he killed her, too.”
Gretchen and Dan must have been staring slack-jawed at their client.
“I might be a traitor, a Commie stooge, whatever,” Dwight Christie remarked philosophically. “I sure as Hell don’t agree with the system and I’d like to replace the government with something fairer. But you and I can talk about it, sit down like reasonable people. That doesn’t work with guys like Galen. He’s a monster and if you’re not with him, you’re against him and he’s going to come after you.”
He began to detail the nature of the monster.
“Cheney’s a bad hombre, an extreme ‘Revelationist’ like some of the zealots who were holding out in Chicago last winter.”
Gretchen’s curiosity spiked.
Her Battle of Washington ‘clients’ spoke, albeit with varying degrees of incoherence, of a ‘day of judgment being at hand’.
She tested if Christie was talking about the same syndrome.
“But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars – they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur.”
Dwight Christie nodded, a ghost of a smile touching his lips.
“Revelation twenty-one verse eight,” Gretchen told him. “Several of the ring leaders of the December uprising quote it in justification of their actions; they get offended when I ask them where exactly in Revelation, or for that matter the rest of the Bible, it says they are to rape women and girls to death?”
“Galen usually quotes Genesis to justify that sort of thing,” the former G-man countered. “Something about Adam’s rib and Man’s dominion, and how it was God’s commandment that women bear the seed of man. Like I said, you can’t argue with a rabid dog; you just have to shoot it and move on. That was pretty much what I had in mind when Mr Tolson’s boys caught up with me.” The man grimaced. “But that’s not going to happen unless you talk Tolson’s boss into cutting me loose.”
Gretchen thought about this.
Turning to her husband she decided: “I think we ought to invite Mr Tolson and Mr Lovell hack into the room, darling.”
Dan weighed this, looking into his wife’s eyes.
He nodded.
Chapter 23
Monday 15th June 1964
Naval Station Norfolk, Sewell’s Point, Hampton Roads, Virginia
General Curtis LeMay was the last of the Chiefs to arrive, his departure from Camp David having been delayed by his breakfast meeting with the President over-running by approximately forty minutes. Flying into what was the biggest naval base in the World, glimpsing the rows of flat tops, cruisers and destroyers moored along the four miles of docks and piers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had seethed at the parlous state of the nation’s armed forces.
The meeting with his Commander-in-Chief had gone badly, like most politicians President Kennedy talked up the numbers without accepting any of the caveats about what those numbers actually meant in terms of war-fighting capability. Last year’s ‘peace dividend’ butchery had torn the heart out of the Army and Navy. The programs to remobilize the first eighteen disbanded regiments and the re-commissioning of the initial tranche of eighty-seven mothballed ships, was only now gathering pace.
As for the Air Force...
Just thinking about it made him want to kick something!
His front line B-52 and B-47 Bomb Wings had been cut to shreds in the October War, and forty percent of the men who had come back had since been reassigned to ground duties, or had retired from the service. After the Administration had finished salami slicing his budget appropriations for the years 1963-64, 1964-65 and 1965-66 he had had to gut the Air Force. Somehow, he had contrived to hang onto a strike force of some one hundred and fifty B-52s but the B-47 squadrons had been scrapped, and two out of every three other aircraft in service grounded. Tens of previously ‘vital’ overseas bases had been abandoned, and the lovingly, expensively acquired infrastructure to support the planet’s most formidable aerial fleet left to wither on the vine. The Administration had cut too much too fast and the damage was structural; it would take several years to undo the self-inflicted wound.
However, in comparison to the other services the Air Force had got off relatively lightly. At least Strategic Air Command was still in a condition to take on the re-born Soviet menace. New Minutemen rockets and silos became operation every week and LeMay’s B-52s – although reduced by two-thirds in number since October 1962 – were still ready to go to war at the President’s command.
With the USS Enterprise in dock – the best estimates were that it would be another fourteen to eighteen months before she was fit to go to sea again – and four other big carriers barely retrieved from the Reserve Fleet, each one several months away from re-commissioning and as much as a year away from being combat ready the Navy only had the Kitty Hawk and the Independence around which to build and operate battle groups. Moreover, while the USS Midway and the Oriskany, the latter a minimally modernized World War II Essex class carrier less than half the size of the Kitty Hawk, were about to start shaking down and working up under-strength air groups, otherwise the Navy was hopelessly over-extended.
The Independence was the flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean; the Kitty Hawk had taken most of the Seventh, Pacific Fleet, to the Indian Ocean. The US Navy had virtually no meaningful presence in the Atlantic or in most of the Pacific; worse, both Carrier Division Seven in the Indian Ocean, and the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean were basically, ‘on their own’. Sixth Fleet was operating with such a reduced ‘fleet train’ that it was confined to harbor most of the time; Carrier Division Seven was operating so far from ‘safe ports’ that it was entirely dependent on ‘friendly’ or rather, formerly ‘friendly’ countries in the region for re-oiling and the re-supply of basic provisions. Set against this inauspicious backdrop it was one thing for the Chief of Naval Operations to reflect that his nuclear submarine fleet had escaped the worst of the cuts; but what use were his submarines in the Mediterranean - where the British routinely ‘marked’ US boats with an anti-submarine frigate or one of their antiquated conventional diesel-electric ‘scows’ as they made passage through the Straits of Gibraltar - or in the constricted waters of the Persian Gulf or its approaches where the water was too shallow for ‘viable’ submerged operations?
The Air Force and the Navy’s problems palled into insignificance in comparison with the travails of the Army and the Marine Corps. First the Battle of Washington had sucked painfully scarce resources into the Maryland-Virginia sector and held them there; then the South had started burning, and now the Chicago Front had literally, blown up in First Army’s face. Just making a start to repairing the ‘peace dividend’ damage to the US Army had been a nightmare. Following the Battle of Washington the National Guard had had to be stood down in several states, and in others – most notably the three West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington – state governors had refused to permit their formations to be reintegrated, or employed out of state by the Federal Government. In many parts of the country servicemen who had been summarily dumped back into civilian life during 1963 had declined the invitation to rejoin old units, many in rallies organized by veterans so disgusted by the way they had been treated that they publicly burned their reenlistment papers. Thousands of men and women who had previously had unblemished, distinguished service records had simply decided that th
eir families, communities and their native states needed them more than a government which had so recently, betrayed them. And besides, many honestly felt that the post-Cuban Missiles War United States was no longer the same country to which they had previously sworn allegiance.
Ten weeks ago when the Soviets had invaded Iran – from the outset it was obvious that this was only a prelude to a campaign to seize the Kurdish oilfields, the British holdings on Abadan Island and to threaten the Arabian Peninsula the Chiefs of Staff had activated contingency plans – Operation Mobile Bay - from the late 1950s to deploy a Marine Expeditionary Force and to transfer significant air assets to Saudi Arabia to ‘backstop’ the British and to safeguard Arabian territorial integrity.
Inevitably, given the weakened state of the US military machine implementing Operation Mobile Bay had meant denuding the North American ‘continental reserve’ of its best units, and making preparations to redeploy vessels from Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf via the Cape of Good Hope, a voyage of over twelve thousand miles.
Since there was no prospect of transferring ships of the Sixth Fleet from the Central Mediterranean, the Chiefs of Staff had regarded the President’s order to send Carrier Division Seven to the Indian Ocean as a substitute ‘phase one’ of that 1950s ‘global response’ to Soviet aggression in the Middle East. However, it had never been envisaged that the Kitty Hawk and her battle group would operate in ‘glorious isolation’.
What the President now wanted to do was – overnight and without any reasonable planning window – implement selective elements of the air and naval plan of Operation Mobile Bay.
Which was insane!
The thinking behind Operation Mobile Bay had evolved after the Suez Crisis of late 1956. It was specifically designed to halt the Soviets in Iraq if and when the Kremlin decided to attempt to annex Iran and or Iraq, and to deny the Red Navy a base with access to the Indian Ocean. In its original, pristine form the plan had called for the bottling up of the Red Navy in its ports, the employment of three carrier battle groups, the transfer of up to six hundred aircraft and over a hundred thousand troops to the Middle East, and assumed the active support of major British and Turkish ground, sea and air forces to support US operations.