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

by James Philip

  The Intelligence Office was a fifty year old reservist who had been teaching Chemistry and Physics in Cincinnati at the time of the October War.

  “Sulphur burns blue,” he observed. “In natural daylight it burns invisibly.”

  The prisoners looked at him as if he was an idiot.

  “The nations were angry, and your wrath has come,” the woman intoned. Her face was bruised and dirty, her left eye puffy and half-closed and her victim’s arterial life blood was liberally sprayed on her scrawny arms and her torn shirt. “The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small – and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”

  “Yeah,” the Intelligence Officer murmured distractedly. “So what happens when you’ve killed everybody who doesn’t agree with your particular interpretation of scripture?”

  “There is only one God. There is only one scripture...”

  “Revelation?”

  “We are the only true people of the Book!” The man protested smugly.

  The Intelligence Officer shook his head.

  “They’re all like this, sir,” he reported, grimly.

  “We’re through here,” Rosson agreed. He stood over the man and the woman. “You are hereby convicted of breaking the established rules of war by infiltrating US Army lines by falsely claiming refugee status. Thereafter you murdered one man and injured several others in an unprovoked attack. You are hereby sentenced to death by firing squad. Sentence will be carried out forthwith.”

  The prisoners were under the misapprehension that they were entitled to a few last words. However, their captors had already heard more than enough. They were gagged before being frog-matched out of the bunker.

  Several minutes later a volley of rifle shots rang out.

  Rosson went above ground and walked across relatively open ground to make his daily report to Governor John Reynolds. The news the day before that Green Bay, the Governor’s birthplace had fallen into rebel hands had broken something in Reynolds. Although he was the younger of the two men by a couple of years the 36th Governor of Wisconsin was haggard, old before his time.

  “We’re getting the same story from every prisoner, sir,” Rosson prefaced, dropping into the chair drawn up by Reynolds’s chief of staff. “It’s hard to credit but as my Intelligence people say, the ‘narrative is increasingly coherent and compelling’.” He quirked a rueful smile and shook his head. “It seems people returning to the Great Lakes area from the failed coup d’état in DC in December took control of the gangs in North Chicago and the bombed out badlands to the west. Religious nuts mostly...”

  “Or,” Reynolds countered quietly, “people so traumatized and terrified by the Cuban Missiles War that they were prepared to follow anybody who gave them hope, or offered to make some kind of sense out of the madness of that war?”

  “Anyway,” the commander of the 32nd Infantry Division went on, keen to avoid the conversation sliding into a new metaphysical quagmire, “eventually a cult or a sect which bases its belief system around a thing they call ‘the end of days’ came out on top. It’s sort of a bastardized version of several fundamentalist Christian creeds. The breakout from Chicago was a spontaneous thing, something started by a small number of fanatics. There was never any plan to invade Milwaukee, leastways, not until it happened. It’s almost as if when the rebels seized Milwaukee they became, I don’t know,” he threw his arms wide, “self-aware. My Intelligence Chief likens what’s happened since to the viral spread of some kind of explosively virulent plague bacillus.”

  Reynolds nodded thoughtfully but remained silent.

  “The religious nuts followed the fanatics to Milwaukee,” Rosson expanded, “and hey presto, suddenly the pogrom against unbelievers was an organized thing.”

  “And,” the Governor offered, “presumably, the people now leading the rebellion realized that unless the insurrection, uprising or whatever we want to call it, kept moving forward it would inevitably turn in upon itself.”

  “Yes,” Bill Rosson’s throat was dry despite the bile threatening to rise. “If one was being cynical; expelling the whole population of Milwaukee, driving the unbelievers before them like Biblical Gadarene swine instantly solved the problem of what to do with the dead weight of the civilian populations suddenly under their control. Those that survived the expulsion could be used as human shields, or would convert and join the rebellion because anything was better than starving to death or being driven unarmed onto our guns!”

  Reynolds groaned.

  “The Gadarene swine into whom our Lord flung a madman’s demons, destined to run to their deaths at the cliff’s edge...” He sighed. “My God, how many people must have already died?”

  The soldier did not care to speculate on this topic.

  A few minutes later Rosson made his excuses and departed.

  A tide of human misery was washing across Wisconsin. It was spreading out from Chicago and Milwaukee; already the Michigan coast all the way to Green Bay was lost, and Fond du Lac too. Madison was being bypassed, to the south but mainly to the north, and there was little or nothing to stop the ever-growing horde from forging northwest to Minneapolis. The insurgency was moving across a landscape of woods and rivers, lakes and pastures, prairies and ground where no army on earth could mass and move with the speed and agility necessary to corral or even channel such a huge wave of people, even if it held Madison. Elsewhere there was little that the scattered, over-stretched US Army and Marine contingents in Wisconsin could do to halt the tsunami of desperation, misery and rage short of the great, distant city of Minneapolis.

  Nobody had ever posited this sort of scenario at West Point; it would have been the vision of a madman.

  Bill Rosson arrived above ground with two aides at his heels.

  Engineers had thrown up rubble berms and trenches had been excavated in the grounds of the Capital Building. Positioned on a broad isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona the area was out of range of small arms fire from outside the perimeter lines and other than shooting speculative single artillery rounds onto the isthmus, the area remained the safest in the city.

  Rosson involuntarily broke step and glanced to the heavens.

  High above two dark silhouettes wheeled like albatrosses.

  Skyraiders circling like hawks awaiting the call to action.

  The first round caught him in the side.

  He grunted, all the air knocked out of his lungs as if he had just taken a right hook to the solar plexus.

  “Sir?”

  Rosson sank to his knees, he tried to speak but no sound came out of his bloody mouth in the seconds before the sniper’s second round blew away the top half of his skull.

  Chapter 30

  Saturday 20th June 1964

  Campus of the University of California, Berkeley

  Nathan Zabriski had scraped into the finals on Wednesday evening and come in second last at that afternoon’s track and field meet. His ring-rusty, somewhat heavy-footed performances in the fifteen hundred meter trials and the final had, however, hardly been in any way inexplicable given that he had spent most of the last three nights and two days fucking his psychiatrist. No, that was wrong; after their initial urgent rather than frantic, spontaneous re-coupling it had definitely been ‘making love’, not fucking.

  And the ‘psychiatrist thing’ was past history by then.

  Not that Professor Caroline Konstantis, before the war a luminary of the Chicago School of Medicine, had actually ever considered herself to be her much, much younger lover’s ‘attending physician’. Nathan had resisted any kind of ‘therapy’ so she had settled for just talking to him, as if she was his friend, his big sister...or his mother. And things had well...got out of control. One day she would write a book about it; try to quantify and specify the precise psychopathy which had led her to drive a metaphorical Sherman tank through every single sacred doctor-patient shibboleth which ha
d previously ruled her entire adult life. The sanctity of those quasi-religious professional protocols had ruled her life right up until her first ‘private consultations’ with the man who was a year younger than her son.

  Every time she looked in the mirror she figured Nathan was seeing something she was missing. Notwithstanding she had been unhappily dowdy in her youth, her still slim figure was nothing to shout about, and she was absolutely no kind of sultry middle-aged temptress, Nathan just kept coming back for more. The weirdest thing was that he made her laugh. Not often but a lot more than any other man she had ever met, and once he had got past attacking her as opposed to making love to her he had proven to be marvelously imaginative, very gentle and possessed of exactly the stamina one would expect of a middle distance runner in training.

  Berkeley’s Edwards Stadium had been almost completely empty for the Wednesday evening local qualifying rounds ahead of the main Saturday Meet. She had been lost in the scale of the place which at a pinch could accommodate some twenty-two thousand people. The arena would have echoed more but for the fact it was open plan at both ends of its north-south alignment. Two great stands flanked the long sides of the stadia – or ‘Field’ - as everybody at Berkeley called it. Apparently, even though it was just a college track and field venue it remained, over three decades after its opening the largest of its type in the US.

  Nathan was a mine of information about things like that; as befitting a former B-52 bombardier/navigator he liked to know what he was getting himself into, to research and to examine situations in fine detail before they could bite him. In applying to study at Berkeley he had made himself an expert on the University of California, its curricula, the faculty members likely to be in charge of his combined Geography, Geology and teaching courses, the precise layout of the town and the surrounding Bay Area, and in addition to putting his name down for the running team, he had joined several university clubs and societies, one or other of which already took him out of his garret on Hearst Avenue two or three nights a week, and all this before he had actually attended a single class.

  Thus, Caroline – she was ‘Caro’ to Nathan, she did not know why but loved it - was unusually well informed about the athletics stadium which occupied the south western corner of the Berkeley Campus.

  The stadium was named for Colonel George C. Edwards. The appellation ‘Colonel’ was an honorific arising out of his leadership of the cadet cadres of the University in the early part of the twentieth century. Born in 1852 Edwards had entered the newly founded University – it had received its charter from California Governor Henry H. Haight, a man now principally commemorated in the name of a street in San Francisco (Nathan was nothing if not exhaustive in his inquiries) - in March 1868. In 1869 Edwards had been in the first class of a dozen graduates. He was destined to become the ‘grand old man’ of Berkeley, a fellow of the University, and from 1909 to 1918 Professor of Mathematics. Athletics had been a lifelong interest of Edwards, and after his retirement he was famous for proudly attending every track and field Meet in his capacity as the University’s oldest alumnus. Although his death in November 1930 pre-dated the opening of the new stadium named in his honor, few men had had their legacy preserved so indelibly in stone, cinder, grass and eternal Berkeley folklore as George Edwards.

  Caroline had walked around the great Art-Deco ‘Field’ – nobody could make up their mind whether it was Edwards ‘Stadium’ or ‘Field’ – and discovered that courtesy of the slightly elevated situation of the Campus, from various vantage points in the stands one could enjoy marvelous panoramic views of San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco skyline, the distant Golden Gate bridge to the west, or of the Berkeley Hills and Strawberry Canyon to the east.

  What with one thing and another, the idea of making a new start in the Bay Area was growing on her every minute of every day!

  There had been perhaps three to four thousand people in the East Stand around her during the finals that Saturday afternoon. She had sat in the sun with the other college kids and their parents, anonymous behind her Ray Bans. Nathan had planned to make his mark; she felt a little guilty – in a tingling sort of way – for having ruined him for today and probably for days to come. However, there would be other days; it was not as if she thought that what they had – whatever it was – was likely to last overlong.

  Caroline was a little surprised when Nathan – despite everything still a gung ho go-getting Air Force guy - was relatively sanguine about his lowly position in the last race of the Meet.

  “You ran very bravely,” she commiserated after they had settled in a side alcove in a busy coffee house on campus. She wanted badly to employ a comforting ‘sweetheart’, or ‘darling’ to most sentences but as yet neither she nor the man had reconciled themselves to that level of ‘commitment’.

  Perhaps, it was because she was back in a place of academia that she was beginning to feel more secure, less foolish. Being at Berkeley was like walking through the gates of a great fortress designed to keep the real world at bay.

  “I couldn’t relax,” he explained. “It’s got to be way over three years since I raced for real. I’d forgotten how intense it could be.”

  They had settled opposite each other in a quiet corner.

  Caroline stirred her coffee.

  “I wore you out, sweetheart.”

  The word slipped out inadvertently and she instantly blushed, lowering her eyes like a teenager on her first prom date.

  The man left her discomfiture unremarked.

  “A little, maybe,” he grinned uncomfortably. “But it wasn’t just that. I wasn’t up to speed in my head. I was better than all those guys in the final. Well, most of them. A couple of the guys from out of state were probably out of my league, but I just couldn’t hook everything up. I was never striding economically, I was unbalanced, I was too worried about what the others were going to do, it was as if one of the big birds I flew with the 5136th Bomb Wing was down on power on a couple of its engines. I let the others dictate the pace of the race and which piece of track I got to run on...”

  Nathan halted in mid-sentence, aware that he had turned introspective.

  “Next time I’ll run better,” he promised philosophically.

  Tonight there was a California Civil Rights Forum sponsored ‘event’ – not a rally, just an ‘event’ – at Wheeler Hall. The CCRF had booked, somewhat optimistically Caroline suspected, the Wheeler Auditorium, the largest lecture hall on the campus. Several student ‘leaders’, representatives of the offices of the Mayors of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, a representative of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a speaker from the NAACP were due to be on the podium. Dr Martin Luther King’s March on Philadelphia had been launched in Atlanta a fortnight ago and so far, protected by National Guardsmen and several companies of regular troops including detachments from the 2nd Marines, Dr King’s progress north through Georgia and Tennessee – one bus leap at a time, each separated by two to three days – had proceeded without bloodshed. Soon the dog-legging route would move east, into North Carolina and Virginia with the condemnation of the Deep South ringing in its ears. More alarming, there were wild rumors of ‘militia columns’ from Mississippi, Texas and Alabama preparing to follow the Civil Rights marchers north; and more ‘columns’ of hundreds of armed bikers racing to get ahead of the ever growing ranks of ‘marchers’, supported by truck loads of Southern States’ Rights activists, Klan men reinforced by disaffected veterans who felt ‘sold out’ by the Federal Government.

  Each time Dr King stepped out at the head of the next stage on the road north, more local people joined, mostly blacks but a lot of whites too. Many of the so-called ‘day marchers’ returned home after making their gesture of solidarity but already several hundred had become ‘all the way to Philly marchers’.

  Caroline was surprised by the number of police officers and state troopers outside Wheeler Hall and in the corridors inside. Many of the twenty or more Berkeley PD men on the steps carried
pump action shotguns or long night sticks. Within the building the police were randomly searching everybody before they were permitted to enter the Wheeler Auditorium. Nathan was patted down, and subjected to several hard stares; Caroline was waved through, perversely, a little miffed by the blanket assumption that women of a certain age were unlikely to be carrying concealed weapons.

  The lecture hall was half-full by the time they found places in the body of the tiered seating. There was a lot of talking; the atmosphere was half party, half revivalist rally, increasingly charged as more and more people filed noisily into the auditorium.

  Caroline had thought she would feel left out, old in this company but although the majority of the audience comprised college age kids there were people of all ages sprinkled around her. All ages and all colors which was a weird experience for her and suddenly she was asking herself why. She was the daughter of second generation German-Jewish, and Greek-Cypriot immigrants who had initially settled respectively in the Bronx and Atlantic City around the turn of the century. But she had always been an American because being American was not about where you came from but about signing up to the shared idea of America.

  All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...

  But if a child was born black or was in any way less than wholly white in this country those fundamental rights had never been ‘inalienable’. Perhaps, she ought to have cared about that a lot more than she actually had long before now?

  It also occurred to her that she had never previously attended a political, let alone a ‘protest’ rally before. Throughout her life the American political process had completely passed her by and she had never even bothered to wave at it as it rolled off towards the horizon. She had been too busy paying lip service to her miserable marriage, too deeply immersed in her career to worry overly about who was sitting in the White House; most election years she never got around to voting. She could have told a third party who the Mayor of Chicago was most years, but as to the identity of her Congressman or either of the Senators sent to Washington DC by the State of Illinois, or their party affiliation, she was indifferent and frankly, ignorant. And then the October War had blown away her old certainties and politics had mattered even less.