by James Philip
They were men with agendas who wanted more than anything to get things done; and that, when all was said was the unbreakable steely cord that bound them together.
“California was peaceful, Mr Vice President,” Marshall smiled, shaking his host’s hand. “Governor Brown would not be drawn on any of the major issues I raised with him.” He shrugged. “But then neither of us expected a great deal from our meeting. I hadn’t been out to the West Coast since before the war,” he went on, adding: “it was instructive.”
Johnson and his wife nodded, saying nothing.
Marshall sighed.
“I was honored to attend a service at which the NAACP ‘blessed’ those among its number who were preparing to leave to join the March on Philadelphia.”
Lyndon Johnson took this as his cue to lead his guest into the privacy of his lair to continue the conversation. The plan was for Marshall to stay over at the ranch that evening and to travel back to Philadelphia on the Air Force Boeing 707 carrying LBJ’s retinue north. They would have plenty of time to talk, swap gossip and to ‘clear the air’ but both men were eager to ascertain if they were still of the same mind over the things which really mattered to them.
Marshall’s work for the NAACP had been complicated rather than curtailed by his appointment in 1961 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, responsible for hearing cases in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont, with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the District of Connecticut, all four Districts of New York and in the District of Vermont.
The appointment ought to have been the beginning, not the end of the Kennedy Administration’s campaign to confront head on the unwritten color bar that still blighted the US legal system. Over the years Marshall had prevailed in all but three of the thirty or so cases he had brought before the Supreme Court but alone he could achieve only so much.
“Hoover’s people tell me Philadelphia will be a powder key by the time Dr King’s people march up to the steps of City Hall,” Johnson said, cutting to the chase.
Very few people knew that Thurgood Marshall – until Martin Luther King junior’s explosion onto the national stage unquestionably the most formidable black lawyer in American history - had been for many years been on friendly terms with the Director of the FBI. That was not to say that they were on the same side of the Civil Rights debate, far from it and the two men had clashed – privately and often angrily since the October War – over the FBI’s ongoing persecution of the moderate elements of the Dr King’s organization.
However, the two men remained on good terms because Marshall was wary, a little afraid of the extremists who had attached themselves to King’s flag and had viewed King’s leadership of the Civil Rights movement as reckless right up until the Bedford Pine Park atrocity.
“Director Hoover sees threats beneath every stone,” Marshall pronounced sternly. “The Atlanta murderers are still out there. There are dark forces at work. It worries him that all the leading figures in the Civil Rights movement, the Administration and Congress, not to mention many leading citizens, military officers, judicial figures and leaders of our society will all be in one place at one time.”
“What do you think?”
“I think the sooner you are back in Philadelphia the better,” Marshall grinned, allowing his mask of severity to slip.
The two men had sat down.
Johnson nodded thoughtfully.
“I won’t stand against the President,” he said, sucking his teeth. “I’m coming back but I’m not jumping ship. We got ourselves into this mess and it’s our duty to see this thing through.”
Thurgood Marshall contemplated this for several seconds.
“Governor Brown will lose the Party in California if he backs the President at Atlantic City. Without his delegates the President cannot carry the convention.”
“Did Pat Brown actually say that?”
“As good as.”
The Vice President was silent.
“If the California Democrats were ever in the same party as people east of the Mississippi they aren’t any more,” Marshall declared. “The West Coast Governors are actually pursuing the civil rights agenda the Administration talked about enacting in 1961. California, and maybe Oregon, not so much Washington State because of all the war damage, are already different countries to the rest of America. The people out there are more worried about what’s going on in the Midwest than they are about anything coming out of Philadelphia.”
Lyndon Johnson was aware the other man’s gaze had settled on his face.
“What would you do if you were President?” Marshall asked.
The Texan grunted, expelling a terse guffaw.
“That’s the thing,” he confessed. “I haven’t a goddammed idea what I’d do if JFK stepped aside, or God forbid something bad happened to him. And you know what?”
His stare was agate hard, unrelenting.
“Any man who says he knows what he’d do if he was President now is a goddam liar!”
Chapter 38
Friday 26th June 1964
Lake Atsion Camp, Wharton Forest, New Jersey
Dwight Christie had half-expected to be beaten up and dragged insensible into a bandit hideaway in the woods. Actually, he was walked through the trees along the lake shore for some minutes and then inland into a clearing, where a group of about a dozen military-style green-grey tents were laid out on a square grid around a central mess awning. One or two ragged men in leathers and grubby fatigues looked up when Christie was led past the central area, mostly there were just women, children, and teenage boys hanging around or working. Nobody, absolutely nobody met Christie’s eye.
“Isaac says he knows this guy?” This from the man of the former special agent’s own age as he pushed Christie ahead of him into a tent externally no different from any of the others.
Christie’s eye began to adjust to the darkness.
“Was he carrying?” Demanded the familiar voice; the question was uttered lowly from within the gloomy interior as the flap fell back into place blocking out most of the watery morning sunshine.
“No.”
Galen Cheney had been lying, fully clothed on a camp bed.
His hair had grown longer and his face was gaunt, aged.
Painfully, he swung his legs over the side of the cot, planted them on the ground and stood up. He swayed, looming over the two newcomers.
“For what it’s worth I got the women away from the Texas City compound before the Feds got there,” Christie said. “In case you were wondering, Mikey didn’t make it.”
It was literally a life or death gamble lying to Cheney but one he had thought about long and hard. The FBI had kept everything about the hunt for the Atlanta killers secret; so secret it had made hunting Cheney and his son Isaac down virtually impossible. That was why they had had to do business with him. They had no way into Galen Cheney’s mind, no way to get close to him unless they got lucky, and even in the unlikely event they eventually caught up with him no way of ensuring that the Agency dodged the blame for not catching him sooner. That was why they had offered Christie a deal; whichever way this thing turned out he would be the fall guy.
He regretted putting Billy Murdoch in hospital but it was not as if he had had much choice in the matter. Back in Albuquerque he was resigned to his fate when he reckoned all he had to look forward to was a jail time, a Kangaroo court and the electric chair but he was not about to be J. Edgar Hoover’s patsy!
“Mikey stayed inside the compound and set off the sump,” the gasoline-dynamite booby trap the Cheneys had planted at the heart of their Texas City compound, he explained “so I could get the women away.”
Big lies were the best, simplicity was king.
“How...”
“I’ve got no idea how the Feds found the compound,” Christie retorted irritably. “After Atlanta all Hell broke loose. You should have told me what you were going to do!”
He left unsaid the thought tha
t a sane man would have removed his family to a place of safety before he embarked on his latest and most egregious killing spate.
“You know this guy, Galen?” Christie’s guard asked. His tone was that of a man who felt he had been kept in the dark too long about something that might be life or death to him. Most people who had ever had any dealings with Galen Cheney ended up feeling exactly the same way.
“Yeah, I thought he was dead, Dan.”
“Me, too!” Christie interjected. “Heck, Galen, after you, I’m public enemy number one! You stirred up a Helluva hornets’ nest with that stunt in Atlanta!”
Galen Cheney was looking at him cold-eyed.
Christie thought he was a dead man.
Cheney was one of those ‘dangerous individuals’, or ‘dangerous madmen’ whose FBI file had been as voluminous as Dwight Christie had expected it to be when he had finally got his hands on it.
‘Galen’ was not his given name. He had been christened John Herbert Cheney into a Texas City family embedded in a small close-knit fundamentalist Christian religious community; some kind of ultra-puritanical Americana offshoot of the Plymouth Brethren. His father was a lay preacher, his mother a woman who ruled her brood – literally – with a rod of iron. His family was poor, dirt poor because his father was usually out of work, living off the charity of neighbors in and around Galveston Bay until the day he was expelled from the ‘communion’. That was when Cheney was about nine. Cheney senior had been accused of molesting the daughter of another member of ‘the communion’; an eleven year old girl. Subsequently, the family had travelled to New Mexico, then Arizona, Nevada and back to Fort Worth, Texas in the following years. The father had reinvented himself as some kind of archetypal whiskey preacher, or snake oil salesman or a flimflam man, depending upon one’s perspective. One of seven children – John Henry was the eldest of three boys but had two older sisters – the young ‘Galen’ had spent his teenage years being passed from pillar to post and ended up, aged thirteen, in a reformatory in Abilene. The one thing he clung to from those harsh childhood days was his eye for an eye, unashamedly brutal ‘faith’. God did not just exist; He was righteous and He was always looking over Galen Cheney’s right shoulder.
When he was fourteen Cheney had shipped out on a steamer running down to Panama, and sailed the world until he was twenty. Back in Texas he had joined the Rangers, in the Second World War he had signed up for the Air Force, serving in England and Western Europe as a military policeman. Back stateside after 1945 he joined the Federal Marshall’s Service; a grim, humorless man he would have probably been a Marshall until he dropped but for the Cuban Missiles War, for like so many other men who lived their lives on the edge of sanity, the war had robbed him of the one anchor in his otherwise joyless, dutiful existence.
The reason Galen Cheney’s pre-October War FBI file was so big was that he had killed four men in the line of duty, one when he was a Texas Ranger and the others during his service as a Federal Marshall. He had also killed a man in a fist fight in England during the 1945 war. He was a pathologically violent man whom, it seemed, courted danger and never flinched when the bullets started to fly. While everybody else went to ground he stood tall and blazed away until all the bad guys were down. He would have been an all-American hero but for his overly muscular religiosity and his habit of ‘preaching’ to his superiors.
The missile launched from Cuba which had destroyed Galveston Island and South Houston had obliterated his house on Texas Avenue and with it his wife of twenty-three years, Mary, his daughter May Rose, and his youngest son, Jacob. The small Navajo medallion which he normally wore with his black Bolo tie was for Mary, whose maternal grandmother had been a pure-blood Navajo...
“You knew where I’d be,” Cheney said, breathlessness catching each word. “You didn’t have to come here to tell me...”
“I didn’t know where you’d be! How the fuck would I know where you’d be, Galen!” Christie objected angrily. “I guessed you’d be here now because the March on Philadelphia hits town next week! You could have been anywhere. In camp in Tennessee, or even back in Texas.”
“You should have told me about Mikey.”
“I just did! Getting caught trying to get a message to you when you’d fucked up and put us all in danger because you didn’t listen to a single goddam word I said to you,” the smaller man retorted, “wasn’t, still isn’t, dammit, at the top of my to do list!” The one thing a man never did with Galen Cheney was take a backward step. “Besides, being your fucking personal messenger boy was never part of the deal!”
Dan, Christie’s captor opened his mouth to speak.
Cheney raised a hand.
“You were with Mickey...”
“No. If I’d been standing beside him when the sump lit off I’d be dead too! Trust me, he couldn’t have got out of the compound. The explosion took out a Huey and God knows how many agents and state troopers. What the fuck did you prime it with? It went off like a small nuke!”
Keep it simple.
Do not embellish the lie.
“The women?”
“They’re safe.”
“Where?”
“They won’t be safe if you or anybody else in this camp knows that, Galen,” Christie told him abruptly. He was tempted to add ‘if you or somebody from your fucking church had come back down to Texas after the Atlanta fuck up you’d have been a lot better informed!’
But he refrained.
Had Cheney sent anybody down to Texas to root around he would have worked out that it had been Christie who tipped off the FBI and ‘taken out’ Mikey to separate him from the women. The fact that Christie was still alive bore eloquent testimony to the Cheney’s cold-hearted desertion and betrayal of his family.
“What happened to blow the Texas organization?”
“Are you serious?” Christie exploded angrily. “After that stunt you pulled in Dallas what did you think was going to happen! I told you that if you poked the FBI too hard it would bite you back. After Dallas the agency closed down the Texas operation, just like they did in Georgia after the Bedford Pine Park shooting. And while we’re on the subject where do you get off killing hundreds of innocent civilians? King was a legitimate target. So were senior members of his staff. Nobody gave you permission to murder a whole lot of women and children, Galen!”
Cheney nodded at Dan.
“Wait outside, brother.”
Christie’s complaints had bounced off the big man’s impenetrable psychic carapace like pea-shooter rounds off an M-60’s cemented armor glacis plate.
“You through, Dwight?” He asked. Almost amiably.
“That’s up to you, Galen.”
“True.” With a long groaning sigh Cheney sank back onto his cot. “The Lord has tested us all with pestilence,” he muttered idly. “We lost some of the brethren to dysentery... Bad water. We think the flies carry malaria. That’s what did for the first brethren to settle these shores hundreds of years ago...”
There was only the one cot in the tent.
Christie looked around for a chair or a stool; there was none.
He shifted on his feet, despite himself a little shocked to find the monster so obviously enfeebled.
“Malaria?”
“That’s what Dan thinks. He was a medic in the Pacific. Guadalcanal and places like that.” Cheney gathered his strength. “Why did you come here?”
Dwight Christie put his hands on his hips.
He said nothing, getting used to the knowledge that he got to live a little longer.
“You didn’t come all the way out here just to tell me my son was dead and my women were lost to me forever?”
Christie shrugged.
“I didn’t know if you’d heard about Mikey. A man has a right to hear such things from,” he shrugged again, “a friend...”
Galen Cheney shivered, lay down on his back and stared at the canvass a few feet above his face.
“Maybe,” he grunted, unimpressed.
/> “Okay, I came here because I was ordered to come here,” Christie confessed, stuffing his hands in his trouser pockets. “The resistance has big plans for the fourth of July,” he explained, the merest quiver in his voice. “I’m here to make sure that whatever you’ve got planned doesn’t fuck up the party!”
Chapter 39
Saturday 27th June 1964
Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota
Sixteen B-52s of the 5136th Bombardment Wing had transferred to Ellsworth Air Force Base in the last eight days. Another twelve of the huge bombers, drawn from the 100th Bomb Group had flown into Offutt Air Base in Nebraska. Ellsworth was seven hundred and fifty miles from the heartlands of Wisconsin; Offutt a little over four hundred miles, comparative short ‘hops’ for the Stratofortresses of Strategic Air Command.
“Stand easy, resume your seats!” General Curtis LeMay bellowed long before he had reached the lectern and its microphone. That morning he had visited Offutt AFB, and delivered the speech he was about to give to the men of the 5136th.
Everything might be going to Hell but nobody would guess it looking at the The Big Cigar as he strode into the briefing hall. Command, leadership was not about shouting at people it was about winning hearts and minds, and looking the part in every possible way was a big part of that.
In point of fact Curtis LeMay was actually feeling a lot sunnier than he had any right to that afternoon. George Decker had been discharged from hospital in Joliet last night and returned to duty that morning. The Chief of Staff of the Army had sounded positively bullish during their twenty minute telephone conversation while LeMay had been in the air on the way to South Dakota.
Security at all headquarters had been radically beefed up since that kid had walked into Decker’s First Army communications room and set off a twenty pound bomb in his kit bag.
WRONG PASS or NO PASS got a man – or a woman – shot on sight now anywhere near any Army or Air Force base on the Chicago Front. LeMay blamed himself for not making that rule earlier but heck, what sort of World was it when teenage kids walked up to a group of men in uniform, or got on a bus or rail coach and blew themselves up?