by James Philip
LeMay was in no mood to grant the Navy man time to catch up.
“Give me an update on what we know?”
“About an hour before sunset - Gulf time - the destroyers William V. Pratt and Dewey had shot down two aircraft approximately seventeen nautical miles north of the Kitty Hawk. At around that time the cruiser Albany launched two Bendix Talos long-range ‘beam riding’ surface-to-air missiles at other ‘incoming threats’. Simultaneously, two F-4s were engaged by air defense systems in the Abadan area, and forced to engage full reheat to escape out to sea.”
McDonald spoke calmly, unhurriedly, careful to stick to reported ‘facts’, avoiding embellishments or speculation.
“The cruiser Boston engaged the New Zealand frigate Otago – which had opened fired on the Pratt and the Dewey – with her main battery at a range of approximately fifteen miles. HMS Centaur’s other ASW escorts were on the Kharg Island side of the battle group at the beginning of the action. These two vessels – the anti-submarine frigates Palliser and Hardy – placed themselves between Carrier Division Seven and Centaur...”
“Remind me what sort of firepower these British ships have?” LeMay demanded, badly wanting to establish more ‘context’ before he spoke to the President.
“Otago has two 4.5-inch guns. Palliser and Hardy just 40-millimetre AA guns.”
“And all our ships have five, six or eight inch guns? Lots of barrels?”
“Yes,” McDonald retorted tersely. “We think Otago had a Sea Cat surface-to-air missile launcher.”
LeMay was feeling gut sick.
“Jeez,” he groaned. He had never shirked a fair fight in his life but this was starting to sound like cold blooded murder.
“An A-4 Skyhawk was shot down; most likely by one of the Otago’s Sea Cat missiles. The Dewey and the Pratt subsequently engaged Otago until she was dead in the water. The Boston closed the range with the Centaur. Centaur,” he went on, “held her course and continued to launch aircraft until Boston scored several hits on her and at least one of Kitty Hawk’s A-6 Intruders hit her with a free fall bomb. A subsequent attack by A-4s sank Centaur approximately forty minutes into the engagement.”
McDonald hesitated.
“It seems that in the heat of battle Centaur’s ASW escorts – Palliser and Hardy – were able to close the range with the Kitty Hawk and launch an unknown number of torpedoes before they were intercepted and destroyed by gunfire from the destroyers Towers and John Paul Jones. Kitty Hawk was subsequently hit by a single torpedo on starboard side aft.”
The Chief of Naval Operations was frowning.
“What?” LeMay demanded.
“Nothing, it’s just that according to the reports I have Kitty Hawk turned away from the torpedo attack; standard operating procedure is to turn towards such an attack. A ship’s bow is inherently less vulnerable to potentially crippling damage than its stern and its rudders and propeller shafts.”
McDonald moved on quickly.
“Currently the destroyers Lawrence and Du Pont are in the process of arresting the British fleet oiler Wave Master, some miles closer inshore to Kharg Island. The oiler’s escort, a minesweeper, is unaccounted for at this time.”
“Jeez,” Lemay breathed in exasperations. “How many people were there on those British ships?”
An aide handed the CNO a sheet of paper.
“Centaur’s war complement was around fourteen hundred men. Palliser and Hardy about a hundred and twenty each. Otago, over two hundred.”
He was handed another message sheet.
“The nukes over Iraq were air bursts,” McDonald confirmed, not looking up, “north west and south west of Baghdad at ranges beyond which any damage would have resulted in the city...”
LeMay froze.
In that split second he understood exactly what was going on in Iraq and realized that his country had just intervened in the Gulf at precisely the worst possible moment. He remembered the night of the October War; the way things had spiraled out of the control, assuming a disastrous, unstoppable momentum which had carried them all to catastrophe.
“Halt all air activity in the Persian Gulf except reconnaissance and electronic surveillance.”
“That will leave Kitty Hawk vulnerable...”
“If the President wants to go to war with the British and the Soviets that is his prerogative; we’ve probably already started World War Four but just in case we haven’t, I don’t plan on getting the blame for it this time!”
Chapter 47
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Atsion Lake, Wharton Forest, New Jersey
There was of course, no such thing as ‘the resistance’ and there never had been. Or if there had been, nobody had told Dwight Christie about it.
Dwight Christie had been working for the Russians –the KGB – for years but he had never come across anything that suggested that anybody in the US was capable of tying together anything remotely resembling a nationwide anti-government coalition. His FBI interrogators might have been so hung up with something called ‘Red Dawn’ that they actually believed that there was ‘a resistance’; he reckoned that the main ‘anti-Federal’ groups loosely banding together to violently oppose ‘the government’, were primarily religious or just plain criminal, or in some cases, crazies like the unholy coalition of white supremacists, nut jobs, Nazis and religious zealots who formed the core of Galen Cheney’s little sect.
But what did he know?
All he really knew about what was going on in the Midwest was what he read in the papers or heard on the radio or TV; he just assumed that nut jobs like Galen Cheney and his disciples were the sort of whackos who would be involved in the mayhem going on in Chicago, Milwaukee and Wisconsin. All that ‘end of days’ shit sounded right up their street!
Even the women in the camp seemed infected with the same poison...hate. The guys around Cheney hated everything; it was like they all wore some psychological latter-day mark of Cain. They hated blacks, Democrats, Republicans, people who did not share their literal comprehension of the Bible. They talked about ‘taking’ the ‘country back for decent folk’ but what they actually meant was going back to the good old days of burning witches. Destroying their enemies, scourging the ‘evil-doers’ from the face of the Earth was all they cared about; the useless bastards could not even feed themselves without raiding – stealing, wasn’t there something about that in the Bible? - neighboring communities. No, thieving from unbelievers was not, apparently, any kind of sin.
On the plus side these idiots seemed to have swallowed the ‘resistance’ baloney hook line and sinker. Unfortunately, it turned out they already thought they were ‘the resistance’ and they had no intention of letting the ‘other resistance’ tell them what to do.
All things considered Dwight Christie drew little or no comfort from having successfully ‘sold’ his captors on the big lie. Left to his own devices his thoughts wandered while he waited for the end.
Yes, the Soviets had stirred the pot before the October War, made it easier for a small number of the disaffected to coalesce into viable short-lived ‘subversive’ cells; but as to there being a guiding hand behind the anarchy in the Deep South, or the secessionism of the West Coast states, or the rebellion in the Midwest well, heck, initially most of that was just down to people behaving badly because the Federal Government was too weak to do anything about it. When good men – and their governments – failed to stand up to evil very bad things always happen. But that was not what the FBI had wanted to hear, and it certainly wasn’t what Galen Cheney and his crazies wanted to hear either. Telling the FBI what it wanted to hear went against the grain and it only encouraged the Agency to be even dumber.
Basically, Christie had never had a problem telling maniacs like Galen Cheney exactly what he wanted to hear.
“Walk with me,” the big man demanded. In recent days he had recovered his strength although the latest bout of fever had clearly taken a lasting toll on him. Dusk was close and nobody h
ad spoken to Christie since that morning; it was sultry in the trees and the dampness from a brief, violent squall earlier that afternoon lingered in the branches and underfoot.
The two men had gone down to the lakeside.
The waning day was grey and the water looked glassy, the color of the clouds.
Galen Cheney carried his long-barrel .44 Magnum in a shoulder holster in full view but right now he was not pointing the cannon at the former FBI special agent. The leader of the Atsion Lake ‘gang’ was oddly reflective, deceptively normal and unusually for him, talkative.
Dwight Christie said very little.
It seemed that once he was done with his business on the East Coast Cheney planned to lead his followers to the Midwest. Presumably, because he imagined he could kill unbelievers and deflower virgins to his heart’s content out there in the ‘war zone’ without the bothersome let or hindrance, other than that of his own perverted moral compass.
It transpired that he had given up on finishing the work he had started that afternoon in February in Atlanta. God had another fate in store for ‘Lucifer’s black angel’ – Martin Luther King - and Christie’s description of the resistance’s long-standing plot to blow up City Hall had played perfectly to his warped take on reality. As to whether or not he planned to join the party on Saturday he was silent.
“I don’t want to know what you’ve got in mind, Galen,” Christie sighed. “I don’t need to know so I don’t want to know. But I do need to tell my people that they don’t need to worry about your group crashing the party.”
The two men stood at the water’s edge, with the mirror calm of the lake to the north and the sepulchral quietness of the forest behind them.
“Worry?”
Christie looked the big man in the eye.
“Yeah. If I don’t show up back in Philly by midnight tonight they’ll have to come into the forest to get you. What’s planned at City Hall is too big to risk guys like you pressing the trigger at the wrong time.”
Galen Cheney sneered, glanced away into the middle distance.
“Nobody can take us out,” he snorted, “not here in the forest.”
“No, but they can cause you a world of pain, Galen.”
“Maybe.”
“How come they know about my people?”
“They didn’t.”
Cheney stiffened, said nothing.
“But I reckoned you’d be here and I’m the guy whose job it is to see that all the loose ends get neatly tied up. After the way the thing went wrong in DC,” he grunted, “nobody wants to go through that again. Shit, a lot of good men went into the cage last year. Anyhow, you need to cut me adrift before my people come looking for me, Galen. You’ve got too many women and kids hereabouts to put up a proper fight.”
“It’s time to move on, anyway,” Cheney announced. “The women will be fine here. We’ll pick them after later,” he shrugged, “if that’s God’s will.”
Christie considered arguing further, decided not to waste his breath.
Instead he posed a rhetorical question.
“When you went up to Atlanta I was around to pick up the pieces down in Texas, Galen?”
The other man eyed him with reptile cold eyes. Presently, he turned away to stare across the lake.
“Mikey was a good kid,” he sighed. “But he never believed. Isaac believes. Isaac walks with God.”
“And that’s all that matters?” Christie asked softly.
“God sent the fire to cleanse his children,” Cheney replied. The way he said it almost made it almost sound like a reasonable proposition. “You should have left the women after Mickey was taken. Woman lives to serve man; to carry his seed and to his bidding. All women are harlots no matter how sweet their hearts.”
Christie was tempted to inquire of his companion if he had actually explained any of this to the women in his camp, who presumably, were under the impression that they were under his protection, had he not know this too would be a waste of time.
Only a fool tried to argue with a sick mind.
Chapter 48
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Situation Room, Philadelphia White House
Down below street level in what had once been the vault of the Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank Building, only the swish of the air conditioning fans and the breathing of the men seated around the big conference table ruffled the quietness. That and the angry static buzzing from the speakers attached to the phone placed directly in front of the President.
Jack Kennedy had been visibly shaken by what Curtis LeMay had told him; and horrified by the recommendations his ranking military commander had stated to him in the most unequivocal terms.
‘Carrier Division Seven has just killed two thousand British and New Zealand servicemen, sir,’ the airman had boomed pugnaciously. ‘For no good reason that I can see other than that Admiral Bringle was operating under orders which I, and Admiral McDonald warned the Administration were just plain wrong. Diplomacy is not a thing you do down the barrel of a goddammed gun, sir!’
Three of the four other men in the room; Secretary of Defense McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of State Fulbright had blanched at this, McNamara’s ‘special military advisor’ three-star General William Childs Westmoreland, had not.
LeMay believed that getting straight ‘on the horn’ to the British was simply compounding the blunder the Administration had allowed to happen in the Persian Gulf. Having just gone to war to achieve ‘peace at any cost’ what did the President honestly think he was going to say that would ‘pacify’ the British?
However, the President of the Unites States was in no mood to listen to the professional head of a US military that had, in his mind, just fired the starting pistol for World War IV.
He had commanded that arrangements be made for him to talk to Oxford.
“Thank you for taking my call, Prime Minister.”
The transatlantic line was periodically very nearly blocked with bursts of static, the rest of the time it was just ‘clicky’, the volume swooping and dying away without warning.
“I am always happy to take the President’s call,” Margaret Thatcher’s clipped, prissy tone reverberated around the old bank vault. She sounded royally pissed off, cool to the point of frigid.
“My people,” Jack Kennedy prefaced, his drawl hesitant, uncertain and edgily angry as if he was the one who had just had his sailors and airmen butchered in a ludicrously unequal fight, “are telling me that the electro-magnetic pulses of two medium sized nuclear devices have been detected over Iraq?”
“They are correct in that assumption,” the woman shot back at him. “RAF V-Bombers conducted strikes some sixty miles to the west of Baghdad over sparsely populated areas.” Without giving Jack Kennedy the opportunity to come back at her she went on, demanding: “What of it, Mister President?”
“What of it...”
The Prime Minister cut through the hissing background static.
“I trust and pray that you are not going to ask me why I did not give you forewarning of the activation of Arc Light protocols, Jack?”
The President had been about to interrogate her about exactly that.
“Margaret,” he retorted, misinterpreting the woman’s employment of his Christian name as an act of conciliation. “We moved the Kitty Hawk into the Persian Gulf specifically to deter the Soviets reaching for the nuclear trigger.”
Curtis LeMay winced.
I am not hearing this!
His Commander-in-Chief had got it into his head that he was, in some bizarre sense, in the right. He honestly did not believe he was having this conversation with the same woman who had talked him out of retaliating against the Red Dawn strikes in the Mediterranean and the Balkans back in February.
LeMay had told the President that it was highly likely that the British did not yet know what had happened in the Persian Gulf; that now was the time to admit that a dreadful mistake had been made and to do whateve
r it took to stop the bleeding.
Unfortunately, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his Commander-in-Chief were reading from different play books.
“Now,” Jack Kennedy continued, “if the Soviets ‘go nuclear’ we’ll all be dragged into this thing.”
“Mister President,” Margaret Thatcher replied with the patient angst that told everybody on the other end of the line that she was speaking between grinding, clench teeth. “The reason RAF V-Bombers attacked Chelyabinsk eight days ago was to ensure that the Soviet High Command could have no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that we are fully prepared to complete the work General LeMay’s boys left unfinished in October 1962. If the Soviets retaliate with nuclear weapons we will do likewise.”
That was when Curtis LeMay realized he had been right; the British still had not learned about the destruction of the Centaur Battle Group. It was not too late to...
The President was barely containing his exasperation.
“Margaret, you can’t...”
“Further,” the British Prime Minister added, a hectoring note rising stridently in her voice, “if the worst come to the worst I will bomb the Red Army all the way back to Baghdad!”
Understandably, this prompted a horrified silence in the vault.
“Oh, shit!” This from Secretary of Defense McNamara’s trusted military assistant, General William Childs ‘Westy’ Westmoreland who involuntarily passed a hand across his face.
LeMay threw a look at Westmoreland, suspecting the despair in the younger man’s eyes was no more than a mirror of that in his own.
“Are you still there, Jack,” the woman in Oxford asked peremptorily after a gap of about ten seconds.
“Er, yes...” The President regained his composure, his voice hardened. “I will be no part of that,” he declared.
LeMay stifled a groan.
This was like October 1962 all over again.
Except this was worse; there had been no ‘hot line’ to the Kremlin, everything had happened in slow motion. There had been an element of the blind leading the blind back then, not so now. This thing was playing out like some nightmare Greek tragedy in real time; like a race to perdition...