The Pillars of Hercules (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 3)

by James Philip

  “What is it Tom?” James Callaghan asked quietly.

  “JFK has just suspended a whole raft of measures designed to give the Portuguese colonies in Southern Africa exemption from US import and export tariffs. The value of the Portuguese escudo will fall like a stone against the dollar. Salazar’s already got a guerrilla war spreading across Angola. As for Mozambique,” the Foreign Secretary shook his head. “Salazar’s bound to turn to the South Africans for help in Mozambique...”

  The problem with this wasn’t immediately apparent to the others in the room. Realising as much, Tom Harding-Grayson tried to explain.

  “Southern Africa is like a house of cards. If one card falls the contagion could easily spread to the next, and so on. Several of the guerrilla movements in the region were essentially Soviet backed nationalist entities. However, just because the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore it doesn’t mean there aren’t still Soviet advisors and weapons on the ground, or that the movements themselves have melted away. For example, the African National Congress was never a Soviet tool. Most of its leaders were sheltered and many were educated, in Britain...”

  Everybody was suddenly listening to the President of the United States of America.

  “You will have read disturbing reports about United States Air Force participation in attacks against British interests and warships in the Central and Western Mediterranean Sea...”

  “And in the North Atlantic!” The Angry Widow hissed.

  “I will say this once, and once only,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy asserted, his voice quivering with emotion. The sermon was reaching its crescendo; demanding a leap of faith. “Not one of these actions was ordered by, or sanctioned by my Administration and anybody who is found to have knowingly participated in, either by deed or commission, in inducing American servicemen to take part in, and in many cases, die, in the course of those actions will be pursued by my Administration and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

  The Prime Minister exhaled a long slow reflective breath.

  “He’s started speaking off the cuff,” he remarked. The others in the Cabinet Room knew how meticulously Edward Heath prepared his every public utterance. As befitted a Balliol man and a former President of the Oxford Union few men in the UKIEA understood better how to construct a coherent, consistent and entertaining speech. He might not be the most riveting of orators but he was always good value for money and by the time he sat down and put away his notes, everybody knew exactly where he stood. Not so the President of the Unites States of America. “I think somebody’s slipping new, revised notes in front of him as he goes along. He’s extemporising off the cuff.” The very idea of it appalled the Prime Minister. The idea that a man could sit down to talk to his nation about peace and war, and then half-way through start making it up as he went along beggared belief. The possibilities for disaster were almost limitless...

  “As I speak I am aware that there may be American servicemen in the hands of the British authorities. I solemnly vow to the American people that I will not attend a peace summit while our boys are held captive overseas...”

  “He’s just added that,” Tom Harding-Grayson gasped. “What’s wrong with the man? Is he drunk, or something?”

  A thing once publicly promised to tens of millions of one’s own people cannot be taken back again except at huge personal and political cost. There was a short pause as the President contemplated the folly of what he’d just said.

  “I know this will not be an insurmountable problem because in my heart I choose to believe that the vital national interests of both the United States and the old country remain indivisible, one and the same thing and that when good friends differ, the spirit of friendship and reconciliation can conquer all things!”

  Chapter 24

  Monday 9th December 1963

  The Oval Office, White House, Washington DC

  Jack Kennedy’s hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t hold the tumbler of neat Bourbon his younger brother had tried to press into his hands. After the broadcast had ended he’d stared into the middle distance, ignoring everybody in the room. He’d have said something but he was out of words; the most loquacious man since FDR to sit in the Oval Office had run out of words to express the stark dissonance of his thoughts.

  “Bobby,” Lyndon Baines Johnson, every inch the Texan cowboy in his cool unflappability, drawled softly. “You need to leave me alone with the President now.”

  The Attorney General scowled at the older man.

  “You boys might want another war but me,” the Vice-President shrugged, “I talk to voters now and then. Up close and personal, and they don’t want another war. Trust me, they want a lot of things but most of all they don’t want another war and if we carry on doing business this way that’s what we’re going to get. So you take all these other folks outside while I talk to the President.”

  The tall Texan drew up a chair across the desk from his President.

  Presently, the two men were alone.

  “Well,” the older man said, “I told you jumping on that conspiracy shit Bobby and Dean brought back from State this afternoon was a mistake. You just told the American people you got fooled by the bad guys, Mister President. If we had some bad guys in our hands we could put them on death row but we don’t and we probably never will. The next thing that’s going to happen is Curtis fucking LeMay is going to come busting into DC like a B-52 loaded for bear because you named and shamed his fucking Air Force without giving him a heads up first. LeMay’s a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch and you don’t call out a guy like him unless you’ve seen his hand and you know you’ve got the table covered.”

  Jack Kennedy began to focus on the Texan.

  “You finished yet, Mister Vice-President?”

  “Jeez, I haven’t started yet. Who the fuck put in that shit about the Brits stopping our Embassy people coming home? And the demand to hand our POWs back before we agree to talk?”

  The President held up a hand.

  “That was a mistake,” he murmured, his thoughts elsewhere. “The Greeks called Straits of Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules,” the former Rhodes Scholar went on. “The Rock of Gibraltar was the northern ‘pillar’, with either Monte Hacho in Ceuta, or Jebel Musa in Morocco being the most obvious southern ‘pillar’. The Pillars of Hercules marked the end of the known work in classical times; and beyond them lay monsters...”

  The Vice-President did not reply, instead he glowered at the younger man.

  “That is exactly what we have become to our friends and enemies alike, Mister Vice-President,” Jack Kennedy ruminated. “Monsters.” He saw the untouched tumbler of grain whisky by his right hand and pushed it away. “We have become monsters terrified of our own shadows.” Suddenly, his eyes were clear and he was studying Lyndon Baines Johnson’s rugged face. He reached for the black handset of the telephone linked to the White House switchboard via his personal secretary in the adjoining office.

  “How may I help you, sir?” Chimed the voice of Edna Zabriski, the newest of the three permanent secretaries who staffed his White House personal office twenty-four hours a day when he was in DC.

  “Would you ask Secretary Rusk, Secretary McNamara and the Attorney General to return to the Oval Office please, Mrs Zabriski?”

  “Yes, Mister President.”

  Jack Kennedy’s lips formed an involuntary grin for an instant as he replaced the handset in its cradle. Until Edna Zabriski found her feet at the White House she’d remain the one person in Washington DC who was still in his thrall. He met his Vice-President’s stare.

  “What? No home spun pearls of wisdom?”

  “No, we’re way beyond that.”

  “What would you do if you were sitting behind this desk?”

  Lyndon Baines Johnson thought about the question.

  “I’d be pissing my pants, Mister President.”

  Before Jack Kennedy could answer a side door opened and Edna Zabriski ushered Dean Rusk into th
e Oval Office. The Secretary of State looked to the Vice-President, then the President.

  “I want to talk to the British Ambassador,” the President said flatly.

  Dean Rusk could be a maddeningly pedantic man: “There is no British Ambassador, Mister President. Sir James Sykes surrendered his accreditation when you refused to grant him an interview yesterday.”

  Jack Kennedy wanted to bite back. He refrained. Calmly he suggested: “I don’t care how you do it, Dean. Go up to 3100 Massachusetts Avenue North and knock on the door of the British Embassy in person if you have to but bring Jim Sykes back here. Now please.”

  Dean Rusk hesitated, opened his mouth as if he was going to protest, and immediately shut it. He nodded.

  “As you wish,” he muttered and turned on his heel.

  Robert McNamara walked into the Oval Office as the disgruntled Secretary of State departed. The Secretary of Defence stopped for a moment and watched his Cabinet colleague depart. He threw the President and Vice-President a quizzical glance.

  “I expect the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sit on Curtis LeMay,” Jack Kennedy told McNamara, who pursed his lips and nodded his acknowledgement as he removed his glasses to excise a speck of dust from the right-hand lens.

  “General Wheeler says LeMay wants a personal interview with ‘the Commander-in-Chief’. Bus Wheeler says LeMay went out to Barksdale as soon as he heard about the Malta,” Robert McNamara’s lips twitched into a configuration of mild distaste, “fiasco. LeMay’s staffers discovered gaps in the paper trail at the Air Force Department and at the Pentagon, so he went directly to the one place where he knew for certain he’d get his hands on the original operations orders and the sequenced coded authentication documents related to the two separate B-52 missions.”

  “Two?” Jack Kennedy rasped, an icy hand clutching at his guts. He’d thought he had a handle on the situation. Now it seemed he’d been catastrophically wrong. “You said two, Bob?”

  “There was a second mission involving four other B-52s targeting Gibraltar. The second mission was aborted because the Spanish Air Force failed to suppress British carrier-based air. Bus Wheeler’s got his staff crawling all over the Air Force Department and the Pentagon to ascertain whether there are any other ‘rogue operations orders’ in the system. Le May has the FBI and his own security people rounding up anybody who had anything to do with the drafting, transmission and authentication of the mission orders received at Barksdale AFB on December 3 at 22:57 hours.”

  Jack Kennedy’s eyes were widening, pupils dilating.

  “The Air Force got an order to carpet bomb the two key Mediterranean bases of our British ‘allies’ and nobody at the Air Force Department queried it?”

  The rumble of distant thunder filtered into the Oval Office like an ill omen from the gods.

  “No. The authentication codes checked out. LeMay says the CO at Barksdale wasn’t happy about it but after he placed a called to LeMay’s staff he got on with obeying his orders. He claims to have spoken to a Colonel Seedorf at the Pentagon but we have no trace of any such officer on LeMay’s staff. Two Pentagon staffers with that surname have been arrested for questioning as a precautionary measure. However, it seems that they were not involved in this matter...”

  There was another clap of thunder.

  Except it wasn’t thunder because everybody in the room felt the ground flinch beneath their feet and heard the blast wave rattle against the bullet proof windows of the Oval Office; within seconds Security Service men with drawn hand guns were rushing the President of the United States along the corridor and down into the subterranean Situation Room bunker complex that ever since the October War, had been partially mothballed to permit hurried and much deeper extensions to constructed.

  Jack Kennedy, the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defence were hurried through bare concrete rooms and dusty passageways heavy with dust and the fumes of fresh paint. Within less than a minute they had been corralled in the relative safety of the Situation Room. Secret Service Agents and Marines – still in their ceremonial guard duty uniforms but now carrying M16 automatic rifles grimly barred ever door, every corridor.

  Washington DC was under attack.

  Twenty feet underground beneath ten feet of reinforced concrete the drum roll of big explosions sent shivers through the bed rock to register on the stunned minds of the men and women sheltering in the White House Situation Room.

  “Is there any coffee?” The President inquired, strangely relaxed now that the worst had happened. If he was to die tonight he’d die with a mug of coffee in his hands. He’d never really been that afraid of dying; he’d sat out the whole nightmare of the October War in the Oval Office despite the pleas of his family and advisors. The American people had had no opportunity to run to shelters that in most places didn’t exist, so he’d had no personal inclination to run and hide from the consequences of his actions.

  It was Edna Zabriski who placed the steaming mug on the blotter before her President some minutes later. The middle-aged, matronly woman grimaced apologetically.

  “I’m sorry it took so long...”

  “Do you have family in DC, Mrs Zabriski?” Jack Kennedy asked gently.

  “Mr Zabriski was a contractor with Boeing in Seattle,” the woman confessed shyly. “I live with my sister in Georgetown...”

  The huge Boeing plant in Seattle and the giant naval base and dockyard at Bremerton had been virtually undamaged by the two megaton-sized air bursts over Dabob Bay and Sammanish, even thought the death toll in the city and the area surrounding Puget Sound had eventually topped out at around three hundred thousand, of whom approximately half had died of injuries sustained in the initial strikes.

  “Did they find your husband’s body?” Jack Kennedy asked quietly.

  “Yes, I was one of the lucky ones, Mister President.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” The woman made as if to go. “No, stay with us, Mrs Zabriski,” the Commander-in-Chief directed, “this is as safe as any place in DC.”

  No reports from above ground filtered down to the Situation Room for almost twenty minutes. Then the arrival of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shouldering past the stone-faced Secret Service Agents and Marines, broke the log jam and suddenly there was far too much information.

  “There have been as many as twenty major bombings in the city,” General Earle Wheeler reported with a stoic impartiality. “There are also accounts, unconfirmed, of gunmen roaming the streets killing at random.”

  Trucks filled with high explosives and fuel and chemical tankers had been driven up to Government buildings and detonated without warning. Many of the buildings which had been attacked had – due to the late hour – been virtually empty; conversely, because hardly anybody was present where only small fires had been started by the initial explosions there had been nobody to stop those fires spreading out of control. Vehicles had blown up in the parking lots adjacent to the Pentagon and several dozen projectiles – thought to have been launched by an improvised trench mortar of some kind – had been fired into the Pentagon itself. The Navy Department building on Constitution Avenue was on fire, as was the State Department complex. The list was long and growing.

  Bobby Kennedy ran into the Situation Room.

  “Dean is dead!” He blurted. “So is one of his Secret Service guys. The Washington PD says he was right next to the truck that blew up outside the British Embassy!”

  Chapter 25

  Tuesday 10th December 1963

  Villa Nova de Gaia, Lisbon, Portugal

  Clara Pullman yawned and stretched as she walked through into the kitchen of the ancient but thoroughly modernised villa on the hills overlooking the Estuary of the River Tagus. The sprawling city of Lisbon was beginning to emerge out of the grey haze of the morning. She’d been to Lisbon many times during the 1950s and with one partner or another, walked its streets and relaxed on the waterfronts, fallen a little in love with the city, its people and with the
Portuguese, whose language she’d acquired a limited but conversationally fluent familiarity.

  The tall spymaster, Sir Richard – call me ‘Dick’ – White had departed before dawn leaving Arkady and herself in the ‘protection’ of three amiably formidable ‘minders’. The trio looked like soldiers out of uniform to Clara. Each man carried a Browning 9-millimetre semi-automatic pistol and each man had that hard, weathered tan that spoke of lives lived outdoors and a casual acquaintance with danger.

  The Head of MI6 – the British Secret Intelligence Service – had kept Arkady going on strong black coffee and ‘pep’ pills, presumably amphetamines, most of the night. Clara hadn’t expected the debriefing to be so immediate or so intense, nor had she anticipated being in the same room with her lover while it was going on. Dick White and a second man, a sallow-faced acolyte who’d darted questions at Arkady in Russian and at Clara in French, and spoken English with a pronounced Germanic accent, had scratched notes all night long in a big, legal-size hardback notebook. He’d been introduced as ‘Max’.

  ‘Red Dawn,’ Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, once Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin’s personal translator, and afterwards a Colonel in the Komitet gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti – the KGB – who’d been in fact, Dick White’s ‘mole’ inside that organisation since late 1956, explained, ‘was not initiated as an apparatus of the Soviet State because in the event of a catastrophe who could say whether the state, in any meaningful sense, would survive. Red Dawn was an idea which became a movement in the years after the Great Patriotic War which ended in 1945. Because the Americans had the atomic bomb and for several years, we, the Soviet Union, did not, the annihilation of the Mother Country was a very real possibility. In such a climate of fear strange and dangerous decisions are often made in haste and later, rued at leisure. In inculcating a ‘will to resist’ in the face of utter defeat, the men in the Kremlin created a terrible monster. A monster that was so terrible and came to be regarded as being so threatening to the integrity of the Soviet State that in the years before the October War, the leaders of the Red Dawn movement were ruthlessly persecuted. Many were sent into internal exile in Siberia, or posted to closed cities, some were imprisoned and, I daresay, some were simply disappeared. In October 1959 my old mentor, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev called me to a private meeting at his dacha outside Moscow and anointed me his personal witch-finder general. By that time Red Dawn had infiltrated every organ of the Soviet State. The Red Dawn movement and the Soviet State had become indistinguishable; a war party that would never make peace with the western democracies.’