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

by James Philip

  “NO SURFACE CONTACTS IN SIGHT!”

  The Captain of HMS Dreadnought breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.

  Reaching into his breast pocket he withdrew the signal he’d composed in the minutes after he’d concluded that surfacing was the only realistic way of making sure that at least some of his crew survived.

  He handed the signal sheet to the communications yeoman who’d been waiting by his shoulder.

  Dreadnought was wallowing horribly in the seas, her low, bulbous mass rolling and starting to pitch sickeningly.

  “Increase to six-zero revs please!”

  Simon Collingwood staggered across to the plot table.

  “It feels like the seas are coming from a point or two south of west,” he observed, grabbing a hand hold.

  Max Forton, his bearded Executive Officer nodded.

  “The old girl will ride a lot easier if she’s taking the seas from abaft, sir.”

  “Helm!” Collingwood called softly. “Make your course one_four_zero degrees!”

  “Engineering report we’re taking on water again, sir!”

  “Reduce revs to three zero!” Collingwood had felt the vibration through the soles of his feet so the report from the machine spaces hadn’t come as a surprise. He’d row back on the revs. If that didn’t do the trick the boat could stay afloat indefinitely without steerage way providing nothing else broke. Marvellously clean, cold salty air was being sucked down the sail into the control room.

  “Surfacing signal has been acknowledged by friendly forces, sir.”

  “What about Fleet HQ?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  Collingwood had ordered his abbreviated after action report to be transmitted in the clear the moment Dreadnought’s sail broke the surface. The transmission would be repeated at ten minute intervals until further notice.

  He glanced thoughtfully at the radiation monitor on the rear control room bulkhead. It read ‘negative’.

  “Ventilate the boat, Number One,” he declared. “I’ll be in my cabin for a few minutes.”

  Simon Collingwood slumped onto his bunk, resisting the urge to bury his head in his hands. Dreadnought had been idling when the first two homing fish destroyed the Scorpion. The lightweight Mark 44 13-inch torpedo had a maximum speed of up to thirty-five knots but a relatively short range of just over three miles. The second S-2 Tracker had had to manoeuvre so as to clear the disturbance area caused by the Scorpion’s death before she could drop her torpedoes. In this short respite Dreadnought had accelerated to almost fifteen knots. He’d poured on the power knowing that Dreadnought would still be working up to flank speed when the fish arrived. Dreadnought’s maximum speed was several knots slower than the homing fish. The mathematics of the situation – well, more correctly, the trigonometry – were against Dreadnought and there was nothing he could do about it. There were no miraculous angles to be bisected, no escape. He’d thought he was going to die. He’d fought the urge to attempt to turn to one side or the other, knowing he couldn’t shake off the racing acoustic harbingers of doom. He’d done the only thing he could do, guessed the collision angle of the incoming Mark 44s and steered a directly reciprocal course and ordered his engineering officer to red-line everything. He’d sat unmoving in his command chair, worn a confident mask and held Dreadnought arrow straight. Any deviation meant a loss of speed, and feet and inches might make all the difference between life and death. There had been the momentary hope and relief of the first fish detonating astern; and then the last fish had kept on coming, and coming...

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Fleet HQ have acknowledged our transmission, sir.”

  Simon Collingwood puffed out his chest, smiled.

  “Thank you.”

  Chapter 46

  Wednesday 11th December 1963

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Joanne Brenckmann was a little bit unnerved and then hugely relieved to hear her husband’s voice on the other end of the line. It was nearly two months since they’d spoken – over a dreadfully noisy line from England for barely two minutes before the connection went down – and she had not expected to speak to him again for at least another two months, when he was due to be rotated home for a month’s leave. She hated the separation but accepted it as part of the exigencies of the Service. If the Navy wanted Walter in England he had to go and there was nothing either of them could do about it.

  In her husband’s long absence she’d got on with putting the house in order. It was only a month since the final repairs had been carried out to the roof and the last of the windows had been repaired. Walter had said they ought to have taken advantage of the Government’s interest-free reconstruction loans; she’d hated the idea of being in debt to Uncle Sam and besides, some people had already been waiting six months for the paperwork to go through the system, so they’d dug into their dwindling savings. If they’d waited for the Government to sort out its own bureaucratic muddle they’d have had to spend another winter with a tarpaulin over the roof in a house that was liable to blow away in a stiff breeze. While Walter might be a shrewd litigator and a safe pair of hands commanding one of the Navy’s destroyers, she’d always been the one who balanced the family’s accounts and managed the home. For a lawyer Walter had never been focused on money or very practical around it unless he was fighting a case in court. At home he’d always left that sort of thing to Joanne. They’d always had one of those marriages where each partner had well-established and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. They’d kept things simple and it had worked out just fine. Walter was the breadwinner; Joanne was the mother of their children and the homemaker. They’d had a huge fight about something once, although it was so long ago neither of them could remember what. They’d never done that again because they’d both felt so ashamed afterwards, as if they’d let each other and the kids down in some terrible, unfathomably way. They’d become true soul mates without whom neither could be the person they aspired to be, and so when Joanne heard the timbre of her husband’s voice she knew something was wrong. Horribly wrong.

  Sweetheart,” she gasped, her thoughts scattered, “I didn’t expect to speak to you for...”

  “I’m in DC,” Walter Brenckmann told his wife.

  “Oh, my God!” She’d stopped watching NBC’s grainy coverage of the abomination going on four hundred miles away in the nation’s capital earlier that afternoon. It was too...monstrous. Then one of the kids - she still thought about her grown up sons as ‘kids’ - had turned on the radiogram in the lounge and she’d caught more snippets of the horror. If she hadn’t had two of her ‘boys’ at home she’d have got nervous, started watching people on the street, bolted her doors. Notwithstanding the anarchy that seemed to have taken over capital, Boston was calm, oddly normal.

  Joanne had imagined that the next time she talked to her husband of over twenty-nine years she’d tell him about the house and how the three ‘boys’ were getting on. She and her eldest two ‘boys’ had painted all the upstairs rooms and she’d trawled the local marts for throws and quilts for the beds, and rugs and carpets for the floors. The boys had cleared the yard, cut back the trees and removed all the branches cracked and bent by last year’s the blast wave... She still shuddered to think about that night thirteen-and-a-half months ago. Although the house was finally back to the way it was before the war she was saddened by the patchwork of ruined and empty buildings disfiguring the surrounding blocks, soon those lots would be overgrown. She despised the way some people had just given up, even in a community like Cambridge so close to the revitalised, thriving Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. But there was no accounting for people and she could understand that some of her old neighbours would never again feel safe living in a big city or close to a so-called ‘strategically important target’; like MIT.

  “I’m okay,” her husband reassured Joanne. “I came back from England yesterday with a British delegation. It is a long story, but I’m okay. I’m at
the White House.”

  “The White House?”

  “Like I said, it’s a long story.”

  Joanne Brenckmann shivered. There was something awful in her husband’s tone. Fear mingling with loss and a thing she’d never heard in his voice in all their years together, despair. Her husband had lost his hope.

  “Walter, you sound...”

  “Sorry, honey, it’s just that...”

  Joanne was disturbed by a sound at her shoulder.

  “You okay, Mom?” Asked the lean, grey-eyed man in the uniform of a Lieutenant (Senior Grade) in the United States Navy. He’d been packing his kit upstairs in his old bedroom when the phone had rung down in the lounge. He had wondered if it was a call from Norfolk notifying him of some last minute change in his movement orders. Given what was going on in Washington he’d been a little surprised not to be called back to Norfolk earlier. He’d reported for duty at the Navy Office in downtown Boston yesterday; explained that he wasn’t due to report for duty again for another few days and put himself at the disposal of the local Naval District ‘for service in the current emergency’. The men in the Navy Office had eyed his gleaming submariner’s dolphin thoughtfully before refusing his offer. He’d left his contact number and address at the Navy Office, just in case.

  Joanne put her hand over the handset.

  “It’s your father.”

  “Look,” Walter Brenckmann said, his voice faltering. “Look, the thing is...”

  “What is it, sweetheart?” Joanne was terrified now. Sensing his mother’s near panic her eldest son put his arm around her shoulders. “You’re frightening me, Walter.”

  “It is...”

  “What is it? What has happened?”

  “The Scorpion is,” a moment’s dreadful hesitation, “missing...”

  “Oh, God!” Joanne was a Navy wife and mother and knew that when a submarine went missing it, and every man onboard, was gone.

  “It happened a few hours ago. The circumstances are still, confused...”

  Joanne knew her husband was crying. Not so anybody watching would know. Inwardly, he was sobbing like a baby. She ached to hold him.

  “That’s, bad,” she stuttered.

  “What is it, Mom?” Her son asked again.

  Without putting her hand over the receiver she explained: “It is the Scorpion, Junior,” even though her son was the most grown up of young men well on the way to thirty, he’d always be ‘Junior’ in the family, “something’s happened. She’s missing.”

  “Jo,” Walter Brenckmann asked, “is somebody with you?”

  “Yes.” The mother sniffed a proud sniff and glanced up at her worried son’s face. He was so like his father at his age... Except unlike his father Walter Junior could have been born to wear the crisp Lieutenant’s uniform with the submariner’s dolphin badge. His father wore his uniform like the Boston lawyer he’d always be. “Junior’s with me. He’ll be real cut up about this.” She quirked a sad, tight-lipped grimace at her eldest son. “Your father says the Scorpion’s down, Junior.”

  Walter Brenckmann didn’t believe his ears for a moment.

  “Junior’s with you in Boston?” He blurted loudly.

  Joanne joined up the dots in a mad rush.

  “Oh, God! You wouldn’t have heard! I’m so sorry, sweetheart! I should have guessed! Junior transferred off the Scorpion before her last cruise. He’s been posted to Groton, Connecticut ahead of his joining his new boat... Hey, he can tell you better than me...”

  Joanne pressed the handset into her son’s hands and ran into the kitchen fumbling for her handkerchief. Her husband had thought his son was dead and she couldn’t begin to imagine how dreadful that must have been.

  “Pa,” Walter Brenckmann, junior, murmured into the handset. “Pa, are you okay?”

  The younger man was shocked to realise that his father was sobbing uncontrollably at the other end of the line.

  Chapter 47

  Wednesday 11th December 1963

  Communications Room 2a, The White House, Washington DC

  Bobby Kennedy’s jacket was crumpled and a little dusty. He’d washed his face and combed his hair, his complexion was less ashen, his gaze was steady and in that curious way of his, convincingly empathetic. Even in the bunker twenty feet beneath the shrapnel-strewn grounds of the White House the stink of burning tainted the atmosphere and lay upon them all like a curse.

  “My boy wasn’t on the Scorpion,” the older man said dully. “He was standing right beside my wife in Cambridge just now.”

  The Attorney General had come into the room carrying a half-empty bottle of Kentucky bourbon and two cut glass tumblers. He chuckled wearily, popped the cork from the bottle and poured two generous slugs of amber fluid into the glasses.

  “That,” he decided, “it a Helluva thing!”

  “Isn’t it just,” the older man agreed as he accepted one of the glasses. “I don’t usually drink on duty, but...”

  Both men drank deep.

  “Walter Junior was called off the Scorpion twenty-four hours before she sailed. He’s pulled instructor duty at Groton pending joining his next boat in April. He was on furlough in Cambridge. He was helping his mother and his younger brother, Dan, paint the goddammed house!” He sighed long and hard. “Dan’s just finished law school. Yale,” he added. And then, unable to stop talking went on: “he’s doing a six-month internship with the DA’s office in Boston. I always hoped he’d pick up my old practice when Joanne and me kicked over the traces and headed down to the Florida Keys...”

  “Now, that’s a thing,” the younger brother of the President of the United States agreed, in the aimless way of a man who didn’t quite know what to say. “Captain Brenckmann,” he began, thought better of it. Gathered his courage, tried again. “Captain Brenckmann, I owe you an apology.”

  The bourbon burned Walter Brenckmann’s throat.

  “What for?” Their country was trying to tear itself apart and was still on the brink of war with its one surviving former ally from the now distant World of the pre-Cuban Missiles Crisis disaster. It was too late for heart-searching, for apologies, for atonement. The World was what they’d made it and somebody, somewhere had to start looking to the future.

  Bobby Kennedy grimaced.

  “There will be no war,” he said simply. “Premier Heath and the President have signed a unilateral ‘non-aggression’ agreement. The British Foreign Secretary will remain in the US when the Premier flies home to discuss the full re-establishment of diplomatic, trade and humanitarian aid links. Once things have settled down Jack and the Premier have agreed in principle, to exchange full military missions authorised to draw up plans to rebuild our alliance. All questions relating to spheres of interest in Europe and the Mediterranean will be dealt with in due course at a summit to be convened in England in the spring. All British and American naval forces have been ordered to discontinue surveillance and all contact with each other for a period of seventy-two hours to permit new and robust contact protocols to be established between the parties.” The President’s younger brother shook his head. “I don’t know what you and Le May said to Jack but whatever it was it worked!”

  The older man shrugged.

  His head was still in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His son’s voice rang in his ears and the joy of recognition still suffused the relieved father. His son had been lost to him and suddenly he’d got him back. A more religious man than Walter Brenckmann would have regarded the moment when he discovered his son was alive as one of revelation and apotheosis. In truth, religious or not, it had been a sublime, and perhaps, a defining moment of his life. There might not be a God but there was reason to have faith.

  He’d known that there was a chance of peace when he’d put through the call to Cambridge, having come straight from the Situation Room where he and Curtis LeMay had confronted the President.

  ‘Mister President,’ General Curtis LeMay, the bulldog Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told th
e President, ‘you have a decision to make, sir. If we’re going to go to war with the Brits we’re going to get hurt real bad unless we hit them now with everything we’ve got.’

  The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America had looked at Curtis LeMay with cool, contemplative eyes.

  ‘You know I’m not going to do that, General LeMay.’

  ‘I’ll know it when you tell me, sir.’

  Jack Kennedy had looked to Walter Brenckmann.

  ‘I’m sorry about your son, Captain,’ he’d said. Shaking his head he’d straightened and turned to Curtis LeMay. ‘Stand down Strategic Air Command and order all Polaris submarines to surface and to squawk their names and positions in the clear. All SAC aircraft are to be grounded forthwith. All SSBNs are to return to their home ports. Do you have any question general?’

  Curtis LeMay had had no questions.

  The President had spoken for peace.

  That short meeting now seemed like a dream.

  “I’m sorry,” Walter Brenckmann told the Attorney General, grimacing ruefully, “I’m not at liberty to divulge that information.”