by James Philip
She saw his eyes linger on her hand, and instantly snatched it away from the bar.
“It is a long story,” she said, her gaze avoiding his.
Sam shrugged.
“I’m not in any hurry,” he grimaced.
The woman pursed her lips, undecided whether to stay or leave.
“This was a bad idea,” she decided. However, she did not move. “I’ll have that drink, maybe. But I’ll pay.”
Sam sipped his beer and had a good idea; the first that day.
He waved at a free table near the back of the bar and wordlessly, Judy followed him to it. Sam propped his guitar case in the corner. He always felt better when he had positioned the case protecting his faithful Martin somewhere well out of the way when he was in a bar. Especially, on Saturday nights although from what he had seen of it in the last week Bellingham – a quiet port, a God-fearing little town surrounded by the forests and mountains where folks came to retire or in the summer came on vacations - was not the sort of place which suffered regular riotous assemblies.
“I like long stories,” Sam chuckled.
Judy was viewing him over the rim of her glass. Her grey green eyes were intent and a little wary. There was a weary determination in her gaze, and a waning anxiety as she relaxed.
“I heard those guys talking about you after the fight,” she prefaced, catching the man unawares.
“I thought we were talking about you?”
“Later, maybe,” she rejoined, allowing herself to dance around flirting with the stranger. “They said your Uncle played with Glen Miller?”
“Great Uncle Saul. My Ma’s Uncle Saul,” Sam explained. “He must be sixty now. He’s still on the road. Somewhere, I don’t know where.”
“The guys who beat up on you said it was going to cost them a couple of hundred dollars to find somebody to play guitar and piano on their record next month?”
Sam Brenckmann’s guffaw was uncharacteristically scornful.
“Those guys are full of shit,” he caught himself, “if you’ll forgive my language, ma’am. They sold me this line about having this recording contract with some suit in Memphis who’d worked with Elvis. That was supposed to happen sometime after we’d played Vancouver and some place called Chilliwack,” he winced, “if there’s such a place...”
“There is. Chilliwack’s just over the border. About forty-five miles north east. An hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half by car at this time of year.”
“Oh, right. Anyway, we were supposed to be playing some club there tonight.”
“Chilliwack’s a nice place. A bit like Bellingham, but Canadian if you know what I mean.”
“Like your accent,” Sam observed, not unkindly.
Judy shrugged. “You think?”
“A little. In a good way.”
The woman might have blushed but the lights were low and it was impossible to tell for sure.
“My dad worked in Vancouver during the war,” she explained. “He was in Army Intelligence, I think. He never talked about it, of course. My Ma’s Canadian, she was born in the Fraser Valley, that’s just over the border. They moved to Montreal a few years back.”
“My folks are from Massachusetts. Well, from Germany on my Pa’s side, a hundred years ago, I guess. Ma’s folks are New England folk from way back.”
Judy held up her hand, highlighting her ring finger.
“Mike, my husband,” she declared, with an almost theatrically elongated sighing breath, “is in the military. He was in Germany last time I heard. The Corps of Engineers. I’m still friendly with Mikey’s sister, Heidi, she says he got promoted to Master Sergeant last year. He stopped writing me and sending money home two years ago. I’ve been waiting tables at night and working in the typing pool at City Hall most weekdays ever since. We’ve still got a mortgage to pay, you know how it is.”
Sam frowned mock bewilderment.
Mortgages, waiting tables, nine to five office jobs, paying ones dues were not exactly his stock in trade, or things about which he could claim any personal experience, or interest.
Judy giggled. “Okay, you’re a musician, so maybe, you don’t,” she admitted. “Anyhow, I wear the ring to stop guys hitting on me when I’m waiting tables.”
“Does it work?”
“Sometimes.”
Sam was noticing little things about Judy. For example, she chewed her finger nails to the quick and she did not go big on makeup. It was getting smoky in the bar, louder as it filled up. His Ma had waited tables and worked in a typing pool to help pay Pa’s way through law school in the thirties. How spooky was that?
“Do you accost every wandering minstrel who passes through Bellingham?”
Fuck! That wasn’t what I meant!
But Judy was laughing.
“No, you’re the first!”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean that to come out the way it probably sounded.”
Judy sobered a little.
“Honestly and truly,” she confessed, “I have no idea why I’m accosting you. Except I saw you at the bar through the window and you looked kind of lonely. And you didn’t try to hit on me at the diner. So I thought I’d, well, say hello, I suppose.”
“Hello, Judy,” Sam smiled.
It was a beautiful moment; the sort of moment that deserved a more serendipitous denouement than that which uncaring fate delivered, a split second later.
One moment the bar was gloomy, smoky, noisy and the next it was filled with painfully white light that seemed to, for a spasm of milliseconds paint everybody and everything in the room black and white down to their bones like they were sitting or standing in a giant x-ray machine.
Glasses dropped from numb hands, shattered on the bare boards underfoot.
One or two men cursed, most people were awed and shocked to silence.
“Get away from the windows!” Somebody shouted. “Get down on the floor!”
Sam Brenckmann was already on his way under the table, dragging Judy with him.
“What?” She mouthed, initially too befuddled to be terrified.
Sam had gone to a high school in Boston where the Principal, a Marine Corps veteran, had taken civil defence drills extremely seriously, much in the fashion of a religious rite and conducted morning-long exercises every month.
When the air raid sirens go off this is what we do, children!
Tonight there had been no warning sirens.
The first and most import thing is to get under cover as quickly as possible!
“Where’s the nearest bomb shelter?” Sam asked, cutting to the chase.
Your teachers will know where the nearest bomb shelter is located!
“Bomb shelter? I don’t know?”
You must not panic!
“That was a big bomb,” Sam said lowly, hissing almost in her ear. “That flash was the initial thermal airburst. Judging by the way it lit up everything in here anybody outside in the street who was looking directly towards it at the time it lit up is blind now. After the flash comes the blast over-pressure shock wave. That travels at the speed of sound. The longer it takes to get to us the farther away the bomb went off and the better our chances.”
Panic is unpatriotic and counter-productive and will not help to keep you safe, children!
Judy snuggled against Sam and he circled her in his arms beneath the table.
Nothing happened.
Or at least, nothing happened for several minutes.
Other that was, than for the belated wailing of the sirens; the unearthly, ululating howl first cranked up in the southern part of the town and washed north with an ever-increasing keening anger.
Suddenly, the whole building shuddered as if it had been hit by a hurricane force gust of wind; windows rattled, timbers creaked, and in the seconds after the dying pressure wave roared past there were moments of absolute silence.
Four or five minutes?
That meant Bellingham was forty to fifty miles away from the bomb.
There had bee
n no ground wave like there had been an earthquake; so the bomb was definitely an airburst...
Nobody moved.
The next bomb might be closer, much closer.
Chapter 2
22:02 Hours Zulu (Washington DC Time)
Saturday 27th October 1962
B-52 ‘The Big Cigar’ 23 miles south-west of Gorky
First Lieutenant Nathan Zabriski watched the green and grey repeater screens, and listened to the hiss and cackle of the intercom and felt like being sick. The clock ticked down remorselessly as the huge bomber screamed north-west in a desperate shallow dive to escape the deadly twin envelopes of her bombs when they air burst above the cities of Gorky and Dzerzhinsk, approximately two hundred and fifty miles east of Moscow. He checked the bulkhead clock; one hundred and twenty-seven minutes since the earth fall of the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile strikes; and one hundred and nine minutes since the barrage of Polaris submarine launched ICBMs started to plummet onto the cities of the Eastern Soviet Union and its satellites. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Minsk, Warsaw and half-a-hundred other places would be burning; but on the ground the surviving Red Air Force interceptor and missile forces were still attempting to fight back.
Onboard The Big Cigar it was business as normal. Exactly like a training exercise except for the impenetrable communications mush.
After the first strikes the whole Soviet air defence system had come alive like a giant wasp’s nest prodded with a big stick and then kicked around a field. Hundreds of fighters were airborne and for a while it had seemed as if no bomber could possibly survive. The British V-Bomber Force ought to have fallen on the western flank of the Soviet air defence net as the first ICBMs lit up over their targets but it was patently obvious that that had not happened. The Brits had not turned up for the party and it was not until the relentless salvoes of Polaris submarine launched ballistic missiles, many targeted against Red Air Force airfields, radar stations, missile batteries and dispersal areas in the Baltic States, Poland, East Germany, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and the north around Leningrad, Murmansk and Archangel began to rain down, that eventually the Soviet Union’s command and control of their air space had been sufficiently dismantled and degraded, to allow the surviving bombers in the first two strike waves to penetrate deep into the USSR. Now, with the air defence radar net torn to pieces and its command and control system shredded the Soviets were blind and mute. Interceptors still circled, or raced hither and thither and the massed surface-to-air missile batteries filled hundreds of square miles of empty air with ragged and wastefully speculative undirected spasms of violence but it was like watching a blind giant flailing thin air with a mighty club, murderously hit and miss, occasionally finding a target by pure happenstance. Farther into the Russian heartland pockets of the formidable air defence system might still survive, but over the Ukraine the Red Air Force was powerless to curtail the torment. In the frigid vastness of the Russian night the surviving B-47s and B-52s of Strategic Air Command were sowing a terrible thermonuclear whirlwind across the steppes.
Nathan Zabriski had honestly believe the Brits would fly to Hell and back if that was what it took; that they had failed to show up at the critical moment when the first wave of B-47s and B-52s crossed into defended Soviet air space and suffered sixty to seventy percent casualties overflying the virtually intact defences – forcing the survivors to initially turn away to avoid certain immolation - had enraged him and his comrades, and oddly, sparked a series of horrible pangs of doubt in his mind.
Why had the Brits not joined the fight?
Had the British already been knocked out of the fight by the Soviet first strike? Was it possible that the RAF’s entire V-Bomber Force had been caught on the ground?
And if so, what did that mean for the folks back home...
Every burst of static over the communications net was another warhead bursting over another city, or striking ground or water to take out another airfield, or bridge, or rail centre, or port or troop concentration. Nathan Zabriski might be far too junior to see the big picture in any detail but he knew enough to know that he was participating in a global catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
“One minute to Gorky air burst!” He reported tersely.
Theoretically, under SIOP-63 – Single Integrated Operational Plan 1963 – which had been promulgated during the previous summer in an attempt to rationalise the somewhat chaotic, inefficient overkill strike planning of the late 1950s under which the US Air Force, Navy and Army basically attacked whatever they wanted to attack with little or no regard for overall strategic, or even regional tactical integration; The Big Cigar was operating as a component in a single integrated attack plan. SIOP-63 sought to avoid wasteful overkill with bombers, submarines and land-based ICBMs all targeting the same objectives, thus obviating the pre-SIOP-63 risk of a large number of high priority enemy assets being overlooked, or ignored because the Air Force assumed the Navy or the Army would be ‘taking care of business’.
SIOP-63 achieved ‘integrated targeting’ by combining all the different targeting priorities and offering the President of the United States of America – the Commander-in-Chief – a menu of five incrementally more massive strike options.
Specifically, option one targeted Soviet missile sites, bomber air fields and submarine bases. Option two included military targets located at a distance from cities such as airfields, missile batteries and warships at sea. Option three permitted the targeting of any or all military forces or installations regardless of whether they were situated near or co-located with, concentrations of major civilian population. In a logical escalation option four targeted all command and control centres and by definition, the enemy high command. Only the final, fifth option, envisaged an all out, or ‘spasm’ attack. The planners had pragmatically, they believed, regarded this last option as primarily a second response, or retaliatory exercise.
In practice the President had, when confronted with the actual logic and real time stresses of global nuclear war, had inevitably concluded that adopting any or all of options one to four was a very good way to guarantee that tens of millions of Americans would be killed. Thus, earlier that day the President of the United States of America had determined to gather every resource to hand and to throw it at the Soviet Union in a great ‘spasm’ of thermonuclear violence in the vain hope that, under such a ferocious all out attack the enemy’s capacity to retaliate would be obliterated by a massive ‘first strike’.
Nathan Zabriski was cognisant of the fact that Gorky, formerly Nizhny Novgorod in Tsarist times, with a population of around a million people was the fifth most populous city in the Soviet Union. He also knew that it was a regional centre of government, a major transportation hub and an important industrial centre.
Dzerzhinsk, Gorky’s smaller western neighbour abutting against its eastern suburbs was the place where the Soviet empire manufactured many of its vilest chemical weapons. His briefing notes informed him that the manufacture of these abominations went back to 1941; and that since the Great Patriotic War the production of lewisite, yperite, prussic acid and phosgene had been centralised in the so-called Kaprolactam Organic Glass Factory at Dzerzhinsk.
The crew’s briefing folder had described the products of the Kaprolactam Organic Glass Factory in graphic detail. Lewisite was an organoarsenic compound which acted as a skin vesicant (a blistering agent) and lung irritant (causing victims to drown in their own destroyed lung tissue). Yperite was good old-fashioned mustard gas, albeit now produced in several particularly vicious and agonising variants. Prussic acid as any moderately informed school child knows is hydrogen cyanide; fatal in relatively small doses in minutes, and in doses of over 3000 parts per million within seconds. Phosgene was the gas commonly used alongside basic formulations of yperite in the trenches of World War I.
The Big Cigar had had to alter course and bomb four minutes late to clear the mushroom cloud of a large airburst over the northern suburbs of Gorky. The
first of the B-52’s Mark 39 bombs, each with a W39 3.8 megaton thermonuclear warhead had been primed so as to explode at two thousand feet approximately over the centre of the city.
At the Initial Point of the bomb run First Lieutenant Nathan Zabriski, The Big Cigar’s navigator and bombardier, had walked through the failsafe protocols with the bomber’s pilot and co-pilot. Once the detonation sequence of the Mark 39 was programmed, there were three fail safes. The final fail safe was a simple ready-safe switch. Flicking the switch on each weapon had churned Nathan Zabriski’s guts. Notwithstanding, he had done his duty with painstaking, exhaustively practised competence.
Twenty-four seconds after the first Mark 39 dropped from The Big Cigar’s bomb bay the second had detached and fallen towards an ignition point high above the Central Administrative Block of the Kaprolactam Organic Glass Factory. No matter how much Zabriski wished good riddance to that foul factory he could not help but think of the imminent death of over two hundred thousand, mostly innocent, Russians living within the boundaries of the closed city of Dzerzhinsk.
“Thirty seconds to Gorky airburst!”
“I’m painting bandits rising at vector one-seven-five!” The electronic warfare office sitting in the claustrophobic mid section of the bomber behind Nathan Zabriski called calmly. “Two. No, cancel that. Four bogeys rising through level three zero. Range five-seven miles. Closing at,” he hesitated, “five miles per minute.”
Nathan did the math.
There was no way the bandits could engage The Big Cigar before both W39 warheads detonated. Whatever happened, he would know that he had done his duty. It was like a bad dream.
“Twenty seconds to Gorky air burst!”
“Missile lock!” The Electronic Warfare Officer’s voice was unemotional.
“Where did that come from, Elmer?” The pilot asked, his Texan drawl insouciant despite the clicking and hissing of the intercom.