by James Philip
John McCone raised his right hand to interject.
“A number of the later strikes failed, or hit targets of no apparent tactical or strategic importance. It may indicate that only a proportion of the Soviet Strategic Missile Force’s inventory was actually at immediate launch readiness prior to our first strikes. Later launches may have been so hurried that the crews made mistakes configuring inertial guidance systems. For example, programming in the wrong numbers to compensate for the distance the Earth rotates between the launch time and the time of impact.” The Director of the CIA grimaced. “But that’s just a guess. I suppose the question you have to ask yourself is if you’re a Soviet missile technician standing on top of the gantry of a hundred foot tall rocket with nukes lighting up all around the horizon how good are you going to be making slide rule calculations in the dark?”
McGeorge Bundy nodded.
“Illinois,” he murmured. “There was an air burst in the five to six megaton range approximately five miles north of Evanston. This community was destroyed and widespread damage has been sustained across the northern suburbs and north central Chicago. The air burst occurred at a distance of approximately eighteen miles from the centre of the city. It was the first of a two ICBM attack on the Chicago area. There was a second very large air burst within a mile of the centre of Elgin, some forty miles east of city. This strike destroyed Elgin and caused widespread damage in the eastern suburbs of Chicago. The population of Evanston was about eighty thousand, and that of Elgin around fifty thousand, most of whom will have become casualties. I have no estimate of casualties for the Chicago metropolitan area but we must expect the toll to be high.”
This was an obscene understatement and all the men in the room knew as much. Some three-and-a-half million people lived in Chicago and at least half the city was wrecked. The United States National Security Advisor did not linger overlong on the Windy City’s torment.
“Michigan. There was a ground burst estimated to have been of the order of perhaps one hundred kilotons – possibly a bigger weapon whose guidance and initiation sequence partially failed – some twenty-five miles west of Grand Rapids. The ground burst was on the coast in a sparsely populated area.”
Bundy looked briefly to a new page and went back to the one he had been reading from.
“Ohio. Something similar seems to have happened near Cleveland. A weapon in the low hundreds of kilotons range detonated in Lake Erie some five miles offshore. The nearest settlement, Avon Lake, escaped significant damage. Just a few windows blown in, that sort of thing. This detonation was about twenty-three miles approximately west-north-west of Cleveland.”
Nobody looked at the President.
Jack Kennedy was on the verge of tears. The man who had treated the Presidency like a licence to party; the playboy chief executive in whose company no woman between the age of twenty and fifty was safe; the man who had been the bane of his Secret Service minders constantly putting himself at risk in crowds and in his unscheduled lascivious assignations; who had concealed his chronic illness – Addison’s disease – from most of the senior members of his Administration; who had kept himself going by bringing in quack doctors who were no better than latter day snake oil salesmen to pump him full of steroids, and uppers and downers, now faced the horrific consequences of what he suddenly regarded as his personal moral, intellectual and physical failure to do his duty as the thirty-fifth President of the Republic. Tens of millions were dead and the buck stopped with John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The party was over. How soon would it be before his weaknesses, his predatory sexual predilections and the disastrously inappropriate company he had kept in the last few years became public knowledge? He had partied, bestrode the World stage as if he really was some modern Arthurian reincarnation building Camelot anew in the shadow of Capitol Hill. Last night that dream had died and all that was left was the sickening stench of the fires in the smashed cities and the foul, corrupt taste of ashes in his mouth.
“New York State,” McGeorge Bundy went on. “Previous reports of a five to six megaton airburst directly over Buffalo have now been confirmed. The Canadians are reporting massive damage across most of the Niagara Peninsula...”
Bundy paused at the sound of the President of the United States of America retching uncontrollably. Avoiding looking directly at the Chief Executive he threw a burning glance at the Attorney General. Bobby Kennedy shrugged, got up to go to his older brother who shook off his arm angrily.
Not for the first time in the last twenty-four hours the United States National Security Advisor regretted the absence of the Vice-President as the crisis had deepened in recent days. That was Bobby’s fault. Lyndon Baines Johnson and the younger Kennedy sibling detested each other and LBJ knew anything he said in front of the Attorney General would be undermined five minutes after he left the room. Mac Bundy had never thought he would think it – he was not quite yet ready to say it aloud – but he could not help feeling that his country would not have been in this mess if the wily Texan former ringmaster of the House of Representatives, had been in charge rather than the two spoiled rich kids who had actually been calling the shots the last two years.
Half-a-million people had lived in Buffalo this time yesterday. Half-a-million men, women, children, babies in arms, and now they were most likely, all dead or dying. Outside the city the carnage would have spread for mile upon mile, tens of thousands more would have died, or been horrifically burned, or would presently be ingesting lethal doses of radioactive fallout with every breath they took...
“Massachusetts,” Bundy said, the word choking in his throat. “The Boston suburb of Quincy was destroyed by an air burst estimated to be in the low one to two megaton range. Southern Boston has suffered significant damage. Structural damage to buildings and loss of life has been reported as far from ground zero as Cambridge and the main Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. Casualties are likely to be in the high tens of thousands, probably in the low hundreds of thousands.”
The President of the United States of America leaned forward and resting his elbows on his knees buried his head in his hands and began to weep inconsolably.
Chapter 25
07:47 Hours Mountain Standard Time (10:47 Washington Time)
Sunrise on Sunday 28th October 1962
Bellingham, Washington State
The woman’s feet pattered on the bare boards, the bed creaked and she snuggled against the man again. She had thrown on a cotton nightdress when she went downstairs to check that all the doors and windows were locked.
“There’s electricity again,” she sighed, pressing against Sam Brenckmann.
Sam lazily, for he was half asleep because it was still intolerably early in the day for his musician’s body clock, fondled his lover’s breasts. Judy was curved in all the right places and exquisitely soft and warm in all the right ways. They had fitted together pretty much perfectly, as if they had been purpose built to be each other’s ideal sexual mate and partner. Which, given how they had met and the circumstances of the last few hours, was as serendipitous as it was, well, bizarre.
“I’ve put the kettle on,” Judy murmured. “I think the voltage may be low but the whistle will blow when the water boils.”
“Cool,” he muttered. His left hand explored the delicious shallow roundness of the woman’s belly and began to slide beneath her thighs. She clamped her thighs together, giggling.
“No. I’m far too sore already.”
“Sorry.”
Again, Judy giggled. “It wasn’t as if I begged you to stop at any time.”
“This is true,” he groaned, intent on wrapping her close. “You said the power is back on?”
“Yes.”
Sam’s head still was not switched on.
“Tell me you’re not going to throw me out just because the power is back on and nobody in your street got blown up last night?” He invited his bed mate.
Judy thought this was so hugely funny she was almost convulsed with
hysteria.
Sam held her tight and she squirmed around to press her face to his.
“No,” she decided fitting with giggles. “But only because you’ve got nice eyes.”
The urgent whistling of the kettle in the kitchen was the only thing that forestalled a new bout of love-making. The first couple of times had been fucking but that word had lost its currency overnight.
“If you want coffee you’ll have to come down and get it!” Judy declared, as if she had decided that unless she bent the long haired, unshaven good for nothing layabout in her bed to her will in the small things straight away, she would have no chance of reforming him in the big things later.
Even though he recognised and understood this subtext Sam obediently swung his long legs over the side of the bed and wrapped a blanket around his lean tanned, California torso. He was still not convinced that rushing to embrace the new day at such an ungodly hour was a good thing; but even a no hope loser like him recognised that although his carefree life of surfing, busking, hanging out, bumming around on tour and in bars and clubs, and drinking and sunning himself on Santa Monica beach had gone down the plughole, along with the dreams, hopes, plans and lives of all the people who had died last night, he might just have landed on his feet.
He liked Judy even more in the daylight.
Her fair, straw blond hair was wild, and although her old lady’s night dress mostly concealed her pertly busty figure; she had a smile that reached inside Sam’s head and punched all the right buttons. He had thought she was taller, in bare feet the top of her head barely came up to his chin, which was cool because her hair smelled musky...
“Thank you for last night,” she said, fluttering her green grey eyes.
“Do I get to know the rest of your name?” He inquired, grinning.
“Judith Marian Dorfmann,” she replied. “That’s my married name.” She held up her ring finger. “I’m still married, remember?”
“How could I forget?”
Judy smiled that smile.
“Kennedy. My maiden name was Kennedy. But if it’s all right with you I’ll go with Dorfmann until they’ve stopped lynching people called Kennedy at street corners.”
Chapter 26
11:15 Hours Eastern Standard Time
Sunday 28th October 1962
The White House, Washington DC
Nebraskan born thirty-four year old Theodor Chalkin ‘Ted’ Sorensen had become the then Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s chief legislative aide as long ago as 1953. Since then he had become the President of the United States of America’s special counsel, advisor and de facto acknowledged chief speech writer. Riding the runaway rollercoaster of JFK’s caravan for the last decade had been an exhilarating, frightening, marvellously disconcerting and fulfilling experience for the son of the Danish American former Attorney General of Nebraska who had graduated top of his law school class before heading East to seek his destiny.
The last twenty-four hours had been a nightmare.
Ted Sorensen had not slept for two days and being in the White House as the missiles flew, the bombers climbed high in the night and the damage and strike reports filtered in had been like helplessly watching a slow motion car wreck on a global scale.
Five minutes ago he had handed the amended final script of the Emergency State of the Union Address to the President; the eight minute long speech that everybody in the Oval Office hoped above hope would signal the end of the war, and go some way to calming the worst terrors of the American people. Only then could the rescue, recovery and disaster management programs envisaged under long standing, constantly updated civil defence and emergency disaster management protocols begin to be implemented.
First things first; they had to stop the bleeding.
Ted Sorensen was one of the Administration’s quiet men, discreet and forever at the edge of the frame in any picture in which he inadvertently appeared. However, everybody knew that he was one of the few irreplaceable gears in the engine room of the White House machine. Jack Kennedy had once referred to Sorensen as his ‘intellectual blood bank’. Sorensen was the man who had crafted Kennedy’s inauguration speech, the man behind the immortal phrase ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’, which had so caught the imagination of not just America but of the whole Western World. No man had done more to create the Presidential aura around JFK than the unassuming, modest lawyer now blinking at the bright television lights from behind his horn-rimmed glasses.
The broadcast was being recorded for television and radio and the full text would be issued to the wire services and news organisations as soon as the taping was completed. Thereafter, the networks would re-broadcast the President’s message every thirty minutes on the hour and half-hour.
Ahead of the first broadcast all normal national network radio and television programming had been suspended to enable the transmission of emergency information, instructions and fallout warnings to the public.
Ted Sorensen knew Jack Kennedy as well, if not better than any man in the room other than the President’s younger brother, Bobby. The Attorney General was still in shock, walking around in a daze and there was a visible lack of ‘grip’ at the top of the traumatised Administration. Camelot lay in ruins around their feet and the one man who might walk in and knock a little sense back into the woolly heads and gut-sick inner circle around the President - Lyndon Baines Johnson - was currently orbiting Baton Rouge in SAM 26000, the flagship of the Presidential fleet of jetliners. On one level the fact that the Vice-President was airborne, out of reach of a fresh Soviet counter strike, made perfect sense. On another level, unless somebody manned up very, very soon in Washington the overnight disaster would, as inevitably as night follows day, begin to threaten the severely undermined stability and the unity of the nation. Nothing was as dangerous as a vacuum of power at the very top and this morning, the Administration seemed directionless, headless.
Terrifyingly, nobody seemed to know for sure whether the Soviets were so badly hit that they were incapable of fighting on. Among the Chiefs of Staff there was a lot of reckless loose talk about the possibility the USSR was ‘playing dead’ because that was the only way it could stop the pain.
The military men might even be correct.
Nonetheless, Sorensen hoped above hope that the President had called it right when he had refused to be bullied into a second strike by the Chiefs of Staff. With every passing minute JFK’s singular moment of high moral courage and rectitude seemed ever more prescient.
It was several hours since the last ICBM had tracked over the Arctic and fallen towards an American city. All of the Soviet bombers entering Canadian airspace had been shot down or turned tail and run for home. Fighting was still going on in Europe; occasional pot shots with nuclear artillery or short-range tactical missiles. The British were back in communication with Washington; somebody had told Ted Sorensen that the Brits had only been informed what was going on after the first Minutemen, Atlas and Titan ICBMs had launched from their pads and silos in the Mid-West but he had discounted that. That sounded too crazy, the British V-Bomber Force was supposed to be an integral part of War Plan Alpha. If the Brits had not gone in at low level to suppress the massive air defences of Western Russia – a virtually impregnable aerial killing ground stretching from the West German border all the way east to Moscow, comprising layer upon layer of radars, surface-to-air missile batteries, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of MiG interceptors - Curtis LeMay’s bombers would have been cut to shreds...
Without quite knowing why Ted Sorensen moved through the crowd and walked around behind the President’s desk. He noticed Jack Kennedy’s hands were shaking.
“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”
The haggard man seated at the desk in the glare of the television lights sighed, looked up at the friend who was his most devoted and eloquent lieutenant, the man without whom he could never have delivered the instantly memorable speeches and countless o
ne-liners that had so caught the imagination of millions of Americans and eventually carried him to the White House in 1960.
“Is it a good speech, Ted?”
“It is a good speech, Mister President,” Sorensen said. “A JFK speech. The one that everybody will remember for all time. A speech that only you can carry off. After this nobody will remember the ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ line.”
“That would be sad. That was a hell of a line, Ted.”
“Yes, sir. It was. But only you could have delivered it.”
Chapter 27
13:00 Hours Mountain Standard Time (16:00 Hours in Washington DC)
Sunday 28th October 1962
Nob Hill, San Francisco, California
Molly Fleischer had come into the room at the top of the old 1930s town house built very nearly on the highest point of one of the seven original ‘hills’ of San Francisco. Over the years as the city had grown it had acquired more ‘hills’, currently the tally stood at around forty but Nob Hill was high above the Bay in the old, fashionable part of the Golden Gate City and the Fleischers’ big, uncluttered home had long ago become a place of tranquillity and safety for Miranda Sullivan.
Miranda’s ‘Aunt’ Molly pulled the blinds and turned on the radio as the younger woman groaned and shielded her eyes from the blinding, dazzling light of what was actually, a grimly overcast fall day. Miranda’s head throbbed mercilessly; she was hungry and nauseous at the same time, trembling a little from head to foot as if she was very cold despite the balmy warmth of the room.
“The President’s speech has been playing every half-an-hour, petal,” the older woman said, adopting the maternal no nonsense tone she had had occasion to periodically employ with her favourite ‘niece’ ever since the girl was a skinny teenager. Privately, Molly thought that if Miranda’s parents had taken a firmer, more tactile approach to coping with their daughter’s waywardness they would have saved themselves, and Miranda, a lot of trouble. However, it was not her business to tell other people how to bring up their kids – it was not as if she had any of her own – and neither she or Harvey, her husband, wanted to do anything to damage their long, close and genuinely fond personal friendships and business partnerships, with Miranda’s mother and father. Besides, a falling out between members of the older generation, no matter how short-lived, was not going to help Miranda. “You must listen to the President. Things aren’t as bad as they could have been.”