by James Philip
Von Braun glanced at the other man.
He and Rees had run the program to improve the V-2 design at the US Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds at White Sands in New Mexico, and then at Fort Bliss. Despite the lack of imagination and tunnel vision of their American hosts they had pioneered two-stage rocketry and honed inertial guidance systems before the Army Ordnance Corps had transferred the whole program to the huge Redstone Arsenal Complex, the site of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Together they had produced the Jupiter booster and Rees’s team had developed cutting edge ablative heat shield technology, the prerequisite for enabling men sent on manned space missions to return safely to Earth. The ‘Saturn Project’ – named for the giant multi-stage rocket that would be required to launch a ‘moon ship’ – had effectively been placed on hold since the October War. Eighteen days ago they had been given a second green light to ‘go to the Moon’; but now it looked as if that had all been ‘moonshine’.
“Everybody who hasn’t already come inside the complex ought to be called in. Their families, anybody who is in any way connected to any of our programs, Eberhard,” von Braun decided. “I will speak to the security people. As many of us as possible should be armed. If unauthorized personnel penetrate the perimeter we must be ready to defend ourselves.” He sighed. “Like in the old days.”
Chapter 7
Tuesday 10th December 1963
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Carl Drinkwater knew that the man claiming to be Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Galen Cheney was bad news the moment he opened the door and his visitor had held his badge in front of his face. The former Manager of the Burroughs Corporation Systems Integration (Peterson Air Force Base) Network Implementation Team had always known this visit would come; ever since fate had decreed that he was the duty Burroughs NSCAC – Network Systems Communications Analyst Consultant – that night of the October War. What he had not expected was that the visit would come at two o’clock on the morning after the he had watched – horrified and frightened beyond measure – the grainy pictures, and listened to the panicky, shaken voices of the radio reporters describing the lawlessness, mayhem and casual widespread destruction and desecration of great national icons like the Pentagon, the State Department building, the Smithsonian and scores of other supposedly immutable bulwarks of the American nation and its cultural heritage.
What was terrifying was that nobody knew if it was some kind of coup d’état, a revolutionary uprising or simply some monstrous primal upwelling of medieval violence and wrath.
“Who is it, Carl?” His wife asked timidly from behind his shoulder. They had both been watching the television, drinking coffee and periodically checking that the kids were still all right. Their world had turned upside down several times since that dreadful night in October 1962 and now it seemed as if it was about to be upset again.
The man in the doorway tipped his hat – not the Homburg every other FBI man either Carl or his wife had ever encountered before had worn – but a moderately battered brown Sedona. Special Agent Cheney was a tall man, over six feet high before he pulled on his boots. He wore blue jeans, a dark shirt and a black Bolo tie with what looked like a small Navajo medallion. His jacket was brown leather, well-worn.
Carl Drinkwater glimpsed the shoulder strap of the visitor’s holstered gun and knew – he just knew – that whatever type of weapon the big man was packing under his arm it would not be any kind of peashooter.
Cheney took off his Sedona as he stepped into the house.
He was a handsome man in his fifties with the bearing of a stern-faced sheriff from the movies; High Noon, perhaps, and the flintiest grey blue eyes that either Carl or his wife had ever had the misfortune to meet.
“We’ve been watching the TV,” Carl blurted, so unnerved and having drunk so much coffee that evening he very nearly wet himself in his anxiety.
“Washington, yeah,” the tall man murmured. “Not good.”
Carl and his wife looked at each other, they could not help it. There was something in the visitor’s demeanour that indicated the goings on in faraway Washington were no business of his, even had he cared overmuch, which clearly, he did not.
“I’d have waited to call until the morning but I saw your light was on,” Galen Cheney went on with a distinctly Southern courtesy. Had he wanted he might have panicked the Drinkwater’s with a single arching of an eyebrow but that was not yet his intention. He spoke lowly, as if not wanting to awaken the household’s two young children although his boots sounded heavily on the bare boards of the lobby of the modest two-storey wood-frame house in the middle of the anonymous estate attached to Ent United States Air Force Base. “We should all sit down. This isn’t the time of day to stand on ceremony.”
The Drinkwater’s living room was exactly as Cheney had anticipated. A sofa, an armchair, a rocking chair which probably nobody ever used, rugs on the floor and flowery drapes on the windows, with everything arranged around this year’s model twenty-two inch TV. There was a wooden playpen in one corner of the room for the Drinkwater’s two year old daughter, and a big walnut radiogram in another.
“Can I offer you a coffee, Agent Cheney?” Mrs Drinkwater inquired timidly.
“That would be an act of mercy, Ma’am,” the tall man half-smiled for a moment.
Carl Drinkwater shifted uneasily on his feet as he watched his wife skitter out of the room.
“I’ve tried to shelter Martha from things,” he muttered.
The TV screen flickered; the sound was turned off. On the screen the darkness was punctuated with eruptions of light, flashes in the night, and the spears of tracer curving across a burning city at incredible speeds.
“Forgive me,” Carl Drinkwater prefaced, finding a packet of courage, “but you don’t look like any of the FBI men I’ve met in the last year, Agent Cheney.”
The other man lowered his weary bones into the armchair, indicating for his host to sit on the sofa.
“That’s because I’m not like any of the G-men I know either,” he guffawed softly, allowing a suggestion of a Texan drawl to curl away from his lips. What he had had said was no lie; but he made no attempt to elaborate upon it or to embellish the subterfuge. Instead he fell silent and viewed the balding, bespectacled forty year old Burroughs Corporation man – Burroughs had not completely cut him off even though he had been effectively under house arrest for most of the last year – with inscrutable intensity.
Carl Drinkwater squirmed under the scrutiny.
“Is it right,” Cheney inquired mildly, “that you computer guys knew SAGE wasn’t worth a barrel of piss in a real shooting war?”
Semi Automatic Ground Environment; the multi-billion dollar cutting edge computerised radar Defense system that had been designed to allow Americans to sleep safe in their beds at night.
The blood seemed to freeze in Carl’s face.
“I don’t understand...”
After serving as a radar man on a cruiser in the latter stages of the Pacific War Carl Drinkwater had gone to Caltech – the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena under the auspices of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, more generally known as the ‘GI Bill’ - and studied mathematics and physics. On graduation he had been head-hunted by Burroughs and swept unknowingly into the biggest, cost no object, military-scientific jamboree of the 1950s; the headlong quest to shield the North American Continent behind an impenetrable super-advanced computerized air defense umbrella.
Of course, back in 1949 Carl Drinkwater had had no idea what he was actually working on, and nobody at Burroughs with the necessary security clearance had gone out of his way to explain. However, Carl had known the company was working on ‘something big’ and he had not spent three years at to Caltech discovering the ‘God’ of the natural universe just to spend the rest of his working life designing and building better and bigger ‘adding machines’. What he had not known and what he would not – at the time - have believed
had he been told it back in 1949 was the mind-boggling scope and ambition of SAGE.
“You were in NORAD on the night of the war,” Galen Cheney stated. “What did you feel like when you saw those ICBMs tracking down towards Seattle, Chicago and Buffalo?”
“I don’t...”
“Did you get down on your knees and pray?”
“No, I’m not religious.”
Because of the SAGE Project so much money had been thrown – literally thrown – at the American computer industry that by the late 1950s there had been nine US computing powerhouses: IBM was the largest by a distance but the other eight were all world players, bigger than any foreign competitor and market leaders at home and abroad; Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR (National Cash Register), General Electric, CDC (Control Data Corporation), RCA (Radio Corporation of America), Sperry, and DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). By the dawn of the 1960s IBM’s market position had seemed so dominant that computer industry insiders – who knew well enough to leave Burroughs out of the equation – had begun to refer to ‘IBM and the seven dwarves’ to describe the unquestioned ascendancy of International Business Machines in global computing.
However, what the man in the street did not know, but what many in corporate America and elsewhere in the West suspected, was that IBM’s and the rest of the US computer industry cartel’s research, development and core advanced technology production had been wholly underwritten by the US Department of Defense ever since the end of the 1945 war. The mammoth scale of that support in the form of open-ended hugely lucrative contacts – year after year - coming out of the Pentagon had been so vast, and the political gerrymandering behind the subsidies priced, often double-priced, into those contracts so complex and so gross, that not even IBM’s numerous special projects departments could think of ways to spend all tax dollars that had flooded into its coffers in those years; hence the Burroughs Corporation, and every one of the other ‘seven dwarves’ had grown fat and complacent on the Government paycheck.
Incited by Cold War paranoia successive Administrations had fought to close the mythical ‘bomber gap’, the equally imaginary ‘missile gap’ only to be suddenly confronted with the humiliating public spectacle of the Soviet Union stealing a march in the space race with the launch of Sputnik. From the very beginning the only answer had been the SAGE system. The British and the Germans had pioneered radar-based early warning and air defense systems in the Second World War; but from the outset the Pentagon, enthusiastically supported by the Truman, Eisenhower and the Kennedy Administrations had dreamed of creating something much grander. American science and overwhelming technical and industrial muscle had therefore been applied to the problem with little or no regard for the cost.
The acronym SAGE – the letters standing for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment – had eventually come to describe a system comprising a score of revolutionary giant, so-called mainframe computers, and the hard-wired networking equipment and communications infrastructure required to co-ordinate the data inputs from all connected radar and intelligence resources available to the US armed forces; thereby enabling NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, to combat any conceivable airborne threat to North America.
It had only cost the American tax payer a piffling $2 billion to build the atomic bomb; by the time of the October War IBM alone had been handed $10 billion – and change – for its part in creating and implementing SAGE.
“Not religious. That’s too bad.” Galen Cheney did not need to effect regret or resignation. He was genuinely sad for the balding, defeated man before him. Faithless, Godless people like Carl Drinkwater had led the American people blindly towards Armageddon and even now, long after the thermonuclear fires had burned out they had no shame. They watched Washington burning and they still did not understand that now was a time of revelation. He heard the Burroughs man’s wife moving about in the kitchen.
But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
Chapter 8
Tuesday 10th December 1963
State Capitol, Sacramento
The California State Capitol building had the feel of a besieged fort by the time Governor Edmund Gerald ‘Pat’ Brown’s convoy sped into Sacramento in the early hours of the morning. The thirty-second Governor of the most populous state in the Union had been about to sit down at dinner with his fellow ‘West Coast’ Governors, Democrat Albert Rosellini of Washington and Republican Mark Odom Hatfield of Oregon, in Portland when the first news from Washington had come in. Yesterday the three men had taken the first step towards formalising the unwritten ‘mutual assistance’ pact they had first discussed in the spring, their state police and military men having finally drawn up framework agreements covering future common ‘standard operating procedures’.
It was only days since the monstrous insurgency - which had transformed the sleepy north-western port community of Bellingham from a peaceful logging, fishing and vacation town into a murderous concentration camp in the hands of the dregs of humanity - had been ruthlessly crushed by the combined forces of the three West Coast states.
In response to the snuffing out of the Bellingham insurrection the Federal Government in Washington DC had sent the United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to slap Brown, Rosellini and Hatfield’s hands; otherwise, the Kennedy Administration had carried on doing what it had been doing everywhere east of the bomb-damaged Great Lakes cities since the October War; precisely nothing! It was this which had pushed the three governors – and the majority of their closest friends and advisors – over the brink; and forced them to think the unthinkable.
It had seemed to them that the men in power in the District of Columbia had washed their hands of California, Oregon and Washington State’s problems. Notwithstanding, the Administration still expected the West Coast governors to go on collecting federal taxes, and to go on accepting their ‘fair quota’ of refugees and displaced persons at the whim of the newly formed Federal Emergency Management Administration. Truth be told, it was the increasingly onerous demands of FEMA that had given real impetus to the West Coast Governors’ decision to position their three states as a ‘co-dependent entity’ within the Union, rather than attempt to maintain the status quo as ‘states of the Union’, putting the Federal Government on notice that California, Oregon and Washington State planned to attach conditionality to their ongoing membership of the union. Notwithstanding other political considerations, adopting such a posture provided each individual Governor a shield with which to ward off the increasingly vociferous ‘go it alone’, state’s rights movements which threatened to sweep all three of them out of their respective State Capitols the next time they were up for election
At the time of the October war FEMA’s role – that of co-ordinating both the immediate and the long-term strategic Federal response of ‘major national disasters’, had been split between several governmental organs. Chief among these had been the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, formed in the late 1950s by the merger of the Federal Civil Defense Administration created in Harry S. Truman’s time, and the Office of Defense Mobilization. FEMA had been created by haphazardly subsuming this organisation and random chunks of over a dozen other Federal departments under a single administrative umbrella split between the Pentagon and the Department of the Interior. Overnight unconnected parts of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the General Services Administration, the Bureau of Roads, and two-thirds of the US Army’s Corps of Engineers had suddenly become answerable to a new and from the outset, secretive cabal headed by Kennedy Administration insiders and place men.
Probably unfairly, most people west of the Mississippi regarded FEMA as a thinly-disguised tool of the Chicago-centric clique who had put John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the White House, specifically designed to siphon off the entire Federal US disaster relief budget into the Great Lakes States.
The
Kennedy Administration had kept the roads open and maintained the air bridge to Chicago all year long, and despite the ‘peace dividend’ that was slashing the military everywhere else, found the troops needed to hold anarchy at bay from South Chicago. At the same time it had washed its hands of half-wrecked Seattle and the abominations of Bellingham and other isolated communities in the Cascades and the Sierra Madre; washed its hands in every way, that was, other than in continuing to bus tens of thousands of ‘displaced persons’ to the West, and systematically beefing up the Inland Revenue Service’s staffing and legal muscle to extort every last tax cent and dollar from the hard-pressed economies of the West Coast states.