by James Philip
For the first time Sam realized the doctor was wearing a military tunic beneath his coat. However, before he could say anything the LAPD Trooper had opened the door.
“Escort Mr Brenckmann back to his holding cell.”
Sam confusion was complete when a carbine-wielding National Guardsman stepped into the doorway and indicated for him to follow him.
Chapter 10
Tuesday 10th December 1963
McKinley Avenue, Oakland
Darlene Lefebure had only just finally managed to get back to sleep by the time the quietly insistent knocking at her door awakened her again. Last night’s nightmare had been nothing like the ones she had had since she witnessed the shooting of Admiral Braithwaite and his wife in Sequoyah County. Those bad dreams had been endless, varied replays of the shooting; not seen as the distant, unreal thing she had witnessed in real life but close up, unspeakably bloody and filled with screams and deafening gun blasts.
No, last night’s nightmare had taken her back to Jackson, Alabama. She was with Dwayne; surrounded by angry men in tall white pointed hoods brandishing nooses and burning braids. Dwayne was beaten to the ground, kicked and punched until his face was a bloody mess and then, slowly, slowly a rope was tightened around his neck. The mob had thrown the rope over a low tree bough, pulled on it until Dwayne was tottering on his toes, gasping and choking, his eye wide with terror. And then the Klansmen had hauled on the rope...
Afterwards the murderers had raped her.
They always raped her in those dreams.
She could smell the stench of those petrol soaked burning braids which lit the circle of terror about her even now.
The knocking at her door was firmly persistent.
“Miss Lefebure! Darlene!”
Darlene blinked quizzically at the broad, balding man with the heavy eyebrows and overlarge nose who forced a stern smile as she opened her door as far as the chain would allow. Agent Christie had told her to put the chain on; and she had heard his footsteps receding towards the stairs only when he had heard it click into place. She recollected that the FBI man had paid up her rent. The FBI guys had all been detached, uncommunicative while she was around them but last night Agent Christie had turned fatherly on her and now she did not know what to think about the him, or the other agents.
“Miss Lefebure,” the man in the hallway said quickly as if she was afraid she would slam the door shut. “I’m Harvey Fleischer. I’m an attorney. I worked with Stanley Mosk, the California State Attorney General to persuade the FBI to release you from protective custody...”
Darlene stifled a yawn.
She recollected that she had seen the man’s name on a legal document or form.
There were other men outside her door.
“I don’t want to have anything to do with the FBI or,” she protested feebly, “or anything...”
“That’s quite understandable, Miss Lefebure,” the man assured her. “But there was an unfortunate incident at the house in Berkeley last night, and what with things still being a little tense this morning after last night’s power outages and the looting, well, we were worried about you.”
What incident at the house in Berkeley?
What power outages?
What looting?
“I don’t understand, Mr Fleischer?” The young woman confessed.
The man hurriedly reassessed matters and tried to explain.
“The whole country is a mess this morning, Miss Lefebure,” he prefaced, deciding to keep it simple. “There is fighting in Washington DC. Some kind of uprising. Martial law has been declared across large areas of California and other states. There has been a lot of civil disorder here in Oakland and across the Bay in San Francisco. And also in Los Angeles and in San Diego.”
Darlene risked a long look at Harvey Fleischer through the crack in the door jam. He did not look terribly threatening; in fact he looked old, worn out and deeply troubled. She released the chain and opened the door. She had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders to guard her modesty as she was only wearing a thin cotton nightdress. Standing behind the lawyer were two US Navy military policemen, both packing Colts on belts at their waist and wearing steel helmets. The older of the two MPs smiled thin-lipped at her.
“What incident in Berkeley, Mr Fleisher?” She asked, suspecting she really did not want to hear the answer.
“May we come in?”
Darlene nodded jerkily and Harvey Fleischer and the older MP came into her claustrophobic apartment, virtually filling it. The second MP remained outside, ever watchful.
There was very little furniture in the ‘apartment’; Darlene’s narrow single bed, a small rickety table and two equally battered hard chairs which looked like something stolen from an old schoolhouse. She had no TV, and had not turned on her cheap Japanese transistor radio – the one luxury in her life – since she got home last night.
Darlene waved at the chairs while she sat on the edge of her bed, feeling small and trying to make herself even smaller, drawing the blanket close.
“Shortly after Agent Christie returned to Berkeley after driving you to McKinley Avenue, the house where you had been staying was attacked and all four FBI men present were killed.”
Darlene stared at the lawyer.
“Unknowingly,” Harvey Fleischer continued gently, “Miss Sullivan and I arrived in Berkeley some time after this attack still under the impression that you were in the house. We only discovered that the FBI had pre-empted the State of California’s warrant to release you from custody an hour ago. We came straight here to check that you were okay.”
Understandably, Darlene Lefebure was anything but okay.
“Agent Christie was nice to me, he paid my rent,” she sobbed in the moments before the tears began to flow and she started to shake like she was in the grip of a mild epileptic fit.
Chapter 11
Tuesday 10th December 1963
Main State Building, 2201 C Street, Washington DC
At first Gretchen Betancourt thought she was deaf and blind but slowly, slowly the darkness around her resolved into different hues of inky, impenetrable blackness broken by the faintest of almost indistinguishable glows. It was when she realized that the yellowy glow was the cracked face of her wristwatch two inches from her face that she realized she was still alive. Instinctively, she attempted to move. Nothing happened, except suddenly she hurt everywhere. Not aching or stabbing pain but gut-rending, agonising spasms. She lay very still, listening to her own wheezing, shallow, ragged breathing.
‘Not deaf,’ she murmured silently to herself.
Her right eye was closed, she tried to blink it open but nothing happened.
Gretchen’s ears were ringing and every sound was muted as if coming to her underwater or through ears stuffed with cotton wool.
‘I’m alive...’
She passed out; when she again attempted to take stock her ears had stopped ringing. Still unable to move she realized she was being pinned down. Her legs and pelvis were squashed to the floor, and her upper body was twisted a little onto her right side. The air was filled with the stench of smoke and corruption. If she tried to take a deep breath she coughed dust. There was grit in her mouth and she was desperately thirsty.
Panic was horribly close.
Gretchen attempted to wiggle her toes.
Yes!
Her lower legs remained immobile.
Her right arm was beneath her and felt wrong.
When she moved her left arm she moaned in anguish and fright; mainly because she did not know whether it was her arm or the other arm which had moved.
Suddenly, things made sense.
Somebody was lying on top of her.
Which helped in one way and did not help in another because she was too week and hurt in too many places to disentangle herself from the other body. Her feeble effort exhausted her energy and she lay for minutes, maybe much longer, waiting for her body to regain the will to move. Fully conscious, it was like
being outside of her body, viewing her situation for afar, as if all the pain and helplessness and humiliation had to be happening to somebody else. It also crossed her thoughts that she might be dying. That would be a pity because I had such great plans...
I was in Under Secretary of State George Ball’s office?
There was a huge bang and everything had fallen in on them; she had been stuck on the floor under something then, too.
How weird was that?
People had picked her up.
At some point I remember running down a corridor and shooting...
Yes, shooting and explosions.
Gretchen’s memories were disordered; some of them were back to front. It was an age before she recollected what she was doing at the Main State Building at 2201 C Street.
I thought it would be clever to say something about Vietnam but that had not worked out so well; the Under Secretary of State had mentioned Australia and been explaining why Australia was so important when...
The world had turned upside down and the office had disintegrated around them. Was the President really going to send GIs he did not have to fight in a war in South East Asia? A war that America did not need to fight against an enemy who was no worse than the murderous despot the Administration had already put into power in Saigon?
I may be dying on the floor in a wrecked government building; why do I care about some place I could not have found on a map until twenty-four hours ago?
No, that is all wrong!
If I was dying surely my life would be flashing in front of my eyes about now?
Wouldn’t it?
I would be thinking about all the things I have not done yet.
Maybe, I would be feeling a little guiltier about...
Dan Brenckmann.
No I would not! Just because we sat on the porch of my father’s old summer house in Wethersfield on the night of the war it does not mean Dan and I are ‘meant to be’. In a couple of years I am ‘meant to be’ marrying Joseph Theodore van Stratten. We hardly know each other but once our families are ‘joined’ we will both have the World at our feet. One day Joe will be running his family bank, racing his yachts and I will be...
What will I be?
The perfect wife.
No, I was not ‘meant to be’ that, either. Sometimes it was as if the whole ‘marriage thing’ was just another one of her father’s party games. I was never really happy about the ‘marriage thing’. It was different years ago when I was still a kid but that was before the war and now, well, I seem to be trapped in a building that might collapse on me at any moment so it really does not make that much difference now...
Gretchen stopped breathing.
Somebody was moving nearby.
I was in a corridor and there was shooting and I was pushed into this small room and I fell over.
And I hit my head...
What if the people moving about outside are the killers who attacked the building?
She stopped herself laughing at how ridiculous that question was.
If I lie here much longer I am going to die anyway!
Gretchen tried to call out.
She opened her mouth but at first no sound emerged.
She tried again and ingested so much dust and grit that she gagged, coughed agonizingly.
“Help me!” She croaked.
Chapter 12
Tuesday 10th December 1963
Colorado Springs, Colorado
When Martha Drinkwater entered the living room to join her husband and the tall, forbidding stranger she hesitated at the threshold, as if physically inhibited by the frigid menace hanging invisibly in the atmosphere. The man called FBI Special Agent Galen Cheney was sitting in Carl’s armchair viewing the world with flinty blue eyes that were bleaker than the worst winter day in the Mid-West.
The television set was still on, its volume turned low.
Washington burned and the commentators had no idea what was going on in the street next to where they were broadcasting from, let alone across the rest of the great, tormented city.
Her husband had tried to shelter her from the ongoing investigations, inspections and inquests going on at Ent Air Force Base. She had little or no idea what the mythical SAGE project was, or what it did other than – obviously – have some key role in the nation’s defense, or any concept of the nature of the work her husband actually did for Burroughs and the US Air Force. Carl never talked about his work.
‘It is all electronics and gobbledygook,’ he would smile.
She knew he had been a radar man in the Navy during the war and that he had graduated from Caltech with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics; she had consciously elected not to attempt to join up any of the pieces. Carl had been engaged on secret work for as long as they had known each other and basically, they never discussed anything remotely connected to it. It was safest that way, and simpler by far. She had taught English and geography up to twelfth grade before their marriage, and once the kids had started to come along – she was two-and-a-half months pregnant with their third child – she had become a full time housewife and mother. Carl’s pay had been good, they had lived well if not extravagantly because it was well known that the Burroughs Corporation never paid the top dollar or stumped up the bonuses that all the career IBM people were constantly bragging about.
“Please sit down, Mrs Drinkwater,” Galen Cheney directed, not rising from his chair.
Martha Drinkwater did as she was bade, placing the coffee tray she was holding with unsteady hands on the low table in the middle of the room and joining her husband on the sofa.
“We live in a Godless age,” the Drinkwaters’ visitor intoned, mimicking the distant tolling of a dull bell.
“I was brought up a Lutheran,” Martha replied, fighting the coldness invading her soul. “But I lapsed when I was college.”
Her husband cleared his throat.
“Martha knows nothing about my work, Mr Cheney.”
The other man pondered this for perhaps half-a-minute.
“Time is short. Your wife has a right to know the reason why what is happening tonight is happening,” he decided, finishing his pronouncement with a flick of the eyes towards the screen of the TV.
Carl Drinkwater felt his soul turn to ice.
There was nothing he could say to this man; no argument to which he would listen or could possibly sway him because in his bleak blue grey eyes there was only implacable certainty.
Carl reached for and grasped his wife’s left hand.
“I started working for the SAGE project two years before we were married,” he said, his mouth dry with fear. He looked to the coffee cups on the table.
Galen Cheney nodded.
Carl leaned forwards and took a cup, sipped coffee to wet his lips and throat before he continued.
“Semi Automatic Ground Environment. SAGE. The term describes an interlinked system comprising hundreds of radar stations and a dozen regional Air Defense Centers providing for the air Defense of continental North America. The system also includes real time inputs for radar and monitoring stations all over the World. Or at least, it did, before the war. The overseas radar stations in Japan, Great Britain, Western Europe and Turkey were all destroyed in the war.” He paused to take another drink of coffee. “SAGE was almost fully operation by the time of the war. Most of the ADCs, like the one at Ent Air Force Base were operational or coming on line. Each of the ADCs was constructed and equipped like the one at Ent; four storey concrete reinforced bunkers hardened against anything but a near miss by a big bomb, each one running a pair of one hundred and thirty-five ton IBM-Burroughs mainframe computers. Because of SAGE America is five, ten, perhaps twenty years technologically ahead of anybody else in the world in the application of computer and other scientific military and commercial applications. If the President is really serious about putting a man on the Moon this decade it will only be possible because the discoveries and the wholly new technologies which exist on
ly because of the SAGE Project.”
This last was said with something akin to defiance.
Every time Carl Drinkwater had walked into the NORAD control room at Ent Air Force Base he had felt like a character out of a science fiction novel transported in the blink of an eye by some magical time machine into the far distant future. Every output from all the other ADCs fed back into the control room at Ent Air Force Base via a hardened network of AT&T - American Telephone & Telegraph – dedicated lines and modems in real time. The air defense controllers manning their rows and semi-circles of gun metal consuls stared constantly at their big flickering cathode ray tubes. At any time individual displays could be projected singly, or in combination onto the big, backlit wall projections of the North American continent. At the touch of a button interceptors and missiles could be brought to readiness, launched, and vectored via Buck Rogers’s type electronic uplinks directly to aircraft or formations in the field. Air raid warnings could be ordered or cancelled, and the vast aerial battlefield intricately managed at ranges of hundreds and thousands of miles. SAGE had been designed to enable Americans to sleep in peace at night.
Carl Drinkwater looked at Galen Cheney.
“Who are you?”
“I am a man who has been so sorely tried by his Government that I have been forced to exercise my constitutional right to take up arms to resist the tyranny of the over-mighty rulers who still believe they rule over those whom they oppress.”
Carl nodded at the television.
“Are you are a part of that?”
Galen Cheney stared at him.
“You should confess your sins, brother.”
“What sins?”
“My family should have been safe. You and people like you made it possible for the Government to pretend that we were all safe. By your lies shall ye be condemned.”
“What’s he talking about?” Martha Drinkwater asked her husband. Notwithstanding her fear she was deeply offended that a stranger should come into her house and abuse her husband so unfairly.