by James Philip
“SAGE is the technological marvel of the age in which we live,” Carl said, beginning to ask himself whether there was mileage in going along with the madman sitting in his armchair. The man might have some really peculiar ideas but he seemed rational enough in other ways, albeit immovable in championing of whatever outlandish theology or belief system to which he subscribed. “But as soon as the Russians developed the ability to launch satellites into low earth orbit, SAGE was compromised. After the launch of Sputnik 1 six years ago the whole game changed. On the night of the war NORAD detected and shot down every Soviet bomber that pressed home its attack and most of the ones that turned tail and tried to run away, too. That part of the system worked – if not perfectly – then it at least it stopped the bombers getting through to America. There was nothing SAGE could do about the incoming ICBMs except to accurately predict and track their sub-orbital trajectories and calculate their ground fall with sufficient accuracy to provide the civil defense authorities with a few minutes pre-warning. SAGE was never designed to defend American airspace in the space age and nobody pretended it was!”
This of course, was a white lie of the worst kind.
Nobody had specifically informed the man, or woman or child on the street in Buffalo, or Seattle or Chicago that there was nothing which could stop a thermonuclear-tipped rocket launched from Soviet soil hitting America.
This dreadful truth had dawned on most Americans as the Cuban Missile Crisis had dragged on without resolution; until then the Soviet nuclear threat had seemed to be a long way away, somebody else’s problem.
Galen Cheney sighed and stood up.
The gun in his right hand seemed huge.
Carl found himself on his feet, his arm extended to shepherd his wife behind him, even though the scientist in him knew full well that a single human body would be no kind of shield in the face of a weapon like the one in the madman’s hand. He guessed he was looking down the barrel of a .44 long-barrelled Smith and Wesson; at this range a couple of rounds would probably cut him in half and he would be dead before the remaining contiguous parts of his torso hit the floor. Nevertheless, he tried to edge in front of his wife.
“Let Martha go!” He pleaded. “We have young children!”
Galen Cheney gave no indication of having heard this.
“The path of the righteous man,” he declaimed solemnly, “is strewn with pitfalls. But when I come across those who have sinned I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”
There was no anger in Galen Cheney.
Just sadness and resignation as if there was nothing he could do about what happened next; everything was pre-ordained and he was just following the way of the righteous. He was just doing His God’s work.
“What kind of cowardly traitor would kill a pregnant woman in her own house?” Martha Drinkwater demanded, tears rolling down her pale cheeks as she finally fought past her husband’s despairing restraining arms and stood directly before the gunman, the muzzle of his revolver just inches from her sternum. “What kind of man could follow a god who allows such obscenities to be committed under His sight?”
The tall stranger inclined his head a little to the left as if he was pondering this question.
“I’m an American patriot,” he said in a voice falling down to earth from an unimpeachable pulpit. “And my war has only just begun.”
Chapter 13
Tuesday 10th December 1963
Van Nuys Police Station, Los Angeles
Sabrina Henschal had just about had it with the LAPD and the cub reporter – ‘cub’ as in so wet behind the ears he left a moist trail on the ground wherever he went – the Editor of the Los Angeles Times had sent down to Van Nuys to get her off his back. She had given Nick Williams a hard time when the wise guy running the Van Nuys District, an overdressed prick called Captain Reginald O’Connell, had given her the brush off after she came over from the hospital.
‘Reggie’ O’Connell was a throwback, everybody knew he was crooked; how else did he get to live in a fucking mansion up in the fucking Hollywood Hills on a police captain’s pay? Reggie and his latest trophy wife, Loretta – who behaved like she was the Queen of Mulholland Drive – were minor local celebrities, they went to all the best parties and got to rub shoulders with every arsehole in town.
Sabrina and Nick Williams of the Los Angeles Times did not go back that far. She had button-holed him at a couple of gallery exhibitions before the war when she was still actually trying to sell her stuff; lately that sort of thing had not seemed very important. Nick was straight up and down; he had been the main man at the Times since 1958 and he was shrewd enough to know that it was good to have friends in the Canyon who might be in a position to feed his stringers by-lines on quiet news days.
The Times was no local hick operation, it thought big these days and reached a long way beyond Southern California. It and the Washington Post had been in bed together the last eighteen months, syndicating nationally and Nick Williams seemed to have the inside track when it came to what was going on in West Coast politics. Which was all fine and dandy but today she needed the threat of the Los Angeles Times to back her up and once she had told Nick Williams about what had happened at Gretsky’s, her place in the Canyon and on the road back to Van Nuys, and then linked this drama to what had probably transpired at The Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard, the Editor of the Times had taken the hook like a starving Barracuda.
The cub reporter’s name was Tom Wrigglesworth, he was twenty something and been studying journalism at UCLA at the time of the war. Tall, gangling, awkward, and far too polite to make it in any newsroom Sabrina could imagine even in the middle of a chemically induced hallucination, the boy had no idea how to deal with cops.
That was not to say that Sabrina had not been somewhat perturbed herself discover nervy National Guardsmen hefting World War II vintage M1 Carbines outside, and inside, Van Nuys Police Station.
“Who the fuck is running this fucking circus?”
Everybody in the foyer of the station stopped talking and turned, seeking the source of the shrilly incandescent screech. For some reason most people looked first to Tom Wrigglesworth, who in turn, nodded towards his wiry, diminutive companion. There might not have been a lot of Sabrina physically – she was five feet four, sparsely built with a shock of straw blond hair streaked with grey – but nobody had ever denied that she had presence.
“Tom Wrigglesworth from the Los Angeles Times,” the young man explained apologetically. “I’m here to cover Ms Henschal’s report concerning corruption by,” he frowned, consulted his notebook, “a Captain O’Connell?”
While the young man was speaking Sabrina had elbowed her way to the reception desk like a hungry she wolf carving through a herd of confused ungulates which until a moment before had been minding their own business unknowingly standing chewing the cud between her and her next meal.
“The Times,” she shouted angrily, “is running a story later today about how officers from Van Nuys rousted a pregnant woman, and several mothers and young children from my place in Laurel Canyon last night. My friend Judy’s waters broke when Captain O’Connell’s fucking storm troopers cuffed her. They refused to take off the cuffs until AFTER she’d had her first contraction!”
A woman civilian administrator behind the desk was staring at Sabrina aghast; the desk sergeant’s mouth was moving but no sound was as yet emerging.
“THAT WAS IN THE BACK OF AN LAPD CRUISER!”
The momentary silence was instantly oppressive.
“Let me through!” Barked a gravelly voice.
Sabrina looked over her shoulder as a stocky, grey-haired National Guardsman approached through the crowd.
“Lieutenant Sanchez, ma’am,” he growled. He glared at the desk sergeant. “I suggest you clear this room. Now!” His tone had about it that particular inflection with suggested this was not the first time he
had ‘requested’ the LAPD to ‘get a grip’.
“The Captain said....”
“I don’t give a shit what the fucking Captain said!” Sabrina shrieked, spinning around to confront the cop behind the desk. “The Captain’s a fucking wise guy and if you don’t know that you’re as bad as him and those fucking arseholes who forced my best friend in the whole fucking world to give birth to her first baby in the back of a fucking LAPD cruiser!”
The press of bodies was lessening as those nearest the exits edged backwards.
The left-hand side of Lieutenant Sanchez’s face bore the sun-bleached scars of old burns and his head beneath his cap was cropped. Part of his left ear looked like it had melted and been clumsily re-shaped many, many years ago. The old warrior’s expression was grim.
“I would be the man running this circus, ma’am,” he explained patiently. “As of six hundred hours this day the Governor of California declared a seven-day state of emergency under which martial law is in effect in designated areas of the State of California.”
Sabrina was briefly but only briefly speechless.
Somebody, somewhere in this fucking country got something right eventually!
The National Guardsman flicked an irritated glance at the looming form of Tom Wrigglesworth, and then to a trooper standing with his carbine slung over his shoulder by the main entrance.
“Escort this gentleman out into the car lot!”
Sabrina scowled, said nothing.
“What happened to your friend and her baby?” The man asked as the man from the Los Angeles Times was led away.
“The cops had a big fight among themselves and two young guys drove us down to UCLA. I trained to be a nurse at the end of the war. The Pacific War, that is, and I’ve had kids of my own so I knew what to do once the arseholes had uncuffed me.”
The soldier clearly wanted to kick somebody.
“You are seriously telling me that LAPD officers from this station hand-cuffed a heavily pregnant woman?”
“They sure did.” Sabrina involuntarily put a hand to her right cheek which was sore, a little puffy and probably going to bruise badly in the next day or two. “They slapped me about when I complained.”
“What’s going on?”
Captain ‘Reggie’ O’Connell had been a cop all his life, albeit a political one. He was a friend and drinking crony of several movie stars, whose lifestyle he sought to ape. Three times married, often investigated he had never got himself into a corner he could not slide out of. Until now, that was. Even now he honestly believed his friends would assuredly come to his aid because that was what friends were for.
“Ah, Ms Henschal,” the newcomer guffawed. The most corrupt policeman in Los Angeles – no mean achievement given there were a lot of highly skilled and well-connected operators in the same field – was wearing a thousand dollar suit, newly shaved, with gold on his fingers and smiling a sparkling party smile. “We meet again.”
Lieutenant Sanchez grunted.
“This lady is here to make a complaint, Captain O’Connell.”
Sabrina shook her head.
There was no point wasting time writing up a formal complaint against a wise guy like O’Connell; that was just storing up a heap of trouble down the road.
“No?” The soldier queried, his patience fraying.
“I’m here to spring my friend’s boyfriend.”
“Oh, I see.” Lieutenant Sanchez backtracked immediately. “No, I don’t understand.”
Sabrina waved her arms like windmills in a gale.
“These arseholes arrested Sam Brenckmann after The Troubadour burned down!”
“Brenckmann?” The Guardsman echoed. “My Medical Officer treated him earlier...”
“Sam’s hurt?” Sabrina squealed in anguish.
“Calm down, ma’am...”
“I WILL NOT FUCKING CALM DOWN!”
“No, obviously not,” the soldier agreed. “Mr Brenckmann is okay. A few stray buckshot, nothing that won’t heal in a week or two.”
Sabrina was so relieved to hear the news that she very nearly swooned. She leaned against the reception desk and sucked in several huge gulps of air.
“Brenckmann’s being held as an accessory to murder,” Reggie O’Connell announced with an oddly saturnine smile. “His associate killed a man in cold blood with a shot gun at the scene of the fire on Santa Monica Boulevard.”
Chapter 14
Wednesday 11th December 1963
The White House, Washington DC
The midnight hour was calling.
Although great fires still burned across the shattered city and now and then, gunshots rang distantly in the cold smoky winter air as flecks of snow fell from the unbroken overcast, the worst seemed to be over. However, fate had had one last cruel trick to play on its exhausted, traumatised victims.
The two senior survivors of the desperate British peace mission who had flown into Andrews Air Force Base at the height of the uprising – their American hosts steadfastly refused to call the rebellion what it was, a murderous but thankfully botched coup d’état - sat alone in a dimly lit side room in the unfinished bunker beneath the White House.
For all that they were each, in their own way, hardened, season political operators who had suffered numerous hard knocks in their lives and careers, both men were in shock, reeling.
They were also agreed that they had to act now.
The senior man – politically although junior by several years in age – Iain Norman MacLeod, the Minister of Information in the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration and the Chairman of the dominant party in that coalition, the Conservatives, stared thoughtfully at the phone receiver he had just replaced on its mount. He sighed and looked to his companion, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary.
“Jim,” he said, referring to James Callaghan, constitutionally the de facto Acting Prime Minister, who theoretically as of a approximately two minutes ago held the reins of power back in Cheltenham, England, “concurs with us.”
Both men were still in a state of shock.
A little over ninety minutes ago Prime Minister Edward Heath had been shot dead by a White House Secretary – a middle aged woman called Edna Maria Zabriski – who had suddenly pulled a Navy Colt from her handbag and started blasting away at random as the signatories to the newly signed ‘friendship treaty’ between the former North Atlantic Treaty organization – NATO - allies the United States of America and the United Kingdom had toasted each other’s good sense in averting a new war. A war between the World’s last two nuclear powers would have been an unimaginable catastrophe and the mood in the bullet pocked Oval Office had been euphoric, albeit in an understated, exhausted sort of way. Everybody had been sighing such a huge collective sigh of relief that common sense had prevailed that nobody had noticed the gun until the first shot rang out.
What had ensued had been broadcast live on television and radio to the American people.
One bullet had passed through Edward Heath’s right eye, killing him instantly. Another had cut down the President’s brother, the United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy –although the wound to his lower left leg was serious it was in no way life-threatening - and a Secret Service man had received a flesh wound to his right hip. But for the actions of Captain Walter Brenckmann, the US Naval Attaché on the staff of the US Ambassador to the Court of Balmoral, in immediately wrestling the mad woman to the floor the carnage might have been indescribably worse.
And yet, coming after the dreadful events of recent days when Washington had been a bloody battleground and American and the old country had very nearly sleepwalked into an all out shooting war, the death of Edward Heath was an indescribably crushing blow to both men in the clammy, fire-tainted room off the White House Emergency Situation Room buried some thirty feet below the West Lawn.
The politics of power are unforgiving. While as human beings the two men badly needed to grieve, to come to terms
with the tragedy; as men with their country’s future in their hands they had no time for any of that. These last few months they had lived in an unimaginably brutal world in which terrible decisions had to be made daily, sometimes hourly where the stakes were usually measured in suffering and death. Presently, there was no time or space for grief or for attempting to come to terms with personal loss.
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had stepped into the shoes of his murdered predecessor only days ago after a life spent in the Foreign and Colonial service. He had not known Edward Heath well as a man but had always respected his integrity and judgement in foreign policy matters. The dead Prime Minister’s epitaph would be the launching of the peace mission to Washington that had single-handedly averted a disastrous war with America. However, that was already in the past. The Foreign Secretary’s preoccupation now was to ensure that the good work, the achievement of a meaningful truce and the avoidance of another disastrous war, was not undone in the aftermath of the atrocity that their American hosts had negligently allowed to take place in the Oval Office. One did not need to be any kind of conspiracy theorist to imagine that the dark forces behind the uprising – possibly Red Dawn – might as easily have been behind the assassination of Edward Heath.
The ‘peace’ might unravel in a moment if either of the parties made a mistake.
For Ian MacLeod, Edward Heath’s death was a personal as well as a political tragedy. He had had few older, better friends in politics and life than Ted Heath. They had been young tyros together after the Second World War when the Party’s fortunes were at their lowest ebb following the Labour landslide of 1945. Together with others just back from that war, like Enoch Powell, Ian Macleod and Ted Heath had been the driving force, intellectually and on the ground, in forging the new ‘one nation Conservatism’ within the Party which had enabled it to reconnect to its disaffected natural constituency. After 1950 the Tories had swept to four successively greater election victories and become by the early 1960s ‘the natural party of government’ in the United Kingdom. At the time of the October War MacLeod had been leader of the House of Commons, and Heath, after several years as the Government’s Chief Whip, been the man charged with negotiating the country’s post-empire membership of the European Economic Community. Both men had been pro-European campaigners most of their lives, their convictions solidified by their war experiences and their determination to save future generations from ever having to go through what they had had to go through between 1939 and 1945. The October War had annihilated the world they had both dreamed of passing on to those future generations; but because they were the men they were, to whom duty and service trumped all other considerations, together they had carried on and basically, done their best in an impossible situation. Iain Macleod could not have been more bereft had he lost a brother; notwithstanding that he and Ted Heath had been at cross-purposes many times in the last year he would have cut of his right arm if his friend had assured him it that it was in the national interest.