The Great Society (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 3)

by James Philip

  He heard the car squeal to a halt behind him.

  Dwight Christie fought the urge to look over his shoulder. His gun was under the driver’s seat of the Lincoln. He carried on staring out across San Diego Bay towards Coronado Island. Before the October War there was talk of a bridge joining San Diego to the island – actually Coronado Island was a ten mile long sandy isthmus between the city and the Pacific – but the Cuban disaster had put an end to that sort of talk. It was a pity; a bridge would have turned Coronado Island into a suburb of San Diego, and possibly the premier money-making holiday resort of Southern California within a decade. That would have been good for everybody, sucking in investment and new blood from all over the American South West. Presently, San Diego was in the grip of a vicious economic recession, wholly dependent on the dwindling largesse of the US Navy, its population declining fast despite the influx of refugees from elsewhere in the Union. They said things were so bad that some San Diegans were heading south across the border into Mexico.

  “Heck of a thing!” Sighed the tall man who had levered himself stiffly out of his beaten up Chevy and stalked unhurriedly towards the man sitting on the bench smoking his cigarette.

  Dwight Christie nodded.

  “Heck of a thing, Galen,” he agreed, not rising to his feet.

  The newcomer joined Christie on the bench, wearily planting his trademark Sedona on his knee. His cowboy boots were scuffed and the perennial black Bolo tie with its distinctive Navajo medallion was absent. Despite the warmth of the day he was wearing a long grey coat.

  “Did you know what those fucking idiots were planning?” Galen Cheney demanded with the mildly vexed weariness of a man who had been behind the wheel of a car for the best part of the last forty-eight hours.

  Christie shook his head.

  “No, just that something was going on. I tried to call off the ‘actions’ my people were supposed to carry out on Monday night when I realized what was happening in DC. It was too late, of course. I wouldn’t be surprised if we burned half the West Coast resistance on Monday night. The rest of us, like you and me, are basically in hiding.”

  “Not me, son.”

  Dwight Christie did not like Galen Cheney but sometimes liking a man was immaterial. He particularly did not like being referred to as ‘son’ by somebody who was only sixteen years his senior and whom he regarded as being just that little bit too crazy for their line of work. However, beggars could not be choosers, especially when one was fighting a war with a vastly more powerful and apparently victorious enemy.

  He looked Cheney in the eye.

  “I’m not your son, Galen.”

  The older man shrugged.

  Galen Cheney was one of those ‘rugged individuals’, or ‘dangerous madmen’ – it all depended upon one’s viewpoint – whose FBI file was as voluminous as Dwight Christie had expected it to be when he had finally got his hands on it.

  ‘Galen’ was not his given name. He had been christened John Herbert Cheney into a Texas City family embedded into a small close-knit fundamentalist Christian religious community, some kind of weird offshoot of the Plymouth Brethren. His father was a lay preacher, his mother a woman who ruled her brood – literally – with a rod of iron. His family was poor, dirt poor and seemed to have lived off the charity of neighbours in a three room house on Galveston Bay until they were expelled from the ‘church’ when Cheney was about nine. Cheney’s father had been accused of molesting the daughter of another member of ‘the communion’ – an eleven year old girl – and he had taken his family to New Mexico, then Arizona, Nevada and back to Texas, Fort Worth in the following years. The father sounded like some kind of archetypal whiskey preacher, or snake oil salesman or a flimflam man, depending upon one’s perspective. One of seven children – John Henry was the eldest of three boys but had two older sisters – the young ‘Galen’ had spent his teenage years being passed from pillar to post and ended up in a reformatory in Abilene. The only thing he had clung onto from those harsh childhood days was his eye for an eye, openly brutal ‘faith’. God did not just exist; He was righteous and He was always looking over Galen Cheney’s right shoulder.

  When he was fourteen Cheney had shipped out on a steamer running down to Panama, and travelled the world until he was twenty. Back in Texas he had joined the Rangers, in the Second World War he had signed up for the Air Force, serving in England and Western Europe as a military policeman. Back stateside after the 1945 war he joined the Federal Marshall’s Service; a grim, humourless man he would have probably been a Marshall until he dropped but for the war. Like so many other men the October War had robbed him of the one anchor in his otherwise joyless, dutiful existence and the resistance had drawn him into its waiting arms.

  The reason Galen Cheney’s FBI file was so big was that he had killed four men in the line of duty, one when he was a Texas Ranger and the others during his service as a Federal Marshall. He had also killed a man in a fist fight in England during the 1945 war. He was a violent man whom, it seemed, courted danger and never flinched when the bullets started to fly. While everybody else went to ground he stood tall and blazed away until all the bad guys were down. He would have been an all-American hero but for his overly muscular religiosity and his habit of ‘preaching’ to his superiors.

  The missile launched from Cuba which had destroyed Galveston Island and South Houston had obliterated his house on Texas Avenue and with it his wife of twenty-three years, Mary, his daughter May Rose, and his youngest son, Jacob. The small Navajo medallion which he normally wore with his black Bolo tie was for Mary, whose maternal grandmother had been pure-blood Navajo.

  Ever since the day of the October War Galen Cheney had been on a personal crusade of revenge.

  “You heard from your boys?” Dwight Christie asked quietly. Cheney’s surviving sons; Michael and Isaac, aged respectively twenty-two and twenty had, against Christie’s ‘advice’ gone up to Bellingham, supposedly to ‘recruit’ for the resistance that autumn.

  “Yeah,” the older man grunted. “I don’t rightly recall you ever having mentioned there were Ruskies in Bellingham?”

  Christie contemplated parrying this.

  In the end he addressed the issue head on.

  “In a war my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

  This made no impression on the older man. His flinty grey-blue eyes viewed Christie coldly.

  “My boys say the Commies were shipping in arms to the scum running Bellingham?”

  “If you say so,” the younger man offered neutrally. “Why were you in Colorado last week?” He asked before Galen Cheney could quiz him further.

  “I was doing the Lord’s work.”

  “Specifically?”

  “Finishing unfinished business.”

  Dwight Christie groaned out aloud.

  “We’re not fucking executioners, Galen!”

  The older man threw him a thoughtful look and then gazed out across the bay as if he had only imagined he had heard what he had just heard, and instantly put it out of his mind.

  “The Washington thing changes everything,” he observed.

  “Yes,” Christie retorted. “It does. Are you still onboard?”

  Galen Cheney contemplated this for perhaps twenty seconds, made as if to speak, thought better of it and mulled the question for the better part of another minute.

  “Yeah, I reckon me and my boys are still onboard.”

  Chapter 16

  Friday 13th December 1963

  The Washington Navy Yard, Washington DC

  Having been commissioned in October 1799 the Washington Navy Yard was the oldest shore establishment on the books of the United States Navy. Situated in the south east of the city and protected by high walls and a permanent guard company, it had emerged from the uprising relatively unscathed. A truck bomb had demolished the facade of the famous old Latrobe Gate building on the north side, desultory attempts had been made to blast a way into the complex and grenades and a handful of small calibre
mortar-type rounds had gone off in the vicinity of the yard’s perimeter but otherwise, the Washington Navy Yard had been an impregnable bastion from which to mount ground and helicopter strikes against the rebels. The secure southern boundary of the Yard, the Anacostia River, had enabled Marine Corps and National Guard squads to be assembled and transported wherever needed along the Anacostia or the Potomac, and eventually after a thirty-six hour fire fight to relieve the defenders of the Pentagon, the surviving terrorists had been driven onto the heights of Arlington where presumably, scores of the scum bags were still hiding among the graves of the dead of America’s former wars. That was a desecration of hallowed ground that the Vice-President of the United States of America had vowed not to leave unpunished.

  “Where the fuck is Hoover?” Lyndon Baines Johnson demanded when he stomped into the bunker conference room.

  At the end of the 1945 war the Washington Navy Yard had been the biggest naval ordnance complex in the World; even after the war when its manufacturing infrastructure was renamed the US Navy Gun Factory its one hundred and twenty-six acres had at one time accommodated over a hundred and eighty separate factories and employed over twenty-five thousand people. In recent years ordnance work had been phased out; much of it transferred elsewhere or supplanted by new emerging technologies. The great mid-century armouries that had produced the guns and shells that had defeated Hitler and won the war in the Pacific, had given way to futuristic factories all over the country manufacturing circuit boards and high-tech widgets for the new generation of modern guided munitions. Progress was sometimes intrinsically cruel.

  Driving through the Yard that evening the Vice-President had been reminded that the unavoidable dereliction of this great engine of his country’s former wars was symptomatic of the crisis of the hour. There had been a coup d’état – which by the grace of God rather than by anything the Administration had done had failed – and the country was on its knees, possibly as divided as it had been at any time in the ninety-eight years since the end of the Civil War.

  “Director Hoover’s security convoy was delayed, sir,”

  That was because the arrogant old SOB set off too fucking late!

  “Thank you gentlemen for making it here at such short notice,” Johnson said pointedly to the men in the room who had struggled to their feet at his entrance. “Please sit down.”

  Right now the President and General Curtis LeMay – whom Jack Kennedy had designated as the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, the least he deserved after ‘old iron pants’ had flown in at the height of the rebellion and effectively snubbed it out in less than a day – were currently otherwise occupied putting the senior officers of the not so great American Military straight on one or two key matters. The President and his Vice-President had already given John McCone, the head of the CIA the same treatment. To his credit McCone had taken it on the chin, offered his resignation and when this was peremptorily refused gone straight back to Langley to start kicking the living daylights out of the battalions of useless, overpaid shitheads who had the nerve to call themselves ‘analysts’.

  What had been allowed to happen over the last few days beggared belief. US servicemen had been inveigled into mounting murderous unprovoked attacks on British bases, ships and submarines and very nearly started a shooting war with the World’s only other surviving nuclear superpower. There had been a coup d’état in the capital! Across the country there had been hundreds, possibly thousands of killings of government civilian and law enforcement personnel, and at least seven city mayors assassinated. Power lines and electrical switching stations had been sabotaged in at least a dozen states, likewise oil refineries in Louisiana and Texas had been set on fire, railroad trains de-railed, and attempts made – largely unsuccessfully – to bring down bridges as far apart as North Carolina and Mississippi. Disturbingly, there had been gun and petrol bomb attacks and campaigns of mob violence targeting synagogues up and down the East Coasts. Across the Mid-West minority fundamentalist Christian communities had suffered the same sort of persecution. It was as if the whole country had gone mad, everywhere reports were coming in speaking of unprecedented crime waves, organised civil disobedience and angry crowds moving on Federal buildings and besieging police stations.

  Lyndon Johnson understood that at time such as these somebody in the Administration needed to keep a cool head. He had decided that he was that somebody. His colleagues might elect to talk up the bad news he was determined that the other, not so bad side of the news, should also be heard in the corridors of government.

  Contrary to the alarmist narrative being peddled by the networks – and by some sections of the Administration – of widespread endemic anarchy and lawlessness apparently tearing the whole country apart; in many, perhaps the vast majority of places, nothing untoward had actually happened in the last few days. It was this that he told anybody who wanted to hear what he thought about the situation. And if he met somebody who did not want to hear this; he told them anyway.

  However, beneath the Vice-President’s calm exterior a volcanic explosion was never far beneath the surface. There were simply no words adequate to the task of expressing Lyndon Johnson’s feelings about the absent J. Edgar Hoover and other men around the table – not to mention John McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who had had his ‘talking to’ earlier – who had allowed the country to descend into madness without uttering a single, solitary documented word of warning about it in advance.

  This was also the considered view of forty-one year old Acting United States Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach. His boss, Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, was still in the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda Maryland. One of the bullets fired by the killer of British Prime Minister Edward Heath, Edna Zabriski, had removed a two-finger wide lump of flesh and muscle from his left calf and he was due to undergo a second operation that evening to ensure that someday – maybe a few months down the line – he might be able to walk again without pain.

  There was a commotion in the corridor and the doors to the conference room were flung open to permit admittance of the small, bulky, hunched figure of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the man who had been his deputy for over thirty years, Clyde Tolson.

  Katzenbach raised a thoughtful eyebrow.

  Hoover feels so threatened that he needs his best man to back him up!

  An additional chair was scraped across the floor to enable Tolson to sit at his master’s shoulder.

  The Vice-President was about to say something caustic when Hoover looked up and in his scatter-gun rat-a-tat fashion – shooting words like bullets; a technique developed as a young man to counter a stammer – he said, with a clumsy almost pleading contrition: “I am sorry, Mister Vice-President.”

  This so astonished his listeners that they hardly credited what he said next.

  “I’m sorry. The Agency has failed the American people...”

  The tears in the old man’s eyes were anything but Crocodilian.

  Tolson coughed. Everybody in the rooms was so accustomed to his being the most silent of public silent partners that it was some moments before they realized that he planned to say something.

  Sixty-two year old Clyde Anderson Tolson was an enigma to both the public and to Washington insiders. A Missourian hailing from Laredo he had moved to Washington DC in 1919, working first as a clerk and then as a confidential secretary in the offices of three successive Secretaries of War. During this time he had qualified to practice law at night school at George Washington University, graduating in 1927 and applying to join the FBI in 1928. He had been by J. Edgar Hoover’s side – quite literally, they drove to work together, vacationed together, and ate together – ever since. Promoted to assistant director as long ago as 1930, Tolson had been with Hoover in 1936 to arrest the back robber Alvin Karpis, and in the same year had been involved in a gun fight with the notorious gangster Harry Brunette. He and Hoover h
ad thrown the dragnet over the Long Island spy ring in 1942; and for as long as anybody remembered Tolson had been FBI Associate Director responsible for discipline, budget and administration. Hoover and Tolson were both showing their age, Hoover particularly because he blacked his hair and some said, wore makeup to maintain a false air of youth and vitality, neither of which was present today.

  “As many as three hundred special agents have been killed or injured in pre-meditated attacks,” Clyde Tolson said. “In a number of incidents members of their families and other innocent persons have been killed and injured. Several individuals, all men, have been apprehended by the Bureau and by other law enforcement agencies in connection with these crimes.”

  Katzenbach listened, watching the reactions of the other men in the room.

  Fifty-five year old James Joseph Rowley was the fourteenth Director of the Secret Service. Rowley was a Bronx-born New Yorker of Irish extraction who had started his career in the FBI and transferred to the Secret Service in 1938 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President.

  Lieutenant-General Gordon Aylesworth Blake was the fifty-three year old fourth Director of the National Security Agency. Gordon Blake was an Iowan who had won a Silver Star for gallantry in the face of the enemy when, on 7th December 1941, he had been base operations officer at Hickham Field, Pearl Harbour. As if to prove the old adage ‘what goes around comes around’, in 1945, the veteran of that ‘day of infamy’ in 1941 had been a member of the one hundred and fifty man advanced force sent to Japan to prepare for the initial airlift of the US army of occupation.