by James Philip
“How’s our girl today, Dan?”
Dan Brenckmann tried not to broadcast his worry but that was not easy when you were feeling as comprehensively torn up inside as he was feeling at that moment.
“The same, sir,” he murmured, attempting a tight-lipped smile and failing dismally. Each day he hoped for some tiny sign of improvement, a suggestion of a spark of life, recovery, genuine hope. The Doctor’s half-suspected Gretchen would be blind. Brain damage had been hinted at but not specifically voiced; she had had a bad knock on the head and been without oxygen on the operating table for one, two, perhaps several minutes. What with one thing and another the omens were uniformly bad. It cut him to pieces to see Gretchen with her arms full of tubes, her throat opened, lying inert in the big hospital cot. “The same...”
“When you’ve been around as long as I have, son,” the old man decided, releasing Dan’s hand and taking him by the elbow, “the same is good news. Trust me, it is good news that our girl is holding her own. If I was a religious man, which I’ve never been, I’d be down on my knees thanking my God for ‘the same’.”
Dan Brenckmann nodded numbly.
While he was near Gretchen he could hold himself together; when he left her side it was as if his strength evaporated.
“Give yourself a break, son,” Claude Betancourt ordered gently. “Go for a walk. Have a beer if you can find one. Gretchen doesn’t need us right now but when she wakes up properly she’ll need us. Trust me, she’ll need us.”
Chapter 22
Monday 16th December 1963
Camp Benedict Arnold, Fairfax, Virginia
There were tents being erected by filthy, haggard looking men on the boggy ground within sight of the road heading down to Centerville and the old Civil War battlefield of Bull Run. There was nothing fancy about the POW camp; the Army had strung barbed wire around the perimeter and was keeping the rebels and their collaborators back with the threat of fifty-calibre machine guns mounted on jeeps.
The first two nights it had rained and the hurriedly erected arc lights had failed; thirty prisoners had been gunned down attempting to escape.
Camp Benedict Arnold!
Major General Colin Dempsey had allowed himself a brief guffaw at the name. Somebody still had a sense of humour. Naming a shit hole like this for a Revolutionary War turncoat like Benedict Arnold was a classy touch. Likewise, the refusal to prioritise the raising tents for the overlarge contingent of FBI men who were under the mistaken impression that they owned the inmates of the prison cage. If J. Edgar Hoover’s boys wanted a nice dry tent or two in which to ‘interview’ rebels they could put them up themselves.
Dempsey stared across the coils of barbed wire at the shambling mass of humanity inside Camp Arnold. The men and the small number of women trudging aimlessly or squatting on their haunches around smouldering fires fuelled with green wood, had about them the look of a rag tag defeated Confederate Army of yore. Separate from the rest were forty or so people of color in the cage. They huddled together for safety; the FBI had probably only rounded them up because they were still convinced the civil rights movement was in some way involved in the uprising.
The sixty-one year old Washingtonian mood was as jaundiced as his soul these days. It would not have surprised Dempsey one jot if most of the people in the cage still called the nearby battlefield by its Southern, rebel name, Manassas. Some of the ‘rebels’ had fought with maniacal bravery, many had died charging machine guns and tanks, or had stood their ground with hopeless, doomed courage even after they had survived the first napalm and rocket strikes by the A4-Skyraiders Curtis LeMay had ruthlessly called down upon every possible insurgent strong point. But the courage of religious zealots rushing towards the promised land, or the one-eyed conviction of men who had convinced themselves they had a constitutional right to overthrow what they construed to be tyranny by force, or of men who reserved to themselves the right to exact whatever revenge took their fancy against those who they believed had done them ill was hardly a thing of any honour. Wherever the ‘rebels’ had seized ground or roamed they had murdered, looted and raped; women old and young, girls, and small children had been subjected to a sustained outrage that would have not been out of place in the sack of a medieval city by Genghis Khan’s Mongol horde. The emerging scale of the sexual violence spoke to the fact that the ‘rebels’ had deliberately paused every time they had seized new ground, not to secure their lines or to prepare for the next move forward, but to methodically murder, loot and rape their way through whole neighbourhoods. Hardly any woman who had fallen into the hands of the rebels had not been brutally violated, usually by gangs of men drunk on killing, alcohol, drugs or some kind of vilely warped religious need to take out their sense of injustice and rage on the womenfolk of their clan enemies.
It was now evident that within hours of the outbreak of the rebellion it had disintegrated into an insane orgy of murder, torture and bestiality; it was as if the ‘rebels’ had forgotten they were supposed to be toppling a government in the euphoria of sacking the nation’s capital.
Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had always considered himself to be an honourable and humane man; whenever possible during his career in the Army, and in civilian life, he had been mindful to conduct himself by the tenets of his Episcopalian upbringing in rural Washington State. He still considered himself to be a good man, a Christian man, albeit one driven to do terrible things in the defense of everything that he held dear and sacred. However, lately righteous anger had become his guiding star, no matter that sometimes it made him no better than his enemies. Duty was not and never had been a kind mistress.
He turned to face the ragged line of prisoners he had ordered to be paraded in full view of the huddled crowds inside Camp Benedict Arnold for the last two hours.
Unhurriedly, he drew his service pistol, a forty-five calibre Remington Rand Model 1911A1. The weapon had been with him through Tunisia, Sicily, Italy and the Ardennes. It had sat on his hip when he had been a staffer with Patton as he raced the British to Messina in 1943; and it had come home with him after he was invalided back to the States at Bastogne. During the ‘liberation’ of Bellingham it had never left its holster but after the sights he had seen in the streets of Washington in the last two days, the gun felt reassuringly heavy in his right hand as he looked up to scowl at the line of prisoners, drawn randomly from the caged inmates by snatch squads of Marine Corps MPs shortly after dawn that morning.
When Dempsey looked at the rebels he did not see human beings.
All he saw were the broken, burned, mutilated bodies in the road, the thousand yard stares of the countless women who had survived their ordeals at the hands of these animals and the smoking husk of the Smithsonian and practically every other great building in Washington.
There were eighteen men and two women covered by as many Marines and National Guardsmen respectively hefting modern automatic rifles and older carbines.
Dempsey pointed his gun at a big, filthy man with thinning hair and a long unkempt beard in the middle of the line.
The butt of a National Guardsman’s carbine drove the man forward, out of the line.
“Name?” Dempsey demanded coldly.
“Tyler McPherson,” the other man grunted. “I want to talk to a lawyer.”
“Where do you hale from, Tyler McPherson?”
“Ain’t none of your goddamned business, soldier.”
The forty-five bucked in Colin Dempsey’s hand.
The big man involuntarily danced back two steps as the bullet discharged between his legs, drilling into the mud at under his feet with a soft ‘phut’. Immediately, a Marine prodded the prisoner forward to resume his original position with the muzzle of his M-16.
“Okay,” Dempsey sighed. “The way this works, Tyler McPherson, is that I ask you a question and you tell me the answer and everybody is happy. On the other hand, if I ask you a question and you don’t answer it. Or I don’t like the answer I get to shoot you. Firs
t I will shoot you in the knees. Then I will shoot you in the elbows. Then I’ll blow off your balls and leave you to bleed to death in the mud.” The old warrior quirked a predatory smile. “And then I’ll talk to one of your friends.”
“I come from Frenchburg, Kentucky!” The big man blurted.
Dempsey did not have to try very hard to look disappointed that he was not about to start – quite yet – shooting Tyler McPherson to pieces.
“What do you do in Frenchburg, Kentucky?”
“I hunt, I live outside town.”
“You hunt?”
“Yeah. I repairs guns, I breed dogs...”
“You were captured in a rebel held area of DC. What were you doing in Washington?”
“Visiting my Ma...”
“If,” Dempsey explained slowly, because Tyler McPherson gave every sign of being man to whom comprehension tended to come if all, slowly, “you give me the name of your ‘Ma’, her place of abode, her age, her place of birth, and the particulars of the rest of your family and any one of those particulars later turns out to have been incorrect, a lie, I will have you stripped naked and dragged around the old battlefield of Bull Run tied to the back of a Jeep by your neck.”
The big man gulped.
“We was called,” he muttered. “The niggers and the communists and the faggots are taking over,” Tyler McPherson added, trying to be helpful. He threw a resentful look towards the small group of black men standing separate from the horde close to the barbed wire. “There weren’t ever no war with the Ruskies; it was God taking his retribution for the sins of all those unbelieving Reds in Russia and the government bombed Chicago and all them other places just to make it look like we won the war!”
Colin Dempsey blinked.
He was grimly silent because it took him a few moments to move on past the outrageous idiocy of what Tyler McPherson had just said to him.
“So, you lied to me about visiting your ‘Ma’?” He asked coldly.
“I, no...”
Dempsey was tempted to kneecap the Kentucky backwoodsman who had, in all probability committed any manner of heinous crimes during the Battle of Washington. He had told the oaf what would happen if he lied to him and shortly thereafter, McPherson had lied to him.
There was great virtue in keeping things simple for the Tyler McPherson’s of the world; complexity and ambiguity only confused them. There followed a short, contemplative interregnum in which he considered his options.
And then he shot Tyler McPherson in the left foot.
The big man reeled away, hopped two steps and toppled, much like a felled tree into the mud, squalling all the while like a school bully who has never been on the receiving end of a beating.
Colin Dempsey watched him for a few seconds.
He looked up.
“Next!” He demanded.
A barrel-shaped youth with a week’s fuzzy stubble on his face staged forward, propelled by the stock of a National Guardsman’s carbine. The man stumbled and almost fell at Dempsey’s feet.
The old soldier had not troubled to holster his pistol.
That would have been a waste of time when he was probably going to have to get it out again in a minute.
Dempsey studied the boy, his unblinking stare fixed on his dirty face.
“Don’t even think of telling me you were visiting your Ma in DC, son,” he advised the wild-eyed man before him.
Chapter 23
Monday 16th December 1963
Andrews Air Force Base, Virginia
Captain Nathan Zabriski had slept most of the way across the North Atlantic; it was as if the pent up angst, rage, humiliation and bewilderment which had filled his head for most of the last ten days had slowly dissipated the nearer he got to home.
He had given up worrying about what would happen to him when he and his fellow 100th Bomb Group ‘survivors’ stepped back onto United States territory. They were war criminals responsible for the death and maiming of over two thousand innocent men, women and children; in any sane world they would all be lined up against a wall and shot. He had believed he was obeying lawfully authorized orders, that American cities had already been nuked by British V-Bombers but what he had ‘believed’ had been a monstrous lie and now he felt nothing but irredeemable shame...
He had tried to explain a little of it to the seraphic, nutmeg-haired almond eyed Maltese nurse who had been appointed as the prisoner of wars’ guardian angel by no lesser person that the British C-in-C. Not that any of the POWs’ guards had lifted so much as a hand, or so far as he was aware uttered so much as a single disparaging remark to any of the shot down airmen responsible for reducing large parts of the Maltese Archipelago to dust and rubble, and for sinking or badly damaging at least three major warships. By and large the Brits had been friendly – almost sympathetic - in a watchful sort of way; as if they were genuinely a little sorry for their prisoners.
The nurse’s name was Marija Calleja.
She was one of those people who momentarily quietens a noisy room when she enters; who instantly seizes one’s attention and somehow, has an uncanny knack of making one feel more than one actually is. The British guards had treated her like minor royalty.
Marija Calleja had disappeared for a day after their first meeting.
‘We missed you yesterday, ma’am,’ he had said formally, since he was the senior POW being held at Fort Pembroke, an old British base.
Marija had explained that she had been sent home to catch up on her sleep and he had belatedly recollected that the first time they had met she had seemed to be moving slowly, stiffly, like a much older woman.
‘I am to be your guardian again today. Although, I don’t think it is very likely your British captors mean you any harm.’ She had looked to the two unarmed British sentries casually taking the airs with the prisoners on the ramparts of the ancient fort.
‘My name is Marija,” she had informed him. ‘I am a Maltese civilian.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am... Marija.” He had grimaced. “My Ma’s middle name is Maria.”
They had walked along the wall and gazed into the haze out to sea like two normal people. Nathan remembered that inshore two small fishing boats, their high prows and sterns painted in the blue and red and yellows of the ancient Phoenicians had bobbed on the gentle swells in the middle distance.
They had talked as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
‘I grew up on Air Force Bases in the Mid-West. Everything for hundreds of miles was flat, just farmlands and prairies. We once lived in a place that was over a thousand miles from the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean.’
Marija Calleja had leaned against the pitted limestone rampart.
‘Your father was in the Air Force?’
‘He started out as an engine fitter and ended up flying B-24 missions over Germany in the Second War. He was with the 7th Bomb Wing at Carswell until a couple of years before the war. That’s in Texas. He went to work for Boeing in Seattle when he and my Mom split up. That kind of messed up Mom for a while. She’d had crazy times when I was a kid but after Pa left she, well, sort of changed. She was angry all the time. Betrayal does that to you, I suppose? I don’t think my Pa had found anybody else, or anything, it was just that after he left the Air Force he didn’t want to be with Mom any more. It was like it was the Service and base life that had kept them together all those years and when he stopped flying the big birds... Hell, I don’t know. You think you know your Mom and Dad and then something like that happens...’ He had shaken his head, eyes misty. The moment of self pity had quickly passed. ‘After the October War my Ma moved up to Washington DC to live with my Aunt Ida. The last thing I heard she was applying for a government job...’
He had apologised for telling her his troubles.
‘Don’t be sorry, Captain,’ Marija had assured him. ‘We all have our stories and sometimes I am afraid that people have stopped listening to them.’
‘From what I overheard some of the Brits sayi
ng,’ he had prompted, ‘you have quite a story yourself?’
Marija had laughed.
‘When I was nearly six years old I was trapped in a building that was hit by a bomb. Me and my little brother, Joe. He was unhurt; I was trapped by falling masonry. My pelvis and my legs were crushed. They’d never have found us but for Joe’s crying.’
Marija had not been troubled that Nathan had not known what to say.
‘They didn’t expect me to live,’ she had confided, looking at him with thoughtfully quizzical eyes. The guards had told Nathan that she was ‘friendly’ with a British naval officer; apparently, the pair of them had been exchanging letters since they were kids even though they had never met each other face to face. That had sounded weird. He had not known at the time that the ‘naval officer’ in question was none other than the son of the British Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, or that he had been on the destroyer HMS Talavera when she had been attacked by US Air Force A-4 Skyhawks off Cape Finisterre the day he had been shot down over Malta. The other thing he had not known that day was that Marija Calleja had not known whether the only man she had ever loved was alive or dead. ‘They didn’t expect me to ever walk again,’ she had recalled wryly. ‘If it wasn’t for Commander Seiffert,’ the former US Navy Surgeon Commander who was actually in command of Fort Pembroke and directly answerable for the safety of the POWs directly to the British C-in-C, ‘and a Royal Navy Surgeon called Reginald Stanley Stephens, I’d have lived a different life.”
Nathan had discovered himself trapped in the young Maltese woman’s gaze very much like a jack rabbit transfixed in the headlamps of an onrushing truck. She had half-turned to study the airman. They were – give or take a year – the same age. She was perfectly lovely. Perfectly lovely and he had fallen under her thrall. In another place, in another time he would have hit on her for sure. Not straight out because she was not that sort of girl, but he would have flirted and seen what transpired. She had known what he was thinking and become briefly tongue-tied.