by James Philip
She had taken pity on him.
‘I lost nobody who was close to me in the October War.’ As to more recent disasters, specifically the sneak attack on Malta by the 100th Bomb Group, Marija had confessed that she did not know yet if she had lost anybody close. ‘Things are still too confused. People I know must have been hurt, or killed, because so many are dead and injured...’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.’
‘There is nothing to be said, Captain. The World is the way it is and we must carry on as we may.’
‘Marija!’
The Maltese woman had turned around at the sound of her name.
‘Peter is safe!’
On subsequent days Marija had shyly, proudly spoken a little about Peter Christopher, the man she loved. But on that day the release of knowing that he was alive had overwhelmed her.
She had fainted with relief.
And if Nathan had not caught her she would most likely have fallen fifteen feet down a flight of limestone stairs onto the unyielding stone of the Victorian gunroom floor below.
Marija had been with the POWs each day after that.
Later she had accompanied them to RAF Luqa, shaken each man’s hand at the foot of the ramp up into the cargo cabin of the US Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules.
Nathan had swung around to berate the US Air Force cameraman who had taken a snap of Marija planting a sisterly, entirely platonic kiss on his right cheek. She had placed a gentle hand on his arm.
‘We are friends I think, Nathan,’ she had said. ‘Nobody can shame us for that; and shame on us if we let them?’
The Hercules had flown the eight 100th Bomb Group survivors north to Prestwick in Scotland where a silver Boeing 707 in Air Force livery had been waiting to carry the returning ‘butchers of Malta’ to Washington.
“DRESS RIGHT AND CENTER!” Bawled the Marine Corps Major in command of the honour guard. The bemused airmen trooping down the steps onto the cold, windswept tarmac blinked in astonishment as the band struck up the opening bars of the US Air Force song.
However, nothing in Christendom could conceivably have been more disorientating to Nathan Zabriski than the unmistakable sight of General Curtis Emerson LeMay standing at the foot of the steps.
The next few minutes were a blur.
Nathan saluted the great man who had smiled grimly and crushed his right hand in a bear-like grip.
“A man who obeys orders and presses on to the limit of his endurance and courage and far, far beyond in the pursuance of his duty will always be welcomed back into my Air Force, son,” Old Iron Pants said solemnly. While the other returning POWs waited patiently on the steps behind Nathan the legendary former commander of Strategic Air Command leaned closer to the much younger man. “The dishonour in this matter rests on other shoulders. The Air Force will stand behind you and your men. I give you my personal word on that.”
Nathan thought he must have dreamed that part of it because within a hour of landing at Andrews Field he had been whisked away by the Secret Service in the back of an armoured personnel carrier to the CIA Headquarters at Langley.
It was shortly after arriving at Langley, in a brightly lit underground conference room, that he had learned that his mother was in custody in the same complex.
She had assassinated the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and attempted to assassinate the President of the United States of America.
Chapter 24
Monday 16th December 1963
NAACP Office, Third Baptist Church, San Francisco, California
Miranda Sullivan had driven to San Francisco with Gerry Devers, a twenty-four year old intern fresh out of UCLA with degrees in Business Administration, Economics and of all things, French. Gerry was an entertaining kind of guy; good looking, obsessively clean, a little over-talkative and clearly aching to hit on her. Unlike Miranda, Gerry was no nearer being taken onto the Governor’s staff now than he had been the day his big check Democrat donor parents had foisted him upon the Office of the Governor back in August. Miranda hardly knew the man but anybody could tell he was an airhead who was never going to have to pay his own way in the world, and that right now he would much rather be hitting on her or playing golf than discussing the composition and the constitution of the California Civil Rights Forum.
“Is there a telephone I could use please,” she asked her hosts after her companion had yet again put his foot in his mouth. The man was an idiot and she had no idea why she had to put up with him.
There were no plush meeting rooms at the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. The coffee was not real and Gerry Devers had made up his mind about the prospective CCRF, the neighbourhoods through which they had driven to get to the meeting and his hosts’ worth and character based on the color of their skin before he and Miranda had left Sacramento.
Terry Francois had conducted himself as if he was oblivious to Miranda’s sidekick’s presence but the faces of Dwayne John, and the other NCAAP members crowded into the stuffy bare-walled little vestry behind the church had quickly hardened with hostility.
It was the big man who escorted Miranda to the Pastor’s office, a Spartan, spic and span room with table and a couple of chairs and nothing much else other than a bookcase filled with well-thumbed hymnals.
“I am so sorry!” Miranda cried. “I want to slap that man’s face,” she hissed angrily the moment she was alone with the hulking black man.
“The Lord sends us new trials every day,” Dwayne John concurred, permitting himself a wry grin.
Miranda scowled at him; irritated that he could be so calm.
The man and the woman looked at each other, the memory of their brief encounter to set up today’s exploratory meeting in Sacramento still crystal fresh in their minds.
Dwayne John had been surprised to see other blacks, and people of color sitting in the long refectory of the State Capitol Building, although none of them seemed to have white friends or co-workers. He and Miranda had stood out like sore thumbs; a negro and a blond white woman sitting together, publicly sharing a table, talking with each other like normal people.
Miranda had insisted on paying the tab for their two coffees.
She had been all business.
‘We should meet with the people in San Francisco as soon as possible.’
‘How soon do you think?’
‘Why not tomorrow? Is it easier if I drive over to you?’
He had honestly believed she would be put off by the idea of any meeting in the Fillmore District but she had not batted a single golden eyelash when he had suggested the Third Baptist Church as a venue.
‘That’s fine.’
A time was agreed and the place confirmed. Yes, she knew where the Third Baptist Church was; in fact she had already seemed to know almost as much about the NAACP in California as he did which was a little bit unsettling even though Terry Francois had taken him aside and warned him ‘this girl is sharp enough to cut you if you don’t pay attention’.
As Dwayne John had sat in the refectory at the State Capitol with the woman he had girded his courage and broached the thing which had troubled him ever since the night of the war.
‘That night, Miss Sullivan?’
‘At Johnny Seiffert’s place on Haight Street?’ She had shot back like a bullet from a .357 Magnum.
Dwayne had winced.
‘Look, that was my dark time. That man isn’t who I am now.’
She had thought about it for a few moments.
‘I don’t ever want to talk about that night again,’ she had informed him in a hissing whisper. ‘That’s the deal, okay? I can’t go there again. I just can’t!’
For a split second she had been horribly, heart-wrenchingly vulnerable.
Now she was just achingly, perfectly beautiful and Dwayne had absolutely no idea how he was going to get her face out of his head; or if actually he would ever find it in his soul to even attempt to expunge it.
“You’re giving me that look a
gain, Mister John,” Miranda said, frowning at her companion in the vestry as she waited for somebody to pick up the phone in Sacramento.
“Sorry,” the big man murmured and turned away, unwilling to meet the challenge in the woman’s topaz stare.
Presently, Miranda’s boss, the Governor’s Chief-of-Staff came on the line. He was not happy, evidently having been called out of a meeting.
“What is it Miranda?”
“Gerry Devers is an ignorant, bigoted pig and if he goes on the way he’s going he’s going to get himself lynched from a lamp post on McAllister and Fillmore!” Miranda drew breath. “Always assuming I don’t shoot him first, sir!”
“Oh,” Miranda’s boss was knocked off his stride. “For goodness sake! Who on earth sent that young idiot with you?”
“I have no idea,” she reported truthfully. “I know the Governor doesn’t like female staffers going to ‘certain’ places on their own. Maybe, that’s it. But I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself, sir.” She almost added ‘I lived in much worse places than the Fillmore District before the war’.
“You two better come back to Sacramento.”
“That’s not necessary, sir. Gerry can take the car...”
“No, he can’t. Just tell the idiot to come back to Sacramento. He can find his own way back. No,” a second thought. “Would you tell him to come to phone please.”
Gerry Devers stormed out of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco approximately three minutes later but only after he had stopped to give Miranda what he probably hoped was an ‘if looks killed’ sort of look. His anger bounced off her much like a pebble would have bounced off the front glacis plate of an M60 Patton main battle tank.
“Ma’am,” Dwayne John had whistled softly, “you surely are a force of nature.”
The older she got the worse Miranda became accepting compliments.
This one she brushed off with scorn.
“Men!” She sighed in unfeigned exasperation.
Back in the cramped meeting room she forced a smile.
“I owe you all an apology. I am personally very, very sorry for my, er, colleague’s attitude and behaviour. It was inexcusable. All I can say is that my boss, the Governor’s Chief-of-Staff was as angry as I am about what has just happened. I’m sure that when the Governor is informed he will be very angry, too. Mr Devers will have nothing further to do with the California Civil Rights Forum. Respectfully, may I suggest that we start all over again?”
Fifty-one year old Terry Francois had been elected President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1959. The Louisiana-born former Marine had returned home to study at Xavier University in New Orleans after the Second World War, achieved a master’s degree in Business Administration at Atlanta and travelled west to qualify as an attorney in San Francisco in 1949. Since then he had immersed himself in the civil rights movement.
For much of his time in San Francisco - even after the October War - he had been a little out of step with many NAACP members; where he saw the need for a more activist approach others still preferred quiet protest or no protest at all. Whereas, he saw in the ruination of the old World a once in a generation opportunity to advance the cause of the civil rights movement in America; many saw only the pitfalls, and the dangers of pressing so hard that they left themselves vulnerable to the accusation that they lacked patriotism and civil responsibility and were deliberately making a bad situation worse. While Terry Francois understood the feelings of his people –members of the NAACP were no less patriotic and to his mind, a lot less irresponsible, than the majority of their fellow Americans – lately he had felt like he was wading through knee-deep mud.
He reflected for a few seconds.
He asked himself if the California Civil Rights Forum was no more than a sop, a reluctant gesture from a beleaguered state administration. Governor Brown was a decent man, of that he had no doubt. But he was also a practical politician who knew that everything that was worth doing had its price. What exactly was the signal that Governor Brown was sending the NAACP and the rest of the civil rights movement by appointing a mere slip of a girl to be his office’s public face of the CCRF?
Therein lay the conundrum.
For all that Miranda Sullivan was just that – a slip of a girl – she was self-evidently shrewd and driven, not to mention brave, and self-evidently came with none of the normal white middle class hang ups about the color of a man or woman’s skin; which was still, sadly, a very rare thing in California. And of course one only had to take one look at the kid to know that she had inherited the naturally telegenic looks of her film star parents; if nothing else she would one heck of a poster girl for the CCRF!
“Yes,” he confirmed, coming to what he felt in his bones was a turning point in his Presidency of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, “starting all over again works just fine for me, Miss Sullivan.”
“Miranda,” the slip of a girl replied.
She looked around the faces of the NAACP members crushed together into the small, stuffy room.
“Unless anybody’s got any objections I think we should be as informal as possible in our dealings with each other. We are all in this together.” She smiled wryly. “In fact if we are not all in this together we might as well give up now!”
Chapter 25
Monday 16th December 1963
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun since July 1960 the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center had not been informed of the purpose of the Vice-President’s visit – no more than a flying stopover – to Huntsville or why he specifically wanted to speak to him while the flagship of the presidential fleet of jetliners, SAM 26000 a specially customized long-range VC-137C Boeing 707, was on the ground being refuelled.
Wernher von Braun was not a man who cared for surprises like the phone call he had received less than an hour ago summoning him to the old Redstone Arsenal Air Base. For an aircraft the size of a Boeing 707 the runway parameters of the old Army Air Force test facility were marginal and the field was rarely used by large modern jet aircraft; so what was so important that Lyndon Johnson was detouring out here into the boondocks at such short notice?
The former Director of the Peenemunde Research Center and the chief designer of the V-2 rocket took some small comfort from knowing from his experience of his eighteen years in the United States, that whatever was going on was probably not going to involve a show trial and a summary execution. Although his American friends would never have suspected as much, it had taken him many, many years to put those sort of terrors out of mind in his dealings with his adoptive countrymen. Back in Hitler’s Germany a man’s life often hung suspended by a thread; one never knew when a gloved hand was likely to grip one’s shoulder, the denouncements would begin and the wrath or offended dignity of some Party or SS bigwig would sign a man’s death warrant.
The Americans had asked him why he had gone along with Hitler and Himmler. He had tried to explain but eventually he had ducked the questions. The victorious Western Allies into whose hands he had gone to great lengths to fall in the spring of 1945 simply did not understand the true nature of the evil that they had been fighting. They discovered the concentration camps, the slave workers reduced to human skeletons but still they did not really understand. Not going along with Hitler was a death sentence. Not going along meant one’s entire extended family would be sent to the camps, that one would be tortured, or hung by the neck from a rafter with piano wire.
Operation Paperclip, the American exercise to transport hundreds of Germany’s surviving top scientists and where possible, their families to the United States – effectively removing every man from the reach of the ongoing war crimes tribunals and the rigors of the de-Nazification program – had been for Wernher von Braun like being given back his life. Eventually, one hundred and twenty-seven of his team had been brought to America a
nd contracted to the US Army; all but one of his technical directors at the Marshall Space Flight Center was an old hand from either Peenemunde or the latter V-2 development program at Blizna in what post-war became southern Poland. Nordhausen hung over most of their heads, even now; he tried not to think much about the V-2 assembly factory in the Harz Mountains where thousands of slave workers had been starved, beaten and worked to death in the final months of the European war. People still occasionally pointed the finger at him even if few actually had the courage or the inclination to speak of it; Nordhausen was an SS factory and even if he had known what was going on there he could have done very little about it. Other, that was, than to earn Heinrich Himmler’s personal displeasure and how many men in London or Washington or anywhere else in the civilised world could honestly claim that they would have risked antagonising the Head of the SS had they actually been in his situation. Besides, in those days he had been a patriotic German fighting to save his country!
However, on days like this the man who considered himself to be the World’s leading living rocket scientist - Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, his Soviet counterpart had in all likelihood perished in the October War - was beset with a raft of troubling, disconcerting insecurities which he had long ago learned to conceal from his public. In fact, an observer watching him now would interpret his expression and general demeanour as being those of a man who was convinced he had been called away from his work on what he believed to be a fool’s errand.
He watched the big jet approach.
Only the best Air Force pilots got within a hundred miles of any of the Presidential jets; they said that winning a seat at the controls of SAM 26000 was an American military pilot’s equivalent of going to Heaven and personally being welcomed at the Pearly Gates by a smiling St Peter.
The jetliner landed gently without the usual puff of smoke from the main undercarriage wheels and came to a halt some two hundred yards before the end of the runway without any squealing of brakes. Then the aircraft turned and taxied directly to its appointed hardstand.