by James Philip
Tragedy and regeneration had happened before in this place and perhaps, some day Texas City would rise again from the ashes.
In April 1947 Texas City had suffered the worst industrial disaster in American history; but that anybody would want to come back to this blighted place after what had befallen it on 27th October 1962 was beyond Dwight Christie’s understanding. However, if recent events had taught him anything it was that the American soul was nothing if not resilient and in a baffling way, grudgingly optimistic.
Of course the ‘disaster’ of 1947 was as nothing to what had happened here fifteen months ago. Notwithstanding, in its aftermath the city had come to refer to itself as ‘the town that would not die’.
In 1947 a ship loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the French merchantman Grandcamp, had blown up and set in motion a catastrophic chain reaction. The initial explosion had destroyed the adjacent Monsanto office block and its surrounding warehouses and set fire to a second ship, the SS High Flyer, also loaded with ammonium nitrate. The High Flyer, literally blown off its moorings had collided with another ship, the SS Wilson B. Keene – as chance would have it, like the High Flyer and the Grandcamp loaded with ammonium nitrate – and inevitably there was a second and a third devastating explosion. Oil refineries on the foreshore ignited in sympathy, whole neighbourhoods of Texas City were razed to the ground. The force of the first blast was so big that the anchor of the Grandcamp was later discovered several miles away at the Pan American refinery. Nearly six hundred people had been killed and over five thousand injured, the bodies of sixty-three of the dead were never recovered and the entire City and Port fire departments were wiped out in the disaster. In the following years the wrecks had been cleared from the docks, the port reconstructed and the shattered refineries restored.
All that had been comprehensively swept away fifteen months ago; Christie had no trouble finding the Cheney family compound.
Four freshly constructed wooden huts with half-a-dozen vehicles including a big flatbed truck parked up like wagons around a nineteenth century settler camp in Indian territory. Wispy grey smoke rose in the unusually still evening air as Christie’s rattling old Dodge creaked and squealed to a halt outside the encampment.
This was Christie’s first visit to Texas City; this evening he imagined he detected the taste of burning in his mouth. A hurricane last year had scattered the ashes of the city across Texas all the way to Chihuahua in Mexico but he could not think of this alien, desolate landscape with tasting those ashes in his mouth. Sometimes even the most terrible physical scars were as nothing to the abominations seared into a man’s mind.
Christie jammed his forty-five – a rebuilt untraceable Navy Colt he had picked up in San Antonio a week ago – into the waistband of his trousers.
Getting out of the Dodge he waved to the tall young man who had emerged from the compound. He made no effort to conceal the forty-five as he reached back into the cab and recovered a scruffy sports jacket of a type that would have terminated his career in the FBI in an instant.
“Hi, Mickey!” He called to the elder of Galen Cheney’s surviving sons as he pulled on his jacket.
“We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow, Mister Anders,” the twenty-two year old with a mop of rebellious dark hair said, visibly relaxing the moment he recognized the newcomer. He looked over his shoulder and shouted: “It’s okay. It’s Mister Anders!”
Dwight Christie had become Edward Thomas ‘Tom’ Anders, a former Air Force man searching for missing members of his extended family a week after the failed rebellion.
It was only now that the true scale of the disaster in the District of Columbia was becoming evident. The resistance had recklessly burned seventy to eighty percent of its effective, organised – well, barely semi-organised as things had turned out – militia in the doomed attempt to topple the Kennedy Administration. The rebellion had been ruthlessly crushed and any time soon the now re-invigorated Federal Government, supported by a perverse post-insurrection fragile national unity, was Hell bent on hunting down every last ‘traitor’. Old Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities witch hunt of the 1950s had nothing on what was going on now. Anybody who had ever had a question mark against his or her name in any FBI, Secret Service, National Security Agency, US Marshall’s, or local police department file was being called in, interrogated and basically, if they did not come up with a good answer, carted off to hurriedly organized ‘holding camps’ for further questioning. In the armed forces it was worse, much worse, anybody who had been anywhere near any of the suspected ‘issues’ which had ‘compromised’ the chain of command in the days and weeks before the battle of Washington was presently the subject of a full-blown military Special Investigation Branch inquiry, and or, in the custody or the sights of the FBI. The atmosphere was so poisoned that everybody in law enforcement, the military and state and national politics suspected practically everybody else and members of the House of Representatives were literally drowning under the weight of ‘leaks’ and allegedly ‘inside’ intelligence information deluging down around them from countless aggrieved, and probably very frightened whistleblowers. That was the dreadful, unfunny irony of the situation; had the resistance not broken itself – entirely of its own volition – on the barricades of Washington DC now would be the perfect time to strike at the heart of the Union.
However, it was too late; the enemy was in disarray but so was what remained of the resistance. The shock troops of the revolution were mostly dead or competing with each other to give up their secrets in Federal interrogation pens like Camp Benedict Arnold just outside Washington near the site of the Civil War battlefield of First Manassas.
The leaders of the resistance were mostly locked up in Federal jails; show trials were already scheduled for the early summer and in the meantime networks which had taken decades to build were being methodically unravelled by a resurgent and focused FBI. The Battle of Washington had temporarily stilled the clamour for state’s rights in the South and the East because right now nobody wanted to be seen to be disloyal to the Union. Besides, if Washington could come under attack from within was any State Capitol safe without the mailed fist of the US military at its back? America had been sleep walking to whatever fate awaited it before the rebellion; the country had been drifting, the seeds of revolution had been sown. If the leaders of the resistance – the majority of whom were presently in JFK’s prison camps - had held their nerve another year, or perhaps two, the country might have been ripe for the taking...
Christie had followed Michael Cheney between the circled cars into the heart of Galen Cheney’s little kingdom. A teenage girl with a dirty face and a shock of blond hair peered at him from the door of one of the huts.
The average age of the member’s of Galen Cheney’s personal harem got younger every week...
The resistance was a busted flush and he was attempting to keep the cause alive fighting alongside maniacs like Galen fucking Cheney!
The last time Christie had met Cheney he had been clean shaven, now he had three weeks growth of beard, his dark hair was unkempt and his clothes worn, patched and dusty, and his old workman’s boots scuffed beyond repair. In recent weeks he had shed some of his former fleshiness, begun to acquire a hard-bitten, prematurely grizzled look which perfectly matched his current mood.
Galen Cheney was sitting at a rough hewn bench cleaning his long-barrel Smith and Wesson .44 calibre revolver – as he did around sunset most days – when the visitor was ushered respectfully into Hut No 1.
Hut No 2 was where the women lived and worked.
Hut No 3 was where Galen Cheney’s sons lived and slept.
Hut No 4 was where the Cheney clan ate and worshipped.
But Hut No 1 was Galen Cheney’s; nobody stepped over its Spartan threshold without his say so. Today Michael Cheney hesitated at the threshold, waiting to be instructed to enter or depart.
“Shut the door, Michael,” the father murmured, waving for him to go.
Dwight Christie heard the door clump shut at his back as he stepped towards the older man. The interior of the cabin was mostly empty. There was the work bench, the cedar box in which Cheney kept his guns and his ammunition, another for his gunsmith tools. There was no bed; the man spread a blanket on the bare boards to sleep.
“What happened in Dallas?” Christie demanded lowly.
“Oswald disobeyed my orders,” Galen Cheney replied evenly, indifferently. He carried on threading the cleaning brush down the barrel of his Smith and Wesson. “It was a test. He failed. I left him to his fate.”
Christie was sorely tempted to pull out his forty-five and blow the mad sonofabitch’s head off!
Which part of ‘the enemy can lose a thousand men to every one man we lose and he will still win’ did the fucking maniac not understand?
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said calmly, his temper seething behind his poker face.
Galen Cheney shrugged.
“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” he declared coldly. “Oswald betrayed us. His family was forfeit. Those are the rules.”
“They’re not my fucking rules!”
When Christie had discovered what Cheney had done on the first night of the Battle of Washington to Carl and Martha Drinkwater and their two young children in Colorado Springs he had said nothing, done nothing and been ashamed, and horrified that he could walk away from such an atrocity.
Never again, he had vowed.
And yet here he was about to walk away again.
“I follow a higher calling,” Cheney countered, his tone that of a man a little disappointed in his comrade in arms.
“Was it you who raped the wife?”
“What’s it to you?” Galen Cheney sniffed, raising the silvery barrel of the gun in his hands to his eye and sighting along it. “Not me. Two good old boys I know. I needed Isaac to see how we treat people who betray his God.”
Even in this Godless age the rape and murder of a young housewife and her two infant children still had the capacity to shock and disgust any normal human being. But not, it seemed, Galen Cheney.
“Isaac?” Christie asked. Cheney’s younger surviving son was a moody, silent boy. He was clumsy of movement and relatively slow of thought and never looked one in the eye. Christie had wondered if he was retarded the first time he had met him. “You made Isaac watch the rape of that poor woman?”
Galen Cheney’s eyes narrowed.
“It was God’s will.”
Dwight Christie sucked in a long, deep breath.
“That may be the case,” he observed acidly, folding his arms across his chest. “The problem is that when a young housewife is raped and murdered and her infant children bludgeoned to death it tends to engender a law and order shit storm of epic proportions that we really, really don’t need!”
The older man shrugged and put down the barrel of his disassembled revolver. He said nothing.
“Sooner or later,” Christie continued patiently, “some cop or some G-man somewhere is going to connect, for example, what happened to the Drinkwaters in Colorado Springs with what happened to Marina Oswald in Forth Worth, and when that happens the Secret Service and the FBI will throw everything they’ve got at figuring out why some idiot in Dallas was taking pot shots at an armoured Presidential limousine. And then they’ll start talking to everybody who stepped foot in Dealey Plaza in the month before the shooting. Before we know it some passerby will start talking to them about this tall guy walking around the place with this weird little guy, and hey presto, the Feds have suddenly got a line into what’s left of the resistance in Texas and the South West!”
“They aren’t about to make that connection, son.”
“I’m not one of your fucking sons!”
“Just a figure of speech.”
Christie dropped onto the opposite end of the bench and gave Cheney an exasperated look.
“Look, Galen. There aren’t enough of us left to take risks we don’t have to take. What we think of as ‘the resistance’ is gone, and we’re all that’s left. Us and a few people like us scattered around the country and out of contact with each other. The Federal Government has started relocating to Philadelphia to allow the rebuilding of Washington to begin. The President has reversed all the cuts to the military; straight away all the disaffected veterans who had a beef with the Administration have melted away. The Federal Government has purged State National Guard units and a whole raft of Pentagon staffers.”
Galen Cheney frowned.
“So what are you saying? We should give in?”
“No. Although, that would be the easiest thing to do.” Christie met the older man’s flinty gaze. “No, what I’m talking about is doing something much harder. I’m talking about starting over. Making a new beginning. I’m talking about building our own resistance; building our own networks, raising our own secret militias. The resistance must go on.”
Galen Cheney raised an eyebrow and for an instant there might have been a flicker of ironic amusement in his agate hard grey-blue eyes.
“Only goes to show,” he sighed. “I thought you’d come here to plug me with that forty-five in your belt.”
“I might still,” Christie murmured.
The older man shrugged.
“Maybe,” he agreed as if living or dying was a matter of no significance to him. “Stay awhile and we’ll talk some more about resistance.”
Chapter 53
Tuesday 28th January 1964
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
In a more enlightened age and in a more rational country than most Americans actually lived in, there would have been no need for subterfuge, secrecy and a battalion of lies with which to ensure, if necessary, a corpus of plausible deniability in the event that the coming encounter went wrong.
The handsome thirty-five year old Georgian knew this as he stepped down from the US Air Force Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King, took a moment to compose himself and then moved forward to shake the hand of the President of the United States of America. Despite his recent meetings with the Commander-in-Chief’s younger brother, Bobby, he had travelled to Maryland with mixed feelings and – despite being a generally optimistic man – relatively low expectations. The man standing before him was the man who had already given the World ample notice of the fact that if it came to it he was prepared to smite his enemies with very nearly God-like righteous violence; while he, a humble guest at this Presidential sepulchre in the Catoctin Mountains dedicated to the class – pretty much exclusively comprising the privileged white Ivy League sons of the captains of American commerce and industry – who ruled his country, believed that non-violence was the last best hope for humanity. Moreover, the man now stretching out his hand in apparently sincere friendship was the same man whose arbitrary diktat had, to all intents, forbidden the Southern Civil Rights Movement to march on Washington DC last summer.
On the bright side the fact that the President was a scion of the Catholic Irish aristocracy of the East Coast and he was a Southern Baptist was no impediment to dialogue and co-operation. As a man of God it was a given that he respected and defended another man’s right to believe what he wanted and to worship in whatsoever manner he pleased, Unfortunately, in the big picture of things, this was small comfort. Two months ago there had been an armed insurrection against the government; half of the District of Columbia had been burned to the ground and thousands of people killed and maimed. Already Southern Democrats like George Wallace, the rambunctiously racist Governor of Alabama, was claiming that the ‘rebellion’ was some kind of reaction to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. In Alabama and elsewhere in the South the Kennedy Administration’s kind words and the President’s scatter gun executive orders seeking to bypass a House of Representatives seemingly indifferent to the plight of people of color, had as yet barely scratched the wicked blight of segregation.
With the exception of a handful of well publicised events like the ‘stand in the schoo
lhouse door’ incident in which Governor George Wallace had ‘stood’ in front of the door of the Foster Auditorium of the University of Alabama; ostensibly to prevent the desegregation of that institution by the enrolment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood and been confronted by Deputy United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Federal Marshalls and a detachment of men from the Alabama State National Guard, the Cuban Missiles War had put the whole question of Civil Rights on the back burner of national politics.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy had had the guts to take on and defeat the Red Menace; thus far it seemed to the man making his first visit to the Presidential retreat, that for all his fine words his President had done virtually nothing to remove the chains of oppression from his people.
“Welcome to Camp David, Dr King,” the President said, smiling sternly.
The two men looked each other in the eye and oddly, it was only then that they both realized how poignant, not to say piquant, and potentially earth-shaking this moment might be. They were different kinds of men from backgrounds which could hardly have been more unalike; the one tormented by the October War and rocked to the core by the recent trauma of Battle of Washington, the other stabbed by doubts as to his worthiness and fitness to lead his people towards some better, half-promised land in which the color of a man’s skin was never again assumed to be the badge of his character or his rightful standing in the land of his birth.
Martin Luther King had not expected the President’s grip to be so dry or firm, nor had he anticipated the steely resolve in the man’s green eyes. Although he enjoyed increasingly warm and frank relations with the President’s younger brother, Jack Kennedy had remained a closed book to his guest. The Kennedy brothers had come late to the ‘party’ in addressing the civil rights agenda. Likewise, they had been slow to disentangle themselves from the nonsensical ‘un-American activities’ inquisitions of the previous decade. Worse, when he ran for the White House JFK had been at pains not to risk completely alienating the segregationist South Democrat wing of the broad, unholy church that was the modern Democratic Party. The Baptist preacher from Atlanta would have held this against his President had he not already been a man well versed in the realities of practical, everyday politics. If Kennedy had lost all of the South to Richard Nixon in November 1960 he would never have won the White House; and nobody in Georgia or anywhere else in the South imagined a Nixon Presidency would have been good news for people of color. This being the case for the moment he would give Jack Kennedy the benefit of the doubt; in politics expediency, not necessity was the mother of invention.