by James Philip
She had cried when he had gone with her. Later she had sobbed and turned her back on him; he had taken her from behind, anyway. She had stopped crying after that and he had felt dirty. Sarah Jane was pretty, maybe twelve or thirteen, the same age as his dead sister Hannah. Although Hannah would be older now, of course. He ought to have let Sarah Jane alone after he had defiled her that second time but she had smelled so good and she had been so, well, helpless, that he had rolled her onto her back and despoiled her one last time as she lay, unmoving, coldly oblivious beneath his flailing loins. He would not have hit her so hard if she had not been such a whore...
Isaac gathered up every scrap of courage.
“Are we doing God’s work in Atlanta, Pa?”
“Men like us are always doing God’s work, son.”
Isaac Cheney smiled, inwardly warmed by his father’s reassuring words but he still wondered what awaited them in Atlanta. He recollected that Atlanta was from where that murdering godforsaken criminal Sherman had marched through Georgia. History was not really Isaac’s thing; he did not have the memory for it, all those fact and figures, places and people! People were trouble, that much he had learned in his twenty some years. His sisters had made fun of him, his Ma had treated him like he was a retard or something, only his Pa had understood, only Pa seen his world through his eyes and understood. One day Pa had stood at the school gate and after that none of the other kids ever made fun of him, the gangs left him alone, nobody talked to him and that had suited him just fine. The teachers had stopped giving him work to take home, never asked him to read aloud again in class; it was around then he had picked a fight with two kids because he thought he could but his Ma had chased him out of the house with a stick when he got home, so he had never done that again.
Isaac had hated leaving home without shaking his Mickey’s hand. Mickey had always looked after him when Pa was not around, Mickey understood him too, just not in the way Pa did.
When he was packing up the Dodge, Mickey had given him that look.
‘You don’t even know what you’ve done wrong,’ he had muttered accusingly.
‘I just done what Pa told me to do, Mickey...’
The protest had fallen on cruelly deaf ears.
It was not as if Mickey had not done bad things when they had been up in Bellingham. He had shot men, gone with women in the beginning before everything went crazy.
Trophy sniper.
That was what the guys in charge in Bellingham had called Isaac.
Mickey had been his spotter; he had drawn the bead, the long rifle rock steady in his nerveless hands and a mile away another spy, or trespasser, or mountain goat or deer had gone down.
Looking back those first three months in Bellingham had been the happiest days of his life. It had been him and Mickey together, out in the woods most of the time, stalking, waiting, and killing.
‘You’ve gone with lots of girls!’ Isaac had retorted, thinking his argument perfectly unanswerable.
‘I’ve never been with a woman who didn’t want to go with me!’ Mickey had snapped back instantly with a speed and venom that had disorientated the younger brother, much as if a stinging right cross had slammed into the flat of his jaw. ‘I’ve never gone with a child!’
Isaac had been utterly lost.
Woman, child, girl?
What did that have to do with anything?
The last he had seen of his brother was Mickey’s back as he stomped away shaking his head.
“Mickey said I did wrong with Sarah Jane, Pa?” He voiced before he could stop himself.
Galen Cheney put down his cup.
“Woman was made of Adam’s rib,” he sniffed. He viewed his son with agate hard eyes for several seconds. “Woman must submit to Man’s dominion, boy. That is the way of things. Remember Genesis. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them and said unto them be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over every living thing that moveth over the earth!”
No, Isaac remembered none of that.
“A man is not a man,” his father declared as if reading from holy writ carved into the living rock of the tablets in his hand, “until he has impregnated his seed into a woman. Procreation is our sacred duty to God.”
“Sarah Jane cried, Pa?”
Galen Cheney guffawed and shook his head.
“Women cry a lot, son.”
Chapter 58
Tuesday 28th January 1964
Community Meeting Hall, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania
Lyndon Baines Johnson honestly did not know if the pact he had made with his President in the darkest hours of the Battle of Washington was worth a mess of beans. He had not walked away from their solemn handshake with overly high expectations; anticipating being shot down by the Kennedy camp’s Irish Mafia sooner rather than later. Basically, he had been playing things day by day. But then Kenny O’Donnell, the ultimate Kennedy insider had stood down and his own man, Marvin Watson had been endorsed as his replacement as White House Appointment Secretary, the President’s de facto Chief of Staff. Suddenly, the raucous voices of the Boston and Chicago factions were being drowned out by, well, reason at last and as he stepped on more and more toes and ruffled more and more feathers, nobody close to the President had so much as raised a finger to stop him let alone said ‘boo’ to a passing goose.
The last few weeks had reminded the Vice-President that he had once been the ring master of the Senate. Apart from the fact that there was an election in November that he did not believe any Democrat could possibly win; he was a man back in his natural element at the heart of the Administration.
The President had gone back to doing what he did best: being John Fitzgerald Kennedy, dragging Jackie around the Union as if he had made up his mind to run again in November. Back in the District of Columbia Bob McNamara was planning the reconstruction of the Capitol and the long-term reshaping of the US military machine. Here in Philadelphia Lyndon Baines Johnson called the shots.
The President had asked him to oversee the removal of the House of Representatives and the Federal Government to Philadelphia, and to turn his mind to the great national reconstruction which ought to have been the Administrations number one priority this time last year.
Better late than never.
The man who had been the most influential American after Eisenhower in the late 1950s had known better than to simply sign up to this ‘new deal’ within the Administration. Big projects simply were not doable in the US system without command of the necessary ‘levers’. Levers for example, like the Moon Project which far too many people who really ought to have known better still regarded as theatre rather than a sensible way to expend huge amounts of federal dollars. Exactly the same people whose support LBJ most needed to overcome and to over-ride Congressional and Senatorial inertia, and to redirect substantial commercial and industrial assets to the massive reconstruction schemes for bomb-ravaged Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo, South Boston and Houston, were exactly the same people who also badly wanted a piece of other big projects like the Moon Program which he had firmly secured in his back pocket. Politics was about leverage and nobody ever got anything worthwhile done if he was not prepared to get his hands dirty.
Lyndon Baines Johnson had always accepted this precept because he had actually gone into politics to change things for the better. Standing next to the Kennedy brothers he cut a weathered, grizzled figure, a man whose time had come and all but gone by the time he was sworn in as Vice-President. Few people suspected that his was the one practical political mind within the Administration actually focused on the dark underbelly of the American dream; the poverty and the bigotry which blighted great swathes of the south and the industrial cities of the north, the abomination of the anti-Diluvium Jim Crow Laws and the taint of sleaze which seemed to afflict every level of government. While it was true that in the idle sinecure of the Vice-Presidency
he had had a lot of time to think about such things, it had troubled him for many years that despite the unprecedented post-war boom of the late 1940s and the 1950s, prosperity had singularly failed to reach, or ‘trickle down’ to so many Americans.
That in the modern age the most scientifically advanced and economically successful country on the planet had no safety net for its old, its sick and its unemployed was a national disgrace. Why was it that in the land of the free anybody who talked about the government taking responsibility – any responsibility at all – for the health and wellbeing of poor Americans was ridiculed as a closet socialist? Now more than ever there was much great work to be done; and yes, if he had to get his hands dirty in righting those wrongs that were within his power to right, so be it.
In December Jack Kennedy had told him he did not intend to stand for re-election. That was pure baloney and he had told the younger man as much. It was inconceivable that JFK’s name would not be listed on the ballot when the New Hampshire Primary came around in less than six weeks time...
Johnson realized he had been woolgathering.
“Tell me about the status of the Atlantic Fleet again?” He asked, sitting back in his chair.
The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral David Lamar McDonald stirred. He guessed that the Vice-President had been taking a brief time out from the conference’s deliberations ahead of confronting the most problematic item on the agenda. He took a moment to organise his thoughts and replayed a conversation he had had with Johnson a week ago in his rooms at City Hall.
There had been ten fleet carriers in service at the time of the October War including five of the eight huge modern Kitty Hawk and Constellation Class ships. In addition, the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise had just finished working up and was about to join the fleet. The arbitrary ‘peace dividend’ mothballing of over two-thirds of the surface fleet had left the Navy with three operational carrier battle groups. The Kitty Hawk was not likely to be fit for sea again for at least two months; the Independence was currently in the Indian Ocean heading home for a six month refit; and the Enterprise was working up in the North Atlantic - assimilating a new command team subsequent to the summary removal of her previous flag officer, most of his staff and several key members of the nuclear-powered carrier’s operations team – in the aftermath of the ‘Dreadnought Incident’ in which aircraft flying off the nuclear powered carrier had attacked the British submarine and ended up accidentally sinking the USS Scorpion.
The reactivation of other recently mothballed major surface assets had not started; nor would it for some weeks and none of the other de-commissioned big carriers could be returned to service before the autumn at the earliest. The only part of the fleet which had not been completely hamstrung by the ‘Peace Dividend’ exercise was the Submarine Division. It had got away with mothballing all its conventional, old-fashioned diesel-electric boats, halting the ballistic missile submarine building program, and by making superficial adjustments to the scheduled rate at which it was building the next generation of nuclear-powered hunter killers.
‘We can send the Enterprise and her escorts to the Mediterranean,’ the Chief of Naval Operations had stated unequivocally. However, he had immediately added an important caveat. ‘Enterprise is not fully combat ready. Her command team has not had time to bed in and most of her original air group was rotated after the events of last month.’
‘Can she fight?’ The Vice-President had inquired.
‘Yes, sir. She can fight.’
‘What else can we send?’
‘Three, maybe four SSNs can be warned for departure or diverted to the Mediterranean in the next forty-eight hours.’ McDonald was not a man who went in for hand wringing. ‘As to the surface fleet,’ he had informed the Vice-President, ‘the way so many ships were taken out of service and so many key personnel were sent ashore in so short a period has damaged the esprit de corps of the whole service, sir. That’s going to make it hard to reverse the cutback programs still in effect. Before we can get parts of the Fleet back to sea we need to stop the ongoing mothballing. Another issue is that a lot of officers have resigned their commissions. Some by way of a protest, I suppose. But others because they are afraid they’ll get caught in the FBI’s dragnet. If you want the Navy back at sea as fast as possible somebody is going to have to call off the witch hunt. Either way, we’re eighteen months to two years away from restoring the Fleet to its pre-war fighting strength.’
McDonald did not think that the Vice-President had forgotten a single word of that week old conversation, notwithstanding, he paraphrased it anew.
“The leading elements of the Enterprise Battle Group are preparing to sail as we speak, sir.”
Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had listened to the statements of policy and the reports of the Chiefs of Staff of the Air Force, the Army, the Navy and of the Marine Corps with quiet interest. Around this table Curtis LeMay, now elevated to the Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee still spoke for the Air Force, General Harold ‘Johnny’ Johnson for the Army, Admiral McDonald for the Navy and General David Shoup for the Marines, and Dempsey as a jumped up National Guardsman whose substantive rank in the US Army Reserve was that of a lowly lieutenant-colonel, had adopted the approach of only speaking when he was spoken to up until now.
“Chicago,” Lyndon Johnson grunted. “Something has to be done about Chicago.”
Suddenly everybody was looking at Dempsey as if he was the answer to their prayers. The greying veteran tank commander had spent the last few days looking at the aerial photographs, reading the situation reports and talking to officers and men who had spent time on the front line in the shattered Windy City.
He was tempted to tell his exalted audience that he was having a little trouble believing that they could have completely mishandled the situation quite so badly. He would have but for the caveat that most of the senior officers who had served on the line in Chicago reported that they had had their hands tied behind their back by ‘the President’s people in South Chicago’.
“Forgive me, sir,” he said instead. “It is my assumption that I am here because of Bellingham, the operations my people back on the West Coast are conducting against enclaves in the countryside and the work you asked me to undertake at Camp Benedict Arnold?”
Nobody interrupted him.
“Respectfully, none of that has any bearing on the situation as it exists in Chicago,” he explained. “Bellingham style tactics would turn what’s left of Chicago into the Stalingrad of the Great Lakes. The employment of military force – probably military force of an order several times that which has already been applied to the, er, problem – is a given in any viable solution but all the plans I have seen would, frankly, result in a Chicagograd disaster in which tens or scores of thousands of non-combatants would be killed.”
“What would you do if you were in charge, Dempsey?” Curtis LeMay demanded brusquely.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know?” Marine Corps Commandant General David Shoup queried, a little surprised.
Dempsey turned to him.
“In my opinion the late General Taylor’s plan involving a partial blockage of areas of the city, attempts to negotiate local cease fires and surrenders and relatively small scale offensive actions at need, was a rational and proportionate response to the situation as it pertained in the late summer of last year, sir. However, I believe – as I am sure General Taylor would agree was he here today in this room – that the time for that plan has now passed. The situation on the ground has changed for the worse and a lot of people will have died in the winter weather the last couple of months.”
General Maxwell Taylor and several of his most senior staffers had died in an air crash coming back from a tour of inspection of US Forces in South Korea, Japan and Hawaii in October. But for the qualified support of the former commander of the 101st Airborne Division and veteran of the Normandy Invasion, the Kennedy Administration could never ha
ve gone ahead with the ‘peace dividend’ cuts; for no other man could have held the disparate, disgusted US Defense establishment in check in the face of such intolerable provocation. Every man around this table had been shocked and a little lost when the news of Taylor’s disappearance over the Pacific had filtered through the grapevine. It was only when Curtis LeMay, a very different man but of equally formidable presence had emerged from the chaos of the Battle of Washington as the only man the President could appoint to the vacant Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, that the much reduced and badly shaken US military machine had begun to re-find its mission.
General Johnny Johnson, the latest distinguished officer to attempt to fill Maxwell Taylor’s shoes as Chief of Staff of the US Army placed his hands on the table before him.
“You served with General Taylor in the Ardennes, they tell me,” he smiled thinly.
“I had that honour, sir,” Dempsey replied stiffly. “General Patton assigned me to the HQ of 101st Airborne for several weeks prior to the German offensive. I was wounded several days into the Battle of the Bulge operating in support of elements of the 101st near Bastogne.”
This produced a thoughtful quietness around the table.
“When I said I don’t know what to do about the situation in Chicago,” Dempsey remarked, his tone mirroring the briefly contemplative mood of the senior officers around him. “That is not to say that I don’t have anything to say about the matter. Specifically, I have one observation about the current tactical situation in Illinois in general, and a question that I would like to pose to the room.”
The Vice-President fulminated, but nodded for him to continue.
“The winter weather has effectively closed down operations in both the city of Chicago and in the surrounding areas of Illinois currently not under Federal control. Given the resources available to us and the impracticality of mounting major operations at this time we actually have a window in which to review our plans.”