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

by James Philip

  Dan was already feeling a little guilty that he had suggested that Gretchen add her name on the list of putative defense attorneys for the as yet unscheduled ‘rebel trials’. The trouble was that Gretchen did not know how to ‘go through the motions’; and even while she was still trapped in her bed at the National Navy Medical Center at Bethesda she had got down to work.

  Dan followed Mrs Nordstrom up the steps into the house.

  Entering Oak Hill was like walking into another age. Polished boards underfoot, ancient gas light fittings now glowing with electric bulbs, big portraits in coarse oils on the walls, and the stuffed head of an Elk, was just one of a dozen mounted animal heads on the wall. In places the low oaken frames of the house might easily have brained a taller man if he stood up too quickly. A grey haired man in a blue cardigan emerged into the pool of light inside the door. He viewed Dan with his earnest curiosity.

  “Welcome again to Wethersfield, Mr Brenckmann.”

  Karl Nordstrom was some years older than his wife and more than somewhat in her shadow, seemingly a rather meek, affable man perfectly happy doing exactly what his life partner demanded of him.

  “Dan,” the younger man replied. “Please, I’d be much happier if everybody just called me Dan. Every time somebody calls me ‘Mr Brenckmann’ I start looking around looking for my Pa.” He said it with a boyishly mischievous smile. If he was going to be Claude Betancourt’s protégé and, by proxy, the great man’s personal representative on the Warren Commission into the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, anything which kept his feet well and truly grounded was to be enthusiastically embraced.

  “Dan,” the old man agreed.

  Gretchen had told Dan the Nordstrom’s story one afternoon at Bethesda. Karl had been a junior officer in the Kaiser’s Navy at the outbreak of the First World War, a Leutnant zur See on the light cruiser Breslau which in company with the battlecruiser Goeben, had fled from the British Mediterranean Fleet and sought sanctuary at Istanbul. As part of the treaty which saw Turkey enter the war on the German side both the Goeben and the Breslau had been handed over to the Turks, their crews transferring to serve under the Turkish flag for the duration of hostilities. After the war Karl – a gunnery officer – had stayed on in Turkey as the two ships were handed over to wholly Turkish crews. By the time his extended tour of duty was over Germany was in chaos, there was rioting in the streets, starvation in some cities and he, a Lutheran secular Jew had determined that – at the age of twenty-six – there was no future for him in the post-war Weimar Republic. Travelling via Denmark and England he had sailed to America in 1920. Having learned English as a naval cadet – most officers in the Kaiser’s Navy spoke English – and with many years practical engineering and ordnance experience he had had no trouble finding work; and when he had looked to find a wife soon fallen into the waiting arms of Kathleen Steinmeier, the daughter of Silesian born parents who had come to New York as children in the 1890s. Kathleen had been working as an assistant housekeeper at the Betancourt’s mansion on Brooklyn Heights; and it had happened that at the time the couple became engaged to be married, a vacancy for an accountant and steward became available within the household and the rest, as Hollywood would have its gullible adherents claim, was history. The Nordstrom’s had taken over Oak Hill, the Wethersfield ‘retreat’ as long ago as the fall of 1928.

  “Dan!” Gretchen called, slowly wheeling herself into the lobby. “You’re late!” This she declared with a severity that was of that particular variety that a woman tends to effect when she is trying, and failing – for her own indefinably feminine reasons - to conceal how inordinately pleased she is to be reunited with a man for whom she has a host of contradictory and horribly unresolved feelings. “We were expecting your hours ago!”

  The man chuckled.

  “It’s great to see you again too, Gretchen.”

  He bent down and planted a pecking kiss on her left cheek.

  Dan stayed down on his haunches so he could look the woman he loved in the eyes. Or rather, eye, because Gretchen’s damaged left eye was concealed by a pale gauze protective bandage. An eye specialist flown in from Philadelphia had operated to re-attach – or tweak, Dan was not really very clear about what had been going on just that it was the last chance to save the sight in that eye – the retina two weeks ago. It would be several weeks before they would know if the procedure had been successful.

  Gretchen’s dark hair had grown back over her scarred scalp. Her facial injuries, so obvious in the days after Dan had found her half-dead and comatose in that emergency ward at Bethesda Hospital while sporadic fighting was still going on across the District of Columbia, had healed so well that one had to look really hard to re-discover them.

  It was only what her doctors called the ‘nerve damage’ in her lower spine and her slowly knitting together left leg that kept her in the wheel chair most of the day. She was capable of moving around the house – but not negotiating steps or the stairs – on crutches but her balance was dangerously imperfect and her nurses and the Nordstroms hovered around her whenever she tried to rise from her chair. Gretchen might be in a hurry but there were some things which simply could not be hurried.

  What lifted Dan Brenckmann’s spirits was that Gretchen, although pale and drawn, and still so thin that a strong gust of wind might blow her away, was so obviously and very combatively determined to show that she was, albeit slowly, on the mend.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been out here to see you since you were discharged from Bethesda,” Dan apologised wanly as he pushed Gretchen’s chair into the front living room. He planted himself in a chair before her, studied her sympathetically. “You really do look much better.”

  “Um...”

  The man reached out and took Gretchen’s right hand.

  “Joseph called yesterday,” she declared, frowning.

  Dan’s eyes widened a fraction. Joseph Theodore van Stratten would one day inherit several blocks of Wall Street, the banks located therein and a sizable chunk of the treasure stored in their impregnable vaults. He was also Gretchen’s fiancé. That he should visit Wethersfield was entirely expected, wholly proper and ought not to have surprised him in any way.

  “Oh?” He murmured, his mood instantly depressed by mention of the obscenely rich playboy banker’s son whom the Betancourts and the van Strattens had many years ago determined would, with Gretchen, found a new East Coast dynasty.

  “It was a duty call,” Gretchen explained. “He needed to be seen to be taking an interest in the cripple.”

  “You are not any kind of cripple,” Dan protested.

  “I know that!” She snapped distractedly. “I also know that I’m not any kind of potential trophy wife anymore!”

  The man smiled; he had to smile.

  The notion that Gretchen Betancourt, the brilliant, driven, beautiful – even just out of hospital wearing a pirate’s eye patch, sitting in a wheelchair with a leg in plaster she was completely beautiful – force of nature who had addled Dan’s mind from the moment he first made eye contact with her across a crowded garden party in Quincy the summer before the war, was ever going to be any man’s trophy wife was so implausible that he had to smile!

  “What?” Gretchen demanded, perplexed. A lot of things about Dan Brenckmann perplexed her which was odd because most men were open books to her.

  “Nothing,” he chortled uneasily which further vexed her.

  “Anyway, I told Joseph that the engagement was off,” Gretchen announced, her tone quietening.

  “Okay...”

  “He wanted to get married before I was on my feet again. Probably, because that would have made him look even better. The van Strattens like to pretend they’re the Saints of Wall Street.”

  Dan did not trust himself to speak.

  “I was never his type even before,” Gretchen hesitated, “this,” she waved with her free left hand in a strange throwing away gesture.

  “This?”

  “I’m
a mess and I will be for a long time.”

  “But not forever,” he pointed out. “You got blown up, had half the Main State Department Building fall on you and then some scrum bag rebel shot you in the back,” Dan continued wryly.

  “Twice,” Gretchen agreed, forming a very un-Gretchen like coyly girlish smile on her lips for a split second.

  “Twice,” he agreed.

  “You’re going to tell me things could be worse next?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I’d hate for you to think I was that predictable.”

  “But you are,” Gretchen informed him; but not in a bad way. “In some things, leastways.”

  “Name one?” Dan challenged her, loving it that she was so playful. Very nearly flirting, in fact. Loving it that despite everything she had been through she was still Gretchen.

  “However badly I treat you, you always come back for more?”

  Dan made every pretence of giving this his weightiest consideration, furrowing his brow as if he was struggling to unravel some impenetrable metaphysical conundrum which had thus far defeated the minds of the greatest thinkers of past ages.

  “Yes,” he confessed earnestly, “I think that would be about right.”

  Chapter 61

  Sunday 2nd February 1964

  Texas City, Galveston County, Texas

  Michael Cheney watched the two columns of black cars crawling across the ruined cityscape in the pre-dawn twilight. He was lying on his belly with the binoculars jammed to his face. There was no doubt that the columns, with no vehicle showing lights, were cautiously converging on the deserted Cheney family compound approximately two miles from where he had laid up overnight. He had sent the women and girls to the old shack in the swamps down the coast; they would be safe there or at least as safe as anybody was in this Godless world.

  Dwight Christie had walked into the camp out of the darkness around midnight demanding to speak to his father. Pa and Isaac were long gone and the stranger had greeted this news with scarcely veiled contempt. In his Pa’s absence the women and the girls had come out of their sleeping quarters and started asking questions; none of them were afraid of Mickey so there was nothing he could do to stop them talking to Christie.

  ‘The FBI and the Texas Rangers will be here in a couple of hours. The women will be safe but you have to go, Mickey. NOW!’

  The women had gone away in two of the cars while Mickey had holed up at a safe distance and waited.

  Christie had ignored him when he had asked how he knew the government men were coming and the anger still burned hot. Distantly, a flare popped high in the grey sky illuminating the heart of the urban wilderness.

  There were the flashes of explosions, the delayed muffled booms of the detonations rumbling through the gloom like faraway thunder. It was a little hazy, the pre-dawn breeze often stirred up dust and grit, and he could not be sure if he was actually seeing the muzzle flashes of several automatic weapons.

  Had Christie betrayed them?

  The former G-man had been as angry as Hell over that thing in Dallas with that little guy Oswald. Oswald has been supposed to shoot out the tyres of the Presidential limousine, not try to put a round through the window. They knew the windows were over an inch of armoured, multiple-layered laminated glass; nothing short of an artillery round or a shaped charge was going to penetrate that sort of protection and an ex-Marine like Oswald ought to have known that. If the little prick had done was he was supposed to do the President’s car would have been slowed down enough for the truck the other side of the bridge to block it off or ram it. Five tons of high explosives surrounded by two hundred gallons of kerosene might actually have destroyed the President’s car. But that idiot Oswald had taken a couple of aimed shots at the back windows of the limousine even though Pa had told him what would happen if he disobeyed his orders.

  That was the trouble with traitors like Oswald.

  Any rational country would have put a turncoat like Oswald straight into the electric chair the moment he stepped back onto the hallowed soil of America after he had defected to the Soviets. People like him did not suddenly turn back into good Americans just because life in the Russia was not everything he had hoped it would be. And as for allowing him to bring his Commie wife back with him. Well, sometimes Mickey despaired of the ruling class!

  Why would Christie warn him if he had been the one who had sold the family out to the FBI?

  That made no sense at all.

  It was much more likely that Pa had got careless.

  They had a right to their faith but there was a time for preaching and there was a time for fighting, and if it came to it, killing. Mixing the two things together was a bad idea.

  Christie had wanted to know where Pa and Isaac had gone with the long guns; even if he had known Mickey would not have told him. Christie was not family and he did not share the faith, he was on a different mission. Mickey would pray for his eternal soul; otherwise, he was done with the onetime FBI special agent.

  Christie had disrespected him in front of the women folk.

  Uttered un-Christian blasphemous oaths taking Pa’s name in vain.

  He had asked if any of the women wanted to ‘leave the family’ and come with him!

  The harlot Sarah Jane would have gone with him if Mickey had not promised her that her eternal soul would burn in Hell.

  In the distance the family compound was on fire.

  Sometime soon Pa’s Greek fire ‘sump’ would light off.

  Pa had always said that if anybody ever tried to take him alive he would ‘rain flames upon their cursed heads’. He had primed the booby trap before he took Isaac away; he always primed the ‘sump’ when he departed the compound for an ‘action’.

  Mickey was a little surprised the ‘sump’ had not exploded yet.

  Pa called the ‘sump’ a ‘fuel-air bomb’ like the ones the Militias had used at the beginning of the Washington uprising. Explosives surrounded by gasoline, preferably fixed like ‘Napalm’ so when the device went off it did not just generate a huge explosion and over-blast shockwave but everything and everybody within hundreds of yards was drenched with sticky, oily impossible to beat out ‘Greek fire’ that would burn a man’s flesh down to the bone in seconds.

  From the north he detected the thrumming of rotor blades.

  He did not see the two choppers skimming south for some seconds; two Bell UH-1 Iroquois ‘Hueys’ tracking across the ruined footprint of Texas City towards the fire burning on the plain. Nearing the blazing, smoke-shrouded family compound the helicopters separated and began to quarter the ground around the circling government cars, before edging closer, ever closer to the abandoned, burning huts and vehicles left behind.

  When his father’s ‘sump’ lit off it was as if full day had broken an hour early; the flash was hurtfully dazzling and destroyed Mickey’s night vision for several seconds. The rippling, crackling, tearing sound of the explosion hit his senses. Later he watched the mushroom cloud of the detonation rising, the shockwave kicked up dust and blew it into his face like a hot wind off the desert.

  The two choppers had disappeared.

  Where the government cars had been circled there was only burning wreckage.

  Of the compound there was nothing.

  Within a hundred yards of the ‘sump’ the ground itself seemed to be on fire.

  He had no pity in his heart for the men who had perished; such were the wages of sin. Nobody said God’s work was easy. Sometimes the only real test of a man’s faith was his ability to do evil in the name of his God.

  It was time to go and Mickey levered himself to his feet, pausing to brush down his fatigues. The explosions and the fires would bring more government men sooner or later. He took one last look at the devastation on the other side of the city and with a sigh, he turned to return to the dead ground where he had camouflaged the Jeep.

  It was as he turned away from the pillar of smoke that the bullet crashed into his torso and exited his back, the passag
e of the high velocity round fired from approximately a four hundred yards away was only minimally retarded by its encounter with Michael Cheney’s leanly muscled body due to the fact that it had somehow contrived to avoid contact with any part of his skeleton on entry and had disintegrated by the time it had shredded the contents of fifty percent of his chest cavity, before exiting his back in fragments causing a three inch diameter wound fouled with the wreckage of two shattered ribs.

  All the young man actually felt was a massive hammer blow to his chest and then he was crumpling to his knees where for some seconds he lingered, unable to work out what had happened.

  One small part of his shocked and disorientated conscious mind registered that he seemed to be kneeling in a pool of blood; although he did not immediately draw the connection between the blood and gory hole in his chest, or with his dribbling, coughing and spitting gobs of cardinal red spume from his mouth. His last memory was of the vile taste of iron as he toppled helplessly face forward onto the dirt. There he lay for about a minute, staring blindly, his body sucking air in and out of his blood-filled throat and his open chest cavity; and then his world went dark forever.

  He was long dead by the time Dwight Christie cautiously approached to stand over the body. Neither he nor his companion could not afford to linger long but it paid to be sure of the kill when one was hunting a wild animal.

  “We’ll carry him over to his Jeep.”

  His companion, a much older man with an old-fashioned Mauser Karabiner 98 bolt-action rifle with a modern telescopic site slung over his right shoulder grunted.

  “Whoever taught the young idiot field craft ought to be shot,” he observed sourly as he gazed down at the carnage wrought by the big 7.92 calibre 57 millimetre round fired from his trusty souvenir of his time in France, Belgium and Germany in 1944 and 1945.

  “Like I said, his father is a religious nut,” Christie retorted wearily. “The way things are going you might well have to shoot the crazy sonofabitch one day!”