by James Philip
California Dreaming
by James Philip
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2015. All rights reserved.
Cover Artwork concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
Author’s Note
‘California Dreaming’ is Book 2 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62 – USA.
It is November 1963 - thirteen months after the Cuban Missiles Crisis went horribly wrong. In this timeline the swinging sixties are not going to happen and the survivors, far from counting their blessings are beginning to wonder exactly what sort of World they have created.
‘California Dreaming’ is the second verse of the American story of Armageddon.
In the aftermath of the war of October 1962 the United States of America had seemed victorious; but what price victory in a World half-wrecked and in which so many old friends have died?
America has survived but has been changed forever. The fracture lines in the Union are widening and America’s time of trial, far from being over, still lies in a future fraught with what eighteen months before would have seemed like unimaginable perils.
‘California Dreaming’ is the first full-length instalment of the Timeline 10/27/62 – USA Series. Set in America it tells the Timeline 10/27/62 story through American eyes. At points in the narrative the books of this series will 'touch base' with, and offer alternative perspectives on the events in the other books set in the Timeline 10/27/62 World but each book in the USA series will stand alone. Some of the characters from ‘Aftermath’ and ‘California Dreaming’ will have appeared in earlier books set in the Timeline 10/27/62 ‘verse but many of the leading players in the USA Series – most in fact - make their first bows in the first two books of the new series.
PLEASE BE AWARE – CLIFFHANGER WARNING!
* * *
Welcome to the Timeline 10/27/62 – USA Series:
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country (Available 31st December 2016)
Book 5: The American Dream (Available in 2017)
The Timeline 10/27/62 Main Series is:
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower (Available in 2017)
* * *
To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it up in my own head. None of the fictional characters in ‘California Dreaming’ – Book 2 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Series’ - is based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events described in California Dreaming – Book 2 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Series’ - have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.
The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Series’ is an alternative history of the modern world and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in some cases their words and actions form significant and substantial parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures, would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them on or after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always say in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it up in my own head.
Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Author’s Endnote
Other Books by James Philip
California Dreaming
[Book 2 of Timeline 10/27/62 - USA]
“The war is over. We won... Or perhaps, we all lost. Either way, I will not kick a beaten enemy when he is down...”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States of America
Sunday 28th October 1962
“Kennedy. My maiden name was Kennedy. But if it’s all right with you I’ll go with Dorfmann until they’ve stopped lynching people called Kennedy at street corners.”
Judith Marian Dorfmann, Citizen of Washington State
Sunday 28th October 1962
Chapter 1
16:14 Hours Zulu
Friday 15th November 1963
USS Sam Houston (SSBN-609), 288 miles WNW of San Francisco
There was no more securely or closely guarded and monitored compartment on the Ethan Allen class Polaris missile submarine USS Sam Houston - SSBN-609 – than the ‘radio shack’. Of course, the ‘shack’ was anything but ramshackle, and the equipment crammed into every conceivable corner of the small space adjacent to the control room was so state of the art that it was likely to remained classified for decades to come.
That afternoon – already two days out from Alameda, morning, afternoon, evening, day and night had already become purely notional concepts – the senior of the boat’s two radiomen, Petty Officer 2nd Class Warren Dokes, was on duty. Dokes was a veteran twenty-one year submariner, a balding, bespectacled man who looked much older than his thirty-eight years. His service file told of a spotless, if unremarkable career that reeked of quiet competence and reliability. Absolute technical command of his specialisation was taken as read or he would never have been posted as a senior radioman on an SSBN. Dokes was unmarried, the sort of man who hung around base during periods of furlough or designated R and R; preferring to play with new kit, or to shoot the breeze with other member of the communications fraternity. The man had never registered to vote in a General Election and had not returned to his place of birth, Chattanooga, Tennessee, since being drafted into the United States Navy in September 1942. His only family was the Navy and within the Navy, his clan was the Submarine Service.
Once a Polaris boat departed harbour on a ‘deterrent cruise’ it maintained total radio silence but it listened to everything as it stealthily prowled the ocean. At scheduled intervals the boat would rise to periscope depth and skim aerials close to or just ab
ove the surface, otherwise it would trail a great long thin short-wave wire aerial astern. At sea the USS Sam Houston listened hard to every scrap of radio noise, and if the worst happened, for the nothingness that might signify that the World had come to an end.
In the October War the USS Sam Houston’s Polaris A2 missiles had fallen in and around Leningrad and Murmansk before, with nine birds flown a Soviet destroyer had driven her deep under the broken pack ice of the Barents Sea. The war had been over before she escaped. The voyage back to Norfolk, where the boat had been routinely re-armed and re-provisioned had been a miserable, numbing experience; and the equally routine rotation of the Blue crew, taking over from the Gold crew which had fought in the October War had been like a ten-day long funeral, sombrely dispiriting. As the Duke of Wellington said after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo; ‘nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ Five in every ten men in the Gold crew had been replaced since that dreadful night over a year ago but still the melancholy stalked the USS Sam Houston. How could it be otherwise? America was a nation founded on high morals – albeit sometimes poorly executed ones – and it was simply not within the American soul to take pleasure from the cataclysm.
Warren Dokes – who had transferred to the Blue Crew that summer in a service-wide expedient to ‘refresh’ jaded complements and to spread the ‘war experience gained in the recent war more evenly across the SSBN Fleet’ had been onboard the USS Sam Houston that night in the Barents Sea, and like many of the men who still served, he had buried himself in his duties as an antidote to the indefinable feeling of vague unease that dogged his waking hours like an itch he could never scratch.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Warren Dokes was scrawling notes on a pad when the door behind him opened and he sensed the presence of others in the radio shack.
He cricked his neck turning around.
Automatically, he began to rise from his chair.
“Stand easy, Warren,” Commander Troy Simms, the commanding officer of the submarine drawled.
Dokes did as he was told.
The second man who had entered the radio shack was the boat’s Master at Arms, the senior non-commissioned officer on the USS Sam Houston. Both the newcomers were wearing side arms on their right hips, forty-five automatics. Dokes was briefly disorientated; there had been no alarm, the submarine was idling through the depths with the watch at normal duty stations and all was quiet. Yet the Master at Arms had dogged the hatch shut at his back.
Troy Simms dumped his large – over-large frame for a submariner – into the chair beside Warren Dokes. The forty-two year old commander of the SSBN hailed from New London, Connecticut. His great grandfather had captained a whale ship, his grandfather and father had been Navy men through and through, and the sea ran in his family’s veins. Command of the USS Sam Houston had been, and remained the crowning pinnacle of a more than averagely accomplished career in the Navy that had started back at Annapolis in 1939. The World had changed more than once in the intervening twenty-four years and Troy Simms was horribly afraid it was about to change again. However, the one thing a man accepted when he signed up for the Submarine Service was that no matter how bad things seemed to be at the time, they could always get worse.
“I need you to send a signal to CINCSUBRON 15,” Simms explained to his senior radioman.
Warren Dokes asked himself what had happened to the Communications Officer; but refrained from asking the question aloud. The Captain was God onboard any ship; and on a submarine at sea he was God with half-a-dozen special extra godly powers.
“Aye, sir,” he acknowledged. “What coding and priority, sir?”
“PERSONAL MOST SECRET SSBN-609 TO CINCSUBRON FIFTEEN,” Troy Simms declared grimly, brandishing a slip of paper with his eight – hexadecimal – character personal code typed on it. “COMMAND CODE ALPHA.”
The senior radioman repeated this back in acknowledgement, trying very hard not to swallow so hard that he forgot to breathe.
If the Skipper wanted to send an immediate personal signal to Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite, the commanding officer of Submarine Squadron 15 based at Alameda on the Oakland side of Bay from San Francisco, it was not Warren Dokes’s job to ask him why. The fact that the Skipper was breaking not just standard operating procedures but practically every other rule in the Polaris boat operations manual was none of his business. It was not as if it was Petty Officer 2nd Class Warren Dokes’s Navy career that was about to go up in smoke.
Troy Simms unfolded a page torn from a notebook and placed it in front of the radioman.
Dokes blinked in confusion.
And then alarm.
His heart started racing and for a moment he was a little afraid he was going to faint.
His conscious mind registered the words and something of their meanings; but in those initial moments while he fought the unreasoning urge to panic, the language of the signal was pure gibberish. He looked at his commanding officer with wide, imploring eyes, desperately seeking reassurance.
Commander Troy Simms lips had formed a thin hard line. He flicked a glance at the Master of Arms, standing stone-faced above the two seated men guarding the door like the last Praetorian at the gates of Rome viewing the Vandal Horde surged down the Aurelian Way.
Troy Simms patted Dokes shoulder in paternal reassurance.
“No, Warren,” Simms said gently, “we’re not going south.”
The Commanding Officer of the USS Sam Houston might have added: “No, we’re not going to start World War IV today.” But he refrained, because although he was not about to fire the first shots of another war; somebody, somewhere evidently had other ideas...
Chapter 2
Friday 22nd November 1963
Hotel del Coronado, San Diego
The old hotel had seen better days. A lot of better days, in fact. That its latest owner, thirty-seven year old Illinois born real estate developer Larry Lawrence, had called in his entire credit tab with the California Democratic Party to drag the Governor of the State across San Diego Bay for this morning press call and whistle stop tour said it all.
Edmund Gerald ‘Pat’ Brown, the thirty-second Governor of the most populous state in the Union had cavilled at the engagement when it had appeared in his diary five days ago. He had important business in San Diego and M. Larry Lawrence, notwithstanding his rock solid Party credentials, was not the kind of Democratic supporter he needed to be seen around right now. He might have beaten off Richard Nixon’s challenge in last fall’s Gubernatorial race just after the war – mainly because Nixon had completely misread the mood of the State and bad-mouthed the President during that short-lived interlude when ninety percent of all Americans still believed that, if had not been for John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s courageous actions on the night of the war they would all be dead – but if there was a re-run tomorrow he and his Party would be wiped out so comprehensively that afterwards nobody in California would even remember that there had once been a political party called ‘The Democrats’. Pat Brown had been a little relieved when the photo shoot in front of the Hotel del Coronado had been so poorly attended.
He had only agreed to the Coronado Island ‘diversion’ forty-eight hours ago because it filled a vacant slot in that day’s appointments, in between a breakfast with the outgoing Mayor of San Diego, Charles Dail, whom he had known for many years and a Veterans Rally that afternoon. Wisely in the present political climate Dail had decided not to run for a third term, and in hindsight, Governor Brown, sometimes wished he had resigned his own post last year, or he had lost to Richard Nixon. Not that he believed for a single minute that an interloper like Richard Nixon – a man with a pragmatic, if cynical grasp of national and international affairs but with remarkably little understanding of the people or the affairs of the State in which he lived - would have managed the aftermath of the October War any better than him.
Charles Dail had cautioned his old friend not ‘to be too rough on Larry Lawrence’. Things h
ad got so bad that ‘any investment’ in the city is a ‘good investment’. In the event, despite his irritation wasting time promoting the business interests of a man whom he hardly knew, Pat Brown had actually rather enjoyed his short trip across the San Diego Bay on the Coronado Ferry. The photos taken of him on the deck of the boat would make much better press than the ones in front of the falling down old hotel, and he had enjoyed chatting amiably with several of the local hacks about the pressing need to build a bridge over the bay.
The only reason there was no bridge across San Diego Bay to the ‘island’ – actually, the hotel sat on a sandy isthmus running parallel with the mainland only accessible by ferry or a twenty mile drive south, east and then north again back up the narrow spit joining Coronado to the continental United States just north of the Mexican border – was United States Navy. The Navy was afraid that a bridge between Sand Diego and Coronado might collapse if there was a big earthquake, blocking navigation and cutting off the huge navy base located in the ‘southern’ bay from the Pacific Ocean.
The bridging of San Diego Bay was one of many big infrastructure projects that had been under weighty and very serious consideration in California before the October War. But that was then and this was now. Since the spring the Kennedy Administration had been talking up ‘the Peace Dividend’ and the massive additional funds that would eventually be made available for ‘civil projects’ by cutting back the military. The Administration was trying to sell the line that billions of dollars would be released ‘for the great task of rebuilding the bombed cities and revitalising the American economy’. It was all pure baloney from where Governor Pat Brown sat in his office in the State Capitol Building in Sacramento. From what he could tell, and from what he had heard from Washington DC insiders and business contacts, the purely ‘notional’ billions that had been allegedly ‘saved’ had thus far mostly gone in compensation to contractors whose programs had been axed, to repaying old favours, buying off special interest lobbies – including the powerful fruit and vegetable producers lobby in his own State – to bankrolling a raft of failing banks and big corporations whose overseas markets had been scourged off the face of the earth in the October War, and to underwrite the purchase of mining, drilling and commercial and industrial ‘assets’ abandoned by, or neglected by the British and other helpless European former colonial powers in sub-Saharan Africa, the far East and Australasia.