by James Philip
History would recollect – most likely – that in late October 1962 the United States of America had won a crushing, annihilating victory over the Soviet Union, and in many respects ‘history’ would be right. However, all subsequent studies would probably show that the victory ought to have been even more total, and that many fewer Americans ought to have died. The Administration and the Pentagon had known this immediately after the October War; and ever since then the search had been on for enemies within; the traitors who had so obviously sabotaged the American war machine. The secret witch hunt was the greatest, most closely guarded secret of the age and known only to a few men. The recent death of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor – his aircraft having disappeared without a trace mid-way between Honolulu and San Diego returning from a tour of inspection in the Far East – had done little to assuage the growing conviction among the small, self-selected group of senior officers in the Navy and the Air Force that something was very rotten at the heart of the Republic. What had happened over the weekend up in Washington State left an especially bad taste in the mouth; not least because it was a gruesome warning of how easily the Union might soon start to fray and splinter.
However, for the moment Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite put his brooding premonitions to one side.
“How badly do you want to command your own boat by the time you are thirty-five, Lieutenant?”
The younger man took this in his stride.
“Very badly, sir.”
“Right now you are a two-ring hopeful with your nose just ahead of the pack, Brenckmann,” Jackson Braithwaite informed him, his gaze locked on the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s Torpedo Officer’s face. “Every commanding officer you have served under has given you A-One ratings and the last two have recommended you for Command School. I have endorsed your current Skipper’s assessment that you are qualified to advance one rank. Your promotion to Lieutenant-Commander will take effect when you report to your next duty station. On return from leave on January sixth you will report to CINCSUB at Groton to receive your interim assignment prior to joining Command Course Six-Four in March.” COMSUBRON Fifteen gave this a few seconds to sink in. “Do you have any questions?”
Lieutenant Brenckmann had not had any questions.
Braithwaite had relaxed a fraction, risen to his feet and shaken the younger man’s hand, dismissing him shortly thereafter with a stern smile.
In no part of the United States Navy was the sanctity and, for want of a better word, ‘loyalty’, to the chain of command more critical than in the two squadrons of Polaris missile boats. Once an SSBN put to sea it was effectively ‘out of control’ of the land, operating on a pre-determined set of orders – or variations on those orders – with the firing codes and targeting co-ordinates for its sixteen Polaris A1 or A2 submarine launched ballistic missiles pre-programmed. Security onboard a Polaris SSBN at sea was so tight that only half-a-dozen men in any given crew actually knew where the boat had gone during its time on patrol. Standard operating practice was that once a boat cast off on a ‘deterrent patrol’ it did not contact base again until shortly before it returned to port. Once at sea an SSBN ran quietly, listened and waited, lurking in its pre-assigned patrol ‘box’ for the call nobody in their right mind wanted to hear.
Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite shuddered inwardly every time he thought about the long, deadly dark shape of the USS Sam Houston moored alongside the seaward flank of the tender USS Hunley out in San Francisco Bay. Her captain had broken the cardinal rule, broken radio silence and queried the sealed orders he had been directed not to open until he was two days out into the Pacific.
SSBN SIX-ZERO-NINER FOR COMSUBRON ONE-FIVER-ZERO STOP RESPECTFULLY REQUEST CONFIRMATION PATROL AREA THREE-ONE SOUTH ONE-FIVE-NINER EAST MESSAGE ENDS.
The USS Sam Houston had been ordered to operate in a patrol area of approximately two thousand square miles centred on Lord Howe Island, a sparsely populated volcanic outcrop some three hundred and seventy miles east of Port Macquarie. This was insane on so many counts that COMSUBRON Fifteen hardly knew where to begin to quantify the magnitude of the obvious insanity of the orders which had somehow got into the hands of one of his captains!
Port Macquarie was a small town on the coast of New South Wales located at the mouth of the Hastings River some two hundred and forty miles north of Sydney, and some three hundred and fifty miles south of Brisbane, the capital of the Australian State of Queensland. Operating from the vicinity of the Lord Howe group of islands the Australian cities of Melbourne and Adelaide, respectively the capitals of the States of Victoria and South Australia, as well as the Australian capital, Canberra would all be several hundred miles within the maximum range envelope of the USS Sam Houston’s sixteen UGM-27 Polaris A2 submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missiles each tipped with a W-58 warhead with a designed explosive yield equivalent to over of over one million tons of TNT.
In the aftermath of the October War the Australian Government had been appalled by the destruction of Cuba and the ‘holocaust’ of the ‘nuclear exchange’ with the USSR; subsequently, bi-lateral diplomatic relations had initially been frosty, and then positively frigid after the United States had refused to prioritise post-war aide to ‘the old country’, the United Kingdom. In recent months the Australians had curtailed exports of uranium and a long list of other rare earth metals essential for the US’s huge computer and electronics industries, and begun to regulate – ration might be a more accurate term – the supply, and hugely increase the price of bulk ores it still permitted to be transhipped to North America. Moreover, all Australasian military cooperation with US Armed Forces had ceased some months ago after the Seventh Fleet had attempted to ‘intimidate’ a Royal Navy squadron in international waters off Borneo. To emphasise the Australian Government’s continuing displeasure with Washington, it had made a huge public song and dance about Australian frigates and destroyers operating alongside elements of the former British Pacific Fleet escorting the later Operation Manna convoys east across the Southern Ocean to Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands beyond.
But Australia was hardly an enemy!
And even if Australia entertained hostile intentions towards the United States it was in absolutely no position to do anything about it.
Yet the USS Sam Houston had been tasked to patrol an area over five thousand miles distant from its nearest remotely legitimate ‘war target’, whatever was left of Vladivostok in the far east of the Soviet Union. Vladivostok was approximately four thousand miles beyond the effective range of a UGM-27 Polaris A2 submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missile fired from anywhere within the designated patrol box around Lord Howe Island.
Jackson Braithwaite had recalled the USS Sam Houston, cooking up the story about the boat having grounded and therefore, automatically needing to be dry docked before resuming normal operations. Yesterday, his missile technicians had confirmed that eleven of the sixteen A2s in the boat’s silos had been programmed to hit Australian cities; two each on Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, and one on the New South Wales coal mining port of Newcastle.
The USS Sam Houston’s crew of ten officers and one hundred men were presently quarantined on their boat, while provisional contingency arrangements were made on land to ‘contain’ them ashore. What terrified COMSUBRON Fifteen most was the knowledge that no one man in the chain of command could have issued those targeting orders, or tasked one of his SSBNs to patrol that far south. SUBRON Fifteen mainly operated in the waters of the Bering Sea in the far north of the Pacific Ocean, in the Sea of Japan or in the Sea of Okhotsk. Other than in rare transits to the Indian Ocean his boats never passed south of the Equator. The patrol orders and targeting co-ordinates for the USS Sam Houston’s missiles must have passed through half-a-dozen pairs of hands, checked and authorised at each stage and rubber-stamped by, if not scrutinised by the operations staff of Braithwaite’s own operational superior, COMSUBPAC, the Commander, S
ubmarine Force, Pacific Fleet. In that chain of command Braithwaite was, de facto, the man responsible for the final ‘sign off’ of the sealed orders issued to each submarine’s captain twenty-four hours before departure from port.
However, he had not seen, let alone authorised the document that the commanding officer of the USS Sam Houston had handed him four days ago.
There had to be a traitor on his own staff!
Somewhere, here at Alameda!
The logic of the situation was as chilling as it was unavoidable and the premature return of the USS Sam Houston had inevitably alerted the traitor that his, or her, subversion of the chain of command had been identified. Nevertheless, if Braithwaite officially sounded the hue and cry it was likely to result in either the traitor going to ground or his becoming a laughing stock. The story about the SSBN grounding would wear thin soon but he could hardly squawk his alarm via normal channels to the Navy Department, or anybody else, without risking being accused of crying wolf or of being undermined by the very people who had conspired to subvert the USS Sam Houston’s patrol orders in the first place. A lesser man would have been paralysed on the horns of his dilemma. Not COMSUBRON Fifteen. He had decided that this thing had to swim back up the chain of command via secure back channels; via men and women he had known for years and whom he trusted with his life. He chaffed that it would be another twenty-four hours before the alarm bells rang in DC; but there was nothing he could do about that. He had set the hare running now all he could do was wait; meticulously maintaining the pretence that nothing was amiss. To support this fiction it was vital that he carried on as normal.
Collecting his cap he went out into his flag lieutenant’s office. The youthful officer leapt to his feet, the two uniformed female secretaries half-rose with a more dignified deference before their boss waved them down.
“I’m meeting my wife for lunch at the Club. You have the Club Secretary’s number if you need to get hold of me. I will be back on the base for my sixteen-thirty hours staff meeting. Tell the departmental chiefs in advance to keep it short and sweet.” He chuckled and shook his head. “My wife has relations flying in from Colorado this afternoon and my presence for cocktails at seven on the dot is required!”
“Yes, sir!” Braithwaite’s flag lieutenant acknowledged keenly.
There were spits of rain in the grey air as COMSUBRON Fifteen bustled out of the Headquarters Building – a long, low World War II vintage structure inherited from the adjacent Naval Air Station – and stepped into the back seat of the waiting gleaming black Navy Chrysler. Braithwaite registered that his driver today was not his customary chauffeur.
“What’s happened to Seaman Perez?” He inquired gruffly, his tone genuinely affable.
The immaculately uniformed Man behind the wheel did not turn his head.
“They told me he ate something that didn’t agree with him, sir.”
“Poor man.” The passenger stared out of the window as the car gently traversed the wide open spaces of the airfield making for the roads funnelling down to the crossing to the mainland. “What’s your name?”
“Grant, sir. Petty Officer Third class. I was in the depot office and it was on the board that you required a car to transport you to the Sequoyah Country Club, sir.”
Jackson Braithwaite lit a cigarette, a Camel, and allowed a little of his existential angst to leak out through the pores of his skin. The car rumbled over the bridge to Oakland. It was not an overlong drive to the club as his wife, Dolores, called the Sequoyah Country and Golf Club. He and Dolores had both been in their late thirties when they met. She was a golfer, an outdoor, party-going sort of woman; he was workaholic, constantly being posted away from home, utterly immersed in the Navy and its politics, and a very reluctant socialite but they had been happily married for nearly fifteen years for the simple reason that they allowed each other to live their own lives. Where those lives touched was where they lived their married life, mostly with no little bliss. There were no children, of course, and counter intuitively that probably contributed a great deal to their middle-aged contentment. Dolores’s father had left her a fat trust fund, which although somewhat diminished by her self-confessed profligacy and the recession caused by the October War, still enabled the couple – bolstered by Jackson’s not insubstantial Admiral’s stipend - to continue to bump along in the style to which they had become accustomed regardless of the appalling state of the World.
Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite sighed, took another long drag on his cigarette. His wife had scheduled a round of golf with a girlfriend that morning; she would either be in an ecstatic or distracted mood over lunch. Such was the cross every golfer’s spouse bore.
Petty Officer Third Class Grant’s hair needed a trim, he decided.
However, for the rest of the drive across Oakland he looked forward to a rare lunch with his witty, vivacious wife. Hopefully, a suitable moment would, serendipitously, present itself and he could break the news that he was planning to spend a few days in Washington DC.
How would you feel about fending for yourself in New York for a couple of days, darling? Spending some time in Bloomingdales, perhaps? I’ll be stuck in unbelievably tedious meetings all day every day; you know what the Navy Department and the people at the Pentagon are like...
Chapter 10
Monday 25th November 1963
Sequoyah Country Club, Oakland, California
Ben and Margaret Sullivan were already at their table in the clubhouse when Harvey and Molly Fleischer arrived at the Sequoyah Country Club. The two couples greeted each other like long lost siblings, for in most of the ways that counted their personal and business relationships were as close, if not much closer than the ties that bound most mere brothers and sisters. Not only were their shared financial, property and political connections of the most intimate type, all four parties to the partnership which dated back to the bad old days of the 1930s, liked – perhaps, ‘loved’ better reflected the depth of their mutual respect, friendship and loyalty – each other and were utterly at ease, one with the others.
Strangers glancing at the two couples as they hugged, shook hands, slapped backs, and exchanged kisses of greeting often made the mistake of noting how superficially unalike the couples were. Ben and Margaret Sullivan were aging movie stars, svelte, tanned and still lean, always on show, perfectly groomed, always ready to play their parts in life’s dramas large and small; Harvey and Molly Fleischer were large and clumsy by comparison with none of the ‘gentrified’ airs and graces of the Sullivans, or for that matter any of their dress sense, or their effortless charm and indefatigable joie de vivre. But that was to miss the main thing; the underlying strength of their partnership had always been that each person brought something unique to the party.
“There was a really bad tailback on Sequoyah Road,” Molly Fleischer explained, although she knew her apology was unnecessary. “That’s why we are so late. There were cops everywhere and the traffic was down to one lane...”
The couples continued to arrange themselves around the big table in the window with an unobstructed view down the eighteenth hole of the rolling woodland golf course which had hosted the Oakland Open between 1938 and 1944, in which stars like Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson had paraded their inestimable talents.
“There was a shooting,” Margaret Sullivan declared. “One wonders what things are coming to when that sort of things spreads to the country.” Margaret was just sixty – but looked fifty from most angles – and retained the poise and deportment inculcated into her at a series of expensive and very exclusive New England finishing schools as a teenage girl in the early 1920s. On screen her beauty had always been of the timeless, fairy tale sort. Her acting career had eventually become a long sequence of roles as statuesque gangster molls, or haughty out of place and time grand ladies in rag tag westerns, or at the head of a cast of tens or scores of women in long period piece frocks. She had once yearned to fill great dramatic roles but by the time silent mov
ies had given way to the talkies she was already into her thirties, and her voice did not quite have the sultry sexuality of a Bacall, or the stridency of a Hepburn and besides, like Ben, her English future husband, she was trussed head to foot in a disastrously bad studio contract. Vermont-born her accent still retained a mid-Atlantic, occasionally Canadian twang.
Her husband cleared his throat.
“I had our car stop so I could ask a cop what was going on. Dreadful business,” he shrugged. “The victims were a Navy man and his wife. Apparently, they were both members here!”
Harvey and Molly Fleischer became wide-eyed with concern.
One unforeseen consequence of the October War was that many wealthy New England families had come out to the West Coast, giving the top end of the real estate market a welcome boost and providing a much needed fillip to the golf and country clubs of the Bay Area. The Sequoyah Country Club, an exclusive privately owned, member-only golf and country club had been an early beneficiary of the influx of new money.
“That’s terrible!” Molly Fleischer bemoaned. She and her husband were infrequent visitors to the club. They usually only visited when they had friends staying over from out of state, or when Ben and Margaret came up from Los Angeles on business.
The Sullivans and the Fleischers had bought into the Sequoyah Country Club at the bottom of the market just after the 1945 war, one of a string of similarly astute investments Harvey Fleischer had recommended in the Bay Area at that time. Ben and Margaret Sullivan practically lived at the club when they were in San Francisco; Ben still played of a six or seven handicap and the idyllic, forested oasis on the fringes of Oakland was an ideal venue for social reunions or to meet and to entertain other potential ‘investors’.