California Dreaming (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA)

by James Philip

  While Walter Brenckmann’s stunned consciousness was still trying to assimilate the implications of what he had been told, the older man went on.

  “Subsequent analysis revealed that more than half my birds had been re-targeted onto Australian cities,” Commander Troy Simms rasped disgustedly.

  “More than half?” The younger man queried, still in shock.

  “Eleven. Two onto each of Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide and one on Newcastle.”

  Walter Brenckmann was still in shock.

  Lord Howe Island!

  No SSBN had ever been tasked to go that far south on a ‘deterrent patrol’, not even in transit. The Polaris boats of SUBRON Fifteen operated in the waters of the North Pacific.

  Theoretically, the patrol orders and targeting co-ordinates for the USS Sam Houston’s missiles must have passed through many pairs of hands, authorised at each stage, rubber-stamped all the way up the line to senior COMSUBPAC staffers at Pearl Harbour. In that chain of command Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite was de facto, the man who physically signed off on the sealed orders issued to each submarine captain. However, it was inconceivable that COMSUBPAC, Rear Admiral Clarey, or COMSUBRON Fifteen, Jackson Braithwaite had ever seen, let alone authorised the USS Sam Houston’s designated patrol area or targeting orders.

  The logic of the situation was as chilling as it was compelling; there must be traitors within the Navy and the premature return of the USS Sam Houston had almost certainly alerted the traitors that their attempt to subvert the chain of command had been uncovered.

  “Why didn’t Admiral Braithwaite hit the alarm button, sir?” Walter Brenckmann asked.

  “Because he didn’t know who to trust, Lieutenant.” Troy Simms stood up, threw back his broad shoulders. “You and I are the only men in SUBRON Fifteen who know about this. Admiral Braithwaite had already sent a report via back channels to people he trusts in the Navy Department. We have no way of knowing if that report was intercepted by an unauthorised third party. It is our duty to ensure that the people who matter know about this.”

  An ignoble part – albeit a small part – of Walter Brenckmann rather wished Troy Simms had kept this secret to himself. Notwithstanding, the pressing imperative was no longer secrecy but to alert Rear Admiral Clarey, COMSUBPAC, that there had been a systemic failure of security and that it was horribly likely that the United States Navy had lost control of elements of its nuclear arsenal.

  “We have to talk to COMSUBPAC, sir.” He said, voicing the patently obvious.

  “Yes,” Troy Simms concurred. “Can you get me onboard the Roosevelt?”

  Walter did not ask the commander of the USS Sam Houston why he wanted to communicate with Rear Admiral Clarey at Pearl Harbour via his old boat’s radio room. When a skipper did not know who he could trust on his own boat the World was in a bad way.

  He reached for his desk phone.

  Commander Troy Simms gave him an interrogative look.

  “To get to the Theodore Roosevelt,” Walter explained, “we need to cross deck the USS Sam Houston, sir. I’d feel a lot happier having an armed escort waiting to meet us when we go over to the Hunley, and to have somebody I trust alerted on the Roosevelt who knows that we’re coming.” The skipper of the Gold crew of the USS Sam Houston did not shoot him down in flames. “Master Chief Petty Officer Erickson and several of Blue crew’s senior non-commissioned officers are still onboard the Hunley in training roles, sir. I’ll also speak to Lieutenant Tom Clark, my Gold crew counterpart on the Roosevelt before we board the launch out to the Hunley.”

  Troy Simms waited patiently, smoking a cigarette while Walter put through the calls to the big submarine tender, the USS Hunley, and to the USS Theodore Roosevelt. On both vessels he spoke to the Officer of the Deck.

  He invented a plausible white lie to explain his visit to both ships, not mentioning he would be in company with the Gold crew skipper of the USS Sam Houston. He explained that he had been detailed to fly east ahead of Admiral Braithwaite’s funeral to report to the Navy Department in Washington DC; and that before he departed he wanted to say goodbye to Master Chief Petty Officer Erickson, and his opposite number on the Roosevelt.

  Putting down the handset he hesitated.

  “May I ask you something, sir?” He inquired, his expression one of a man who was going to ask the question whether he was given leave to or not.

  “Yes,” Troy Simms nodded brusquely.

  “Is it your understanding that Admiral Braithwaite took it upon himself to contact the appropriate people in Washington, sir? But that he did not confide in you who he planned to communicate with?”

  Again, a nod of the head.

  “He ordered me to ensure that the USS Sam Houston was ‘locked down’. When I heard the news of his death I had no way of knowing if he had successfully communicated his fears, well, our suspicions to anybody. I waited twenty-four hours and when nothing happened, I decided that you, given your current anomalous position of unusual authority at Alameda as the master of ceremonies responsible for planning the funeral arrangements, would be in a position to assist me to make sure COMPUBPAC and the Navy Department are aware that we have a problem out here.”

  Walter Brenckmann smiled without conviction.

  If somebody was so desperate to keep this breakdown of security ‘secret’ that they would murder a Rear Admiral and his wife in broad daylight, what price his or any other man’s life?

  “If it is all the same with you, sir. I won’t thank you for your confidence in me.”

  Chapter 22

  Monday 2nd December 1963

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  “They’ve gone, dear,” Joanne Brenckmann announced cheerfully as she came back into the kitchen of the newly repaired timber-framed house next to the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Gretchen Betancourt smiled lamely. Nothing had prepared her for how awful the last few days would turn out to be. She felt utterly humiliated; a little as if she had failed the first great test of her adult life. Things had gone so badly that she had been forced to accept the protection of her alleged boyfriend’s family hundreds of miles away from Washington DC. What made it ten times worse was that Dan’s mother was possibly the sweetest, calmest person she had ever met in her life.

  Grey and slim, Dan’s fifty-eight year old mother settled opposite the younger woman at the kitchen table and picked up her neglected coffee.

  “Cheer up, Gretchen,” she suggested sympathetically. “This will all blow over, you’ll see. You’ve done exactly the right thing refusing to say a word to anybody. Your boss will know he can trust you in the future. And so will Mr Katzenbach’s colleagues. Treat this unpleasantness as an investment.”

  “You haven’t asked me if the stories are true, Mrs Brenckmann?” It irritated Gretchen that Dan’s mother had not asked her the question.

  Joanne smiled seraphically.

  “Would it make you feel any better if I did?”

  “I don’t know!” Gretchen remembered her manners. “I’m sorry; you’ve been so kind...”

  Gretchen’s host would have none of this.

  “You have absolutely nothing to apologise for,” she declared. “In a couple of days you’ll be able to go back to Washington. In the meantime it will be lovely to have your company in this old house.”

  Just every now and again a flicker of pain crossed Joanne Brenckmann’s face. She thought about her dead daughter Tabatha all the time. Time did not heal; time could not heal some wounds. Joanne had decided to carry on for the sake of her husband and her boys and because not going on, giving in, would have been to submit to the darkness. She had been a more spiritual person once and in years gone by rather liked the idea of living in the sight of a merciful God. However, plainly, there was no God, and His mercy had been a cruel illusion.

  Her husband was thousands of miles away in England, her sons were free spirits. Only Dan, her middle boy, had remained a constant in her l
ife this last year. He had helped her make the house habitable again in the spring, and tried to pick up the wreckage of his father’s law practice. Although she had guessed that there was a guiding hand in Dan’s career, somebody watching over him and doling out well-paid pieces of work; she had not guessed it was Gretchen’s father, Claude Betancourt until the old man had rung her on Saturday.

  ‘The kids have got themselves into a fix,’ the former legendary corporate litigator who had retired to oversee his old partnership in Quincy before the October War, had explained glumly. ‘Entirely innocently,’ he had added hastily. Claude and her husband had been on friendly terms for many years, for they were hardly competitors and Claude Betancourt was the sort of man who sometimes enjoyed the company of a man who was neither afraid of him or in hock to him. And besides, Walter was the most discreet of men, a thing a man like Claude Betancourt valued above all else. ‘Somebody has set a hare running with the Washington press, probably to keep the jackals at the Post from scenting a real scandal somewhere else in DC. Anyway, might I prevail upon your good offices for a small favour?’

  Joanne had been a peripatetic member of Gretchen’s stepmother’s ‘occasional’ circle in the late fifties; in those days Gretchen had always seemed to be an uneasily spoiled brat desperately trying to be less ‘precious’ than she had any right to be, which was brave considering whose daughter she was and all the inflated hopes her family had, presumably, invested in her from her earliest days.

  ‘Gretchen will be very welcome in our house, Claude,’ she had assured the old man, ‘for as long as she needs to keep out of the limelight.’

  Gretchen had arrived just after dark on Saturday night.

  Meanwhile poor Dan remained besieged in his hotel in Washington, against all expectations somewhat relishing his role in the drama. He had sounded positively ‘chirpy’ on the phone that morning. That was just like Dan. Walter junior might have been the one to follow his father into the Navy but Dan was the son who most took after Walter senior in temperament and reminded Joanne most of her husband. Whereas, Sam was a throwback...

  Joanne shuddered inwardly remembering how they had first learned Sam had been somewhere in the North-West on the night of the October War. Then there had been those horrible months before the news came through – a terse cable from California - that Sam was alive and well. A few days later in a clicking, whooping and hissing long distance telephone call in early April there had been mention of ‘Judy’. In a later call – long distance calls were still problematic because of something called ‘EMP damage’ to the telephone network on the night of the war – Joanne had discovered that Sam and Judy had escaped from Bellingham together and were still ‘a couple’. She had resisted the urge to interrogate her youngest son about Judy or about anything in particular, because Sam was only ever going to tell her what he wanted to tell her anyway.

  Then eventually the letter had arrived. The terse words had clarified everything and completely allayed all his parents’ fears about the fate of their prodigal third son. Judy, it seemed, was a fixture and well-advanced towards producing Joanne’s first grandchild.

  She and Walter had been foolish to worry about Sam!

  But as parents are wont, they worried constantly about all their children.

  Walter junior said his submarine had been in port the night of the October War but Joanne had taken this information with a large pinch of salt. His father had long ago confided to her that trying to get a submariner to tell one what he got up to was a waste of time. Notwithstanding, if Walt junior claimed the USS Scorpion was in dock the night of the war who was she to say nay. She was content and grateful that her eldest son dutifully stayed in contact and religiously spent a couple of days back in Cambridge between cruises.

  “Who was it at the door?” Gretchen asked, having not dared to sneak a look through the curtains at the most recent callers to the house.

  “An uncouth young man and a rather down at heel photographer from the Boston Globe. They wanted to know if I had any comment on my ‘son’s notoriety in Washington DC?’ “I said ‘no’. In the way of these things I knew that wouldn’t get rid of them so I explained that I was extremely proud of all my children. They also wanted to know if I knew where you were, my dear. I looked very blank and informed them that parents are the last people to know where their children are!”

  Gretchen smiled involuntarily.

  “The worst thing is the feeling that everybody is watching one all the time,” she confessed.

  Even though Joanne did not know the younger woman very well she had decided that Gretchen was going to have to get used to being in the public eye. She recognised the ambitious, driven type from afar. Hopefully, sooner or later she would open her eyes to what was staring her in the face and admit that Dan was exactly the sort of man she needed by her side; a man happy to bask in her reflected glory and who always be there to catch her when she fell; and who would quietly, uncomplainingly fight her corner against all comers. As a mother Joanne hoped Gretchen would open her eyes sooner rather than later because Dan might not wait forever. Of her three sons, Dan was the marrying kind and most women with any sense saw it instantly. Gretchen Betancourt, it seemed, was self-evidently not most women.

  Both women heard the car draw up outside the house, and the doors thumping shut. Both women’s spirits took a disappointed dip as they waited for the door bell to ring.

  “Stay!” Joanne Brenckmann ordered paternally to her young guest. “It seems I will need to be more assertive with our callers this time.”

  Inside the lobby behind the front door she girded her loins, set her face and prepared to ‘repel boarders’. With a husband who had commanded a destroyer in the Korean War and a son who was a hot shot submariner, nautical terminology had been invaluable to her down the years.

  She opened the door.

  And dissolved into gushing matriarchal delight.

  The boys – well, Walt junior and Dan – were horribly embarrassed when she hugged them in public. Sam was made differently, an altogether more tactile man. She would hug him and he used to hug her back, literally lifting her off her feet for a moment.

  Walter junior grinned lopsidedly at his mother.

  The spic and span, somewhat weary young man in the uniform of a Lieutenant in the United States Navy submitted to his mother’s embrace with good grace, even briefly returning it.

  “Junior!” Joanne laughed with relief. “I, we, weren’t expecting you!”

  “I thought I’d be tied up on the boat for another week or so,” her eldest son explained in that unfussy, polite way of his. Walter junior could never have followed his father into the law; he was incapable of dissembling.

  The boat, the proud mother assumed, was still the USS Scorpion, a deadly nuclear powered hunter killer submarine packed with Buck Rogers’s type ultra modern and secret devices. Junior – even though he was their first born, she and his father had always called him ‘Junior’ – talked very little about his Navy career, his duties, where he had been, anything much at all. His father said ‘that’s the Submarine Service for you’, whereas Joanne hankered to know more. Frustratingly, her son was discretion personified.

  “When do you have to report back to the Scorpion?” She asked.

  “Not for a while, Ma.” The son had resolved to pick his moment to vouchsafe the news that he had been posted to Groton and this was not it.

  Joanne looked up and down the autumnal street.

  A big canvas kit bag and a metal trunk lay on the ground behind her eldest son.

  Parts of Cambridge were deserted these days, although not so much this close to the MIT campus. Few houses this far from the Quincy air burst had suffered major structural damage, just windows blown in, tiles lifted off roofs, and trees and fences blown down. There had been no power or water for several days after the war, a rash of break-ins, car thefts; and gangs of kids had roamed the streets while the Boston PD and the other emergency services were overwhelmed. The arr
ival of National Guard troopers and squads of Navy Military Policemen on street corners and patrolling the battered, otherwise intact suburbs had driven off the gangs of threatening young men on motorcycles, and put an abrupt end to the crime spree. There were stories about looters having been shot but Joanne had never met anybody who had actually witnessed that happen.

  In the last year a lot of people had just up and left, afraid to live in a big city. Lately, the big cutbacks in the armed forces were beginning to hit a lot of families in Boston, especially some older folk who relied on now frozen military pensions for all their income as prices for basic foodstuffs and commodities crept up. Inflation had been bad just after the war but it was still running at ten to fifteen percent. Wherever one drove in Boston there were abandoned houses, back lots returning to nature, the playgrounds for kids and squatters, increasingly desecrated with graffiti. Personally, she believed it was criminal to just give in the way so many people who ought to have known better had given in since the war.

  Joanne made as if to grab her son’s unwieldy kit bag.

  He put his hand on her arm.

  “It’s heavy, Ma,” he said diplomatically.

  Joanne relented and held the door as Junior dragged in his worldly belongings. The big metal trunk only usually came home to Cambridge if her first born was headed off to a new posting. She held onto that thought, without dreaming for a moment of voicing it.

  Gretchen Betancourt had moved into the kitchen door and was viewing the homecoming with curious, very thoughtful eyes.

  Joanne tried not to smile.

  She recollected exactly how taken the young woman had been with Junior the first time they had met, at one of her father’s ‘at homes’ in the hills behind Quincy. That old mansion was gone now, of course, like so much other Massachusetts history, taken by the cataclysm. Gretchen had gone distinctly, unmistakably doe-eyed the moment she was introduced to Junior.

  The poor kid had probably been bewildered when her son was completely indifferent – albeit in a charming, gently empathetic way – to her obvious signals of interest.