by James Philip
O’Brien had promised himself that one day he would get to the bottom of the Dan-Gretchen-Junior thing. Not that he knew any of the parties very well, not yet; but it was obvious that the brothers were extremely close, and that Dan in no way resented Gretchen’s unashamedly intimate friendship with his older sibling.
It went without saying that O’Brien had done his homework on the entire family – including its extended members – before he took the plunge and joined the team, and had decided that, of the three sons, Junior was an enigma.
He had heard that the Chief of Naval Operations, Tom Hinman, had been incandescent and people – at least one of them a four-ringer – were now ‘on the beach’ as a result of the politicking which had seen temporary Commander Walter Brenckmann junior reverted back to substantive Lieutenant Commander and recalled from his high-profile role in the Joint Polaris Strike Force in Scotland, to sail a desk in the bowels of the Pentagon. The affair had caused unwanted - and presumably unforeseen - ‘friction’ with the Brits, resulting in the Ambassador, Nicko Henderson door-stepping the Secretary of State, whereupon, an allegedly, ‘robust exchange of views’ had followed in a transatlantic telephone conversation between the President and Margaret Thatcher.
Junior was still officially on leave.
The word was that later this year he would soon be quietly promoted to full three-ring commander, and attached to the CNO’s personal Operations Staff in a public gesture re-confirming his previous high-flier status.
Inevitably, it was only a matter of time before somebody in the White House leaked the old news about Junior’s recall and apparent demotion; as always, at a time when they thought it would cause the Ambassador – these days a hated enemy of the state in their eyes - the maximum embarrassment.
O’Brien worried about Junior. Thirty-two was pushing it for an unmarried, ambitious naval officer. There seemed to be no girlfriends in his past; albeit a blameless, spotless past. Within the Navy he had numerous friends, was liked and well-respected; more importantly, he did not seem to make enemies. He was the sort of guy officers and men alike came to with their problems, or naturally asked for help because they knew he was not going to think any the less of them for asking. All to the good; but if there had been a little woman somewhere in his life, he would have been untouchable if and when the White House started getting really, really twitchy about his father’s prospects in November.
The Brenckmann women had all brought flowers, as had many others, for the surrounding ocean of blasted rubble now slowly returning to nature, was hallowed ground.
Where they gathered had been ground zero on the night of the October War, formerly Buffalo Zoo although nothing was recognisable. Everything was heaps of brick and pulverised concrete, latterly partially blurred by drifting dust and the spring greenery of the undergrowth sprouting it seemed, as far as the eye could see beginning to mask the terrible scars of the dead city. All the way to the horizon no crumbling wall stood more than a storey high; the obliteration had been as near total as made no difference.
The Ambassador’s speech had been drafted by Dan, and circulated to the family and senior campaign officials. Ted Sorenson, not fully on board, presumably watching from afar, had not been shown today’s text.
It was not a ‘political’ oration; this was for the family who had come to this place to bid a belated farewell to the bright young life they remembered as the best of them; the young woman, the sister who had been the sunniest, brightest hope for all their futures whose passing in the maelstrom which had consumed Buffalo, was but a miniscule, incidental component of an unimaginably greater tragedy, and today symbolised a first, faltering attempt to draw a line between the nightmare of the past and the possibilities of the future.
Walter Brenckmann gently squeezed his wife’s hand.
His family drew about him, close at his shoulder.
“No politics,” he said hoarsely.
There were no microphones in place although the media people tried to press forward to catch every word.
“Not today. There are things we need to remember. Things to be said lest they haunt us yet. Other families have suffered worse than mine; I grieve for them, truly my thoughts are always with you but today, we are here to remember the people of Buffalo, and all victims of the most terrible war in human history. So, no politics.”
He glanced to his second son.
Dan Brenckmann grimaced in acknowledgement.
“Dan was privileged to be asked to assist Chief Justice Warren in his enquiry into the events of the night of 27th-28th October 1962 and was able, therefore, to cast new light on exactly what happened here. I am sure that you will all be aware that the recent partial rapprochement with the Soviet Union has made possible a selective exchange of information which has revealed new information about certain specifics of the war, and I am indebted to Earl Warren for giving me leave to share unclassified elements of Soviet documentation passed to his Commission by Ambassador Dobrynin, subsequent to the President’s most recent summit with Chairman Shelepin.”
Larry O’Brien tried not to wince.
He could see headlines proclaiming: COMMIES HAND BRENCKMANN SECRETS!
He knew Walter Brenckmann did not give a damn about any of that.
“This is what happened to Buffalo that night.”
There was a surreal hush.
The wind gusted off the great lakes, Ontario to the north, across the still abandoned ruins of Niagara, clear down to Lake Erie. They said that when the wind blew from the south west the fog horns of the big ships in the Welland Canal – shut for over a year after the October War – carried clear across Buffalo, like the moaning cries of the countless dead.
“For Buffalo,” Walter Brenckmann began, for a moment threatening to stumble before he steeled his soul anew, “think of all the other cities here in North America – Seattle, Chicago, New York, St Paul, Las Vegas and elsewhere – and in England, Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, destroyed in the blink of an eye in 1962 and since. No nation, no ideology can claim the monopoly on grief and loss, or of the hopes and the dreams extinguished by an unimaginably cruel fate. But today, I shall talk only of Buffalo.”
Judy Dorfmann, seemingly a small, vulnerable presence had buried her face in her husband’s chest and Sam was clasping her tight. Gretchen wiped away a tear. Joanne had put her left arm about Walter’s waist, while their eldest son had gripped her free hand, otherwise remaining impassive.
“We cannot remember unless we know and we find the courage to acknowledge what really happened. This, is what we have been able to piece together about what happened here. In this case, that piecing together, allows us to remember not just our own dead but those of fellow human beings whom in time of war we call enemies. If there is ever to be peace in this world we must recognise, once and for all, that we are all God’s children, alike beneath the skin, regardless of our colour, our faiths, or our political beliefs. On that night in October 1962 my family lost a daughter and a sister; but by then millions of other families in Central Europe and Russia had also lost countless sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers, and the ones they left behind have every right to grieve, to be angry, to yearn for peace as I, and my family grieve. My family has come here today to remember, and to…forgive.”
Larry O’Brien had suggested that a priest be present.
‘No,’ Walter Brenckmann had decided. ‘I plan to be President for all Americans, not just Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons or any of the other credos.’
The Ambassador had been just a little ticked off with him for a moment.
‘My Christianity is my business, Larry. A President needs to be consoler-in-chief as well as Commander-in-Chief but he’s not there to guard individual morality or religiosity. He’s there to make damned sure everybody gets an even break, to uphold the law and to defend the Constitution to his last breath. I will respect all faiths equally. At Buffalo, we will be our own confessors.’
Head
s were bowed.
“The Soviet R-16 inter-continental ballistic missile which destroyed Buffalo was launched from a pad in north-west Kazakhstan approximately fourteen minutes prior to warhead initiation over the city, after having travelled around six thousand miles. NORAD first plotted the airburst in the vicinity of the campus of Buffalo State College; but we now know it occurred at about two thousand five hundred feet above ground zero, where we are standing today.”
Walter Brenckmann paused.
This was not what the press or even many among his campaign staff had been expecting. He was okay with that, and so were his family, and that was what mattered.
The only thing that mattered.
“The Type R-16 was the USSR’s first truly operational ICBM, deployment in the field having commenced only in 1961. It was produced by Plant 586 – the Makarov Southern Machine-Building Plant at Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine – and the one which was aimed at Buffalo was designated missile 8K64/017, having been delivered to the 33rd Guards Rocket Army in early May 1962. On the night of the war the Soviets only had about thirty operational ICBMs but had planned, by 1965 to deploy over two hundred R-16s, including a silo-launchable variant. However, in late October 1962, ‘our’ missile was one of only a handful of operationally certified R-16s armed, and available to launch when the ‘strike’ directive was transmitted from the command bunker of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces Headquarters outside Moscow, minutes before it was bracketed by and completely destroyed by two of our Minutemen.”
All of this information – and much, much more - was contained in the volumes of appendices to the Final Report of the Joint Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, provisional material from which had already been selectively leaked to the press by various congressmen and senators.
Nevertheless, eyebrows were being raised.
“You must understand that Soviet ICBMs were massive in comparison to our rockets; this was, is, because Soviet H-bomb technology is less sophisticated. At the time of the October War comparable yield Soviet warheads were two to three times heavier than weapons in the US arsenal, hence, Soviet rockets were monsters, which was why in 1962 they had been much better-suited than our rockets at shooting satellites into low Earth orbits. For example, Yuri Gagarin rode into space in 1961 on the back of an R-7 variant of the Soviet Union’s first ICBM.”
Walter Brenckmann and his son had agonised over how to tell the story – the story they wanted to tell, not the one people probably wanted to hear – before Dan had suggested the only way to do it. Nobody in America had really been told the story from the other side of the hill; or frankly, wanted to hear it but if the world was to move on, sooner or later everybody was going to have to listen.
“You see,” the father went on, “a war is not just about what we do, or about how we suffer. We are all victims in the end. To survive is usually to have blood on one’s hands. I was on DDEs – destroyer escorts – in the Second War; four times we rolled one-ton depth charges over the stern on top of suspected U-boat sonar contacts. I have no idea if we hit anything but it must have been nightmarish for those men in the submarines we attacked. Off Korea, I conned my ship – the USS Watson (DD-482) – inshore to bombard targets on land at Inchon, Wonsan and other places during the first Korean War: we poured hundreds of five-inch rounds landward. Again, I have no idea if we hit a thing; but we probably killed a lot of North Korean soldiers. All of them had families, mothers, fathers, just like the men under my command on the Watson. That is the pity of war. In the Second War we had to leave drowning merchant seamen in the water – we were forbidden to stop to pick up survivors – my skipper almost got court martialed once for going alongside a sinking freighter to save her crew. Off Korea I damned nearly got sent ashore for picking up a downed MiG pilot off Wonsan. There is no right, no wrong. You just have to be true to yourself. Which is why you need to know the other story about what happened here on the night of the October War. The story that got forgotten. The story we forgot and, in the forgetting, has caused us all so much agony since.”
The morning had begun bright and clear. Now, the high, scudding clouds were lower and there were spits of rain in the air. They said there was a storm coming in from the north later; the main reason Dan and Gretchen, and Sam and Judy had left their youngsters back at Batavia, thirty-five miles to the east, half-way to Rochester where later today, a plane had been chartered to take the whole party to Philadelphia.
“We had state of the art Minutemen sitting in near-bombproof silos in Nebraska,” Walter Brenckmann continued. “But the Russians were still working with rockets like the R-16, a hundred feet high and weighing over one hundred and forty tons at blast off. The R-16 was a two-stage, liquid-fuelled death trap universally regarded by its launch crews as accidents waiting to happen. The launch crews all knew that there had been a famous launch pad ‘incident’ at the Baikonur test range, when a prototype R-16 had blown-up without warning, incinerating over a hundred people, including practically the whole original project team and the then commander of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, Marshal Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin.”
Joanne Brenckmann leaned against her husband.
He glanced to her for support.
There had never been a moment he had been alone in the world after that day, nearly four decades ago, he had laid eyes on Joanne in that downtown diner. He had been working his way through BU Law - Boston University School of Law – a late starter who had left High School and clerked for Sallis and Betancourt in its city office, for several years before deciding, basically, that he did not plan to be a clerk the rest of his life. Bill Sallis had thought he was an idiot, Claude had organised a small bursary for him and an introduction to a connection, a professor at BU Law, that had got him past the highest hurdles placed in a young man’s way in those hungry, troubled days of the Great Depression; but he would have starved, and probably ended up without a roof over his head if he had not met Joanne, long before he walked away from Boston University with a law degree.
Sallis and Betancourt had had no scope to hire junior associates in those days. When Claude asked him to lunch one day in 1932, it had been to offer him seed corn to start his own practice. The man who was later to become his friend, and was, in hindsight, from the outset, his mentor, had known that one day, he would need a loyal, and an honest cut out. There was nothing shady, nothing outright beyond the law, which Walter had always taken for his bible but nevertheless, there was always business to be done which could not go through the books of Sallis and Betancourt. Kennedy family business, as it turned out; mostly routine legal work, the sort that Claude could have parcelled out to anybody but he had given it to him, and that had been the difference between keeping his head above water in the thirties, and throwing in the towel. The arbitrage work, standing between two or more embattled litigants, had come later, and been interrupted by his war service in the US Navy between 1940 and 1945. Bill Sallis had put people in place to manage his vacant practice during those years, and again when he came out of the Reserve in 1950, running the Brenckmann firm with juniors. By then, of course, Walter had been one of the gang, the man Bill, and Claude rolled out when the chips were down.
He hoped he had repaid his old friends’ faith in him, and been touched when the full partnership had come along, a frank recognition that he had been the one down in the engine room pushing the firm ahead in the decade before the October War.
Claude had been very much an absentee landlord since the Second War, building his own empire elsewhere. Part of the Betancourt fortune was inherited, and people always assumed that was the end of the story. Walter was one of the few people – Bill Sallis would be another – who understood that the old fox’s partnerships with members of the monied New England elite did not begin and end with the Kennedys.
Only Joanne knew all the ins and outs of his relationship with Claude and the firm, that he had been up to his neck in the business of old Joe Kennedy, the man who kept C
laude Betancourt’s hands clean; that most unlikely of figures, a fixer and when he needed to be, an enforcer, who never, ever stepped over the line. The law was the law, it was his friend and his compass and everybody had known it.
So, when he looked to his wife, there were never any secrets.
She had been with him, ever-present in spirit if not in person, ever since that night in the diner where she had been serving tables.
Walter Brenckmann cleared his throat.
“The Buffalo-bound R-16 which was rolled out onto its unshielded, open-air pad approximately two-and-three-quarters of an hour before it was launched, was, we think, the last Soviet ICBM successfully launched that night. Once on the pad it had had to be fuelled at suicidally breakneck speed with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine – a hydrazine derivative often referred to as UDMH – a stable compound resistant to ignition by shock, which only becomes a viable rocket propellant when combined with an oxidizer, in this case dinitrogen tetroxide. Again, the Soviet technology deficit in comparison with our own Strategic Air Command’s rocketry is glaringly apparent. Because of the highly corrosive properties of dinitrogen tetroxide, an R-16 could only stand at launch readiness for a maximum of seventy-two hours. Thereafter, the fuel would have to be removed – itself, a very dangerous procedure - and the missile transported all the way back to Plant 586 in the Ukraine, to be completely rebuilt.”
Walter Brenckmann shook his head.
“To say that the R-16 was extremely vulnerable to a counter strike in the hours before it was fired would be an understatement of monumental proportions. Even when it was fully fuelled, it took over thirty minutes to spin up the rocket’s navigational gyroscopes before its launch crew could even begin to configure its inertial guidance and targeting co-ordinates. This, in itself, was no mere formality; for example, the missile could not be remotely programmed from a safe distance. Moreover, although the mathematics involved in formulating a ballistic trajectory are relatively straightforward, in practice, in the heat of the moment, under intense time pressure, the actual calculations would, I suspect, have seemed fiendishly convoluted to the launch crew.”