by James Philip
But then nobody had expected Ted Sorensen to come aboard the Brenckmann caravan – or rather, somewhat elliptically, announce that he was not going to become the new Chair of the McGovern for President Committee – which most people took as a sure sign he was about to back the Ambassador. Nor, of course, had anybody predicted that the Kennedy family’s semi-moribund election machine was going to be fully reincarnated, or that it would swing in so smoothly, and impressively behind Walter Brenckmann in the last week.
It was as if all that had gone before was now incidental, and had no real bearing on anything that was likely to happen in the coming months. George McGovern had carried New Hampshire, the symbolic Wisconsin caucus, and Pennsylvania by a whisker and lost, as anticipated, to Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts albeit by a slimmer margin than predicted, only a couple of percentage points. In retrospect, Ambassador Brenckmann had already been quietly making up ground on the inside rail even before the promise of the Kennedy delegates’ votes materialised, apparently out of thin air yesterday morning.
“Why are we here today, Ambassador?” The greying, solemnly avuncular newsman asked as the candidate and his wife walked, hand in hand, through the greening ruins of Quincy, the town obliterated by the Soviet ICBM which had overshot Boston on the night of the October War and detonated high above Quincy Bay.
The surviving city fathers of Boston had ambitious plans to lay out a new town with broad tree-lined boulevards and sports fields. However, as yet, only survey markers and cairns marked likely streets, and the sites allocated for rebuilt civic amenities, because nothing was going to happen until the logjam of land ownership litigation was resolved.
Cronkite’s camera crew was struggling to keep up.
Obligingly the candidate and his wife halted to take in the view south across the inundated flood plain of the Weymouth Fore River to the damaged, but now regenerating town of Weymouth itself.
Walter Brenckmann smiled a rueful smile.
“Jo and I thought that the world was about to come to an end that night. The night of the war. We expected our house in Cambridge to blow away when that big bomb went off just out there over the bay. We sat there, in the basement, together thank goodness, and waited for the fire to come. But it didn’t; and every day since I thank God for that.”
He too, was greyer than he had been before the war and some days, even at this time of year, the cold of those winters in England still burrowed into his bones. He and Joanne had spent the summer and fall of last year, Thanksgiving and Christmas in California, getting properly re-acquainted with Sam and his young family. The sunshine and the extended rest, an escape, had done them both a world of good.
Joanne had been ill last fall; her husband had seriously contemplated pulling out of the race until she had put her foot down. She planned to get better and he would never forgive himself if he left the job half done!
Walter Brenckmann had forgotten any notion of quitting.
People had warned them that associating so publicly with their ‘peacenik’, ‘beatnik’, musician son and his ‘hippy-dippy’ pacifist friends would hurt him at the polls. That was horse manure, family was family and people who forgot that did not deserve anybody’s vote!
Father and son had joked that there was no doubt which of them was the most famous; Walter had no problem with that. Sam and his ‘friends’ had sold millions of records, singles and long-players, filled great halls in North America and the British Isles, and packed out the Hollywood Bowl at will.
Walter had suggested to his youngest son – by happenstance the tallest and rangiest of his offspring, a good three or four inches taller than him, and ever-more the spitting image of several uncles on his mother’s side of the family – not to be so sure about the ‘fame thing’.
Adding, with a grin: ‘Your brother wrote the Warren Report, remember?’
Sam said he had written a song about that, too; they had agreed he ought to talk to Dan, and probably Gretchen, before he debuted it in public!
Even though the election was still months away Gretchen was already on the stomp. Although the boundaries of the 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts had been gerrymandered since the last election in 1966, nobody seriously thought the Republicans would have the courage or the native gumption to field an official candidate. Nevertheless, it was important to keep the number of ‘write-in’ dissenters as low as possible.
Besides, Gretchen had never knowingly done anything by half in her whole life, so, she was hardly likely to start getting complacent now!
Joanne Brenckmann smiled.
Walter Cronkite waited patiently.
Everybody knew the Brenckmann’s story.
Gretchen had made sure of that long before she formally departed the campaign.
Joanne was three-and-a-half years her husband’s senior; they had met while he was studying law; and she had worked in a typing pool by day, and served tables by night to help pay Walter’s way through BU Law. Notwithstanding their families had been mildly scandalised, they had married as soon as Walter finished college, started making babies straight away and lived happily ever after. The couple were self-evidently devoted to each other, and inevitably, each still grieved for their youngest daughter, the eighteen-year-old baby of the family, Tabatha, who had disappeared – as everybody in the English-speaking world now knew - in the firestorm that had consumed Buffalo on the night of the October War.
Thirty-two-year-old Walter junior was a Lieutenant Commander in the Submarine Service; thirty-one-year-old Daniel had been clerk to the Warren Commission on the Conduct and Causes of the Cuban Missiles War, and to the Chief Justice, until January, and was married to the eldest daughter of the man who had become the eminence grise of the resurgent Democratic Party in the last twelve months; and Sam, in league with his friend and collaborator Bob Dylan and their ‘band’ had sold as many, if not more records than Elvis in his prime – whom these days, was allegedly living in the boondocks of his native Mississippi - most months.
“Quincy might be a metaphor for what’s still wrong with America,” Walter Brenckmann offered, with the quiet gravitas of a trial lawyer beginning to lay out his case. “The war was five-and-a-half years back; but there are still thousands of people living in misery in cramped, and frankly, disgracefully sub-standard over-crowded and unsanitary social housing in downtown Boston. Why aren’t we building new, decent houses for them out here where they and their children ought to be breathing clean air, not to mention living in the dignity every man, woman and child in this country is entitled to?”
“That’s a good question, Ambassador…”
“We have a country to rebuild, Mister Cronkite,” Walter Brenckmann grimaced, “and it is about time we got started!”
“Isn’t that what Senator McGovern wants to do?”
“Yes. It is what all good men should want for their country.”
“Surely, you should be supporting him?”
To Cronkite’s surprise the other man smiled.
“The real race isn’t between Senator McGovern and me. This isn’t the real race, Mister Cronkite,” he observed wryly. “That only starts after the Convention in August. Right now, we’re testing the soul of the Democratic Party; trying to figure out if voters really, really want the change they keep telling me they want.”
“That’s not how most people see it?”
“I’m not here to tell people what, or how they should think; I’m just telling you what I think.”
Walter Cronkite thought about this proposition, and changed tack. His viewers were not interested in existential semantics.
“How do you react to criticism that you ought to be going after the other candidates much harder?”
“Why would I do that?”
This baffled the newsman.
“They aren’t sparing any punches going after you, Ambassador?”
“Fellow Democrats are not my enemies, Mister Cronkite. Granted, I don’t have a lot of time for Governor Wallace’
s ideas. The fact of the matter is that, in my experience in the Navy, when you’re in the middle of the worst typhoon in living memory, the helmsman’s moral courage is by far and away more important than the colour of his skin. I confess, in this day and age after what we’ve all been through, I find it extraordinary the people who claim to be God-fearing can be so ready to ignore the literal message of the Bible that we are all created equal in the sight of our God. We treat black people and Hispanics, and persons of Asiatic origin despicably in this country. To my mind, that is fundamentally un-American. As for the things Governor Wallace has said about me,” he shrugged, almost in sadness, “I don’t remember Governor Wallace standing beside me, serving his country on the deck of a destroyer in the Second War; and he sure as hell wasn’t beside me on the USS Watson in the middle of that big storm in the South China Sea!”
Both men knew that Governor Wallace had been a staff sergeant flight engineer with the 468th Bombardment Group in the Marianas in 1945, who, having participated in raids on the Japanese home islands, had been medically discharged from the service on account of ‘psychoneurosis’ with a 10% disability pension. Ironically, back in the day, the commander of the Twentieth Air Force in the Mariana Islands had been none other than Wallace’s current political sidekick, Curtis LeMay.
Neither Cronkite of Walter Brenckmann had a lot of time for would-be ‘strong men’ preaching racial and sectarian bile who, when the going had got tough, had baled out of the fight half-way through after just a couple of rounds.
Quietness fell as they walked on.
Cronkite waited, curious to discover if either the Ambassador or his wife would fill the silence.
“Senator McGovern is a decent, admirable human being,” declared the other man. “Heck, he flew thirty-five B-24 missions in Europe in the Second War. He’s an American hero. I wish I knew him better. I wish I knew him as a friend; one day, I hope I will but I’m sorry, right now, here, today, I don’t think he’s the guy to hold this President and all his crooked men to account. I don’t think Richard Nixon is afraid of Senator McGovern; I know he isn’t afraid of Governor Wallace even if General LeMay jumps on board his ticket. I doubt if he’s afraid of me at the moment; but come November he’ll know better.”
Chapter 15
Saturday 4th May, 1968
Seryshevo Air base, Siberia
The Amerikanskaya Mechta was grounded, again. The maintenance logs recorded overheating problems with one of the engines, a pressurization issue in the rear fuselage and, just to make it look good, a couple of non-existent ‘suspected’ hydraulic leaks.
The 182nd’s Engineering Chief had duly authorised the necessary inspection work. He knew that if he wanted to hang onto his quiet life, he was going to have to keep the last of General Zakharov’s Tu-95Ks in the air, and besides, he was not the one having to chase down ghosts in the system, and the checks and work allegedly required on the aircraft kept his people busy.
The Devil makes work for idle hands…
Major Dmitry Akimov had hung around for several minutes beneath the starboard wing of the huge bomber as several oil-spattered, sweating men laboured on the tall scaffold erected around the problematic power plant. It was a hot day, very humid, and the air was, periodically, full of swarms of ferociously biting midges. Another group of technicians was working under the belly of the beast, tracking back pipes, checking for the infuriatingly elusive leaks.
He scowled at the duty crew chief.
“Of course, nothing’s dripping onto the fucking hardpan,” he snorted, trying to sound frustrated and a whisker from losing his temper. “The leaks only occur when there is pressure in the fucking system. You’re going to have to drain the undercarriage reservoir, refill it and re-pressurize the whole fucking thing!”
Shaking his head in exasperation he clambered up into the bomber. People looked at a Tu-95 and imagined that inside it must be like a cathedral; actually, the fuselage was so crammed with equipment, most of it Second War vintage and therefore, bulky with a lot of hard, and very sharp edges, that in places it was only possible to move forward, or aft by holding one’s breath and squeezing, or squirming past protruding, unyielding obstructions or crawling, like a bug on one’s belly through communication tunnels designed to accommodate twelve-year-old, underfed children unencumbered with the clumsy pressure suits all crew members were obliged to don whenever the aircraft was in the air.
Dmitry Akimov found Olga Petrovna and Tatyana Zhukov studying creased and somewhat ragged-edged wiring blueprints in the radio operator-navigator position in the compartment behind the cockpit on the upper deck of the leviathan. Several service panels had been removed, stacked neatly to one side and the women were systematically looking from the schematics spread around them, to the actual installations in front of them.
After much deliberation – between Akimov, his deputy, second pilot Yevgeny Novak, Olga and General Zakharov – the decision had been taken, to replace practically all the bomber’s existing radio, listening and jamming equipment. Pragmatically, if they did not, then the later, modified and updated sets and components which had been sitting in the store rooms since before the 1962 war would, sooner or later be shipped back to Chelyabinsk for redistribution to units closer to the seat of power.
Taking the Amerikanskaya Mechta off the flight line was the only way they could think of disguising what they were doing. Even that was a very tenuous ruse; a thing they would never have got away with before the war.
However, the logic of their situation was inescapable.
There was no point readying one of the Kh-20s for operational deployment if they were still operating with the pre-war, easily jammable guidance systems which had, largely, most likely, uniformly failed to penetrate enemy defences back in October 1962. True, the enemy might well have updated and improved his systems since then; but there was nothing they could do about that. The mantra had to be: do what can be done!
“What do you think, Olga?” Akimov asked, leaning against the main spar bulkhead, wiping perspiration off his brow with a grubby rag.
A fan whirred somewhere and the women seemed infuriatingly cool, both with the sleeves of their relatively clean, uncrumpled one-piece uniform overalls rolled up.
“I think we’ve finally rescued enough good stuff to complete a single upgrade,” Olga announced thoughtfully. “If we were trying to repeat the new-build on any of the other aircraft it would be a waste of time. Those idiots at the depot must have ignored the environmental factors specified in the documentation for most of this kit. A lot of the stuff we’ve checked out is water damaged, or shows surface corrosion due to the poor environmental monitoring of the storage facilities.”
Olga knew Akimov had not come to check up on her.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Is it true?” The Forst Pilot asked. “The General tells me that a couple of Kirov’s people are being rotated back to civilisation?”
“He hasn’t said anything about that,” Olga reported, matter-of-factly. “Are they being replaced?”
Her lover would have to have been a naïve schoolboy, or an idiot if he did not already entertain suspicions that she had ulterior motives for opening her legs; badgering him with questions about matters which were none of her business would have been stupid. And besides, the way things had turned out opening her legs for the big man had not exactly, been any kind of penance and she had no desire to call a halt.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
“Andrei hasn’t mentioned it. There isn’t much for his people to do out here. Why? Doesn’t the General like it?”
“No,” Akimov shook his head. “He thinks the KGB may be freshening up their act out here. Apparently, there’s a new top man in Vladivostok. A hard case called Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov. The General thinks he’s one of Andropov’s, the KGB’s number two man in Sverdlovsk’s, protégé’s.”
Olga shrugged.
That was all politics, nothing to do with her.
The main thing was that the General, and now, Dmitry Akimov wanted her to discover more. Presumably, the next time she was in bed with Andrei.
“Okay,” she sniffed, keen to get back to work. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
The two women were soon alone.
“They might transfer Major Kirov to Komsomolsk or Vladivostok?” Tatyana suggested timidly, quickly lowering her eyes.
“His loss,” Olga retorted, too quickly.
“Perhaps, it is better if he goes away?”
The other woman gave her an odd look. “I’m just saying, boss,” Tatyana apologised, withdrawing into her shell.
Olga hardly ever pulled rank with another crew member; which was not to say she could not be a holy Tartar if she needed to be. Especially, if they took the piss or could not hack their duties.
Tatyana was not in on the plot although by now, she had probably guessed something was not quite right. She was clever, listened and watched, almost like a spook but that was just her way, there was nothing sinister about it. Nonetheless, she would have picked up signs, begun to suspect by now.
“It means nothing,” Olga said, affecting a half-yawn, as if she was bored. “He’s just a guy. I haven’t decided how long I’ll string him along. I like fucking with him, that’s all.”
Lately, calling what General Zakharov had put to Dmitry, Maxim Godolets and her in the beginning a ‘plot’ or a ‘conspiracy’ increasingly seemed a bit like calling a dog a cat because both had four legs and a tail. It was mutiny, pure and simple. Yevgeny Novak, for one, had worked that out for himself before he heard the half of it when Akimov made the decision to ‘brief him in’ on what was going on.
There was no way of knowing how the others would react when they, as sooner or later they must, joined up the dots.