Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  “Were you looking for the Comrade Weapons Specialist, boss?”

  Akimov nodded, trying not to show his worries.

  “Her pet Commissar turned up here about half-an-hour ago,” Tatyana reported, a wryly knowing smile in her eyes. “And they went off together in his car.”

  The man scowled.

  The woman was suddenly afraid she might have been too flippant, pursed her lips in mute apology.

  “I volunteered to cover her duty station until she returned…”

  Dmitry Akimov relented.

  Nobody had been working harder, more tirelessly up to fifteen or sixteen hours a day than the two most competent, and experienced specialists Olga and Zhukov - in the crew. He had no reason to accuse either of them of shirking. In fact, their dedication put the rest of the crew to shame.

  If only the Tu-95’s under-strength ground crew was as dedicated to their duties…

  “It was nothing urgent,” Akimov declared. “I’m sure that you can bring me up to date with developments in the last forty-eight hours?”

  This Tatyana did. Concisely. They had identified working – or as she correctly asserted ‘functioning’ – replacement equipment and where this had been unavailable, cannibalised components so as to affect the desired upgrades. Thus far, they had only tested a handful of systems but, all in all, they were ‘winning’ at last. Although, as to when the Amerikanskaya Mechta was going to be back on the flight line, that was another question.

  “Comrade Olga is optimistic we will be finished in here in about a week, assuming nothing else breaks, boss.”

  The starboard outer engine was going to have to be replaced with a power plant with less hours on the clock; that was going to take two or three days once the job could be scheduled. If everything had happened in slow motion in the old USSR; these days, it seemed to take forever to get anything done.

  Akimov went to the Officers’ Mess that night.

  He did not want to drink alone.

  Maxim Godolets and Yevgeny Novak joined him mid-evening; they were both well-oiled by then and clearly planning to carry on until they passed out. As long as his aircraft’s navigator and second pilot reported for duty in the morning, Akimov was not going to make an issue of it.

  Olga’s absence soon became a subject of slurred, disjointed ribaldry. Like Akimov, his companions tacitly assumed their esteemed Weapons Specialist was almost certainly bouncing up and down on her Commissar’s ‘rod’. He and the others went on drowning their never-ending sorrows in the smoky, half-empty bar where they seemed to spend most of their off-duty hours.

  Dmitry did not tell the others that Andrei Kirov had been ordered back to KGB Central in Vladivostok; or speculate as to the state of their female comrade’s emotional connection to the bear-like Political Officer.

  He recollected that Olga had not been amused when the general had first told her to get into bed with Kirov.

  ‘I am an officer of the Red Air Force, not a common whore, Comrade Commandant,’ she had retorted, not worried how Zakharov reacted to being accused of being a pimp.

  That was why Zakharov had asked Dmitry Akimov to attend that particular interview.

  ‘The Political Officer is the only person at Seryshevo, apart from me,’ Zakharov had explained, evenly, ‘who has unrestricted access to every corner of the establishment, and can ask any question of any person, at any time. Unlike me, he has a direct line – well, when the atmospherics aren’t haywire, and the fucking radio is working – with regional HQ.’

  All the secure, buried communications lines that had run through Belogorsk, and other places had been obliterated in October 1962.

  ‘If anybody in this room has got a better idea how to get close to the bloody man so we can keep an eye on what he is up to, I’d like to hear it now!’

  ‘He’s an oaf,’ Olga had remarked dismissively.

  ‘That, I very much doubt.’

  This had piqued her curiosity.

  “He was actually a fighting PO in his time in Iraq. He picked up a gun and fought as an infantryman during the withdrawal from Baghdad. Later, he led a fighting column against the Kurdish insurgents. He only ended up here because he punched out a superior oaf back in Sverdlovsk who’d been bad-mouthing the poor sods left behind in Northern Iraq.’

  A KGB man with a conscience…

  That did not happen very often!

  Joking about Olga’s supposed wantonness was part of the game they were playing. She was the crew ‘slut’; and talking about it in the Mess and around the base reinforced her cover. But Dmitry Akimov hated it.

  It did not help that he was still sober.

  “Lay off,” he muttered irritably. “Talk about something else.”

  Chapter 21

  Thursday 16th May, 1968

  Mar-a-Lago, Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach, Florida

  Tempers had flared that evening. Larry O’Brien had wondered if they might but then he had needed to know, here and now, what was and what was not fair game. For all that he was the Brenckmann for President Director of Campaigns – that was a dumb title, he was just the goddammed Campaign Manager – he sometimes felt as if he hardly knew these people at all. Apart from Gretchen, none of them seemed to be capable of thinking politically and it was driving him up the wall!

  Honesty, decency, and fine principles were laudable; so far as they went. However, that was not what running for President was about. Granted, his candidate had a vision, he got the ‘big picture’ but the Buffalo event notwithstanding, he remained a very private man.

  “Look,” O’Brien persisted, irritated that this fight was taking place in comfortable chairs in front of big windows looking out on swaying palms in the dusk, rather than around a table which he could thump at regular intervals. “What the polls tell us is two things: George McGovern is still winning the race to the National Convention, and; that there are a very large number of Americans who don’t care if Richard Nixon is a crook. Neither of those things will change of their own accord, if at all, especially if we carry on fighting with our hands tied behind our backs!”

  Walter Brenckmann raised his coffee cup to his lips.

  That was another thing Larry O’Brien had not got used to: these people were sober all the time. Oh, they liked a beer, or a nightcap and they drank to be sociable; they just did not, ever, get plastered or even significantly mellowed by alcohol. Nor did they routinely swallow uppers or downers to keep themselves on track, or to take the edge off before an appearance, or an interview, and none of them smoked.

  Heck, even Sam – the beatnik musician in the family – seemed to be a clean-living, straight up and down family guy.

  Sam and Judy had been invited down to Florida; but elected to go home to California. Sam was touring with Bob Dylan and their band in Canada, Great Britain and possibly France, in June and wanted a spell ‘at home with the kids’ before stepping back onto the treadmill.

  When Sam had been in Wisconsin, he had played a show at Fort Little Bear for the GIs and the Air Force personnel based there. It had gone down a storm with Judy joining him on stage for a couple of numbers. That had played awesomely well with the networks; and told O’Brien that there was at least one member of the Brenckmann family who understood how to play to his audience.

  ‘I’m not singing anything political tonight but if you don’t all vote for my dad in November, you’ll be square!’

  Now, Sam Brenckmann was a man Larry O’Brien could work with!

  Not that that was ever going to happen.

  He tried to make his point again: “As for standing on a foreign policy platform, that’s hogwash, Ambassador!”

  Walter Brenckmann was silent.

  O’Brien found that a little unnerving. It was as if he had just come onto the bridge of a ship in a ferocious storm and complained about the weather. He had the unnerving sensation that his captain was patiently waiting to hear a proper report.

  He gestured at the TV set in the room, which was off.
<
br />   The Ambassador and his wife were radio people; that had been another jolting discovery. They needed to be reacting to the pictures on the screen, not waiting to read about the news in tomorrows’ papers.

  The Seventh Fleet was ‘exercising in the South China Sea and the sea of Japan,’ and library sequences of the President on the deck of the Enterprise talking about ‘making a statement’ and ‘deterring the red menace in Asia’, cut into film of ships steaming, aircraft catapulting into the air, and cruisers and destroyers shooting their guns. Apparently, Chinese and Korean jets had been chased away, and a suspected enemy submarine depth-charged. It seemed that General Chiang Kai-shek was entertaining a Congressional delegation at his palace in Taipei, presumably, ecstatic about the number of US warships docked in Taiwanese ports, and the squadrons of sleek, silvery US Air Force interceptors and strike aircraft parked on the island’s airfields.

  It was deterrence, of that there could be no doubt; but it was also a very dangerous provocation.

  “Nixon is showing that he’s a strong man. He’s saying, I won the Midwest war and if anybody messes with me, I’ll win the next war,” Larry O’Brien observed sourly. “He knows nobody gets any brownie points for criticising the White House when our boys are in harm’s way overseas.”

  “Nixon is desperate,” Walter Brenckmann countered mildly. “What is it they say? The last refuge of a scoundrel is to wrap himself in the American flag?”

  “What if the bastard provokes an incident with the Chinese?”

  If Larry O’Brien had hoped to tap into an unsuspected vein of intemperance, he was to be disappointed.

  “I don’t think he’s that stupid,” Walter Brenckmann shrugged. “The trouble is that by sending the Navy so far forward, so far from home, he has created any number of hostages to fortune. He has lost control, ceded it to chance and the split second decisions of relatively junior officers lacking any real understanding of the psyche and the perceived strategic imperatives of the mainland Chinese.” Another shrug: “And, of course, nobody knows how the Koreans will react in any given situation. Anybody who says otherwise, is being disingenuous or they don’t know what they are talking about.”

  Larry O’Brien wanted to tear his hair out.

  “The American people don’t care about that, Ambassador!”

  “They do. They just don’t know it.”

  “You have to win Middle America, not just East Coast liberals.”

  “That won’t happen if we out-Nixon Nixon about being the world’s policeman, Larry.”

  “No?”

  “We tried that in the seventeen years after the Japanese surrendered on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay; and hundreds of millions of people died. Then we flirted with America First and ended up getting involved in new wars in Korea, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. We left thirty thousand of our boys in Korea, and before that another five-and-a-half thousand in the Gulf and almost went to war with both the Soviets and the British in the first week of July 1964. Now we’re behaving as if we want to trade punches with China, a country with two or three times our population and an indifference to casualties which, pray God, no American President will ever have again. I agree we cannot just disengage, or bring all our boys back home overnight but we ought to be exporting American values, goods and culture, not our young men in uniform.”

  O’Brien tried another tack.

  “All the polls say that Nixon scores well for his deal with the Soviets and for building up the military to make America great again…”

  Walter Brenckmann shook his head.

  “When were we not great, Larry?”

  “You know what I mean!”

  Joanne Brenckmann had been out of the room, making a fuss of Gretchen and Dan’s little ones before they were put to bed. She sat down beside her daughter-in-law on a sofa.

  The older woman had been a little worried about Gretchen the last couple of days, she seemed uncharacteristically distracted, less combative than usual as if she was sickening for something or worried, unsettled which was not at all like her.

  She had put it down to worrying about Junior’s troubles at the Pentagon.

  Dan had said Gretchen was just a little tired.

  He was concerned about her, also but when a man was married to a force of nature like Gretchen he learned, very early on, to bide his moment before pressing her.

  “I agree with the Ambassador, Larry,” Gretchen said, a perplexed expression touching her lips and eyes. “But not because I’m a nice person, or anything like that.”

  Earlier, she had confirmed that she had arranged to meet Ted Sorenson the next time she was in DC, although that might not be for at least a couple of weeks. Dan had run speech texts past him in the last month and got useful feedback, even though JFK’s old speechwriter still seemed cautious about committing whole-heartedly to the Brenckmann cause.

  Dan was grinning at his wife and momentarily, she relaxed, and smiled in return.

  “But I don’t think it’s worth going after Nixon via his family, Larry,” she declared.

  White House ‘sources’ and various GOP motor-mouths on the Hill had been going after her lately, and sucking up the sniping had got old in a hurry. Her father had advised her to stay above the fray, sentiments echoed by Larry O’Brien whom she was well aware, viewed her continuing presence in and around her father-in-law’s campaign as problematic.

  “Why not?” O’Brien inquired, curious.

  “The President’s got two brothers. I get it that one of them is shady; but the other one is an all-American kind of guy…”

  “Donald,” O’Brien retorted, “is an accident waiting to happen!”

  “Why, because he took a two hundred thousand dollar loan from Howard Hughes to bail out his restaurant in Whittier?”

  “Which went bankrupt a year later…”

  “That was in 1957, Larry! So, what if one of the President’s little brothers allegedly failed to pay back a loan to that creep Hughes? Who cares? Two hundred thousand is petty cash to somebody like Hughes. You don’t honestly think HH has a hold over Tricky Dicky for that sort of loose change?”

  “I don’t. But the voters may think differently.”

  Walter Brenckmann stirred, put down his cup and saucer.

  “Larry’s right to be asking questions about the Nixon family’s connections to Howard Hughes. Larry’s more experienced, better at this than the rest of us in this room. The reason Mister Sorenson and other people have stayed neutral in the primary race up until now is that nobody wants to back a loser. I get that, it is not personal. We’re all learning from Larry as we go along. If Larry feels I’ve tied his hands, I apologise. I’m not a normal political candidate; I must be very hard to work with.”

  O’Brien opened his hands, waved this away but said nothing.

  The other man smiled a wan smile.

  “As for President Nixon’s brothers, well, if they were real crooks – like the President himself – I wouldn’t hesitate to go after them. But I very much doubt if they are. From what I hear about the President’s youngest brother, Edward, he’s a real straight arrow. Heck, he’s a Commander in the US Navy Reserve, an aviator who volunteered to return to the service in 1964 and was on board the Bonhomme Richard at the height of the Korean fiasco.”

  “Isn’t he a geologist?” Joanne put in sweetly.

  “I believe so.”

  “He’s running Nixon’s campaign in California,” Larry O’Brien offered, neutrally. “Look, everybody in DC knows Howard Hughes was into Nixon back in the later fifties. It stands to reason the Administration will have ‘looked after the Hughes Corporation’ the last few years. If the House wasn’t in the hands of the GOP, Congress would have gone after Hughes…”

  Larry O’Brien’s voice trailed off.

  One of the student interns, a bespectacled, gawky girl, he had inherited from Gretchen’s time running the campaign, had come into the room, looking agitated.

  “I’m sorry, it’s
on TV…”

  Walter Brenckmann looked around.

  “What’s that, Eleanor?” He asked paternally.

  Joanne had told Larry O’Brien that her husband’s singular gift for remembering everybody’s name was a hangover from his Navy days.

  “Something has happened in the Taiwan Strait…”

  Everybody waited for more.

  “Our planes shot down two MiGs over the Pescadores Islands,” the young woman faltered. “Er, wherever they are…”

  Chapter 22

  Monday 20th May, 1968

  USS Berkeley (DDG-15), Taiwan Strait, South China Sea

  If Lieutenant Commander John McCain had not known, and been stoically reconciled to the fact that he still had an uphill fight to convince the US Navy that he was fit to fly fast jets, he would have regarded his present – probably less than thirty-day assignment – as a real kick in the guts. But actually, it did no harm to remind ‘fighter jocks’ like him, although strictly speaking, the Skyhawks he flew were attack birds with only a limited dogfighting capability, that they were all still, first and foremost, ‘naval’ officers.

  The Berkeley was a junior watchkeeper down – the poor jerk’s appendix had suddenly gone bad on him a couple of hours before the destroyer sailed from Subic Bay – and somebody on the Big E had noticed McCain’s watch certificate was out of date.

  The destroyer did not really need him but it was a good opportunity to get a little bridge time, under supervision admittedly, because even he accepted that his days flying jets off carriers were numbered. That meant that if he wanted a long career in the Navy, he was going to have to bend a little, learn new tricks and more importantly, re-learn everything he had unlearned in his two-and-a-half years flight training at Pensacola. Or rather, all the ‘navy and ship guff’ he had paid far too little attention to back in those carefree days as an Ensign with a hankering to party.