by James Philip
It just so happened that George Wallace had built his career on mining the insecurities and the anger to be found in rich seams across the ‘deep’ southern states. He had only ever talked to his people, known that away from his heartlands – where segregationist leanings and historical memory was bitterest, or contrarily confused – he was preaching in the wilderness to people who knew little and cared less about the lives of his people. He ought to have been able to take his fight into parts of Texas, Florida and the Carolinas but he was not going to carry any of those states in November: no, Arkansas and Mississippi, with only a handful of electoral college votes between them, and the three big prizes, Louisiana, Georgia and his native Alabama, were his realistic targets with a lot less than the fifty or sixty electoral college votes his enemies talked about. Their calculations included the Carolinas - and their twenty delegates - which he knew were out of his reach In reality, what he was looking at were forty-two – Alabama (10), Arkansas (5), Georgia (12), Louisiana (9) and Mississippi (6) - out of the five-hundred-and-thirty-eight electoral college votes which, in a close race, might still block the Brenckmann for President surge, especially if Nixon took California.
Most of those forty-two votes – delegates to the conference which actually elected the President – were in Wallace’s pocket, and if his people held the casting votes after November, he planned to exact a high price for standing aside, or for supporting the next man in the Oval Office.
Curtis LeMay did not understand that side of the game; he still thought he had a shot at being Vice President. It was not going to happen. Not this time around, leastways. Perhaps, after the winner of this year’s race had screwed up badly enough, 1972, or maybe 1976, might be Wallace’s best shot at the White House. It paid to think long; to always be plotting moves two, three, four or five steps farther along the road.
The state troopers who had moved to the sides of the stage had relaxed now; they were enjoying the party, getting into the mood of the occasion.
“Here, today the good people of Montgommery are sending the people in DC a message! Don’t tell us how to run our state! Stay out of our colleges! Don’t tell us what we ought to be thinking! We know what’s right! We are the real Americans…”
George Wallace never saw the straggly-haired, wild-eyed man raise his right arm above the first two rows of the crowd pressing up to the stage almost directly in front of him.
Or see or hear the old Colt revolver whose first shot burst the eardrum of the man whose head was barely an inch away from the chamber as the first round belched, smokily from the barrel.
That round tugged at George Wallace’s right forearm, ripping away a spurt of muscle before grazing Curtis LeMay’s left rib cage.
The second round crashed into the Governor of Alabama’s chest an inch to the right of his sternum, shattered a rib, tumbled and came to rest high in his ruined right lung.
That bullet might have killed him but even as he began to crumple to his knees, too shocked to comprehend what was going on the third shot tore into his throat, nicking his left carotid artery and almost wholly severing his spinal column just below its junction with his brain stem.
Chapter 53
Saturday 21st September, 1968
Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
In August, the skeleton ground crews responsible for overseeing Seryshevo’s mothballed fleet of over thirty aircraft, had been transferred to transit depots in the Amur Valley, ahead of reassignments all over what was left of the USSR. Now, around the base the once deadly products of Soviet aerospace engineering prowess were abandoned, rotting, the windblown dust building into pale drifts around their undercarriages. Saddest of all were the four great swept-wing Myasishchev M-4 Molot – Hammer – long-range jet bombers, each in their big, camouflaged blast revetments on the eastern side of the base.
Of course, no sooner had the guards and the protective maintenance crews gone than Olga Petrovna had led the 182nd’s first – of many – scavenging sorties to recover anything remotely useful from the forgotten bombers. Five weeks later, the ‘Hammers’ had been robbed clean even though there was surprisingly little interchangeability of components between different aircraft types, notwithstanding they were, generationally, not that far apart.
The biggest bounty salvaged from the M-4s had been of parts capable of being adapted, or in other ways ‘bodged’ to replace expired or faulty items of communications, radar, autocannon gun trains and barbette hydraulics on the Tu-95s.
The Myasishchev M-4 and the Tupolev Tu-95 originated from different design bureaus, the products of differently trained minds, answerable to different, and secretive, competitive hierarchies with their own historically evolved linkages into the military’s internecine trials and procurement infrastructures. There had been Mikoyan and Gurevich, Ilyushin and half-a-dozen other predatory players fighting tooth and nail for orders from the vast empire of the Red Air Force before the Cuban Missiles War. Why ever would one manufacturer’s design bureau employ another’s engines, electrical or hydraulic components; if they had had their own way each aircraft type would have used its own in-house-hydrogen bombs, its own calibre autocannons, its own brackets and clamps to secure externally carried munitions and fuel tanks. In fact, all the supposed evils of the derided and despised capitalist system were integral to the more technologically advanced areas of the pre-war Soviet economy, where the most valuable currency was ideas and ever-progressing innovation, concepts which had rarely been applied to Soviet heavy industry or to agriculture where a ‘one size fits all’ mentality had held the Motherland back for decades.
Or at least, that was Olga Yurievna Petrovna’s take on the reason why the only really useful things she had managed to ‘rescue’ from the otherwise relatively futuristic M-4s had been ‘bits and pieces’ from the silvery bombers’ communications, radar and guidance suites.
She still had something of a bee in her bonnet over it.
“Can you imagine the waste and the redundant bureaucracy required to keep all those fucking design bureaus staffed? And all the completely useless prototypes that got to be built when what we ought to have been doing was down-scaling our big rockets, so we could hide the fucking things in bomb-proof silos like the Yankees?”
Andrei Kirov admitted he could not imagine it.
They had climbed up into the Myasishchev M-4 in the revetment farthest from civilisation, and dogged the pressure hatch shut behind them. It was the weekend, the seven-day godless rotation of the old days was a thing of the past and besides, there were so few people left at Seryshevo, that nobody worked on the handful of remaining aircraft on a Saturday or a Sunday. So, they had the far reaches of the base to themselves. Well, and to the other secretive lovers who needed a place where they could be together in…private.
Not that there was a great deal of room inside a ‘Hammer’; the aircraft was what it was, a streamlined airframe mounting four Mikulin AM-3 wing-rooted turbojets capable of carting up to fifty-two thousand kilograms of bombs – in its two bomb bays – and on external pylons to targets over five thousand kilometres distant at speeds of up to nine hundred kilometres per hour. Consequently, there was not an awful lot of room for its eight-man crew: first and second pilots, a navigator-bombardier with a position in the nose, a radar operator-navigator, a flight engineer-gunner, a radio operator-gunner, a dorsal turret gunner behind the cockpit; and a tail gunner to operate the aircraft’s nine-23-millimetre Nudelman-Rikhter NR-23 autocannons, located in dorsal, ventral and tail turrets. All those guns were a throwback to another age; most of the M-4s lost in the 1962 war would almost certainly have been destroyed by surface-to-air missiles without their gunners ever seeing another aircraft.
Olga had already explained that the M-4 would have been ‘near supersonic-capable’ if the guns had been scrapped and the fuselage’s miscellaneous ‘lumps and bumps’ interrupting the smooth flow of air over the aircraft, flattened out.
That afternoon she had wriggled out of her
shapeless boiler suit as soon as the hatch shut behind them; Andrei too had started throwing off his clothes. Inside the aircraft, whose skin and wings were made of aluminium, it was sultry, already warm despite the shading of the massive camouflage netting.
In the lover’s regular assignations in one or other of the derelict aircraft they often heard, or came across other couples looking for similarly private locales. There were drinking parties under the wings of the big bombers some nights; everybody knew the base was being run down and that the new occupants would bring in their own people. So, it was a case of drinking now and being merry; tomorrow a man or a woman could be transferred to anywhere in the Motherland.
It was a stupid way to run an air force but then the bomber force was being pared back to a purely home defence corps. At the same time there was no restriction whatsoever on the deployment and development of interceptors and ground attack aircraft. Border and airspace defence had become the priorities and that meant fighters and missiles, not great lumbering monsters like the Amerikanskaya Mechta or its jet sisters, the M-4 Hammers.
The winding down of the base had been a surreal backdrop to the never-never land through which Andrei Kirov had been stumbling for the last two months.
Once he had understood that he was trapped his infatuation with Olga, and his disillusion with everything else had drawn him into the heart of the plot.
It was all a little unreal. It was like being caught up in a whirlpool that was inexorably sucking him down, ever deeper into its darkness...
He was an accidental conspirator in a conspiracy in which most of the key players were going through the motions, not knowing if and when the man who literally, held their lives in the palm of his hand – Vladimir Zakharov – would sell them out, or as bad, compel them to go ahead with the madness.
If the conspirators among the crew of the Amerikanskaya Mechta had ever been heart and soul invested in their ‘new mission’, that hell-fire, blind obsession had faded by the time Andrei had come on board.
Andrei tried not to be careless but actually, it was hard not to get complacent when basically, you did not give a damn anymore. Knowing that one was completely screwed was, counter-intuitively, oddly freeing. The KGB man still went about his duty, ensuring that he and his troopers were a constant nuisance to all and sundry; that after all, was what the KGB presence at a place like Seryshevo was supposed to achieve. He filed his reports about Zakharov – omitting the part about his insane plan to bomb the East Coast of North America, obviously – to his superiors in Vladivostok. And Zakharov presumably, carried on submitting his complaints and accusations about the ‘rapist, out of control KGB thug’ of a political officer attached to his base administration. And in the meantime, a fifteen metre-long Raduga Kh-20 flying bomb slowly took shape in Special Weapons Store Number Two, and the Amerikanskaya Mechta took to the air every few days, flying a variety of reconnaissance and unarmed long-range simulated bombing missions. Twice, Kirov had sat in on such exercises – one a cross-country flight to the Arctic north, the other a sortie two thousand kilometres out over the Northern Pacific, landing back at Seryshevo in full darkness.
They had found him a pressure suit which almost but not quite fitted his bear-like frame. It was intolerably uncomfortable and he hated the face mask, always worn for a part of the flight even though the crew compartments in the fuselage were fully pressurised.
Recent weeks would have been almost pleasant had it not been for the constant fear of the dreaded pre-dawn knock at the door of his dacha; or of Air Force security troops piling out of a truck and dragging them all off to interrogation cells.
‘If it all goes wrong,’ he had advised Olga, ‘confess to everything. Say whatever they want you to say. That’s what everybody does in the end anyway. The pain isn’t worth it, not just to be awkward, or out of some false sense of loyalty to the others.’
At first, they had tried to be discrete. Lately, they were beyond caring. In the sauna-like heat of the lifeless fuselage of the Myasishchev M-4, after they made love they lay together on the floor, their sweat running off them in rivulets, breathless.
“How did your meeting with Zakharov go yesterday?” Olga asked, presently.
“We swapped drafts of what we were going to report to our respective bosses about each other, agreed them. We drank a glass of Vodka. I asked if everything was going to be ready for 5th November. He said yes but said that the date of the American election was only for planning purposes…”
“The Americans are bound to be very watchful that day,” she sniffed, her left hand roving over the man’s still heaving chest, and then, down between his legs.
“He asked me about your attitude,” the man laughed cynically. “I said it was much improved. He got angry and made a crude remark about fucking like dog’s on heat which I thought was a little uncalled for; and told him so!”
Olga squeezed him provocatively. He felt his cock rising in her hand. Before he could roll her onto her back, Olga had straddled him. The late afternoon sun blazed in through an observation window, illuminating her head and shoulders, glistening with perspiration in dazzling light, contrasted against the darkness of the inside of the powered down, lifeless hulk.
She squashed down on him.
Began to grind against his tumescence.
“It’s all,” she moaned, “such a fucking joke, isn’t it?”
Chapter 54
Saturday 21st September, 1968
The West Wing, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington
That morning, the President had been meeting relatives of some of the officers and men who had died on board the USS Ranger; awarding posthumous medals for valour and attempting to comfort the bereaved loved ones of men he had sent into harm’s way. It had been a mostly private ceremony, followed by an intimate reception during which he and Pat, and his younger daughter, twenty-year-old Julie, had overstayed their scheduled time by over an hour-and-a-half.
How could they have simply stood up and left when the appointed hour - actually, the engagement was a forty-five minute diary slot - when they too, were crying.
Julie, who was engaged to be married to Dwight Eisenhower’s grandson, David, whom she had met in 1956 – when they were both eight-years-old - at the GOP National Convention in San Francisco, was currently a student at Georgetown University.
During the summer, she and her friends had been appalled by the way the campus had been torn apart by the anti-war movement; and the presence of so many peacenik activists and agitators, many bussed in from outside who had no connection to the university, and had attempted to compel everybody to take sides, leading to frequent violent verbal, and a handful of upsetting, physical confrontations between opposing factions. What was really terrifying, was that the mood of the whole campus seemed to have turned against the Administration, the war, and her Father.
That, several times in the last fortnight, the chaos had restarted with even greater intensity and only been quelled by the influx of large numbers of baton-wielding and shotgun-armed uniformed Washington PD officers, posted outside dorms and lecture rooms, and walking the corridors as students returned for the first semester of the new academic year, had shocked and truth be known, frightened Julie and her fiancé, neither of whom now dared show their faces at the University, or even on the streets of the capital.
However, not that much kept Julie in the doldrums for long!
It was one of those days when it maddened her that nobody outside the family seemed capable, let alone willing, of seeing her father for the great and the good man that he was. If only they could see him as she saw him, every day of her young life; as he was when he and her mother were with the wives, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters of those tragically lost in the Battle of Tsushima. The papers and those evil TV people painted her father as some kind of ogre, an uncaring monster who would stop at nothing to cling onto the job that was slowly, surely killing him.
Sometimes, she just wanted to scream!
“It’s not your fault, Daddy…”
He had shaken his head as they drove back to the White House in the bullet-proof Presidential Lincoln.
There were still bricks and smashed up placards in the gutters and here and there the car’s tyres ground over detritus left in the road from last night’s, relatively small, and easily contained march. With all the windows of the Executive Residence locked shut and a big fan running in her room, Julie had hardly been able to hear the crowd chanting.
We won’t get fooled again!
No more war!
Bring our boys home!
Find the price of freedom buried in the ground…
She hated it when the crowds started singing refrains from that irresponsible beatnik Sam Brenckmann’s hits: Brothers Across the River, and Tabatha’s Gone…
What was it going to be like when We Won’t Get Fooled Again was officially released?
That sick song was already playing on the radio…
Those people in Pennsylvania Avenue would be singing it all hours by next week!
Julie just wanted to hug her father.
“But it is. My fault,” he said to her, lifelessly, “I sent those ships to Taiwan; I believed, and I still believe, that peace with the Soviets is worth whatever price we have to pay. Those were my decisions. Like letting the Legions of the End of Days get all the way to St Louis and the Great Plains, I was the one who authorised scorched earth in the Midwest. And I was the one who ordered Rolling Thunder…’
He had seemed small, old, beaten down.
There was always some new crisis, with one, or several crises at the same time, one after another dogging his every step, awaiting him back in the Oval Office. Julie had watched her father aging before her eyes, close to despair.