by James Philip
Caro had flown into Offutt that morning to discover that Nathan was ‘on operations until further notice’’, which meant he was in, most likely, one of the sixty to seventy-two hour Looking Glass mission-cycles. He would be back sometime in the next twenty-four hours, and in the meantime, she had started to catch up with the correspondence that had accumulated since the last time she had been in Nebraska, three weeks ago.
Tired, she had made herself a hot milk, turned on the TV and, drawing her legs beneath her, settled onto the firm, still new Air Force Issue sofa in the small front room of the apartment she shared with Nathan, and caught the late news.
Ambassador Brenckmann and his wife were in Atlanta.
They were pictured standing in front of the Ebenezer Baptist Chapel sharing a stage with the Reverend Martin Luther King junior, surrounded by a milling, vibrant crowd which would have dwarfed the five thousand on the mount with Christ himself.
Caro had been in the same room as the Ambassador a couple of times during the War in the Midwest; he had been the guy keeping Prime Minister Thatcher and the Brits onside, she had been the President’s shrink responsible for messing with Edwin Mertz’s head. They might have spoken once, albeit in passing. She could not remember if they had. The Ambassador had been a serious player; she remembered how Haldeman and the others, even John Ehrlichman, had been wary of him, and a little suspicious of his aura of calm, unruffled authority.
People used to call that quality ‘grace under pressure’ and that was why all the President’s men had always been so uncomfortable around men like Walter Brenckmann, and Henry Kissinger, she realised, now that she thought about it. Nelson Rockefeller had been above all that but then he had few, if any of the insecurities of the former J. Walter Thompson advertising guys, and former UCLA college boys with whom Richard Nixon had tried to surround himself.
It occurred to Caro that if Nelson Rockefeller had got to sit behind that desk in the Oval Office a year ago, the Democrats would still be in the wilderness and in fifty or a hundred years’ time, Ambassador Brenckmann would be remembered by posterity only because he was Gretchen Betancourt’s father-in-law.
Nixon ought to have got out while the going was good; instead, he had retreated to his bunker, and invited his enemies to besiege him.
Was that hubris?
Or just plain dumb?
“I plan to be the President of all the peoples of America,” the candidate, speaking with the understated certainty of a man who knew he was on the home run several laps ahead of the competition. “Every American has a right to a fair break. Every American child has a right to the same education. We are all God’s children beneath our skins; we are Americans and we all own our country’s manifest destiny!”
Caro had caught glimpses of Miranda Sullivan, the mother of the Reverend King’s illegitimate son – along with King, the original victims of the Warwick Hotel Scandal – in Ambassador Brenckmann’s entourage in recent weeks. Wisely, she was out of sight, out of mind in Atlanta. The way that bastard George Wallace, she had no qualms speaking ill of the dead when it came to people like him, had talked about the Warwick Hotel affair he had made it sound as if the Reverend King had raped Miranda Sullivan. That had suited his racist narrative, his Jim Crow perspective of the South, and fuelled his poisonous rhetoric.
Good riddance George Wallace!
Clearly, all the evidence was that Miranda had loved the guy; okay, he was married and had gone to lengths to keep the affair secret, but she had never been a casual one night stand and oddly of the two lovers, he was probably the one who had struggled with his conscience, and in every way, suffered the greater, ongoing damage. Not least, to his standing within his own community. Although, through a mixture of very public atonement and acclamation he had retained the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, he had been hamstrung for a year or more after the scandal broke, and the impetus for change had been stymied and then rejected by the Nixon Administration.
The evil-doers had won, for a while at least.
Doctor King and his supporters’ non-violent agenda had been hijacked, stirred up by George Wallace and redneck Southern Democrats of his ilk. For King, it had been a much longer road back than for Miranda Sullivan…
Caro heard the door to the apartment open, and gently, close.
Nobody would have told Nathan that his wife was back on base.
That was standard operating procedure; and it was SOP for a very good reason. The mission took priority over everything and nothing was allowed to impinge on an operational rotation.
The mission had landed over five hours ago.
Nathan had decamped to the crew room, showered, put on a fresh uniform, drunk a couple of cups of strong, black coffee and submitted to the exhaustive de-briefing exercise that followed every Looking Glass Mission.
As befitted the US Air Force’s most important operational program, self-inspection and analysis complemented the equally rigorous external expert oversight. Every mission was de-constructed, machine and personal logs compared, collated into standardised formats, summaries prepared and agreed and performance ratings assessed. The standard required of all participants, on the ground and in the air was perfection. There were no caveats, no extenuating circumstances or clauses; Project Looking Glass was too important.
The whole system was predicated on the fundamental assumption that if the Looking Glass Program, which had commenced operations with a fleet of five aircraft in March 1961, had done its job better on the night of 27th/28th October 1962, less American lives might have been lost and possibly, the war might never have happened in the first place.
Rightly or wrongly – there was no evidence, as far as Nathan knew, that anybody in the program had screwed up any worse than anybody else that night – this was the unforgiving prism through which all personnel who signed up for Looking Glass duty expected to be viewed every minute of every day.
Caro had put her mug of hot milk on the floor.
She skipped to the living room door where she was swept up into her husband’s arms.
“I’m back for good,” she gasped, most of the air having been squeezed out of her, lungs.
They kissed, hungrily like the improbable lovers, young and not so young, that they were. In minutes they were in bed, naked, their limbs entwined, breathless and senseless with the passion of reunion.
The bedroom, one of two in the first floor apartment – the Air Force assumed relatively newly-weds would have at least one child – so, the smallest married quarters were modest three or four room arrangements, normally occupied by relatively junior officers and their young families. Bigger, spacious accommodation was available elsewhere on the base, or off base outside Offutt, some miles away.
The light from the living room and the murmuring of the TV drifted into the room.
“Okay, I get it,” Caro giggled, “you missed me!”
Nathan was still inside her and she did not want him withdrawing any time soon. He was perspiring heavily, she knew that if the lights were on, she too would look red-faced, her short hair messed, and old. Not that her husband seemed to care.
He groaned, moved in her.
Caro locked her ankles behind his thighs.
And ran her finger tips across his heaving back.
Nathan had tried to get back to competitive track running when they were first married. He still ran when he could, did weights in the base gymnasium but the demanding cycle of Looking Glass Missions, constant re-training including long classroom sessions, familiarisation and practise with each new piece of cutting edge equipment built into the Boeing EC-135C Looking Glass fleet left very little time to fit in the sort of physical fitness regime a man needed to compete at the highest level in track and field. Still lean, her husband had put on a few pounds lately, and of course, anno domini stood still for no man, or woman. He was thirty-two now, not about to catch her up, she was fifty-five going on fifty-six. Never mind, at least she was no longer twice his age…
&n
bsp; He propped himself on his elbows, gazed down at her.
His breath slowed; his wits regathered.
“Whatever gave you that impression Missis Zabriski?”
“Little things,” she laughed. “Is the world still safe tonight?”
Nathan grinned lopsidedly.
He thrust gently, confirming he was still hard.
Caro closed her eyes.
“I guess,” he whispered, his weight shifting, pressing her down and apart.
“That’s good…”
Suddenly, she was clinging to him, the bed springs were complaining and it was all she could do not to scream in delight.
That had happened before now…
In the morning they went together to the Offutt Base Exchange (BX) store. Nathan was notoriously minimalist about stocking the apartment’s small fridge and larder cupboard; preferring when Caro was away to eat in the Officers Mess, or during the preparation phase of a Looking Glass mission at the flight line canteen within the Operations Block.
Caro still got a sense of profound unreality being wholly ‘normal’, and doing ‘normal’ husband-wife chores with Nathan. Although she was entitled to wear her uniform – she preferred casual civilian slacks, a woollen cardigan over a beige blouse, and to wear ear rings, anything to not be military. She still held her reserve commission in the Air Force; she would have resigned again, pressed the point but every time she did that, they tried to promote her and she was perfectly happy being a bird Colonel; just so long as they did not expect her to fulfil her annual thirty-day service option.
Besides, doing a little shopping for groceries wearing her eagle colonel’s tabs with her much younger, handsome major husband would only draw more than the usual number of curious looks. Not that from a distance she looked like the old woman she often felt herself to be, like on the mornings after she had had sex all night. Like Nathan, she was not a stick thin as she had been, at times, in the year or so after the war. These days she wore her hair longer, off her collar, and never overdid her makeup. Too much foundation never hid the ravages of time; it was better just to smile a lot and to pretend to be young.
They were a recognisable couple these days.
Nathan was a veteran of the night of the October War – what had happened to the Bloody 100th over Malta back at the tail end of 1963, and even the fact his deranged mother had attempted to assassinate JFK had been submerged, lost to all intents, in the chaos of the Battle of Washington – and now he was an established member of the Looking Glass Program, regularly promoted bird colonel himself, albeit only for the duration of a given mission, to enable him to assume the role of Aircraft Commander while he was in the air.
But was still odd, Nathan pushing a trolley down the aisles of the Base Exchange, the old married couple discussions they had about this, or that, about the type of milk, margarine, vegetables, cut of meat, brand of washing up liquid, or the kitchen soap that ended up in their basket.
Caro guessed it was the same for a lot of people.
The last few years had been so messed up; everything turned upside down that it was hardly surprising that people would forget how to recognise what normality looked like.
Maybe I will write a paper about that…
“Do you remember back in 1965 we were talking about driving down to Monterrey?” Caro asked, halting.
Nathan pushed the trolley on a couple of paces, stepped back to re-join her. She was balancing two oranges, one in each hand which clearly, she had momentarily forgotten about. In the fall of 1965, they had still been living in Berkeley, he had been at college, having pretty much written off his Air Force career. That seemed like another lifetime.
“Yeah, I remember. We never got around to that, did we?”
“No…”
“This isn’t really the time of year for it.”
“Next summer, maybe?”
Caro stared at the oranges in her hands, frowned as if to say: “what are they doing there?” and put them back on the shelf behind her.
Nathan would be due a six-month rotation off operations in the spring; a spell at CALTECH had been discussed, nowadays, he probably needed to add a degree to his service jacket if he wanted to keep climbing the promotion ladder, and the Air Force would pay for that.
“Yeah, we should do that,” he said.
Caro reached across the trolly, grabbed a handful of shirt and pulled him towards her so that she could plant a wet, smacking kiss on his mouth.
What could be more normal than necking with one’s husband in public?
Chapter 70
Saturday 26th October, 1968
Holy Trinity Church, Winchester, England
Commander Alan Hannay was one among about a dozen Talavera survivors on the groom’s side of the aisle of the crowded Victorian church. In fact, there were men from the Cavendish, the Campbeltown and from other ships of Dermot O’Reilly’s old 7th Destroyer Squadron. Many men, like Alan, were accompanied by their wives and children. Presently, three-year old Julian, and twenty-three month-old Sophie were behaving themselves, a little awed, each clinging to their mother’s hands as their father fumbled in his pocket for the umpteenth time, constantly reassuring himself that he had the rings to hand as he stood, waiting beside the tall, bearded, unnaturally nervous presence of the groom.
The Chaplain of the Portsmouth Naval Base, a balding, smiling man in his fifties, a beanpole figure standing every inch as high as Dermot O’Reilly, seemed to be the only one of the three men waiting for the bride’s arrival, not to be in a state of fidgety, visibly heightened anxiety.
Behind the groom and his best man, the church had filled with an influx from all around Hampshire, with perhaps, two-thirds of the guests having travelled in a group by train from Portsmouth and Gosport. There must have been a score or more of young children, and a couple of babes in arms snivelling their complaints in the quietness.
Despite her own pregnancy, which she joked, seemed to have been perfectly co-ordinated with her sister, Marija’s, Alan wife, Rosa, had been looking forward to this special ‘day out’ for weeks. Her morning sickness had been worse with this baby and a month ago, it had seemed as if Alan would be attending the wedding alone. Thankfully, Rosa seemed to be over the worst of it now; still, he worried, comforting himself with the thought that Peter and Marija would be back in England soon – Marija and the children sometime in the next two to three weeks – and the two sisters would be together again, supporting each other.
Dermot had stayed with Alan and Rosa at their house in Itchen Abbas, a village north of the city last night. Not for him any wild last fling: ‘No, I did all that before the war, never again!’
Everything had ended up being organised in a rush.
Alan’s posting as Executive Officer of the Leander class frigate Naiad had come through last month; the Navy had a habit of bad timing in these things. Naiad was newly re-commissioned after four months in dockyard hands, and the odds were that she would be deployed to the Gibraltar Station in the coming weeks and he would miss the birth of his third child.
Rosa was pretending to be philosophical about it.
‘I married a naval officer…’
Nonetheless, Alan was guiltily excited about finally getting his Navy career re-started. On board Naiad he would revert to Lieutenant Commander, leaving his substantive rank ashore. He had volunteered this solution, not a thing the Board of Admiralty overly cared for but, in his case, they had made a special exception, thank goodness!
That summer he had briefly commanded HMS Glasserton, a four-hundred ton Hunt class minesweeper with a crew of thirty-three men. That had been pretty daunting; fortunately, his first lieutenant had been at hand to stop him running the ship aground, and he had been sad to move on so quickly. Albeit, Glasserton had never been more than a stepping stone, a way to get his feet back under the wardroom table, as it were.
Learning that their old friend Dermot had popped the question to Charlotte Richards, had come as something of a
shock to the Hannays. If anybody had seemed to be a confirmed bachelor – a fellow once bitten by the marriage bug and now twice shy – they, and most of the people they knew, had assumed it had to be Dermot O’Reilly. The strong, silent, damnably near teetotal Canadian former whale hunter, who had stood beside Peter Christopher on the bridge of the Talavera – as it was shot to pieces – throughout the Battle of Malta, personable to a fault had seemed immune to the ‘wedding game’ that was all the rage these days.
People had talked a lot of rot about loose living, living for the moment, and letting the future take care of itself after the October War. Actually, there was a widespread yearning for normality, for settled family life and the emotional and physical security it promised. Cynics held that the boom in marriages – basically, couples tying the knot at the earliest possible moment, as soon as they identified a likely willing partner – was due to the incentives the Government had put in place. In reality, those ‘incentives’ were incidental in the age of austerity they were all going to be living through for years to come, just a few pennies here and there, another point on local authority housing lists, nothing that really make much difference to most people.
Alan looked around.
Charlotte – Lottie – had taken out a friend’s old wedding dress; her own had been lost, like so many others’ life’s possessions and clutter, in the fires of the October War.
By all accounts, the lucky couple had had a mostly distant courtship, what with Dermot being up in Scotland, or endlessly travelling around between far-flung naval bases and Oxford that autumn. Apparently, Lottie fully intended to continue in the service, at least for the time being; she had an important job at HQ in Portsmouth, at which she was very good at and enjoyed. One did one’s bit, come what may.
The Prime Minister was probably right when she said that it was precisely this ‘carry on’ spirit that was what had kept the country’s head above water in the last six years.