Ask Not Of Your Country (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 4)

by James Philip

  “Top Dog’s on the horn, sir!”

  Norman Schwarzkopf put down his binoculars and took the handset from his communications trooper. The other man was his age, a married man from Shreveport, Louisiana. Unlike his company commander, Corporal Romney was a man of average height and stature, who seemed ludicrously burdened by the bulky radio hanging on his back.

  “This is Little Bear on the horn, sir!”

  “You ready to bug out, Little Bear?” Lieutenant Colonel Harvey Grabowski, commander of the 32nd Infantry Combat Group of the Wisconsin National Guard inquired.

  “That’s an affirmative, Top Dog!”

  “We have BIG STICK incoming. Repeat BIG STICK incoming. When the shit hits the fan put the pedal to the metal, Little Bear! Top Dog OUT!”

  Schwarzkopf passed the handset back to Corporal Romney.

  He could already hear the distant scream of jet engines.

  Moments later all Hell broke loose east and north of the town.

  Within seconds shells began falling north and east of Sun Prairie, some actually within the eastern boundary of the suburb. The fighter jets rocketed overhead; F-100 Super Sabres and A-4 Skyhawks with cannons rattling and Napalm canisters toppling end over end from under-wing pods. As the fast jets circled for a second strafing run the thrumming thunder of the big Wright R-3350 radial power plants of five Douglas A-1 Skyraiders filled the air. Coming in so low they brushed tree tops and skimmed the chimneys of the few still standing buildings each aircraft’s four 20-millimetre cannons blazed, and from as many as a dozen hard points on their wings bombs and missiles spilled and smoked away.

  It had been Skyraiders which had turned the Battle of Washington against the rebels in December; each aircraft blasting hundred yard-long avenues of death and devastation with a single pass. Against an enemy moving above ground with no forewarning the Skyraiders were the ultimate grim reapers of any battlefield.

  “GO! GO! GO!” Schwarzkopf screamed above the bedlam.

  The calculus was simple.

  Either his men jumped into their M113 armored personnel carriers and every other surviving serviceable vehicle in the town and hightailed it back to Madison while the enemy was still in a state of shock; or what was left of Company ‘A’ and the valiant Sun Prairie militia ended up emulating George Armstrong Custer’s hopeless last stand at the Little Big Horn. Schwarzkopf’s men were low on ammunition and the surviving M113s were already loaded with wounded.

  It was only a matter of time before the enemy realized as much.

  The M113s’ 50-caliber machine guns were hosing bullets into buildings less than a hundred yards away as the column formed up, rumbled onto Route 151 and began to race south west.

  Something had clutched at Schwarzkopf’s left thigh as he ran back to his command vehicle. He had stumbled, crashed into a wall. Romney and another man had grabbed him before he fell. Almost immediately, Romney had given way to a bigger man and the group had moved forward again, with Schwarzkopf vehemently protesting he was okay as he was half-carried, half-dragged through the rubble. Bullets pinged off the hardened flanks of his command M113 as its motor roared and the thirteen ton monster picked up speed, rocking and rolling like a boat in a choppy sea, its tracks grinding over debris.

  “I’m fine, dammit!”

  A corpsman was trying to apply a tourniquet to his upper leg; there was blood everywhere.

  “Keep still, Captain!” The other man shouted.

  More rounds were ricocheting off the armored personnel carrier as it raced headlong down the road with its Detroit Diesel 6V53T 6-cylinder diesel engine transmitting every one of its two hundred and seventy-five horsepower to its tracks.

  Spent 50-caliber cartridge cases from the APC’s constantly firing Browning M2 machine gun rained into the crew compartment, bouncing, rattling on the floor among the bodies. The whiff of cordite was overpowering, positively nauseas.

  Somebody had voided his bowels.

  As the agony from his leg began to hit him in red-hot stabbing waves Schwarzkopf wondered if he was the man responsible.

  He clenched his teeth to stop himself bawling like a baby.

  The worst agony peaked, subsided.

  His leg was numb, dead.

  He knew it was a mistake but he glanced down at his left thigh anyway.

  Shit! I didn’t think I had that much blood in my whole body...

  The corpsman and Corporal Romney’s hands and arms were covered in his blood as they fought to stop him bleeding out on the floor of the bumping, jarring, tossing armored personnel carrier.

  Briefly, Schwarzkopf must have passed out.

  And then it was quiet.

  The M113’s engine suddenly throttled back, the 50-caliber fell silent and the APC was thrumming evening across level ground.

  “How many made it out?” Schwarzkopf asked, feebly, his strength ebbing and an irresistible weariness threatening to overwhelm him.

  “We lost Little Bear Three, sir. Everybody else got out.”

  One M113 left behind.

  Company ‘A’ had got out of town with half the men he had taken into it two days ago; it almost seemed like a victory.

  The darkness fell.

  Chapter 27

  Thursday 18th June 1964

  Walnut Street, Philadelphia

  The setting sun shone almost directly into the living room of the 3rd Floor apartment as Claude Betancourt greeted his daughter and son-in-law. Gretchen hugged her father and exchanged pecking kisses. Dan Brenckmann shook the old man’s hand.

  “So, now you tell me you hate that old pile out at Cherry Hill?” The patriarch demanded testily.

  “Hate is putting it a little bit strongly, sir,” Dan rejoined diplomatically. “It’s just that it’s a little bit big for us and it’s quite a long way out in the sticks for our work in the city.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Daddy,” Gretchen interjected. “It’s not that we don’t appreciate all that you’ve done for us but you know full well that Dan and I intend to stand on our own feet.”

  The old man scowled half-heartedly at the apple of his eye.

  “Um...” Even if he had been remotely upset that his daughter and her husband were so keen to sever the generous financial umbilical cord he had extended to them so soon, his mood would have been hugely uplifted to discover Gretchen looking so much like her former self. She had been unsteady and pained on her wedding day, today, only a few short weeks later she was positively blooming. It was an impression enhanced by the fact she was wearing a new, very elegant dress rather than the androgynous trouser suits she had been hiding inside most of the last couple of months.

  He glanced to his new son-in-law; struck by how much the boy was the spitting image of his father at his age. So many of the people who worked for him – well, depended on him if he was being honest – were literally in his pocket but Walter Brenckmann had never been that, he had always been his own man and he recognized exactly the same, rare but admirable, trait in his son. Betancourt’s own sons had been brought up too softly, everything had come too easily to them and none of them had inherited his drive, his ambition or to be frank, his native gumption. Gretchen was different to her brothers, and Dan Brenckmann, well Claude Betancourt recognized in Dan the same steely, incorruptible streak he had stumbled across in the father all those years ago.

  Walter Brenckmann had been an invaluable friend over the years; sometimes he regretted the fact that for reasons of politics their friendship had been of necessity, out of the public eye.

  “Well, McDermott’s Open is in your names. Do whatever you want with it. If I were you I’d rent it out to the Government or some such, the way real estate prices in this end of Philly are these days you won’t be able to afford a place like,” he sniffed, waved about himself, “this on your junior counsels’ pay checks in a year or two.”

  While the relatively modest Walnut Street apartment might not be to his liking it had been Gretchen’s and Dan’s decision to
rent it, and secretly, nothing gave him so much pleasure as the knowledge that he had been right all along to assume the young couple would want to start making their own way in the World as soon as possible.

  He would always be there in the background; and when he was gone a substantial part of his fortune – leastways, whatever his ex-wives’ and his under-achieving sons’ lawyers failed to get their hands on – would mostly be Gretchen’s. It was not that he loved his sons, or his elder daughter’s younger sister, Kathleen, any less than Gretchen; it was just that he had always believed that money, wealth as such, ought to be used. Moreover, used not simply for personal or dynastic aggrandizement, frittered away on indulgences but for some higher purpose. Basically, if a rich man did not know what to do with his fortune he ought to give it away; and he viewed every cent he ‘invested’ in Gretchen – and now in Dan Brenckmann – as a copper-bottomed down payment on a sure fire thing.

  “I’ll talk to some people downtown,” the old man guffawed, looking around the as yet sparsely furnished reception room in which they were standing. “The Government can afford top dollar for a place like McDermott’s Open. If you get involved they’ll try to get smart.”

  The apartment had two bedrooms, a modern bathroom, a moderately ‘large’ reception room overlooking the street below and was situated in a block accommodating at least three members of the House, which meant it had round the clock security. It would do the young people just fine for the moment; they would move up in the world soon enough.

  The two young attorneys went straight from their meeting with Gretchen’s father to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Field office in Philadelphia on Arch Street. Evening had drawn in and in the darkness the red brick building next to the city’s main court house looked a lot less threatening than it did during daylight hours. Inside it was like stepping back into the 1930s; and both Dan and Gretchen half-expected to be confronted with Tommy gun totting special agents at every turn.

  J. Edgar Hoover kept them waiting twenty minutes.

  He did this not just because he was a mean old man; but because he could.

  It was the second time Gretchen had met the infamous Director of the FBI; for her husband it was a first. Clyde Tolson stood by his master’s desk, and in total there were four other black-suited, white-shirted, black-tied agents in the commandeered office on the block’s fourth floor. It was like walking in on a funeral party.

  J. Edgar Hoover did not get up.

  Other than to point – jabbing a stubby finger – at two hard chairs placed before his desk he did not acknowledge the arrival of the two attorneys.

  Seven months ago on the occasion of her first meeting with Hoover Gretchen had still been a little starry-eyed about such encounters but that was then and this was now. The Director of the FBI looked today exactly as he had back in November; somewhat like an over-sized toad dressed up in a morning suit, his hair slicked back and unnaturally black, and his face oddly young-old as if he was wearing makeup.

  She had warned Dan that the sixty-nine year old Director often spoke really fast, so fast that words sometimes fell over each other. It was a technique he had developed to combat a stutter in his younger days which he now used to routinely to cow subordinates and opponents.

  “We meet again, Director,” Gretchen smiled. While fluttering her eyes at the old faggot was a waste of time; civility cost her nothing.

  ‘This is one time you really need to leave the talking to me, honey,’ she had suggested to Dan in the cab on the way over. ‘Oh, and Daddy will respect you even more for having stood up to him today. But you already knew that, so forget I just said that...’

  Her husband had chortled softly, and patted her knee fondly.

  J. Edgar Hoover stirred, leaned menacingly towards the young people.

  “Allowing Christie to go free is out of the question, Ms Betancourt.”

  “Of course,” Gretchen concurred reasonably. “You must understand that Dan and I are humble attorneys; we are messengers, no more. No man in America knows his business better than you, Mister Director. If you don’t know how to hunt down this monster Galen Cheney, nobody does.”

  She went on smiling a gallingly seraphic smile at the old man.

  “However,” she went on, “given that Mr Christie has confided to us, and briefed the FBI – exhaustively - on the matter of the heinous plans Galen Cheney and his son,” Gretchen paused, “Isaac, may be hatching...”

  Hoover fulminated, his jaw muscles threatened to work yet no sound emerged from his thin, pale lips.

  “To attempt to assassinate Dr King and other others, including the President on the steps of City Hall at the conclusion of the Civil Right’s Movement’s March on Philadelphia on Independence Day,” Gretchen continued, “it seems to me that the sooner he is freed to ‘go after’ Cheney the better.”

  The Director of the FBI made a growling noise.

  Gretchen ignored this.

  “I understand that one of the problems the Bureau is facing is that its records concerning Mr Cheney have been destroyed, or mislaid. According to Mr Christie, that is. He has confided to me that he destroyed many of those documents and ‘doctored’ others, his word, and I am unclear what that implies for the veracity and reliability of other files and records to which he had had access in the last ten years. I should imagine that gives the Bureau a bit of a headache...”

  “If your client refuses to co-operate under the terms of the immunities agreed he will still got to the electric chair!”

  Gretchen recoiled – a little theatrically – and adopted a mildly perplexed expression.

  “My client is only too happy to co-operate in any way he can with the FBI, Mister Director,” she pointed out. “The problem is that he does not know what you do not know about Cheney and his associates. While he agrees with the FBI that Cheney and his son Isaac were responsible for the Bedford Pine Park atrocity, and has supplied you with detailed information about other killings Cheney and or his associates may have been complicit in, he complains that since there is no reciprocal flow of ‘case information’ his ability to help you is necessarily limited...”

  “He’s holding out on us!”

  “No, Mr Director. He is not!”

  The hairs on the back of Dan Brenckmann’s neck were standing on end. It was all he could do not to hide behind his chair and yet Gretchen was fearlessly slugging it out toe to toe with the old ogre!

  She was magnificent…

  Hoover was staring at Gretchen.

  He glanced to Clyde Tolson who shrugged imperceptibly.

  “Look,” Gretchen sighed. “Mr Christie is a seasoned field operative with recent personal familiarity with the subject of your investigation. In many ways he is as committed to hunting down Galen Cheney as you or any of your agents. Nobody is suggesting letting him free at this time; but surely it makes sense to make the best use of his experience, proven skills, and his knowledge of your suspect’s methods and psychology?”

  Tolson leaned over and said something into his boss’s ear.

  “You’d guarantee Christie wouldn’t make a break for it?”

  Gretchen laughed a short, gentile laugh.

  “No, Mister Director.” She met his cold gaze. “This is your investigation. You take the risks and you get the glory if it all turns out for the best. That’s the deal the Department of Justice and the FBI signed up to earlier in the week. We are here to ensure that the FBI abides by that agreement. We are not here to tell you your business.”

  Chapter 28

  Saturday 20th June 1964

  LBJ Ranch, Stonewall, Texas

  Whenever he visited the South Claude Betancourt felt like he was leaving his country and travelling to somebody else’s. Before today he had never visited the LBJ Ranch, situated some fourteen miles west of Johnson City and felt no little discomfiture to be well over fifty miles from the nearest centre of what in Texas roughly approximated – in his opinion - to civilization, the city of Austin. The probl
em was that he needed the Vice President a lot more than the man who was a heartbeat from the White House needed him; that after all, was the true measure of how badly things were going for his clients. He would never have made the long, wearying and now very dusty trek down to what he regarded as universally hostile territory unless he – or rather, Jack and Bobby, and most of the rest of the Administration – was desperate.

  Of course, Claude Betancourt no longer spoke for the Kennedy boys or what was left of Camelot from the glory days. He had been Joe Kennedy’s lawyer, and friend when it suited the old bootlegger, something of a distant, protective uncle to the two surviving older sons but they, and he, had never actually been that close. Jack had asked his advice a couple of times; ignored it both times. Bobby well, Bobby always knew best. Ever since Joe Kennedy’s death he had been attempting to navigate the stormy cross currents of the Kennedy family; and come to the conclusion that no feuding mediaeval dynasty – excepting perhaps, the Medici family or the Hapsburgs – were in the same league as the Hyannis Port mafia.

  Now that old Joe was gone the clan was a very Catholic matriarchy, ruled over by the Presidents mother, Rose. Like everybody else in the family Rose, since 1951 the ‘Countess of the Holy See’ courtesy of Pope Pius XIII –the pontiff who failed to speak out against the Holocaust - had been under her husband’s thumb during his life. She had coped with his infidelities with, among other prescription medications, the help of Seconal, Placidyl, Librium, Lomotil and Librax, and sustained by her faith. Faith notwithstanding, there was no evidence she had lifted a finger to stop her eldest daughter being lobotomized, her prudishness was legendary, and she had made several of her children’s lives a misery insisting that they all marry within the Catholic communion. It was Rose who exiled her second daughter, Kathleen – killed in an air crash in France in 1948 - from the family for marrying ‘outside the Church’ during the Second War. Since her husband’s death it was Rose that was the keeper of the family’s secrets and the implacable guardian of what she imagined was its ‘good name’.