by James Philip
“Okay...”
Gretchen looked around the table trying not to broadcast her nervousness.
“Sorry I whacked you so hard, Murdoch,” Christie declared, his matter of fact remorse seemingly entirely genuine. “You’re a big guy and I thought you’d go down after I caught you with that first sneak right hand.”
“What is all this about, Dwight?” Gretchen asked. It was the obvious question.
“That’s complicated. It’ll take the Bureau about ten minutes to trace this call. Mr Tolson’s boys will already know which exchanges it is being routed through. Once they get back to the originating exchange they’ll be all over me. Sorry, but I’ll keep this short and sweet.”
One small part of Gretchen’s mind was saying ‘we have to get this equipment installed in our downtown offices’, the rest of her head was trying to decode what exactly she was doing still sitting here in a second floor FBI office on 9th and Chestnut Streets.
Dwight Christie had planned to let her in on the secret anyway.
“For the record,” he went on ruefully, “Mrs Brenckmann had no prior knowledge of, or suspicion that I planned to renege on the deal with Justice. Had she had such knowledge or the suspicion of the same I am sure she would have notified the FBI and the Department of Justice.”
Gretchen’s frown had become a scowl.
“Now we’ve got that out of the way,” Christie chuckled, “we can get down to business. The Government wants the Bedford Pine Park killers dead or alive. I’m the only guy who can make that happen before those crazy bastards do something even worse. But that’s never going to happen if I’ve got the whole Philadelphia Field Office on my back. Galen Cheney would see me, or any of J. Edgar’s finest coming a mile away.”
The line hissed loudly.
Gretchen shivered involuntarily.
Dwight Christie knew where to find the killers.
He had always known where to find them.
Chapter 34
Monday 22nd June 1964
Yacht China Girl, Sausalito
A fortnight ago Darlene had mentioned, in passing, that ‘sometimes I miss the TV’. Her husband had promptly acquired a small monochrome set and jury rigged an aerial on the after mast of the China Girl.
Miranda Sullivan’s brother, Gregory – the youngest of her three brothers, and only a couple of years her senior - was the ‘nice guy’ of the family whom their parents had never expected to amount to very much. He had been blissfully happy teaching school, he had fallen hopelessly in love with Darlene on first sight – and she likewise with him – and now he owned his own boat. Oh, and he and Darlene were expecting their first child. Basically, his cup was running over and he had spent the last few months walking around with an idiotic smile on his face.
While Miranda sometimes envied her brother she knew she could never be him. Or like him. He was made the way he was, and she was what she was; flawed in ways she could not explain to any living soul.
“Miranda!” Darlene called from the lounge.
It had been a cool, overcast day with fog in the Bay all morning and drizzle in the air all afternoon. Miranda had taken the bus into San Francisco and spent the middle part of the day working in the NAACP office, filling envelopes and answering the phone. Darlene had heard her foot fall on the deck over her head.
“Miranda! Come on down, you’ll want to see this!”
Darlene was standing up watching the TV screen as if her feet were nailed to the planks underfoot.
“We were just talking to General George Decker, the Chief of Staff of the US Army,” explained a strangely uncertain Walter Cronkite. “When something happened... We are endeavoring to restore the connection...”
“He was talking to this Army guy on the telephone and there was this really big bang,” Darlene explained. “And there was a lot of screaming and shouting and cussing... And then the line went dead...”
Cronkite was talking.
“General Decker was talking to me from City Hall in Joliet, Illinois about the wave of bombings across that state and neighboring Indiana and Iowa. I was asking him to clarify the situation in Milwaukee. I was asking him when the Army and the Navy would allow journalists and TV reporters to visit the Michigan coast city which appears to have been cut off from the World for over three weeks...”
Miranda stepped into the lounge and she and her sister-in-law exchanged pecking kisses.
“I know things are bad back home in Georgia and Mississippi,” Darlene said, her drawl almost childishly innocent. “But nobody stopped no newsmen going into Birmingham or Jackson or Selma.”
Walter Cronkite was talking, his expression severe and his voice ringing with a peculiarly sad gravitas as if he was having trouble believing, let alone, crediting what he was saying.
“Earlier this afternoon President Kennedy’s spokesman refused to confirm or deny that White House Chief of Staff Marvin Watson had resigned. Watson, a long-term ally of Vice President Johnson, is believed to have quit the Administration for quote ‘family and personal reasons’ and returned to his home in Dallas, Texas. It is not known if he will be paying his respects to the Vice President who is currently convalescing at his Ranch at Stonewall, near Austin. The White House has yet to make any comment on recent events in the Midwest...”
Darlene was looking perplexed.
“General Decker was talking about a place called Madison,” she explained. “Before the big bang...”
Miranda trawled her memory.
“I think Madison is the state capital of Wisconsin,” she thought out aloud. “It’s about eighty miles west of Milwaukee and about a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Chicago.”
“He said there was a big fight going on around it and that ‘insurgents’,” Darlene found the word hard to wrap her Southern vowels around, “were ‘pouring’ up Interstate 94 towards a crossroads at a place called Tomah, and west to Dubuque, Iowa along Route 151. He said the Air Force was bombing the roads and ‘taking out’ bridges along both them roads...”
Miranda had never heard of either Tomah or Dubuque but knew that Gregory had atlases in his bookshelves. Her brother had started to build himself a rough and ready ‘study’ at one end of the main deck house.
As one the two women abandoned Walter Cronkite and headed forward from the lounge. Soon they were searching intently through the pages of a small, much battered and dog-eared former school text book about the geography of the states east of Lake Michigan.
“There’s Tomah,” Miranda exclaimed. She roughly approximated distances. That’s another eighty miles northwest of Madison. Dubuque?”
“Iowa,” Darlene said helpfully.
The women found Dubuque on the western – Iowan - bank of the Mississippi River, which marked the border between Iowa and Wisconsin, some hundred miles southwest of Madison.
The sisters-in-law stared at the small maps.
“They say the ‘rebels’ are bad people,” Darlene offered hesitantly. They’re doing all the things they say they did in Washington, except worse. They treat women bad, real bad...”
Miranda put her arm around the shorter woman’s shoulders.
Unlike her Darlene knew exactly what it was like to be treated ‘real bad’.
“That will never happen here in California,” she said, hoping she sounded confident. “Besides,” she added, brightening, “if it did Greg would hoist the sails and take you off to a desert island, or something!”
Darlene giggled.
“Naw,” she sighed fondly, “we’d only run into a rock.”
Both women snickered like naughty schoolgirls.
The rebellion had spread two hundred miles from Chicago across a great quadrant of two, perhaps three states. What sort of battle was going on at Madison tens of miles behind the storm front of advancing ‘insurgents’?
What was the Army doing about all this?
They heard footsteps on the deck.
Gregory stood in the door. The grin on his face faded.
<
br /> “We were listening to Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News,” Miranda explained.
“He was talking to this General out in Joliet and there was a bang and then he wasn’t talking to him anymore,” Darlene informed her husband stepping into his arms and exchanging the sort of kisses that only newlyweds usually swap.
Miranda did not think the happy couple were going to stop being newlyweds any time soon.
“They’re talking about rebels heading for the Mississippi at Dubuque, Iowa,” Miranda re-iterated for her brother’s benefit, “and way past Madison. It sounds like Madison is going to be the Wisconsin Alamo.”
She had tried to say this lightly, as if she was being tongue-in-cheek; the only problem was that immediately the words had escaped her lips she realized that if what she had just alluded to was even half-true then a part of her country had already descended into a state of full scale civil war.
Chapter 35
Tuesday 23rd June 1964
State Capitol Building, Madison, Wisconsin
The camp fires of the horde besieging Madison flickered and glowed evilly in the night. The summer days were broiling hot, or sultry with short, violent thundery squalls, at night the skies cleared and towards dawn the temperatures plummeted. In the distance fires periodically flared and flashed as freezing rebels splashed kerosene on damp logs. It was an eerie, old world sort of scene; the fires of a barbarian army burned in the night encircling the city, while the defenders and thousands of terrified civilians awaited the next assault at first light, and the sack and pillage that would surely follow.
It had been a slow, excruciatingly painful climb up to the observation gallery beneath the dome of the Capitol Building but one that Major Norman Schwarzkopf had had to make. The wound to his left thigh was a through and through which had missed bone and artery; he might be classified as ‘walking wounded’ but that did not make him any less capable of leading men in battle. Besides, there were other men – many other men – more deserving of a hospital bed than him.
‘If you can get yourself up to the machine gun platoon at the top of the Capitol,’ his former Battalion Commander, now the de facto Commander-in-Chief of all US forces inside the ‘Madison pocket’, Lieutenant Colonel Harvey Grabowski had said once he got used to the idea that Schwarzkopf was not going to say no for an answer, ‘you can take over the Redoubt Company.’
Stumping up the steps to the upper gallery of the State Capitol Schwarzkopf had been passed by relays of men carting boxes of 50-caliber ammunition. In the middle distance a mortar round went off. The enemy had brought up tanks and 105-millimetre howitzers in the last couple of days; if the rebels ever figured out how to shoot straight the 90-millimeter rifles of the M-48s and the howitzers would be a real problem.
Not that the defenders of Madison did not already have enough problems already. There were possible as many as three thousand people sheltering in the basements and inner recesses of the Capitol Building; old, young, infirm, mothers with babies and there was no food or clean water. There was a casualty clearing station in the west wing; but medical suppliers of every description were running low.
Every morning the rebels probed the perimeter, not as before in insane, berserker waves, now they came in countless marauding bands, shooting and moving, probing for weak spots along the increasingly sparsely defended trenches and barricades. The enemy was wearing down the defenders; the garrison of Madison was dying a death by a thousand cuts.
Everybody in Madison understood the end game.
That was why the Capitol Building had become the heart of the last redoubt. Sooner or later the lines would break and the rebels would pour into the heart of the city. With Lake Mendota to the north and Lake Monona to the south protecting its two long flanks and readily defensible urban street lines to the east and west the Madison Isthmus would be a tough nut to crack. Engineers were mining and booby-trapping the ground behind the outer perimeter trenches, and each night more heavy equipment and men bled back into the Isthmus to man the ever more convoluted defense works at its extremities. The 32nd could not hold the whole city of Madison but it could hold the Isthmus forever.
Or if not forever, or at least as long as the ammunition lasted.
Schwarzkopf swung his field glasses to the east where the camp fires flickered throwing a faint orange glow into the darkness. How many fires were there? Hundreds? Thousands? Was this what it was like inside Magdeburg in the weeks and months before its sack in May 1631 by the forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic League?
His men already talked about ‘the Alamo’ but that was not an army out there in the night. Whoever led that great ravening horde was not Antonio López de Santa Anna desperately trying to forestall the manifest destiny of Mexico – New Spain’s – acquisitive northern neighbor.
Anyway, the word was that unlike the Alamo, First Army was not about to let Madison fall. There were plans to intensify the airborne re-supply of the garrison, and new men, ammunition, medical supplies and food would be dropped into the Isthmus redoubt.
Besides, militarily this was nothing like the Alamo; this was more like Bastogne had been in the Ardennes in December 1944, and while the Union held it the Midwest was not lost.
Schwarzkopf turned and eyed the spotlights, filtered red and blue on the ground a quarter of a mile west of the Capitol Building, straining his ears to catch the first thrum of engines.
The Air Force was using hurriedly modified C-130 Hercules four-engine transports, pushing huge pallets with giant parachutes straight down the loading ramps of the aircraft as they hurtled low over the city. Last night the cargo had been replacement barrels for the M2 50-caliber machine guns – if the M2 barrels were over-used they got so hot they drooped, deformed – 105-millimetre howitzer fragmentation reloads and mortar rounds. A further consignment of medical supplies and emergency ration packs had mostly gone down in Lake Mendota.
The Air Force was going to try again tonight.
A radio crackled unnaturally loudly in the darkness behind Schwarzkopf.
“ONE MINUTE!” A man shouted.
Last night the enemy had attempted to interdict the air drop runs by laying down a curtain of fire across the eastern end of Lake Monona. Tonight the Redoubt’s M2s and the mortar sections along the Yahara River line at the north western end of the Isthmus had been tasked to lay down ‘a storm’ of suppressing fire.
Schwarzkopf lowered his glasses, pictured the grid of streets around the Capitol. To the south west was the city’s industrial and commercial heart, to the north west low rises, housing blocks either side of the three main roads feeding into the grid of streets from the east; East Gotham, East Washington – Highway 151 – and Williamson Streets. Few of the streets were blocked with rubble as yet and the city retained many of its older open spaces.
Open spaces...
Unrestricted fields of fire...
Insurgents attempting to come across Lake Mendota or Lake Monona on small boats and makeshift rafts were sitting ducks for the trip wire pickets stationed along each shore. The western flank of the Isthmus was the more vulnerable, the lines over-extended in places and there was no natural water barrier like the Yahara River. The enemy seemed weaker in the west, more spread out but that would not last. Sooner or later it would dawn on whoever was in charge over there that if Madison held out it was going to be a thorn in the side of the rebellion. Once the insurgents ran into the barrier of the Mississippi it was suddenly going to become important to bring forward supplies and booty from the south and east and Madison lay across most of the key road links back to Milwaukee, Lake Michigan and down to Chicago.
Or so the theory went…
Schwarzkopf prided himself on being an avid scholar of military history.
Hannibal had lived off the lands of the Roman Republic for twenty years during the Second Punic War, fought several of the greatest battles in the old world including Cannae, without ever seriously troubling to threaten Rome itself. Rome had been not just
a thorn in his rear during all those years but the nexus of economic and military power in the whole of Italy. Beleaguered, half-starved Madison was nothing in comparison but then, all things considered, whoever was leading the insurgency was probably no reincarnation of Hannibal, the greatest of all the Carthaginian generals either.
That somebody was leading the rebels – somebody or some guiding hand – was not in doubt. The enemy had systematically closed the noose around Madison after the first attempts to storm the city’s eastern defenses by force majeure. The enemy had learned from what had happened around Sun Prairie; now he was bypassing strong points, bringing up heavier weapons, cordoning off Madison. Elsewhere in Wisconsin columns were rushing towards the Mississippi, dispersed by day to negate the threat posed by the ever-present Skyraiders and National Guard F-86s and F-100s.
The military side of the insurgency was fast maturing.
Its game plan around Madison was one of infiltration, slow erosion and only occasionally suicidal frontal attacks. The women and children, the human shields had been expended, or perhaps, pragmatically employed in roles less profligate than as sacrificial lambs to the slaughter. Although Madison was surrounded by a guerrilla army equipped with tanks and artillery; regardless of the paraphernalia of modern weapons the insurgency retained a fundamentally barbaric soul, it was as if the greater part of the civil population of Wisconsin had been brainwashed, coerced or converted into participating in some dreadful medieval crusade.
“INCOMING!”
There was a low whistling sound and then mortar rounds were creeping down East Washington Street. Somewhere below Schwarzkopf’s feet a shell crashed into the Capitol. The enemy was learning about artillery by trial and error; that hit felt like a 90-millimetre armor piercing solid shot from the gun of an M-48, possibly at extreme range. Still, the beauty of artillery was that all you had to do was point and shoot; sooner or later you hit something that mattered.
Another shell buried itself in the facade of the Capitol.
