The Pillars of Hercules (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 3)

by James Philip

  Whump! Whump! Whump!

  Farther away this time.

  The manoeuvring bell clanged.

  The ship’s motion altered; she was taking the seas on her starboard stern quarter for the first time since she’d gone to Air Defence Condition One. Five minutes later the pulse of her screws slackened and she rode the swells more easily. High above their heads an aircraft slapped down onto the flight deck, its engines briefing roaring like a great enraged beast before the arrester wire caught and stopped the plane dead on the deck, and the pilot throttled back.

  “Back to normal again,” the man said, thinking out aloud.

  Later they were disturbed by a knock at the door. Clara started in alarm; she’d been dozing contentedly in her lover’s arms. The hatch opened.

  “Excitement over,” said the same bearded Petty Officer who’d mandated the closing of the hatch earlier that morning. He was wearing a grim face. “The chopper boys will probably be bringing us more casualties soon. Surgeon Commander McKitterick’s compliments, ma’am, but he’d appreciate your presence in the sick bay at your earliest convenience...”

  Chapter 9

  Sunday 8th December 1963

  The Oval Office, The White House, Washington DC

  President John Fitzgerald Kennedy awakened with a start, calmed a little when he remembered where he was. He’d fallen asleep at his desk, probably only for a few minutes. He tuned into the agitated, low voices of the men snapping at each other in the comfortable chairs nearby. He looked at his wristwatch. It was just after midnight; in England it would already be five in the morning.

  One of his secretaries, a new dour, homely middle-aged woman who seemed on the verge of swooning every time he smiled at her, had placed a fresh cup of black coffee on his blotter and was in the process of making good her escape.

  “It is Mrs Zabriski, isn’t it?” The thirty-fifth President of the United States of American inquired of her retreating back.

  The woman turned and in an agony of indecision nodded like a hen pecking the ground for grain.

  “Why yes, Mister President.”

  “Your coffee is always the best, Mrs Zabriski,” Jack Kennedy said, flashing the killer smile that had seduced heiresses, movie stars, shop girls and the occasional gangster moll alike for over a quarter of a century. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  The poor woman sprinted from the Oval Office in disarray.

  Bobby Kennedy approached the presidential desk wearing his serious face.

  “Don’t go puritanical on me, Mr Attorney General,” his older brother cautioned him, still basking in the afterglow of the pleasure and the exquisite - entirely harmless - embarrassment he’d caused Mrs Zabriski. “That lady makes a dammed fine cup of coffee. That’s not a thing to be underestimated.” He sniffed. “Not the way things are at the moment.”

  The Vice-President stamped into the Oval Office ten minutes later.

  “The British Ambassador says he’s been waiting to speak to you for four hours, Mister President,” Lyndon Baines Johnson stated irascibly without bothering with the normal greetings and salutations. Storms in the mid-west and the tail end of an Atlantic hurricane system had delayed his flight back to Washington from Houston. “What in God’s name is Dean playing at? And whose idea was it to light a fire under that arsehole Franco’s arse? And while I’m on my feet what in the name of fucking...” Not a man usually given to profanity in his dealings with the President or his closest advisors, the Vice-President, realising that he had lost his temper, shut his mouth until he decided he’d got a grip on his ire. “Is it true about the B-52s out of Barksdale?”

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” Bobby Kennedy said quickly.

  “Don’t give me that lawyer shit, Mister Attorney General,” the tall Texan snapped, leaning towards the younger man as if he was bracing himself against a strong wind. LBJ was notorious for his tendency to loom over an opponent and stare them down until they wilted or backed off. Other members of the Administration were usually exempt from ‘the treatment’, especially when the President was anywhere in the vicinity. Tonight the Vice-President was beyond caring. “I swear to God you Ivy League rich kids have screwed the pooch this time!”

  Jack Kennedy cleared his throat.

  “Welcome back to Washington, Mr Vice-President.”

  The older man glared at the man behind the huge desk.

  “Gentleman,” the President declared, “the Vice-President and I need to have a frank exchange of views. Would you leave us for a few minutes please?”

  The only other person in the room who thought that was a remotely good idea was LBJ. Nevertheless, within a minute Jack Kennedy was waving his Vice-President – the man who was never farther than a heartbeat away from the chair he’d just vacated – to sit down. The two men studied each other across the divide above the giant American Eagle woven into the carpet at their feet.

  “This is my fault,” Jack Kennedy confessed.

  “That ain’t no lie,” his Vice-President agreed; but without sourness or censure. “I heard you got sick after that dammed fool trip to Rice two weeks back. I told you it was a mistake. If the Republicans can find somebody with the balls to run against you next year who is worth his salt, it’ll cause us a lot of trouble we can do without. Now is too early for all that inspirational campaign trail shit.”

  Jack Kennedy nodded thoughtfully, took a series of long, slow breaths.

  “I will not be running for a second term,” he said.

  The older man didn’t respond immediately. For one thing he didn’t actually believe he’d heard what he’d just heard, and for another, he didn’t believe in Santa Claus. Or for that matter, the Tooth Fairy. He’d been in politics – dirty, no holds barred winner takes all politics – most of his adult life and if he’d learned anything it was that nothing was ever quite what it seemed. First impressions were the most dangerous things in Christendom and he never, ever trusted his or anybody else’s first take on a thing at face value.

  “Last time I checked your name was on the ballot for the New Hampshire Primary in nine weeks time?”

  “I was diagnosed with Addison’s disease in England in 1947,” the younger man replied. “Back in the mid-thirties when I was in my teens I almost died twice on the operating table when they tried to fix on my back.”

  The revelation about Addison’s disease hadn’t come as news to the Vice-President. However, LBJ’s left eyebrow twitched with interest at the second admission.

  “Getting bust up in the war covered up the back thing,” the younger man went on. “Ever since that night in 1943 when the PT109 got rammed by the Amagiri I’ve had the perfect get out every time somebody asks me a question about my health. I was an all-American hero, wasn’t I?”

  “You can only play with the cards you get dealt,” the Texan conceded, his oddly contemplative tone betraying the fact that he was beginning to ask himself where this increasingly surreal conversation was headed. He was viewing the younger man with narrow-eyed suspicion, confident that he understood John Fitzgerald Kennedy better, at some levels, than even his brother. The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America was – and at the same time – was not, exactly the man most people took him for. Anybody who took him for a rich kid who’d bought the Presidency with his wit, charm and movie star good looks missed the point. While it was true he was a rich kid, a one-time playboy and a serial womaniser; he was also an oddly talismanic, charismatic leader who might conceivably, be the only man who could rescue America from its modern day slough of despond. LBJ had grown up in a harder political school than scion of the ‘old bootlegger’ – old Joe Kennedy had never been that but he’d had so many enemies on Capitol Hill that the lie would probably persist while he lived and far beyond – and in the process developed a thick steely carapace that made him virtually impervious to all knocks. Not that he hadn’t very nearly shit in his pants half-a-dozen times while the Soviet ICBMs – thankfully only a handful – had fallen on and a
round the cities of the north-west and the Great Lakes and the strikes had crept towards the north east. He’d flown over, walked in the ruins of several of those shattered places in the last year and even a hard-hearted old dog like LBJ shivered every time he thought about what he’d seen. Notwithstanding, he’d been the one man who’d kept his eye on the ball in the days after the October War. He’d been the man who’d led the ‘it was us or them’ campaign, while the ‘Whizz Kids’ were still wandering around DC with thousand yard stares or hunkered down in their departmental bunkers. The Vice-President sighed. “And you will run again next year, Mister President.”

  Jack Kennedy sucked in his breath.

  He’d anticipated that there was a sixty-forty chance of the wily Texan calling his bluff. Neither man broke the lengthening silence, each man daring the other to pierce the quietness. Jack Kennedy, knowing this was a game he couldn’t win allowed himself, eventually, to yield a small victory to his Vice-President.

  “The American people deserve a great national cause, Lyndon,” he said at last.

  “Yes,” agreed the older man flatly. LBJ had no pretence at being any kind of intellectual giant, in fact he despised many of the characteristics of men who claimed or behaved as if they were the great minds of the age. For all the fanfare about the ‘new generation’ JFK had brought into his Administration he’d never been seduced by any of that crap about a new Camelot, or some reincarnated round table whose members were the ‘best and the brightest’ of their era. What did the Kennedy Cabinet amount to? McNamara was a car dealer; albeit after Henry Ford one of the most successful car dealers in history. John McCone, who’d inherited Allen Dulles’s nest of vipers at the CIA, was a shameless Republican war-profiteer. Dean Rusk was at the State Department because JFK hadn’t had the cajonas to bring in the guy he’d really wanted, James William Fulbright. Unlike many of the other members of a Cabinet made up of allegedly the ‘best and the brightest’, fifty-eight year old Southern Democrat Fulbright – currently representing Arkansas in the Senate, was a real force to be reckoned with. Unlike the Kennedy brothers who’d come relatively late to their professions of liberalism, Fulbright had consistently and very publicly opposed McCarthyism and the Byzantine machinations of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Like so many members of the Administration Dean Rusk was a reliable go-to guy, but he was neither the ‘best’ nor the ‘brightest’. Rusk had sleepwalked with everybody else into World War III; it was hard to imagine Fulbright, a fervent multilateralist and a passionate believer in the United Nations, meekly sitting on his hands while the DEFCON numbers climbed towards the outbreak of nuclear war. “Yes,” the Vice-President went on, “but the Moon isn’t the right ‘great national cause’, Mister President.”

  Jack Kennedy’s expression was momentarily quizzical; like that of a student who’d been listening to a professorial dissertation with half an ear until suddenly, without warning and out of a clear blue sky, revelation had jabbed him hard in the ribs.

  “And,” he began before he could stop himself, “what would be the ‘right’ great national cause,” he posed, “in your opinion, Mister Vice-President?”

  LBJ snorted.

  “Putting that arsehole LeMay up against a wall and shooting him would be a good start!”

  No matter how much General Curtis LeMay had it coming to him neither man knew the Republican Party would ever forgive them if they shot the ‘hero’ of the Cuban Missiles War who’d sooner or later find his way onto their Presidential ticket. There was already loose talk on the Hill about the maniac running with Richard Nixon as early as next year, although, again, neither man thought Nixon would be that dumb. Poison was poison; whatever its colour.

  “Apart from getting even with LeMay?” The President prompted.

  “We should look to our own people. To our own constituency, Mister President. If we have to go to war with the Brits so be it.” LBJ shrugged. “If we have to, that is. And I mean ‘if we have to’ because if we end up fighting another war we later discover that we didn’t have to fight, and we ought never to have fought, I’m gone, Mister President. This country is sick enough as it is with the fucking Air Force and Allen Dulles’s ‘stay behinds’ at Langley screwing around like they’ve been the last few months.”

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy was oddly shocked.

  “No even LeMay’s people would go so far as a coup,” he objected.

  The older man’s brow creased with anger.

  “Jeez!” He muttered in exasperation. “Didn’t your daddy’s mistakes teach you kids anything about politics?”

  Much later Jack Kennedy realised this ought to have stung him a lot harder than it actually did at the time. He’d revered and for most of his life, feared his father. Joseph Patrick ‘Joe’ Kennedy had been born into a well-connected Boston family in 1888. Still in his twenties, during World War I he’d been an assistant general manager of one of Bethlehem Steel’s Boston yards where he’d met the then Assistant Secretary to the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was later to become the thirty-second President of the United States. In the 1920s Joe Kennedy made a huge fortune in stocks and commodities, profits he invested in property and business acquisitions the length and breadth of the country. Later he became wealthier still refinancing and ruthlessly reorganising several Hollywood studios; merging his interests into the Radio-Keith-Orpheum – better known as just ‘RKO’ – studios. Joe Kennedy’s breathtaking career seemed to know no bounds. When Federal Prohibition finally ended in 1933 he’d headed directly to Scotland in the company of the son of his old friend, now President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to buy up the American distribution rights for Scotch whisky. Overnight Kennedy became the North American agent for Dewar’s Scotch and Gordon’s Gin. By ruthlessly buying up a string of spirits importation contracts he became the first great mogul of post-Prohibition America, and not surprisingly, one of the richest men in the world at exactly the time his country was in the middle of the Great Depression. But Joe Kennedy never forgot politics because to him life, business and politics were all the same thing. In the 1930s he owned the largest office block in America, and therefore the World; Chicago’s Merchandise Mart which in time became the castle keep from which he built a formidable political base in league with the Irish-American political establishment of what, at the time, was probably the greatest industrial and commercial city in Christendom. That such a wheeling, dealing, billionaire freebooter like Joe Kennedy could, at the height of the Great Depression, be appointed Head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission by his old friend, FDR, said as much about the realities of Democratic politics as about the ethics and mores of the age. American power politics had ever been thus. Appointed Ambassador to London in 1938, Joe Kennedy had been the obvious shoe-in for the Democratic ticket when FDR’s second term ended in 1940; but then the war had happened, FDR had decided it was his destiny to steer his nation into calmer waters, and Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Senior, no friend of Great Britain, its ruling class or of anything to do with its Empire had in November 1940,in the third month of the London Blitz, declared: ‘The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time... As long as she is in there, we have time to prepare. It isn't that Britain is fighting for democracy. That's the bunk. She's fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us.’

  Jack Kennedy winced when he thought how those words had comprehensively wrecked his father’s grandiose political ambitions. It isn't that Britain is fighting for democracy. That's the bunk. In political life ideas were the currency of success or failure. To suggest that – with the Luftwaffe raining nightly fire, death and destruction on the capital of the Empire - that the British weren’t fighting to preserve democracy was...political suicide. Thus, in a blink of an eye Joe Kennedy’s ambassadorship had ended and his hopes of ever becoming President of the United States of America had been flushed down the toilet of history.

  Now Joe Kennedy’s eldest surviving son was asking himself if the ‘Moon Speech’ was h
is own political epitaph. Worse, he knew that Lyndon Baines Johnson, the acutest analyst of a chink in an opponent’s armour on Capitol Hill had been asking himself exactly the same question for the last fortnight while he’d been laid up, incapacitated in the Executive Residence.

  “Anybody,” the President decided, visibly straightening in his chair as if to support the decision forming in his mind, “who tells you that history repeats itself,” he observed, the boyish wry charm that had captivated part of the nation in 1960 flickering in his eyes and twitching at the corners of his mouth, “doesn’t know anything about history, Mr Vice-President. Talk to me about what happens if I don’t run for a second term?”

  LBJ’s left eye brow arched.

  “We all get fucked backwards and forwards for all time, Mister President,” the Texan retorted. “If we lose the White House we lose the whole game. That’s it. We’re through. Most of us will be lucky if we don’t end up on death row.”

  Jack Kennedy didn’t think it would come to that but then they lived in strange and troubled times. He wasn’t personally afraid of accounting for his actions before the court of the American people. In many ways he longed to do just that; however, he was old enough and wise enough to know the difference between wanderlust and hard realities. No man who wasn’t firmly rooted in practical, pragmatic realpolitik had ever, or could ever become the President of the Unites States of America.

  “Okay,” Jack Kennedy declared, “what do we do next?”

  Chapter 10

  Sunday 8th December 1963

  The Officers Club, Mdina, Malta

  Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Wemyss Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, walked out onto the battlement terrace of what had, until a few hours ago, been the Central Mess of all RAF commissioned personnel on the Maltese Archipelago. The late afternoon was hurrying towards dusk but from his vantage point he could see the whole vista of the main island laid before him from St Paul’s Bay in the north – where legend had it that the saint had been shipwrecked - east along the coast to St Julian’s, Sliema, Valletta, and around to the south-east past Marsaskala to Marsaxlokk.