by James Philip
Walter had just earned his submariner’s ‘dolphins’ and although he had not been in uniform he was the sort of guy who was never really out of uniform. Crew cut, ready for parade with his mind sharpened like the blade of a brand new penknife, he was precisely the sort of man others willingly followed over the parapet in a war. Dan had resented that in his teens and he and Walt had never been that close until the last three or four years.
Dan had had no idea ‘what he was doing with his life’. Ma and Pa, mostly Ma, had tried to talk to him. Compared with Walt junior’s example, Ma and Pa must have often despaired about their younger sons, comforting themselves that Tabatha, the gregarious, bouncy, optimistic baby of the family at least would be around to brighten their declining years. Ma and Pa had given up on Sam, perhaps recognising that he was never going to settle down to the ‘normal’ life that they understood so well; and so Dan had become their focus. Dan at least might be redeemable. And so it had proved, albeit in a funny sort of way.
Dan was the least talkative, least social of the Brenckmann children, the happiest in his own company and thoughts, forever curious about the natural world around him and the history that spoke to him from every old building, every folk tale, every myth and legend of previous generations. His pipe dream was to go back to Germany to trace the history of the Brenckmanns one day; and he loved walking in the New England countryside poking around for the traces of the land’s first European settlers. He thought it was shameful the way that the legends, traditions and culture of the original native Americans – who had been in New England for millennia before the coming of the ‘white man’ – had been ignored, then decried, systematically belittled and shunned, and very nearly excluded from the consciousness of the nation. In an ideal world he would have been a historian, a writer of lost histories except he had failed to get the right grades and done the wrong classes at school, and then he had wasted a couple of years bumming around, working for the Democrats and trying to get a foothold in journalism in Boston when he ought to have been at college. Now he was two to three years older than most of the others in his college class, no great star and lagging miles behind each and every one of his contemporaries in the game of life as he belatedly strove to turn things around and to get back on track.
He had been far too busy trying to catch up for lost time in the last couple of years to pursue any kind of personal attachment or distraction. He had too many debts to repay and too many kindnesses to respect. Ma and Pa were paying his way through Yale, Pa had lined up an internship with a partnership in Quincy and at long last it was likely that one day, Walter Brenckmann Associates might actually become Walter Brenckmann and Son Associates. His future seemed assured, back under control, and yet he still dreamed of something more...
“You’ve gone all silent?” Gretchen Betancourt queried tersely.
“Maybe I’m just the silent type,” Dan sighed, breaking from his thoughts. Sitting comfortably in the front passenger seat of a car being driven by an intelligent, more than middlingly attractive woman who was so far out of his league that a less sanguine man would have ached, it was very nearly possible to block out the self-evident madness of the outside world. In the darkness of the Connecticut countryside one could forget for a while the fact that World War Three had just broken out and was raging, hopefully far away, even as they drove down eerily deserted country roads after midnight. “Maybe, it just occurred to me that I’ve been wasting my time the last thirty months trying to qualify for the Massachusetts Bar.”
“Huh!” The woman scoffed.
“Where are we going, Gretchen?”
“I don’t know.” This she said with angry indecision. Then reconsidered and allowed herself a moment to think things through. “My people have a place in the country at Wethersfield. It’s built into the side of a hill. We used to go there most summers years ago. We’d play in the workshop under the house.”
“We?” Dan inquired.
“My brothers and I.” When Dan said nothing, she went on. “Your brother is in the Navy, so was you father, what should we expect to happen now?”
The man tried not to laugh.
“I’ve got no idea. I don’t think anybody has, Gretchen. Logically, I suppose really bad things keep happening until one side has had enough or basically,” he sighed, “doesn’t exist anymore.”
“But the Government has a plan?”
Dan unhurriedly contemplated this oddly naive premise. He seriously thought about questioning it, pointing out its inherent implausibility but decided that in the circumstances it would not actually help very much. Gretchen Betancourt was not the sort of girl who gave a man very many opportunities to score cheap points but even so, this was not the time to bank those points.
“If we still have a Government,” he observed.
Gretchen pulled the Dodge off the road. The nearside types squelched into the grassy verge and the engine rumbled unhappily in the sudden quietness.
“Of course we still have a Government!” She insisted, badly wanting to be convinced.
They sat in the unnatural dark loneliness of the night, neither speaking again for perhaps two to three minutes.
“I had things planned out,” Gretchen said eventually, more in irritation than regret.
“How so?” Dan inquired flatly.
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“Try me,” he invited her, quirking a smile in the gloom. “You might as well. The World may be coming to an end so what have you got to lose, Gretchen?”
Squally, angry rain had begun to splash across the Dodge and to blur the view through the windscreen. Heavy droplets hit the roof over their heads and nearby trees shook and trembled as gusts of wind brutally struck. Autumn in New England could be cruel when the weather came in from the North Atlantic; people were too easily seduced by the myriad panoply of dazzling, brilliant colours as summer ended, they forgot the brooding grey immensity of the ocean across which pilgrims, the persecuted, the starving and the dispossessed in their millions had journeyed to reach the harsh sanctuary of the New World.
“I was going to be something,” Gretchen confessed. “I was going to make my mark in the World. And now it is all ruined...”
Chapter 11
00:35 Hours Mountain Standard Time (02:35 Washington DC Time)
Sunday 28th October 1962
Bellingham, Washington State
The air raid sirens had started up again around midnight. The horrible banshee ululating screeching had wailed across Bellingham for ten minutes before it wound down, and with a whimper died completely. Judy’s house was well away from any major thoroughfare, its windows closed not against fallout but the seasonal chill of the autumnal night air in the American North-West.
The unearthly racket had awakened Sam Brenckmann but the woman in his arms had almost slept through it; or so he had thought until she stirred, shrugging closer. Judy said she had a transistor radio in the kitchen; but neither of them really wanted to hear the news or to move from the warm safety of the bed in the first floor room of the old wood-framed house on the edge of Bellingham. They might be safer in the cold, dank basement, for all they knew a great cloud of deadly radioactive fallout was about to envelop and blight the town. For all they knew more rockets and bombs were heading directly for Bellingham. But how could anybody know anything foe certain in a world suddenly turned upside down?
Vancouver or somewhere a few miles north of the border had already been hit, so had Seattle eighty miles to the south, to the west was the Pacific, to the east the Cascade Mountains. If they ran away where would they run?
And what was the point of running?
The worst had happened. At least while they were in this bed they were still human beings in control of their destiny, out in the streets they were just anonymous victims of the future. They did not need to discuss what to do next. The discussion would have been pointless, utterly futile. And besides, they already knew exactly what they wanted to do next.
/> Judy groaned and rolled over.
She kissed him wetly, and stroked his stubbly beard.
She giggled, kissed him again.
“I don’t even know if you’ve got a girlfriend?”
Sam propped himself on an elbow. A few hours ago he would have played this scene coolly. Icily. Like Rick Blain, Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca – he often framed things with reference to scenes from his favourite movies – even though Judy was not exactly Ilsa Lund, Ingrid Bergmann in the great film of 1942. Judy was more the sort of girl a red-blooded guy actually wanted to spend a B-movie necking with in the back row; although not perhaps the kind of girl every mother wanted her son to marry but...
Where the fuck did that thought come from?
Sam tried to unscramble his wits.
God in heaven, Judy smelled great...
“Her name is Miranda,” he admitted. “Miranda Sullivan. She’s English, well, sort of Anglo-Californian, I suppose. Her folks were walk ons in a hundred movies back in the day, her Pa is something serious at one of the big studios in LA. Miranda was the one who linked me up with the Limonville Brothers. Well, with their agent, a mean piece of work called Johnny Seiffert, leastways. We had a big falling out. Miranda thinks I ought to be pushier. Whatever that means.”
“Miranda? What’s she like?”
“Blonde. Legs up to her navel. She was going to be a model once. Still is, I suppose. We don’t live together or anything. Most of the time I get the feeling I’m just her latest project. She wants me to move back up to San Francisco but I like LA just fine.” He reconsidered this last remark. “Not so sure it feels the same way about me anymore but hey, that’s life.”
Judy squirmed onto her back.
She reached for him, squeezed and stroked him as he quickly became engorged.
It took every ounce of resolve for Sam not to mount her immediately. He ran his tongue over her erect nipples, sucked and toyed, his left hand starting to explore the wet warmth between her thighs until she started to moan.
“Fuck me!” She demanded huskily.
He was inside her momentarily, deeply and urgently thrusting as she wrapped herself around him.
Chapter 12
02:52 Hours Zulu (Washington DC Time)
Sunday 28th October 1962
NORAD, Ent Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado
It had taken Max Calman over an hour to get through security. The thirty-four year old Caltech mathematician and Burroughs Corporation Senior Network System Analyst eventually found his boss, Carl Drinkwater alone in the bunker conference room rifling through a heap of computer printouts.
“What are you doing here, Max?” Drinkwater asked distractedly.
“It was a false alarm with Lena,” replied the prospective father of twins due any day now. “I left her at the hospital. They’ve got a big shelter, she’s probably as safe there as anywhere.”
“You should be with Lena.”
“She said I was freaking her out,” the younger man shrugged. “I reckoned I’d be more use here, Carl.”
Drinkwater nodded. Although he had worked with the Philadelphia-born Calman for over four years he could not claim to know him very well. Nobody knew Max well. Max was an introverted, work-obsessed man who had come to Burroughs from Honeywell after an assignment on the H-bomb project at Los Alamos. He and his wife, a plain looking, dumpy high school teacher from Idaho, kept themselves to themselves. They turned up for the occasional ‘at homes’ organised by Carl’s wife, otherwise they fiercely guarded their privacy. Carl did not begrudge his people that. Sometimes the team worked days and nights without a break, never seeing their wives or kids for week or more; everything they did was ‘outcome orientated’, either they got results or they were history. Those were the rules and when a man signed on the dotted line the terms of the contract were unambiguous. The upside was that he and his people got to work at the ragged, razor edge of the newest, most state of the art computer science. They were breaking new ground daily and the possibilities seemed limitless. Or at least, they had been until a few hours ago.
Carl Drinkwater forced himself to take a sip of cold black coffee.
“We launched an all out first strike,” he said sombrely. “Everything we had ready to go. We ought to have creamed the Soviets but,” he groaned softly, “they must have already been at a high state of alert because they managed to shoot at least eleven confirmed ICBMs at us over the Arctic.” Several of the other suspected incoming ICBMs had been re-classified as ‘ghosts’ now that the Air Force had had a chance to run a preliminary analysis of the actual Soviet counter-strike. Carl was not convinced, the data was as flaky as Hell and it was pretty chaotic out there. “NORAD is dealing with the bombers within SAGE’s kill zones as they come over the horizon. We don’t think any bandits will get through but,” he gestured aimlessly with his hands, “the network took a big hit early in the exchange. Right now there could be a Tu-95 running in from its initial point right on top of us for all I know!”
“Shit!” Max Calman grunted. He was a man of slightly less than average height, leanly made with dark eyes and brows. His hair was invariably, as today, severely crew cut and notwithstanding possessing an IQ that trumped that of any of his colleagues – all top men in their own fields – he had never mastered the art of tying his own tie. Without Lena constantly organising him he blithely wandered around looking creased and downtrodden like a hobo who had lost his way. However, nobody who actually knew him mistook his appearance for anything other than the outward disinterest of a man whose mind was constantly on fire. “The Soviets must have known what was coming.”
“Jesus, Max!” Carl Drinkwater retorted in a confidential whisper. “We only found out what was happening when General LeMay came on the horn!”
Max Calman had already moved on from the conclusion he had drawn from the bare details of the exchange that he had learned in the last few seconds. The Soviets had been pre-warned that they were about to be attacked. It was obvious; they had been able to retaliate with ICBMs that took anything from three to four hours to several days to prepare for launch on unprotected open pads. Logically, from this starting point there were only three scenarios worthy of further consideration: one, the Soviets had been preparing their own first strike irrespective of US actions; two, the Soviets had been tipped off; or, three, every assumption NORAD had ever made about Soviet strategic missile capabilities had been wrong.
“What have we lost?” He asked, coldly didactic.
Carl Drinkwater frowned. He noticed for the first time that the other man was trembling with something akin to rage, his fists balled. In retrospect that was the moment he realised he did not know Max Calman at all. The man’s hooded eyes were filled with murder.
“I guess this must be kind of rough for you and Lena?” He asked gently. “What with the twins due about now?”
“For us?” Max Calman snarled. “What about all those people we’ve just killed tonight?”
Drinkwater’s hackles rose.
He had not personally killed anybody and he was not about to apologise for doing his best to save the lives of innocent Americans.
“Calm down, Max.”
Things got a little hazy after that.
Sometime later he was blinking at the conference room from beneath the level of the conference room table.
Later still he started asking himself why he was sitting on the floor staring at the blood on his hands; and why somewhere nearby there was a lot of very loud shouting and scuffling?
Chapter 13
02:57 Hours Eastern Standard Time
Sunday 28th October 1962
Oak Hill, Wethersfield, Connecticut
The Betancourt family’s summer ‘weekend’ retreat – as befitted a country hideaway where senior Democrats all the way back to FDR’s time had secretly met in conclave to foment forthcoming plots and coups - was a large, much modernised old six bedroom colonial style house dating from the middle of the l
ast century.
Gretchen and her chaperone were greeted on the front porch by a large, fierce looking matronly woman of indeterminate late middle years whose stern visage momentarily dissolved into maternal pleasure to welcome Gretchen, and instantly reverted to suspicious severity as she eyed Dan Brenckmann.
“All the TV stations are down,” the older woman reported to Gretchen. “We’ve been trying to find out what is going on by listening to the radio but the signal keeps dropping out.”
Dan followed Gretchen into the lobby.
It was like walking into something out of another age. Polished boards underfoot, ancient gas light fittings now glowing with electric bulbs, big portraits in coarse oils on the walls, and the stuffed head of what Dan assumed was an Elk, was just one of a dozen mounted animal heads on the wall. In places the low oaken frames of the house might easily have brained a taller man if he stood up too quickly.
A grey haired man in slippers and a blue cardigan emerged into the pool of light inside the door. He viewed Dan with earnest curiosity rather than the mistrust of the woman who had answered the door bell.
“This is Dan Brenckmann,” Gretchen explained perfunctorily. “Commander Brenckmann’s son,” she explained in a tone which suggested, much to Dan’s surprise, that his father was well known to both the older man and woman.
The stout woman relaxed, viewed Gretchen’s friend with something akin to watchful indulgence. Dan felt a little disorientated. He had had no idea his Pa was so well in with these people. He knew his Pa had done a lot of work for old Claude Betancourt after the 1945 war and it was this which had probably kept his modest Boston law firm from going under; but he had never suspected he might actually have visited a place like this. That suggested his Pa had once been, perhaps still was, one of Gretchen’s father’s go to guys and that put a whole new complexion on those ‘at homes’ he had tagged along to over the years in Quincy.
